The 9/11 novel' : eternal return in Pynchon and DeLillo

The September 11 attacks on the United States, what Jean Baudrillard has called "the pure event. .. the 'mother' of all events" (Baudrillard 2002, 4) has quickly emerged as the paradigmatic focus of American literature in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In this chapter I examine the '9/11 novels' of two emblematic American (and New York) writers, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. We discover that what both have developed in their work after the 9/11 attacks is a renewed awareness of time, and indeed, a rejuvenated focus on the politicisation of time. DeLillo's Falling Man and Pynchon's Against the Day illustrate both authors' reconsideration of temporality and an instructive recourse in both novels to the concept of the eternal return.