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Key Words: Don DeLillo, subjectity, dominant culture, social dysfunction, pathology
Readers of Mao II may disappointedly lament the reclusive protagonist Bill Gray’s obsessive impotence to accomplish his novel. But in fact, he has, in his customary circular narrative, rehearsed his accomplishment. He does not intend to claim that he comes to a natural conclusion about the whole matter as the traditional fiction has done. He has detailed it in a narrative circuit, in which what he wishes to write is conscientiously evidenced in the writing process. It is perhaps a strategy of meta-fiction that DeLillo employs, as has been categorized by some critics, but more than that. In fictionalizing his fiction-writing, he has rehearsed how a pathological culture has been constructed and how it works to make his protagonist impotent and stuck perpetually composing his anticipated work.
DeLillo’s text has inspired waves of instant existential horrors of his personas. In Mao II, Bill Gray’s experience indicates that DeLlilo’s world has been pervasively contaminated by the diseased values, moral sadism and self-denigration. It is a world of communal psychoses and neuroses, in which a social dysfunction and cultural delusion prevailed.
1. Introduction of the Novel
The story centers on a famous reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, “a Salinger-Pynchon type” who toils a stalled masterpiece he can’t finish (Passaro 2005, 79). Scott Martineau is Bill’s obsessive live-in assistant. Karen Janney, Scott’s companion, is the lover of Bill, who, a former member of Unification, is married to Kim Jo Pak in a Unification Church Blessing ceremony. Brita, a New York photographer, is documenting writers and Bill agrees to be photographed by her and have a dialogue with her on novelists in an age of terror. Bill disappears without a word and secretly decides to take the chance to travel to London to aid a Swiss writer, a hostage trapped in a basement in Beirut. His sudden disappearance leaves Scott and Karen stranded. In London, Bill is introduced to George Haddad, who is a representative of the Maoist group responsible for kidnapping the writer. Bill decides to go to Lebanon himself and help release the kidnapped writer and he goes to Cyprus, waiting for a ship to take him to Lebanon. In Cyprus, Bill is hit by a car and suffers a lacerated liver. The lacerated liver plus his heavy drinking kills him on his way to Beirut. His fiction will never be finished. At the end of the story, Brita photographs the terrorist responsible for the kidnapping, but the fate of the kidnapped writer has never been revealed. Mao II earned DeLillo plenty of praises. On May 28, 1991, Michiko Kakutani published his review titled “Fighting Against Envelopment by the Mass Mind” in The New York Times and praised Mao II as “One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America” (Kakutani 1991, C15). Paul Gray claimed that in Mao II “DeLillo’s gifts – terse, electric dialogue, descriptive passages of insidious beauty – have never been more apparent or put to better use” (Gray 1991, 68). In 1991, Mao II won a Pen/Faulkner Award and in 1992 it earned DeLillo a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Nomination.
2. Analysis of Bill
The protagonist of the novel, Bill Gray, tries to avoid any public contact, living as a recluse, in that he is entrapped in the flood of media-generated culture and even kidnapped by it. Under such circumstances, autonomous subjectivity is never possible, and the subject is always a part of his culture.
Bill decides to hide himself from others and surrounding world completely in order to write the novel without being influenced by others and surroundings: he lives as a recluse in a covert, not wanting others to find him; he keeps his photographs from appearing in public; he even doesn’t mail his letters directly for the sake of keeping his address secret, but posts them first to the publishing house and then the head of the mailroom changes envelops and reposts them. He also does his possible to avoid being photographed by anyone. Bill thinks that “(A) hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful” and “a little sacred” and people “inaccessible” have “a grace and a wholeness” that the others envy (DeLillo 1991, 36). He tries his best to keep others from getting in touch with him. It is really difficult to find him that Scott, his later assistant, spends quite a long time and energy to know where he lives, writing letters to him persistently, even working in the mailroom at the house which publishes Bill’s books to get his address (DeLillo 1991, 59).
Besides, Bill doesn’t want the customers to be attracted by fashionable packing of his books. While some other books which covers “were lacquered and gilded”, making the readers seem to “hear them shrieking Buy me”, Bill’s “two lean novels” are just “banded in austere umbers and rusts” (DeLillo 1991, 19-20). One of the reasons why Bill doesn’t feel like becoming a prolific is that he intends to decrease the medium’s appropriation of him. By doing so, Bill hopes that the customers can focus on the content of the books, which may reveal his true selfhood. This is totally different from what the publishers desire, who intend to make the readers attracted by the glossy packing. Bill just wants to retain his personality, not wanting to be controlled by the publishers who prefer to make Bill’s book become bestsellers without attaching importance to the self presentation that his books show. From the above, what can easily be inferred is that the protagonist himself really doesn’t want to communicate too much with others. He has tried all he can to avoid public contact, but things turns out to be just the opposite to what he wishes. As the case stands, he can’t hold back himself from being entrapped in the flood of media-generated culture, no matter how hard he has endeavored.
Bill has tried very hard to avoid being controlled by the dominant culture. Otherwise, fleeing from the dominant culture is not an easy thing. Writing the novel is an important try that Bill has taken. He thinks the process of writing the novel is just the process to show his personality. He scarcely “sleeps past five a.m.”, waking and staring and comes back to his desk, resuming the writing. Bill even can’t leave his desk five feet away, or “the doubt hits him like a hammer in the back”. The novel has nearly “burn him out” (DeLillo 1991, 52). Finishing the novel seems to be so difficult. 23 years has been spent on writing the novel, but it still seems far from ending. If the never-ending novel stands for Bill’s escaping from the dominant culture, the task is really not an easily accessible one to fulfill.
It is impossible for Bill, a subject living in the society, to isolate himself from media and surrounding environment. The more efforts he makes to conceal his trail, the more curious his fans become, and the more energy and time they spend to track his whereabouts. Scott describes how media and other people try to find Bill:
There have been media forays that we’ve heard about, intrepid teams with telephoto lenses. And his publisher forwards mail from people who are setting out to find him, who send word of their progress, who think they know where he is, who’ve heard rumors, who simply want to meet him and tell him what his books have meant to them and ask the usual questions, fairly ordinary people actually who just want to look at his face (DeLillo 1991, 30).
Bill’s alienation from the others can’t help him achieve his goal. Instead, it makes him become a mystery. The publishers even take advantage of his isolation and mark him as reclusive, which all the better arouse the curiosity of the readers which compels them to chase his trace hard. Realizing this, Bill finally decides to let Brita take some photographs for him in order to “ease the pressure” that the surroundings create on him after 30 years of keeping his pictures from appearing in public (DeLillo 1991, 30). In the novel, Brita is a photographer who documents writers, especially “the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced” of whom Bill is one (DeLillo 1991, 66). She photographs them, interviews them and gives some of the pictures to magazines and directories. Undoubtedly, she is the representative of the media although she claims that she “eliminate(s) technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible” (DeLillo 1991, 26).
Even when inviting Brita to take photos of him, Bill still tries to keep his residency secret. When Brita asks Scott to tell her where Bill lives and she will go there by her own, Scott refuses her by saying that the place is hard to find and Bill insists that Scott leads her there himself. When Brita suggests to “meet somewhere central” in order not to disclose where Bill lives, Scott also refuses her and offers the reason – Bill “doesn’t go anywhere else” because he wants to separate himself from the outside world and leaving his abode may make him worried about giving others chances to find him (DeLillo 1991, 22, 24). Eventually, Brita is led to Bill’s house by a road without landmarks after it is dark. Even when Brita arrives, Bill is kind of deliberately mystifying, still staying “(U)pstairs hiding” (DeLillo 1991, 30). All these efforts are made in order to make her not remember the route.
Bill can also not escape from the erosion of the media just as he can’t prevent from having ties with Brita, from A to Z. Brita gets the chance to take pictures for Bill. Although Bill set so many obstacles to keep Brita from knowing the exact place where he lives, she finally meets him, gets familiar with his appearance, his life and his work, has an in-depth conversation with him, and even makes him feel that she is a confidant who exactly knows what he thinks. So Bill believes that with the pictures taken by Brita he can deliver the true self without being appropriated by the mass media, which proves to be false later. All the twelve sheets taken by her have slight differences which “might easily be one picture repeated, like mass visual litter that occupies a blink” (DeLillo 1991, 222). What these pictures present is not the “dangerous” writer that Bill wants to show to the readers (DeLillo 1991, 157). They are virtually the simulacrum of his image as a reclusive novelist. These pictures will surely be used by the media as a tool of propaganda, which will duplicate and eventually dissolve his individuality. Although Bill apparently refuses to contact with other people and the outside world, trying his best to make his eremitic life avoid being interfered by the media and wanting to create a novel which is not contaminated by the ubiquitous dominant culture, unconsciously he can’t hold back his desire to communicate with others. His permitting Brita to take photographs for him is the evidence. While waiting Scott to bring Brita to his covert, Bill is both anxious and eager. He keeps standing in front of the window, expecting the headlights of the car to appear. He makes the decision again and again that he will sit in front of the desk to continue his writing if the car doesn’t show if he counts to ten, but every time he fails to force him back to the desk until the headlights show.
In front of Brita’s camera, Bill is unable to show himself as he wishes. Although he realizes that “sitting for a picture is morbid business” and he is quite clear that the pictures taken by Brita announce his death – the death of his faith and personality, he has to follow Brita’s instruction and poses as she wants. She asks Bill to raise his chin or close his mouth, etc, in order to get “what she’d come for”, and finally she does (DeLillo 1991, 41-43). As a person who has been interested in taking pictures, he knows exactly how to appear in the photographs, but in front of Brita who works for magazines, he can do nothing except to obey her orders. He himself realizes this and says to Brita:
See, anything you want. I do it at once...We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin… I’ve become someone’s material (DeLillo 1991, 43).
Not only Bill but also others can’t easily escape from the dominant culture. Karen and the members of the Church are the good examples.
3. Analysis of Karen
Karen, the former member of the Unification Church, is the live-in girlfriend of Scott, who sometimes also serves as Bill’s mistress. One detail about Karen has been mentioned. When talking with Brita about Karen, Bill expresses his surprise at the fact that Karen can guess the contents and tones of people’s words when watching TV with the voice turned off. As Bill describes, she “does their voices with a trueness that’s startling” (DeLillo 1991, 66). It is neither because Karen is extraordinarily intelligent nor because she has the special ability to predict, but because she often watches TV and is immersed in the image-world created by the media. She likes to watch TV and film footage “without sound”, finding it interesting to “make up news” “by sticking to picture only” (DeLillo 1991, 32). Immersed in the image-filled society, Karen has already surrendered her true self to the outside world. The culture she lives in has deprived her of her selfhood. She doesn’t have her own thoughts any longer. What she thinks is what the society wants her to think. She is completely a person without personality. No wonder Bill thinks her as the representative of those whose individualities have been absorbed by the mass and calls her as “com(ing) from the future” (DeLillo 1991, 85). Several forces work in turning Karen into a being like this, and one of them is her family. Karen’s cousin Rick and other two strangers seize her and took her to a motel room, where her father stays and waits and intends to move her by crying and ensuring her his love. Her mother also called to have “a normal practical chat about getting enough to eat” and “sending clothes” (DeLillo 1991, 79). The strange men who show “a certain weary expertise” keep on telling her and try to persuade her that she was “brainwashed” and “programmed” by the church (DeLillo 1991, 78, 80). They also brings a former sister, Junette, who was “deprogrammed, turned against the church” to tear down “Master’s teaching” by reading “letters from disaffected members in the important voice of the dead”. Karen easily sees through her and finds she is just “pretending to show deep empathy is the word but actually feeling superior and aloof” (DeLillo 1991, 81). These people compel her to accept the idea that “the church had made a drone of her” (DeLillo 1991, 82). The two strangers guard outdoor all the time. When Karen tries to escape, they slam her so hardly that Karen even thinks that they will “tear her clothes away just to enjoy the noise of ripped Korean acrylic” (DeLillo 1991, 80). Her family are so eager to bring her back to the American dominant culture that they decide to send her to a deprogramming center “where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling” (DeLillo 1991, 82). Douglas Keesey points out clear that her family’s deed is also an “attempt to brainwash her”, “a violation of individuality” by bringing her “back to an American family that only pretends to care, feeding her ‘tabloid-type reassurances about love and mother and home’” (Keesey 1993, 183).
DeLillo has mentioned that “(E)verything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film”. Brita tells Bill that he is expected to look just like the picture, or people will question him (DeLillo 1991, 43). People don’t believe what they see but are deeply convinced of what the media tell them. DeLillo describes it as follows:
Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow.
The media-generated culture has taken root in people’s minds and made them follow its logic. They have already been unable to tell what they really thinks and what the media want them to think. So it is not strange for a subject like Karen who loses her own subjectivity and whose mind is manipulated by dominant culture to foretell what figures in TV programs will say next. 4. Conclusion
Judging from the above, it can be easily inferred that subjects is impossible to be separated from the culture he is in, no matter he is willing to or not. Bill is not an exception. Neither is Karen. Constantly saturated in the diseased culture, they are undoubtedly influenced by it, just like others. So it is impossible for Bill to create a novel irrelevant to the culture. That is why he always amends his work which is never perfected to his satisfaction even when he is dead. It also refers to the ineffectiveness of an ideal novel in a media-saturated world. So it is impossible for Karen to have her own ideas without blindly following the master’s instruction. Surrounded by the late capitalistic environment in which values of dominant culture pervade, no one can escape. Actually they help constitute the culture, becoming a part of it. Autonomous subjectivity is never possible.
Works Cited:
Aquila, Mike Dell’. “Delillo’s Mao II.” Construction Magazine (May 22, 2012). 16 May, 2013
Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao
II.” Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Eds. Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 2000. 245-257.
DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
DePietro, Thomas, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Readers of Mao II may disappointedly lament the reclusive protagonist Bill Gray’s obsessive impotence to accomplish his novel. But in fact, he has, in his customary circular narrative, rehearsed his accomplishment. He does not intend to claim that he comes to a natural conclusion about the whole matter as the traditional fiction has done. He has detailed it in a narrative circuit, in which what he wishes to write is conscientiously evidenced in the writing process. It is perhaps a strategy of meta-fiction that DeLillo employs, as has been categorized by some critics, but more than that. In fictionalizing his fiction-writing, he has rehearsed how a pathological culture has been constructed and how it works to make his protagonist impotent and stuck perpetually composing his anticipated work.
DeLillo’s text has inspired waves of instant existential horrors of his personas. In Mao II, Bill Gray’s experience indicates that DeLlilo’s world has been pervasively contaminated by the diseased values, moral sadism and self-denigration. It is a world of communal psychoses and neuroses, in which a social dysfunction and cultural delusion prevailed.
1. Introduction of the Novel
The story centers on a famous reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, “a Salinger-Pynchon type” who toils a stalled masterpiece he can’t finish (Passaro 2005, 79). Scott Martineau is Bill’s obsessive live-in assistant. Karen Janney, Scott’s companion, is the lover of Bill, who, a former member of Unification, is married to Kim Jo Pak in a Unification Church Blessing ceremony. Brita, a New York photographer, is documenting writers and Bill agrees to be photographed by her and have a dialogue with her on novelists in an age of terror. Bill disappears without a word and secretly decides to take the chance to travel to London to aid a Swiss writer, a hostage trapped in a basement in Beirut. His sudden disappearance leaves Scott and Karen stranded. In London, Bill is introduced to George Haddad, who is a representative of the Maoist group responsible for kidnapping the writer. Bill decides to go to Lebanon himself and help release the kidnapped writer and he goes to Cyprus, waiting for a ship to take him to Lebanon. In Cyprus, Bill is hit by a car and suffers a lacerated liver. The lacerated liver plus his heavy drinking kills him on his way to Beirut. His fiction will never be finished. At the end of the story, Brita photographs the terrorist responsible for the kidnapping, but the fate of the kidnapped writer has never been revealed. Mao II earned DeLillo plenty of praises. On May 28, 1991, Michiko Kakutani published his review titled “Fighting Against Envelopment by the Mass Mind” in The New York Times and praised Mao II as “One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America” (Kakutani 1991, C15). Paul Gray claimed that in Mao II “DeLillo’s gifts – terse, electric dialogue, descriptive passages of insidious beauty – have never been more apparent or put to better use” (Gray 1991, 68). In 1991, Mao II won a Pen/Faulkner Award and in 1992 it earned DeLillo a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Nomination.
2. Analysis of Bill
The protagonist of the novel, Bill Gray, tries to avoid any public contact, living as a recluse, in that he is entrapped in the flood of media-generated culture and even kidnapped by it. Under such circumstances, autonomous subjectivity is never possible, and the subject is always a part of his culture.
Bill decides to hide himself from others and surrounding world completely in order to write the novel without being influenced by others and surroundings: he lives as a recluse in a covert, not wanting others to find him; he keeps his photographs from appearing in public; he even doesn’t mail his letters directly for the sake of keeping his address secret, but posts them first to the publishing house and then the head of the mailroom changes envelops and reposts them. He also does his possible to avoid being photographed by anyone. Bill thinks that “(A) hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful” and “a little sacred” and people “inaccessible” have “a grace and a wholeness” that the others envy (DeLillo 1991, 36). He tries his best to keep others from getting in touch with him. It is really difficult to find him that Scott, his later assistant, spends quite a long time and energy to know where he lives, writing letters to him persistently, even working in the mailroom at the house which publishes Bill’s books to get his address (DeLillo 1991, 59).
Besides, Bill doesn’t want the customers to be attracted by fashionable packing of his books. While some other books which covers “were lacquered and gilded”, making the readers seem to “hear them shrieking Buy me”, Bill’s “two lean novels” are just “banded in austere umbers and rusts” (DeLillo 1991, 19-20). One of the reasons why Bill doesn’t feel like becoming a prolific is that he intends to decrease the medium’s appropriation of him. By doing so, Bill hopes that the customers can focus on the content of the books, which may reveal his true selfhood. This is totally different from what the publishers desire, who intend to make the readers attracted by the glossy packing. Bill just wants to retain his personality, not wanting to be controlled by the publishers who prefer to make Bill’s book become bestsellers without attaching importance to the self presentation that his books show. From the above, what can easily be inferred is that the protagonist himself really doesn’t want to communicate too much with others. He has tried all he can to avoid public contact, but things turns out to be just the opposite to what he wishes. As the case stands, he can’t hold back himself from being entrapped in the flood of media-generated culture, no matter how hard he has endeavored.
Bill has tried very hard to avoid being controlled by the dominant culture. Otherwise, fleeing from the dominant culture is not an easy thing. Writing the novel is an important try that Bill has taken. He thinks the process of writing the novel is just the process to show his personality. He scarcely “sleeps past five a.m.”, waking and staring and comes back to his desk, resuming the writing. Bill even can’t leave his desk five feet away, or “the doubt hits him like a hammer in the back”. The novel has nearly “burn him out” (DeLillo 1991, 52). Finishing the novel seems to be so difficult. 23 years has been spent on writing the novel, but it still seems far from ending. If the never-ending novel stands for Bill’s escaping from the dominant culture, the task is really not an easily accessible one to fulfill.
It is impossible for Bill, a subject living in the society, to isolate himself from media and surrounding environment. The more efforts he makes to conceal his trail, the more curious his fans become, and the more energy and time they spend to track his whereabouts. Scott describes how media and other people try to find Bill:
There have been media forays that we’ve heard about, intrepid teams with telephoto lenses. And his publisher forwards mail from people who are setting out to find him, who send word of their progress, who think they know where he is, who’ve heard rumors, who simply want to meet him and tell him what his books have meant to them and ask the usual questions, fairly ordinary people actually who just want to look at his face (DeLillo 1991, 30).
Bill’s alienation from the others can’t help him achieve his goal. Instead, it makes him become a mystery. The publishers even take advantage of his isolation and mark him as reclusive, which all the better arouse the curiosity of the readers which compels them to chase his trace hard. Realizing this, Bill finally decides to let Brita take some photographs for him in order to “ease the pressure” that the surroundings create on him after 30 years of keeping his pictures from appearing in public (DeLillo 1991, 30). In the novel, Brita is a photographer who documents writers, especially “the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced” of whom Bill is one (DeLillo 1991, 66). She photographs them, interviews them and gives some of the pictures to magazines and directories. Undoubtedly, she is the representative of the media although she claims that she “eliminate(s) technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible” (DeLillo 1991, 26).
Even when inviting Brita to take photos of him, Bill still tries to keep his residency secret. When Brita asks Scott to tell her where Bill lives and she will go there by her own, Scott refuses her by saying that the place is hard to find and Bill insists that Scott leads her there himself. When Brita suggests to “meet somewhere central” in order not to disclose where Bill lives, Scott also refuses her and offers the reason – Bill “doesn’t go anywhere else” because he wants to separate himself from the outside world and leaving his abode may make him worried about giving others chances to find him (DeLillo 1991, 22, 24). Eventually, Brita is led to Bill’s house by a road without landmarks after it is dark. Even when Brita arrives, Bill is kind of deliberately mystifying, still staying “(U)pstairs hiding” (DeLillo 1991, 30). All these efforts are made in order to make her not remember the route.
Bill can also not escape from the erosion of the media just as he can’t prevent from having ties with Brita, from A to Z. Brita gets the chance to take pictures for Bill. Although Bill set so many obstacles to keep Brita from knowing the exact place where he lives, she finally meets him, gets familiar with his appearance, his life and his work, has an in-depth conversation with him, and even makes him feel that she is a confidant who exactly knows what he thinks. So Bill believes that with the pictures taken by Brita he can deliver the true self without being appropriated by the mass media, which proves to be false later. All the twelve sheets taken by her have slight differences which “might easily be one picture repeated, like mass visual litter that occupies a blink” (DeLillo 1991, 222). What these pictures present is not the “dangerous” writer that Bill wants to show to the readers (DeLillo 1991, 157). They are virtually the simulacrum of his image as a reclusive novelist. These pictures will surely be used by the media as a tool of propaganda, which will duplicate and eventually dissolve his individuality. Although Bill apparently refuses to contact with other people and the outside world, trying his best to make his eremitic life avoid being interfered by the media and wanting to create a novel which is not contaminated by the ubiquitous dominant culture, unconsciously he can’t hold back his desire to communicate with others. His permitting Brita to take photographs for him is the evidence. While waiting Scott to bring Brita to his covert, Bill is both anxious and eager. He keeps standing in front of the window, expecting the headlights of the car to appear. He makes the decision again and again that he will sit in front of the desk to continue his writing if the car doesn’t show if he counts to ten, but every time he fails to force him back to the desk until the headlights show.
In front of Brita’s camera, Bill is unable to show himself as he wishes. Although he realizes that “sitting for a picture is morbid business” and he is quite clear that the pictures taken by Brita announce his death – the death of his faith and personality, he has to follow Brita’s instruction and poses as she wants. She asks Bill to raise his chin or close his mouth, etc, in order to get “what she’d come for”, and finally she does (DeLillo 1991, 41-43). As a person who has been interested in taking pictures, he knows exactly how to appear in the photographs, but in front of Brita who works for magazines, he can do nothing except to obey her orders. He himself realizes this and says to Brita:
See, anything you want. I do it at once...We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin… I’ve become someone’s material (DeLillo 1991, 43).
Not only Bill but also others can’t easily escape from the dominant culture. Karen and the members of the Church are the good examples.
3. Analysis of Karen
Karen, the former member of the Unification Church, is the live-in girlfriend of Scott, who sometimes also serves as Bill’s mistress. One detail about Karen has been mentioned. When talking with Brita about Karen, Bill expresses his surprise at the fact that Karen can guess the contents and tones of people’s words when watching TV with the voice turned off. As Bill describes, she “does their voices with a trueness that’s startling” (DeLillo 1991, 66). It is neither because Karen is extraordinarily intelligent nor because she has the special ability to predict, but because she often watches TV and is immersed in the image-world created by the media. She likes to watch TV and film footage “without sound”, finding it interesting to “make up news” “by sticking to picture only” (DeLillo 1991, 32). Immersed in the image-filled society, Karen has already surrendered her true self to the outside world. The culture she lives in has deprived her of her selfhood. She doesn’t have her own thoughts any longer. What she thinks is what the society wants her to think. She is completely a person without personality. No wonder Bill thinks her as the representative of those whose individualities have been absorbed by the mass and calls her as “com(ing) from the future” (DeLillo 1991, 85). Several forces work in turning Karen into a being like this, and one of them is her family. Karen’s cousin Rick and other two strangers seize her and took her to a motel room, where her father stays and waits and intends to move her by crying and ensuring her his love. Her mother also called to have “a normal practical chat about getting enough to eat” and “sending clothes” (DeLillo 1991, 79). The strange men who show “a certain weary expertise” keep on telling her and try to persuade her that she was “brainwashed” and “programmed” by the church (DeLillo 1991, 78, 80). They also brings a former sister, Junette, who was “deprogrammed, turned against the church” to tear down “Master’s teaching” by reading “letters from disaffected members in the important voice of the dead”. Karen easily sees through her and finds she is just “pretending to show deep empathy is the word but actually feeling superior and aloof” (DeLillo 1991, 81). These people compel her to accept the idea that “the church had made a drone of her” (DeLillo 1991, 82). The two strangers guard outdoor all the time. When Karen tries to escape, they slam her so hardly that Karen even thinks that they will “tear her clothes away just to enjoy the noise of ripped Korean acrylic” (DeLillo 1991, 80). Her family are so eager to bring her back to the American dominant culture that they decide to send her to a deprogramming center “where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling” (DeLillo 1991, 82). Douglas Keesey points out clear that her family’s deed is also an “attempt to brainwash her”, “a violation of individuality” by bringing her “back to an American family that only pretends to care, feeding her ‘tabloid-type reassurances about love and mother and home’” (Keesey 1993, 183).
DeLillo has mentioned that “(E)verything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film”. Brita tells Bill that he is expected to look just like the picture, or people will question him (DeLillo 1991, 43). People don’t believe what they see but are deeply convinced of what the media tell them. DeLillo describes it as follows:
Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow.
The media-generated culture has taken root in people’s minds and made them follow its logic. They have already been unable to tell what they really thinks and what the media want them to think. So it is not strange for a subject like Karen who loses her own subjectivity and whose mind is manipulated by dominant culture to foretell what figures in TV programs will say next. 4. Conclusion
Judging from the above, it can be easily inferred that subjects is impossible to be separated from the culture he is in, no matter he is willing to or not. Bill is not an exception. Neither is Karen. Constantly saturated in the diseased culture, they are undoubtedly influenced by it, just like others. So it is impossible for Bill to create a novel irrelevant to the culture. That is why he always amends his work which is never perfected to his satisfaction even when he is dead. It also refers to the ineffectiveness of an ideal novel in a media-saturated world. So it is impossible for Karen to have her own ideas without blindly following the master’s instruction. Surrounded by the late capitalistic environment in which values of dominant culture pervade, no one can escape. Actually they help constitute the culture, becoming a part of it. Autonomous subjectivity is never possible.
Works Cited:
Aquila, Mike Dell’. “Delillo’s Mao II.” Construction Magazine (May 22, 2012). 16 May, 2013
Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao
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