#‘thus i ask of absurd creation what i required from thought—revolt freedom and diversity.

[frankensteincest]

While DeLillo argues that it may not be possible to find a totalizing structure to make sense of everything, he does think ‘it is possible to make up stories in order to soothe the dissatisfactions of the past, take the edge off the uncertainties’. He has famously said:

I think fiction rescues history from its confusions. It can do this in the somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces. But it can also operate in a deeper way: providing the balance and rhythm we don’t experience in our daily lives, in our real lives.

Paradoxically, then, the theory of fiction which Win Everett propounds in Libra and which has been so often quoted by DeLillo critics—that ‘there is a tendency of plots to move toward death’—is contradicted by DeLillo’s s own ideas about the purpose of plotting. [...] In White Noise, Jack gives a lecture in which he espouses the same notion about the deathward motion of plots, telling his students that ‘We edge nearer death every time we plot’. But then Jack immediately asks himself, ‘Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?’ Critics perhaps ought to pay more attention to Murray Jay Siskind’s words on plot rather than Everett’s, since they appear more in line with DeLillo’s own comments about plotting and fiction:

‘To plot is to live,’ he said.

I looked at him. I studied his face, his hands.

‘We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control....

This is how we advance the art of human consciousness.’

ELIZABETH K. ROSEN, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination