"[M]idair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative."
Artists will always look to history for inspiration; retroactively, history looks to art for explanation. In search of some literary precedent to the events of Sept. 11, many turned to The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad's novel of anarchistic terrorism; the book is quite prescient in its understanding of the troubled relationship between government and those who will strike out violently in the name of the society it serves. But for insight into the real meaning of terror in the modern condition, a reading of The Secret Agent reached too far back--it is not Conrad, but Don DeLillo who offers us the best "explanation" for the catastrophic events of the new millenium:
"In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed." These are the words of DeLillo's novel Mao II, published just a decade ago--the most important book of 2001.
And so it is fortuitous that Duke University will host the first dramatic production of Mao II. Adapted and directed by Jody McAuliffe, associate professor of theater studies, Mao II will be performed by the Duke Players in Sheafer Theater from April 17 through the 21--the highest profile event of the entire theatrical calendar. A considerably important work in its own right (it was given the PEN/Faulkner Award upon its first release) the novel's unexpected topicality is, said McAuliffe, "a timely coincidence". She had actually been working on this stage adaptation since early 2000.
McAuliffe's husband, Frank Lentricchia, professor of literature, serves as dramaturg for the production. The two share a close relationship with the author, who has always had a reputation for being wary of the attention of the culture he chronicles. Lentricchia has been DeLillo's preeminent advocate for many years, having edited several books of essays on the author. DeLillo himself will attend the Blackburn Literary Festival next week and is scheduled to give a reading at Perkins Library Rare Books Room April 18.
Lentricchia teaches Mao II in his own classes, and notes that DeLillo's White Noise is a staple text in other courses across the country. Both books, he observed, "have a way of representing our lives that feels very immediate, very authentic, very sharp." "It just speaks to [the students]," agreed McAuliffe, who said the book has been a favorite among her students. "They get into the world very readily."
Indeed, novels like White Noise and Mao II are veritable textbooks of cultural commentary, simultaneously cerebral and accessible. Stylistic mastery comes hand-in-hand with an impressive grasp of American contemporaneity--both its ironic idiosyncracies and the deeply-rooted contradictions that they reveal. His stories perpetually seek meaning from the conundrums
Mao II, for instance, sounds at times like Jean Baudrillard's theories of simulation rewritten as poetry--the main character, while leaving a voice message, digresses: "I feel like a TV set left on in an empty room.... The loneliness of voices stored on tape. By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up."
Through much of his work runs an uneasy strain of alienation and dread, to which British novelist Martin Amis referred when he snidely dubbed DeLillo "the poet of paranoia." But what can appear unrelenting and bleak is undercut with a sharp edge of dark humor. Instead of nihilism, his work is imbued with a rich and challenging ambivalence--as fascinated as it is repulsed by the grotesqueries of consumer culture. There is always paranoia but never panic. Rather, it is a paralysis that seeps through his novels and traps both characters and readers.
Crystallizing this queasy thematic mixture of terror and alienation, Mao II is about the struggle to break free of that numbing paralysis. Its central character is Bill Gray, a burnt-out novelist living in J.D. Salinger-like seclusion--wholly alienated from the world whose attention he once held. Locked into an endless cycle of rewriting a dead novel, Bill lives with two devotees who tend to his affairs and keep his days occupied while his mind idles. Bill reestablishes contact with the outside world through a photo shoot: He develops a connection with Brita, the photographer, and tells her, "I think I need these pictures more than you do. To break down the monolith I've built.... I've paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I'm sick of it finally." Brita draws Bill back into the city, where his old friend and editor implicates him into a terrorist plot.
He ultimately ventures willingly into this world of "men in small rooms"--a world with a vibrant power that fascinates him. "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous." Bill's journey leaves behind all the security of his seclusion, but it is also his only chance at salvation--said McAuliffe, "He gets to experience a moment of true feeling, a life-enhancing desire."
The title of the book refers to a series of Andy Warhol pencillings of a Mao Tse-tung portrait--a sly manipulation, through replication ad infinitum, that perversely strips the photograph of all meaning.
McAuliffe's adaptation will exploit this fascination with the image to its advantage. Bill Noland, professor of art and art history, designed a video projection scheme that defines the set: Three imposing screens serve to create both a spatial orientation for the stage and a curiously surreal sensation. McAuliffe said the effect is "very beautiful and evocative."
The World Trade Center attack inevitably springs to mind. If ever a moment has been fused inextricably with an image, it was this--shot at multiple angles, replayed endlessly until the footage seemed to swallow up all reality. And then, without any discernible signal, the footage disappeared entirely, never to be seen on the news again: a true DeLillo moment.
McAuliffe, Lentricchia and Noland certainly had that footage in mind when preparing the visual aesthetic. "We did think about [putting it in] ," says Lentricchia, "but realized it would be a bad idea." Today, a montage of disaster footage almost seems achingly incomplete without the smoking plumes of the twin towers. For this reason, Lentricchia notes that "the impact would be stronger without the [World Trade Center] footage." He adds, "Terror needs no updating; among other things, Mao II is about an individual held hostage and tortured."
There is even actual dialogue about the towers in the book. Brita observes them from her apartment, sees the size of the towers as "deadly"--although she's referring to them as boring. Bill says that the World Trade Center "is already harmless and ageless. Forgotten looking". In the play, this dialogue gets no special directions--its portent is eerie enough as is.
Just days after Sept. 11, Karlheinz Stockhausen dropped his own little bomb, saying that the terrorist attacks were "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." It was the work of human minds achieving "something in one act" that "we couldn't even dream of in music," said Stockhausen, one of the premier avant-garde composers of the 20th century. "People practice like crazy for 10 years, totally fanatically, for a concert, and then die.... In comparison with that, we're nothing as composers."
The New York Times, echoing outrage in the German press, shot off a scathing piece that called the aging composer "a raving has-been": "Art may be hard to define, but whatever art is, it's a step removed from reality." But for just that moment, life seemed even more unreal--the whole world was a step removed from reality. It seemed as if Don DeLillo was writing it all.
Don DeLillo's Mao II will run April 17-20 at 8pm and April 21 at 2pm in Sheafer Theater, Bryan Center. Tickets are $8 for general admission, $6 for students and seniors. Call (919) 684-4444 or visit www.tickets.duke.edu to order.
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