"There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s—eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative. 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. The crowds in Mao II, except for the mass wedding, are TV crowds, masses of people we see in news coverage of terrible events. The news has been full of crowds, and the TV audience represents another kind of crowd. The crowd broken down into millions of small rooms."
Don DeLillo in interview from a Fall 1993 edition of the Paris Review. DeLillo was responding to a question about a sentence from his novel Mao II, “The future belongs to crowds.”
12 Dec 2011 / 12 notes / crowds television mass media don delillo paris review writers writing novel
"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."
Long and fascinating interview with Don DeLillo from a Fall 1993 edition of Paris Review.
12 Dec 2011 / 8 notes / don delillo literature novel writing paris review writers
