21 - Screening Fundamentalism, Fanaticism and Terrorism in DeLillo’s Post-9/11 Fiction

Summary

As Don DeLillo suggests in a 15 April 2003 Los Angeles Times interview with David L. Ulin, terror ‘is now the world narrative, unquestionably’. Describing the attacks of 9/11 in the same interview, DeLillo observes that ‘[w]hen those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything’ – even though, or perhaps because, most Americans only witnessed the attacks on television (‘Finding Reason’). In a notably digitising world at the onset of what Thomas L. Friedman terms ‘Globalization 3.0’ (10), there exists a knot that binds not just ‘novelists and terrorists’, to cite DeLillo's words from his fin de millénaire novel, Mao II (41). There also exists a knot that binds screen culture (which invites non-religious and non-terrorist fanaticism) with terrorism (which regularly gets conflated with fundamentalism, or devout textual literalism) and with religious or terrorist fanaticism. As DeLillo intimates in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, a December 2001 Harper's essay on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that focuses heavily on the subject of digitisation, ‘Technology is our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the only superpower on the planet. The materials and methods we devise make it possible for us to claim our future’ (37). And as DeLillo continues, notably invoking religious language on which fundamentalist believers rely, ‘We don't have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think’ (37).

This chapter explores the complicated knot that binds fundamentalism, fanaticism, terrorism and screen culture in Don DeLillo's literary fiction of the twenty-first century, an era that cultural critics have simultaneously termed the age of terror and the digital age. Through readings of ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), ‘Hammer and Sickle’ (2010), Point Omega (2010), ‘The Starveling’ (2011) and The Silence (2020), I argue that DeLillo critiques post-9/11 screens (for instance, television and cinema screens) for the ways in which they encourage Americans to see fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism as external Islamic threats. Screens prime Americans to see an excess of these phenomena and feel as though they understand them as a result.