Uzbekistan state university of world languages theory and practice of translation faculty

Works and Themes of Don Dellilo

DeLillo's first decade of fiction writing was his most productive to date, culminating in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978.

He quit advertising in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the Queens-Midtown tunnel ("It wasn't Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy") and began writing his first novel. myself. When he first started his writing career, he remarked, "I live a very minimalistic life. My phone costs $4.20 a month. I pay $60 a month in rent. And I'm getting back to work. So, in a sense, I wasn't aware His first novel, Americana, was written over four years and was finally published in 1971. , to modest critical acclaim. Americana tells the story of "a television network programmer who sets out in search of the big picture".
DeLillo revised the novel in 1989 for a paperback reissue. Reminiscing about the novel later in his career, he said, "I don't think my first novel will be published today when I submit it. I don't think any writers Which publication would read its 50 pages It ended up being a lot of the top and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and we all ended up doing it. work on the book and it was published...] I have absolutely no guarantee that this book will be published because I know there are elements that I don't have' I didn't know at the time I didn't know how improved, so I wrote someone else for two years and finished the novel. Surprisingly, it's not hard to find a publisher. I have no representation. I don't know anything about editing. But an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the manuscript and decided it was worth pursuing."³
Americana was quickly followed by the American college football/nuclear war dark comedy End Zone (1972) – written under the titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology". " – and the rock and roll satirical Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "one of those books that I wish I had done differently. It had to be tighter and perhaps more humorous. a little more fun." He married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned gardener, in 1975. DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976) - which DeLillo says is "structure on the works of Lewis Carroll, especially Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through mirror - took two years to write and offers many favorable comparisons to the work of Thomas Pynchon, about a 14-year-old boy who excelled at maths joining an international consortium of scientists madman deciphering an extraterrestrial message." DeLillo said it was both one of the hardest books for him to write and his favorite of his novels.
After this first attempt at writing a full-length novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977), originally conceived as "based on what might be called linguistic proximity - how people really live together", regarding the lives of a couple young couple yuppie while the husband joins a national terrorist group. Its 1978 successor, Running Dog (1978), written in four months, is a horror film. tells of a hunt for a reel of plastic film for Hitler's sexual exploitation.
Regarding Running Dog, DeLillo commented, “What I really mean in Running Dog is the sense of terrible acquisition we live with with the ultimate indifference towards the object. After all the crazy efforts to get that thing, people suddenly decide that, well, maybe we don't really care about it. That's what I think characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think it was part of the American consciousness at the time."
In 1978, DeLillo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to finance a trip to the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novel, Amazons and The Names.
In his first six novels and a rapid writing turn later in his career, DeLillo said, "I didn't learn to slow down and take a closer look at what I was doing. I have no regrets about the work. this, but I think if I had been a little less hasty at the start of each new book, I could have produced better works in the 1970s. My first novel took a long time and was such an effort that once it was released I became almost carefree in a sense and rode a whole decade, stopping at Ratner's Star (1976), which was a huge challenge for me and perhaps a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and 1990s." DeLillo also acknowledged some weaknesses in his 1970s writings, reflecting in 2007: "I know I don't do a perfect job. Seriously, tell me so."
The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons, a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more lighthearted and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent ones. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists.
While DeLillo was living in Greece, he took three years to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller about "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East". While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair, who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979. On that occasion, DeLillo handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it."⁴
With the 1985 publication of his eighth novel, White Noise, DeLillo rapidly became a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction and a place in the canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down.
White Noise's influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel). Among the 39 proposed titles for the novel were "All Souls", "Ultrasonic", "The American Book of the Dead", "Psychic Data" and "Mein Kampf". In 2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph."
DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalized life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission report (which DeLillo called "the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material.") Written with the working titles "American Blood" and "Texas School Book", Libra became an international bestseller, one of five finalists for the National Book Award, and the winner of the next year's Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. The novel also caused sharp divisions among critics, with some critics praising DeLillo's handling of Kennedy's assassination while others criticized him. George Will, in a Washington Post article, called the book an insult to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship." DeLillo has often reflected on the importance of the Kennedy assassination not only to his work but to the entire culture and history of the United States, remarking in 2005, "November 22, 1963 marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of disasters: political assassinations, the Vietnam War, denial of citizenship and subsequent uprisings, civil war. the uprisings of young people in American cities, up to the Watergate affair When I first started writing, it seemed to me a lot of material that you can find in my novels - feeling doom, widespread suspicion, distrust - coming from the assassination of JFK."
DeLillo's concern with the novelist and novelist's place in a society dominated by media and terrorism was made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). . Clearly influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on author Salman Rushdie and the press's intrusion into the life of writer J. D. Salinger, Mao II gave DeLillo many important accolades from John Banville and Thomas Pynchon, among others. He won the PEN/Faulkner Prize and was nominated as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Mao II in 1991 and 1992 respectively.
After Mao II, DeLillo remained in hiding and spent several years writing and researching his 11th novel. Apart from publishing a short story folio, "Pafko at the Wall", in Harper's Magazine in 1992, and a short story in 1995, little was seen or heard of him for several years. ⁵
In 1997, DeLillo finally emerged with his long-awaited novel, the epic Cold War history Underworld. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."
Underworld became DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving great success and receiving nominations for the National Book Award and the New York Times Best Book in 1997, and a second nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998. The novel won the 1998 American Book Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, as well as the William Dean Howells Medal and the 2000 Riccardo Bacchelli International Prize. It was a finalist for the 2006 New York Times survey of the world's best American novels. past 25 years. White Noise and Libra were also recognized by an anonymous jury of contemporary writers.
DeLillo later expressed surprise at Underworld's success. In 2007, he commented: "Honestly, when I finished Underworld, I didn't really have much hope. It's a pretty complicated thing: 800 pages, over 100 different characters - I'll keep an eye on it. Who cares?" After re-reading it in 2010, more than ten years after it was published, DeLillo said that rereading it "makes me wonder if I am capable of writing this kind of writing now - the scope and scope its en there."
Although acclaimed in many places, DeLillo's post-Underworld novels are often considered "disappointing and bland" by critics, especially when contrasted with his earlier epic epics. " noted the change "no longer sweeping, epochal". defines novels" such as White Noise, Libra, and Underworld to a more "simplistic and slanted" style, characterized by "shortened lengths, dismantling of the plot apparatus and dramatic deceleration of narrative time".
DeLillo said of the transition to shorter fiction, "If a longer novel comes out, I'll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I have trend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I feel like a compact book." In an interview in March 2010, it was reported that the style change was intentional. DeLillo's work is due to his recent rereading of several thin but influential European novels, including Albert Camus' The Stranger, Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Max's Man in the Holocene Frisch.
After publishing and conducting an extensive promotional campaign for Underworld, DeLillo retreated from the limelight again to write her twelfth novel, appearing with The Body Artist in 2001. The novel features DeLillo's many established interests, especially his interest in the performing arts and intimate domestic relationships. to the widest range of events. But it was very different in style and tone from the epic tale of Underworld, and was met with mixed reviews by critics.
DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern take on James Joyce's Ulysses set in New York during the dotcom boom of 2000. The novel received widespread acclaim at the time. that point. - notably John Updike - expressed their objections to its style and tone. In 2005, when asked how he felt about the novel's mixed reception compared to the broader positive consensus for Underworld, DeLillo commented, "I try to distance myself from that aspect of it. in my work as a writer I have not read any reviews or articles I was almost finished writing the book when the attacks took place, so they cannot have any had any effect on the book's design, as well as his writing. For some readers, it reversed their expectations." Since then, critical reviews have been revised, with the novel recently considered promising because it focuses on the flaws and weaknesses of the national financial system. economy and network capital.
DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, reputedly for "half a million dollars". There are " hundred and twenty-five boxes" of DeLillo materials, including various drafts and correspondence. Of his decision to donate his papers to the Ransom Center, DeLillo has said: "I ran out of space and also felt, as one does at a certain age, that I was running out of time. I didn't want to leave behind an enormous mess of papers for family members to deal with. Of course, I've since produced more paper—novel, play, essay, etc.—and so the cycle begins again."
DeLillo published his final novel of the decade, Falling Man, in 2007. The novel concerns the impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, "an intimate story which is encompassed by a global event".[6] DeLillo said he originally "didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11" and "had an idea for a different book" he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with the idea for the novel, beginning work on it following the reelection of George W. Bush that November.
Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations.

3. 
   “Player” summary by Dellilo
   

With new terrorist events every day in Entebbe, Wall Street or Midtown Manhattan, it becomes more natural for terrorists to start appearing as archetypal characters in fiction; but in fiction they have their use. They replace car accidents as a means of violence and sudden death, and replace psychiatrists and saints as spokespersons for the authorities. Like Shakespeare's fools, they satirize; like clowns, with an air of humorous confusion, they draw attention to the meaning of things that we have missed the meaning of. By the time they returned, some of their powers - such as the right to apply punitive justice - had been lost to the perpetrators. Perhaps they are the only moral agents one can trust now. However, no one thanks an ethicist, like Don DeLillo ought to know. His previous excellent books were well received but not widely read, perhaps because they dealt with deeply shocking things about America that people didn't want to face. "End Zone" (1972) connects football and nuclear war; "Ratner's Star" (1976) plays with science and science fiction; and "Great Jones Street" (1973) delve into rock music, nihilism and urban decay. ⁶

In "The Player," his fifth novel, DeLillo wittily deploys terrorists to explore every nook and cranny of the contemporary sensation. In the opening sequence, passengers standing on the piano bar of a flying plane watch a movie about hippie pirates shooting and slashing to death a group of golfers. The tranquility of a Sunday morning is insulted, the innocent pastel suits of the golfers soaked in blood. Without headphones, passengers can't hear the soundtrack, so the pianist improvises the silent soundtrack to accompany the action - the sound of the chase, the suspense, the Buster Keaton, the absurd antics for Deadly complex physical awkwardness on screen - body banging, rolling, splashing. Passengers laughed and applauded. Those are the terrorists they welcome. The author observes: "In the face of the glamor of revolutionary violence, before the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul, the brilliant jingle of the piano offers a very possible irony. can be ignored." This elegant and highly successful novel does not hesitate to suggest Americans' complicity with the terrorists they condemn. If they make themselves topical, novels are never good for looking at what's happening in the world; The novelist's pocket is balanced with tricks to avoid it. Victorians often put off their romance for several decades; Modern writers adapt the strategies of the Romantic poets and place their strategies in remote or unusual places (banana republics, prisons) or in the flat landscape of time or myth. phone. Lately, everyone seems to be looking for a small town where the people, who seem to live today, are not like the people of today but sitting in the pool of pumps and toilets talking about the old days. nice in the style of John Gardner.
This nostalgia, one of DeLillo's many goals, is an implicit commentary on the present, but the present is lost in a tangle of anti-macassar. The sense of the present is also lost in trendy confessional novels, which guide life through the meshes of private feeling, attempting to reduce it to controllable literary proportions. , but sacrifice any authentic social vision for its own style and richness of character. (Some cult novels, like Joseph Heller's "Something Happened" manage both richness and relevance.) It's not imperative that fiction considers the whole situation grandiose, but the important thing is that few people try . It is the measure of DeLillo's courage that he strives, and the measure of his art, which he succeeds, for all its deceptive simplicity, if not simplicity. .
"The Player" is about two Everymen, Pammy and Lyle Wynant, a fun professional couple from New York. Since the days of Freud, we have been accustomed to the way novelists usually present a character: he looks ordinary, he is secretly strange and individual. In the first of many inversions of physical appearance and book structure, Pammy and Lyle look amusing and seem to be doing interesting things, but are not themselves interested. Wealth is only superficial. That is, the novel is not romantic about how they don't fit in with society, but about how they come from society and how their normalcy is something we hate to admit. Humorous tone; The style is Candid Camera. Their every move is closely watched: “Lyle checked his pocket for change, keys, wallet, cigarettes, pens and notepads. He does this six or seven times a day, absent-mindedly, his hands just lacing up his pants and coat. We don't hear their enthusiasts but their conversations, the people they actually deal with in life: “Wonderful, cheddar. "What is that?" "Triffic." "Search." "No, you're pushing me. Their voices were almost indistinguishable: Lyle polished, sarcastic; Pammy is gullible.
He works on the floor of the Stock Exchange. She works at the World Trade Center, for a grief management company. They are great. At home, in their apartment, they watch a lot of TV but rarely go out because “there is nothing outside”. Pammy vacations in Maine with Jack and Ethan, two gay men they know, while Lyle drifts to a terrorist group that's planning to bomb Wall Street. He is also hedging his bets by reporting to the other side - whatever that is - of course, many of the terrorists themselves belong to. It didn't matter to Lyle. Pammy mostly believes in things she's heard, like "follow your instincts, be yourself, do what you imagine". In Maine, she had sex with one of her friends, Jack, who then, for more complicated reasons, poured gasoline over her and set her on fire. She returned home. ⁷
We know very little about them. DeLillo abandons the conventional fictional assumption that action is due to character and character is due to experience, at least some of which is the author's duty. Pammy and Lyle have no history; they have no past, have never been children, do not know where they come from. They worry that they have become too complicated to experience things directly and intensely, but the truth is the opposite. They are transformed by contemporary reality into a paralyzing simplicity, a weariness: “Pornography bores him. Talking about violence made her sigh. Things on the street, just the things she sees and hears every day, subtly compels her to flee. Your body will automatically relax. You live Pammy and Lyle's existence as if they were the subject of an authentic painting, without curiosity or argument, for the world of others has always been lived by your own. Pammy and Lyle: What made them like this? They are like that. Society breaks the cherished family-dominated causal relationship in the novel; DeLillo suggests that Zeitgeist may be more important than motherhood.
Lyle, the urban man, deals with terrorists, who claim, as terrorists often do, that they want to rid society of oppressive elements, even though they appear to be oppressors, seeking to replace a form of freedom with an order of their own. What was clear to DeLillo was that suppression was what everyone (Lyle and Pammy) was looking for. It is not that the structures of present society are not repressive, but that these structures are not perceived. Society is seen as a vacuum, an unmanageable chaos in which everyone has to create his own order. Lyle brought home some number plates, because he found them very pleasant. Ethan, their friend, also likes to "fill in those little boxes with numbers. Numbers are essential to my view of the world today. I don't believe I do that. That is the job of a toad. But I sincerely appreciate it. It's anal satisfaction." Pammy likes the soft, predictable tunes in her classes. The first terrorist, accurately assessing the aspirations of modern fascists, showed Lyle his weapon, the Pento-Mex, and the ammonium nitrate explosive. "I have a silly idea that once you see these, you'll be fine," he says. Weapons require order.
DeLillo terrorists want to blow up the Stock Exchange, like Conrad in "Secret Agent" wants to blow up the Prime Meridian, supposedly to sow confusion by destroying vestiges of spiritual order. most sacred, but in fact and above all to communicate with anyone who has left the structure. Even with the government. Half jokingly, Lyle spoke of the glamor of revolutionary life; it belongs to seduction. He can imagine "Calling a government office, an official, okay, government agency. 'I have information about this and that.' Or better yet, being visited, makes them come to you... The call of the labyrinth and complex techniques, hints at a double life. 'Fantastic, sign me up, I'll do it.' 'Of course, sir, you won't be able to tell anyone about this, including your nearest and dearest.' 'I love it, I love it, I'll sign.'"
When everyone turns out to be double agents, it's in a way twice as good. Each side resembles the other in its assumptions, in its respect for Jesuitical reasoning and certain rules. It's a relief to become a player, in any game; for there, where chance operates only within calculable limits, you can grasp the pattern. Terrorist action is not so much an example of lawlessness as a comment on the rules, an aspect of the structure itself. ⁸
If urban Lyle has abandoned hope of value, Pammy's bucolic attempt to recover it is DeLillo's pot shot at nostalgia. Pammy and her friends yearn for primitive life, Maine: "It may be simple, Ethan, but it has a power. You feel like it's kind of the core, the moral core." However, they hated Maine when they got there. Animals live under the house, birds fly through the windows and are killed. "I didn't know it would be like this," Jack complained. "I think I'm swimming at least: Do you believe this water?" However, their failure was enough to help Jack commit suicide. Its faceless, fingerprintless, unidentifiable ending concerns the fates of individuals in the computerized void.
Few recent novels have found such an admirably fitting form of them. The tight, carefully balanced structure, which encapsulates the book's idea of ​​people's yearning for boundaries, seems too rigid to accommodate unruly, even violent, bizarre comic book developments. odd. Instead, it shows the ruthless human tendency to establish order rather than chaos. Even the hip touches of trendy French thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Georges Poulet ("It's a lesson in the closeness of distance.

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