Mao II - Don Delillo [64]
He found the thought happy and attractive and he smiled through Bill’s hand-wagging and the motion of his shaking head.
“No. It’s pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They’re perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order.”
“Terror is the force that begins with a handful of people in a back room. Do they stress discipline? Are they implacable in their will? Of course. I think you have to take sides. Don’t comfort yourself with safe arguments. Take up the case of the downtrodden, the spat-upon. Do these people feel a yearning for order? Who will give it to them? Think of Chairman Mao. Order is consistent with permanent revolution.”
“Think of fifty million Red Guards.”
“Children actually, Bill. It was about faith. Luminous, sometimes stupid, sometimes cruel. Look today. Young boys everywhere posing with assault rifles. The young have a cruelty and unyieldingness that’s fully formed. I said in London. The more heartless, the more visible.”
“And the harder it becomes to defend a thing, the more you relish your position. Another kind of unyielding.”
They had another drink, sitting crouched, face to face, with motorcycles going by in the brassy street.
“Is it a little Maoist band you’re speaking for, George?”
“It’s an idea. It’s a picture of Lebanon without the Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, without the Iranian volunteers, the religious wars. We need a model that transcends all the bitter history. Something enormous and commanding. A figure of absolute being. This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being.”
“Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine.”
He shook out a match and held it.
“Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.”
He found he was angry, unexpectedly.
“And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose.”
There was no more medication. Ingested and absorbed. He decided so what, don’t need it anymore, and he didn’t bother finding out what was available over the counter in the pharmacy near the hotel. He wondered if he could get away with charging hotel and meals to Charlie’s conglomerate even though he