The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Don DeLillo · a novel in a prologue, two parts and an epilogue · Viking, New York, 1991 · scored on DeLillo’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of the writer and his vocation as political parable; the cult, the hostage drama and the photograph in one meditative book
Mythos
The hidden author as a god withdrawn, whose photograph is his last appearance; one man offered in exchange for another, and the exchange never completed; the crowd and the leader’s face across the world: myth named more than built
Phase
The late 1980s, after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie of February 1989: from a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium through a novelist’s last months to Beirut
Presentation
Fiction; a prologue, two parts and an epilogue, in the third person throughout, the point of view moving among Bill Gray, Scott Martineau, Karen Janney and Brita Nilsson
Register
Grave, ironic and meditative throughout: the choral narration of the prologue, Bill’s long and bitter talk, the debates with Haddad, the cold watching of crowds
Scale
Four persons, a house in hiding and a few cities, with the cult, the hostage-taking and the image economy that reach them
Governing Proposition
A novelist who has not published in many years lives hidden in upstate New York, rewriting one book, kept by his assistant, with a young woman in the house who was married to a stranger at a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium; a photographer comes to take his picture, his old editor draws him to London to read in public for a poet held hostage in Beirut, and he dies unidentified on a ferry bound for Lebanon while the book passes on to others. The wager of the novel is that in a culture of mass images the novelist has ceded his claim on the inner life of a society to the terrorist and the crowd, and that a short novel can show the writer’s solitude and the longing to dissolve into a crowd as one motion.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in Yankee Stadium, at a mass wedding of the Unification Church. Thousands of couples are married at once, each to a partner the church has chosen, and among them is Karen Janney, married to a stranger. Her parents are in the stands, searching the field through binoculars for one face among thousands. The narration moves as a chorus: the couples, the parents, the leader of the church and the scale of the stadium are carried together in one long movement, and the daughter her parents look for is dissolving into the mass as they look.
The prologue closes on a prophecy: “The future belongs to crowds.” It is the book’s first claim and the first term of its frame. Whatever the novel goes on to show of one man’s solitude, it has set that solitude against this: thousands of persons made one body by a faith and a leader, and a daughter lost to her parents in plain sight. The scene is terrible and grand at once, and it is the height from which the rest of the book is measured.
Don DeLillo published Mao II with Viking in 1991, after White Noise and Libra. It is a short novel in a prologue, two parts and an epilogue, told in the third person throughout, the point of view moving among four people: Karen; Bill Gray, a novelist; Scott Martineau, his assistant; and Brita Nilsson, a photographer. Its matter is the late 1980s, the years of the hostages in Beirut and of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989, and its title names Andy Warhol’s images of Mao Zedong, which the novel brings into view: a leader’s face made into a repeated image.
Movement II
Bill Gray has not published a book in many years. He lives hidden in upstate New York, and for most of those years he has been rewriting one novel. His assistant, Scott Martineau, keeps the house, the manuscript and the secret of where he is. Karen, out of the stadium, lives in the house with them. The three make a strange family: the writer who will not be seen, the young man who has made the writer’s concealment his work, and the young woman married to a stranger at a leader’s word.
The house is an economy of concealment. Bill’s power as an author has come to lie in his absence: the less he is seen, the more his name means, and the unfinished book is kept like a relic. The long scenes in the house set out that economy, and then set it out again, and the book’s patience with them is also where it slackens. What they show is a man who has made himself invisible and who suspects that invisibility is all that is left of what a novelist once was.
Bill’s belief, argued in his own long talk, is that the novelist once claimed to shape the inner life of a society, and that the claim has passed to others: to the men who make bombs and take hostages, and to the crowd. He says it bitterly and well. The book lets him state its meaning as an essay states one, and the meaning is heard more than it is seen. Beside him Karen carries the other half of what the book finds, without arguing it: her longing to dissolve into a crowd, a cult or a leader’s face is the counterpart of his solitude, not its opposite.
Movement III
Brita Nilsson, a Swedish photographer of writers, comes to the house to photograph Bill, and he lets himself be seen. The session is the hinge of the book: the hidden author hands over his face, and the photograph will be his last appearance. What he cannot give the world as a book he gives it as an image, and the image will outlast him as the unfinished novel does not.
Charles Everson, Bill’s old editor, draws him out of hiding to London. A Swiss poet is held hostage in Beirut, and Bill is to read in public for him. The writer who has refused for years to be seen offers himself in the cause of a man in a room: one man for another, the oldest of bargains. The poet never appears in the book. His absence is required, since what the book argues is that the man in the room has become an image, held by men who know what images are worth.
The London event is broken by a bomb, and the reading does not take place. Bill goes on, out of the reach of his house and his assistant, toward the side that holds the poet. The form has begun to carry the claim: the man who kept his face from view has given it away, and the story he once commanded from hiding now carries him where he cannot command it.
Movement IV
George Haddad speaks for the side that holds the poet. With Bill he argues the book’s thesis from the other end: that the terrorist now does what the novelist once did, shaping how a society sees itself, and that the age belongs to those who make events rather than books. The debates are intelligent, and they are speeches. They argue writer against terrorist several times in nearly the same terms, and what they carry is set in dialogue rather than made by the shape of the book.
Bill is hurt in an accident in the street. The exchange he offered is never completed, and it fails not by the logic of the bargain but by chance. He travels on, injured, and dies alone on a ferry bound for Lebanon. His papers are taken. No one on board knows who he is.
It is the strongest thing the book builds. The hidden author, whose power was his absence and whose last appearance was a photograph, dies in an anonymity that is the exact reversal of that image: unrecognised and without a name, while the narrative passes on to others. The novel goes on without its novelist, and the going on is its argument. After the prologue this is the book’s height, a quiet one, an extinction rather than a climax.
Movement V
Karen is alone in New York. She moves among the homeless of the city, and she watches crowds on television, one after another, with a cold attention. She came out of a crowd in the first pages and is drawn back toward one; her sections drift, and the drift is hers. Through her the book holds the city and the cult, the parents she left in the stands and the faces on the screen, and holds them as one longing.
Brita, at the end, is in Beirut, to photograph Abu Rashid, a leader whose followers go hooded and wear his image. The photographer of writers now photographs a man who has made himself the author of a crowd. The novel that opened on thousands married at once in a stadium closes among followers who have given up their faces for a leader’s, and between the two stands the man who tried to keep his face from being seen. The epilogue rises at its close.
Mao II won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992. After September 2001 its pairing of novelist and terrorist was read again as foresight, and DeLillo’s essay “In the Ruins of the Future”, in Harper’s in December 2001, sent readers back to it. It is read now as one of his novels, taught in courses on him and on fiction after 2001, its surface fixed to the hostages, the cult weddings and the fatwa of its years. It is a short book that argues more than it shows, opened by one of the great set pieces of its author’s career.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the frame passes it: the crowd of the prologue and the hooded followers of the epilogue are the two terms between which one man’s solitude is set, and neither could go. The poet held in Beirut never appears, and his absence is required, since the book’s argument is that the man in the room has become an image. The middle passes less well. The long scenes in Bill’s house, with Scott and Karen and then with Brita and her camera, set out the hermit’s economy of concealment and then restate it; the exchanges with Haddad argue writer against terrorist several times in nearly the same terms; and Karen’s New York drifts in a way the book does not always make purposeful. Perhaps a sixth of the whole could go without loss.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in a culture of mass images the novelist, who once claimed to shape the inner life of a society, has ceded that place to the terrorist and the crowd, and the hidden author survives only as a photograph. Beside it Karen carries a second: the longing to dissolve the self into a crowd, a cult or a leader’s face is the counterpart of the writer’s solitude, not its opposite. The first was read as prophecy after 2001, but it rests on the 1980s of hostages and the fatwa, and is credited on what it showed then. Held a tenth short of the bar because much of it is argued aloud, in Bill’s speeches and his debates with Haddad, as an essay argues, and because Karen is drawn more as a sensibility than as a person whose inwardness is opened.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The prologue is one of DeLillo’s great set pieces: thousands of couples married at once in a stadium, the parents’ binoculars searching for one face, the person dissolving into the mass, and at the close a prophecy, “The future belongs to crowds.” That is a real height, terrible and grand. Karen’s watching of crowds on television reaches a cold awe; Bill’s death, alone and unidentified on a ferry, his papers taken, has the quiet grandeur of an extinction; the Beirut epilogue rises at its close. Between these the house scenes and the debates run level, and the book’s mode is argument more than elevation. One summit and several lesser heights in a mainly discursive book: the height recurs, but not often.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Deep patterns are evoked more than built. The hidden author is a god withdrawn, whose absence is his power and whose photograph is his last appearance; the writer offers himself for the hostage, one man for another, and the exchange is never completed; the father of the cult in the stadium and the leader in Beirut are one figure across the world. These organise the book, but the characters name them, Bill above all, more than the structure enacts them, and the exchange fails by an accident in the street, not by the logic of the myth. The strongest built element is Bill’s death unrecognised, the exact reversal of the image the photograph made. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that the myth is spoken more than carried.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the novel of the writer and his vocation, from James’s tales of the master to Roth’s Zuckerman books and the many novels of the reclusive author; the political thriller; and DeLillo’s own Players, Running Dog and The Names, novels of terror and its theatre. The turn was to stake a novel on an argument about the novel’s own obsolescence, made from within a novel, and to set the photograph and the mass image beside it as rival forms; the prologue’s choral method departs from the writer’s novel as well. The stake was modest: the book followed DeLillo’s two largest successes, worked ground his earlier novels of terror had opened, and kept a conventional third person. A swerve in its subject more than in its instrument.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The frame is the instrument. A prologue in which persons vanish into a crowd and an epilogue in which a leader’s face stands for his followers’ faces enclose a middle in which one man tries to keep his face from being seen, and fails. Bill leaves the book before its end, dying unidentified while the narrative passes to others, and the leaving enacts the thesis that the author has gone out of the story. The third person, moving among four minds, keeps any one consciousness from governing, which is the book’s picture of a world in which the solitary voice no longer holds the centre. Held off the higher reaches because the middle could be told in another order without loss, and the debates of the second part are content set in dialogue, not knowledge made by form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over thirty-five years. The book has a steady place in the criticism of DeLillo and a second life after September 2001, when its pairing of novelist and terrorist was reread as foresight, and DeLillo’s own essay “In the Ruins of the Future”, in Harper’s in December 2001, sent readers back to it. The readings it supports are real and several: the author and the image, after Warhol; the crowd and the self; terror as a form of narrative; the photograph as a rival art. But they lie near the surface, because the book states them. Held here because the return is mostly to its arguments, and its arguments, stated in so many words by the people who carry them, are known after one reading.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the American novel of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book set the writer against the terrorist and the crowd as rival authors of the culture, and gave American fiction a figure, the hidden novelist overtaken by the image, that it has used since; it did not reorganise what the novel could do, and its method is DeLillo’s own, already formed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction of 1992; a standing among the most cited novels in the argument about fiction and terrorism, above all after 2001, when its lines on novelists and terrorists were widely quoted; and an influence on the novel of the vanishing writer that is felt more than documented. No school turned on it, and its reach lies mostly within criticism and the conversation of writers.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole and has been in print throughout. Its presence is continuous but narrow: it is read as one of DeLillo’s novels, taught in courses on him and on fiction after 2001, and less read beyond them than White Noise, Libra or Underworld. Its surface is fixed to its moment more than most books of its age: the Beirut hostages, the cult weddings, the fatwa, the photograph and the fax. Against that, its theme was found more pertinent after 2001 than in 1991. Both charges stand, the narrow presence and the topical surface, and they hold it a tenth below Time’s Arrow and Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and level with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between, and argued from construction more than from sentences. The prologue is a feat of choral narration: the couples, the parents in the stands, the leader, the scale of the stadium, all carried in one long movement to its closing sentence, “The future belongs to crowds.” Bill’s voice, in his long talks with Brita and with Haddad, is intelligent and bitter and carries the argument, and the prose at its best is DeLillo’s mature instrument, compressed, rhythmic and exact about the surfaces of a culture. Three charges: the debates are speeches; Scott and Karen at times speak in Bill’s oracular register; and the second part moves between its strands more loosely than the prologue promised.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs: the self is drawn toward its own disappearance, into a crowd, a cult, an image or a hiding place, and the strands are cases of it. Take the two most distant elements, the wedding in the stadium in New York and the hooded followers in Beirut. They obey it, and Bill’s hiding and Karen’s longing for the leader are seen to be one motion. The tone is held, grave, ironic and meditative throughout. Charged: the law is tighter in statement than in action. The bomb in London and the accident in the street are plot events the law does not require, and Karen’s New York runs on a looser physics than the rest. The range is wide in place and narrow in tone, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders are several, and the crowd and the self join them: the writer’s consciousness and vocation; religion as cult; the household, Bill, Scott and Karen as a strange family, with Karen’s parents in the stands; the city and its homeless; international politics as terror and hostage-taking; the image economy and its art, Warhol and the photograph; history in the face of Mao. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that several are present as reference more than as held reality: Beirut is seen briefly and late, politics appears as theory spoken by Haddad, and labour, class and the state as an institution are absent. The scale is a short novel’s: four persons and a few cities.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.5, then The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Imperishable at 8.3. A choral narration that carries a stadium wedding in one long movement to its prophecy, and a mature prose exact about the surfaces of a culture; a disclosure that holds, that the novelist has ceded the inner life of a society to the terrorist and the crowd and survives as a photograph; and a text whole and in print for thirty-five years, its theme found more pertinent after 2001 than in 1991.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 7.7. The first because the hidden author as a god withdrawn, the exchange never completed and the leader’s face are named by the characters more than enacted by the structure, and the exchange fails by accident; the second because several orders are held as reference more than as reality, Beirut seen briefly and late, politics spoken as theory, labour, class and the state absent, in a field of four persons and a few cities. Next above them, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8: a figure the novel has used since, but no school turned on it, and its reach lies mostly within criticism.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short of the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable at 8.3 two tenths short, and The Swerve at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 fall further below it. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven it governs is The Archetypal Deep at 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.0, stands below it as well, at the foot of Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Don DeLillo’s Mao II, published by Viking, New York, in 1991: his tenth novel, after Libra (1988). It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992. It is scored as one novel in a prologue, two parts and an epilogue, in DeLillo’s English as first published. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: one sentence, the last of the prologue. The sentences of the book, the sequence of the second part and the particulars of the epilogue are held less closely than its shape and its people; where that is so the page argues from construction, and nothing is credited or charged beyond what is known. Facts that could not be verified, among them the titles of the prologue and the epilogue, the photographs that may open the sections, the page count of the first edition, the city of Bill’s accident, the setting in which Warhol’s images appear, the particular crowds Karen watches on television and the record of the book’s critics, are not given. Citations are by part.