Art in Don DeLillo’s 9/11 Literature

DeLillo is undeniably significant in contemporary American fiction. His 9/11 novels continue to signal DeLillo’s importance as they mark one of the most catastrophic events in American history in ways that honor those who lost their lives but also make a critical examination of the social, political, and interpersonal relationships present immediately prior to and after the attacks. Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), and Zero K (2016) seek answers to these questions in a trajectory of pre, immediately post, and post 9/11. Falling Man is surely DeLillo’s 9/11 novel. Cosmopolis and Zero K combined with Falling Man provide DeLillo’s fully realized trajectory of American life pre and post 9/11, especially focused on the interpersonal trauma and its relationship to art.

Cosmopolis, a contemporary take on Ulysses, takes place one April 2000 day, in a world of technology and cyber-capitalism. In the novel the protagonist, Eric, continually displays and pursues a fetishistic, consumer-based approach to his relationship with art. For Eric, art is first a capitalist acquisition. In the most traditionally Marxist fashion, the desire to acquire the Rothko Chapel is an example of commodity fetishism. Eric has made the Chapel into his fetishistic representation of peace and calm. It comes to represent his manic concern for money-making and is the antidote for his omnipresent drive for gain. In Eric’s intense solipsism, though, he fails to understand the implications that buying and squirreling away a great work of art would have on society. Eric’s goal is not to own the chapel, to make it a museum or to endow it, but to, in fact, move the entire structure into his apartment. The sheer impossibility of such a move has no impact on him, as Eric’s narcissism is so great that he does not consider the process an impossibility. In his mind, if he wants something, it will happen. In this desire, Eric represents the worst of pre-9/11 American society. He is the embodiment of sheer greed and self-aggrandizement, the ultimate American exceptionalism.

Art also has a palliative effect on Eric. Cosmopolis begins with the reader learning about Eric: “Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five.” Though young and successful, Eric suffered from insomnia. “What did he do when this happened? ...There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call…There was no answer to this question. He tried sedatives and hypnotics, but they made him dependent, sending him inward in tight spirals.” Instead, his elevator music becomes his sedative; art is a palliative for Eric when the extraordinary pressure of being Eric Packer become too much.

Eric needs art, in its many forms, to regulate his moods. In this way, music is a drug for him, a stabilizer. Like the Rothko Chapel, designed for peaceful contemplation and mediation, Eric uses Satie’s music. Eric uses music the way he uses all things in his life, as commodities, objects to bend to his will, objects with an almost Benthemian purpose. He has no appreciation for them outside of their usefulness, and that usefulness is better if instead of global scope it applies on to him. Eric is the embodiment of the worst features of pre-9/11 American exceptionalism. His desire is to be and have the biggest, greatest, and most expensive and to keep it to himself. It is a level of selfishness which he displays, but is not even cognizant of, further highlighting the attitudes for which America is so easily criticized.

Eric’s inability to complete his quest for immortality through technology paved the way for the immortality function of art. In Cosmopolis, Eric, on his way to have his haircut,

witnessed an anti-capitalist demonstration in Times...