Article in Law and Literature · July 2007 doi: 10. 1525/lal

2 9 5
T h u r s c h w e l l
•
W r i t i n g a n d T e r r o r
passage describing the hostage is in DeLillo’s authorial voice or Bill’s. In
any event, what is clear is that because Bill dies before he reaches the hos-
tage, this “convergence,” and Bill’s intended substitution of himself for the
hostage, remain purely literary. 
What then do we make of this literary substitution? It certainly con-
forms to the model of aesthetic representation that we have developed
above, insofar as it consists in an imaginative identification with a lost,
absent or dead other, in which the writer-artist disappears—literally, in
Bill’s case—in the act of identification-representation. Indeed, if we can
assume that the passage describing the hostage ’s experience is in Bill’s
words, it is a literary act that bonds the dead with the dead, since the hos-
tage is also presumably killed (we learn at the end of the novel that the
Maoist group has “sold him to the fundamentalists”).
68
An affirmation
between the dead—is that a political act?
Before trying to answer that question, we should note that 
Mao II
begins
and ends with two other affirmations and bonds, this time between the liv-
ing, in the form of two marriages. In every way, they are mirror-images of
each other. The first, which occupies the novel’s prologue, is the infamous
simultaneous marriage of 
,
people by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon
at Yankee Stadium (in the novel, one of the characters, Karen, is married in
this ceremony). This marriage forms a bond in name only. Karen met her
Korean husband, who speaks no English, only days before the wedding;
they were chosen for each other (as were each of the other couples married
that day) by Reverend Moon; and they will separate immediately after the
ceremony to live in different countries, each slaving separately for the finan-
cial success of the Unification Church. Nor, ultimately, is it a bond between
two people at all, but between a crowd and a supreme Master, whose touch-
stone is adulation rather than identification. And it is more a media event
than ceremony—indeed, a marketing stunt, an advertisement premised on
the Warholian principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Finally,
Karen and her parents’ experience of the event is anything but genuinely
lived; her parents experience it as the horrifyingly alienated parody that it is,
and Karen daydreams throughout, thinking about her past and future days
of exhausted indentured servitude to the Church. 
The novel also ends with a wedding scene. Brita, who photographed Bill
at the beginning of the novel, has come to Beirut to photograph Abu Rashid,
the leader of the Maoist group that took the poet hostage. On her last night
LAL1902_07.fm Page 295 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

---