A review by wmbogart
Mao II by Don DeLillo

I’ve become someone’s material. There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. […] Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. […] Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.

You can see how DeLillo got here after Libra.

Bill Gray, an aging, reclusive novelist, agrees to have his photo taken for posterity. He is asked to participate in a reading in support of a hostage being held in Beirut. Words, images, terrorism. Hijinks ensue.

There’s a thesis to Mao II that I can get behind. We collectively need some sort of cohesive, guiding narrative for a sense of cultural or political direction. But DeLillo, as an author and as someone compelled by the power of the written word, is particularly interested in the role of the novelist in all this. He concludes that literature has lost its role in providing these guiding narratives.

Novels don't shape our culture. DeLillo proposes that images and news cycles provide the modern narrative that occupies and compels the public’s attention. News of terrorism or catastrophe or violence. The mediation of these events by the larger news apparatus is just as important as the events, if not moreso. 

We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.

How does this tie back to the concerns around images, and the plot of the reclusive novelist? There is a power that comes with the withholding of an image from the public. Given the proliferation of images (in advertising, in art, in print, on television), the absence of an image sparks fervor in a public unaccustomed to a lack of access.

The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.

Images (think press photos or Warhol’s works) can strip a subject of its power and context. But these visual representations have their own kind of power - the public readily receives and absorbs iconography, the signifier, to the extent that the iconography can come to replace the actual individual in the cultural consciousness. The author, in time, is “known” through their photo. The subject, the author as they were, is lost; only the image is preserved. Likewise with the subject’s works; the books “disappear into the image of the writer.” In this way, the image invents its subject. Or the subject’s eventual history.

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.

So, as with all DeLillo, it comes down to words and images. The public narrative is now disseminated in images rather than in novels or in text. Televised newsreels. Advertisements. Photographs. Modern life is organized in relation to these images; we are guided in some way by them, even when they are reductive, or deceptive, or decontextualized. The narrative is in the sheer quantity of images provided to us. 

In a culture flooded with images and micro-narratives, what cuts through? On one end of the spectrum -  terrorist activity, mass cult rituals, war. And the other extreme - the absence of the author’s press photo.

Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? What do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of streaming images.

I realize this is not really a review of the book. But Mao II explores these ideas and raises these questions. It’s trite to say that DeLillo’s novels are prescient. But they are!