’Freud is finished, Einstein’s next’: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis , Chaos Theory, and Quantum Entanglement

Abstract

This essay argues that, in Cosmopolis, DeLillo returns to mathematical topics and formal structures, like those presented in Ratner's Star, and expands them to reflect more recent developments in science and technology to contemplate time—the subject that permeates many of his twenty first century novels—and to highlight, variously, the unpredictable, uncertain, interconnected, and illusory nature of the contemporary world. Written in between the dot-com bubble burst and the aftermath of September 11, 2001, this essay asserts that Cosmopolis is liminal: it offers a glimpse of the ruins of the future, and as one of its rejected titles suggests, it approaches an omega point. Drawing heavily on archival research in the Don DeLillo Papers at University of Texas, Austin's Harry Ransom Center, this essay contends that Cosmopolis is a thought experiment, of sorts, in which DeLillo incorporates his substantial and ongoing research on strange attractors, quantum entanglement, and the physics of time to consider the "[t]wo forces in this world, past and future." In doing so, this essay suggests that DeLillo calls for a reassessment of the time in which this text is set and proposes an alternate way of perceiving the post-9/11 world.