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

 
2 7 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
 
There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In
the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the
power to shape and influence. . . . Years ago I used to think
it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the
culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that
territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What
writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
— Don DeLillo
2
Allow me to begin with a story. In October 

, one month after the 

/

disaster, I attended a conference in New York City. Air travel was still fraught,
and I arrived early at the Cleveland airport for my New York flight, to dis-
cover that I had brought along nothing to read during my wait for departure.
Wandering into the airport bookstore, I noticed Don DeLillo’s 
 
Underworld
on
display and decided to buy it. It was only after the plane had taken off that I
looked at the book and realized, for the first time, what must have triggered
my desire for it in the first place—the haunting cover photograph of the
World Trade towers, shrouded in low-lying clouds and partly occluded by the
silhouettes of a church steeple and a single black bird, wings spread wide and
appearing to fly in the direction of the towers. 
The uncanniness I experienced at that moment fell, I think—however
trivially in this particular instance—within the psychoanalytic definition of
“trauma.” Trauma occurs when the conscious 
 
experience
of an event that
befalls a subject fails to coincide with the event itself—typically, when that
experience is delayed, as in my purchase of 
 
Underworld
, which was moti-
vated by an event (my perception of the cover photo, which was in plain
view at the time I bought the book) that I did not register until later. That
the psychoanalytic concept of trauma is crucial to the analysis of any cul-
tural sphere—whether law, literature or “Law and Literature,” to mention
three—“since 

/

,” hardly seems open to question. 
That is not the project I will pursue in this essay, however. Rather, not-
withstanding the title of this special issue, I will attempt to read some of Don
DeLillo’s novels from the 

s and early 

s as a way of exploring the
traumatic symptomatology of the 

/

terrorist attacks on law and literature
(or, to be more precise, the politics of literature) 
 
before

/

. Before 

/

? A
traumatic experience that precedes the event? Plausible or not, it is precisely
the possibility of such a “pre-experience” that Don DeLillo posits in his
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