Guy Debord argued that modern life was increasingly being replaced by representations of itself. In 1994, he died by suicide. David Foster Wallace proposed sincerity as an escape from recursive irony. In 2008, he died by suicide. Mark Fisher wrote about the ghosts of futures that never arrived. In 2017, he died by suicide. Now it is our turn to solve postmodernism.

But first, in 1991, DeLillo opens his novel with a prologue that concludes:

The future belongs to crowds.

His eleventh novel is a philosophical piece about the nature of writing, the author, the novel, and post-modernity's effect on society and the aforementioned. In this sense, it is thematically similar to White Noise in its contemplation of mass hysteria/media, society of the spectacle. Mao II is more specific because it is concerned w/ the effects of television/news on literature and the author.

The book is structured around spectacle, the main ingress being terror, but it is actually bookended by wedding ceremonies connecting the settings of NYC to Beirut. Aside from the celebrations though, the story is very deliberately set in the Spring and Summer of 1989 which gave us:

• Tiananmen Square
• Death of the first supreme Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, (not to be confused with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who got got earlier this year)
• Rushdie affair

The story consists of few characters and the drama between them (which feels DeLillo-esque, but I've not read enough of him to know this for sure. White Noise esque to be sure, but also getting traces of Gaddis from the "four characters in a box" improv experiment, maybe that was just a popular format for postmodernism).

• Karen Janney is introduced in the first wedding ceremony, the mass marriage of members of the Unification Church where she is joined with Jim Jo Pak
  • Doubles also as Bill's assistant, and a lover of both Scott and Bill
• Reclusive author Bill Gray who eclectic in the exact same way that Pynchon seems eclectic. There's maybe like 8 photos of him floating around on the internet in toto, but occasionally he descends from his hermetic vantage point overlooking society/history for funsies e.g. to vooice himself in The Simpsons (wearing a paper bag for privacy/anonymity) or to provide the blurb for novels which are practically about him, such as Mao II which reads

This novel's a beauty. DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.

• We have also Scott, who weaseled his way from obsessed fan to live-in assistant of Bill's
• and finally, Brita, a photographer profiling authors

The story is split into two parts, the first of which takes place at Bill's residence, largely consisting of conversations between the assembled cast regarding art, literature, media, violence, asceticism, etc. We learn about Bill's reluctance to publish, for so long as he keeps procrastinating, he has a good book on his hands. As soon as it becomes "real" in the hands of the public, he's cooked:

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I’ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I’ve forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I’ve lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I’ve let good enough be good enough. This is someone else’s book. It feels all forced and wrong. I’ve tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I’m sitting on a book that’s dead.”

In Ch 4, there's an ominous discussion of the WTC and the towers looking dangerous. Much more so than if there were just one of them (book written in '91 btw):

“Where I live, okay, there’s a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it’s water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island—little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it’s all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers. ”

“Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time.”

“I’ll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop.”

“You’ll wonder what made you mad.”

“I already have the World Trade Center.”

“And it’s already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse.”

“What?” she said.

“If there was only one tower instead of two.”

“You mean they interact. There is a play of light.”

“Wouldn’t a single tower be much worse?”

“No, because my big complaint is only partly size. 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.”

“They’re saying, ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

“Someday, go walk those streets,” she said. “Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?”

At the center of the book is this reclusive author, the figure of Salinger and of Pynchon who does not want to be seen being contrasted against the larger than life figure of Mao. The author used to be a public figure, but the writer has been displaced and no longer enjoys the pre-television stature he or she enjoyed.

“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.”

“Keep going. I like your anger.”

“But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.”

An author may become reclusive, as does Bill, to reify the mythical proportions of his existence. To publish is to shatter the mythical image that he might be working something great.

“I’ve become someone’s material. Yours, Brita. There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.”

So alongside the thematic contrast between the crowds (Mao), and the author (reclusive Bill), there is also this development of the interplay between word (Bill) and image (Brita/his readership). Every section break in the book has a photograph watermark; the novel is in dialogue with the images that appear in it itself. Maybe they're threatening (as media threatens the author), maybe they're just symbols.

In the following chapter, over dinner w/the troupe of four:

“Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.”

“He told me, more or less.”

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.”

The title itself also implies reproduction; repetition; facsimilizaiton; banalization; commercialization. Language of art and the language of violence. They're almost interchangeable. At the end of the novel, Brita is doing a photoshoot of teh terrorist leader. She shoots pics, and reloads the film. DeLillio loves this sort of linguistic irony (believe Endzone his second novel is primarily about this sort of rhetoric two-birdedness).

The novel is continuously concerned with the crowd: herd mentality & individualism. From the opening wedding scene with the thesis "the future belongs to crowds," We can find consolation and oppression in crowds. White Noise began with students arriving to campus, this novel begins with the procession of newly weds. Both speak to the death of individualism.

“From the bandstand at home plate the Mendelssohn march carries a stadium echo, with lost notes drifting back from the recesses between tiers. Flags and bunting everywhere. The blessed couples face the infield, where their true father, Master Moon, stands in three dimensions. He looks down at them from a railed pulpit that rides above a platform of silver and crimson . . .

And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. He keeps the glasses trained, feeling a slight desperation now, a need to find her and remind himself who she is. Healthy, intelligent, twenty-one, serious-sided, possessed of a selfness, a teeming soul, nuance and shadow, grids of pinpoint singularities they will never drill out of her. Or so he hopes and prays, wondering about the power of their own massed prayer. When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops. The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought. See how happy they look.”

When free thought is viewed as the a burden, the crowd is able to escape though participation in herd mentality. Escape from freedom.

This brings us to the title. Mao II is one of a series, like a Warhol painting (overt). "The work of art in the age of industrialization." Every reproduction is another version of the original, but lacking its aura. Mao II is the first reproduction, and thus the moment at which the aura or mythos is lost. I love how this book explores postmodernism, without really participating in it. DeLillo studies the author, doing the thing the author is doing, describing his troubles, but in terms of form and content, it's not so meta otherwise to be "a postmodern work," though maybe I'm being pedantic. A critique? sort of... A critique of self, a letter to something he can feel himself losing through his own participation? ya

Conflict arises when Brita notifies Bill that his editor Charles wants to talk to him. Chuck wants Bill's next novel (which he's been putting off), but also there's a Swiss poet being held hostage in Beirut, and Charlie wants Bill to play a part in his rescue. to resurrect Bill's image via heroic glory (death and resurrection of the author – the right kind of publicity: spectacle => money).

Bill and Charlie are in Europe, heading towards the poet. They encounter George Hadad (spelling) with ties to the people holding poet hostage. He acts as a liaison between academia and terror.

“Of course he’s innocent. That’s why they took him. It’s such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don’t abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It’s the only honest word to use.”

Similar scene as the German nuns in White Noise:

“In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew’s sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it’s good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints’ names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven’t forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.”

Final section follows Brita in Beirut, but now photographing terrorist leaders (the role of the author has been transformed).

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