Peter Baker

Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4bak@toe.towson.edu

 

Through the issues it raises, the kind of writing style it employs, and coming as it does in a series of other novels by Don DeLillo, Mao II demands to be treated seriously in the context of postmodern work and theory. Rather than spend time developing that theory explicitly, hooking in to the arguments presented by, say, Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, I want to develop a series of themes and meditations through a comparison of Mao II with two other texts that are roughly contemporary, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game (1992). That is, rather than attempt to define “postmodernism,” I will take as a given that all three of these works are postmodern and explore what this might mean. The comparison of DeLillo to Pynchon has become rather widespread, but Mao IIspecifically presents the character of a hyper-reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who may interestingly be compared to the real-life figure of Pynchon, whether or not we want to argue that Gray is “based” on Pynchon.¹ The comparison with Jordan’s film rests principally on the way The Crying Game stages an encounter between a “terrorist” and a hostage that is not dissimilar from some of DeLillo’s meditations on this theme. As novelist Bill Gray travels, first to London, and finally to Lebanon, he seeks to engage the relationship he has theorized between novel-writing and “terrorism” through his own person. I want to argue that Gray (and maybe DeLillo as well) is fundamentally–and in Gray’s case, at least, fatally–mistaken in his view that equates the role of the novelist with that of the “terrorist.” As Jordan’s film carries this theme out, I think it becomes clear that the “terrorist” occupies a role more like that of the interpreter, and moreover, that this has something to do with our “postmodern condition.”

 

There is beginning to emerge a critical consensus that Thomas Pynchon “is perhaps the preeminent practitioner” of English-language postmodern fiction (McHale 1992: 83). I want to argue briefly in this context that this is at least in part due to the fact that Pynchon’s work deals with historical materials exactly defining the parameters of the rise of the United States to the status of the world’s only superpower, roughly that period from the end of World War II to the Persian Gulf War known from “our” point of view as the Cold War. Edward Said’s recent epoch-making work, Culture and Imperialism, argues for an ongoing reinterpretation of the canonical works of the modern European/American tradition based on an examination of the relationship between imperialism and culture. Twenty or thirty years from now, anyone’s first reaction to hearing the phrase “the Western tradition” will not be “Great Books” or whatever catchphrase is currently being pushed by the pundits in The New Criterion and elsewhere; it’s going to be (and for many of us already is): imperialism.² Said’s approach is not to reject the works of the western tradition, but to reexamine them in light of these geopolitical realities for how they reveal “a structure of attitude and reference” (62). Whereas Said’s primary cultural analysis concerns texts produced at the height of colonial experience, Verdi’s Aida, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kipling’s Kim, I would argue that the same kind of analysis could be used to examine works by such “preeminent” figures as Pynchon and DeLillo for what they say about U.S. imperialism and its deep and intricate relations to American culture. Such an analysis, to be adequate to Said’s complexity, would clearly have to go beyond assigning terms implying value judgments, such as “progressive” or “pessimistic.”³ I want to begin to explore some of the outlines for such a discussion with regard to the work of Pynchon, especially Vineland, before examining how some of these same issues are worked out by DeLillo in Mao II.

 

Pynchon’s “big” book, Gravity’s Rainbow, principally concerns the time frame at the end of World War II when the position of being the leading nation-state in the Western global hegemony passed from France and Great Britain–and for a brief time, Germany–to the United States. This is at least one reason for its enormously important cultural position and the intense reactions it continues to provoke. While many other works of fiction deal with the American experience of the world war, Pynchon’s novel gives a mythic embodiment to this central shift in power of the twentieth century, focusing significantly on the transfer of rocket technology from Germany to the United States, while ostensibly concerned with the resulting terror of the British population during the V-2 bombings. The earlier V. deals mainly with the underside milieu of fifties America, but significantly this underside also has its military aspect, indicating the strong links between culture and hegemony that Said outlines. Again, significantly, those segments of V. that predate the fifties mainly concern French and British efforts to maintain and extend their political influence in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin. The Crying of Lot 49 again links paranoid systems of meaning and control of power to European antecedents, the Tristero system seemingly related to the more ancient Thurn and Taxis. Pynchon’s famous paranoia remains tremendously appealing to many of us because he, almost alone among American novelists, has attempted to describe a wide-ranging response to social life in the world’s sole superpower. Pynchon’s works outline the interpellation of subjects into the U.S. cultural system and point, usually through humorously paranoid gestures, to moments of resistance to that interpellation.

 

My officemate at the university is someone who is proud of having taught a course on everything you need to know to read Gravity’s Rainbow; but every time I mention Vineland he says he has yet to finish it, saying of Pynchon, “he’s tired, we’re all tired.” Something of this fatigue has shown up in the initial critical response to the novel, the neo-conservatives accusing Pynchon of indulging his “nostalgia” for the sixties and more progressive writers finding a lack of existential commitment to the struggle. In the Cold War context that I have begun to suggest, this fatigue is perfectly explainable as what is left at the end of an era. If Pynchon is the writer who most forthrightly takes on the issues, both global and cultural, of the Cold War era in which he came of age, then Vineland can be viewed as his “last word” on the subject (raising once again the sempiternal mystery of what he could possibly produce after this). This is not primarily a story of the relation of the U.S. to Britain, France and Germany, or even to the rest of the world where American domination is played out–it is the story of “our” government declaring war on key segments of its own population as a necessary corollary to maintaining its “preeminent” position. Pynchon’s paranoid view of the American social landscape of the Reagan eighties, though he tries hard to maintain the comic book humor and some of the same verve and excess to the writing as in the past, is less easy to take this time in part because he strikes so close to home.

 

One way Pynchon strikes at the home base is to implicate Left resistance types in the triumphant success of Reaganism (in itself nothing more than another variation on triumphant Americanism generally).⁴ While former hippies like Zoyd Wheeler are stuck in a self-induced haze of pot smoke and mental disability benefits, former committed revolutionaries like Frenesi Gates have sold out the revolution to the forces of repression represented by Brock Vond. The main plot, such as it is, of Vineland concerns Zoyd’s and Frenesi’s daughter Prairie and her efforts to locate her mother when word comes down that Frenesi may be making a move to get back in touch.⁵ The story of leftist betrayal in Vineland is enacted by Prairie viewing the films of Frenesi’s revolutionary collective, 24fps, many of these shot by Frenesi, while the narration is presented by former co-members of the collective Darryl Louise (DL) and Ditzah Pisk Feldman. Prairie is presented with both visual evidence and an oral history of her mother’s seduction by super-narc and federal hitman Brock Vond, and Frenesi’s participation in a scheme to murder protest leader Weed Atman. In terms of narrative levels, much of this material is not recounted directly to Prairie, but rather focalized through Frenesi in overlapping flashbacks, so that some of Frenesi’s inner life of the time is made clearer. This reveals the worst betrayal of all, since Frenesi’s only positive motivation in all of this seems limited to her strong sexual attraction to Vond and to uniformed men in general. Her negative motivation seems to be an existential crisis of meaning–more on that in a minute. The question remains why Pynchon chooses to tell the story of the underside of the triumph of the political Right in America as a parable of political betrayal by members of the Left. Is this simply an instance of scapegoating, or is Pynchon trying to tell a more complicated story of the co-implication, or interpellation, of various smaller narratives in the larger political narratives of our time?

 

Perhaps tellingly, I want to insist that this kind of large question is one that can have no definitive answer, but rather demands repeated acts of interpretation and reinscription into different political and cultural contexts.⁶ To make this analysis more exact, I want to concentrate briefly on the interpretive dilemma that Vineland stages with respect to “drugs.” I place “drugs” in scare quotes to indicate that any discourse on this subject can not simply take the concept as a given, but must attempt some kind of contextualization before any analysis is possible, an approach carried out in exemplary fashion by Avital Ronell in Crack Wars. As Ronell states, with her usual economy and forcefulness, “While everywhere dealt with, drugs act as a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language” (52). Drugs escape the closed circle of hermeneutic inquiry because they are one name for the desire that overwhelms language. Ronell quotes Heidegger to this effect on the first page inside the cover: “Addiction and urge are possibilities rooted in the thrownness of Dasein.” What it is to be human is inextricably linked to our strongest (and strangest) desires. Frenesi’s existential torment and her politically incorrect fixation on Brock Vond’s erect penis can be seen, in some sense, as aspects of each other. But what happens when the word “drugs” is invoked to elicit and to control this generalized desire?

 

Zoyd Wheeler’s comic and slightly sad fixation on weed is nothing compared to Pynchon’s scathing contempt for how the Reagan-era Department of Justice uses “drugs” as a code for enforcing a clampdown on Americans as desiring creatures. The feds are seen moving in on the last outpost of northern California marijuana growing in a community called Holytail:

 

Sooner or later Holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie. (221-2)

 

This passage has been quoted often as revealing Pynchon’s attitudes toward a whole range of issues, from drugs to television to Reagan’s America. While I agree with Brian McHale that even the “extra-diagetic narrator” is never simply identifiable as the author Thomas Pynchon (see especially, McHale 90ff.), the elements presented in this passage are understandable as a means of talking fundamentally about the Cold War at home. The key here is that “drugs” can be used to mobilize military force–in a manner exactly parallel to that used to enforce American policy in places like Central America–to extend governmental control over the behavior of its own citizenry. And as usual in Pynchon’s work, this paranoid vision is based on and corresponds to historical realities. Why this vision of the American social polity should be threatening to neo-conservatives is clear enough. But this view of the limitations on the possibility for effective, engaged political action is likewise such that left critics like Alan Wilde complain of “Vineland‘s very different dereliction: its refusal of the existential commitment it ponders only to evade” (180). But this is just the point: the political engagement of Vineland is too close to the realities of the culture/imperialism nexus to admit the individualist revolutionary project as a satisfactory “existential” solution.⁷ Without a fully realized dialectical context, the revolutionary project itself can become, as it seems to have for Frenesi, just another in an array of interchangeable “drugs” that can be used by the forces of order to enforce a hegemonic social program.⁸

 

Don DeLillo’s Mao II presents a fundamental engagement with many of these same issues of geopolitical concern, such as the United States’s leading role in maintaining global hegemony and what that means with respect to U.S. cultural production, and their necessary interpretive scenarios. Part of its brilliant strategy is to stage some of these dilemmas through delving into the thoughts and actions of its novelist character, Bill Gray, who presents certain similarities, at least when viewed externally, to Thomas Pynchon. The irony of a blurb by Pynchon figuring prominently on the back cover of Mao II is only one of the many nestings typical of postmodern culture. Bill Gray is a hyperreclusive figure who obsessively guards his privacy with the aid of two live-in helpers, Scott Martineau and Karen Janney. Karen has been glimpsed briefly in the prologue to the novel as one of the six thousand five hundred couples married in a mass ceremony by Reverend Moon, to whom Karen refers as “Master,” in Yankee Stadium. The action of the novel begins when Scott goes to New York to transport photographer Brita Nilsson to Gray’s secret domicile for a photo session that will result in the first pictures of Bill to be published in over thirty years. Now, Bill Gray could be based on any number of prominent American writers. J. D. Salinger, for example, is at least as famous a literary recluse. The connection with the reclusive Pynchon, however, is tantalizing for several reasons: Pynchon’s famous reluctance to be interviewed or photographed, extending if one believes the stories to excising his picture from copies of the high school yearbook; his cultural centrality, or “preeminence,” despite a somewhat limited body of published work, very similar to the fictional Gray; and the insistent linkage that has taken place in the critical discourse between Pynchon and DeLillo, offering DeLillo a convenient alter-ego who is both like himself and plausibly identifiable as someone else.⁹

 

One of the concerns of Mao II most clearly identifiable as postmodern is the cultural centrality of images, and how this relates to the role of political leaders and artists in society. The photo session of author Bill Gray rhymes insistently with references to the work of Andy Warhol and to Warhol’s posthumous existence in image form. Warhol’s famous dictum concerning everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame and his use of political and culture icons insistently pose questions of simulacra and the role of cultural figures in the experience of individuals in a society. This in turn relates to an almost obsessive series of meditations on the relation between the individual–figured in Mao II insistently as the figure of the novelist/writer, but also relating to political, spiritual and terrorist leaders–and the masses. Mao Zedong is both the leader of the Chinese revolution and the enigmatic figure who appears in a photograph swimming across the Yangste River after a long period of reclusion and rumored death. Mao is the embodiment of the revolution whose writings are memorized by the faithful millions, particularly around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and he is the mass-produced silk-screen image hanging in the MOMA and reproduced on the cover of Mao II. Mao’s influence over millions of Chinese is clearly meant to rhyme with Sun Myung Moon’s influence over the 6,500 couples married together in Yankee Stadium, an event that so shocks the parents of Karen Janney, parents who metonymically represent the masses of middle Americans.¹⁰ What does the much-vaunted American concept of selfhood and individuality amount to when compared to the experience of the crowd? The prologue ends with the apothegm, “The future belongs to crowds” (Mao II 16), and Part I ends with the figure of Bill Gray leaving his publisher’s office building in New York, the beginning of his escape or disengagement from his former life, “where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd” (103.

 

Is the novelist an artist who works alone in a room with a typewriter, or is the novelist the creation of a commodity culture, packaged and marketed for consumption by the masses? Mao II‘s Bill Gray is clearly both, and the conflict that this causes “inside” him is the leading motor of the various plot machinations. Scott Martineau, Gray’s assistant, is first pictured in New York in a bookstore:

 

Bookstores made him slightly sick at times. He looked at the gleaming best-sellers. People drifted through the store, appearing caught in some unhappy dazzlement. There were books on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays. He went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass-market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. Covers were lacquered and gilded. Books lay cradled in nine- unit counterpacks like experimental babies. He could hear them shrieking Buy me. There were posters for book weeks and book fairs. People made their way around shipping cartons, stepping over books scattered on the floor. He went to the section on modern classics and found Bill Gray’s two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill. (19-20)

 

The tonality of this passage is reminiscent of the often-praised supermarket segment of White Noise (35ff.). Just as contemporary novelists rarely pay attention to the details of food shopping and other quotidian tasks, so they rarely venture into bookstores in their prose. The self-image of the novelist as “artist” would seem to require viewing the novel as just another commodity, even a refined and highly valuable one, as demeaning to the artistic integrity of the work. DeLillo not only faces this question–one could pose it as the relation of the writer to the audience, but that would already involve certain presuppositions, including the commodity aspect addressed here–he begins to burrow inside it. There is finally something queasy-making about the ambiguity of the last sentence. Is Scott checking the shelves “for Bill” to be interpreted as: checking for Bill’s works, checking the shelves on Bill’s behalf, or checking for some kind of commodified version of Bill’s corpse? After all, it is the commodification of the author, as Foucault reminds us, that leads to the author’s disappearance.

 

Mao II could even be interpreted as a complex meditation that stages what Roland Barthes has called “the death of the author,” this being in some sense the “point” of the novel. Bill Gray dies an anonymous death on a ferry from Cyprus to Lebanon, with a crew member seen lifting Gray’s passport and identification. Although DeLillo is well known for his ambling and unresolved plot lines, Gray’s death seems particularly “unmotivated,” his internal injuries stemming from an apparently random accident in Athens.¹¹ Having gone to great lengths to create the Pynchon-like Gray, imagining his secretive retreat, his relationships with his assistants and his publisher, even sending him on an Amnesty International/PEN mission of mercy across the European continent–this denouement is reminiscent of the classic ending “and then they all got run over by a bus.” The question is whether this unmotivated death of Gray is some kind of complex joke DeLillo is playing on his audience and his critics, or whether Gray’s death has been planted (like Jack Gladney’s death in White Noise) in the circumstances of his writing, his fame, and his reclusion from the world.

 

As Walter Benjamin states, famously, in his essay “The Storyteller”: “Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell.” Any writer who tries to represent the story of a human life borrows, as Benjamin says, from the authority of death. Bill Gray would seem to wear this mantle heavily. The theme of death has been introduced, as I have been suggesting, even before Gray makes an appearance in the text, but he himself is clearly obsessed with the idea of death and how this relates to his role as a writer. During the photo session, Gray says, “I’m playing the idea of death.” He expands for Brita Nilsson:

 

“Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out.” (42)

 

Gray’s theory of photography exactly parallels Benjamin’s theory of the story; the meaning of each develops from and depends upon the end of the person’s life being known. DeLillo had already given classic expression to an aspect of this idea in Libra through the speculations of Win Everett: “Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men” (Libra 221). Significantly for our understanding here, death serves as a key mediating term between the work–whether image or text–and its role in the culture. This preunderstanding is necessary, I think, to understanding Gray’s (and DeLillo’s) meditations on the link between the novelist and the terrorist.

 

Gray consents to have his photograph taken in part because the burden of his fame, specifically his reclusion from the world that is both a reaction to and source of that fame, has become too great for him to bear. He has a sense that if he releases photos of himself to the public he can delay the inevitable tightening of the noose that he represents as those fans who are desperately seeking to find his whereabouts. So if, as I have speculated, Bill Gray’s death has been “planted” long before his death on the ferry, the seeds lie both in his writings and in the effects of his reclusion, which in turn bears a complex relationship to those very writings. Arnold Weinstein has provocatively proposed a reading of Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield” as an “ur-narrative” for understanding depictions of the self in American fiction (13-26). Hawthorne’s Wakefield is a man who disappears from his life for a period of twenty years and sets himself up across the street from his former home to observe the effects of his absence, particularly on his wife. Weinstein takes this creepy parable as paradigmatic of a concern for self-shaping in American letters generally. If we want to view DeLillo’s Bill Gray as a kind of postmodern Wakefield, some of the key differences between the two may begin to emerge more clearly. For one thing, Gray disappears from the scene of his self-imposed seclusion; more importantly, he dies without a trace, whereas Wakefield eventually returns. Gray’s “self-shaping” is more emphatically oriented around his own death, although when it arrives, it seems to catch him at least partially unaware. Also, in keeping with DeLillo’s insistence on the writer being superseded by a public image, Gray’s actual death may in the end be irrelevant to his continued “existence” as a writer and public figure: Scott and Karen are seen planning to keep the household going as before, releasing the photographs, and perhaps even publishing the latest book manuscript as well (Mao II 222-4).

 

The most significant aspect of Bill Gray’s determined reclusion from public life is the variation this allows DeLillo to play on the trope of the isolated writer as outlaw or criminal, leading to the central importance in Mao II of the figure of the terrorist. As Scott is taking photographer Brita Nilsson to Gray’s secret residence, she says to him:

 

“I feel as if I’m being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains.”

 

“Tell Bill. He’ll love that,” said Scott. (27)

 

Gray has his own extensive theories on this relationship, which he expounds on in the first part of the narrative and then tries to enact in the second part. He tells Brita:

 

“There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? 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)

 

Clearly we need to distinguish between what Bill Gray the character says, and what Don DeLillo might be said to believe, but there is no doubt that the figure of the terrorist plays an important role in nearly every one of DeLillo’s more recent works. Further, the equation that Gray draws here is complexly enacted in the plot of Mao II, as Bill Gray leaves his private seclusion and enters into an active role in the interplay between the forces of culture and the forces of terror. My working hypothesis is that DeLillo views Gray’s statement here as at least somewhat deluded and that Gray’s eventual death is in some important sense the price he pays for that delusion. But the entire, complex treatment of the “terrorist” theme in Mao II would seem to require two related moves that were adumbrated in the discussion of Vineland. One move is to investigate the highly-charged polyvalence of the term “terrorist”; the other is to uncover, if possible, what Said calls “a structure of attitude and reference” that emerges in DeLillo’s staging of the interplay between the novelist and the terrorist, particularly as this involves an American writer’s necessary implication in the culture/imperialism nexus.

 

Terror and its derivatives, terrorism and terrorist, are highly complex conceptual markers all of whose complexity I cannot hope to outline fully. The usual pairing places terror in a conceptual binary with reason or enlightenment. Perhaps the paradigmatic historical event linking these two terms is the French “Reign of Terror,” when the enlightenment motives of the 1789 revolution were seen as overcome by the forces of the revolutionary vanguard, leading to a paradigmatically undemocratic dictatorship sustained by raw force and unrestrained cruelty. This binary serves to shape Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s strange and controversial examination of the Stalin purges, Humanisme et terreur (1947), and may serve to remind us of the stand taken by many French intellectuals at the outset of the Cold War.¹² Although Merleau-Ponty quickly abandoned even this qualified support for Stalinism, his high-level analysis that seriously attempts to contextualize Stalin’s violence by comparison to the violence present in liberal democracies shows a need to understand the argument for liberal democracy within a specifically postwar historical context. Jean-Francois Lyotard has renewed aspects of this controversy, in the context of theorizing the postmodern, by examining shifts in the meaning of terror:

 

Terror is no longer exercised in the name of freedom, but in the name of `our’ satisfaction, in the name of the satisfication of a we which is definitely restricted to singularity. And if I judge this prospect intolerable, am I still being too modern? Its name is tyranny: the law which `we’ decree is not addressed to you, to you fellow-citizens or even to you subjects; it is applied to them,to third parties, to those outside, and it is simply not concerned with being legitimized in their eyes. I recall that Nazism was one such way of mourning emancipation and of exercising, for the first time in Europe since 1789, a terror whose reason was not in theory accessible to all and whose benefits were not to be shared by all. (1981; trans. 316-317)

 

For Lyotard, as theorist of the postmodern, terror also needs to be contextualized in what he calls the “regime of phrases” and not only, or even primarily, in the totalizing discourses of emancipation or human progress. Who is addressed by the various sentences, laws, discourses that have recourse to terror? Who is excluded? How do totalizing discourses elide these questions, necessarily placing them on the outside of the discourse of rational humanism? What are the results of this marginalization?

 

This marginalized outside is what is always hidden by the ideology of liberal democracy, an ideology constituted during the Cold War by the unquestioned binary opposition between freedom and communism, and now, given the breakdown of the world communist system, transferred to an equally unquestioned opposition between democracy and terrorism. According to this logic, whatever injustices may exist in the liberal democratic system or in the relationship of liberal democracies to the rest of the world, this system represents an undeniable advance over previous and currently existing political systems based on terror, cruelty and coercion.¹³ Whether consciously or not, this logic underlies the commonly accepted usages of “terrorism” and “terrorist.” The United States is not seen as using terrorism when it wages war with Iraq, using overwhelmingly superior technology and force to inflict a large number of both military and civilian casualities (the casualty estimate itself, or more precisely the lack of an official American estimate, is only one of the scandals of this war). The bombing of the World Trade Center, by contrast, is instantly branded an act of international terrorism. American domestic lawlessness, whether it be Randall Terry and the borderline murderous “Operation Rescue” or David Koresh and his armed-to-the-teeth suicidal followers, is never referred to as terrorism in the American media.¹⁴ The end of the Cold War and establishment of the United States as the sole remaining superpower has seen all opposition by lesser nation-states to U.S. control branded as terroristic: first came “state-supported terrorism” (read: Iran); then “terrorist states” (read: Libya, Iraq). Whether one supports American foreign policy or not, and whatever one’s views may be on recent armed conflicts and other acts of violence committed in the context of these struggles, it should be clear that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” are markers invoked to build ideological consensus for certain kinds of U.S. domination abroad. Just as the Reagan-Bush era “war on drugs” was a code for all sorts of government-sponsored paramilitary, ideological, class- and race-specific attacks on “them,” so “terrorism” functions as what Ronell terms a “parasite” on language, possessing an enormous resonance that threatens to overwhelm our interpretive structures of understanding.¹⁵

 

DeLillo obviously realizes much of this and he utilizes (or one could say, exploits) the recurrent theme of terrorism in Mao II and other works in order to tap into the tremendous force of these associations. His willingness and ability to face these central, defining geopolitical issues is a primary reason that he, much like Pynchon, is seen as one of our “preeminent” writers. But, at the same time, because he is a “preeminent” writer and one who moreover deals, as an American, with issues such as terrorism, his work may be seen to point to some of the necessarily limiting and blinding effects of the culture/imperialism nexus outlined by Said, even as it presents what critics mainly agree is a “progressive” position on most ostensibly political issues. Said’s astonishing discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, highlights the interconnections between a novelistic discourse that presents an outward critique of the ostensible effects of the dominant ideology while in many ways remaining under the sway of that same ideology.¹⁶ DeLillo bravely sets out to imagine a complex political and cultural connection between his postmodern novelist, Bill Gray, and a “terrorist” leader, Abu Rashid. While the motivation of novelist Gray in seeking to act out his theories equating the novelist with the terrorist in terms of cultural significance is both fascinating and revealing, DeLillo’s imagined portrait of the “terrorist” half of the equation reveals some of his–perhaps necessary, maybe even inevitable–limitations as both a Westerner and an American.

 

Richard Rorty, associated with the liberal democracy argument rehearsed above, might also be said to represent the putative position of the “early” Bill Gray (“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture” [Mao II 41]). Rorty has argued for the shaping value of novels for the ethical thinking members of a culture engage in. In works such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty says that there is an unbridgeable gap between what philosophers and other intellectual and cultural workers do, and the real world in which innocent people are imprisoned, tortured, killed or left to starve to death. The value of the liberal democratic system is that by eliminating the worst kinds of government-sponsored cruelty and coercion it establishes a reason-oriented rule of peaceful discussion to attain pragmatic social goals. One of these goals is the establishment of an intellectual climate in which writers and intellectuals can discuss issues such as ethics and morality, but crucially without the responsibility for anybody’s actual well-being, which is guaranteed by the liberal-democratic state. Since the intellectual sphere is primarily engaged in imaginative exercises, novelists in Rorty’s view are much more able to engage thoughtful, well-intentioned people with questions of ethical and moral import. Novelists present imagined situations that parallel real-life ones in which people face the questions of how to resist state terror, whether or not to engage in political action, how to respect other people’s choices, and so forth, showing how individual characters are capable of the wrong as well as the right choices. Because of this imaginative license, Rorty’s novelists–his primary examples in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity are Nabokov and Orwell–are better able to engage and shape readers’ moral reactions than are, say, professional philosophers, educators, political or religious leaders.

 

Now, Rorty has been widely criticized for ignoring the cruelty, violence and coercion that exists within the liberal democratic state. He has also been accused of establishing a kind of analytical “apartheid” with his insistence on the absolute separation between the realms of intellectual endeavor and real-world situations of power and domination.¹⁷ Richard Bernstein also argues, “Rorty’s praise of novelists who educate not by didactism but by imaginative concrete description depends on a dubious presupposition which he never justifies and for which there seems to be little, if any, concrete empirical evidence”; and that “in a society such as ours where there are fewer and fewer readers of novels, it seems little more than a false nostalgia to think that novels can play the role Rorty so desperately wants them to play” (285). This would seem to be the stage of thinking that Don DeLillo’s Bill Gray has reached, one we could fairly term postmodern. Yet the consequences of this thinking are potentially devastating for Gray’s view of himself, since he is a novelist others had indeed credited with giving expression to the inner life of the culture, and he had at least until a certain point believed himself capable of sustaining such a role. If the postmodern culture is one in which novels and their creators are increasingly commodified (the heightened commodification correlating to a presumably diminishing public) rather than read and cherished, this may explain Gray’s increasingly morose view of himself and his writing. Certainly this view provides a motivation for Gray’s thinking that the only possible remaining step is to try to bridge the gap between the interiorized experience of novel-writing (and reading) and engaged action in the public sphere.¹⁸ The second half of Mao II sketches Gray’s itinerary in a distinctively postmodern and hallucinatory way; as the stages of this journey are increasingly marked by setbacks and failure, the possible interrelation between the private and public spheres is both questioned and problematized.

 

The first stage in Gray’s journey away from his former seclusion and toward a version of public action is precipitated by a request for a meeting from his old friend and publisher, Charlie Everson, communicated by Brita Nilsson. At this meeting Everson explains a situation in which Gray can be of use in his role as famous author and public figure. Everson is the “chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression” (98); and he wants Gray to appear at a media event in London on behalf of the group. This media event will be timed to correspond to the release of a hostage held by terrorists in Beirut, a hostage who is of special interest to Everson’s group because he is a Swiss poet. When Gray leaves the initial meeting with Everson, he purposely avoids his assistant Scott Martineau, and begins a process of disappearing from his life as it has been constituted up until then.¹⁹ In London, the media event never comes off, in part because the place chosen for the meeting is bombed. Gray’s itinerary is furthered, however, by his encounter and conversations with George Haddad, an intermediary figure between the literary group Everson represents and the terrorist group holding the hostage. Haddad suggests that Gray may be able to serve as an agent for freeing the hostage, if he is willing to meet directly with a leader of the terrorist group. As the bombing in London has demonstrated, however, Gray may be the object of the same “terror” that the group practices in Beirut, the fear for his personal safety placing him in a position parallel to the Swiss poet. Eventually Gray accedes to Haddad’s wish that he travel to Haddad’s base in Athens (in a significant place-echo with The Names), where according to Haddad true dialogue is easier. In Athens, though, Gray comes to understand that his only possible mediating role is to substitute himself for the hostage, a kind of literary “trading up.” Caught in this extremely uncertain position, unable to return to his previous life and apparently enmeshed in his own logic equating the novelist and the terrorist, Gray travels to Cyprus and arranges ferry passage to Beirut, during which trip he dies.

 

If the novel ended there, we might speculate that DeLillo was trying to stage the impossibility of the Western individualist-author “crossing over” to the “terrorist” Orient, trapped as Gray is by his own imaginative limitations. But in an ironic doubling that resonates with the postmodern themes of image, simulacra and personal identity examined earlier, the postscript, “In Beirut,” presents the photographer Brita Nilsson completing Bill Gray’s journey and meeting with terrorist leader Abu Rashid. Nilsson has abandoned her project of photographing authors and switched to terrorists, enacting Gray’s theorized substitution. Her experience of Beirut is hazy and surreal, dominated by the dizzying simulacra of Coke ads and the cult of the terrorist leader’s personality. As a Swede, Brita Nilsson is coded “international” from the outset and so might be seen as more able than the American Gray to move easily in this “foreign” setting. But Nilsson’s art of photography is also more capable than Gray’s written medium of communicating the surface reality of Beirut, a reality DeLillo seems to urge is all there is. (In a telling juxtaposition as the book ends, Nilsson experiences flashes followed by no sound that she realizes are not shell bursts, but someone taking photographs.) DeLillo’s Abu Rashid, seen in a single encounter with Nilsson, is a taciturn terrorist, given to mouthing phrases like “Don’t bring your problems to Beirut” (232). Much as Scott Martineau parrots statements made by Bill Gray, so Abu Rashid’s interpreter expands on, even makes up, statements for Abu Rashid. Abu Rashid also exerts an unspoken control over his hooded young followers who wear his picture on their T-shirts. But, somewhat paradoxically, Abu Rashid does seem to care what Brita Nilsson thinks of him, saying repeatedly: “You must tell me if you think I’m totally mad” (236). Where Bill Gray’s “failure” to cross over fully to the other side might be said to enact a certain reality, a division between world views and systems of thinking, Mao II‘s Abu Rashid represents, in my view, DeLillo’s imaginative “failure” even to attempt to render any kind of satisfactory counterpart to the Western novelist in the figure of the terrorist leader.

 

It may be that in order to render anything like an adequate view of what it is to be a terrorist, one must have had the actual experience. But when confronted with a situation like that presented in Mao II of someone held hostage, how is one to image the captor’s mentality? The Swiss poet has no direct contact with the leader, Abu Rashid, only with someone referred to as “the boy” who may or may not be the same “boy” with the hood that Brita Nilsson sees with Abu Rashid. The scene of captivity is imagined entirely through the consciousness of the Swiss poet. Throughout the text, “the boy” is credited with having almost no independent thought or existence; instead, his actions are random and forgetful:

 

The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse. (110)

 

There were strip fragments of concrete still attached to the bent steel rod the boy used to beat the bottoms of the prisoner’s feet when he remembered. (203)

 

I don’t know what logic this representation of the captor’s random forgetfulness is meant to serve, but it does correspond in its way to the lassitude and taciturnity attributed to the terrorist leader Abu Rashid in the Postscript. Whatever the case may be, this semi-bored, inattentive approach to torture is most certainly not what narratives told from the “other side” present. Marguerite Duras’ brief narrative that presents an autobiographical account of torturing a French collaborator, for example, shows her and her compatriots to be tense, alert and extremely involved with the process of torturing their prisoner (La douleur 135-162). And in a note preceding this narrative, Duras “the author” tells her readers: “Therese is me. She who tortures the informer is me. I give you she who tortures along with the other texts. Learn to read: these are sacred texts” (134; my trans.). This same “sacred” quality permeates Elie Wiesel’s (one would think at least somewhat fictionalized) account in Dawn of a Jewish terrorist, as a member of a group in Palestine, holding hostage and finally shooting a British army officer.

 

The recent, surprisingly successful, film The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992) devotes roughly the first half of its narrative to a similar terrorist/hostage confrontation.²⁰ Both in its representation of the terrorist/hostage relationship and in the terrorist’s very different set of experiences in the second half of the film, Jordan presents material suggesting the terrorist’s role in postmodern culture is less that of the “novelist” (someone who influences the inner mind of the culture) and more that of the “interpreter” (someone who participates in smaller-scale interpretive acts). Although the second half of the film and its focus on the mysterious transvestite or transsexual Dil has provoked the most response, I find the first half of the film to be as powerful a cinematic experience as any in recent memory. Jordan has said that his depiction of the hostage/terrorist relationship in the context of Northern Ireland–though he wouldn’t tend to use the word “terrorist,” would he?–bears a relationship to two previous treatments of the theme, Frank O’Connor’s story “Guest of the Nation” and Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage (Introduction to The Neil Jordan Reader [NJR], xii). He continues:

 

O’Connor and Behan dealt with simple friendship between two men. Underlying this friendship lay an erotic possibility, a sense of mutual need and identification that could have provided salvation for their protagonists. That possibility remained subdued, and so both stories ended tragically. With The Crying Game, I brought the erotic thread to the surface. Instead of two, there were now three. A hostage, a captor, and an absent lover. The lover became the focus for the erotic subtext, loved by both men in a way they couldn’t love each other. (NJR xii)

 

Although there are many differences in all of these situations of captivity, I would propose that Jordan’s romanticizing tendency is one way to explore the “sacred” element both Duras and Wiesel insist upon, and that DeLillo’s narrative either denies or completely elides.²¹

 

The Crying Game‘s hostage Jody is a British soldier on assignment in Northern Ireland. He is also a black man, born in Antigua, and the film uses his racial identity to comment in repeated, ironic fashion on the complex interrelations inhering in Britain’s “postcolonial” experience. In the film’s opening sequence, Jody is seduced by Jude, an IRA operative, while the music from the opening credits “When a Man Loves a Woman” fades in the background. There are multiple ironies operating here, of course, as when we find out that Jude is merely playing a role in Jody’s capture, and later when we find out that the woman Jody does love is not a woman at all. The film consistently sets up these enactments of interpretive scenarios, in which the principal characters are presented with situations requiring responses to bodies of information. The film’s audience is likewise asked to participate in these interpretive actions; but, unlike the audience who are given clues and may even guess “right” (“I knew all along” “No, you didn’t” “I did too”), the film’s principal characters almost always are wrong. Jody makes a huge error when he goes with Jude, something he appears to admit when he says, “I didn’t even fancy her. . . . She’s not my type” (NJR 189). Fergus, of course, makes a big mistake in getting involved with the prisoner, a mistake that leads to a whole series of others, including letting Jody take off his hood when he is about to be executed. The film’s most notorious interpretive dilemma involves Fergus’ lack of insight into the clues presented regarding Dil’s gender. Even once his error has been exposed, Fergus continues not to recognize Dil fully, and thus both to underestimate her and to pass on faulty information to his cohorts: for example, when Maguire asks “And who is she?” and Fergus responds “Just a girl” (NJR 245). Underestimating Dil leads Fergus to botch his next assignment, when Dil ties him up, preventing him from making his rendezvous with Maguire and Jude. When Jude arrives at the apartment, Dil correctly identifies her as an agent in Jody’s abduction and shoots her. Now, we could say that all of these errors are part of the romantic plot of the film–Fergus the terrorist with a heart simply making a muddle of things–but that would likewise be a mistake of interpretation in my view.

 

Jordan’s IRA terrorists (or any other terrorists, for that matter) are by no means in control of the meanings generated by their actions, despite what they might like to think, and despite DeLillo/Gray’s equation of the terrorist with the novelist. The situations in which terrorism arises do not admit of these kind of unambivalent messages in which one person or group does the emitting and the wider culture or the masses do the receiving. Following the analysis of Lyotard in Le Differend, it is this impossibility of a universal or totalizing discourse, as paradigmatically represented by the silencing of the wronged party, e.g., the holocaust victim, that leads inevitably to the incommensurable difference or differend. The language of the Law, the language of Western imperialism, even the language of liberal democracy, does not address all subjects and does not allow all subjects to formulate utterances (most notably those who are victims of genocide). Operating out of a determinant us/them opposition, the universalizing discourse of Western humanism necessarily excludes and marginalizes certain utterances, prevents them from being heard or even from being made. The Abu Rashids of this world are not taciturn “by nature”; they are rather denied the fundamental conditions in which to formulate language in a meaningful way. Of course, this leads the Abu Rashids and the Ferguses to undertake actions that rational, moral and ethical thinking is quick to condemn. What this analysis of terrorism uncovers as an aspect of our “postmodern condition,” however, is that we all occupy roles as speakers and interpreters in various discourse communities that may or may not overlap or communicate with each other. This does not excuse any one of us (as the by-now routine misreading of Lyotard would claim) from the obligation to try to understand the ideological structures determining our own discourse communities, and the way these same structures systematically distort the meanings generated by others.

 

It is no longer a viable option, pace Rorty, to say that Western humanism is the best show we have and everybody else had better be convinced (preferably by persuasion rather than force) to get on board. The famous “conflict of interpretations,” which Lyotard continues to insist upon through linking the differend to theories of justice, means from this perspective that no one occupies the role of the “novelist” in the sense of entering into the inner mind of a culture and determining what its members should think about key moral questions. Our various social formations lack the kind of cultural consensus necessary for such a “preeminent” figure. It is a fatal error to think that the “terrorist” is any more able to occupy such a position and in this way I think DeLillo’s Mao II is exemplary in presenting Bill Gray’s doomed attempt to somehow force this connection. Where Mao II falls short, in my view, is in its imaginative representation of the figure of the terrorist. Neil Jordan’s Fergus may be a romanticized version of the terrorist, but at least Jordan’s terrorist is given a “sacred” dimension. DeLillo may wish to deny this “sacred” character to his terrorists, showing rather something like the banality of evil in “the boy”‘s random behavior and Abu Rashid’s programmatic and taciturn utterances. But it is only in attempting to understand the silenced utterances resulting from the inherent lack of justice in our society and leading to all kinds of terrorism both at home and abroad that our postmodern culture deserves to survive at all.

 

Notes

 

1. This notion is advanced by Glen Scott Allen in the fuller version of a paper presented at the 1992 Modern Language Association meeting in New York, “Spectral Authorship: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and the Postmodern Legacy,” and in his essay in this collection.

 

2. In Said’s terms, ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; “‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a consequence of imperialism is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. . . . In our time, colonialism has largely ended; imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices” (9).

 

3. This is a stage where not only the anti-Left reviewers of The Washington Post and other media outlets are stuck. For a forceful critique of these, see the articles by Hal Crowther and Frank Lentricchia in (Lentricchia, ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo. On the other side of the ideological divide are the little + – symbols that Fredric Jameson affixes on his chart next to various theorists of modernism and the postmodern, according to whether they are “progressive” or “reactionary” (61).

 

4. Something about the mirror symmetry, or pleonastic quality, of “triumphant Americanism” and “American triumphalism” ought to give pause to anyone wishing to assume the label of “Americanist.” Paul Bove has given an incisive expression to some of the problems associated with the Americanist discourse in literary studies (48-66). I am very disturbed by the suggestion voiced by some that American literature should be seen in the context of “post-colonial” literatures. Here again, I think Said’s recent work is indispensable for understanding “America”‘s role as a leading imperialist power and for providing ways of contextualizing any analysis of U.S. cultural production.

 

5. Prairie’s search is similar to that in another roughly contemporaneous work, T. Coreghessan Boyle’s World’s End (1988). In this novel, a young man’s search for identity hinges on finding out what happened during a leftist political rally that took place when he was just a child. The betrayal committed on this occasion by his father led to the death of his mother and his father’s permanent estrangement. A combination of mystery story and search for personal identity, World’s End counts for its tacit support by readers of leftist sympathy in order to invest its traditional patterns of mystery story and identity quest with political resonance. This topic has obvious resonances with Borges’ “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s film based on the Borges story, The Spider’s Strategem (1968). In the Bertolucci film, where Borges’ indeterminate setting is replaced by postwar Italy, a son returns to the town in which a statue of his father, martyred by the fascists, dominates the town square. The son intends to investigate the background of his father’s murder, but the further his investigation takes him, the more it looks like the father planned his own murder in order to make amends for betraying his cell of partisan resistance fighters. My guess is that a more thorough examination of modern European and European-influenced literatures would yield countless examples of this motif.

 

6. As should be clear by now, I am following some of the conceptual apparatus for understanding postmodernism proposed by Jean-Francois Lyotard, particularly in The Postmodern Condition and Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants.

 

7. That is, if existentialism was ever in itself a satisfactory solution on a political level. Edward Said’s discussion of Albert Camus’ work in L’Etranger and other texts shows that Camus’ vaunted existential crisis of meaning, particularly the supposedly “unmotivated” murder of the Arab by Meursault, serves as a cover for his deep intrication in the colonialist history and mindset of the French Algerians (Said 169-185).

 

8. That Marx had this metaphorical/nonmetaphorical sense of “drugs” is clear from his statement regarding religion. Lindsay Anderson’s film O Lucky Man! (1973) turns Marx’s dictum around in a prominent wall graffiti: “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

 

9. These concerns with selfhood and authorship are central to Arnold Weinstein’s recent magisterial study of American fiction, Nobody’s Home.

 

10. In American and Western thinking generally, Asians mean numbers. In Guy Banister’s paranoid imagination, Chinese are massing in the Baja on the border with California: “There was something classic in the massing of the Chinese” (Libra 352). It is too simple merely to call this racist (though it clearly is), because we thus tend to indulge in self-righteous determinations of other people’s racism. DeLillo’s work consistently moves in to the minds of Americans–the Banisters, the Oswalds, the Bill Grays–to show how these racist and other ideological principles serve as organizing tropes for the larger social entities in which we all participate to one degree or another.

 

11. The paranoid reading of DeLillo’s fiction, as solicited for example by The Names, would raise the question of whether there can ever be an “unmotivated” killing of an American in Athens. That is to say, perhaps Gray’s ultimately fatal accident, like the near-fatal shooting of David Keller / James Axton in The Names, stages the “return of the repressed,” mirroring Meursault’s “unmotivated” murder of the Arab in Camus’s L’Etranger. But maybe America’s leading role in maintaining the “New World Order” is not as transparent as I see it as being. Arnold Weinstein, for example, says (astonishingly) about the situation presented in The Names: “American hegemony is a thing of the past” (291).

 

12. Merleau-Ponty says, for example: “It is from the conservative West that communism has received the idea of history and learned to relativize moral judgment. Communism has retained this lesson and sought at least within the given historical milieu those forces which had the best chance to realize humanity. If one does not believe in the power of the proletariat to establish itself or that it can accomplish all that Marxism believes it can, then the capitalist civilizations which have, even if imperfect in themselves, the merit of existing, represent perhaps the least terrible of what history has made; but the difference between these and other civilizations, or between these and the Soviet enterprise, is not between heaven and hell, or between good and evil: it is only a matter of the different uses of violence” (295; my translation).

 

13. This apology for Western-style pragmatic humanism under the guise of liberal democracy is usually associated with the work of Richard Rorty; see especially, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Specifically in an article entitled “Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard,” Rorty rejects the idea that there is anything wrong with taking liberal democracy as the norm when dealing with other cultures: “We cannot leap outside our Western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try. All we should try to do is get inside the inhabitants of that culture long enough to get some idea of how we look to them, and whether they have any ideas we can use” (212-213). If that sounds like cultural imperialism, that is fine with Rorty, because liberal democracy is unquestionably the best social system yet devised. It is unfortunate that in the past force was used to colonize non-Western peoples in the name of liberal humanism, but that doesn’t diminish the ultimate validity of Western values (cf. 218-219). These very significant differences in political outlook between Rorty and Lyotard are consistently overlooked by those who want to lump the two together and accuse Lyotard of Rorty’s political shortcomings.

 

14. As DeLillo well knows, and as Mao II explores in great depth through the character of Karen Janney and her association with the Moon organization, Koresh’s Branch Davidians are known as a “cult.” Karen’s free indirect discourse formulates this as follows: “The other word is `cult.’ How they love to use it against us” (9).

 

15. In the context of the PC wars, one has only to recall George Will’s suggestion, in his Newsweek column on the debate over the Carol Iannone nomination to the NEH advisory board, that members of the MLA were the domestic equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s palace guards, comparing Dick Cheney’s role in defeating Saddam to wife Lynn Cheney’s role in fighting far more insidious enemies within the American academy. This analogy would be ludicrous if it weren’t so revealing of the links between imperialism abroad and cultural hegemony at home.

 

16. As Said says, “Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (30).

 

17. Richard Bernstein addresses “Rorty’s logic of apartheid–his rigid separation of the private and the public. For like all apartheid, it has violent consequences. It seems curious that Rorty, who shows us that most distinctions are fuzzy, vague, and subject to historical contingencies, should rely on such a fixed, rigid, ahistorical dichotomy. My objection is not to drawing sharp distinctions. Without doing so, no thinking would be possible. My objection is to the way Rorty uses this specific dichotomy, which leads to all sorts of violent consequences” (286). I dispute the ability of Rorty to maintain this distinction, specifically with regard to the language of gendered violence, in Chapter Six of The Ethical Turn: Postmodern Theories of the Subject (forthcoming).

 

18. One recalls that Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? argued for the superiority of the novel as an art form precisely because it alone was able to accomplish a satisfactory synthesis of these domains.

 

19. Weinstein, as we have seen, sees the Wakefield story as paradigmatic of this desire to disappear from one’s life. In the postmodern context I am working to establish here, I see parallels with two fairly recent films, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977). In each of these films the male protagonist seeks a form of disappearance: in The Passenger, Jack Nicholson’s character switches identities with a dead man who turns out to be an itinerant arms dealer; in The American Friend, the character played by Bruno Ganz is tricked into committing a mob murder by his “American friend” (Dennis Hopper), and then finds that he enjoys the thrill and isolation from his family that results. I think we could call each of these films postmodern in part because of the dissolution of previously stable identities both main characters go through, linked to paranoid systems of shady power figures, both political and criminal, similar to the terrorist network DeLillo constructs in Mao II. This postmodern connection between the individual and the larger conspiracy as a form of what he calls “totality” drives Fredric Jameson’s discussion of recent North American film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992).

 

20. My continued use of the word “terrorist” to describe the IRA character of Fergus (Stephen Rea) is deliberate. Reviews of the film also used this term, although somewhat more casually, calling Fergus, for example, “the terrorist with a heart” or “the thoughtful terrorist.” Lest it seem that I am shifting ground–from the Middle East to Ireland–without justification, I would refer to Edward Said’s discussion of W. B. Yeats in the context of the resistance to imperialism (Said 220-238). Said calls Yeats “the indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power” (220).

 

21. Raymond Queneau’s 1947 novel, We Always Treat Women Too Well (On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes), set during the Easter Rising of 1916, is a wickedly satirical take on the erotic possibilities of the terrorist / hostage situation, as well as being what now seems a presciently postmodern work.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Rustle of Language. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations. New York: HBJ, 1968.
• Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
• Borges, Jorge Luis. “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1962.
• Bove, Paul A. In the Wake of Theory. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/New England UP, 1992.
• Boyle, T. Coreghessan. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1988.
• DeLillo, Don. The Names. New York: Vintage, 1982.
• —. White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
• —. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.
• Duras, Marguerite. La douleur. Paris: P.O.L., 1985; translated as War, by Barbara Bray, New York: Pantheon, 1986.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 141-160.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Wakefield.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982 (Ohio State UP, 1972, 1974).
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Captalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, and London: BFI Publishing, 1992.
• Jordan, Neil. A Neil Jordan Reader (including Night in Tunisia [stories], The Dream of a Beast [novella], and The Crying Game [screenplay]). New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit, 1979; translated as The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. “Histoire universelle et differences culturelles,” Critique 456 (1981): 559-568; translated by David Macey as “Universal History and Cultural Differences,” The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 314-323.
• —. Le differend. Paris: Minuit, 1983; translated by Georges Van Den Abeele, Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. Le postmoderne explique aux enfants. Paris: Galilee, 1986.
• McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le probleme communiste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; translated by John O’Neill, as Humanism and Terror Boston: Beacon, 1969.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. New York: Little, Brown, 1990.
• Queneau, Raymond. On est toujour trop bon avec les femmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; translated by Barbara Wright, as We Always Treat Women Too Well. New York: New Directions, 1981.
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