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

 
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competing destructive “world narratives” of cyber-capitalism and terror,
“it is left to us to create the counternarratives.”
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The essay is itself disjointed by the same trauma that it describes (DeLillo
is a native New Yorker who remains palpably in love with the city), shifting
without transition among cultural diagnosis, reflections on the role of the
writer, and its own story-telling. Nevertheless, in its groping for responses
to the horror, one can perceive the outlines of a program for writing after
the disaster, one that seems to involve equal parts of mourning, imaginative
identification, affirmation, and aesthetic representation:
The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to
take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not diminished. The
writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. . . . [L]anguage is
inseparable from the world that provokes it. The writer begins in the towers,
trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and
religion, there is the primal terror. People falling from the towers hand in hand.
This is part of the counternarrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in
the crush of meshed steel.
There are “100,000 stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the
world,” he says, and by way of example, “In the Ruins of the Future” gives
us moving samples of such stories, from an account of the terror experi-
enced by his nephew’s family, who lived only blocks from the World Trade
Center and believed they were going to die, to DeLillo’s sighting of a Mus-
lim woman shortly after September 

, praying on her rug on a Canal Street
sidewalk—a sight that confirmed for him more than ever “the daily sweep-
ing taken-for-granted greatness of New York.”
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But are such counternarratives in fact possible? At least, counternar-
ratives that carry a realistic hope of countering the competing narratives
of cyber-capital and terrorism? The dominant view of critics who have
engaged with DeLillo’s essay has been that they are not. Indeed, accord-
ing to these critics, this claim is refuted by DeLillo’s own novels’
accounts of the fate of the writer in the “society of the spectacle” of late
capitalism. Thus, in a passage that sums up this dominant view, Joseph
Walker concludes:
These texts of DeLillo, Roth, and Auster, then, all present novelists confronted
with the knowledge of their own excessive marginalization, novelists who are
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