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PARTISAN REVIEW
News of disaster is the only narrative people need . The darker the news,
the grander the narrative."
What DeLillo seems to be saying in these grim but rather confused
reflections is that terrorism in the contemporary world has displaced lit–
erature, stolen its power. Novelists are no longer "shapers of sensibility
and thought," and have thus ceased to be "dangerous" (a favorite word).
Though one can assume that DeLillo had Salman Rushdie in mind - the
free-thinking individual artist hunted down by a terrorist theocracy - as
Bill Gray worked out the conflict between the novel and terrorism, the
point is by no means clear. It is not Rushdie's novels that have been
threatened by terrorism, but his very existence.
Neither is it easy to unriddle the parallel DeLillo seems to be draw–
ing between a victimized artist like Rushdie and Bill Gray, though he
links Gray to another major theme of the novel - that "the future be–
longs to crowds." In the light of this premise, the impotent Bill Gray is
represented as yet another free and lonely voice raised against the smoth–
ering uniformity of the crowd - the defeated
aile
against the obliterating
!'nall
y.
But the characterization of Gray is too thin and epigrammatic to
endow him with such significance. To demonstrate the murderous suffo–
cation of the individual by crowds, DeLillo offers a series of scenes that
Karen, entranced, watches on television with the sound turned off: the
lethal crush of soccer fans at an English stadium, the hysterical mourners
at the Ayatollah's funeral, and the protesters in Tiananmen Square
loomed over by an enormous poster of Mao Zedong.
DeLillo's idea of crowds as instruments of terrorist devastation brings
to mind, however, an earlier and very different conception of terrorism.
In Conrad's
The Secret Agellt,
published over eighty years ago, the
destructive act of an individual is aimed not at arbitrarily random targets
but at a symbolic institution . A Russian diplomat in London orders the
secret agent Verloc to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in order to
destroy science, time, and history in an act that will have "all the
shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy." His idea is in fact not at
all senseless, but it becomes so through a ghastly accident, when the half–
witted boy carrying the bomb is blown up instead. Crowds,
pace
DeLillo, are neither always nor only the agents of death that he likes to
imagine: the crowd of Chinese students in Beijing was not murderous;
the students were demanding individual freedom. As Conrad knew, an
individual in the grip of ideological fanaticism is capable of even greater
damage than a crowd.
Yet it is the meaning of crowds that DeLillo is ostensibly exploring
in
Mao II,
and the figure of Mao provides a vital point of DeLillo's
enigmatic scheme, as well as the novel's title. In a pencil sketch by Andy
