"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.
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