DeLillo News & Notes: has Jonathan Franzen learned anything from DeLillo?

An early exchange was typical of the entire interview. Franzen asked how important meaning was to DeLillo’s writing. “Not much,” the older writer deadpanned. “I’m a writer of sentences … I don’t know where meaning comes from.” Franzen was visibly chastened by this anti-response.

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I recently came across this story on Artforum, which interests me insofar as it provides insight into the relationship between Jonathan Franzen and DeLillo, from whom Franzen claims influence. Although I have already published a few posts on the relationship between DeLillo and DFW (see "commemorating the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide" and "DFW's 'miglior fabbro'"), I'll admit that I haven't spent any time heretofore discussing the relationship between him and Franzen. Partly, this is because I haven't much read Franzen -- though, this news story has me itching to do so.

Now, I'll say up front that I'm not sure if the writer of this story, Andrew Hultkrans, has some sort of bias against Franzen, but frankly, I don't care, as he offers enough good points to make up for it.

The best of these points, about the notion of "overexplaining," Hultkrans borrows from the critic James Wood (I've read Wood, yet I'm not exactly sure where this notion springs from -- perhaps a review of Franzen?). According to Hultkrans, Wood has criticized Franzen and other young writers as being "overexplainers." Adding his own two cents to this debate, Hultkrans writes that Franzen will "have to stop worrying so much about meaning and learn how to be coy when interviewed. [...] It's hard to continue the striptease when you're already naked."

While I can only say so much about Franzen, I can comment on how DeLillo has evaded this charge of overexplaining. In short, DeLillo has remarked on his work by saying that it shouldn't much be remarked on -- at least, not by him. By using DeLillo's first published interview, with Tom LeClair in 1982, we can clarify what he means. Responding to the very first question that LeClair asked -- "Why do reference books give only your date of birth and the publication dates of your books?" -- DeLillo offered this deft response:

Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. [...] If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether necessary. The sources weren't deep enough. Maybe this view is overrefined and too personal. But I think it helps explain why some writers are unable or unwilling to discuss their work.

In answer to a later question, DeLillo built on the above point:

There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of it. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

While he may be incapable of being "straightforward and penetrating" about his own work, DeLillo is very much so about writers overexplaining their writing: Don't do it. Instead, DeLillo says, simply cherish and trust the fact that "life is still full of mystery." A writer fails to recognize this truth when he or she attempts to overexplain his or her work.

With this information in mind, perhaps we can better understand why, according to Hultkrans, "DeLillo's eyes widened" when he heard that he "meant more to [Franzen] than any other writer": Franzen, it seems, does not understand the role of the novelist in the same way as DeLillo.

Now, I'm not a novelist myself, so I can't exactly comment on which is the better method, but I can at least say this: If DeLillo, as Hultkrans writes, did indeed designate Franzen as "'the future of the novel,'" then let's hope that Franzen starts coming to class and taking some notes because it's evident that he really hasn't learned anything from DeLillo.

At least, not yet.

Favorite Passages: "soccer in history"

Another humorous yet insightful comment from DeLillo about the world's most famous sport and its relationship with America.

I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?

-- "Hammer and Sickle,"
The Angel Esmeralda

Registers of Affect #11: bodily forces

She felt the uneasy force, the strangeness of seeing a man who had lived in her mind for years as words alone--the force of a body in a room.

-- Mao II

DeLillo News & Notes: a DeLillo-esque moment: Mitt Romney pumping his own gas

We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America.

-- End Zone

"It is pretty amazing that in such a short period of time you can go from missing becoming the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world by a couple % to pumping your own gas like everyone else."

Image and passage reproduced from Reddit. See more HERE.

11/22/12: in commemoration of Libra

I think every emotion we felt is part of that film, and certainly confusion is one of the larger ones, yes. Confusion and horror. The head shot is like some awful, pornographic moment that happens without warning in our living rooms--some truth about the world, some unspeakable activity people engage in that we don't want to know about. And after the confusion about when Kennedy is first hit, and when Connally is hit, and why the president's wife is scrambling over the seat, and simultaneous with the horror of the head shot, part of the horror, perhaps--there's a bolt of revelation. Because the head shot is the most direct kind of statement that the lethal bullet was fired from the front. Whatever the physical possibilities concerning impact and reflex, you look at this thing and wonder what's going on. Are you seeing some distortion inherent in the film medium or in your own perception of things? Are you the willing victim of some enormous lie of the state--a lie, a wish, a dream? Or, did the shot simply come from the front, as every cell in your body tells you it did?

-- Don DeLillo

Registers of Affect #10: the affective power of small rooms

Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.

There is a world inside the world.

-- Libra

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See: DeLillo, "The History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (I'm still struggling to find a link to this essay)

DeLillo News & Notes: Don DeLillo is DFW's "miglior fabbro"

In a recent review of DFW's new collection of nonfiction essays, Both Flesh and Not, D.T. Max -- staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace -- makes several references to Don DeLillo.

Specifically, Max mentions the DD-DFW correspondence, which I plan to sift through in the spring when I visit the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. (This correspondence, I'm sure, has yet to receive the attention it deserves.)

This review is also particularly interesting to me because Max, drawing on T.S. Eliot's dedication to Ezra Pound in The Waste Land, refers to DeLillo as Wallace's "miglior fabbro." 

Here's the link:

"D.F.W.'s Nonfiction: Better with Age"

Enjoy!

DeLillo Interviews: a seminal interview (1993)

"Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction No. 135"

In 1993, Adam Begley put together what may just be the best interview with DeLillo to date. Here DeLillo discusses everything from language and the process of writing to literature and film. Because there is really no way to boil this interview down, I have opted to reproduce the highlights from this interview into four sections below:

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Process of Writing:

A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper [...] 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.

You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involves a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often--completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere.

But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences.

But I'm aware of the fact that time is limited. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract--let me live long enough to do one more book. How many books do we get? How much good work?


Language:

I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.


But before everything, there's language. 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.


The State of Literature Today:

[...] I think we need to invent beauty, search out some restoring force. A writer may describe the ugliness and pain in graphic terms but he can also try to find a dignity and significance in ruined parts of the city, and the people he sees there.

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.

Today, the world has become a book--more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage. And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic narrative that used to belong to the novel.


Film:

Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything?

The [Zapruder] film represents all the hopefulness we invest in technology.

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not--examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. [...] This is the world narrative, so they play it until everyone in the world has seen it.

Favorite Passages: "the simplest greeting"

So true.

What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It's as thought one friend says to another, "How good is it to say 'How are you?'" The other replying, "When I answer 'I am well and how are you,' what I really mean to say is that I'm delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things--they bridge the lonely distances."

-- The Names

Registers of Affect #9: the "heaving and breathing" of systems

"Systems heaving and breathing all around you. Tell us. That sort of essence in the air. That sort of underbreath of powerful thrilling systems."

-- Valparaiso

DeLillo News & Notes: ALA 2012: DeLillo and Film

The Don DeLillo Society will be hosting a session at the ALA (American Literature Association) Conference in Boston in May of 2013. The topic is "DeLillo and Film." As described by the DD Society:

Topic: DeLillo and Film. David Cronenberg’s _Cosmopolis_ marks the long awaited adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel. But DeLillo has long been interested in film, from his screenplay for _Game 6_, use of real and imagined films throughout his novels (_Americana_, _Running Dog_, _Underworld_, _Point Omega_), references to filmmakers in interviews (“I began to understand the force that movies could have emotionally and intellectually in what I consider the great era of the European films: Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman . . . Kubrick and Howard Hawks”), and use of cinematic technique in the novels themselves. Papers may develop these or other topics related to DeLillo and film.

Please send a title, abstract (300 words), AV needs, and brief bio to Jesse Kavadlo, Maryville University, at jkavadlo@...<mailto:jkavadlo@...> by January 1, 2013.

More information can be found HERE.

Registers of Affect #8: the "secret" energies of television

Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy.

-- Players

DeLillo News & Notes: 125 Boxes of DeLillo at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX!

Doing early preparation for my trip to the Harry Ransom Center in the spring, I came across this interesting article in The New Yorker written by D.T. Max, who recently published a biography on DFW. The middle-third of the article provides a nice description of the DeLillo collection. For my own part, I'm excited to see and touch the pages of the drafts themselves, especially given DeLillo's penchant for emphasizing the importance of the visual nature of his typewriter-produced manuscripts.

Here's the link: "Final Destination: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?"

Enjoy!