I dreamed about Marilyn Hacker last night, again:
I fall asleep drunk and dream of Lee Harvey Oswald –
in the dream, I’m his wife, the one he beats,
and we have a baby who knows how to open doors.
He’s not faithful. He has sex with a schoolteacher on the front seats
of our car, and when she gets out, it’s raining. The rain
is a sheet over the front steps, puddles on the walkway,
but something pink or red floats on top. Petals?
He’s going to kill her and I wake up. When I remember the dream
I wonder if someone I’m having sex with is going to kill me.
I remember sitting at the window in the apartment in Baltimore
icing my wrist and face and how guilty it felt,
that I hadn’t made it work. The summer of cicadas.
Their bodies three deep. I can’t tell if I’m still that woman.
I can’t tell if it’s going to happen again.
Monica Wendel
(Source: lambdaliterary.org)
Before history and politics, there’s language. And it’s language, the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head—this is the thing that makes my work go. And art can be exhilarating despite the darkness—and there’s certainly much darker material than mine—if the reader is sensitive to the music. What I try to do is create complex human beings, ordinary-extraordinary men and women who live in the particular skin of the late twentieth century. I try to record what I see and hear and sense around me—what I feel in the currents, the electric stuff of the culture. I think these are American forces and energies. And they belong to our time.
—Don DeLillo
(Source: theparisreview.org)
- DeLILLO: ... If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying. This is what we eventually confront if we think long enough and hard enough.
- INTERVIEWER: Could it be related to the idea in Libra that—
- DeLILLO: —all plots lead toward death? I guess that’s possible. It happens in Libra, and it happens in White Noise, which doesn’t necessarily mean that these are highly plotted novels. Libra has many digressions and meditations, and Oswald’s life just meanders along for much of the book. It’s the original plotter, Win Everett, who wonders if his conspiracy might grow tentacles that will turn an assassination scare into an actual murder, and of course this is what happens. The plot extends its own logic to the ultimate point. And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.
The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured -
“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” — Don DeLillo
(Source: theparisreview.org)
- INTERVIEWER: How do you imagine your audience?
- DeLILLO: When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
- INTERVIEWER: I’ve read critics who say that your books are bound to make people feel uncomfortable.
- DeLILLO: Well, that’s good to know. But this reader we’re talking about—he already feels uncomfortable. He’s very uncomfortable. And maybe what he needs is a book that will help him realize he’s not alone.
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
—Don DeLillo
(Source: theparisreview.org)
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. How much of this did I feel at the time? Maybe just an inkling, an instinct. Writing was mainly an unnameable urge, an urge partly propelled by the writers I was reading at the time.
—Don DeLillo
(Source: theparisreview.org)
