In an early moment in Don DeLillo’s quickly canonized Harper’s essay on 9/11, “In the Ruins of the Future,” DeLillo takes stock of the attacks. Written ten days after the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, DeLillo tries to find a narrative frame adequate to capture the immensity of the event at both a literary and a historical level:

What begins as a material inventory of the detritus emanating from the towers quickly morphs into an allegory for mediating 9/11. DeLillo is looking for a narrative frame of reference, a way to represent and mediate the “unmanageable,” but his analytic frameworks are frayed at the borders of “practiced response.” Equally striking about this passage is that people are conspicuously absent. While DeLillo starts with a nod to “running men and women,” they are the background furniture upon which we encounter “mashed” handkerchiefs. As a counterpoint to the bodies jumping out of the towers and the final cellphone calls played on a constant loop, DeLillo offers a reflection on the nonhuman import of crisis. DeLillo starts with the objects of 9/11 – “cellphones,” “shoes,” “box cutters and credit cards” – before we see the paper darkening the September sky. DeLillo focuses on these “smaller objects” to suggest that understanding 9/11 requires a synthetic perspective incorporating the “marginal” and the “massive spectacle.” He is darting between frames of mediation, what I will call throughout this book “scales,” trying to find the right narrative form and critical vantage at which to write “too powerful a thing.