Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature 9781441122414, 9781628926866, 9781628925005

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Falling After 9/11

Falling After 9/11 Crisis in American Art and Literature Aimee Pozorski

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Aimee Pozorski, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Credit: Christopher Kennedy, excerpts from “To the Man Who Played the Violin and Fell from a Plank into a Vat of Molten Steel,” “Blue Collar Drive,” “My Father’s Work Clothes,” “Vesper,” “Broken Saints,” and “Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death” from Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death. Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Kennedy. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., HYPERLINK “http://www.boaeditions.org”www.boaeditions.org. Credit: AP Images / Richard Drew Credit: Diane Seuss, “Falling Man” from September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Edited by William Heyen. Copyright © 2002 by Diane Seuss. Reprinted with the permission of the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pozorski, Aimee L. (Aimee Lynn) Falling after 9/11 : crisis in American art and literature / Aimee Pozorski. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-2241-4 (hardback) 1. American literature–21st century–History and criticism. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in literature. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in art. 4. Psychic trauma in literature. 5. Psychic trauma in art. 6. Loss (Psychology) in literature. 7. Loss (Psychology) in art. 8. Tragic, The, in literature. 9. Tragic, The, in art. 10. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001–Psychological aspects. I. Title. II. Title: Crisis in American art and literature. PS231.S47P69 2014 810.9’006 – dc23 2014016680

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For the families of 9/11

Contents Preface  Acknowledgments Falling After 9/11: A Crisis in National Tradition 1 2 3 4 5 6

Gravity, Gravitas, Grave: How to Refer to Falling? Beyond the Literal: The Falling Man and Moral Failing Journalism’s Falling Man: On Documentation and Truth Telling Don DeLillo’s Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling Poetics of Falling: The Lyrical Laments of Kennedy and Seuss Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Historical Reverberation and Scientific Invention in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 Iconotext

Epilogue: Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: Parrish’s 9/11 Mural Revisited Works Cited Index

viii xiii 1 23 41 61 81 101

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145 150 157

Preface Just after 12 o’clock noon on November 4, 2013, the university where I teach was put under lockdown. Running late for a 12:15 p.m. meeting, I was told by local police to turn around and drive away from campus. Roads were closed to traffic; no one was allowed to enter or exit campus. The lockdown was a result of more than one call placed to 911 after students riding a city bus noticed someone dressed in black from head to toe, wearing a ski mask and carrying what looked to be a weapon. The costumed man got off the bus on campus and walked into his residence, James Hall. The event drew the attention of local and national media.1 Helicopters circled overhead. The National Guard and various towns’ SWAT teams swarmed to the site. Colleagues from universities located as far away as California and London called and texted their expressions of concern by 1:00 p.m. that day. Students and faculty who were already on campus “sheltered in place”—locked doors and closed windows, hid under desks, texted frantically, only guessing at what could have been taking place outside: Some social media reports made guesses at a possible hostage situation; others assumed the loaded backpack was heavy with ammunition or even a homemade bomb. Bystanders were shoved to the ground if they looked suspicious, wearing camouflaged pants themselves or black boots. A nearby middle school and elementary school were also under lockdown for nearly two hours: Those students, without cell phones or access to media, sat terrified against a wall, passing the time in whispers and fear. At around 3:00 p.m., three hours after first responders arrived on campus, the situation appeared to have been resolved: The suspect was arrested, charged with breach of peace, and was released shortly See, for example, Kingkade writing for The Huffington Post.

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thereafter when his father posted the $1,000 bail. There were no weapons, real or fake, found at the scene (Webster, et al. 1). The boy later explained that he was returning on the bus from a Halloween party he attended four days earlier, without bringing a change of clothes. He went as “Snake Eyes” from the G.I. Joe franchise. He apparently was very convincing. Since that day, citizens on campus and who reside in the surrounding community seem torn about whether CCSU (Central Connecticut State University) law enforcement officials reacted appropriately: Some would argue that, in 2013 after the mass shootings in Newtown and across the country, after the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Americans should be ever vigilant in response to potential terrorist threats. Everything about the emergency systems worked, university officials said, congratulating themselves and the individuals in uniform who saw the event to its end. Other citizens protested the heavy militarization on our campus and other campuses across the country, citing evidence that these kinds of actions instill a deeply felt fear that can become pervasive if left unchecked. “The boy was wearing a costume!” they exclaimed in indignant rage. That should not be illegal. “The boy should know better in this day and age,” the proponents of paramilitary action responded. I suspect that we will be waging versions of this debate for many years to come. For me, it goes beyond a question of appropriate action or not and points directly to a thematic concern of this book: We as American intellectuals, artists, citizens, and parents have found ourselves at a crisis point that stems from an inadequate response to twenty-first-century traumas. Many before me have discussed art and literature post-9/11 as revealing the “limits of representation”; in this book, I take that consideration further and describe instead a crisis in art and literature—not simply in terms of their potential to represent traumatic experience such as mass shootings and the fall of the twin towers, but also in terms of our abilities to read them. Whereas a limit of representation suggests that “there are no words or references,”

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what I posit here as a crisis point is precisely the opposite: There are too many possibilities of seeing a terrorist attack in any number of ordinary scenarios. Not only am I interested here in a crisis in our ability to read art and literature of disaster, but also in our ability to read the world: an airplane in the sky; a college student in a Halloween costume; a necktie in the street; a child covered in sand. Prior to the mass shooting of elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, in December of 2012, educated people in Connecticut were able to see a masked person carrying a toy gun the weekend after Halloween and assumed the figure to be an exuberant kid in costume. Now, we see a masked student and assume he intends to murder university citizens in cold blood. Prior to the fall of the towers in September of 2001, people everywhere were able to see a plane flying low in the sky and assumed it maybe an accidental crash or a new pilot coming in for a landing—maybe too quickly, and too close, but never did it occur to anyone that it could be a weapon of mass destruction overtaken by a malicious terrorist plot. A return to Virginia Woolf ’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway reminded me that the sudden appearance of an airplane in the sky had, at one time, provoked excited curiosity—a bringing together of the community in anticipation of what it all means. Woolf writes, “Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters” (20). The appearance of the plane resulted in a twittering town square: Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Bletchley, Mr. Bowley, Lucrezia Warren Smith, all have their own guesses as to what this sudden appearance could bring (20–21). Nearly one hundred years later, we find ourselves suffering a very different relationship with airplanes, one that harkens back, as it would for a Londoner, to World War II and the London Blitz. Post9/11, a plane described as “dropping dead down” provokes a sense of terror and fear, a bearing up for the unanticipated, a wondering about what to do next. These days, we can read Woolf ’s airplane as

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anticipating 9/11 instead of the Blitz, thanks in part to Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday, a British novel deeply indebted to Virginia Woolf. The novel revisits this plane sighting from 1925, as its protagonist, a brain surgeon, wakes up to see an ominous figure in the sky. The novel begins before dawn, as Henry Perowne tries to discern the figure on fire in the sky outside his window. He is, somehow, prepared for the worst, understanding that it is possibly “catastrophe observed from a safe distance” (15). As Henry reflects, from his comfortable London home, “It’s already eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again, the unseen captives driven through the sky to slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed” (15). For Perowne, the plane that he sees is both “predatory” and “doomed”—a plane on fire in the twenty-first century equates terrorism, trauma, and death. And it is not just Perowne. He presents my thinking most directly when he reflects, “Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days.” Later in the novel, we learn with much relief that what Henry sees in the middle of the night is not terrorism but a mechanical failure. Similarly, what CCSU campus learned a few hours into the lockdown crisis is that it was not terrorism but a Halloween costume—a failure in judgment on the part of all those involved perhaps (the student, the university, law enforcement, and the media) but certainly no terrorist plot. For me, this exemplifies our crisis point: As the modernists have tried to tell us, we readers do not know how to read—not the signs in the sky, not language, not art, not each other. But even Virginia Woolf ’s aeroplane writing is innocent enough. How does one read a burning plane in the twenty-first century? How does one read a man falling? How does one write about these iconic images without conveying offense, appearing to profit from the suffering of another, or succumbing to reductive sentimentality or worse?

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Those artists who choose beauty must answer for their aestheticization of violence. Those artists who choose minimalism must answer for their reductive symbols. Those artists who choose nothing must answer for their silence. Meanwhile, the planes fly on, as do the masked crusaders, as do insults, barbs, accusations, and frustration. Art and literature are supposed to help make sense of our times. At this crisis point, however, we have yet to determine what new form it must take to succeed.

Acknowledgments This project began when Nels P. Highberg invited me to present new work as a part of his interdisciplinary seminar on pain at the University of Hartford in 2007. At the time, I said I had an idea about the image of the falling man, and that’s all it was: an idea. By the end of that seminar, thanks to the University of Hartford students and faculty present that night, I knew I had a book. Nels was the first of many interlocutors who contributed to these pages—interlocutors who started as colleagues and have since also become friends as a result of our shared intellectual work: Sarah Senk, Avi Patt, Nicholas Ealy, Sandor Goodhart, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Walter Kalaidjian, Michael Elliott, Ira Nadel, Brian Croxall, and David Cappella. Their contributions came in the form of links and references, encouragement, and thoughtful questions that I hope I have answered in this book. A long-time faculty member at CCSU, I first and foremost thank my students. My interests in 9/11 literature begin and end with them. Particularly, I thank Stephanie Wall, Stephanie Kapinos Stevens, Brittany Hirth, Kacper Nedza, Michael Lacy, and Elizabeth Browner. Thank you for being so consistently engaged and, above all, for listening. Thank you to Careen Waterman, Darlene Gable, and Stephen Cohen, who, during a dark day in December, must have known I needed encouragement when he said, “I don’t know how you do it,” and sent me on my way. Thank you to Mary Collins, who told me to read Tom Junod. Thank you to Karen Ritzenhoff, who published my early work on Abu Ghraib photography in her special volume of Augenblick. Portions of Chapter 3 have appeared in German under the title “Traumatic Realism and the Ethical Witness: Abu Ghraib Torture Photos, 2004–2008” in the spring 2011 issue of Augenblick, volume 48/49.

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Thank you to the staff at the Elihu Burritt Library at CCSU— Kimberly Farrington and Susan Slaga—who found hard-to-reach sources and negotiated deadlines and fines through our inter-library loan partners. Thank you to the administrators and staff at the New Britain Museum of American Art—first, for granting permissions to use their stunning mural on the cover of this book, and second, for tolerating my presence as I returned time and again to look at the painting under the gaze of the surreal wax watchman. I thank Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury, who supported this work from beginning to end. Our partnership in book production began with my first monograph Roth and Trauma. He has been instrumental in launching my career as a writer and professional scholar. Thank you to the design department, layout, the copy editor, Balaji Kasirajan, and external readers. This book would not exist without you. Further, this book benefits from the rare opportunity of the presence in my life of the artists and thinkers at its heart. Whether in conversation with them, or in the same room as them, sometimes the miracle of both, I had the benefit of first-hand insights into their responses to the falling man. Thank you to Cathy Caruth, Diane Seuss, Christopher Kennedy, and Graydon Parrish, who all took the time to think through these ideas with me—sometimes when they were only forming. Thank you to Christopher Kennedy and Diane Seuss for permission to reprint their poetry here. Thank you to Philip Roth for inviting me to his eightieth birthday party, where I was able to stand in the presence of some his greatest contemporaries—among them, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer—which made leaving the terrain of Philip Roth Studies slightly less terrifying. Thank you to Eliot Jones, who has teased me good-naturedly for missing so many soccer games. Eliot, you are a promising athlete and scholar in your own right. I am confident I will see many, many more of your astounding saves. Thank you, first and last, to Jason

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B. Jones, whose innumerable contributions to this book reflect not only the collaborative nature of our partnership but also his singular generosity and enduring patience. Jason, to say that my life as it is now began at Emory with our intellectual and literary exchanges is no overstatement. In addition to the families of 9/11, this book is dedicated to you.

Falling After 9/11: A Crisis in National Tradition

The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges. Anthony Lane, quoted in Frost, 2008 [H]ow [did] the problem of reference [become], in the history of thought, inextricably bound up with the fact of literal falling? Cathy Caruth, 1996 In many ways, this book stages an extended conversation with Anthony Lane, who immediately remarked on the disturbing sight of people falling from the ledges after 9/11, and Cathy Caruth, who asked how the problem of reference became “bound up with the fact of literal falling” (75). Writing in 1996 in response to an essay Paul de Man published in 1984, Caruth had no way of knowing that, not only in the history of thought but also in the history of History, reference would pose such a problem to writers, critics, photographers, poets, and novelists who tried to capture the reality of people falling from the ledges. As I shall argue in this book, “the problem of reference” bound up with the fact of literal falling in the wake of 9/11 is not that there are no adequate words or signs. The problem, conversely, is that there are too many: too many situations in which we still cringe at the sight of falling. In the twenty-first century, performance art, photographs, poems, even advertisements seem to refer in excess, not only addressing something potentially unrelated to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but also, inextricably, calling to mind the memory of the most horrific images from that day.

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Tom Junod’s short 2012 piece responding to nearly national hysteria over the recent advertising for the AMC hit show Mad Men bears this out. To advertise the first episode of season five of Mad Men, AMC printed a poster featuring a man in a suit, rendered in black and white, apparently falling out of an office window from high above the ground. People were stunned. As Junod argues, “when a television network is accused of exploiting a sacred 9/11 image for its own purposes, it’s worth looking once again at the image in question to see what those purposes might be. In particular, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the guardians of American culture have been exploiting sacred 9/11 images since at least 9/12” (Junod 2012). As for Junod, I do not think he cares as much about the AMC advertisement as he does about the “guardians of American culture”—those who, as I shall argue in Chapter 3, insisted that Richard Drew’s stunning photograph of a man falling from the North Tower on 9/11 be removed from print media altogether. Examples of accusations of writers who appear to be exploiting the figure of the falling man abound in this book, which points to my sense that we are now at a particular crisis point in art and literature, a crisis point generated by the fact that whatever images or words or symbols that we use to communicate in this post-9/11 world will perpetually, inevitably, unwittingly point back to a contemporary American trauma we cannot seem to get out of our collective consciousness. In his 2012 piece called “Falling (Mad) Man,” Junod remarks that after he published his Esquire piece on the Drew photograph in 2003, he got a call from a friend, who said: “Well, now you have a book.” Drew recalls saying, “I asked him what he meant, and he told me that anyone I wanted to write about could be written about for a book called The Falling Man, because, in his words, ‘We’re all falling men now.’ ” With a sustained reading of various representations of the falling man after 9/11—and, crucially, of the criticism of those representations ranging from uncomfortable to outraged—I too see us as falling in more ways than one. When reference fails us, it seems we have very little left to grasp hold of.

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The first and last example in this book considers the mural that the New Britain Museum of American Art commissioned in response to the attacks. Museum director at the time, Douglas Hyland asked Graydon Parrish if he would paint something for the museum, the oldest museum of American art in the nation. Five years after 9/11, Parrish unveiled his masterpiece entitled Cycle of Terror and Tragedy (the painting that graces the cover of this book). To my surprise, Parrish revealed his mural to rather disappointing reviews. Grace Glueck, the first prominent art critic to review the painting nationally, claimed that the work’s allegorical imagery “is slickly theatrical and off-key. [Parrish] has suggested that his painting might be read as an opera, but it reads more like those corny, symbol-crammed W.P.A.era murals that still grace post offices throughout the land” (“Art in Review; Graydon Parrish”). Five months later, Benjamin Genocchio weighed in with his own remarks, explaining to readers of The New York Times that “Mr. Parrish has a fine arsenal of talent and ideas, but this particular work comes off as overly staged, showy and annoyingly melodramatic, the clichéd pomp and classical symbolism drowning out a gentler, more compassionate spirit” (“The Tragedy of 9/11”). Both critics voice a double criticism of Parrish’s 9/11 work: First, they grant him the back-handed compliment of being “well-schooled” or “academic,” a heavily symbolic, “realist” painter in the Renaissance tradition. The second, and for my purposes more interesting, move is slightly different: Glueck and Genocchio both complain that to treat 9/11 symbolically or allegorically is, almost by definition, overly aesthetic—each compares the painting to a Broadway musical. They seem to see the 9/11 painting as avoiding the gritty, post-modernist reality of this traumatic event. In both cases, however, for these critics—and others like them—the painting is, paradoxically, too beautiful. It is too polished. It is too symmetrical. It is too clearly a homage to the Renaissance painters who inspired Parrish, and, as a result, cannot be taken seriously as a piece that depicts the harsh brutality of the events of 9/11. It appears as though critics in the contemporary art and literary worlds demand representations of 9/11

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fraught with jarring images. It is as though the critical community desires images and texts that are raw and unpleasant in order to convey the unpalatable nature of the pain associated with that day. It may be worth noting here that most of these critical tropes are rather well worn, having first gained attention related to aesthetic representations of the Holocaust. Perhaps the best example of this type of criticism is Adorno’s notorious declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” However, there is an interesting dynamic here: Adorno’s claim about poetry comes from a worry about participating in the culture that produced it, thus making the poet inadvertently complicit in that horror. The worry, in other words, is related not to the failure of witnessing but rather to an observation that the aesthetic nature of such poetic witness undercuts its ideological force. But the 9/11 attacks are different, as they are usually presented as a clash of cultures, in which a terrorist group apparently dedicated to recreating the Middle Ages attacks the most technologically and economically sophisticated nation on earth. So the Adorno critique of poetry and the contemporary critiques governed by this line of thinking do not readily apply; nevertheless, it seems as though the 9/11 critics have taken it a step further, lamenting that any artistic attempt to bear witness to atrocity is overly aesthetic, and thus inadequate. In fact, it is true that what Parrish has created is a lovely and symmetrical allegory: The twin bodies—strong, virile, and painted as though a part of a Botticelli painting—are also allegories for the virile twin towers about to fall. The children holding planes represent the loss of innocence of an entire nation. In the fall of the old man, and the mothers, and the children, we see the fall of a nation, each image neatly capturing the horror of 9/11. But this anxiety over overtly aesthetic responses to 9/11 is not exclusive to the art world. There has been a rush of 9/11 poems and novels, in fact, and invariably reviewers gesture toward the difficulty of such representations. Rather than see this as a commentary on the difficulty of depicting a single, horrific moment in time, however, they see it as aesthetic failure at its

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most insulting. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), for example, ends with dozens of pages with the image of the falling man ordered in reverse, so, when flipped the right way, these pages reveal a man flying back up to the top of the Tower. Foer has been criticized as being “precious” at best; at worst, he has been criticized as a writer willing to capitalize on such tragedies as 9/11 and the Holocaust. William Heyen, editor of September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002), didn’t fare much better than Foer and Parrish. Bill Marvel of The Dallas Morning News suggested that “there is … much that might have been improved by second or even third thoughts” (“All on the same page”). For Marvel, this art, the art of 9/11, was published too hastily. There is always a sense, with this material, that it is too soon to convey any kind of meaning or reparation about the event. This was certainly true in 2002, when American Writers Respond appeared in print. Further, the proliferation of artistic responses to the 9/11 attacks by the summer of 2002 led New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani to question: “What is the line between preserving our historical memory—ensuring that ‘we will never forget,’ as the banner erected over ground zero pledged—and cashing in on a terrible event, between remembering and exploiting the dead? Does reading about (or viewing pictures of) that September day reopen old wounds, or help us come to terms with our loss?” (“The Information Age Processes a Tragedy”). Kakutani seems to believe that 9/11 art will not to be able to help us come to terms with our loss. And, to make matters worse, Kakutani has now charged those who make any attempt at representing this historical trauma with exploiting the dead. Meanwhile, Don DeLillo’s long-awaited Falling Man (2007) received immediate attention, led by Kakutani, who ultimately claimed that “the reader approaches Mr. DeLillo’s post-9/11 work with great anticipation. Unfortunately, his strangely stilted 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, was a terrible disappointment, and so is his spindly new novel, Falling Man” (“A Man, A Woman, A Day of Terror”).

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Falling Man is an incredibly difficult and ambiguous work, however. First, like several other works I take up in this book, it draws on what is perhaps the most vexed image associated with 9/11: the images of men and women falling to their deaths, in “mass suicide,” as Tom Junod reported in Esquire, in order to avoid death by suffocation or burning in the twin towers. Much like in his previous novel, The Body Artist (2001), DeLillo here questions the ability for performance art to have reparative effects on a grieving individual or culture. When the victims of 9/11 within the novel see an “artist” staging his own death by falling— only to be saved at the last minute—they wonder, as do we, at whether such a move is an appropriate (aesthetic or otherwise) response to such a gruesome act. There is a double bind here, however: Reviewers, politicians, and audiences clamor for artists to interpret the “great questions of the day”—to use their talents on behalf of all of us to voice something as the horrible and repeated image of the falling man associated with 9/11— and then immediately dismiss the results as inadequate or inappropriate because of their beauty. The events of 9/11 have brought this double bind to the fore, as critics appear largely unanimous in calling this art— from paintings to poetry to novels and photography—a failure. This focus on failure in the face of the tragic events of 9/11 raises some perplexing issues, not only about representation, but also about the status of fiction—indeed, of all art forms—in the wake of a national crisis. Rather than seeing fiction as an appropriate witness or response to trauma, for example, those vested with the task of reviewing new work often seem to have rejected these representations completely out of hand—either as being too perfect or too imperfect, written too early or too late. As such, we have reached a kind of crisis point—a moment where testimony, documentary-style photography, and newspaper reportage have emerged as being, somehow, more aesthetic and affective, more moving, even, than art. While it seems that too many books to count have appeared in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, few of them arrive at the difficult conclusion that American literature has reached a crisis point in

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representation—seeking, rather, solace in many of the images offered since 2001. And of those critical works that take up the “problem” of 9/11, none of them offers a sustained look at the figure of the falling man—at once the most-cited and perplexing image to emerge in our national consciousness from that day. In fact, many books take a general approach, either through an edited collection of essays regarding representation —Judith Greenberg’s Trauma at Home After 9/11 (2003) and Peter Schenck and Philipp Schweighauser’s Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction (2010) take up this approach, for example—or they offer a reflection on 9/11 novels generally, as is the case of Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009). Other examples of the more general approach include monographs on the relationships between media culture and politics after 9/11, such as Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005) and Sandra Silberstein’s War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 (2002). Udo Hebel’s book, Transnational American Memories takes up, in particular, trauma and national memory (2009). Greenberg’s and Hebel’s books have been invaluable, however, for their understanding of trauma theory and the function of memory—both in terms of personal memories and in terms of national or cultural memories. While Richard Gray’s After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (2011) looks at the effects of 9/11 on the national literary tradition, his study is incredibly broad and far-reaching. My book exists in conversation with his insofar as I read closely the figure of the falling man in 9/11 literature in particular, and present it within the theoretical framework of trauma. It would scarcely be possible to discuss representations of 9/11 without invoking the concept of trauma, although few critics have explored that notion with the rigor characteristic of trauma studies. Versluys takes up both the themes of 9/11 and trauma; however, he reads these narratives as holding the potential to offer redemption in the wake of extreme experience. Perhaps more rigorously wedded to the other side of trauma studies—that which wonders if reparation is ever fully possible—I read the figures of the falling man in 9/11

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literature as indicative of a crisis in representation, seeing no real sign of redemption in these works, despite, often, their best attempts at providing it. Schneck’s and Schweighauser’s edited collection on DeLillo is perhaps the most focused of the works and also gestures toward a defense of post-9/11 art using DeLillo as a special case. Given the book’s focus on DeLillo’s novel Falling Man and its relation to memory and ethics in the first part, I align my readings with other critics in this collection (Linda S. Kauffman in particular) who see value in DeLillo’s provocative novel when so many others have tended to dismiss it. Using DeLillo’s novel Falling Man as one case of a novel that seems to falter beneath the emotional and associative weight of the actual falling man in history, my work goes on to explore other cases of the critical reception of literature featuring this figure; it is my aim here to defend these so-called failures for their power to communicate something about a referential crisis American artists have encountered in their repeated attempts to adequately refer to falling. While this power cannot be called reparative—which is what critics such as Kakutani seem to want—it still is worth considering seriously. John Duvall’s essay “Witnessing Trauma” is perhaps closest to my own project for its theoretical interest in the effects of traumatic events as well as its focus on representations of the falling man. A close reading of DeLillo’s Falling Man in particular, Duvall’s essay also considers as a contextual backdrop the reception of other images of falling after 9/11, including Richard Drew’s photograph of the man falling to his death from the North Tower and Eric Fischl’s sculpture, Tumbling Woman, which I take up later in this introduction (Duvall 159–168). Crucially, Duvall’s sense of this crisis in representation is real, as he is one of the few critics today who seems to recognize, as I do, that it is difficult to find reparation in the face of this haunting image. For Duvall, “in Falling Man DeLillo illustrates both the inadequacy and the necessity of artistic mediation and meditation to the task of remembering and memorializing 9/11” (153). In fact, he uses the exact phrase “problem of representation” in reference to DeLillo’s novel later in the essay (158) and ultimately concludes with a compelling explanation of the stakes of

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reading DeLillo in this way: “What DeLillo asks us to remember is that images—whether identified as documentary or aesthetic—crucially matter, and his performance artist known as Falling Man invites our reflection on the images of 9/11, since that may be all that ever will allow us a partial glimpse into trauma’s unknowing” (168). Catherine Morley has also recently written on the problem of unknowing in terms of 9/11 literature: In an essay recently published in a special issue of the Journal of American Studies entitled “Ten years after 9/11,” Morley’s article on American literature’s perpetual interest in the domestic sphere begins with a question: “How do we write about this?” (717). What this special issue of the Journal of American Studies points up in particular, however, is the fact that the image of the man falling still has not left our consciousness—cultural, intellectual, artistic, political, or otherwise. In addition to Morley’s essay, the issue features a roundtable in which three scholars discuss the prominence of Richard Drew’s photograph of the man falling from the North Tower. Entitled “The Ascent of the Falling Man: Establishing a Picture’s Iconicity,” this roundtable’s title—and, to some extent, its thematic focus—alludes both to the rise of the prominence of the vision of the man falling and also to the end of Safran Foer’s novel, in which the young protagonist recreates a flipbook to visualize the catechresic image of a man “falling” “up.” The debate, for these scholars—Rob Kroes, Miles Orvell, and Alan Nadel—involves the status of Richard Drew’s famous photograph as “iconic” and delves into the question of why it remains so indelible in the national consciousness. Kroes reports that his purpose for writing is “to account for the fascination of that one image, in a struggle to find words to describe that impact. To that end I looked at how others—the photographer himself, Tom Junod, Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman—have translated their fascination into language that may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us” (10). In his response, Nadel rightly notes that “Rob Kroes’s contemplation of Richard Drew’s photograph Falling Man is that the more Kroes tries to talk about the photograph, the more he talks about other things”—

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Falling After 9/11

in fact, highlighting the elusiveness not only of the image but of the idea itself (16). For Orvell, for example, “the image functions less as an icon than as an existential symbol … [and] the visual representation of 9/11 is of historical importance not because of any one iconic image but because of the panoply of images associated with the event” (11). Building on the work of Duvall—and after him, Kroes, Orvell, and Nadel—this book takes up the vexed image of the falling man in order to consider its failure, on almost all counts, and what that failure can teach us about the place of representation in the literary arts in the twentyfirst century. I want to ask, in particular: How do we recuperate these images in order to assimilate them and to somehow recover, through paradoxically non-reparative means, from the trauma of 9/11? Further, do we want to “move on”—and somehow feel healed following this terrible event? How do we interpret, as a culture, repeated references to the trope of the falling man, images that never quite seem to capture the horror of the day, but yet emerge, as though via traumatic repetition, again and again and again? I propose that this repetition of a single trope of the man falling— and apparently one that repeatedly fails, despite the multiple attempts at rendering this history—illustrates what theorists of deconstruction and trauma would refer to as “the problem of reference.” Certainly, the problem of reference, war, and death is not specific to the narratives of the late twentieth century. As Cathy Caruth argues, Paul de Man’s “The Resistance to Theory” is intrigued by how Newton’s theory of gravitational force might inform the story of “how the problem of reference became, in the history of thought, inextricably bound up with the fact of literal falling” (93). According to Caruth’s reading of de Man, the problem of reference is exemplified by scientific, philosophical, and artistic questions about “how to refer to falling” (93, emp. in original). Falling, in this reading, is a figure for the difficulty of referring to something that is impossible to fully assimilate into consciousness and the system of language. For de Man, and Caruth after him, it is not simply the fact of falling that is a surprise but also the emergence of the law in 1687 of universal gravitation

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describing the gravitational attraction between bodies with mass. As Caruth points up, Newton’s theory reveals that everything is falling all of the time, so there is never a stable reference point. What we call “falling,” then, is just a special case of something that is always true. The related problem, Caruth speculates, is not simply confronting the science behind falling but confronting the fact that there are, perhaps, no words to refer to such a moment. Granted, many of us survive our perpetual moments of falling perfectly well. However, the limit case, such as the figure of the falling man I take up here, emphasizes, to borrow from Caruth, “an example of the occurrence of difference: the difference between living and dying—which resists being generalized into a conceptual figure or law. This is the difference that, we recall, appeared in, but remained inassimilable to, the formal system, a difference it could not know, just as, we could add, the system was unable to know the event of falling” (89). How does one refer to falling—if at all? Not only was the scientific community shaken by the theory of gravity, but those of us who find our faith and strength in the potential of language to convey the unimaginable felt the impact as well. Such difficulty, we imagine, might be undercut by the potential of the image as rendered through the photographer’s lens. However, even photographs—or, more precisely, especially photographs of the falling man—were met with grief, then horror, then outrage, then censorship in the wake of 9/11. Junod’s award-winning 2003 article for Esquire magazine seeks to explore why, as he tracks, especially, the search to determine the identity of the falling man in the now-iconic photograph taken by Richard Drew. Some families, he says, when asked to identify whether the man in the photograph is a relation, are hostile even to looking at the picture itself; he ultimately surmises that imagining the possibility of a family member jumping to his death reveals a betrayal of faith—or of the quest to return home safely. However, what interests me most about this piece is what connects it to the Parrish backlash—it is actually a lovely photograph—again, as many have noted, it is perfectly symmetrical. It reveals a sense of freedom and defiance.

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Falling After 9/11

Perhaps it is Junod’s poetic description of the photograph that links it so directly with art. Junod writes: “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. [ … ] In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.” What stands out for me here is the accidental symmetry of the photograph, the fact that the photograph is so balanced: The falling body itself “achieves” “geometric balance.” While Richard Drew has captured a terrible, grisly event here, he has done it with an artist’s eye, but still he is unable to render the moment any more imaginable than any other depiction of falling from that day. Junod here makes the surprising move of linking this man’s traumatic death with freedom, a move that Diane Seuss also makes in her 9/11 poem “Falling Man,” which I discuss below and at length in Chapter 5. Some readers of the Esquire article—and indeed many family members—when presented with the photograph and asked to identify the man, think only of the betrayal of suicide when they see this man falling. The photograph asks the viewer to confront many grisly subjects, the terrorist attacks only being one of them. However, this work, much like the life-sized bronze entitled Tumbling Woman, rendered by Eric Fischl, appears to be rejected not simply for the philosophical decisions embraced by people about to fall to their deaths but also—and this is the interesting part for critics—because it is too beautiful. Junod also considers Fischl’s story in his Esquire article, explaining Fischl’s process: He “had taken photographs of a model tumbling around on the floor of a studio. He had thought of using the photographs as the basis of a sculpture. Now, though, he had lost a friend who had been trapped on the 106th floor of the North Tower. As he worked on his sculpture, he sought to express the extremity of his feelings by making a monument to what he calls the ‘extremity of choice’ faced by the people who jumped” (Junod). But this work, too, was criticized outlandishly, highlighted by Andrea Peyser’s New York Post review entitled “Shameful Art Attack” (Junod, “The Falling Man”).

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The criticism of these two works—the “Falling Man” photograph and the Tumbling Woman sculpture—like the literature, like the painting, appear to critics to capitalize aesthetically in the face of the pain of others—and even manage to fail in the aesthetic enterprise to boot. As Fischl recalls, “I was trying to say something about the way we all feel, but people thought I was trying to say something about the way they feel—that I was trying to take away something only they possessed. They thought that I was trying to say something about the people they lost. ‘That image is not my father. You don’t even know my father. How dare you try telling me how I feel about my father?’ Fischl wound up apologizing—I was ashamed to have added to anybody’s pain—but it didn’t matter” (Junod, “The Falling Man”). For 9/11 literature, a refusal to fall based on commitment to faith or to family, and the opposing narrative technique of pulling the rug out from under readers, is vexed by the images ingrained in our minds of people apparently willingly falling (the crux of the tension behind the search for the identity of the man in the photograph)—of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center towers in order to save themselves from burning alive. Diane Seuss addresses such an image in a poem simply called “Falling Man,” published in Heyen’s collection, which I mentioned earlier. Although many post-9/11 writers have used this trope in compelling ways, I want to consider Seuss briefly because of the way she appears to act out her ambivalence about using such a trope in the poem itself. She seems to want to depict the harsh reality of falling, but ends her poem apparently caught up, instead, in images of flying and freedom. Further, Seuss seems to erode our perspective as witness here, in the last couplet, reframing the point of view in order to challenge our own desires, ultimately suggesting that perhaps we are too willing to see birth and redemption where there are none to be found. And this, too, reveals the criticism behind Parrish’s 9/11 mural and Drew’s photograph and Foer’s and DeLillo’s novels: 9/11 art cannot be both “beautiful” and appear trustworthy in any way as a genuine representation of the experience. For me, however, what appeals about

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Falling After 9/11

the formal beauty of such works is not that they offer redemption as such but rather that they point up the impossibility of such redemption. One recent literary example depicting the reality of a man falling comes in the form of Frédéric Beigbeder’s 2004 novel Windows on the World. The novel ends not with one man falling but with one man and his two children—one who has already died from smoke inhalation. Just before they jump, the father (named Carthew Yorston) thinks: “we’re going home, we’re taking your little brother home, come and surf the clouds of fire, you were my angels and nothing will ever split us up again, heaven is being with you, take a deep breath and if you’re scared at all, all you’ve gotta do is close your eyes” (290). The novel is highly emotional, in part because of this moment and many others leading up to it—scenes written intentionally with elevated language to capture the horror of the event. But precisely because it depends on poetic language, these passages are beautiful, heightened by images of clouds of fire and flying angels. The chapter ends with Yorston saying: “For a split second, I really believed we were flying”—a literary maneuver made by a number of American artists I take up in this book (290). One thing that separates this novel from others like Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and DeLillo’s Falling Man, however, is that Beigbeder’s novel was, on the whole, very well received. Among the complimentary reviewers of Windows on the World were the high-profile writers Laura Miller, for Salon.com, and Stephen Metcalf for The New York Times. Metcalf went as far as to write: “How is it that in approaching so delicate a subject as 9/11, he has written so funny and moving a book?” (Web). Although one could say the same of Safran Foer and DeLillo, I cannot help but wonder if critics were more forgiving of a French novelist writing of a man falling after 9/11. There is perhaps one other moment that treats the image of the falling man as satisfactory—according to the art world, although it has never been published or framed or presented as “art” as such. Below, I cite what Shoshana Felman would call, following Stéphané Mallarme (who wrote poetry about accidents) and Paul Celan

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(whose own poetry appears as pure accident), “the art of accident” (18–42). For Felman, who writes specifically about the Holocaust testimony, “testimonies in themselves are definitely, at least on their manifest level, as foreign to ‘poetry’ as anything can be, both in their substance and their intent. Yet many of them attain, surprisingly, in the very structure of their occurrence, the dimension of discovery and of advent and the power of significance and impact of a true event of language—an event which can unwittingly resemble a poetic, or a literary, act” (41). Such a claim has led Felman to be criticized for finding—or wanting to find—beauty or redemption in the literal testimony of another’s suffering. But I do not think this is a fair assessment. The surprise, including the surprising aesthetic dimensions, of the “event” of testimony, especially in a moment when other, “more fictive,” responses feel fake or manipulative, is noteworthy for Felman—as one would see in the testimony from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, held during 2003. For example, what follows is an honest and raw representation of the image of the falling body, a moment that appears to come straight out of a play. It begins like this: On September 11th Brad called my husband at work shortly after the first plane hit tower one. Like other times when there was an emergency in the building, he wanted to reassure us that he was ok. He was shaken, because he had seen someone ‘drop from the 91st floor … ALL THE WAY DOWN.’ He knew a plane hit tower one, but wasn’t aware it was a commercial jet. The Port Authority directed my son’s company to stay put in their office, ‘that the building is safe and secure.’ My husband asked Brad to call me at home. Here is the recording of the message Brad left me around 9:00 a.m. (15 minutes after the first plane hit tower one, 3 minutes before the 2nd plane hit tower two): Hi Mom, it’s Brad. Just wanted to call and let you know. I’m sure that you heard there was … or maybe you haven’t heard that a plane crashed into World Trade Center One. We’re fine. We’re in World Trade Center 2. I’m obviously alive and well over here. But obviously … a pretty scary experience. I saw a guy fall out of probably

16

Falling After 9/11 the 91st story … ah … all the way down … so … (long pause, cleared throat). You’re welcome to give a call here. I think we’ll be here all day. I’m not sure if the firm is going to shut down for the day or what. But ah … give me a call back later. I called Dad to let him know. Love You. (Fetchet)

I would propose here that Fetchet’s words—especially when read in full—might help inform via their literary quality our responses to the poetry, paintings, and novels submitted to express the traumatic experiences of 9/11. Critics are hungry, it appears, for the raw, gritty, messy, emotional testimony that has the power to move readers, to make us feel the losses of 3,000 lives. The words of Mary Fetchet and, indeed, of her son Brad do not self-consciously strive toward literariness, and yet it exists here too. The long pause, the stuttering, the throat clearing—the failure to represent—all around the image of the falling man seem to succeed in surprising ways at adequately, somehow, dealing with the shock. Are these qualities, I wonder, that we’ve appeared to hunger for in our national literature about 9/11? But, if this is the case, then we have some important implications to consider: Do we really want our literature, our fiction, after 9/11 to resemble traumatic testimony, rather than the polish of the masters we have come to base our canon upon? What would it mean to pillage the words of mothers, for example, for rare, accidental, artistic moments in a rejection of more outlandish, aesthetic, manipulated art forms? Fetchet’s words, after all, are testimony intended to serve another purpose: to put the country on trial for not knowing enough. She continues, in anger: “How is it that they were receiving such conflicting information, which ultimately, senselessly cost my son’s life and the life of 600 others in building two? What were the lessons learned after the 1993 bombing? Were there evacuation policies in place? Were they followed? NO ONE IN BUILDING TWO SHOULD BE DEAD TODAY. WHAT WERE THE FAILURES AND AGAIN WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE?” This is not literature, then, but rather the testimony of a mother on the witness stand. Or is that all? What is striking, when we look

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to the testimony of witnesses, is a confounding of falling and literary reference comparable to that invoked by Caruth. For example, at the first public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Mary Fetchet gave a statement on March 31, 2003, testifying—using the language of literature—to the knowledge of a man falling. Fetchet’s purpose for testifying is not only to add to the literary or artistic or cultural record; rather, she seeks to uncover answers. She testifies “[a]s a mother who lost her child [as one who feels it is her] moral obligation to speak on behalf of [her] son and all those that died on September 11th.” She testifies with the desire to know what the failures were and who is accountable. Again, what we will see emerge here is a double bind, whereby testimony delivered up under the sign of a moral imperative to tell the truth intersects with a figurative language that exceeds such literal-minded truth-telling. This is perhaps, however, a problem better articulated as, in particular, the “problem of reference” presented through the events of 9/11. Yet I am thinking here, too, about a course on trauma and literature Shoshana Felman offered at Yale in the early 1990s—a class that looked at Holocaust poetry and the testimony of survivors themselves as surprisingly effective in conveying “the truth” about a traumatic event (Felman 1–56). I am thinking, too, about the objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, who wrote his long poems Testimony and Holocaust simply by looking at the actual testimony of witnesses, inserting line breaks, and publishing it as poetry (see Pozorski, Reznikoff ’s Holocaust Revisited). And I am thinking about Erin Striff, a professor at the University of Hartford, who wrote and staged in the fall of 2008 the one-act play entitled Close Your Eyes— about a young British woman on trial for the murder of her newborn baby—borrowing “nearly every line” from court transcripts and testimony. As such, then, and given the history of the trope of the falling man, I think we can ask meaningful questions together about where we stand now as a literary and artistic community—one that, on the one

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Falling After 9/11

hand, wants and needs to claim a tradition from the ruins of national disaster, but that, on the other hand, feels rightly compelled to honor the singular pain of actual witnesses to the same disaster. Where do we draw the line? To return to the example of Mary Fetchet, the grieving mother in the wake of 9/11, I do not suggest here that we replace the failed attempts at “literature” with the “literary” that we see emerging in the raw data, the testimony itself. What does it mean to say that successful representations of 9/11 would ideally reflect the actual testimony— more than the actual fiction and paintings, the “allegorical” or “fictional” representations critics find so offensive? What would it mean to say that what we, as readers and critics ourselves, want in depicting a national tragedy would look something more like the testimony of a grieving mother than canonical work in allegory that goes back to the masters, as do the Heyen collection poets and the Parrish mural? After all, we need to maintain a distinction, it seems to me, between a national literature and surprising instances of the “literary” that we find in traumatic testimony of witnesses to 9/11. Guided by Michael Rothberg, perhaps we can supplement a reading of this literature via trauma theory and an awareness of the problems of reference with “a positive vision of social and political transformation” (“There Is No Poetry,” 156). But, what would that look like—and how would we then keep the aesthetic enterprise at the core of the art itself? Ultimately, I believe that possible answers will lead us beyond art and into discussions of history. For, if the only “true” way to depict the unimaginable is through actual testimony, then that fact alone necessarily tells us something strange and unsettling about the impossible position of artists in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this book all contribute to an answer to the question of how one might refer to falling in the midst of twenty-first-century trauma, ultimately arriving at the troubling realization that we have possibly reached a limit point or crisis in our attempts to represent traumatic experience as exemplified by the image of the man falling.

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Chapter 1, “Gravity, Gravitas, Grave: How to Refer to Falling,” establishes the theoretical grounding of my work, beginning with Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma. I propose here that, whereas Paul de Man and Caruth after him read images of falling as a literary trope that points to what is unimaginable, post-9/11 writers have the additional problem (and responsibility) to represent the falling man as a particular truth of 9/11. In fact, as I argue throughout, the image of the falling man is perhaps the exemplary case, to date, of the horror of the 9/11 tragedies experienced by New York City and beyond. Chapter 2, “Beyond the Literal: The Falling Man and Moral Failing,” juxtaposes Vietnam War fiction—in particular, the work of Robert Olen Butler and Tim O’Brien—with 9/11 literature, focusing especially upon the image of a man falling. Building on the work of Chapter 1, I illustrate via close readings of Vietnam literature that representations of a falling man or soldier often function metaphorically for the process of writing or depicting traumatic experience. However, twenty-firstcentury writers seem to struggle with the weight of representing a man literally falling and, I argue, appear at first glance as much less effective. At the end of this chapter, I introduce testimonies of witnesses during the 9/11 commission—in particular, I return to the Mary Fetchet testimony, as she, too, describes her son’s response to seeing people falling, and this testimony, curiously enough, seems more literary than the literature we have turned to in order to capture the history of the event. Chapter 3, “Journalism’s Falling Man: Documents and Truth Telling,” picks up on this idea of “truth telling” by considering, first, the controversial documentary Falling Man—one that inspired an award-winning article published in Esquire in 2007 to determine the “true” nature of the event and the identity of the man falling that has appeared in so many 9/11 photos. On the other side of this search for truth are videos such as Loose Change published by the “truthers”— American citizens who believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy—and the amateur photographs taken of torture victims at Abu Ghraib in the shadow of 9/11.

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Falling After 9/11

Chapter 4, “Don DeLillo’s Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling,” suggests that Don DeLillo—arguably one of the most important living contemporary American writers—arrives at a particular kind of “truth” of 9/11 not through video but, crucially, through literary language. With a focus on the poetic nature of language, his novel Falling Man picks up where his previous novel, The Body Artist, leaves off— with the healing or recuperative power of language and performance art. Ultimately, Falling Man differs from The Body Artist in that children play a central role, something I return to in Chapter 6. In this respect, DeLillo seems to be saying, ultimately, something about the nature of the child as witness and asks questions not only about survival but also about a new life or tradition emerging from the ashes of 9/11. Chapter 5, “The Poetics of Falling: The Lyrical Laments of Kennedy and Seuss,” argues that, much like Don DeLillo’s fiction, the “Falling Man” poetry of Diane Seuss and Christopher Kennedy has, when read at all, been challenged as inadequate, as unable truly to capture the emotional impact of 9/11. Seuss, however, seems not simply to be a “failed poet” in this regard but as deeply ambivalent about writing through a new national tradition. Her own poem, “Falling Man,” for example, is as equally lacerating as it is healing, appearing not to know whether what we need, now, is literary writing that consoles or literary writing that shatters (as in the modern tradition). Ending her poem with an image of birth and a turn toward the value of aesthetics, she seems to want to “advocate”; “push” too close to birth imagery. Chapter 6, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Historical Reverberation and Scientific Invention in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Iconotext,” directly addresses the criticism of Foer’s 9/11 novel by emphasizing the ways in which it seems to acknowledge that language is not enough—especially when trying to describe a man falling. The novel ends with the child’s recognition of an important mystery surrounding his father’s final days, but ends without the consolation of words. Instead, Foer offers repeated images of a man falling. In the end, the child suggests that if we turn the pages backward, the man appears

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to be flying—also an image confused in the poetry of Seuss and the Vietnam fiction of O’Brien. The refusal of language, in the end, and the turn toward visual arts, seems to say something about the failure of literature to adequately depict a man falling. Finally, the book’s epilogue, “Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: Parrish’s 9/11 Mural Revisited,” transitions from Foer’s iconotext of a man falling/flying to another emotionally stunning visual image—Graydon Parrish’s long-awaited 9/11 mural: Cycle of Terror and Tragedy. At once celebrated and condemned for being a “learned” or “scholarly” painter by turning toward Renaissance masters, Parrish failed to impress the art world with his mural. The example of Graydon Parrish allows me to ask questions about where we, as literary critics and readers of contemporary American literature and art, stand in terms of tradition. On the one hand, I want to argue that the early critics of Parrish and DeLillo, among others, who decry 9/11 art as overly showy are ultimately misguided, as the artists themselves seem to recognize, self-consciously, the failure of representation that the very critics of their work lament. On the other hand, there is also a way in which to understand these critics, ultimately, as right—there is a case to be made that these images “don’t work” in quite the way we expect—which points dramatically to the moment of crisis in which we find ourselves. Clearly at a crossroads, critics and readers seem to be looking for a particular answer to the problem of how to refer to falling but have not yet arrived at one that is satisfactory. When it comes to traumatic experience, I worry that we never will.

1

Gravity, Gravitas, Grave: How to Refer to Falling?

[W]hen a person in a military cemetery among grave markers that spread to all the horizons understands that all of existence has been destroyed again and again, when depression after mania causes clock hands to stick and days to crawl, when the full moon’s light creeps across a sleeper calling to her atavistic soul, when a soldier, who has always known life is imperfect, is wheeled to another hopeless attempt at surgery—but, this time, resolves to sleep and not wake again until such time as time begins again—then gravity grips us to the earth, and crosses its fingers. Galway Kinnell, 2013 While its imagery seems to turn toward timeless, even “atavistic,” problems, Galway Kinnell’s 2013 poem “Gravity” uncovers an oddly resonant twenty-first-century concern: the difficulty of referring to falling. No matter how many wars are visible to “a person in a military cemetery/among grave markers,” one cannot help but think of the fallen soldiers after the terrorist attacks of 9/11—those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to respond to the attacks. As a result, for me, Kinnell’s soldier, “who has always known life is imperfect,” is inextricably linked with 9/11 and the falling men he was sent to avenge. The key word in this poem is “gravity”—a word that unites the force by which all bodies fall toward the center of the earth

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with the grave into which we will all one day fall, the “grave” of the second line of this excerpt, the “grave” of the soldiers killed in action or victims of suicide after their return home. It links a specific problem of how to refer to falling—an historical situation tied to 9/11—as well as how to refer at all: how, at the turn of a phrase, gravity becomes simultaneously a term from physics as well as a signifier of trauma, the double meaning indicating how far we have come from clarity of language and thought following the attacks. Kinnell’s poem works through its ability to connect the word “gravity” with two senses equally compelling after 9/11: on the one hand, in the physical sense, as in “[t]he attractive force by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth; the degree of intensity with which a body in any given position is affected by this force, measured by the amount of acceleration produced”; on the other hand, in the emotional sense, “the quality of being grave” (OED). Even with these two senses of “gravity,” we have added a third complication— the multiple connotations with the word “grave,” as in (from the Old English) its usage as a noun: “A place of burial; an excavation in the earth for the reception of a corpse”; on the other hand, we have its usage as an adjective: “Highly serious, formidable. Of diseases or symptoms: Serious, threatening a fatal result.” It is worth recalling this etymology when we think about 9/11, and the iconic media image of the man falling. In this figure of the falling man, all three meanings of gravity converge: the force pulling bodies to the center of the earth; the place of burial; and the seriousness that brings to mind fatalities. As I will argue here, the “problem” of reference is not that any language or any word is inadequate to represent the trauma of 9/11 but rather that there is too much language, too many slippages of associations, too many possibilities for reading and misreading. Meaning is insecurely grasped by, but not beyond the reach of, our words. To unpack my admittedly dense claim, this first chapter establishes the theoretical grounding of the chapters to follow, beginning with Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma. In Unclaimed Experience (1996), Caruth considers Paul de Man’s reading of the Newtonian theory of gravity, arguing ultimately that “the problem of the Twentieth Century

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is how to refer to falling.” Ever since my days as a graduate student at Emory University in the late 1990s which, at the time, provided a haven in the humanities for several former students of Paul de Man, I wondered why trauma theory would be so indebted to the problem of falling in particular. Why falling, for example, and not genocide or poverty or the atom bomb? During that time, I heard many lectures and read many essays about the referential problem posed by falling in particular—some of that material I hope to outline here. In part, I have come to understand the problem of falling not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense, connoting a moral or spiritual fall, which is where the literary resonances first found its greatest power. However, after September 11, 2001, referring to falling took on an added dimension, a greater weight—even more responsibility. Somehow, after 9/11, it seemed to me as though Paul de Man and his academic successors had articulated unknowingly—and eerily twenty years before the attacks—that the problem of the twentyfirst century would remain “how to refer to falling” Now, whereas Paul de Man and Caruth after him read images of falling as a literary trope that points to what is unimaginable, post-9/11 writers have the additional problem (and responsibility) to represent the falling man as a particular and literal truth of 9/11. In fact, as I propose throughout, the image of the falling man is perhaps the exemplary case to date of the horror of the 9/11 tragedies experienced by New York City and beyond. By offering a close reading of Paul de Man’s work linking a famous essay by Kleist and the implications for Newtonian thought, as well as the readings offered in response by Cathy Caruth, Cynthia Chase, and Wolf Kittler, I will argue that the problem of the twenty-first century has also been “how to refer to falling”—but not in the way people expect: The problem lies not with the limitations offered by language but rather with the excessive potential for references, contributing to further confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the event. Unclaimed Experience is perhaps most usually read for its engagement with psychoanalysis, but Caruth’s theory of trauma derives as equally from the de Manian school of deconstruction as it does from

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Freud. Of course, de Man and Freud share a common investment in understanding understanding to limit signification, and the various ways people suffer from meaning. An astute reader of both Freud and de Man, Caruth reveals that trauma has as much to do with language as with history, with reference, and with the question of how to refer to the trauma that befalls us all. In the beginning of the fourth chapter of Unclaimed Experience, Caruth reveals that a part of her project is to trace, first of all, the philosophical attempt to distinguish language from empirical law by making theory into a self-reflexive system. I will then show how de Man’s reading also uncovers a resistance to this project arising within the language of philosophy that emerges in its use of examples, a referential resistance de Man will associate with a performative dimension of discourse. Both the necessity of theory and the resistance to it will occur, in de Man’s analysis, in the transformation of a specific example—the example of falling—and through the appearance of a specific figure—the figure of a body. It is in de Man’s insistence on the centrality of the body, I would suggest, that we best understand how his own theory both conceptualizes and enacts a mode of referential resistance. (77)

In interpreting de Man’s reading of Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater, Caruth sees a tension between the “language” and the “law” in describing the sensation of falling: For de Man, the perfect case of his theory of “referential resistance” associated with “the performative dimension of discourse”—that is, how discourse fails precisely at the moment we need it to succeed—is found in the example of a body falling, a somewhat uncanny test case for de Man’s twentieth-century work that depends upon unpacking a series of slippages that simultaneously predicts our contemporary conundrum. What was once a figure for de Man, and Caruth and Chase after him, is now, in hindsight, a literal reality. de Man’s theoretical exercise, in other words, actually became historical fact twenty years later. Writing in his original essay, de Man acknowledges the difficulty in reading Kleist’s Uber das Marionetteentheater (1810) and notes that it

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“has remained curiously unread and enigmatic. It belongs among the texts of the period which our own modernity has not yet been able to confront” (266). To that, I would add that de Man’s essay, and after him Caruth’s and Chase’s, also remains curiously unread and enigmatic—as though our own modernity, now further into the twenty-first century, has not been able to confront theorizations of reference, particularly through the lens of a body falling. Paul de Man asserts that Kleist’s essay sets out to be mathematical; it is said to be about “proof ” (268). Even still, it is arranged around three narrative frames: the first stages the larger debate between Herr C and K, and features conversational tendencies that reflect the structure of a ballet, a conversation in which Herr C is made to defend the proposition “that mechanical puppets are more graceful than live dancers” (269, 270). The second involves K’s story about a “young man who lost his gracefulness after seeing himself in the mirror” (270). The third concerns a scene of reading involving a fencing bear— showcasing the bear’s “apparent ability to read” C (271). In other words, Kleist’s essay features anecdotes about the young man and the bear framed by a dialogue between K and C. Here de Man surmises: “One is left with three narratives (the puppets, the ephebe, and the bear) as allegories of the wavering status of narrative when compared to the epistemologically sound persuasive of proof. They correspond to three textual models that offer varying degrees of resistance to intelligibility. These models offer different versions of the same theme: aesthetic education as the articulation of history with formally arrivedat truth” (276). For de Man, in other words, the lesson of Kleist is not the potential of science, as he would intend, but rather language’s own “resistance to intelligibility”—the “wavering status of narrative” in the face of scientific proof. In seeing the stories as revealing a fall from grace (as indicated by the puppets), the cost of narcissism (as indicated by the ephebe), and the scene of reading as a performance (as indicated by the bear), de Man concludes that “[s]uch is language: it always thrusts but never scores. It always refers but never to the right referent” (285).

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This is to say that the problem is not simply an inadequacy of words but rather the slipperiness of words: Language does in fact always refer— but not necessarily to our intended target. In many ways, especially for the purposes of the book, de Man’s reading of the story of the puppets and a puppeteer resonates most strongly, since for de Man the puppets, on the one hand, follow “the pure law of gravity” (286); on the other hand, they are “antigrav” in their ability to “rise and leap … as if no such gravity existed” (286). Writes de Man: “Caught in the power of gravity, the articulated puppets can rightly be said to be dead, hanging and suspended like dead bodies: gracefulness is directly associated with dead, albeit a dead cleansed of pathos” (287). Here, in an anecdote about grace and gravity, de Man sees a figure for death—the falling puppets suspended at the last moment, falling and then rising again, hanging and suspended, “a dead cleansed of pathos” (287). It is almost as though the puppets give us a sense of mastery over what we know we cannot master, the sheer force of gravity taking over in the moment of falling. For us, there are no strings, there is no antigrav to save us as it saves the puppets. Or, to put it slightly differently, meaning or grace in de Man’s reading seems only to work on the dead, not on the living. In concluding this section, de Man links all three stories together, suggesting that “[t]he violence which existed as a latent background in the stories of the young man and of the bear now moves into full sight. One must already have felt some resistance to the unproblematic reintegration of the puppet’s limbs and articulations, suspended in dead passivity, into the continuity of the dance” (288). But for de Man, the resistance moves beyond the suspension of the puppet; rather, it has to do with a sense of frustration over the clear, mathematical, cold analysis that science offers in referring to falling, on the one hand, and the existential experience of falling, on the other hand. As de Man goes on to clarify: “And when, by the end of the tale, the word Fall has been overdetermined in a manner that stretches it from the theological Fall to the dead pendulum of the puppet’s limbs to the grammatical declension of nouns and pronouns (what we call,

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in English, the grammatical case), then any composite world that includes Fall (Beifall, Sudenfall, Ruckfall … acquires a disjunctive plurality of meanings” (289). Here, then, is the key to de Man’s essay. He is not interested in Kleist’s parallels between the fall of the puppet and the theological fall from grace in the Garden of Eden; still less is he interested in the mathematical formula that proves a theory of gravity. It becomes interesting to note that of all of the thinkers de Man had at his disposal to illustrate the tension between science and language, and to reveal language’s inherent slipperiness, he chose to read Kleist’s triptych of the falling bodies. For him, it seems as though reference to the body in motion presents the ideal case for illustrating “grammatical declension,” a linguistic fall, in which one word such as “fall” can acquire “a disjunctive plurality of meanings.” That is, the problem of reference in de Man’s view is one of too many, or even competing meanings, rather than not enough. There is in fact a fourth way that de Man reads the single word “fall”—in the German sense of “trap,” arguing that Kleist’s essay too has been a trap, that “this” (Kleist’s essay) and “all texts” involve “the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance. This dance, regardless of whether it occurs as mirror, as imitation, as history, as the fencing match of interpretation, or as the anamorphic transformations of tropes, is the ultimate trap, as unavoidable as it is deadly” (290). In other words, literary language, like a dance, while beautiful and graceful, sets an inevitable trap—one that misleads, transforms, and corrupts the truth. In revealing to us the ways in which “esthetic education” can be a trap, de Man presents his own essay that seeks to educate us about art, aesthetics, and language. For him, it is unavoidable, but also misleading. As such, he must sacrifice the integrity of his own writing in order to argue that it is impossible to derive a certain truth through this scholarly dance between writer and reader. Using such diction as “dismemberment” and “deadly,” de Man seems to present the act of reading—of reading

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any text—as violent. For him, the body of a falling puppet and the multiple frames and discussions used to understand its fall exemplify this violence scene. But it is also a violence that mirrors the physical world, a world of falling de Man (and Kleist before him) uncannily foretold in 1984. Wolf Kittler’s recent (2011) essay entitled “Falling after the Fall,” a provocative title that at first glance seems to be interested in twentyfirst-century scenes of falling, takes up de Man’s reading of Kleist. Kittler’s essay alone perhaps performs de Man’s awareness of the resistances to theory he has written about elsewhere, as instead of reading de Man’s essay for its treatment of the vagaries of language, he offers a critical reading of what he would say is de Man’s blatant misreading of Kleist. According to Kittler, “[w]hat he says about Kleist’s mathematics only serves him as a springboard for the literary scholar’s favorite leap from axioms and precise definitions to the tricks of free association” (279). Here, Kittler defends Kleist largely against a footnote in de Man’s essay, in which de Man writes: “Kleist’s mathematical references are not always correct and make mistakes unworthy of a gymnasium student” (314). However, Kittler gives less weight to what follows in the footnote by de Man: “The errors may be deliberate, with mystifying or parodic intent. Incorrect details in mathematical language do not imply however that Kleist’s notion of ‘the mathematical’ as a model for aesthetic formalization is arbitrary or aberrant” (de Man 314).1 Overlooking de Man’s own defense of Kleist, Kittler goes on to say that “the suspicion I have always had about de Man’s work, and his article on Kleist in particular, is confirmed, namely that this work derives ill-defined, and at least with respect to mathematics, empty concepts from a superficial reading” (282). While Kittler is utterly focused on math and de Man is focused on language, I would argue, nonetheless, that they share an interest in the inadequacies, the limits, of reference. For Kittler, “[t]he graceful, spontaneous, and mysterious movements of a dancer or marionette are perfectly calculable”—that is, a mathematical equation exists in order to understand this kind of motion (286). Nonetheless, there remain(ed) limits—and “grace” is that limit point. Kittler goes on to say that “[g]race is the limit of that which is computable by the most advanced mathematics of Kleist’s time” (289). Grace cannot be computed by mathematics, nor can it be defined adequately through language. It is the grace of the falling body it seems—a gracefulness we will see in the turn to Richard Drew’s photograph of the falling man— that provides the limit case for both equations in mathematics and excesses in language.

1

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Caruth’s 1996 book Unclaimed Experience seems to acknowledge this need to clarify de Man from the outset, arguing in her chapter, “The Falling Body and the Impact of Reference,” that Paul de Man defends linguistically oriented theories against charges that “language cannot refer adequately to the world and indeed may not refer to anything at all” (74). For Caruth, the message of de Man’s work is that language refers not to too little or to nothing at all but beyond itself in unexpected ways. Caruth’s close reading of de Man’s 1982 essay “The Resistance to Theory”—a work, in her words, that provides “a good framework for this inquiry because it is specifically about references and it is also about falling” (74)—alongside his “Aesthetic Formalization of Kleist,” reveals that it is “de Man’s unexpected association of theory with falling that … constitutes the original insight of his theory, a theory that does not eliminate reference but precisely registers, in language, the impact of an event” (74). That is to say, for Caruth, de Man’s theory, generated as it is by the fact of a fall, does not argue that reference disappears. Rather, de Man’s theory argues that reference, through its very multiplicity of meanings, “registers” “the impact of the event” through the strength and force of history that itself is overdetermined by the language that seeks to describe it. In clarifying what she means when she says, in de Man’s work, “the story of how the problem of reference became, in the history of thought, inextricably bound up with the fact of literal falling” (75), Caruth argues further that “the history of philosophy after Newton could be thought of as a series of confrontations with the question of how to talk about falling. And similarly, the problem of reference, insofar as de Man implicitly associates it, in my interpretation, with this development in the history of philosophy, is: how to refer to falling” (emphasis in original, 76). In offering a fascinating reading of de Man’s difficult text, an interpretation of de Man’s very focused reading of the way reference works in Kleist, Caruth seems to be predicting the history of the twenty-first century as well. Again, for Caruth, referring to falling is strictly textbook: Newton struggles, Kleist struggles, de Man struggles, as does Caruth. But while all of this academic and

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theoretical discussion gives us a framework for discussing the 9/11 crisis in referring to falling, it remains for them an exercise. “How did they know?” I ask myself, looking back to the late 1980s and 1990s. Of course, no one could predict what would happen on September 11, 2001. But it unnerves me to this day that this one sector of the ivory tower, the scholars of deconstruction in the 1980s that would go on to experience such hostility, actually foretold this referential crises with the example of the literal man falling. For me, this is the central theoretical (and, in light of 9/11, practical as well) insight of this book—Caruth’s reading of de Man points up the shared or parallel stories of reference, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other hand, which both seek to answer the question: “How to refer to falling?” Again, Caruth, as with de Man, was writing before 2001 and seems uncannily to foretell the problems artists, critics, journalists, and poets would face in referring to falling as well as to register the event of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For me, she articulates this problem most forcefully and clearly when she points out that while Newton found a way to make mathematics apply to the world when he presented his theory of gravity, the thing it refers to—the impact, the sensation of falling, epistemologically—“seemed a pure fiction” (76). In other words, part of the problem for Caruth is that we think there is solid ground somewhere, but in fact we are falling all of the time; further, everything is falling—even the thing we are falling toward. Caruth goes on to underscore her point when she states that “with the introduction of gravitation, the only thing that was adequate to the world was, paradoxically, that which didn’t refer (mathematics); and what did refer, language, could no longer describe the world. In a world of falling, reference could not adequately describe the world” (76). Mathematics, in other words, is adequate in describing the world, the actual fact of gravity, but it does not use reference to do it. Conversely, language itself, a system of reference, could not describe the world, not in the sense of what it means to fall, not in the sense of the force of gravity, which so easily slips into the grave.

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Caruth sees de Man’s interest in the theme of falling in terms of its potential to illustrate the “problem of reference” not only as it comes out of his essay “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist,” as I have read above, but also in terms of his reading of Kant’s “metaphysics” in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”—in which he distinguishes between metaphysics (elucidation of Newton’s laws of motion; the potential of empirical science), on the one hand, and philosophy or theory (that relies on the narrative example of bodies in motion), on the other hand (77). In this essay, Caruth suggests, the body becomes “a figure for the very knowledge philosophy has about its inability to refer to bodies” (79). It is here, in a 1996 book chapter that seems to foretell the crisis in art and literature we were to experience after 9/11, that Caruth also shows the ways in which Kleist’s writing foretells his own personal and professional breaks; for her, there is a temptation to read these essays autobiographically—in terms of Kleist’s life as a writer (in the sense that the relation he depicts between the puppet and puppeteer parallels the relation between author and his writing [81]) as well as in his personal life, in a series of breaks he suffered in 1801. For Caruth, it is “through the interruption of the marionettes by the falling of a broken body, de Man strikingly implies, that a shadowy autobiographical reality first begins to emerge” (87): In part, this reality speaks to Kleist’s own death via a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel, whom he shot with a gun before shooting himself (89). Caruth argues here that de Man’s essay reveals the ways it enacts its very insight by referring beyond itself; for her, “de Man’s text no longer simply knows what it says, but indeed does more than it knows, and it is in this that we can read the referential significance of his own theory” (89–90). Caruth says here that de Man’s text knows also about Kleist’s biography—that it is haunted by falling on multiple levels. But now, in the twenty-first century, we might say that the text (taking de Man the author out of the equation) also knows about the falling man, about the crisis in trying to depict him after 9/11. In this way, taken together, the essays of Kleist, de Man, and Caruth all, in fact, know more than they know—about history, about

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language. The referential significance of these theories has come home to us in 2001, predicting that the impact of a fall will lead us into a kind of artistic crisis: There is now no way not to see a man falling from the World Trade Center Towers when seeing a man falling at all; there is no way not to see the grave of an Afghanistan veteran or the body of a man falling to his death when we see the words, side by side, “grave” and “gravity.” Both of these words may have particular contextual referents, but they also have taken on the connotative dimensions associated with 9/11. As Caruth would have it ultimately: “This significance has the weight of a paradox: that reference emerges not in its accessibility to perception, but in the resistance of language to perceptual analogies; that the impact of reference is felt, not in the search for an external reference, but in the necessity, and failure, of theory” (90). In anticipating this conversation about the limits of reference, Cynthia Chase’s 1984 essay considers the limitations not only of single words but also of whole narratives, of allegories that seek to present a lesson, namely the lesson that a single interpretation may not be found for allegories. For Chase, as she reads Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater alongside his Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten, in conversation with a seminar de Man gave at Yale University entitled “Theory of Irony,” the lesson is that “[t]he consequence of supposing a text to be both meaningful and formal, Kleist’s allegory suggests, is to miss the point entirely and end in a fruitless exhaustion of interpretive energy. This suggestion is discouraging indeed, since it’s not at all clear what, if not both formal and meaningful, language or a text might be” (61). While Chase’s point is well taken, that is, it is discouraging as a reader, as a literary critic, to understand one’s task at interpretation to result in “a fruitless exhaustion of interpretive energy,” it is also a bit liberating, in the sense that language, allegory, and text could offer a whole range of meanings. Like de Man and Caruth, Chase reads Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater as being about “the condition of gracefulness” and narrative production (62); she argues that Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten,

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another allegory about bodies, contemplates conditions of truth. For her, they are “unlikely truths” told in another triptych, three stories: one about a wound sustained by a foot soldier; one about a giant stone displacing a large barge on the Elbe River; one about a cadet officer standing on the left bank blown into the air by an explosion and displaced to the right bank intact (64). Here, too, she arrives at conclusions about language similar to de Man and Caruth; that is, that the force of language depicts its very own unpredictability (65). As Chase argues, “The force of language does not, in fact, work. The indeterminate way in which the narrative works, or does not work, is evoked exactly by one doubled edge phrase … ‘in die Luft sprengen.’ What is the cause, or the subject, or the object, or the consequence of blowing up?” (65). She continues in this vein when she argues that “[r]ead closely, the text’s terms imply that it is the force of language that is once again at stake, misfiring as a speech act in addition to missing the mark as a telling truth” (66). Again, what Chase’s reading of Kleist uncannily adds to the conversation is a new focus on the body, one that has sustained an explosion in an event that also tests the efficacy of language and the narrative structure. The “force of language” acts like the force of an explosion—misfiring, missing the mark, an act of excess that can sometimes do violence, as de Man and Caruth also make clear. It leads Chase to ask the question that continues to be on our minds thirty years after the original publication of her essay: “What could be the status of a narrative neither true nor persuasive?—or the function of narration which neither convinces nor deceives? Narration of such a kind could only be the activity of a windbag: performance for the sake of performance, drained of significance; gratuitous expenditure of energy, to incalculable effect” (67). While we like to find effective, reparative, meaningful messages in our post9/11 literature and art—literature and art that have been criticized for having the opposite effect—we might take to heart what those from the school of deconstruction have been trying to tell us all along, that one of the beauties and horrors of language is that it does not know

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what it knows; it is simultaneously excessive and insufficient; it can in no way match what science and mathematics so clearly lay out via equations and the scientific method. But this unreadability perhaps can be language’s greatest strength, too, refusing to master or to be mastered. In Chase’s words, “To describe the narrative as a mutilating machine, mutilating itself and others, is to refer first of all, then, to its unreadability, to an explosion of the possibility of reading which negates not only the function of the reader but also the function of the narrative” (68). While it would be easy to focus on such violent terms as “mutilating; explosion; negates,” I think we can also focus on the word “possibility,” as in “an explosion of the possibility of reading,” which may very well negate the function of the reader but might very well depend upon it as well. It is with this focus on possibility that I try to keep in mind as I discuss Eleanor Kaufman’s 1998 essay on theories of falling—an essay that takes up Perec’s W as well as Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience and reads them for their repeated representations of falling. Entitled “Falling from the Sky,” Kaufman sees in these two authors, but in particular Caruth’s chapter four, liberating, affirming associations with references to falling. For Kaufman: Like W, Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience—which is ultimately as much about affirmation as it is about trauma—situates this affirmation on several registers at once. Just as affirmation is played out in W in the scene of falling, so too is this positivity most striking in Caruth’s chapter on falling as it inflects both the work of Paul de Man and the scene of philosophy more generally. While the space of the happy fall may fall dangerously close to an unwarranted optimism in the face of events that are generally characterized as unrepresentable or traumatic and discourses that are characterized as nihilistic or meaningless, it is also a space of opening to different ethical dimensions. Here, to read a traumatic event as affirmative is not so much to misread it as to read from a new vantage point that is made possible by the very impasse to which it bears witness. (53)

I cite this passage at length to point up that I am not overreading or overstating, neither misreading nor mishearing the focus on affirmation

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in this work: such “affirmation” used four times; “positivity”; “happy fall”; and “optimism” showcase the general direction of Kaufman’s work. I suppose this tendency also speaks to what de Man has said about the multiplicity of language—the many ways a single word or work can be interpreted—as well as Chase’s point about the “possibility of reading.” Indeed, as Kaufman herself says above, seeing in Caruth such optimism “may fall dangerously close to an unwarranted optimism”; it is also made possible through a new relationship with ethics, a way to find meaning in an otherwise nihilistic or meaningless event. True, Caruth’s book is about nothing if not ethics, as can be seen from her chapter four on de Man’s reading of Kleist, as well as her chapter on the dream of the burning child. What makes this example so compelling for me is that it illustrates, however, the ways in which our access to language—different connotations for “fall” as well as “gravity,” now and “grave”—changes our relations to the texts themselves. Although there is a sense in which the inscrutability of trauma creates possibility or freedom, because otherwise we would simply be governed by such events, I do not see an optimism in Caruth’s reading of falling. I argue this particularly as a result of the autobiographical dimensions she pulls out not only of Kant and Kleist in her falling chapter but also of Freud, Lacan, and Duras thoughout the rest of the book. But I also read Caruth’s falling as historically inflected by persons falling from the World Trade Center Towers in ways neither she nor Kaufman (nor Chase, de Man, or Kleist) could have possibly predicted. It emphasizes the lesson, I think, about the explosion of possibilities having both positive and negative consequences; it points to the multiplicity of meanings that deconstruction has been arguing for all along rather than the so-called problem of having no words at all. On the one hand, I think that Kaufman may be overreaching when she says that “[w]ithin the framework of Unclaimed Experience, the conjoined discussion of falling and de Man appears, as it were, out of the blue. [ ... ] To the contrary, it is more interesting and I think more accurate to consider Caruth’s penultimate chapter on de Man and falling as a central key to an alternate and non traumatic reading of the entire book” (50). If we read Unclaimed Experience as a definitive text

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on trauma theory and its origins, then the problem of reference and the special instance of a body falling seem perfectly in keeping with the other trauma narratives she takes up in the book. It is so consistent, I might go farther to say, that her penultimate chapter on de Man and falling is a central key to a reading of her entire book as focused on trauma. There is always Chase’s point about possibilities, but with the weight of history both behind and in front of Caruth, I cannot see in her work the idea of any kind of fall that is “happy.” Following Kaufman’s 1998 essay, there was very little work done on the relationship between deconstruction and the figure of the falling man, save the mathematically oriented 2011 essay by Kittler referenced above. Equally as recently, Aaron Mauro’s 2011 article which advances a reading of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close considers extensively the implications of Caruth’s writing for post-9/11 work. Entitled somewhat fortuitously “The Languishing of the Falling Man,” Mauro’s article considers that [w]ithin Caruth’s larger discussion of Kant, Kleist, and Paul de Man, the gesture of the shadow puppet becomes a perfect abstraction of artistic thought freed from gravity and restriction. The figure falls free of referential restraints and enters the realm of abstractions, anachronism, and horrible absences. Abstracting trauma requires, then, a certain falling into theory. The falling figure literally and figuratively falls into abstraction, theory, and the trauma of disrupted reference. By enacting a function of a conscious perceptual system, a theorization of trauma tends to render abstract and figural that which was once too shocking. (589)

According to Mauro, Kleist’s puppet allows not only for an abstraction of traumatic history—allowing the reader to face trauma head on—but also for a kind of freedom in reference. Just as the shadow puppet “free falls,” so too can the artist, unrestrained and unrestricted from linguistic constraints in the post-9/11 world. Such a reading, for Mauro, allows him to read the photograph of the falling man—the work of Richard

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Drew, which I shall take up in a future chapter—and such literature that mediates it as written by DeLillo and Foer (Mauro 596). But in his more contemporary work, too, Mauro is more interested in looking at the “failure” of language than in its excesses. For de Man, and others after him, particularly in this twenty-first-century moment, these indeed might be the same thing: Given the tendency of language to carry so much baggage, to betray its own history with every possible utterance, it is no wonder we find ourselves at a critical crossroads in our discussion of 9/11 literature. According to Mauro, “If DeLillo’s novel enacts the failure of imagination and a belated historicizing of the image, Foer’s novel allows his protagonist’s imagination to metaphorically withdraw from historical accuracy in the process of mourning. Foer reimagines history and literally remakes photographs as a means of taking on the failure of America’s imagination” (596). And yet, I do not see a failure of imagination—not as revealed by such 9/11 writers as DeLillo and Foer, not as enacted by them, not as corrected by them. The failure lies in not too little imagination, perhaps, but in too much: It is exemplified by Kinnell’s turn from grave to gravity and from gravity back to grave—an inextricable conjoining of the two terms, particularly in literatures about a man falling.

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Beyond the Literal: The Falling Man and Moral Failing

There’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just what to say. There are no words at all to express this. Kenneth Goldsmith, 2013 Poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s latest project Seven American Deaths and Disasters—a collection that takes real-time coverage of such devastating American experiences as the assassination of John F Kennedy and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center—begins with an epigraph by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” By invoking Wittgenstein, Goldsmith points up not only at the ways in which the seven American moments of death in his pages underscore the inability to make meaning in the aftermath of traumatic events but also, and more crucially, at the very moment they take place. In his project Goldsmith appears to give the witnesses their language back, by turning their testimony to disaster into prose poems. In his “Technical Notes” section, Goldsmith further reveals his process, the way that he “culled from publicly available sources” all of the transcriptions that compose the book. An outgrowth from his own teaching experiences, Goldsmith says, “how I hear and transcribe something will be different from you. Practicing what I preach, all transcriptions in this book follow my own hunches and stylistics” (174). For him, therein lies the creative and recuperative act: locating the material and cutting away until poetry appears in what remains.

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Although Goldsmith gathered testimonies for his World Trade Center section from “an initial CNN television report, the bulk of it is taken from New York City radio stations including WABC, WOR, WFAN, and WNYC” (175). Within the reportage Goldsmith transcribes, he finds what Shoshana Felman would call “the art of accident” (19); Goldsmith says, “these jerky, jittery texts felt more like shattered dialogues from Ulysses than stable media reportage. Here, the written word had all the cadence, tenuousness, and unpredictability of speech. The next step was to actually render them back into speech as poetry readings by surgically extracting punchy excerpts which seemed to embody the spirit of the fuller tapes; stumbles and stutters were left intact” (173). Within these chapters, I am more interested in the particular moments when references to the falling man in history—men falling from the World Trade Center—are rendered as poetic through everyday speech. What would it mean for us to say that the traumatic element is the very element that also makes them poetic? As I will argue here, within this post 9/11 art and literature that addresses the reader, not simply through vivid imagery, but also, or perhaps as a result, through appeals to moral consciousness. But before turning to the place in history from where we began, I look back in this chapter at Vietnam War narratives, and, in particular, their figures of the falling man, in order to emphasize the uncanny way in which history appears to predict our own limits of language and limits of the world. Whereas the Vietnam War narratives seem to incorporate a figural dimension to representations of soldier falling, in 9/11 literature the men falling appear as purely literal, raising the question: What distinguishes poetic texts referring to falling in traumatic contexts that precede the fall of the towers? Uncanny similarities appear when juxtaposing Vietnam War literature and 9/11 literature, as even The 9/11 Commission Report begins, as do O’Brien’s novels, against a pale blue sky. However, there is something extra, a remainder, that results in comparing two different kinds of texts—Vietnam War literature, on the one hand, and 9/11 literature, on the other hand—and that is the weight of moral ambiguity, of entering a war in bad faith. As such, the figure of

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the falling man seems both to denote the history of men falling to their deaths during a time of war and to connote a kind of moral failure—a symbolic falling of conscience and ethics. As such, the figure of the man falling in these literatures—in particular, two canonical novels about Vietnam by Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990)—uncannily foreshadows the moral dilemma regarding how to respond to the terrorist acts of 2001.1 In reflecting on the inadequacy of any kind of response to traumatic history, in 1975 Joe David Bellamy raised the question: “If reality becomes surrealistic, what must fiction do to be realistic?” (5). Arthur Saltzman in reading two Vietnam War novels, Paul Brodeur’s The Stunt Man (1970) and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, begins with this sentiment in his 1980 article about Vietnam War literature, lamenting, even then, the current state of American foreign policy and the loss of credible language in depicting it. Here, he observes: “The texture of contemporary existence, if we are to believe the testimony of the majority of writers who make it their business, is more outrageous and grotesque than the most fantastic fictions it has produced. In the past decade, perhaps the single most compelling event in its effect upon artistic consciousness in America has been—and will continue to be— the Vietnam War” (32). As such, this chapter juxtaposes Vietnam War literature, given that it once registered as the “single most compelling event in its effect upon artistic consciousness,” with 9/11 literature, focusing especially upon the image of a man falling. Building on the work of Chapter 1, I illustrate via close readings of Vietnam literature—in particular, the work of Robert Olen Butler and Tim O’Brien—the ways in which representations of a falling man or soldier can function metaphorically for the process of writing or depicting traumatic experience. However, twenty-first-century writers seem to struggle with the weight of representing a man literally falling and, I argue, appear at first glance as much less effective. At the end of this chapter, I return to the For additional readings of O’Brien’s Vietnam War fiction from the perspective of trauma theory, see Bonn, Griffith, Kaufmann, McWilliams, Palm, Raymond, and Saltzman.

1

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testimony of Mary Fetchet, as she, too, in the context of describing her son’s response to seeing one man falling “all the way down,” testifies to an ethical falling, and in so doing, captures the surreal history of the event. In her testimony, as in the testimony from Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths, Fetchet in her way speaks to the failures of the day—systematic failures, failures in character—that she calls upon the nation to address. As the work of Bellamy and Saltzman attest, criticism of Vietnam literature seems to anticipate uncannily new concerns about representation in the face of the history of 9/11—wherein the grotesque aspects of history as exemplified by Vietnam have returned in the form of unexpected terrorism. Readers familiar with trauma theory will perhaps recognize this double structure—the past’s anticipation of the future, the future’s regression to the past—as analogous to the psyche’s traumatic repetition, an approach to unclaimed experience which somehow comes simultaneously too late and too soon. Caruth’s notion of temporality speaks to problems with time exposed in this fiction: The work of O’Brien, particularly his figures of men falling and the passages questioning the US government’s response to the war situation, also appears to predict (or repeat) our moral conundrum in responding to a new kind of terrorism in the twenty-first century, one that is understood through falling—the literal moments of a man falling in response to the acts that precipitate a war, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, references to falling in the figurative sense, to falling morally, to failing adequately to respond. In calling into question the effects and motives of the US War against the North Vietnamese, Robert Olen Butler’s 1994 short story entitled “Salem” depicts a North Vietnamese soldier weighing his country’s order to turn over all of the objects belonging to dead American soldiers. While he sits at a table in his home, waiting for his wife to enter, he considers the belongings of a man he killed during the Vietnam War: a pack of Salem cigarettes and the photo of a woman the American soldier loved. He finds something uncanny about the package of cigarettes. For example, one of the cigarettes within the

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package is half-smoked, evidence that the American soldier was poor, perhaps a farmer, much like himself. As the soldier-narrator notes, “there is something to understand here” (33): The two bands of color, top and bottom, are colors like I have sometimes seen on the South China Sea when the air is still and the water is calm. And the sea is parted here and held within is a band of pure white and this word Salem, and now at last I can see clearly—how thin the line is between ignorance and wisdom—I understand all at once that there is a secret space in the word, not Salem but sa and lem, Vietnamese words, the one meaning to fall and the other to blur, and this is the moment that comes to all of us, and this is the moment that I brought to the man who that very morning looked into the face of his wife and smoked. (33, emphasis in original)

This passage’s vertiginous, trans-lexical obsession with linguistic reference, telescoped in the image of the falling and fallen soldier, crystallizes a crucial ethical and aesthetic conundrum: How can we represent trauma? Further, how do we address the other as an enemy, when there is so much humanity shared in common? For Butler’s Vietnamese veteran, the problem of reference is foregrounded through a half-smoked cigarette and the label that marks it—the label which names both Salem, and sa and lem: the dying soldier’s—and the witnessing soldier’s—confrontation with what it means to fall, and the blurring such a fall entails. Similarly, Tim O’Brien’s well-known The Things They Carried (1990) is organized around images of falling soldiers. O’Brien also gives us an account of referentiality in his story “How to Tell a True War Story” by embellishing and repeating the story of the falling soldier in order to show the impossibility of properly referring to the blur of the event. Certainly, the problem of reference, war, and death is not specific to the narratives of the late twentieth century. As I have argued in Chapter 1, Cathy Caruth has suggested that Paul de Man’s essay, “The Resistance to Theory,” alludes to Newton’s theory of gravitational force in order to tell the story of “how the problem of reference became, in the history of thought, inextricably bound up with the fact of literal

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falling” (93). According to Caruth’s reading of de Man, the problem of reference is exemplified by realistic and artistic questions about “how to refer to falling” (93, emphasis in original). Falling, in this reading, is a figure for the difficulty of referring to something that is impossible to fully assimilate into consciousness and the system of language. For O’Brien, Curt Lemon embodies the problem of reference as he emerges as the falling, flying soldier who haunts The Things They Carried. Although O’Brien addresses many types of falling on multiple occasions, witnessing Lemon’s death is impossible for him to describe fully, to truly capture as “the truth as it seemed”—a problem that preoccupies the novel from beginning to end. In the opening section of the novel, O’Brien introduces the concept of falling in ways that will complicate his later description of Lemon’s death: first, he describes falling in order to oppose it to the soldiers’ perception of courage, and second, to associate it with the freedom of flying. According to O’Brien, the soldiers in First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s Alpha Company each morning made their legs move and “did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar up and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell” (21). The irony here, of course, is that soldiers in this text were falling all of the time. Ted Lavender was shot down outside of Than Khe; Lee Strunk fell hard after stepping on a mortar round; Curt Lemon stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round while playing catch with Rat Kiley. The falling they suffer is a matter not of submitting to fear but of unexpected accidents. In effect, they sustain the rhetoric of moral uprightness in order to eclipse the unpredictability of their literal falling. More paradoxical in this novel is the fact that when the soldiers go to sleep at night, they “dreamed of freedom birds” bound up with images of death and afterlife (21). These “birds” are unassimilated figures of dream-logic:

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[T]hey were naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements … and it was a restful, unencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and everything weighed exactly nothing. (22)

Freedom and falling appear to be inextricably bound in both the description of the soldiers’ dreams of flying and their refusal to accept the “obvious” alternative to enduring the daily commands of war ritual. Yet, already there is reference to death here: What O’Brien describes is an out-of-this-worldliness that is associated with death, an escape from the boundaries of the earth and into a vacuum where there are no burdens. Similarly, going limp, letting muscles unwind, and neither moving nor speaking until soldiers carry you away describes not only a soldier refusing to continue marching toward death but also a soldier who has been gunned down or maimed by a booby trap. From the beginning, O’Brien seems, through the rhetoric of falling, to blur the distinction between freedom from war and death, perhaps to establish an easier acceptance of the falling deaths of the soldiers he has prepared to narrate. Ultimately, for O’Brien, seeing the ground move from under Lemon also threatens the grounding of the witnesses to the event. In order to combat this vertiginous effect, the soldiers in Jimmy Cross’s Alpha Company commit themselves to resist falling—to refuse to give in and simply close their eyes and fall. Not surprisingly, O’Brien engages images of falling much earlier in his career, in Paul Berlin’s groundbreaking, surrealist account of serving as lookout during the Vietnam War entitled Going After Cacciato. The novel’s title refers to his

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company’s search for an AWOL soldier, the aforementioned Cacciato; however, when their journey takes them on the road to Paris, the novel becomes a dreamscape, a fantasy to which Berlin will return each time he is on the lookout. My interest in this novel, beyond its surreal experimentation, lies in its obsession with falling—three years after the “end” of the War—as a way of confronting an otherwise unbelievable act. For example, chapter ten of the novel appears to narrate another grueling march on the road to find Cacciato. But then it gets caught up in references to falling: just as the characters fall down, so too does the narrative. Everything stops—time even seems to stop—as characters fall along with everything around them. As Berlin recalls or dreams the moment: Then they were falling. Paul Berlin felt it in his stomach. A tumbling sensation. There was time to snatch for Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand, squeeze tight, and then they were falling. The road was gone and they were simply falling, all of them, Oscar and Eddie and Doc, the old lieutenant, the buffalo and the cart and the old women, everything tumbling down a hole in the road to Paris. (76)

What gives momentary pause here is the phrase “simply falling,” as there appears nothing simple about the experience or even imagination of a body in motion, in free fall. That no one was hurt seriously as a result of a buffalo falling with them, as well as the cart, speaks to the dreamlike quality of the text, in case the destination—Paris, the City of Light and romance—did not give it away. But even later, the novel doubles back on itself, as the circular plot line mimics the circularity of traumatic time. Chapter 13, entitled “Falling Through a Hole in the Road to Paris,” appears to depict this same moment of falling. It begins: For a moment he was back at the observation tower, the night swimming all around him, and, yes, even there he was falling, his eyes sliding slick over the surfaces of things, drowsy, pinching himself but still falling. Silly! Something came plunging by—a peculiar living

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object, a man—and as it descended he saw it was the old lieutenant spread out full-eagle like a sky diver. Then a flurry of falling objects: weapons and ammunition and canteens and helmets, rucksacks and grenades, all of it falling. Stink Harris sped by. Then Oscar and Eddie and Doc. Doc waved. Graceful even in full flight. Oscar fell with his arms neatly overhead like a springboard diver. Eddie yodeled as he fell, and Stink Harris cackled like a little boy. Tumbling after them, Paul Berlin watched until they’d disappeared deep into the hole. (82–83)

Just as in The Things They Carried, O’Brien here gives his characters marks of distinction, personality quirks, even as they are asked to conform as soldiers. As if to emphasize their humanity, the narrator reveals the ways in which each soldier has a unique way of falling. A form of the word falling is repeated here five times—“falling”; “falling”; “falling”; “fell”; “fell.” And certainly we can count “plunging” and “in full flight” as two additional references. A writer as skilled as O’Brien certainly knows better than to rely on such repetition, but I would contend here that the multiple references point back to one of the most horrific moments of the War—maybe not falling into holes on the way to Paris, but falling, as Curt Lemon does, in the bright sunlight, while unexpectedly stepping on a booby trap. In referring to the graceful fall as well as the “flurry of falling objects,” O’Brien might as well be predicting the impact of the fall of the towers—with papers, paperclips, desk paraphernalia, ash falling along with the bodies themselves. Over thirty-five years after the appearance of this book, war gear is replaced with office equipment—both types of objects falling into nothingness and disappearing. For O’Brien, I argue, these figures of falling address not only actual soldiers who fell to their deaths but also a moral failing and falling on behalf of the US government in escalating the war in Vietnam. The problem for Berlin, as for so many other characters in O’Brien’s novels, including “Tim O’Brien” in The Things They Carried, is that it is not altogether clear to them why they are at war in the jungle. In revealing his moral conundrum, Berlin reflects: “He would have told them he wanted to harm no one. Not even the enemy. He had no enemies.

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He had wronged no one. If he’d known the language, he would have told them how he hated to see the villages burned. Hated to see the paddies trampled. How it made him angry and sad when … a million things” (263). In further reinforcing this ambivalence, Berlin goes on to detail everything he does not know, with O’Brien capitalizing on the poetic device of anaphora—the repeated phrase beginning every line— in order to emphasize the fact of Berlin’s unknowing: They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were crucial. They did not know the strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content, whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai—tales passed down from oldtimer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil. (270–271)

Twelve times Berlin introduces a new question with the phrase, “they did not know.” The things they did not know are sometimes basic— how to engage an enemy, the terrain, the significance of villages. Still others depend on human subjectivity—feelings, rules of fair play, which stories to believe to be true. With the final last line of the passage, however, “they did not know good from evil,” O’Brien seems to be saying all twelve of those listed aspects have something to do with the larger questions of morality. Are we the good guys or the bad guys, Cormac McCarthy’s boy asks in the post-apocalyptic contemporary

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American novel The Road (128–129). Similarly, O’Brien’s Paul Berlin seems to have the same fundamental question, the answer to which he does not know. In this way, literal falling also becomes bound up with figurative or moral falling—a similar entanglement seen in 9/11 literature and testimonies. In fact, the representations of falling in 9/11 literature look back to the unfinished business, in the American psyche at the very least, of Vietnam. Caruth takes up the question of a moral failure surrounding Vietnam in the context of the Iraq War in an article she published in English in 2006—three years after the beginning of the War. Entitled “Confronting Political Trauma,” the essay somewhat interestingly appeared in 2000 in a Japanese newspaper even before the fall of the towers—a moment she, too, seems to anticipate in this work (182). The article uses as its starting point Daniel Ellsberg’s public revelation in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers—of making visible a governmental policy to deceive the public regarding remaining in and escalating an unwinnable war (180). In so doing, Caruth calls this revelation a “form of political resistance,” which, in this case, was thus to make us see, and, in particular, to make us see “an invisible War,” a war whose decision-making process and actual carrying-out were hidden from the public. To see, in this case, thus means to see not only the war, “but the phenomenon of deception”— both deception of the public by the government and the deception of the government by itself, its eventual “loss of institutional memory” and the “internal toll of secrecy” that such a loss took on the decisionmaking process and on the government’s self-understanding. The political act of resistance was thus to make us see, not only war, but blindness: to understand the war by understanding blindness to the war and its very creation. (180)

This passage significantly points out not only what we have come to take for granted since the Vietnam War—that somewhat questionable decisions were carried out without the public’s knowledge—but also that the government was blind to itself, to its own motives. The “loss of institutional memory” and “internal toll of secrecy”—the overall

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ways the very government deceived itself—resonates with the moral and practical failings associated with 9/11. Caruth closely reads the repeated nightmares of a Vietnam veteran; a veteran Jacob Lindy treats for posttraumatic stress disorder that originates, in part, from the fact that the soldier, whom he names Abraham, had killed an armed child while on patrol. Within the nightmare, the child he kills appears alive and tries to wake the man from within a dream. In Caruth’s analysis, this dream “tells us something about a task that we, as Americans, still have before us: to remain awake in the face of a memory around which we’d rather fall asleep” (181). Caruth calls upon her readers not only to confront the global implications of the escalation of the Vietnam War and the damage done on the ground there but also to consider the impact of continuing to ignore, or to use her language, to remain asleep in the fact of countless victims. Writing in 2000, Caruth acknowledges that foreign policy failings can have unintended consequences in the present day—or in one year from the time of the appearance of the Japanese translation of this work. She concludes by suggesting that “[o]ur subsequent involvements in international conflicts have not reflected a direct confrontation with these issues and these lessons, and it is my hope that the focus on trauma in our culture will lead us back to a sustained vigilance on our own blindness and to the meaning and impact—in the past and for the future—of what was both a moral and a political trauma in our history” (181). Rather than sustained vigilance to the meaning and impact of the moral and political trauma of Vietnam, however, the United States— according to recent 9/11 literature and recent war memoirs—has fallen further down the hole, becoming entangled in yet another conflict overseas that has lasted over a decade. The emphasis on not knowing in Ian McEwan’s Saturday from 2005, for example, echoes O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel in its insistence that we know too little about the battles being waged in the name of freedom. Saturday, as I’ve mentioned in the Preface, takes place during a single day in the life and mind of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a

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man who wakes up in the early morning hours of a Saturday in 2003 and sees a flaming aircraft in the sky. The effects of this sighting at first seem devastating; Henry sees automatically a terrorist plot and hijacked plane descending toward his home. He has access to no other ways of reading the moment. As he observes: “It’s already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again, the unseen captives driving through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed” (15). For him, the sight of the airliner does not bring excitement about a new day, appreciation over the technological marvel of flight, but instead sees these inanimate objects as predators, or else doomed to fall, to fail, after going up in flames. Not coincidentally, the novel takes place also on the Saturday when anti-war protesters have taken over Hyde Park, a protest Henry glimpses while out running errands in preparation for his daughter’s arrival. Such a plot device allows McEwan to stage a ten-page debate between Henry and his poet daughter Daisy about whether England should go to war with the United States against Iraq—a highly literary scene between his literate characters that dramatizes the complexity of both sides of the position. Henry, like Berlin, does not know. When Daisy arrives after an extended stay away, she is breathlessly excited and asks Henry why he did not participate in the anti-war demonstration. He cites “lack of certainty” as a reason (190). At ten pages long, the argument that ensues is a set piece to begin the last third of the novel. Then they argue: “Why should I feel any certainty about it?” he seems to conclude (192). And later, in conceding to Daisy’s point about why there should be no war, Henry again says: “It’s true. I honestly think I could be wrong” (193). Later he reflects on the highly tense moment with his newly independent daughter: “He has a hollow feeling from only arguing a half of what he feels. He’s a dove with Jay Strauss, and a hawk with his daughter. What sense is he making?” (198). The repeated questioning here is significant,

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especially since this kind of thinking occurs before any military engagement, which Henry rightly says will take place whether or not average English citizens agree with their government’s intentions. But it also emphasizes the importance of keeping the question open—even if indefinitely—if the actual consequences are so difficult to discern or predict. In his essay entitled “Prolonged Suspension: Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, and the Literary Imagination after 9/11,” Clemens Spahr speaks to this question of moral ambiguity in the face of war, suggesting: On the one hand, both novels [DeLillo’s Falling Man and McEwan’s Saturday] imagine a literature of moral responsibility. On the other, they fail to imagine a vision of the future because they bracket or even reject a commitment to political and social change. Both novels are, of course, post-9/11 novels by virtue of their subject matter as addressed to a particular event; at the same time, however, Falling Man and Saturday stand for an ongoing revaluation of the power and the limits of the literary imagination. If the novels are not able to come to terms with the notions of class, poverty, empire, and religion that they evoke, they do register a historical moment that stands in need of new literary imaginaries. (Spahr 235)

Yet, this failure to commit to political action, I believe, is not a weak point as Spahr argues but rather a strong point in their commitment to refusing to take easy sides in light of such a morally compromising situation. Going After Cacciato enacts the effects of going into war too quickly, perhaps with too strong a commitment in light of so many other reasons not to engage. Just as the US government seems to have deceived itself over the question of Vietnam, so too does it seem to have deceived itself regarding national security—both before and after the 9/11 attacks—and regarding what to do in response to the attacks themselves. The authorized edition of The 9/11 Commission Report that appeared on July 22, 2004 reveals the ways in which such national security agencies as NORAD and the FAA were caught off guard the morning of September 11 and the equal confidence with which the President

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and his cabinet sought immediately to retaliate. Presented as a narrative (xv) in the Preface, the report also opens like a novel, appealing both visually and viscerally: Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. (1)

Immediately, the setting is established as temperate and cloudless, as an ordinary day featuring quotidian routines. The backdrop could easily appear in Saturday or Falling Man, two novelistic renditions of the effects of the day. After establishing the setting and main characters, however, the report quickly turns to the horror of the day, reading less like a government document than a Pynchon novel, as if it were historical fiction or a futuristic science fiction account of the worst imaginable. It is in its focus on unknowing, of all the traumatic surprises of the attacks—and with an unquestioned ultimatum at the end of the first chapter to go to war—that makes this text as horrifying as any futuristic fiction. Now, over ten years after the attacks, it is difficult to remember a time “before”—before international terrorist plots designed to devastate an entire city, and beyond that a global sense of security. In a section entitled “Clarifying the Record,” the authors remind us that “the defense of U.S. airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with previous training and protocols. It was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction” (31). Such reflection points up the unimaginable horror of that morning, but also a radical failure to act on, or to communicate, intelligence that something like this plot against America was predicted to take place. After receiving news of the attack

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on the Pentagon, the President told the Vice President: “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here, I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay” (39). And yet, the report, over several pages, discusses the confusion around authorization to engage any apparent enemy plane in the sky between 10:00 and 10:30. Ultimately the committee concludes: “The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet” (45). The words “unprepared” and “unprecedented” again underscore the previously unimagined, the surreal plot, involving passenger planes used as weapons of mass destruction. But it also emphasizes a kind of complacency on behalf of the US government: complacency before the event rendered severely unbalanced by premature confidence about how to respond in turn. Such a national security failing is on display in Mary Fetchet’s testimony in front of the US Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. On August 17, 2004, Fetchet founded with Beverly Eckert “Voices of September 11,” an information-clearing house for families of 9/11 victims. On August 17, Fetchet testified that her twenty-four-year-old son Brad “was shaken because he had seen someone falling to the ground from the 91st Floor ‘all the way down’ ” (1). This occurs in the first paragraphs of her testimony, setting the scene against a backdrop of people falling out of the windows, jumping. This is not what she has been called upon to witness however; Fetchet seeks to call attention to the Commission Report and to have the Governmental Affairs Committee oversee an implementation of the prescribed next steps. According to Fetchet, “I have come to recognize the inadequacies in our overall preparedness as well as the grave responsibilities and the inexcusable inertia of our political system” (2). She continues, again pointing to the blindness of the

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US government: “I believed that my government was a cohesive organization whose officials and agencies, in the interest of national security, would share intelligence, collaborate, and coordinate their counter terrorism efforts” (2). Perhaps Fetchet is most damning, however, when she underscores at just how many levels the country had to fail in order for the terrorist plot to take hold. On this point she remarks: “ONE system didn’t fail our country; virtually ALL systems failed. They failed to follow existing procedures and failed to have protocols or effective lines of communication in place, leading to widespread breakdowns in our preparedness, defense and emergency response. The other painful realization was that our government is often paralyzed by partisanship and complacent to a fault” (3). On the one hand, as with the Commission Report, Fetchet is willing to recognize the unprecedented nature of the events of the day; yet she also records and foretells a partisan paralysis that continues to plague the nation, leading to further complacency in the face of terror. Given the political, social, cultural, literary implications of such a recognition—an utter lack of trust in the governmental institution as well as the power of language to communicate the most devastating moments in US history—it is difficult to find a way out, to determine where to go from here. Recognizing the crisis in tradition, in some large part, involves simultaneously distrusting our institutions; consequently, one would think all representations would feature anti-reparative elements, a kind of desolate hopelessness one would associate with post-modern literature overall. However, on the contrary, I have found glimmers of hope and beauty in artistic responses, such as in the Diane Seuss poem “The Falling Man,” which I will take up more in depth in chapter 5. Seuss’s poem features the surreal elements of O’Brien’s war literature, especially in the lines: The man falls or he is born. He is entering the world headfirst. Or he is still, a great stillness, and it is we who are falling, beautifully falling, we who will be forever falling.

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While “we” will forever be falling, in the recognition of a new reality in the twenty-first century, “he,” the falling man, seems to be reborn. He is reborn in literature; in the form of poetry he lives on indefinitely. And although we are falling, forever falling, it is described as a “beautiful” falling—one that recognizes the necessity of aesthetics among the ashes. Ultimately, in my reading, these lines underscore the desire of the witness and, indeed, of the reader, to find redemption in such an act, rather than to see it as the hopeless vision it is. Goldsmith’s collection, with all of its self-consciousness about the “limits” of language, seems deeply ambivalent about this search for reparation—especially in light of the literal fact of people falling. On the one hand, all of the ellipses restored here in actual news coverage of the event suggest a kind of loss for words. The pauses and stutters seem at once a literary device and a response to trauma. At one point, Goldsmith cites newscasters as saying, in real time: They can’t believe it. And then you hear the sirens and people screaming as they look up at the building and see people trying to get out and some people jumping. Now, the EMS is here, fire personnel, police, everyone’s here trying to keep calm and get everyone away from the building and keep it safe. Let’s listen. … but, um, I did see someone jump. I did. And I talked to someone and in her own voice you could hear it and she just lost it. … they … they’re throwing themselves off the building. Oh my God. (136–137)

The “Oh my God” here seems to point to a definite limit point, and just earlier the “I did,” while referring to the actual sighting of someone jumping, also indicates that the witness seems to have seen herself jump—“I did” she says. In the midst of such graphic coverage, first responders seem to say what we have come to believe since then, that “[t]here’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just what to say. There are no words at all to express this” as well as “it is a situation beyond description” (141, 144). Rather than focus on this failure of language to communicate, to describe the scene and the impact, Goldsmith’s coverage of the event

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ends on an unexpected reparative note. There is a new beginning to be seen, as discovered in a scene from a park on the edge of Chinatown. And here I quote at length to give the full effect of this hopeful turn in prose: And while there’s some curiosity among these people, they continue to play their card games. They continue to chat as if nothing is going on. Their markets are open. They’re shopping, they’re … they’re … they’re buying their fish. Uh, it’s … it’s as if this little corner of New York City was totally unaffected, but you know it’s at the top of their minds. They’re talking about it. They’re pointing up in the air periodically and they’re continuing with their card games. So it’s, uh, just a little snapshot of, uh, a piece of New York as they deal with this immense tragedy. (154)

Just as in the highly literary Mrs. Dalloway, actual people in this park in Chinatown are pointing up into the sky, wondering at the power and terror of the airplanes they see there. Again, what sets 9/11 literature apart somehow is this return to reparation—a sense of closure, continuing card games (like Keith in Falling Man), and a sense that they are talking about it, indicating that there is, in fact, language. There are in fact still words. In the space that remains however, the level on which to read a phrase such as “falling man” is just not always clear; it is not clear how to approach the image of a man falling: Is it fiction or fact? Given our crisis of conscience above all else, such a figure can no longer be seen as anything other than a literal man falling to his death—a man falling against the backdrop of our government’s past and future failures adequately to respond to “moral and political trauma in our history” (181).

A person falling headfirst from the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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Journalism’s Falling Man: On Documentation and Truth Telling

We can’t hope to understand these incredible times unless we look at these images and accept the witness of these images. Looking at the falling man and to discuss it is the one option that we have, given that there is a falling man. Tom Junod, 2006 In his professional attempt to depict these incredible times, journalist Tom Junod wrote an important essay for Esquire Magazine about the search for the identity of the falling man photographed by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew—a picture striking in its beauty and elegance but also in its potential to provoke. At once characterized as voyeuristic and inappropriate, it features a man falling headfirst to his death alongside the North Tower. While the figure of the man falling has emerged as an iconic figure of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the fiction, poetry, and art that have attempted to grapple with it have often been met with hostility and even rage. Similarly, the journalism, especially the photography, that documents the falling man and our witnessing of his fall elicits a kind of open-wound response that is understandable even as it raises such questions as: Why did Americans react so strongly even to the truthtelling mission of photography and journalism to capture 9/11 and its aftermath? What does it say about us as a nation in crisis more broadly, and about the status of art and literature in its failed attempts adequately to respond to the event?

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With a focus on Junod’s Esquire article of 2003, Henry Singer’s 2006 documentary 9/11: The Falling Man, and the Abu Ghraib photography that appeared as a generic attempt to understand the treatment of that prison’s detainees, this chapter details the powerful reactions against these images as evidence for my broader claim about the vexed relationship between traumatic events and representation. By juxtaposing the reception of Richard Drew’s photograph of the falling man with US soldiers’ photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, I seek to articulate the difficult nature of reading a photograph linked inextricably with trauma and the claim it makes on the viewer. Ultimately, I argue that while we all have an ethical responsibility to look, to commemorate, we simultaneously—and paradoxically—must grapple with the impossibility of offering an adequate, and therefore ethical, response. What intrigues me most here is the fact that mural artists, poets, and novelists are not the only creators burdened with how to refer to falling, of how to document it for a mourning public. What is striking about the discipline of journalism, of the profession of journalists and photographers who work in tandem to capture history, is that their duty to record the facts would initially seem more straightforward, less prone to questions about taste and aesthetics, especially when rendered, as with Drew’s photography, with such honesty and grace. Yet, on the other side of this search for truth are videos published by the “truthers”—(mostly) American citizens who believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy. While we might all agree that some attempts at documenting the truth about 9/11 are more credible than others, I nonetheless wonder at the appeal that the “truthers” version of documenting the event holds for US citizens. Both the professional media and, in my mind, the conspiracy theorists point to a larger problem in how we as a nation mourned in the wake of the attacks: even straightforwardly recording the facts of the day proved inadequate. While I begin with the controversy surrounding Richard Drew’s photograph as detailed by Tom Junod’s writing for Esquire and Henry Singer’s documentary, I will end with a discussion of another set of

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provocative photos: those taken at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners in a war the U.S. government said was related to 9/11 were being tortured. In this way, I argue, the camera works to call into question our sense of ethics and responsibility in the wake of the attacks, a crisis point not only in representations but of a wavering moral code as well. In the cases presented here—the falling man photograph, the documentary, the Esquire follow-up, the Abu Ghraib photos—no one wanted to look, certainly not Americans, as they challenged our reputation as fighters, as holders and enforcers of the moral code, of righteous and unified survivors during crisis and controversy. Singer’s documentary begins with Michael Lomonaco, executive chef and director of the Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower. There were 170 people there on 9/11/01. Just over eight minutes into the film, Lomonaco, who was late arriving to work that day, reflects that jumping was likely “the only option left”: there was no exit through the building as the plane sliced through the elevator shaft. Flames and toxic smoke raged throughout the stairwells. Richard Drew, the Associate Press photographer, is introduced in the film, as not long after that “people started coming down”; he says, “bodies were falling.” He could hear them hitting the ground. Richard Drew shot the photograph that disturbed the world—a photograph that was labeled “distasteful” and “voyeuristic” and was rejected initially, according to the documentary’s narrative voice, Steven MacKinton, in favor of heroic images depicting instead “how the American spirit prevailed.” Drew used his camera as a filter: “[W]hat was so traumatizing was not just burning buildings, but falling bodies” (16:27). After looking at all of the frames he had taken, he chose the now canonical falling man photo: “It hits you—no blood, no guts, it’s just a person falling” (25:00). As Drew sensed from the beginning, this photograph was special for its artistic and aesthetic qualities in addition to the fact that it captured the final moments of a young man’s life. The film uses a local paper, The Morning Call, the daily out of Allentown, PA, as a perfect case about what happened next—beginning

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with an editorial decision about which photos, of those distributed by the Associated Press, would be printed to commemorate the previous day’s news. Michael Hirsch believed the photo was too obscene, in that it captured a private moment; he felt it would be taking the faller’s humanity away by peering into the last moments of a person’s life (26:44). The photo was printed precisely for that reason: It was one of those historical photos that provided a literal flashpoint. The Morning Call printed it larger than any other photo in the country. On September 12, 2001, 170,000 copies of the paper featuring Drew’s photograph were distributed throughout Allentown. Allentown citizen Bob Messinger viewed it, he remembers, with “utter disgust” (29:42). Ken Myers confesses how “that day, that picture made me angry” (30:16). According to the narrator, “the reaction in Allentown mirrored” the response around the world (32:01). When interviewed for the film, Tom Junod wonders why, reiterating what Drew had already sensed about the composition of the photograph and the uncomfortable relationship between beauty and horror it embodies. For Junod, “He seems almost perfectly composed. I never saw that picture again. No one wanted to confront the existence of the jumper” (32:29). “Americans recoiled from the falling man,” reflects Junod, continuing, “the pictures that lasted are heroic [as if to say] the American spirit shall prevail” (34:00). When Junod called the Coroner’s Office and asked about how many people made the 1500-foot jump, he was told straight out: “Nobody jumped that day” (34:44). According to Junod, it was one of the “Things about that day you weren’t supposed to talk about.” And all of that had been attached to Drew’s picture. Canadian reporter Peter Cheney was assigned to find out who it was (36:09), only to learn very early that “no one wanted to claim the falling man” (38:06). At first Cheney thought that based on the goatee, the waiter’s jacket, the dark skin tone, it would be Noberto Hernandez. After getting some confirmation from the family, he published an

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article identifying Hernandez as “the jumper”—a title that horrified the family, his wife and three daughters. “That’s not my father,” Jacqueline Hernandez repeated (39:54). It contradicted everything their family stood for: “Together forever” (41:00). The family insists that it was more than grief that was driving their denial of the photograph; it was also a belief that suicide is punishable by God: “by calling him a jumper, you are telling me he’s in hell,” they say (43:57). When Junod learns that there is more to the story, the falling man was also wearing an orange shirt—a shirt never owned by Hernandez— he pursues the question of the man’s identity once more. He was “convinced America needed to confront” this photo, this issue (46:06). He “wanted to be sure that healing didn’t mean forgetting” the people who perished in the attacks (49:50). Lomonaco agrees to look at the photo again, and says it could be Jonathan Briley, a sound engineer working at Windows that day (1:00:15). Says Lomonaco, it “offered me no comfort to think, oh, that’s Jonathan.” But for Junod, there is a kind of closure—paradoxically—through the hauntingly open question: “One has to be made to stand for many” as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier does (1:09:22). And that is when Junod says that we can’t refuse to look: we must “accept the witness of these images,” he says, suggesting that these images testify to a history we will never know. That reality is linked to what it might take to commit to the unimaginable fall from 1,500 feet up: the decision to take “his life in his hands for just that second,” says Briley’s sister, Gwendolyn (1:03:04). It must have felt like flying, people say—for just that second. The essay that seems to have motivated, even inspired, Henry Singer’s documentary is Tom Junod’s 2003 article for Esquire that traces the journey to identify the unknown “jumper.” Whereas the strength of Singer’s journalistic account lies in the camerawork, the sometimes incessant coverage of the burning buildings, the sheer weight and repetition of the images of all of those people about to jump or who are in the process of falling through the sky, the strength of Junod’s 2003 account lies in his use of language, which is equally as

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lyrical and affective as the poetry and fiction I take up in this project. Beside the famous Richard Drew photograph, we read this ekphrastic description: If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. (Junod 2003)

Like the creative writers I take up in this book—Tim O’Brien, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Diane Seuss, Christopher Kennedy— Junod’s journalistic style also connects falling with flying, death with life. He too focuses on the fact of gravity, of its apparent “divinity,” and to the visual paradox of watching a man fall and yet seeing in him aspects of flight, of survival: the perfectly graceful position buoyed further by the shirt that acts like a parachute. In his article, Junod goes on to talk about the sheer grace and beauty of the photograph, words that, as I type, still seem sacrilegious to display on a screen or on the page. What kind of monster or critic (and by monster and critic, I mean me—not Junod) would peer into the final minutes of a man’s life, a life that will end, that will have ended, in a gruesome fall, and see in it something as pleasing as beauty? Is it possible to see in the image of a man falling both beauty and horror— the new exemplar for the sublime? Junod sees the exceptionality of this photograph too when he says: In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. (Junod 2003)

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What Junod sees is what an artist sees—he looks at lines, at scale, at the parallelism between the man falling and the tower as it still stands. He continues on with the language of geometry in this, one of the most lucid and articulate descriptions of the photograph, poetic in its focus, philosophical in its thought: He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else—something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. (Junod 2003)

In this reading, Junod ascribes the reaction against the photograph to the jarring depiction of a death resulting in being trapped in a smoky skyscraper with the freedom sought that will nonetheless also result in death. It is a choiceless choice by definition: resign oneself or commit oneself to death by asphyxiation or to death by falling. The “terrible ...  freedom” is not something we ourselves can confront, the impulse to jump, the sensation of flying for even that instant. And perhaps it is with a focus on stoicism and willpower that Junod is able to see a kind of righteousness, or rebelliousness (to use his word): There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. (Junod 2003)

Junod here focuses on the man’s agency, militaristic power, and control: he is compared to a spear and a missile. Juxtaposed with the literary language of the simile “as though he were a” is the language of time and mathematics: “fifteen seconds past 9:41”; “thirty-two feet per second

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squared”; “upwards of 150 miles per hour.” It is interesting that, despite the objective language, the thing that one remembers is the apparently tagged-on phrase “and he is upside down.” One wonders at the sense of exhilarating freedom, that “terrible freedom,” the literal rush of falling so fast, headfirst. It is, of course, a way to die that is impossible to imagine. But what Junod seems to be pointing out here is the way the photograph invites the imagining, and perhaps that is why it has met with such resistance: it is not the voyeurism simply, but the personal connection with, and confrontation of the question: What might it feel like to fall so fast to your own death? This is a question that, it seems to me, no one wants to face, least of all in the twenty-first century. Junod reports that the fact of the man falling posed a conundrum not only for Richard Drew, who was there with his camera, but for the first responders and city leaders as well. Junod reports: “It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, ‘We’re in uncharted waters now’ ” (Junod 2003). Giuliani most likely was talking about how to handle the crisis in the city—the fire, the bodies, the media—but it is an observation that critics and artists would also do well to heed. We too are in unchartered waters, as evidenced by the extreme reactions to representations of the man falling. How does one report on such atrocity without appearing to appeal to people’s desires to both face and turn away from horror—in life and in art? As Junod concludes: In most American newspapers, the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again. Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Post, were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography. (Junod 2003)

And yet, for all of his searching, Junod would say that his quest to identify the man in the photograph, a quest that led him to look at the image (and others like it) hundreds of times, is neither leering nor driven by an attraction toward pornographic violence. He

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understands his writing, and his search, as a way of bearing witness, angered and confused by the fact that Drew’s image and the narratives of the falling men and women were swept away so shortly after the attacks. According to Junod, “The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen” (Junod 2003). As he will do in the Henry Singer film, Junod ends his piece by comparing the Drew photograph with the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, suggesting that if we have one icon to stand for the many, then we may perhaps have an easier time confronting the war-related deaths. But Junod is not making a simple comparison here: By saying “we have not yet seen” the end of the war of the falling man, “buried” as he is inside a photograph’s “frame,” he is referring, I believe, not only to the literal wars that the attacks apparently motivated, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, but also it is a war waged against those whose duties it is to report the violence. The directive from the American public seems to be to report using the facts in front of you, but carefully to select the facts so that they are “decent” and easy to take in. Unfortunately, this goes against much of the training that journalists, reporters, and photographers receive. How can one turn his back on a falling man, when the most appropriate thing to do seems to commemorate the life for all time? In his 2011 Esquire follow-up, published on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, Junod returns to this idea of memorializing all of the jumpers—whether or not his name is Jonathan Briley, saying: “The memorial that will stand for all the others murdered that day is on the ground; the memorial for Jonathan is in the sky, or in the infinitely replicable pixels of a digital photograph” (Junod 2011). I like to think that the photograph itself can be a kind of memorial, precisely because of its sheer artistic power. And certainly the conversation it sparked is a kind of memorial unto itself. Junod wanted to be sure that “healing didn’t mean forgetting”; and although I am not sure we can say as a

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nation we have fully healed, I do believe it is fair to say we have not forgotten, nor will we ever. It is with this focus on memory and commemoration in mind that I turn all too briefly to the “Truthers” movement—a movement that argues with increasing passion that the 9/11 terrorist attack was “an inside job.” I do believe there is more scholarly work to be done in this area—that is, offering perhaps a cultural or psychoanalytic reading of why the movement has garnered such momentum and support—but I have to say that I am not the person for that depressing work. Some examples of films that share the same visual effect as Henry Singer’s include Loose Change (written and directed by Dylan Avery and produced by Korey Rowe) and Painful Deceptions, by Eric Hufschmid. One important difference however is that they argue not for a recognition of those who lost their lives that day but for a recognition that the victims of 9/11 were casualties of a governmental plot. Loose Change uses the same footage as the mainstream media and other documentarians to argue that money hidden under the towers was at stake and that the December 14 Osama bin Laden confession tape does not feature bin Laden at all. Painful Deceptions offers a close reading of the 9/11 Commission Report, but argues that there are too many questions left unanswered and too many contradictions for the attacks possibly to have been instigated by the United States against the United States. Further, STJ911.org—Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice— represents professors who believe in the conspiracy plot and allows them a platform for speaking and publishing their theories via the Web. In terms of my argument about a crisis point in representing 9/11, especially in the case of representing the falling man, which is an image these alternative documents increasingly rely on, I wonder how and in what ways these conspiracy theories speak to the larger problem of reference in representing 9/11. Is this yet another sign of a traumatized culture indicating the myriad ways we all watch images in both horror and disbelief? Especially in the case of Scholars for 9/11, I might wager that anyone reading this book probably knows one or two people who

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are a part of the movement, as generally they are intellectuals who come from a culture of questioning, of closely reading documentations, and have channeled their disbelief and grief in this way. Just as the photos capturing the falling man on September 11, 2001 were met with horror, so too were the photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004—photos that reveal not a literally falling body but the falling moral compass and culture of the US military. While Americans are quick to decry the atrocity perpetrated against the United States on 9/11, they seem far less willing to talk about the atrocity Americans inflicted on others in prison. These later photos, it seems to me, would be the ones to be confronted by deniers and conspiracy theorists; they are so horrific—and they are horrific in a very particular way: They reveal representatives of the United States not in the heroic terms associated with the clean-up efforts of 9/11 but as perpetrators of terror in their own right. Like the 9/11 photos, the Abu Ghraib torture photos are “war photos” in the specific way that they capture war, but also from a distance, which was true for the great majority of us who watched the events of the twenty-first century unfold from within the pages of newspapers we held in the comfort of our own homes. What follows is a brief theoretical genealogy linking trauma and war photography—a linkage I have tried to make here via Junod and Richard Drew, but which needs perhaps more emphasis on the role of the witness in the following section on Abu Ghraib torture photography. By integrating this final section on torture photos, I aim to extend my argument about what it means not to want to look, to reject such painful images as voyeuristic, when perhaps we also are guilty of the voyeuristic impulse. Susan Sontag writes about the role of the secondary witness in the opening of her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others by reflecting on the opening pages of another war treatise: Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas, published 65 years earlier. Both writers ultimately consider the causes and effects of war and, particularly, the effects of photographs of war on the “privileged” and “merely safe” invited to look at them. For Woolf, and for Sontag after her, war photos have

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an equal chance at preventing wars as they do of inciting them; and while their gruesome nature may invite people to look, even their documentary style cannot promise that viewers could grasp the reality they seek to depict (Sontag 3–7). Such is the challenge of photography, along with other types of ostensibly transparent representations as the documentary, court transcripts, journalism, and testimony that beg the question: How does one fully capture the truth of a traumatic event? Is it even possible, for photos of torture, for example, to serve as realistic representations—despite what Michael Rothberg refers to as “the demands of extremity” (14)? In their interest in “traumatic realism,” Rothberg and Sontag both to some extent take their lead from Marianne Hirsch, who argued in 1997 that the myth or image of a particular group, through photography alone, “dominates lived reality, even though it can exist in conflict with it and can be ruled by different interests. It survives by means of its narrative and imaginary power, a power that photographs have a particular capacity to tap” (Hirsch 8). Hirsch’s language here helps reinforce the relationship between testimony (in the form of photography, court transcripts, survivor accounts) and the trauma it seeks to represent. For Hirsch, photography in particular has the capacity to tap an imaginative power—a power to testify to trauma— where other modes of representation may fail. What would it mean, however, for the torture photographs of Abu Ghraib to have tapped this “imaginary power”—a narrative of the US foreign policy—that bears on our identities as bystanders who are, to borrow from Sontag, “privileged” and “merely safe,” and might otherwise choose to ignore a conflict that takes place half a world away? To what extent do these photos simultaneously invoke and complicate American fantasies about the preternatural professionalism of our soldiers, and about our own willingness to embrace torture? What might be more troubling than even considering these torture photos as singular moments in the history of US foreign policy, then, is that they are just one of many types of documents testifying to the traumatic legacy of the United States. As Walter Kalaidjian has argued:

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What makes these photographs such a “different thing”—as Rumsfeld’s testimony has it—is, arguably, not just the impact of such literal images of death and bodily violation, but also the return of a certain specter of modernism haunting the photographic archive of American foreign policy. The gleeful and thoroughly banal sadism captured in the thumbs-up sign that Graner and Harman flash beside a desecrated and unburied corpse … surely conjures the phantoms of atrocity witness in the pictorial record and survivor accounts of the Holocaust and other modern genocide. (195)

On this argument, what is different about the Abu Ghraib pictures is that they frame not just the present but also America’s violent past, and they present the violence of America’s foreign policy as a traumatic repetition with no end to the cycle in sight. Such awareness on Kalaidjian’s behalf crystallizes how contemporary “art”—in all of its variations—has the potential both to convey and problematize, paradoxically, those historical atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that we have never fully witnessed in the first place. In his epilogue considering the emergence of photographs from Abu Ghraib, Kalaidjian underscores the significance of his project, a book focused on what he refers to as “The Edge of Modernism,” when he explains: Trauma, as we have seen, plays havoc with time. Haunting the new millennium, the legacy of loss bequeathed by modernity makes an uncanny claim upon the present. Modern genocide, total war, as well as modernism’s unresolved social antagonisms of race, class, and sexual difference remain charged with the traumatic affect of histories that, because they cannot be fully known, are subject to endless repetition. (189)

For Kalaidjian, poetry offers a crucial response to atrocity in its ability to offer one way out of this cycle of endless repetition. This repetition is further exemplified by what Caruth has recently suggested in “Confronting Political Trauma,” as wars waged in the name of American patriotism and spurred on by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the injustice of the previous generation. Taking the lead

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from Kalaidjian, and influenced as I am by Hirsch and other theorists of photography, we might say the same about photographs because of the claim they make on the viewer-turned-witness. Kalaidjian argues that because of the difficulty in confronting these cultural artifacts, our reaction becomes a “necessarily belated … response to what otherwise goes missing from the conventional regimes of representation regulating the ‘breaking news’ of the day” (196). Kalaidjian’s use of “regime” in the book’s epilogue about Abu Ghraib is telling here, as it acknowledges that more alienating representations of trauma may reject the limiting conventions of “everyday” language, in favor of offering important commentary on the actions of dictatorial regimes. The “thumbs-up” photos of Graner and Sabrina Harman, in particular, might offer a special case in the proliferation of photos that first came to light in 2004, with several more following in 2008: the “thumbs up” sign at once signifies as an “indexical sign of victory,” as Kalaidjian would have it (195), but it is also a gesture of the carefree American adolescent corroborated by Harman’s fresh and smiling face. As Gourevich and Morris reported in 2008 of Harman’s photography, it was originally explained away as something soldiers do to show mastery, desensitized as they are to dead bodies all around them. However, there seems to be something else here, too: “The pictures of Harman and Graner with the corpse may have been taken as a gag—‘for personal use,’ as Frederick said of his photos of Gilligan—but they are starkly at odds with Harman’s claim of a larger documentary purpose. By contrast, her grisly, intimate portraits of the corpse convey her shock at discovering its wreckage” (Gourevich and Morris 10). This understanding of the photography that emerged out of Abu Ghraib in terms of their “grisly” nature and shock value seems to work against many of the theorizations that have emerged about photography in the wake of 9/11. Traditionally, the power of the photograph lies in its ability to step in—to record history anew—when imagination fails. However, the Abu Ghraib photographs present a very specific problem: They testify to a reality that ordinary Americans may want to deny;

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they embody a memory function in their own right—even though this particular historical moment is one that we may choose to forget. If anything, they require the viewer not simply to bear witness to the event of torture but also to put him- or herself into the photograph—not only to pay homage to the tortured victims, but also to see themselves in the place of the torturers making the thumbs-up sign as well. In her now famous work Family Frames, Hirsch explains how the foundation for her ideas comes, in part, from Roland Barthes, particularly his theorization of the photograph in Camera Lucinda, photographs that embody what he calls punctum: “that prick and shock of recognition, that unique and very personal response to the photographic detail that attracts and repels us at the same time” (4). For Barthes, “Punctum is also a stick, speck, cut, little hole—and also a case of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is also poignant to me”) (quoted in Hirsch 4). Barthes’s association of the effect of looking at traumatizing photographs with the very tangible “prick” or “bruise” helps articulate what, precisely, is at stake when looking at a photograph—particularly the photographs of Abu Ghraib that capture such traumatic and traumatizing images in the first place. The photograph generally and also, I would argue, the particular photographic images chronicling the circumstances at Abu Ghraib are “prickly,” in that they rely on the figurative quality of prosopopoeia: “the ‘thou’ we accord a body of writing” (Chase 70); the “hallucinatory” power of art to “make the invisible visible” (de Man 49). It is this speaking “face”—the faces in the photographs looking back at us— one dead, the other living, that demands a witness and represents the residue of personal and collective guilt. In this way, the photographs of Abu Ghraib seem to demand that we confront such figures, but that we cannot possibly confront them adequately. What is at stake here, particularly in confronting the photographs of Abu Ghraib, is the simultaneous demand to recognize the torture, on the one hand, and the warning against mastering the knowledge of what the photographs record—because in that mastery comes a

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comfort and forgetting. A similar point could be made with regard to Junod’s interest in Drew’s falling man photograph, as he seemed to want to master a certain kind of knowledge related to the photograph—such as the man’s identity—but ultimately was satisfied with not knowing. The Abu Ghraib photographs not only require us to face the figures of those who died under torturous circumstances, but they also require us to face the killers themselves—who turn out to be, unlike the perpetrators of 9/11, very much like ourselves. For Hirsch, then, the “arresting anti-narrative wound of the punctum” helps understand photographic works as ethical, not simply in their demand that we confront the radical otherness of the image looking back at us, but also in its critical rejection of more dominant cultural models for grief. What these photographs demand of the ethical witness is a full attempt at recognizing the complexity of the situation, despite the psychically wounding effects of these photographs that make us want to turn away. But they also say something important about the process of grieving in the twenty-first century: Whereas dominant models of grief such as the traditional elegy or funereal procession help witnesses process loss by offering solace, these photographs require viewers to process loss through the less traditional “anti-narrative wound” (Ramazani iii–ix). After viewing these photos, there is no way to feel better about the American soldiers’ involvement in Abu Ghraib and the possible complicity of American citizens; there is no way one can look away—both in the literal sense of turning one’s face from the photograph and also in the figurative sense of feigning ignorance or indifference. In keeping with this idea of rejecting dominant cultural models for grief embodied by the funeral, wake, elegy (or any other healing response to mourning), I would like to propose here that the photographs of Abu Ghraib are singular in their refusal of reparation—either in the sense that they reject the idea that “something can be learned” from this moment or in the sense that they fail to comfort us in their mere presence as historical artifact. Jahan Ramazani articulates this antireparative tendency in the modern elegy as an attempt to “reopen

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the wounds of loss” (3). We could say the same about these modern photographs in the twenty-first century given the discomfort they have elicited around the world. This effect occurs, in part, because the dual nature of this photograph, and others taken by Harman featuring cloaked corpses and naked bodies, not only points back to the traumatic legacy of the United States and its similar involvement in Vietnam, the lynchings in the US South, and the US failure to intervene in the Holocaust until it was too late; they also point a finger at the viewer of the photograph, to ask what “evil”—to borrow from Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect— is lurking in all of us, stressed as we could be under the duress of war. In fact, Zimbardo was called as an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard and gained access to many photographs of abuse for the case. According to Zimbardo, “The college students role-playing guards and prisoners in a mock prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in the summer of 1971 were mirrored in the real guards and real prison in the Iraq of 2003” (Zimbardo 20). Such a take on these photographs seems very different than the way such authors as E. Ann Kaplan and Marianne Hirsch “frame” the US photographic responses to 9/11 and 9/11-related wars in Judith Greenberg’s collection Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Perhaps what makes these prior reflections so reparative is that it appeared in 2003, a full year before the first Abu Ghraib photographs came to light. As Kaplan reflects, “Did we hope that pictures of the towers could undo the trauma of their collapse or that they would write over the haunting, unforgettable scenes of the plane driving straight into the second tower and of the bright flames bursting forth into the pure blue sky—scenes that have returned again and again into nightmares?” (98). Even Kaplan’s language here is poetic—the vivid language, paradoxically, beautifies a scene that Kaplan ultimately admits causes nightmares. However, the key words here are “hope” and “undo”—as if the photos of 9/11 themselves have a kind of restorative power. The same tendency is found in the 9/11 photography writing of Hirsch, who argues:

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Here, too, Hirsch represents these photographic images as necessary for making the trauma of 9/11 “manageable,” a “coping strategy.” Hirsch continues by suggesting: Through photography I can become a witness in my own right, a witness not so much of the event as of its aftermath, a witness to the other acts of witness all around me. … The proliferation of books, photographic displays, and exhibitions allows everyone to share in this act of witnessing and working through. (78–79)

For Hirsch and Kaplan, then, the proliferation of photographs related to 9/11 helps with the act of witnessing, sometimes a second time, with new perspective, a traumatic event. Crucially, participating in the scene through photography aids with a kind of “working through”: a phrase now associated with Sigmund Freud, who privileges in his canonical paper “working through” as a mourning function over “acting out,” since working through explains how healing or reparation would be possible. However, these Abu Ghraib photographs that began emerging a year after Greenberg’s groundbreaking collection are fundamentally different in that they refuse closure or working through. Instead, they point up a kind of guilt that most Americans would perhaps want to deny. What nearly every article about the torture photos from Abu Ghraib would state, by way of warning, is that the photos are graphic in nature, traumatizing in their very gore and realism. Yet, there is something else going on here, too: Another traumatic shock comes from the recognition that the American faces looking back at us could very easily be us, how eagerly we may have responded the same way under similar circumstances. What would it mean to think of ourselves,

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the witnesses to these atrocities, as fully capable of perpetuating the same horrific treatment, or simply the innocent posturing that has now become the legacy of US practices at Abu Ghraib? The faces offering the “thumbs-up” sign in the torture photographs are also the Americans of the past who turned a blind eye to previous atrocities; and they are the individuals we are in the present time who, as Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and, now, Philip Zimbardo have explained, have the banal capacity for evil ourselves if it is demanded of us. After reminding her audience of images from the Spanish Civil War, Woolf wondered in the 1930s whether war photos have the potential to make war real for us, to bring the war home by asking: “whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things” (quoted in Sontag 4). As the Abu Ghraib photos of Harman show, the war is closer than we like to believe—it is at our fingertips, writ large in the blink of an eye. But this personal connection, I would argue, is crucial to a conscious refusal to forget. To return to the Richard Drew example, when Paula Zahn for CNN asked Drew how he feels about taking the photographs of the people falling, he responds: I look at it in that there are images that we have seen in our newspapers—we’ve seen AP photographer’s Nick Ut’s picture of the little girl running from the napalm in Vietnam, we’ve seen AP photographer Eddie Adams’s picture of the Saigon police chief executing the man on the street; then we see the AP photographer John Filo’s picture of the girl bending over the fallen student at Kent State. Those are all images that we all thought we didn’t want to see, and there was controversy about them all, but it’s part of the story. You have to tell the story. You can’t just turn your head and stop.

By extension, the same can be said for his photograph of the falling man and the Abu Ghraib torture photos. As Sontag has argued: “The photographs are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore” (Sontag 7). You can’t just turn your head and stop looking. These photos were made to be seen.

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Don DeLillo’s Performance Art: Failure Bears Witness to Falling

There is a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze. Because what was he doing finally? Because did he finally know? She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own, not some grim vision of others falling. Don DeLillo, 2007 Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man ends almost as it begins, with its protagonist, Keith Neudecker, fleeing the Twin Towers in the midst of the 9/11 attacks. The first sentence reads: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night” (3). Part trauma narrative, part apocalyptic tale, the novel’s poetic beginning presents Keith as a kind of every man, or any man, who walked out of the towers in 2001 and lived to tell about it. In fact, one does not learn his first name until it is used in conversation by his estranged wife in chapter two; their last name is only revealed three dozen pages in—an afterthought in this novel that depicts more than a couple and their marriage; it also questions what it means to survive another man’s falling. Falling Man’s ending is a slight variation on the beginning, as it adds one crucial piece of information: It narrates several moments before Keith’s exit from the building, detailing Keith’s failed attempts within one of the swaying towers to save a co-worker named Rumsey. While Keith works to gather Rumsey, glimpses of men falling from the windows in the same building catch his eye. “He could not stop seeing it,” the narrator reveals: “twenty feet away, an instant of something

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sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it” (242). The temporality of that moment—describing as it does how the man seems always to have been falling, falling interminably— functions as a synecdoche for the novel overall: Beginning as it does in medias res, the novel imagines Keith in a perpetual free fall—falling before it even begins—dislocating the reader in the time and space of the novel just as Keith is dislocated himself. In Keith’s final attempt to save Rumsey, he pauses and looks at the man, at the body “who’d fallen away from him, upper body lax, face barely belonging. The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now. [ … ] He stood and looked at him and the man opened his eyes and died” (243). Whereas Keith functions, on first reading, as the novel’s sole witness to falling—he sees bodies falling out of the sky in his descent from the towers; he sees them repeatedly in his waking life afterward—his estranged wife Lianne too bears witness to the falling. It is as though DeLillo gives us a layered impression of what it means to witness the falling of another: Through Keith we see the primary witness to literal falling; but through Lianne we see a witness to the staged art of falling—a scripted free fall of a performance artist. Keith repeatedly returns to memories of others’ literal falling; Lianne returns to references to the performances of the falling man, tracing his career until his final act, an apparently unsuspected death. It is Lianne, in other words, who perpetually faces the performing artist. The performance artist, in fact, functions both literally and figuratively as another man falling, as his performances also bear witness to the traumatic falls in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.1 As she watches one of his signature performances, she wonders: “There is a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze. Because what was he doing finally? Because did he finally know? She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own, not some grim vision of others falling” (167). However, I believe that we can read the performance For exemplary scholarship considering the relationship among Falling Man, ethics, and the visual image, see Apitzsch, Boxall, Duvall, Frost, Kauffman, Leps, Mauro, Polatinsky and Scherzinger.

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artist as reenacting the falling of the people from the towers. Although he performs his falls in a different context in a myriad of ways, he seems to want to repeat the act for a public audience looking for a way to confront an image they have yet to process fully. Perhaps he does have within him, even further, perhaps he embodies, “some grim vision of others falling.” He bears witness through his art to others falling. The novel, in this way, is about the weight of history and the burden to bear witness on a small, nuclear family: father Keith, mother Lianne, son Justin—an only child of seven years old, who also must make sense of the attacks. In fact, one of the most touching scenes in the novel clarifies a misunderstanding among Justin and his friends about the sound of the name of the perpetrator, repeated over and over again: “Bill Lawton,” in this novel becomes a child’s malapropism for the mastermind of the attacks, an “every day,” “American” name that could as easily be the family’s doctor or plumber. Given DeLillo’s representation of this family’s attempts to survive in the wake of the attacks, critics such as Linda Kauffman have read this novel as an allegory, arguing that the “Falling Man” of the title is not simply literal but also refers to the falling men and women after the attacks. “The women are falling too,” she argues. “[S]ome are ‘fallen women’; others are falling in and out of love. Some are spiraling downward psychically; others are slowly dying. This novel is obsessed with the corporeal body—in motion, in bed, in suspense” (135). Keith’s extramarital affair and gambling addiction aside (presumably Keith’s behaviors that lead readers to understand the novel in the sense of “moral” or “ethical” falling and failure), I would like to focus on the repeated and very literal image of the actual men falling—usually it is men with neckties; the performance artist is a man—rather than on the allegorical connotations. For it is in the performance of the falling man against traumatic memories of World Trade Center (WTC) employees falling to their deaths that DeLillo is able to capture the most haunting effect of the 9/11 attacks: From the moment Americans—and people around the world—saw the repeated video or photography of the man falling from the towers,

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there has not been an alternative way to read or understand the image of a man falling, or of anything falling for that matter. It could be a performance artist, a skydiver, a trampoline exercise, a free fall in the most exuberant sense, but we will forever see a suicide, an attempted destruction of a city, a terrorist plot, debris, and destruction. There is no before. Only after: “a time of space and falling ash” (DeLillo 3). Given the novel’s sensitivity to the figure of the traumatized survivor in Keith, and his other half Lianne, a survivor once removed, in the sense that she only witnesses the falling deaths through performance art, the early reviews of the novel are somewhat difficult to reconcile with the touching lyricism of the novel overall. Michiko Kakutani’s review for The New York Times, referenced in this book’s Introduction for the somewhat hasty descriptions of the novel as “a terrible disappointment” and “spindly,” ends her review with: Instead of capturing the impact of 9/11 on the country or New York or a spectrum of survivors or even a couple of interesting individuals, instead of illuminating the zeitgeist in which 9/11 occurred or the shell-shocked world it left in its wake, Mr. DeLillo leaves us with two paltry images: one of a performance artist re-enacting the fall of bodies from the burning World Trade Center, and one of a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert.

On the one hand, Keith’s Las Vegas trips do seem somewhat beside the point, unless one comes to the horrifying realization that this is what can be expected in the “shell-shocked world” after 9/11: the traumatic repetition afforded by gambling, sex, constant and repeated sightings— real and imagined—of the “fall of bodies from the burning World Trade Center.” Kakutani’s review, published almost immediately after the appearance of the novel, does betray, however, the disappointment that it is rather impossible to capture “the impact of 9/11 on the country.” How does one even begin to try? Appearing almost as a defense of DeLillo’s work, three recent scholars have presented convincing readings of the novel as almost self-consciously addressing this problem in representation—and they

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make the argument through the case of the performance artist, the falling man who falls with the protection of a harness until he finally takes his own life. For John Duvall, “The prevalence of art, artists, and art critics in the novel at the very least raises a question about what role art might play in addressing the traumatic events of 9/11. I believe that in Falling Man DeLillo illustrates both the inadequacy and the necessity of artistic mediation and meditation to the task of remembering and memorializing 9/11” (153). The key words here, “inadequacy” and “necessity,” offer a defense of DeLillo’s novel, in the sense that it succeeds in its very failure to use language to speak to the crisis of the moment. Duvall’s essay appeared in 2011 and was followed, two years later, by Hamilton Carroll’s essay, which asks: “If the events of September 11 produced a crisis of representation [ … ] how is that crisis manifest in contemporary U.S. narrative fiction and in DeLillo’s novel in particular? How is that representational crisis itself represented?” (108). For Carroll, as with Duvall, one sees DeLillo’s engagement with “various types of visual representation” as offering a possible answer—but not a comforting one. “Seeing only failure,” Carroll concludes, “DeLillo pushes representation to the limit” (127). And yet, I am not so sure if it is “inadequacy” or “limits” of representation that is on display in this notorious novel. While I would agree with Carroll’s assessment of a “representational crisis,” I do not believe the crisis lies in language or in art. In fact, the artists and writers on display in this very study—Parrish, Drew, Seuss, Kennedy, Safran Foer, and DeLillo as perhaps the exemplary authors on display here— have succeeded all too well. They have given us beauty in both the visual and lyrical senses. For me, the crisis lies in the world itself—in the very fact of airplanes, men, paper, neckties, towers falling—a world that has led every reader everywhere to see the attacks of 9/11 and the horror of that day every time he or she sees the image of a man falling. Because of this, representation works maybe too well; it exceeds its bounds rather than reaching its limits. Kakutani faulted DeLillo for his “paltry” images without recognizing how the terms of representation

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have changed around 9/11: There is such a surfeit of representability that a “paltry” image can seem welcome. In the repetition of our collective viewing of the performance of the falling man, DeLillo seems to say that as people in the world we cannot help but confront the 9/11 attacks all over again. The falling man connotes trauma every time. In its consistency and accuracy lies the problem—not in its failure to be understood. To put it another way, DeLillo’s novel represents to us a failure not in how artists represent the world but in how the world represents itself to us: through repeated traumatic events ingrained into our individual and national consciousness. The crisis, as I see it, is not in the sense that language cannot represent but in the sense that art reminds us that we are now forced to come to terms with lyrical renderings of violent actions and with negotiating our simultaneous desire for and rejection of reparation. This crisis signals our place in the historical moment— the trauma borne not out of language but of history. So perhaps to return to Kakutani’s early review, the impulse to criticize stems not from DeLillo’s failure to communicate or to represent the world after 9/11 but from a fundamental discomfort with his successful, aesthetic, poetic, lyrical rendering of something so ghastly, as unimaginable as a man falling. This is deeply unsettling. As I argue here, DeLillo’s later novels reveal consistently that ultimately there is hope in poetry, in art, in bodily and linguistic lyricism. In fact, DeLillo’s The Body Artist appeared in February of 2001 uncannily to predict a new state of terror to come. The novel opens with a couple during their morning routine: Lauren Hartke, the body artist, is preparing breakfast with her husband Rey Robles, described in his obituary, which appears at the end of that very first chapter, as “cinema’s poet of lonely places” (27). During their final morning together, Rey anticipates the “terror of another ordinary day [ … .] You don’t know this yet” (15). On the surface, Rey seems to be trying to warn Lauren about his decision, already made, to commit suicide. But DeLillo’s interest in the skewed nature of traumatic time becomes clear in the juxtaposition between “terror” and “ordinary” as well as “ordinary day”

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and “you don’t know this yet.” If it is ordinary, then how would Lauren not know it? If it is a day of terror, then how can it be ordinary? For DeLillo, in this novel as well as in Falling Man, all time blurs into one time: “Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments” are the first two lines of this novel, anticipating the first lines of Falling Man: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash” (7, 3). But in both worlds, the performance of a body in mourning leads somehow to a new understanding of what was too gruesome, too unexpected to be processed in the first place. It is a safe re-turning of (a “giving back of ”) trauma, the repetition of an unanticipated thing. The artistic performance in The Body Artist, Lauren’s performance, is called Body Time: In a single chapter, DeLillo conveys a fictional review of the work, and quotes Lauren as saying she wants to “think of time differently [ … .] Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up” (107). What is most fascinating about the appearance of this genre-bending review, however, is what Lauren does with her body in the midst of an interview about her performances in the wake of her husband’s suicide: “She switches to another voice. It is his voice, the naked man’s, spooky as a woodwind in your closet. Not taped but live. Not lip-sync’d but real. It is speaking to me and I search my friend’s face but I don’t quite see her” (109). Here, performance art seems to offer an opportunity for reliving the past—for conjuring a loved one gone too soon. The effects, in fact, are palliative: There is found in this novel a kind of closure and reparation so unusual in the contemporary tradition. The novel ends with Lauren returning home to an empty room: “She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the window open. She didn’t know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body to tell her who she was” (124). This novel, like Falling Man, ends with an image foreshadowed in the beginning: The Body Artist features Lauren looking out the window, feeling unsettled by a blue jay on a feeder looking into the house (21–22). By the novel’s end, there is no bird and there is no Rey, not even the stranger referred to as a

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possibly imaginary figure throughout; there is only Lauren and time, and we imagine, through her art, she feels a sense of recompense in, paradoxically, contorting her body into other people’s forms to learn finally “who she was.” As “Mariella Chapman,” the fictional reviewer of Lauren’s performances reminds us, performance art is generally neither critically nor culturally appreciated as a form of representation. Mariella describes her newly acquired understanding of time in Lauren’s work: “Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully. This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed” (104). And despite this fact of a reader’s or viewer’s impulse to walk out, to refuse to witness such contortions of the body artist and contortions of time—or maybe because of this fact—DeLillo returns in Falling Man to the figure of a performance artist, one coming to terms with the losses of 9/11, and who also helps Lianne come to terms with her own sense of loss in the wake of the fall of the towers. With a focus on the poetic nature of language, DeLillo’s Falling Man picks up where his previous novel, The Body Artist, leaves off—with the healing or recuperative power of language to describe performance art. Ultimately, Falling Man differs from The Body Artist in that children play a central role even if they are marginal characters appearing at disjointed moments throughout the narrative. In this respect, while DeLillo on the surface seems to be caught up in the “limits of representation,” he also conveys a sense of promise both in art and in the figure of the child as witness—referring not only to a collective sense of traumatic survival but also about a new life or tradition emerging from the rubble of 9/11. One of the most striking ways Falling Man reenacts the repetition of witness, of traumatic survival, is via the repeated image of a shirt falling out of the sky that haunts Keith throughout the novel. The first time he references the shirt is in the sixth paragraph, as he leaves the towers. In addition to the “falling ash” and the people who “ran and fell,” in addition to hearing the “buckling rumble of the fall” of the tower, in addition to “figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free

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space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens,” Keith sees “something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft” (3–4). The word here “aloft” is striking—as it, alone among the suffocating objects falling from the sky, seems to be floating or somehow held up. It is not subject to gravity but rather buoyed by the air. It is the only thing that seems not to fall so suddenly, but then it too succumbs: “He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river” (4). Described in terms of an empty parachute, this disembodied shirt, like the man or woman wearing it, falls “again” against the backdrop of scant light and high smoke. Keith repeats this image a second time when the narrative perspective shifts to a free indirect discourse that appears to account for Lianne’s thoughts as Keith walks through the door directly following the attacks: First he says, “Everyone’s giving me water” (87) and “Then,” Lianne reflects, “he had said something else. The briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky” (88). As with Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which begins as a quest to find the owner of a lost key, Falling Man features a briefcase for a similar reason: to bring people together. The briefcase is not Keith’s after all. But what is more striking here is that one of his first thoughts as witness returns to the shirt falling out of the sky. Such an ominous image, now in the wake of the attacks, reminds us that someone had been wearing the shirt, but had dissipated. The figure reminds us that the attacks made nothing out of something. The only remainder is the shirt. The third reference to the same shirt occurs in the end of the novel—in the novel’s penultimate line—as it refocuses the reader on the moment in the novel’s beginning, a catalog of all that Keith witnessed in the midst of the attack. It occurs directly after the moment Rumsey dies, after Keith sees the body “going past the window,” confusing it, significantly, with Rumsey who has also fallen. The body Keith reflects as “the man falling sideways, arms up and out, like pointed up, like why am I here instead of there” (244). Rather than given the punctuation

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of a question, this plea is imagined as an address, an address to Keith as witness, asking implicitly why he is falling from the sky and Keith is not. One also wonders at the level of personification granted to the falling body here. What happens when a body falls from such high altitudes? Is the man alive or dead? Is the narrative here conscious about the difference between falling and flying, or is this a projection of Keith, who already feels the guilt of a survivor? In the end, the briefcase is passed to Keith’s hands; he is heading out of the door, “the tower falling, the south tower diving into the smoke”; “they ran and fell and tried to get up.” Finally we learn, “[t]hat’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name. Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246). The novel ends with an empty shirt, falling and waving. Already it is understood as previously unimaginable—an exemplary image for the events of the day. The image of the “arms waving” is eerily haunting, another reference to the demand to bear witness, to pay attention, to remember the empty shirt as somehow simultaneously other-worldly and evidence of the world as it is from this moment on: “This is the world now,” says DeLillo in the book’s second paragraph (3). In the end, as in the beginning, “things kept falling” (4), giving another layer of connotation to the William Butler Yeats poem of 1919 “The Second Coming”: “things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” If it is Keith who has borne witness at the site of the attacks, who has watched a co-worker die in the office and one—or several others— fall to their deaths out of his office window, then it seems striking that Lianne would be assigned the salvific effect of the performances of the falling man. He and his art are introduced in the fourth chapter, as Lianne is out in the city near 42nd street. People are gathered around, watching. Then Lianne discovers why: “A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at this sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct” (33). As viewers—and critics alike—have been quick

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to acknowledge, the falling man has dressed and positioned himself like the iconic image from Richard Drew’s photograph, which I discuss in Chapter 3. The image also sounds like a repetition of the shirt Keith recalls—and the image Lianne remembers from Keith’s retelling of his escape from Lower Manhattan. Lianne gives meaning to the scene for the reader, recalling: “She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man” (33). Although the performance artist is not given a name until nearly the end of the novel, when he has a section titled after him—Part Three: “David Janiak” (179)—the work of the performance artist and continued reflections on the significance of his work are revisited at three different points in the novel and often for several pages at a time (33; 163–169; 218–222). But perhaps it is Lianne’s first extended sighting that brings the most pause—the outrage of the spectators on the street, the way she refers to him in terms of what his presence means: Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body coming down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theatre piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal. (33)

On first reading, the theatricality of the scene is what strikes her: the “puppetry,” “the gaze,” the “theatre piece” all suggest that this is “merely” a performance for the slowing traffic and the gaze of the world. Echoing Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater, the novel seems to telescope simultaneously two opposite reactions: the onlookers’ annoyance with being reduced this way and the fact that such emotions can in fact be distilled so that we can experience them again. Further, what disturbs is not simply the image of a man held by a harness, the intent to jump into a free fall protected by a parachuter’s gear. The disturbing, “awful openness” which causes “collective dread” is that it is a performance of a man falling after the fall of the towers and after the fall of so many

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to their deaths. Lianne refers to the scene as “something we’d not seen,” which gives pause, as surely the Drew image had been broadcast around the world dozens of times before being briefly censored because of its own disturbing quality. Or perhaps she means this is something we had not seen—had not imagined—before 9/11. What remains so commanding about the scene is that “the single falling figure … trails a collective dread, body coming down among us all” demands a witness a second time, and third time, repeatedly throughout the novel. If it had not been seen originally, as Keith had seen it, then the falling man would demand it be seen through his terrifying and repeated performances. Lianne’s understanding of the performances of the falling man evolves with each of his appearances within the novel. The second time she sees him, she understands more fully his motives: “Performance art, yes, but he wasn’t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows. He as situated where he was, remote from the station personnel and railroad police, waiting for a train to come, northbound, this is what he wanted, an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure” (164). He is performing, in part, for people moving on a train, people who would not see him “attach the safety harness”; “[t]hey would only see him fall out of sight” (165). The effect would be another missed encounter or perhaps an attempt to return such imagery to its proper place. Parallel with Keith’s sighting, the people on the train would catch the falling man’s flight out of the corners of their eyes. As Lianne reflects, “the ones already speaking into phones, the others groping for phones, all would try to describe what they’ve seen or what others nearby have seen and are now trying to describe to them” (165). In other words, Lianne thinks she has determined that the falling man seeks to establish another situation of failed or false witness, a reenactment of the moment of trauma rather than a recuperative opportunity to view the fall directly, knowingly, consciously aware that it is a safe return to the moment of crisis. Lianne continues in this confused thought process: “There was one thing for them to say, essentially. Someone falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by

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cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and the hijacked planes” (165). For Lianne, this is not simply performance art but performance art post-9/11. On the surface, it seeks to disturb, to disrupt, to reopen the confusion felt on that day. Then she discovers that she has imposed or perhaps projected intentions onto the falling man’s craft. “She was dreaming his intentions,” she thinks: “She was making it up, stretched so tight across the moment that she could not think her own thoughts” (165). Now the two moments—the performance of the man falling and the men falling from the WTC—become blurred. The next line comes from a disembodied voice: “I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” says the voice. And we think it is the falling man, given a voice at last. But several pages later we learn it is Keith, in conversation with Lianne, not about the man at all, and not even about Florence, the affair he would like to confess. Later, Lianne is still reflecting on this most recent performance to the extent that she replays it in her mind, as Keith does the fall of the bodies, of the shirts, out of the tower. As the train passes, the falling man seems to jump (167). But then Lianne wonders: “Jumps or falls. He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst, drawing a rustle of awe from the schoolyard with isolated cries of alarm that are only partly smothered by the passing roar of train” (167). It seems to be a headfirst fall, like a dive, like Richard Drew’s Falling Man, to a mix of awe and mourning. The school children are called upon to witness this scene, as are the passengers on the train, whose reactions one cannot see. The cries are smothered by the roar of the train, also symbolizing a kind of stifled mourning or inadequate response to an expression of terror in the face of a man falling. What stands out about this moment, however, is the detailed description of Lianne’s reaction to the art, to the falling man’s very performance: She felt her body go limp. But the fall was not the worst of it. The jolting end of the fall left him upside-down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement. The jolt, the sort of midair impact and bounce, the recoil, now the stillness, arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee. There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and

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While Lianne watches this performance, it is her own body that goes limp, presumably the way the artist’s will at the end of the fall itself. Stylistically in this passage, Lianne and the falling man are linked via repetition. Her “body” goes limp as his stylized pose incorporates “body” and limbs. Her witnessing of the “fall” was not the worst of it as the jolting end of the “fall” leaves him upside down and a deluge of sound “falls” about him. The fall was not the “worst” of it for her; the “worst” of it was the stillness. The “jolting” end of the fall is referred to again as the “jolt, a sort of midair impact and bounce.” The “stillness,” arms at his sides, is once again described as the “stillness” being the worst of it. His “stylized pose” (or “position”) is compared with her “position here,” so close to the man. The “stillness” itself is juxtaposed with the “train still running in a blur in her mind.” Just as the circling and repeating language of the passage connects the two characters rhetorically, Lianne feels compelled to connect with the man, in this “fallen” position as well. She wants to speak with him but he is on “another plane of being, beyond reach.” “Plane” here of course means level or location at the literal level, but it also suggests an existential quality of being—one that also connotes the jolting crash and fall of the planes and the stillness left in their wake. Further, the alliteration of the “b” sounds as in “body,” “bounce,” “beat,” “body” again, “being,” “beyond,” “blur,” and “blood” convey an ominous feeling in the midst of the scene—a kind of poetry of violence that Lianne least of all expects. Again, with lyricism on display like this, I can hardly argue for a failure of literary language. Instead, what we get is a kind of success of aesthetics, but the question is: Is this what we want our post-9/11 literature—particularly, literature that refers to falling—to look

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and sound like? The passage, as the fall in this scene, is jolting and despairing, but it is nothing if not beautiful. The lyrical quality brings with it the affective dimension only language of this kind can offer: We are awestruck as is Lianne; she thinks there is something “awful” about the pose which could as easily be understood as terrible and gruesome as awe-inspiring. Ultimately, the motionless body as set against the movement of the train offers us what the photograph of the falling man offers us—with the artist’s arms at his sides and leg bent at one knee, he is bearing witness to, testifying to, that horrendous fall to the death. And so is Lianne. And so is DeLillo. It is a kind of witness that joins one to the other: Lianne to the falling man; DeLillo to his readers; a nation in mourning to the men and women who jumped to their deaths. One page later Lianne thinks, somewhat disjointedly, “Died by his own hand” (169). This latest sighting was “thirty-six days after the planes” (170)—again the word “plane” connecting with the man’s alternate “plane of being.” So when we see the sentence again—“Died by his own hand,” fifty-some pages later, it makes a certain kind of sense. Except it doesn’t. Because in the later instance, Lianne seems to be thinking in 2004 (nearly three years after the first performance) about her father’s suicide—an event that appeared to take place in 1985. This memory leads into her reading of the obituary for the falling man, finally identified as David Janiak who died “at 39, apparently of natural causes” (220). Again, shifting across planes of time and being, DeLillo seems to link the reenactment of the falling man in 2001 with the death of Lianne’s father—another possible failure to witness, another life gone too soon. The representation of Lianne’s discovery of the obituary takes up six full pages and resembles the printed obituary of Rey Robles in The Body Artist. According to the obituary in Falling Man, “All his falls were headfirst, none announced in advance. The performances pieces were not designed to be recorded by a photographer” (220)—a fact returned to three pages later when Lianne compares photographs of the man’s performances to the performance she had seen in 2001: “She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated

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tracks [ … ] watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past. There were no photographs of that all. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb” (223). In depicting Lianne as the recorder, the witness, the survivor to Janiak’s fall, the narrative points up the role of the traumatic witness generally, the role of Keith, for example, who records and absorbs the images of the falls he has seen and walks home to tell about it. The relationship she has with the photograph makes Lianne something of a vector of trauma for others, a carrier of an image of the performance artist who did not want to be photographed in the first place. The obituary goes on to describe Janiak’s signature pose and ultimately asks: “Was this position intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at this sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?” (221). Those six pages depicting the obituary, although consistent with DeLillo’s use of free indirect discourse, blend brilliantly the perspective of Lianne with the perspective of the obituary writer so that it becomes difficult to determine what the reporter writes in the obituary and Lianne’s interpretation of the language found therein. In what appears to be the voice of the obituary, we learn that “[f]ree fall is the fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute. It is the ideal falling motion of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field” (221). The references to the “falling motion of a body” subject to gravity give new meaning here to Caruth’s 1996 essay about de Man’s reading of Kleist’s falling puppetry and the traumatic discovery of gravity that I discuss in Chapter 1. Further, this idea that there is an “ideal” falling motion is picked up again in the voice of Lianne herself, as she now reflects: “She clicked forward and there was the picture. She looked away, into the keyboard. It is the ideal falling motion of a body” (222). These three short sentences compose their own brief and striking

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paragraph—at once mourning, sarcastic, sincere, and nostalgic, giving way to Lianne’s thoughts about the causes of death: “The preliminary finding is death from natural causes, pending an autopsy and toxicological report” (222). Again, one can’t help hear, from four pages earlier, “Died by his own hand” (218). One has the sense that Lianne’s reading of the man’s death is as a kind of failed witness: Chronically depressed “due to a spinal condition” (222), could he not have been depressed by the actual falling men on 9/11, the repeated images in the media, borne out by his own traumatic repetition, his own artistic free falls? Lianne of course has no way of knowing: “He said nothing when asked whether anyone close to him had been lost in the attacks. He had no comments to make to the media on any subject” (222). Janiak’s expression then is felt only through his art. In a fine moment committed to redescribing performance art in literary language—one of several in the novel—Richard Drew’s photograph is relived in the language of DeLillo, as presented in the context of the obituary of the falling man, himself bearing witness to the man photographed that day. As such, we have access to a man living perpetually in and through language despite the gruesome fall to his death, raising questions about what it means to describe, to capture in any medium, the figure of the man falling. The novel continues in this vein: She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific. (221–222)

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At once this passage reflects on the formal beauty of Richard Drew’s photography, on the horrific beauty of the man falling, on the beauty of the vertical, soaring lines of the towers in the sky. The passage relies on the language of art: “frame” and “picture”; “soaring lines, the vertical column stripes”; “composition”; references to lightness and darkness; the importance of the precise centering of the object of interest: “the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes.” The effects of such artistry, Lianne thinks—four times we are reminded this is her mediation and not the obituary writer’s—is its emotional appeal: It hits her hard and burns a hole in her mind and her heart. One does not know whether to focus on the aspect of “beauty” in Lianne’s reaction to the photograph or its “horror.” DeLillo’s point seems to be both that something so devastating can be rendered beautifully and that, in fact, the beauty can emphasize the devastation. This is an aspect of art that I believe reveals the ways in which we have not met up with the limits of representation—or more precisely, the excesses of representation—after 9/11. The crisis may lie not with art and literature but in the fact that we do not know how to react. Bearing witness seems to be the slightly easier part of the equation; the question remains: What do we do in the aftermath? How do we confront the world, its every image, when it all seems to be falling down around us—when every artist who depicts falling, both before and after 9/11, cannot help but instill in us a crushing devastation, the vision of a falling angel who in fact was once a working man in a suit? One way out of the crisis, I might suggest, comes from the voices and the language of the novel’s children—language that reminds us not only about the malleability of future generations but about language itself, evolving as it does to reflect the time, to incorporate misusages in order to account for the slipperiness of representation and the effect of changes in interpretations over time. Like Safran Foer, DeLillo’s novel features an only child, a son, who must grapple with what he, too, witnessed on that day. Lianne remarks to Keith, the moment he walks in the door covered in ash, that Justin remains carefully sheltered

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from the horrific images on television. As a result of the fragmented narrative Justin and his friends must piece together on their own, they make up a fictional agent in the plots against the United States on 9/11. Like Justin’s father Keith during the moments of the attacks, Justin spends time looking out the window with his two best friends, looking with binoculars and talking of “Bill Lawton,” the title of Part One (17, 37, 72–74). While Lianne thinks they are studying clouds (17) and then hawks (37), the twins’ mother thinks there must be something more. Eventually it becomes clear that the children are “ ‘looking for more planes. [ … ] Waiting for it to happen again’ ” (72). On the one hand, this representation of the children’s traumatic repetition seems incredibly tragic, suggesting as it does that they know more than their parents in fact realize. Lianne confesses this renewed sense of terror when she says: “That scares the hell out of me. God, there’s something so awful about that. Damn kids with their goddamn twisted powers of imagination” (72). But it is precisely the powers of their imagination that allow them to use language and creativity to devise an alternative ending, a new narrative, a fictional coming to terms with the real events of the day. After Lianne discovers that “[t]he name originates with [Justin’s friend] Robert,” she tells Keith, “He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying bin Laden” (74). But what happens next in the narrative provokes a sense of sympathy and care, as we learn that “Lianne considered this. It seemed to her, at first, that some important meaning might be located in the soundings of the boy’s small error. She looked at Keith, searching for his concurrence, for something she might use to secure her free-floating awe” (73–74). In fact, there is a kind of important meaning to be located here, which is that language is malleable and it does not always refer precisely to what it seeks to name. Or conversely, what language names does not necessarily need to exist in the “real” world. Children know this better than adults. Lianne’s “free floating awe” seems to stem from this realization: If language succeeds at one thing, it is at meaning somehow beyond itself, of knowing uncannily what it does not know—or, conversely, of not knowing what it uncannily knows.

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In a novel full of mis-steps, lost opportunities, lies, and failures, at this moment, Lianne and Keith come together over this recognition. Keith answers her: “So together … they developed the myth of Bill Lawton” (74). Keith has heard from Justin the entire “myth”—the character that is Bill Lawton—the children create him together: “He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on that list” (74). While the image of three children searching the skies for “Bill Lawton” disturbs Lianne, there is a kind of comfort that children are talking about the events in ways the grown-ups are not. Lianne believes this is the result of putting “a protective distance between children and news events” and Keith believes the opposite, that “we didn’t put a distance, not really” (74). Lianne’s response, “Between children and mass murderers,” seems incredibly out of place here, but also speaks to the power of language as well: By reinventing the narrative of 9/11 through linguistic slips and myths, children’s mistakes allow them to engage more authentically with the trauma. Although they have entirely misunderstood nearly everything, in the children’s failure lies a kind of success: Bearing witness, these figures of children seem to suggest, demands assigning language, however faulty or funny or sad or tragic or beautiful, to an event that would otherwise have no meaning. The falling man bears witness through his nearly literal dramatic reenactments. He lies dead at 39. The children bear witness through myth making and malapropisms— language used beyond its denotative powers. And if the novel suggests one thing clearly, it is that “[t]he kids are all right.” At the end of the chapter—directly after Keith reveals the aspects of the Bill Lawton myth Lianne has not yet discerned—even Lianne and Keith have reached an understanding: “We’re ready to sink into our little lives,” he says finally (75).

5

Poetics of Falling: The Lyrical Laments of Kennedy and Seuss

These lives, bundled together so randomly into a union of loving memory by those terrible cataclysms of September 11, remind us of what Walt Whitman knew:“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Howell Raines, 2002 In response to the overwhelming number of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks, as well as the obvious local interest, The New York Times began publishing a section entitled “Portraits of Grief ”: Careful not to sound like obituaries, these portraits were offered by a myriad of Times reporters as tributes to the people who perished in the attacks. Later, Times Books and the Henry Holt Company collected these portraits (1,910 stories in all) under the title 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief,” a large coffee tablebook heavy alike with the sheer number of pages and the emotional impact contained therein. In introducing the book, Howell Raines situates these portraits within the context of US history and poetry, suggesting that “ ‘Portraits of Grief ’ reminds us of the democracy of death” (vii). Influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Raines amplifies this democracy into a shared nobility: When I read [the portraits], I am filled with an awareness of the subtle nobility of every day existence, of the ordered beauty of quotidian life for millions of Americans, of the unforced dedication with which our fellow citizens go about their duties as parents, life partners, employers or employees, as planters of community gardens, coaches of the young, joyful explorers of this great land and the world beyond its shores. (vii)

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As Raines makes clear through his reference to Whitman—that the United States is a poem itself—the responses to the attacks were also perhaps uniquely American, ranging from The New York Times’s project to detail the working lives of the Americans who died that day to the lyrical laments who were also inspired by Whitman, not simply in what he had to say, but also in terms of how he said it. In other words, Raines’s Whitmanian observation—that the United States is itself a poem—encourages us to reflect on the Americanness of responses to the attacks, ranging from this journalistic effort to detail the ordinary lives of those who died to more explicitly poetic laments. In this chapter I consider two poets who also take their cues from Whitman in their focus on America and Americans. However, Diane Seuss, author of “Falling Man” (2002), and Christopher Kennedy, author of Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (2007), inevitably write about the democratic project and working men and women in the specific post-9/11 context. Largely overlooked, save for a few reviews and mentions in footnotes, these two poets mourn the loss of life in the attacks through both the literal and figurative image of the falling man in particular. The striking reality of both projects is the insistent literalness of what would ordinarily remain figural: Both Seuss and Kennedy use lyrical language to try to capture the literal truth of a man falling. For these poets, the falling man is not only a figure for a larger concept or idea—loss of innocence or spiritual purity, or hubris as in the case of the Icarus myth. Rather, Seuss and Kennedy recall us to the fact that the falling man is a reality with which we all must continue to live. Like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the “falling man” poetry of Diane Seuss and Christopher Kennedy has not been met with the critical acclaim it merits. In the case of these poets, the crisis is not that the poetry has been labeled as somehow inadequate or as unable truly to capture the emotional impact of 9/11. Rather, their poems seem to have been lost, barely registered in the consciousness of the contemporary American literary canon or canon makers. Seuss, for example, seems to be deeply ambivalent about writing through a new national tradition—

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one that, in hindsight, must grapple with the moral and aesthetic demands of how to refer to falling. Her own poem “Falling Man” is as equally lacerating as it is healing, appearing not to know whether what we need at the present moment is literary writing that consoles or literary writing that shatters (as in the modern tradition that seeks to “reopen wounds of loss” (Ramazani xi)). Ending her poem with an image of birth and a turn toward the value of aesthetics, she seems to advocate for comfort in the face of a new reality—the possibility of a man plunging to his death in the wake of a national attack. Like Seuss, Christopher Kennedy is also deeply invested in the question of the man’s—indeed humanity’s—falling. He would even describe his 2011 collection Ennui Prophet as his “9/11 book”—it is identified on the copyright page as “1. September 11 terrorist attacks, 2001—poetry and 2. Alzheimer’s disease—poetry.” Although I see the connection with 9/11 as more tangential in Ennui Prophet than in his earlier collection, Encouragement for a Man Falling (2007), Ennui Prophet does feature a line about the weight and burden of gravity— both as a physical and emotional force: “As it happens,” he writes, “I was thinking how the earth curves always away, how/we spend most of our time fighting gravity, how death leaves a body/heavier, harder to carry, how we go through each day accepting this” (11). The image of the man falling seems to underwrite this line in its association of “gravity” and “death,” and the fact that we must “go through each day accepting this,” not only in preparation of our own deaths, our own falls, but also in terms of dealing with the past. However, from the earlier collection’s very title, it seems as though Kennedy has been writing about 9/11 for much longer than since 2011. Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2007, Encouragement is, on the surface, a collection of elegies for Kennedy’s father shot through with images of falling against the backdrop of memories from deep in the childhood past. While Ennui Prophet connects Alzheimer’s disease with a kind of public or collective amnesia in the wake of 9/11, Encouragement is haunted by references not only to falling but also to burning, molten steel, and empty shoes.

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In particular, Encouragement features seven poems which, when read in light of 9/11 and the falling man, capture the resonating effects of the deluge of images of falling people, first responders, the terrorized running from the falling towers themselves. Entitled “Halfway Down the Wishing Well,” “Blue Collar Drive,” “My Father’s Work Clothes,” “Vesper,” “To the Man Who Played Violin,” “Encouragement for a Man Falling,” and “Broken Saints,” the poems in this falling man collection feature a figure who makes “a literal leap of faith that something is going to catch him.” Christopher Kennedy has revealed that he was seven years old when his father died and he was left with both a grieving mother and a palpable sense of loss. In his family, he says, they never openly grieved. As an attempt to put his grief into words, Kennedy wrote Encouragement when he was fifty years old—the same age of his father when he died. In the process of writing, he said, he was “very fixated on the image of man falling and played through his mind multiple images of a man falling.” For example, he recalls a moment during an outdoor concert when a man jumped out of a plane and his chute caught on fire. “Someone I knew watched him burn,” Kennedy recalls. Later in an interview about his writing process, he continues, “when writing I had no sense of how I was being affected. Writing triggered recollections of people falling out of the sky.” For him, returning to the image of the man falling became a way of dealing with his father’s death: “Poems are about transformation,” he says: “They are about moving from one place to another, midflight. This became a dominant motif for the book.” Despite the collection’s interest in falling and flight—a juxtaposition put to work to great effect in so many other 9/11 texts, among them Falling Man and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Kennedy’s collection seems to have escaped the purview of 9/11 scholars. Reviewed online in two places that I have counted as of the publication of this book, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death deserves much more critical attention than it has previously received. The two existent reviews I have uncovered are by Jason B. Jones for Bookslut

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and Tom Holmes for Redactions. In March 2008, Jones points out that the collection’s epigraph carries significant weight. It is an epigraph from Weldon Kees’s “The Smiles of the Bathers”: “No death for you. You are involved.” But who is this “you”? In the source, Kees seems to address his readers in a sort of call to action. Here, however, coming so soon after the dedication, “you” seems to speak to his father: You can’t be dead—you’re still involved with me. Look at these poems I’ve written.

For Jones, as with Holmes below, the collection reveals the personal connection between father and son, particularly as it channels the son’s grief as he comes to terms with his father’s death so many years before. For Holmes, “you could read the whole of Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death and realize that you are just hearing a tone of irreverence that is covering up fear, aloneness (‘the germ/of [ … ] loneliness’), and absence (‘when every presence became his [his father’s] absence’). Yes, the speaker’s father was lost, but how he was lost is a mystery between what happened, what happened to someone else, and the memory splicing the two together.” Holmes reads particularly for the collection’s humor and irreverence: A perfect example is the collection’s titular poem, which begins “I’m sorry your parachute is made of cream cheese, but think of the spectators and their stories, and the asphalt’s loneliness until you arrive” (33). At first glance, what might appear as irreverence is actually a gesture toward literary absurdity, a reaction to the post-9/11 world in which we have already witnessed more than we thought we could imagine—a world where the truth is stranger than fiction or even surrealist poetry. As a result, I also want to read this collection as a collective offering to the memory of 9/11. For the purposes of this chapter, I will consider more closely five poems from the collection: two that deal with the working classes, written apparently in the spirit of Walt Whitman (“Blue Collar Drive” and “My Father’s Work Clothes”); one poem that takes up Icarus and his mythical flight (“Vesper”); a poem set on the

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day of the funeral of Kennedy’s father (“Broken Saints”); and, for me, the most powerful poem in the collection, “To the Man who Played the Violin and Fell from a Plank into a Vat of Molten Steel.” The first poem I will take up here, “Blue Collar Drive,” is a prose poem, just seven lines long, a four-line stanza followed by a three-line stanza. The title already betrays a double entendre: the word “drive” refers to a street name but also to the motivation of his father, possibly a blue-collar worker, a father who “steered me past the steel mill where he worked.” Or, a third possibility is that the “drive” that father and son take together, a drive during which they connect over a father’s job and son’s aspirations. The word “mountain” is used strangely three times in this first stanza, as in “Drove through a mountain of fog” and “A mountain of stones for boys to throw as punishment, until/the mountain exists on the other side of the street” (20). In a poem set near a steel mill, the juxtaposition of the diction of the landscape, on the one hand, with the diction of the mill, on the other hand, seems slightly misplaced, unless one thinks about the mountain in the figurative sense—so much distance to climb, so much unknowable between father and son. The next page contains a partner poem entitled, “My Father’s Work Clothes,” also a prose poem, but one that is shorter, composed of just one stanza of four lines: Reduced to memory, a torn blue work shirt and pants worn through at/the knees. At night, I’m secretly trying to mend them, my sevenyear-old/fingers fumbling with the needle, but I have no thread, and my hands/keep folding, mysteriously, into prayer (21).

The seven-year-old persona here we might take to be Kennedy himself, mourning the premature loss of his father by mending a torn shirt. Lacking thread in his hands, he folds them in prayer, a tribute to his father—a way of connecting in the gulf between life and death. Although these are very personal elegies, I still cannot help but be reminded of the steel of the Twin Towers, the rescue workers and bluecollar workers who perished at the foot of the towers. I associate the torn shirt and worn pants as having a wider association than just with Kennedy’s father.

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In conversation about these poems in particular, Kennedy shared that he felt, in the wake of the fall of the towers, people appeared to be rather dismissive of victims in terms of class: “working class people seemed not as connected to the event” as depicted in the media, he reflected, as though 9/11 were a white-collar tragedy. Kennedy suggests that the people cleaning, the people serving, and, I might add, the first responders—“everybody’s role is valuable; the fall of the towers transcended class divisions.” If the Twin Towers are a symbol of America’s worth and capitalism, then we would do well to recognize that the Twin Towers were built on the backs of steel workers. But mostly, for Kennedy, these poems are not political in any sense. When I ask about the resonances between his collection and other works I have read that refer so directly to a man falling in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Kennedy confides: For the most part, the book is my attempt to know my father better. I was seven when he died, and I knew him mostly through the stories I was told about him. Many of the poems are my way of trying to examine memories of him and figure out who he was and what our relationship was like. The stories I heard about him made him seem mythic. When I was a child there were times when my mother introduced me to men who knew him, and they would cry and shake my hand and tell me he was the greatest man they ever knew. Yet my memories of him are few and he was an intimidating presence. I didn’t share the men’s opinion, and as I approached the age he was when he died, I wanted to try to figure him out with whatever fragments of memory I had to work from.

This mythic side becomes apparent in Kennedy’s poem “Vesper,” a poem that features the story of Icarus and Daedalus as a crucial intertext. The poem ends: “Before I knew it, two sharp bones cut through my shoulder/ blades and sprouting wings unfurled. // That’s as close as I got to flight. I bound the wings behind me, because/I knew the myth, the father’s good intentions and the son, spiraling/downward into sea” (26).

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While it is easy to see references to the figure of Angel from the X-Men here, a cast of characters I perpetually see negotiating the twenty-first-century setting in New York, the boy with the wings on his back refers to the classical figure of Icarus, who flies too close to the sun and disappears in a body of water after the heat melts the wax securing his wings. Again, the intergenerational ambivalence—also told through Angel’s story in the X-Men series—is the most striking aspect of the poem— the love a father has for his son; the frustration both father and son feel by the limitations of the other. But the figure of the falling child also resonates after 9/11, especially after engaging the story of Beigbeder, who describes the falling deaths of a father and his two children from the top of a burning tower. When asked about the connection between the figure of the falling man post-9/11 and the figure of the falling boy, Kennedy surmises: That myth seemed appropriate as a way of talking about my relationship to my father. As I stated, he was a mythical figure to me, and I wanted to be like him based on the stories I heard, but the danger there is that I may not be like him, and trying to emulate him might lead to a disastrous result a la Icarus. In a way, that poem puts me in the shoes of the person who is falling, having attempted to do something beyond his capacity to achieve.

I am interested that Kennedy uses the colloquialism, “puts me in the shoes of the person who is falling,” for the shoes call to mind the dustand ash-covered shoes of DeLillo’s protagonist in the beginning of Falling Man as well as current and past references to empty shoes to commemorate large-scale atrocities such as the Holocaust. In many ways, this separation of the father and son in “Vesper” foreshadows a more permanent separation as depicted in “Broken Saints,” another poem that is organized around the motif of falling bodies. Set during the day of the funeral of Kennedy’s father, “Broken Saints” features a young persona breaking his mother’s religious statues. In an attempt to clean up the mess he made with his protest, the

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persona recalls: “I arranged the headless bodies like bowling pins and rolled the/ heads at them until all the bodies fell down.” In this context, the falling bodies seem to offer consolation or reparation: the boy feels better after knocking down the statues, seeing the bodies fall. And even after an attempt at fixing them with glue, the persona observes: “They were never exact; the heads /bowed slightly at time as if in prayer. And no matter how many times/ I tried, I couldn’t hide their shame” (59). The shame is a projection, of course; it is no doubt the boy feels shame. But this ending also calls to mind the end of Seuss’s poem, about the witness endlessly falling. So too, we all share a sense of shame after 9/11—shame that nothing more could be done, or that nothing more can be done even now. For me, however, even more than the title poem “Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death,” a poem that rejects sentimentality in favor of a certain jadedness, the poem entitled “To the Man Who Played the Violin and Fell from a Plank into a Vat of Molten Steel” captures the pity and despair that followed the falling deaths during 9/11 (31). Occupying just two stanzas, at first sight it seems as though the poem is composed of two unrhymed sonnets. However, to underscore the unevenness, the trauma of the event, the poem betrays unevenness in form: the first stanza has thirteen lines while the second stanza has the full fourteen. The poem begins: They buried an ingot instead of a man, a cry encased in steel to replace a soul, the faux soul trapped and singing of liquid fire. There are buildings built with him inside their beams. (31)

The first line, “They buried an ingot instead of a man,” requires pause, as the word “ingot” seems archaic for such a contemporary collection of poetry. Meaning “a mold in which metal is cast” or “a mass of cast

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metal,” the word seems to have lost its cultural resonances as far back as the eighteenth century. “Who are the they?” you wonder, and “why are they burying metal?” The same kinds of questions call for pause in the second line: “how can one encase a cry?” and “why is the soul no longer real?” For me, it is difficult not to connect the poem with 9/11 after reading “There are buildings built within him,” as the man’s death seems here inextricably bound up with the tangible fact of a steel building. The man’s death is now linked with the history of a building. It is not until half way through the fifth line that the persona elaborates on these previous questions: His story: A man fell/into a molten sea and the sea returned a city (31). And here is the key phrase “a man fell.” Judging from the poem’s title, the man fell from high up, he falls into steel, the steel becomes a city built from the essence of this man. But, the persona seems to say, that story is not enough. These lines are ineffective in telling the story of a man who fell to his death. So, the persona tries again: Here’s another story: The man played the violin; he gave his friend who played the fiddle a grapevine that grew behind the friend’s house, and every summer day the friend’s son looked out his window at the vine that grew untrellised and watched the wild birds eat the grapes that dried in the afternoon sun.

This second story contains the mythic dimensions of which Kennedy speaks when he refers to the power of the Icarus myth. The reference to the growing grapevine resonates with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, a story of a lost boy who climbs one day to a new reality. As Kennedy would go on to say later, this man who fell to his death actually existed: He played the violin and gave Kennedy’s father a grapevine and later fell “into a Vat of Molten Steel.” And so ends the first stanza, a boy in mourning connecting with his father by watching the grapevine grow, and watching the birds as they find a source of sustenance in the grapevine too.

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The poem continues, in the second stanza, with a kind of empathy, a human connection between the dead and the living: the living boy tries to understand an unspeakable horror: The son would try to imagine what the man’s last thought might have been, and he could never find the words to make a thought that would capture whatever a man would think at the moment the unthinkable was happening. (31)

The key word in these six lines is “thought,” as in “the man’s last thought”; “words to make/ a thought”; “whatever a man would think”; and “the unthinkable.” For me, this is the most compelling section of the poem—the persona/poet/boy making the self-referential claim about the failure of language: “How does one possibly refer to falling?” he seems to ask here. And, more poignantly still: How does one refer to a man’s thoughts at the moment of falling? Again, the resonances with the story of the falling man during the 9/11 terrorist attacks are striking and, as I argue, no accident. It is an overlapping story—the story of the falling man, the story of the man falling into a vat—that speaks to the double nature of trauma: It takes one event, Freud would say, to make a previous event more real. The persona continues in this vein: And the story of the man stayed with the son, who asked his mother to tell it to him whenever the son missed his father, who died when the boy was young. (31)

The triple layering of the loss of a man’s life in this poem becomes more powerful here: The son, who misses his father, asks to hear the story of the man who once knew his father too. But it is not until the poet is fifty—the young son in the poem—that he can confront the death of his father, now through the story of the man falling into a vat of steel, and also through the narrative of the falling man from the Tower on 9/11.

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The poem ends with a kind of redemptive power, for even though the losses continue to resonate, the poet’s mother does seem to have the words to tell the story. The poet reflects: And every time the mother would say, Your father worked with a man from Portugal who played the violin, and one day at work, he fell from a plank into a vat of molten steel. (31, italics in original)

The mother’s words, cast through the memory of the poet, seem very direct here, and very matter-of-fact. There appears to be no lingering over the existential questions arising from the fact of a man falling to his death; there is no self-consciousness about putting the facts into words: There was a man “who played the violin, and one day at work,/ he fell from a plank into a vat of molten steel.” And here too is the title of the poem, dedicated as it is “To the Man Who Played the Violin and Fell from a Plank into a Vat of Molten Steel.” The poet’s mother adds a new dimension to the man’s story, however, which is that he was a working man—he fell “one day at work”; probably he was building something, casting steel into a framework and ultimately becomes a part of the mold himself. While the scene seems horrific, especially in the telling of the poet, there is a kind of Whitmanesque move here to show that we Americans are all a part of one another—the men and the buildings and the leaves of grass. As Kennedy says of the image—of the man falling from the WTC and the man in his memory who falls into the vat: “how calm he seems,” which has been echoed in much of the literature referring to the famous 9/11 photograph. How calm he seems: this workingman. I have suggested to Kennedy that for me the poem that bears the most striking resemblance to the history of 9/11 is the poem that precedes “Encouragement for a Man Falling to his Death” in the collection: “To the Man Who Played the Violin and Fell from a Plank into a Vat of Molten Steel.” For me, the presentation of the images of falling, fire, steel, and trauma—“the unthinkable”—seem to be a direct homage to the fall of the Twin Towers. And yet, the poem reads like a

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personal history of a violin player that seems far away from traumatic and collective history. When I ask him if there is a connection between the personal and the collective there, and—if so—what that connection is, Kennedy responds: When the towers fell, I remembered my mother telling me the story about a man who worked in the steel mill with my father and who fell to his death at work. He landed in a vat of molten steel, and I fixated on that image, his being a part of the steel that would be used in buildings, etc. and the idea of those who were killed in the towers becoming part of the debris from the buildings. It struck me as profound in the sense that they (the man and the victims) would always be part of something more permanent, a monument of sorts. In both cases, the reality of what happened is so awful that I suppose I was trying to bring some dignity to the man’s death as a way of honoring him (and by extension the victims).

In other words, for Kennedy, the poems reveal a sense of futurity after the event, after the personal and public deaths: those killed in the towers become a part of something larger than themselves, larger than all of us. And whereas Walt Whitman would have that human collectivity originate in the land itself, the land where we will all ultimately be buried, for Kennedy the futurity stems from the potential of building— of cityscapes now at the turn of the twenty-first century rather than the landscapes at the turn of Whitman’s twentieth. For Kennedy, the monumentalization is literal, and, if I may extend this, we may not need a team of architects and new structures and the passage of ten years’ time to build a monument to the dead. The monument always already existed, in the sense that the falling men became a part of their surroundings after their gruesome deaths. In wanting to push this connection further, I asked Kennedy whether it was a conscious decision to include the title poem “Encouragement,” which seems largely whimsical, and, I would argue, not directly connected with the twenty-first-century trauma at all, in order simultaneously to channel personal and collective grief. To this, Kennedy responds:

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There is a definite connection between my attempt to honor my father and to acknowledge the collective grief following 9/11. The title poem is actually an absurdist attempt to deal with the trauma of seeing an acquaintance fall to his death in a skydiving accident, an image that kept coming back to me after seeing the image of the falling man. The entire book is an attempt to deal with the idea of transformation through dramatic changes (falling=life to death).

This collection then exemplifies not only the traumatic repetition we all have faced after seeing the image of the man falling before us over and again; it also speaks to the specific fear of gravity, of falling, and of what the scientific principle of gravity itself means for our human understanding of transformation. In this specific sense, it is a movement from life to death—a brief moment in time of transition, or “transformation,” to use Kennedy’s words—and then the moment for which one cannot possibly prepare: death. Like Kennedy, Seuss is not so much a highly-criticized poet as an under-read one, save perhaps for Karen Alkalay Gut’s insightful essay “The Poetry of September 11: The Testimonial Imperative,” which focuses on the first line, “I’m told.” Gut argues, “She distances herself, through the reported (‘told’) information from the terrifying live footage of victims jumping from the towers to avoid the alternative fiery death” (267). Gut’s reading focuses on the mediation of technology, the video coverage that reveals to us the fact of a man falling in real-time, demanding an adequate witness to the horrific death while simultaneously refusing it. Similarly, Laura Frost’s “Still Life” explores “how the falling people are central to 9/11 storytelling in literary narrative. While there are strong commonalities among artistic and literary representations of 9/11’s falling bodies, literature both responds to visual culture and [ … ] offers a critique of the common ideal that visual culture is the medium best suited to representing 9/11” (183). The undecidability of the literal and the figural turns out to be literary language’s secret strength against the apparent immediacy of visual culture. Frost’s effective essay, like this study, takes up various references to the fact of a person

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falling, such as Eric Fischl’s bronze sculpture Tumbling Woman; Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Henry Singer’s documentary The Falling Man; Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World; and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Frost quotes astutely Anthony Lane’s writing for The New Yorker: “The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges” (quoted in Frost 180). Frost mentions Seuss in two footnotes, suggesting that it, like Wislawa Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11,” “emphasizes time through verb tenses” (201) as well as the conflict between burning or falling which structures the poem (202). While I agree that Seuss’s poem manipulates the readers’ sense of time to mirror the skewed sense of time as presumably experienced by the person falling, this chapter extends Frosts’s analysis by considering Seuss’s poem in terms of its birth imagery as well as in terms of its focus on the American working man in the tradition of Whitman. To begin her poem, Seuss writes: The man falls. I’m told he jumped: he had no choice, or two bad choices. Burn or fall. He chose falling. (350)

Here, as Frost has noticed, the poem begins with the disorienting switch from present tense, “The man falls,” as the man continues to fall in our national consciousness to this day, only before moving to the past tense: “he jumped,” followed by “He chose.” Lines two and four shift rather uncomfortably from “choice” to “chose,” with the end result being the choice of falling: a single word registered in a line by itself. Further, Seuss’s enjambment here makes it trickier still: We might usually think of “chose” as implying the exercise of agency, but here it is as if there is a fall internal to the choice itself.

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Following this narrative exposition, the poem returns to the present tense to track the falling man in real time with the next lines: His clothes are the clothes of a businessman. White shirt, dark, well-tailored pants. His tie extends from his throat and draws a black line parallel to the horizon. (350)

As if a study of the well-known Richard Drew photograph, which appeared briefly only to disappear as a result of complaints ranging from its offensiveness in glamorizing suicide to its aestheticization of trauma, these lines describe the working clothes of a businessman, which slightly revises the national narrative of the working life of the man who falls in the canonical Richard Drew photograph. As Seuss surmises, the falling man was a businessman or trader dressed in “tailored pants” and a tie. Like Junod’s reading of Drew’s photograph, as discussed in Chapter 3, Seuss sees a kind of parallelism in her ekphrastic homage: the tie parallels the horizon, a formal or artistic response to one man’s horrific fall. Seuss’s poem continues, then, in the same vein with which it began— with a dismantling of the boundaries of space and time. She continues: He has not fallen; he is falling. He falls. (350)

Again, focusing on the repetition in the poem, the shift from “fallen” to “falling” to “falls” reminds a twenty-first-century reader how strongly this image is still with us. The man falls as much in our memories today as he did in 2001. Seuss seems to offer a corrective here—“He has/ not fallen” is to say this man’s fall is not in the simple past tense—it is in the past perfect tense, to suggest that the fall has not been completed. As Seuss will go on to conclude, the man will always be falling, as we will always be falling—in both the metaphorical and literal senses of

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the word. The enjambment in those lines, “He/falls,” emphasizes the presence of the moment to this day. The universality of this image is also rooted in details, as well as tenses. Shifting again to the appearance of the man, of what he wears, the poem continues: The tail of his shirt has come untucked. He’s pulled it free, or it’s been pulled free by the wind. (350)

The seemingly inconsequential detail of the untucked shirt reveals a continued consideration of the everydayness of the moment: A man with an untucked shirt may have pulled it free himself. However, a moment’s reflection clarifies that the gravitational pull, the speed of flight, has pulled the shirt “free”—another key word choice uniting a primary American value and the disorienting sense of the man’s free fall. Seuss focuses closely on the context of work. Again, the next few lines present the man as slightly out of context, as a man finished with his day’s work, about to return home. The persona continues: He’s an elegant man at the end of his day. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a briefcase in his hand. (350)

Noteworthy here are the half rhymes, “man” and “hand,” two otherwise living elements in a poem about an individual about to die. The “briefcase” here is also telling, as it links him to the workforce epitomized by the Twin Towers—towers containing workers on every rung of the professional ladder. The word “end” however to end a line refers, as we know now, not to the end of a workday but to the end of his rope, the end of a life. Everything about the faller points up uncanny details. The next image seems to be a parallel with the image of the untucked shirt—one

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that represents relaxation in everyday life, but in this context refers to a kind of failed parachute. The poem continues: His pants balloon a bit, filled with wind. His hair is cropped short, the cut of a professional man. An expensive cut. (350)

The wind-filled pants, we might naively hope, would be enough to lower him down safely. The plosive “b” sounds, however, in “balloon” and “bit”—with the latter serving as such a colloquial word—reinforce that this cannot be true. The expensive haircut of the professional man turns the attention back to the worker’s appearance, such an unlikely point of focus given the extremity of the event. Here, the emphasis is on the word “cut,” which by the final syllable connotes violence and pain. And then, just as it seems too uncomfortable, too unbearable an image, the persona finds a new way to see the man, mid-flight: I’m told he is falling, but he seems to be flying. The man flies. He dances in the air. It’s a sophisticated dance. Smooth. Something out of the 40s, a black and white film. A man and woman have been dancing, he’s held her in his arms but now he breaks free. Time for a solo. (350–51)

The metalepsis (in the slightly exaggerated form of the slippage of associations) from falling to flying to dancing returns us to a scene from the 1940s, with “black/and white” referring to another moment in the darker past of the United States, a time of segregation of black and white citizens rendered in the black and white photography. However, what interests Seuss is the scene of a dance, of a union of sorts, with the man’s free fall simply indicative of a solo performance. The “black/ and white” again also points to the Junod image, the stark coloration of the man’s black-and-white work uniform against the black-andwhite metallic towers. The “solo” seems to refer to a lone moment in

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the spotlight, which is literally how the image of the falling man came to be. The repeated word “free” here also suggests that there is a kind of unburdening in this man’s decision to fall: he is free of his dancing partner; he is free from the world. More jarring still becomes the persona’s close attention to the details of the man’s face, as if to say: This is a living being falling from the sky. The poem continues: The bones of his cheek, his jaw, his chin are exquisite. I can imagine cupping that face in my hands. I want to call after him: Have a good day. Don’t work too hard. I’ll see you at dinner. I love you baby boy. (351)

Moving in perspective from stunned bystander to invested onlooker, a mother or a lover or friend, the persona again juxtaposes an everyday activity—in this context, saying goodbye before work—with the knowledge of a more permanent separation. The persona continues in this vein, taking on the perspective of a loved one, remaining in the perspective of a man’s loved one, thinking so calmly, in such a detached manner, of terms of endearment: I like to call him that. Baby boy. It works against who he is. Such a grownup. Competent. A man who knows how to take care of himself. How lucky I am to have found him. He is a man who works and now his work is falling. (351)

The repetitive emphasis on the word “man” here reminds us that the falling man is not simply a figure or a trope but an actual man, a human, falling to his death before our very eyes. The word “work” is also repeated here, twice more: “He is a man/who works” and “now his work/is falling.” At first glance, this seems a bit contradictory: How can it be work to fall? But the work is both emotional and ideological,

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I would argue: I think about the work behind the choice made to burn or to fall—to say goodbye to the world, to loved ones—as so emotionally depicted in the Beigbeder novel I discuss briefly in this book’s Introduction. As the poet would have it, the man does good work: He falls well, better than anyone has fallen before. Such grace. Such a strong wind in his clothes. His shirt emits light. His pants foretell The darkness coming on. His belt is the circular horizon. (351)

Focusing on the paradoxical beauty and horror of the image, and perhaps on the pro-American spirit that even falls better than any other nation, the persona fixates on the grace of the man, the light in the shirt, the literary foreshadowing of the color black: Literally black in color, the pants might as well be a literary construct—the color imagery of blackness associated with the darkness of evil, of terror. The belt around the man’s waist is also a circular sun, or even, more provocatively still: a birth canal. While such a reading might sound like an impossible stretch, the poem is explicit on this front: The man falls Or he is born. He is entering the world Headfirst. Or he is still, a great stillness, and it is we who are falling, beautifully falling, we who will be forever falling. (351)

Like the poem’s previous pivot from falling to flight, here the poem moves from death to life, a new beginning, a moment of birth. More powerfully still, however, is the consideration that it is we readers and survivors who remain in free fall after our confrontation with the image, with the history. And here it is that the literal fact becomes a figure once again: we will “be forever falling”—not only, literally, because of gravity,

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but also because of a new relationship with our faith in humanity, the crisis point presented by the fall of the towers. Through this poem, the word “fall” is repeated fourteen times. Ultimately, through Seuss’s diction, the poem is itself a kind of still life, to echo Laura Frost, while we readers and viewers experience the vertigo associated with falling. Somewhat provocatively, in the end, the falling man appears to fly—as also mentioned in the opening of the Junod piece and made possible in Foer’s final flipbook in Extremely Loud, both of which are preceded by Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War literature that conflates falling with flying. Ultimately, I understand Seuss here as offering a literal description of the very photograph that caused such a controversy, the Richard Drew photograph, as the poem seems to be as much about the problem of reference as it is about the literal fact of falling. But, it is also about the desire of the witness and, indeed, of the reader, to find redemption in such an act, rather than to see it as the hopeless vision it is. Rather than seeing a fall, the persona as witness prefers to see flight, and if the vision of flight does not hold up, then finally a birth: “The man falls/ or he is born” and it is humanity that has fallen. Just as Junod argues in his famous Esquire piece, this poem requires that we look at the photograph and acknowledge: “[W]e have known who the falling man is all along.” As with the work of Cathy Caruth, I see in Kennedy’s and Seuss’s poetry a sense that the theory of gravity, of its attempt to articulate what it means to fall, is traumatic in its own right. When I ask Kennedy, for example, what about the image of the man falling is so simultaneously compelling and horrifying, about why it is given exemplary status in his work, he responds: Falling is the ultimate loss of control. It can be exhilarating, or, in the cases I’m obsessed with, it can be deadly. The urge to jump from a high place is common, but mostly it isn’t acted upon. In the case of the falling man, I want that image to be one of a man trying to stay alive through an improbable leap of faith. I guess I hope he thought

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he might be saved, that ultimately his leap was an attempt to stay alive. As far as the images of falling I speak to directly in the book, I have a similar hope that until the very last moment of those men’s lives they believed in the possibility that they would live.

In the end, Kennedy says that Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death was a way to connect the collective and the personal without being exploitative, and, as he says above, a way to convey hope and possibility in the face of absolute horror and ultimate death. For Kennedy, “My hope is that the book gives its readers a way of understanding ‘the unthinkable’ to mitigate the power of those types of experiences and create a way to heal from the trauma through an understanding that art can help us transcend or at least cope with emotional pain, even on the largest scale.” The lyrical laments of Kennedy and Seuss, in this way, go a very long way in helping us artists and citizens after 9/11 survive this impasse: Although not always reparative or redemptive, there is nonetheless something magical inherent in literary language, which is the ability to make the familiar unfamiliar and, conversely, the unfamiliar familiar again. When a literary critic sees the circumstances of 9/11 in a book of elegies about a father lost, we might see that as the epitome of the crisis point. Or we might see it as a gift that only lyrics can bring: a simultaneous moment of reckoning in both our personal and collective lives.

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Historical Reverberation and Scientific Invention in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 Iconotext

Finally, I found the pictures of the falling body. Was it Dad? Maybe. Whoever it was, it was somebody. I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005 Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ends with something not loud at all: a flipbook created by the novel’s 9-year-old narrator Oskar Schell. Oskar spends the novel searching the streets of post-9/11 Manhattan for the owner of a mysterious key he had found at the bottom of an expensive vase in his parents’ closet. When he finds the owner, a man named William Black, he finds not only closure for his quest but forgiveness with this same stranger who was looking for the key. Like Oskar, William Black has also lost his father, and so becomes a willing listener to Oskar’s story, which ends with Oskar’s confession that he did not pick up the phone the fifth and final time his father called home from the WTC on 9/11. He witnesses his father’s death via voice mail—traumatic history mediated by a technology Oskar both loves and loathes. But after Oskar’s confession comes another ending—an ending without words—that reverses the history of his father’s falling death.

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Rather than falling down, Oskar manipulates seeming photos of a man falling in order to show how a man can “fall up”—an extremely silent and incredibly distanced take on a moment in time that claimed his father’s life. Aside from the fact that Oskar’s favorite two modifiers are “extremely” and “incredibly”—words picked up by an intelligent boy to give emphasis to aspects of his life ranging from the most unusual to the most banal—the title of the novel, at first glance, seems to refer to the sound of the planes crashing into the towers on 9/11/01. However, the novel features additional traumatic bombings in American history, such as the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima during World War II, overseen by the American military. As such, the novel—told as it is from the perspective of a 9-year-old boy—represents history as both extremely loud and incredibly close. Oskar is surrounded by history—a history that can be created, destroyed, and potentially redeemed by scientific discovery, which he loves. In using the flipbook to reverse history—to imagine his father’s last day backward, to understand that a reversal of ordered pages would allow his father to “fall up”—to fly out of history rather than to fall out of it—Oskar reveals his investment in the time travel quality of science fiction: as if he were a youngish Dr. Who, Oskar wonders at the possibility of saving his father by reordering time. As with the other texts this book takes up, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is not a general post-9/11 novel but one fully obsessed with—indeed, upset by—repeated images of a man falling to his death. The images are described not in language, as in DeLillo’s Falling Man, but through reproductions of photos—inserted largely as an intertext in Oskar’s scrapbook entitled Stuff That Happened to Me. The photo appears first in an entire page on 59, then again on page 205, and finally, in reverse order, in the last fifteen pages of the novel that are not numbered, existing simultaneously as an intertext (of Oskar’s scrapbook) but outside of the text (of the novel) as well. With a focus in particular on the photographs of the man falling that compose the novel’s icono-textual flipbook, this chapter seeks

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to mediate the criticism launched by such reviewers as Walter Kirn, who see the flipbook as little more than a writerly farce and failed attempt at pulling at the readers’ heartstrings, on the one hand, and the attempts by critics like Richard Gray, who see the novel ending with a “touching account” of a boy “ascending above loss” (52–53). For me, the novel makes neither finding nor refusing consolation quite so easy, as the fact of the photography outside of the novel’s text leaves the question of consolation outside of the framework of the novel as well. For me, rather than consider the reality for Oskar at the novel’s end, we might turn our attention to the world of his fantasy, of his scientific and narrative inventions that propel him throughout the novel. By focusing on three obsessions of Oskar—science, the photograph, and the mechanics of history—broadly exemplified by the five messages left by his father on the family’s answering machine, I hope to recuperate the novel from readings that tie it too closely to traumatic history, as well as from its ungenerous early reviewers. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’s early reviewers often disliked the book because of its narrator Oskar: a grating child who is somewhat unbelievably imagined given all that he knows, all that he says, and all of the ground he covers traipsing the New York City streets alone in search of the owner of the key. At the same time, other critics have been less interested in the voice of the narrator than in Foer’s stylistic experimentation—the relationship between the novel’s post-9/11 roots and pictorial, artistic obsession with the photograph of a falling man—a text about the trauma of falling. Relatedly, these critics remain divided on whether the outcome is one of reparation or punctured loss. Both of these trends, Catherine Morley has surmised, come from the novel’s experimentation, arguing that “the September 11 terrorist attacks engendered a new form of narrative realism, a form of realism born of a frustration with the limits of language as an effective and representative tool” (295). Morley sees DeLillo’s Falling Man and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as exemplars that merge “the written and the visual in order to realize the new realities of post-9/11

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socio-political and personal landscapes of trauma, grief, and loss” (295). In so doing, Morley too acknowledges that Foer’s novel was met with “largely disapproving reviews”: “Foer was even accused of deliberately playing on the reader’s emotions by presenting the traumatised grief of a precocious nine-year-old who searches for clues into his dead father’s life and imaginatively constructs a flick-picture book of the falling man in reverse” (306). She lists Tim Adams and Tom Barbash of the Observer (London) and San Francisco Chronicle, respectively, as two critics in this vein (306). I wonder whether we might approach the novel slightly differently: What if we ought to suspend any expectations of realism at all? Given the very fact that Oskar uses the pictures in his flipbook to reverse history and the way he flips backward to show flying via a reversal of gravitational forces and a visual catachresis, I would say Foer is more interested in the promise of science as embodied in the genre of science fiction/fantasy than in literary realism—especially when confronting the photographic image of a man falling. In other words, I want to focus here not on the redemptive quality of art or the ways art supplements textual responses to loss but on a fantasy about the redemptive quality of science and its relationship to history. Inventions, possible and not, are key to the novel: The 9-year-old narrator, Oskar, uses invention to try to cope with the loss of his father. Those who criticize the novel do so by measuring it against the conventions of realism. But what would it mean to read this iconotextual novel as a kind of science fiction, a postapocalyptic novel based on the possibilities of time travel and reversal of history, where the past and present intersect and are revised via a child’s imagination? Granted, the novel finds hope in forward movement, but only through an altered reality. In this way, we can read the novel not as a skewed version of realism nor even as a fairy tale (as Phillippe Codde has argued) but for its investment in the imaginative possibilities of science, where history, photography, and technology all come together in the name of an altered future.

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To understand this intersection, let us begin with the photograph, which wholly replaces text in at least seventeen pages of the novel. It is useful to think of it as an iconotext, particularly as articulated by Lilliane Louvel. What interests me is her employment of the language of science in order to talk about the poetic potential of an image that structures a text. According to Karen Jacobs, for Louvel the term “iconotext” “best evokes the attempt to achieve the ‘pluriform fusion’ of text and image, a fusion which conveys the desire to merge two distinctive objects into a new object, a fruitful tension in which each term maintains its difference in the text’s ‘pictorial subconscious’ ” (5). This idea of a pluriform fusion sheds light on Foer’s enterprise, less a form of realism than a desire to create a “fruitful” tension between a photographic image of a falling man and the way the text of a novel succeeds or fails in making that image understood from the perspective of a nine-year-old child. The idea of an iconotext orients us away from questions of realistic representation and toward the desire to merge existing objects into a new one. As I will show soon, this desire is key to Oskar’s mode of invention. As Jacobs formulates the productive study of the relationship between an image and the text that contains it, she argues that “the narrative functions of the image in the text may be along the lines of supplement, to employ a Derridean language, and may include the support and extension, thwarting and contradiction of their immediate and larger narrative contexts” (Jacobs 7). Underscoring the possible contradictory relationship between text and image—the way an image may “support” or “extend” text even as it “thwarts” it, the language of iconotextuality suggests ways we might already see Foer’s novel as underwritten by frustration—not only in content but in form as well. Given the verbosity of the nine-year-old narrator of the novel, the text his voice produces alongside repeated images of a man falling, it is not possible to say language is wholly inadequate or that there “are no words.” There are clearly all too many words! In fact, as I shall show later, it is the very language of the child that gives meaning and weight to the images embedded within, especially as he articulates his desire

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to turn back the clock and revise history in a superheroic sense—in the sense that Dr. Who and his TARDIS make and remake history; in the sense of Superman’s reversal of the rotation of the earth to correct a villainous and destructive act. This iconotextual focus, which moves the photograph from considerations of representability and toward a productive tension, suggests that it might be a bit unfair to call Foer’s novel a realist project and then to say he fails in this mode. In fact, it seems as though Foer would say the opposite: That in the wake of 9/11, social realism is not enough. Oskar’s reversal of the order of the photographs reveals a childlike fantasy to reverse history: history that is extremely loud and incredibly close—depicted as it is through the grand historical narrative that affects us all. What would it mean to turn back time, Foer’s young narrator seems to ask, to go back and back and back to the beginning, before genocide, before terror, before speechless acts of war? Critics may want to attack Foer’s rendering of his narrator, but he holds within him a fantasy of all of us, a universal desire to intervene actively in a traumatic time “before.” As with her damning early review of DeLillo’s Falling Man, Michiko Kakutani was one of the earliest reviewers of Foer’s Extremely Loud. For Kakutani: The core problem has to do with the novel’s 9-year-old hero. Oskar Schell, whose father died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, should be a highly sympathetic character: a clever, sensitive boy, griefstricken over his father’s death, neglected by his self-absorbed mother, and beset by insomnia, depression and panic attacks. Unfortunately, he comes across as an entirely synthetic creation, assembled out of bits and pieces of famous literary heroes past. Like J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Oskar wanders around New York City, lonely, alienated and on the verge, possibly, of an emotional breakdown. (Web)

On the one hand, I wonder too if Kakutani is making reference to Oskar’s interest in “inventions” and creations, as with her phrasing “creation, assembled out of bits and pieces,” Kakutani alludes to the construction of Frankenstein’s monster. And while there can be

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disagreement over whether Oskar is believable or not, her greatest criticism is reserved for what she terms Oskar’s “precocity”: “To make matters worse, Mr. Foer has endowed Oskar with an exasperating precocity that’s reminiscent less of Salinger’s Glass-family kids than those annoying child guests on late-night talk shows.” The words “exasperating” and “annoying” seem less literary critical terms than words used by an irritated parent. Nevertheless, it is perhaps Oskar’s propensity toward geek culture, toward the potential of scientific inquiry that might rather endear him to readers as a very smart boy who has language for everything except for his grief. Like Kakutani, Walter Kirn did not hold back his disdain for Oskar Schell. Early in his review, he says: Kids, we’re told, will say the darnedest things, but kids like Oskar— authorial surrogates with their darling whimsicalities and cute “have you ever noticed?” observations and disarming “what if?” descriptions of talking anuses, underground skyscrapers and a body paint that changes color with its wearers’ moods—drive adults to the bar for a stiff drink. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with a narrator like this, especially when he’s a cunning combination of other narrators from the kind of books that his author wants to conjure with, but there are neurological limits to some readers’ ability to tolerate a wee one who says whatever springs to mind at roughly the same speed it springs to mind and keeps circling to the clue of cluelessness and other riddling Oriental insights. (Web)

Oskar’s precociousness, for Kirn, is not the worst part; he saves his highest frustration for the novel’s flipbook ending, when he says, “the novel’s ideal reader is meant to riffle through the flip-book, while Oskar riffles through it in the story, and let himself, for one Peter Panish moment, imagine how incredible that would be. Sept. 11 would never have happened! Even cooler and weirder, the pages of this novel, starting with the last, would all turn blank (except for the pages that are blank on purpose to teach us that some extremes of pain and loss can be signified only by the text of no text)!” The mocking tone here—“even cooler and weirder,” “can be signified only by the text of no text”—tries,

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rather hyperbolically, to take Foer’s logic to the extreme conclusion of turning back all of history, all of the pages, until there is nothing remaining to write, or at least until a time “before” 9/11, when there would not be a post-9/11 novel to write. Both Richard Gray and Rachel Greenwald Smith have considered some reasons why the “conceit” of the flipbook as a redemptive measure may have failed. For Gray, “[t]he strategy is striking but it suggests just how close to the surface the narrative experiments of this novel are. They are, in fact, not so much disruptive as illustrative. And what they illustrate is a deeply conventional if occasionally touching account of a young man growing up, coming to terms with and perhaps even transcending, ascending above loss” (52–53). Following Kakutani and Kirn, and consistent with his reading of the novel as a coming-ofage story, Gray sees Oskar in the tradition of such figures as Holden Caufield. Thus, to the extent the novel exemplifies rather than disrupts narrative conventions, Gray wonders why September 11 novels are somehow unable to let go of the traditional forms of novels generally. Although, I continue to wonder about whether that is the question we should be asking at the end of this novel—whether or not the novel’s experimental, iconotextual ending leads to anything like consolation or repair. Linking the rise of the 9/11 novel with the political atmosphere, Smith sees novels like Foer’s as mirroring “the historical conditions of the post-9/11 period in the United States,” which “involved, among other things, a profound instrumentalization of the event at the service of political and economic goals that were more ideologically continuous than disruptive” (155). In other words, just as the political elite exploited 9/11 as an opportunity that changed everything—so long as “changed everything” means “doubling down on the elite’s existing policy preferences,” so too have novelists after 9/11 used the event as a pretext to justify their existing aesthetic programs. While Smith sees the failure of the novel’s iconotextual form as consistent with the political and economic goals of the United States—both art and politics fail to “disrupt” the narrative trajectory

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of their particular fields, Deborah Solomon produced (in February of 2005) a personal interview and essay about Foer just as his novel was published—one that links the “extremely loud & incredibly close” history at the center of the novel to a personal crisis in Foer’s youth, rather than to the September 11 terrorist attacks. As Solomon reports the conversation: “Astoundingly, he insists that his development as a writer was shaped less by his parents and by his genetic endowments, less even by the novelists and poets he loves, than by a single event: the Explosion, as he calls it. ‘It made me a person,’ he claimed in a lengthy and startling e-mail message he sent one night last month.” The “Explosion” was an accident in Foer’s chemistry lab, when four children were injured and Foer was taken to a hospital with seconddegree burns on his hands and face (Solomon). The Washington Post reported the next day that he had “suffered shock as a result of the violent blast”—a blast that Solomon suggests is uncannily at the heart of Foer’s representation of the terrorist attacks, foretelling the history Foer would write as also being “extremely loud & incredibly close” to a child coming away from the moment in a state of shock. Although Solomon reads the novel in the sense of Foer’s personal trauma, a reading that is slightly reductive despite being provocative, many of the best scholarly articles that take up Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close acknowledge the place of historical trauma in the novel—the trauma not only depicted in Oskar’s loss of his father but also the more global sense of loss on that day as well as its connection to other historical traumas: the fire bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, for example. The prevailing academic consensus has been to link Foer’s depiction of 9/11 with trauma and the corresponding difficulty in representing traumatic experience.1 That Oskar relies so heavily on his pictorial scrapbook entitled Things That Happened to Me—with the images in the scrapbook “reproduced” within the pages of the text itself—reinforces the idea that where language fails, there may be only the visual, as discussed most See, for example, Saal, Mullins, Michel, Cooper, Codde, Smith, Hornung, Haviland, and Huehls.

1

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convincingly by Aaron Mauro and Elisabeth Siegel. Further, as Mauro is quick to point up, the novel’s repeated visual depiction of a man falling speaks particularly to a national literary obsession with grappling with the very fact of a man falling (n2, 601). What interests me further is the academic community’s struggle to interpret the stakes of the novel’s ending, with its graphic, flipbook representation not of a man falling down but the reverse—of the man falling up, as though he were flying. Matthew Mullins’s focus on neighborhood solidarity, Julián Jiménez Heffernan and Paula Martín Salván’s ultimate interest in restoration, and Mitchum Huehls’s reading of qualified hope all seem to confirm Oskar’s desire to see reparation in this fiction—reparation that nonetheless always betrays signs of traumatic loss. After all, the image of the falling/flying man at the end of the novel reverses not only history but the laws of physics as well. It is the final way Oskar is able to deal with his grief. In defying the laws of realistic fiction and of gravity, Foer’s novel is less a model for realism than it is an illustration in a fundamental fantasy of us all, rendered here as a literary and visual catachresis possible only in science fiction. Somewhat tellingly, Oskar’s visual flipbook features a photographic image of a man falling. That the flipbook is composed of (1) a photograph and (2) a man falling reinforces Foer’s ultimate interest, which is in the effects of photography and the unimaginable reality of a man falling to his death. That Oskar imagines it is his own father falling (or flying, ultimately) in the picture makes the ending all the more compelling. In his work subtitled “Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Photographic History of 9/11,” Mauro acknowledges the debt both DeLillo’s Falling Man and Foer’s Extremely Loud owe to the photographic image of the falling man, suggesting that “photography remains a transformative medium that renders a whole host of figurative possibilities through a sudden exposure to images. This normalized state of emergency may be ruptured by the sudden emergence of an image for which this is not an adequate political or cultural response” (586).

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Although I agree with Mauro’s analysis, I might quarrel with the idea of this “sudden exposure” or “sudden emergence” of an image— particularly as it is used with frequent warning and reflection in Foer’s novel. Yet cleverly linking photography and falling with trauma, Mauro goes on to say that “[a]t the point of exposure to this falling man, as the shutter falls and the witness blinks, photography and falling are harshly aligned in a terrifying moment” (587). For Mauro, Richard Drew’s image “is a reminder of the moments of absolute danger history attempts to capture and grasp. By accounting for the necessary caesura of this moment captured in photography, Drew’s image is also a reminder of history’s inevitable failures” (587). While Foer does not use Drew’s infamous photograph, but rather a modified version of a Lyle Owerko photograph from his 2005 And No Birds Sang, Mauro’s point is well taken (Mauro 596). What I like about Mauro’s analysis is his understanding that, when facing the reality of a man falling—and likely failing—it is not the failure of art or literature but rather a failure of history that is so disconcerting. On the one hand, this could be the perspective that leads Kirn to mock Foer’s ending so passionately; perhaps it is a frustration with Foer’s apparent lack of engagement with the history of 9/11 in general and of the falling man in particular that could be grounds for an annoyance with the voice of this young boy. But the opposite could also be true: By referring to the important visual intertexts of Drew’s falling man and Owerko’s birds, Foer positions his book in direct conversation not only with previous art forms referring to falling but also with the history they record. In fact, Foer’s reliance on the photographic image—an iconotext to be read with and against the narrative prose of a nine-year-old narrator—and Mauro’s analysis of that photo as revealing “history’s inevitable failures,” calls to mind the work of Susan Sontag, who has forcefully argued that photos have an equal chance at preventing wars as they do for inciting them; and while their gruesome nature may invite people to look, even their documentary style cannot promise that viewers could grasp the reality they seek to depict (Sontag 3–7). For Hirsch, a scholar I take up in more detail in Chapter 3, photography as

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it is used in Foer’s novel has “the capacity to tap” an imaginary power especially when read alongside narrative history. Although the power of the photograph ordinarily lies in its ability to step in—to record history anew—when imagination fails, the falling man photograph presents a very specific problem: It testifies to a reality that ordinary Americans may want to deny; it embodies a memory function in its own right—even though this particular historical moment is one that we may choose to forget. If anything, it requires the viewer to bear witness to the event of something as unimaginable as a body falling. In rejecting dominant cultural models of grief embodied by the funeral, wake, elegy (or any other healing response to mourning), Foer’s embedded photographs of the man falling are exemplary in the sense that Hirsch lays out in their refusal of reparation—either in the sense that they reject the idea that “something can be learned” from this moment, or that they fail to comfort us in their mere presence as historical artifact. Clearly, as can be seen from early reviews, Foer’s final moment has moved critics to the point of sarcasm and condescension. This effect occurs, in part, because of the dual nature of the photograph. As we have seen, for Hirsch and Kaplan, the proliferation of photographs related to 9/11 helps with the act of witnessing, sometimes a second time, with new perspective, a traumatic event. Crucially, participating in the scene through photography aids with a kind of “working through”: a phrase now associated with Sigmund Freud, who privileges in his canonical paper “working through” as a mourning function over “acting out,” since working through facilitates a kind of healing or reparation by creating a new relationship with the loss. However, Foer’s novel seems to offer little redemption—at least if we read it as an experiment in the tradition of realism—and even if we read it in the tradition of science literature, the ending is reparative largely if we subscribed to the possibility of an alternative reality and the possibility to turn back time. From a certain perspective, though,

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we are able to gain a sense of closure in that the surviving boy is able to find comfort in this small thing. In what follows, I will offer a close reading of the novel as it presents a “precocious” boy who has fantasies of himself as inventor, a boy who ultimately becomes an inventor and finds comfort in science above all else: a comfort and potential afforded to compensate for the lacerating effects of the photograph of a man falling. But I will also look at the ways in which science and technology work against the boy: he obsesses over other instances of the traumatic use of technology in history; he learns about his father’s death—and fails his father—through a machine. Ultimately, it is perhaps less science than relationships that save him in the forms of the human forgiveness of William Black, and a long-awaited response from Stephen Hawking, who describes Oskar’s potential as a researcher. We learn that Oskar sees himself as “an inventor” on the first page of the novel, although very quickly it becomes clear why he is “inventing” and the kinds of things he would invent if he could. He says, “I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of ‘Yellow Submarine,’ which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know” (1). Already, one can see how Oskar’s voice would be grating for an adult reader with little patience—do nine-year-olds really know a French expression, the word “entomology”? But beneath the surface is a boy grieving, one who “invents” ways to bring his father back to him in the wake of the fall of the towers. We further come to understand, via a modified epistolary mode, that Oskar has been writing letters to his favorite scientists seeking advice, guidance, even perhaps solace. He tells us that “[a] few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters” (11). The first is to Stephen Hawking: “I used a stamp of Alexander Graham Bell. Dear Stephen Hawking, Can I please be your protégé? Thanks, Oskar Schell” (11, italics in original). He also writes to Jane Goodall of his “scientific research,” but hears very little encouraging back from her:

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Dear Oskar, While you certainly express yourself like an intelligent young man, without even having met you, and knowing nothing of your experience with scientific research, I’d have a hard time writing a recommendation. Thanks for the kind words about my work, and best of luck with your explorations, scientific and otherwise. Most sincerely, Jane Goodall (199, italics in original).

It is not until much later in the novel that we learn that Hawking has written back, and that Oskar continues to “invent” things—but it is not the kind of invention even Hawking can understand. After all, Oskar invents in order to grieve, not to distract himself from the absence of his father, but to find ways to bring him back. The grief of Oskar is related inextricably with his guilt. As he tells us throughout, he saved and repeatedly listens to his father’s five answering-machine recordings from 9/11/01—the last of which he is home to hear first-hand, in real time. The novel, in fact, is structured in part around the messages on the machine, as much as it is structured around the photograph of the man falling. Throughout the text, messages are relayed, one by one. The first proceeds as follows: Message one. Tuesday, 8:52 a.m. Is anybody there? Hello? It’s Dad. If you’re there, pick up. I just tried the office, but no one was picking up. Listen, something’s happened. I’m OK. They’re telling us to stay where we are and wait for the firemen. I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll give you another call when I have a better idea of what’s going on. Just wanted to let you know that I’m OK, and not to worry. I’ll call again soon. (14–15)

The first seems innocuous enough, although the reader knows the ending of the story—so, too, does Oskar as he revisits his father’s voice. But already Foer has built into this recording the need for the victim to be heard, to find someone to listen to what is about to be told. The repetition of the word “OK” here becomes noticeable and is used more and more frequently as the messages go on. As he says later on page 15: “There were four more messages from him: one at 9:12, one at 9:31, one at 9:46, and one at 10:04. I listened to them, and listened to them again,

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and then before I had time to figure out what to do, or even what to think or feel, the phone started ringing. It was 10:22:27. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was him” (15). The second message, as Oskar notes, becomes a bit more frantic, fragmented. Oskar’s father talks to the machine about the reality of the situation. The machine, in other words, mediates history—or an encounter with history Oskar has missed: Message two. 9:12 a.m. It’s me again. Are you there? Hello? Sorry if. It’s getting a bit. Smoky. I was hoping you would. Be. Home. I don’t know if you’ve heard about what’s happened. But. I. Just wanted you to know that I’m OK. Everything. Is. Fine. When you get this, give Grandma a call. Let her know that I’m OK. I’ll call again in a few minutes. Hopefully firemen will be. Up here by then. I’ll call. (69)

Here is where we learn about Oskar’s repeated inventions, however: The fragments of his father’s speech give way to Oskar’s own fragmented paragraphs. In fact, they become only one line long—sentences about the science of the universe, discovery, self-pain: I stared at the fake stars forever. I invented. I gave myself a bruise. I invented. (69)

Message three is short: “9:31 a.m. Hello? Hello? Hello?” (168). By the fourth message, we understand that Thomas Schell is now trying to reach home, to tell his son—“It’s Dad,” he says—goodbye. The confusion of the situation now manifests itself here; he is talking to someone else. There is smoke and fire and an escape plan: Message four. 9:46 a.m. It’s Dad. Thomas Schell. It’s Thomas Schell. Hello? Can you hear me? Are you there? Pick up. Please! I’m underneath a table. Hello? Sorry I have a wet napkin wrapped around my face. Hello? No. Try the other. Hello? Sorry. People are getting crazy. There’s a helicopter circling around, and. I think we’re going to go up on the roof. They say there’s going to be some. Sort of evacuation—I don’t know, try

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that one—they say there’s going to be some sort of evacuation from up there, which makes sense if. The helicopters get close enough. It makes sense. Please pick up. I don’t know. Yeah, that one. Are you there? Try that one. (207)

The son, Oskar, plays the messages. Then he “invents”; he is burdened with trying to learn the reality of his father’s death, and rather than go to his family members for specific details, he seeks out the World Wide Web for possible scenarios leading to a man’s falling death. He explains to his grandfather his deepest struggle: “I need to know how he died [ … ] So I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing” (256). One of the ways he researches his father’s death is through videos of bodies falling, increasingly more convinced that his father fell to his death after the fifth call. Referring subtly to the censorship surrounding particularly Richard Drew’s image of the man falling in the wake of 9/11, Oskar complains that he can only learn about those who have fallen to their deaths through foreign sites—Portuguese, or Polish, for example. Seeking less to impress with his knowledge of foreign languages than through a desperate attempt to learn the facts surrounding his father’s death, Oskar says: I found a bunch of videos on the Internet of bodies falling. They were on a Portuguese site, where there was all sorts of stuff they weren’t showing here, even though it happened here. Whenever I want to try to learn about how Dad died, I have to go to a translator program and find out how to say things in different languages like ‘September,’ which is ‘Wrzesien,’ or ‘people jumping from burning buildings,’ which is ‘Menschen, die aus brennenden Gebauden springen.’ (256)

The Polish and German language used to refer to the American terror jars here—most readers have to take Oskar at his word—but what is more startling is what he betrays next: When his grandfather says, “You want him to have jumped?,” Oskar answers: I want to stop inventing. If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside an elevator that was stuck between floors, which happened to some people, and I wouldn’t

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have to imagine him trying to crawl down the outside of the building, which I saw a video of one person doing on a Polish site, or trying to use a tablecloth as a parachute, like some of the people who were in Windows on the World actually did. (257)

Once again, as throughout the text, Oskar’s attention turns to his own invented fantasy (which is somewhat different from the scientific invention to which he clings most strongly) reconstructing his father’s falling death: a death that Oskar comes to believe took place seconds after his fifth and final call. Incidentally, Oskar reveals the fact of this last call to no one until he meets William Black, owner of the key at the bottom of his mother’s vase. Just when it seems as though the novel will devolve into heavy symbolism, during this crucial moment (Oskar holds the “key” to William’s safe deposit box; William holds the “key” to Oskar’s forgiveness), Oskar understands himself as a failed witness to a man’s death in his failure to pick up the phone. Oskar proceeds: “He needed me, and I couldn’t pick up. I just couldn’t pick up. I just couldn’t. Are you there? He asked eleven times. I know, because I’ve counted. It’s one more than I can count on my fingers. Why did he keep asking? Was he waiting for someone to come home? And why didn’t he say ‘anyone’? Is anyone there? ‘You’ is just one person. Sometimes I think he knew I was there. Maybe he kept saying it to give me time to get brave enough to pick up. Also there was so much space between the times he asked. There are fifteen seconds between the third and the fourth, which is the longest space. You can hear people in the background screaming and crying. And you can hear glass breaking, which is part of what makes me wonder if people were jumping.” Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you And then it cut off. (301)

Oskar’s fixation on time and numbers seems to get him through, although it leads him to the ultimate realization of the moment of his father’s death: “I’ve timed the message and it’s one minute and twenty-

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seven seconds. Which means it ended at 10:24. Which was when the building came down. So maybe that’s how he died” (302). This moment with William Black—“Do you forgive me?” “I forgive you,” Black says—offers nearly reparative closure, at least for Oskar, who wants to be forgiven for not picking up the telephone; however, the novel does not end here. There are, to my mind, two additional endings: one that features the response of Stephen Hawking; the second with the alternative reality reinforced by the reversal of the flipbook. Stephen Hawking’s rather charming pronouncement that “You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. [ … ] It’s wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination to scientific ends” seems to put the world back right again (305, italics in original). But then Hawking goes on to say: “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we’ll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What’s real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you’re not inventing at all” (305, italics in original). “What if I never stop inventing?” Oskar asks Hawking in a prior letter (305). Rather endearingly, he is asking a total stranger (albeit a scientist!) how he will ever recover from the loss of his father. The observation that “the majority of the universe is composed of dark matter,” on the literal level, for Hawking, speaks to the laws of nature and the composition of the earth that remain yet undiscovered. But Oskar too must understand this in terms of the attacks of 9/11, his ethical conundrum, the loss of his father. When Hawking says, “Maybe you’re not inventing at all,” I do not hear that as an insult but rather as a point of fact—what research scientists do is not create something new but rather discover or uncover what is already there. The problem comes in when these discoveries are used against humanity. In fact, there are two other instances in the novel when Foer depicts historical moments when scientific discovery and logic are used against humanity—once in a memory that Oskar’s grandfather tells him about

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a man he knew growing up in Germany. His name is Simon Goldberg, and he haunts the text at vexed and surreal moments (126–127; 279). If anything, he is the voice of Foer when, during the Dresden fire bombing of World War II, he tells Oskar’s grandfather: “ ‘War!’ [ … ] We’ll go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight!” (128). We learn later that he was killed in a Nazi concentration camp— scientifically designed, operated with mathematical precision—even though Oskar’s grandfather continues to see him in random places like a bookstore in the upper west side of Manhattan (279). Perhaps somewhat more vexing is a chapter in the present day entitled “Happiness, Happiness” (187), when Oskar is giving a class presentation on the history of Hiroshima. Underscoring the connection in exposure between the atomic bomb and photography, Oskar uses a tape recorder to play for the class the survivor testimony of a person named Tomoyasu: “There was a flash. My first thought was that it was the flash from a camera. That sounds ridiculous now. It pierced my eyes. My mind went blank” (187). Tomoyasu discusses with the interviewer the mushroom cloud and black rain, giving the scene a dystopian quality—as though it was a scene out of a science fiction graphic novel. Oskar does not end there, however. He proceeds to talk about the science of exposure of the atom bomb: Another interesting feature that has to do with the explosion was the relationship between the degree of burning and color, because dark colors absorb light, obviously. For example, a famous chess match between two grand masters was going on that morning on a life-size board in one of the city parks. The bomb destroyed everything: the spectators in the seats, the people who were filming the match, their black cameras, the timing clocks, even the grand masters. All that was left were white pieces on white square islands. (189–90)

Rather than talk about ethics or history, trauma or grief with his class, Oskar somewhat tellingly talks about the “interesting features” of the atomic effects. It is difficult not to hear the language of photography here, especially given the haunting effects of the photographic image of

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the man falling throughout the novel. Ultimately, what the Dresden and Hiroshima scenes reveal is Foer’s interest in history’s layers of traumatic events. His multi-layered text functions to depict multi-layered histories presented through enigmatic signifiers that nonetheless fall entirely to Oskar to decipher. In considering these multi-layered histories, Kristiaan Versluys pays particular attention to the fact that Oskar’s Grandpa and Grandma are German survivors of the Dresden bombing (82). For Versluys, like Smith, this representation of intergenerational trauma is somewhat political on Foer’s part. He argues: As the atomic bombing (again by the American air force) of Hiroshima also obliquely serves as a 9/11 analogue, the novel universalizes grief. Within a highly contentious political context, in which the Bush administration tried to instrumentalize the events of September 11 for its own partisan purposes and in which some commentators regard the terrorist attacks as an episode in a wider clash of civilizations, this book launches a strong plea for tolerance, refusing to take sides. (82)

While I see the point about the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 politics, I do not see politics in the background of the novel at all, except insofar as choosing to represent this moment in history is in itself political. Nevertheless, what I do see is a boy’s very specific grief in the throes of a reverberative history he does not fully understand, and I see his attempts at grappling with the science that both gives rise to the history and potentially reverses it. The final flipbook, then, is a culmination of this scientific thought, as it relates to photography, to history, to invention: For Oskar, the redemption of flying can only be seen in falling reversed: an ideal state offered in the subjunctive sense—through the repetition of the verb form “would be.” In other words, it is not possible at all, except for in its pictorial form. Whereas the text ends with “we would have been safe,” the image ends with a body that is, in fact, safe—suspended in mid-air against the bright blue sky. As Huehls has argued:

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While this reversal is clearly just so much wishful thinking, its temporal form—the flip-book’s cinematic, real-time performance of motion—proves crucial to Oskar’s healing process. He must relegate the event to the past by embracing time’s forward progress into the future. (“Temporal” 43)

But time’s forward progress only happens in the conditional, as reinforced by the catalog of things that “would have been” if history were reversed. Among the most compelling are Dad “would’ve left messages backward until the machine was empty” (325); “would’ve walked backward to the subway, and the subway would’ve gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop” (326); “would’ve gotten back into bed”; “would’ve walked backward into my room” (326); “would’ve gotten into bed with me” (326); and “would’ve looked at the stars on my ceiling” (326). Oskar, too, would have a different, backward role in history, but it would have the same translation, as he would speak in palindromes: “I’d have said ‘Dad?’ backward which would have sounded the same as ‘Dad’ forward” (326). And, finally, Dad and Oskar as singular entities become joined in the final “We,” as in the last line: “We would have been safe” (326). In the end, however, what the reader focuses on is not the “we” or the “safe” but the compound verb, “would have been”—an historical impossibility, a possibility rendered grammatically as one that is too late: a missed encounter with safety. While the image of the flipbook gives us one alternative reality, that image is in tension with the text—a text that literally has the final word: that safety will only come if and when it is invented, that historical reverberations are inevitable, that falling after 9/11 may look like flying in an image, but it remains as falling in language, a crisis that haunts us still.

Epilogue: Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: Parrish’s 9/11 Mural Revisited

A painting unravels in minutes and days. Graydon Parrish, 2013 On September 11, 2013, I attended a lecture given by Graydon Parrish on the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After six years of thinking about this project, a project inspired, in part, by my own curiosity with the unfair criticism his 9/11 mural received, I wanted to return to the New Britain Museum of American Art where the painting hangs, in part to close the circle on this research, in part to meet, finally, the artist behind the work. And so this book ends as it began, with a reflection on Parrish’s great mural, which features in its center the perfectly rendered bodies of two human twins, towering men who simultaneously represent the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center that came down on 9/11/01 as well as the ideas of Terror, on the one hand, and Tragedy, on the other hand. I revisit these figures here in a repeated attempt to redeem the painting in the face of the criticism it received. My son was four years old when I looked closely at the mural for the first time. In that painting, then, I saw only flames in the background and terror in the faces of the twins who stand in for the fallen towers. But on the September day in 2013, I saw for the first time a glimmer of light coming from the torch of the Statue of Liberty, a small gesture toward hope way off on the right-hand side, hope for my now ten-year-old, hope for the future of American foreign policy, hope for art and literature and the society it reflects. It is there that I swear I heard Graydon Parrish say: “A painting unravels in minutes and days.” It is what I wrote down in my notebook anyway. By that, I took him to mean that the meaning inherent to a

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painting becomes clear over the span of minutes and days—and that sometimes meanings change, depending on where we are in time and space when viewing it. As I look back however, after so many minutes and days (and months and years) immersed in this book, I pause at the word “unravels,” as in “undoes itself ” or “comes apart.” The de Manian (in part) critic in me, after all, is difficult to purge, and I wonder what it means to think about a painting as unraveling, as undoing itself, as coming apart. But for now I think about Parrish’s painting as having taken on a life of its own: It means something different now in 2014 than it did when it was unveiled in the later months of 2006. There is more history layered on our various interpretations; there is more distance between it and the specific event it was commissioned to commemorate. A part of me still does not know why, when I look at Parrish’s twins— the one named Terror, the other Tragedy—I see two falling men. They clearly are not falling in the literal sense. The focus is on their faces and hands, not their legs. Certainly they are not in the position of free fall like the other images I take up in this book. Maybe, in my mind, they are about to fall, or they connote falling—more a state of mind or spiritual state than the fact of literal falling. And even today when I see them I think about a fallen state of criticism in the fields of art and literature: How can so much snark be leveled at simultaneously earnest (or, at least well meaning) and impassioned attempts to represent the unspeakable horror as a person falling to his or her death from towers on fire? On September 11, 2013, Parrish, who refers to himself as an “American Figurative Artist,” remarks that his style reflects a hybrid of neoclassical art and theory and the boldness of Texan allegory; being a “Texas maverick,” he insists that allegory is not dead, that it is still possible to capture emotions through symbols, that allegory can still respond to feelings and universals in the wake of the modernist period that rendered symbolism and allegory all but outdated. “Look at American currency,” he says: Americans love old symbols. The back of a dollar bill showcases a pyramid with an eye, referring

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to durability and providence. The dollar bill’s eagle looks at peace; the shield denotes self-reliance. We would do well to interpret the symbols in his own painting, he suggests: the children holding airplanes, not typically associated with fear but with innocence. And yet these children are blindfolded, revealing that they, and we by extension, cannot see the future. The planes the children are holding are now not toys but carry with them a history of destruction, pointing as they are to the twins standing in the middle of the painting. What was once an innocent gesture now embodies violence, death, and loss. But looking from left to right, as one would read the progression of the life span, we move from a vision of children to a vision of two young virile men, two twins who embody an ideal: terror on the left, tragedy on the right, the only way to differentiate them being the difference in their hands. The three women to the right of them, Parrish explains, represent the Fates, our fates, fate handcuffed to an event that we cannot change. Beside the Fates is an old man, Wisdom, and the child beside him, also blindfolded, returns us full circle in the cycle of man: the painting moves from left to right, from child, to young man, to old man, from innocence to wisdom—a palimpsest in the visual sense. Parrish sees his painting as one would an old document that has been partially erased, then written over—now with new text. Drawing on a combination of allegory, of universal associations with Innocence, Wisdom, Terror, Tragedy, on the one hand, and other classical works that have come before his, on the other hand, Parrish has created a new piece of work that is nonetheless grounded firmly in the past. This method, he says, comes from his training at the New York Academy of art with Michael Aviano, a student of Frank J. Reilly who is well known for reinvigorating classic art on his way to articulating a new theory of postmodernism. Parrish is fond of citing Craig Owens, as he did during his presentation at the New Britain Museum of American Art: “Allegory has the capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear” (Parrish). A statement that also serves as an epigraph on his website, it too recasts allegory not as an outmoded

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art form but, conversely, one that is persistently committed to the present—to rendering, in perhaps defamiliarized terms, a history that dare not be lost. Parrish appropriated the allegorical and added to it at least two canonical intertexts that also have to do with bombing: Pablo Picasso’s mural-sized painting Guernica (1937), a response to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and Nick Ut’s 1972 Pulitzer photo of Kim Phuc, forever known as the girl running from a napalm bomb dropped on her village during the Vietnam War. The two, considered together in the context of 9/11, mean something different than they do separately, Parrish has argued. But also there are some personal connections embedded within Parrish’s work: The old man, Wisdom, was painted after the likeness of a former professor and mentor who died in 2012; he was a WWII veteran and activist. It was not until months later that Parrish also recognized the old man, with his mouth open never to be heard, possibly representing his father, who died after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease in the fall of 2013. The child closest to the left of the frame, the child holding the biggest plane pointed down, also holds the most love: His likeness is that of Cupid, who said, “Whoever you are, I am your master.” According to Parrish, Love fights. Love conquers. Perhaps because of some combination of Parrish’s reparative vision and my own sense, finally, of distance from the 9/11 attacks, I left the September 11, 2013, lecture feeling consolation as well. Parrish’s focus that day was on continuity, on futurity suggesting that the children on the left can be the adults on the right—holding hands, bound together by time. On the far right-hand side of the painting, Parrish created his own way to foreshadow in 2006 the hope that we might find in 9/11 art and literature when going back to it in later years. The light on the Statue of Liberty I now see as Parrish’s prediction that hope will prevail: Again, reading from left to right, we see hope coming out of tragedy. The color scheme has borne this out all along: the contrast between lightness and darkness harkens back to Caravaggio’s St. Peter on the Cross; the colors red, white, and blue show that America can find its

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collective footing again; the flower petals on the ground intermingled with the shredded Constitution reveal beauty amidst the tragedy. And just when I think that we have indeed been able to close a circle here, a young person in audience on the day in 2013 when Parrish speaks stands up and projects a new tragedy onto the painting. The child says: “What happened in Sandy Hook seems real to me now.” The child is as old as the children in the painting—was as old as the children who were killed during the school shooting in December of 2012. Even, or perhaps especially, allegorical reference has eluded all of us. There will always be an American tragedy. What allegory has the power to do, for better or worse, is slip along the associative chains of reference, pointing to the present as powerfully as it does the past. Truly, as this child-critic made so powerfully clear in September—A painting unravels in minutes and days.

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Index Apitzsch, Julia 82 Arendt, Hannah 79 Avery, Dylan 70 Begin, Sean ix Beigbeder, Frédéric 14, 108, 115, 120 Bellamy, Joe David 43–4 Bonn, Maria 43 Boxall, Peter 82 Butler, Robert Olen 19, 43–5, 90 Carroll, Hamilton 85 Caruth, Cathy xiv, 1, 10–11, 17, 19, 24–7, 31–8, 44–6, 51–2, 73, 96, 121 Chase, Cynthia 25–7, 34–8, 75 Codde, Philippe 126, 131 Cooper, Vern 131 DeLillo, Don vii, xiv, 5–6, 8–9, 13–14, 20–1, 38–9, 54, 66, 81–91, 93, 95–9, 102, 108, 115, 124–5, 128, 132 de Man, Paul 1, 10, 19, 24–39, 45–6, 75, 96 Drew, Richard iv, 2, 8–9, 11–13, 30, 39, 60–4, 66, 68–9, 71, 76, 79, 85, 91–3, 97–8, 116, 121, 133, 138 Duvall, John 8, 10, 82, 85 Felman, Shoshana 14–15, 17, 42 Fetchet, Mary 16–19, 44, 56–7 Foer, Jonathan Safran vii, xiv, 5, 9, 13–14, 20–1, 38–9, 66, 85, 89, 98, 115, 121, 123, 125–37, 139–43 Frost, Laura 1, 82, 114–15, 121 Genocchio, Benjamin 3 Glueck, Grace 3 Goldsmith, Kenneth 41–2, 44, 58

Gray, Richard 7, 125, 130, 145 Greenberg, Judith 7, 77, 78 Griffith, James 43 Gut, Karen Alkalay 114 Haviland, Beverly 131 Hebel, Udo 7 Hirsch, Marianne 72, 74–8, 133–4 Holmes, Tom 105 Hornung, Alfred 131 Huehls, Mitchum 132 Hufschmid, Eric 70 Jones, Jason B. xiv, xv, 104–5 Julián Jiménez, Heffernan 132 Junod, Tom xiii, 2, 6, 9, 11–13, 61–2, 64–9, 71, 76, 116, 118, 121 Kakutani, Michiko 5, 8, 84–6, 128–30 Kalaidjian, Walter xiii, 72–4 Kaplan, E. Ann 7, 77–8, 134 Kaufman, Eleanor 36–8 Kaufman, Linda 82 Kaufmann, Michael 43 Kennedy, Christopher iv, vii, xiv, 20, 41, 66, 85, 101–15, 117, 119, 121–2 Kingkade, Tyler viii Kinnell, Galway 23–4, 39 Kirn, Walter 125, 129–30, 133 Kittler, Wolf 25, 30, 38 Kroes, Rob 9–10 Leps, Marie-Christine 82 Louvel, Lilliane 127 Marvel, Bill 5 Mauro, Aaron 38–9, 82, 132–3 McCarthy, Cormac 50 McWilliams, Dean 43 Michel, Berit 131

158 Miller, Laura 14 Morley, Catherine 9, 125–6 Mullins, Matthew 131–2 Nadel, Alan 9–10 O’Brien, Tim 43–51 Orvell, Miles 9–10 Otlowski, Acadia ix Palm, Edward F. 43 Parrish, Graydon vii, xiv, 3–5, 11, 13, 18, 21, 85, 145–9 Polatinsky, Stefan 82 Pozorski, Aimee 17

Index Salván, Paula Martin 132 Scherzinger, Karen 82 Schneck, Peter 7–8 Schweighauser, Philipp 7–8 Seuss, Diana iv, vii, xiv, 12–13, 20–1, 57, 66, 85, 101–3, 114–18 Siegel, Elisabeth 132 Silberstein, Sandra 7 Singer, Henry 62–5, 69–70, 115 Smith, Rachel Greenwald 130–1, 142 Solomon, Deborah 131 Sontag, Susan 71–2, 79, 133 Spahr, Clemens 54

Raines, Howell 101–2 Ramazani, Jahan 76, 103 Raymond, Michael 43 Rothberg, Michael 18, 72

Versluys, Kristiaan 7, 142

Saal, Ilka 131 Saltzman, Arthur 43–4

Zahn, Paula 79 Zimbardo, Philip 77, 79

Webster, Amanda ix Woolf, Virginia x, xi, 71, 79