listening to writers

I'm listening to an interview with Don DeLillo. I think it's Jonathan Franzen interviewing him - the video is called A Conversation with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen. Franzen asks what, to me, seems like a super weird question: how important is meaning to your writing? It's hard to know what he's getting at. One clue is that the question comes after he reads a quote from one of DeLillo's stories that evokes a dichotomy between the sound of language and its meaning, and emphasises sound over meaning.

But DeLillo really gets the question and gives a very interesting answer. He says that meaning is not 'the primary force' in his writing. Language is more important and he says that he will sometimes 'yield meaning to words - just to words...to the sound of words...to the look of words...and to the beauty, at times, of a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph'. He goes on to say that he doesn't know where meaning comes from....it builds slowly as he works on a novel or story. That's kind of counter-intuitive. Isn't that what writers do - they convey meaning through their writing? Isn't that what it's all about, in a way? 

I enjoy listening to David Foster Wallace a lot more than I enjoy listening to Franzen. To me, Franzen seems very aware of his own stature as a writer, but Wallace seems more tentative and more concerned with what is interesting in general and what other people think than with imparting some kind of writing expertise. Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, this wasn't an intereview of Don DeLillo - it was a conversation between two successful writers. I've read neither of them but I intend to...maybe if I knew their work I would find the conversation more interesting. Also, the topic of the conversation was writing, and people had come to listen to two writers have a conversation, so I can hardly blame Franzen for talking about his craft or being aware of his stature as a writer, which is the whole reason he was there having the conversation. 

Franzen and Wallace were friends too, so there's that. I haven't read any of them - Wallace, Franzen, or DeLillo, but I plan to...probably Infinite Jest first, because I've heard such good things about it, then Underworld by DeLillo, then The Corrections is Franzen's novel that I've decided to read first.