Pg. 41 of David Markson’s copy of Mao II by Don DeLillo:
On which Markson wrote a note in the margins next to a passage in DeLillo’s novel.
The DeLillo passage reads:
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”
Markson’s response?:
“Too facile.”
He placed a line next to the passage as well, and wrote something more, under “Too facile,” but then crossed out whatever he had written.
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This exchange reminds me of Markson making a similar connection between writers (as terrorists) and terrorists (as terrorists)…
In his novel Vanishing Point, Markson quoted a passage from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:
“When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming to blow up New York.” (Pg. 169).
Immediately after that passage, Markson wrote this:
“Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists.” (Pg. 169).
And throughout the entirety of Vanishing Point, the specter of 9/11 rears its head.
(After all, it was published in 2004, only a few short years after the towers fell.
And was being written when the towers fell.)
On pg. 8, Markson wrote:
“The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.”
On pg. 40, Markson used the quote:
“Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!”
Which had been said by a young, naive schoolgirl unknowingly commenting on the bodies falling from the burning buildings.
On pg. 79, Markson let the Author assert his presence with:
“Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.
Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.”
And on pg. 111, Markson connected:
“Jack the Ripper was left-handed.
Like Osama bin Laden.”
As Françoise Palleau-Papin explained in her study of Markson, This Is Not A Tragdy, re: Vanishing Point:
“The novel also deals with current affairs, but in a roundabout fashion, as when we are reminded of the nineteenth-century definition of the word ‘terrorist’: ‘Terrorists. Which was in fact the literary term chosen to categorize the earliest nineteenth-century female Gothic novelists’ (p. 169). To move implicitly to the political definition of terrorism from the word’s former literary sense draws our attention to the power of writing. Literary terror does not kill but thrills, and, presented in its uncanny, Gothic aspect, it questions our culture. But, implicitly, Author is also concerned with the contemporary definition of terrorists and feels terror when faced with the barbarity of his times, and wishes to impart his fears and views.” (Pg. 256).
No matter what our opinion as Readers (of Markson Reading) is of his assessment that DeLillo’s passage in Mao II on writers/terrorists is “too facile,” we can certainly agree that Markson’s wrestling with the same issue in Vanishing Point is anything but “facile.” The way the concept of terror in the post-9/11 world creeps up on you subtly by a few scattered mentions throughout Vanishing Point, and then comes to a crescendo on pg. 169 with him bringing it back to writers as terrorists is done without hammering it over the reader’s head whatsoever.