Abstract
DeLillo’s fiction is postmodern mostly in that it addresses the major aspects of what has been called the postmodern condition. Mao II, published in 1991, voices concerns about the menace of terrorism. It also deals with the issue of the position of the novelists/the novel in an age dominated by the media. Paul Virilio has also paid particular attention to such aspects in his theories. The novel published about three decades ago and the theories first presented around that time have proved to be prophetic today. Reading the American author in the light of the theories of the French thinker better illustrates the status of both as figures warning against the daunting realities of our age. This article attempts a reading of Mao II in the light of Virilio’s theories about war of images or info war, tele-presence, polar inertia, and the substitution of actual reality by the virtual.
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Notes
Thurschwell (2007), Wilcox (2006) and Leppard (2007) are among the scholars who emphasize the status of DeLillo in contemporary American literature, especially in connection with the issue of terrorism. Adumbrating the 9/11 events is often given as the classic example of the prophetic character of much of DeLillo's fiction.
Critics have discussed DeLillo's work in connection with the theorizations of contemporary theorists like Baudrillard and Žižek. For instance, Wilcox (2006) mentions the points of convergence between DeLillo's representations of the contemporary scene in Mao II (1991) and Baudrillard's The spirit of terrorism (2003). In his view, the two figures share a lot on what he calls "postmodern terrorism" as they both see the postmodern culture as an arena for the mediatic consumption of signs and consider terrorism as a "canny" response to the "regime" of proliferation of images, sign exchange and the "spectacle" of the West, generally. (For a critique of this view see Pirnajmuddin and Borhan (2011a, b). More on Baudrillard later.).
Virilio's position in this regard is more akin to a figure like Michel de Certeau.
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Bagherzadeh Samani, B., Pirnajmuddin, H. & Akhavan, B. Don DeLillo’s Mao II: a Virilian reading. Neohelicon 47, 315–330 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00518-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00518-1