The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 14 (2003)

Welcome to the Imploded Future:
Don DeLillo’s Mao II Reconsideredin the Light of September 11
Katsuaki WATANABE

Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him,
the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings.
This is the new tragic narrative.
It is just like Beirut, it looks like Beirut.
—Don DeLillo, Mao II

I“The Bush Administration was feeling a nostalgia for the Cold War.
This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative.”1 So Don DeLilloasserted in the December issue of Harper’s in the aftermath of theSeptember 11 attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In
this essay entitled “In the Ruins of the Future: Reﬂections on Terror andLoss in the Shadow of September,” he put a special emphasis on the contemporary writer’s mission to weave the alternative counter-narrative to
set against “the new tragic narrative”2 terrorists had authored and thecountervailing Cold War narrative George W. Bush resurrected as an
excuse to counterattack “them.”
In the midst of the catastrophic havoc, DeLillo observed “a hundred
thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world,”3
which not merely gave us a glimpse of how each individual behaved in
Copyright © 2003 Katsuaki Watanabe. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.

69

70

KATSUAKI WATANABE

response to what might be called an epic tragedy but let us ponder upon
the very nature of our identity in terms of the apocalyptic calamity. From
this perspective he referred to some marginal episodes he gleaned out of
the smoky rubble as embryos of the prospective counter-narrative thatcarried “around their edges the luminous ring of coincidence, fate or premonition”4: anonymous men and women running for their lives; people
falling from the towers hand in hand; doctors’ appointments that happened to save patients’ lives; the cell phones used to report the hijacking and thwart further attack; last but not least, “[t]wo women on twoplanes, best of friends, who die together and apart, Tower 1 and Tower
2.”5 Breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan, he witnessed the spontaneous display of photographs of missing persons and improvised memorials, which exempliﬁed a great variety of lost countenances and voices
faithfully reﬂecting the multicultural conﬁgurations of the victims.
As a novelist with a particular interest in and concern with the spectacular disasters terrorists plot, DeLillo advocated in the same essay writing back against the massive spectacle by desperately imagining thedetails of the crucial moment each individual had experienced. To thesame effect, he persisted in meticulously collecting vestiges of diverse
memories, even paying close attention to the debris of scattered objects
left behind in the mire of wreckage. Nevertheless, inasmuch as the provisional counter-narrative, including dubious discourses circulating on
the Internet, is, as he stated, “shaped in part by rumor, fantasy, and mystical reverberation,” it involves some difﬁculties in verifying whether it
is ﬂavored with “a shadow history of false memories and imagined
loss”6. As was the case with the Kennedy assassination, “[f]or the nextﬁfty years,” DeLillo predicted, “people who were not in the area when
the attacks occurred will claim to have been there. In time, some of themwill believe it. Others will claim to have lost friends or relatives, although
they did not.”7 All these responses taken into account, what is most
relevant to him is not so much the verisimilitude of any particular testimony as the “mystical reverberation” of the quintessential American
psyche, albeit versatile and amorphous, taken aback by the unexpectedbuffet.
If the September 11 attack reminds us of the Kennedy assassination,
which was featured in Libra (1988) as “the seven seconds that broke theback of the American century,”8 obliquely referring to the Zapruder ﬁlm,
it is chieﬂy because the airplanes crashing into the twin towers might beseen to have had a similar effect as the bullets triggered at JFK in abruptly

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

71

bringing about “an aberration in the heartland of the real.”9 Paradoxicallyenough, this aberrant violence reiteratively broadcast owed itself to what
was taking place in secret in the heartland of “simulacrum America.”
Viewed in this context, aberrations contingent to the collapse of theWorld Trade Center entail far more implication and adumbration thanﬁrst meets the eye. Just as a targeted simulacrum “JFK” lent itself to thecreation of the illusionary Camelot myth and the New Frontier, so the“WTC” which had actually dominated the New York skyline10 for overa quarter of a century undeniably stood as an undermined simulacrum
for the hallucinatory “white-hot future”11 which American consumer culture and technology in fact combine to pre-empt. As to what the Babellike twin towers used to epitomize, DeLillo hit the nail right on the headin his penetrating insight that “[t]he World Trade towers were not only
an emblem of advanced technology but a justiﬁcation, in a sense, fortechnology’s irresistible will to realize in solid form whatever becomestheoretically allowable.”12
As if far-sighted enough to anticipate the demolition of the towers,13
DeLillo interpolated the unforgettable scene just in the middle of his
voluminous masterpiece Underworld (1997) in which the World Trade
Center still under construction is juxtaposed with garbage bags left instacks as a result of the on-going strike in New York.14 In combination
with a distant view of the prominent towers seen from the vast Fresh
Kills landﬁll, this classically DeLilloesque interlude of the surrealistic
landscape predicts how the accelerated “white-hot future” claimed by“technology’s irresistible will” ends up in reality. Omnipresent garbage
bags, in stark contrast with the hubristic bulk of the towers viewed fromany place in the Big Apple, preﬁgure once again the saturated garbage
bags DeLillo reported having witnessed everywhere in the barricaded“third-worldish” territory where the twin pillars used to soar. Given the
déjà-vu-like synchronicity that oddly links the future-oriented World
Trade Center and wastes originating from the past,15 it is not far-fetched
to infer that what DeLillo actually witnessed on the doomsday was not
the ostensibly exploded landmark of the global mercantile transactions
but the implosion of the “white-hot future” America invented.
II
Since the beginning of his career, DeLillo has devoted himself topursuing the potential for an alternative counter-narrative against the72

KATSUAKI WATANABE

ubiquitous discourses of media and technology through the deconstructive appropriation of their precarious nature. In his view, what is at stakeis a highly glossy future they continue promising like oracles, where
Americans are supposed to lead a comfortable life for good and all withever-increasing desire satisﬁed as in advertisements. As Mark Osteen
aptly sums up, “in all his work DeLillo imitates the discourse he aims todeconstruct and thereby generates a dialogue with those cultural forms
that both criticizes their consequences and appropriates their advantages.”16 Whether these deconstructive tactics of mimicry and appropriation prove to be double-edged or not, no doubt White Noise (1985) is
his monumental achievement to subvert “from within the culture itself”17
the spectacular postmodern media culture infested with white noise—aheavily loaded metaphor of pervasive media blitz.
Whereas the lengthy episode of “The Airborne Toxic Event” awkwardly embedded in the middle of White Noise can be regarded as a(re)appropriated narrative of so-called environmental terrorism, his following bestseller, Libra, revolves around the intriguing complicity andrivalry between Lee Harvey Oswald and other plotters scheming to pull
strings behind him in pursuit of the terrorist narrative converging in the
JFK assassination. Triggered by this notable accomplishment worthy of
his reputation, DeLillo’s long-nursed interest in the theme of terrorists
having seized control of the world narrative by taking advantage of thesociety of spectacle ﬁnds its best expression in his next masterpiece, Mao
II (1991), a Pen/Faulkner Award winner published just a decade before
the September 11 attack. Grappling with the threatening advent of the
new narrative based on the unprecedented system of world terror as opposed to the narrative of the self which novelists endorse, Mao II comes
into being as an inevitable “sequel” to Libra, where the motif of “menin small rooms” manifests itself with the seeming afﬁnity between terrorists and novelists reinforced.
In an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, DeLillo refers to the intricate
interrelation between insidious plots concocted by terrorists and thebrightly colored future American consumerism unequivocally guarantees everyone else:
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of
consumer fulﬁllment in America. Again we come back to these men in smallrooms who can’t get out and who have to organize their desperation and theirloneliness. . . . I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly colored

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

73

packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that
American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go.18

Further evidence supporting this view of Oswald as a paradoxical product of postmodern consumerism can be drawn from a close analysis of
his next work, Mao II. If this novel deserves reconsideration at present
in the wake of the current wave of terrorism, it is not just because it
provides us with the exquisite delineation of a novelist placed in a
predicament in “a zero-sum game”19 with terrorists, but because it contains within itself a paradox in future-obsessed American culture, which
inspires a novelist/hero to come up with some tentative prescription fordisseminating the germ of the counter-narrative rescued from the “ruined
future.”At ﬁrst glance, the image-saturated media culture of late-twentiethcentury America presented in detail in Mao II appears to be so prevailing that a voracious barrage of proliferated images seems to havetransformed everything into a mere simulacrum, whose ultimate form
could be metaphorically sublimated into the holographic “white-hot
future.” More relevant, however, is the appalling fact that this is also thevery milieu where terrorists and apocalypse-awaiting cultists desperate
to hurry time avail themselves of publicity stunts. They make a hasty
move toward millennial apocalypse by making use of the society of spectacle and technology which is in their favor to such an extent that the
futuristic world narrative is utterly at the mercy of their cause. To borrow Margaret Scanlan’s words, “[t]errorists use the latest information
technology to promote medieval theologies and despotism. This technology permeates our lives, naturalizing even guerilla war. . . .”20 Just as
the prologue of Mao II that ends with the ominous jingle, “The future
belongs to crowds,”21 depicts as an epitome of the whole book a mass
Uniﬁcation Church wedding at Yankee Stadium, the future ﬁnds itself
always already preoccupied and on the verge of implosion: “the future
is pressing in, collapsing toward them [crowds].”22
It is those faceless individuals entirely swallowed up in crowds andendlessly multiplied through the manipulation of images that Bill Grayturns his back on. He is the celebrated reclusive novelist DeLillo himself might have become, leading a secluded life in a remote hermitage
in upstate New York, where he is struggling to work on his abortive third
novel, ﬂeeing every kind of publicity and media appropriation. Despite
this pathetic situation, it would be too hasty to conjecture that his

74

KATSUAKI WATANABE

fastidious posture stems only from the plausible apprehension that anovelist might otherwise be co-opted and made harmless by excessivecommodiﬁcation which giant publishing conglomerates facilitate in collusion with the media. As a matter of fact, his decision to recede into
sanctuary, “playing God’s own trick,”23 is regressive by its nature, if notdegenerative, in that it involves merging into the anonymity of facelesscrowds in which reclusive terrorists hide themselves.
Thus his quixotic seclusion cannot be taken at the face value he gives
it from the practical standpoint; it can possibly be an ambivalent gesturehe makes in an attempt to simulate the anonymity of terrorists who heassumes have taken the place of writers as leading shapers of culture.
Indeed, in his analysis of the oppressive predominance terrorists haveaccomplished by circulating the new narrative of terror, he deplores theirresistible disadvantage writers are forced to endure: “There’s a curious
knot that binds novelists and terrorists. . . . Years ago I used to think it
was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now thebomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids onhuman consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”24 Nevertheless, the measures he has actually taken against theirascendancy over him are retrogressive enough to let him behave like amartyr, who is “merely playing the role of the famous recluse.”25 Having
erased every single vestige of his individuality, as hooded terrorists do,
he is so infatuated with the facelessness he has newly procured that heenjoys toying with it like a child. As a result, ironically enough, his aura
as a missing novelist becomes enhanced beyond all measure, owing to
the absence of his portraits as well as his never-published work in progress.
It is under these self-indulgent circumstances that Bill Gray, “a local
symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear,”26 has ﬁnally made up
his mind to put an end to his lengthy seclusion that has only augmented
mystiﬁcation. Regardless of his misgivings caused by his exposure beingnear at hand, he dares to invite Brita Nilsson, a middle-aged camerawoman, into his hideout and agrees to have his photograph taken. Yet
what this tentative gesture of revelation implicates is neither so self-evident nor single-minded as it appears; in fact it results from his contradictory impulse to come out of hiding to quit his suffocating way of life
and at the same time to seek further seclusion. In consequence, his photosession with Brita, which includes the most sophisticated DeLilloesqueconversation in the novel, is characterized by a strange equilibrium of

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

75

his two opposing predispositions: actively propagating his images as a
singular novelist who champions the self, and passively receding into
obscurity as a recluse simulating a terrorist way of conspiracy. This
dilemmatic incongruity, as DeLillo himself suggests in an interview, precisely originates from the intriguing fact that the endlessly reproducible“photographic image is a kind of crowd in itself.”27
III
Now that the intrinsic interdependence between mechanically reproducible photographs and the emergence of crowds comes into focus, it
becomes evident that it is of no little signiﬁcance that Mao II, whose
cover is embellished with Andy Warhol’s famous photo-silkscreen, theMao series, is installed with a variety of para-textual framing devices.
As Laura Barrett contends in detail, this novel is “constructed like a photograph, framed by two slim chapters”28—the eye-catching prologue
entitled “At Yankee Stadium” and the sequel-like epilogue named “In
Beirut”—both narrated exceptionally in the present-tense, describing
photogenic wedding ceremonies in striking contrast to each other. On
top of that, it is also worth arguing that the text itself is visually demarcated by several blurred photographs of an “undifferentiated mass”29
interpolated between each section, including the images of a rally in
Tiananmen Square, a Uniﬁcation Church mass wedding, the Shefﬁeld
soccer stampede, and Iranian mobs mourning against a backdrop of anenormous portrait of the late Imam Khomeini.
Given the undifferentiated visual images of a mass of people photographed deliberately out of focus, it stands to reason that they serve as
oblique reminders of the uncanny afﬁnity between mechanically replicated photographs and the ubiquitously proliferated images of crowds
who “survive as a community instead of individuals.”30 This observation, however, does not necessarily exclude another interpretation thaton a potential basis they are reminiscent of the amorphous yet differentiable visages of myriad future lookers, whose retrospective gaze only
the sitter can envision over the photographer’s shoulder. While Bill complains, as if in self-mockery, about the metamorphosis he undergoes during his own photo session with Brita, which ostensibly reduces him to amere superﬁcial material as “ﬂat as a birdshit on a Buick,”31 he is notunconscious of the after-effect of “this mysterious exchange”32 with
her—the posthumous implications for posterity his photographs might

76

KATSUAKI WATANABE“post forward”33 with a full three-dimensional depth. Comparing thisassiduous sitting endowed with ritualistic qualities to his own wake andreferring to Brita as a priestess-like mortician who embalms his body,he speculates on the mysterious aura his photographs will reinforce inthe not-too-distant future:
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 createa kind of sentimental past for people in 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.34

As this prophetic statement about his own photographs eloquently indicates, Bill considers the rare occasion of sitting as a virtual announcement of his death that provides him with a ﬁxed point from which he can“remember forward”35 and presage the re-formed future his empowered
posthumous portraits are bound to affect. His intuition of “a kind of simulated death”36 of his own becomes all the more pertinent when juxtaposed with Scott’s interpretation of what Bill’s following disappearance
is all about: “Scott thought the photograph might make him [Bill] lookolder. Not older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of thepicture. The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show
him how he looked to the world and give him a ﬁxed point from which
to depart. Pictures with our likeness make us choose. We travel into oraway from our photographs.”37 Even though Scott, who used to be Bill’sfanatic fan and now acts as a self-appointed secretary, suspects that his
master intends to “revise the terms of his seclusion” by cornering himself into “the crisis of exposure,”38 he is of two minds in what direction“older” Bill is likely to depart. He is not certain whether Bill means toproject his disparate images forward onto future observers or just intends
to fade away into undifferentiated oblivion.
Neither is Brita, whose worldwide project of photographing none but
writers Bill makes mock of by saying “you’re smart to trap us in yourcamera before we disappear . . . Put us in a museum and charge admission.”39 In a sense, Brita is a postmodern daughter of August Sander, therenowned German photographer who “hit upon the idea of an epic photographic collection to be called Man of the Twentieth Century, a massive,

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

77

comprehensive catalogue of people written in the universal language—
photography”40 and whose photograph captioned Three farmers on their
way to a dance, 1914 furnishes Richard Powers with the title of his distinguished ﬁrst novel. What Sander embarked on at the turn of the century only to fail at Brita appears to take up on a far limited scale at theend of the same century. Whereas her predecessor was preoccupied withthe anachronistic cataloging of representative types of his time, Brita
specializes in a cross-sampling of moribund writers, although she has
not yet decided if she will present her collection of images of eclipsed
writers as conceptual art in some portrait gallery or stash it away in permanent archives. Anyway, at least at the outset of her work in progress,
what counts most for her is to make an accurate visual map of a rare
“species” categorized as writers, and it is Bill Gray who turns out to be
her last and foremost specimen, and the one that brings her whole project to a standstill.
As is true of photographers, Brita cannot fully predict how her art isto capture her sitter and ﬁx him onto the contact sheets, nor can she conﬁdently surmise what effect she has exerted on Bill throughout the photosession, which is in a sense a substitute for deadlocked writing on his
part. She has contributed far more to his transformation and metamorphosis than she herself is conscious of; she actually mystiﬁes and demystiﬁes him all at once by manipulating his likeness at her disposal. Despite
Bill’s disappearance and demise, reminiscent of his assassination, after
her “shooting,” a term that connotes the predatory impulses inherent inphotography, his portraits as duplicated phantoms are subject to and open
to the close reading, free revision, and deliberate editing later generations might evolve. The twelve sheets of Bill’s portraits now available
as simulacra to Scott and Karen are a telling metaphor of these palimpsestic reverberations of polyphonic meaning because of the minute differences discerned in their advertisement-like repetition: “Although in away, and at a glance, the differences frame to frame were so extraordinarily slight that all twelve sheets might easily be one picture repeated,
like mass visual litter that occupies a blink. All the more reason to analyze. Because there really were differences of course. . . .”41 Sufﬁce it tosay here that these seemingly replicated photographic images of Bill subtly differentiated are meant to have much in common with Warhol’s factory-produced multiple pseudo-Maos, which ingeniously differentiatethemselves in gradation of colors and shades arbitrarily modulated as if
to invoke the democratic deconstruction of the authoritative original.42

78

KATSUAKI WATANABEIV
It is not until the dissemination of his differentiated visual images iscomplete that Bill follows his impulse to fade into faceless anonymity,
putting Scott off the track and merging into “the surge of noontime
crowd.”43 This well-wrought move towards self-effacement is a naturalextension of the photo session, no matter how contradictory it may appear to his decision to expose his self-images. Importuned by his oldfriend, Charles, who is eager to edit his long-awaited novel, Bill halfheartedly gives assent to his request to take part in a media event—reading poems in London to release Jean-Claude Julian, a Swiss poet held
hostage in Beirut.44 What is more, even after the terrorists’ interruption
which results in the canceling of the reading, he does not turn back but
precipitately heads east for Athens, Larnaca on Cyprus, and his ﬁnal destination, Beirut, as if to take a head-on plunge into the headquarters of
his opponent, the terrorist chief, Abu Rashid.
During this reckless journey, his desperate struggle as a novelist
against terrorists over their “spectacular authorship”45 is belatedly underway. Regarding Jean-Claude as a sympathetic fellow writer and his double, Bill makes such a great effort to project his innate desire for writingon the hostage that his consciousness does not merely blend into JeanClaude’s but virtually permeates the objective narrative that depicts his
doleful plight. In consequence, Bill’s narrative gradually underminesand supersedes the omniscient narration that is supposed to portray theyoung poet held in custody.46 In contrast to “a digital mosaic in the processing grid,”47 which is what Jean-Claude has been reduced to, what
Bill attempts to embody with paper and pencil is the living hostage imagined as his character profusely burdened with bodily agony and sufferings: torture whimsically repeated by the boy in charge of him, withwhom, as in cases of the Stockholm syndrome, the detained hostage identiﬁes himself; sporadic sounds of launched rockets perceived through thehood with no eyeholes; prolonged pain inseparable from the slow progress of time. Even though Jean-Claude/Bill cannot help admitting “[a]llenergy, matter and gravity were ahead, the future was everywhere”48 infavor of the terrorists, it must be underscored that once in a while Bill’s
sentences manage to succeed in giving expression to the poet’s numbedsense and giving voice to his acquiescence: “There was something atstake in these sentences he wrote about the basement room. They held apause, an anxious space he began to recognize. There’s a danger when

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

79

it comes out right, a sense that these words almost did not make it to thepage.”49 For this reason, for the ﬁrst time since he left his hideout, heﬁnds himself in dire need of his typewriter, not the word processor which
George repeatedly recommends.
Apart from those dangerous sentences he has managed to ﬁx on paper,a series of acrid disputes over the authorship of the future narrative
between Bill and George, an intelligent spokesman for the Maoist group
who abducted Jean-Claude, bears witness to his integrity and individuality as a writer. In response to George who has a ﬁrm belief that “history is passing into the hands of the crowds,”50 Bill sets forward a
counterargument against the undifferentiated mass mind and monolithic uniformity terrorists enforce on the masses. George evaluates “the unchanged narrative”51 Mao invented and required people to conﬁrm evenafter his death: “He [Mao] became the history of China written on themasses. And his words became immortal. Studied, repeated, memorized
by an entire nation.”52 Refusing this arrogant conceit, Bill criticizes thereiterated narrative scribed alike on innumerable people for incurring acomplete demolition of “[o]ne thing unlike another, one voice unlike thenext. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints.”53 Furthermore, in his
retrospection after parting with George, he wishes he could have madea more candid retort:
You begin to empty the world of meaning . . . replacing real things with plots
and ﬁctions. One ﬁction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other ﬁction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could
have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the ﬂow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beatback our fear. (Italics added)54

This is precisely what Bill narrowly puts into practice when he endeavors to fabricate the hostage in his own way as his character during his
fatal journey to Beirut—the self-imposed ordeal he submits to. Towards
the very end of his life, he does not hesitate to do his best to retrieve
hijacked “ﬁction” and facilitate the centrifugal proliferation of meaning
too fertile and versatile to narrow down. Putting himself in Jean-Claude’s
shoes, he wishes to contribute himself to what his beloved “ﬁction”
stands for, so that he can get rid of his haunting fear and ﬁght back against
the detention of Jean-Claude—“the ﬁrst tentative rehearsal for mass terror.”55 In the last analysis, what he intends to rejuvenate is no other thanthe living language and lived time as opposed to the monopolized language and accelerated “time forced and distorted”56 by terrorists.

80

KATSUAKI WATANABEV
Nevertheless, nothing is more ironic than the fact that throughout his
wandering, Bill as an “author/creator” seems to degenerate step by step
into a mere “character”57 not so different from wretched Jean-Claude
himself or the ﬁlthy bum Scott encountered in a gorgeous bookstore in
New York. After all, Bill ends up as a nameless corpse on a ferryboat
bound for Beirut with his passport stolen, as if he had merged into theanonymous masses. In accordance with his demise, his elaborate last
writing about the hostage, scribbled on a memo pad, is most likely to getscattered and be lost in utter oblivion. Thus Bill’s last attempt to create
the counter-narrative as a “modernist” writer of high integrity seems not
to have borne the fruit he envisioned. On the other hand, the sheets of
his portraits, as well as the manuscript of the unﬁnished novel he is tobequeath to posterity, survive as surrogate materials, “collecting aura
and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly.”58 This is at once thelast situation Bill anticipated and the very circumstances he apprehended at heart when he initially agreed to have his photographs taken andbegan to commit himself to the distress Jean-Claude was suffering.
More intriguingly, Bill Gray’s last attempt to invigorate the counternarrative and his following surrender to the overwhelmingly spectacular future projected by terrorists is roughly paralleled by the way Karen
behaves during his disappearance: “Karen’s life had no center with Billon the lam. She was all drift and spin.”59 Karen, an ex-Moonie who looks
like “something out of Bill Gray,”60 emerges herself as a girl of the image
who has an idiosyncratic afﬁnity with the media. Fascinated with watching the TV news without sound, she can not only predict the remarks ofannouncers but also impersonate their “voices with the trueness that’s
startling.”61 In addition to this “uncanny mimicry”62 which is instrumental in making her a mutant “human chameleon, whose empathy is boundless,”63 she is “thin-boundaried”64 enough to be pervious to any visual
discourse projected upon the future: “She took it all in and believed itall. . . . She carried the virus of the future. Quoting Bill.”65 Infected withthe dazzling allure of the “white-hot future” abounding in white noiseand contaminating in turn whoever contacts her, Karen is totally at homewith the non-literary world, where she has a great command of visuallanguages, thanks to her peculiar ability to acknowledge any “dialect of
the eye.”66
Of particular relevance here is Joseph Tabbi’s observation regarding

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

81

one of the most signiﬁcant roles Karen and Brita play in putting Bill’s
private narrative in the right perspective: “[T]hey take the narrative out of
Bill’s room and into the realm of competing voices, mixed populations,and nonhegemonic, even ‘terrorist,’ institutions.”67 These vicarious activities Bill seems to have entrusted the two women with after his disappearance surely correspond to his ethical belief in the democratic
multiplicity of voices inherent in the counter-narrative he asserted in theheated debate with George.68 Indeed, in their respective ways, Karen and
Brita are both willing to lend themselves to democratization of Bill’s narrative by taking it into an open ﬁeld and exposing it to heterogeneous
voices, but Tabbi’s point would have become all the more lucid, had hepaid scrutinizing attention to the noteworthy difference between the twocompassionate women.
In the long run, Karen ends up “drifting and spinning” like “visual litter” on the multilateral interface between the grand narrative she cannot
completely do away with and the counter-narrative Bill has newly instilled in her, virtually nullifying the intricate line of demarcation drawn
between them. No doubt she is enthusiastic about making an entry into
the versatile multi-layered microcosms of derelicts in the lean-tos andtents,69 longing to appreciate the esoteric poetry of their vernacular “language of soot”70 “that sounded like multilingual English”71 tinged with
Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Yet, what she is actually engaged in is enforcing upon them the formulated grand narrative that accelerates the anticipated advent of her “Master,” from which she has not yet entirely been
deprogrammed.
In contrast to Karen’s recurrent apocalyptic mission into which she
has drifted away, Brita’s arduous ﬁnal mission in the epilogue, “inBeirut,” has more to do with differentiated verbal language than totalizing visual images. First and foremost, Beirut is delineated as an imploded “millennial image mill”72 as a result of the long-standing civil war,
where local militias have taken to a new form of ﬁghting, ﬁring at portraits of each other’s leaders. Filled with the rambling ruins and ravages
somewhat reminiscent of the devastated Ground Zero, DeLillo’s Beirut
is a typically “third-worldish” locus no less plagued than New York73
with the bombardment of rampant visual images, including gaudy red
posters for Coke II—a palpable sign of “Cocacolonization.”74 Yet, thisis not the whole story. As David Cowart spells out, “he [DeLillo] characterizes Beirut itself as language, its squalor, suffering, torture, civil
war, and endless, violent death all giving tongue to the misery of the82

KATSUAKI WATANABE‘nowhere’ people. . . .”75 No matter how inextricably Brita is enticed intoand entangled in an image-ridden labyrinth of Beirut and no matter how
far she makes inroads into the heart of the slums where Abu Rashid’s
hideout is located, it is not her camera but her tongue that she makes thebest use of in her showdown with him at the end of their photo session.
Her battle of words with the chief of the terrorists, however, is just aprelude to the multiple reverberations of miscellaneous radio voices shehears day and night “calling across the leveled city.”76 Interpellating andpraying for all the hostages, all the babies, all the refugees and all thedead, these imperishable verbal voices “crowd in toward her, pressing
with a mournful force.”77 So far as these polyphonic sounds aired
throughout the city are concerned, they converge nowhere but in theruins of Beirut: “Only our language is Beirut.”78 Appreciating the practice of these resilient verbal activities in the most demolished area of the
imploded city, Brita, who awakes at some sounds at dead of night, “interpellates”79 in salutation the bride and groom in the midst of the wedding
parade advancing just below her balcony escorted by a battle-tired tank.
Whether rudimentary or not, her multilingual blessings towards the couple and their felicitous response endorse DeLillo’s unﬂinching conﬁdence in the humble everyday narrative he highly evaluated “In the Ruinsof the Future”: “But living language is not diminished.”80 In opposition
to the September 11 attack that was plotted, in Osama bin Laden’s words,
to “overshadow all other speeches made everywhere else in the world,”81
Mao II rejuvenates itself as a metaﬁctional counter-narrative that exempliﬁes the awkward yet surmountable predicament living language confronts at Ground Zero.
NOTES
1Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reﬂections on Terror and Loss in the
Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001, 34.
2
Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991; Penguin Books, 1992), 157. In connection with this new tragic narrative, Bill states as follows: “The darker the news, thegrander the narrative.” See DeLillo, Mao II, 42.
3
DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” 34.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 35.
7
Ibid.
8
Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988), 181.
9
Anthony DeCurtis, “ ‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

83

DeLillo,” in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991), 48.
10In Mao II Brita complains about the sheer massiveness of the wall-like WTC thatlooms, occupying too much space and obstructing most of the view from her loft. In
response to her remark, Bill points out the dialogical relationship the time-honored twin
towers seem to have entered into, naturally assimilating into the landscape. See DeLillo,
Mao II, 39–40.
11DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” 34.
12
Ibid., 38.
13
As has already been pointed out, the eerily religious jacket of Underworld, on whicha large bird-like object is making its way towards the WTC against the stark silhouetteof a church, looks as if it is prophetic of the September 11 attack. On DeLillo’s commitment to the selection of this monochromic iconography based on a photograph byAndré Kertész, see Vince Passaro, “Don DeLillo and the World Trade Center Towers.”<http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/>.
14
See Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 372–6.
15
Jesse Detwiler, “a garbage guerrilla” in Underworld, provides an intuitive insight
into the relationship between civilization and waste: “[C]ities rose on garbage, inch byinch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. . . . It pushed
back. It pushed into every space available. . . . No, garbage rose ﬁrst, inciting people tobuild a civilization in response, in self-defense.” See DeLillo, Underworld, 287.
16
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 193.
17
Ibid.
18
DeCurtis, “An Outsider in This Society,” 57–8.
19
DeLillo, Mao II, 156.
20
Margaret Scanlan, “Writers among Terrorists: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and the
Rushdie Affair,” in Modern Fiction Studies, 40.2 (Summer 1994), 244. Reprinted in
Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction, (Charlottesville andLondon: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
21
DeLillo, Mao II, 16.
22
Ibid., 7.
23
Ibid., 37.
24
Ibid., 41. His quotation from a 1991 interview sums up much of what DeLillo has
to say about the afﬁnity between writers and terrorists: “True terror is a language and avision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they inﬁltrate and alter
consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.” See Vince Passaro, “Dangerous
Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, 19 May 1991, 77.
25
Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (New York: Twayne, 1993), 188.
26
DeLillo, Mao II, 36.
27
Maria Nadotti, “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Trans. Peggy Boyers. Salmagundi
100 (1993): 88.
28
Laura Barrett, “ ‘Here, But Also There’: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao
II,” in Modern Fiction Studies, 45.3 (Fall 1999), 799. Her argument about “DeLillo’s
destabilizing narrative space” by means of “the interrelation of storytelling and photography” is cogent. See Ibid., 805.
29
DeLillo, Mao II, 3.
30
Ibid., 89.
31
Ibid., 44.
32
Ibid., 43.

84

KATSUAKI WATANABE

33
There may be no direct intertextuality between Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on
Their Way to a Dance and Mao II, but the concept of “posting forward” and “remembering forward,” which crops up sporadically in the former, is illuminating enough tothrow a new light on our discussion about the latter here. Concerning this, see Powers,
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (New York: Beech Tree books, William
Morrow, 1985), 209, 210, 257, 259.
34
DeLillo, Mao II, 42.
35
Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 209.
36
DeLillo, Mao II, 140.
37
Ibid., 141.
38
Ibid., 140.
39
Ibid., 42.
40
Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 39.
41
DeLillo, Mao II, 222.
42
In a nutshell, Bill is to Brita’s replicated Bills, as Mao is to Warhol’s silk-screened
Maos, insofar as the slightly differentiated simulacra ﬂoat free of history, nullifying theoriginal. Since the postmodern aura is achieved by replication, as Barrett underscores,
the way what Warhol did with Mao in turn affects the creation of his own aura as simulacra is worth scrutinizing, but it is a little beyond our scope here.
43
DeLillo, Mao II, 102.
44
This situation parallels the fact that DeLillo himself read in support of Salman
Rushdie at the Columns Gallery in New York City, which suggests that Mao II was
scrupulously intended as a response to the Rushdie Affair. In his interview with Passaro,
he maintains that Rushdie is situated as “a hostage.” See for more details Ryan Simmons,“What Is a Terrorist? Contemporary Authorship, the Unabomber, and DeLillo’s Mao
II,” in Modern Fiction Studies, 45.3 (Fall 1999), 677.
45
Brieﬂy referring to Jennifer Wicke, Osteen deﬁnes this term as follows: “the power
to use photographic or televised images to manufacture, as if by magic, spectacular
events that profoundly mold public consciousness.” See Osteen, American Magic andDread, 193.
46
See Les W. Smith, Confession in the Novel: Bakhtin’s Author Revisited (London:
Associated University Press, 1996), 138–9.
47
DeLillo, Mao II, 112.
48
Ibid., 204.
49
Ibid., 167.
50
Ibid., 162.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 161.
53
Ibid., 159.
54
Ibid., 200.
55
Ibid., 163.
56
DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” 39.
57
For example, Bill asks a group of vets he runs into on Cyprus to make a diagnosisof his own symptoms caused by the car accident, pretending that they are his character’s, not his own.
58
DeLillo, Mao II, 224.
59
Ibid., 142.
60
Ibid., 77.
61
Ibid., 66.
62
Ibid., 13.

WELCOME TO THE IMPLODED FUTURE

85

63Louis Menand, “Market Report,” in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, eds. HughRuppersburg and Tim Engles (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 2000), 74. Originally published in the New Yorker, 24 June 1991, 81–84.
64
DeLillo, Mao II, 119.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 175.
67
Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer
to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 202.
68
Bill insists to him, evaluating polyphonic voices inherent in his own narrative: “Even
if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks
the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine.”
DeLillo, Mao II, 159.
69
A bag lady’s “secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plasticbags” epitomizes the concealed tight-knit microcosms Karen is attracted to, but after all
she cannot help feeling alienated from “some inﬁnite collapsible system of getting
through a life.” See DeLillo, Mao II, 145, 152.
70
DeLillo, Mao II, 180.
71
Ibid., 149.
72
Ibid., 299.
73
Apart from this, there are some passages throughout the text, where the dreary sightsof New York abruptly overlap with the devastated landscape of Beirut. For example, see
Mao II, 146, 176.
74
Scanlan, “Writers among Terrorists,” 246.
75
David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens and London: The
University of Georgia Press, 2002), 113.
76
DeLillo, Mao II, 239.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid.
79
Instead of reinforcing the ideological unconscious Althusser elucidates in conjunction with “interpellation,” Brita’s spontaneous hail from her balcony deconstructs it fromwithin itself. Thus, unlike the thousands of newly-weds depicted “at Yankee Stadium,”
this couple is not subjected to the hailer in terms of any ideology.
80
DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” 39.
81
Quotation from “Transcript of Osama bin Laden videotape—December 13, 2001,”
issued by the U.S. Department of Defense. <http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/
tape.transcript/>.