Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World

2. Some Versions of the Samurai: The Budō Core of DeLillo’s Running Dog

2 Some Versions of the Samurai The Budō Core of DeLillo’s Running Dog John Whalen-Bridge “Dying is an art in the East.” “Yes, heroic, a spiritual victory.” —Don DeLillo, Running Dog Yukio Mishima, the budō code, the Japanese guide for killer courtiers known as the Hagakure—these would not appear to be the important elements from a novel by Don DeLillo, arguably America’s finest living novelist, but they are. Running Dog is his fifth novel and was published in 1978, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the conclusion of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. There have been many novels and films about America’s failed involvement in Vietnam, and there have been innumerable reflections in film and other media forming American popular culture concerning America’s fascination with Asia. Running Dog involves Vietnam tangentially and fears of rising criminality in American intelligence agencies centrally.1 Seventies popular culture (e.g., films like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View) reflects popular fears about government secrecy and criminality, while Orientalist fantasies were in that decade more often kept in their own generic ghetto, 29 30 Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge but DeLillo fuses these genres fruitfully. Running Dog, in the manner of postmodern parody, is a novelistic imitation of a crowd-pleasing, only vaguely political, spy thriller, but the novel contains within this apparently consumerist framework a much more searching critical reflection on what President Jimmy Carter termed the American “malaise.” By presenting the budō path as the hero’s alternative to an uncritical acceptance of this malaise, DeLillo connects the political crises of the late seventies to the increasing fascination—the seventies was the decade when everybody was kung-fu fighting—with various manner of Orientalist phenomena.2 What is especially surprising to post-Saidian readers is the way in which DeLillo gives his Orientalist fantasia an anti-imperialist spin. Joke and Pastiche: Running Dog as Spy Thriller and Postmodern Romance If we were discussing the literature of the 1930s as Daniel Aaron does in his 1961 study Writers on the Left, we would identify the political affiliation of the writer by making connections between the books themselves and the authors’ memberships, signed petitions, and participation in public political actions. According to such criteria, DeLillo would barely count at all as a “political writer,” but the term now is used to draw attention to the symbolic action of the texts produced by such writers. Novels “hail” readers in ways that not only publicize but also construct political identities. Edward Said’s study Orientalism—published in the same year as Running Dog—has arguably been the single most persuasive statement in the post-Vietnam era regarding the political significance of literary texts, and this text and others in its wake have realigned many critical judgments regarding what it means to be a politically progressive text. A “politically progressive text” will, more often than not, fight a two-front war. When attacked from the Right, DeLillo is the “bad citizen” who makes it attractive to hate America. From the Left he has been discussed as a “Cold War” novelist, a “white male” writer, and a creator of “imperial romance” fantasies.3 Defenders such as Frank Lentricchia have attempted to protect both flanks simultaneously by embracing the “bad citizen” label while asserting that the mainstream, as opposed to the margins, of American literature has been “bad” in DeLillo’s way. Lentricchia then creates a canonical coalition of Leftist/progressive writers that intentionally disrupt the purifying strategies of the politically cor- 31 Some Versions of the Samurai rect: besides DeLillo, the pantheon includes Morrison, Melville, Mailer, Didion, Doctorow (Lentricchia 1991: 3). Many critics would just as well jettison the notion of “political fiction” on the grounds that writers are powerful magicians in the realm of private imagination but utterly powerless as shapers of law or public values, but DeLillo, like the other writers Lentricchia mentions, will not entirely give up that ghost.4 Even though he knows in advance that political fiction is completely harmless to those who usurp the powers of government to benefit antidemocratic profiteers, DeLillo, accepting in advance the “death of the novel,” can be read as a samurai writer who is free to proceed in his attack precisely because he has fully accepted the notion that he must fail. Just because this battle cannot be won, it does not...