goula.sh

📰 DeLillo on Writing

Author: perival.com

Full Title: DeLillo on Writing

URL: http://perival.com/delillo/ddwriting.html

Highlights from March 10th, 2021.

Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. 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.
Beckett is a master of language. He is all language. Out of the words come the people instead of the other way around.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end.
My head is bent with current work these days and all I can say about White Noise from this distance is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear. By the former I don't mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less everything -- microwaves, electrical insulation etc. One would have to write a long dense essay to explain this connection adequately -- that's why I wrote a loose-limbed and shadow-sliding work of fiction.
For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherant reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.