Article in Law and Literature · July 2007 doi: 10. 1525/lal

2 9 8
L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
•
Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
The
Guardian
(December 

, 

), http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/
story/

,

,

.html, last visited October 

, 

). 
.
One exchange captures this theme very well (from Don DeLillo, 
Underworld
[New York: Scribner,

], 

):
‘And when the cold war goes out of business, you won’t be able to look at some woman in
the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today.’
‘Erotic. But what’s the connection?’
‘You don’t know the connection? You don’t know that every privilege in your life and every
thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the
planet?’
‘That’s an amazing thing to say.’
‘And you don’t know that once this threat begins to fade?’
‘What?’
‘You’re the lost man of history.’ 
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

. 
.
See DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

–

; see also, for example, Don DeLillo, 
Players
(New York: Vintage, 

),

(on a character who works at the “Grief Management Council,” housed in the World Trade Center
towers: “It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit
such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?”). 
.
“‘Vielleicht sehe ich einiges klarer und früher als andere.’ Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Don
DeLillo über die prophetische Kraft seiner Bücher, den 

. September, Freundschaft unter Autorenkol-
legen und seinen neuen Roman ‘
Cosmopolis
’,” 
Frankfurter Rundschau
, 

November 

, No. 

, 

–

(interview with Peter Henning; re-translated back into English by Julia Apitzsch; available at http//:
perival.com/delillo/ddinterview_henning.html (last visited on January 

, 

). 
.
DeLillo, 
Cosmopolis
(New York: Scribner, 

), 

–

.
.
As Peter Boxall puts it in his recent (and excellent) book on DeLillo, “[t]hrough the operations of a kind of
reverse déjà vu…it is the pressure of 

that exerts itself most forcefully as we enter into [DeLillo’s nov-
els of] the 

s.” Peter Boxall, 
Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction
(New York: Routledge, 

), 

;
see also, for example, John Carlos Rowe, “
Mao II
and the War on Terrorism,” 

South Atlantic Quarterly

, 

(Winter 

). Boxall, following in the path of Thomas Pynchon’s discussion of similar issues in
George Orwell’s work, usefully distinguishes between “prediction,” which trades in surface details and
which can be definitively confirmed or refuted by future events, and “prophecy,” which addresses the
“hidden underlying forces that continue to produce history” and “the spirit of a future that not yet been
lived out.” For all his remarkable anticipation of the symbolic details of the 

/

disaster, as Boxall points
out, DeLillo’s writings clearly fall into the category of “prophecy” by this definition. Boxall, 
supra
, at 

. 
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

.
.
Id
. 
.
Joseph Walker, “A Kink in the System: Terrorism and the Comic Novel,” 

Studies in the Novel

, 

,

(Fall 

); see also, for example, Mark Osteen, 
American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue
with Culture
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 

), 

. 
.
See Jean Paulhan, 
The Flowers of Tarbes, or, Terror in Literature
, Michael Syrotinski, trans. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 

); Blanchot, 
supra
note 

.
.
Paulhan, 
supra
note 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
.
Blanchot, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
The political dimension of Blanchot’s essay stems in part from the fact that it was also an oblique cri-
tique of Sartre’s recently-published theses on “
littérature engagée
[committed literature].” See Jean-
Paul Sartre, 
What is Literature?
, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 

). 
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