It seems to me--and the passage isn't written with any great clarity--that the writer is complaining about the contemporary sophisticated novelist's credo (which I suppose you could call post-modern, which is that "character" and "consciousness" are false constructs of bourgeois society and therefore it's dishonest to reality to attempt to write about them. The only true subject for the artist is artistic form and the biased ways in which we process information.
The snobbish implication is that to like story and character is to be hopelessly unsophisticated and possibly fascist.
I'm not up on my DeLillo (can't read him) but Tom Wolfe has often protested against this abandoment of the traditional forms of novel-writing. He tried to correct this in his novels, but unfortunately his considerable gifts are for recording and reporting, and his characterizations aren't very compelling.
This battle was fought long ago in painting, with first the Impressionists and then the Cubists declaring that a painting should record the way we perceive, either physically or psychologically, and not just be a more-or-less realistic "picture of something,' like the Mona Lisa or The Night Watch. As you can feel when you see Impressionist and Cubist paintings, this approach was at first immensely freeing and released a lot of energy, but it's pretty much run dry by now, a century later.
In my opinion, non-representational art like that of abstract expressionism can be terrifically powerful and moving. But the more abstract the novel became/becomes, the more it has lost its popular audience (it's also trying to usurp a form of literary expression that poetry already does quite well and that, in narrative terms, movies and plays can do better). Some people have argued that the "real" literature of the late twentieth century is found in genre writing, which still emphasizes character, plot and sometimes ideas.
no subject
The snobbish implication is that to like story and character is to be hopelessly unsophisticated and possibly fascist.
I'm not up on my DeLillo (can't read him) but Tom Wolfe has often protested against this abandoment of the traditional forms of novel-writing. He tried to correct this in his novels, but unfortunately his considerable gifts are for recording and reporting, and his characterizations aren't very compelling.
This battle was fought long ago in painting, with first the Impressionists and then the Cubists declaring that a painting should record the way we perceive, either physically or psychologically, and not just be a more-or-less realistic "picture of something,' like the Mona Lisa or The Night Watch. As you can feel when you see Impressionist and Cubist paintings, this approach was at first immensely freeing and released a lot of energy, but it's pretty much run dry by now, a century later.
In my opinion, non-representational art like that of abstract expressionism can be terrifically powerful and moving. But the more abstract the novel became/becomes, the more it has lost its popular audience (it's also trying to usurp a form of literary expression that poetry already does quite well and that, in narrative terms, movies and plays can do better). Some people have argued that the "real" literature of the late twentieth century is found in genre writing, which still emphasizes character, plot and sometimes ideas.
Yrs pedantically,
L.O.