Although I am much less familiar with DeLillo than a number of students in our class, I am quickly becoming a fan. I read Mao II in less than a day (which is unusual for me these days), and I found myself really intrigued by the notion that art and terror may be intimately connected.
The first thing which struck me as horrifying and yet somehow remarkable was DeLillo’s connection between the World Trade Center towers and terrorism. How was he to know that the United States would come to understand terror because of the World Trade Center exactly ten years after this novel was published?
In Chapter 3 when Brita is photographing Bill, they are discussing how she feels about New York City and she complains about it “all being flattened and hauled away so that they can build their towers” (39), which leads to their specific discussion of the World Trade Center towers. She explains that her “big complaint is only partly size” when it comes to those two towers, and that “the size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it’s like a dialogue, only I don’t know what they’re saying” (40). On the next page, Bill explains one of the major themes of the novel, the connection and transition from art to terror, saying, “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists… Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated” (41).
Somehow, these few pages seem so ominous and yet entirely innocent. All we knew of terrorism before 2001 was international terrorism really, not terror on our own soil, well except for incidents like the the Oklahoma City bombing and the unabomber. But for the most part, we were ignorant of terror incidents. DeLillo takes us into various worlds where people are brainwashed into submission and/or acts of terror, but to do so, he uses international figures and groups like Mao Zedong, Ayatolla Rhuholla Khomeini, el Sendero Iluminoso (the Shining Path), the Unification Church and Sun Myung Moon (and his “Moonies”), among others. And yet, only ten years later, he would have been able to cite a relevant situation here on our own American soil to add to Bill Gray’s notion that terrorists are taking over the part of artists in shaping culture.
I began also to consider how this book adds to my understanding of Postmodernism. Again, we see the complex and multi-layered use of art in Mao II: Brita uses photography to record writers’ faces, and then towards the end, to document what is going on in the outside world: “barely watched wars, children running in the dust” (227), while Gray writes novel, well actually not anymore, but has written novels, and of course, we are reading DeLillo’s novel. The metafictive and self-reflexive nature of the novel suggest, once again, that Postmodernists love to self-reflect, and they love to reflect on art and what it all “means.”
As for reshaping my understanding of Postmodernism, so far I have decided that DeLillo’s book suggests that international awareness as well as a brainwashing motif run through this contemporary literary period. I suppose it is obvious that international connectedness is pertinent to our contemporary literature simply because technology has made our world infinitely “smaller,” or at least better connected. Karen constantly watches the world on television; she sees Khomeini’s funeral chaos and crowds of Mao’s China (always crowds). Bill travels to New York City (from his hideaway home), then to London, then Cyprus, and then tries to get to Beirut, all to save a Swiss writer who has been abducted. The international connectedness appears throughout the story; even when Karen meets people in the park from all over the world, she seems to be stationary and confined to the United States, but she is really very much tied to the foreign experience through both her conversations at the park and the world news she watches on television.
I also see brainwashing as an element closely connected to postmodernism; Karen is portrayed as a brainwashed Moonist who can never quite shed her Unification beliefs. When Brita travels to Beirut at the end of the novel, she meets Abu Rashid and his brainwashed youth followers. She thinks to herself, “Eloquent macho bullshit” (254), a favorite line of mine from the book, after Rashid explains, “Mao believed in the process of thought reform. It is possible to make history by changing the basic nature of a people” (233). That lines seems a rather fitting way to end this post: Mao’s “thought reform” or “brainwashing” has moved from using art to using terror, if we are to follow DeLillo’s suggestions in this book. Terror has, unfortunately, become beautiful, meaningful, and vital to some cultures (albeit mostly radical and marginalized groups, many DeLillo seems to anticipate here), and the art that once had the power to shape culture may, indeed, have been replaced by violence.