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영어

In Don DeLillo’s Mao II, visual media such as photography seem condemned as the very forces destroying human authenticity and individual uniqueness. As image culture is ominously associated with foreigners, terrorists, and women in the novel, DeLillo is occasionally criticized for Orientalism, racism, and sexism. Although he is not free from the above criticisms of xenophobia and misogyny, he also takes a self-ironizing distance from the rise of the society of spectacle in his own country while offering self-reflective, ambivalent representation of the defeatism of a writer. This irony is produced by his juxtaposition between Bill Gray, an aged, impotent novelist, and Brita Nilsson, a professional photographer. Instead of simply blaming visual media for damaging human consciousness, DeLillo acknowledges photography as an artistic medium and a kind of writing, as he uses several photos in the novel to illuminate his prose. Moreover, DeLillo’s ironic distance from Bill’s defeat paradoxically suggests the lasting value of the “old” art form of the novel in the world dominated by multimedia. This essay discusses how the mass media is shown to be the foreign threat to the white male novelist Bill in Mao II. It subsequently illustrates Brita’s photography having a redemptive force giving life to its objects, in contrast with Bill’s abomination of the mass media. DeLillo insinuates that, used by an individual artist, photography can be a productive tool to express the human mind.