DeLillo: World Narrative

[joeallonby]

on 4/16/03 5:31 PM, bekalex at bekalex at ocsnet.net wrote:

> 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
> 
Thanks. I'll have to reread Mao II now.

Peace
Joe