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

2 9 3
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
All of these themes converge in 
Mao II
, DeLillo’s most explicit
engagement with the relations among literature, terrorism, and the cul-
ture of late capitalism. As already noted, there is plenty in this novel to
support the critics’ pessimistic view of these relations. Bill Gray, the
novel’s chief protagonist, is a famously reclusive author who is inexora-
bly drawn out of his seclusion (in which he has lived for years, nursing
his depression and his writer’s block) and into the world of Middle East
politics, where he eventually dies from injuries sustained in a car acci-
dent while traveling to Beirut to try to substitute himself for another
writer who has been taken hostage by terrorists. From start to finish, the
trajectory of his actions are driven by a convergence of the two “world
narratives” of late capitalism and terrorism. 
Thus, the main plot line opens (there is also a prologue, to which I
return below) with Bill’s decision to break thirty years of invisibility and
allow himself to be photographed, because, he says, his very reluctance
to appear has become a kind of 
hubris
: “The writer who won’t show his
face is encroaching on holy turf. He ’s playing God’s own trick.”
60
But
this is 
hubris
only from the perspective of a market culture for which the
commodified image is the final destination of every lived event:
“There ’s the life and there ’s the consumer event. Everything around us
tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film.”
61
Thus from Bill’s very first act, in the depths of his attempted seclusion
from society, he is already being controlled by the dictates of capitalist
exchange. At the same time, he experiences his being photographed as a
kind of death, in terms that are reminiscent of Blanchot: “A portrait
doesn’t mean anything until the subject is dead. . . . The deeper I pass
into death, the more powerful my picture becomes.”
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And earlier, in the
passage from which the epigraph is taken, Bill had noted that the image
was in effect killing off writers like him, who “become effigies as our
books lose the power to shape and influence,” courtesy of the spectacu-
lar images provided by terrorist bombings.
63
The remainder of the plot plays out these themes in a way that appears
entirely consistent with the notion that literature is impotent in the face of
the larger forces shaping our culture. Brita, the photographer, brings Bill a
message from former friend and editor Charlie Everson (whose main moti-
vation is to get the rights to Bill’s next book for his publishing house) that he
has an urgent need to see him. Bill eventually meets with him and learns that
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