I’m in the middle of a Don DeLillo marathon, reading his books in chronological order. I just came across this famous passage in Libra.
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it.
Your thoughts?
-
View all posts
John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
Share this:
- Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
- Share on X (Opens in new window) X
- Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
- More
- Print (Opens in new window) Print
- Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
- Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
- Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
- Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
- Share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram
- Share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp
Personally, I’ve had to put great effort into not killing something in every story I write. Which isn’t to say I write tight plots…
Something, if not a character or plot, gets killed in a book. Hopefully not the joyful inspiration, but sometimes even that.
A character makes a very similar observation in White Noise, although I don’t have it in front of me right now. But yeah, that might be the difference between a plot and a bunch of things that happened.
It is Don DeLillo’s thesis about the massive amounts of data in a post-modern world and its influence on our perception of language. If contemporary culture accepts the ideas of post-structuralism and its beliefs about who signifies data, cause and effect seem to vanish into something more complex. Information has increased so dramatically that there are multitudes of contradictory information. Since culture accepts the idea that the reader places meaning information, multiple stories of reality is created based on their personal view of cause and effect (another cornerstone of post-structuralism). Since there are contradictions, we never really know what the plot of the present and past actually is.