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.