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.