DeLillo: World Narrative

[bekalex]

At 12:50 PM -0700 4/16/03, s~Z wrote:
>"For many years," he says, "probably since the late 1980s, I've thought it
>wasn't novelists who were writing the world narrative anymore. It was
>terrorists. It seemed that the air -- that the news itself but, beyond that,
>the air -- was filled with that kind of threat and that kind of violence.
>It's not as though novelists ever had that kind of effect, but there was a
>time when you could think of the world as having been created in a piece of
>fiction or a body of work."
>
>http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-ulin15apr15.story

Well, he's consistent.

Mao II (1991).

paperback pg 33

	"There is a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists.
	In the West we become famous effigies as our  books lose the
	power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they
	feel about this? 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.

	"But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles
	photographing writers. Because we're giving way to terror, to
	news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios to
	bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative
	 people need. The darker the news, the grander the narratives.
	News is the last addiction before - what? I don't know. But
	you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear."


page 157

	"Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person
	who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The
	artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and
	processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV
	commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't
	figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill
	the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed,
	the only language the West understands. The way they determine
	how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless
	streaming images."


Becky