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.

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.

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 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.

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!

DeLillo News & Notes: DeLillo receives the Carl Sandburg Literary Award

On October 17, 2012, both DeLillo and Walter Isaacson (author of Steve Jobs, Einstein: His Life and Universe) received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award (DeLillo for fiction, Isaacson for nonfiction).

According to the article that I read, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award "is presented annually to an acclaimed author in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public's awareness of the written word."

Congratulations to DeLillo!

DeLillo News & Notes: an odd website about White Noise

I recently came across an odd website that relates to DeLillo. Called "White Noise on White Noise," it is basically just a collection of 36 fragments from DeLillo's novel that the user can experience one-by-one.

According to the home page, the purpose of the website is "to provide an experience akin to quickly browsing through the novel in a bookstore."

It also links parts of the the text to other websites in order to "bring forth the appropriate emotional or cultural response."

Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of this website, but playing with it is interesting. I would suggest browsing through it at least once.

Enjoy!

DeLillo News & Notes: Why you shouldn't pay attention to New York Magazine's "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre"

In 2007, New York Magazine published this "Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre" on their website. While I think that this is a great idea, especially for a writer like DeLillo, I think that it could have been executed much better.

For example, I cannot understand why Mao II -- a short, accessible book with big ideas about images, terrorism, and novelists, a book that won the Pen/Faulkner Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist -- is listed as "Recommended" instead of "Classic." Nor can I fathom why End Zone -- an early, eerie, and deeply funny book about the relationship between war and football -- is "For Fans Only"; certainly it should be "Recommended."

This guide, following in the footsteps of many critics, asks us to disregard DeLillo's post-Underworld writings, including Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Love-Lies-Bleeding. Though I understand why someone might criticize these works, I just cannot get on-board with it. I would recommended Valparaiso and especially Cosmopolis (which, we can say with hindsight, proved part of its worth when the American economy recessed.) The only exception, perhaps, is the Body Artist: I am still searching for a way to redeem this book.

Finally, Libra, one of my favorite DeLillo novels, is, I must say, something of a departure from his usual writing style. So, even though it is an enjoyable read, it does not give someone a good introduction into DeLillo's sensibilities as a writer. For this reason, it may not be the best place to begin. At the same time, the highlight of Libra -- i.e. the assassination of President Kennedy -- does provide the basis on which all of DeLillo's work is built, and this may be sufficient justification for reading it first.

As I wrote in a previous review that I expect to publish on this blog tomorrow, I believe that DeLillo's recently published short-story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, provides the best introduction to his work because it is accessible, easy to read, features classic DeLillo themes, and spans the better part of his writing career (1979-2011). (Of course, this short-story collection was not in print when the New York Magazine created its guide.)

Or, if it must be a novel, then I would recommend that one begin with White Noise. It's difficult to find a better representative text of DeLillo than this.

DeLillo News & Notes: using DeLillo to understand Hurricane Isaac

As a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, I had the pleasure of "experiencing" Hurricane Isaac earlier this month -- that is to say, I watched all of the different things that the media had to say about Isaac on television from the safety of a hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. Perhaps it's only because I was reading DeLillo at the time, but I was struck by how much the media's presentation of Isaac resembled the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise.

As I constantly flipped through news channels (it seems that everyone, even me, likes a little disaster (imagery) in life), I kept hearing different things: "Isaac's just a tropical storm"; "Isaac is bordering on a Category One"; "Isaac expected to turn into a Category Two when it makes landfall." Not only did every news channel seem to have a competing opinion about what Isaac was, I also kept thinking that all of these arbitrary names -- "tropical storm"; "Category One"; "Category Two" -- were supposed to signify some hopefulness on our part that we could use language to control this event.

As I mentioned above, all of these thoughts that I was having reminded me of the "airborne toxic event" of White Noise. Readers familiar with White Noise are also aware that there is a mysterious toxic spill that occurs about halfway through the novel. This spill takes on new identities as the media decides to issue them. I have reproduced the three-part progression of this incident from "a feathery plume" to "a black billowing cloud" to an" airborne toxic event" (the names and backgrounds of the characters aren't important in order for me to make my point):


An hour later he was back in the attic, this time with a radio and highway map. I climbed the narrow stairs, borrowed the glasses and looked again. It was still there, a slightly large accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.

"The radio calls it a feathery plume," he said. "But it's not a plume."

"What is it?"

"Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?"

"Air time is valuable. They can't go into long tortured descriptions." (111)

...

"That was the Stovers," she said. "They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore."

"What are they calling it?"

"A black billowing cloud."

"That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming to grips with the thing. Good." (113)

...

"It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore."

"What are they calling it?"

He looked at me carefully.

"The airborne toxic event."

He spoke these words in a clipped and foreboding manner, syllable by syllable, as if he sensed the threat in state-created terminology. (117)


The best thing about this section of White Noise is twofold. On the one hand, DeLillo uses the medium of the novel to (re)present the media (re)presenting the news through the medium of television. At the same time, he also manages to critique this very (re)presentation when, for instance, he speaks of "the threat in state-created terminology." (This level of threat is taken to an entirely new level in Cosmopolis. Expect a post on this soon.)

So, what we should make of this relationship between DeLillo and real life? The answer to this, unfortunately, is not so clear. Using his satire, has DeLillo now authorized us to laugh at the media, thus consoling us? Or, is laughter not enough, and should we still worry about how much control the media has over reality? With DeLillo, of course, we often have to balance more than one answer at a time. Yet these answers certainly don't feel like solutions.

Maybe this, then, is DeLillo's flaw as a writer: he cuts to the heart of the problem, yet fails to offer a solution. David Foster Wallace seems to say as much in his brilliant reading of DeLillo (see: "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction").

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DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

DeLillo News & Notes: he confirms that he is working on a new book

In late April, DeLillo confirmed that he is working on a new novel (though, seeing as it's now September, perhaps he's already finished it). Not only am I very excited to learn this news, but I'm also not surprised in the least about the book's purported subject matter: images, disasters, footage, all classic DeLillo themes. Below I have reproduced the section of the interview where he talks about this upcoming novel:

It is because when I write, I need to see what is happening. Even when it is just two guys in a room, writing dialogues is not enough. I need to visualize the scene, where they are, how they sit, what they wear, etc. I had never given much thought about it, it came naturally, but recently I became aware of that while working on my upcoming novel, in which the character spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster. I had no problem describing the process, that is to say to rely on a visualization process. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

(See the full interview HERE.)

The great thing about this quote is how DeLillo manages to bury a golden nugget of information within a great insight into his writing process. One day, I hope to put together insights like these, of which there are many, and further develop an interpretive approach that I have tentatively been calling "cross-media theory."

Still, no one is blind to the fact that DeLillo is getting up there in his years, and he probably doesn't have much time left for writing (though, I'm sure he has no shortage of ideas). Anyway, this realization reminded me of a moment near the end of the interview that he gave with Adam Begley in 1993. Asked about his future plans, DeLillo confessed:

[...] 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?

DeLillo News & Notes (Special): commemorating the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide

In lieu of DeLillo-related news, I would like to commemorate the four-year anniversary of DFW's suicide by providing a handful of links to sources that all highlight his relationship with DeLillo in some way.

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- "I don't enjoy this war one bit"

This is a letter that DFW wrote to DeLillo in October, 1995. The letter seems to carry so much more weight when we remember that at this time, both writers must have been working on what would become arguably their most important books (for DFW, Infinite Jest; for DeLillo, Underworld). While it is difficult to choose just one passage from this letter to excerpt, one can't not be moved by these candid words:

I sent it to you because your own fiction is important to me and because I think you're smart and because, if you do end up reading it and end up saying something to me about it, I stand a decent chance of learning something.

One sees in this letter just how much DFW is struggling with his fiction psychologically. It is unfortunate that he did not live a longer life, or he may have been able to realize these words, which DeLillo wrote back to him in November:

At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.

- "See the inside of some of Wallace's books"

The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas has a collection of books that belonged to DFW. A few of these, including Players and Ratner's Star, DeLillo wrote. While this website only provides a quick glimpse into these books, it's enough for one to see how much value DFW placed on DeLillo, seeing as he inscribed voluminous notes onto the title pages of both of these books.

- "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This essay, which I was pleased to find on the Internet, is still one of the best readings of DeLillo, and it is certainly the best reading of the scene in White Noise about "the most photographed barn in the world." Again, it is difficult to extrapolate a single passage from this brilliant essay, so I would just recommend reading it for yourself. Like the two links above, this essay again demonstrates how important DeLillo was to DFW.