Bill Millard

Department of English
Rutgers University
millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu

 

“There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.”

 

–Weird Beard (Russell Lee Moore, a.k.a. Russ Knight), KLIF disk jockey in Libra

 

I. Paranoias and paradigms: Who’s afraid of Don DeLillo?

 

One of the most challenging qualities that Frank Lentricchia finds in Don DeLillo is that he “offers us no myth of political virginity preserved, no ‘individuals’ who are not expressions of–and responses to–specific historical processes” (“Introducing” 241). While most mainstream fiction of the Reagan era is marked by regionalisms and privatisms that bespeak an alarming poverty of imagination, DeLillo dares to project a world in its full political complexity and to grapple with ideas that might make some sense of events observed in the public sphere. Working within a culture that was both postmodern and nostalgic, a culture that longed for the pieties of laissez- faire economics and Euro-American bourgeois individualism while its socioeconomic institutions were busily breaking down any remaining space for individuals or individuality, DeLillo recognized that the 1980s could not be understood without attention to the problem of individual behavior in a social sphere hypersaturated with the products of signifying systems. The “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (Libra 181) is a superb symbolic moment on which to focus such attention, since it is obviously much more than a symbol.

 

To publish a historical novel that posited a plausible chain of events leading to the assassination of John Kennedy was more than an act of defiant imagination or political chutzpah; it raised the stakes for the enterprise of fiction within a culture rapidly losing its allegiance to written language as a practical means of organizing experience. Libra makes the implicit claim that no matter what one might believe of the lone-gunman theory or the Warren Commission’s report–in CIA master-researcher Nicholas Branch’s view, “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred” (181)–the assembly of explanatory narratives from the available evidence surrounding the events at Dealey Plaza is as legitimate a concern for a novelist as for any journalist, historian, or member of an investigative body. Given the evidentiary problems surrounding this assassination, the unexplained (or unsatisfyingly explained) deaths of participants in these events and witnesses to them, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of credibility, the novelist may in fact be on stronger ground than members of these other fields in asserting truth claims about Kennedy’s death.

 

This position depends on a precise characterization of the nature of a historical truth claim. Libra achieves its disruptive force by offering a fresh paradigm by which an event like the Kennedicide may be understood. This paradigm¹ is post-individualist, while accounting for individual actions and decisions within social signifying systems; it refuses both the easy gambit of universal skepticism toward the possibility of explaining such an event and the equally easy temptation of overreaching causal conjecture. It is immune to charges that might be lodged from opposite directions: the accusation of credulity, involving the sense of universal connectivity associated with conspiracy theory (regarded as paranoid in both the vernacular and the Pynchonian senses), and that of ahistorical nihilism, involving the disjunctivity of explanations that lodge sole culpability with Oswald (and thus reduce an incident with massive social causes and consequences to private motivation, mere inexplicable insanity). DeLillo’s text implies an interpretive paradigm that neither overplays nor underplays its hand, connecting events with participants’ intentions while eschewing any model of those intentions as deliberate, purposeful, or necessarily connected with their outcomes.

 

Libra‘s reception among the guardians of a conceptual border between fiction and the presumably nonfictional discourses of history, politics, and journalism was venomous to an astonishing but hardly inexplicable degree. Like Lentricchia, journalist Hal Crowther assesses the vituperation directed at DeLillo by George F. Will and Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post as a significant barometer of the book’s power, an indication of the authoritarian paranoia that it arouses–a deeper and truer paranoia than the accounts Oliver Stone, James Garrison, the aficionado of the Austin bookstore’s “Conspiracy” section in Slacker, or any caller to a WBAI-FM talk show might conjure. Crowther posits a credible reason why the paranoia in corporate journalism’s higher circles might mirror or exceed the paranoia in the lower: “At the Post they love to talk about Watergate, but they don’t want to talk about Dallas. Establishment journalists know in their guts that they chickened out on the biggest story of their time and left it to fringe players and exhumers of Elvis” (330).²

 

Both of the Post commentators are sniffishly dismissive of the political implications of Libra, but Will also makes an explicit case for historical disjunctivism: “It takes a steady adult nerve to stare unblinkingly at the fact that history can be jarred sideways by an act that signifies nothing but an addled individual’s inner turmoil” (qtd. in Crowther 323). Characteristically, Will takes a reasonable-sounding position in favor of willfully limiting the reach of historical reasoning. One may safely presume that any historian, journalist, congressional investigator, or novelist does desire “a steady adult nerve,” but Will’s argument fails to consider why causal inquiry must stop with the observation of individual pathology.

 

Oswald, as DeLillo represents him in Libra, is indeed addled–afflicted, apparently congenitally, with a moderately severe combination of dyslexia and dysgraphia– and in constant personal turmoil. Will’s criticism thus seems not only disproportionate but misapplied to this novel. In depicting a clueless gunman who bases his actions on romantic adolescent notions of political destiny, plays into the hands of nearly every conspirator or would-be conspirator around him, and even carries the requisite familial baggage for the privatistic banalities of Freudian interpretation (absent father, domineering mother, and largely repressed but recurrent gay desires), doesn’t DeLillo provide individual-pathology theorists with all the evidence they need? But the crucial distinction here is between a reading that incorporates individual pathology and an individualist, disjunctivist reading. DeLillo’s offense, beyond merely “exhibit[ing] the same skepticism that was almost universal at the time the Warren Report was released” (Crowther 323), is continuing the investigation into and through the pathological individual. Oswald is pathological without being particularly distinct from his surroundings.

 

Will and Yardley’s wagon-circling responses to Libra also resemble Tom Wolfe’s comments about Noam Chomsky’s theories of the structural imperatives of the news media within the corporate state, included in the documentary Manufacturing Consent (1992). Wolfe derisively dismisses Chomsky’s argument about control over the limits of permissible public debate on the grounds that it would require the manipulation of the media by a cabal of plotters, presumably gathered in a single room–a laughably cinematic image of organized malignity, mirrored from the right by Gen. Edwin Walker’s rant about the “Real Control Apparatus”:

 

The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives. (Libra 283)

 

Because his account of the Chomskyist critique adheres to the same individual-intentionalist paradigm, Wolfe cannot imagine a controlled discourse without conscious and practically omnipotent controllers; because they refuse to entertain possibilities beyond Warren Report orthodoxy and rational intentionalism, Will and Yardley conflate DeLillo with the “fringe players and exhumers of Elvis.” To posit mechanisms by which fringe players operate is hardly to embrace the fringe oneself. Like Chomsky elucidating the hard-wired requirements of the information industry, DeLillo outlines certain inevitable tendencies of organized sub rosa actions, aware that those tendencies go into effect no matter who does the organizing or why.

 

Cluelessness is indeed central to the actions of this novel, but it is crucial to recognize that cluelessness in this political atmosphere is by no means limited to Oswald. From Win Everett’s private mixture of motivations (only belatedly incorporating the recognition that “the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot” [221]) to David Ferrie’s sexual desires and religious mysticism, private perceptions with distinct limits shape the actions of each participant in the action of Libra. A plot against JFK arises, but without the conscious guidance of its master plotters. It is a conspiracy that Wolfe, Will, and Yardley would not recognize, an overarching “deathward logic” (221) that encompasses clever players like George de Mohrenschildt, whose loathing for Gen. Walker elicits his only expressions of strong emotion (55-56), and the CIA’s Laurence Parmenter (“part of the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies . . . the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret oaths and initiations” [30]) along with willfully delusional Birchers like Guy Banister, who spends late-night hours poring masturbatorily over his “final nightmare file” purporting to document “Red Chinese troops . . . being dropped into the Baja by the fucking tens of thousands,” and who “wanted to believe it was true. He did believe it was true. But he also knew it wasn’t” (351-52). Each conspirator, seeing no further than his own interests, fears, or desires for revenge, moves in a private direction; the resultant vector of all these individual movements is something no individualist interpreter dares call conspiracy.

 

II. Insects and insubordinations: A myopic-interaction model

 

An interdisciplinary model of collective behavior that develops its own directionality, regardless of any single participant’s agenda, comes from the improbable intersection of two fields of study: entomology (as practiced on an amateur basis by a budding physicist) and computer science. Richard Feynman, recalling his home experiments with ants’ navigational behavior, finds that the insects either move randomly or follow each other’s trails, and that the repetition of small deviations when they follow each other results in a composite trail that gives the illusory appearance of order.

 

One question that I wondered about was why the anttrails look so straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they’re doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to demonstrate their sense of geometry didn’t work. . . . At first glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant cooperation. But if you look at it carefully, you’ll see that it’s nothing of the kind. (95-96)

 

None of Feynman’s ants moves individually in a straight line, but the collective movement nevertheless produces a straight line, simulating purposeful effort.

 

Transylvanian computer scientist Alfred Bruckstein, working with mathematical pursuit problems at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, has formalized Feynman’s conjecture, proving the theorem that an initially disorderly series of pursuit paths will converge to the straight segment connecting the initial point of departure, e.g., an anthill, and the destination of the original “pioneer ant,” e.g., a recently discovered food source (Bruckstein 60-61). His model of “global behavior that results from simple and local interaction rules” (62) has implications for robotics as well as for the behavior of animal colonies. It also has implications for the behavior of human organizations, at least metaphorically–and perhaps, if one notes its resemblance to the “political resultant” theory used in the field of geopolitical decision analysis (Allison 7-8), literally as well.³ If “globally optimal solutions for navigation problems can be obtained as a result of myopic cooperation between simple agents or processors” (Bruckstein 62), can any form of multiple myopia–perhaps the combined myopias of a disgraced, “buried,” and resentful CIA agent; a soldier of fortune with no fixed address and undiscernible loyalties; a disease-obsessed and mystically inclined pilot, sacked from an airline job because of institutional homophobia, who contemplates developing hypnotism as a weapon and claims to “believe in everything” (Libra 314-15); and a dyslexic political naif who daydreams of merging with the flow of history–also give the appearance of directed movement?

 

In the national security state as depicted by DeLillo, myopic interaction is not a human imperfection in an otherwise efficient system; it is built into the system from the outset. During the planning that resulted in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Everett and Parmenter were part of a layered and deliberately fragmented bureaucracy, described by DeLillo in parodically numbing detail:

 

The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter. This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three.

 

Chances are they didn’t. When the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4. Win Everett was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages (20).

 

The point of all this Beckettish enumeration is not simply that antlike bureaucrats come and go, talking of Guantanamo, but that the form of rationality peculiar to such organizations depends precisely on minimizing the possibility that anyone might know enough to comprehend the full narrative:

 

 Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. . . .

 

It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. They all knew that JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab. but they weren’t allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they’d charged themselves to carry out. The White House was to be the summit of unknowing. (21-22)

 

Resemblances to the Reagan-Bush White House, the unpenetrating Tower hearings into the Iran-contra phase of covert national security operations, and the doctrine of “plausible deniability” are perfectly coincidental, of course. But the plot against Castro, taking grimly comic turns at first (poisoned or exploding cigars, “a poison pen in the works . . . testing a botulin toxin on monkeys . . . fungus spores in his scuba suit” [21]), then culminating in the botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, serves as a kind of prologue-plot, prefiguring the myopically planned spectacle of Dealey Plaza. When the control of public events requires the diffusion of awareness and dispersal of control, it is unsurprising that Everett’s initial idea of a theatrically managed, well-controlled near miss–as executed, or functionally interpreted, by black-ops technician T-Jay Mackey and his team of shooters, including “Leon” Oswald–goes out of control, its multiple shades of signification simplified to the brutality of an actual hit.

 

The tendency toward myopic interactions pervades the official and unofficial national security apparatus, not only in the Bay of Pigs fiasco but in the meetings that continue after the official dispersal of groups such as Leader 4 and SE Detailed. “True believers” like the men of Leader 4 may be too “overresponsive to policy shifts, light- sensitive, unpredictable” (22) to continue in covert operations, but they carry on meeting obsessionally out of sheer momentum, a shadow-cabal without real powers (and a caricature of Tom Wolfe’s vision of conspirators). Everett, the one agent who knew enough details of the anti-Castro operations to serve as the Agency equivalent of a pioneer ant, is relegated to the emasculated existence of a planted fake professor at Texas Woman’s University, repeating pointless movements:

 

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need (16).

 

He imagines a painting commemorating the confrontation of Leader 4 with agents of the CIA’s Office of Security, titling this canvas “Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly” (24)–implying religiosity and the Fall, not instrumental rationality, which they have tried for a time and found inoperative.

 

III. Cinema and simulacra: The fallacy of forensic romance

 

Everett and his fellow ex-“clandestines” are drawn to pointless activity as lapsing believers are drawn to ritual, no longer convinced that their actions have political content, but compelled to continue them nonetheless. They are not so much a conspiracy as the simulacrum of a conspiracy, performing according to a script whose composition is ongoing and is not under their control. They have effects on history, but hardly the “personal contribution to an informed public. . . . the major subtext and moral lesson” (53) that Everett hopes will ensue, redeeming him in the eyes of history. He fails to see that this romantic vision (the truth seeing the light of day!) is incompatible with the simulacral nature of postmodern political activity–that his plan’s complex elegance is unlikely to survive its implementation by field operatives such as Mackey and Wayne Elko, who have consumed too many images of themselves as Seven Samurai (145) to be reliable executors of subtle instructions (much as follower ants simplify the intricate paths of a pioneer ant).⁴ Once Everett has embraced the politics of the public image, hoping to manipulate the media and the Agency through the perception of a vengeful Castro–publicly raising the question of just what actions Castro is seeking to avenge–he reveals his myopia: he forgets that the politics of the public image tends to embrace you back.

 

It is practically inevitable that a consideration of Libra, with its displacements of agency and its recurrent coincidences between engineered events and happenstance (“It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot” [178]), will lead to a Baudrillardian vision of social processes. The use of Oswald, Boy Marxist, as the instrument of the anti-Castroite conspiracy (a “negative Libran” [315] whom Ferrie believes might flip in either direction) is a clear example of Baudrillard’s “Moebius-spiralling negativity” whereby

 

[a]ll the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. . . . Is any given bombing . . . the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power . . . ? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. (30-31)

 

Even the Post‘s pet conspiracy Watergate was a nonscandal to Baudrillard, a show trial designed to create a “moral superstructure” (27) behind which the amoral capitalist state can function. To interpret such events as struggles of right and left over rationally expressible questions of public interest–rather than structural fictions obscuring the fact that the Watergate break-in and cover-up, or whatever plot culminated in Dealey Plaza, were closer to normative than exceptional state behavior.⁵–is to mistake vertigo for orientation.

 

Power, in Baudrillard’s vision, both uses and fears simulacra. It strives for a monopoly on simulation, punishing acts such as a theatrical “fake hold-up” (39); it fears unsanctioned simulation more than it fears violent transgression, precisely because simulation “always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation” (38, emphasis Baudrillard’s). The Everett/Parmenter/Banister/Mackey/Elko/Raymo/ Ferrie/Oswald mechanism converts the near-miss, a simulation that might have publicized sensitive covert operations, into a hit on Kennedy, a shock that the state apparatus can ultimately absorb. Sociopolitical structures could tolerate actual violence against this president, but not symbolic violence against the system of signs that functions as protective coloration for the operations of capital. “Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others . . . only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders” (37).

 

Discourses of truth come in for rough treatment in Baudrillard’s world, and the figures in Libra who try to enact discourses of truth are likewise disoriented and defeated. At the opposite end of the plot from the hapless Everett, who thought he could induce media hyperreality to do the work of the real, sits Nicholas Branch, performing historical reconstruction from the masses of evidence supplied to him by the Curator. Branch, the would-be panoptical reader who can synthesize the entire mass of materials into a credible historical truth claim, is at first driven to complete his history whether or not anyone will ever read it. It steadily becomes apparent to him, however, that he is performing a simulacrum of research. His position is both a scholar’s heaven, with apparently infinite research materials provided instantly on request, and a scholar’s hell of overabundance and nonintegration; his papery environment is hallucinatorily Borgesian, part Library of Babel and part Garden of Forking Paths. Branch is Homo documentarius, linear-thinking Gutenbergian Man, with his logical and recombinatory faculties underscored in his surname,⁶ but his attempt at a definitive reconstruction of the Kennedicide peters out as miserably as Everett’s attempt to send true information to the public.

 

For his naive belief in the possibility of a realist discourse about Dealey Plaza, Branch receives a different form of knowledge, which he comes to interpret as a form of punishment, from the sources he depends on. He is damned to an eternal investigation, drowned in information that is sensory as well as documentary, including the contradictory, the irrelevant, and the gruesome. The primary texts that the Curator continues to send him include not only the obligatory Zapruder film (that most exhaustively scrutinized of cinematic texts) but autopsy photos, “the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. . . . an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell. . . . The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point” (299). In place of the coherence of an explainable conspiracy, he comes to see the plot as “a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like”–yet “[t]he stuff keeps coming” (441), defying comprehension at Branch’s end of the plot just as events defied control at Everett’s. Instead of attaining the closure one expects from a narrative syntagm, the successful completion of his forensic romance, Branch becomes the Sisyphus of mediated information. He is still reading signs at the close of the novel; he has still written little; he has accepted a grim role as the goatherd of historical hell, keeper of the unintelligible secrets of the state.

 

IV. Infocide

 

DeLillo’s plot is a nightmarish parable of the transmission of any type of consequential information through the public sphere under late capitalism. The sender, mediators, and receiver of the message (Everett, the other conspirators, and Branch, respectively) are all maintained in a state of myopia throughout the process; the initial message is replaced by an antithetical counter- message and never reaches its true intended receiver, the politically responsible public. This is precisely as ruling-class apologists of George Will’s ilk would have it, of course, with forensic interpretation forestalled and political accountability rendered risible. Useful communication is stultified under such conditions; the state’s literal control apparatus (from police to spies) becomes redundant, if not vestigial, when much of the citizenry is occupied with information-games that lack real referents and consequences. In Baudrillard’s glum description of daily life in the realm of infinite simulation, there is “[n]o more violence or surveillance; only ‘information,’ secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect again comes into play. We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space” (54).

 

The capitalist polity, of course, has always had its own defensive mythologies to characterize its processes as positively benign. The theory of myopic interactions is by no means the only case of insect behavior offering a metaphoric explanation of human behavior. If, under this paradigm, a series of antlike actions in pursuit of private interests combine to result in public calamity, one formative myth of the early capitalist era uses another arthropod collective to extol the processes that Adam Smith would anthropomorphize and anatomize some 70 years later as capitalism’s benevolent Invisible Hand. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, first appearing in 1705, offers a conceptual structure remarkably similar to Bruckstein’s. His beehive prospers as long as it tolerates a rich array of interlocking iniquities, but it loses both its wealth and its power relative to other hives when it gives in to the impulses of reform, economic leveling, and anti-imperalism. A critical difference between these two images of human- society-as-insect-colony is that Mandeville, while applauding the system that transmutes private vices into public benefits, also inverts the equation and identifies public-spiritedness itself, on an individual scale, with disaster on the social scale. Throughout the period of capital’s social dominance, it seems, one encounters a form of consciousness that wilfully refuses to form a lucid and integrative social vision.

 

Mandeville’s account of apian society is founded on the same sort of macro/micro disjunction by which Feynman and Bruckstein explain formic navigation: behavior that looks like error or disorder at the individual level combines with other such behavior to produce order for the collective. Like any capitalist utilitarian, pre-Marxian or post-, Mandeville rationalized the glaring class distinctions among his bees with the observation that “Industry/Had carry’d Life’s Conveniences,/It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,/To such a Height, the very Poor/Lived better than the Rich before” (ll. 198-202). This is the classical rationalization of inequities and iniquities under capitalism; it would recur in the Reaganite trope of a rising tide lifting all boats. And Mandeville’s identification of social reform as counterproductive, removing the incentives that drive the invisible hand, would recur nearly three centuries later in Margaret Thatcher’s denouncements of any public policy based on compassion or economic justice as tearfully sentimental, or “wet.”

 

The same contempt for social interaction reaches a peak of comic exaggeration in Libra when David Ferrie, joking with Mafioso Carmine Latta (who will later manipulate Jack Ruby into taking his role in the script) about the Cold War apocalypse that might ensue if the U.S. tried to bomb Cuba to retrieve it from the Communists for the mob, asserts a positive preference for postnuclear Hobbesianism:

 

. . . I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It’s a government funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit. (173)

 

How clearly can one distinguish this parodic hyperindividualism from the attitude expressed in the Impeach Earl Warren signs⁷ and swastika graffiti that sends Weird Beard into nervous premonitory improvisations? (381-82).

 

On a fundamental level, communication itself is at odds with the belief system shared by Mandeville, Will, Reagan (the “Great Communicator”!), Ferrie, Latta, Gen. Walker, and the looming Bircher population of 1963 Dallas. This is a community that has been immunized against community, unified in acceptance of fragmentation. Much has been written about the proliferation of signifiers from commercial culture in DeLillo’s works, and about how these intersecting messages shred the idea of an individual consciousness: “a whole network of popular mythology, allowing DeLillo to show how the possibilities of meaning and action are shaped by the contemporary ethos of simultaneity and indeterminacy . . . . Character, the transformation and realization of the novelistic subject’s depth through narrative time, is replaced by the notion of character as a function of the frequently self-canceling languages of representation in which the novelistic self is situated” (Wacker 70-71).

 

These environments are so oversaturated with disconnected messages that they pose a risk of what one might call “death by information”–a particular hazard for someone like Oswald, who lacks (probably for hereditary neurologic reasons) the integrative capacity that makes purposeful linguistic behavior possible. For all his protestations about economic injustice, Oswald’s image of Communism is a consumer item, a boy’s perverse fantasy of becoming the Other the whole culture fears; the roles of Stalin and Trotsky are natural outgrowths of teenage idol- worship, exotic alternatives to John Wayne, in whose screen- sanctified presence he also bathes while on mess duty at Corregidor (93-94). He forgets to visit Trotsky’s house in Mexico City, and “[t]he sense of regret makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it quickly, saying so what” (358), like a visitor to Hollywood missing part of a Universal Studios tour. Writing his Historic Diary while in Russia, he is “[s]tateless, word- blind”:

 

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess the rest.

 

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world. (211)

 

Word-blindness is not the same thing as ignorance: “He knew things. It wasn’t that he didn’t know” (211). Spymaster Marion Collings gives Oswald a recruiting speech about the interpretive importance of context–“A fact is innocent until someone wants it. Then it becomes intelligence. . . . An old man eating a peach is intelligence if it’s August and the place is the Ukraine and you’re a tourist with a camera . . . . There’s still a place for human intelligence” (247)–but Oswald is unsuited for this type of cognitive work. He incorporates within his own cranium the perspectivelessness and disconnection of the whole culture; he is a living representative of a myopically interactive informational realm.

 

Death by information goes hand in hand with the death of information. In a hyperreal environment where messages are infinitely reproducible and convertible, Collings’ elision of the two meanings of “intelligence” (the raw informational material itself and the human skill at making sense of it) metastasizes throughout the culture, and the former overcomes the latter. As William Cain observes after discussing this passage, “in American culture, there are always more facts, more intelligence. . . . The irony is that the spread of information fails to lead to clearer meaning and more finely focused intelligence. People assemble knowledge, and its transmission from person to person and place to place does signify, yet the import of it all stays mysterious” (281). Such a quantity of information ensures that little or no actual informing ever occurs.

 

Is the dominance of the myopic-interaction paradigm absolute? Does Libra reinforce “what we darkly suspect about the postmodern alteration of the mind” (Cain 281)? The bathetic but intensely imagined monologue by Marguerite Oswald (448-456), patching together incoherent cliches and insights until they achieve a desperate coherence, concludes Libra in a minor key, but it is hardly the same fatalistic minor key in which Baudrillard composes. Implicitly, at least on a metafictional level, passages like this imply that it is still possible to select information from the ceaseless media Babel and combine it in ways that generate power (at least if one has Don DeLillo’s ear for the spoken American language). The question remains whether the borders between art-language and world-language are permeable.

 

For one alternative to communicative myopia, one can do worse than return to the empiricist intelligence of Richard Feynman. The ant-navigation paradigm is opposed in his text by a recurrent behavioral model that equates global awareness of purpose with problem-solving effectiveness. The most explicit description of this informed-interaction model occurs in the long chapter “Los Alamos from Below,” where he recounts his experiences working on the Bomb. Security interests have mandated the fragmentation of knowledge–with a level of control and surveillance that can properly be called paranoid, however justifiable under wartime conditions–but Feynman intuits that disseminating more knowledge about the project among technical workers will improve the quality and efficiency of their work. Experience proves him right:

 

The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment –clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.

 

Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines–punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission . . . .

 

Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. . . . [A]ll that had to be done was to tell them what it was. (127-128)

 

The bureaucrats who set up Special Engineer Detachment counted on the efficacy of myopic interactions, under the assumption that only a small coterie (analogous to the pioneer ant that knows the location of the food) could be trusted with information about the direction of the collective endeavor, but Feynman explicitly demonstrates the superiority of informed interactions for certain types of operations. What works for ants and assassins does not necessarily improve results for engineers, and DeLillo’s account of the information-structures that produced the Kennedicide–regardless of whether the specific events he imagines to occupy that structural framework are veridical, a proposition unlikely ever to be confirmed or disproved– qualifies him as something like a conceptual engineer. This status adds weight to his works’ implicit claim to have influence in the public sphere.

 

In Mao II, DeLillo extends and deepens the intimation that the Gutenberg/Branch paradigm cannot make sense of the postmodern era’s public events. The transition from the world of Libra to that of Mao II–perhaps a paradigm shift within DeLillo’s work to mirror the one he sees occurring in the political world–becomes clear toward the conclusion of the latter book as Bill Gray approaches death, sensing that his form of information is in eclipse during the days of Moon and Khomeini (“‘What terrorists gain, novelists lose’” [157]). The literary world where he once enjoyed ferocious debate with his friend and editor Everson is in decline, eroded by the perks of capital (“‘Who owns this company?’ ‘You don’t want to know.’ ‘Give me the whole big story in one quick burst.’ ‘It’s all about limousines’” [101-02]). His belief that his actions have public consequences is also in decline; his agreeing to meet with Abu Rashid’s hostage-holders represents the beginning of a prolonged suicide for both Gray and his mode of thought. Moving eastward toward the rendezvous and the grave, Gray sustains an inner monologue that retreats from public observation into the myopic realm of personal and familial nostalgia.

 

The individual artist in language, this plot implies, is obsolete because he has always been bounded by, and bound to, his privacy–an artifact of a social order that no longer exists. Yet Gray’s language is succeeded by a different language, that of Brita Nilsson’s camera. She does not refuse to participate in history; her gesture to unmask the armed youth at the end of her meeting with Abu Rashid dramatizes her willingness to be an active participant in events, not a passive recorder (236). She, like DeLillo, is still a public citizen and an artist who can surprise the public; her visual language produces factual texts that are indeed selected–hardly the panoptical god’s-eye view of a would-be master historian like Branch, or of the illusory “objective” news media–but selected with the informed, receptive eye of a new kind of informational engineer. Myopia, after all, is easily corrected with lenses.

 

Notes

 

1. I will designate this paradigm the “theory of myopic interactions,” borrowing the term from Alfred Bruckstein. Bruckstein does not use the term “myopic interactions” in his Mathematical Intelligencer article, but the phrase is attributed to him in a brief description of this article in Science (April 23, 1993). It is broader in scope than the phrase he originally uses, “myopic cooperation,” since it allows for noncooperative or actively antagonistic interactions such as those involving governmental operatives and Oswald or Ruby.

 

2. Whether they would still love to talk about Watergate after talking about it with Baudrillard, however, is an open question.

 

3. Graham Allison offers competing explanatory models for a particularly intricate geopolitical test case, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. According to the “Rational Actor” or “classical” model, the one most foreign policy analysts and laymen have implicitly embraced, governments make decisions monolithically as individual chess players do, referring to specific defined objectives and calculating the rational means of attaining them. However, the “Organizational Process” and “Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics” models better explain the “intra-national mechanisms” (6) that determine international behavior: each apparent monolith or chess player is in fact a black box containing competing organizations, interests, and individuals, each of whom pursues distinct and only partially compatible objectives. Analysis of the organization, routines, and relative bargaining power of these components yields an understanding of how participants come to make irrational decisions. I am indebted to Katie Burke, MD, FACEP, for calling my attention to Allison’s work and its applications to medical and governmental decision analysis, as well as to the argument presented here.

 

4. Elko’s identification of his paramilitary role with cinematic models is made explicit, as is his own form of myopia, when he muffs his task of killing Oswald at the arranged rendezvous site, the Texas Theater, by waiting through the feature (Cry of Battle) to “let the tension build. Because that’s the way they do it in the movies” (412), allowing police to apprehend him instead. Staying for the second feature (War Is Hell) after “Leon” is removed confirms Elko’s priorities.

 

5. “In fact, the charges against Nixon were for behavior not too far out of the ordinary, though he erred in choosing his victims among the powerful, a significant deviation from established practice. He was never charged with the serious crimes of his Administration: the ‘secret bombing’ of Cambodia, for example. The issue was indeed raised, but it was the secrecy of the bombing, not the bombing itself, that was held to be the crime. . . . We might ask, incidentally, in what sense the bombing was ‘secret.’ Actually, the bombing was ‘secret’ because the press refused to expose it” (Chomsky 81-82).

 

6. Branch is among the first characters introduced in the book, appearing within six pages of another Nicholas: one of young Oswald’s taunting truant companions in the Bronx, Nicky Black, who “know[s] where to get these books where you spin the pages fast, you see people screwing” (8). Referring to himself in the third person as “the kid,” collapsing the distinction between written language and cinema with his primitive porn, bearing the Devil’s conventional given name (though “the name was always used in full, never just Nicky or Black” [8]), and vanishing from the book after a single scene, Nicky Black is the sort of background character whose very irrelevance to the narrative charges him with symbolism. When a second Nicholas B. then appears among larger, more important masses of paper, does the inference that DeLillo is setting up early subtextual linkages between an obsession with textual forms and Auld Nickie-Ben constitute interpretive overaggression?

 

7. The irony of rightists calling for the impeachment of the very man who would head the commission that performed a simulacral investigation, thus protecting the plotters (in yet another Moebius-spiral), is unlikely to be lost on many readers of Libra but is probably lost on quite a few of the rightists.

 

Works Cited

 

• Allison, Graham T. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.
• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79.
• Bruckstein, Alfred M. “Why the Ant Trails Look So Straight and Nice.” Mathematical Intelligencer 15.2 (1993): 59-62.
• Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful World: Self and History in Libra.” Rev. of DeLillo, Don, Libra. Michigan Quarterly Review 29.2 (1990): 275-287.
• Chomsky, Noam. Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
• Crowther, Hal. “Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist’s Choices in the New Mediocracy.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 321-336.
• DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• Feynman, Richard. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. Ed. Edward Hutchings. New York: Norton, 1985.
• “Follow-the-Leader Math.” (News report on Bruckstein’s paper, with quote from Bruckstein.) Science 260 (April 23, 1993): 495.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen–Introducing Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 239-244.
• —. “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 431-453. Originally published inRaritan 8.4 (1989): 1.
• Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., Marshall Waingrow, and Brewster Rogerson. New York: Harcourt, 1969: 267-277.
• Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Dir. Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar. 1992.
• Slacker. Dir. Richard Linklater. 1991
• Wacker, Norman. “Mass Culture/Mass Novel: The Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Works and Days 8.1 (1990): 67-87.

 

Stephen Bernstein

Department of English
University of Michigan – Flint
bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu

 

Aside from their humor, Don DeLillo’s novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a frisson at the core of contemporary existence. Frank Lentricchia comments on DeLillo’s “yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (“American” 2), while Arnold Weinstein observes that “one is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in DeLillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems” (294). The terror is not simply the terrorism with which DeLillo is almost obsessively concerned, but also that of a sublime dimension of experience. Again and again DeLillo’s characters are faced with the inexplicability of events and the giddy suspicion, terrifying in its eventual impact, that a darker force determines reality.

 

The sublime appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms. As John Frow has shown, White Noise‘s airborne toxic event and the sunsets it subsequently influences trigger a representational inadequacy on the part of their viewers. Jack Gladney wonders why he should try to describe what the sunsets have become. This is not the eighteenth-century sublime of Kant or Burke, however, but one more specifically postmodern: “the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations” (176). The sublime of belatedness Frow formulates does not exhaust DeLillo’s excursions into the category; Michael W. Messmer reveals an “activist (Kantian) sublime” (410) in White Noise which centers on the ability of the Gladneys to respond to the terrifying sublimity of the airborne toxic event, to question the gains of science if they produce such aberrations.

 

In Libra DeLillo returns to the more familiar Kantian sublimes of magnitude and ineffability. For Kant the sublime “is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality” (90). The result for the observer is an emotion “dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination . . .a negative pleasure” (91). Kant’s “mathematical” sublime is rooted in cognition, being that “in comparison with which all else is small”(97), while his “dynamically” sublime appeals more to imagination, raising it “to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature” (111-12). DeLillo’s sublime will not share the more transcendental aspects of this model, as his characters are predictably limited, from the postromantic vantage of the 1950s and 1960s, in their ability to appreciate the sublimity of the imagination’s sphere.

 

For Kant “One who is in a state of fear . . . flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained” (110). Containing as it does the account of terror which is largely absent from Kant’s, Burke’s model is similarly relevant to DeLillo. While DeLillo’s readers may have the appropriate distance from his novels’ terror to appreciate the sublimity of his depiction of a culture about to spin out of orbit, his characters do not. Thus they are more helpfully considered in the Burkean model, which holds that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . .whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (39); the imaginative response to the sublime, then, “is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (57). What we will see in Libra is a hybrid combination of Kant and Burke, a sublime which is manifested through magnitude and ineffability, exhausting the powers of enumeration or speech to give any representational account of it. At the same time this sublime will arouse a powerful terror, the terror so frequently noted in DeLillo’s work which gestures frantically toward apocalypse.

 

This definition is obviously devoid of contemporary models of the sublime. Frow alludes to Lyotard, but the aesthetic program contained in the last pages of The Postmodern Condition will not be particularly relevant to this investigation of Libra. In a by now quite familiar formulation, Lyotard charges the postmodern sublime to put forward “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81). By this account we would have to consider DeLillo resolutely modern (in Lyotard’s schema), since his sublime will be that which is more concerned “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists” (78). Probably more to the point in terms of specific periodization is Fredric Jameson’s discussion of a postmodern sublime that can only be “adequately theorized” “in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (P 38).

 

Now this “other reality” is immediately recognizable to readers of DeLillo. It is the “world inside the world” ofLibra (13), the massively structured shadow machinery which so covertly scripts the possibilities of quotidian existence. Jameson acknowledges in DeLillo “the formal dilemma” presented by “a totalized world . . . finally unavailable for perception” (Rev. 122), but in a slight departure from his model I would like to suggest that DeLillo’s most important sublime occasions in Libra go beyond configurations of “economic and social institutions” and the “totalized world” to become attempts at the comprehension of history itself. For the committed Marxist, of course, there is no difference between the terms, and I am merely performing a willful mystification of the great motor of culture. Nevertheless, DeLillo’s novel offers visions of society and economics which are at variance with another and much larger operator, and this is where levels of the text’s sublime must be discerned.

 

There is, in fact, some difficulty in stratifying the sublime in Libra since it is so consistently present. In the chiaroscuro world of covert operations men are “light-sensitive”; the interruption of a past plot by internal security is fancifully allegorized as “Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly” (22, 24). Thus the various CIA and former-CIA agents inhabit an unrepresentable world of darkness, a gloom the magnitude of which is ungraspable by the isolated intellect. Win Everett’s plot spins out of his control almost immediately, largely because he fails to foresee its ability to expand to fill the larger magnitude of the plotters’ darkness. When Everett first unfolds his plan to T. J. Mackey and Larry Parmenter it is under a Texas sky which “towered unbearably” (25), yet another reminder of the eighteenth-century sublime and its predeliction for natural settings which “make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might” (Kant 110).

 

Parmenter’s wife Beryl appears in Libra on only a few occasions, the “domesticated version” (Cain 282) of the rarified intelligence-gathering absurdity of the career CIA operatives. She runs “a small picture-framing shop” (124) and corresponds with friends by sending them newspaper clippings, isolated vignettes “that tell us how we live” (261). Toward the end of the novel she watches replays of Oswald’s televised murder. “[T]his footage only deepened and prolonged the horror,” the narrator comments; “It was horror on horror” (446). This horror arises from the fact that Oswald’s death is “not at all like the news items she clipped,” that is, Beryl is unable to decontextualize it from the magnitude of the exterior world: “She didn’t want these people in her house” (446). Oswald’s death provides the sublime alternative–“The far reaching ‘something’ that . . . can never be named” (Cain 287)–to her earlier desire to find “Refuge only in irony” (259). In the videotape she is confronted again and again with a terror too present and unprecedented to be clipped and folded. But even this gives way: as anyone knows who sat through several days of coverage of the Challenger explosion, Tiananmen Square, or a host of other recent news stories, repetition begets numbness. As Beryl perceives, “After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead” (447). The sublime is finally subsumed, framed, by the numbing repetition of the image as DeLillo pinpoints the moment in which one form of the sublime gave way to the other–the moment when the terror of Kant’s mathematical sublime (Oswald and the world too vast to enumerate) recedes into the sublime Frow discusses, that which leaves its subjects edgy through their inability to develop an appropriate specificity representation.

 

In the world of the plotters and the experiences of Beryl Parmenter we see two versions of a socio-economic sublime, a sublime dependent upon the mental formulations of human actors fixed in social and historical specificity. This sublimity differs markedly, however, from the sublime as we might apply it to Oswald and to the actual mechanisms of history in the novel. DeLillo himself mentions “coincidence and dream and intuition and the possible impact of astrology” as motivating forces in the novel (DeCurtis 55); he also speaks of “a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision” in contemporary life (DeCurtis 63). “This extraordinary wonder of things,” he goes on, “is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions” (DeCurtis 63). This dread is activated in Libra as DeLillo gives it dimensions it never had in White Noise. It is certainly true, as Weinstein points out, that with the earlier novel’s airborne toxic event DeLillo sheds light “on our deep-seated need to believe in the supernatural. In so doing he gives the disaster . . . the authority of subject not object, of agent not setting” (303). But in Libra this role is transferred to history itself, with an effect far more vast than Jack Gladney’s fear of death.

 

As Daniel Aaron notes, “Subways figure in the educations of both Billy Twillig and Oswald” (79). The protagonist (in DeLillo’s novels hero seems far too strong a word) of Ratner’s Star is shown the “substratum” by his third-rail inspector father; it becomes an important metaphor for the novel’s constant dualities, its mirror worlds and the idea that “existence tends to be nourished from below” (RS 4). But this below is also “the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness,” and the walk Billy and Babe take through the subways is made for “the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation” (RS 4). The sublime traits of this chthonian realm are suggested in the earlier novel; in Libra the subway metaphor is even more fully developed. The novel’s first sentence, “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track” (3), introduces the image immediately and its sublime characteristics are not far behind.

 

The subway is of course symbolic of the “world within the world” that Oswald seeks throughout the novel, the inner workings of the external real. Win Everett suggests that “when the world is no longer accessible” one might be moved to “invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail”(148). And as Thomas Carmichael puts it, assassination for Oswald becomes one way to escape “all that which would undermine the illusion of an unmediated access to the real and the sound assumption of a coherent and stable subjectivity” (214). In the sublime experience of the subway Oswald already has intimations of such an approach to the real. In the train his “body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control” (3). The sublimity of rapid movement is evoked as the novel’s primal gesture and finds its own echo when one of the metamorphosed assassination plot’s mercenaries, Wayne Elko, speculates that “They were making a crash journey over the edge” (379-80). So from the very first we understand Oswald as someone craving a literal rush, one which will have to be metaphorically converted into the rush of history as it sweeps by. Oswald thinks “the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him,” and that “The name we give this point is history”(248). The point of no separation, the point of going over the edge, these become the novel’s metaphysical analogia for the actuality of history.

 

Seen in this light, Oswald is, in Frank Lentricchia’s words, “an undecidable intention waiting to be decided” (“Libra” 201), the object of Weinstein’s formulation above waiting to be acted upon by history as subject. But what sort of subject is history? Certainly on one level history is the plot, conceived by Win Everett and modified by T. J. Mackey, against Kennedy. But on a hazier and more complicated level there is something else happening in Libra, a causality seemingly too eerie, too sublimely ineffable to be reducible to human intention. While Everett plans to “Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it” (147), this intention is not enough to explain Oswald’s status as “a fiction living prematurely in the world,” word made so fleshly that it arouses “the eeriest panic” in Everett himself (179). DeLillo reaches for a more comprehensive mode for depicting this strangeness; as the novel’s title suggests this will be astrology. Thus, to quote Lentricchia again, “astrology is the metaphor in Libra for being trapped in a system whose determinative power is grippingly registered by DeLillo’s double narrative of an amorphous existence haphazardly stumbling into the future where a plot awaits to confer upon it the identity of a role fraught with form and purpose” (“Libra“202).

 

The novel’s chief proponent of astrological explanation is David Ferrie, one of very few characters who look to an explanation for events external to the world of humans. Astrology for Ferrie is “the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs” (175) and thus is linked to what Everett thinks of as “whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls” (148). But astrology’s truth is sublimely ineffable. “We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence,” Ferrie says at one point (172), effectually assigning a linguistic version of Kant’s mathematical sublime to the problem of causality. Kant suggests that “In the case of the logical estimation of magnitude the impossibility of ever arriving at absolute totality by the progressive measurement of things of the sensible world in time and space was cognized as an objective impossibility, i.e. one of thinking the infinite as given, and not as simply subjective, i.e. an incapacity for grasping it . . .” (108). Thus Ferrie suggests that beyond the world of plots there is a level of cause that cannot be adequately cognized. The resultant effect is that of the sublime. “[W]hat history consists of,” Ferrie claims later, is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us” (321). In this formulation ineffability still plays the central role. The shadowy “they” who “aren’t telling” are politicians and the media in this context, but given Ferrie’s usual tenor throughout the novel, the agent is far closer to the ominous and sublime “Them” of Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

Ferrie eventually attributes all control over the assassination to the forces alluded to above. “Truth isn’t what we know or feel,” he claims, “It’s the thing that waits just beyond” (333), so that the explanation of how everything converges on Dallas is also ineffable: “We didn’t arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don’t have that kind of reach or power. There’s something else that’s generating this event” (384). Now if it were only Ferrie who felt this way in the novel we would have to attribute such a conception of causality to his extreme peculiarity as a character. But similar thoughts, not so clearly articulated, appear elsewhere. “Summer was building toward a vision, a history,” Oswald thinks several times during 1963 (322), while the crowd around the Kennedy motorcade is “a multitude, a storm force” producing “the roar of a sand column twisting” (393, 394).

 

Perhaps most striking in the novel as a sublime indicator of history’s presence, however, is the Dallas disc jockey Russ Knight, the Weird Beard. Not only does his name allude homonymically to the darkness which resists attempts at causal explanation, but what his radio persona says provides some of the strangest passages in the book. In the novel’s first transcription of his show, the Weird Beard is on the radio in Jack Ruby’s car: “Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them” (266). The passage’s relevance to Ferrie’s usual concerns are obvious, and the Weird Beard acts too to link several of the narrative’s numerous characters. His listeners include Win Everett’s daughter and wife as well as the men Mackey sends to Dallas for the assassination. Knight is also present at an abortive press conference the Dallas police try to arrange for Oswald. Even Nicholas Branch, the novel’s beleagured historian of the assassination, has a note that “The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight” (301).

 

The Weird Beard’s genealogy in DeLillo’s fiction goes back to his first novel, Americana. In that work Warren Beasley (who even shares the Beard’s initials), fired from his job as a television weatherman after announcing that “the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. Storm warnings up and down the subconscious” (94), has a radio program called “Death Is Just Around the Corner” (93). Beasley’s show is pure talk – “I know you’re out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your Scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals” (232) – talk which gives the narrator David Bell “frightening dreams” (235), just as the Weird Beard inspires strange behavior in the Everetts’ daughter.

 

Both disc jockeys attest to Norman Wacker’s assertion that in “DeLillo’s novels, mass culture is a spectral presence haunting and disorienting every appeal to grounds outside its protean representational fields” (69). For listeners of both the Weird Beard and Beasley, this disorientation is sublime. Unlike the numbness Beryl Parmenter develops to the televised image of Oswald’s murder, the eeriness felt by the radio listeners is unabated. To the assassins traveling west to Dallas the Weird Beard is “an eerie voice rid[ing] across the long night,” a voice speaking uncanny versions of the future: “Tell you something,dear hearts, Big D is ner-vus tonight. Getting real close to the time. Notice how people saying scaaaary things. Feel night come rushing down. . . . Danger in the air. . . . Some things are true. Some are truer than true. Oh the air is swollen. Did you ever feel a tension like right now? . . . All the ancient terrors of the night. We’re looking right at it. We know it’s here. We feel it’s here. It has to happen. Something dark and strange and dreamsome. Weird Beard says, Night is rushing down over BigD” (381-82). The deadpan summation of this passage is the sentence “Raymo, Wayne and Frank had never been to Dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean” (382), but the sentence is perfectly apposite to the operation of the historical sublime in the novel. Since the three men are carnal manifestations of the larger ineffable, they are properly unaware of the greater force, the “subject not object” in Weinstein’s coinage, which directs their actions.

 

What is by now abundantly clear is that DeLillo signifies the operation of history through the sublime at nearly every step. The operations of the plotters are sublime at one level; the gradual shaping of the actual assassination sublime at another. For the former the organization of the plot on the president’s life is a project which gradually gets out of control due to what is considered an inherent fault in human protection of secrets: “The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal” (218). The plot veers away into the sublime darkness of plotting, but that darkness is to a great degree the product of human manipulation, the cloaking of cloak and dagger men. But the historical forces which gather their sublime strength in the areas of the novel I have just been reviewing operate on a far different level, on a literally awesome plane of ineffable cause.

 

A remaining question, however, is just what we can make of such a text, a historical novel with an ineffable model of historical process. The tendency toward unspeakability in DeLillo’s writing has been maligned: John Kucich, writing before Libra‘s publication, criticizes DeLillo’s “lack of clarity, “which is actually, Kucich believes, “a symptom of his own postmodern inability to reason out an alternative politics” (340-41). And Theodor Adorno, criticizing not DeLillo but the American attraction to irrational explanation, cites the “type of irrationality in which the total order of our life presents itself to most individuals: opaqueness and inscrutability. Naive persons fail to look through the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society, but even the sophisticated ones cannot understand it in plain terms of consistency and reason, but are faced with antagonism and absurdities . . . . Who wants to survive under present conditions is tempted to ‘accept’ such absurdities, like the verdict of the stars, rather than to penetrate them by thinking which means discomfort in many directions” (20). In the cases of both Kucich and Adorno the problem is, of course, mystification. The mysterious or ineffable can only mask a level of shrugged-off analysis and wind up as an opiate for the reading public.

 

Surprisingly even DeLillo himself, in “American Blood,” the article that was Libra‘s genesis, writes that there is “No need” to “lapse into mystical fatalism” in quest of the truth of the assassination (24). As he goes on, “Dallas remains unique in its complexity and ambiguity, in the sinister links, the doublings, the organized deceits, but we tend to see it now as simply the first of a chain of what we might call instances of higher violence–violence with its own liturgy of official grief, its own standards of newsworthiness, with its built-in set of public responses” (“AB” 24). In this view the “complexity and ambiguity,” the very things which have helped mark the event’s historical sublimity, recede before the ritual level of American violence. But there is a marked shift between “American Blood” and Libra, a shift that is again helpfully elucidated through DeLillo’s own account. “My books are open-ended,” he tells an interviewer, “I would say that mystery in general rather than the occult is something that weaves in and out of my work. I can’t tell you where it came from or where it leads to” (DeCurtis 55). Here, succinctly, we find the very ineffability which characterizes Libra‘s historical sublime. “I can’t tell you” resonates with Ferrie’s conjecture that history is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us,” and again questions of process are left in limbo.

 

What Kucich, directly, and Adorno, indirectly, criticize is the authorial refusal to confer a predetermined ideological closure on a given narrative. Lentricchia has noted that “The telling assumption of DeLillo’s media right reviewers is that he is coming from the left” (“American” 5). In the left critique the telling assumption is that DeLillo is a bourgeois apologist, writing from the “obvious privilege of the liberal middle-class intellectual” (Kucich 334). But it is consoling to few members of the middle-class, I would guess, to be told that history is a mixture of chaos and fearsome sublimity. This is the message of Libra, a model of history beholden to theories of chaos and the lack of certainty which has haunted Western science throughout this century.

 

DeLillo is not alone in such conjecture either; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s World’s End both feature models of causality which finally rest on the random or the ineffable. For Morrison the chaotic carelessness which results in the naming of the first Macon Dead (18) has vast historical consequences absolutely relevant to the name’s literal and punning meanings, while the never explained scent of ginger haunts several of the novel’s moments of historical revelation (185, 241, 324, 339). In Boyle’s novel, indebted both to Pynchon and to Grass, the historical currents of an upstate New York town are controlled by a grotesque dwarf, the Dunderberg Imp. Though the Imp resembles a character in the novel’s present no confirmation of this link is ever made and the Imp’s meaning or purpose is never fully revealed. Yet he governs traffic on the Hudson, metaphorically the movement of time, a “capricious gnome . . . deranged and irresponsible” (170).

 

Political motivation is not lacking in this company. Morrison’s novel is part of a larger project involving the reclamation of unwritten history and the nomination of the African-American subject. Boyle uses World’s End as a satire of 1960s pop-existentialism while simultaneously hypothesizing a history of betrayal within the American labor movement. All three novelists seek some purchase on the Sixties, the decade in which all the novels are chiefly set, and all three find that a level of sublime ineffability is central to such a project. It may be that despite a widespread effort by novelists, historians, and others there is nevertheless a strong current of feeling that we are not sufficiently distant from the Sixties to be able to historicize them with any accuracy.

 

But in DeLillo’s case there is an additional impetus for the sublime: a sense on the novelist’s part of a larger and indescribable system at work. “It is just my sense that we live in a kind of circular or near-circular system,” he tells DeCurtis, “and that there are an increasing number of rings which keep intersecting at some point, whether you’re using a plastic card to draw money out of your account at an automatic teller machine or thinking about the movement of planetary bodies. I mean, these systems all seem to interact to me. . . . The secrets within systems, I suppose, are things that have informed my work. But they’re almost secrets of consciousness, or ways in which consciousness is replicated in the natural world” (61). This quasi-mystical formulation again finds its predecessors in Kant (“Sublimity . . . does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind” [114]) and Burke (“the idea of bodily pain . . . is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it” [86, emphasis mine]). Libra‘s awesome historical sublime may simply have its roots in the related sublime of consciousness itself, and the impossibility of understanding the latter is writ large in the impossibility of encompassing the former. The resultant conceptual implosion leaves us with a better understanding of Libra as it points directly toward David Ferrie’s implicit description of the novel itself: “Think of two parallel lines . . . One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of theself. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path to his destiny” (339).

 

Any supposed evasion of politics or history by DeLillo is thus a misreading of what we might call a depth politics; history’s intention is the sublime intention of subjects, billions of them, and what novelist would want to claim certainty about what those intentions might be? Perhaps, as a line in Mao II asserts, “The future belongs to crowds” (16). Still, we should not be quick to blame DeLillo for not wanting to predict the future, to divine the intentions of these crowds. Libra finally makes the same case for history that chaos theory has clarified about weather forecasting: the impossibility of grasping the plurality of details inherent in initial conditions renders any human attempt at understanding the present or forecasting the future proportionally deficient. Like other aspects of the novel (the Nicholas Branch sections for example) and indeed the Kennedy assassination itself, Libra‘s sublimes are variations on the theme of uncertainty, variations which drive home a stunning postmodern inheritance: what Arnold Weinstein terms “a special purgatory of epistemological murk, of never again seeing clear, of permanent exile in the realm of information glut and data overload” (311). If this is an evasion of political realities and a prescription for bourgeois comfort, then many of us should feel shortchanged. Instead it appears that DeLillo has successfully transferred the infinite of the classical/romantic sublime to the postmodern conception of history itself. History is not acausal but too complex, too immense, to be reckoned by the unitary subjective mind. With the lens turned the right way, DeLillo’s conversion of an eighteenth-century aesthetic to a postmodern analytic has the terrific–in every sense– flavor of whatever might remain as truth.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 67-81.
• Adorno, Theodor W. “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column.” Telos 19.1 (1974): 13-90.
• Boyle, T. Coraghessan. World’s End. New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enguiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James Boulton. London: Routledge, 1958.
• Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful Worlds: Self and History in Libra,” Rev. of Libra, by Don DeLillo. Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 275-87.
• Carmichael, Thomas. “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 204-18.
• DeCurtis, Anthony. “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 43-66.
• DeLillo, Don. “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone 8 Dec. 1983: 21-2, 24, 27-8,74.
• —. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• —. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage, 1980.
• Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 175-91.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. Rev. of The Names, by Don DeLillo and Richard A, by Sol Yurick. Minnesota Review 22.1 (1984): 116-22.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
• Kucich, John. “Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White Male Writer.” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (1988): 328-41.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 1-6.
• —, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. “Libra as Postmodern Critique,” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 193-215.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Messmer, Michael W. “‘Thinking It Through Completely’: The Interpretation of Nuclear Culture.” Centennial Review 34 (1988): 397-413.
• Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: NAL, 1977.
• Wacker, Norman. “Mass Culture/Mass Novel: the Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Works and Days 8 (1990): 67-88.
• Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

 

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.
• Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1992.
• Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• —. “Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard.” Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Qu’est-ce que la litterature? Paris: Gallimard, 1948; translated by Bernard Frechtman, as What is Literature? New York: Harper and Row, 1949.
• Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford, 1993.
• Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. Trans. Frances Frenaye. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.
• Wilde, Alan. “Death in and around Vineland, U.S.A.” Boundary 2 18:2 (1991), 166-180.

 

Glen Scott Allen

Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

 

“Terror: from the Latin terrere, to frighten; intense fear; the quality of causing dread; terribleness; alarm, consternation, apprehension, dread, fear, fright.”

 

—Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary

 

“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.”

 

–William Gray in Mao II

 

Terrorism has played an important part in nearly every novel Don DeLillo has written to date. While the terrorists of Running Dog (1978) are essentially cartoon figures in search of a hypothetical pornographic film made in Hitler’s bunker, the more realistic terrorists in Players (1977) assassinate stock brokers and attempt to convert (albeit apathetically) disillusioned upper middleclass New Yorkers. The Names’ (1982) use of terrorism is more complex, positing a terrorist group–or perhaps cult is closer to the mark–whose assassinations are either random or based on an arcane understanding of a “pre-linguistic” language, depending on what they believe that day; and White Noise (1985), with its “airborne toxic event” extends this unpredictability factor and presents terrorism as something perhaps beyond the control of human agency at all. Libra (1989) suggest that terrorism of a bureaucratic but inherently uncontrollable nature lurks at the heart of the Kennedy assassination. And finally DeLillo’s most recent novel, Mao II (1991), returns to an human terrorist, Abu Rashid, and suggests a complex and almost hypnotic symmetry between his praxis and that of a famous but disillusioned writer in the novel, William Gray. This symmetry is of course not unique to Mao II; the extended meditation about “solitary plotters” in Libra posits that both the scheming terrorist and the struggling writer are at root “men in small rooms” seeking to reconnect with a society from which they feel alienated, and so they both must “write” themselves back into the world.

 

Terrorism in DeLillo seems an integral component of the postmodern condition, its ubiquitousness aiding and abetting in the construction of a subject for whom paranoia is not so much a neurosis as a canny adaptive strategy of survival; a strategy which has “evolved” from what we might call its classical form in the works of Thomas Pynchon, especially his magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Terrorism in GR is figured as the product of increasingly omniscient institutional surveillance over the increasingly impotent and isolated civilian. While the agents of this surveillance are obscure, still they are agents, coherent sites of surveillance and control. In DeLillo’s work, however, terrorism seems to have evolved beyond the need of human agency, to have seeped into the very texture of contemporary life. DeLillo’s response to this postmodern dynamic of terrorism and paranoia argues for an almost romantic return to the sovereign powers of the individual, an entity considered essentially extinct in postmodern fiction. This resurgent individualism is in fact not only a rejection of the paranoid strategy for postmodern survival formulated in Pynchon, but it also represents a rejection of the postmodern subject (as figured in the works of critics like Benveniste, Jameson, and Beaudrillard to name only a few) as something nearly inseparable from the semiotic “signal soup” of postmodern life.¹ For instance, Kaja Silverman singles out the writings of Benveniste as an example of the representation of this spectral postmodern subject: “[In Benveniste’s] writings, the subject has an even more provisional status . . . it has no existence outside of the specific discursive moments in which it emerges. The subject must be constantly reconstructed through discourse.” (Silverman, 199). But I will argue that DeLillo seems to feel our only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism, repression and paranoia is in moving away from formulations of the subject which work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site of responsibility and authority.

 

Typically when we speak of terrorism we’re referring to violence committed by a minority in demonstration of its status as victim: of political repression or geographic isolation or “cultural ghettoization.” Thus terrorism is fundamentally an act meant to call attention to itself; like postmodern fiction, it is inherently self-conscious. And in order to disseminate its self-conscious image as victim, it must have recourse to the media. Clearly when DeLillo’s character William Gray suggests that terrorists have usurped the role in the public conscious that novelists once held, he is referring to the fact that terrorist acts must be circulated to attain identity, and thus such acts compete for the public’s limited attention span with other circulating “texts.” Much of the debate within the scholarship of terrorism does in fact center on whether or not mass media encourages terrorist acts or is largely irrelevant to them. Two recent articles in the journal Terrorism are good examples of this debate. Ralph Dowling suggests that TV coverage is unimportant to terrorist aims, while Russell F. Farnen argues that terrorism and TV have a fundamentally symbiotic relationship, and that in fact terrorism is “made to order” for the specific requirements of the television media: “Terrorism is different, dramatic, and potentially violent. It frequently develops over a period of time, occurs in exotic locations, offers a clear confrontation, involves bizarre characters, and is politically noteworthy. Finally, it is of concern to the public” (Farnen, 111). Farnen cites what is apparently the majority opinion in terrorism studies by paraphrasing (unfortunately) Margaret Thatcher, to the effect that TV coverage is the “oxygen” which allows terrorism to breathe.

 

Whatever one’s opinion about the relationship between TV and terrorism, a far more interesting point is to be found in Dowling’s suggestion that understanding terrorist acts is no more–and no less–difficult than understanding any human attempt at communication. For certainly “understanding” terrorist acts is the one thing the “authorities” must claim to be incapable of doing. By its very definition, terrorism, at least to modern western democracies, is “mad.” To see why this is the case we begin with a quote from a member of Al Fatah on the purpose of their use of violence: “Violence will purify the individuals from venom, it will redeem the colonized from inferiority complex, it will return courage to the countryman” (Quoted in Dowling, 52). Violence for this terrorist is not the medium, it is the message. Violence is the transcendental signifier, the one term that cannot be reduced to any positive correlative within the discourse itself; axiomatic, beyond justification or logical debate; beyond logic. Thus to the logocentric Western sensibility, the terrorists’ use of violence is the most “senseless” of all terms he/she could possibly employ. It is, in terms of cultural linguistics, essentially impossible for most “First World” Western civilians to “read” the terrorist text, to see in it any expression worth interpreting. Farnen quotes the U. S. Ambassador at Large, L. Paul Bremer, who casts terrorism in its familiar Western role of evil incarnate: “Terrorism’s most significant characteristic is that it despises and seeks to destroy the fundamentals of Western democracy–respect for individual life and the rule of law” (Farnen, 104).

 

Though these two authors disagree about the relationship between terrorism and the media, they both agree that terrorism does in fact serve a fundamental rhetorical purpose, like any other form of human communication consisting of the manipulation of symbols. The communicative act is, Dowling argues, the way humans “find a place in the world,” the process of identifying oneself and one’s group as distinct from other selves and other groups. Terrorist acts signal to the terrorists themselves who they are. In Dowling’s view, the cultural effect of mass media-broadcasted terrorist violence is quite secondary to the more fundamentally human need of terrorists to “speak” themselves: “The seemingly senseless killings by terrorists serve the same function for terrorist society that wars and punishment of criminals and dissidents perform for mainstream society” (Dowling, 51). Farnen also believes that terrorism is a form of expression, a text which all the parties involved seek to control.² He uses the example of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Brigate Rosse, which Farnen says was “played out” as a classic narrative of sacrifice and tragedy by all the parties involved: government, media, and the terrorists themselves: “The saga was complete with ‘Christians’ (Moro and his martyred bodyguards), BR ‘lions,’ state ‘Caesars,’ media ‘tribunes,’ and the anxious Italian public” (Farnen, 116). In fact, Farnen argues that the terrorists intentionally and specifically “wrote” various symbolism into the entire kidnapping drama, in such forms as the “placement of [Moro’s] dead body in the center of Rome, on a street linking the two major party headquarters” (118). Even more interesting is Farnen’s observation that, though the event was discussed at obsessive length in the media for months, very little was ever said about the terrorists’ possible motivations or rationale. In fact, he concludes that, like many such terrorist acts, the entire event was treated as though it occurred somewhere outside the normal course of human events: “The Moro affair was treated much like an inexplicable natural disaster or an act of God” (118). Finally, Farnen points out terrorism’s usefulness as a dramatic trope, which has made it a mainstay of TV shows and popular spy novels: “With the sudden demise of post-Gorbachev communism as the main enemy, terrorism has become ‘public enemy number one’ in American public discourse” (103). (Certainly this move is evident in the work of Tom Clancy, who began by casting Soviets in the role of arch villain, but has easily substituted terrorists–both narco- and political–in that role in his more recent novels.)

 

While much of Dowling’s argument seems finally rather simplistic–at times he appears to cast terrorists in the role of the misunderstood teens from “West Side Story”–at the very least he works to move the discourse about terrorist acts from reductive tactical debates to a recognition that terrorism is a means of expression. However, by downplaying and eventually denying the role the mass media audience plays in the formation of the “terrorist identity,” he skims over what is clearly for many postmodern writers, especially DeLillo, the most interesting, perhaps the most terrifying aspect of modern terrorism. For if terrorists have become nearly ubiquitous players in the contemporary social narrative, then, whatever the intent of their “expressive” acts, they contribute as much to the formation of our identity as to their own, and their acts of seemingly random and “meaningless” violence have become an integral component of what being a modern individual means. Given that it has become something of a commonplace to say that part of what being a postmodern subject means is a pervasive sense of anxiety and vulnerability, then terrorism’s chief aim would seem to be perfectly consistent with that “meaning.” According to an authority on terrorism, its chief “objective . . . is to convey a pervasive sense of vulnerability”; vulnerability which produces consequent paranoia and guilt in the civilian; guilt which arises “when terrorism proves that societal institutions cannot provide the peace and security they promise” (qtd. in Dowling, 52). Thus in a broad cultural context, terrorism is an all-too material demonstration of the uncertainty principle, i.e., that we cannot absolutely control our environments and destinies, and that our ability to dictate the narrative of our own lives is limited and circumstantial.

 

In order to describe DeLillo’s presentation of this dynamic of terrorism and paranoia, we first need to discuss terrain so often considered Pynchon’s preeminent stomping ground. Pynchon’s chief contribution to literature may well be considered a body of fiction where the legacy of a paranoid style–out of Orwell via Burroughs, Kerouac and Mailer–comes to full fruition in what a character in Running Dog calls the “age of conspiracies.” According to John McClure, the appeal of conspiracy theories in the late 20th century stems from their essentially indisputable, self-justifying, self-referencing hermeneutics: “For conspiracy theory explains the world, as religion does, without elucidating it, by positing the existence of hidden forces which permeate and transcend the realm of ordinary life” (McClure, 103). Though McClure is writing here of the work of Don DeLillo, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would undoubtedly serve equally well as an example of this conspiracy fiction, with its nearly infinite schemes crossing and crisscrossing nations, continents, and decades, while in the center of these intersecting plot-lines sits forlorn Tyrone Slothrop, like a target in a crosshairs.

 

But a target of what? Certainly the V-2 rocket is one possibility; by the end of the novel we have reason to believe that the rocket is in fact “pursuing” Slothrop, or that he is pursuing it. In any case, they seem bound, through the early experiments of Dr. Jamf with Imoplex-G, in some complicated dance of death. But this “chemical bond” is only conjectural, and certainly not the only candidate for some They out to get Slothrop. In fact, by the time Slothrop wanders the Zone, They has become nearly every postwar institution, regardless its national or ideological boundaries. Finally what pursues Slothrop is the World; but what pursues the reader is the lasting image of a rocket, poised an infinitesimal inch above our heads, completing an arc which began with its vapor trail first witnessed by Pirate Prentice 800 pages earlier. And in a purely physical sense, the greatest terror of the novel is the V-2, the German “terror weapon” that was intended to demoralize the British civilian population. By using the V-2 as a trope of paranoia, Pynchon categorically identified the primary legacy of our victory in WWII as anxiety; anxiety fueled by a world armed with weapons which had transcended all classical theories and strategies of warfare. This fundamentally “material” terrorism is one easily recognized by anyone who lived through either WWII or the 25 years of intense Cold War which followed. As critic John Johnston has argued, the “They-system” of Gravity’s Rainbow “is depicted as arising out of the new bureaucratic needs and technologies of World War Two” (“Post-Cinematic Fiction,” 91); bureaucratic needs and technologies which would come to identify Slothrop’s “time” as the progenitor of this age of conspiracies:

 

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly–perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly–and there ought to be a punchline to it. But there isn’t. The plan went wrong. (GR, 680)

 

Though Pynchon’s Theys are depicted as beyond traditional national ideologies, Their politics are clearly identifiable as essentially those of isolation, repression and control. In the post-WWII world of Pynchon’s fiction, the development of modern and efficient state surveillance is a form of terrorism which motivates the civilian to seek out patterns of information which may (or may not) reveal hidden agencies and concealed plots. Thus paranoia is an adaptive reaction formation to omniscient institutional surveillance. And the mass media in Pynchon–radio, TV and print journalism, even the US. postal system–has been largely co-opted by these forces of surveillance and control until they have become little more than state-dominated networks for distributing dis-information. Pynchon correctly predicted that the surviving nation-states, unable to take to the battlefield against foreign enemies, would turn all their powers of surveillance on their own citizens, project their institutionalized paranoia onto these civilians, and thus construct an international and domestic tension where peace in the world was purchased with the disappearance of this very civilian as an independent subject. What Pynchon represents in GR is, for want of a better term, the ascendancy of State Terrorism; not the state terrorism claimed by the PLO as a underlying reality in the foreign policy of the United States and other world powers, but rather an intra state terrorism, i.e., the development of complex and interconnected domestic and international networks of surveillance which depend on the acquisition and circulation of vast quantities of new information.

 

And these new information technologies also become central to the thematics of DeLillo’s novels, but in quite different ways. For instance, the information in DeLillo’s work often seems utterly ahistorical. The characters of DeLillo’s novels often “inhabit” identities whose connection to history–either personal or cultural–is merely theoretical. DeLillo’s fictions seem set in a time when World War II has become a distant influence. In Running Dog, for instance, there is the pornographic film from Hitler’s Bunker, yet nothing else about World War II seeps through into the novel; even Vietnam seems to belong to an entirely other world. Of course, the paranoiac “fallout” from World War II and the stalemate of the Cold War is only one of the trademarks of Pynchon’s fiction. Others include conspiracies whose agencies are dispersed or uncertain, characters who disappear in ways which mirror the dispersal of those agencies, and endings which suggest imminent and perhaps apocalyptic revelation. Yet, while all of these components are evident in DeLillo’s novels as well, they are all warped by this increasing mass of information which shapes, or perhaps is the postmodern subject.

 

In other words, many of DeLillo’s characters seem to be in danger of becoming exactly the sort of postmodern specter to which I referred earlier. In fact, critic Daniel Aaron has suggested that, in all of DeLillo’s novels, his characters are less Cartesian individuals than “integers in a vast information network” (70). And LeClair sees information and its various incarnations as the very essence of DeLillo’s works: “The novels are all about communication exchanges, the relations between information and energy and forces, the methods of storing, retrieving, and using new kinds of information” (“Postmodern Mastery,” 101). How, then, is DeLillo arguing against the acceptance of the dissipated postmodern subject? This is a point I will return to in a moment. But first I want to pursue the ways in which DeLillo re-structures Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia, and the relationship in Ratner’s Star between paranoia and what DeLillo presents as the “new, improved” version of postmodern terrorism.

 

DeLillo remaps Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia onto a distinctly American, largely urban post-historical landscape. In novels of middle class ennui like Players, White Noise, and even to a certain extent Mao II, the America of DeLillo is not only a land existing completely within this “age of conspiracies,” its inhabitants seem capable of defining themselves only as victims of these conspiracies. Frank Lentricchia believes that DeLillo’s works serve as cautionary tales about such conspiracy and media-bound identity, illustrating “how the expressive forces of blood and earth are in the process of being overtaken and largely replaced by the forces of contemporary textuality. Lives lived so wholly inside the media are lives expressed (in the passive mood) through voices dominated by the jargons of the media” (“Postmodern Critique,” 211). And while the terrorism in DeLillo’s novels often begins as something familiar to us as terrorism–small bands of individuals plotting acts of violence against “innocent” civilians–this “prosaic” terrorism typically metamorphoses into something else: an independent, uncontrolled, mysterious and perhaps even unfathomable force which disrupts the best laid plans of terrorist and civilian alike. Again, the airborne toxic event in White Noise is one example. But the best sustained representation of this “agentless” terrorism is to be found, oddly enough, in one of DeLillo’s earliest novels, Ratner’s Star (1976); a novel unique among his works if only because there is no representative terrorist among its characters; at least no recognizably human terrorist. But we do recognize in Ratner’s Star a “Pynchonian” mise en scene, complete with proliferating plots, daunting intertextual connections, hidden and potentially non-existent agencies, dispersing narrative voices, and, at the center of the plots and counter-plots, a lone and relatively naive protagonist, Billy Twillig, whose task it is to determine whether he is a perceptive victim or a delusional paranoid. In Ratner’s Star, DeLillo rewrites the global plots of Gravity’s Rainbow onto the larger stage of the Universe, which itself becomes both scheme and schemer, as well as the chief “terrorist.”

 

The premise of Ratner’s Star is that we have received a signal from outer space. Fourteen-year-old Billy Twillig, a mathematical prodigy, is summoned to a distant research complex, Field Experiment Number One (FENO), to help decode the message. From the beginning of the novel the uncertainty of Billy’s task and the instability of the fictional world which surrounds him are emphasized: “Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. . . . But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one’s perspective” (RS, 3). From the moment Billy arrives at FENO, he is besieged by what any reader of Pynchon would recognize as an overabundance of signal which threatens to degenerate into noise; and the only scientist other than Billy capable of deciphering the alien message–the aged and venerable Henrik Endor–has run away from the complex and is out in the desert, digging a hole.

 

Billy’s dilemma is not unlike that of Benny Profane or Oedipa Maas or Tyrone Slothrop: to “sort noise from signal,” and determine whether or not there is an intelligent “agency” at the origin of the message; but to determine first of all if there is a message. And like Benny and Oedipa and Tyrone before him, Billy encounters a dizzying array of characters in his search, all with their own interpretation of the message, all with their entirely idiosyncratic agenda of signals and counter-signals. But whereas in Pynchon the “terror” generated by mysterious plots is largely a result of the revealed size and complexity of those plots, in Ratner’s Star the terror arises from the randomness and potential irrelevance of the information with which Billy is bombarded; which is to say, in Pynchon what is learned contributes to the background of terror, while in DeLillo the acquisition of knowledge is problematized to the point where “learning” itself is an experience of random and meaningless violence; the very process of searching is, in and of itself, terrifying.

 

This terrible process of learning is figured as inescapably arising from the dynamics and limits of language. While the later half of the novel is devoted to the revelation of many things Billy doesn’t really want to know (about adulthood and sex, trust and betrayal), the first half concentrates on reducing language, and particularly conversation to something more like hand-to-hand combat than communication. For instance, dialogue between characters is less the revelation of information than an exchange of cliches, a sort of preliminary sizing up of one another for soft spots. A dialogue between Billy and a vaguely sinister man he meets on a plane (an entrepreneur who will turn out later to be the closest thing the novel has to an actual terrorist) goes like this:

 

"How was the bathroom."
"I liked it."
"Mine was first-rate."
"Pretty nice."
"Some plane."
"The size."
"Exactly."

 

Throughout the novel most of the characters play their conversational cards very close to the vest, but Billy’s responses to questions particularly are more like stage directions for speech than speech itself: “My mouth says hello”; “I do not comment.”; “I make no reply” (RS, 11). And when Billy eventually reaches the secret complex FENO, he is almost literally assaulted by a blizzard of scientific jargon from a dozen different fields–biology, child “sexology,” astrophysics, architecture–as well as the apparently secret agendas of everyone he meets. All of this secretive and gestural communication occurs in an atmosphere of instantaneous computer networks, portable communicators, super intelligent computers and hyperbolic referentiality, which makes language something violent, unrelenting, and unpredictable. No communication is simply referential, pointing to any unambiguous signified. In fact, signification in the world of FENO is (in Barthes’ terms) all connotation, no denotation–rhetorical “slippages” alone accounting for what little coherent meaning can be derived. Language here is often so rote as to be almost all ritual, its meaning residing entirely in its context. For instance, when Billy reaches his room in FENO, certain “safety precautions” are read to him by his escort:

 

“The exit to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture.”

 

“I have understood.”

 

“Most people just nod,” Ottum said. “It’s more universal.” (17)

 

And often language “attacks” occur without any context. In fact, individual words often take on a paranoiac aura which is completely independent of either their denotation or connotation. For instance, Billy feels certain words are threatening all by themselves–words like gout, ohm, ergot, pulp; “organic” words which he refers to as “alien linguistic units.” And his paranoid reaction makes perfect sense: in a world where all quotes are taken out of context, each utterance would indeed seem an “alien linguistic unit,” something whose purpose is suspect and presumptively threatening. Thus the material violence which is the transcendental signifier for terrorists like the member of Al Fatah becomes in Ratner’s Star the abstracted violence of decontextualized and seemingly nonsensical language; language without a logical referent, pointing either to itself or nowhere, or both.

 

Of course much postmodern fiction depends on this technique of decontextualization for its disorienting effect. But typically accompanying this technique is the employment of intertextual references which signal to the reader exactly what sort of larger context–often ironic–is to be used to “ground” signification. Throughout Ratner’s Star, however, what we would typically refer to as the intertextual references are made not to individual texts at all, but rather to vague “sites” of cultural signification. These sites are in turn reduced to single tropes, what we might call “signature” tropes, the decoding of which depends on the reader’s possession of a repertoire of contemporary cultural trivia: cliches from classic films, one-liners from TV shows, characters and quotes from comic books, popular novels, newspaper headlines, tabloids, the jargon of Scientific American, the newspeak of federal bureaucrats, the glib argot of tabloid journalists . . . all of these idiolects existing side-by-side as equally valid discourses. Thus “texts” are less discrete and more continuous, terms which Ratner’s Star uses with considerable frequency; something like subatomic particles, which aren’t really “particular” at all but rather fields whose density fades vaguely off into other fields. And very often these “fields” of reference merely deflect the reader to still other “tropic fields” (to coin a perfectly awful phrase) until the paths of reference become so intricate that any map of this referentiality would look like the tracings of subatomic collisions produced in particle accelerators.³

 

In such a miasmic communicative environment, traditional boundaries between “texts” are dissolved. The result is more chaotic tropic plasma than orderly intertextual network. In this new form of intertextuality, the process whereby texts make contributions to the intertextual langue are best thought of as something like a field of signification, something one measures with probabilities and approximations rather than certainties and units. The characters of Ratner’s Star move through clouds of such tropes, charged with the reflexive urge to find some sort of order, to arrange these signals into “spectra” based not on the content of the original text from which the signature trope is derived, but rather on the degree to which each trope serves as a vector pointing toward a potential agency at the message’s point of origin. For instance, even when Billy believes he has finally decoded the message from space, he is admonished for working toward the wrong goal: “Content is not the issue. So don’t go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking” (416). Robert Softly, the character who has conceived of the perfectly logical, perfectly useless language called Logicon (a language for which one of the key rules is “i. All language was innuendo.”) often speaks with every word–even articles and prepositions–in quotes: “‘It’ ‘is’ ‘time’ ‘for’ ‘me’ ‘to’ ‘get’ ‘out’.” Each word is thus partitioned by an ironic valence even from its immediate, syntagmatic context. Thus severed from all context global and local, much of the language in the book does indeed seem like the “alien linguistic units” which so terrorize Billy. To what do such “alien linguistic units” refer? For Billy at least, that common direction, the principle which he uses in an attempt to bring shape to the tropic plasma, is the discourse of mathematics–the only discourse which he does not find threatening. Language which is not simply “alien” is “comforting” to the extent that it can be translated into mathematical equivalents. And what Billy finds comforting in mathematics is the distinct quality of its constituent components–at least its integer components: “Words and numbers, writing and calculating. . . . Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole” (7). Fractions, we are told, have always made Billy feel “slightly queasy.”

 

The typical Pynchonian reaction to such a state of paranoia would be a dispersal of agency. By dispersal of agency, I mean both the figurative way in which the plots in Pynchon’s novels are always potentially agentless and self-perpetuating, and the literal manner in which Pynchon’s protagonists have a tendency to disappear: we recall Benny in V. disappearing into the sunset of Malta, Oedipa in Lot 49 disappearing into the auction room, and, most significantly, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, who disperses into the plot itself, becoming a “pretext” and a concept which is “just too remote” to hold together. We might also remember the way in which Slothrop merges with the symbol of what’s been pursuing him–the V-2 rocket–by becoming Rocketmensch just before he merges with the plot ever further and becomes vaguely visible (at least to Pig Bodine) but insubstantial; before he becomes, that is, a specter. And such a move is, again, perfectly in keeping with the paranoid logos of the novel, as the other trademark of Pynchon’s plots is their undecidability, their sense of imminent but unrealized revelation. In one sense, revelation ought to be the ultimate moment for the paranoid, as it is the moment when the “truth” of his world view is substantiated, made incarnate; but of course this ultimate moment is also the final moment–for if paranoia is more the state of seeking agency than the moment of finding it, then revelation threatens the paranoid’s very raison d’etre. Thus the most dedicated paranoid would be the one able to forever defer this moment of revelation.

 

At this point I need to briefly discuss the idea of tropes. The root of the word trope is the Greek tropaion, which was a marker left to indicate where an enemy had been turned back. We might ask, then, what “enemy” is it that tropes turn back? As tropic or figural language is, at least in a basic sense, considered the opposite of literal language, a first order answer might be that tropes mark the place in language where literality is “turned back.” What is literal is “made up” of letters; and literal reading is after all an effort to reduce the ambiguity of a term to a single meaning; to transform signifiers into signals whose meaning is constant across all possible contexts. Tropes, on the other hand, tug language in the opposite direction, toward a multiplicity of meaning and thus toward an uncertainty of interpretation. With this understanding of the tension between literal and tropic reading in mind, I would suggest then that the paranoid reader is in fact a very literal reader, one who works to reduce the ambiguity of the signifiers about him to mere signals which can all be traced back to the same and central agent–the agency at the center of the “plot.”

 

Who or what is this agent? To quote first from Gravity’s Rainbow:

 

“There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry–“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what [Slothrop] felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he was in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.” (861)

 

By the end of Ratner’s Star, Billy Twillig feels “there was something between himself and the idea of himself . . . and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence” (RS, 361). Is Death, then, the elusive agency at the heart of both Pynchon and DeLillo’s paranoid plots? After all, a paranoid’s literal reading of Revelation–as in the revelation of agency–would necessarily dictate that it be followed inevitably by the completion of apocalypse, i.e., annihilation. And here we might remember the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow, with the tip of the rocket suspended above our heads and the words, “All together now” uniting us in the paranoid’s penultimate embrace. But in Ratner’s Star, DeLillo again raises the stakes of this near moment of revelation: for, while the imminent apocalypse in Gravity’s Rainbow is global, the imminent apocalypse of Ratner’s Star is “literally” universal.

 

Ratner’s Star posits something in space called a “mohole,” where all the recognized laws of physics cease to apply. “‘If I had to put what a mohole is into words’ (asks the reporter, Jean, who is chronicling the development of Logicon)’what would I say?’ ‘You’d have a problem,’ Mainwaring said” (365). By the end of the novel, the earth seems to be in just such a place, to be “mohole intense,” as it is cast into darkness by an “unscheduled” solar eclipse. Though the gathered scientists predict that life in a mohole will be radically different, they have no idea how to explain or describe the difference: “I don’t feel any different,” Softly said. “Rob, we don’t know. That’s it. We don’t know what it means. This is space-time sylphed. We’re dealing with Moholean relativity here. Possibly dimensions more numerous than we’ve ever before imagined” (410). Thus DeLillo gives Pynchon’s formula of dispersed and uncertain agency a boost by moving his imminent apocalypse into an area of potentially absolute dispersal and infinite uncertainty. Perhaps at the conclusion of Ratner’s Star we are on the verge of a literal apocalypse; that is, an apocalypse of literality; and, potentially, the genesis of an entirely “figural” universe where there is absolutely no consistent, predictable relationship between one experience and the next, between any word and any thing, between cause and effect. At the very least, such a universe would mean, in Ambassador at Large Bremer’s words, the end of “respect for individual life and the rule of law”; i.e., the final and complete triumph of terrorism.

 

So perhaps Slothrop’s disappearing act could well be considered a maneuver intended to outflank this revelation of universal uncertainty and thus omnipresent terrorism: a countering of the “reign of terror” engendered by the dispersal of agency by mirroring it and becoming the dispersed subject. And this dispersal of the subject is also found in Ratner’s Star–but again, with a twist. While Slothrop disperses into the narrative, still the narrating voice of Gravity’s Rainbow remains relatively coherent. However, in Ratner’s Star, while Billy Twillig retains his coherence as a character, what had been the third person omniscient narrating voice of the novel essentially disperses into the characters, moving in the same sentence between locales, even between thoughts:

 

Softly stopped reading here, thinking I am old, I will die, no one cares, her upper body slumped forward on the desk and what an implausible object it is, she thought . . . the photoelectric command at the end of Bolin’s hand, thinking I am old . . . Wu’s middle ear conveying vibrations inward . . . the implausibility of my parts, she thought. . . . (425)

 

In this final section of the novel, sentences intrude on one another like filaments of conversations overheard on car phones, as if the very atmosphere of the novel were filled with detached segments of dialogue drifting about, looking for a conversation to link up with. Thus it is the “voice” of Ratner’s Star which disperses, and which anticipates and evades the imminent revelation that its own end implies but does not quite reach.

 

DeLillo particularly seems interested in the link between death as the final paranoid revelation and the act of authoring itself. One of the entries quoted from Oswald’s diary in Libra expresses Oswald’s greatest longing, which is to cease being Oswald the individual and to merge into a spectral identity called “the struggle”: “Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general” (quoted in Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 197). Lentricchia sees in Oswald’s banal desire something other than merely one soldier of the revolution wishing to become one with the army of the revolution. Rather, he suggests that Oswald wishes to exchange places with Win Everett (the former CIA agent who is “plotting” Kennedy’s fake assassination), to become the author of the plot in which he is only a character–or perhaps to become an author, period: “Oswald, in his desire for a perfectly distilled, scripted self–propelled by itself as its own novelist/prime mover–is a figure of the assassin as writer, a man isolated by his passion, room-bound, a plot schemer” (“Postmodern Critique,” 209). Lentricchia suggests that in his feelings of impotence, victimhood, and insubstantiality Oswald is the perfect representation of the spectral and manipulated postmodern subject: “Self-constructed, constantly revised, Oswald’s narrative is a search for the very thing–a well-motivate, shapely existence–whose absence is a mark of the negative libran . . . Oswald’s patched voice produces the presiding tone of the postmodern absence of substantial and autonomous self-hood” (Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 209).

 

And DeLillo’s most recent novel Mao II centers on another “room-bound” plot schemer, a writer whose infrequent books are considered vastly intricate and dauntingly knowledgeable (which is of course also reminiscent of Pynchon). The writer’s name is William Gray–a fine name for blending into the background. ⁴ Gray is a recluse, in the style of J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. In the novel, Gray has become something of a cultural “trope,” whose usefulness to his culture resides in the very insubstantiality of his celebrity. However, Gray feels his best work is behind him; or rather, that the best role of the author in society is behind him, and that authors as enactors of literature no longer have any effect on society. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness” (Mao II, 87). Yet the “plot” Gray eventually becomes involved with is one authored by terrorists, not novelists; a plot which leads him to the realization of what seems to be his ultimate desire, which is not so much a merging into the struggle, as Oswald wanted, but a disappearing altogether into an anonymous death. There is the suggestion that Gray trumps the terrorist Abu Rashid’s plans for him by dying before he can be victimized, by making his sacrifice his own statement rather than allowing it to be shaped to Rashid’s purposes. But of course this is a statement no one reads, which we can think of either as an act of supreme idealization.

 

Or supreme futility. Mao II hardly endorses Gray’s self-willed abdication of self, his “devout” wish “to be forgotten,” as any sort of positive solution to the problem of postmodern terrorism and paranoia. For one thing, Gray’s anonymous death does not end the novel; we see the various characters adjusting to Gray’s disappearance, using it, shaping his absence to their own ends: his friend Scott settles into Gray’s house, becoming a simulacrum of the absent author; the photographer Brita who sought to “reproduce” Gray shifts her aim easily to the terrorist instead, in a move both opportunistic and smoothly adaptive (and one which models the very sort of symbiotic interdependence Farnen suggests between those who “write” violence into the text of everyday life and those who disseminate it). Gray’s dispersal leaves only a vacuum which others rush in to fill, without giving a second thought to the “message” intended by his disappearance. Thus the novel poses a subtle, even tragic question: what are the limits of dispersed subjecthood? If one seeks to evade the terror of random violence by blending into the background and denying the terrorist–whether individual or Universe–a coherent, identifiable site of violence, what is sacrificed? To what extent is Gray’s preemptive vanishing a death not only of potential victimhood, but also of personal identity, of responsibility, and thus of legacy? How thoroughly can the author disown author-ity before also surrendering integrity; the ability, in the words of Gravity’s Rainbow, to appear as any sort of “integral creature”?

 

Lentricchia suggests that, in the traditional American novel, the author provides a stable point of reference from which the reader can take society’s “critical measure,” that the reader can find relative detachment “within the value of the ‘omniscient’ author who displays the workings of the dynamic but is not himself subject to them. The author, then, is a transcendent figure, someone the reader is implicitly asked to identify with . . . that constantly throws us forward into some other, some imagined, existence” (“Postmodern Critique,” 210). Lentricchia goes on to say that this “exit” is “sealed off” in Libra. Johnston makes essentially the same observation about Ratner’s Star, which he sees as refusing to grant authority to any univocal narrator or point of view: “[Ratner’s Star] refuses to privilege any single ‘authoritative’ version or to subordinate its varied stories and discourses to a higher or more englobing authorial narrative discourse, which would amount to yielding to precisely those powers and functions that it wants to lay bare. Instead, it inscribes an uncertainty and indeterminacy in its own narrative structure, and plays with how we might know certain connections between events” (“Post-cinematic Fiction,” 91). I would point again to the novel’s last section, when what has previously been a coherent and recognizable narrating voice disperses into the “text.” Thus Ratner’s Star robs the reader of the comfort of any transcendental authorial figure who might otherwise serve to “make sense” of the random violence of decontextualized language; who might, that is, provide relief from the terrorism of meaninglessness. And this absence further denies the reader any detached platform from which he/she might, with impunity, take his/her society’s “critical measure.” Thus, in the absence of the narrator and author, the reader is forced to construct some central embodying principle to grant overall context to the otherwise terrifying uncertainty of the novel; to build upon an interpretive principle which is secretive, elusive, coded, with a potentially totalizing or “universal” agenda and capable of explaining vast and obscure connections. . . . In other words, the reader must write a plot. He/she must actively engage the terrorism of meaninglessness which seeks to overwhelm the novel; to assert, that is, his/her individual strategies of sense-making.

 

However ambiguous the endings of DeLillo’s novels, there is almost always at least one character who “models” this sort of adaptive strategy for the reader: one thinks of Pammy in Players, moving away from the violent ennui of her husband-become-terrorist toward an alternative she can’t quite articulate; or the final image in Ratner’s Star, which is not the ascendancy of the dispersed voice of the narrator (as in Gravity’s Rainbow), but rather the frail and oddly exuberant image of Billy Twillig–who has spent the last half of the novel almost paralyzed with terror–exuberantly pedaling a tricycle into the “reproductive dust of existence” (120). While DeLillo’s representation of terrorism in novels like Ratner’s Star and Mao II seems even more universal, insidious and hegemonic than Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow, his work finally does not seem to completely accept Pynchon’s solution, i.e., that we abandon the field to the ablest postmodern paranoids. In fact, I would argue that DeLillo’s characters often embrace the plots which surround them, which perhaps construct them, and work–against all reasonable odds–to adapt to such a statement of existence so that they might in turn alter the statements of that existence. They seek some alternate way of existing within a world admittedly filled with random violence and meaningless communication, to resist both the role of surveilled and terrorized subject and paranoid, dispersed specter. Though there is certainly an overlay of despair and futility in DeLillo’s work, there often seems too an indefatigable energy, a belief just as strong that the production of plots we call novels might not be completely futile or always already culpable. DeLillo himself has expressed a willingness to embrace rather than resist what other writers see as the terrorism of technology and technological modes of existence in postmodern society: “Science in general has given us a new language to draw from. Some writers shrink from this. . . . To me, science is a source of new names. . . . Rilke said we had to rename the world. Renaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth” (LeClair, “Interview” 84).

 

Much of DeLillo’s work, especially Ratner’s Star, points toward a strategy of adaptation and rebirth particularly of our sense of individual identity and responsibility as, perhaps, the only counter to becoming the dispersed and irresponsible postmodern specters. But his work also recognizes that such a rebirth of our sense of self and community involves a considerable struggle; a struggle Jacques Derrida seems to have had in mind when, writing about the importance of a new formation of European cultural identity in response to terrorism–whether it be religious, political, or ethnic–he calls for a postmodern subject which is informed by rather than frightened of our increasing and inescapable connectedness; a cultural identity “constituted in responsibility” shaped by, in a quite traditional way, the anticipation of one’s cultural legacy. “For perhaps responsibility consists in making of the name recalled, of the memory of the name, of the idiomatic limit, a chance, that is, an opening of identity to its very future” (Derrida, 35). Perhaps such an interpretation reads DeLillo (and Derrida) as more neo-existentialists than postmodernists; perhaps it even suggests that DeLillo’s work needs to be re-examined for its links to modernism, even romanticism, in its representation of the theoretically obsolete individual as the only viable site of resistance to the ubiquitous terror of postmodern life.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for instance, Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (1971); Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992); and Jean Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social (1983).

 

2. Farnen also has a second and more interesting point to make, which is that the portrayal of terrorism in the media has created a false trope. He quotes at length statistics which show that, especially in the last five years, terrorists acts have become so rare that “[I]n the United States, a person is more likely to die as a victim of an asthma attack than as a victim of a terrorist attack” (101).

 

3. See John Johnston’s discussion of the heavy use of cinema in the works of both Pynchon and DeLillo in “Post- Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo,” where he suggests that “the interest in cinema revealed in these novels seems to respond to a sense of the cinema as an apparatus for producing and disseminating images which both construct and control a new kind of subject.” A subject, I would add, which is a product not of the accumulated content of interrelated texts, but rather the transient acontextual moment of intersecting tropes.

 

4. In fact, it is rumored that Bill Gray is the name Don DeLillo often used when traveling incognito.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 67-81.
• DeLillo, Don. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage Books, 1980 (1976).
• —. Players. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
• —. Running Dog. New York : Vintage Books, 1978.
• —. The Names. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
• —. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Dowling, Ralph E. “Victimage and Mortification: Terrorism and Its Coverage in the Media.” Terrorism 12-1, (1989): 47-59.
• Farnen, Russell F. “Terrorism and the Mass Media: A Systemic Analysis of a Symbiotic Process.” Terrorism 13-2, (1990): 99-123.
• Harris, Robert R. “A Talk with Don DeLillo.” New York Times Book Review, 10 Oct. 1982: F26.
• Johnston, John. “Generic Difficulties in the Novels of Don DeLillo.” Critique 30-4, (1989): 261-275.
• —. “Post-Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo.” New Orleans Review 17-2, (1990): 90-97.
• LeClair, Tom. In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 1987.
• LeClair, Tom. “Interview with Don DeLillo.” Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983. 79-90.
• LeClair, Tom. “Post-Modern Mastery.” Representation and Performance in Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Maurice Couturier. Nice: Delta Press, 1983. 99-111.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critque.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 193-215.
• McClure, John A. “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 99-115.
• Price, Andrew Jude. “The Entropic Imagination in 20th Century American Fiction: A Case for Don DeLillo.” Dissertation abstracts, ’88 nov 49-5, 1143A.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1976.
• Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

 

John Unsworth

Department of English
University of Virginia
jmu2m@virginia.edu

 

This journal does not usually run editor’s introductions, but with this issue it enters a new phase of its existence, and that new phase deserves some comment. For more than three years, Postmodern Culture has been publishing peer-reviewed critical and creative work in a text-only format that accommodates electronic mail: we will continue to publish in that format, but beginning with this January, 1994 issue, we will also publish each new issue (and provide all back issues) through the World-Wide Web. Regular subscribers of the journal will also note that this is the first issue ever to be published late: unfortunately, producing two versions of each file and setting up templates for article and issue design proved more time-consuming than anticipated. That it came out at all is due in large part to the efforts of the guest editors, Scott Allen and Stephen Bernstein for the DeLillo cluster and Tan Lin for the poetry cluster–and no less to Jim English, the review editor, and the editorial staff, Jonathan Beasley, Chris Barrett, Amy Sexton, and Jason Haynes.

 

What’s the Web?

 

The World-Wide Web may already be familiar to some of our readers, since its use is growing faster even than the internet itself, but many others will not yet have discovered it and may welcome some background information. The World-Wide Web is a client-server system for providing integrated text, graphics, sound, and video over the internet. The most important feature of the Web, though, is its ability to link files to one another in a hypertextual structure: in fact, it has the capability of turning the entire internet into one hypertextual web.

 

The Web has been around for a couple of years, making it older than gopher, the more well-known client-server program that currently underlies (for example) many campus- wide information systems. At the moment, Web traffic is growing much faster than gopher traffic–341,634% per year vs. a mere 997% per year, according to one estimate¹ –but its relatively slow start was due in part to the lack of an adequate client program. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Champaign- Urbana, has filled that void with Mosaic, an excellent, free, mouse-oriented client for the Web. Mosaic clients are available for Macintosh, Windows, RS6000, DEC, and Sun computers (by anonymous ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu). The entry-level equipment for using these clients might be, for example, a 386 with a VGA monitor and an ethernet card– equipment that costs under $1000 at this point. In fact, the nature of one’s connection to the internet is more likely to be an obstacle than is the nature of one’s equipment: since using the Web involves transmitting sizable files (graphics, sound, etc.), the transmission speeds of an ethernet connection are required for satisfactory performance. It’s possible to cruise the Web over your modem, with an additional layer of SLIP software, but this is agonizingly slow and can be absurdly difficult to set up.

 

Since June of 1993, the World-Wide Web has been growing at a rate faster than one new server a day. In June, there were 100 sites; in November, there were 270 sites; in December, there were 623 sites (according to Matthew Gray of MIT, author of the WWW Wanderer, a program that follows links from one server to another, to determine the extent of the web). These estimates are certain to be low, but they give an idea of the curve. At present, something on the order of a quarter of a million documents are provided over the Web; the increase in use of Web clients is on the order of 2000% a month. In other words, while it is not clear how well all this will scale up, it is clear that we’ll find out the answer to that question very soon. The Web has its shortcomings (for example, its hypertext pointers refer to literal file- and path-names, making it easy for someone on one system to set up a pointer to a file on another system that gets moved or renamed, resulting in a non-functioning link), but these shortcomings are minor in comparison to the great advance it provides in the general usability and perusability of the net. And since Mosaic can also open ftp, telnet, WAIS, and gopher sessions, all with a mouse- and icon-oriented graphical user interface, it functions as a kind of meta-menu for a panoply of networked information services.

 

What Does It Mean for PMC?

 

Explanations of the Web tend to make the eyes glaze over; demonstrations tend to make the eyes light up. The first outing induces a kind of informational vertigo, especially when one considers the implications of this medium for networked scholarship and publishing. The network-as-hypermedia implies that the connections now gesturally performed in notes and citations can–will– become explicit and navigable links from document to document. It means that in the very near future, authors will propose and editors will review such links, and it means that readers can keep private marginalia on networked documents, as well. For Postmodern Culture, it means that we can begin publishing film clips, readings of poetry or fiction, musical performances, and hypertexts of all kinds. It also means that, as more and more of the material published in PMC incorporates non-text elements, the e-mail version of the journal will inevitably become less authoritative or complete.

 

We welcome comments on this new phase in the journal’s existence, suggestions on the journal’s hypermedia format and design, and submission of hypermedia texts. Excellent information and extensive tutorials on the various techniques and requirements of the Web are available under the Help button on the Mosaic clients (though you may find it impossible to get through to the beseiged hosts at uiuc.edu at certain times of day); information specific to PMC’s implementation of the Web’s standards is available from the Table of Contents page for the January, 1994 issue. Moreover, since Mosaic allows you to view the underlying markup for any Web page, it is easy to learn by example.

 

In closing, I should note that older offshoots and avatars of PMC have not been amputated in this new phase of our existence. PMC-Talk continues its fitfully productive existence, and a thread from that discussion group is included in this issue. PMC-MOO has moved from North Carolina to Virginia (hero.village.virginia.edu 7777) and has adopted email registration in the interest of discouraging irresponsible and unpleasant behavior (there was the mention of PMC-MOO in Wired, followed by a wave of rather juvenile net-tourists who came tramping through with little interest in postmodernism and many personality problems to work out…but they’ve moved on now, for the most part, to new encampments). We have a new gopher site (jefferson.village.virginia.edu), but the old ftp site remains (ftp.ncsu.edu), and the listserv archives continue as before. Appropriately enough, the Web version of the journal provides an integrated menu of all of these services and versions.

 

Notes

 

1. The Internet Index, revised 1/7/94, compiled by Win Treese (treese@crl.dec.com).