出版与作家生涯2019theparisreview.org编辑精选
唐·德里罗：《小说的艺术》第135号访谈（1993）
Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135 (1993)
导读
这是《巴黎评论》对唐·德里罗的访谈（1993），内容涉及：他为何写作、怎样看待人物，以及《白噪音》里“被拍照最多的谷仓”这一著名片段。写作者值得读，因为它把“写作即思考”“人物即愉悦”“符号遮蔽现实”这些抽象问题落到了具体写作经验上。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把写作当成一种浓缩的思考方式：对某个题目，先别急着下结论，坐下来写，你才会知道自己真正怎么想。
- 02
用具体的场景和细节承载主题，避免直接说教——“没人看见谷仓”比任何抽象议论都更有力。
- 03
人物是作家给读者的愉悦的一部分，但作家不必溺爱人物、也不必要求读者跟着溺爱；能写出人物的存在感就够了。
- 04
读小说时，不妨把它理解为与作者的对话：关注形式、结构和创作过程，不要只去找“我像谁”。
HN 评论精选
用“被拍照最多的谷仓”这个具体场景，示范如何以细节和对话承载“符号遮蔽现实”的主题，不说教。
有人贴出《白噪音》里的“美国被拍照最多的谷仓”片段作为回馈：默里带“我”开车二十二英里去看法明顿郊外那座谷仓，沿途标牌接连出现，到景点前已数到五块；停车场里有四十辆车和一辆大巴，人人带着相机、三脚架、长焦镜头，亭子里卖明信片和幻灯片。默里沉默良久，偶尔在小本上记几笔，最后说：“没人看见谷仓。一旦你看过关于谷仓的那些牌子，就不可能再看见谷仓了。”拍照的人离开，立刻被新来者取代。“我们来这里不是为了捕捉影像，而是为了维持影像。每张照片都在强化那层光晕。你能感觉到吗，杰克？一种无名能量的累积。”
craigsmansion查看英文原文
To pay it forward: this excerpt was posted at some point on HN. I thought it was funny so I got the book. I wasn't disappointed. Maybe you won't be either. “Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides-pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” Excerpt From: Don DeLillo. “White Noise.”
写作是思考的浓缩形式：坐下来写，才知道自己真正怎么想。
德里罗自己也许不信，但我信。访谈开头，采访者问他是否知道自己为什么成为作家，他回答：“我有个想法，但不确定自己信不信。也许我想学会如何思考。写作是思考的浓缩形式。有些主题，甚至到今天，我也是坐下来试着写它们时，才知道自己怎么想。”
j_b_s查看英文原文
DeLillo may not believe it, but I do. From the start of the interview: "INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea what made you a writer? DON DeLillo: I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them."
人物是给人愉悦的载体而非溺爱对象；读小说应关注形式与艺术，把它当作与作者的对话。
评论者引用德里罗的话：“人物是作家想给读者的愉悦的一部分。一个活生生、会说出有趣话的人物。我想通过语言、通过一本书或一句话的建筑结构、通过可能滑稽、恶劣、暴力或兼而有之的人物来给读者愉悦。但我不是那种溺爱某些人物、也希望读者跟着溺爱的作家。事实上，每个作家喜欢自己人物的程度，只限于他能把人物的存在写清楚。”评论者认为这正符合自己对小说人物的感受，并引纳博科夫课程结语佐证：读名著不是为了幼稚地认同人物、不是为了 adolescent 地学做人、也不是为了学术地泛泛而谈，而是为了形式、视野与艺术，为了感受创作中的喜悦与困难——读书是与作者对话。
leftyted查看英文原文
> A character is part of the pleasure a writer wants to give his readers. A character who lives, who says interesting things. I want to give pleasure through language, through the architecture of a book or a sentence and through characters who may be funny, nasty, violent, or all of these. But I’m not the kind of writer who dotes on certain characters and wants readers to do the same. The fact is every writer likes his characters to the degree that he’s able to work out their existence. This is exactly how I feel about characters in novels. It reminds me of Nabakov, who famously ended a lecture with: > In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter I think that's basically right: the best way to read a novel is as a dialogue with the author. DeLillo is the only example of an American who has written about recent history and contemporary American life in a way that resonants with me: unmistakably American, involved, but also detached. He's written about everything from foreign policy (The Names), to academia (White Noise, Ratner's Star), to JFK's assassination (Libra), to the Cold War (Underworld), to finance (Cosmopolis), to 9/11 (Falling Man), to the Iraq War (Point Omega), to start-up culture and worship of technology (Zero K).
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