“Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine.”
Tag: Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo | The Point Magazine
Don DeLillo | The Point Magazine — Read on thepointmag.com/criticism/don-delillo/
Don DeLillo and systems thinking
DeLillo also explores narrativization, or the creation of plots with actions, actors, purposes, etc. Burke’s pentad is useful here; the idea is that people create stories with acts, agents, agencies, scenes, and purposes. This is how we observe reality, or reduce the complexity of raw perception. We find the creation of stories with clear actors, purposes, etc., irresistible.
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
The novel as a genre, particularly as written by Turgenev, is all about the study of individuals–what makes people different, not what makes them similar.
The Novel, the Individual, and the Public
In a primarily stratified or centralized society, there can be no individuality in the modern sense. The same can be said for the public. There was no public in pre-modern society because there was no individual. The individual/pubic distinction arose together as a result of functional differentiation, which legally separated the individual off from the family
