Category: Week 11 – Mao II

I must say I enjoyed reading the Lev Manovich article, even though I’m not sure I agreed with everything he wrote. I think the examples of new media like the weather visualizer and conversation fit in pretty well with his description of databases as ever-growing algorithms of data that contain no narratives. While I can listen to people prattle on about products, there really are no elements of narrative, but certainly one would say there is something to these sites on a deeper level than just a list of links.

One thing I think sites like the “conversation” allow users to do is create their own narrative. An author is not weaving a carefully constructed story, but, rather, the user is allowed to take the elements that Jason Nelson provides and create their own type of story from it. This is much what Lev Manovich argues is behind databases as a genre of new media, but a lot has happened since Manovich wrote this article. I think video games have changed in a way so that they both serve as database and narrative, but what I want to explore here is how Web 2.0 has changed the way databases operate.

One good example of this is the “We Feel Fine” page. This is a database of sentences (and sometimes pictures) and it operates in much the same way that Manovich describes. However, in the current post-postmodern state of New Media, the user has become increasingly more important. The “We Feel Fine” database serves as more of a thief than an organizer of information. It requires users blogging out there in the world to write a sentence with the word “feel” in it, then it goes and steals that sentence for its own purposes. Not only is this cool, but the algorithm at play here would have little to work with if the Web was not increasingly user-generated. Manovich mentioned in his article that with the advent of the Web, people became data archivists for work or hobby. We Feel Fine is serving this role, but what about all the people out there blogging? Those people are not really archiving data in a narrative-free database environment. Blogs, while short, actually serve as a collection of narratives, like a collection of short stories, that is forever growing. Blogs may not always have character, conflict, plot, etc., but often have some of these elements, especially when people are recounting their day/week/month.

Nowadays, the Web thrives because people like us post to blogs and allow a site like We Feel Fine to continue populating its content. We post videos to Youtube and, in so doing, are as responsible for the growth of the database as the adminstrator who may be adding content to another site. While I agree that these types of sites still function in the way Manovich describes, I find a new and exciting element as well. Youtube can still be surfed out of order and the site as a whole lacks narrative, but each video posted is the narrative of someone out there somewhere. Whether you’re watching someone do a stupid trick or a mock trailer for Mary Poppins, these narratives do exist. And because of the increasing amount of user-generated material being posted, the sites now begin to show the human narrative. Youtube allows us to glimpse into all sorts of pockets of life and realize that the idea that there is no universal truth (a postmodern tenet) or one right way of seeing the world becomes pretty evident. I think this is what the Web does now. While each site may not weave its own narrative thread, we get glimpses of the smaller narratives playing out in the world around us every day. And in a sense, this is what books attempt to achieve. The Web is just going about it with a little more chaos and a lot more everyman participation.

I want to apologize for this late post.  I know some of these topics were discussed on Wednesday and some were exhausted but I would like to contribute some of my thoughts.   I thought that Mao II was one of the most interesting novels we have read so far and the most representative of what postmodernism is. 

Terrorism and its portrayal in the media is such a striking theme in Mao II.  Terrorism played such a prominent role, not only forming the novel’s plot, but also in influencing our society’s reception of art and stimulation.  The shift from traditional art, i.e. paintings, sculptures, novels, etc., to the media oriented “art” is an overarching theme of Mao II and a symptom of postmodernism.  I thought Delillo’s execution of this idea is insightful and impeccable, given that terrorism has become central to today’s media coverage.  I first thought that terrorism stood in as a metaphor for the utopian tendency to conform culture into a uniform society by way of unrealistic ideals.   I think Delillo is certainly suggesting that but I also think that terrorism is literally used as a social and cultural pervading revolution, no matter how disturbing and repulsive it may be, and that is pulling social thought away from traditional art and into a stimulated society.  People react to terrorism portrayed on the news more readily than say that of a novel.  The horror of terrorism overshadows whatever emotion tied with traditional art.   On page 200, Bill is thinking about the conversation he had with George on the terrorists, “When you inflict punishment on the innocent, you began to empty the world of meaning…replacing real things with plot and fiction.  One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself.”  This One fiction of the terrorist is recognizable as the utopian ideas that are wrapped up with modernism and other nonpostmodern ideas.  Bill sees this revolution as a form of subversion and a threat to the art that he represents.  However, at the same time I found that the terrorist achieve what postmodernists see as the end of the great novel and the beginning of the new media, the only force capable of changing social thought and beliefs – the revolution will be televised. 

Bill’s unfinished book is another aspect of Mao II that struck me as a poignant signal of postmodernism.  Bill is the reclusive writer, which as we discussed in class is a cliché.  Bill tries to separate himself from the society of spectacle, or the mass mind of today’s culture, but ultimately fails.  His book remains unfinished and modernism dies or at least stays unfinished.

I found the change of occupation for Brita to be the saddest point in the novel.  She has abandoned her work of photographing writers for the oversaturated and over stimulated culture of war correspondence and other bloated forms of media exemplifies the postmodern theme of Mao II.  She travels to Beirut to photograph the terrorist after Bill fails to communicate with them.  The irony of this scene is striking.  Brita accepts that the terrorist have replaced the writer, the traditional artist.  On page 229, “She does not photograph writers anymore.  It stopped making sense.”  Terrorism and new media have replaced the artist and have become the new art.  

I thought I would write about an unrelated topic to DeLillo and the criticism this week since they seem to be pretty well covered. I am thinking about writing my term paper on the video game Fallout 3 and how the game’s setting, gameplay, and story all immerse the user in postmodernism. This got me thinking about video games in general as postmodern art forms. Not all games are alike, but I believe that video games in general are a very postmodern tradition.

One of the first things about more modern video games is the mix of high and low culture. Games require brilliant coding and engine design from some of the top programmers in the field. Many computer programs, like the one I am using to write this blog, provide a service and others like encyclopedias and Microsoft Office applications allow knowledge to be assembled and disseminated. However, for the amount of brilliant programming that goes into a video game, the function, more often than not, is to allow the user to navigate his way through a virtual world killing just about anything he encounters. In a game like Bioshock, an incredibly well written story about a Utopian society gone wrong (complete with repeated imagery and themes like love, power, and family) guides the gameplay, which mostly centers around killing. I think that is one perfect example of what games are becoming capable of these days. They do not just provide stunning environments and the opportunity to kill Nazi zombies (Call of Duty: World at War) but some also weave fascinating tales, the likes of which previously only occurred in literature.

It is also worth noting that many of these new first-person-shooter games owe their creation to a game called Wolfenstein. This game combined two previous traditions and pretty much paved the way for an entirely new genre of game. Driving simulators frequently used the first person before Wolfenstein, but most shoot-em up games where third person. Wolfenstein combined the two traditions and some of the most popular first-person games ever (Halo 3, Call of Duty, Resident Evil) are members of that fused genre.

The technological aspects of video games are clear when one looks at the software and hardware design needed to create such complex worlds, but since the creation of online gaming (first with computers, now also on consoles) we have seen a new level of postmodernism come in. I can play a game with my roommate while we both sit in our own rooms because of online connectivity. Users across the world come together to play against each other and receive world-wide rankings in the process–a kind of constant Olympics where medals can always be lost. This has also allowed the video game space and time to become completely fractured. Games still have beginnings and ends when it comes to single-player campaigns, but with games like World of Warcraft the multi-player experience literally never ends. The game exists and the story just continues and continues. You may not always be playing in a game like Fable, but the time keeps ticking. So every time the user signs back in, their time frame has been fractured by however much time they have been away. They could leave a game after completing one mission, and rather than having the experience pick up again where they left off, they could sign back in a few days later to find a friend has robbed them of all their gold and items. A point in which they will actually move backwards in time because they now have to play catch up.

These are just a few of the things I’ve been thining about as I prepare to write my paper. Games have always been pretty postmodern, if for no other reason because of the inherent use of technology, but as games move online and become deeper and more robust, they are beginning to encapsulate more than just technology with thier postmodern tendencies.

-Jared

I cannot help but think of Bill Gray as the ideal or romanticized representation of the writer.  As in Mark Z. Danielewski’s interview (where he told some story about beginning his magnificent first novel on a Greyhound bus in the dark with a flashlight on the way to visit his dying father), there are echoes of the stereotype (or perhaps recurring theme in history) of the author shaped by painful experiences.  Gray is reclusive (a trait associated with many famous authors: Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Salinger) and this sense of remoteness contributes to an aura of loneliness and exhaustion.  During his photo session with Brita he talks about the exhaustion of keeping up this writely seclusion.

“Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel.  I have my own cosmology of pain.  Leave me alone with it.  Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt.  Most of all don’t take my picture.  I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding.  And I’m finally sick of it” (45).

The quotation shows how he is fed up with the certain aspects of the writer life he has designed for himself.  He makes a clear distinction between himself and the rest of the world, wanting to remain apart.  There are people who get their pictures taken and then there are other who don’t want to be photographed.  The interesting thing is that he gives in, he has his picture taken, in a sense killing the writerly image he has made for himself.  Image actually isn’t the right word for it because I don’t think he’s very concerned with image.  I think he genuinely wants to have his depressing solitude, but he sees himself  and his lifestyle as a writer as outmoded; photographers and terrorists can do his job better.  

In a sense I read his decision to do the photo shoot as a suicide or perhaps the prelude to one (I have heard that less civilized people believe that cameras can steal your soul).  Afterwards he leaves the country and tries to help the Swiss writer escape from his kidnappers.  He talks with George about a possible exchange that would endanger his life, which indicates a desire to die (George tells him to get a computer to replace his typewriter, further proof of how Gray is outdated).  Gray travels to Lebanon a place of conflict (more wanting to die) and steps off a curb to be hit by a car (still more wanting to die).  Then he actually talks to a group of veterinarians about his “accident,” I think, in part so he better understand his wounds and he ends up dying more because he thinks he has/wants mortal injuries rather than actually being seriously hurt.  

That being said, sadly, I’m not sure what to make of this suicidal writer other than he may represent the every-writer lost in a post-modern world.

sara flood’s post about how our experience of the world is mediated through and filtered by a biased visual news media reminded me of Googlezon’s EPIC, the concept of a future where there would be no pretense to impartiality and generalized information.  Such increasing specialization in the news and media we consume would seem to lead to increasing fragmentation of geographical societal units in terms of the cultural references we share.  Yet it also leads to bridging of cultural gaps among people in many different geographical areas.   Of course the internet has enabled some progress along these lines, but even Mao II, which is set before the internet became a part of people’s lives, foregrounds the distortion and authorship present purely in the medium of still photography.  Reality is filtered through Brita’s lens, through her decisions made in a single moment. In addition, DeLillo implies that reality is created by its mediation, that the hostage’s freedom “is tied to the public announcement of his freedom” (129).

Complicating the authorship and ownership of photographic images, however, is the chance that is always an aspect of their capture.  Especially before the days of digital previews and easy photo editing, when a photographer clicks the shutter, s/he is never quite sure how the picture will turn out, and has no opportunity for the constant crafting and revisions of an author of written media.  Gray thinks that “a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning” to “reply to power and beat back our fear” (200).  So if written fiction (and all narrative can be called fiction) is meant to add meaning to the world (although Osteen thinks Gray is being disingenuous), what is the purpose of photography?  Does the chance inherent in photography leave more room for a plurality of meanings than writing does?

With the addition of the internet and 24 hour news, has society been reduced to “blur and glut” where we don’t know whom to “take seriously” among the cacophany of specialized voices – and is the only one we take seriously the “lethal believer,” as George asserts? (157)  Gray states that on the contrary, the terrorists themselves are just as implicated in the aims and narratives of their own backing groups and do not stand outside the crowd at all, and Osteen adds that terrorists are not individual authors but dependent upon the media for shaping and conveying their message.  I was intrigued by the “mass mind” that Osteen identifies Brita as being a part of, how Brita notices that “everything that came into her mind […] seemed at once to enter the culture” (165). Terrorism was linked to both narrative and brainwashing, but what is its relationship to the mass mind?  Is the mass mind simply the consequence of our certain globally shared cultural references?

Osteen identifies Gray as representing the individualist in combat against the mass mind, and I thought maybe this is where his strange focus on bodily excretions comes from.  The workings of his individual body are uniquely his creation and possession, as “He urinated.  He shook the last drop of pee off his dick.  This was his life” (212).  Earlier Gray muses that a real biography of him would be a catalogue of his bodily workings – with a catalogue instead of a narrative, there is less room for others to insert their own meanings into the text.

Overall, Mao II seems concerned with different media of narrative (writing, photography, terrorism, brainwashing) and which is the appropriate one for our current society.  The arguments about the different forms of course expose the assumptions of the speaker about what narrative should accomplish.  To Gray, it should be the art of a novel, something “so angelic it makes your jaw hang open” (159), to George it should be the political change of terrorism, a “model that transcends all the bitter history.  Something enormous and commanding” (158), to Rashid it is the extension of the great leader by brainwashing to give people “identity, a sense of purpose” (233), to Brita it is a record and a clue to the mysteries she can’t grasp, and for Osteen it serves the goal of remaking social order by operating within that social order.

I’m fascinated by cults–namely what drives people to join them.  In high school I remember  seeing images on the news of bedrooms full of hooded dead bodies wearing new sneakers in a compound in California.  The participants of the Heaven’s Gate cult were instructed to take the “Kool-aid” when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared, thus taking them off the earth before its destruction.    Also during my early high school years, the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas went up in flames, killing 75 members. What drives people to join these cults?  To forfit reason in service to a madman?  To hand over one’s future to someone who values the collective at the violent expense of the individual?  For whatever reason, time and time again people are sucked into cults.  

It should come as no surprise that I was drawn to the cult element of DeLillo’s novel.  The opening scene of Karen’s  mass wedding ceremony performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon sets the stage for the many cult references in the play.   Even though Karen later leaves the cult, she still is described as a deeply religious person who is fanatically devoted to Bill Gray. “If  it’s believers you want, Karen is your person.  Unconditional belief” (69). Karen openly and even wistfully describes her past in a community, but appears as though she is still living in one with Bill and Scott.  Together, Karen and Scott share the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, and even disciplining Bill.  It is unclear to me why Karen is so loyal to Bill. Clearly she trusts what Scott does and says and he brought her to Bill, but why stay?  There is something unusual about the part where Karen has sex with Bill on page 86.  It isn’t passionate or forbidden, but almost as if there has been agreement in the community that that is what Karen should do for Bill.  

 “Does Scott know you come up here”  

[Karen replies,] “Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?”

“That’s what I thought,” he said (86).  Karen’s devotion goes beyond her housekeeping duties and extend into the fanatical.

 I understand Karen’s obsessive devotion; it is Bill’s that I don’t understand.  The part that I continue to have trouble with is why Bill Gray would go to such great lengths to conceal his whereabouts, curb his media presence and precisely time his release of a new book in the first half of the book, only to wake up one day and be persuaded he should drop everything for a publisher/friend, leave the comforts of his home, and enter into the international spotlight.   I understand having a political agenda.  I understand doing it to free a fellow writer.  I understand doing this for personal gain.  But all of these seem out of character for the Bill developed in the first half of the book.  I appreciate Osteen’s argument that Bill was modeled after DeLillo, but I don’t think it entirely clears of the question of motives.  The best explanation I can come up with is that Bill too was sucked into a cult: a cult of terrorism.  He blindly followed Charlie, George and Rashid, when he rationally should have been able to pull away or not get involved in the first place.   

While reading Mao II, I felt that I kept waiting for something to happen–for the pieces to come together, for something to “click” more than it was. I was initially drawn into the work, but then I began to feel that the novel was a never-ending exposition. Additionally, it took me a while to get used to DeLillo’s style. (This was my first exposure to DeLillo.) The writing felt very stiff and the dialogue and interactions felt unnatural, maybe even unbelievable. (For instance, the scene of Brita’s photo shoot with Bill seemed awkward and artificial in an unnatural way, if that makes sense.) I liked how DeLillo changed the “focalizer”, but I sometimes found it difficult to keep up with the dialogue changes and would have to frequently go back and re-read sections of dialogue. I am pondering the greater significance of this confusion. Was DeLillo intending for the dialogue to sound like one voice, adding to his commentary on individual identity vs. combined experience/identity?

Now, before it sounds like I’m bashing DeLillo’s work, I have to say there were things that I liked about the novel. Again, I liked the shifting point of view, and I did enjoy the bits of humor interspersed throughout the text. Additionally, I liked DeLillo’s use of the prologue and epilogue to shape the narrative. (I am interesting in discussing the greater significance of the epilogue, though.) While I didn’t feel as fulfilled at the end of the novel as I had expected I would be when I started reading, there are definitely things I like about the novel, and I definitely have questions!

Alyssa brought up some great points about the crowd/individual pattern seen throughout the book. This was a pattern that I, too, took note of starting with the prologue. As Alyssa pointed out, Bill fights for the individual. On the other hand, Karen wants to blend in. Obviously, she took part in the crowd at the mass-marriage. She also seems to be drawn to crowds in the news and photographs. And she seems to enjoy the city. At one point when Karen is in the park she “realized they saw her” and this realization was a “shock” (151). I’m not sure that we could say that Bill and Karen are complete opposites in this respect, and I’m not exactly sure where Scott and Brita fit on this spectrum of individual vs. crowds, but it is clear that DeLillo is making a statement about the individual identity and experience being consumed by the idea of the common experience and identity.

In addition to the identity motif, I was also intrigued by the references to writers and writing. Todd made some interesting observations about these references in his post. Throughout the novel, writers seem to be held high in society-everyone is wondering what has happened to Bill and rumors have been circulating; Bill is asked to read Jean-Claude’s poems because he will carry some weight as a writer; the veterinarians in the restaurant seem impressed that Bill is a writer. However, the text also speaks to the weakening influence that writers have in the world. I also found it interesting that while the text speaks to writers losing their influence in society, writing is what Bill blames for his decline, saying that “it was writing that caused his life to disappear” (215). Writing may not have the influence on the greater population, but it definitely impacts the individual.

I also picked up on the idea of images vs. reality and how they can become one in the same with technology. Brita speaks of the “authority” of images and how they can become reality when she tells Bill that “the moment [his] picture appears [he’ll] be expected to look just like it. And if [he] meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question [his] right to look different from [his] picture” (43). This passage stood out to me and stuck with me throughout the novel.

Overall, I noticed many things in the novel which we had discussed in class (images,/reality, media coverage, etc). I look forward to class discussion in hopes of a greater understanding of DeLillo’s work!

Don Delillo’s Mao II begins with Karen and Kim’s “mass-marriage” in the center of Yankee Stadium. The event, written in present tense (perhaps to maintain resonance through the text), questions the commodification of human relationships and the consequence of this process on the individual. As the couples walk together in lines of two, they enter into a “sacramental” assembly line. The repetition of act devalues the individuality of each union. One party seems completely interchangeable with another. In fact, from the grand stands, parents, mothers and fathers of the brides and grooms, strain to identify their own child in the crowds. Even “[t]hey [the bridal parties] feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self” (Delillo 8). The individual internalizes this commodification—embracing or surrendering to it.  Moreover, it seems, in many circumstances, it is the individual that improves on it. Though Karen does not immediately return to Unification Church, she continues to consider herself a commodity: “…Didn’t he [Scott] bring me here for you [Bill]?” (84). Her question demonstrates her lack of agency. She did not act, but instead was acted upon. In her mind, she was “gifted” like a toaster or a Saint Bernard.

In like fashion, other characters participate in commodification (self-commodification and the commodification of others). Scott seems unable or unwilling to separate Bill from his identity as a writer. He discourages Bill to publish his most recent creation, because it will mar his image or perhaps more accurately Scott’s image of Bill. Scott feeds Bill’s image, even if it is to the determent of Bill himself. Bill is an object that may be manipulated and controlled. As Mark Osteen points out, the bonds of commodification are strong. Resistance may thrust you even deeper into its grasp: “Like the real-life Thomas Pynchon or the fictional Bucky Wunderlick, his very resistance to celebrity has made him one. Gray now realizes that his isolation has allowed others to manufacture an aura for him larger than he will ever be” (Osteen 649). Any action, a publication or a picture, can damage the soft-focus of his writerly-persona, precisely because of its lines and detail. Scott, electing himself brand-manager, recruits Karen to join in his game. Soon the entire household is a willing participant. As Brita states to Karen, “‘Go back to Scott and stay with him. You people belong together, all three of you. I think it’s a strange and sad way to live in many respects but who am I to say that something is strange and anyway you desperately need each other. I don’t like thinking of Bill being off alone somewhere’”(Delillo 183). Until this point in the text, the characters abstain from commentary. Though all seem to understand that something is going on, that they are a party to something, they are incapable of confronting it. Perhaps it is the postmodern at work, but Delillo offers an observation of a problem and no hint of a solution. The reader must merely observe the happenings.

The crowd versus the individual was one pattern of thought that I followed throughout the text.  The book shows several crowds, starting with the wedding in the prologue.  But more abstract crowds appear in the form of the terrorist group, the unification church, and the homeless crowds near Brita’s apartment.  The crowds are often positioned in opposition to the individuals in the text: “She went home to feed the cat but returned right away, taking a Jamaican taxi and saying Tompkins square…People in clusters and large groups” (150).  Karen feels compelled to walk amongst the crowd.

Bill, who embodies the individualist through his reclusive habits, attempts to fight a terrorist group on behalf of the individual.  Bill goes to speak for the kidnapped writer, but ends up getting even more involved.  I think this connection has less to do with him being a writer, and more to do with him being an individual.  He tries to go against the terrorist group, not on behalf of that specific person, but on behalf of the principle of individuality. 

Reading the book in this way made the ending even more jarring.  Bill’s death symbolizes the death of the individual and the triumph of the group.  Is DeLillo trying to say that there is no longer a place for the individualist in our society?  He brings up the idea that we no longer have power on an individual scale, because the only real power comes from groups.  This, to me, is a very frightening idea.

The idea of the individual versus the crowd is a reoccurring theme in DeLillo’s body of work.  In an earlier novel, End Zone, DeLillo’s main character is a reclusive football player who often seeks solace in the empty desert surrounding the town.  He is more at peace when he is in the wordless desert, compared to being on the field with his team.  In Great Jones Street, the main character is a rockstar who leaves his band and management to go into hiding.  In this book, we rarely see large crowds, but I feel like American consumers act as a crowd that is felt without being explicitly shown.

In an interview from the New York Times, the writer makes a comparison between Bill Gray’s reclusive individualism and Don DeLillo’s own lifestyle. (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-dangerous.html?_r=1&oref=login)  This makes me think that DeLillo understands the success of the crowd as having a negative impact on our society.  The crowds is devoid of the artistic ability that Bill and DeLillo hold in such high regard.  It seems like DeLillo fears that the crowd, especially in the form of the terrorist group, is quickly replacing the power of the writer: “The cult of Mao was the cult of the book.  It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike” (162).  He also makes this connection earlier in the book when Bill explicitly states “…our books lose the power to shape and influence…Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture.  Now bomb-makers and gunmen have that territory” (41).  I’m not sure if this prolific passage could have been fully understood by the books original audience, but at this point I feel it’s something that should really resonate with our society.

I find the idea of reality mediated through photography, the Internet, advertising (and whatever else) both interesting and disturbing. Also overwhelming. Obviously our idea of the world is mediated through the news, etc., and it would be impossible to keep up with anything otherwise. And if news items weren’t pared down to what they are, there would just be information overload. I mean, it’s already information overload, but it seems like what remains often gets rebuked as sensationalism or biased reporting. Different newspapers and TV stations are known for specific political slants. But who decides what is important or accurate, and who is to say what is real when our reality is shaped so much by the media?

Mao II deals with a whole cast of characters confused or tormented by their own reality and place in both contemporary society and history. It plays with the idea of organizing and reorganizing people. Karen is one of the more exaggerated examples. During the mass wedding at the beginning, her father is shocked by so many people sculpted into an object. Confused family members hurry to take photos in an attempt to “shape the experience.” Karen sometimes seems like a parody, an extreme. But she’s also an example of how people are mediated through any number of technological or representational materials. Faced with multiple coded meanings, she wonders, “Which crisis do I trust?” (99)

While sitting for her photographs, Bill discloses to Brita: “Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print on film.” (43) Images have multiple roles, as mediated sources of power and detachment. In his essay, Mark Osteen says, “Moon gives his followers a supportive community that lends meaningful order to their lives” and provides a “projective narrative” (647) for his subjects. Narrative order through a promise of transcendence. Reorganized under the lens, people are no longer people, but commodities or tools.

Rather than being a person, Jean-Claude is something reassembled by terrorists and reporters. His own individuality is stripped – even he doesn’t know who he is. It seems like DeLillo equates terror to life lacking a narrative. He says, “When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty…you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions.” (200)

After considering Osteen’s argument, I was reminded of House of Leaves. Brita comments at one point that even if her subject matter is horrifying, the photograph makes it appear beautiful. Karen too, equates the Sheffield disaster to a mural. I think Osteen uses the word aestheticizing. We aestheticize horror and therefore distance ourselves from it. We can look at horrifying pictures in a detached way. I really don’t think this is true all the time, but for many images it is. Anyway, I thought of Navidson’s Delial photograph, how he felt guilty and tormented by it. However, by this logic, I feel like with the amount of mediation going on in House of Leaves, Truant should never have gone as crazy as he did. Detached, yes, but not so excessively consumed.

I’m glad we got assigned this particular article, because as I was reading DeLillo I couldn’t help thinking of Easten Ellis and wondering, what is it with these guys and terrorists? What’s the appeal?

I was also wondering if anyone felt the same way about Mao II in terms of “datedness” or the novel showing its age or feeling very much of its time period as we mentioned in connection to The Female Man. In several places I feel as though DeLillo is eerily prescient.

Mark Osteen raises a number of really interesting points. In particular, I found his argument that DeLillo is conferring more value onto Brita than Bill Gray (who, according to Osteen, is a sort of version of DeLillo himself). Or perhaps “more value” is not the right term, but indicating that Brita is less deluded than Gray and more realistic, especially in her understanding and “buying in” of her role as a photographer, as opposed to Gray’s futile struggle against his own role in consumption.

But back to the terrorists. Osteen writes about the necessity of media for terrorists-terrorists need the media, otherwise who are they terrorizing if they don’t have publicity? Which reminds me of the various accusations leveled against both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, accusing them of, among other things, deliberately staging situations of civilians, particularly children, getting killed by soldiers, or moving civilian corpses onto bombing sites to inflate death tolls.

So I was struck by Brita’s bravery and her certainty that she wouldn’t be harmed as she photographed Rashid and his followers in Beirut. Brita fulfills a need the terrorists have which Jean-Claude doesn’t, as evidenced by his sale to the unnamed fundamentalists. Without Bill Gray’s participationg, Jean-Claude is rather useless to their organization (although that’s probably little comfort to the prisoner in the cell, with whom my sympathies lie).

Moving on, I’m interested in questioning why DeLillo chose these particular moments-the Sheffield disaster, Khomeini’s funeral-as examples of this paradigmatic shift, of the “future belonging to crowds.” Why Sheffield?

Although I think there’s certainly no question that this novel is a postmodern work, I was also struck by the lack of textual experimentation that we have come to associate with postmodernism. Of course, DeLillo does insert the pictures that delineate the different parts of the novel, the narrative of the text itself is rather more straightforward and less experimental than I was expecting.

I wonder if anyone else experienced feeling a link between Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Abu Rashid. It seems that both articulate a remarkably similar idea about crowd consciousness and how to exploit it. Rashid explains his philosophy behind his appeal to his child-militia: “We teach them identity, a sense of purpose…all men one man. We teach that our children belong to something strong and self-reliant…no martyrs here. The image of Rashid is their identity” (DeLillo 233). This parallels the child/parent dynamic of Moon and his followers and the purposeful dissolution of an individual identity into an identity that is dependent on a group for existence. During the wedding, Karen’s father desperately hopes that she will retain her “grids of pinpoint singularities” even as the Master “unburdens them of free will and independent thought” (DeLillo 7). I feel like going any further with this right now will get me bogged down in arguing for/against the very existence of the possiblity of independent thought (in my opinion, impossible) but it might be an interesting jumping-off (literally) point.

I haven’t finished Mao II yet but will post when I do. In the meantime, I thought I’d let the class know that I just finished watching La Strada, which is the film that Danielewski mentioned in the interview that Prof. Sample posted a while back (Danielewski took the name Zampano from the film).

So, it’s an Italian film from the early 1950s and was not what I was expecting at all. Actually, the character of Zampano was not what I was expecting at all, but I think I managed to find a couple of insights into Danielewski’s choice.

First, to summarize (SPOILERS): the character Zampano in the film is a big, muscular one-man traveling show, performing feats of strength, etc. He brings on this girl, Gelsemina, who has the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin and a face described by another character as an “artichoke.” She’s really sweet and there’s some lingering love issues but he treats her like sh*t pretty much and at the end leaves her in the middle of nowhere and sneaks off. Years later, he hears that she dies and finally, realizing how much he loved her, falls to his knees by the sea and cries–the first time we see him display any sort of emotion.

So, not quite the intellectual who might write of the Navidson Record, right? Well, per those aforementioned insights:

1) Early in the film, before performing this trick where he straps a chain around his chest and expands his chest to break it, he tells the surrounding crowd that “men have gone blind” from doing the trick… I think he said something about straining an optic nerve… I forget. But, as we know of course, Zampano in HOL is blind.

2) The guy was a drunkard. And in HOL, there’s a lot of references to Zampano drinking, like the slip where he talks about a character drinking and accidentally says “I” instead of “he,” etc.

3) Also, I was thinking about that line in the book (the coded message) that says, “Dear Zampano, who did you lose?” Of course, if you read the quick summary I gave of the movie above, the clear answer to this is the girl, Gelsemina. That was pretty much the climax/resolution of the film–how he lost her and how he realized he “lost” her. Everything in the film led up to him losing her. So…

… That’s all I got. Has anyone else seen the film? If so, did you make the same or any new connections?