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

2 8 6
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
abstract, idealistic, absolute, negative and ultimately futile attitude toward
political reality—and there is plenty of evidence, both historical and con-
temporary, for the tendency of great writers to cluster at the political
extremes of left and right—then there is even less reason to hope that liter-
ary writing can play a constructive role in the face of capitalist co-optation
and the terrorist’s fantasy of total revolution. 
In the remainder of the paper, in the face of these two challenges, I will
first draw out and then test DeLillo’s claim that art can have a political
valence that avoids both the Charybdis of late-capitalist cooption and the
Scylla of (literary) terror. I will do so through a reading of his most recent
novels, 
Cosmopolis
and 
The Body Artist
, before concluding with his earlier
novel 
Mao II
. 
Mao II
is DeLillo’s most extended consideration of literature ’s
relationship to the culture of late capitalism, on one hand, and to terrorism,
on the other. It is also Exhibit A for the critics who claim that his novels
refute the hopeful political stance with regard to art that he tries to articulate
in “In the Ruins of the Future.” And indeed, at least on first glance, there
appears to be a great deal to support this critical doubt. In what is probably
the book’s most quoted passage (reproduced above as the second epigraph),
the protagonist and novelist Bill Gray both recognizes that “[t]here ’s a curi-
ous knot that binds novelists and terrorists” and that market capitalism has
reduced literature to the status of commodity, by noting that writers are now
“all incorporated.”
27
Despite these indications, my thesis is that DeLillo’s
novels nevertheless succeed in supplying a political justification for litera-
ture that meets both these challenges, albeit not necessarily in a form that
either capitalists or terrorists are likely to recognize as “political.” By that
same token, however, they also perhaps provide an alternative notion of
“the political” itself, one, I believe, that we are badly in need of today.
But let me approach these issues by returning to the novels’ traumatic
temporal reversals with which I began. In each instance, it is the imminence
or aftermath of that paradigmatic trauma, death, that jumbles the temporal-
ity of experience. In 
The Body Artist
, for example, it is Lauren Hartke ’s
mourning for her recently suicided husband, whose ghostly presence is
embodied in the strange character who speaks in his voice and words, but
who also recites Hartke ’s own words back to her before she says them.
28
In
Cosmopolis
, it is first a simple hand gesture, then a bomb’s detonation and,
finally, Eric Packer’s murder that appear to him on video screens before they
occur.
29
Perhaps this concurrence of death and pre-experience should not
LAL1902_07.fm Page 286 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

---