The philosopher Georg Lukács once said that there was something nightmarish in the experience of an intellectual with no vision of the future. Underneath all of its obstructions and code, DeLillo’s writing seems to express the same thought. The future is a kind of narrative category, after all: the projected goal that gives the present its sense of order and purpose. It’s something we suffer without. For an individual, the inability to imagine life improving, or changing in any way other than badly, is a kind of death sentence. On the collective level, too, a society without any aspirations toward a better shared existence is condemned to the unchallenged perpetuation of injustice and misery, the ineradicable underside of all human history to date (and a horror that weighs “like a nightmare” on the living, as Marx so famously put it). DeLillo’s entire project has been based on a sense of disorientation that’s fundamentally political—the loss of a collective narrative, the transformation of a once-shared experience of America into something enigmatic and foreign. Part of Lukács’s point was that a society can’t suffer something like that without the damage making itself felt in everyday life, through all the sensations that DeLillo has spent his career so expertly evoking: confusion, anomie, anxiety, isolation, fear.
The obvious question is then: What would it be to overcome that? The most electrifying moments in Cosmopolis are gestures in the direction of an immense world order beyond the limits of ordinary perception. Packer’s enchanted map of Earth is one; another arrives as he and Kinski stare up at a massive electronic display of market information, “three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street,” a glittering maze “of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words … [not a] flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable.” The imagery is marvelous and alienating, a premonition of a vast globalized unity that we are all now part of, but one that seems to be hopelessly hidden from sight—and a repository for all of the book’s stillborn political dreams. “I understand none of it,” is the mantra Kinski repeats whenever she is brought face to face with the miracles of capitalist technology, and the point is perhaps that it’s laughable to imagine that our minds could ever acquire purchase on something as supernaturally complex as our own society. There are moments in the book where we catch sight of the less fortunate world beyond the borders of New York, places where the free market has visited little except destruction and chaos. But it seems telling that these images never advance beyond the edges of the plot. They belong to our story and they don’t—symbols for the parts of the system we can’t countenance or even fully register.
Yet it would be wrong to say that everything feels finished once Cosmopolis ends. Despite its resolutely grim conclusion, some spectral sense of possibility remains—the feeling that perhaps, even so, all of this has just been the prelude for something larger and new. Whatever else, the novel is a testament to the strength of DeLillo’s vision: the world he has been imagining for so long really does seem to have folded out into reality. Dissolving national identities, missing narratives, complicity, powerlessness—aren’t they just facts of globalized life? The intimation that we are all part of a single huge, unseen story has also come closer and closer to lived experience, and our most urgent collective problems (the looming ecological catastrophe, for example) reflect it. But it still feels like more than we can imagine. What would it be to tell such a story—to assimilate its mind-breaking scale, the networks of superhuman technology and the anonymous billions who populate it? For whom could it be anything more than an abstraction? Cosmopolis falls apart before it comes close to answering those questions. But the questions are real. The world demands a response. The riddle is how to become the type of creatures who can give it.