>"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."
>"Interesting. How so?"
>"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."
>"And the more clearly we see the terror, the less impact we feel from art."
>"I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."
>"Very nice indeed."
>"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."
>"In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. 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. I said in London, Bill. It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you."
Is DeLillo the most prescient writer of our time?
Yes
there's no point to being an artist when terrorists are running around a major city killing people and blowing shit up on the reg
you can't make any art let alone a novel that will affect people more than that/
>>7356226
Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451, where the police chief talks about societies evolution into "blur and glut" and the firemen.
>>7356226
I have a booktube channel, and I thought about making a video of the relevance of Mao II and this passage in particular. I didnt do it because I thought I'dbe laughed at, so I guess now Im missing out onbig youtube bucks.
>>7356468
It's a great book. DFW quoted from it on multiple occasions and there are parts of IJ that seem directly lifted (I'm thinking of the metaphor of time being a line of ants slowly crawling along). This passage does seem particularly relevant after the events in Paris
>>7356497
I was actually reminded of it back in the Charlie Hebdo incident. but i bet theres countless other s that im not thinking about or heard of.
>>7356226
DeLillo vastly overestimates the influence that novelists held over mass consciousness before the era of worldwide terrorism. The majority of people don't read many novels at all, and certainly not any novels of literary merit that will influence their worldview. Their worldview is shaped by mass media and religion, not novels.
>>7356604
Delillo drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.
Who was the writer/critic who said that 'Beckett was the last artist to influence the society, ever since it's been the terrorists'?
I think they have sth in common w/ DeLillo.
>>7356395
>there's no point to being an artist when terrorists are running around a major city killing people and blowing shit up on the reg
Tell that to late 15th/early 16th century Italy.
>>7356635
>comparing global consciousness of mankind from 5 centuries ago to the contemporary one
shiggy
>>7356395
I'll stand with Vonnegut's view of why one should practice the arts, or of Bukowski's quote describing what fiction is.
The point is greater and more important than ever. Terrorism and war may snuff us, but will never touch our creative humanity.
>>7356621
OP is a dialog conversation in Mao II
>>7356726
>I'll stand with Vonnegut's view of why one should practice the arts, or of Bukowski's quote describing what fiction is.
Post it.
>>7356726
>I'll stand with Vonnegut's view of why one should practice the arts, or of Bukowski's quote describing what fiction is.
Post that shit motherfucker, the point of your post is completely lost without the quotes.
Stockhausen said something similarly in 2003 about the 9/11 attack
Below is somewhat relevant I think.
DeLillo in his interview with Paris Review -
"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."
>>7356726
>Terrorism and war may snuff us, but will never touch our creative humanity.
When you're dead you can't be creative.
>>7356226
>>"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."
He's right.
> Is DeLillo the most prescient writer of our time?
Yes. He predicted 9/11 and it's possible Osama bin Laden stole Delillo's idea.
>>7356604
The lines are spoken by a reclusive author talking to a photographer doing an article on him.
There's a level of irony and ambiguity as to whether Delillo agrees. Plus that ending.
> "You'll wonder what made you mad."
> "I already have the World Trade Center."
> "And it's already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse."
> "What?" she said.
> "If there was only one tower instead of two."
> "You mean they interact. There is a play of light."
> "Wouldn't a single tower be much worse?"
> "No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it's like a dialogue, only I don't know what they're saying."
> "They're saying, 'Have a nice day.'"
Players even spookier, if I recall correctly. One character mistakenly thinks a plane is about to fly into the world trade center buildings, and the other character works in the WTC and becomes some kind of terrorist (non-religious albeit).
I just finished watching the 2nd half of the film adaptation of "Cosmopolis" on BBC2 tonight. It had me intrigued, resulting in a brief search of DeLillo on the web.
Is there a particularly good entry point to his works or shall I go on as intended and start with a reading of Cosmopolis?
>>7356627
Bill Gray (the character from Mao II).
>>7356604
Harold Bloom basically says the same thing: Beckett was the last true genius, and since then it's all been hit or miss. He thinks all the po-mo writers are inconsistent (even Pynchon).
But also Delillo chooses Beckett specifically because Beckett has that sort of political/existential resistance in the face of both capitalism and communism. No one really knows how to deal with capitalism and in this sense, Bill Gray is right, no one has gone beyond Beckett.
Since Beckett the novelist/writer has become increasingly marginalized. There really is no big writer to compare. No groundbreaking household name.
Delillo is OK with the novelist getting less attention. He thinks it's still necessary to work in those margins and push boundaries.
>>7357753
Mao II is a good entry.
Libra and Underworld are his best imo.
>>7357753
I started with White Noise and was intrigued to read more. Picked up and read Americana on a whim, then read Libra (my favorite so far). I'll most likely read Mao II next.
>>7357753
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc
>>7357753
Seconded (thirded) on Libra. Easy to get invested in then the pages just fly. Great book.
>>7357760
So has no one gone beyond Beckett because he was the last artist who still held some sway over the public's consciousness
or
Has no one gone beyond Beckett because Beckett was such an incredible genius that there's no match for him.
When people talk about Beckett's greatness and originality, are they mainly referring to his plays or his novels? What was so groundbreaking about Molloy and the other two?
DeLillo said in an interview (I think it's this one but don't kill me if I'm wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ_iDyzxxTE) that he does not agree with Bill Gray's views on terrorism and art.
>>7358751
Maybe it has more to do with Beckett's sort of Adornian "at least I can resist" maxim.
So if Beckett's plays are themselves about resistance, Beckett is also the figure to represent the writer's resistance (against terrorism) but not to actually defeat it. Just resistance, that's all.
And I think this is Delillo's stance. No guarantees of success, just resistance. And this is necessary.
>>7356726
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding."
Was this the Vonnegut quote?
>>7361288
Almost there. The quote continues. Read a little further on.
And Bukowski?
Nail that and you've got all ye needs to know.
And now ... I hear the creak of jihad crowbaring away my door, and the droning buzz preying along from above.
Six months? Or six seconds? For either I shall do my typing as Asimov said. As answers to this thread -- all one and the same.
