Telling Postmodern Tales: Absent Authorities In Didion's Democracy and DeLillo's Mao II

RICHARD LEVESQUE Telling Postmodern Tales: Absent Authorities In Didion's Democracy and DeLiIIo's Mao ÍÍ After engaging in relatively straightforward narration in the opening pages of her 1984 novel, Democracy, Joan Didion ends the first chapter with the narrator's voice intruding on the narrative, telling readers that "This is a hard story to tell."1 Were this narrator Bill Gray, the jaded novelist of Don DeLillo's Mao II, the statement might instead be "This is a hard story to finish telling." For, as DeLillo's book opens, Gray has been working on his third novel for twenty-three years, not writing it so much as toiling ovet it in an endless cycle of composition and revision, a task so immense and so apparently endless as to be reminiscent ofpunishments in the Hades ofGreek myth. Though Gray is not the narrator of Mao II, the book's focus on authorship and authority in a world ofspectacle and mediated images invests it with a degree of the same self-reflexivity that so predominates Democracy in its handling ofthe same subjects. It could be argued that even within postmodernity the ability to narrate is the foundation ofstorytelling. More than the desire or the means to write, it is this ability that both allows the writer to write and that subsequently mystifies the act of writing in the eyes of much of the reading public; this is exemplified by Brita, the photographer in Mao Ii who believes that writers have "a secret language I haven't learned to speak."2 But ifpart of the project ofpostmodernism is to depict a postDerridian world aware of the absent center, this fundamental privileging of narration and narrator would seem to be one of the old myths in Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 70Richard Levesque need of debunking. In a 1982 interview, Don DeLiIIo had this to say about the relationship between the writer and what is written: I think after a while a writer can begin to know himself through his language. He sees someone or something reflected back at him from these constructions. Over the years it's possible for a writer to shape himself as a human being through the language he uses. I think written language, fiction, goes that deep. He not only sees himself but begins to make himself or remake himself. Ofcourse this is mysterious and subjective territory , (qtd. in LeClair 23) On the one hand, this position of DeLillo's seems to uphold the mystification ofthe writer writing, as he uses such phrases as "shape himself" and "the language he uses" to connote the writer's ultimate control over the written word. But he also destabilizes this authority by suggesting that the writer is changed in the act of writing and is thus not a fixed, centered entity. If one follows DeLillo's argument and considers that an author, regardless ofhow deftly he/she "uses" and thus controls language, is simultaneously writing and being written, then the mythic author at the center of his/her text simply vanishes. The mystification surrounding the fact of narration may remain—and may even be intensified—but it is also problematized. In other words, an author cannot be an author without die coexistence of that which is authored. The mystery of writing, then, is that the writer (in a traditional sense) does not exist until something has been written. And while DeLiIIo seems to have been engaging in analysis about himself and his writing in this interview, his statement could just as easily be about Bill Gray, whose story DeLiIIo would publish nine years later.3 It could also be about Jean-Claude Julien, the hostage-poet whose situation captivates Gray to the point of being able to put his book away to begin writing something new. And it could also be about "Joan Didion," the narrator of Democracy whose struggle to narrate is indicative of her growing awareness of how little she knows about her characters, her story or her ability to "remake" herself through the act of narration.4 Another trope of canonical texts and traditional narrative is...