Re: DeLillo + the public figure
darren@daknet.com
Wed, 13 May 1998 12:17:38 -0500
At 10:02 PM 5/12/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I was wondering, being new to the list and all, how many of you have
>read Mao II by Don DeLillo. The protagonist is based on Salinger,
>namely the front page photo of Salinger. DeLillo describes it as "A
>Photo of a man being shot." I think the role salinger has in the book
>is to show how closely we tie characters and the writers. we are unable
>to seperate salinger from holden. DeLillo's proposal would be that
>salinger went into reclusion so that the reader could examine the works
>without looking at them in the conifines (context) of the writer (new
>criticism). I was wondering what everybody thought. Should the writer
>be able to publish and not expect their personal lives to be dragged
>into it. Should the work stand distinctive of the writer or is it part
>of the societal contract that a writer is a public figure?
Quoting _Mao II_:
- "When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's
famous reluctance to appear."
- "But this is intriguing to many people."
- "It's also taken as an awful sort of arrogance."
- "The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face."
- "Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn't
published in years and years and years. When his books first came out, and
people forget this or never know it, they made a slight sort of curio
impression. I've seen the reviews. Bric-a-brac, like what's this little
oddity. It's the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by
doing nothing. ...We could make a king's whatever, multimillions, with the
new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets
bigger as his distance from the scene deepens."
- "Keep this book out of sight. Build on it. Use it to define an idea, a
principle."
- "What principle?"
- "That the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left."
- "The book disappears into the image of the writer."
Darren