Literature and Politics

Don DeLillo wrote in December 2001: “[t]he terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past.” DeLillo’s pronouncement was in direct contrast with his view of the ‘west’, which, he argued, lived in the future. DeLillo’s 2007 publication Falling Man, which has been defined as a ‘post-9/11 novel’, presents an interesting view of what is inherently politicised time. His novel begins and ends with a plane impacting the Twin Towers, evoking the Nietzschean concept of eternal return.

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a novel that seems to set itself apart from the emerging ‘9/11 novel’ genre. Pynchon details the fin-de-siecle in both Europe and the Americas, ostensibly analysing (in one strand of his narrative) the threat of anarchist bombing. And yet, there are two sections of the novel in which Pynchon presents a vision of a New York, ravaged by fire, with parts of the city turned into a wasteland. It is my contention that Against the Day is a novel that must be included in the ‘9/11 novel’ genre.

My paper will then map out the analysis of terrorism that both Pynchon and DeLillo attempt, focused through their analyses of politicised time. Pynchon utilises a disambiguation of eternal return, seeming to conform to the conception of eternal return that Deleuze proposes in his Nietzsche and Philosophy in contrast to DeLillo’s seeming utilisation of Nietzsche’s concept itself. The problematisation of time that is proposed by the concept of eternal return is crucial to a reconsideration of the political, especially as it is refracted through literature.

James Gourley is a doctoral candidate with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. He is currently working on American fiction, and has previously been published writing on the works of Beckett and DeLillo.