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

 
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T h u r s c h w e l l
•
 
W r i t i n g a n d T e r r o r
most recent novels. Characters hear their own words repeated back to them
before they are spoken, for example, and view themselves on video screens
experiencing events before they occur. “This is a man who remembers the
future,” as DeLillo says of one such character.
3
One can certainly under-
stand this motif as simply an artifice. But it has to be said that these moments
of clairvoyance would seem more fantastic if they did not have such a strong
echo in DeLillo’s own 
 
oeuvre
and the uncanny manner in which, like the
characters who populate it, it has anticipated our age of terrorist violence
and dread. 
That foresight extends in particular to the events of 

/

. DeLillo’s novels
have long maintained a fascination with terrorist violence, and I have
already mentioned the cover of 
 
Underworld
, which was published in 

. It
also bears remembering, however, the role played by the towers in that
novel, as a figure of the world-mastery that the United States achieved dur-
ing the Cold War through the development of its economic and technolog-
ical powers—the very symbolism that made the towers a prime target of Al
Qaeda’s 
 
ressentiment
.
4
 
Underworld
itself is a literary chronicle of the Cold
War epoch, from the Soviet Union’s detonation of its first hydrogen bomb
in 

to the era’s demise in the post-Berlin Wall era of the 

s. In the
novel, that ending is portrayed less as a discrete bookend corresponding to
the explosion of the Soviet bomb than as a petering out, a loss of the world-
organizing structure and national purpose that the Cold War, for all of its
dread, provided.
5
In that sense, the destruction of the World Trade towers
on September 

is the novel’s conclusion that DeLillo himself could not
write, since it has come to signify precisely that missing bookend, an end of
one historical epoch and the beginning of another. DeLillo makes that point
himself in an essay he wrote for 
 
Harpers
following the events of September 

:
“the [cold war] narrative ends in the rubble.”
6
I could go on at length in this vein—the World Trade Center towers
make other appearances in DeLillo’s novels as well
7
—but I will content
myself with a few citations to 
 
Cosmopolis
, a work that, although published in

, DeLillo has insisted was essentially complete on September 

, 

,
and that he saw no reason to change thereafter.
8
This claim is a little difficult
to believe, among other reasons because the novel includes the line, “You
live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God”—an accu-
sation leveled at the main character, Eric Packer, who is the richest man in
the world and condenses in his person all of the coldness and arrogance of
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