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Notion of a book (of a text) in which is braided, woven, in the most personal way, the relation of every kind of bliss: those of "life" and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of real life are subject to the same anamnesis.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 20 February 2003 15:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
two weeks pass...
When critics and readers praise DeLillo they often speak about his sentences, as if sentences were what he wrote, rather than words or phrases or paragraphs or books. The cue comes from DeLillo himself who in Mao II (1991) has a writer say that he's always seen himself in sentences, that he's 'a sentence-maker, like a doughnut-maker only slower', and that 'every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it.' This last sentence is manifestly not itself true, and although DeLillo does write wonderful sentences, like the one quoted above about 'massive and unvaried ruin', some of the others can get a little sticky, like doughnuts only more talkative: 'A hollow clamour begins to rise from the crowd, men calling from the deep reaches, an animal awe and desolation.' 'The deep discordance, the old muscling of wills, that unforgiving thing in the idea of brothers'. 'Longing on a large scale is what makes history.' Er . . . maybe. 'When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous.' Now there's a sentence.
In fact the most interesting syntactic unit in Underworld is the paragraph, or more precisely the evoked image or moment, instantly intercut with another image or moment. All of DeLillo's stories in this novel run in parallel with other stories, restlessly zig-zagging from one time or place or connection to another. This is true even of conversations, which are always conducted on several fronts, non sequiturs being retrieved by sequels, sequels beings interrupted by new non sequiturs. Here's a simple example:
At home we wanted clean healthy garbage. We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins...
He never committed a figure to paper. He had a head for numbers, a memory for numbers.
We fixed her up with a humidifier, the hangers, the good hard bed and the dresser...
The first 'we' is a mother and two boys, in the old days in the Bronx. 'He' is the absent father. The second 'we' is one of the boys and his wife, and the 'her' is the mother - the time is now the Nineties. The whole narrative relies on our hanging onto stories in our heads, being ready for their return - the effect is about as close to simultaneity, or a split-screen, as one could get on pages that run in lines and have to be turned over one after another.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/wood01_.html
Cor!
― the pinefox, Thursday, 6 March 2003 16:14 (twenty-one years ago) link
five years pass...