The New Tragic Narrative

[Dave Monroe]

Can't recall if this has come up already, but, from
Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997) ...

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and
terrorists ... 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 ... What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
 The degree to which they influence mass consciousness
is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility
and thought.  The danger they represent equals our own
failure to be dangerous ... Beckett is the last writer
to shape the way we think and see.  After him, the
major work involves midair explosions and crumbled
buildings.  This is the new tragic narrative."

Cited in Tony Tanner, The American Mystery (New York:
Cambridge UP, 2000), Ch. 11, "Don DeLillo and 'The
American Mystery': Underworld," pp. 201-21.  I don't
have DeLillo's novel handy, and Tanner (maddingly)
provides no pagination, so not only do I not know the
page number(s) here, I don't even know whose ellipses
those are.  The following chapter, by the way, is on
Mason & Dixon ("'The Rubbish-Tip for Subjunctive
Hopes,'" pp. 222-38) ...

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