In the cosmology of Don DeLillo, Mao II is something of a lesser star, a dwarf, drifting  dimly behind the burning, shining White Noise, the gaseous giant of The Names, all of them orbiting the masterpiece Underworld (a novel that weighs in at a pound and a half, by the way). Mao II is a neglected DeLillo novel, wedged between some of his most critically acclaimed work, and attention to it is lacking (maybe because the quantity of DeLillo criticism in general has diminished greatly over the years, funny for a writer so often burdened with labels like “oracular” and “prophetic”. So it goes).

But Mao II actually represents an untapped critical opportunity not just for DeLillo scholarship generally, but for post-colonial literary studies and historiography. A careful reading of Mao II allows us to name and define an entirely new kind of Orientalism I call nervous Orientalism, one that is both distinct from and in conversation with the original Saidian conception. Okay, so what? I would argue this little overlooked novel is actually the skeleton key not just to DeLillo generally, but to the whole genre of disaffected-white-maximalist-postmodernist novels– your Wallaces and what not. (Which is not a diss necessarily.)

So what’s this book even about? It’s about this famous reclusive writer, Bill Gray, who’s sort of a William Gaddis (The Recognitions) or Pynchon type. Gray is enlisted as a hostage negotiator on behalf of a writer imprisoned in Lebanon. That’s the broad sweep, anyway, because we’re also concerned with the fate of a young woman who joins and leaves the Moonies, and Gray’s estate manager, and the broad sweep of Bill’s thousand page novel in progress. 

Mao II is an Orientalist novel. I do not mean Orientalist as an academic byword for (just) racist or (just) anti-Asian, but Orientalist in the literal Saidian sense. It’s a novel about an American in a foreign, perverse land. The thematic weight of the novel is predicated on the existence of an essential dichotomy between West and East, sobriety and fanaticism, American and -un, but most of all between the individual and the crowd.

Let me defend myself: this is not an unreasonable characterization, a ‘reach,’ an inappropriate application of academic terminology. Said reminds us that even in our ‘enlightened’ age there are “a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets [and] novelists… [who] have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, [and]  novels”. To pick and cite every example of this phenomenon from the novel’s multitude  would be unproductive, so please allow me to choose a simple enough example: the first page.

“Here they come,” the novel begins, “marching into American sunlight”. Before we go further let me note that the Orientalist dichotomy has already been constructed before the  sentence’s conclusion. “They,” in this context, already means ‘other.’ It is the first word, the first human thing in the novel, and is attached to no other descriptor or noun. The reader understands “they” to  mean ‘people,’ but because the reader knows nothing else, the “they” is empty, devoid of any status or understanding. A nameless people who march without distinction is the ‘other:’ there can be no other attribution.

“They” is so often the tool of language used to define, in opposition, an ‘us,’ an in-group which must be maintained against the threat of the ‘other,’ the “they”. And  “the Orient,” Said reminds us, “is one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other”. 

And a threat they are, for they are “marching”. The word “marching” carries in it the  image of soldiers, identical uniforms, synchronized movement, standardized form and appearances, a mass of people stripped of individuality, an effect that “they” also contributes to — this is a group of human beings without meaningful distinctions between them, flattened to a  “they”. “Marching” is freighted with connotations of both unity and threat, the promise of a  unified group advancing towards a target. There is no such thing as an innocuous march: marching carries the potential of force. Consequently, this is no innocuous ‘other,’ but one that ought to be regarded as a threat that the ‘us’ should be weary of.  

Then there is that DeLillian end : “marching into American sunlight.” This sunlight,  shining down over the field— this in Yankee stadium, quite possibly the Platonic ideal of a  ballpark— is distinctly American. Sunlight, of course, is not a natural resource only Americans  are privy to; it is the very opposite, it is universal, every human person alive has felt it warm  their faces and tickle their eyelids. There is nothing about the sun that is American; the sun predates and will postdate us by hundreds of millions of years. The characterization of sunlight as “American” serves only to emphasize the foreign character of the “they” marching under it. “They” are in the wrong place, a place that does not suit them; if these  are Americans, an ‘us,’ then there is no need to describe the nationality of the sun’s rays. 

Finally, consider the connotations of “into”. This mass is not “marching” ‘under’ the  sunlight, or ‘with’ the sunlight, they are “marching into” it. We get the sense that this crowd is emerging from something— perhaps a dark tunnel, with all the bug-like implications that carries— and this implies a measure of perversity, the transgression of something better kept in the dark creeping into the light. This is not just a transition between domains, but by virtue of  “they” and “marching” it is clear this is a penetration, or breaching.  

Worse, since this is “American sunlight” that “they” are “marching into,” the reader  understands this is no less than an invasion. Here is a uniform mass of the other penetrating ‘our’  domain, the alien in our homeland: the text, in very few words, has constructed the Orientalist  dichotomy by which the whole novel operates: here is the “they” (a crowd, a mass, a ‘horde’)  contrasting the (so far implicit) ‘us’ (the individual American, singular).

This is by no means to say that the Orientalist nature of the novel is restricted to a  simplistic, imperial connotation; this close reading serves to show how deeply Orientalism  permeates the text; it is not implied simply by choice of geographic setting, or by a dated  depiction of Islam, or anything so simple: the Orientalist dichotomy is ingrained into the  construction of sentences at a grammatical level, not just in theme or plot.

Okay, so we’re getting really pedantic here. So what? What’s happening outside of the specific grammar of this opening?

Mao II opens on a mass Unitarian wedding in the Bronx’s Yankee stadium. The prose situates us somewhere in the stands, with a view of the whole field, watching the “eternal boy-girl” couples crossing the outfield. The novel tells us that there are “too many of them to count” and that they “assemble themselves so tightly… that the effect is one of transformation… they become  one continuous wave, larger all the time”. This is not polygamy or plural marriage, certainly, but it is a subversion of traditional, American monogamous marriage. This is ballpark as cathedral.

There are too many of these couples to count, not one pairing ordained by God. The choice of setting here further reinforces the idea that this is an invasion: forget the American sunlight, in DeLillo’s work, the ballpark is sacrosanct– in Underworld, the entire novel is precipitated by a scramble for a home run baseball– America writ large, and here it is being  penetrated by something obscene, something amassing.  

If there is a “they,” then there is also an “us”. We sense in these descriptions an aura of revulsion and fascination, and indeed, as the narrative introduces its first named, individual character, Rodge, this is exactly what he is feeling: “They’re one body now, an undifferentiated mass, and this makes him uneasy”. The mass marriage here is an occult ritual, transforming individual American women— like Rodge’s daughter, Karen, our ex-Moonie from our summary— into part of  an “undifferentiated mass.”  

So we could continue analyzing at the microscopic level Mao II’s opening, which runs for a brief fourteen pages, and find the same sentiments and images recurring: there is a crowd, a mass, coming towards us, and it is something we ought to fear. With this close reading establishing the novel’s Oriental tendencies, allow me to go a step further. This Orientalism is a specific one, and it is very specifically characterized.

A proposal: Mao II is a manifestation of a nervous Orientalism, a distinct branch, perhaps an evolution, of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said originally defined Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” but this is not the case for nervous Orientalism. While this original conception of Orientalism was defined by a colonial desire to impose, dominate, and extract, nervous Orientalism is post-post-colonial in nature: it is defined by the Occident’s fear of its own subjugation. Mao II’s nervous Orientalism is not an Orientalism imposed from the seat of power or authoritative (Foucauldian) discourse, but an anxious, reactionary discourse, constructed in a moment of geo-political ascendancy for the Middle East and East Asian nations at the expense of American economic, cultural, and  political dominance.

(At the time of the novel’s writing, late 1989 to early 1991, “Japan-bashing”  was an inescapable phenomenon, animated by American anxieties about the nation’s quickly growing economy and expanding cultural influence. This filtered into novels like Rising Sun and other popular culture of the time). This cultural paranoia constitutes a Foucauldian episteme that held that American decline at the hands of ‘Oriental nations’ was inevitable and to be feared.  

But Said would argue that this evolution of his thought is impossible: there is no change in  Orientalism, no development: from the moment of its conception, it is permanent. He calls  Orientalism a “system of ideas [that] remains unchanged[d] as teachable wisdom … from … the  late 1840s until the present”. And yet, he continues that Orientalism also requires “continued  investment” as an “accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness”.

t is not possible for this discourse to exist without any reaction or any development or adaptation, especially with reference to the relative decline of the Occident to the Orient—  which, it should be noted, is not an independently verifiable phenomenon, but the exact fear that nervous Orientalism begets. In this way, the character of nervous Orientalism has something of the ouroboros in it.

From the novel’s opening to its anticlimax, nervous Orientalism is writ into every single  sentence. The penetration, the marching into, the invasion to the heart of Americana, is an image  that resurfaces throughout the novel: the photojournalist Brita, on assignment in Beirut, observes  a wall covered in posters for an all-American soft drink that has been defaced with Arabic  graffiti: “the placards are stacked ten high in some places… they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals  of the Coke II logo”. The choice of these numerals, evocative of a long-gone empire every imperialist hopes to live up to, is particularly pointed. Again, the Other is depicted as invading a Western space, defiling its images and symbols, overwriting them; nevermind that the sale of an American cultural product like Coke in Lebanon is something of Western economic imperialism anyway.

Note again the language of crowding, of mass, the Arabic (Arabs) teeming over each other, one crowd, not individuals, but a horde. DeLillo is not generally a fan of marketing and logos— see the entirety of White Noise— but he seems to take offense at their ‘desecration’ here. As inconsequential as this graffiti is, the attention that the text affords to it, along with the palpable discomfort the language betrays in depicting it, betrays the paranoid, almost inescapable quality of the nervous Orientalist attitude in the novel.  

Not only Mao II is emblematic of this system of discourse I am calling nervous  Orientalism, but it is also a commentary on this exact phenomenon: Mao II is fearful of the  (Western, individualist) novelist’s decline at the hands of the (Eastern, mass) terrorist. Bill Gray,  the novel’s protagonist and writer character, awakes at night from “heart-attack dreams;” his  anxiety borne of a fear of “writers… consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic  force”. “Apocalyptic news,” he will clarify, is news of car bombings, hijacked airliners— Islamic terrorism.

This is an Orientalism that does not dominate or impose, because the  historical moment where an Orientalist novel could implement or augment colonial power has  passed. “The novel used to feed our search for meaning,” Scott, the estate manager, says, paraphrasing Gray, “[but now] we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe”. A novel, after all, cannot influence hearts and minds if it is not read.  

Mao II equates the Western individual with art, and the Eastern crowd with terror, and  forces them into contrast. As Bill Gray says: “There’s a curious knot that binds writers and terrorists”. Whereas novels could once “shape and influence,” this is now the “territory” of  “bomb-makers and gunmen”. This is because both art and terror are ways to construct narratives that allow humans to adopt narrative meaning and adapt it to the actual experience of their lives.

Ironically (and probably intentionally) if one accepts this thesis, then Mao II is just another narrative object that is attempting to define and name reality so that people can describe the world around them. This is why the novel’s Orientalism is an anxious one: confronted with  the waning cultural power of the novel, their inability to “shape the inner life of the culture,” as  Gray says, Mao II frets about its own efficacy.

Of course, one could describe Mao II as ‘just’ a novel anxious about novels losing their cultural  importance and cache, and that since its historical moment of conception was one generally  Orientalist in nature, then the novel’s anxiety also, consequently, had to be Orientalist: the  images, words, and experiences a contemporaneous novel can draw from for are historically  contingent.

This is bull. It’s an overly simplistic argument, and smacks of apologetics. Here’s the academic angle– in Mark Osteen’s “Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s ‘Mao II,’ he claims that because the mass media serve as “journalistic and photographic gatekeepers” who mediate, compose, and comment on terrorism, DeLillo’s suggestion that “terrorists have supplanted novelists as the shapers of culture and consciousness” is fundamentally compromised. Osteen argues that this is because terrorists rely on media coverage– like a Hollywood starlet, they “need publicity” (659). Osteen concludes that it is actually mass media that has dethroned the novelists; terrorism is simply a means to end.

Deconstructing Osteen, however, implies that if the media simply ignored terrorism, then the cultural value of the novel as a form would be intact. As dubious as this is, media ethics wise, Osteen raises a question worth exploring. But DeLillo’s work, in this novel and others, reflects a deep engagement with mass media, from popular culture to hard news— look no further than the careful attention afforded to the sounds and rhythms of advertising in his novels, and the constant mention of media devices. Staring at the Coke II ads, “[Brita] has the crazy idea these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group”. In Mao II, the appeal of terrorism is of its images, which resonate even without journalistic dissemination.

So Mao II is not a beloved or famous novel. It does not occupy ‘best-of’ lists, or feature in  the collections of avowed Western canonists. It does not break new ground in DeLillo’s fiction, or represent a marked evolution in his style. It is interesting, but muddled. It is a good novel, but not a great one.

And yet, it is an incredibly important text, for it is a clear example and distillation of a previously unspecified tendency in Orientalism— nervous Orientalism, a historically contingent Orientalism, predicated on specific cultural, political, and social  conditions of the late ‘80s and ‘90s, when Mao II was written. Talking about the novel with Said  and Foucault in mind allows both a deeper explication of the novel’s text and a more rigorous  use of the analytical material at hand, with consequences for anyone who cares about DeLillo or Orientalism.