Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo 9781472542809, 9781441139931

Citation preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The book you are holding in your hands received its initial impetus from an international conference on Don DeLillo’s work. “Terrorism, Media, Literature: Don DeLillo and the Ethics of Fiction” took place at the University of Osnabrück from April 25–27, 2008 and brought together a number of established DeLillo scholars as well as promising younger academics who had done previous work on this eminent contemporary American writer. As co-organizers of that conference, we wanted to initiate a dialogue between DeLillo scholarship in Europe and the United States. The present volume continues and intensifies that dialogue in ways that sometimes confirm and sometimes contest our initial suspicion that DeLillo is read and understood very differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dialogue we began at Osnabrück brought together not only people from different places on the map, but also people from different areas of literary activity. On the third day of the conference, we hosted a panel chaired by DeLillo’s German translator Frank Heibert. The panel featured not only two academics who had given papers at the conference—Eben Wood and Philipp Schweighauser—but also DeLillo’s German discoverer and editor (Bärbel Flad), a theater director who had staged DeLillo’s The Body Artist (Jan Langenheim), and an actor and film director who has engaged with the author’s work (Michael Ostrowski). Julia Apitzsch, who also contributes an essay to our volume, knew these people and brought them into a dialogue. For that, we thank her. We are also greatly indebted to a number of people who made those dialogues possible in the first place. Sara Duana Meier, Devin Zuber, Stefanie Krüger, and Jann Krüger at Osnabrück not only ensured the conference’s success but also set the collective spirit, which has made this publication possible. At the University of Göttingen, Frederike Rathing and Rebecca Scorah assisted with the panel organization and graciously helped out wherever they were needed at the conference itself. At Basel, Chantelle Kley-Gomez made sure this volume was in good (Chicago) style and proofread large parts of the manuscript—as did Sarah Bartholomäus at Osnabrück. Our thanks also go to the Thyssen Foundation, which provided essential financial support for the conference and to the University of Osnabrück and the Universitätsgesellschaft Osnabrück for providing logistic support and important lateral funding.

PSchweighauser_FM_Final.indd vii

5/13/2010 8:49:07 AM

viii

Acknowledgments

With one exception, this is a collection of original essays. We are grateful for permission to reprint Linda S. Kauffmann’s “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of The Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man,” which was originally published in Modern Fiction Studies, (54.2 [2008], 353–77). We would also like to acknowledge and thank for permissions to reproduce the following media: (in Sascha Pöhlmann’s contribution): “Jihad.” Music and text by Jeff Hanneman, Tomas E. Araya, Dave Lombardo. ©Universal Music—MGB Songs, Pennemunde Music, SS810 Music, Death’s Head Music. SVL: Musik Edition Discoton GmbH (Universal Music Publishing Group Germany). (in Marie-Christine Leps’s contribution): Seventh in a series of eleven—A person falls from the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001 after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and brought down the 110-story towers. Associated Press/ Richard Drew. President Bush flashes a “thumbs-up” after declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, Thursday, May 1, 2003. The carrier will arrive in San Diego May 2, 2003, following a record 10-month deployment including “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Associated Press/J. Scott Applewhite. (in Eben Wood’s contribution): Five stills from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Rony Vissers. Courtesy of Zapomatik. Now enjoy. P.S. and P.S., April 2010

PSchweighauser_FM_Final.indd viii

5/13/2010 8:49:07 AM

Introduction

The American and the European DeLillo Philipp Schweighauser and Peter Schneck In Mao II (1991), Don DeLillo lets his protagonist, the novelist Bill Gray, speak words that have been read as eerily prophetic in the aftermath of 9/11: “Years ago [. . .] I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness” (41). While the collective imagination of the past was guided, DeLillo seems to suggest, by the creative order and ethos of narrative fictions told by novelists, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are completely controlled by the endless narratives of war and terror constantly relayed by the mass media. Where terrorists make the headlines, using global mass media to publicize their message, the ethical craft of the novel has become obsolete, an almost pathetic remnant of the past. And indeed, as many commentators drawing on the work of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard have pointed out, the fictional worlds of Americana (1971), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), Valparaiso (1999), and Cosmopolis (2003) are saturated with mass-mediated images to such an extent that the very distinction between fact and fiction is almost erased. As one of our contributors, Martyn Colebrook, notes, [i]n DeLillo’s work, the camera—be it that of the photographer or that of the film director—is a constant presence: in Libra, it records the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald; in Running Dog, murderous conflicts ensue over the search for a film that has the final moments of Adolf Hitler captured on a grainy piece of celluloid; in Americana, the advertising executive David Bell records himself on a personal odyssey; and in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer watches a personal preview of his own death.

DeLillo’s incisive analyses of the performative force of media images, the visibility of terror, and the collapsing division between reality and simulation are more than mere illustrations of theoretical positions in contemporary media studies. To take DeLillo’s literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the obvious ethical implications of his media critique. In exploring DeLillo’s negotiations of the intricately related issues of terrorism and the place of literature within late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first-century media cultures, this essay collection begins with the premise that there is a need for a broader investigation of the ethical dimension in (and of) DeLillo’s works. To launch that investigation, we have invited DeLillo scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to share their thoughts on these timely issues. What has

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 1

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

2

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

emerged is a set of 13 essays and a coda that probe—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—the convergences and differences between American and European responses to one of the most powerful voices in contemporary U.S. fiction. This essay collection, then, approaches DeLillo’s reflections on the place of literary fiction in the age of mass media and global terrorism from a decidedly transatlantic perspective. If one adopts such a perspective, one conclusion almost immediately suggests itself: that Don DeLillo’s work has met with very different receptions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, DeLillo’s acute observations of contemporary American culture and society, as well as his poignant descriptions of states of collective consciousness troubled by media spectacles and narratives of terror, have been celebrated as one of the most important contributions to cultural criticism in American literature today. In contrast, in the United States, DeLillo’s work in general and his most explicitly political novels—Libra and Falling Man—in particular have received a very mixed reception, ranging from George Will’s, Bruce Bawer’s, and Jonathan Yardley’s acerbic critiques of DeLillo as yet another misguided liberal who keeps barking up the wrong tree to literary scholars’ as well as fellow writers’ insistence on the magnificence of DeLillo’s style and his cardinal status among contemporary American authors. Yet the essays collected in this volume do not always testify to such a European–American divide. To give but one example: while Linda S. Kauffman is but one of our American contributors who praise the subtlety with which DeLillo probes the psychological and political reverberations of 9/11 in Falling Man, Sascha Pöhlmann, one of our German contributors, stridently critiques the novel’s portrayal of Hammad, which “does not succeed in imagining the terrorist as anything other than an Orientalist construction of an Islamist terrorist.” The line between American and European responses to DeLillo cannot be drawn as readily as our preceding paragraph suggests. But what, precisely, are those convergences and differences that we postulate? To answer that question, it makes good sense to divert our gaze for a moment from literary scholarship to literary reviews because it is there that we may expect disparities to emerge most sharply. In the remainder of this introduction, we compare and contrast American reviews of DeLillo’s oeuvre with German, French, Swiss, and British reviews of the same. We embark on this survey of DeLillo’s reception with one specific goal: to embed the essays collected this volume in a broader transatlantic context that helps us make sense of their differing takes on DeLillo’s probing of the intersections between terrorism, media, and the ethics of fiction. Since the publication of Underworld in 1997, it has become a commonplace for European reviewers to affirm the literary stature of Don DeLillo in words that range from praise to veneration. DeLillo has been called “one of the most famous contemporary American novelists” (Solis 2002, 39), “the greatest American novelist at the beginning of the 21st century” (Busnel 2003, 88), “a master” (Busnel 2008b, 92), and “the superstar of American letters” (“Don DeLillo, la solitude au scalpel”).1 European reviewers especially admire

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 2

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

3

DeLillo’s writing style, which has been compared to “the hoods of Cadillacs: shining” (“Don DeLillo, la solitude au scalpel”); highlighting what one German critic wrote of Falling Man: “language [. . .] is the central event” (Diez 2007). That style, most European reviewers agree, has been perfected in Underworld, a novel that one German reviewer has praised lavishly for DeLillo’s “tremendously mutable language” (Spiegel 1998) and which Nathalie Crom called “one of the most magisterial works of fiction that have come to us from the United States in the last 15 years” (2004, 18). A further aspect of DeLillo’s literary fame stressed by European reviewers is his considerable influence on (mostly younger) fellow writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, James Ellroy, David Foster Wallace, and Rick Moody (Busnel 2003, 11; “DeLillo ou le temps de ‘l’après’ ”). Surprisingly, perhaps, even Paul Auster is mentioned in that context (Busnel 2008a, 122). That take on DeLillo’s literary filiation would certainly put a smile on the face of at least one of our American contributors. In his coda to our volume, “The DeLillo Era: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period,” David Cowart joins European reviewers in affirming DeLillo’s high stature and his influence on fellow writers, noting in passing that “[t]he other day, asked whether I had yet read the latest Paul Auster, I found myself thinking: no—I’ve read all the Auster I need to.” The European reception of DeLillo’s oeuvre is perhaps summed up best in French critic Jacques-Pierre Amette’s review of Cosmopolis: On the American stock exchange, Don DeLillo is valued very highly. Nevertheless, the writer gives back his fellow citizens an image of their country that is less than tender. [. . .] So this writer from the Bronx has traveled, written, disappeared, and reappeared, in his leather jacket, with a manuscript that he dropped off at Houghton Mifflin or Knopf or Scribner, all prestigious publishing houses. Each of his manuscripts left his literary managers, who had never read such prose, dumbfounded and dreamy. In describing the roads that appear in red on American maps, in describing American stones and herbs, American bungalows, and old, rotting American shacks, why does he pulverize the comfort felt by American citizens proud of their lawn mowers and Plymouths? [. . .] He has always been prey to sinister predictions. His books are marked by that strange foreboding of possible terror or at least ultimate disorder. He has pushed his forebodings even as far as to imagine, already in Underworld, his 1997 masterpiece, a gigantic bird menacing the World Trade Center [. . .]. Having turned into quite a misanthrope, the author has his literary takeoff in the 90s. He receives the National Book Award and places himself ahead of the novelists of his generation. (2003)

In Amette’s review, we find everything we have already encountered—and more. Amette’s DeLillo is a reticent writer who grew up in the Bronx, wears a leather jacket, and these days emerges from hiding only to deliver yet another manuscript at the door of one of the most prestigious publishing houses; he is a prophetic writer who cultivates a style that is in a class of its own; with his masterpiece Underworld, he has placed himself at the forefront of contemporary writing; he is a fierce critic of his culture, who denies his fellow Americans

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 3

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

4

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

even the small comforts that consumer culture has on offer. All of this is familiar from American reviews of DeLillo’s work, which comes as little surprise given that European assessments of DeLillo’s stature always also take into account American assessments of the same. This is also true for our European contributions, most explicitly Paula Martín Salván’s essay, which reflects at length on the mixed reception Falling Man received in the United States, and Philipp Schweighauser and Adrian S. Wisnicki’s contribution, which comments on DeLillo’s refusal to meet U.S. reviewers’ expectations for a 9/11 novel in ways that tie in with our Canadian contributor Marie-Christine Leps’s observation that “the reader of Falling Man is not presented with an overall analysis, a final truth, [. . .] which would make world economic and political movements coalesce into a whole that would somehow rationalize, explain, make the events of September 11 make sense.” Yet there is one significant difference between Amette’s take on DeLillo and that of American reviewers. It would be difficult not to be struck by the string of stereotypes Amette buys into in his characterization of both the American writer and the country he lives in. For Amette, America is a thoroughly commodified space in which a writer’s worth is assessed on the stock exchange and in which people find comfort in their lawn mowers and Plymouths. One cannot help thinking that more than a slice of the kind of French anti-Americanism that also informs, to give but one example, Jean Baudrillard’s America, has crept into Amette’s review. His portrayal of DeLillo needs to be qualified, too. By the time Amette wrote his review, DeLillo had come a long way from the Bronx and had been living in Westchester County, NY—a mostly suburban area that has one of the highest per capita incomes in the whole country—for years. Moreover, at least since the publication of Underworld in 1997, DeLillo has also abandoned some if by no means all of his reservations about being a figure of public interest: he has accepted prizes; collaborated on productions of his plays; and given speeches, readings, and interviews (though not on TV). And yet, despite, or perhaps precisely because of its shortcomings, Amette’s review crystallizes some of the main currents that run through the European reception of Don DeLillo. Most crucially, Amette sums up the central role European critics assign to DeLillo: he is one of America’s most eloquent and fiercest cultural critics. To some extent, this is also the role DeLillo assigns to himself. Quoting from Vince Passaro’s interview with DeLillo from 1991, Leif Grössinger in his contribution to our volume notes DeLillo’s conviction “that if writers should aspire to bear on public consciousness again, they would be among ‘the nationless, the outcast and the hunted’ and be regarded as socially dangerous.” This conviction, Martyn Colebrook notes in our volume, also infuses DeLillo’s oeuvre, which “is characterized by a sense of the beleaguered, oppositional artist or writer, the presence of spectral, marginalized figures located in small cells.” European reviewers regularly reiterate that assessment. Take the French reception for an example: Christian Salmon asserts that “all of DeLillo’s work undertakes to deconstruct the myths of an America that is bogged down in its

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 4

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

5

fictions much like the Spain of Cervantes is bogged down in its romances” (2008, 31); Bruno Corty writes that “DeLillo puts America under the scalpel, triturates its entrails and its lesser creases in search of vices, of tumors that make it paranoid, dangerous and thus fascinating” (2000); and Josyane Savigneau affirms that DeLillo is one of those writers “who confront social norms with their words, opposing narration to information in order to restore a genuine exchange” (1999). In a similar vein, German critics almost habitually point to DeLillo’s uncanny ability to tap into the unconscious undercurrents of the American cultural psyche. As Georg Diez has it, DeLillo’s writing is seismographic: “He tries to trace in his language changes in the tectonics of our consciousness, with a kind of secular spirituality that is deeply American” (2007). What is also rather typical for European assessments of DeLillo is the way in which Diez emphasizes DeLillo’s “Americanness” while at the same time accepting the universal validity of the author’s “seismographic” probings of a collective postmodern consciousness, which is somehow both American and European. So what are the objects of DeLillo’s cultural critique? From the Europeans’ point of view, they are American consumerism, the mass media, and, most fundamentally, language itself. Given DeLillo’s own media reticence and his sustained engagement with the mass media since his first novel Americana, the European focus on DeLillo’s media critique is entirely congruous. Thus, the French critic André Clavel speaks of his “constant demystification of clandestine powers that alienate and manipulate us—particularly those of the image” (2008); Jacques-Pierre Amette comments on DeLillo’s opposition to “massmedial voracity” (2003), and Josyane Savigneau reads Running Dog as a critical comment on “a world in which the image has become that through which social control passes” (2000). One can find similar assessments in German and British reviews, for instance in Tim Adams’s assertion in The Observer that “no writer since [the late 1960s] has been as alive to the congruence of violence and its media” (2007). At the same time, though, these critics realize that DeLillo’s critique reaches deeper than a media critique à la Neil Postman or Jean Baudrillard. For them, DeLillo’s writing is “scandalous” because “it seems to offer the safety of known and comfortable genres and crumbles, denounces, problematizes, ‘betrays’ them” (Chénetier 1994), and that dissection of popular genres is part of DeLillo’s larger project of exposing and ultimately redressing “the malady of words” (Salmon 2008, 31). Thus, in DeLillo, cultural critique and media critique are always also language critique. This is perhaps inevitable, for writers have—to quote Nabokov’s Lolita—“only words to play with” (1995, 34). Our contributors, too, have a keen ear for the ways in which DeLillo’s words resist the languages of advertising and news shows. One of our contributors, David Cowart, has, after all, written a book entitled Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. In his coda, Cowart asserts that “[g]reat contemporary fiction” such as DeLillo’s critically engages with “the sprawling, vital, endlessly vulgar culture of the American moment” in ways that “tend to illuminate fresh thinking

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 5

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

6

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

about the mechanics of language.” This insight—which traces DeLillo’s cultural and media critique to the particulars of his style—runs like a red thread through the essays collected here. Discussing DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man, Julia Apitzsch notes “the near-total absence of the media images that constitute our experience of the event” and probes how “DeLillo contrasts the violent images of the collective memory with [the] fresh and surprising art images and performances” of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi and the fictional performance artist Falling Man. Thus, she continues, DeLillo’s novel “open[s] up new perspectives beyond the exhausted mainstream comparisons, a new and unconsumed realm of images and language.” As our contributors probe the ethics of fiction in times of mass-mediated terrorism, it becomes clear that DeLillo’s refusal to employ the languages we already have for speaking about political violence is at the heart of his take on contemporary American culture. In Leif Grössinger’s words, “DeLillo [in Falling Man] refuses to use emotionally charged and over-determined terms such as ‘9/11’ or ‘Ground Zero,’ and even has bin Laden’s name confused with “Bill Lawton” by Keith and Lianne’s son Justin. The images DeLillo uses are generally known and discernable, but adapted and defamiliarized; he resists the spell of the images and the language provided by the mass media.” DeLillo inherits this insistence on speaking differently from modernist literary practice and thus aligns himself with an aesthetics of the disruption of dominant social discourses—an aesthetics of what Adorno has called “negativity.” But he does so only to a certain extent. Several of our contributors are as aware as DeLillo himself that the writer cannot fully extricate himself from what he critiques. Grössinger, for instance, interprets DeLillo’s artist figures, especially Bill Gray and Falling Man, as sites that allow DeLillo to explore the extent to which postmodern writers are forced to “rely on the mass media that sustain the very postmodern society they oppose.” Thus, it may be more accurate to consider DeLillo’s cultural and media critique a form of what Linda Hutcheon has called “complicitous critique” in The Politics of Postmodernism: a “strange kind of critique, one bound up, too, with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze and maybe even undermine” (1989, 4). How do U.S. reviews of DeLillo’s work relate to all of this? More so than in Europe, reviews differ depending on the work under consideration. Generally, Underworld has received the most favorable reviews. It has been called “his masterpiece” (Fry 1997), “the crowning achievement of a career that already had him at the top of American literature” (Baker 1997), a “great great novel” (Harris 1997), “a Moby Dick for the 20th century” (Hoover 1997), and “perilously good so good, so strong, deep, knowing and funny, that you might be tempted to read it and it alone, fanatically, the rest of your days” (Hanrahan 1997). Conversely, Cosmopolis has received mostly slating reviews. It has been critiqued for its “trite, superficial satire” and called “his worst novel” (Allen 2007); it has been judged as “frigid” by a fellow novelist (Cobb 2003); it has been characterized as having “all the cautionary timbre of an anonymous car

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 6

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

7

alarm” (Caldwell 2003); and it has been brushed aside by Michiko Kakutani as “a major dud, as lugubrious and heavy-handed as a bad Wim Wenders film, as dated as an old issue of Interview magazine” (2003). This cursory glimpse at U.S. responses to two of DeLillo’s novels already indicates that his American reception is far more ambivalent than European critics such as Jacques-Pierre Amette suggest. But the ambivalence of American reviews of the author’s work reaches much deeper than divergent responses to different texts. Yes, a great number of critics and writers revere DeLillo. When, in May 2006, The New York Times Book Review asked “a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years,” three of the top 22 books were by DeLillo: White Noise, Libra, and Underworld (Scott 2006). David Streitfeld of The Washington Post already in 1992 noted that “DeLillo these days is more than recognized; he’s practically anointed. [. . .] [T]here’s an increasing sentiment that he’s one of the major forces in American fiction;” Jan Wildt of the San Diego Union-Tribune calls him “the current senior statesman of mandarin-American literature” (2003); Jon Barron of the Chicago Sun-Times muses that “[y]ou may say of other writers that they are the heart of American literature, or the muscle, or the brains. If that’s the case, DeLillo is the DNA” (2003); and Michael Shannon Friedman of the Charleston Gazette sums up DeLillo’s stature thus: “Don DeLillo is one of America’s most acclaimed living authors, having won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and most recently, the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Underworld” (2001). Reviewing The Body Artist for the Intelligencer Journal, Michael Long put it wittily: “ ‘You haven’t read Don DeLillo? Where have you been?’ The only acceptable response to which is: ‘In a cave’ ” (2001). Yet as both European and American DeLillo scholars well know, there are quite a few critics who pull apart almost any work DeLillo’s publishes, and Curt Gardner’s supremely useful website Don DeLillo’s America has a whole section devoted to his fiercest critics (“DeLillo Detractors”). Long-standing members of that group are George Will, Bruce Bawer, and Jonathan Yardley; B. R. Myers and Dale Peck are more recent additions. Roughly, these critics can be divided into three factions: those that find fault with his politics, those that find fault with his style, and those that find fault with both his style and politics. The novelist and critic Dale Peck belongs to the first group. In a scathing review essay that begins with the declaration “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation” and goes on to explain that Moody is “the lowest common denominator” of a whole generation of writers, he tears into a range modernist and postmodernist writers to conclude that DeLillo is one of the worst of their kind: In my view, the wrong turn starts around the time Stephen Dedalus goes to college in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and echoes all the way through Don DeLillo’s ponderously self-important rendering of Bobby Thompson’s shot

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 7

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

8

heard round the world in the opening chapter of Underworld. [. . .] [T]hese writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo. (2002)

For Peck, DeLillo is a pretentious writer whose work exhausts itself in a display of linguistic virtuosity that lacks substance. Thus, DeLillo aligns himself with “the most esoteric strain of twentieth-century literature,” a high postmodernism that “has turned the construction of a novel into a purely formal exercise, judged either by the inscrutable floribundity of its prose or the lifeless carpentry of its parts.” Peck has certainly become the most prominent critic who attacks DeLillo for his style, but others have joined in. Thus, Allen Barra calls DeLillo’s dialogue in his script for the movie Game 6 “labyrinthine, [. . .] pretentious, stilted, and alienating” (2006), and Lewis Beale trashes Underworld as “a work of supreme self-indulgence” and “supreme hubris” (1997). A second group of DeLillo critics focuses more on his alleged politics than on his style. George Will’s review of Libra has set a standard here: he calls the book “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship” that peddles a “lunatic conspiracy theory” whose only virtue is to remind its readers “of the virulence of the loathing some intellectuals feel for American society, and of the frivolous thinking that fuels it.” Will concludes his diatribe thus: “What was unfairly said of a far greater writer (T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis 100 years ago this Monday) must be said of DeLillo: He is a good writer and a bad influence” (1988). This kind of assessment of DeLillo—good writer, bad politics—is not uncommon among the naysayers. One of his most prominent critics, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post, has traced the author’s work for over two decades, affirming over and over again what he already proclaimed in his review of White Noise: “Don DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise” (1985). DeLillo’s politics are, however, far less to Yardley’s liking. For him, White Noise is “yet another of DeLillo’s exercises in fiction as political tract,” fiction “as op-ed material” that “retail[s] the shopworn campus ideology of the ‘60s and ‘70s” and is ultimately “more interested in the message than the medium.” The outcome is books “that, while their sheer intelligence and style are dazzling, are heartless—and therefore empty—at their core” (1985). With this review in mind, it came as little surprise when Yardley dismissed DeLillo’s much more explicitly political novel Libra three years later: “He is a writer of skill, wit and ingenuity, but he employs these considerable gifts in the evanescent craft of pamphleteering rather than the durable art of fiction. [. . .] [T]he liberties he has taken with the dead range from the plausible to the unwittingly comical, but those he has taken with the living are beneath contempt” (1988).

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 8

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

9

The third group of DeLillo critics comprises those who dislike both his style and his politics. With his review of Falling Man, Yardley seems to have joined that camp: “At his most confident and accomplished, DeLillo can write. But Sept. 11 seems to have paralyzed him stylistically. [. . .] What is certain, though, is that people simply don’t talk that way. [. . .] None of the characters ever emerges from cardboard wrapping, and none of the emotions DeLillo tries to arouse feels earned” (2007). Yardley here stages a critique that runs like a red thread through most of the negative reviews: that his characters are flat and their dialogues unrealistic. Thus, Bruce Bawer asserts that DeLillo’s writing “defeats any hope of verisimilitude,” is characterized by “a stunning implausibility,” and features characters that “do not think, they cogitate; they do not talk, they engage in dialectic and endless monologues about the novel’s major themes” (35). A case in point is the dialogue between Jack and Babette Gladney in White Noise—the novel Bawer reviews: “It’s consistently fast-paced and facile, and occasionally witty, and absolutely never sounds like two married people talking to each other. Most of the time it sounds just like what it is: an author’s collection of stale cultural barbs” (37). In Bawer, the connections some reviewers draw between DeLillo’s style and his politics become clear: DeLillo is a novelist of ideas who delivers sententious, shallow philosophizing rather than a good plot and credible characters. Bawer’s DeLillo is so enamored of repeating liberal clichés about consumerist America as “the worst enemy that the cause of human individuality and self-realization has ever had” (34) that he reduces his characters to “little more than authorial mouthpieces” (41). Bawer concludes his review in the same spirit: “While those of us who live in the real America carry on with our richly varied, emotionally tumultuous lives, DeLillo (as White Noise amply demonstrates) continues, in effect, to write the same lifeless novel over and over again. [. . .] If anyone is guilty of turning modern America into xerox copies, it is Don DeLillo” (42). More recently, B. R. Myers has made very much the same point in his oft-cited “Reader’s Manifesto.” For him, too, DeLillo belongs among the “Consumerland writers,” whose fiction is populated by characters that are “paper-flat contrivances.” The effect of this kind of fiction, Myers continues, “is so uninvolving, so downright silly, that it baffles even sympathetic readers” and raises the rhetorical question, “why should we bother with Consumerland fiction at all, if the effect of reading it is the same queasy fatigue we can get from an evening of channel-surfing?” (2001). Ironically, perhaps, what critics such as Yardley, Bawer, and Myers diagnose in DeLillo’s writing is precisely the malaise that affects Bill Gray. In David Cowart’s words: “he has been brought low by the great paradox of modern and postmodern poetics: politicized expectation diminishes the art it affects to take seriously.” If we compare the European reception of DeLillo’s work with its American reception, it quickly becomes clear that while DeLillo has a great number of fervent admirers on both sides of the Atlantic, scathing attacks on this particular author are an American specialty. DeLillo’s work seems to divide American reviewers much more deeply than it does their European colleagues.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 9

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

10

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

This corresponds to the impression most American scholars familiar with the writer’s European reception have, and it corresponds to most European DeLillo scholars’ perception. That perception is, however, somewhat skewed for two related reasons. First, negative reviews by a relatively small number of prominent critics (Will, Bawer, Yardley, and, more recently, Kakutani) tend to obscure that the vast majority of reviewers, including especially those in smaller newspapers, are full of praise and admiration. Second, in staking out their own claims, reviewers and scholars who admire DeLillo’s work tend to quote the same three or four naysayers over and over again. Thus, those few critics— who publish their reviews in The New Criterion, The Washington Post, and The New York Times—are given even greater prominence. Still, the fact that DeLillo’s work does provoke deeply hostile responses from some prominent U.S. critics bears further scrutiny. Why all that anger? The U.S.–European comparison shows that DeLillo’s fiercest American critics attack precisely what European reviewers value: the writer’s cultural and media critique. That critique, they argue, is misguided in a number of respects: it caters to conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, the surveillance society, environmental pollution, and a host of other issues; it stages an outdated critique of consumerism and the power of the mass media to shape individual consciousnesses; and it falsifies history, particularly in Libra. In all of this, DeLillo adheres to an outmoded leftist ideology straight out of the 1960s and 1970s that is, at least for Bawer and Will, ultimately un-American. So why do we not find those kinds of attacks on DeLillo in European reviews of his work? On the face of it, the answer is simple: Europeans, conservative or not, have little incentive to call any American writer either “un-American” or—as George Will did—a “bad citizen.” Such judgments are usually made by fellow citizens, not by foreigners—and that holds true for both the United States and Europe. A second reason for European critics’ refusal to chastise DeLillo’s politics is that if we boil down his cultural and media critique to what might be considered its most basic assumptions—which is something DeLillo’s fiercest critics are much guiltier of than DeLillo himself—it does cater to longstanding European stereotypes about America as a land without culture and history that is inhabited by overfed citizens numbed by television and an insatiable appetite for commodity consumption. If B. R. Myers disparages DeLillo as a “Consumerland writer,” he does justice to neither the self-reflexivity nor the complexity of DeLillo’s cultural and media critique, but part of that critique is too eagerly embraced by European reviewers because it seems to confirm their ideas about what some Germans derisively call “Amiland.”2 A third and final reason for DeLillo’s differing reception on opposite sides of the Atlantic lies in the diverging social positions writers are assigned to here and there. While American reviewers of whatever political persuasion tend to discuss DeLillo as an author who writes from the political-ideological margins of U.S. culture, European reviewers tend to position him at a hypothetical Archimedean point outside that culture.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 10

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

11

The American perspective has two decisive advantages. First, it cautions us against demanding from postmodern writers the kind of “pure” critique many a modernist still aspired to. To position DeLillo within the culture he depicts is to acknowledge that his critique is always already complicit in Linda Hutcheon’s sense. After all, DeLillo is, as are all writers, part of and shaped by the very culture he critiques. Second, it registers that cultural critique is alive and well within a U.S. culture that many a European observer tends to characterize as fully homogenized and brought into line by Fox News and CNN. The downside in the American take on the oppositional writer’s positionality can be witnessed in Will’s slating. If the writer of differing political persuasion is acknowledged as an American citizen who exercises the right of free speech—a right that is valued much more unconditionally in the United States than in Europe—then he must be vilified as a “bad citizen.” The European perception has its own advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages of positioning the oppositional writer in a putative outside is that one does not need to gauge whether a given writer is a “good” or a “bad” citizen, whether s/he is “patriotic” or “un-patriotic.” What one can continue to gauge from such a vantage point is whether a given cultural and media critique is accurate, precise, eloquent, witty, and so on. A clear disadvantage of the European take on American writers is that it tends to set up a false opposition between the oppositional writer on the one hand and the culture at large on the other. Thus, the polyphonic nature of the American nation is obscured and stereotypes about America as a monolith in which all dissent has been drowned out by the white noise of the mass media are reinforced. As the editors of this volume, we firmly believe that in their engagement with the intersections of media, terrorism, and the ethics of fiction in DeLillo’s work, both our American and our European contributors successfully avoid the potential pitfalls we have just outlined. We further believe that our authors’ success is partly due to the willingness and enthusiasm with which they have entered this transatlantic dialogue on Don DeLillo’s fiction. In the process, many an American contributor’s views have been Europeanized, and many a European contributor’s views have been Americanized. Thus, our readers will find that the line between the American and the European DeLillo is not always an easy one to draw. But we do hope that our reflections on that line help you to judge how fair and balanced our assessment of the writing collected in this volume is. The essays that follow are divided into five parts and a coda. In our first part, “Memory Work after 9/11,” Linda S. Kauffman, Silvia Caporale Bizzini, and Sascha Pöhlmann ask, how does one mourn 9/11, and what acts of remembering are appropriate to it? All three essays engage with the specifically literary nature of DeLillo’s memory work. While Kauffman and Bizzini contrast DeLillo’s representations of terror favorably with the mass-mediated spectacles we know so well, Pöhlmann takes a critical look at DeLillo’s Orientalist stereotyping of the terrorist in Falling Man.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 11

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

12

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

In the second part, “Writers, Terrorists, and the Masses,” Mikko Keskinen, Leif Grössinger, and Julia Apitzsch discuss DeLillo’s engagement with postmodern mass society and its spectacular world of images. While Keskinen’s discussion of Mao II and Falling Man probes the challenges a fundamentally individualist genre such as the novel faces in the attempt to represent crowds and masses, Grössinger in his discussion of Players and Falling Man scrutinizes the discrepancy between both writers’ and terrorists’ claims to shape mass consciousness from a putative outside perspective and the smaller-scale real world effects of their actions. Apitzsch traces DeLillo’s strategy of countering mass-mediated representations of 9/11 with a strikingly different set of images: the disturbing performances by Falling Man and the still lifes of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi to which DeLillo refers throughout Falling Man. In “Don DeLillo and Johan Grimonprez,” our third part, Eben Wood and Martyn Colebrook probe the intricate relationships between DeLillo’s work and Belgian video-artist Johan Grimonprez’s use of textual fragments from Mao II and White Noise in his experimental documentary Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. While Wood analyzes both artists’ divergent challenges to the reader’s sense of resolution as a visual as well as narrative concept, Colebrook picks up the concerns of Grössinger’s essay in the preceding part to discuss both artists’ and terrorists’ diminishing significance as agents of change in contemporary society. The fourth part, “Deathward and Other Plots,” contains a single-author essay by Paula Martín Salván and a joint essay by Philipp Schweighauser and Adrian S. Wisnicki. Both explore plotting in its narrative and sociopolitical senses. While Salván identifies what she calls an “ascetic process” at the heart of DeLillo’s thematic and stylistic concerns in Falling Man and many of his earlier works (including The Body Artist, Underworld, and Libra), Schweighauser and Wisnicki’s discussion of Libra and Mao II examines the ethical implications of DeLillo’s refusal to provide narrative closures in his use of and critical engagement with Victorian detective novels and their closural patterns. More explicitly even than the other parts, the fifth and final part, “The Ethics of Fiction,” engages with the question of the ethics of fiction in the age of global terrorism. While Peter Boxall and Marie Christine Leps both detect in DeLillo’s work a process of slowing down that they consider an ethically viable response to “the globalization both of U.S. capital and of terrorism” (Boxall) and the “practices of biopolitics” and “thanatopolitics” (Leps), Peter Schneck’s essay addresses DeLillo’s continuing interest in the function and aesthetics of quasi-religious moments of experience and the promise of transcendence which his novels both criticize and employ for specific effects. Using examples from The Names, Mao II, Underworld, and Falling Man, Schneck investigates the peculiar “secular spirituality” that has characterized DeLillo’s writing from the beginning, and which has turned from ironic detachment to an increasingly poignant reflection and meditation on the state of faith and the sacred in a culture of mediated terror and violence. Finally, in his coda to our volume, David Cowart probes the pivotal relevance of DeLillo’s work to a younger generation of contemporary American writers.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 12

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

13

Notes 1 All translations from German and French are by the authors. 2 In German, “Ami” is short for “Amerikaner” (American, i.e., one American individual). It has a slightly pejorative ring to it, which is more pronounced in “Amiland” (instead of “Amerika”).

Works Cited Adams, T. (2007). “The chronicler of America.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Observer, April 22. Adorno, T.W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory, trans. and introd. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Allen, B. (2007). “After September 11: Don DeLillo’s searing tale of a family’s unease.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Times, July 1. B08. Amette, J-P. (2003). “New York, le rapport DeLillo.” Rev. of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. Le Point, September 26, 120–1. André C. (2008). “DeLillo affronte le mardi noir.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Le Temps, April 12. Samedi culturel. Baker, J. (1997). “DeLillo’s grand slam.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. The Sunday Oregonian, October 5. G01. Barron, J. (2003). “DeLillo bashful? Not this time.” Interview with Don DeLillo. Chicago Sun-Times, March 23. Show 1. Baudrillard, J. (1988). America, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Bawer, B. (1985). “Don DeLillo’s America.” Rev. of White Noise, by Don DeLillo. The New Criterion, 3.8: 34–42. Busnel, F. (2003). “‘Je n’ai pas de réponse littéraire au terrorisme.’ Interview with Don DeLillo.” L’Express, September 11, 88. —(2008a). “DeLillo, le chroniqueur de la terreur.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. L’Express, April 18, 122. —(2008b). “Don DeLillo: ‘Mes romans examinent l’impact de l’histoire sur la vie.’” Interview with Don DeLillo. Lire, April 1, 92–7. Caldwell, G. (2003). “Bonfire of inanities.” Rev. of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. The Boston Globe, April 6, C6. Chénetier, M. (1994). “DeLillo, la résistance aux systèmes.” Le monde, July 29, 16. Christian S. (2008). “Storytelling; De Don Quichotte à Don DeLillo.” Le Monde, May 24, 31. Cobb, W.J. (2003). “Fast-forward fiction flops; DeLillo’s frigid novel could be antidote for global warming.” Rev. of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. The Houston Chronicle, May 4, Zest 21. Corty, B. (2000). “Don DeLillo, l’oeil de l’Amérique.” Le Figaro, February 17. Cowart, D. (2002). Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Crom, N. (2004). “DeLillo, magistral.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. La Croix, March 6, 18. DeLillo, D. (1971). Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —(1977). Players. New York: Knopf. —(1985). White Noise. New York: Viking. —(1988). Libra. New York: Viking.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 13

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

14

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

—(1991). Mao II. New York: Viking. —(1997). Underworld. New York: Scribner. —(2001). The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2001). “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December, 33–40. —(2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. —(2007). Falling Man. New York: Scribner. DeLillo detractors. (2003). Don DeLillo’s America—A Don DeLillo page, ed. Curt Gardner, July 14. http://perival.com/delillo/detractors.html. “Don DeLillo, la solitude au scalpel.” (2001). Rev. of The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo. Le Temps, April 14. “DeLillo ou le temps de ‘l’après.’” (2001). Rev. of The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo. Le Point, April 20, 122–3. Diez, G. (2007). “Nähe. Distanz. Kälte.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Die Zeit, May 21. Friedman, M.S. (2001). “Infinite possibility, lifeless monotony meet in DeLillo.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. Charleston Gazette, February 25, 3F. Fry, D. (1997). “Don DeLillo’s view: Where fiction and history intersect.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. The Seattle Times, October 21, Entertainment News. Hanrahan, P. (1997). “DeLillo nails the big picture, and the small ones, too.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 21, Cue 13. Harris, R. (1997). “DeLillo touches all bases.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. The Star-Ledger, September 28. BOOKS 6. Hoover, B. (1997). “Underworld, a dark delight from DeLillo.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. The Patriot Ledger, October 8. FEATURES 26. Hutcheon, L. (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Kakutani, M. (2003). “Headed toward a crash, of sorts, in a stretch limo.” Rev. of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. The New York Times, March 24, E10. —(2007). “A man, a woman and a day of terror.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The New York Times, May 9, E1. Long, M. (2001). “It’s never too late to start reading Don DeLillo.” Rev. of The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo. Intelligencer Journal, May 4, Happenings 10. Myers, B.R. (2001). “A reader’s manifesto.” The Atlantic, BOOKS July/August. Nabokov, V. (1995). The Annotated Lolita, ed., with a preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. 2nd ed. London: Penguin. Passaro, V. (2005). “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro, 75–85. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi. Peck, D. (2002). “Moody Blues.” Rev. of The Black Veil, by Rick Moody. The New Republic, July 1. Savigneau, J. (2000). “Les fantasmes miteux de l’Amérique.” Rev. of Running Dog, by Don DeLillo. Le Monde, March 3. Savigneau, J. (1999). “DeLillo, la balle et la bombe.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. Le Monde, March 5, 1. Scott, A.O. (2006). “In search of the best.” The New York Times, May 21. Solis, R. (2002). “Valparaiso, sur la planète DeLillo.” Rev. of Valparaiso, by Don DeLillo. Libération, June 5, 39. Spiegel, H. (1998). “Die hängenden Gärten der Unterwelt.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 7. Streitfeld, D. (1992). “DeLillo’s ‘Mao’ wins PEN award; $7,500 prize for author’s 10th novel.” Rev. of Mao II, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, April 1, C1.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 14

5/13/2010 8:48:31 AM

The American and the European DeLillo

15

Wildt, J. (2003). “Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis finds the master at full stride, satisfying his yen to dazzle.” Rev. of Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 13, Books 1. Will, G. (1988). “Shallow look at the mind of an assassin.” Rev. of Libra, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, September 22, A25. Yarbrough, S. (2007). “DeLillo’s craft captures essence of 9/11 horror.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Sunday Oregonian, May 20, O13. Yardley, J. (1985). “Don DeLillo’s American nightmare.” Rev. of White Noise, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, January 13, 3. —(1988). “Appointment in Dallas.” Rev. of Libra, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, July 31. —(2007). “Survivors of 9/11 struggle to live in a changed world.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, May 13.

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 15

5/13/2010 8:48:32 AM

PSchweighauser_Intro_Final.indd 16

5/13/2010 8:48:32 AM

Chapter 1

The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s “In The Ruins of The Future,” “Baader-Meinhof,” and FALLING MAN Linda S. Kauffman Two months after September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo published a rare essay, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.” Five months later, “Baader-Meinhof” appeared. The title refers to Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the 1960s German radicals, but the tale evokes the post-9/11 climate. The major motifs in the essay and tale resurface in DeLillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. It deals with Keith Neudecker, his estranged wife Lianne, and their circle. DeLillo juxtaposes these New Yorkers with the terrorists who man the plane that hits the north tower—where Keith is at his desk. All three texts portray the social, economic, and psychological fallout from the attacks. They also describe the disconnect that exists between America’s self-image and its image in the eyes of the world. One can map history’s coordinates in these texts, which lead back inexorably to Mao II. Two abiding preoccupations unite these works: the repression of memory and the memory of repression. First, “In the Ruins of the Future” an essay by Don DeLillo is a rare treat. However, while the nation clamored for answers, DeLillo resolved instead to ask more questions. He wanted to comprehend the causes and consequences of 9/11, but wondered: “Is it too soon?” (39). No one was more aware than DeLillo of the speed with which politicians and media pundits transformed the tragedy into spectacle, which then became the official story. Instead, DeLillo highlighted “the counter-narrative,” which is both subversive and heartbreaking. It includes crosses, flags, flowers, and posters of the missing—all the ephemeral tokens of grief. The counter-narrative’s provenance is the realm of the unspeakable, the unfathomable. It does the work of mourning. DeLillo does not reconcile myth with fact. Both are part of the counternarrative, as is false memory and the Internet’s “rumor, fantasy, and mystical reverberation” (DeLillo 2001, 35). In other words, self-deception is part of this psychic geography. “We can tell ourselves,” DeLillo writes, “that whatever we’ve done to inspire bitterness, distrust, and rancor, it was not so damnable as to bring this day down on our heads.” “We can tell ourselves,” but in order to understand what has befallen us, we must abandon the binary division between “Us and Them” (34). In this regard, Mao II provides a useful analogue, because it links fascism and fundamentalism in ways that hit close to home. “In the Ruins of the Future” describes al-Qaeda’s apocalyptic desire “to bring back the past”—the same words Mao II uses to describe Reverend Moon.1 The analogy is explicit, for the Moonies are obsessed with the Last Judgment, “thinking of the bloodstorm to come” (DeLillo 1991, 7), just as al Qaeda

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 19

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

20

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

pledges “submission to God and meditates on the blood to come” (DeLillo 2001, 34). It would be easy simply to demonize these leaders, but instead, DeLillo examines their appeal. Why do people desire to be led by a demagogue? Moreover, rather than portraying that desire as foreign, DeLillo audaciously begins Mao II in Yankee Stadium. Reverend Moon officiates at a mass marriage ceremony for 13,000 people: “Here they come, marching into American sunlight. [. . .] He is here, in American light, come to lead them to the end of human history” (DeLillo 1991, 3, 6). Repetition underscores the point: far from being alien, an Absolute Leader who promises policing and protection is right at home on American soil. Just how close is the link between Christian fundamentalism and fascism? It is tempting to dismiss the Moonies as an extreme, unrepresentative case, but since the novel’s 1991 debut, Reverend Moon’s influence has increased exponentially—particularly over America’s media and its elected representatives. A convicted felon notorious for Congressional influence peddling in the 1970s, he is a billionaire who continues to bankroll Republican candidates (including both Bush presidents). His multibillion dollar media conglomerate is the major propaganda outlet for the Republican Party. In 2001, the then Attorney General John Ashcroft violated the Constitutional separation of church and state by appearing on Capitol Hill with Reverend Moon. As Attorney General, Ashcroft is the official most responsible for prosecuting such violations. The crime was repeated on March 23, 2004, when the Dirksen Senate Office Building was the site of a coronation celebrating Moon’s ascension as messiah, an event attended by 40 congressmen and 2 senators. One wonders what these congressmen would think of Reverend Moon’s connections to a drug empire in Paraguay and a fascist movement in Japan.2 Fundamentalism makes strange bedfellows: when the religious Right espouses the sanctity of marriage, do they really have Reverend Moon’s methods in mind? Would they endorse crowning anyone except Jesus Christ as messiah? Religious and political demagogues—and those who politicize religion— create a single totalizing narrative, the story of their infallibility and destiny. That story justifies the brutality necessary to enforce fealty. Mao II warns: “When you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state [. . .] replacing real things with plots and fictions” (DeLillo 1991, 200). When one recalls the plots and fictions surrounding weapons of mass destruction, Mao II seems particularly prescient. “In the Ruins of the Future” aptly describes the current state of affairs as well. DeLillo criticizes the Administration’s fixation on one specific narrative—Cold War rhetoric and foreign policy: “The Bush Administration was feeling a nostalgia for the Cold War. This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble” (DeLillo 2001, 34). The Cold War mindset is utterly useless in combating global jihad (holy war). The jihadist is a “lethal believer” who reduces the world to one plot—in both senses of the word: one story and one conspiracy (DeLillo 1991, 157).

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 20

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

The Wake of Terror

21

DeLillo’s more recent essay provides thumbnail sketches of the terrorists, which he transforms into three-dimensional characterizations in Falling Man, tracing their background, psychology, and evolution. Hammad is particularly memorable because he secretly harbors doubts about jihad. He wants marriage and children. He has an overwhelming desire simply to be “normal”—which he knows he must resist (DeLillo 2007, 83). He must renounce his little self in order to “love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom” with his brothers (178). But it is not easy. Hammad’s guide in the process is Amir, the name he calls the terrorist we know as Mohammed Atta. Atta is the true believer who eliminates all contradictions. With his superior powers of abstraction and rhetoric, Atta breaks down Hammad’s resistance. The following passage reveals Atta’s character from Hammad’s point of view: “The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. [. . .] They were [. . .] being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies. This was Amir, his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together” (80–1). Hammad, moreover, is acutely aware of his transformation while it is taking place. As he reluctantly surrenders his individuality, he imagines his life gaining mystery, status, and structure. He acquires a meaning and purpose larger than himself. Once the terrorists arrive in Florida, they begin to feel the “Magnetic effect of plot. [. . .] Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to this. There was the claim of being chosen, out there, in the wind and sky of Islam. There was the statement that death made, the strongest claim of all, the highest jihad” (174). The terrorists, however, have distorted Islam, for—rather than death—the highest jihad is an internal process, a rigorous spiritual striving in one’s own heart to reach God.3 In both the essay and Falling Man, DeLillo contrasts al-Qaeda with America; medieval vengeance with advanced technology; a brotherhood of martyrs with global markets. But he deconstructs the very dichotomies others reinforce. He cites the (overdetermined) history of global capitalism’s ill effects leading up to September 11: rapid destabilization, displacement of millions of refugees, the vast discrepancy between our wealth and their suffering. It seems odd that DeLillo mentions protestors at the World Trade Organization summits in his essay, but this is what they tried to change. He pays tribute to their discipline, diligence, and deliberation: collectively, they are a “moderating influence [. . .] trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future” (2001, 34). To my knowledge, DeLillo is the only American novelist who connects these protestors to 9/11—much less praises them. In “Baader-Meinhof” and Falling Man, their relevance becomes clearer, as I will show presently. Because of the media’s consistent trivialization of these protestors, who now remembers their persistence and courage in Genoa, Prague, Seattle, and other cities? Have we also forgotten that the twin towers symbolized the displacements of global capitalism—beginning with their very construction? In Mao II,

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 21

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

22

lower Manhattan is being demolished to build the towers, which signify voracious economic and geographic consumption, “two black latex slabs that consumed the available space” (165). DeLillo’s essay similarly critiques our entire investments—psychic, social, and above all, economic: In the past decade the surge of capital markets [have] [. . .] shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the Internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit. (2001, 34)

The puns on “utopian glow” and “memory” are pointed barbs: technology and cyber-capital lulled us into ignoring history. Such amnesia is, of course, as willful as it is convenient. Like Gerhard Richter, DeLillo invokes Walter Benjamin, the prophetic visionary who saw aesthetic representations as a symptom of larger processes beyond the realm of art. Politics and history are two of those larger processes. The technological transformation of time, space, and matter is a third. Not only does DeLillo’s title evoke Benjamin’s “far-flung ruins and debris,” in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but he begins where Benjamin ends, by bringing technology’s strengths and limitations up-to-date (DeLillo 2007, 236). Technology is “our fate, our truth” (DeLillo 2001, 37). In the Persian Gulf War, for instance, video technology made the war abstract with cyberspace targets and military euphemisms like “collateral damage.” But on September 11, the abstract became concrete. Using our own planes as missiles, al-Qaeda turned our technology against us. It hit home. DeLillo chronicles the state’s inexorable geopolitical decisions that fueled al Qaeda’s fury. By citing earlier incursions into Islamic domains, DeLillo reminds us that September 11 did not occur in an historical vacuum. Americans saw the twin towers as a shrine to technology—which we worship, own, and use to dominate. But to the terrorists, our technology is “a thing that kills [. . .] that brings death to their customs and beliefs” (DeLillo 2001, 38). Capitalism and terrorism: two forces on a collision course, both out of control. The former defies the laws of nations; the latter is now “a global theocratic state [. . .] unboundaried and floating” (40). DeLillo simultaneously pays tribute to 9/11’s victims. His helplessness and grief—for them, the city, the nation—is profound. Words fail him: “In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space” (2001, 39). The catastrophe is unlike anything that has come before. It defies metaphor, simile.4 Although he goes on to say that language itself is not diminished, he seems to protest too much, as he tries “desperately” to imagine the unspeakable: the horror of the moment of impact in the towers (DeLillo 2001, 39). (Falling Man begins and ends with that precise moment.) Paradoxically, what this specific passage in “In the Ruins

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 22

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

The Wake of Terror

23

of the Future” eloquently conveys is absence, emptiness, the howling space of the void: the rest is silence. Perhaps that deafening silence helps to explain the appeal of Richter’s visual art in “Baader-Meinhof.” A brief history: The people that became known as Baader-Meinhof Group began by peacefully protesting against nuclear proliferation, authoritarian regimes (like that of the Shah of Iran), and the Vietnam War. Once peaceful protests began to be brutally suppressed, however, violence escalated. Their aim, like that of the Weather Underground, was to “Bring the War Home,” as the popular antiwar slogan put it. But in contrast to American youth, those in Germany had to deal with parents who had been actively or passively complicit with fascism. Far from dying in 1945, fascism had seeped into every aspect of civic life. Nazi-era industrialists led the postwar economy. Ex-Nazis infiltrated every corporate, political, and educational institution, including the police and the military. Allied with the Red Army Faction (RAF), the BaaderMeinhof Group was arrested in 1972, charged with 27 counts of bombing, murder, and bank robbery (Aust 1987, 157). After their arrest, the RAF became more active and more lethal—Baader-Meinhof to the second power. In Stammheim Prison, the Baader-Meinhof Group was held without trial for years longer than other prisoners, many spent in isolation. In protest, they mounted hunger strikes. Holger Meins died of starvation on October 2, 1974. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself on May 8, 1976. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells on October 18, 1977. The state’s official ruling was suicide, but many remained skeptical. Stephan Aust, a former close associate of the group, makes a compelling case for massive malfeasance by the police in The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon. He exposes the lies and contradictions that fueled speculation that the police murdered the radicals. Aust surmises that the radicals probably did carry out a suicide pact, but he adds that what happened in the last nine hours of their lives will “probably never be known; it remains a matter of conjecture, speculation and myths” (Aust 1987, 536, 542–52).5 Gerhard Richter was enormously affected by Aust’s book, which was originally published in German in 1985. In 1988, Richter, who is widely viewed as one of the greatest painters of the second half of the twentieth century, began painting 15 black and white oil paintings of the group’s capture, incarceration, and death. The paintings drew from a vast archive he compiled of posters, newspapers, magazines, television, and documentary images, as well as forensic police photos and materials from the group’s underground associates’ archives. Titled October 18 1977, the Baader-Meinhof cycle was part of Richter’s triumphal retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from February–May 2002 (Storr 2000, 99). MoMA is the setting for DeLillo’s enigmatic tale, which is about an unnamed woman and man who meet in front of these paintings. She confesses to the male stranger, “I feel helpless. These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be” (DeLillo 2002, 78). Does she feel helpless because the State invariably vanquishes those who defy it? Or because she will never know whether

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 23

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

24

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

the radicals were executed or committed suicide? Or because she cannot see the paintings clearly? Richter purposely obscures the images; they are shadowy, out of focus. We shall never know the answers to these questions, and that is the point. Richter and DeLillo confront us with myriad forms of misrecognition and unknowing: ignorance, amnesia, blindness, denial, and disavowal. The woman visits MoMA four times to study the 15 paintings. At the end of the tale, her helplessness becomes acute: she brings the stranger home, and then retreats from his sexual advances. He reacts by masturbating on her bed and departing. The contrast between the portentous paintings and the mundane (if perverse) boy-meets-girl story seems incongruous. But the paintings are an objective correlative for blindness and insight: she studies the canvasses, but is blind to the man’s motives; he is blind to the paintings, but shrewdly sizes her up. She has no desire to talk to him or bring him home, yet like a sleepwalker, she complies. At the end of the tale, her own passivity leads her to disgust, disillusionment—and rage. What connects this enigmatic tale to 9/11? Its setting is a specific time (shortly after the terrorist attacks) and place (MoMA, New York City), but the tale is no mere parable of modernity (the Museum of Modern Art) versus primitive drives. Nor is it an allegory about capital’s links to sexual aggression, although DeLillo’s essay provokes such comparisons by alluding to the “thrust” of our technology, its power to “penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind,” as well as to the twin towers’ “tactful sheathing [. . .] intended to reduce the direct threat of such straight-edged enormity” (DeLillo 2001, 3, 38). Just as DeLillo describes the twin towers in Mao II and “In the Ruins of the Future” as taking up all the available space, the pushy male intruder in the story “took up space, a tall broad man” who protests too much when he denies that he is manipulative and controlling (DeLillo 2001, 80). He seems to be a financial analyst of some kind, unemployed as a result of the economic fallout of 9/11. Before then, many men on Wall Street capitalized on the sex appeal of money and power, but with the economy in shambles, this shambling, shiftless man is reduced to onanism; the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. The tale is no mere allegory, but it evokes the allegories of reading so crucial in deconstructive practice. “Baader-Meinhof” portrays one kind of frustration (sexual) and its outlet. Another kind of frustration involves sight—and sites. The woman turns to art to be provoked by contradiction and complexity, but the man demands fixed categories and absolutes. He mocks her when she explains what happened to the group: “They committed suicide. Or the State killed them” (DeLillo 2002, 78). Ambiguity is alien to the man, who is sure the radicals got what they deserved. He pigeonholes the woman too: she must be an art student or teacher; who else wastes time in a museum unless (like him), they are looking for someone to pick up? As in Henry James’s fiction, the way one responds to art is an index of moral character. But Richter ups the ante by confronting German viewers with things they have assiduously tried to forget. One of his most controversial paintings (one that is not part of the Baader-Meinhof cycle or DeLillo’s story) is based on

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 24

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

The Wake of Terror

25

a photograph of his own Uncle Rudi, smiling cheerfully in his Nazi uniform. In all his work, Richter compels the viewer to confront complex and contradictory psychic identifications, none of which are innocent. While Richter reminds viewers of the Nazi past, Walter Benjamin augured their future. Speaking of Baader-Meinhof, Richter reflects on the merger of psychic identifications: If people wanted to see these people hanged as criminals, that’s only a part of it: there’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists. And that is forbidden. So this terrorism inside all of us, that’s what generates the rage and fear, and that’s what I don’t want, anymore than I want the policeman inside myself—there’s never just one side to us. We’re always both: the State and the terrorist. (Richter 1995a, 185–6)6

Terrorism is inside us all—not just individuals, but nations. As the Nazis demonstrated, this means the State can readily become as ruthless as those it pursues. Indeed, by the time of Baader-Meinhof’s trial, public perception had shifted drastically: people felt that the Federal Court had become as lawless as those it sought to punish—literally a terrorist (Houen 2002, 214). Richter’s insights apply not only to Germany, but also to America—particularly in its role as the world’s policeman, now enmeshed in renditions, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, and a gulag of secret prisons. Walter Benjamin’s apocalyptic warning is never far from mind: “The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society” (1969, 242). What counted as “elemental” then was the Third Reich’s cunning manipulation of First Reich mythology; today it is cutthroat vengeance by—and toward—the Middle East. DeLillo’s essay highlights this: “Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage” (2001, 33). Rather than focusing exclusively on the danger, we should pay more attention to the rage. Rage consumes the woman by tale’s end. The man insinuates himself into her territory and utterly transforms it: “She saw everything twice now. She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard. Nearly everything in the room had a double effect—what it was and the association it carried in her mind” (2002, 82). In this cold tale, the man departs unscathed, while the human stain leaves a residue on the woman’s environment and her psyche. DeLillo concludes on a bitter note of territorial invasion, which is then repeated one more time: returning to MoMA the following day, she finds the man standing in front of “Funeral,” the enormous painting depicting the procession of the radicals’ coffins to the burial site. “The double effect” of associations with the man contaminates the paintings, the museum, her apartment, perhaps even the city itself. Now she truly sees, darkly. The ending makes us reevaluate the beginning, when the heroine was still innocent—or blind. She wants to see an element of forgiveness in Richter’s paintings, but, by the end, forgiveness seems preposterous. What are we to make of her harsh transformation? Are we to conclude that

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 25

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

26

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

forgiveness is fine in the abstract, but impossible once one’s territory has been invaded? Or that, such noble sentiments are only possible in art, not in life? Or that they only apply to those long dead? Within the context of the tale, none of these options are precluded, but DeLillo reinforces the latter one, for the words “viewing,” “looking,” and “belief” recur insistently. The woman feels as if she is in a “mortuary chapel” for a “viewing.” Gazing at “Funeral,” similarly, she decides (the crucial word is “feels”) that one tremulous brushstroke is a cross: “It was a cross. She saw it as a cross, and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness” (DeLillo 2002, 80). Finally, is the word “terrorist” repeated in order to suggest correspondences between September 11, 2001 and October 18, 1977? The tale subtly makes the connection, but it is difficult to pin down—until it resurfaces in Falling Man. The novel features a German art dealer who was once a member of Kommune 1, a collective “demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state” (DeLillo 2007, 146). Kommune 1 inspired BaaderMeinhof’s early writings (Storr 2000, 48–9). The art dealer may have also worked with the Red Brigades (also known as the RAF) in Italy. He is now known as Martin Ridnour, but his real name is Ernst Hechinger. In Berlin, he has preserved a famous Most Wanted poster of the 19 Baader-Meinhof radicals, which DeLillo juxtaposes with the famous newspaper image of the 19 September 11 terrorists: Hechinger “thinks [. . .] these jihadists [. . .] have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. [. . .] They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood” (DeLillo 2007, 147). We never learn what Hechinger’s exact role was: he may have dealt in stolen art to finance their activities; he may have been part of a support group or sleeper cell. Perhaps he still funnels funds to sleeper cells today, for the second part of the novel, which links his past to the terrorists’ present, is entitled “Ernst Hechinger.” Hechinger uses an assumed name, a forged passport, and nearly everything about him is surrounded by speculation and surmise. Except his beliefs. He presents the same viewpoint DeLillo presents in his essay, for Hechinger maintains that the jihadists “strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies” (DeLillo 2007, 46). His twenty-year relationship with Lianne’s mother, Nina Bartos, ruptures over politics. Nina is an eminent art historian who is described as an “unchallenged arbiter of beauty” (48); she sees terrorism as a “virus” that wants to destroy civilization (113). Hechinger, however, repeats the ideas from “In the Ruins of the Future” almost verbatim: “One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die. [. . .] These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness” (46–7).

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 26

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

The Wake of Terror

27

Nina’s conflict with Hechinger thus highlights the contradictions between America’s self-image and its image in the eyes of the world. Where she sees civilization, he sees brute force—police, prisons, and the military. Hechinger insists that those in the Middle East want their own land, identity, and culture—a point DeLillo reiterates emphatically in his essay: “For all those who may want what we’ve got, there are all those who do not” (DeLillo 2001, 38). Hechinger tries to convince Nina that the dispossessed are sick of “lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West.” (DeLillo 2007, 113). He maintains that the United States can no longer ignore these politics, nor can it disavow its own authoritarianism and lawlessness—at home as well as abroad. In Falling Man and “Baader-Meinhof,” the parallels between German and American state repression are seldom explicit, but they are never far from mind.7 Following protests in May 1968, the West German government passed an “Emergency Constitution,” which permitted police to arrest sympathizers and bar them from employment. By 1976, nearly 500,000 names were on the government’s list of radical sympathizers (Houen 2002, 214). Postwar Germany compiled the most massive collection of information about its citizens since the Nazis—in the name of national security (Storr 2000, 53–7). The parallels to the Patriot Act are as insidious as they are far-reaching: as David Cole points out, the government can monitor attorney–client conversations; authorize secret searches and wiretaps; collect telephone, Internet, email, credit card, and business data; and spy on religious, political, and humanitarian groups. Guilt by association is rampant, and most suspects never even know the charges against them. Since so many of the Patriot Act’s provisions are secret, it is impossible to identify abuses, which have been flatly denied by the Bush Administration and the Justice Department. “ ‘Data Mining,’ links police records to computerized analysis of extensive electronic databases”; it has been deployed to compile a “terrorist index”: by 2004 over 100,000 suspects were identified (Cole 2004, 56).8 On March 6, 2008, The Washington Post reported that a “National Dragnet is a Click Away;” the network linking several thousand law enforcement agencies now makes domestic intelligence gathering instantaneous (O’Harrow and Nakashima 2008, A1). The technology has expanded faster than “the public’s understanding or the laws intended to check government power and protect civil liberties” (A5). DeLillo’s post9/11 texts portray the consequences of the world’s policeman operating outside the law. As John Carlos Rowe observes, DeLillo thinks that “literary representation can and should challenge the totalitarian impulses fueled by postmodern dislocation” (2004, 27). However, DeLillo’s post-9/11 texts suggest that all representations—including painting and photography—can and must confront totalitarianism. This illuminates Richter’s appeal for DeLillo, for just as the painter reflects on the merger of cop and terrorist, DeLillo has long been interested in multiple psychic mergers, from White Noise to Cosmopolis. The pop

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 27

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

28

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

culture professor of Hitler Studies and the nihilistic billionaire are secret sharers with George Haddad in Mao II, who describes how terrorists “[h]ate many of the things you hate. [. . .] In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. [. . .] Is history possible? Is anyone serious?” (157). DeLillo is equally preoccupied with the ways citizens blithely forsake civil and other liberties. Reverend Moon “unburdens them of free will and independent thought. See how happy they look” (7). Who are Germany’s—and America’s— willing executioners? No one can contemplate Richter’s paintings or DeLillo’s post-9/11 texts without asking such questions. Far from being nostalgic, Richter’s writings about Baader-Meinhof reveal how deeply divided his own views are. Richter, who witnessed the rise of Hitler and grew up in East Germany, remarks that: “I was impressed by the terrorists’ energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response. That is what States are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones” (1995c, 173). Richter nevertheless sees his paintings as a form of mourning for the disavowed past, which is why Baader-Meinhof has haunted many artists and intellectuals over the years. Heinrich Böll calls Baader-Meinhof’s struggle a “war of six against sixty million” (quoted in Aust 1987, 154).9 Is the utopian hope of resisting totalitarianism wherever it appears now over, replaced by a siege mentality that fences in (or out) individuals and nations? Far from being ancient history, these questions erupted anew in January 2001 when news photos surfaced depicting Joschka Fischer engaged in a Frankfurt street battle with police in 1973. They were delivered to the German newsweekly Stern by Bettina Rohl—the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof. In Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, Paul Berman (2005) contextualizes the disavowed past by tracing Fischer’s evolution from 1960s radical to Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor. Fischer repudiated the tactics of Baader-Meinhof, and is now one of many prominent European intellectuals (including André Glucksmann, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard-Hénri Levy, and Bernard Kouchner—who founded Doctors without Borders) who promote a political philosophy opposed to dictatorships all over the world. Berman argues persuasively that the radicals in the generation of 1968 have left a lasting legacy of resisting totalitarianism and fighting for universal human rights.10 In this light, DeLillo’s tribute to the World Trade Organization protestors takes on greater significance. Similarly, in the tale, the woman insists that what Baader-Meinhof did “had meaning. It was wrong but it wasn’t blind and empty. I think the painter’s searching for this. And how did it end the way it did? I think he’s asking this. Everybody dead” (DeLillo 2002, 80). DeLillo had obviously researched Richter’s exhibition catalogues and his other voluminous writing, for Richter does ask this very question: “What have I painted. Three times Baader, shot. Three times Ensslin, hanged. Three times the head of the dead Meinhof after they cut her down. [. . .] Then a big, unspecific burial. [. . .] Their presence is the horror and the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion” (1995c, 175). The passage underscores Richter’s appeal for DeLillo, for the

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 28

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

The Wake of Terror

29

“refusal [. . .] to give an opinion” is the refusal to limit interpretation. Craig Owens argues that Richter not only endorses the Barthesian theory of “the death of the author”; he stages his own disappearance by repudiating the role of “auteur” who produces a coherent body of work in a single identifiable style (132–3). No one knows better than DeLillo that the author has been “dying” for a long time. Mao II’s chronicle of a death foretold merely updates a long, historical process, which ends with DeLillo dispatching the hero-novelist, whose prose we never read. Those who insist on “the author function” see art as a means of commercialization and/or cultural containment—another word for “repression.” By refusing to pose as supreme authority of his own work, Mao II’s hero repudiates the cult of the author—not just in literary and celebrity culture, but in religion and politics. His is a disciplined political stance against all literalism and infallibility, the cornerstones of totalitarianism and fundamentalism. Like Ernst Hechinger’s identity in Falling Man, the author’s identity in Mao II has never been fixed. Born Willard Skansey, Jr., he dies enroute to Cyprus, stripped of his passport and all other identifying documents that contain his fictitious name: Gray. “Gray,” Richter reflects, “is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape” (Richter 1995b, 82–3). The opposite of black and white, gray incorporates both.11 It has, Richter notes, “the capacity no other color has, to make ‘nothing’ visible” (82). An elegant ambiguity: Richter may mean that gray makes nothingness visible—le mot juste, since the canvasses depict corpses. Or he may mean that it is about nothing. Falling Man reaffirms this aesthetic, for Nina is an expert on the work of Giorgio Morandi, famous for his still lifes of everyday objects that seem to be damaged, discarded, or dematerializing before one’s eyes. Like Richter, Morandi rigorously tests the limits of perception and representation.12 Everything in Falling Man seems contaminated by September 11. But Nina cherishes Morandi because his work is “not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension and projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things” (DeLillo 2007, 111). Nina’s remark sheds light on Richter’s technique too, for he incorporates photos (personal, historical, forensic, and news), then blurs the image to the point where it appears ghostly, indistinct. He uses anamorphosis, a technique of deformation. Anamorphosis signifies misrecognition, a theme crucial in both the paintings and the tale.13 In his Baader-Meinhof canvasses, Richter drew on a top-secret archive of police photographs. He imbues the forensic evidence with doubt, while DeLillo highlights how speculation and desire are projected onto the personal and political evidence. For the painter and the novelist, then, the repression of memory and the memory of repression operate on the level of both theme and technique. They frustrate the desire for proximity and contact—and accentuate its impossibility. In DeLillo’s tale, this applies not just to the man and the woman, but to the past and the dead. What you see depends on how it is framed.

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 29

5/13/2010 8:45:58 AM

30

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Were the radicals framed in their own executions? Who can say what BaaderMeinhof means in life, death, and art? The news media’s photographs alone do not suffice—in fact, their ubiquity is precisely what all artists must resist. Otherwise, the news image has the last word: Meinhof’s corpse in the German newsweekly Stern, imprinted on the mind’s eye. Media images colonize the unconscious, fixing meaning and history. DeLillo and Richter share the same aims: subvert news images, destabilize their truth, and imbue them with doubt. Deconstruct media images that attempt to fix meaning, while highlighting how the state capitalizes on that fix. They both rescue history from the news media’s blindness and restore it to vision.14 Richter and DeLillo also question the function of art—and the art museum. Is it a temple, a sanctuary, an archive of aesthetic tradition? Since some see the art museum as a secular cathedral, it is significant that the woman in DeLillo’s tale wants to see a cross in “Funeral.” But they both remind us that the art museum is also a war museum: whether one thinks of Brueghel, Goya, or Picasso, art memorializes warriors and innocents, holy crusades and massacres, the whole history of bloody atrocities and scorched earth. Ironically, Richter, along with Michael Asner and Hans Haacke, was instrumental in deconstructing the institutional structures that make art possible.15 Even more ironically, images of Baader-Meinhof from Richter’s Atlas were scheduled to be exhibited in a show on “The RAF: The Myth” in Eastern Berlin in 2003, but public outrage delayed the exhibition for two years. The curators insisted that their aim was not to glorify the RAF, but to explore “the perception of terrorism in the media and the arts” (Grieshaber 2005, A24). One of the three curators was Felix Ensslin, the thirty-seven-year-old son of Gudrun.16 Another furious debate arose in February 2007, when Brigitte Mohnhaupt was freed from prison after serving 24 years for her involvement with the Baader-Meinhof Group—longer than almost any Nazi war criminal ever served.17 Richter privately confesses that the radicals’ deaths “and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it” (1995c, 173). No statement about the repression of memory and the memory of repression could be more eloquent. In Richter’s suite and all three of DeLillo’s texts, the representation of death poses enormous challenges. It seems paradoxical that his essay about September 11 pays tribute to the humane roots of Islam, but DeLillo wants to thwart the inflammatory rhetoric of “Us versus Them” so prevalent in the west. While the American media has demonized the concept of jihad, it is a core principle in Islamic ideology. Jihad connotes striving to serve justice, pursue knowledge, aid the less fortunate—in short, to serve God’s purpose on Earth. It entails rigorous discipline and sacrifice. It entails striving to cleanse oneself of vanity and pettiness.18 This explains why “In the Ruins of the Future” describes the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The pilgrims are engaged in the highest jihad— striving in their hearts toward God. Such rituals affirm the humility and compassion of Islam’s followers around the world, including the Muslim woman

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 30

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

The Wake of Terror

31

on her prayer rug near Ground Zero. Like the pilgrims, she affirms her connection to the souls of the dead. In contrast to those who erect plots and separate mental states, the dead are “their own nation and race, one identity, young or old, devout or unbelieving—a union of souls, a fellowship of the dead” (DeLillo 2001, 40). The somber tone of pity and terror in the short story “BaaderMeinhof” reiterates this motif. Ultimately, the most important thing about Baader-Meinhof is that they are dead. Indeed, the subtle differences between the three paintings of the dead Ulrike show her in the process of dematerializing.19 Confronted with unassimilable horrors, one must unsentimentally confess that they are hard to bear and commit them to memory. This is a moral and political responsibility: to rescue the dead from abstraction and oblivion— including the dead terrorists. Falling Man invokes that same responsibility. What historical and psychological factors produced young men who willingly committed suicide? As a novice recruit, Hammad hears a story about the thousands of little boys who were used as cannon fodder, massacred in the 1986 Iran–Iraq War. Seconds before the plane’s impact, he thinks of them again; now he too is “carrying his soul in his hands” (DeLillo 2007, 238). Death is everywhere in the novel—in the air, the clothes, the smells of the city in the weeks and months following the attacks. It haunts all the characters’ consciousness. They are obsessed with disintegration: psychic, spatial, temporal, national, and marital. The novel is a sustained meditation on time, chance, loss, and mutability. The process of dematerialization even extends to language. Lianne conducts writing sessions with patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, helping them to retrieve shards of personal memory, history, and identity through the act of writing. They experience the loss of language, spatial voids and visual gaps, rifts in their fields of vision. It becomes more and more difficult to make connections. In contrast to the fanatical certitude of terrorists like Atta, who is convinced that his narrative is the only true one, the Alzheimer’s patients are losing the storylines of their own existence. Lianne is overwhelmed by their decline, in part because it may augur her own: Alzheimer’s is hereditary and her father killed himself when he began manifesting symptoms of the disease. Alzheimer’s is a metaphor for the post-9/11 condition. That condition is progressing exponentially: history is receding more and more rapidly from us—along with our will, imagination, and power to anchor it in anything approaching the familiar. Nor can we fathom what the future holds, except to acknowledge that it will not resemble the past. We are all, DeLillo suggests, like the patients in the early stages of the disease: “They approached what was impending, each of them, with a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen” (2007, 94). How much time and space remain? That is the question that haunts Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost: “On the day we eat / Of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die” (Milton 1968, 901). Since time only has meaning after the Fall, the first two problems of interpretation arise in Eden: what is a day? What is death? Milton’s Genesis becomes retrogenesis in Falling Man—the tortuous going backward, a reversal of time. Retrogenesis

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 31

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

32

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

also happens to be the clinical term for Alzheimer’s. Falling Man portrays the contradictions between present and past; life and death; time and eternity. It records, moreover, the precise moment when these contradictions collide with deadly impact. Hence the heightened significance of chance, luck, and gambling in DeLillo’s novel—and in the new world order. When Keith and his wife parted (18 months before 9/11), they each struggled to fill the void left by the separation. Lianne devotes herself to the Alzheimer’s patients; Keith devotes himself to his poker pals. “The steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group” (DeLillo 2007, 96) is the laconic way DeLillo puts it, as if any port suffices to substitute for a stormy marriage. Keith Neudecker’s name seems to augur a new deck of cards, a fresh start—the perennial theme of American literature. But Keith is no Gatsby. The fresh green breast of the new world was already receding in the 1920s; the dream of unlimited potential has now disappeared. When someone asks Hechinger, “What comes after America?” he replies, “There’s an empty space where America used to be” (192–3). Before September 11, Keith’s poker pals—an adman, a business writer, a mortgage broker, and a man named Terry Cheung—enjoy “testing the forces that govern events [. . .] [ using] intuition and cold-war risk analysis [. . .] cunning and blind luck” (96–7). Gambling is a performance that entails feigning, masking, sizing up, minimizing and maximizing drama. It is also a performance of masculinity: Keith and his buddies find pleasure in drinking, farting, mocking, “hoisting their balls [. . .] [while trying] to shred the other’s gauzy manhood” (97). One player, however, demurs: Terry Cheung is a fanatic who plays online, at times for 20 hours straight. Reprising Haddad’s question, “Is anyone serious?” Cheung criticizes his buddies for being “shallow people leading giddy lives. [. . .] You are not serious people. [. . .] Get serious or die” (98–9). On September 11, one buddy is critically injured and two of the six players die. Keith is in the World Trade Center office where he works as a real-estate investment attorney; his colleague, Rumsey, dies in his arms. With the reckless ferocity of someone who cheated death, Keith devotes himself to tournament gambling. (He is also out of work, like the shambling man in DeLillo’s “BaaderMeinhof.”) But Keith’s addiction has nothing to do with money. Money is symbolic, and Keith has as strong an aversion to symbols as Nina has to symbolic art. He seeks out the “crucial anonymity” of the casinos, “the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached” (204). What matters to him are the codes, protocols, rituals of the game: “the stacking of the chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye [. . .] because they would all be dead one day” (228). He is the falling man who has lost his moorings. Lianne speculates that the real source of Keith’s restlessness is that he wants to kill somebody. He has the deranged look of someone who would like to burn something up in order to piss on the flames. In this regard, he is the counterpart of the violated woman in DeLillo’s tale, contaminated by rage. But we are all, DeLillo suggests, in free fall. The plots, myths, institutions we once relied on to provide meaning and purpose are suspended. Our idols have

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 32

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

The Wake of Terror

33

fallen too: “God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here’ ” (236). Like Alzheimer’s patients, all we can do is watch in suspense for what is ever-impending. And one man keeps popping up—like a puppet or a mime—to remind New Yorkers of the catastrophe. He calls himself Falling Man, a performance artist who appears unexpectedly around Manhattan, suspended from various structures, dangling upside down from a harness, dressed in a suit and tie. His name is David Janiak. His art is a happening, a situation. His performances, although lacking the satire and slapstick of the Situationists and also Kommune 1, have the same hit-and-run effect as Kommune 1’s prank of throwing a pie in the face of Vice President Hubert Humphrey when he visited Berlin in 1967.20 Falling Man invokes another fallen figure in the Bible: Lucifer. Shortly after 9/11, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 “Lucifer’s greatest work of art.” He was commenting on Lucifer’s choice to use his high intelligence for destruction, rather than creation. But the analogy outraged many Americans, who interpreted it as an endorsement of the attacks. DeLillo’s source for Falling Man may be more pedestrian: Jeb Corliss—the professional parachute jumper who has orchestrated jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge; the Eiffel Tower; and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—was arrested when he tried to jump from the Empire State Building in April 2006, but a judge dismissed the case in January 2007 (Hartocollis 2007, A21). Every time Janiak appears, he “trails a collective dread, body come down among us all” (DeLillo 2007, 33). To the outraged spectators who see him, Janiak merges in their minds with the horrific memory of the man in the newspaper photo, plummeting from the towers. Janiak dies at 39—apparently from natural causes. He had planned on one final performance, which would take place without a safety harness—a suicide mission. Lianne reads everything she can find about David Janiak obsessively. DeLillo depicts a Google searchin-progress, as Lianne gathers information about Falling Man’s life and death. Thanks to computers, vast quantities of information are at our fingertips, but how are we to make sense of it? What does it mean? While Janiak’s art is agitprop, Lianne embraces a different kind of art. Three years after 9/11, she attends an exhibition of Morandi paintings in Chelsea. Lianne “looked at the painting [for] a long time [. . .] [very] intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see” (210). The scene reprises the setting and characterizations in “Baader-Meinhof,” for as Lianne gazes at the paintings, a man enters and sizes her up. But Lianne deflects his overtures and concentrates on looking. No encounter ensues—except with the art. The theme of perception nevertheless links her to the tale’s unnamed woman, who confesses, “I realized the first day I was only barely looking [. . .] only getting a bare inkling of what’s in these paintings. I’m only just starting to look” (DeLillo 2002, 80). The pleasures of the text in DeLillo’s tale and novel revolve, to an unprecedented degree, around visual art. He describes Richter’s “Funeral” as “the largest

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 33

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

34

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

by far and maybe [the] most breathtaking” (1992, 82). Furthermore, as we saw earlier, aesthetic responses reveal the morality of each character. This Jamesian sensibility is even more pronounced in the novel: Nina Bartos, “the woman who’d given birth to the word beautiful” (DeLillo 2007, 48), fills her home with art and might spend 90 minutes studying three paintings in the Met. Hechinger, in contrast, traffics in art, but his own walls are bare. One section in Chapter 7 is perhaps the most Jamesian; as in The Ambassadors, it frames the action, dialogue, and conflict around a single painting (a Morandi). The lovers argue about the function of art, God, and terrorism; about mortality, morality, and identity. In the course of their long relationship, Nina teaches Hechinger how to see “the light,” which is to say the beauty in art. To do so, she thinks that he must suspend his Marxist critique—the same critique that causes their quarrel about terrorism, which ultimately destroys their bond. Nina is not blameless, however, for she summarily dismisses his defense of the dispossessed. Each character in the novel adapts to the post-9/11 climate by adopting a set of rituals, superstitions, or obsessive-compulsive behaviors. In contrast to her husband’s gambling, Lianne obsesses over the New York Times’s longrunning feature, “Portraits of Grief”—capsule obituaries of 9/11’s victims. She also begins to think about God. God—whose name was on the lips of the terrorists and the passengers in the planes on 9/11. Hechinger tells her that “God used to be an urban Jew; he’s back in the desert now” (DeLillo 2007, 46). In contrast to the Koran’s interdiction, “This Book is not to be doubted” (231), Lianne’s doubts are such a burden that she wishes she could “snuff out the pulse of [her] shaky faith” (65). Once her mother Nina lays dying, however, Lianne finds herself going to church every day. She and her mother both live in the spirit of what is ever-impending, in lost time, falling out of the world. “There was religion,” she thinks, “then there was God” (64). As in DeLillo’s essay and tale, Falling Man describes numerous psychic projections and identifications. But in the novel, everyone is falling. All identities are either confused (Keith’s son thinks bin Laden’s name is Bill Lawton) or double (Martin Ridnour is Ernst Hechinger) or merging (Hammad with Atta) or failing (the Alzheimer’s patients; Lianne’s father and mother). Lianne is attracted to old passport photos, perhaps because they fix the individual’s identity in a specific moment and location: “Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects.” But the passport photos actually record a moment in flux—people in transition, flight, enroute to a new country, and perhaps identity: “Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state [. . .] people [. . .] people on long journeys, people now dead. [. . .] [The Alzheimer’s patients] are not looking out of a tinted mist, as the passport bearers are, but receding into one” (DeLillo 2007, 142). In Falling Man after the terrorist attacks, life takes on a dimension of unreality—disoriented in time and space. The characters feel puny, insignificant.

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 34

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

The Wake of Terror

35

As Keith tells Lianne: “We’re ready to sink into our little lives” (75). Keith comes back home to his wife and son, but he then begins an affair with another World Trade Center survivor; he needs to absorb her experience to comprehend his own. She is the secret sharer of the trauma. Such fusions are not just metaphorical, but literal. In the emergency room at the hospital after the attack, a doctor tells Keith what happens to bystanders who find themselves near a suicide bomber: fragments of bone and flesh from his body become embedded in theirs. Months later, they develop a ghastly aftereffect: these little pellets form bumps and sores on their skin. The medical term for this condition: “organic shrapnel” (16). We are all, DeLillo suggests, the walking wounded, living with organic shrapnel; the very skin of those driven by desperation and violence is seared into our own. “Wake” signifies a ritual of mourning while the body lies in repose—a ritual denied to most victims of September 11. It also signifies the displacement of a body of water, as in a tsunami. It also means coming to consciousness, waking up. Writing in the wake of terror, DeLillo portrays the post-9/11 condition as a diseased, rapidly receding consciousness of what is impending. From BaaderMeinhof to Mohammed Atta, history unfolds inexorably in DeLillo’s essay, story, and novel. All three texts illuminate terror’s long history, hidden logic, and deep structure. All three texts show how far we have traveled in the past three decades, in terms of psychic states as well as nation-states. DeLillo asks the questions America needs to ask in order to see itself: Who were—and are— the willing executioners? How much have we forgotten in the past 30 years? What, 30 years hence, will we remember? DeLillo confronts the repression of memory and the memory of repression, using his considerable craft to give memory and tenderness to all our howling grief about what is past, passing, and to come.

Notes 1. DeLillo portrays Reverend Moon’s use of brainwashing, thought control, and coercion to enforce total obedience. Despite his sponsorship of state terror, Americans seem to know very little about him. Moon was born in 1921. After being excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church of Korea, which saw his views as incompatible with traditional Christianity, Reverend Moon organized the Unification Church in 1954. In 1959, his disciple Young Oon Kim emigrated to establish the American base for the Unification Church, which prophesized that an apocalyptic event would occur in 1967. When that failed to happen, some followers left the Church. Reverend Moon had legal trouble in both Korea and the United States, where he moved to in 1972. The Church flourished in the 1970s and 1980s because of a massive recruitment drive, but Reverend Moon spent 13 months in prison after his 1984 conviction for tax evasion. A megalomaniac with proselytizers throughout the world, he created a group whose mission is to create a council of religious leaders within the framework of the United Nations. To consolidate his influence, he bought the once-renowned UPI wire service and The Washington Times. He hired the children of noted conservative thinkers (including Norman

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 35

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

36

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Pordhoretz’s son John; Paul Weyrich’s daughter, Dawn; Irving Kristol’s daughter, Liz, as well as Tony Snow, the former Fox News anchor and press secretary to George W. Bush (Gorenfeld and Gunzberger). Robert Parry calls the Times “a three billion dollar propaganda organ for the Republican Party.” The mainstream media wholly ignored the story, until Internet journalists John Gorenfeld and Ron Gunzberger reported it on the website www.gorenfeld.net/ book/ (Gorenfeld and Gunzberger 2009). Gorenfeld (2008) exposes Moon’s fascist fundamentalism and nefarious global activities. Gunzberger discusses the 2004 coronation ceremony in “Dark Side of the Moon (Rev. Moon crowned “Messiah” and “King of Heaven” by sitting Congressman)” (2004). My thanks to all the students in my graduate seminar on “Contemporary Literature, Media, and the State” (Fall 2007), particularly to Basit Chaudhry, who pointed out Lianne’s Google search and the terrorists’ distortion of Islam. On Islam, see also Abou El Fadl (2005). Abel (2003, 1243) discusses “In the Ruins of the Future” with particular emphasis on the visual and on the efficacy of language. Aust, ex-editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, in his book chronicles the ideological origins, evolution, and lasting significance of the Baader-Meinhof Group in postwar German history Knowing that the Baader-Meinhof paintings would open old wounds and be enormously controversial, Richter prepared some remarks before the opening exhibition at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany in February 1989, titled “Notes for a press conference, November–December 1988” (Richter 1995a). DeLillo’s most explicit allusion to the destruction of American civil liberties, the subversion of justice, and guilt by association may be his allusion in Falling Man (217–18) to the female attorney who defended the radical Muslim cleric known as the Blind Sheik, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. She insisted that he had the right to a fair trial; she was subsequently accused of aiding the cause of terrorism. Although she is never identified by name in the novel, her name is Lynne Stewart: she was sentenced to 28 months in prison in October 2006, but is free on bail pending appeal. Regardless of the outcome, her prosecution and conviction sends a chilling message to all defense attorneys. On data mining, the terror index, and the Patriot Act see Cole (2004). In April 2002, when “Baader-Meinhof” appeared, Americans did not yet know just how lawless their government would become; the Iraq War was still almost a year away. Numerous books have since appeared documenting malfeasance by the CIA, the White House, and the Justice Department under Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. See Brenkman (2007), Oren (2007), and Clarke (2004). Visual artists obsessed with Baader-Meinhof include Joseph Beuys and Odd Nerdrum, who unequivocally titles one of his paintings “The Murder of Andreas Baader” (Storr, 68–9, 130). In 1978, the film Germany in Autumn debuted. (The title refers to the last 44 days of the radicals’ lives, which became known as the German autumn of terror). The film was a collaboration by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Henrich Böll, and others. A new German film about the group, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, based on Aust’s book, premiered in September 2008. As if to reinforce the parallels DeLillo evokes between 1960s radicalism and the present day, in Berman’s closing chapter, “The ‘68ers and the Tragedy of Iraq,” he concludes that a new generation of resisters must find its own way of speaking about “very old and wrenching and unresolvable arguments. About resistance,

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 36

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

The Wake of Terror

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

37

and collaboration. [. . .] About totalitarianism and antitotalitarianism. About liberal and humanitarian intervention” (2005, 311). For more on the function of black and white in Richter, see Storr (2000, 112). Karen Wilkin describes Morandi’s “nearly obsessive investigation of perception that produced images at once remarkable for their repetitiveness and for their subtle variation” (1997, 99). His still lifes are objects that seem to have been “discarded” or “suffered some kind of damage” (102). His “enigmatic pictures [are] unforgettably intense” (122). For more on the significance of the Morandi still lifes in Falling Man, see Julia Apitzsch’s essay in this volume. Jacques Lacan discusses anamorphorsis and its relation to art in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978, 67–90). See also Žižek (1989a, 30–55; 1989b, 1–53). In this context, see also Luc Lang’s remarks on Richter (1995, 39). See Owens (1992, 132–3). Owens also points out that Haacke exposed the corporate funding behind the culture industry—Mobil, Chase, Allied Chemical, and American Cyanamid. See Smiley (2005), who mistakenly identifies Felix Ensslin’s father, as a member of the Baader-Meinhof group; in fact, it was his mother, Gudrun, who was one of the ringleaders. See Landler (2007). Mohnhaupt’s release caused such a furor that President Horst Köhler subsequently rejected the clemency appeals of two other Baader-Meinhof Group members, Christian Klar and Birgit Hogefeld (“German President”). See Khaled Abou El Fadl (2005, 220–1). See Storr, who also notes that Richter “darkens the ligature around [Meinhof’s neck] [. . .] emphasizing the horrible manner of her death” (2000, 108). See Storr (2000, 48), who contrasts the prank against Hubert Humphrey in 1967 with the escalation of violence (by protestors and the police) that occurred the same year. Specifically, on June 2, 1967, a young pacifist student named Benno Ohnesorg, who had never before participated in a demonstration, was shot and killed by the police in West Berlin, during a peaceful protest against the state visit by the Shah of Iran. That event became the flash point after which Baader-Meinhof issued a call to arms.

Works Cited Abel, M. (2003), “Don DeLillo’s In the ruins of the future: Literature, images, and the rhetoric of seeing 9/11.” PMLA 118, 5: 1236–50. Abou El Fadl, K. M. (2005), The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. New York: Harper. Aust, S. (1987), The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Bodley Head. Benjamin, W. (1969), “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), trans. Harry Zohn, 217–68. New York: Schocken. Berman, P. (2005), Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath. New York: Soft Skull. Brenkman, J. (2007), The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought Since September 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clarke, R. A. (2004), Against all Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press.

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 37

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

38

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Cole, D. (2004), “Uncle Sam is watching you.” The New York Review of Books, November 18, 56–60. DeLillo, D. (1991), Mao II. New York: Viking. —(2001), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December, 33–40. —(2002), “Baader-Meinhof.” The New Yorker, April, 78–82. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. “German President Horst Köhler rejects early release for Christian Klar,” (2007), Spiegel Online, May 7. www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,481418,00. html. Gorenfeld, J. (2008), Bad moon rising: How Rev. Moon created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom. Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint. Gorenfeld, J. and Gunzberger, R. (2009), “King of America.” www.gorenfeld.net/book/ Grieshaber, K. (2005), “An art exhibition raises the issue of terrorism.” The New York Times, January 29, A24. Gunzberger, R. (2004), “Dark side of the moon” (Rev. Moon crowned “Messiah” and “King of Heaven” by sitting Congressmen). www.FreeRepublic.com/focus/f-news/ 1155664/posts. Hartocollis, A. (2007), “Foiled daredevil fares better in court.” New York Times, January 18, A21. Houen, A. (2002), Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacan, J. (1978), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Landler, M. (2007), “Germany relives 1970s terror as 2 seek release from jail.” The New York Times, February 7. www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/world/europe/07reds.html. Lang, L. (1995), “The photographer’s hand: Phenomenology in politics,” in, JeanPhillip Antoine, Gertrud Koch, and Lang (eds), Gerhard Richter, 29–52. Paris: Editions Dis Voir. Milton, J. (1968), The poems of John Milton, John Carrey and Alastair Fowler (eds), London: Longman. O’Harrow, R. and Nakashima, E. (2008), “National dragnet is a click away.” The Washington Post, March 6, A1, A5. Oren, M. B. (2007), Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. New York: Norton. Owens, C. (1992), “From work to frame, or, is there life after ‘the death of the author?’ ” in Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (eds), Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, 122–39. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parry, R. (2006), “The GOP’s $3 billion propaganda organ.” Consortium News, December 27. www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html. Richter, G. (1995a), “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the cycle 18 October 1977, 1989,” in, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), trans. David Britt, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–1993, 183–207. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —(1995b), “From a letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975,” in Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), trans. David Britt, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–1993,82–3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 38

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

The Wake of Terror

39

—(1995c), “Notes for a press conference, November–December 1988,” in Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), trans. David Britt, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–1993,. 173–82. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rowe, J. C. (2004), “Mao II and the war on terrorism.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103: 21–43. Smiley, S. (2005), “Germany debates ‘terrorist chic.’” The Washington Post, February 20, A25. Storr, R. (ed.) (2000), Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Wilkin, K. (1997), Giorgio Morandi. New York: Rizzoli. Žižek, S. (1989a), Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. —(1989b), The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

PSchweighauser_01_Final.indd 39

5/13/2010 8:45:59 AM

Chapter 2

Grieving and Memory in Don DeLillo’s FALLING MAN Silvia Caporale Bizzini

The task of the mind is to understand what happened, and this understanding, according to Hegel, is man’s way of reconciling himself with reality; its actual end is to be at peace with the world. (Hannah Arendt, “The Gap between Past and Future”) She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

In a work in progress entitled “Memory, Autobiography, History,” John F. Kihlstrom refers to trauma therapy as a means of recovering memories from the past in order to reconstruct the reality that has been banished by tragic events in individual lives.1 Remembering is seen as a way to reconstruct a lost world and a lost perception of self. Within a completely different disciplinary context, but with the rise of totalitarianism in mind, Hannah Arendt focused on the importance of tradition and remembrance in the perception of one’s identity, understood both as individual awareness of self and as a feeling of belonging to a community. Human consciousness originates from the (cultural) dialogue that we maintain with our past, and that situates us in the present; when we are deprived of these points of reference, a crisis results: For remembrance, which is only one, though one of the most important, modes of thought, is helpless outside a pre-established framework of reference, and the human mind is only to the rarest occasions capable of retaining something which is altogether connected [. . .] without the articulation accomplished by remembrance, there simply was no story left that could be told. (Arendt 1977, 5–6)

Remembrance, then, is a primary element in the process of ontological reconstruction, but it is not the only one I am interested in: the other is storytelling as public performance. In Men in Dark Times (1968), Arendt points out that to perform in public is a political act because the subject is made visible by having his or her message seen and heard by many. This idea also informs The Human Condition (1998) where Arendt elaborates on her understanding of storytelling as an act of freedom and a move into public discourse: the realm of the polis understood as democratic dialogue.2 I believe that Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) makes a political statement in its negotiation of these two concepts: remembrance and storytelling. At the same time, DeLillo’s novel moves away from more classical conceptions of

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 40

5/13/2010 8:45:48 AM

Grieving and Memory in DeLillo’s Falling Man

41

narrative in order to focus on a small group of characters whose struggles stand in for a collective condition. Falling Man does not represent collective paranoia but seeks to understand, through depictions of grief and memory work, the events that took place on September 11, 2001, thus transforming them into shared memories and starting the process of healing. DeLillo’s novel is an ambiguous text, a reflection in progress that projects onto the reader the epistemological chaos, insecurity, and uncertainty of Western societies in the wake of 9/11. In “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children,” James Berger uses the Biblical reference to the destruction of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor to refer to the violent disappearance of the known social order after the terrorist act, the coming of a chaotic perception of the real, and the ensuing collective trauma. Berger points out that language becomes the site of ontological and epistemological tensions at the same time that individuals project onto it the necessity to voice their traumatized selves: Language is broken—has been traumatically broken—yet remains nevertheless ideologically imprisoning. There is some other language (whether divine, traumatic, or neurological), but we have only our existing broken language with which to summon and encounter it. Thus, the transcendent can only be expressed or addressed in terms of the traumatic. (Berger 2005, 346)

According to Philip Tew, novels published after 9/11 can be considered as belonging to “a traumatological rather than postmodern bent” (2007, 190). The traumatological, he insists, is rooted within certain historical circumstances that simultaneously blow apart both our sense of identity and the social order. Tew draws a clear distinction between “trauma-culture fiction” (192) and the traumatological. The first originates in the subject’s private life-story and is, at times, representative of the impossibility of coming to terms with the order of things that surrounds us, while the latter aims at analyzing how groups respond to what is considered as a common threat in a clearly defined historical moment in time and space. My point is that Falling Man does not aim to tell a story that is centered on the spectacle of terrorism and terror, even though it retains most of DeLillo’s fictional themes and theoretical nodal points such as the analysis of postmodern society or his interest in the power of images, in language, and in cultural history. Rather, DeLillo’s 9/11 novel probes how we react to terror and how we seek reasons in order to come to terms with a reality that is falling to pieces not only metaphorically but also physically. This is exemplified by the beginning of Falling Man and of Keith Neudecker’s story. The text starts with a third-person narrator and with short and broken sentences in order to stress the sensation of chaos and loss of understanding: The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 41

5/13/2010 8:45:48 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

42

walked away from it and into it at the same time [. . .]. He kept on walking [. . .] and things kept falling. (4)

In this apocalyptic context, storytelling and writing become both the means of a verbal reconstruction of tradition and the real and the point of contact between characters that people an apparently choral novel but who inhabit different existential spheres.

1. Writing the Trauma Alex Houen states that “A trauma that is so real it can only be experienced as a kind of fiction” (419). He goes on to explain that writing can convey the lived tragedy but is only partially able to transform it into images: “For anyone who was an actual victim, what lay at the heart of the disaster was the traumatic crossing between mediation and visceral reality” (419). 9/11, it seems, has brought forth a reality too harsh to be true, too hard to believe, and never before experienced by North Americans. Against that background, it is linguistic mediations that allow us to assimilate the events on 9/11 and to engage in a kind of collective scriptotherapy that enables us to work through the mourning. Houen reminds us that in the days following the terrorist attack, various periodicals requested writers to transform the tragedy into words in order to give voice to collective grieving, to come up with “personal responses that could translate suspension of belief into emotional eloquence for a public forum” (420). Houen then refers to the introduction of Ulrich Baer’s anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (2002), quoting Baer’s categorization of writing modes in relation to the attack: One way is as therapeutic absorption, whereby stories “transform even [the] most violent transformations by shaping them into words” [Baer 2002, 3]. [. . .] A second way is as “unconscious history-writing of the world: as a form of expression that uncannily registers subtle shifts in experience and changes a reality before they can be consciously grasped to have fully taken place” [5]. The third way, which Baer specifically associates with novels, is as apotropaic defense. (Houen 2004, 421)

While Baer relates writing and memory to the grieving and healing process, Anthony Kubiak follows Roland Barthes in understanding narrative as the process of transforming memory and the unconscious into words: “The principle of narrative then, supersedes ‘the literary,’ the mythic, the ideological, and even in some sense, the syntactic. Narrative seems [. . .] somatic, organic, the physical impulse of consciousness itself” (295). Kubiak suggests that terrorism aims at telling its stories not through its victims’ gaze but through the spectators’ gaze: “The ability of narrative (fictional or not) to construct a world that is fearful, uncertain and dangerous is its link to terror” (298). Moreover, he reminds us of Paul Ricoeur’s contention that the main aim of stories is to (re)

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 42

5/13/2010 8:45:48 AM

Grieving and Memory in DeLillo’s Falling Man

43

create time and history as each narrative, from fiction to autobiography, determine a timeline through the use of memory (299). In fighting back the spectacle of terror as a crucially significant element of the contemporary definition of the real, DeLillo meets the writer’s responsibility not to forget by writing about the victims’ memory, their pictures, and their personal objects. It is in this sense that he writes: The cell phones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women. The box cutters and credit cards [. . .] These are among the smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day. We need them, even the common tools of the terrorists, to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response. (DeLillo 2001, 35)

In Falling Man, each of the main characters carries out a solitary negotiation with a reality that has been shattered by a barbaric act of seemingly nonsensical cruelty and the resulting feeling of defenselessness. In such a traumatic context, memory is transformed into something real through the “narrative drive” (Kubiak 2004, 295). For instance, once a week, Lianne Glenn, Keith’s estranged wife, meets a small group of people suffering from the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The therapeutic session focuses on remembering their lives, perhaps the last chance they will have to be able to connect their present with their past before both fade for good. They first write about their storyline and then read it aloud: Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefiguring that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff. But there were a thousand high times the members experienced, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows. [. . .] They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves. [. . .] Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. Anna wrote about the revelation of writing itself, how she hadn’t known she could write ten words and now look what comes pouring out [. . .] There was one subject the members wanted to write about, insistently, all of them but Omar H. It made Omar nervous but he agreed in the end. They wanted to write about the planes. (DeLillo 2007, 30–1)

The narratives of these people—Carmen G., Benny T., Rosellen S.—highlight their struggle against the deterioration of an irretrievably fading perception of self in the painful and unstoppable progression of the disease. They clearly situate themselves as resilient subjects because their narratives are a way to structure what is left of their life experience in the private and public spheres insofar. As Paul John Eakin suggests, “narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive experience” (115). These characters

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 43

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

44

fight against Alzheimer’s disease and at the same time contradict theorizations of the society of the spectacle, specifically the notion that history and memory are substituted by images and the commodification of culture so that any lived experience is converted into an apparently eternal present that leads to collective amnesia (Best 1995, xii). Theirs in an act of resistance that testifies to the fact that, “after all, words do represent people and things” (Wilson 1995, 57). These characters also defy Philip Tew’s distinction between “trauma-culture fiction” and “traumatological narrative.” In their case, memory and writing help in a double process of healing; the private fight against disease and—in terms of the Arendtian polis—the public need to recover and/or preserve memories to strengthen ties with the public realm of (historical) collective grieving.

2. Negotiating Tradition One of Hanna Arendt’s most basic and crucial notions is that of “traditional categories,” understood as realizations of “the binding authority of tradition” (Kohn 1997, xxi). When such categories are violently shattered (as in the case of Nazism and other totalitarian regimes), our old sense of self is at stake because, as Kohn aptly puts it, it is extremely “difficult [. . .] for anyone to think for him- or herself in the gap that separates the ‘no longer’ from the ‘not yet’ ” (xxi). In Between Past and Future (1977), Arendt insists that tradition gives to us the cultural categories that we use to name what defines our reality and our understanding of ourselves as individuals: Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition—which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are [. . .]—there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future. (5)

Anne Longmuir points out that “[c]ritics have frequently remarked about DeLillo’s prescience: after September 11, 2001, DeLillo’s longstanding engagement with the relationship of the United States to the Middle East and Islamic fundamentalism confirms him as one of America’s most important and shrewd cultural commentators” (105). From this perspective, Falling Man does retain the nodal points that define his writings but at the same time, it presents a tense duality and ambiguity in relation to the role that tradition plays within the novel and how some of the characters in the text cling to their traditional cultural values in their attempt to redefine their subjectivity. Berger suggests that people who suffer from trauma because of a personal encounter with violence and experience of pain feel the need to restore the epistemological and ontological points of references they had prior to the upheaval that devastated their lives: “The logic and desire both of terrorism and of antiterrorism are to restore the imagined former state: of social harmony and perfect correspondence between word and thing” (343). Thus, people affected by trauma seek to

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 44

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Grieving and Memory in DeLillo’s Falling Man

45

recover the old shattered symbolic order and, in order to do so a new identification with traditional cultural values can be seen as a way to heal their wounded selves. In The Names (1982), for example, DeLillo’s reference to ancient languages and language is a constant presence in the text, but in the end, as Longmuir suggests (106), we wonder if language in this novel is ever more than a kind of intellectual game in the wake of structuralism and other inspiring and appealing language theories. In contrast, in Falling Man, Lianne’s interest in and near obsession with ancient languages and old books details her search for a link between her beliefs and those of other cultures. Her work as an editor allows Lianne to retain a critical connection with her own cultural tradition, the rational thought that has defined and structured her individuality and liberal frame of mind: There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’s doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. (DeLillo 2007, 65)

It is because of this need for rationality and the responsibility for understanding the reasons of the other that Lianne desperately wants to edit a book no other editor is willing to accept: an essay on plane hijacking written by a retired aeronautical engineer: “Lianne didn’t care how dense, raveled, and intimidating the material might be or how finally unprophetic. This is what she wanted” (139–40). She edits this manual at the same time as another difficult and demanding text, one on ancient languages, a mixture of written and graphic codes that together impart to her a sense of disappeared cultures that link her present with a past that she can only imagine. In the process, her coming to terms with the tragedy is channeled through the written word and a logical, consistent effort to control her grieving and her response to suffering. Lianne’s need to deal with terror and personal fear is related to a deeper necessity to know if two cultures—one represented by the book on ancient languages (the past) and the other represented by the book on hijacking (the present)—can ever come to know and understand one another. Nonetheless, this self-protective attitude is suddenly shaken by the rage she feels when she hears music with an Arabic resonance coming persistently from her neighbor’s flat. At Lianne’s enraged verbal attack, Elena, her neighbor, calmly answers back: “It’s music. You want to take it personally what can I tell you?” (119). While words and images are there as subtexts that allow Lianne both to recuperate and interrogate tradition rationally, the exoticism of the music powerfully touches her on a more intimate, transcendent, and unconscious level and presents a challenge to her rationalizing response to suffering. Lianne can face reading a table full of numbers on hijacking or decode ancient writings but she cannot deal with the other’s emotional roots when her own emotions of trauma and suffering are being liberated from the cage of rational understanding imposed on her from without.

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 45

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

46

As already indicated, Arendt in Between Past and Future firmly proclaims that a historical time continuum in rational terms is only possible if we retain those names and words from the past that guide us and help us preserve our capacity for telling our own (his)story: “[W]ithout the articulation accomplished by remembrance, there simply was no story left that could be told” (1977, 6). Elsewhere, she adds that it is always through remembrance that the work of art defies mortality (Arendt 1998, 43). Nina Bartos, Lianne’s mother, is a fine intellectual and a staunch defender of the cultural tradition she has taught and written about during her academic career as a Professor of Art History. Nina is resisting both her poor health and the trauma caused by the bombing, which has caused a private and a public suffering that she fights the only possible way she knows: [S]he walked up the street to the Metropolitan Museum and looked at pictures. She looked at three or four pictures in an hour and a half of looking. She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip of the eye and mind, on memory and identity. Then she came home and read. She read and slept. (DeLillo 2007, 11; my emphasis)

Tradition, as stressed above, is at the heart of the conversation we have with ourselves and with our consciousness, and Nina is firmly intent on not interrupting that dialogue. Nevertheless, as Lianne’s inner conflict highlights, the relationship that contemporary Western societies maintain with tradition is marked by tensions and a constant questioning of inherited cultural categories. That tension is also negotiated by Nina Bartos and Martin Ridnour, her German lover of 20 years, an art merchant who in his youth supported the radical left: He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the Fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I am not sure what they did. I think he was in Italy for a while in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know. (146)

In Falling Man, the presence of two characters—Martin and Nina—highlights the epistemological ambiguity and fracture within Western culture that underlies all cultural discourses on the reasons leading up to the events of September 11, 2001. On one side of the fray, we find Nina, who reads the violent clash between cultures in terms of religious and cultural difference; on the other side, we find Martin, who performs an analysis that subreptitiously addresses issues of cultural and economic imperialism with their burden of structural violence: “They strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies.” He spoke softly, looking into the carpet. “One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die.”

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 46

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Grieving and Memory in DeLillo’s Falling Man

47

“God is great,” she said. “Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.” (46–7)

While Nina stubbornly clings to Giorgio Morandi’s paintings as both icons of Western civilization and a worldly projection of her own previous life—Martin suggests a more materialist reading of the political and intellectual reasons for the terrorist attack.

3. Communication as Interior Reconciliation In spite of the differences between DeLillo’s characters in Falling Man, they all share something in common: a deep and imperative need to come to terms with the disappearance of an earlier, seemingly more secure and controlled environment. Most of the novel’s characters experience a symbolic coming to awareness that has its source in the death of others, although Hammad—one of the terrorists on the planes—interprets death as a way of completing the one task that will ultimately give meaning to his life: “God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life. He wore a bomb vest and knew he was a man now, finally, ready to close the distance to God” (172). In the intricate social puzzle that makes up DeLillo’s portrayal of human disarray, we meet a number of life stories that exemplify the complex range of responses to emotional distress. In this novel, we encounter Hammad’s Bildung as an inversion of the Western enlightened narrative of the individual’s sentimental education; the public performances of David Janiak—the novel’s eponymous figure—as a tribute to the memory of the lost ones; and the children’s confused reconstruction of the attack; their language games and mispronunciation of Bin Laden’s name (“Bill Lawton”). One way or another, these characters and their survival strategies are both visually and physically connected with the outside world—be it in the form of a book or a painting, of a wall to climb or of a plane to look for in the sky. Keith Neudecker’s quest for inner reconciliation, however, proceeds along somewhat different lines. He is a survivor from the North Tower who witnessed, as we learn in the final chapter, the death of Rumsey, one of his closest friends. Slightly injured, Keith wanders aimlessly for some hours and finally ends up at his estranged family’s place. In contrast to Nina or Lianne, who partially retain a visual perception in their need to redefine the role of tradition and remembrance in the elaboration of grieving, in Keith’s healing process, images are forcefully suppressed—at times unsuccessfully—as they become a sort of obstacle impeding him from moving on. Joseph Dewey stresses that: [t]he problem, as DeLillo has articulated now across five decades of fiction, is the loss of the authentic self after a half-century assault of images from film,

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 47

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

48

television, tabloids, and advertising that have produced a shallow culture too enamored of simulations, unable to respond to authentic emotional moments without recourse to media models. (6)

In a culture that yearns for images, Falling Man is a mosaic made up from interrelated histories where prefabricated images are basic starting points for a deeper reflection on life in which memory and narrative are the main concepts. In Dewey’s words, “In the act of recording, in the precise engineering of prose, the transient becomes stable; the inconsequential, significant; the neglected, the examined” (10). Keith is lost in an outer cartography that he is unable to recognize and that does not display clear and known symbols of identification: “The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now” (DeLillo 2007, 3). Thus, this traumatized New York lawyer feels the need to look meekly within himself and dive into an intimate process of redefining subjectivity. Keith, it emerges, yearns to recuperate something that really never existed—such as a close relationship with Lianne and his son— and he tries to fill the void in his soul by recovering sensations and emotions which, in fact, never characterized his way of being: It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. (66)

Keith is unable to connect with his new nightmarish perspective on reality and he is trapped in an existential situation very close to psychological paralysis. He rejects the relief images offer to make sense of what happened, and he rejects images as a memory aid to redefine the past and give meaning to his present even as he senses that he needs to do precisely that. Keith’s search for some kind of healing eventually revolves around two activities: communication and playing poker, which in the context of his present life story come to represent his connection with both the materiality of life and a ceremonial perception of it. The conversations he has with Florence Givens, another survivor from the North tower, will soon become the nodal point of his therapeutic path. Healing emerges as a possibility through words and a constant repetition of the events that links these two people. They share a sense of closeness that nobody else can understand, and which will develop into an intimate but transitory bond where speech finally transforms memories into words that help both in handling nightmares and trauma: They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest details, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 48

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Grieving and Memory in DeLillo’s Falling Man

49

of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women. (91)

But the need to share his grief is not the only way Keith Neudecker tries to overcome suffering. As I have indicated earlier, the game of poker is another of Keith’s strategies of survival and rebirth. Before the terrorist attacks, he played poker once a week with a group of friends. This was a recurring event that represented a steady point in his life, possibly the only one. After 9/11, he invests in poker playing with an even stronger sense of rituality: the lost ritual of the weekly game is now understood as a search for a new spirituality and a new inner reality. By devoting his life to professional poker games—Keith’s final election—he pays homage to all his poker mates that died in the attacks.

4. Conclusion Despite the lingering presence of the images of the falling twin towers, visual perception in Falling Man gradually recedes to make room for a group of characters who do not try to find their place as individuals within a society of spectacle. Instead, they struggle to embark on an introspective process to recover their traumatized selves. After September 11, their old points of reference are shaken to the foundations. What results is a need to revise, analyze, and recuperate personal histories and memories to escape ontological chaos. In Dewey’s words, which were written before the publication of Falling Man, “most recently, [DeLillo] has turned to the implications of the soul, the difficult confirmation of a viable spiritual dimension” (8). In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (2001), DeLillo explains the role of the writer in relation to memory work after 9/11. In a world transfigured by rage and terror, the writer’s role is to give a voice to those who cannot speak, to add a human dimension to desolation and wreckage: “The writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space” (39). And he adds, “There are a hundred thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington and the world [. . .] Stories generating others and people running north out of the rumbling smoke and ash [. . .] and it is precisely these stories that shape our response to the event” (34). The characters that people Falling Man are to some extent representative of what DeLillo describes; each of them relies on his or her own survival strategies: culture, politics, tradition, storytelling, language games, and a poker tournament. In their own ways, they aim at recovering their old selves in a cartography that is not recognizable anymore. These characters’ narratives, nightmares, and obsessions highlight the need to recuperate and understand the past in order to face the present. DeLillo writes that: “[t]he writer wants to understand what this day has done to us” (39), but in the end, memories are all that is left: they are the bridge that spans the past and the future.

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 49

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

50

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Notes 1. Kihlstrom’s work is available online at socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/rmpa00. htm. See also Kihlstrom’s essay in Proteus for a previously published version. 2. In The Human Condition, Arendt states: “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together” (1998, 198).

Works Cited Arendt, H. (1968). Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. —(1977), Between Past and Future. London: Penguin. —(1998), The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baer, U. (ed.) (2002), 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. New York: New York University Press. Berger, J. (2005), “Falling towers and postmodern wild children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and turns against language.” PMLA, 120, 2: 341–61. Best, S. (1995), The Politics of Historical Vision. New York: Guilford Press. DeLillo, D. (2001), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s Magazine, December, 33–40. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Dewey, J. (2006), Between Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Eakin, J. P. (2001). “Breaking rules: The consequences of self-narration.” Biography, 24.1: 113–27. Houen, A. (2004), “Novel spaces and taking place(s) in the wake of September 11.” Studies in the Novel, 36, 3: 419–37. Kihlstrom, J. F. (2002), “Memory, autobiography, history.” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, 19, 6: 1–6. —(2009), Memory, Autobiography, History. University of California, Berkeley. socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/rmpa00.htm. Kohn, J. (1977), “Introduction,” in Between Past and Future, by Hanna Arendt, vii–xxii. London: Penguin. Kubiak, A. (2004), “Spelling it out: Narrative typologies of terror.” Studies in the Novel, 36, 3: 294–301. Longmuir, A. (2005), “The language of history: Don DeLillo’s The Names and the Iranian hostage crisis.” Critique, 46, 2: 105–20. Tew, P. (2007), The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum. Wilson, S. (1995), Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

PSchweighauser_02_Final.indd 50

5/13/2010 8:45:49 AM

Chapter 3

Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the Terrorist in FALLING MAN Sascha Pöhlmann With so much known about 9/11, and with ever more information being added to the vast network of stories that describe, represent, imagine, discuss, question, mourn, and explain the terrorist act, the persisting silences also become more of a presence. The project Here is New York (2004) serves as a striking illustration of this: while it collects an amazing number of images in its online “democracy of photographs,” its “victims” category presents only the presentable—people walking through the rubble and gray haze, standing, sitting, lying down, certainly deeply shocked, but in each case alive. There are no dying people; the only people missing or dead are present-twice-removed, as photos within the photos, held by the living; most notably, there is not a single photograph of a person falling from one of the Twin Towers. The category “victims” omits the unspeakable and deals with the vagaries of representing these deaths by trying not to represent them. Like any traumatic event, 9/11 has such blank spaces where representation fails. The very term “9/11” is designed to speak about what cannot be spoken about, and it becomes both more and less significant with every iteration, just like “Chernobyl.” In Wittgensteinian fashion, we persist in running against the walls of our linguistic and representational cage, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) can be read as another attempt to perform that run. This essay focuses on the novel’s representation of two particularly blank spaces in the discursive network of 9/11, probably the ones that most definitely resist being known and narrated: the events inside the two planes about to hit the Twin Towers, and the minds of the terrorists that acted in these planes. I argue that, on the one hand, Falling Man accepts these sites as unrepresentable, treating them with almost metafictional care, and successfully surrounding them with narratives that emphasize a plurality of viewpoints rather than a singular explanation. On the other hand, Falling Man ultimately fails to leave dominant ideological frameworks precisely in its attempts at representation, and, despite its own occasional resistance, it does not succeed in imagining the terrorist as anything other than an Orientalist construction of an Islamist terrorist. This is not to argue that DeLillo here falls short of the expectations we might have of him as a postmodern writer, but rather that a hasty categorization of Falling Man as postmodern may prevent us from paying attention to how modes of representation shift within the text. As Philipp Schweighauser points out, DeLillo’s public pronouncements—indeed like those of many other postmodern authors—testify to his “unequivocal endorsement of liberal humanist beliefs in the inviolable strength and integrity of the individual, the

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 51

5/13/2010 8:45:34 AM

52

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

universal applicability of human rights, and the power of literature to transcend the context(s) of its production” (2006, 97). Therefore, my analysis of the representation of the terrorist in Falling Man should not be misconstrued as a critique of DeLillo’s conformity or nonconformity to postmodern tenets. I rather seek to find out how narrative strategies of representation vary throughout Falling Man, and what effect these variations have on the dichotomy between the perpetrator and the victim of terrorism that the novel is so deeply concerned with. Despite my critique of ideologically problematic aspects of Falling Man, I maintain that the novel’s persistent desire to represent the unrepresentable forces its readers, especially literary critics, to reevaluate the terms in which they think about 9/11 fiction. It is hardly surprising that, with just about everyone agreeing right after the event that 9/11 had changed the world forever— literary scholars would also jump at the opportunity to forge a new category. Thus, “post-9/11 fiction” was born. Under close scrutiny, however, the term reveals itself as unfortunate and of limited use at best. It says nothing as a temporal category, and as a critical term, it addresses a body of literature of undeniable interest and significance, but one that is far too small to merit the all-encompassing usage of the term. To my mind, “9/11 fiction” suffices as a precise enough categorization, which does not suggest that a small set of texts that negotiate a specific subject matter (“9/11”) define a whole literary era. Of course, “post-9/11 fiction” already has its canon, which is often accepted all too uncritically; the unavoidable text being Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a novel that is often presented as a genre defining text. One must, however, wonder how much critical acclaim the novel would have actually gotten if it had not used 9/11 as a backdrop. Without the 9/11 bonus and the novel’s attendant evocation of the desire for contemporary mythmaking and narrative “healing,” readers may have been more likely to consider the text as merely a sentimental narrative with an insufferable protagonist who is constructed as weakly as the child narrator in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006)—another novel that fails to carry the burden of its emphatically serious story. While its allegedly “experimental” graphic narrative elements in the text strive to be more than illustrations of what is narrated, they mostly fail to carry the burden of more meanings. Reading Foer’s novel after, say, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) is like picking up Coelho’s The Alchemist (1993) after Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). The most interesting fictional texts dealing with 9/11 are those that engage the event head-on, which does not necessarily mean that they attempt to recreate its events in fiction, but that they go beyond using the events as mere backdrops to make otherwise uninteresting stories interesting (and to make the books marketable). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) is as much about 9/11 as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is about Pearl Harbor. Let me note that my judgment of such novels does not amount to a demand for realism; it is a protest against exploitation.

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 52

5/13/2010 8:45:34 AM

Collapsing Identities

53

Transforming a Pynchonian dictum, one might say that 9/11 fiction has most often decided not only to “[a]pproach and avoid” (Pynchon 2000, 55) but also to “avoid the approach,” the approach of the planes on the Twin Towers, that is. Virtually everything about 9/11 is well-documented, but our stories hardly ever reach inside those planes as they approach their civilian targets. These unrepresented sites seem among the most demanding ones for 9/11 narratives, and the urge to represent them becomes especially acute since historical truth seems hard to come by. Especially the terrorists constitute such a problematic node in the narrative network about 9/11. While their victims on the planes and in the towers were woven into the vast web of American stories, for example by investing the words “Let’s roll” with patriotic meaning, the perpetrators resist this incorporation, since putting their pieces into the puzzle would force us to seek conclusive answers to the overwhelming question of “why?” Although we know certain facts about the terrorists and about the planes they changed into weapons, they remain within the realm of the speculative and the subjunctive. As such, they present the most profound challenge to the fictionalization of the events of September 11, 2001. With Falling Man, DeLillo enters this contested speculative territory. While he does not shrink from addressing the attacks of 9/11 in all their traumatizing impact, his readers quickly realize that the dominant narrative focus is on the white upper-middle class. The text thereby provides a center—albeit an unstable one—from which we are invited to read the lives of their marginal opposites, the terrorists. Yet even in its characterizations of terrorists, Falling Man does not maintain an unequivocally binary opposition. Instead, it works with dichotomies that are not exactly deconstructed but shot through with crosslinks and inversions to such an extent that readers cannot fully recognize the problematic construction of American victim versus Islamist terrorist that they know from mainstream media reports since 9/11. DeLillo does work with binary oppositions, and while Falling Man at least raises some doubts about their validity, its representation of the terrorists ultimately follows Orientalist patterns and thus subscribes to what Edward Said has famously defined as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” of managing and producing “the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period” (2003, 3). Among all the narratives of “with us or against us” suffusing 9/11 discourse, one might want to consider DeLillo’s partial success in challenging dichotomies quite an achievement. But it is not enough. In the final analysis, Falling Man fails to imagine the Islamist terrorist in terms that are different from or more sophisticated than the dominant post-9/11 Orientalist discourse. There is a problem of representation at the heart of this matter, one that is relevant for 9/11 fiction in general. How can Falling Man even be said to fail to imagine the Islamist terrorist “properly” when, arguably, fiction is neither capable of communicating a mind nor concerned with psychological and

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 53

5/13/2010 8:45:34 AM

54

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

epistemological transfers from author to reader? How can we blame the novel for not giving us the “realistic” terrorist but his caricature if the true person can never be reached by way of representation? This question misses the point, though, since it demands a verisimilitude outside of ideology and an access point to an objective reality beyond mediation. Falling Man cannot be criticized for not presenting a “real terrorist” to its readers, but it can be criticized for ultimately offering only a singular image of the terrorist that remains within the dominant framework of representations and fails to equal the complexity with which other characters are imagined in the novel. 9/11 fiction does not need a critique of veracity; it needs an ideology critique. These two conflicting assessments of the status of representation—which revolve either around issues of veracity or around issues of ideology—are found concisely in Birgit Däwes’s challenge to Alfred Hornung’s contention that “the postmodernist principles of relativity and playful signification have collapsed with the World Trade Center” (2007, 521). Däwes argues that “ ‘Ground Zero Literature’ does not necessarily abandon the principles of relativity, pluralism, and self-reflexiveness which postmodernism cherished” (522), and Falling Man for the most part conforms to that view. It does, however, retreat from a pluralist approach where it presents a singular image of the terrorist that offers none of the self-reflexive ambivalences that characterize other passages. In an interview with Mark Binelli, DeLillo explains that he wanted to engage 9/11 directly, and in doing so, he speaks of a will to verisimilitude: “I didn’t want to write a novel in which the attacks occur over the character’s right shoulder and affect a few lives in a distant sort of way. I wanted to be in the towers and in the planes” (2007; my emphasis). In entering these blank spaces of the unrepresentable, Falling Man leaves behind its ambivalences and settles for representation according to convention instead of imagination. Before entering the towers and planes, and before pretending to enter the mind of the terrorist, the novel does not go easy on readers’ preconceived notions of perpetrator and victim. Falling Man self-reflexively comments on the problems of representing the terrorists when the people in Lianne’s therapeutic writing group find themselves unable to write about them: “No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men coming here to kill us” (63–4). Anna responds to this by acknowledging the unspeakable: “But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names” (64). Lianne experiences a similar distance between representation and what is represented later on, when she remembers the passport photos from her lover Martin Ridnour’s collection: “She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs” (142). This is the epistemological limit she and the members of the writing group

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 54

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Collapsing Identities

55

are faced with: to know representations but not the real person represented. In the course of the novel, this limit is, however, transcended by way of representations of terrorists that are not marked as representations. In this context, the text also comments on what is not represented: “She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license” (19). Lianne already imposes her interpretation onto the surface of the photo by reading it in hindsight and investing it with meaning. And she performs a similar reading with the equally famous photograph of the man falling from one of the towers: “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” (222). Lianne reads Atta’s representation on the basis of her knowledge that he was a terrorist and murderer; and her reading of Richard Drew’s photograph is fueled by her desire to find meaning in the falling man’s death. To construct the victim as angelic is a move similar to the hyperpatriotic practice of calling all victims American heroes. In all cases, one image is imposed onto another, and our readings are determined or at least influenced by the conditions under which meaning is produced and circulated. Remembering a trip to Cairo, where she is defined and judged through the eyes of ethnic others, Lianne tells of her own experience of this process of meaning-making and identity formation. What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain. (184–5)

Louis Althusser argues that “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself’ ” (1971, 182). In the passage from Falling Man quoted above, Lianne is interpellated by the crowd, accepting their hail as something that addresses and defines her, assuming and recognizing a subjectivity she was formerly not aware of. This particular white subjectivity haunts her as she ponders her lover’s possible terrorist past: “Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her—one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white” (DeLillo 2007, 195). She recognizes her place within a particular ideology but naturally cannot step outside it; her statement oscillates between identity formation and

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 55

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

56

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

ideology critique. This paradox undermines simplified representations of the terrorist as DeLillo reveals the mechanisms that create these representations and the functions they perform. DeLillo also counters reductions of complexity by blurring the binary opposition between perpetrator and victim. The powerful image of organic shrapnel—which describes how “tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body ‘get’ trapped in the body of anyone within striking range” (16)—serves as a metaphor for the transgression of this boundary. Other passages in Falling Man also hint at the impossibility of maintaining a neat, clear-cut division between the victim and perpetrator. At the level of language, the children in Falling Man transform bin Laden into “Bill Lawton” (73 et passim), an Americanized version of someone usually constructed as radically Other. And Robert for one refuses to let go of his misrecognition: “Maybe he heard the name once, or misheard it, then imposed this version on future occasions. In other words he never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing” (73). Similarly, Katie “probably keeps the other name going precisely because it’s the wrong name” (74). DeLillo here suggests that these children refuse to replace a familiar ideological representation with another, less understandable version, even though it may be closer to “reality.” Bill Lawton is easily and continuously characterized and defined by the children; he “has a long beard. He wears a long robe, [. . .] [h]e flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives. What else? He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on the list” (74). Bill Lawton’s set of characteristics is simple, selective, and obviously imagined, but it is precisely Bill Lawton’s fictional nature of being twice-removed from the actual person bin Laden that allows the children to project all these imagined characteristics as real. Like the terrorists in the planes, bin Laden himself is “outside someplace, on the other side of the world” (64), so the children set up an imagined substitute for him that can then serve as a projective screen for everything the actual person cannot be. Thus the Bill Lawton motif not only illustrates how identities are imagined and assigned by others, but also that these creations can never really be separated from those who create them. Bill Lawton is an Other that has its definitional roots within the children’s familiar cultural context— a context that creates complex relationships between the terrorist and the terrorized. A particularly telling passage in this respect works through an inversion of the roles assigned to perpetrator and victim in acts of violence. Lianne physically assaults her neighbor, who constantly plays loud music. Poignantly, it is not so much the volume as the music itself that outrages Lianne. She lacks the cultural knowledge to identify it, and she can only roughly place it within “another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition” (67). She responds once more with a paradoxically self-criticizing prejudice: “They’re the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasn’t true” (68). Yet knowledge of her ideological position does not prevent her from

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 56

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Collapsing Identities

57

adopting it, and her anger only finds release in physical violence, changing her from a person traumatized by an act of violence into a person committing such an act herself. This passage effectively challenges any binary opposition between American victimhood against Islamist violence. This does not mean that Falling Man condones violence if it is committed by the right people, but it means that terrorists are not imagined as the only people who are capable of violence. This renders more complex characters that are all too easily cast as victims. The most obvious and most striking fusion between perpetrator and victim occurs when the plane hits the tower. The impact becomes a moment of transition from plane to tower and from perpetrator to victim: A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. (239)

The connection made here between terrorist and victim is not as ostensibly corporeal as in the case of organic shrapnel, but the composition of the scene nevertheless implies a certain continuity of chronology and simultaneity as well as action and reaction. The morphing point of view allows readers to extend the gaze of the terrorist beyond the blast that eradicates him and to witness what the suicide bomber cannot witness himself any longer. The blast wave may hit Keith Neudecker unexpectedly, but for the reader it is an event in a continuous chain of cause and effect that began in the perceiving mind of the terrorist. In smoothly switching from terrorist to victim as focalizer, the narrative forces readers to connect two characters despite an ideological reluctance to see them as anything but radically opposed to one another. Yet there was “God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both” (134), and the description that “[t]he dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carries from the river” (25) makes no difference between killer or victim either: both are inextricably tied up in a web of complexities that goes far beyond the narratives employed for ideological purposes of identity construction. Falling Man also succeeds in complexifying the victim–perpetrator relationship by outlining, in broad strokes, the variety of ideological discussions that surround 9/11. This includes the simplified nationalist viewpoint as well as the apologetic position without privileging either of them. It seems as if neither could get us closer to an explanation of the events. For example, Florence senses a troubling religious connection to her own faith: “Those men who did this thing. They’re anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God” (90). Lianne similarly tells Martin that “we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly” (112) and calls the “system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings” (112) a “viral infection” (113). Martin’s counterarguments are

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 57

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

58

merely summarized and not presented in direct speech, which creates a sense of exhaustion. Martin, it seems, is not really being listened to: “Martin sat wrapped in argument, one hand gripping the other, and he spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West” (113). He only succeeds in undermining Lianne’s view later, when he says, “Don’t think people will die only for God” (116), and when he interprets the World Trade Center as a capitalist symbol and a challenge: But that’s why you built these towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. (116)

The argument ends with Martin leaving, and he and Lianne find no common ground regarding their differing explanations for the attacks. An earlier discussion ends similarly, leaving the reader poised between arguments about “matters of history [. . .] politics and economics” and “their own history, their mentality” (47). Note that “they” here remains poignantly unspecified; it refers to “[t]he other side” (47) without naming that other side openly as Muslim or Middle Eastern. Martin’s point of view is made even more complex by his own alleged involvement with an earlier terrorist movement, possibly the RAF. It is that possible ominous past that makes him construct historical continuities: “He thinks these people, the jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern” (147). Later on in the narrative, Martin engages in blatant anti-Americanism when he says that “We’re all sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates us” (191). And again, Lianne counters, “If we occupy the center, it’s because you put us there” (192). In Falling Man, the competing discourses surrounding 9/11 that find no resolve, and all explanations given always remain poised against counterarguments. As a reader of the novel, one feels as if one was running in ever-widening circles around an unreachable core that is beyond explanation and representation. Falling Man, then, acknowledges complexity through its self-reflexive stance on questions of representation, ideology, and identity. However, as I will argue later, it falls short of its own standards when it comes to the portrayal of the terrorist, or rather the attempt to enter the terrorist’s mind. That move is carried out in strictly singular terms that lack all of the challenging complexity of the other parts of the novel. What happens in these passages is comparable to what M. Shaid Alam outlines as an ideological reduction of a multiplicity of questions: Once the perpetrator of a crime has been identified, it is natural for the family of the victim to ask: why? After 9–11, Americans too were asking such questions. “Why did the 19 Arabs attack us?” “What was their motive?” “Why did they

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 58

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Collapsing Identities

59

take their own lives to inflict death upon us?” “What did they want from us?” “What had we done to make them so angry, so suicidal?” These questions could easily take a dangerous turn. They had to be preempted. (2006, 219)

Alam goes on to argue that “the President fixed the question for Americans” as “Why do they hate us?” (219), a “canonical question” that “became the steel frame which has bounded the official, establishment discourse on the etiology of September 11” (220). Alam adds that the answer to the canonical question was fixed shortly thereafter, too: “The Muslims hate our freedoms” (220). In the terrorist passages, Falling Man trades its multiplicity for a question-answer structure that is similar to that which Alam considers hegemonic in the discourses on 9/11. As we move from Keith, Lianne, and Martin to Hammad, the effect of this trade-in is a flattening of character. Keith wonders at one point how, by becoming a husband and father, he could finally occupy “a room in three dimensions in the manner of his parents” (157); this move of a character into the third dimension, into a reality more complex, is denied to the terrorists in Falling Man, who remain only twodimensional vectors with only one speed and one direction, going straight into the towers without any significant detours or ambivalences of representation. The text may justify this via the psychology of conspiracy, stating that for the terrorists, “[p]lot closed the world to the slenderest line in sight, where everything converges to a point” (174). However, the terrorists are never represented otherwise, and so the transformation remains dubious. Martin maintains that “[n]othing seems exaggerated anymore” (41) after 9/11, and yet, the Hammad chapters are closer to “cartoon human” (134) than those that deal with other characters. In the end, it is the contrast that makes the portrayal seem even more stereotypical, ideological, and Orientalist. In DeLillo’s representations of the terrorists, hardly any of the dialectical spirit of argument exchanged between Martin, Lianne, and Nina is present. True, Hammad himself in his studies of urban planning may not be sure whether it “was funny, true or stupid” (79) to blame “the Jews for defects in construction” (79), but his ambivalences and doubts never have the same credibility as Lianne’s. We could read this as a representation of an individual under heavy social pressure to conform, and the following passage would seem to lend support to such a reading: The beard would look better if he trimmed it. But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers. (83)

However, such musings come across as simplistic and reductive even for a character that has never been character enough to make his development credible. DeLillo’s depiction of Hammad fails because he is less a character than a narrative device that is too obviously introduced for the single purpose

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 59

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

60

of committing a terrorist act. What we encounter here is a problem that is similar to what we find in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1998). There, the character of Rosemary Daye is introduced only to be blown up three pages later in a bombing of a Belfast sandwich shop (216–18)—a scene so obviously designed to convey horror to the reader that it entirely fails to do so. Hammad fulfills his role in the design of a narrative that seeks to represent how a man can become a terrorist, but that design itself is so familiar and stereotypical that Hammad as a character does not matter at all. Lianne and Keith at one point watch a report on war in “Afghanistan or Pakistan” conveyed by “stock footage [. . .] of fighter planes” (DeLillo 2007, 131); Hammad’s passages are just that, stock footage, comfortably recognizable within the well-known ideological framework of interpretation we create familiar meanings with. This familiarity begins with the stock phrases Hammad hears at first and then utters himself. They are as well-known as Martin’s and Lianne’s arguments, but they lack the dialectical or textually self-reflexive dimension that would have made them challenging reimaginations or even critiques of their ideological Orientalist context. These phrases echo both crude jihadist propaganda and Western clichés of Islamist paranoia, anti-Semitism, and blind hatred of the West: “Everything here was twisted, hypocrite, the West corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds” (79); “Islam is the struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans” (80). These sentences speak of a desire to become a shapeless mass: “They read the sword verses of the Koran. They were strong-willed, determined to become one mind. Shed everything but the men you are with. Become each other’s running blood” (83). DeLillo also associates Islamist ideology with reductions of complexity and an archaic understanding of masculinity: “They sat around a table on day one and pledged to accept their duty, which was for each of them, in blood trust, to kill Americans. [. . .] In the camp on the windy plain they were shaped into men” (171, 173). In the final section, the tone becomes even simpler; the language DeLillo’s readers’ encounter there is that of submission to orders and repetitive religious fervor: Forget the world. Be unmindful of the thing called the world [. . .]. Recite the sacred words. Pull your clothes tightly about you. Fix your gaze. Carry your soul in your hand [. . .] Every sin of your life is forgiven in the seconds to come. There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come. You are wishing for death and now it is here in the seconds to come. (238–9)

In these passages, Falling Man apparently imitates the translated words from a five-page letter found in Mohammed Atta’s luggage, which was published in excerpts by several media outlets after 9/11 (“Last Words of a Terrorist”). However, since it does not imagine anything beyond that document, it achieves an imagination of the terrorist mind that is actually less complex than that conveyed in the final stanza of the thrash metal band Slayer’s 2006 song “Jihad,” which is based on the same letter (Atkinson 2006). The lyrics, written

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 60

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Collapsing Identities

61

by Jeff Hanneman and Tom Araya, go beyond the monocausal motivation of religious zeal and add the politics of terror plus very personal rage and sadism to an imagination that is itself anything but subtle: I have witnessed your death I’ve seen it many times Your tortured screams Your decrypted little mind A father’s son With pathetic eyes that bleed Twins in the end Begin and let the brothers fall I will see you burned alive Screaming for your God I will hunt you down again for him God won’t touch what I’ve done He cries upon my feet A privilege pain Beneath buried are your dead On splintered bones I walk Sifting through the blood Besieged in fear Await the coming of the God I will watch you die again for him Blood is raining downward The stain reflects the sun Conquer divide within Terrorize the mind I’ve seen the end it’s yours Rosary in hand Your selfish flesh it melts Spilling from the sky [. . .] This is God’s war God’s war Fucking holy war Be optimistic, happy and calm Show no fear or anxiety Smile at the face of God And your reward will be eternity Holy warriors Your patience will be justified Everything is for him You must not comfort the animal before you kill it Strike as champions at the heart of the nonbelievers

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 61

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

62

Strike above the neck and at all extremities For it’s a point of no return for almighty God God will give victory to his faithful servant When you reach ground zero you will have killed the enemy The great Satan (“Jihad.” Music and text by Jeff Hanneman, Tomas E. Araya, Dave Lombardo. ©Universal Music—MGB Songs, Pennemunde Music, SS810 Music, Death’s Head Music. SVL: Musik Edition Discoton GmbH [Universal Music Publishing Group Germany])

These lyrics—which include a misrepresentation of the line “You [. . .] must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter” (“Last Words of a Terrorist”)—are much more explicitly ambivalent than the respective passages in Falling Man in that they always use the word “God” no matter whose God it is, thus uniting both perpetrator and victim in a conflict of ideologies based on a common fallacy; from this song’s point of view, “God” is an empty word whose repetition and fluid meanings serve both political and very personal ends. “Jihad” suggests that Islam and Christianity share a history of violence: they are “[t]wins in the end.” Thus, Hanneman and Araya locate speculations about terrorism in the larger sphere of religion, not just within Islam. In very different ways, Martin Amis’s imagination of the terrorist minds also surpasses Falling Man in complexity. “ ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ ” rejects Islamist fanaticism as a simplified explanation of the motivation for the attacks, and he turns Atta into a character all the more threatening for his humanity. Since the terrorist is no mere monster here, it is impossible to give a simple explanation for terrorism as something outside the sphere of ideologically conceivable human actions. Amis’s speculations work because they are clearly marked as speculations—not only because the essay opens with the question “What was the scene of this awakening?” (Amis 2008, 95) but also because its title is set in quotation marks, thus removing the text from any claim to veracity into the realm of fictional imagination beyond the ideological limits set to verisimilitude. Falling Man does not take this step in the terrorist chapters, and the fact that it takes that step in other chapters only makes the failure more striking. The terrorist remains within what Rumsey experiences elsewhere as “the aura of his defined state” (150). Furthermore, the terrorist’s God never achieves the meaning that Lianne’s newly found God attains for her toward the end. Lianne’s turn to Catholicism seems to offer a religiosity more genuine and benevolent than that of Islam. While Catholicism certainly allows for as little doubt as does Islam, it is Catholicism Lianne turns to, despite the fact that “[s]he doubted things, she had her doubts” (231). Her reflections on doubt are caused by a misrepresentation of the Qur’an that exemplifies a more general cursory treatment of Islam: “One, a doctor, recited the first line of the Koran in his office. This book is not to be doubted” (231). Not only is this not the first line of the Qur’an but verse two of the second sura, “Al-Baqara” or “The Cow.” As such,

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 62

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Collapsing Identities

63

it is a quotation whose accuracy is dubious; while this could be construed as a self-reflexive hint at the problems of representation in the Falling Man itself, I argue that it is not sufficiently framed in the text to make such a reading convincing. The USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts Website offers three different translations of the verse, all of which differ significantly from the one presented without context in Falling Man: Yusufali: This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah; Pickthall: This is the Scripture whereof there is no doubt, a guidance unto those who ward off (evil). Shakir: This Book, there is no doubt in it, is a guide to those who guard (against evil). (2009)

A commentary on the Qur’an by the Sunni Islamist thinker Sayed Abul A’alā Mawdūdī explains the ambiguity of the verse further after rendering it as “This is the Book of Allah, there is no doubt in it” (45): One obvious meaning of this verse is that this Book, the Qur’an, is undoubtedly from God. Another possible meaning is that nothing contained in it can be subject to doubt. Books which deal with supernatural questions, with matters that lie beyond the range of sense perception, are invariably based on conjecture and their authors, despite their brave show of competence, are therefore not immune from a degree of scepticism regarding their statements. This Book, which is based wholly on Truth, a Book which is the work of none other than the All-Knowing God Himself is distinguishable from all other books. Hence, there is no room for doubt about its contents despite the hesitation some people might express either through ignorance or folly. (45)

This reading is significant in how it relates to Falling Man, since it does what the novel does not do, or, more precisely, it does what DeLillo’s novel does only in those passages that do not represent the terrorist mind. Sayed Abul A’alā Mawdūdī’s reading accepts and explicitly maintains an ambivalence of meaning while at the same time laying bare its own ideological foundations. While Falling Man often manages to create a powerful interplay of conflicting imaginations through pluralist and self-reflexive strategies, it does not employ the same techniques when it comes to the problematic blank spaces of the terrorist mind. Thus, DeLillo’s novel fails to fill these blank spaces with the multiple imaginations and meanings that serve the novel so well in other parts. Instead, it fills them with an ideology it does not self-consciously reflect upon. Qureshi and Sells argue that fanaticism “might be defined as the collapsing of identities into a single association” (2003, 28). While this is too strong a term to describe Falling Man—after all, the text does explore multiple identities and discourses, and it does comment critically on reductive explanations of 9/11—the novel nevertheless at crucial moments collapses some characters’ identities into one association while allowing the identities of others to remain multiple.

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 63

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

64

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Works Cited Alam, M. S. (2006), “America, imagine this!” in Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the “War against Islam,” 219–22. North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publications International. Althusser, L. (1971), “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amis, M. (2008), “The last days of Muhammad Atta,” in The Second Plane, 95–124. London: Jonathan Cape. Atkinson, P. (2006), Rev. of Christ Illusion, by Slayer. July 24. Knac.com. www.knac. com/article.asp?ArticleID=4789. Binelli, M. (2007), “Intensity of a plot.” Interview with Don DeLillo. Guernica, July. www.guernicamag.com/interviews/373/intensity_of_a_plot/. Boyne, J. (2006), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Oxford: David Fickling Books. Coelho, P. (1993), The Alchemist. 1988, trans. Alan R. Clarke. San Francisco, CA: Harper. Danielewski, M. Z. (2000), House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon. Däwes, B. (2007), “On contested ground (zero): Literature and the transnational challenge of remembering 9/11.” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 52, 4: 517–43. DeLillo, D. (2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Foer, J. S. (2005), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. (2004), Here is New York. http:// hereisnewyork.org. “Last Words of a Terrorist.” (2001), The Observer, 30 Sept. Guardian news and media limited. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/30/terrorism.september113. Márquez, G. G. (1970), One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row. McLiam Wilson, R. (1998), Eureka Street. London: Vintage. Maudūdī, S. A. A. (1988), An Introduction to the Understanding of the Qur’ān, ed. and trans. Zafar Ishaq Ansari. London: The Islamic Foundation. Pearl Harbor. (2001), Dir. Michael Bay. Perf. Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale. Touchstone Pictures. Pynchon, T. (2000), V. London: Vintage. Qureshi, E., and Sells, M. (2003), “Introduction: Constructing the Muslim enemy,” in Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells (eds), The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, 1–47. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, E. (2003), Orientalism. London: Penguin. Schweighauser, P. (2006), “White Noise and the web,” in Tim Engles and John Duvall (eds), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise, 94–102. New York: MLA. Slayer, (2006), “Jihad.” Christ illusion. American Recordings. USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts, (2009). Center for Muslim-Jewish engagement. University of Southern California, November 12. www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/.

PSchweighauser_03_Final.indd 64

5/13/2010 8:45:35 AM

Chapter 4

6,500 Weddings and 2,750 Funerals: MAO II, FALLING MAN, and the Mass Effect Mikko Keskinen Mao II (1991) and Falling Man (2007): mass wedding and mass destruction. Mass indeed connects these DeLillo novels that, at least in their opening chapters, seem to occupy opposite loci on the life–death continuum. In this essay, I focus on the two novels’ negotiation of “mass” and the ethical issues that are raised in that process. Mass has a variety of significations in different fields, ranging—to name but a few—from physics, chemistry, and biology to computing and religion. I call the interpretive potential opened up by the different meanings of the term “mass effect.” In science and engineering, “mass effect” refers to “an effect due to or dependent on mass or combined number; a total or grand effect” (OED, sense C.2), but my usage accounts for the totality of significations triggered by that signifier. In the context of the two novels, the term “mass(es)” in the meaning of “ordinary people” or “populace” (OED, senses 8.a and 8.b) is of particular importance. Attitudes toward the masses vary in DeLillo’s oeuvre, and a brief comparison of the opening chapters of Underworld (1997) and Mao II already indicates the range. Both feature a “large number of human beings collected together or viewed as forming an aggregate in which their individuality is lost” (OED, sense 9.a). In Underworld, the cheering spectators—approximately 35,000—of the legendary Giants-Dodgers game on October 3, 1951 form a celebrating and celebrated collective. The members of the crowd “have never had anything in common so much as this,” but nevertheless share a “genderness [. . .] in their experience of the game” (DeLillo 1997, 28, 19). In contrast, Mao II’s portrayal of the mixed mass wedding of 6,500 couples shows a fear of loss of both national homogeneity and individual differences. From the viewpoint of the so-called ethical turn in literary criticism, this attitudinal difference points to at least three recent trends: rhetorical ethics; the ethics of alterity; and the ethics of race, gender, and multiculturalism (Korthals 2005, 142–5; Phelan 2005, 21–3). The majority of contemporary ethical criticism focuses on the novel. Indeed, the novel can be particularly rich in moral fiber and as such good for critical digestion. As Liesbeth Korthals Altes puts it, “the novel through its form and its thematic material represents precisely what ethics is about, namely: a reflection on human action and character; conflicting drives, desires, and choices evolving in time, offered for the reader’s appreciation or judgement from different perspectives” (2005, 142). My main interest is in the rhetoric of DeLillo’s work and how it relates to ethical issues. In probing the ethical lines of force that mass generates in DeLillo’s fiction, I begin by reading and cross-reading the first chapters of Mao II and Falling Man.

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 67

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

68

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

1. One Body Now: The Union of a Division Mao II and Falling Man begin with what, according to E. M. Forster, eighteenthand nineteenth-century novels tended to end with: wedding or death (1981, 50, 94; Booth 1988, 427–32). Yet the narrative beginnings of these two novels differ from their predecessors’ endings both quantitatively and qualitatively. The singular gives way to the multiple and the initial position of the event triggers rather than resolves action. Mao II famously opens with a description of a wedding ceremony of 13,000 Moonies—6,500 couples—at the Yankee Stadium. What is usually a unification of two people in the performance of a rite and its attendant festivities is multiplied by thousands in this opening scene. The intimacy and singularity of a wedding becomes public and general. According to Christian belief, man and woman become “one flesh” in holy matrimony; the 6,500 couples form “one body now, an undifferentiated mass” (DeLillo 1991, 3). The singular event becomes, when multiplied, a hyperbolic sacrament and, as such, an eerie parody of its sacredness. Or, perhaps more accurately, the possibility of endless iterability always lies dormant in the ostensibly singular. What makes this wedding seem grotesque or, rather, uncanny (because it is familiar and strange at the same time), is the shared spatiotemporality of the event. The mass effect of the mass wedding includes, in the novel’s words, “transformation” (3): “[t]hey take a time-honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world” (4). There is one characteristic of the event that defies the multiplication of its structure. There is only one person performing the rite, the pivot around which the nuptial masses rotate, Reverend Moon, not 3,250 priests. This irregularity in the chapter’s general logic of multiplication sharpens the discrepancy between the singular and the general, between the individual and the group. The Mao quotation at the end of the opening chapter (“The future belongs to crowds” [16]) is ambiguous in this respect. The future may indeed be the crowds’, but is it really given to them, and if it is, by whom? In Moonism as it is represented in the novel, the future is the Reverend Moon’s, and the crowds consist of the members of his Unification Church. Significantly, Rodge never spots his daughter among the abundance of brides; instead, “[h]e works his glasses across the mass, the crowd, the movement, the membership, the flock, the following” (5). Since J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962), wedding has been one of the stock examples of the performative in speech act theory, and one is tempted to call marriage the theory’s veritable sacrament. The mass wedding ceremony provides an interesting test case for the felicity of performative utterances. Reverend Moon blesses the 6,500 couples in a marriage ceremony, but the 13,000 individuals are not reported to utter the ritualistic “I do” as a sign of consent.1 As Austin explains, silence on the couples’ part does not necessarily vitiate the performative force of the speech act as long as they do not utter the abortive “I do not” (Austin 1965, 8, 36; Miller 2001, 38). Austin himself does not touch upon the problem of mass weddings. Instead, he gives

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 68

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

69

a lucid account of another multiplication of marriage: bigamy. From the viewpoint of speech act theory, it is not possible to have two spouses at once. One can perform the act of bigamy but not the act of marrying twice, since the state of being married to a spouse “living, sane and undivorced” annuls the purported second marriage (Austin 8, 17). As Austin wittily summarizes the logical impossibility of marrying twice, “[t]he algebra of marriage is Boolean” (17). To adapt the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, not all marriages are happy but every marriage necessarily comes into effect under felicitous or “happy” conditions. In speech act theory, infidelity may result in the annulment of a marriage, but a bigamous second wedding is invariably infelicitous. A marriage contracted in a mass wedding may not be legally binding, and at least it does not function as a safeguard against infidelity any better than ordinary wedding vows, as Karen’s multiple adulteries demonstrate. Mass wedding is a problematic concept in other respects as well. Should the ceremony be considered one wedding en masse or does it consist of 6,500 simultaneous nuptials?2 The similarity of the couples goes beyond their participation in the same ceremony; it even informs their gestures and looks. Rodge thinks that “they are uniformly smiling” and dressed in “identical” suits and gowns (DeLillo 1991, 4). Even their smiles, “squeez[ed] out with the toothpaste every morning” (4), are presumably as individual as emoticons—iconic signs formed of standardized characters of the alphabet.3 The narrator states, with Karen as the focalizer, “They all feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self” (8). From Rodge’s ethnically stereotypical perspective, the grooms, at least the East Asian ones, also look physically identical. His future son-in-law is “either Japanese or Korean. Rodge didn’t get it straight” (5). Even for Karen, her husband, Kim Jo Pak, nominally resembles a Korean version of a boy named Sue: “It will take some time getting used to, a husband named Kim. She has known girls named Kim since she was a squirt in a swimsuit. Quite a few really. Kimberleys and plain Kims” (16). This is an onomastic misunderstanding, since Karen, in her American innocence, seems unaware that Kim is a Korean family name, not a first name. Both father and daughter are thus equally insensitive to the singularity of the Other. After the opening “At Yankee Stadium” chapter, Mao II presents characters’ differing views on the mass wedding. Scott Martineau paraphrases Gray’s analysis of the “millennial hysteria,” as the latter calls it (80). Gray conceives of mass weddings in terms of physics, as processes that involve pressure and velocity: By compressing a million moments of love and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you’re saying that life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone to hurrying its own transformation. (80)

The effect is a reversal of marriage’s cultural and biological significance: “the faith of the species, the means of continuation” is turned into “catastrophe, a total implosion of the future” (80). In contrast, Martineau emphasizes “how

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 69

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

70

people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point in mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force” (89). It is a means of seeing people from a distanced vantage point “where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter” (89).

2. Mechanical Brides and Grooms When human behavior becomes mechanical or machinelike, the effect is, according to Henri Bergson, comic. Bergson also maintains that repetition in general engenders comedy (1911, 40–5). Charlie Chaplin, for his part, claims, in an unsourced dictum, that “[l]ife is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” None of these aesthetic gnomes applies to Mao II. The couples and the ceremony they participate in appear machinelike, repetition permeates the wedding scene, and most of the novel’s opening chapter is focalized by Rodge, who views the happenings from afar, from the stadium bleachers. And yet, no comedy is discernible. The tragic and the frightening permeate the whole chapter: And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks [Rodge] back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. (DeLillo 1991, 7)

The innocence of the wedding ceremony and its peripheral customs become both menacing and thing-like when multiplied into gigantic proportions. Anguished parents fight the uncanniness of the 13,000 exchanges of rings and vows by photographing “anxiously, trying to neutralize the event, drain it of eeriness and power” (6). Paradoxically, the very act of photographing—which Susan Sontag finds as inevitable a part of contemporary weddings as the prescribed verbal formulas (8)—participates in the mass structure of the event. Taking a family snapshot, multiplied by “parents in the thousands” (8), starts to resemble a celebrity shooting at a major gala event. Karen even thinks that “[t]here may be as many people taking pictures as there are brides and grooms. One of them for every one of us” (10). All this is ironically enveloped in the soundscape of “the Mendelssohn march [that] carries a stadium echo, with lost notes drifting back from the recesses between tiers” (5–6).

3. Synecdoches for the Masses Weddings, ordinary or mass ones, do not figure in Falling Man. The novel’s marriages are invariably in a state of disintegration; the marital bond is, in

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 70

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

71

most of the novel’s wedlocks, loosening or broken. Keith and Lianne have separated before the novel starts, the marriage of Lianne’s parents has ended with her father’s suicide, Florence’s short marriage had been “a mistake so fleeting it left few marks” (DeLillo 2007, 89), and Martin, Nina’s lover for 20 years, “did or did not have a wife in Paris” (42). The disintegration and reintegration of Keith and Lianne’s marriage is paralleled by Keith and Florence’s unconventional relationship. Rather than ordinary married life, the novel depicts particles of the alleged basic unit of society, either being released from or colliding with each other. This state of affairs could be read as an analogue of organic shrapnel, “fragments of flesh and bone” driven into other persons’ flesh as the result of a suicide bombing (16). The solid mass of mass wedding in Mao II is, as it were, replaced with the “force and velocity” (16) of released particles in Falling Man. Keith may not have organic shrapnel in his body, as one of the hospital personnel tells him (16), but, by violently colliding against other characters in the novel, he metaphorically acts like a human splinter. Falling Man portrays the fatalities and survivors of the 9/11 attack against the World Trade Center (WTC) through synecdoche. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty people died in the attack, but only one death, Rumsey’s, is given a detailed description in the novel. Analogously, Keith and Florence, a white man and a black woman, represent the survivors. This rhetorical practice of using a part for the whole or one member for a group is a figure of speech that is narrationally economical but by no means innocent or without surplus significations of its own. That Rumsey’s death is alluded to several times in the course of the novel but not narrated until the end is a feature commonly found in trauma narratives, both fictional and nonfictional (Whitehead 2004, 83–4). In addition, the representative surviving pair could be read as interracial, postapocalyptic Adam and Eve.4 The novel refuses to make any reference to the specific number of 9/11 fatalities. It is as if the catastrophe were too massive to be narrated in any other way than by focusing on representative cases. The same synecdochic principle also applies to inanimate objects in the novel. The destruction of the twin highrises is portrayed, as if by force of displacement, as falling smoke, office paper, and debris: Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. (DeLillo 2007, 3)

Paper is an especially important form of debris in Falling Man, not the least because it recurs with the persistence of a leitmotif. The way paper is described contributes not only to its synecdochic association with commercial and bureaucratic activity but also to the theme of mass: “the paper massed in the air, contracts, resumés blowing by, intact snatches of business, quick in the wind” (4; see also 118, 243–4).5 Apart from the masses of paper we encounter here

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 71

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

72

and elsewhere in Falling Man, references to papier-mâché, ancient writing implements, and short passages on the publishing industry also point to the papery side of Falling Man’s world. This emphasis on paper and printed matter is less of a meta-medial gesture than a pointer to the fragility of human existence. The world can disintegrate like the proverbial house of cards. In Falling Man, that house includes at least two cards drawn from a tarot deck.6 Significantly perhaps, Falling Man does not describe funerals, neither mass nor individual ones. The only references to funerals occur in connection with Nina’s “memorial service” (190) and with the burial grounds of Lianne’s father and grandparents (218). The ubiquity of death on 9/11 turns reality into one funeral service of sorts. In the novel’s third chapter, the narrator describes the street scene Keith enters after escaping his WTC office: The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in [Keith’s] hair and on his clothes. (25)

Falling Man is almost reticent about the mass killing on 9/11 and alludes to it by implication. The vague suggestion of the enormous number of fatalities, quoted above, seem to evade the specificity of each individual death. Toward the novel’s end, the narrator reports Keith’s experiences in the burning tower: “He felt the dead nearby. He sensed this, in the hanging dust” (241). In their obliqueness, such references to the fatalities of a mass killing relate to some of the more brutal statements by terrorist figures in both Mao II and Falling Man. In the former novel, George Haddad answers Gray’s question about the hiding of the dead after the Great Leap Forward: “The killing is going to happen. Mass killing asserts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and place” (DeLillo 1991, 163). In Falling Man, the terrorists discuss the planned attack and its collateral damage: “there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. [. . .] Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying” (DeLillo 2007, 176). The anonymity of mass killing and the role it gives to the dead is contrasted with Florence and Keith’s discussions about mortality: “dying is ordinary” except “when it’s you” or “someone you know” (89). The mortality rate in humans (and in all living organisms) is invariably 100 percent, and therefore unmarked or “ordinary.” Significantly, in Underworld, it is Life magazine that publishes a reproduction of Pieter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death—which lands on J. Edgar Hoover’s shoulder and intrigues him (DeLillo 1997, 41–2). As in the painting, death ultimately and massively governs life. But this general condition of all living beings changes toward the singular and personal when death draws near the experiencing subject, who engages with it emotionally. This also means that the ethics of encountering the Other, or alterity, is extended to the dead and the dying. Death as the great equalizer effaces the alterity of the living by its own insurmountable otherness.

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 72

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

73

Mao II features not only a prominent mass wedding scene but also funerals of various kinds. The funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini is attended by some “three million mourners” (DeLillo 1991, 188). The ceremony is thus massive, although not a mass funeral. The description of this funeral scene resembles that of the mass wedding at the beginning of the novel. Even optical devices—cameras and binoculars—are present in both scenes, and neither instrument is shown to be capable of either capturing the mass or focusing on its individual members: The camera could not absorb the full breadth of the crowd. The camera kept panning but could not inch all the way out to the edge of the anguished mass. On the screen the crown had no edge or limit and kept on spreading. (188)

However, Karen, who is focalizing the funeral scene, is reported to be able to zoom in on individuals’ lives, supernaturally and in reverse in her mind’s eye: “Karen could go backwards into [the mourners’] lives. [. . .] Karen found she could go into the slums of south Teheran, backwards into people’s lives” (188–9; see also 190, 192).7 Mao II also features another kind of mass funeral. This one can be called by that name because of the number of deceased that are buried rather than the number of mourners at the gravesite. In Beirut, “[c]offins were stacked at cemetery entrances because there was no more room for the dead. Outside the city they were burying people in clusters, two or three bodies to a grave” (197). Every death and every funeral is singular—at least for the human being who dies and is buried—but when death becomes plural, it becomes as impersonal as mass production. The total effect of massive funerals relates to anonymity, either of the dead or of the mourners. Falling Man’s performance artist can be seen as dramatizing the same tension between mass, life, and death as Mao II does, but in a singular fashion. Falling Man, dangling in midair as if defying gravity’s effect on his mass, occupies a median position between death and survival, but he also functions as a synecdoche of the approximately 200 people who jumped from the burning towers. In his performance, he remains “in stationary fall” (DeLillo 2007, 34) but he also resembles, both homophonically and formally, the stationary fall of office papers. In his performances, he paradoxically creates an immobile tableau vivant out of a natura morta—a still life.8 He freezes a moment of life in the manner of painters and photographers: “now the stillness, arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee. There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself” (168).9 This dangling man does not dangle between alternatives of life, as the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s debut novel does, but between postponed and immediate death.10 His position is as temporary as it is unnatural, and only possible in art. Time and nature will eventually conquer. The artist himself, David Janiak, dies “of natural causes” (220), but death as the inevitable conclusion of life is always, whatever the reason, “natural.”

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 73

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

74

4. Mass Production: Images and Words Mass and masses also figure prominently in connection with (mass) production in the two novels, especially in Mao II. Mass production, reproduction, and reproducibility appear in various forms in Mao II. The novel’s very title alludes to a drawing from Andy Warhol’s serial work on Chairman Mao, and there are also several other references to that artist’s reproductive methods. But there are even more prominent references to other types of mass (re)production: photography and book printing.11 Photography not only enables the mass production or reproduction of images; in Mao II, optical technology itself relates to masses and crowds in that it enhances their effects. As I have already noted, the camera is mentioned throughout the description of the initial mass wedding. The photographs taken of the event multiply the number of couples by splitting their existence into the present and represented ones, into real-size and miniaturized beings: “They’re here but also there, already in the albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become” (DeLillo 1991, 10). This rumination on photography, or the idea of being photographed, does not exactly reverse the relation between original and copy, as a patently postmodern reading would have it. Rather, the reference to the diminutive selves points to the reduction of identity (and simultaneous increase of mass) in Moonism. Camera optics, too, contributes to the sense of crowdedness, to the proliferation of masses. Martineau’s paraphrase of Gray’s analysis of mass weddings uses words drawn from optical illusions created by the long lens, such as “compressing” and “image-bound” (80). Ten pages earlier, Martineau describes a Chinese crowd the way it is customarily represented in the visual media: “crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are” (70). Later on, Martineau zooms out to an extraterrestrial position in his paean to optical nonindividuality: It’s about seeing people new. We see them from space, where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter. We’ve learned to see ourselves as if from space, as if from satellite cameras, all the time, all the same. As if from the moon. We’re all Moonies, or should learn to be. (89)

Such accounts of human beings do not mean that microcosm and macrocosm are alike or that individual differences are unimportant. Instead, we are dealing with a matter of optics, of microscopy and telescopy, as ways of conceiving of, or thematizing, reality. On the other hand, from Karen’s perspective, the photographic reproduction technology that seals the modern marriage and multiplies the masses of the mass wedding can also function in an identifying and personalizing role. The fact that the Master matched, in his “mate selection,” the couples by photograph makes Karen think, presumably without irony, “how great” it is to have an “Instamatic husband” (183).

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 74

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

75

In Falling Man, photography plays a less explicit role. Yet the very novel is named after the most famous photograph of 9/11, and the performance artist of the same name reproduces it in his act (DeLillo 2007, 221). True to the rhetorical principle of the novel, that performance synecdochically represents all the people who jumped from the WTC tower, the mass of the jumpers. The novel is elsewhere informed by the photographic representations of 9/11 as well. The novel’s opening scene, for instance, is likely to remind its readers of photographs and video footage of ash-covered people running away from the falling towers. Photography as technology is hardly mentioned in Falling Man, unlike in Mao II, but the visual characteristics of both novels relate to the photographic medium in equally important ways. Printing, the technology that makes the mass production of books possible, is another medium prominently present in both novels. The opening scene of Mao II’s Chapter 1 of Part One takes place in a New York bookshop, with books—new hardbacks, bestsellers, mass-market volumes, and modern classics in trade editions—on display in various ways. What all these books in “stacks,” “fanning patterns,” “pyramids,” and “counterpacks” (DeLillo 1991, 19) share is that they exist in large numbers of identical copies. In the next chapter, the focus shifts to one author’s work of fiction in the age of its technological reproducibility. Bill Gray’s two-novel oeuvre in all of its editions and translations, complete with peripheral literary-critical work, is described as being preserved in “the holy place, the inner book” of Gray’s cellar (32). Even his massive work in progress paradoxically joins the structure of reproducibility even though it has not been published yet. It exists in “maybe two hundred thick binders representing drafts, corrected drafts, notes, fragments, recorrections, throwaways, updates, tentative revisions, final revisions” (31). This prepublication reproduction is not the only paradoxical feature of Gray’s authorship. Although Martineau, who resembles an archetypal nagging wife, does urge Gray to work on the manuscript (62–4), its market value is highest when it is not published: “We don’t need the book. We have the author” (71). In a way, the reproducibility of Gray’s novels also prints money; he practices authorship by not publishing anything new: “Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. The world caught up. Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income” (52).12 There is also a more dismal aspect to Martineau’s relationship with Gray, which turns out to be parasitic. Gray notes the intertwined etymologies of “guest” and “host” (67), and later on he interprets “hostage” as the beginning of “the closed state” and “[t]he tentative rehearsal for mass terror” (163). In a sense, Gray is Martineau’s hostage.13 Just like the Swiss poet held hostage in Beirut, Gray is important on account of his authorship, not because of his literary output. In George Haddad’s enthusiastic analysis, Mao “became the history of China written on the masses” (161) and his cult was the “cult of the book” (162). George even maintains that Gray could have been a Maoist and contributed, in the vein of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to the rebirth of culture “in the

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 75

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

76

rat warrens of Beirut” (163). Instead, in his attempt to free the poet held hostage by Maoist terrorists, Gary meets his death on the way to Beirut. In Paula Martín Salván’s reading, Gray disappears “into anonymity by getting lost among the undifferentiated mass in the Middle East” (2007). After his death, Gray’s “passport and other forms of identification, anything with a name and number” are robbed from his belongings, to be sold to “some militia in Beirut” (217). Or, expounded through the cult of the book, his identity is—through his documents and thus metonymically—disseminated among the masses (217).

5. Religious Mass In both novels, “mass” also carries the sense of religious service or celebration. The whole opening scene of Mao II is a massive mass. In Falling Man, religion figures in the guise of physical exercise, poker, and mundane activities, and it also crops up in DeLillo’s depiction of a washing machine and a dryer: “The room was like a monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany” (2007, 151). There are also explicit references to religious activities and sacred places in the novel. Lianne, walking “without plan,” finds herself, as if by guidance, at “a building marked Greater Highway Deliverance Temple,” where one of her Alzheimer patients had “found refuge and assistance” (156). She studies the temple’s activities on the notice board but does not enter. Instead, a “call in Spanish” guides her to one of Falling Man’s performance (158)—another 9/11 victim’s freeze-framed plunge into death, or, more generally and metaphysically, a sight miraculously dangling in midair. Other references to religion that relate to special forms of language or heightened discourse occur in both novels. Amy Hungerford’s illuminating article on the Latin mass in DeLillo’s work may be relevant in this connection although the two novels are by no means explicitly Catholic. My own ecumenical use of Hungerford’s idea focuses on the role of language in the manifestation and understanding of transcendence. Hungerford writes: The mysticism we find in DeLillo’s novels is epitomized by the mystical and linguistic structure of the Latin mass. [. . .] The Latin mass, as a linguistic and spiritual practice, persisted in the imagination of Catholic writers for decades after its replacement [by the vernacular mass]. (347)

The “special relationship between language and the mystical” (Hungerford 2006, 347) that the ritual has established for centuries informs both Mao II and Falling Man. While, according to Catholic doctrine, a worshipper could recite prayers in Latin without knowing their exact meaning and still understand their spiritual significance (352), the characters in DeLillo’s two novels have similar experiences within their native English language. The Pidgin English of Moonism is strangely poetical, and it also relates to the transcendent spheres of existence. The “half language” (DeLillo 1991, 7) of Moonism is

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 76

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

77

inevitably ambiguous. But the other half left unexpressed might as well be the mystic, veiled, secret part of reality. Hence the reductive or ever-diminishing language of worship: “They chant for one language, one word, for the time when names are lost” (16). That language appears unknown because it is so elementary to native speakers. In its opacity, that linguistic mode resembles the Latin in the Latin mass: the surface remains undecipherable but the discourse as a whole conveys spirituality. In Falling Man, a similarly constrained or minimalistic linguistic practice can be seen in Justin’s attempt at speaking in monosyllables only. It is a “serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts” (DeLillo 2007, 66). Lianne finds it, half jokingly, “totalitarian,” but Justin says, “It helps me go slow when I think” (66). Later on, his mother explicitly calls this practice “[h] is spiritual development,” whose next phase is “[t]otal silence” (100–1). Apart from the schoolmaster, there may be another mastermind behind this linguistic purification or cleansing of thoughts. That master, like many godheads before him, defies direct naming. The children call him Bill Lawton. The adults came to know him, after 9/11, as Osama bin Laden: “Because maybe it was Bill Lawton. Because maybe Bill Lawton talks in monosyllables”“ (101). Significantly, the adult characters adopt, presumably unwittingly, the monosyllabic practice. For instance, Lianne dwells upon the mantra-like phrase “Died by his own hand” (218). Another group of adults, the Alzheimer’s patients, are gradually drawn to this holy mode of discourse by their deteriorating condition, as if they were counting down from 100 by sevens as a test for dementia (187, 207). What we witness here is a veritable countdown to elementary speech. *** In DeLillo’s two novels, “mass” relates to life and death, to weddings and funerals. In between, sheer mass, in the form of media, power, and religion, creates pressure on language, laying bare its elementary constituents, including silence. Significantly, both novels end with muted visual details: Beirut in flashing lights and a white shirt coming down from the Manhattan sky.

Notes 1. In Moonism, couples are not, strictly speaking, united but blessed in marriage by the Reverend Moon. Therefore, no formulaic utterances are expected from the couples. Furthermore, the blessing ceremony has a more fundamental meaning than an ordinary wedding since the former makes the couple part of Mr. and Mrs. Moon’s “sinless perfect family” (Wolfe 1997). 2. The real-life Sun Myung Moon has performed blessing ceremonies for even larger crowds. In 1997, he blessed 3.6 million couples in marriage by satellite linkup (Wolfe 1997).

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 77

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

78

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

3. The typographic quality of character also informs Karen’s Orientalist idea of her husband: “his hair [. . .] is shiny and fine and ink-black, with a Sunday-comics look. It is the thing that makes him real to her” (DeLillo 1991, 8). 4. The couple’s names, Florence Givens and Keith Neudecker, perhaps fit into the Adamic frame of a second, new chance given to mankind. 5. Very similar catalogues of debris appear in DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (2001), for instance: “The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn backyards, status reports, résumés, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses. Paper slicing into truck tyres, fixed there” (35). Descriptive catalogues are one of DeLillo’s stylistic trademarks and used for various purposes in his fiction. Compare, for instance, the litanies of goods and garbage in White Noise or Underworld. The flying stationery of Falling Man, however, contrasts sharply with Underworld’s “happy garbage” and “personal waste” of paper that the baseball audience is throwing in celebration of the game (DeLillo 1997, 45). See also Keskinen (2000, 68–9). 6. Lianne ruminates on the performance artist’s pseudonym: “[I]t could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky” (221). Lianne’s description actually conflates two tarot cards, the Tower and the Hanging Man. There are other subtle game-related allusions to 9/11 in the novel as well, for instance the chip stacks resembling the Twin Towers (DeLillo 2007, 128) and the rising deck versus the falling men and cards (197, 212). For a detailed reading of tarot cards in Falling Man, see MarieChristine Leps’s essay in this volume. 7. Karen’s omniscient vision is paralleled by the Reverend Moon’s claim that “he can see 7 generations of his followers’ ancestors in order to find the perfect spouse for them” (Wolfe 1997). 8. Actual still lifes also figure in Falling Man. Two still lifes by Giorgio Morandi are prominently at display in the apartment of Lianne’s mother and, after her death, a gallery runs a show of his works, all carrying the same title—Natura Morta. If Lianne finds her mother’s Morandis holding “a mystery she could not name” and their Italian title “somewhat ominous” (12), the exhibition multiplies both attributes. Art draws near life (and death). In one of the paintings, Lianne’s mother’s living room seems to be hidden (210), and dead nature (natura morta) “yield[s] her mother’s last days” (211). Alternatively, life imitates, or at least resembles, art. Earlier in the novel, Lianne “turned away from the [Morandi] painting and saw the room itself as a still life,” complete with two figures, “Mother and Lover” (111), who resemble the woman and man in one of the Morandi still lifes at the gallery (210). On DeLillo’s treatment of Morandi’s still lifes in Falling Man, see also Julia Apitzsch’s essay in this volume. 9. In the words of Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Photograph from September 11,” “The photograph halted them [the jumpers] in life, / and now keeps them / above the earth toward the earth” (2006, 69). 10. For a more detailed analysis of the connections between Bellow’s dangling man and DeLillo’s falling man, see Peter Boxall’s essay in this volume. 11. For insightful readings of Warhol’s presence in Mao II, see Karnicky (2001, passim) and Cowart (2002, 123–6). 12. In this, Gray resembles John Updike’s Henry Bech, a fictitious author who is suffering from a chronic case of writer’s block but whose reprinted and translated old works miraculously manage to create an illusion of uninterrupted literary output (Keskinen 2003, 289–91).

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 78

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Mao II, Falling Man, and the Mass Effect

79

13. Gray’s etymological aside makes the same observation as J. Hillis Miller’s classic deconstruction of the positions of parasite, guest, and host in the relationships between critics and literary texts (Miller 1979, 218–22). But whereas Miller probes the possibility of living happily in “the domicile of the same text” (217), Martineau’s actions tend toward taking nonreciprocal advantage of the author. See also Schweighauser and Wisnicki’s reflections in this volume on the violent dynamics of the relationship between Gray and Martineau.

Works Cited Austin, J. L. (1965), How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bergson, H. (1911), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan. Booth, W. C. (1988), The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cowart, D. (2002), Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. DeLillo, D. (1991), Mao II. London: Vintage. —(1997), Underworld. London: Picador. —(2001a), The Body Artist. London: Picador. —(2001b), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December: 33–40. —(2007), Falling Man. London: Picador. Forster, E.M. (1981), Aspects of the Novel, Oliver Stallyborn (ed.), Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Hungerford, A. (2006), “Don DeLillo’s Latin mass.” Contemporary Literature, 47, 3: 343–80. Karnicky, J. (2001), “Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and seriality.” Critique, 42, 4: 339–56. Keskinen, M. (2000), “To what purpose in this waste? From rubbish to collectibles in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.” American Studies in Scandinavia 32, 2: 63–82. —(2003), “Bech signing: Repetition, identity, and signature in John Updike’s ‘Three illuminations in the life of an American writer.’” Imaginaires, 9: 287–301. Korthals Altes, L. (2005), “Ethical turn,” in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 142–6. London: Routledge. “Mass.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. dictionary.oed.com “Mass effect.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. dictionary.oed.com Miller, J. H. (1979), “The critic as host,” in Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller (eds.), Deconstruction and Criticism, 217–53. London: Routledge. —(2001), Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Phelan, J. (2005), Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Salván Martín, P. (2007), “The writer at the far margin”: The rhetoric of artistic ethics in Don DeLillo’s novels.” European Journal of American Studies 1. ejas.revues.org/ document1147.html. Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 79

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

80

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Szymborska, W. (2006), Monologue of a Dog: New Poems, trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Whitehead, A. (2004), Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wolfe, D. (1997), “Emboldened Rev. Moon to bring his ‘blessing’ ceremony to our nation’s capital.” New Covenant Publications. www.newcovpub.com/unification/ masswedding.html.

PSchweighauser_04_Final.indd 80

5/13/2010 8:45:18 AM

Chapter 5

Public Image and Self-Representation: Don DeLillo’s Artists and Terrorists in Postmodern Mass Society Leif Grössinger On several occasions, both in and outside his literary work, Don DeLillo has linked writing and terrorism. In a 1991 interview with Vince Passaro, DeLillo stated that “[t]rue terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to” (Passaro 2005, 84). The implication is that terrorists and writers are intimately related figures. DeLillo adds that if writers should aspire to bear on public consciousness again, they would be among “the nationless, the outcast and the hunted” (84) and be regarded as socially dangerous. For artists and terrorists, the underlying impetus is similar, though DeLillo certainly does not simply equate the two groups. While artists add something new to the world, terrorists take something away. Yet both try to make an impact on postmodern mass society, and both do that from a position, which they perceive as lying at the margins or even outside that society. This essay explores the similarities and divergences between the selfportrayals of writers and terrorists in both their cognitive and their material manifestations. These self-portrayals are, I argue, closely related to the images of artists and terrorists that circulate in society. In exploring these various connections, I am particularly interested in the extent to which the writer and the terrorist actually succeed in dissociating themselves from the societies they critique. Much has been said about the writer–terrorist nexus in Mao II (1991), for instance, by Peter Baker, John Carlos Rowe, and Ryan Simmons. My own essay will focus on two less-discussed novels by DeLillo: Players—a work that was first published in 1977, and which has received little literary-critical attention—and Falling Man (2007), DeLillo’s novelistic response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001. The 30 years, which have passed between the publications of the two novels, have seen a shift in the public perception of terrorism. In the 1970s, the actions of groups like the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Brigate Rosso (BR), the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Euskadi Ta Akatasuna (ETA), and the attempts on former US president Gerald Ford’s life in 1975 lifted terrorism to a new level. Now terrorists succeeded in threatening people who lived outside the terrorists’ homeland. Terrorism became international. The first readers of DeLillo’s earlier novel were used to being confronted with terrorism, mostly from the news. By way of contrast, the later novel is about a society for which organized terrorism had become distant in time and space. As Lynn Kuzma put it only

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 81

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

82

a year before the attacks of September 11, terrorism did not have much of an influence on the people’s existence in late-twentieth-century America (2000, 93). September 11, was a deeply shocking event, and people were violently torn from wishful notions of life in a secure Western world. The sudden exposure to a terrorist attack revealed fractions within mass society and provoked various distinct ways of dealing with a threat that had been largely ignored. The status of art in DeLillo’s fiction has changed as well between 1977 and 2007. While the society depicted in Players sees little need for it and art only plays a marginal role, in Falling Man Nina Bartos’ apartment with its “art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves” (DeLillo 2007, 8) is one of the few places where Nina’s daughter Lianne finds a desperately sought-after while as all the rest of the world is tumbling down. The performance artist Falling Man himself, too, shows how the public response to art has changed: society, though its reactions to his performances are largely hostile, seems in need of an artistic recapitulation of what has happened.

1. Terrorists in Players With respect to its representation of terrorists, a particularly interesting issue that is negotiated in Players is the divergence between the mass-mediated images of terrorists and their “actual” appearance in the text. In the initial chapter, a scene in a television movie that shows a group of terrorists attacking and killing several golf players is described: The terrorists are seen running [. . .] Being young, and dressed as they are in jeans and leather and attic regalia, and running, they can hardly fail to be a lyrical interlude. The subnormal speed at which their bodies perform makes them seem creatures of gravity [. . .], their incomparable crude beauty a result of carefully detailed physical stress. (DeLillo 1989, 8)

Lyle Wynant, a stock broker and one of the yuppie protagonists of the novel, cannot resist the “glamour of revolutionary violence” and “the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul” (8). As soon as he finds out that Frank McKechnie has contacts with a terrorist group, he tries to convince his friend to introduce him to the group. Later, he describes his involvement in terrorism and counterterrorism as “sexy,” as the realization of a “secret dream” (100). Terrorists, it seems, are dangerous and very intriguing indeed. This image of terrorism as an exciting alternative to the ennui of white collar work and the life of the “true-blue businessman or professor” (100) goes hand in hand with the terrorists’ own claim to stand outside society. They try to look at society from above and discern the flaws that require mending. J. Kinnear, the rather dubious initiator of the terrorist group in Players, adopts a position of distanced objectivity when he states that “[t]error is purification,”

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 82

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Artists and Terrorists

83

an attempt “to rid a society of repressive elements” (102). Likewise, Marina and Rafael Vilar, a sister and a brother who are members of J. Kinnear’s cell, also see a clear divide between themselves and what they call “the system.” Marina states: “Rafael wanted to disrupt their system [. . .]. It’s this system that we believe is their secret power” (107). DeLillo’s terrorists also draw advantage from figuring as “dei absconditi,” to adopt a term used by Steffen Hantke in his treatise on conspiracy and paranoia in contemporary American fiction (1994, 143): they seem to come out of nowhere, and their acts resemble those of a quasi-supernatural omnipotent force. Due to constant media coverage, the public soon believes that terrorists can strike anytime anywhere (see also Kuzma 2000, 92)—a notion the group around J. Kinnear tries to take advantage of. But DeLillo’s notion of terrorism encompasses more than physical violence; often it manifests itself in a diffuse form of psychological terrorization, which is enhanced by media reports that fuel and enlarge the terrorists’ public image. Spectators stand in awe of that image, and the terrorists no longer need to strike to wield power. Deeply affected by media spectacles, DeLillo’s societies are fascinated by groups that stage their violent acts as entertaining media events. This makes it possible for terrorists to reach even people who do not want to be reached. Television, newspapers, radio, and other forms of contemporary mass media enable the terrorists to force themselves into public consciousness. The impact of terrorists and their acts relies, then, both on the terrorists’ claim to stand outside society and their mass-medially enlarged image. But Players immediately undermines these foundational myths. Already the first encounter with a “real” terrorist is anticlimactic: Marina is described as “squat, close to shapeless, dressed in what might have been thrift-shop clothing” (DeLillo 1989, 98). This portrayal has little in common with the dangerous eroticism of the terrorists in the movie scene quoted above. Neither does the smooth and coordinated collaboration of the movie terrorists find its counterpart in the novel’s reality: J. Kinnear’s group is characterized as having “no visible organization or leadership. They had no apparent plan. They came from nowhere and might be gone tomorrow” (121). The public image of terrorism’s powerful effectiveness is further deflated as the fleetingness of terrorist acts becomes visible in the aftermath of the only attack the cell actually succeeds in performing. Rafael manages to shoot a stock broker on the trading floor of the New York stock exchange, but the outcomes are minor: “You know what it all means, don’t you,” Frank McKechnie asks. “It means they’ll install one of those metal detection devices and we’ll have to walk through it every time we go on the floor” (31). This, it seems, is a rather meager result for a murder in the center of international finance—and puts into question the possibilities of terrorism and murder in a financial and societal system in which everything and everybody is so easily replaceable. Yet J. Kinnear and Marina do not consider Rafael’s attack a failure. The group operates largely without a plan and its motives remain hidden, its acts are random and accomplish little to nothing. While it is obviously driven by

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 83

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

84

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

a desire for destruction, the group lacks both a discernible ideology and a clear goal. Soon it becomes obvious that terrorism cannot provide Lyle, who was so eager to join the cell, with an alternative to his meaningless yuppie lifestyle; the terrorists do not, in fact, seek real social transformation. What they yearn for is but another outlet for their self-centered individualism. Even the group’s leader, J. Kinnear, changes sides freely and works as a double agent almost on a whim. For him, too, terrorism is based on no deeply held values or beliefs. This becomes eminently clear when he describes his own group’s plan to blow up the New York stock exchange: “It accomplishes nothing. [. . .] The whole plan was and is stupid. A lot of ridiculous theatrics and it’s just childishly, stupidly worked out” (180). And he goes on: “It’s another media event. Innocent people dead and mutilated. Toward what end? Publicize the movement, that’s all. Media again. They want coverage. Public interest. They want to dramatize” (180). J. Kinnear here gestures at a major problem at the heart of the terrorists’ claim to stand outside society. Ironically, they do not only work with but rely on precisely those means of mass communication that sustain the postmodern world they profess to abhor. More or less knowingly, they thereby live in a symbiosis with the mass media since both of them need dramatized, violent spectacle and coverage to raise public interest. Thus, terrorists and the mass media become receivers and providers of each other’s “services.” Both J. Kinnear’s media critique and his self-distancing from the apparatuses that ground modern Western mass society are therefore disingenuous to say the least. This has two main consequences for the terrorists’ self-portrayal. First, J. Kinnear’s insight that the real-world results of a terrorist act are less important than their satisfaction of the media’s needs implies that the terrorists remain intimately bound up with the status quo. Even if they truly attempted to impact mass consciousness, the terrorists would have to rely on the media as gatekeepers. Second, the terrorists’ dependence on the mass media makes them an integral part of the society of the spectacle rather than a thorn in its side. Due to their limited financial and technological resources, terrorists need the coverage of the mass media to spread their message. But the world of the image is volatile: new material is needed all the time, and the terrorists’ obligation to constantly supply spectacle can soon strain their potential. And yet, the logic of dependency between terrorism and the media works both ways, if only to a certain extent: in a society of the spectacle, the media rely on bombastic events, and J. Kinnear is therefore right in stating that terrorist acts involve theatrics and drama. In the end, terrorism in Players reduces itself to a generator of spectacle for and by the media. Thus, with its basic myths undermined, terrorism loses its socially transformative force. In DeLillo’s 1977 novel, the effects of terrorism are minor—and they are so because the motivations behind these terrorist acts are so similar to the motivations that energize regular members of mass society that they cannot disrupt the logic of the status quo.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 84

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Artists and Terrorists

85

2. Terrorists in Falling Man The terrorism of Falling Man, too, relies heavily on mass-mediated images of itself. Throughout the novel, DeLillo recycles some of images that have become all too familiar to the reader since 9/11: planes crashing into the towers, people covered in ashes running through the streets blinded by dust, people jumping from the buildings in despair. As much as in Players, terrorism in Falling Man draws its strength rather from the mass-mediated reproduction of the terrorist act than from the charisma of the terrorists themselves. Yet while this later novel also challenges the foundational myths of terrorism as they are described above, it does so very differently. In Falling Man, the public image of terrorism is not undermined by its confrontation with the terrorism of the novel’s reality, but by the author’s refusal to reproduce the mass media’s representations of 9/11 the reader is used to. DeLillo portrays private instead of collective grief, refuses to use emotionally charged and overdetermined terms such as ‘9/11’ or ‘Ground Zero,’ and even has bin Laden’s name confused with “Bill Lawton” by Keith and Lianne’s son Justin (2007, 73 et passim). The images DeLillo uses are generally known and discernable, but adapted and defamiliarized; he resists the spell of the images and the language provided by the mass media. The terrorists themselves first appear during their stay in Hamburg, where they seek to distance themselves from Western culture in all kinds of ways, thus trying to cement their perception of standing outside mass society. They grow untrimmed beards to look different from the people around them; they distance themselves spatially by converting their apartments into prayer rooms and calling their flat “the house of the followers” (83); and they think and live Islam, which they define as “the struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far” (80)—the enemy being anybody who is not in line with their beliefs. But these terrorists, too, have great difficulties in trying to live up to the role they fashion for themselves. Their claim to stand outside society is jeopardized by the problems they encounter in renouncing Western culture not so much in their minds as in their daily lives. While driving his car, Amir, one of the terrorists who partake in the conspiracy, experiences this: One day, so strange, he saw a car with six or seven people crammed in, laughing and smoking, and they were young, maybe college kids, boys and girls. How easy would it be for him to walk out of his car and into theirs? [. . .] [O]pen the door of the other car and get in. Amir switched from English to Arabic [. . .]. (172–3)

His strong longing to be a part of this joyous group confuses Amir so much that he has to remind himself that he is supposed to destroy these boys and girls together with their whole nation. He also forgets for a moment that he is actually supposed to think and speak in Arabic and not in English, the language of the oppressor’s culture. The thought of violence and terror serves as a mnemonic device for Amir that makes him remember his true duty.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 85

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

86

Compare this with the terrorists of Players. The title of the earlier novel does not only refer to Lyle and Pammy, his weltschmerz-struck wife, but also to the terrorists, who see their deeds as being self-sufficient: they are players who consider the terrorist performance itself more important than its potential social effects. Their terrorism always remains at the level of play, of a dramatic performance. In Falling Man, the terrorist act is better planned, more purposeful, and it is far from being a game. Yet in its immense death toll and the seriousness of its intent, the attack goes too far, it overburdens public consciousness. The tongue-in-cheek terrorism of Players is insignificant, but somehow acceptable and comprehensible; in Falling Man, it is disturbingly meaningful, but remains unintelligible. As a result, people just turn away from it and fail to engage with the terrorist consciousness. This becomes apparent in an argument between Nina Bartos and her lover Martin Ridnour: [Martin] “Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict.” [Nina] “We’re talking about these people, here and now. It’s a misplaced grievance. [. . .] First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names.” (112–13)

It has become impossible for Nina even to think about the social and historical contexts of the terrorist act. As a result, she remains deaf to Martin’s suggestion that one should at least consider cultural hatred as an explanation. Contrary to the fairly silly group in Players and their bite-sized terrorism, the extremely violent and all too serious behavior of the terrorists in Falling Man disqualifies them as objects of serious contemplation. Learning their names is as far as it goes for Nina, who stands for society as a whole; learning the reasons for their hatred is out of question. More generally, seriousness does not fit the template of DeLillo’s masses. In his 1985 novel White Noise, college teacher Alfonse Stompanato characterizes mass society as having what he calls “brain fade.” He declares that “[w]e need an occasional catastrophe” (DeLillo 2002, 66) since only catastrophes can still catch the attention of mass society’s subjects: they are there to entertain and to show that we are still alive. Disasters, however, are only “enjoyable” as long as “they happen somewhere else” (66). In Falling Man, society as a whole has fallen victim to such a catastrophe; it happened here and now—and this is too much for the masses; they are unable to absorb the scale of the event. Consequently, only very few characters in the novel are willing to think about the sources of the violence. Lianne states that: [p]eople were reading the Koran. She knew of three people doing this. She’d talked to two and knew of another. [. . .] She didn’t know whether they were persisting in the effort. She could imagine herself doing this, the determined action that floats into empty gesture. (DeLillo 2007, 231)

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 86

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Artists and Terrorists

87

Not even Lianne, whose husband Keith had almost fallen victim to the attacks, starts to actively rethink her own position vis-à-vis cultural others or to reconsider her prejudices. True, DeLillo on several occasions does hint at the terrorists’ motivations. Amir and Hammad, the two terrorists who are sketched in greatest detail, believe that they and their people act in self-defense. They feel “crowded out” by other cultures, by “foreign policies,” and the “all-enfolding will of capital markets” (80), which have forced them into isolation for too long and make them lose their cultural heritage. The terrorists are not in a war against a people or a country; they are in a war against a culture. They believe that they “kn[o]w that Islam was under attack” (83) and that they were chosen by fate to make “the strongest claim of all, the highest jihad” (174). Amir’s recitation of an Arabic verse—“Never have We destroyed a nation whose term of life was not ordained beforehand” (173)—needs to be read along those lines. For him, it is not individuals who willed the attacks on the WTC; it was the social, cultural, and historical contexts that made them necessary. The similarities and differences between the terrorists of Players and those of Falling Man begin to emerge more clearly. In the former novel, the goals of the terrorists are not clearly defined; they follow a destructive doctrine of bombs and guns and claim to intend to change society for the better, but they are without a definite idea of what a better world should look like. These yuppies’ plans and attacks are lost in a web of drama and theatre that primarily serves to maintain their media-generated image. By way of contrast, the terrorists’ goals in Falling Man—“to kill Americans” (171)—are clear and frighteningly simple, their motivation is fed by oppression and radical Islamic ideology (even if the details of that ideology remain less than clear in the novel). Amir, and in his wake Hammad as well, advance a philosophy of destruction in order to make the world remember their claim for their own “place in the world” (116). The real enemy, however, is neither America itself nor the American people, but the Western culture’s denial of Islam’s presence and independence. As in Players, terrorism in Falling Man is unable to achieve social change, though the reasons are different. In Players, terrorism fails to transform society because it is too close to yuppie self-expression. Thus, the terrorist acts can be accepted and even welcomed as entertainment. Conversely, terrorism in Falling Man fails because it is too distant, too strange. In the general public, it provokes a turning inward and a retreat from the world: the people affected by the terrorist act turn it into something personal and remember it exclusively as it relates to their own experiences. They refocus on themselves rather than on global politics and abandon themselves to various acts of purification. This is most poignantly illustrated by Keith’s poker routine and by Justin’s decision gradually to give up speech: his words become monosyllabic and he finally tries to go completely mute. His behavior is exemplary for society as a whole as it resorts to introspection instead of a turning outward that might result in a reassessment of social organization.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 87

5/13/2010 8:45:06 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

88

3. Artists in Falling Man Both in his fictional and his nonfictional writings, DeLillo repeatedly draws analogies between the activities of writers and terrorists. In an interview with Ann Arensberg, DeLillo defines the writer’s role as that of “the person who stands outside society” (45), and in another interview with Adam Begley, he adds that “we need the writer in opposition” (97). One of the best-known statements to that effect in DeLillo’s literary work is made by the writer Bill Gray in Mao II: There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. [. . .] Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen [. . .] make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (41)

The question, then, is: how can the masses be reached from a position of (self-imposed) marginality and distance? DeLillo’s terrorists are on the way to finding an answer to that question by staging violence as a mass-mediated spectacle. Artists in DeLillo’s work are struggling with the very same question, and Falling Man can be read as an extended reflection on that struggle. In this novel, the performance artist Falling Man, who restages the falling of a man from the burning WTC tower in Richard Drew’s (in)famous 9/11 photograph, engages in that struggle by taking advantage of the tension between his selfpositioning outside society and his need for public exposure. On the one hand, Falling Man constantly maintains his physical distance from the audience, hanging in midair and out of reach. He also performs completely mute, granting neither interviews nor making public statements. On the other hand, he realizes that his art (like all art) needs an audience, and for that reason, he performs wherever an audience is already present or may gather quickly. Contrary to other artist figures in DeLillo, Falling Man does not openly fight against the environment, which has actually brought him forth as an artist and without which he could not exist. Rather, his performances are a combination of distance and proximity. Lianne suggests as much in her description of Falling Man immediately before one of his performances: “He was situated where he was, remote from 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). Even though he is completely separated from his target audience and will be visible to it only very briefly, he wants to be seen from close by, with his observers, only yards away. Moreover, Falling Man’s take on Drew’s photograph and his self-fashioning in a banker’s suit make sense only against the background of cultural knowledge that is shared between the artist and his spectators. He needs an audience that is both far away and close by. Thus, the performance artist known as Falling Man thrives on the tension between self-marginalization and public exposure.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 88

5/13/2010 8:45:07 AM

Artists and Terrorists

89

Falling Man’s speechlessness is another important element of his performances. It suggests that there is nothing to explain, neither concerning his art nor those happenings of unspeakable violence he revives, “those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump” (33). Even though Lianne has the possibility to talk to him at one point, she remains silent. Talking was, she concluded, “beyond reach” (168). Falling Man’s artistic performances seem to testify to the failure of society to relate to the “real.” He presents himself hanging upside-down, in his banker’s suit symbolizing an uprooted pillar of society, a society that no longer knows which direction to take. The largely hostile reactions that follow his performances indicate art’s difficulties to sensitize people for their experiences. While the staged and defamiliarized falls could animate the reappraisal of traumatic memories, the people largely blame him for hindering their attempts to repress what has happened. But does this not grant terrorism too much influence and deny the social significance of art? If the major goal of early-twenty-first-century terrorism is to fundamentally change the relationship between the West and the Islamic world, then it can be said that the attacks did in some sense succeed. Their geopolitical reverberations were radical indeed. September 11, certainly reminded the inhabitants of Western societies that there are people outside its immediate scope. Still, as Falling Man shows, the effects of the attacks were finally subjective. They did not result in any collective rethinking or reorganization of social structures in the West. All that DeLillo’s characters are finally left with are personal responses and opinions. In Falling Man, the attack on the WTC—a highly public and collective event—is split up into a plurality of individual, private stories. It is through the figure of the performance artist that DeLillo captures this process of atomization most poignantly: all Falling Man does is provide a blank page on which the spectator’s stories can be projected.

4. Artists in Players In Players, there are no artist figures in the strict sense, but the novel is crucially interested in the intricacies, creativity, and power of language. In his 1982 interview with Thomas LeClair, DeLillo states that, in Players, he wanted to explore “[w]hat people who live together really sound like” (2005, 9). Like the personal feelings of the characters in Falling Man, language in Players is something private, and the novel draws much of its aesthetic force from DeLillo’s departures from linguistic norms. Players, also discusses this at the level of characterization. As Pammy muses: “Pammy and Lyle had their own characteristics, of course. Pammy and Lyle, she thought. We sound like a pompom girl and a physics major. Or chimps, she thought. The names of chimps

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 89

5/13/2010 8:45:07 AM

90

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

learning language with multicolored disks” (DeLillo 1989, 138). In this novel, the characters themselves are deeply interested in language. In the scant notes on the terrorists’ personal backgrounds, art, literature, language, philosophy, and terrorism are closely intertwined. And yet, the very idea that these aspects actually are connected is immediately called into question. About J. Kinnear, we read that “[h]e used to be a counselor with a group up in the mountains somewhere, out west” (121) and that he used to teach “voice and diction, junior college level” (153). In one way, this classifies him as a man of learning, but his teaching experience did not go beyond junior college level. The statement Marina makes about her brother Rafael sounds more impressive: “[I]n a way everything we’re doing here, or about to do, comes from him, originates with his plans, his philosophy of destruction. [. . .] He was brilliant too. He had university degrees, he could discuss ideas in any company” (182). Yet even though he may take the philosophical approach, it does not grow out of a love of wisdom or striving for truth; it grows out of affection for bombs and guns. Readers of Players are left with the impression that Rafael has never thought through his “philosophy of destruction,” especially since we learn nothing about any visions of a different world. These terrorists never think about what may come after the destruction. For Marina, too, theory and inertia have to give way to practice and action. Yet her position is marked as extreme; other terrorists in the novel do not divide theory and action so neatly. Luis, the bomb-builder of the cell, claims that he has acquired his bombmaking skills in the library (184), which indicates a direct connection between bookish learning and terrorism. Luis is not the only character in Players who shares DeLillo’s concern for language. Some of the novel’s characters still believe that language performs a constructive social role and that it is able to bring about change, although not necessarily in a terrorist context and only on a personal level. During a dinner with Lyle and Pammy, their friend Ethan Segal states that “[t]o forge a change that you may be reluctant to forge, that may be problematical for this or that reason, you have to tell people. [. . .] This changes the path of your life. Just telling people makes the change begin to happen” (43). While Marina believes that art and the “real” belong to different spheres, Ethan sees the two as parts of a whole. Still, the novel leaves little hope that language can play the creative role Ethan attributes to it. Ironically, language fails even Ethan himself: unable to respond to the beginning silence and estrangement between him and his selfdoubting lover Jack Laws, Ethan cannot prevent Jack’s silent and lonesome suicide. It comes thus as no surprise that the novel ends in silence: a man (possibly Lyle) is in a motel room, eagerly expecting a call, which would give him the “detailed instructions” he is waiting for (210), but the telephone does not ring and the man remains in stillness and inertia. If Ethan claims that language is able to bring about change, then we witness the failure of that project at its very first obstacle: the voicing of change. ***

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 90

5/13/2010 8:45:07 AM

Artists and Terrorists

91

As in some of his other novels—especially Mao II, Libra, and The Names— DeLillo in Players and Falling Man constructs analogies between writing and terrorism that bear recapitulation. First, both artists and terrorists are confronted with a multifaceted audience that is impossible to address in its entirety. For that reason, it seems impossible to effect a collective rethinking of social structure, and all that remains are private stories. Second, artists and terrorists have similar opinions about their respective places in society. Both do not only claim to stand outside the dominant culture, but also see this distance as a precondition for their success. However, a closer examination reveals this distance to be imaginary: both groups are integrated into the general culture in that they rely on the mass media that sustain the very postmodern society they oppose. Third, both artists and terrorists tend to consider communication a unidirectional process rather than a dialog: Falling Man is indifferent to his audiences’ response; the terrorists in Falling Man attempt to renounce all forms of assimilation; and the terrorists in Players strive to cleanse the world without being contaminated by it. Yet both artists and terrorists are in constant interaction with their environment (although they might not be aware of it), drawing on, engaging with, and modifying a symbolic world, a language, and images that they share with their audiences. Finally, both artists and terrorists try to provoke their audiences into actively reexamining the world around them, to question the system they live in. Yet there are important differences between artists and terrorists. Their audiences are always heterogeneous, but whereas artists embrace this diversity, terrorists treat their audience as one uniform mass. Falling Man is quite happy to allow for multiple interpretations of his performances. His speechlessness opens up a space of interpretative freedom—and DeLillo’s own longtime refusal to give interviews can be read in the same vein. The artist may thus trigger creative processes in the observers’ minds. Most importantly, in DeLillo’s work, the divergences between the artists’ claim to stand outside society and their reliance on precisely those means of mass communication that sustain society do not contradict or undermine their projects as they do the terrorists’ activities. Instead, those divergences create a productive tension between the private and the public, between the individual and the collective, between silence and speech. And it is, finally, this tension that energizes both the performances of Falling Man and DeLillo’s work.

Works Cited Arensberg, A. (2005), “Seven seconds,” in Thomas DePietro (ed.) Conversations with Don DeLillo, 40–6. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Baker, P. (1994), “The terrorist as interpreter: Mao II in postmodern context.” Postmodern Culture, 4,2: 34 pars. Begley, A. (2005), “The art of fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo,” in Thomas DePietro (ed.),Conversations with Don DeLillo, 86–108. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 91

5/13/2010 8:45:07 AM

92

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

DeLillo, D. (1977), Players. New York: Vintage. —(1982), The Names. New York: Vintage. —(1989), Libra. London: Penguin. —(1992), Mao II. London: Vintage. —(2002), White Noise. London: Picador. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Hantke, S. (1994), Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Kuzma, L. M. (2000), “Trends: Terrorism in the United States.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 64: 90–115. LeClair, T. (2005), “An interview with Don DeLillo,” in Thomas DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 3–15. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Passaro, V. (2005), “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” in Thomas DePietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 75–86. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Rowe, J. C. (2004), “Mao II and the war on terrorism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 1: 21–43. Simmons, R. (1999), “What is a terrorist? Contemporary authorship, the Unabomber and Mao II.” Modern Fiction Studies, 45, 3: 675–95.

PSchweighauser_05_Final.indd 92

5/13/2010 8:45:07 AM

Chapter 6

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art: DeLillo’s Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art Julia Apitzsch

After 9/11, how can we get back to a blank sheet of paper and just make things up? (V.S. Naipaul) Get black on white. (Guy de Maupassant)

The flood of traumatic images we immediately associate with the events of 9/11 called for an authority able to explain what this day had done to us. The quest for answers and approaches to understand the event behind the movielike staging that made us all—as Susan Sontag explains the essential aspect of our age in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)—involuntary eyewitnesses, put a demanding spotlight on writers. The power of the images that burned themselves into the collective memory by endless repetition called for a literary voice to translate the inexpressible and thus render an event approachable that seemed to defy language. In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (2001a), Don DeLillo seeks ways to confront the shock of 9/11. In his careful inventory, he pieces together the fragments of what is left once the ashes have settled over Manhattan. As the author of that essay, DeLillo comes to resemble the poetic persona in Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report from a Besieged City,” which DeLillo chose for several readings that raised support for the victims: [t]hey graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler I record—I don’t know for whom—the history of the siege. (Herbert 2001)

Written only three month after the attacks, the essay still betrays the shock of the New York author and his involvement in the national trauma, his struggling for words, “simple words lost in the falling ashes.” From this perspective, the process of writing carries less of a responsibility toward the author’s readers, but represents the essential survival strategy of an author who wants to understand “what this day had done to us” (DeLillo 2001a, 39). Like V.S. Naipaul, DeLillo sees himself confronted with the fundamental problem that the event defies even comparison with a Hollywood movie: “The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is” (39). Or, as Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop states when he feels his life

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 93

5/13/2010 8:47:16 AM

94

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

being taken over by Hollywood simulations: “This ain’t the fuckin’ movies” (1995, 527). Seen from a literary point of view, then, DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future” deals with “the ruins of representational language,” as Marc Abel has aptly put it (2003, 1248). But rather than taking the defeatist stand of his character from Mao II, the writer Bill Gray, who argues that terrorists have taken up the writer’s territory, DeLillo reinforces the importance of writers in an age dominated by violent acts and images of terrorism: “But living language is not diminished [. . .]. The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left for us to create the counternarrative” (2001a, 34). In the light of his latest novel Falling Man (2007a), DeLillo’s essay reads like a programmatic foreword to the challenging task of a writer facing 9/11. The present article analyzes the narrative strategies that DeLillo employs in order to create the kind of counter-narrative that will oppose the terrorists’ death plot. Rather than targeting the powerful and endlessly repeated media images of the attacks or the ready-made labels that go with them (“9/11,” “ground zero,” “war on terror”), DeLillo opposes these traumatic images with surprising art images: the disturbing appearances of the performance artist “Falling Man” and the still lifes by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi take center stage. In addition to these two examples of art directly referred to in the novel, I will also explore a peculiar link with DeLillo’s previous short story “BaaderMeinhof” (2002a), which features the famous Red Army Faction (RAF) painting series by the German artist Gerhard Richter. DeLillo begins Falling Man amid the debris left by the fall of the towers, confronting the reader with an extensive set piece that captures the moment between the fall of the first and that of the second tower in a narrative tour de force. Just after he has escaped the burning North Tower, Keith Neudecker makes his way trancelike through the ashes and smoke to the apartment of his separated wife and his little son Justin: “When he appeared at the door it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face” (DeLillo 2007a, 87). This brief “Lazarus moment”—a survivor risen from the ashes—is but a fleeting image. It does not mark the beginning of a heroic survivor tale that the odd reader might have hoped for. The slowly evolving story makes it clear that Keith is a “falling man” rather than a rising Phoenix, who desperately tries to get a grip on the world again. From here, DeLillo undertakes a meticulous literary inventory of the American state of mind after the attacks. Keith begins a brief affair with Florence Givens, a woman whose briefcase he has saved from the towers. The memory of poker nights with his friends—one now severely injured and several dead—develops into an emblem of personal trauma and repressed memory of the attacks. He quits his job to become a professional poker player in the artificial world of casinos while his wife Lianne seeks refuge in her honorary work with an Alzheimer’s group, which also marks her personal struggle to come to terms with her father’s suicide after he was diagnosed with the disease. Meanwhile, their son Justin searches the sky with his friends, in tense anticipation of another assault by the ominous “Bill Lawton”— their misspelled version of bin Laden—who has invaded their games. Three years

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 94

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

95

after the attacks, Keith and Lianne live separate lives connected only by Keith’s sporadic visits in between poker tournaments. Without judging or condemning his new life, there is only one thing that Lianne requests of him: “Go away, come back. Simple as that” (215). It is a repetition of his survival that she requires from him for her own self-assurance; the repetition of his appearance at her door after the deadly attacks. Her need for security—the affirmation of their mutual survival in contemplation of sudden death—marks their fundamental difference: “There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not” (216). DeLillo thus presents two different types of victimhood: while Keith is an immediate survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Karen personifies the countless New Yorkers who did not face direct physical danger but whose lives have been deeply shaken by the event. The three main parts of the novel bear the aliases of three central personae as titles: “Bill Lawton;” “Ernst Hechinger,” the real name from the dubious political past of Lianne’s mother’s lover Martin Ridnour; and “David Janiak,” the civic name of the performance artist known as “Falling Man.” Only in retrospect can the reader decode these names as double identities—another aspect of the irritation and anxiety that the assaults of September 11 have brought upon the stability of real experience. While most chapters depict various episodes concerning Keith and his family as they move ever further away from the fatal date, the last chapter of each part displays the narrative death plot constructed around the young terrorist Hammad. The chapter headings of these parts serve as geographical markers of the terrorists’ plot, as it approaches the fatal intersection where Hammad’s and Keith’s plot lines collide in an explosion as the plane hits the tower: starting off “On Marienstrasse” in Hamburg, Germany, they move on to their training camp in Florida, “In Kokomis,” until the plane enters the “Hudson Corridor,” the airspace over New York, only seconds before it hits the North tower, where Keith is working. The attacks define the threshold of a new era: “Everything now is measured by after”; “three days after the planes” (8); “ten days after the planes” (34); “fifteen days after the planes” (69); “thirty-six days after the planes” (170); and, finally, “three years after the planes” (229). In this double structure, DeLillo depicts both the terrorists’ story as a plot that “move[s] deathward” (1985, 26) and Lianne’s and Keith’s (counter-)story that responds to it. In the narrative and syntactical clash of the two plot lines at the end of the novel, DeLillo metaphorically mirrors the medical phenomenon of “organic shrapnel” that Keith talks about at the beginning of the novel: tiny pieces of a suicide-bomber’s flesh that are driven into the flesh of a victim, causing the uncontrolled growth of pellets of flesh weeks later. The terrorists’ death plots function like the organic shrapnel that makes consciousness occupied by terror. This is expressed quite literally: “Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage” (DeLillo 2001a, 33). As in Libra, DeLillo approaches a national trauma of global impact, concentrating on the intersection of public history and individual fate in an exemplary analysis. His literary eye focuses on a small family in New York in the

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 95

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

96

time that follows the catastrophe. In DeLillo’s own words: “I was thinking about the impact of history on the smallest details of ordinary life, and I wanted to see if I could trace an individual’s interior life, day-by-day and thought-bythought” (Binelli 2007). DeLillo limits his perspective to a minimal frame aperture. His narrative strategy resembles the documenting eye of the camera lens, registering meticulously what is left of the world once the ashes and the dust have settled. The typical crowds of DeLillo’s previous work are absent. Neither does he give us a historical epic (as in Underworld), nor complex conspiracy theories (as in Libra), nor fully fledged terrorist ideologies (as in Mao II). The intimate perspective of his detailed close-up rather resembles the tone of The Body Artist: “small-scale and subdued” (Kirsch 2007). DeLillo chooses the intimate and often oppressive atmosphere of a small theater play. The various scenes and dialogues mostly feature no more than two or three characters. As he put it in an interview, “I could only ever imagine two people in a room who are trying to survive” (Körte 2007, 25; my translation).

1. “Natura Morta”: The Art of Terror What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract? (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

The most striking aspect of Falling Man is the near-total absence of the media images that constitute our experience of the event. Instead of evoking the collective memory of the traumatic images, DeLillo contrasts the violent images of the collective memory with fresh and surprising art images and performances that function as the novel’s central metaphors. Giorgio Morandi’s paintings and the performances of the fictitious “Falling Man” have little to do with the images immediately conjured up by 9/11. Thus, they open up new perspectives beyond the exhausted mainstream comparisons, a new and unconsumed realm of images and language. The loosely connected episodes of the novel draw their inspiration from the polyphonic gesture of abstract art that DeLillo has cited as one of his main influences: I just wanted to get the characters clear and, over time, create a balance, rhythm, repetition. This is what became satisfying to me. I was writing out of sequence and then began to fit the parts together and, as I say, look for these balances and the way in which the past yields the presence and vice versa. Sometimes this is what I think novelists do that makes them similar to painters. Abstract painters in particular. Looking for things in one part of a canvas that echo things in another part of a canvas. (Binelli 2007)

Interestingly, even the form of the novel itself draws on the art genre it depicts: Falling Man resembles a literary still life, or, understood more closely in keeping

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 96

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

97

with the original Italian, a contemplation of “natura morta.” At the same time, DeLillo deliberately draws on the collective picture memory, knowing that by dealing with one of the most photographed and filmed days of the twenty-first century, every little detail of the account becomes a sign that the reader will recognize. He also discards the inflationary shibboleths threatening to cover the event with ready-made labels. Instead of “ground zero,” “Twin Towers,” “World Trade Center,” and “9/11,” DeLillo restores the narrative power to simple words like “the towers,” “the planes,” and “that day in September.” The journalist Sam Anderson captures the effect of DeLillo’s technique aptly: “When the buzzwords do show up, they hit with surprising force: Even September feels obscene and holy” (2007). Again, DeLillo proves the power of language: after the attacks, even everyday objects appear as striking signs of brutal significance. By transforming the overwhelming media images into precise language and clearly observed snapshots of the cultural psyche after the attacks, DeLillo gives the event a brutal but necessary literary visibility: “DeLillo’s language performs the meandering look of the neorealist camera eye [. . .] thus intensifying the experience and concept of narrative as a mode of seeing” (Abel 2003, 1240). In both examples of artistic expression, Lianne serves as the reader’s observer of the artworks, continuing the line of DeLillo’s female protagonists with a special sensitivity for the visual (Mao II’s Brita Nilsson, The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke, Underworld’s Klara Sax, and so on).

2. Falling Man: Performing Terror He was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

The “falling” motif, ominously announced by the novel’s title as well as by its cover (directed by the vertical lines, the reader’s view “falls,” as it were, through the clouds onto the top of the Twin Towers represented on the back cover) reverberates throughout the story on many levels: “falling through space, through time, through memory, being tugged down or forward or back—and about how some of us try to slow or speed the motion” (Begley 2007).1 The motif receives a highly prominent personification in the figure of the irritating and impressive performance artist known as “Falling Man.” As in previous novels, a press photo serves as a visual trigger for DeLillo’s leitmotif.2 The fictitious Falling Man echoes the infamous photograph taken by Richard Drew of one victim jumping out of a tower window. The photo was printed on page 7 of The New York Times and reprinted by numerous other newspapers. It became known under the title “Falling Man,”3 and it created a scandal among people because of its alleged sensationalist exploitation of terror. The picture was suppressed and an unofficial but general censorship was imposed on all other photos depicting so-called “jumpers.” While the burning Twin Towers

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 97

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

98

were elevated to symbols of martyrdom, images of suicidal jumpers were intolerably at odds with traditional Christian icons of mourning. The strikingly symmetrical image of the fall in Drew’s photo—the man appears aligned with the façade of the towers—affects a deeply disturbing contrast between the photograph’s aesthetic composition and the gruesome death that is being documented. This victim’s pose radically differs from the grotesque bodies known from other snapshots of people jumping off the towers. The falling man’s almost elegant posture seems to express a startling ease. This impression, however, is revealed as a mere photo-freeze moment. The complete photo sequence of the fall documents his gruesome agony. DeLillo transforms this still image into the irritating and shocking performance of a fictitious character. While the publication of the real photograph was censored, DeLillo’s performance artist in his unexpected appearances evokes the horrible fate of the victim over and over, throwing himself off buildings and thus echoing the endless media reruns. His disturbing “signature stroke” adapts the position known from Drew’s photo: head down, one leg bent in a 90-degree angle. Lianne notices the action artist for the first time on her way to meeting her mother at the central station: “She was headed to the information desk to check the gate number when something caught her eyes out near the approach to 42nd Street” (DeLillo 2007a, 32). Suddenly and unannounced, the artist appears in public places, transforming Manhattan into a stage for his performances. Secured only with an almost invisible harness, he jumps head on from buildings and remains, like the photo still, in simulated free fall, evoking the memory of the photograph: He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his side. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct. She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. (33)

The stylized pose becomes an iconic reminder of the emotional wound: “He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump” (33). The first mentioning serves only as an introduction to the central set piece a little later in the novel. It is again Lianne who notices his preparations for another jump on the rooftop near the train tracks. This second appearance occurs without introduction. The reader is as unprepared as Lianne. The whole scene makes no explicit mention of his identity as the performance artist and, like Lianne, the reader has to identify the action by observing what is happening: It took a moment for him to come into view, upper body only, a man on the other side of the protective fence that bordered the tracks. He wasn’t a track worker in a blaze orange vest [. . .] She saw him from the chest up and heard the school kids now, calling each other, all the games in suspension. [. . .] White male in suit and tie, it now appeared, as he made his way down the short ladder trough the

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 98

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

99

opening. [. . .] This is when she knew, of course. [. . .] This is who he had to be. [. . .] Why is he doing this, she thought. (159–60)

An enraged woman who is obviously unaware of his identity ironically provides the appropriate context for his performance: “What you doing? [. . .] I call nine one one” (163). In Falling Man, it is a national emergency call that constitutes the semantic center. Although Lianne experiences his preparations as an emotional threat, she is unable to ignore his actions. His art stages a variation of the terrorist violence. Helplessly, Lianne is forced to witness a performance that for her embodies part of Keith’s experience: But why was she standing here watching? [. . .] Because she saw her husband somewhere near. She saw his friend, the one she’d met, or the other, maybe, or made him up and saw him, in a high window with smoke flying out. Because she felt compelled, or only helpless, gripping the strap of her shoulder bag. (167)

This time, his jump is not aimed at onlookers like Lianne, who are down in the street, but at the commuters driving past in the trains: He was situated where he was, remote from 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. She thought of the passengers [. . .]. These people had not seen him attach the safety harness. They would only see him fall out of sight. (164–5)

Just before the train passes underneath him, he jumps: “He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst” (168). The commuters talking to friends on their cell phones will describe the shocking scene; others will grab their phones to share the gruesome experience with their friends, thus reenacting it in the form of many small performance acts. Thus, this audience becomes part of the show: “There were things to say, essentially. Someone falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes” (165). Lianne fails to convince herself that this performance represents merely “some kind of antic street theater, an absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic understanding of what is irrational in the great schemes of being or in the next small footstep” (163). Instead, she painfully experiences that his iconic pose activates her individual trauma relating to the event. The stylized pose also visualizes Lianne’s own free fall: “This was too near and deep, too personal” (163). The iconicity of the gesture becomes a universal expression of every onlooker’s individual fear: “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 come down all among us” (33). Lianne’s physical proximity to the artist hovering above her is also expressed by syntactic means, as a symbolic blood bond between them: “blood rushing to his head, away from hers” (168). A homeless man passing by tries

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 99

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

100

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

to make sense of the action: “He had to learn how to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit” (168). Lianne backs away from this very “crack in the world,” evoked so vividly by the performance, and flees in shock until she meets Keith and Justin at a crossroads, “bright with urgent life” (170). “Thirty-six days after the planes” (170), Lianne unconsciously imitates Keith’s behavior—his escape away from the towers and toward his family. The “signature stroke” that brings the artist’s free fall to an artificial, frozen halt signifies a moment of pause that may be interpreted as a general narrative strategy, one employed in the novel as a whole. Rather than letting the rush of actions and images dictate the pace of the novel, DeLillo establishes control over the events by controlling the words, slowing things down to make them conform to his own rhythm: “DeLillo’s image events resonate aesthetically and ethically with the impossibility yet necessity of responding to events that exceed immediate explanation, both kinds enact their response-ability to show how intensively inhabiting—suspending—an event can bring ethical responsibility to it” (Abel 2003, 1241).4 A few years later, Lianne accidently comes across the obituary of a certain David Janiak, known as the performance artist Falling Man, which reveals the true identity behind the chapter’s title name. Lianne’s internet research yields numerous amateur photos of his jumps, multiplied variations on the real photograph by Richard Drew: There he was, David Janiak, in pictures and print. Dangling from the balcony of an apartment building on Central Park West. Suspended from the roof of a loft building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Dangling from the flies at Carnegie Hall during a concert [. . .]. Dangling over the east River from the Queensboro Bridge. [. . .]. Standing on the rail of a terrace. Dangling from the bell tower of a church in the Bronx. Dead at 39, apparently of natural causes. (DeLillo 2007a, 219–20)

The jump she had witnessed is, however, not among them. It is her memory that serves as a recording medium in this case, accurately defining her role in the narrative: “She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb” (223). Anticlimactically, David Janiak, alias Falling Man, dies of natural causes at the age of 39—the exact age that Keith had been at the time of the attacks. It is not until the end of the novel that DeLillo explicitly reveals the connection with the photograph that serves as the real model for his fictitious character, giving a detailed ekphrastic account of the snapshot that has been in the reader’s mind all along: 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. [. . .] [T]he effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 100

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

101

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. (221–2)5

In his description of a fictitious conference on the topic, “Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave Chronicler of the Age of Terror” (220) that is being held at the New School in New York City, DeLillo half-ironically reenacts the heated debate about the role of art that took place in New York in the aftermath of the attacks. He ironically comments on the internet articles of Lianne’s research on the consumerist appropriation of authentic artistic expression when he has Falling Man refuse the Guggenheim museum’s offer to jump from its roof at appointed hours. The fictitious reviews thus serve as exemplary statements of differing responses to artworks in the aftermath of 9/11 in an often stirring and heated debate. A prominent real example of this is Eric Fischl’s bronze statue Tumbling Woman. Originally created as a memorial for the victims, the statue of a woman falling head-down, legs bent at the hip, met with such violent rejection that it had to be veiled and ultimately removed from its place in the Rockefeller Center. As Anderson observes, DeLillo through the fictitious performance art offers both a concrete artistic statement and a meta-discussion of the debates concerning the possibilities and the role of art after 9/11: “Too painful? Suitably reverent? Overly reverent? Exploitative? Healing or wounding? Which should we prefer? And what can art possibly add to an event we’ve already experienced and reexperienced so often?” (Anderson 2007). In Falling Man, DeLillo offers what the real photo and its censorship could not: a creative variation that might allow for a new approach to the traumatic images.

3. Giorgio Morandi: “The Art of Seeing” It’s all about mortality, isn’t it? [. . .] Being human, being mortal. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

The still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) represent yet another artistic position and central visual motif of the novel while alluding also to DeLillo’s Italian roots. The two oil paintings referred to in the novel belong to Lianne’s mother Nina; they are presents from her European lover, the art dealer Martin Ridnour. The paintings are introduced early on, in the second chapter. DeLillo published an excerpt from this section in the April 2007 edition of The New Yorker, affixing, interestingly, the title “Still Life” to a passage that remains nameless as a chapter in the novel. The title functions as a programmatic leitmotif and sets the frame for the novel as a whole. For Lianne, the two paintings have special emotional value because they are connected with her mother: “What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about” (DeLillo 2007a, 12).

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 101

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

102

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Lianne’s detailed ekphrasis offers a description of the characteristic style of Morandi’s still lifes, pictorial arrangements of bottles, jars, and simple boxes that combine seemingly basic forms with the highly intense study of depth and color: [g]roupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoitre inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. (12)

Morandi’s still lifes show no traces of food or human interaction: they depict stylized arrangements of inanimate objects. But since all these objects have been made for human use, they still express human needs and wants—they are “witnesses” in Heidegger’s sense of the term. Deserted though they are, Morandi’s arrangements always reflect human relationships in their slightly changing variations. DeLillo translates this style into text by arranging his characters within the different episodes in analogy to Morandi’s bottles and jars, illuminating the painful developments in their relationships after the attacks. Like Morandi’s painting style, DeLillo investigates the traumatic impact of the events on the interpersonal relations (daughter–mother–lover), which undergo a difficult development after the attacks. Inside the limited frame of each episode, his characters act as if placed within the boundaries of a small canvas or the confines of a narrow stage. The paintings provide a sensitive surface, mirroring the disturbing ruptures of peoples’ perspectives: Against the background of 9/11, the still lifes change their peaceful appearances to something more like the original Italian term, a grim expression of “natura morta.” The familiarity and stability of stillness are suddenly replaced by the much harsher association of death. As Lianne notes, “The Italian word for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even” (12). In Lianne’s view, the paintings develop into yet another sign of the terror attacks. The invasion of terror into a familiar perspective is made explicit a little later, in Martin’s interpretation. He suddenly perceives something haunting about the familiar paintings: I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be back in another time zone. I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight [. . .]. Because I keep seeing the towers in the still life. (49)

Lianne perceives the towers in Morandi’s bottles and jars as well: “They looked together [. . .]. She saw what he saw. She saw the towers” (49). The irritating objects change in the observers’ perspectives: “The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to” (49). But it is not the paintings that have changed—it is the gaze of the beholders that transforms the still life into a somber natura morta.

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 102

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

103

DeLillo demonstrates how the terror takes possession of the characters’ perspectives. This sudden transformation of a familiar context into a disturbingly different one parallels the prologue of Underworld, where the happy crowds at the baseball game turn into figures from Brueghel’s apocalyptic vision of the “Triumph of Death.” Examining more closely how terror has invaded the victim’s mind yields an entirely new point of view beyond the much repeated images of the burning towers—one that can be even more painful to admit. The terrorists did not only attack their physical targets; they also invaded people’s thoughts and consciousness: “It is our lives and minds that are occupied now” (DeLillo 2001a, 33). As DeLillo makes clear in Falling Man, one fateful consequence of this is the narrowed perspectives that the protagonists are left with after the attacks, which renders them similar to the terrorists with their limited views: “Plots closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point” (DeLillo 2007a, 174). The terrorists’ “slenderest line of sight”—which culminates in their slogan, “Fix your gaze” (238)— disturbingly parallels Keith’s “narrow sight of tight eyes” at the poker table and Lianne’s reinterpretation of the paintings: “Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs” (67). This change of perspective is also noticeable in the longtime relationship between the two lovers, Martin and Nina. Their heated debates add a new element to their relationship that expresses their increasingly diverging opinions on the events on 9/11. Rather than taking sides, DeLillo treats differing American and European perspectives on the attacks as exemplary models to demonstrate the fundamental and unsettling power of the shocking event. Especially Martin’s character is suddenly seen in a different light. The blank patches of his early biography, once an interesting factor adding to his romantic bohemian image, are suddenly seen as suspect. Nina tells her daughter about Martin’s dubious political activities in the 1970s, when his name was still Ernst Hechinger: “He said to me once, I’ve done some things” (146). He was a member of the Berlin “Kommune Eins” and later sympathized with the Italian Red Brigade: “He was involved in the times. All that turmoil. He was active” (144). The exact nature of his role remains unclear, however. Nina has never asked Martin for further information about his previous life, but her trust is now being tried by her sudden confrontation with terrorism. He has once shown her the famous mug shot of the nineteen German RAF terrorists (“Wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies” [147]) to prove that he was not one of the main activists. Although the political and ideological motivations of the terrorist activities of RAF and al Qaeda are incomparable, the mug shot establishes an eerie analog to the actual mug shot of the 19 (!) terrorists of September 11, which Lianne studies at an earlier point in the novel. “She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license” (19). When Nina reproaches her partner for likening the jihadists to the radically left-wing terrorists of the

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 103

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

104

1970s and of sympathizing with them, she does so because her own perspective, not Martin’s, has become muddled. Lianne notes, He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood [. . .]. These were his nineteen, these hijackers, these Jihadists, even if only in her mother’s mind. (147, 149)

Again, it is not Martin who has changed but Nina’s (as well as Lianne’s) perception of him. They now link his shady past to the present terrorist activities in ways that cast a new light on everything: “She [Lianne] saw the hard tight fury in Nina’s face and felt, herself, only a sadness, hearing these two people, joined in spirit, take strongly opposing positions” (47). When Nina finally ends their relationship, this is yet another long-term consequence of the terrorist attacks. Consequently, she returns the two Morandi paintings—a symbolic expression of the fact that their perspectives are no longer compatible. The empty walls reflect the end of their relationship in the literal sense of natura morta: “The room was tomblike without them” (209).

4. Gerhard Richter: The Baader-Meinhof Cycle After her mother’s death, Nina visits a small Morandi exhibition at a Chelsea gallery. The visit is a ritualized farewell, a commemoration of and tribute to her mother. Again, this emotional gaze makes the paintings special canvasses of memories and intense portraits of her mother: She had mixed feelings about going but went. Because even this, bottles and jars, a vase, a glass, simple shapes in oil on canvas, pencil on paper, brought her back into the midst of it, the thrust of arguments, perceptions, deadly politics, her mother and her mother’s lover. [. . .] She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting, Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. (209–10)

All works on display bear the same title, Natura Morta. But what was before a threatening association becomes here an intimate examination of mortality: “All the paintings and drawings carried the same title: Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days” (211). Nina’s visit to the gallery is turned into a very intimate contemplation of her mother’s death. Again, the paintings serve as a sensitive medium, resembling the painted memory of her mother’s life: “She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it [. . .] Turn it into living tissue, who you are” (210). This deeply personal moment is disturbed by a male visitor who enters the gallery and watches her: “She went back to the main room but could not

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 104

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

105

look at the work the same way with the man there, watching her or not [. . .]. [F]ifty and leathery, a mugshot monochrome” (210). Her intimate space thus trespassed, her privacy violated (the “mug shot” comparison likens the intrusion to terrorist violence), Lianne leaves without buying one of the desired catalogs. This scene is particularly interesting because it echoes DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof” (2002a), which serves as an intertext for the novel. In the short story, DeLillo approaches the topic of terrorism through an unsettling alignment of German RAF terrorism of the 1970s and small but profound violations of privacy and identity in everyday experience. As in Falling Man, DeLillo chooses a work of art as his means of expression, this time the famous RAF series “October 18, 1977” by the German painter Gerhard Richter, which featured as the main exhibit of the 2002 MOMA retrospective “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” (Storr 2001). Richter painted 15 large-format studies modeled after the press photos taken in the context of the suicides of RAF-members Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Like the press photos, all paintings are in black, white, and gray tones. They owe their special effect to Richter’s characteristic coating technique, which creates an irritatingly out-of-focus appearance that challenges one’s habitual modes of visual perception. As the female protagonist notes, “You need a special training to look at these paintings” (DeLillo 2002a, 78). Richter’s painting strategy, then, resembles DeLillo’s storytelling: both use images of public events as models for their artistic variations, and both make us see things anew. In the story, a female visitor to the museum is contemplating the paintings and is increasingly irritated by the advances of a male visitor. Like Lianne in Falling Man, the woman feels her intimate act of observation disturbed: She knew there was someone else in the room. There was no outright noise, just an intimation behind her, a faint displacement of air. She’d been alone for a time, seated on a bench in the middle of the gallery with the paintings set around her, a cycle of 15 canvases, and this is how it felt to her, that she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend. (78)

In both scenes, the women are being transformed into objects of contemplation by the male gaze of the intruding visitor. In a later publication of the story in The Guardian, the complex power of gazes DeLillo employs as his narrative strategy is further emphasized by a different title: “Looking at Meinhof” (DeLillo 2002b). Reluctantly, the protagonist is drawn into a conversation with the man. Her feelings vis-à-vis the paintings reflect her strangely helpless passivity and the man’s power over her: “ ‘And what do you feel when you look?’ he said. [. . .] ‘I think I feel helpless. These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be’ ” (DeLillo 2002a, 80). The woman and the man share a snack in the museum cafeteria and end up in her apartment. After he has ignored her repeated pleas to leave her apartment, she locks herself in the bathroom while the man apparently masturbates on her bed, excuses himself, and

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 105

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

106

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

finally leaves. As in the transformed Morandi paintings, the sudden violation has caused a fundamental change in the woman’s perception as she observes her room after the man’s intrusion: She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard. Nearly everything had a double effect—what it was and the association it carried in her mind. She went out walking, and when she came back, the connection was still there, at the coffee table, on the bed, in the bathroom. Bastard. (DeLillo 2007a, 82)

The story ends with a second visit to the exhibition on the next day. When she enters the central room, she perceives the man in front of the largest painting, which is entitled “Funeral.” This visual death emblem ends the story and forms a thematic connection to Falling Man’s “natura morta.” The violence evoked by Richter’s paintings anticipates the increasingly unsettling intrusion of the man into the woman’s privacy. As in the case of the Morandi paintings, DeLillo translates Gerhard Richter’s characteristic painting techniques into his literary strategy. He repeats the blurry fuzziness of Richter’s paintings in the story’s narrative ambiguity. Like the suicides of the RAF members that were never entirely solved, it remains unclear in “BaaderMeinhof” what really happened between the two characters and why the woman allowed it to happen. Just as Richter in his paintings, DeLillo is not interested in passing a definite verdict of guilt, but the picture series becomes emblematic of blatant violation and trespassing.6 Translating Richter’s characteristic painting technique into literary fiction, DeLillo takes a look at terrorism through the filter of these artworks—a look that remains disturbingly ambiguous. Richter’s paintings are also echoed in the nebulous past of Martin Ridnour/ Ernst Hechinger and his affinity with radical leftist activities. DeLillo offers no straightforward parameters to interpret the disturbing analogy he sets up between the likeable Martin Ridnour and the young terrorist Hammad. Lianne, who like the reader is left alone in struggling with her feelings for Martin, offers a somewhat clumsy defense of her lover’s past that reveals the naiveté of our cultural anxieties: “Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her—one of ours, which means godless, Western, white” (195; my emphasis). The performance artist Falling Man as well as Morandi’s still lifes offer specific visual metaphors quite different from the stock symbols of 9/11. DeLillo adapts the genre of the still life as an adequate model for the narrative strategy of his novel. Together with the resonance of Richter’s paintings in his short story “Baader-Meinhof,” he presents three very different and original perspectives that go well beyond the “triumph of death” repeated over and over by the mass media and thus constitute a counter-narrative to the terrorists’ death plot. Such a strategy opposes the deluge of images connected with 9/11. Although the artistic methods are quite different, the Falling Man’s unsettling “signature stroke,” his frozen pose, offers an interesting analogue to Morandi’s

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 106

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art

107

still lifes. It is another instance of deceleration, a slowing down of things. The motionless posture at the end of each jump freezes the death fall into a variation of natura morta. DeLillo thus creates new and idiosyncratic metaphors, which are unsettling and consoling at the same time. Above all, they offer fresh and unfamiliar perspectives on the traumatic events, perspectives that transcend the stale and overconsumed images that are, after all, part of the terrorists’ stage directions. DeLillo forcefully shows that, faced with the unspeakable, the writer’s task remains the transformation of the ruins of language into (sometimes painfully) clear sentences and the giving of “memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space” (DeLillo 2001a, 39).

Notes 1. See also Adam Mars-Jones’s suggestion that Saul Bellow’s novel Dangling Man echoes in Falling Man. 2. DeLillo’s fictitious character was threatened to be overtaken by reality when The New York Times ran an article on its front page about a man who did a similar performance in Chicago. As DeLillo reports in an interview, “That irritated me a little because I had the impression that reality would steal my fictitious character” (Körte 2007, 25; my translation). 3. In 2003, on the second anniversary of the attacks, Esquire printed Richard Drew’s photo again on their cover. The issue featured extensive research by journalist Tom Junod. Junod asks why the iconic photo did not become the visual symbol of the attacks—similar to the famous photo by Kim Phuc shot in 1972 of a naked girl after American napalm attacks that became the emblem of the Vietnam War atrocities. 4. For a discussion of DeLillo’s slowing down in Falling Man, see also Peter Boxall’s essay in this volume. 5. Note the obvious Rilke citation here: “Every angel is terrifying” (Rilke 2007, 23). 6. See also Opfermann (2007) as well as Linda S. Kauffman’s essay in this volume.

Works Cited Abel, M. (2003), “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the ruins of the future’: Literature, images, and the rhetoric of seeing 9/11.” PMLA, 118, 5: 1236–50. Anderson, S. (2007), “Code red.” New York Magazine, May 7. www.nymag.com/arts/ books/features/31521. Begley A. (2007), “DeLillo’s 9/11 resists gravity.” The New York Observer, May 8. www.observer.com/2007/delillo-s-9–11-resists-gravity. Binelli, M. (2007), “The intensity of a plot. An interview with Don DeLillo.” Guernica, July. www.guernicamag.com/interviews/373/intensity_of_a_plot/. DeLillo, D. (1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. —(1988), Libra. New York: Viking. —(1991), Mao II. New York: Viking. —(1997), Underworld. New York: Scribner. —(2001a), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December, 33–40. —(2001b), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner.

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 107

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

108

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

—(2002a), “Baader-Meinhof.” The New Yorker, April, 178–82. —(2002b), “Looking at Meinhof.” The Guardian, August 17. http://www.guardian. co.uk/books/2002/aug/17/fiction.originalwriting. —(2007a), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. —(2007b), “Still life.” The New Yorker, April 9. Herbert, Z. (2001), “Report from a besieged city.” The New Yorker, October 29. www. newyorker.com/online. Junod, T. (2003), “The falling man.” Esquire, September. www.esquire.com/features/ ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN. Kirsch, A. (2007), “DeLillo confronts September 11. Rev. of Falling Man. By Don DeLillo.” The New York Sun, May 2. www.nysun.com/article/53594. Körte, P. (2007), “Vor dem Jahrestag 9/11. Was erzählt uns der Terror, Don DeLillo?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, September 9, 25. Mars-Jones, A. (2007), “As his world came tumbling down. Rev. of Falling Man. By Don DeLillo.” The Observer, May 13. books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/ 0%2C%2C2078265%2C00.html. Opfermann, S. (2007), “Unrechtserfahrung und Geschlechterverhältnisse literarisch inszeniert,” in Opfermann (ed.), Unrechtserfahrungen. Geschlechterverhältnisse in Gesellschaft, Recht und Literatur, 159–75. Königstein, Germany: Taunus. Pynchon, T. (1995), Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin. Rilke, R. M. (2007), “First elegy,” in The Duino Elegies, trans. Martyn Crucefix, 15–22. London: Enitharmon Press. Sontag, S. (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Storr, R. (2001), Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

PSchweighauser_06_Final.indd 108

5/13/2010 8:47:17 AM

Chapter 7

Grimonprez’s Remix Eben Wood

The plane is a metaphor for history. It is transgressive, always on the move between several countries, between several homes. Nowadays, home is a nomadic place. The Palestinians didn’t have a country so the airplane became for them a sort of house. At the end of the sixties and seventies, the political implications of home became very clear. (Grimonprez 1998, 7) Desire, more than any other point in the range of human possibility, meets its limit somewhere. (Lacan 1981, 31)

1. I Mimic what is Going On in the Media, Rather Than Deconstructing It In the first image, I am riding in the passenger seat of a beat-up, dust-covered Subaru south along the border between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan.1 The river is to our left, invisible beyond chain link fence, spiral razor wire, minefields. To the right is the wreckage of a bombed hotel, one of many that dotted the Dead Sea’s northern shore before the territory was annexed in 1967. The wreckage is recognizably a multi-storey building, gray, eroded looking, with mostly intact walls and eye-socket windows. Through huge cracks and fissures we can see the mountains rising away from the sea toward Jerusalem. Surmounting one of the largest and most intact of the buildings is an IDF observation post, sandbags the same nothing color of the building, the white flag with its light-blue star bright against the sky. Below the watching soldiers, scrawled on the wall in huge, spray-painted letters that would be legible far across the river border, is a message in English: Fuck Your Dreams. In the second image, I am waking up at dawn after riding all night from Rafah crossing in the Gaza Strip, west across the Sinai to Cairo. Stretched out on the bench-like seat of a small bus, I had awakened several times in the night, once to see the lights of a freighter moving dreamlike across the moonlit desert, knowing we had reached the Suez Canal. In the morning light, the rest of the passengers still asleep, the driver and his relief talking softly, I can see we have reached the outskirts of a city, a broad, sparsely tree-lined avenue that is bordered by concrete grandstands. I have never been to Cairo before, but this scene is somehow deeply familiar. We continue along the empty avenue, the city approaching out of the night desert behind us, as that eerie feeling of

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 111

5/13/2010 8:47:01 AM

112

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Figure 7.1 Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Xiaoting Lau. Courtesy of Zapomatik

familiarity, of déjà vu grows. Suddenly, and with the visceral certainty of a kick in the gut, I remember watching, over and over on the tiny black-and-white television of my rural American childhood, looped images of Anwar Sadat’s assassination. It had happened, I realize, on this avenue, in these concrete grandstands, in the deep intimacy of distant memory.

2. You Remind Me of Something / I Just do not Know what it is Distinct from simply editing an existing work, remixing is the process by which a song is disassembled and then recombined with new elements to produce something both like and unlike the original, a kind of uncanny double. Describing the origins of the remix in late 1960s Jamaica—in the one-off doubles or “dubs” of ska originals made by producers, engineers, and DJs such as Ruddy Redwood, King Tubby, and Lee “Scratch” Perry—Ben Williams writes that a “good dub mix is like an inverse of its original, the ghostly imprint that’s left over when you take the song away” (2002).2 By introducing a new structural rhythm, a new punctuation, to the song’s elements, remixing also transforms the relations between the work and the world around it, its spaces of performance, exhibition, or consumption. In this process, what is remixed is not simply an individual work but the very quality that had once made film the paradigmatic modern art. Catherine David, cocurator with Jean-François Chevrier of the 1997 Documenta X in Kassel, in which Johan Grimonprez’s film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was first exhibited

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 112

5/13/2010 8:47:01 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

113

(alongside Gerhard Richter’s monumental photographic archive, Atlas), has pointed out that “[o]ne of the great privileges of cinema of [the twentieth century] is that of being an artform which is confronted with and defined by its conditions of production, that is, by its relations to the institution, but especially by a logic of industrial production” (David 2007, 145). David talks about the “irrealization” produced by the postmodern culture of images, in which the specific technical or experiential qualities of different media are lost in “a soft, generalized image with no particular character and lacking qualities,” in which an analog relationship with the ruptured “real” is replaced by the digital simulacrum’s absorptive totality (148). Countering David’s diagnosis of an “image crisis,” DJ and ethnomusicologist John von Seggern has described remix as [a] major conceptual leap: making music on a meta-structural level, drawing together and making sense of a much larger body of information by threading a continuous narrative through it [. . .]. The importance of this cannot be overstated: in an era of information overload, the art of remixing and sampling as practiced by hiphop DJs and producers points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts. (2007)3

The different approaches to digital or synthetic media mapped by David’s and von Seggern’s comments conform to a predictable binary, with media spectacle’s leveling totality alternating with, or flipping into, complex or recombinant forms of cultural exchange. To paraphrase David, the great privilege of the twenty-first-century remix is to be an art form, which is confronted with and defined by the collapse of medium specificity into media indifference, of the politically possible into the immanently virtual. Meaning here lies in movement, but the tectonic rhythms of that movement correspond to a body that is neither individual nor self-evident. Summing up a discussion of “sampling, memory, and the semantic web,” Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid, reminds readers of the dialectic between meaning and movement that Duke Ellington captured in a pragmatic axiom: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Miller adds that in understanding the simultaneously interiorizing or psychological and exteriorizing or global implications of the information age, it would be wise: [t]o recall and remix the [cautionary] tale of a bored billionaire living in a dream world in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, who said: “It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.” (2008)

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 113

5/13/2010 8:47:02 AM

114

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

As DeLillo reminds us through the simultaneously fixed and mobile character of Eric Packer, in the era of media spectacle, the adjective industrial now haunts the West as a ghostly textual, geographical, biological, and political paradigm. Similarly, discussions of documentary practice are increasingly haunted by what has been called documentary’s “museumification,” its incorporation into art-world spaces and modes of aesthetic consumption. Relating Grimonprez’s now well-known work and DeLillo’s novels— particularly those two “originals” on which Grimonprez explicitly drew, White Noise and Mao II—directly addresses this historical change in the location and function of documentary, as well as the relationship between documentary and other narrative modes of representation.4 DeLillo himself uses the rhythmic interplay of still and moving images to interrogate fiction’s defining narrative time, and conversely, uses narrative time to query the image’s claim to self-evidence, to transparent meaning. Given the divergent readings of digital culture by David, von Seggern, and Miller, there is one particular aspect of the documentary image that I think is important here: the doubled idea of resolution. Narratively, resolution refers to the drawing together of a story’s composite elements to provide some sense of an ending that is not simply the last word before the cover closes and the frame is confirmed. Resolution is a purposeful and not an arbitrary kind of death. Visually, resolution refers to the quality of an image’s surface in comparison to some notion of clarity or transparency. In conventional archival documentaries, low resolution operates as the principal mark of the image’s authenticity, of an artlessness that belongs to the narratives of “real time,” outside the documentary’s structuring polemic and against the already absorbed surfaces of the narrative feature film. Increasingly feeding a mainstream “documentary culture,” as Tom Holert has recently argued, the media has also explored the uses of these “signals of authenticity” on which earlier documentary relied. But it has done so to depoliticizing ends. In reporting on the war in Iraq, for instance, broadcast networks such as CNN and BBC World “use a whole gamut of contradictory image types and image qualities— pixellated video-phone images in low resolution, the more usual video images, ‘talking heads’ stagings, video animations with maps and other graphic devices” precisely in order to domesticate or foreclose the narratives that rely on that authenticity to work: “they frame these images with more or less precise data about their provenance, their function and so on” (2005, 160–1). Grimonprez finds both senses of resolution in DeLillo, the ironic relationship between them exemplified by the question he samples from White Noise for the first voice-over in his film: “Shouldn’t death be a swan-dive, graceful, whitewinged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?” (DeLillo 1998, 18).

3. A Vacuum Chamber, an Eclipse, A Sliver of Moon in A Night Sky We are reminded here that DeLillo is present in Grimonprez’s film not as a visual but as an aural image, as sound. Reframed from voice-to-voice-over, the

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 114

5/13/2010 8:47:02 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

115

irony of DeLillo’s lines is transformed. In this process, the question is confirmed not simply as a rhetorical negative (an index of the character that utters it within DeLillo’s narrative, the narrator Jack Gladney), but as what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “allegorical irony” or “parabasis,” that is, “the activism of ‘speaking otherwise’ ” (1999, 156n.64).5 As Brent Hayes Edwards explains in a pertinent discussion of postcolonial literature’s hybrid genres and the global remixing of cultures on which these genres operate, “[a]llegory is a practice of ‘persistent interruption’ in language where the cognitive or epistemological is continually breached by the performative or ethical, forcing the attentive reader to move against the current of the prose, to hear the charge of what it pushes away” (2004, 8). In the opening shot of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y—into which DeLillo’s question about death is inserted—we follow a descending point of view through greenish clouds toward the cipher-like lights and painted numbers of an airfield (see Figure 7.2). The atmosphere is streaked, grainy, hallucinatory, and it is made even more ominous by the rhetorical question that accompanies it. We did not need the attacks of 9/11 to associate aircraft with violent death, Grimonprez here reminds us (as DeLillo did repeatedly) before the fact. Such deaths are unlikely to be as ennobling as the allegorical swan dive or its accompanying song, as pure of color or form as those white wings, and the surface on which it occurs is likely to be highly disturbed and disturbing.6 Immediately, and especially in relation to the smooth-voiced narrator, we are reminded of the role that resolution plays in the documentary, and indeed, in media narratives generally. By quoting absent narratives (the haunting authenticity of

Figure 7.2 Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Xiaoting Lau. Courtesy of Zapomatik

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 115

5/13/2010 8:47:02 AM

116

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

which I spoke above), Grimonprez repeatedly invokes resolution in its double sense: that of the individual image’s immediate, visible surface, and that of the movement between and among images, visual and aural, that structures the film’s temporality. “It’s not going to pretty,” the saying goes, speaking of future resolution, but at the visual level, what we see frequently is pretty, semidetached from the implications of what we see, the “actual”—that is, allegorical—death that moves the narrative forward to its end. I write “semidetached” because while we may feel that the opening images are those of a flight-simulator—and thus not “not real” but simulated—their power rests in their likeness to what is not simulated, to that which is (or appears to be) unmediated, artless, or accidental. Collapsing the temporal distinction between what is simulated and what is “real,” between the aesthetic and the political, the conscious and the unconscious, Grimonprez next shows us a forward shot through an aircraft cockpit as the aircraft seems at first gently to touch down, then shakes more and more violently, finally dissolving into a blurred wreckage of particulars, swirling, slow-motion fragments reminiscent of confetti-filled paperweights (see Figure 7.3). Now the soundtrack turns sweepingly cinematic before dissolving into ominous noise. And that dissolution is paralleled by a reverse shot—outside and front-to-back—of what is presumably the same aircraft we have seen from within the cockpit, crashing headlong into the viewer. At that point, looking at the distinctive, black-and-white markings on the aircraft’s nose, and framing

Figure 7.3 Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Xiaoting Lau. Courtesy of Zapomatik

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 116

5/13/2010 8:47:03 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

117

those markings, the precise and controlled placement of the camera, we recognize that this is, in fact, a set up that characterizes both Grimonprez’s film and the images he is sampling: a simulation, a test, and at the same time, a mediated event that is ineluctably present. Whatever Grimonprez’s larger documentary interests—to which I will return below—he punctuates them with DeLillo’s text and with the nonarchival footage that often accompanies that text, the reflexive content of which does not remotely replace the film’s rhythmic narrative drive. This punctuation is reflected in the film’s title, which as Catherine Bernard has observed, “refers to the multiple choice of automated voice-mail systems” (Grimonprez 1998, 7). The opening crash sequence is followed by images of baby birds fluttering and apparently suffocating in a vacuum chamber, an eclipse, a sliver of moon in a night sky, the cartoon title-sequence and images of Lenin, a bland official at a microphone announcing cryptically that “the aircraft is safe,” and news images of the first transatlantic hijacking in November 1969. Following this montage sequence, the voice-over continues in first-person plural, turning from interrogative to statement in order to frame a further interrogative: Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or in film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event: who will write the book, and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. (DeLillo 1991, 43–4)

In Grimonprez’s redaction of this passage from Mao II, there is no identified narrator. Thus, he evacuates the idea of character in the fictional sense and invites us to ask how character is generated by the position of the speech act: not “who is speaking to us here?” but “how are the here and the who and the us located?” As readers of Mao II will know, this voice-over is lifted from the sequence in which the secretive novelist Bill Gray is being photographed for the first time after decades of concealment and silence, by the photographer Brita Nilsson. This is Bill speaking, and he is commenting on the fact that, being photographed, he has become “someone’s material. Yours, Brita” (43). The conventional distinction between a prior reality and the documentary event that operates on that reality has been reversed, inserted into the series that makes up Brita’s serial project of photographing living writers. For Bill Gray, this reversal tends deathward, as do all plots in DeLillo’s fictions. As Jack Gladney, DeLillo’s protagonist in White Noise, puts it in a passage that Grimonprez uses later in the film, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death everytime we plot” (1998, 26). In Gladney’s reflections, the conventionally diachronic, before-and-after relationship between character and speech act, reality and documentary, between life and the consumer event, between visual image and caption or voice-over is never done nor undone. Resolution here is the bad revolution of late or

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 117

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

118

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

“postindustrial” capital, the endlessly (re)productive spinning of binary poles. In Grimonprez’s film, as with the tradition of documentary that he traces to competing strands of the Soviet avant-garde, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the idea—which can only be comprehended with irony at the present historical moment—is that this diachrony might be replaced by a dialogic or dialectic relationship, a remixing of traces that points neither to an original source or context nor to a future resolution that simply extends established relations, but to a synthesis that produces history as the constructive transformation of both past and future through the lens of the present. This is, of course, the hope that the film originally held out for the avant-gardes, its lifelike motion in place of photography’s deathly stillness. Despite Bill Gray’s abject death en route from Cyprus to Beirut, his image as developed by Brita, of course, lives on, simultaneously supplementing and displacing him. The seamlessness of Grimonprez’s back-and-forth move between White Noise and Mao II and his remixing of fragments from both novels, the assimilation of these fragments by the film’s narrative despite its disjunctive archival and “live” content (the occasionally visible “hand” of the artist’s own camera), exemplifies this process. The media’s endlessly absorbing horror is itself the eclipse of the subject by objects that seem to reflect but instead absorb and displace that subject, echoing the particularly hysterical formation on which Grimonprez focuses: the intertwined histories of television media and aircraft hijacking. By “hysterical” I mean a formation that is marked by the sign of desire, by the overdeterminations of deeper or more extensive cultural processes that seem to lie elsewhere and thus necessitate an interpretive journey. Lacan anticipates Spivak’s reading of allegorical parabasis and its ethical implications early in the lectures that make up The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis when he defines the object of analysis and the concepts, particularly that of the unconscious, on which that object—and the desire that it seems to resolve— rests. Like the narrative concept of resolution to which I have referred, Lacan argues that the concept of causality “is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law.” The privilege of the Freudian unconscious, he continues, is to demonstrate “that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong.” Thus the unconscious demonstrates “the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real—a real that may well not be determined” (Lacan 1981, 22). This gap of indeterminacy provokes the very “activism of speaking otherwise” that Spivak identifies as an ethical imperative, the parabasis through which Lacan defines the Freudian unconscious, not as something “unreal” but “rather un-realized”: The status of the unconscious [. . .] is ethical. In his thirst for truth, Freud says, Whatever it is, I must go there, because, somewhere, this unconscious reveals itself. And he says this on the basis of his experience of what was, up to that time,

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 118

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

119

for the physician, the most rejected, the most concealed, the most contained, reality, that of the hysteric, in so far as it was—in a sense, from its origin—marked by the sign of deception. (Lacan 1981, 33)

This reading of the unconscious as an ethical imperative that is “marked by the sign of deception” points to a characteristic feature of Grimonprez’s remix that connects it with contemporary discussions of documentary. As I have pointed out above, what is excised in the film’s opening voice-over is precisely the fictional narrative’s dependency on the primacy of character, first Jack Gladney, then Bill Gray. Elsewhere in the film, proper names are transformed into pronouns, male-gendered pronouns into female-gendered, first-person narration into third-person, and so on. Bill Gray emerges from hiding via Brita’s photographs and inserts himself into the novel’s terrorism plot. Gray never confronts the terrorist Abu Rashid live, “face-to-face” (as Brita will do), but he does engage the terrorist’s spokesman, George Haddad, first in London and then in Athens. From the novel’s opening mass marriage ceremony, itself a media event, conversion (or transference) serves as a vacillating form of resolution, a kind of death deferred. As indicated by the remixed excerpts from DeLillo, a conversion also occurs between Bill’s conversation with Brita during their photo shoot, early in the novel, and Bill’s much later conversation with George. Grimonprez converts multiple conversations and characters into a new singularity, a singularity that is nonetheless differentiated into particularly generic—and all male—voices. Similarly, this conversion of voice-to-voice-over frames is what Bill Gray observes not as a repetition but as a singularity of history itself, conceived as a “zero-sum game” played by novelists and terrorists: “What terrorists gain, novelists lose” (DeLillo 1991, 157), Bill says, not to George but rather to Brita, during the photo shoot. Beckett, he continues in a passage that Grimonprez does not use, “is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative” (157).7 George Haddad replaces Brita as Bill’s interlocutor, making explicit what Bill can only refuse as the repressed of his own narrative, a narrative in which the novelist is a tragic hero, destroyed by a binary whose diachronic, before-and-after relation masks the absorptive processes of media that convert both novelists and terrorists into digital images, characters, and instrumental bits of information. George (who advocates the use of a word processor to produce or manipulate language in place of the analog typewriter to which Bill is accustomed) converts this instrumental binary into a productive diagnosis, an informational matrix or feedback loop, obeying not the law of causality but the law of the signifier, by identifying what he calls “inertiahysteria,” the sign of an underlying trauma: Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed.

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 119

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

120

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. [. . .]. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. (DeLillo 1991, 157)

Grimonprez quite knowingly, I think, replicates this hysterical formation by converting the differences among Jack Gladney, Brita, Bill, and George into a singular, restricted, yet highly mobile voice-over, the media’s generic law of the father. Thus, he erases their identities as individual voices, the individuating mark of character that resists the leveling structural function of language. Grimonprez does so here by cutting the words “inertia-hysteria,” George’s diagnosis of Western culture, which is posed in one of the exemplary diagnostic discourses of that culture, psychoanalysis. Ironically, George resorts to this diagnosis by working through a loop from Western Marxism to Maoism, seeking a way out for Lebanon between Syria and Israel. In this, Grimonprez points to the ways that George, the terrorists’ spokesman, teases the border between a psychological and a political resolution to the temporal “either/or” that Bill observes between two competing forms of cultural outsiders: the novelist and the terrorist. Grimonprez’s own conversion of literary sources into aural images, remixed with the visual, exemplifies how both figures of Bill’s binary formation, the novelist and the terrorist, are themselves neither cause nor effect but the preemptive resolution of a gap, a resolution found in projected narratives.8 In his 1998 interview with Catherine Bernard, Grimonprez emphasizes this process of hysterical transference or concealment: “I traced the history of hijacking from the first passenger flights onwards, and how it has changed through the course of history, but this is just a cover under which to talk about the story of the media and of the representation of hijacking itself” (Grimonprez 1998, 8).

4. My Angel Rocks Back and Forth This statement precisely articulates what is marked as deceptive by Grimonprez. This, I think, is the artist’s intention: performatively to mark discontinuity in DeLillo, a discontinuity that “is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon—discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation” (Lacan 1981, 25). As Tom Holert has recently remarked, a similar vacillation is palpable in the fact that “every overview that tackles the theories of ‘the documentary’ mentions that a documentary practice which does not reflect on the untenability of claims of objectivity has become impossible” (2005, 159). Nonetheless, the manner in which this refusal of objectivity is performed and the goals that motivate that refusal allow for crucial differences that enable us to compare contemporary documentary practices as disparate as those of Jeff Wall, Nan Goldin, and Susan Meiselas—and

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 120

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

121

that of the Lebanese artist Walid Raad and his Atlas Group, particularly in their long-term archival project My Neck is Thinner than a Hair. In a recent collective statement, the Atlas Group observes that “[w]e are not concerned with facts if facts are considered to be self-evident objects alwaysalready present in the world [. . .]. Facts have to be treated as processes.” Both Raad and Grimonprez assert that the binary of fiction and nonfiction “is a false one and does not do justice to the rich and complex stories that circulate widely and that capture our attention and belief” (Raad 2005, 121). Holert also comments on the Atlas Group’s attention to the “ways in which a socalled document suddenly emerges from the archive, who and what makes it available, and why” (2005, 166). In doing so, Holert adds, the group’s mediaworks shift viewers’ attentions from the content or truth-claims of the document “to the space of speculation and imagination, of deception and adulteration. The authenticity—of sources, witnesses, surveys, images, and so on—is claimed, but an epistemological hesitation and vacillation is already implicit in staking that claim” (165). In a concluding remark that relates to the hysterical method of Dial H-I-ST-O-R-Y, the Atlas Group states that: [o]ur works do not present a chronicle to posterity of the events and deeds of the [Lebanese civil wars], a record of “what happened.” Instead we think they offer us an image of what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, and what can appear as rational or not, as thinkable and sayable about the civil wars, and about the possibilities and limits of writing their histories. We urge you to approach these documents as we do, as “hysterical symptoms” based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories. (Raad 2005, 122)

The Atlas Group here stresses the vacillating actuality of practice against the putatively one-dimensional “authenticity” of the material drawn upon by that practice. Importantly, it does so without supplanting assertions of truth and historical method with either cultural relativism or the supermarket forms of subjectivity that circulate globally in the putatively post-ideological, posthistorical, neoliberal era (what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “ultra-liberal utopia”). In Raad’s words, [b]y shying away from a search for “what actually happened,” our intention is not to imply that such a search is futile. Nor do we want to suggest that historical writing is always interested and that consequently all histories are equally valid and/or equally suspect. The claim that writing is motivated by one agenda or another must be demonstrated and not simply stated. Furthermore, this demonstration must unpack the various meanings generated by any party’s writings, meanings that are invariably overdetermined and thus potentially slip past the control of interested writers and their intended audience. (122)

Grimonprez addresses the overdeterminations of historical meaning and subjectivity (and the interdependency of both) through his remixing of DeLillo,

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 121

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

122

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Figure 7.4 Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Rony Vissers. Courtesy of Zapomatik

through the seamlessness with which the author’s words—distributed across and between two very different texts—are worked into a disruptive surface, across the received gap between artwork and medium, public and private, production and reproduction, I and you, male and female, and so on. Formally, it’s the restless “zapping” of media images, visual and aural, that Grimonprez identifies as the conversion of modernist film tradition in the age of video and beyond, a zapping that is literally built into the absorptive surfaces of contemporary media, surfaces that exceed any particular medium. “In my film,” Grimonprez comments, [t]here is the image of a man being pushed out of an IranAir plane on the runway at Larnaca, Cyprus, and then the words “INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE” suddenly appear on a black screen. I took this sequence as it stood. It is a breakdown in meaning, like something Brecht might have produced. It reflects the combination of two traditions: on the one hand, the fictionalization and the dramatization of history as in Sergei Eisenstein, and on the other, presenting the context in how the image is constructed through showing for example the presence of the camera in the image, as in Dziga Vertov. (Grimonprez 2005, 174–5; see Figure 7.4 above)

Instructively, however, we might note a certain repressed in Grimonprez’s own assertion that he does: [n]ot wish to disregard the meaning of terrorism in political terms. In writing that “[w]hat terrorists gain novelists lose,” DeLillo compares the position of the terrorist in public life to that of the writer. DeLillo is suggesting this is particularly so because terrorists know how to manipulate the media. Their actions

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 122

5/13/2010 8:47:05 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

123

are provocations, but must be presented in a contextual way, not abstractly. Terrorism in Palestine and terrorism among extreme right-wing groups in the United States do not have the same meaning. (2005, 175)9

Of course, it is Bill Gray, not DeLillo himself, who compares the “position of the terrorist in public life to that of the writer”—a statement that “reveals” his character as it conceals the actual media that create, circulate, store, and retrieve his public image. And yet, in relation to the ethics of representing terrorism, it is important to call attention to the slippage that does occur here between a character and its author. How do we read through the words of DeLillo’s characters to an assertion of what the author himself means—a position that is surely distributed, in one way or another, across and throughout the text? This question is analogous to the problems Grimonprez raises in his statement, that we apprehend media images and the indifference they promote, but somehow are able to convert that apprehension into a political or politicizing specificity. Of course, in its use of visual and aural images as well as text, Grimonprez’s film can perform this critique in a multivalent way while DeLillo’s written text must narrate discursively, producing an allegory of the visual supplement that is everywhere available in the ubiquitous media surfaces of our culture. This is DeLillo’s fundamental irony: the more he seeks seriously to interrogate the limits of cultural systems, the more he recognizes the productive capacity of those systems. The problem is contextualism itself, which is not captured adequately by John von Seggern’s hopeful comments on remixing. Instead, contextualism: [h]as tended to an immobilizing or ersatz nostalgia; collage or superposition among existing elements has tended to a play or a transgression increasingly devoid of any virtuality, any future. Once celebrated for their complexity, context and collage became obstacles to new architectures, vehicles of the sad ironies of the post- and the neo-. (Rajchman 1998, 9)

After all, it is not Bill but Brita, the photographer, who survives to the closure of DeLillo’s narrative. In a predictably ambiguous image, Brita, who is staying in the flat of a friend in East Beirut, emerges from sleep and steps onto the flat’s balcony to watch the surreal procession of a nighttime wedding party, escorted by an old Soviet tank. With the war-torn city quiet for the first time since her arrival, she “examines the silence,” reading an aural absence or gap that is converted in her attention to what at first is an unidentifiable visual image, its meaning ultimately resolved formally by her own identity as image-producer. Literally, she is a witness to the processes of that identity, defamiliarized but also confirmed by her surroundings. She looks out past the rooftops, westward. There is a flash in the same spot, several more, intense and white. She waits for the reciprocal flash, the return fire, but all the bursts are in one spot and there is no sound. What could it be then if it’s not the start of the day’s first exchange of automatic-weapons fire?

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 123

5/13/2010 8:47:06 AM

124

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Only one thing of course. Someone is out there with a camera and a flash unit. Brita stays on the balcony for another minute, watching the magnesium pulse that brings an image to a strip of film. She crosses her arms over her body against the chill and counts off the bursts of relentless light. The dead city photographed one more time (DeLillo 1991, 241).

5. In a Way You Become Your Own Curator Like more traditional archival documentary, Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y stands poised ambivalently between the aesthetic ideologies of art-world culture and the visual politics of mass or popular media to which that culture seems opposed. Similarly, tracing the artist’s work leading up to and beyond Documenta X reveals a restless interrogation both of particular narratives and of the fields of knowledge or institutional contexts within which those narratives operate. This interrogation expresses itself most particularly in Grimonprez’s earliest video work, Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter (1992), which draws on the artist’s studies in cultural anthropology and the fieldwork he conducted in Papua New Guinea, but also the semiotics of aircraft technology (particularly, I would note, the sound of aircraft engines as perceived by his “native informants”). At the 1997 Documenta, in addition to Dial H-I-S-T-OR-Y, Grimonprez exhibited a “vidéothèque,” or mobile video library and archive project, on which he had collaborated with film critic Herman Asselberghs.

Figure 7.5 Leila Khaled commandeers TWA Boeing 707 into a 7-minute detour over occupied homeland, August 1969. Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997– 2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Rony Vissers. Courtesy of Zapomatik

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 124

5/13/2010 8:47:06 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

125

Prends Garde! A Jouer au Fantôme, on le Devient (Beware! In Playing the Phantom You Become One) had been installed in different forms and different venues since 1994, and continued from Kassel to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, joining an expanding collection of media-based artworks that, ostensibly liberated from the museum’s walls, are accessible through the Internet. Responding to a question by Hans-Ulrich Obrist on how he connects “global issues of a traveling archive with local adaptions and local necessities,” Grimonprez replied that “it is no longer possible to send homogenous exhibitions on tours and impose them [on] places but the terms have every time to be (re)negotiated” (2009). The artist elsewhere emphasizes this point as an imperative of specificity against the generalizing, hysterical media-image: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is like supermarket history: There is so much available and history cannot be understood as singular. It tells of how history is recorded and catalogued, and how these techniques accelerate and accumulate memory, almost as an excess of history. [. . .] You are already lost in push-button history, so you have to zoom in on specific aspects. In focusing on hijacking, I chose one detail which revealed history in another way. Looking at details is much more concrete because history, after all, is the conflation of the personal with the global. (Grimonprez 1998, 7)10

To my mind, the idea of the remix is one of the most useful to understand Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y’s relationship to DeLillo’s “originals” if we take it as an ethics of reading, a disentangling of the conflated strands of personal and global, private and political. Moreover, it helps to situate the film in relation not simply to documentary but to a range of practices that contend with media culture, particularly with respect to the extension as well as the repudiation of modernist collage or montage practices in contemporary culture. From that vantage point, one might also analyze DeLillo’s response within his writing to the transformation of artistic practices after postwar modernism, to the practices of an international avant-garde that is concerned with the functioning of language across different mediums and previous categorical distinctions such as that between high art and popular culture.11 Participation is a key phrase for Grimonprez, as viewers fantasize their roles “within” and “outside” the media to which they respond (in ways suggested by the practice of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group), the alternating currents of personal and domestic, public and global. This fantasy runs throughout Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y as “the activism of speaking otherwise,” and it establishes a relation to source-texts and to informational networks that is most pronounced in the move from visual to aural image in passages remixed from DeLillo. The non-archival images that frequently accompany these passages form a kind of banal narrative thread throughout the film’s allegorical disjunctures, “a double narrative that sets the television timeline against the backdrop of a story. In classical documentary, chronology and structure are logical and a specific vocabulary is used to describe reality, whereas in my film, the chronology of hijacking is underscored by a fictionalized storyline based on a novel by Don

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 125

5/13/2010 8:47:07 AM

126

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

DeLillo, which plays with how these notions collide” (Grimonprez 1998, 9–10). Most simply put, this narrative thread follows a disembodied visual perspective as it leaves home, takes a taxi to a large urban airport, passes through the terminal and views docked aircraft through the windows of a departure lounge, enters the aircraft, taxis onto the runway, and takes off on a long, presumably transoceanic flight (with accompanying meals and in-flight film). To say that we are all deeply familiar with this global narrative, beyond its mediated image, is of course grossly incorrect, as aircraft travel of the kind that guides Grimonprez’s embedded camcorder narrative is bound to a specific geography of social and economic privilege. Among the many things shared between DeLillo and Grimonprez, one is the way in which the previously distinct realms of Western, middle-class domesticity and the artistic avant-gardes (or neo-avant-gardes) have, in the postmodern era, apparently collapsed into each other on a global stage. On the one hand, Grimonprez says, zapping “buys into the supermarket ideology, but at the same time it can embody a critical distance as well” (2009). On the other hand, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y ends not with the resolution of the takeoff inscribed in the camcorder narrative but with a conversion of that private narrative into the grainy resolution of public, newsworthy images. In Grimonprez’s words, The film ends with the camcorder revolution: honeymooners who inadvertently taped a hijacked, crashing plane and were immediately invited onto CNN to host Larry King’s talk show. It reveals how the distance between spectator and history has entirely dissolved. The spectator has become the hero; now the “Best of Homevideo” programs even urge us to send in our own little catastrophes. (Grimonprez 1998, 7)

Echoing a famous phrase of Marx, both DeLillo and Grimonprez remix the differences in history’s repetitions, the movement from system to subject, sense to sensation, tragedy to farce, catastrophe to comedy. This difference is, to return to the two images with which this discussion opened, the distance we must travel to our most intimate selves, to our dreams and waking surfaces, arriving right on time.

Notes 1. My thanks to Maria Gough for introducing me to Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, to Julia Apitzsch for initiating the conversations that led to this essay, to Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser for inviting me to the 2008 DeLillo conference in Osnabrück, and to Johan Grimonprez and Zapomatik for permission to use stills from the film. 2. Among many discussions of remix culture, some of the most suggestive comments, with a broad and eclectic historical grounding, are two books by Paul D. Miller, known professionally as DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid (Miller 2004; Miller 2008).

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 126

5/13/2010 8:47:07 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

127

3. von Seggern’s remarks accompanied an exhibition at the University of California at Riverside; the link given in the list of works cited is no longer active. 4. The DVD is now widely available, packaged with a volume including texts by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek as well as excerpts from DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II. Some thoughts on the status of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y as documentary can be found in Altena (1998). 5. Spivak relies heavily on the very dense final pages of Paul de Man (1979). 6. This reversal of cause and effect, of input and outcome, of articulation and disarticulation, is traced by Grimonprez at various points to the work of Paul Virilio. See particularly the volume published in conjunction with the exhibition Unknown Quantity, which was curated by Leanne Sacramone at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and took place from November 29, 2002 to March 30, 2003 (Virilio 2003). 7. For more on DeLillo’s relation to Beckett, see Peter Boxall’s essay in his volume. 8. This excision interestingly echoes the comments that Catherine David makes in conversation with Benjamin Buchloch and Jean-François Chevrier, David’s cocurator for Documenta X. Buchloch remarks on the significance of Beckett in Adorno’s aesthetics, “Brecht becomes quite secondary. And this touches again on the question of the extent to which the postwar period sought to reconstruct a high bourgeois civilization or a popular culture. For Beckett, despite his life history, was not perceived as a popular author: his theater is a theater of the elite.” To this, David replies, “Except that in the sixties, Beckett was widely broadcast over the radio, which at the time was a very popular medium. Beckett made an essential contribution to the survival of the theater as a space of language, even if, paradoxically, he comes close to giving up the stage for a purely mental theater. For him, language is the ultimate theater” (Buchloch, David, and Chevrier 1997, 382). 9. See also Grimonprez’s email remarks to Hans-Ulrich Obrist: “Art and mainstream media seem to remain mad twin sisters, always arguing. Hence the rivalry between a novelist and a terrorist staged as a metaphor in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. In this plot it’s the terrorist who’s at the winning hand, since he’s able to play the media. The narrative is taken from DeLillo’s book Mao II, which contends that the novelist’s role within society has been replaced by that of bomb makers and gunmen. ‘What terrorists gain, novelists lose!’, says the book” (Grimonprez 2009). Here, the allegorical displacement on which I have focused involves not the displacement of character by author, but of both these valences by the book itself, and the book in turn by film, the film by video, and so on. 10. In certain respects, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y can be viewed as a critical and performative response to Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernism’s putative “end of history” (noting the ironic intersection between Jameson’s iconic work and Francis Fukuyama’s well-known neoliberal catchphrase): “Cultural production [. . .] can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once present; rather, as in Plato’s cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (Jameson 1991, 25). I thank Philipp Schweighauser for suggesting this point of reference. 11. Benjamin Buchloch, Catherine David, and Jean-François Chevrier cite the importance of Marcel Broodthaers to this discussion (1997). See also Krauss (2000).

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 127

5/13/2010 8:47:07 AM

128

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Works Cited Altena, A. (1998), “Hello? history? hello? (2): Thoughts on terrorism and history on the occasion of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.” Mediamatic, 9,: 2–3. www.mediamatic.net/article5960-en.html Atlas Group/Walid Raad. (2005), My Neck is Thinner Than A Hair: Documents From the Atlas Group Archive. Köln, Germany: Walter König. Buchloch, B., David, C., and Chevrier, J.F. (1997), “The political potential of art. Part 1.” in Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier (eds), Politics, Poetics: Documenta X, the Book, 374–403. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Cantz. David, C. (2007), “Photography and cinema.” in David Campany (ed.), The Cinematic, 144–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Man, P. (1979), Allegories of Reading: Figural Reading in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. DeLillo, D. (1991), Mao II. New York: Penguin. —(1998), White Noise: Text and Criticism. 1985, Mark Osteen (ed.). New York: Penguin. Edwards, B. H. (2004), “The genres of postcolonialism.” Social Text, 22,1: 1–15. Grimonprez, J. (1998), “Supermarket history: Interview by Catherine Bernard.” Parkett, 53: 6–11. —(1992), Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? VHS. Centre Pompidou. —(2003), Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. DVD and Booklet with texts by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje Cantz. —(2005), “Untitled artist’s statement,” in Frits Gierstberg et al., (eds), Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts, 173–6. Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi. —(2009), “Questions of Hans Ulrich Obrist to Johan Grimonprez via E-mail.” Online Archives of the Constant Association for Art and Media. July 15. archive.constantvzw.org/events/e11/fr/jg.html. Grimonprez, J. and Asselberghs, H. (1997), Prends Garde! A Jouer Au Fantôme, On Le Devient/Beware! In Playing The Phantom You Become One. Centre Georges Pompidou. www.centrepompidou.fr/sitesweb/grimonprez Hobsbawm, E. (1996), The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Vintage. Holert, T. (2005), “The apparition of the documentary,” in Frits Gierstberg et al., (eds), Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts, trans. Andrew May 150–70. Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Krauss, R. (2000), A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Lacan, J. (1981), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton. Miller, P. D. (2003), “Loops of perception: Sampling, memory, and the semantic web.” HorizonZero. July 15. www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&art=0&file= 3&tlang=0. —(2004), Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miller, P. D., (ed.), (2008), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 128

5/13/2010 8:47:08 AM

Grimonprez’s Remix

129

Raad, W. / The Atlas Group. (2005), “Untitled artist’s statement.” in Frits Gierstberg et al., (eds), Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts, 121–2. Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi. Rajchman, J. (1998), Constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spivak, G. C. (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reading. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Virilio, P. (2003), Unknown Quantity. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. von Seggern, J. (2007), “Postdigital remix culture and online performance.” Society for Ethnomusicology, Southern California and Hawaii Chapter. ethnomus.ucr.edu/ remix_culture/remix_history.htm. Williams, B. (2002), “The remixmasters: A history lesson for Puffy Coombs.” Slate, July 23. slate.msn.com/id/2068368.

PSchweighauser_07_Final.indd 129

5/13/2010 8:47:08 AM

Chapter 8

Dial T for Terror: Don DeLillo’s MAO II and Johan Grimonprez’s DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y Martyn Colebrook

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail. (Don DeLillo, in an interview with Ann Arensberg [Arensberg 2005, 45]) What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our failure to be dangerous. (DeLillo 1991, 157)

This essay contends that Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II (1991) and Johan Grimonprez’s film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (2003) represent terrorism as an activity that has not only moved from a global to a local scale, but which also crucially depends on the medium through which it is narrated. Terrorism thus becomes spectacular through its appropriation of visual media that allow it to gain optimum exposure and impact. As Jeffrey Karnicky observes, “DeLillo’s novels are interested in the ways in which image proliferation, often engendered by filmic, televisual or photographic repetition, affects our conception of the world” (339). Taking this as a starting point, one can read his novels as attempts to both understand and harness the incessant bombardment of images under postmodern conditions. This is the case for Mao II, and it is also the case for Grimonprez’s film, which offers extended reflections on the ways in which different groups—corporations, states, terrorists, and indeed writers—are able to use images to engage in (counter-)hegemonic activities. In exploring the power of images, both the writer and the filmmaker probe the connections between authorship, authority, the attempted commodification of individuals and groups, and their subsequent resistance to those attempts. DeLillo’s oeuvre is characterized by a sense of the beleaguered, oppositional artist or writer, the presence of spectral, marginalized figures located in small cells and the tradition of anticipating the apocalyptic, portraying the spectacular and commenting on the symbiotic relationship between art, terrorism, and the media. Similarly, Johan Grimonprez’s use of the documentary form offers a commentary on the fictions of terror that permeate his segmented, fractured representation of the history of hijacking, narrated through a framework

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 130

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

131

specifically designed to create a false realism and structured to emphasize personal identification with the events on screen. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y begins with the first recorded hijacking in Lod Airport and moves to the spectacular bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, representing along the way the transition and shift in terrorist activity, both in terms of modus operandi and with respect to mass-mediated representation. Peter Baker argues that “Gray (and maybe DeLillo as well) is fundamentally, and in Gray’s case, at least, fatally, mistaken in his view that equates the role of the novelist with that of the ‘terrorist’ [. . .]. I think it becomes clear that the ‘terrorist’ occupies a role more like that of the interpreter” (1994, 1) This is the dynamic upon which both Grimonprez’s and DeLillo’s narratives rest: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a commentary on the structure of terrorism that selfconsciously heightens sequences of images beyond the limits of realism and into spectacle; Mao II portrays the lives of two men: an author in self-imposed exile who becomes an unwitting spectacle due to his reclusion, and a poet taken hostage and incarcerated as a political prisoner. The figure of the political prisoner in Mao II, particularly that of an artist who is imprisoned, has striking resonance with an event that suggested that the novel still possessed the power to be dangerous. The Iranian Government’s decision to impose a fatwa upon Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses and Rushdie’s inevitable movement from controversial public figure to exiled and persecuted recluse also presents parallels with DeLillo’s protagonist writer Bill Gray in that he adopts a similarly publicity-resistant stance—although Rushdie’s motive was rather different. Gerald Howard suggests that Mao II can be read as an engagement with Rushdie’s plight: “I think this is a book that’s about Salman Rushdie in a way. Don was very upset about the Rushdie business, and I think you can sense that feeling of threat all the way through Mao II (1997, 14). But the links do remain tenuous since they do not rest easily with the story that is told in Mao II. A more appropriate conclusion would be to see Rushdie’s exile as one influence on DeLillo’s story rather than reading Mao II as a direct response to it. The figure of Wei Jinsheng, a Chinese author and political dissident, provides another important context for Mao II, given Jinsheng’s imprisonment by the Chinese Government for openly defying State warnings against consorting or conversing with journalists from overseas, and for publishing his work overseas. On May 13, 1997, DeLillo gave his first reading of a paper entitled “The Artist Naked in The Cage” at an event called “Readings from Wei Jinsheng’s The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings” at the New York Public Library. This essay was composed of 11 numbered paragraphs and intertwined Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” the story of a Russian performance artist impersonating a dog in a cage, and Wei Jinsheng’s imprisonment. It was published in The New Yorker on May 26, 1997: In a culture like ours that tries to absorb and neutralize every threat to a consumer consciousness, the spectacle of a man living as a dog has a kind of shifting eloquence. It offers a genuine sense of the latitude of free expression and places a

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 131

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

132

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

small, incisive shock in the midst of all those Soho apparel shops and restaurants. But it also suggests the grim idea that the performance artist, liberated from Soviet State control, hair cropped, and dog collar secured, may be carrying his own culture’s atavistic wish for order and repression. (DeLillo 1997, 6)

The Russian artist’s “shifting eloquence” (1997, 7) reflects how, on one level, the artist can be perceived as a significant example of genuine performancerelated culture that exists among the extremes of the fashion-conscious, consumerist Soho district. But, as the word “atavistic” suggests, there is a more disturbing element to this spectacle because through his willing descent from the human condition to that of a trained, controlled animal, the performance artist appears to allegorize the West’s conscious relinquishment of freedoms and it’s fostering of human beings’ knowing subservience to agencies of control. This sense of subservience and relinquishment of responsibility and selfdetermination is a theme that DeLillo picks up again in the first chapter of Mao II. In this striking opening, the reader is confronted with the spectacle of a mass Moonie wedding in the New York Yankees baseball stadium. Through this seemingly incongruent piece of juxtaposition—religious ritual and sports arena—DeLillo allows two different ideologies and iconographies to collide. Baseball is a national US institution that stands for an individualistic, liberal democratic culture; Moonism is a cult that demands submission to a life of autocratic dictation: Here they come, marching into American sunlight. They are grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl, stepping out of the runway beyond the fence in left-center field. The music draws them across the grass, dozens, hundreds, already too many to count. They assemble themselves so tightly, crossing the vast arc of the outfield, that the effect is one of transformation. From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time, covering the open spaces in navy and white. (1)

In an interview with William Leith, DeLillo reveals that a photograph was one of the “starting points for this novel”: “It was a grainy photograph of a Unification Church wedding, 1,500 people getting married in a soft-drink warehouse in Korea” (Leith 1991, 18–19). The parallels between the settings for the Unification Church wedding and the Moonie Church wedding are reinforced by the multiple references to photography in the first scene of Mao II and further highlight the cultural clash the novel begins with. The wedding captured in the photograph stages what Westerners tend to think of a sacred and spiritual event in a warehouse that is devoted to the production of a (probable) Western brand of consumer culture that has been exported to and imposed on a country whose political outlook strongly contrasts with that of the United States. Through the subtexts of this photograph, the images of the novel’s opening sequence, and—most importantly—his staging of the photographer Brita Nilsson’s intrusion into the life of the reclusive author Gray, DeLillo also comments on the (in) famous photograph of J.D. Salinger, which also inspired

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 132

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

133

Mao II. As DeLillo comments, “for the editor to send these two men [the photographers] to New Hampshire was a little like ordering an execution. And when you look at the face of the man being photographed, it’s not a great leap of imagination to think he’s just been shot” (Leith 1991, 18–19). Similarly to Grimonprez’s film and the opening scene of Running Dog (1978)—another DeLillo novel that explores the power of images—the beginning of Mao II possesses a cinematic quality. The musical backing track and DeLillo’s choice of words (“marching”) as the camera pans across that movement add a military note to the scene: these couples are organized and ordered into ranks as they assemble “so tightly.” The sheer numerical presence of human beings in an enclosed space implies that individuals are transformed into a mass—a mass that is uniformly “navy and white.” The music that draws them across the grass is hypnotic, their marching determined by its rhythms, and the “one continuous wave” in which they move also suggests that human beings are here deindividualized into one of the crowds, to which, DeLillo tells us, “[t]he future belongs” (16). The significance of this opening sequence is to demonstrate further the process of Othering and alienation that occurs during the formation of and identification of groups whom states or governments view as potential terrorists. As John Carlos Rowe suggests, [t]he crowd in DeLillo’s future is not constituted by choices made by individuals to join a group movement, as in the collective formed to bring about revolutionary change, but instead by the alienation of individuals from their respective agency and the imposition of order and “belonging” from outside or above. (2004, 26)

In Mao II, the Moonies are identified as a group whose ethos is founded upon characteristics similar to those of fundamentalist terror groups: the recruitment of individuals who are disenfranchised with or dislocated from their surrounding cultural bases, whose identity is susceptible to manipulation and suggestion, and who seek social and spiritual structure and order to sustain them in their daily routines. The figure the opening of Mao II focuses on is Karen, a young woman willingly recruited into the Moonies’ ranks against her parents’ wishes (whose will seek to retrieve her from the group and provide her with an opportunity to return to the society she has abandoned). According to Kenneth Millward, “Karen is the character most in tune with the image-saturated culture of late twentieth-century America, and for DeLillo, these two points, totalitarianism and mediation, are often convergent” (2000, 133). In this scene, the focus is on the dependence of hegemonic visuality on its cultural context. The military connotations of the language and activities that take place within the baseball stadium suggest that these Moonies pose a direct threat to the heartland of American culture. The convergence of totality and mediation is addressed at the beginning of Mao II and provides a basis for DeLillo’s exploration of terrorism later on in

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 133

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

134

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

the novel. The comparison here is not of religion and terrorism but of the different methods by which groups are able to establish power over individuals. For terrorist groups, the content of the mediated image is important, but it must be reinforced and emphasized by the context and by the forms in which the content is communicated. Terrorist acts assume their meaning when communicated as a mass-mediated spectacle that juxtaposes images of violence against contexts and symbols the audience is familiar with. DeLillo’s use of cinematic forms in the opening scene of Mao II makes that novel an ideal text to explore the author’s reflections on authorship, authority, terrorism, and the power of images. And this is precisely also the complex of terms Grimonprez explores in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. To begin with, consider the title of the film as well as the novels it weaves into its narrative. Mao II and White Noise are both notable for their fascination with a mordant catalogue of death, dying, and disaster. Tom Paulus writes that Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a “hotline to history,” a “cynical prop and refuge for the lonely hearts who nostalgically pine away for an old world order of grand narratives and patriarchal hierarchies” (1997, 56). Yet there is more to the Grimonprez film than communicating or gaining access to the past. “Dial” implies circularity—a connection, a beginning, a provocation, and an ending that refigures extracts of visually-documented time that are isolated from their chronology and present them in a different context. Grimonprez’s “ ‘dial” affords the audience the opportunity to select and arrange their own histories and narratives. Structurally, that dial also informs history: the film mimics the language of infomercials, grandly demanding that we must all “dial history” to receive answers as in “for help, dial h-i-s-t-o-r-y and get instant access to a chronology of terrorism, packaged, shrunk, and easily digestible.” Grimonprez’s reworking of “history” into “H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” is likewise significant; its hyphenation aptly renders disparate, isolated letters and hyphens that bind one letter to another rather than a whole word. Like DeLillo’s Bill Gray—who remains bound to the terrorists and communicates with an unseen prisoner, constructing crowded word-heavy pages out of random, orderless letters—Grimonprez constructs his own record of terrorism by using a cinematic poetry that appropriates a range of codes, techniques, contexts, and languages. Both DeLillo (and his author) and Grimonprez form text and narrative from individual events and language—they use similar processes of composition and similar techniques, especially in their recourse to cinematic forms. “Shouldn’t death be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged, and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?” Grimonprez asks this question in the opening frames of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Ironically, the swan turns out to be an airplane that enters its descent onto a landing strip in slow-motion, moments before the graceful movement turns into a horrifying pyrotechnic show as the plane crashes. Debris and smoke momentarily mask our view before the plane emerges imperiously from the gloom, heading ominously towards the camera and out of our television screens. Then, the film cuts to a sequence of shots of the cockpit in which the pilots’ bodies are brilliantly illuminated by the dust

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 134

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

135

emerging from the explosion. This highly personal engagement with and voyeuristic gaze at the (albeit simulated) deaths of two individuals renders the audience complicit and places an emphatic focus on the body as a new tool for demonstrating political dissent. This sequence is overlaid by the title of the film, a voice-over informing us that we should “dial history,” and a telephone that flashes intermittently before the on-screen symbol “rings” and the image switches to a cartoon. Interspersed among these sequences are a series of visual disruptions as interferences jag across the screen, which perturbs both auditory and visual coherence. These interferences suggest that what we see is an amateur recording rather than a well-made documentary, thus further emphasizing the personal and “authentic” nature of the film. This initial sequence is followed by a scene in black and white that will recur throughout the film: a house is destroyed by what appears to be an explosion that is accompanied by German military music. Interestingly, the musical score then becomes more diverse, mutating into mimicry of 1970s US crime shows, which recontextualizes the starkly realistic initial images and inserts them into the frame of audiovisual fictions. Such a bewildering array of jump-cuts, handheld camera sequences, scenes of intimacy, and coldly intellectual direction disorient the viewer; Grimonprez executes the technique of shocking through the mundane as he goes on to document the moments after a terrorist attack rather than the attack itself. We next see a cleaner mopping up blood from an airport floor, but then we hear and see a woman screaming for her missing baby. Thus, the viewer is forced to witness the visceral, human consequences of a terrorist attack, not just the spectacular pandemonium and subsequent calm. As a whole, the beginning of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y administers the kind of “small, incisive shock” DeLillo mentions in “The Artist Naked in The Cage.” Grimonprez portrays death and acts of terrorism as events that are not smooth, that do not leave the surface unblemished, that are not clinical, antiseptic, dehumanized or emotionless, and that are not always as distant as the relatively safe space between a camera and an explosion. One specific issue both Mao II and Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y address is “spectacular authorship”—a phenomenon Steffen Hantke discusses as a response to a culture’s “need to stage spectacles in which it recreates its own practices and conventions, to enter the dialogue with itself, interrogate itself and understand itself better. These spectacles are reflections of conscious and unconscious knowledge” (1994, 1). The persistent dialogues between cultural normalization and its margins—which can inform different social and political shifts and changes—are influenced by the symbiotic as well as the parasitic relationship that terrorism maintains with the institutions of the state. Without challenges to existing structures and orders, there is no motivation to either change or reinforce government policies. Thus, the terrorist and the politician are intimately related: “For both the politician and the terrorist, the goal is to recraft the collective experience of the world through the generation of the narrative that cannot be resisted” (Walker 2004, 336). As DeLillo himself adds, the

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 135

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

136

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

terrorism–politics nexus is also relevant to the kinds of discussions concerning the role of artists in a society of the spectacle that Mao II participates in: “The people who are powerless make an open theatre of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways writers used to aspire to” (qtd. in Passaro 2005, 84).Thus, terror can be perceived as a form of communication that is used as an extreme outlet when a disaffected person or a group finds it impossible to make itself heard otherwise. That “true terror is a language and a vision” suggests there is a specific requirement for articulating the terrorist message. For a terrorist act to be effective, its observers must understand or acknowledge its author’s intent to shock and disrupt. The public character of terrorist acts crucially relies on that performative dimension. In an interview with Pierre Bal-Blanc and Matthieu Marguerin, Grimonprez suggests that his use of “hijacking” is also metaphorical: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y engages in the “hijacking of images out of their context” (Bal-Blanc and Marguerin 1998). Although viable in itself, I find that this fails to appreciate the deeper significance of the cinematic medium within Grimonprez’s film as well as within DeLillo’s novel. Arguably, the camera is one of the symbols of the postmodern condition, a crucial tool of our advanced technocratic contemporary culture that serves both as a technological aid for preserving those moments we recognize as history and as a more sinister technique for their subsequent alteration, adjustment, and control (think of video surveillance and the proliferation of close-circuit television). In DeLillo’s work, the camera—be it that of the photographer or that of the film director—is a constant presence: in Libra, it records the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald; in Running Dog, murderous conflicts ensue over the search for a film that has the final moments of Adolf Hitler captured on a grainy piece of celluloid; in Americana, the advertising executive David Bell records himself on a personal odyssey; and in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer watches a personal preview of his own death. However, most pertinent to this essay’s concerns is the ritual and ceremony that surrounds Bill Gray in Mao II. Gray determines to remain dangerous by staying in the shadows and the periphery to ensure that it is his next novel and not himself that becomes the consumer event. Gray is, however, forced to give up his reclusive, independent life and allows Brita Nilsson, a photographer who focuses exclusively on authors, to take pictures of him. As he waits for her to capture him, he observes fatalistically, sitting for a picture is a morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It’s their past, their history that we’re inventing here [. . .]. [T]he deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? (42)

Gray’s belief that the image only gains its full meaning and value after his death suggests that he considers the visual artifact as a commemorative artifact

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 136

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

137

that can only be used effectively once it has been molded into a more encompassing discourse. On its own, the image represents one captured historical moment that can, however, be altered through doctoring or technical tampering. In this respect, the image is an object that, unlike the subjective text, allows the subject (or its self) to be both fixed and manipulated by the photographer or the owner of the photograph. By submitting to the image, Gray becomes the commodity he has sought to resist throughout the narrative. In a close reading of this sequence, one word stands out as a fulcrum for the entire scene: “ceremonial” derives from the Latin “caerimonia”— which means sanctity. “Ceremonial” is a term that is usually used in connection with sacred, religious, ritualized processes during transitions from birth to life, from life to different life, or from life to death. Gray’s own death will occur later when, after an accident, he dies of internal injuries on a ferry to Lebanon. After Gray’s death, his identification documents are stolen by a cleaner on the boat, and so—despite the fact that even in his death, he manages to avoid public spectacle he has hidden from, and which he suspected his photograph would provoke—it is likely that his legacy will be continued by the eventual emergence of these documents in a transaction or sale. His mysterious death counterbalances the anonymity of his act of dying: the legend and mystery of his disappearance will give way to another narrative of speculation and theorizing from both his fans and from figures such as Scott Martineau—Gray’s live-in housekeeper—who wish to profit from the death of the author. As Maureen Whitebrook astutely observes: When Bill is, as the reader knows, dead, Scott remains, replacing Bill as the lonely figure in the house, endlessly ordering and cataloguing the writing that will not be published, more interested, ironically, in the legend of the writer than in his actual work being made public (an implicit and oblique twist to the notion of the image). (2001, 766)

The image of Martineau slipping into Gray’s role in the process of ordering, archiving, and cataloguing aligns him with the figure of Nicholas Branch in Libra, who tries to make sense of the material surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, seemingly without getting any closer to a solution.1 Gray’s persistent association of death or dying with the act of photography is highlighted when he observes, “I’ve become someone else’s material. Yours, Brita. There’s the life and the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in film or print” (DeLillo 1991, 43). The “final reality” is the commemoration in the media, the inescapability of the voracious appetite of the capitalist machine, which assimilates its subjects, then regurgitates them into a form that can be marketed, sold, purchased, and used to propagate the stimuli that its information-hungry consumers need. Gray’s cynical assessment is expressed consummately later in the novel: “Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time it can be used most effectively” (165). The idea of using the photograph when it has an optimum

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 137

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

138

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

value is convergent with the power of the possessed image and the way in which those who hold this image can use it when the moment or the market is at its peak. Gray claims that “I’ve always seen myself in sentences. The language of my books has shaped me as a man” (48), yet is unwilling to concede to those who try to analyze him through his work. He has become delusional about his self-imposed exile so that, even as he acknowledges that he cannot dissociate himself from his literary works, he is still fantasizing about his ability to hide his identity from public view. In effect, Gray is engaged in the act of trying to reinvent himself after creating one image and writing it into society through the medium of the novel. According to Gray, “novels are supposed to absorb our terror,” but one consequence of absorption is reflection and dialogue with that which absorbs. By drawing on their surroundings, writers enter into a dialogue with culture, and their response reflects the environment that provoked the response. Thus, terrorists and authors begin to converge as shapers of a consciousness: they are communicators and mediators, articulators of cultural frustration and disempowerment, rather than revolutionaries who can make permanent change.2 Another point DeLillo made during his speech for Wei Jinsheng was: The total State wants to drain all conviction from the writer. It wants to absorb the dissident writer. In the West, every writer is absorbed, turned into breakfast food or canned laughter. But the more nearly total the State, the more vivid the dissident artist. The artist is so vivid and singular, so unassimilated into the State machine, that the State must find a way to make him disappear. (DeLillo 1997, 6)

The reduction of an author to “canned laughter” poignantly captures the state’s desire to reduce conviction to momentary spectacle, to feed it to the masses audiovisually, and to consign it, finally, to cultural amnesia. In his interview with William Leith, DeLillo returns to the significance of the camera in shaping both cultural memory and Mao II. J. D. Salinger is an obvious model for the character of Bill Gray. Apart from the picture of the Korean Unification Church wedding, a second photograph inspired DeLillo to write his novel: In the summer of 1988, I looked on the front page of the New York Post. There was a startling picture of an elderly man—he looked frightened and angry. It was J D Salinger. The last time he’d been photographed was in 1955. [. . .] For the editor to send these two men [the photographers] to New Hampshire was a little like ordering an execution. And when you look at the face of the man being photographed, it’s not a great leap of imagination to think he’s just been shot. (Leith 1991, 18–19)

By connecting the act of shooting someone with the use of photography as a means of capturing someone’s image (and thus inspiring terror in the unwitting and unwilling victim), DeLillo further highlights the relationship between consumers, subjectivity, and the apparatuses that are used to satiate

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 138

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

139

the consumers’ hunger for images. It is this obsessive desire for images that fuels terrorist activity, be it through passive viewing by those unaffected, or active viewing by the perpetrators and their intended audiences. When representing the body of intellectuals who are negotiating for the release of the hostage, Gray offers a deeply pessimistic assessment of the replacement of the artist’s social function by terrorist activity, which uses the mass media to tell stories that are incomparably more powerful than those writers used to spin: There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? [. . .]. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on the human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (DeLillo 1991, 41)

Gray here attacks the cultural obsession with celebrity. Those who are seen as informing or influencing public beliefs and perceptions have emerged as public figureheads. By manipulating “human consciousness,” they are able to engineer popular opinion and become icons because of the attention they generate through various spectacular provocations. Closer consideration draws attention to the word “effigy”—a figure or icon that is subjected to a public sacrifice—as well as the use of such figures to reinforce the power to influence mass audiences. DeLillo’s equation of the novelist and terrorist raises an interesting question that touches on an underlying tension in his text: is Gray’s identification of himself as the member of a group that, at one time, may have been able to challenge the dominant order an act of self-aggrandizement or is art actually able to have such an effect? Interestingly, the idea that terrorists, revolutionaries, and state leaders are celebrities is also addressed by Grimonprez as his cinematic catwalk—crowded as it is with assassins and provocateurs—smoothly slides across Nixon, Khrushchev, Che Guevara, Castro, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Ronald Reagan, and Leila Khaled—all of whom played important roles in the escalation of hijackings and punitive authoritarian response. As part of his negotiations with the terrorists, Gray attempts to write about the hostage—a poet he has never met—and strives to communicate with him by way of his (the poet’s) texts: Find the places where you converge with him. Read his poems again. See his face and hands in the words. (161)

To converge with an author through his work is precisely what Gray has resisted throughout Mao II. Yet in the present context of an author held hostage, Gray realizes that an artist’s work can in fact help his readers make sense of the author’s life. Grimonprez’s and DeLillo’s works converge in their explorations of the links between terrorism and the media—not just the mass media, but also the

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 139

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

140

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

importance of context, narration, and the materiality of communication for giving meaning to acts of terror. Those links are addressed by Gray when he states, “It’s pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They’re perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order” (158). The complicity Gray identifies suggests that terrorist acts committed against governments are successful because of the way that media coverage will record and disseminate the information. The media must construct a narrative in which the terrorist remains unconnected to the State. This enables terrorists to foster the myth that they belong to an independent group that fights a common enemy; and it enables the state sustain a repressive regime as it incorporates acts of terror to construct an Other against whom it defends itself. Both the author and the terrorist are practitioners of spectacular authorship, and although they represent two extremes, their existence depends on one another. As Abu Rashid explains his rationale for the original kidnapping of the poet in words that are hauntingly indicative of the relationship terrorists and the media: “I will tell you why we put Westerners in locked rooms. So we don’t have to look at them. They remind us of the way we tried to mimic the West. The way we put up the pretense, the terrible veneer. Which you see exploded around you” (235). Rashid’s acts of terrorism are condemned by the Western world, but this is because they are acts of violence that are not institutionalized or sanctioned as a direct response to a self-evident threat. Thus, the fictional Rashid as well as the non-fictitious groups documented by Grimonprez are caught in a double bind: they attempt to overthrow their oppressors but realize that they depend on them for their means of communication. Grimonprez emphasizes this by way of two powerful, vividly shot sequences. At first, his camera focuses on a hostage-taker in Leningrad who has been shot in the stomach and is lying on a trolley, awaiting medical treatment. The reporter approaches him with a microphone and asks him repeatedly, “why did you take the hostages?” But the man dies before he is able to answer the question, a final act that exacerbates the level of complicity between the media and its audiences on the one hand and the dead on the other. In the closing sequence of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the area surrounding Lockerbie is filmed, with wreckage strewn across a large rural area. The form has now shifted from personal to anonymous, from the human, visible killer to an unseen incendiary device. What we witness here is a transition from the representation of a threat on a larger, more comprehensible scale to the localized and more direct effects of terror. The terrorist’s ability to interfere with and invade private, personal spaces has been increased with the help of advanced communications technologies. Paradoxically, the media’s broadcasting capacity enables it to document terror and highlight the plight of the victims but in doing so, Grimonprez and DeLillo teach us, they offer more opportunities to perpetuate terror.

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 140

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Dial T for Terror

141

Notes 1. For a more extensive comparison of Mao II and Libra along those lines, see Schweighauser and Wisnicki’s essay in this volume. 2. On DeLillo’s negotiations of the private–public divide in Mao II and Players, see also Leif Grössinger’s essay in this volume.

Works Cited Arensberg, A. (2005), “Seven seconds,” in Thomas DePietro, (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 40–6. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Baker, P. (1994), “The terrorist as interpreter: Mao II in postmodern context.” Postmodern Culture, 4, 2: 34 pars. Bal-Blanc, P. and Marguerin, M. (1998), “Interview with Johan Grimonprez, trans. Mary Shovelin.” New Media Encyclopedia. www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu. asp?ID=I0037375&lg=GBR DeLillo, D. (1971), Americana. London: Penguin. —(1989), Libra. London: Penguin. —(1991), Mao II. London: Jonathan Cape. —(1997), “The artist naked in a cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 6–7. —(1999), Running Dog. London: Picador. —(2003), Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner Grimonprez, J. (2003), Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. DVD and Booklet with texts by HansUlrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Hantke, S. (1994), Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Howard, G. (1997), “The American strangeness.” Hungry Mind Review, 47: 13–16. Karnicky, J. (2001), “Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and seriality.” Critique, 42: 339–56. Leith, W. (1991), “Terrorism and the art of fiction.” The Independent, August 19, 18–19. Millward, K. (2000), Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Passaro, V. (2005), “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” in Thomas DePietro (ed.),Conversations with Don DeLillo, 75–85. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Paulus, T. (1997), “Bezet, de terrorist als legitimatie van de wereldgeschiedenis: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y van Johan Grimonprez.” Andere Sinema, 141: 56–60. Rowe, J. C. (2004), “Mao II and the war on terrorism.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103,1: 21–43. Rushdie, S. (2000), The Satanic Verses. London: Picador. Scanlan, M. (2001), Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Virginia, VA: University Press of Virginia. Walker, J. (2004), “A kink in the system: Terrorism and the comic mystery novel.” Studies In The Novel, 36,3: 336–51. Whitebrook, M. (2001), “Reading Don DeLillo’s Mao II as a commentary on twentiethcentury politics.” The European Legacy, 6, 6: 763–9.

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 141

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

PSchweighauser_08_Final.indd 142

5/13/2010 8:46:52 AM

Chapter 9

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing in Don DeLillo’s Fiction Paula Martín Salván This essay discusses some aspects of a recurrent pattern in Don DeLillo’s fiction that has been labeled “pattern of withdrawal” (Osteen 2000, 450) and “narrative of retreat” (Dewey 2006, 41). In the course of exploring that pattern, I provide an overview of DeLillo’s long-standing exploration of terrorism, taking Falling Man (2007) as my central object of interest. As Tom Junod noted in a review entitled “The Man Who Invented 9/11” (2007), DeLillo reopens with Falling Man many of the debates he has fueled in the past, such as the close relationship between those who provoke terror and those who suffer it, or the rivalry between terrorists and novelists in the force field of media culture. In DeLillo’s writing, to feel terror and to provoke it are by no means antagonistic or mutually exclusive behaviors. As Murray Jay Siskind suggests in White Noise (1985), to provoke terror may be one way to avoid feeling it. Moreover, in DeLillo’s fictional universes, terror and the narratives that follow it are categories which are very closely related to one another. This invites a meta-discursive reading that probes the ethics of their relatedness. It is against the background of these larger questions that I analyze the connections DeLillo establishes between terror and asceticism on the thematic level and those he establishes between writing and asceticism on the stylistic level. The major question prompted by these analyses is: to what extent can writing be seen as an ethically viable act of resistance against the kind of terror represented in DeLillo’s novels? My tentative answers to that question are informed by the conviction that DeLillo’s representations of asceticism are crucial to the author’s concerns about terror and possible responses to it. As the keyword for a pattern that encompasses recurrent motifs, narrative structures associated with withdrawal, and DeLillo’s frequent use of similar social and psychological features for the characterization of his protagonists, “asceticism” names a recurring device in DeLillo’s fiction. Thus, the ascetic processes undergone by two of the main characters in Falling Man—Keith Neudecker and Hammad, victim and executor of the 9/11 attacks—mirror similar developments in previous DeLillo protagonists. The ascetic pattern is usually triggered by a character who is involved in a search for some form of transcendence. Recurrent expressions of this process make use of the terminology and rhetorical articulations of mysticism (Underworld [DeLillo 1997a, 295–7]; Players [DeLillo 1977, 101]; End Zone [DeLillo 1972, 202]), Zen philosophy (Players [16]; The Body Artist [DeLillo 2001a, 55]), and asceticism itself (Americana [DeLillo 1971, 118]; End Zone [215]). Typical motifs include severe physical discipline based on ritual repetition,

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 145

5/13/2010 8:46:42 AM

146

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

reclusion in closed places or deserted landscapes, abandonment of conventional language uses, involvement in noninstitutionalized communities based on ideas of proximity and physical contact, loss of shared spatial and temporal references, and nostalgia for primitive modes of existence in which all of the above play a relevant role. In DeLillo’s early fiction, the pattern is particularly frequent. It is enacted by characters such as Gary Harkness in End Zone, Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street (1973), Lyle Palmer in Players, and Glen Selvy in Running Dog (1978). A more recent example would be Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist, but most of DeLillo’s main characters participate in one or more of the motifs mentioned earlier. Falling Man follows this pattern in two of its main storylines: Keith Neudecker’s post-9/11 retreat to the desert of Las Vegas as a professional card player, and Hammad’s technical and spiritual preparation for “the struggle against the enemy” (80) that will lead to his direct involvement in 9/11. Most of the features of the ascetic pattern sketched above apply to one or both of these characters: retreat to a desert, ritualized and disciplined activity, longing for physical contact, and face-to-face encounter. In what follows, I test the interpretive potential of the ascetic pattern for Falling Man. In doing so, I focus less on the thematic presence of those motifs than on the way they are embedded in specific social and psychological articulations that have received much critical attention. Moreover, I explore the narrative and stylistic features associated with this pattern.

1. Austerity as a Way of Life In DeLillo’s novels, the patterns of withdrawal are usually embedded in the thematic representation of issues such as characters’ existential crises and critiques of Western capitalist societies. In DeLillo’s early fiction of the 1970s, withdrawal came as an answer to tiredness and disgust over postmodern life that resulted in a Thoreauvian impulse to simplify (Oriard 1978, 5). In Americana, one of the characters associates this tendency with “national life and character” (119): “we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste” (118). In later novels, the same impulse is presented as consistently embedded in characters’ private histories, often as the result of some sort of personal crisis. Thus, Jack Gladney starts his search for transcendence in an attempt to overcome his growing fear of death (DeLillo 1985, 154), Nick Shay relates his mystic musings to a midlife crisis (DeLillo 1997a, 808–10), and Lauren Hartke turns her mourning for her dead husband into an ascetic process of cleansing (DeLillo 2001a, 37). The characters in DeLillo’s novels who embark on the ascetic path are either figures of otherness (anti-system groups, secret cults, terrorists, outcasts) that are radically opposed to conventional social structures, or they are successful professionals whose search for the ascetic transcendental arises once the mechanisms of professional and personal fulfillment offered by society have been

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 146

5/13/2010 8:46:42 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

147

exhausted (Oriard 1978, 7–9). Two different functions of patterns of withdrawal correspond to these two different kinds of characters: they may perform a critique of what DeLillo has called “a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption” (Passaro 1991, 8) or they are psychologically motivated searches for the transcendental that are rooted in private histories. In both cases, Joseph Dewey suggests in his analyses of DeLillo’s “narratives of retreat,” patterns of withdrawal work as metaphors for the individual’s need to control reality: Deploying a wide matrix of metaphoric systems that each suggests such control [. . .] DeLillo plays on the tension between the need for order and the fear of chaos [. . .]. [C]haracters take control in retreat, terrified by the implications of engaging the larger world of accident and mayhem. (27)

The ascetic process engaged in by DeLillo’s characters answers their need to create structure and order—two words that recur very often in his work. In Players, this need is given expression in words that continue to resonate in later novels such as The Body Artist and Falling Man: The idea is to organize this emptiness [. . .]. They’re a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations. A universe structured on such coordinates would have the merits of substance and familiarity [. . .]. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. (211)

From a psychological point of view, asceticism works as a mechanism not only to render the unfamiliar familiar but also to tame the ultimate terror of death by turning one’s life into a preparation for it. In order to organize emptiness into systematic patterns, DeLillo’s characters turn to discipline and simplification as the guiding principles in an ascetic process that may illuminate them or at least help them control their fears. The historical events that ground the narrative of Falling Man validate the pattern in related ways. Traumatized by the events on 9/11, Keith Neudecker— an executive for a firm located in the World Trade Center (WTC)—abandons his profession to retreat to the casinos. This trajectory matches previous characters’ attempts to withdraw from their own pasts. DeLillo describes the mechanics of poker as an exercise in severe discipline that conforms to the ascetic pattern followed by previous DeLillo characters like Lauren in The Body Artist or Lyle in Players: In the beginning they played poker in a number of shapes and variations but over time they began to reduce the dealer’s options. The banning of certain games started as a joke in the name of tradition and self-discipline but became effective over time, with arguments made against the shabbier aberrations [. . .]. They played each hand in a glazed frenzy [. . .]. [T]here were always things to ban and rules to make. (DeLillo 2007, 96–9)

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 147

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

148

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Psychologically speaking, Neudecker’s withdrawal is motivated by trauma and mourning. In this, it closely follows the pattern explored in The Body Artist. Through his own dedication to card playing, Neudecker pays tribute to his friend Rumsey, dead in the WTC, and to the community constituted by their group of players. Keeping on with the game may be seen as the compulsive repetition of a habit that was suddenly interrupted by traumatic events: “Poker was the one code they shared and that was over now” (DeLillo 2007, 129). In this novel, the kind of cultural critique DeLillo has staged via asceticism in earlier novels returns, though less with Neudecker than with the Islamist terrorist Hammad. Hammad’s thinking and feeling is caught up between two antagonistic forces. On the one hand, he feels as strongly as other characters do the systemic impulse to assimilate: “He had to fight against the need to be normal. He had to struggle against himself, first, and then against the injustice that haunted their lives” (83). On the other hand, his dichotomous worldview strongly aligns him with other outsiders in DeLillo’s fiction, such as the Abecedarians in The Names (1982), the anti-system group in Players, and Rashid in Mao II (1991): “These people jogging in the park, world domination. These old men who sit in beach chairs, veined white bodies and baseball caps, they control our world” (DeLillo 2007, 173). Hammad sticks close to the binary us–them rhetoric DeLillo already engaged with in his first text on 9/11, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September”: “We are rich, privileged and strong, but they are willing to die” (2001b, 34). Many reviewers of Falling Man have mentioned the shallow and stereotyped representation of Hammad as one of its flaws.1 I contend, however, that this character grows more complex when considered in the light of DeLillo’s earlier novels. Hammad’s technical and spiritual training is described in terms that fit the ascetic pattern followed by many other DeLillo characters: “His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad” (83). Later in the novel, DeLillo writes: He prays and sleeps, prays and eats. These are dumb junk meals often taken in silence. The plot shapes every breath he takes. This is the truth he has always looked for without knowing how to name it or where to search. They are together. There is no word they can speak, he and the others, that does not come back to this. (176)

From the point of view of his fulfillment of the ascetic process, Hammad incarnates the ascetic ideal present in many of DeLillo’s novels—a convergence that many reviewers of Falling Man have found problematic.2 In DeLillo’s oeuvre, the fact that Hammad’s asceticism leads to a terrorist act represents no break with earlier writings. The connection between asceticism and violence was already present in Americana (“[T]he ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency” [1971, 118]), and it also haunted End Zone:

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 148

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

149

I am interested in the violent man and the ascetic. I am on the verge of concluding that an individual’s capacity for violence is closely linked with his ascetic tendencies. We are about to rediscover that austerity is our true mode. (1972, 215)

Later characters such as Lyle Wynant in Players and Glen Selvy in Running Dog further confirm the connections between asceticism and violence. In what follows, my discussion of violence and the fear of death in some of these novels will lead to a metanarrative reading of plotting—both in its narrative and in its conspiratorial senses—as a structural principle in DeLillo’s fiction.

2. Narrative Structures In one of the “terrorist sections” of Falling Man, Hammad reflects on the nature of conspiratorial plots in terms that may equally be applied to narrative plot: “They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point” (174). Hammad’s ruminations on the idea of plot are anticipated in “In the Ruins of the Future,” where DeLillo mentions that “plots reduce the world” (2001b, 34), creating closed structures organized around one single impulse. In DeLillo’s fiction, the point where everything converges is, inevitably, death. As every reader of White Noise will remember, “All plots tend to move deathward” (26). This statement was further developed in Libra (1988): Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. (221)

Later novels such as Cosmopolis (2003) or Falling Man seem to confirm this, and the same notion has been theorized by critics such as Frank Kermode, J. Hillis Miller, and Peter Brooks. The double-edged nature of narrative and conspiratorial plotting turns it into an attempt to both control and evoke death: “We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot” (DeLillo 1985, 26). In DeLillo’s fiction, participating in a plot means taking control of one’s own fear of death and turning it outward. From this perspective, and according to Murray Jay Siskind in White Noise, people are divided into “killers” and “diers,” depending on whether they are creators of plots or their victims (290). In White Noise, Jack Gladney’s initial response to the fear of death is the attempt to stop time and thus the development of narrative itself: “May the

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 149

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

150

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan” (98). Later, following Siskind’s advice, Gladney tries to take control of his fear of death by becoming the author of his own plot, which involves the murder of Willie Mink. The echoes of Siskind’s ruminations reverberate throughout DeLillo’s fiction, from the ritual killings performed by the Abecedarians in The Names to Bill Gray’s statement in Mao II about terrorism being “the new tragic narrative” (157). In Falling Man, DeLillo’s reflections on terrorists and novelists are sadly confirmed by history, and the Islamist plot seems to confirm Siskind’s ideas: “Amir said simply there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying” (176). The reflections on plots in White Noise invite a metanarrative reading of DeLillo’s other novels. My contention is that Murray Jay Siskind’s and Jack Gladney’s explicit discussions of plotting can serve as a model that helps explain the narrative structures DeLillo creates in his later novels. In the passage from Falling Man quoted earlier, the idea of plot as a catalyst for a worldview in which “everything converges to a point” (174) is mentioned. This remark serves me as a starting point for my narratological analysis of one novel’s plot. In Falling Man, narrative structure is built around the parallelism between Keith and Hammad, with alternating sections devoted to them. Both characters are brought together in the last chapter, where DeLillo repeats a narrative model found in previous texts such as Libra, Underworld, and Cosmopolis. In all these texts, DeLillo creates a double narrative structure that follows two apparently unrelated storylines to bring them together at the end. Libra in particular exemplifies the notion of plotting as a sinuous intertwining of several lines leading toward a convergence point. Chapters are distributed according to two main narrative lines that develop side by side: one follows Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, the other tracks the conspiratorial activities of the agents involved in the Kennedy assassination. The convergence point materializes only in the final chapter of the novel, which minutely describes the assassination and its aftermath. What is most interesting, however, is the description of a third line that brings the other two together: Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. (339)

This third line, which is not explicitly explored in the novel, apparently does not spring from rational motivation but from the “deepest levels of the self,” which bring the two parallel plots together in one single impulse. This kind of rhetorical formulation will reappear in DeLillo’s fiction whenever the idea of plot is presented as a force driving together separate storylines, linking people’s lives in one single impulse toward an end.

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 150

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

151

In Underworld, DeLillo recuperates and enlarges on this idea, creating a novel built around the merging of two time structures, one moving backwards from the 1990s to the 1950s and another one moving forward, following Manx Martin after “the shot heard around the world.” In DeLillo’s own words: “What happens is that at the end of the third episode, these two time-lines connect, so that there is a dovetailing of these two otherwise completely different schemes” (qtd. in Williams 1998, par. 28).3 In Cosmopolis, we find the same kind of dual timeline structure. Again, two narrative lines run parallel. One of them follows the protagonist, Erik Packer, in his limo journey across Midtown Manhattan. The other contains the musings of one Benno Levin, a character apparently unrelated to the main storyline, under the heading “The Confessions of Benno Levin.”4 Both characters, and again, both lines, will come together in the final chapter of the novel, when the connection between them is unveiled and Levin is about to murder Packer at the end of his journey. Here, the story of the victim and that of his killer are developed side by side, and they do not meet until they reach the end of their respective storylines. This final encounter was already anticipated by Packer: “But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he’d always known would come clear in time” (107). As in the aforementioned passage from Libra, the inevitability of the threat is expressed here as well as in other DeLillo novels in terms of what may be called mystical intuition. This structure is reproduced in Falling Man. The novel begins in the moments immediately after the impact of the first plane on the North Tower of the WTC and then follows Keith Neudecker’s escape from the site of disaster. His precarious reunion with his family and the different strategies developed by each of the characters trying to overcome the traumatic experience are at the heart of this narrative. The second storyline focuses on Hammad and constitutes one step further in the kind of narrative structures under scrutiny, combining elements from all of them and adding a formal twist. As in Libra or Cosmopolis, the Hammad sections work as a narrative and ethical counterpoint to the other storyline. As in Underworld, they provide an alternative timeline for the novel. In Falling Man, they imagine the period of time before the attacks, from the point of view of those who planned them. Finally, as in the other three novels, the two lines eventually come together in an unexpected way not because the fact of their coming together is surprising in itself, but because of the way DeLillo tells his story. From the moment Hammad is introduced, readers—especially those who are familiar with other works by DeLillo—are led to expect that his trajectory and Keith’s will meet at some point. As in other novels, it will happen in the final chapter, when Hammad, on board of the plane that is about to crash into the North Tower, says his final prayers and fastens his seatbelt: A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel,

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 151

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

152

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He didn’t drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor. (239)

The narrative meeting point becomes a literal clash, rendered in the text as a sudden change of perspective, from the plane to the building, from Hammad’s to Keith’s point of view. The end of the novel works as a perfect illustration of the narrative structure I have outlined. In Falling Man, DeLillo uses the ideas of connectivity, parallel storylines, and the convergence of a series of seemingly unrelated events to give shape to the narrative itself.

3. Style Falling Man met with a mixed reception upon its publication, with several negative reviews (Junod 2007, Kakutani 2007, Yardley 2007) that measured the novel’s “parameters of reduced expectations” (Kakutani 2007, par. 3) against “his uniquely poised and meticulous talent [. . .] as a phrasemaker” (Junod 2007, par. 5). Even Jonathan Yardley, one of DeLillo’s fiercest critics, admitted that “the clarity and sinew of his prose always had to be acknowledged and respected. At his most confident and accomplished, DeLillo can write,” just to add immediately that “Sept. 11 seems to have paralyzed him stylistically” (2007, par. 2). The most enthusiastic reviewers, on the other hand, did not fail to praise DeLillo’s prose, describing it as “rhythmic and dynamic” (Litt 2007, par. 9) or as “a spoonful of mercury” (L. Miller 2007, par. 9). Their descriptions focus on what Arnold Weinstein called “the remarkable DeLillo style”: “cool to the point of being hip, close to the vest” (1993, 288). It is precisely this style that led François Happe to call DeLillo an “ascète manqué” (2000, 11), an idea that informs DeLillo’s text “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room” (1999): “The way an ascetic goes sunward into wilderness, this is how the writer pitches headlong toward language” (17). This phrase itself illustrates the kind of laconic stylistic tightness it describes, and it establishes a correspondence between the thematic and formal levels that can be mapped out in many of DeLillo’s novels. To call DeLillo’s style “ascetic” is to suggest that his writing is in some way analogous to the kind of spiritual process undergone by his characters. As Philip Nel notes in his discussion of The Body Artist, the pattern of withdrawal followed by characters in DeLillo’s fiction is often accompanied by a sort of stylistic minimalism (2002, 738–9), a tendency toward what may be called “epigrammatic writing” (Mars-Jones 2007, par. 9). Celebrated quotations such as the already cited “all plots tend to move deathward” and “Everything is connected in the end” (DeLillo 1997, 826) exemplify DeLillo’s penchant for literary forms characterized by brevity and sharpness: epigrams, aphorisms, gnomic sayings.

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 152

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

153

This aesthetic principle extends as far back as Americana, where the narrator David Bell repeatedly refers to aphorisms as the verbal outcome at the end of withdrawal: “Oriental aphorisms which seem to convey a shattering truth while remaining stubbornly elusive. One senses meaning but cannot clutch to it” (7). DeLillo himself reflected ironically on this tendency of his own writing in a 1999 interview: “I also have to try to be a bit less epigrammatic. Often my sentences sound as if they were uttered by a French philosopher” (Moss 2005, 164). To date, The Body Artist remains DeLillo’s most explicit attempt at ascetic writing. This already becomes clear in the first sentences of the novel: “Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web” (2001a, 7). DeLillo’s “deliberately stylized prose” (Nel 2002, 740) works as a perfect formal analog to both Lauren’s self-discipline and Mr. Tuttle’s inarticulate discourse. Similar convergences can already be traced in earlier novels. In Mao II, free indirect speech starts to disintegrate as Bill Gray approaches the moment of his death: “His father. I keep telling you and telling you and telling you. His mother. I liked it better with the sleeves rolled down” (216). In End Zone, Gary Harkness’s attempt at obliterating language is followed by the growing “nakedness” of his narration: “The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth” (89–90). The novel is thus reduced to the sort of “elemental list” mentioned by Gary earlier on in the novel: “What we must know must be learned from blanked-out pages. To begin to reword the overflowing world. To subtract and disjoin. To re-recite the alphabet. To make elemental lists” (89). In Falling Man, this style is most clearly apparent in the passages where Hammad approaches the end of his preparations for the attacks: “These people, what they hold so precious we see as empty space. He didn’t think about the purpose of their mission. All he saw was shock and death. There is no purpose, this is the purpose” (177). The final moments narrated from Hammad’s perspective constitute the stylistic apex of his spiritual evolution. This is DeLillo’s style as stark, naked representation of kenosis: Recite the sacred words. Pull your clothes tightly around you. Fix your gaze. Carry your soul in your hand. (238)

One may think that DeLillo is here trying to mimic the discourse of Islamic religious writing (as John Updike did in Terrorist), but the dissolution of writing itself at the end of an ascetic process is a device DeLillo uses elsewhere in Falling Man. Witness his rendition of Keith’s discovery of some sort of mental peace in Las Vegas and other gambling locations: “He didn’t wonder who

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 153

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

154

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

she [Keith’s poker partner] was or where she’d go when this was over, to what sort of room somewhere, to think what kind of thoughts. This was never over. That was the point. There was nothing outside the game but faded space” (189). DeLillo already used the same stylistic device for very different characters in his earlier novels. In Running Dog, for instance, Glen Selvy arrives in the desert and prepares to die: What it meant. The full-fledged secrecy. The reading. The routine. The double life. His private disciplines. His handguns. His regard for precautions. How your mind works. The narrowing of choices. What you are. It was clear, finally. The whole point. Everything. All this time he’d been preparing to die. (183)

Thus, DeLillo’s Falling Man follows the ascetic pattern I have outlined. In this novel, too, characterization, narrative structure, and stylistic features are affected by the motif of the ascetic search. However, I do not conclude from this observation that DeLillo is simply applying a preexisting template to 9/11 in order to give literary substance to a historical event. What DeLillo achieves in this novel is a reconsideration of some of the questions that keep reappearing throughout his fiction: What role does writing in general, and DeLillo’s in particular, play in the realm of post-9/11 culture? What value can be assigned to fiction in a world that DeLillo himself characterizes as dominated by narratives of global terror? DeLillo once declared that “stories can be a consolation” (DeCurtis 1991, 56). This statement points toward a literary model that serves as an interpretive frame for historical events that can reach places historiography cannot: “The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements” (1997b, par. 27). In the post-9/11 world, writing a novel about 9/11 represents an attempt to fill the gap in the reality continuum that was opened up by the terrorist narrative: “Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it. The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately [. . .]. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space” (DeLillo 2001b, 39). In Falling Man, DeLillo reflects on storytelling as a means to confront terrorism. The pattern of withdrawal discussed in this essay functions as one of the textual strategies deployed to provide an intelligible narrative response to 9/11. As a process of preparation for death, asceticism works as a mechanism to soothe the ultimate terror it provokes. From psychological and anthropological perspectives, ascetic searches try to cope with the inassimilable nature of death as that which cannot be confronted directly. Similarly, in DeLillo’s terms, writing can work as consolation against that which cannot be understood or assimilated to previous experience: “The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us” (DeLillo 2001b, 39). Writing provides a hint of order in the midst of randomness and terror, inviting a parallelism between characters’

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 154

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

155

disciplined asceticism and the author’s role in society. In DeLillo’s terms, the writer is a man who locks himself up in a room in order to deal with the collective terror that is imposed on him from without. In trying to explain why DeLillo’s writing replicates—both in its structure and its style—the thematic persistence of asceticism, one should carefully consider his description of the writer’s faithful exploration of language as consolation and entertain the idea that writing is an ascetic exercise in itself that is intended to keep terror at bay. As DeLillo states in “In the Ruins of the Future,” “[i]n its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity” (2001b, 39). As he already claimed for Libra, “fiction rescues history from its confusions. It can do this in the somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces. But it also can operate in a deeper way: providing the balance and rhythm we don’t experience in our daily lives” (DeCurtis 1991, 56). The ascetic pattern works as the ultimate thematic and formal translation of the author’s attempt to provide that balance and rhythm, stressing the need to domesticate the singularity of the event, to offer some sort of consolation.

Notes 1. See Frank Rich in The New York Times: “When Falling Man sporadically leaves Keith and Lianne behind to retrace 9/11 from the point of view of the hijackers, that spell is broken. These brief interruptions seem potted, adding little beyond mellifluous writing to the journalistic record” (2007, par. 9). Toby Litt makes a similar point in The Guardian: “DeLillo’s 9/11 terrorists read like a weak echo of earlier DeLillo gangs [. . .]. There is a definite decline in the quality of the writing” (2007, par. 10). On the Orientalist stereotyping of Hammad, see also Sascha Pöhlmann’s essay in this volume. 2. Laura Miller seems to have noted this pattern of continuity when she claims in connection to Hammad: “DeLillo seems to have an instinctive understanding of the attractions of fanatical martyrdom: What is it, after all, but the disengagement that entices all of his heroes, taken to extremes? [. . .] DeLillo’s most believable character has always been the Lee Harvey Oswald of Libra, and Hammad belongs to the same brotherhood of ambivalent yet determined soldiers of self-destruction” (2007, par. 7). 3. It should be noted, however, that the “dovetailing” mentioned by DeLillo is never rendered explicitly in the novel, but only in the reader’s mind, in an exercise of textual and historical reconstruction. 4. The “Benno Levin” sections of the novel were widely ignored by reviewers, who hardly mention this character at all, a fact that contrasts with the critical attention devoted to the “Hammad” sections of Falling Man.

Works Cited Brooks, P. (1984), Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DeCurtis, A. (1991), “An outsider in this society: An interview with Don DeLillo,” in Frank Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, 43–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 155

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

156

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

DeLillo, D. (1971), Americana. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —(1972), End Zone. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —(1973), Great Jones Street. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —(1977), Players. New York: Knopf. —(1978), Running Dog. New York: Knopf. —(1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. —(1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. —(1988), Libra. New York: Viking. —(1991), Mao II. New York: Viking. —(1997a), Underworld. New York: Scribner. —(1997b), “The power of history.” New York Times, September 7, 49 pars. www. nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html. —(1999), “A history of the writer alone in a room,” in The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, 13–18. Jerusalem: Caspit Press. —(2001a), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2001b), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s December: 33–40. —(2003), Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Dewey, J. (2006), Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Happe, F. (2000), Don DeLillo: La fiction contre les systèmes. Paris: Belin. Junod, T. (2007), “The man who invented 9/11.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Esquire, May 7, 8 pars. www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/delillo. Kakutani, M. (2007), Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. New York Times, May 9. www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/arts/09iht-bookthu.1.5635495.html. Kermode, F. (1967), The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Litt, T. (2007), “The trembling air.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Guardian, May 26. books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,2088344,00.html. Mars-Jones, A. (2007), “As his world came tumbling down.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Observer, May 13. books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/ 0,,2078265,00.html. Miller, J. H. (1992), Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Miller, L. (2007), Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Salon, May 11, 13 pars. www. salon.com/books/review/2007/05/11/delillo/. Moss, M. (2005), ‘ “Writing as a deeper form of concentration’: An interview with Don DeLillo,” in Thomas di Pietro (ed.), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 155–68. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Nel, P. (2002), “Don DeLillo’s return to form: The modernist poetics of The Body Artist.” Contemporary Literature, 43.4: 736–59. Oriard, M. (1978), “Don DeLillo’s search for Walden Pond.” Critique, 20: 5–24. Osteen, M. (2000), American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Passaro, V. (1991), “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 34–6, 38, 76–7. Rich, F. (2007), “The clear blue sky.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 27. www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/ review/Rich-t.html. Updike, John. (2007), Terrorist. New York: Ballantine Books.

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 156

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing

157

Weinstein, A. (1993), Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1998), “Everything under the bomb.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. The Guardian, January 10. books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/ 0,6121,96807,00.html. Yardley, J. (2007), “Survivors of 9/11 struggle to live in a changed world.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, May 13, 13 pars. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051100018.html.

PSchweighauser_09_Final.indd 157

5/13/2010 8:46:43 AM

Chapter 10

The End of Resolution? Reflections on the Ethics of Closure in Don DeLillo’s Detective Plots Philipp Schweighauser and Adrian S. Wisnicki

Although rather different novels, Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Mao II (1991) both explore the intersections between conspiracy, terrorism, and detection.1 Read in succession, these novels also highlight a shift in DeLillo’s creative interests from the domestic to the international spheres and from historical to contemporaneous conspiracy. What are the implications of these narrative developments? On the basis of these two novels, what broader conclusions can we draw about how DeLillo conceptualizes the existential possibilities of the detective within postmodernity and the ethics of detection in- and outside of literature? To introduce a literary-historical dimension, we begin by considering the relation of DeLillo’s Libra and Mao II to classic Victorian detective novels such as Bleak House (1852–1853), The Woman in White (1860–1861), and The Moonstone (1868). Using the template of Victorian detective fiction—which in many respects set the parameters of the modern detective genre as a whole—we discuss the staging of detection in the development of two of DeLillo’s protagonists: Nicholas Branch in Libra and Bill Gray in Mao II. By way of these characters, DeLillo probes the ethical implications of the desire for closure that energizes both his own protagonists’ quests and those of Victorian detectives. In the process, DeLillo explores both the epistemological and the moral aporias inherent in restaging the classic detective’s epistemological pursuits in the postmodern era. Our essay ends with a brief discussion of how our readings of Libra and Mao II relate to DeLillo’s recent novel Falling Man (2007). The desire for narrative closure constitutes one of the major driving forces of Victorian detective fiction. Although Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 in many ways created the prototype of the Victorian detective—quirky, observant, razor-sharp, almost always successful—Holmes represents only one iteration of a literary figure whose history reaches back to Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin and to British detectives like Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1851–1852), Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–1860), and Inspector Cuff and the explorer Mr. Murthwaite in Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the latter of which is often cited as the first full-length detective novel. Each of these detectives, like Holmes after them, confronts a puzzling crime and, by sorting through a mass of seemingly irrelevant details, ultimately produces a solution to the mystery. Sometimes, investigative success depends on energy and social networking, as with Inspector Bucket, who draws on knowledge gained from individuals at all levels of society; sometimes, it lies in observing

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 158

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

159

and understanding minor clues, as when Inspector Cuff notices a paint smear overlooked by the other characters in The Moonstone; occasionally successful detection depends on connecting domestic British incidents with broader international developments, such as the 1848 European revolutions or British colonialism in India, as do, respectively, Walter Hartright in The Woman in White and Mr. Murthwaite in The Moonstone. Whatever the circumstances, in Victorian detective fiction the mysteries introduced at the outset of the narrative usually find resolution and closure at the end, thanks in large part to the efforts of the detectives involved.2 In some of DeLillo’s novels, we encounter similar narratives of detection. In Libra, for instance, DeLillo recreates the circumstances leading up to the Kennedy assassination. Thus, this postmodern historical novel automatically engages a complex debate concerning the question of whether there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. In the process, both DeLillo himself and his character Nicholas Branch, a retired senior analyst of the CIA “hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy” (1988, 15), are faced with the formidable task of making sense of the mass of data accumulated in previous investigations, most notably the Warren Report. In Libra, the narrative of Branch’s investigation into the JFK assassination some 25 years after the event runs parallel to the central narrative of the novel, which tracks Oswald and his fellow conspirators. Much of the aesthetic power of Libra derives from the fact that the novel allows us to see conspiracy theory in the making while also letting us observe not only the assassination and the possible conspiracy that led up to it, but also the quasi-mystical coincidences that make that conspiracy so baffling to subsequent investigators and detectives. For the reader and for the author, Branch represents a modern-day detective who both faces and ultimately fails to disentangle the multiple plot threads that intersect in the killing of Kennedy.3 In stark contrast to the characters directly involved in the rapidly developing conspiratorial plots, all Branch ever does is read and write. In fact, he is immobilized by the sheer amount of documents he has accumulated: The stacks are everywhere. The legal pads and cassette tapes are everywhere. The books fill tall shelves along three walls and cover the desk, a table and much of the floor. There is a massive file cabinet stuffed with documents so old and densely packed they may be ready to ignite spontaneously. (14)

As time passes, Branch develops a symbiotic relationship with the documents he studies—a relationship, it emerges, which has devastating psychological effects on him. Alternating between near-manic clarity and severe disorientation, Branch’s sense of self becomes inextricably tied up with the irresolvable problem he faces: “There are times when he can’t concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back again and again to the page, the line, the finegrained detail of a particular afternoon” (14). As the documents proliferate, Branch loses the ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant evidence.

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 159

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

160

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

His investigation comes to a standstill: “The truth is he hasn’t written all that much. He has extensive and overlapping notes—notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is precious little. It is impossible to stop assembling data” (59). Branch’s descent into paranoia is the ultimate psychological cost of his immersion in a sea of information: “[Branch] knows he can’t get out. The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they’ve known it all along. That’s why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams” (445). For Branch, in contrast to the prototypical Victorian detective, the investigative quest ends not in closure— the resolution of the case and the disclosure of truth—but in psychological deterioration. Branch suffers from the same predicament as Thomas Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, the most famous postmodern detective of them all. Like Branch, the more Oedipa acquires new information, the more difficult it becomes to piece together this information. Revelations “come crowding in exponentially” (56), leaving Oedipa utterly confused and unable to bring her ex-lover Pierce Inverarity’s “estate into pulsing, stelliferous Meaning” (Pynchon 1979, 56). As the novel ends, Oedipa is still without answers to most of her questions and is as far from achieving epistemological closure as she was at the beginning of her quest—perhaps even farther away. Moreover, like Branch, Oedipa is constantly on the brink of paranoia, as Pynchon (in tracking Oedipa’s thoughts) suggests: “what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all” (21). Brian McHale has argued that the shift from modernism to postmodernism involves a “shift of dominance from epistemology to ontology” (1992, 8), that is, a shift from questions of knowledge (“How do I live in this world?”; “How can I interpret this world?”) to questions of being (“Who am I?”; “What world is this?”). For McHale, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is still a modernist text because it reworks the detective genre—the epistemological genre par excellence—to probe questions concerning the accessibility, reliability, and circulation of knowledge that are at the heart of the modernist project.4 By extension, the same could be said about DeLillo’s Libra, whose narrative crucially revolves around the accessibility and reliability of information on the Kennedy assassination. However, contrary to McHale, we would like to suggest here that, in both Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s novels, we are dealing with cases of anachronism. Oedipa and Branch are modern detectives whose quests for knowledge are bound to fail in a fundamentally indeterminate postmodern world—a world that bombards its inhabitants with amounts of information that are impossible to process in meaningful ways.5 Both characters embark on the quintessentially modern quest for knowledge, but are caught up in what McHale himself identifies as the postmodern aporia of “ontological flickering” (2001, 202). Indeed, in both novels, the boundary between fact and fiction is thoroughly blurred in the minds of the characters. Branch is no longer able to disentangle the threads spun by numerous agents involved in the Kennedy assassination (Lee Harvey Oswald, a group of retired CIA operatives, an FBI

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 160

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

161

agent, exiled Cubans, and the Mafia). As a result, he is left with a multiplicity of conflicting versions of the events on November 22, 1963. Likewise, Oedipa is no longer capable of deciding whether the mysterious Tristero system is (a) a truly existing underground communications system, (b) a figment of her imagination, (c) a simulacrum set up by her former lover Pierce Inverarity, or (d) a simulacrum hallucinated by Oedipa herself (Pynchon 1979, 117–18). Both characters, then, hover between a multiplicity of possible worlds that provide radically different accounts of, in Oedipa’s case, the Tristero, and, in Branch’s case, the Kennedy assassination. These characters can no longer fill the gaps that exist between different accounts of the world; they fall into them—as do we, the readers of these two postmodern texts, if only vicariously. In a Rolling Stone essay, DeLillo described the effect thus: There are jump cuts, blank spaces, an instant in which information leaps from one energy level to another. Dallas is a panorama of such things, a natural disaster in the heartland of the real, the comprehensible, the plausible. The lines that extend from the compressed event have shown such elaborate twists and convolutions that we are almost forced to question the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and to wonder further about our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, explain to waiting faces what happened. (1983, 23)

DeLillo here writes about the effects of the Kennedy assassination on the American psyche, but his description applies even better to what happens with Branch, and it also applies, though to a lesser extent, to the effect Libra has on its readers. Yet why should DeLillo stage a modern detective’s epistemological quest only to let it founder on the shores of postmodern ontological indeterminacy? Does he suggest that there is something wrong with the modern quest for truth and knowledge? Are we, in other words, to welcome Branch’s failure? A close look at the epistemological pursuits of some of the main characters in Mao II suggests that there may indeed be something profoundly wrong with such pursuits. Bill Gray, the protagonist of Mao II, who began his writing career by publishing two critically acclaimed novels, and has lived as a recluse ever since, functions as a detective in two different but related senses. First and foremost, he seeks to track down a terrorist group in Beirut that holds the Swiss poet Jean-Claude Julien hostage. Gray plans to “walk into the headquarters of Abu Rashid,” the head of the terrorist organization (215) and trade himself in for his fellow writer. The group, in its configuration, in many ways echoes the configuration of similar revolutionary or terrorist groups found in nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century conspiracy narratives like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–1860), Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1890), and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1890). Like DeLillo’s work, each of these narratives tracks the plotting of a clandestine organization that, except for its central mastermind and one or two other figures, remains faceless

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 161

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

162

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

and ill-defined or, as the group’s spokesman in Mao II, George Haddad, puts it, represents “[b]arely a movement actually [. . .] just an underground current at this stage” (1991, 129). Gray’s desire is to get to the core of this mysterious group, to locate it, engage with it, understand it, and even substitute himself for the hostage to achieve that understanding. Thus, Gray’s quest is, like all detective work, an epistemological project. Gray, however, is also a detective in a different sense. In the final analysis, his epistemological quest revolves less around others (the terrorist group) than around himself. Gray investigates himself, and his accumulative tendencies— which are discussed in greater detail below—are rooted in an intense narcissism. Thus, Gray’s inquiry into the dynamics of secrecy and cult leadership in Beirut becomes very much also an inquiry into the dynamics of his own life and the cult around him and his writings. As Gray’s old editor Charlie Everson puts it, “Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark” (103). Such a convergence of two types of investigations—that of a mysterious other and that of the self—are by no means atypical in the history of the detective genre. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, which is widely regarded as the world’s first detective story, revolves precisely around the convergence of two such quests. Oedipus’ search for his father’s murderer results in both the resolution of the “case” and in a self-discovery with disastrous consequences—the realization that he himself is the murderer. Pynchon has given us a postmodern reworking of that pattern by way of Oedipa Maas, the aptly named protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49. In Mao II, DeLillo restages the same scenario by way of Bill Gray, whose detective work ultimately revolves around his own self. In the process of that double work of discovery, Gray’s actions also come to resemble those of Nicolas Branch. Just as Branch locks himself up in “the room of theories and dreams” (DeLillo 1988, 14), Gray retreats to a house deep in the countryside, where he develops an accumulative obsession similar to that of Branch. Witness DeLillo’s description of Gray’s workspace: There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and lower half of one of the windows. There were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed out names, a cluster of stick-figure drawing, a dozen other cryptic markings. (35–6)

But it is not only the similarity of their workspaces that connects Gray to Branch. For Gray, too, the will to accumulate results in paranoia: “Everything we do that isn’t directly centered on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion. [. . .] It’s an irrational way of life that has a powerful inner logic” (45). DeLillo here, as in Libra, stages paranoia as a symptom of both the desire for closure and coherence and the inability to realize that desire through the increasing accumulation of seemingly relevant data.

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 162

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

163

Apart from Bill Gray, DeLillo develops several additional detective figures in Mao II, all of whose activities revolve around Gray. Keenly interested in the author’s work and, even more so, his life, Gray’s readers develop detective instincts that border on obsession. In the fictional universe of DeLillo’s novel, it is Scott Martineau who epitomizes and gives a face to these readers. After a long search, Martineau tracks down Gray, insinuates himself into the author’s life, and takes control of it as Gray’s live-in housekeeper. The moral quandaries of the detective’s desire for closure emerge nowhere more clearly than in the figure of Martineau. Martineau initiates his relationship with Gray by writing a series of impassioned letters, which he then follows up with a successful effort to discover Gray’s whereabouts and to establish a bond that turns out to be too close for comfort. Martineau’s project pairs the will to worship and investigate with the will to power. In fact, it is not Gray, but Martineau who refuses to publish the author’s latest novel, keeping him in seclusion with the argument that its publication “would be the end of Bill as a myth, as a force” (52). Thus, Martineau holds Gray hostage in a situation whose “inner logic” follows “[t]he way disease takes over a life” (45). As Gray himself puts it, “I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He’s at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife” (38). That there is a menacing and terrorizing quality to Martineau’s dedication to Gray’s life and work is confirmed once Gray has disappeared in the Middle East. Although Martineau makes some effort to find him, he abandons his search in favor of inhabiting Gray’s former life: “The house is paid for,” Martineau tells his lover Karen Janney, “[a]nd he’d want us to live here. And I have money saved from the salary he paid me and this money goes automatically from his account to mine every month and if he didn’t want me to keep getting it he would have advised the bank when he went away” (222–3). Martineau’s desire to inhabit Gray’s life has as much to do with his wanting to develop and sustain the cult around Gray’s personality as with his wanting to be Gray. Martineau has already been grooming himself for the role of the executor of Gray’s legacy by serving as his archivist: “the manuscript would sit and the world would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly” (224). Mao II’s narrative thus allows us to observe how withdrawal, reproduction, and circulation function in uniting and driving the admiring crowd. Martineau’s maintenance of Gray’s files and coordination of the author’s evasive behavior further fuel the investigative drive in Gray’s fans. Whereas Branch toils away in utter neglect, Gray’s seclusion draws the public’s interest—in part, DeLillo suggests, because such seclusion allows Gray to fulfill a key ideological function in American culture: “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear” (36). In a sense, Martineau’s fueling of the reader’s investigative desires is a success: Gray becomes a religiously venerated cult figure not so different, after all, from the dictatorial figures DeLillo parades before our eyes in Mao II—Mao himself,

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 163

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

164

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Khomeini, and Reverend Moon, who conducts the mass wedding at the beginning of the novel. But quite apart from the similarities between the mass dynamics that sustain totalitarian rule and those that sustain cult authorship— which DeLillo points to by way of these figures—Martineau’s success comes at a heavy price. Already before Gray’s disappearance, Martineau’s devotion to Gray creates a not-so-golden cage around the author. Once Gray has disappeared, Martineau’s usurpation of the author’s place is an act of symbolic violence that makes his epistemological project of archiving Gray’s materials appear less than benign. Martineau is Gray’s captor, and he does not renounce that role once Gray has vanished. As such, his actions testify to the intricate connections Michel Foucault postulates between knowledge and power. Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison goes much beyond a critical assessment of Sir Francis Bacon’s well-known assertion that “knowledge itself is power.”6 For Foucault, knowledge is not just an instrument of power; the two are much more intimately related: by knowing we control, and by controlling we know. Gray’s own detective quest reaches a very different but no less dark end. He dies on the ferry that was meant to bring him to Beirut without ever getting near the terrorist leader. Thus, Gray’s abandonment of a life of potentially ineffective seclusion and individuality for one of action results in neither knowledge nor closure, but in a disappearance of the self that benefits not him, the detective, but the objects of his investigation: [The man] said a prayer and went through [Gray]’s belongings, leaving the insignificant case, the good shoes, the things in the bag, the bag itself, but feeling it was not a crime against the dead to take the man’s passport and other forms of identification, anything with a name and a number, which he could sell to some militia in Beirut. (216–17)

DeLillo’s narratives in Libra and Mao II, then, suggest that in the postmodern world, the act of detection does not result in desirable forms of closure, but rather in either the unraveling of desire and the disappearance of the self (as is the case with both Branch and Gray) or an oppressive form of epistemological control of others that is decidedly, if largely symbolically, violent (as is the case with Martineau). Why is DeLillo interested in such narrative configurations in the first place? Why does he stage the desire for narrative and epistemological closure only to let it either fail or go awry? A post-structuralist reading of Libra and Mao II would suggest that DeLillo’s refusal of closure is, in fact, the ethically viable choice. Many post-structuralists sharply critique the modern desire for narrative and epistemological closure, and much of that critique centers on the novel. For instance, in Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes writes that “[t]he Novel is a Death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act; duration into an oriented and meaningful time” (1968, 3). Barthes’s conviction that teleological closure in narrative is ideologically suspect also informs his disdain for what he calls “readerly” literature—less open and more determinate

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 164

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

165

texts that allow for easy comprehensibility and ready assimilation to the reader’s preexisting knowledge. As he puts it in S/Z: To depart/to travel/to arrive/to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify—one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection. [. . .] What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having departed—in which it was never said that, having departed, one arrives or fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be a scandal, the extenuation, by hemorrhage, of readerliness. (1974, 105)

Other post-structuralists have outlined similar critiques of narrative and epistemological closure. Writing from a psychoanalytic angle and aiming at the realist literary tradition, Leo Bersani comments on the importance of temporal coherence in realist novels: Time in realistic fiction is not merely chronological; it is shaped by a prior imagination of beginnings and ends. Dates are enormously important in realistic fiction, and the first paragraphs of countless nineteenth-century novels give us the exact year when their stories begin. The specified year not only serves the illusion of historical authenticity; it also allows us the luxury of assigning precise beginnings to experience, and of thereby making experience more accessible to our appetite for sense-making distinctions and categories. Conclusions are of course just as important in this enterprise of adding sharper sense to life. (54)

To Bersani, realism serves ideological ends in its imposition of such strict temporal frames: [I]n realistic fiction, the unexpected revelation or the surprising coincidence, far from being merely formal conveniences, seem almost to signify an awesome complicity of the most distant or unrelated corners of reality with the requirements of the novel’s main psychological and moral structures. Reality is coerced into providing the suitable conclusion to a continuously meaningful chain of events. (55)

One could cite more examples of the post-structuralist aversion to closure— for instance, Jacques Derrida’s privileging of the text and écriture over what he calls “the book” (1978, 18); J. Hillis Miller’s call to replace, in discussions of narrative endings, the metaphor of the line with that of either the maze (1992, 23) or the simultaneous tying and untying of threads (1978); and D. A. Miller’s preference for what he calls “the narratable” (all those states and events that could be narrated in a story) over the actual realization of narrative closure (1981, 265–7). The post-structuralists’ critique of closure is grounded in their philosophy of language, which affirms and celebrates the interminable play of language and its endless deferral of meaning and presence. Yet it is the literary critic and theorist William V. Spanos who most explicitly brings the post-structuralist critique of closure to bear on our essay’s concern

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 165

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

166

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

with postmodern reworkings of the detective genre. Spanos draws on the existentialist philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre to read early postmodernism as a critique of the dangerous “positivistic structure of consciousness” (1995, 27) that pervades modern life and art, and which fosters our evasion of existential dread. For Spanos, the detective novel paradigmatically participates in that structure of consciousness: According to the implications of existential philosophy, then, the problem-solution perspective of the “straightforward” Western man of action [. . .] has its ground in more than merely a belief in the susceptibility of nature to rational explanation. It is based, rather on a monolithic certainty that immediate psychic or historical experience is part of a comforting, even exciting and suspenseful well-made cosmic drama or novel—more particularly, a detective story (the French term is policière) in the manner of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue or Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. (20–1)

For Spanos, the isomorphism between positivistic consciousness and the detective novel is grounded in shared notions of causality and finality: For just as the form of the detective story has its source in the comforting certainty that an acute “eye,” private or otherwise, can solve the crime with resounding finality by inferring causal relationships between clues which point to it (they are “leads,” suggesting the primacy of rigid linear narrative sequence), so the “form” of the well-made positivistic universe is grounded in the equally comforting certainty that the scientist and/or psychoanalyst can solve the immediate problem by the inductive method, a process involving the inference of relationships between discontinuous “facts” that point to or lead straight to an explanation of the “mystery,” the “crime” of contingent existence. (21)

Ultimately, Spanos contends, the Western trust in rational solutions—which both informs and is fostered by detective stories—“demand[s] the kind of social and political organization that finds its fulfillment in the imposed certainties of the well-made world of the totalitarian state, where investigation or inquisition in behalf of the achievement of a total, that is, pre-ordained or teleologically determined structure—a final solution—is the defining activity” (25). Spanos goes on to argue that early postmodernism forcefully challenges that modern frame of mind by evoking, in an anti-Aristotelian existentialist gesture, pity and fear rather than purging it. Along the way, early postmodernists reject the superficially comforting rationality and positivism that allow us to repress dread. For Spanos, this postmodern move, which manifests itself paradigmatically in anti-detective stories, has profoundly political implications: “[T]he postmodern absurdists interpret this obsession [. . .] for the rigidly causal plot of the well-made work of the humanistic tradition, as catering to and thus further hardening the expectation of—and aggravating the need for—the rational solution generated by the scientific analysis of man-in-the-world” (24). Consequently, the “most immediate task” of early postmodernists is to “undermin[e] the detective-like expectations of the positivistic mind,” to “unhom[e] Western

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 166

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

167

man, by evoking rather than purging pity and terror—anxiety” because “only in the precincts of our last evasions, where ‘dread strikes us dumb’ [Heidegger], only in this silent realm of dreadful uncertainty, are we likely to discover the ontological and aesthetic possibilities of generosity” (38–9). Spanos’s fierce attack on the detective novel and its empirical cognitive analogs raises a number of important questions concerning both Spanos’s own condemnation of the genre and DeLillo’s recourse to it. First and foremost, the persuasiveness of Spanos’s attack on closural ways of thinking and writing very much depends on the level of human existence on which it is brought to bear. If we remain at the psychological level and consider individual yearnings for closure—be it Bill Gray’s desire to understand the dynamics of the terrorists’ as well as his own cult status or Nicholas Branch’s desire to pierce the fog of facts and rumors that surround the Kennedy assassination—we may be forgiven for deriving little comfort from the failure of either the literary characters’ or our own epistemological projects. DeLillo’s two novels poignantly draw our attention to the disastrous psychological consequences of such failures. What Gray and Branch experience is not liberation from constraining rationality but paranoia, loss of self, and, in Gray’s case, death. From this perspective, we may also ask what kinds of violence the postmodernist refusal of closure and evocation of dread celebrated by Spanos actually does to us, as readers. Thus, even if we remain at the psychological or, in Martineau’s case, intersubjective level, we must carefully consider to what extent the kind of critique Spanos levels at closural ways of thinking and acting is itself applicable and, indeed, ethically viable. Admittedly, Spanos’s argument functions less on either the psychological or the intersubjective plane than on the level of the politics of representation. Spanos’s take on the detective novel makes most sense as an investigation of how the narrative structures of detective novels reproduce and reinforce already existing social structures and dominant ways of thinking. On that level, the straightforward trajectories of conventional detective plots, their often predictable push toward narrative and epistemological finality and resolution, their chronological coherence, and their strict adherence to the law of causality may indeed evoke and bolster a desire for closure that fuels and is fueled by the “positivistic structure of consciousness” that infuses “the problem-solution perspective of the ‘straightforward’ Western man of action.” Furthermore, Spanos is right in arguing that that consciousness is not without its moral quandaries. Spanos does not quote Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment—but their brilliant analysis of the catastrophic effects of perverted forms of Enlightenment rationality hovers in the background of both Spanos’s essay and many a post-structuralists’ critique of modern Western thought. Still, even at this level—the level at which the social functions of literary forms come to the center of attention—Spanos’s slippage from the detective stories’ “resounding finality” to “final solution” overshoots its mark. Yes, the detective novel’s closural narrative strategies may indeed be in league with modern forms of rationality and positivism whose psychological and societal effects

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 167

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

168

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

may be less than desirable, but from here, it is a very long way to Auschwitz. Thus, if we want to probe the ethical viability of DeLillo’s decision to withhold closure from his detective plots, we need to tread carefully so as to avoid hasty moral and political judgments of (the desire for) closure. Such judgments, we argue, may have their own moral and political liabilities. DeLillo’s novels teach us that the closural patterns of detective plots speak to fundamental human needs—needs that are not, as Spanos suggests, necessarily ideologically suspect. Moreover, they make us see that it is not only the achievement of closure that may have disastrous effects, but also the failure of that achievement. The structures of detection we charted in Libra and Mao II are by no means confined to those two texts. They are also evident in other DeLillo novels such as The Names (1982; the search for the perpetrators of the ritual murders), White Noise (1985; Jack Gladney’s quest for the identity of the mysterious Mr. Gray), Underworld (1997; Marvin Lundy’s quest for the baseball hit by Bobby Thompson in “the shot heard around the world”), The Body Artist (2001; Lauren Hartke’s attempts to determine the identity of the strange visitor in her house), and Cosmopolis (2003; Eric Packer’s obsessive tracing of data streams, his killing of his security chief, and his own impending murder). Given the pervasiveness of the detective quest in DeLillo’s work, it may come as a surprise that he does not reproduce it in Falling Man, a novel about a terrorist act that cries out for explanation and closure. DeLillo’s latest novel does trace the quests of a small number of 9/11 survivors for closure, and, as in his other novels, those quests are frustrated. But their quests are no investigative searches for knowledge. Rather, they are painful and often seemingly senseless probings of what is left of the traumatized self. In this novel, DeLillo delves deep into individual subjects’ attempts to come to terms with traumatic experiences and their devastating psychological repercussions. Along the way, he poignantly highlights the pain that the failure to achieve closure—be it in the form of psychological repression, acting out, or working through—may entail. At the same time, however, DeLillo does not embark on a search for largescale explanations that might provide a sense of closure to the nation from and to which he writes. In Falling Man, DeLillo refuses to deliver on the expectations of readers who demand rationalization and closure from a 9/11 novel, and US reviewers have regularly taken him to task for what they considered his moral failure to do so.7 What our reflections on the ethics of closure can teach us is, we believe, that DeLillo’s probing of psychological wounds that do not close and his refusal to meet his readers’ expectations that Falling Man provide a sense of closure on a national scale can both more adequately be judged as the result of a writer’s determination to meet his moral obligations.

Notes 1. We would like to thank Andreas Hägler for his extensive and highly useful feedback on an earlier version of this essay as well as for drawing our attention to Spanos’s critique of the detective novel.

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 168

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

The End of Resolution?

169

2. For a more detailed discussion of this point and its relation to Libra, see Wisnicki (2008, 17–51). 3. In a Paris Review interview, DeLillo compares the Warren Report to “the Joycean novel” (Begley 1993, 291). 4. The principal model for these epistemological concerns is the detective novel, where the main concern is the search for hidden knowledge (“Whodunit?”; “Why was it done?”). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) is not a detective story in any narrow sense, but it is a good example of this modernist search for knowledge. In this novel, the narrator Nick is fascinated by the fabulously rich and mysterious Gatsby and tries to find out everything about him. 5. To read The Crying of Lot 49 as an anti-detective novel (Tani 1982, 24 et passim) or a detective novel in reverse (Tanner 1982, 56) are two possible conclusions that could be drawn from this observation. 6. Bacon’s Latin phrase is “scientia ipsa potentia est,” which translates as “for also knowledge itself is power.” Today, Bacon’s maxim is most often abbreviated as “knowledge is power.” 7. Tom Junod’s review in Esquire is but one case in point: “And so what I asked of DeLillo’s Falling Man was not that it be inventive, but that it be commensurate— commensurate to all the falling men, and the falling women, and their agony; commensurate, at the very least, to the capsule profiles that people forced themselves to read day after day, five years ago. And it’s not. It’s a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn” (2007, 38). For further negative reviews of Falling Man, see Kakutani (2007) and (predictably) Yardley (2007).

Works Cited Barthes, R. (1968), Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. —(1974), S/Z, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Begley, A. (1993), “Don DeLillo: The art of fiction CXXXV.” Paris Review, 12, 8: 275–306. Bersani, L. (1984), A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Chesterton, G. K. (1975), The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. 1908. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Collins, W. W. (1990), The Woman in White. 1861, new impr. ed. Harlow, UK: Longman. —(1994), The Moonstone. 1868. London: Penguin Books. DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. —(1983), “American blood: A journey through the labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 21–2. —(1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. —(1988), Libra. New York: Penguin. —(1991), Mao II. New York: Viking. —(1997), Underworld. New York: Scribner. —(2001), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2003), Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Derrida, J. (1978), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 169

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

170

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Dickens, C. (1971), Bleak House. 1852, repr. ed. London: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1988), The Great Gatsby. 1926. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage. Horkheimer, M., and Adorno T. W. (1972), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. James, H. (1986), The Princess Casamassima. 1890. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Junod, T. (2007), “The man who invented 9/11.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Esquire, May 7, 38. Kakutani, M. (2007), Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. New York Times, May 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/books/09kaku.html McHale, B. (1992), Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. —(2001), Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge. Miller, D. A. (1981), Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, J. H. (1978), “The problematic of ending in narrative.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33.1: 3–7. —(1992), Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pynchon, T. (1979), The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Picador. Sophocles. (1982), Oedipus the King. c. 429 BCE, trans. Robert Fagles. The three Theban plays. New York: Viking. Spanos, W. V. (1995), “The detective and the boundary: Some notes on the postmodern literary imagination,” in Paul A. Bové (ed.), Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, 17–39. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tani, S. (1982), “The dismemberment of the detective.” Diogenes, 120: 22–41. Tanner, T. (1982), “The Crying Of Lot 49,” in Thomas Pynchon, 56–73. London: Methuen. Wisnicki, A. S. (2008), Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel. New York: Routledge. Yardley, J. (2007), “Survivors of 9/11 struggle to live in a changed world.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Washington Post, May 13, 13 pars. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051100018.html

PSchweighauser_10_Final.indd 170

5/13/2010 8:46:35 AM

Chapter 11

SLOW MAN, DANGLING MAN, FALLING MAN: DeLillo and the Ethics of Fiction Peter Boxall This essay sets out to suggest a connection between a set of different textual moments, a connection which might help us to think about ethics and literature in the passage from the postwar period to the present day, from Samuel Beckett and Saul Bellow to J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. This connection, as my title suggests, is made in terms of bodily attitude and movement, in terms of a delicately balanced relation between falling, dangling, and slow motion. I want to begin here by establishing this connection as it stretches from Don DeLillo to Saul Bellow, before opening this matrix to the differently inflected presences of J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett. Making this set of connections, putting them into a kind of critical motion, might be all I can manage here, but I hope that from this connection, some critical possibilities arising from Beckett’s legacy to DeLillo and Coetzee might come to the point of expression, and that these possibilities in turn might suggest some new directions in terms of thinking about the ethics both of Beckett’s writing, and of the contemporary literary scene, which his spirit continues to haunt. So let me begin with DeLillo and Bellow. The falling and dangling men that my title refers to are drawn, of course, from Bellow’s novel Dangling Man (1944) and DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007). Bellow’s dangling man is his protagonist Joseph, an American who waits, for the duration of the novel, to enter World War II. The novel is a series of diary entries written while Joseph waits to fight, suspended in a period of dislocated dangling, in which he is able to pursue the kinds of introspection and philosophical musing that full-blooded involvement in the world normally makes impossible. Joseph is a frustrated thinker, an intellectual without a tenured position. Before enlisting, Joseph writes, “I ambitiously began several essays, mainly biographical, on the philosophers of the Enlightenment. I was in the midst of one on Diderot when I stopped. But it was vaguely understood, when I began to dangle, that I was to continue with them” (Bellow 1972, 9). The period of the novel follows Joseph’s gradual disenchantment with the possibilities of intellectual freedom, until, at the novel’s embittered close, he welcomes the moment when he is to be “cut down”—the moment at which dangling comes to an end and he leaves the isolation of his room to enter the European battlefield. “This is my last civilian day,” Joseph writes in his final diary entry: I am no longer to be held accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom cancelled.

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 173

5/13/2010 8:48:15 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

174

Hurray for regular hours! And for supervision of the spirit! Long live regimentation! (159)

DeLillo’s falling man, like Bellow’s Joseph, is also suspended over a battlefield, of a kind. DeLillo’s eponymous character takes his name partly from the famous photograph of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001—the man who became known, in the weeks after the attacks, as Falling Man. In DeLillo’s novel, the Falling Man becomes a performance artist of the same name, an artist who performs the fall from the towers repeatedly, at various sites across the city, in the months and years after the attacks, adopting the pose in which the original falling man was caught in the photograph taken by Richard Drew at 9:41:15 on September 11. DeLillo’s novel opens with a depiction of falling, and returns throughout to the image and the idea of a body falling through space, the “fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute,” the “ideal falling motion of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field” (DeLillo 2007, 221). The opening paragraphs of the novel bring us into the eerily familiar heart of the falling towers, into the heart of a scene in which everything is falling, a place which was “not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night,” a space in which: [t]he roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past. (3)

When DeLillo names his novel Falling Man, does he suggest some kind of opposition between himself and Bellow, between 1945 and 2001? Does the passage from Bellow to DeLillo suggest a transition from dangling to falling? Has the potential for aesthetic and political withdrawal explored by Bellow expired by 2001? When DeLillo’s narrator writes that the New York street has become “the world,” when he describes the insides of the towers collapsing into the city, when he writes of those first moments after the towers had fallen that “this was the world now,” is the suggestion that, with the globalization both of US capital and of terrorism, there is nowhere to retreat to, no possibility of dangling, no room in which to hide oneself away in intellectual quarantine, like Bellow’s Joseph, as the war rages elsewhere? I think that, to an extent, DeLillo’s title does suggest this cultural movement from dangling to falling, and that it does suggest the attendant failure of the possibility of aesthetic and political withdrawal in the passage from the midtwentieth to the early-twenty-first century. But whilst this opposition is sustained at the level of the title, the distinction between falling and dangling is in fact difficult to maintain in both Bellow and DeLillo. Indeed, understanding how the distinction between falling and dangling might work becomes the ethical and poetic task of both novels. When DeLillo’s falling man first appears in Falling Man, for example, what strikes us is that he is in fact not falling at all, but caught in a particular kind

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 174

5/13/2010 8:48:15 AM

The Ethics of Fiction

175

of suspense. Early in the novel, the falling man is first encountered by one of the protagonists in the midst of his performance: [Lianne] edged along a storefront and looked up toward the green steel structure that passes over Pershing square, the section of elevated roadway that carries traffic around the terminal in both directions. A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail. (33)

Here, and every other time that the falling man appears, the word that describes his condition is not “falling,” but “dangling.” The sickening fall of the man captured by Drew’s camera on 9/11, and recalled by the Falling Man’s posture, has become, through the double magic of photography and of performance art, a kind of suspense, a kind of dangling, cancelling the opposition that DeLillo’s title evokes between falling and dangling. Similarly, in Bellow’s novel, the possibility of dangling is shadowed, at every turn, by falling, by the fall into European violence and death with which Joseph is threatened. At the heart of Bellow’s novel, in fact, is a scene of falling, which looks forward to DeLillo’s Falling Man, just as DeLillo’s dangling looks backward to Bellow. Joseph recounts the incident in his diary entry for January 20, 1943: I walked along East Randolph Street, stopping to look at the rich cakes and the tropical fruits. When I came to the smoky alley alongside the library where the southbound cars emerge, I saw a man sprawl out in front of me, and at once I was in the centre of a large crowd and, from a distance that could not have been as great as it seemed, a mounted policeman standing before a Cottage Grove car was gazing down. The fallen man was well dressed and above middle age. His hat lay crushed under his large bald head, his tongue had come forward between his lips, his lips seemed swollen. I stooped and tore at his collar and sprang away. By this time the policeman had pushed his way forward. I drew back, wiping my hands on a piece of paper. Together, we stared at the fallen man’s face. (Bellow 1972, 94–5)

This image of the fallen man recurs at several points in the narrative, bringing with it associations of the European battlefield from which Joseph’s dangling is giving him temporary immunity. It is as if, at this point in the narrative, what Joseph thinks of as the “path of a grey draught” opens up, to connect dangling with falling, life with death, America with Europe, Bellow with DeLillo. The fallen man later comes back to Joseph in a dream, and this intimate contact makes itself uncannily, erotically palpable. “Our encounter,” he writes, [w]as in a muddy back lane [. . .]. Suddenly I heard another set of footsteps added to mine, heavier and grittier, and my premonitions leaped into one fear even before I felt a touch on my back and turned. Then that swollen face that came rapidly towards mine until I felt its bristles and the cold pressure of its nose; the lips kissed me on the temple with a laugh and a groan. Blindly I ran, hearing

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 175

5/13/2010 8:48:15 AM

176

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

again the gritting boots. The roused dogs behind the snaggled boards of the fences abandoned themselves to the wildest rage of barking. I ran, stumbling through drifts of ashes, into the street. Could the fallen man of last week have seen, had he chanced to open his eyes, his death in the face of that policeman who bent over him? (100–1)

At this point in the narrative, one can glimpse a line, a muddy back lane, which runs from Bellow to DeLillo, from the Second World War to the war on terror, from an American empire arising from the ashes of European colonial power to a global United States on the point, perhaps, of economic and military decline. The tension that is set up here between dangling and falling, between immersion in the world and withdrawal from it, is balanced around this encounter, as around a fulcrum. As DeLillo’s falling becomes a kind of dangling, so Joseph’s dangling is inhabited by a fallen man who lies just beneath the surface of the narrative, emerging in dreams and fancies. When Joseph imagines the fallen man seeing his death reflected in the face of the policeman who bends over him, he suggests a mirror in which he might glimpse his own fallen self, a mirror which marks the uncertain boundary that separates these two novels from each other, as it separates falling from dangling, the civilian from the military, intellectual freedom from civic servitude. It is at this point that I want to consider a second set of connections, first with Samuel Beckett and then with J. M. Coetzee, that inflects the balance that is struck here between dangling and falling, and that helps to make sense of the dialogue that I have been staging between DeLillo and Bellow. Bellow’s depiction of Joseph’s incarceration in his room, as he awaits his draughting, is staged, to a degree, as a response to Beckett’s earlier exploration of withdrawal and isolation in a room. Based partly on Bellow’s own occasional and mildly disparaging comments about Beckett in texts such as his 1963 essay “Recent American Fiction,” critics have read Bellow’s work as a riposte to Beckett and other writers who are, in Bellow’s words, “active campaigners on this shrinking front against the self” (1990, 61). Sarah Cohen, for example, reads what she calls “Bellow’s kinetic heroes” as an antidote to “Beckett’s progressively immobile figures” (1974, 12). In the light of this distinction, it is tempting to read Dangling Man as a kind of companion piece to Beckett’s novel Murphy, which was first published in 1938. “Murphy,” the opening of Beckett’s novel reads, “sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton” (1973, 5), just as Joseph sits out of the war, and of the world, in his room in Chicago. Both Joseph and Murphy attempt the same kind of retreat from the big world to the little world of the room and of the mind, as indeed Viktor Krapp seeks isolation in his bedsitting room in Beckett’s first full-length, posthumously published play Eleutheria (1996). But as critical orthodoxy would have it, while Beckett’s work conducts a kind of spiraling into the void, which becomes ever more worldless and wordless from Murphy onwards, Bellow uses Joseph’s experimental incarceration in the womb tomb of Bedsitland as a springboard and eventually takes him out of the room and into the world.

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 176

5/13/2010 8:48:15 AM

The Ethics of Fiction

177

At the close of Dangling Man, though, Bellow flirts with the direction that Murphy takes at the end of Murphy, considering taking the fork in the road that would take him in what John Banville has called a “Beckettian direction” (Schall 1997, 17). As Murphy finally takes his leave from the big world rocking in his rocking chair in an attic room of an insane asylum, so Joseph finally finds himself balanced on the brink of disappearance and insanity, in the arms of a rocking chair. As Murphy finds that the rocking chair transports him toward a deathly peace in which the room and the world dwindle away, so Joseph is offered the same ambiguous exile. “At one of the rock’s dead points,” Beckett’s narrator tells us, Murphy “saw, for a second, far beneath, the dip and radiator, gleam and grin; at the other the sky light, open to no stars” (Beckett 1973, 141); similarly, as Joseph rocks, he is afforded a vision of Beckettian diminishment, in which “the room, delusively, dwindled and became a tiny square, swiftly drawn back, myself and all the objects in it growing smaller” (Bellow 1972, 158). But Joseph does not allow himself to disappear, like Mr Kelly’s kite, across the boundary between the seen and the unseen, choosing rather to reenter the big world, for all its pricks and kicks: I rose rather unsteadily from the rocker, feeling that there was an element of treason to common sense in the very objects of common sense [. . .]. I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone could. To be pushed upon oneself entirely put the very facts of simple existence in doubt. Perhaps the war could teach me, by violence, what I have been unable to learn during these months in the room. Perhaps I could sound creation through other means. Perhaps. But things were now out of my hands. The next move was the world’s. I could not bring myself to regret it. (158)

This dialogue between Bellow and Beckett might help us to understand the relation that I have described between Bellow and DeLillo. It might suggest that both Dangling Man and Falling Man meet in the recognition that there is no avoiding the world, that even dangling, even the limited forms of suspension and withdrawal that are offered by literature, by art, and by criticism, are in fact subject to gravitational force, the gravitational force that damages the Falling Man’s back as he makes leap after leap to the brutally inelastic end of his bungee rope. If Beckett’s work is about making a distinction between the big world and the little world, turning, as Beckett’s Unnameable narrator has it, around the “partition” that art can erect between the mind and the world, then perhaps Bellow and DeLillo are both responding to their perception that war reveals just how impossible such a distinction, such a partition is to maintain.1 As DeLillo depicts the collapse of the building into the street to suggest that there is no longer any built refuge from “the world,” so Bellow closes with the same thought. Murphy is able to “sit out of it,” but Joseph comes to the conclusion that “[y]ou can’t banish the world by decree if it’s in you” (Bellow 1972, 113). To insist on such a clean distinction between Beckett on one hand and DeLillo and Bellow on the other, however, would be to overlook the third term

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 177

5/13/2010 8:48:15 AM

178

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

in my title, the third “man,” and the last connection that I seek to make in this essay. One of the things that connect Beckett with Bellow and DeLillo, and with Coetzee, is an interest in slow motion, a fascination with the ways in which slowness can intervene in the relationship between dangling and falling, allowing us to inhabit that lifting, weightless space that Bellow and DeLillo glimpse between removing oneself from the world and entering into it. J. M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man (2005) is perhaps one of the more striking examples of this development of a slow current in contemporary culture, a current, which is bound up with and emerges from Beckett’s static motion, his still stirring. Like Falling Man, Coetzee’s Slow Man turns around a temporal split, a brutal disjunction between past and future, between before and after. The novel tells the story of an accident, which leaves the protagonist, Paul Rayment, with one leg amputated above the knee, and of Rayment’s difficult adjustment to a circumscribed life in the accident’s wake, a life in which, like so many of Beckett’s characters, Rayment will have to get about, if at all, on crutches, or by other artificially assisted means. It is this accident, and even more this amputation, that makes a temporal disjunction in the novel, a cut in time as much as a cut in flesh. “In his case,” Rayment reflects in the novel, “the cut seems to have marked off past from future with such uncommon cleanness that it gives new meaning to the word new” (Coetzee 2005, 26). This schism between before and after, between past and future, produces in Rayment a sensation of falling that again resonates in DeLillo’s Falling Man. The accident, Rayment thinks, has caused him to become “unstrung”: That is the word that comes back to him from Homer. The spear shatters the breastbone, blood spurts, the limbs are unstrung, the body topples like a wooden puppet. Well, his limbs have been unstrung and now his body is unstrung too. His spirit is ready to topple. (27)

As Bellow’s Joseph experiences his entry into the war as an unstringing, Rayment feels that the event of the accident and the surgery causes him to be cut down, causes a severing of the muscly strings that hold his body upright. But while the novel performs this entry into the newness of disability as a form of falling, it also investigates the possibilities of a kind of Kleistian suspension, a suspension that, as in DeLillo, is both opposed to and won from the act of falling. As in Coetzee’s earlier work The Master of Petersburg (1994) in which Coetzee’s Dostoevsky figure seeks to reclaim his son from the fall that led him to his death by counteracting falling with a kind of suspended poetic temporality (21), so in Slow Man the fall to illness, death, and inertness, is held against a slow suspension that is produced by the artwork itself. The novel produces such slowness as a response to the time of mourning, that disjunct time that finds an earlier manifestation in Hamlet. Rayment’s response to his injury becomes a mourning for his lost body part, a body part that continues to haunt him as if it were a phantom limb. As Coetzee’s Dostoevsky seeks to slow time

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 178

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

The Ethics of Fiction

179

down in order to hold his son suspended on the brink of annihilation (to “keep Pavel alive, suspended in his fall” [1994, 21]), so Rayment seeks to hold on to his lost body by refusing the narrative of recovery, refusing to be fitted with a prosthesis, refusing to reenter the temporal stream, to belong to the time when “everything is measured by after.” Instead, he adopts the position of one of Beckett’s indolent characters, resisting the pull of plot, resisting all attempts by Elizabeth Costello (the novel’s writer figure and Coetzee’s “alter ego”) to make him behave like a good dramatic character. As Belacqua refuses to conform to the demands of the plot in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett 1992), as Viktor Krapp refuses to obey the demands of the script and of the audience in Eleutheria, so Rayment frustrates all of the various figures and forces in the novel that seek to move him along, to return him to health and motion in the here and now. Costello complains that Rayment becomes less and less functional as a protagonist as the novel continues; that he goes “slower and slower, till by now you are almost at a halt” (Coetzee 2005, 100), and that the people who are drawn into his gravitational field are struck by a similar inertia. The characters in the story, she complains, become “four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time” (141). Costello suggests to Rayment that she should tell his stories for him; she should take his slowed life and speed it up. “You can tell me more stories from your treasure hoard,” she says to Paul, “which I will afterwards tell back to you in a form so accelerated and improved that you will hardly recognise them” (232). Costello’s capacity to inject such pace is, however, undermined by another kind of haunting, another phantom limb that makes itself felt here. The words that Costello uses here, in her anxiety to move things along, echo that refrain in Beckett’s Murphy, which the narrator repeatedly inserts into his own story, interjecting to insist that he is speeding things up while, as Steven Connor (2000) has pointed out, actually slowing things down. Like Costello, the narrator of Murphy insists that all of his stories are “expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced” (Beckett 1973, 70), but, in Murphy and in Slow Man, such narrative improvement, such acceleration, leads only to a stalled circling around the empty time marked by Murphy and by Rayment. Such slowness, such resistance to the onward thrust of time, frustrates Costello. Like her character, she too feels like the tensile strength has drained from her body as a result of such stasis; she too feels that she has been “unstrung” (Coetzee 2005, 160), that “the bowstring that used to be taut has gone as slack and dry as a strand of cotton” (160). But if this slowness, if this refusal of the conventions and the temporality of narrative leads to a certain disarticulation between before and after, between narrator and narrative, then it is also from this suspension that the novel points to a new form of accommodation between them. When Rayment is in his immediate recovery phase, and is making the decision to refuse his prosthesis, a nurse named Madeline urges him to give up on his old body, to embrace what she call his “new body,”

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 179

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

180

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

and what Rayment refers to as his “truncated old body.” Madeline admits that “limbs have memories,” but says that her job is [t]o reprogram old and now obsolete memory systems that dictate to us how we balance, how we walk, how we run. “Of course we want to hold on to our old memory systems,” she says. “Otherwise we would not be human. But we must not hold on to them when they hinder our progress. Not when they get in our way.” (60)

The slow going in Slow Man is built around an ardent refusal of this conception of the relationship between memory and progress. The stasis around which the novel revolves is one that seeks to imagine a form in which “obsolete memory systems” remain in contact with the current, with the contemporary. The slow suspension that Coetzee develops in Slow Man, and in his later fiction more generally, becomes a medium in which past and future, in which narrator and narrated, in which self and other, human and animal, enter into a new kind of relationship, a relationship, which points towards a radical new conception of the ethical and political possibilities of fiction. It is this slow current, this slow, lifting resistance to the demands of a body falling through space, that runs from Beckett to Coetzee and DeLillo, and whose recognition helps to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relation between Beckett and Bellow. Joseph and Murphy are not divided by a simple opposition between being in the world and withdrawing from it. Joseph does not choose falling over dangling with any more certainty than Murphy chooses poetic death over the allure of Celia and ginger biscuits. Rather, both Bellow and Beckett produce a philosophical and aesthetic response to war that recognizes the close connection between dangling and falling, connections that resurface in DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, where Bellow’s aesthetics of dangling and falling merge with Beckettian, Coetzeeian slow motion, to produce that strange combination of fall and lift that is DeLillo’s contribution to ethical thinking in the wake of the attacks. In Falling Man, DeLillo crafts a poetics of gesture—of the body in space and time—that resonates richly with Coetzee’s, and that is shaped, throughout, by Beckett’s slowness, as if a current of slow motion runs through the text, catching at every pose, at every sentence, lending to every falling, moving thing a fleeting immunity from the twin demands of gravity and of passing time. This is the immunity that Dorothy Richardson finds in early cinematic slow motion, the “most priceless offering to date of the film considered as a vehicle for revealing to mankind that in man which is unbounded” (1998, 182–3). Keith Neudecker, injured in the maelstrom in the tower, is given a course of physiotherapy to help heal a postsurgical wrist, and these exercises become a form of physical mantra, a set of slow movements that turn around a still centre; programmed, repeated movements that recall the poetics of gesture in DeLillo’s earlier novel End Zone, which is in turn organized around the slowness of movement in Beckett’s late work—in his Rotunda texts, and his late pieces for stage and television. These exercises, termed by the physiotherapists “the gentle

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 180

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

The Ethics of Fiction

181

fist,” are a meditative, gestural response to the brutality of the impact, an attempt to find a gentle “countermeasure,” to find in the fury of 9/11 a kind of slowed calm. “He sat alongside the table,” the narrative reads, “left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds” (DeLillo 2007, 40). The narrative attention to bodily detail, to the angle that bodies make to floor and to ceiling, produces a kind of suspension in the narrative, a restorative lightness made from slowness, from mantric repetition, from counting out seconds, and ritual movements. It recalls that Beckettian, mathematical concentration on bodily placement in DeLillo’s earlier fiction, his sense that “history is the placement of bodies” (DeLillo 1986, 45). “He found these sessions restorative,” the narrative of Falling Man goes on, [f]our times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos [. . .]. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. (2007, 40)

The “levitation” of floors and ceilings in the moments of impact, as a “blast wave passed through the structure,” is recreated here, but in slow motion, in a gestural meditation that works back to the event, that holds the event open, feeling for the possibilities of gentle convergence that are held, in abeyance, in the violent coming together of plane and building. Again and again, the narrative enters into the influence of this lifting slowness, in which one can glimpse the possibility of a utopian convergence, of a world ordered differently. Keith Neudecker’s immersion in the world of poker, Lianne’s immersion in her work with Alzheimer’s patients, Lianne and Keith’s son’s concentration on speaking slowly, in single syllables (speaking in single syllables, Justin says to his father, “helps me go slow when I think” [66])—all these forms of rigor, these forms of contraction, erasure, and concentration, are attempts to tune according to the narrative’s slow current, the current that runs backwards, lifting the novel’s falling particles, working into the endless moments of the tower’s collapse. Lianne thinks of the forgetfulness, the unfolding of self brought about by Alzheimer’s as a kind of falling, a kind of “rough tumble through space” (187) that recalls the fall of the photographed falling man on the morning of September 11—the “ideal falling motion,” Lianne thinks “of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field” (221). But the falling brought about by Alzheimer’s is a kind of slow, antigravitational falling, the kind of falling diminishment that Beckett’s Murphy and Bellow’s Joseph experience in their rocking chairs, that Lianne thinks of elsewhere as a “falling out of the world,” and that Keith thinks of as a “going slow, an easing inward” (66).

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 181

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

182

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

DeLillo’s novel opens and closes with the image of a shirt falling from the towers, a falling, which is caught in this slow Beckettian current, and which is perhaps a companion piece to the performance art that reproduces the photographic combination of weight and weightlessness, falling and dangling. “There was something else,” the narrator says, in the midst of the opening description of the falling towers: Outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. 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)

It is this shirt that appears again in the novel’s short final paragraph, as the narrative takes us full circle back to the attacks: “a shirt c[a]me down out of the sky. He walked and saw it, arms waving like nothing in this life” (246). The twice-seen trajectory of this fall—a falling which is also a lifting, a peculiar, slow disinclination to fall—belongs to an antigravitational space and time that was “outside all this, not belonging to this.” The current on which this shirt is caught, a current that works to lift, to slow down, is at work throughout the novel, and is one of the most striking ways in which Beckett’s slow legacy, what Steven Connor calls Beckett’s “slow going,” is alive in later DeLillo. The ruins of the towers in DeLillo’s novel, what he has called the “ruins of the future,” call to the ruins that run through Beckett’s writing, the devastated landscape of Lessness, in which the walls have “fallen open” and “ruins” are the only “upright”; or the “vestiges” of what Molloy calls his “ruins,” where there is “no upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night” (Beckett 1994b, 40). As in Beckett’s ruins, so in DeLillo’s 9/11 landscape there is no upright thing—the twisted ruins of the WTC, the “strands of bent filigree,” being the “last standing things” beneath DeLillo’s empty sky (2007, 25). But if DeLillo inherits Beckett’s falling ruins, he also inherits the slowness with which Beckett’s world falls, a slowness which produces a kind of suspense, a kind of weightlessness, the kind of disinclination on which that falling shirt is carried aloft. Beckett’s ruins are not just falling, they are also dangling; they do not come down, but endlessly lapse and crumble, finding a continuity, an unendingness in the experience of falling itself. “I Listen” Molloy says, “and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too, and I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come” (1994b, 40). It is this antigravitational current that seeks to open an ungrounded space between dangling and falling, between entering into the world and being flung from it by either murder or suicide, a space which would allow us to think past what DeLillo has referred to, in a quiet reference to George W. Bush’s bellicose jingoism, as the “disarticulation between ‘us’ and ‘them’’’ (2001, 34).

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 182

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

The Ethics of Fiction

183

It is in this slow weightlessness that intervenes between falling and dangling that Beckett, DeLillo, and Coetzee offer a conjoined ethical response to the fall of the towers, and to the darkened world into which their unending falling has delivered us.

Note 1. In Beckett’s The Unnamable (1959), the narrator says, “I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either” (1994a, 386).

Works Cited Beckett, S. (1973), Murphy. 1938. London: Picador. —(1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women. New York: Arcade. —(1994a), The Unnamable, 1959, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. —(1994b), Molloy, 1951, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. —(1995), “Lessness,” in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, 197–201. New York: Grove Press. —(1996), Eleutheria, trans. Barbara Wright. London: Faber. Bellow, S. (1972), Dangling Man. 1944. London: Weidenfeld. —(1990), “Some notes on recent American fiction,” in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, rev. ed., 53–69. London: Fontana. Coetzee, J. M. (1994), The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker and Warburg. —(2005), Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg. Cohen, S. B. (1974), Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laughter. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Connor, S. (2000), “Slow going.” Yearbook of English Studies, 30: 153–65. DeLillo, D. (1986), End Zone. 1972. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —(2001), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December, 33–40. —(2007), Falling Man. Basingstoke, UK: Picador. Richardson, D. (1998), “Slow motion,” in James Donald et al., (eds), Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, 182–3. London: Cassell. Schall, H. (1997), “An interview with John Banville.” European English Messenger, 6, 1: 13–19.

PSchweighauser_11_Final.indd 183

5/13/2010 8:48:16 AM

Chapter 12

FALLING MAN: Performing Fiction Marie-Christine Leps

This is what he’d always lacked, that edge of unexpected learning. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

Reading Falling Man (2007) is a halting process: it begins and ends in the midst of destruction and chaos, with someone walking “away from it and into it at the same time” (4). Don DeLillo insisted on the necessity to start from the burning towers in “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” an essay published a scant three months after September 11: “The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately. [. . .] The writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space” (39). To “give memory” is a provocative collocation, as memory is something one can have or share, but not give. Historical texts give meaning to past events and can thus produce collective memories, but DeLillo’s writing is not historical in the usual sense. Ambiguity increases with the phrase “howling space,” which can refer both to ground zero and to the traumatic aftershock and emptiness suffered by countless witnesses. Years later, the novelist further elaborated on the role of memory in a radio interview: “They say that journalism is the first draft of history. And maybe in a curious way, fiction is the final draft, not because it’s more truthful or more permanent than the work of historians, but because it can enter unknown territory. That is, a writer can work his way into the impact of history on interior lives” (Block 2007, 2). Measuring the effect of history-making events on inner topographies allows DeLillo’s fiction to draw individual lives into larger truth regimes by exposing how ostensibly personal desires and life choices reinforce networks of power relations and at times reproduce state policies. Assembling familiar, predictable, and all-too-visible patterns of conduct in unusual correlations and convergences, Falling Man develops new sightlines, which enable, and indeed require, “unexpected learning” from the reader who is asked to remember September 11 in relation to other past events (terrorist attacks in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s), from the perspectives of fictional characters implicated in these historical conflicts (231). Moreover, numerous correspondences between fictional events and historical ones compel the reader to fill in narrative blanks or complete plot development with missing story information. Thus, we associate the titular performance artist of Falling Man with Richard Drew’s photograph long before the infamous shot is finally described toward the end of the novel. This dual process, of personalizing history through fiction and of involving the reader’s knowledge of historical

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 184

5/13/2010 8:47:58 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

185

events to make the fictional narrative work, thus manages to “give memory”— for reading Falling Man moves one to know, and thus remember, differently. DeLillo responds to “howling space” with a text that plunges the reader into new experiences of time and space, designed to dispel the common categories of common sense and to provoke thoughtful stillness rather than secure truths. My three-part essay analyzes how giving memory, measuring, and facing others otherwise are deployed in DeLillo’s final draft of his history of September 11, and it argues that this assemblage sets in motion alternate forms of apprehending the present that are meant to bypass “the ruins of the future.”

1. Giving Memory DeLillo’s project of giving memory is thematized in Lianne’s “storyline sessions,” during which Alzheimer’s patients struggle to piece together their identity by lining up fragments on ruled sheets of paper, in teleological sequences that endeavor to make sense of present conditions. Such work appears doomed from the start, as it can neither retrieve the sought-for integral subject, nor delay physical decay. This sub-story gives an ironic mise en abyme of the novel’s method and form, which accrue memories differently, and for other purposes. Falling Man gives memory by enmeshing multiple lines of thought and development, cutting across several spatiotemporal planes, and thereby manifesting how the “adhesive friction that makes an individual possible” (30) is the effect of broader forces—something that Lianne’s group members can feel in their bodies, but have difficulty comprehending: “I wake up thinking where’s everybody,” Carmen G. writes on her legal pad, “I’m thinking where’s the rest of them, wide awake, don’t want to get up. It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de dirección. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID” (125). The papers Carmen feels she needs to face the day, the “State papers of identity” (27) Keith saves from his apartment, and the old passport photos hanging on Nina’s wall all manifest the premeditated “bureaucratic intent” that brings one “paradoxically into the lives of the subjects” (142). For DeLillo, as for Michel Foucault, relations of power and domains of knowledge together produce individuals as both their “vehicle” and their “effect.” Operating as nodes in networks of power/knowledge relations that extend throughout the social body, individuals are, as Foucault remarks, “always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power,” and it is “one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals” (1980, 98). By attending to the conduct of a few, Falling Man engages the many in a chaotic history of the present. Maybe the idea is to think of time differently. [. . .] Make a still life that’s living, not painted. (Don DeLillo, The Body Artist)

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 185

5/13/2010 8:47:58 AM

186

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

A constantly shifting composition of memories and stories develops through fragments that overlap, repeat, interrupt, and vary each other. It is left to the reader to integrate this moving assemblage into a meaningful form (that even then cannot be reduced to any single, causal-chronological order). Part One begins in the “world now,” a “time and space of falling ash and near night” (DeLillo 2007, 3) that is never more precisely dated than as “that day in September” (182), which now divides the before and “after-days” (137) of the characters’ timelines: “these were the days after and now the years” (230). By immediately knowing the exact date, indeed the hour of this “now,” the reader begins the requisite, continuous process of filling in the fiction’s transgredient historical surrounds—elements that remain unsaid, yet are required for the novel’s semantic completion (Bakhtin 1990, 27). The text abruptly brings the reader forward to “three days after the planes” (DeLillo 2007, 8), then to six, then back to the day of the planes, then to ten days after, only to recoil again suddenly to “six days, five nights after the planes” (44), in jarring movements and syncopated rhythms that disorient the reader. For example, Nina returns from Connecticut on page 34, before this trip is even suggested as a future possibility by Martin on page 43—the trip itself is never described. Lianne remembers advice that Martin gave her a few days before (23), in an exchange the reader will only encounter in the following chapter (42). This terse, jagged, overlapping temporal line is also spliced with long dashes to eight years before, when Keith and Lianne were first married (and when the towers were first attacked); it comes to a pause, only to start all over almost from the beginning in Part Two, but through another perspective, and then extends to “fifteen days after the planes” (69) and “thirty-six days after the planes” (170). Part Three begins with a massive demonstration of dissent “against war and misrule” taking place on Charlie Parker’s birthday, “three years past” (182), directing the reader to recall the rallies of August 29, 2004 when, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the coalition United for Peace and Justice (among others) advocated a foreign policy based on the respect of human rights and international law (United for Peace and Justice 2009). At every turn, the reader of Falling Man is called upon to make sense of these fragments which, however dispersed, eventually form the arcs of various storylines, each one performed differently. Keith’s escape from the towers, medical treatment, and subsequent physiotherapy is written as a series of disjoined narrated events, going back and forth from the present to the past, dispersed throughout the novel. Similarly, the story of Keith’s relation to Florence Givens is built from several self-contained scenes (in her apartment and then in Macy’s mattress department) arranged chronologically yet disseminated in the narrative over the first two parts, and remembered in the final. Likewise, Lianne’s visit to her mother’s apartment and subsequent conversations with Nina and Martin constitute one continuous episode cut into a series of segments: it starts in (and finishes in) chapter two, as Lianne waits near the intercom for her mother’s lover to come up (13); it continues in chapter four with Martin embracing Lianne “in the doorway, gravely” (41) and pauses again (ending the

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 186

5/13/2010 8:47:58 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

187

chapter) as both stare at two Morandi still lifes and see the towers (49); it begins chapter seven with Nina’s contrary views of the paintings, carries on with a heated debate on the terrorists’ actions, and stops abruptly with Martin’s angry description of the towers as “fantasies of wealth and power” designed to provoke their own destruction and his hasty departure (116); it finally comes to an end in chapter eight, when mother and daughter discuss the absent Martin’s secret past, when he may have been a member of a terrorist cell. Other storylines, of the Alzheimer’s patients or the card games, of Lianne’s relations to her parents, of Justin’s meticulous rituals and elaborate production of the “Bill Lawton” myth, are equally given from various perspectives, in different narrative modes, as stand-alone scenes. Literally marginalized at the end of each part and yet crucial to the plot, the obvious exception to this structure is the Hammad storyline, which progresses inexorably forward in time and closer in space (from Marienstrasse in Hamburg, to Nokomis in Florida, to the Hudson corridor) up to the moment of impact in the towers, a moment that propels the reader back, in DeLillo’s words, to “about ten pages” (Block 2007, 1) before the beginning of the novel—thus both inscribing an irrecoverable gap in the story, and enfolding this ultimately teleological plot (and the reading perspective) into a different process of apprehension. It is as though this incomplete, reiterative, ragged, enfolding structure were designed to interrupt the global narrative spin concerning the events of September 11 (which started with international live broadcasts of the attacks and has continued to grow exponentially ever since), and slow it down to a moment of fictional stillness, in both senses of the word: stillness as an effect of narrative construction, and as fictitious—a method that is also thematized in the novel, in Justin’s game of speaking only with one-syllable words (“It helps me go slow when I think,” [DeLillo 2007, 66]).1 People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. (Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis)

Stillness maps wrenching conflicts of international dimensions onto individuals: in the opening paragraphs, which describe an as-yet unnamed character walking away from the burning North Tower, the narrator notes ambiguously: “Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be” (DeLillo 2007, 3). When Justin (the boy who studies kestrels, birds that hover in eerie stillness in order to locate their prey) sleeps, his mother cannot “look at him without thinking of what was yet to come. It was part of his stillness, figures in a silent distance, fixed in windows” (127). Fictional stillness is further thematized by the performance artist David Janiak, who repeatedly falls into sudden motionlessness, reiterating the unreal immobility found in Richard Drew’s photograph of the falling man (which is described in detail in DeLillo’s novel [221–2]). (See Figure 12.1) Janiak’s art arrests death, lets its presence linger in the middle of life, for all to see, and lets “the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment” (12).

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 187

5/13/2010 8:47:58 AM

188

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Figure 12.1 Seventh in a series of eleven—a person falls from the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center Tuesday September 11, 2001 after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and brought down the 110-story towers. Associated Press/Richard Drew

This play on time and space is sustained through sets of motion motifs, which work with and against each other to produce stillness: the constant reiteration of the “falling” motif is met contrapuntally by that of “standing,” in a studied narrative negation of movement. The text of course falls onto itself with the initial and final tableaux—becoming, through their pairing, violent variations of the Morandi paintings that hang in Nina’s apartment. Standing before the paintings (48), Martin, and then Lianne (49), “keep seeing the towers in this still life,” while Nina insists instead that the work “takes you inward, down and in” (111). DeLillo’s and Morandi’s natura morta show the towers standing and falling.2 Characters feel they are “falling out of the world” (212) and “easing inward” (66); Keith “stands and looks” (66), as does Lianne (20, 21, 156), over and over, but eventually Keith declares them “ready to sink into [their] little lives” (75). “I’m standing here, [. . .] I’m standing here’ ” repeats the stranger on his cell phone while facing the space where the towers fell; shortly after, Keith chants the words verbatim to himself, in the hallway outside the two and a half rooms, “dim and still,” he used to live in during his separation from Lianne (24–7). What are the ethics of this fictional stillness? How does it work, and to what effects? Standing “dead still” (127, 152), characters first see and feel differently: the usual means of rationalization are held in abeyance with different modes of apprehension, which initially resist normalization, prevent fitting into

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 188

5/13/2010 8:47:58 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

189

the common categories of common sense: “Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing [. . .] and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching” (65). Larger narrative patterns, however, available yet unseen or rejected by the characters, are also gradually traced, and offered to the reader. The novel overlays today’s supposedly unprecedented global “war on terror,” for example, onto the now largely eclipsed or ignored terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s both through characterization and plot devices. Nina Bartos’s lover Martin Ridnour, who used to be Ernst Hechinger, may have been an urban guerrilla associated either with the Rote Armee Fraktion (a.k.a. the Baader-Meinhof Group) or the Brigate Rosse (the Red Brigade). Such political activities remain meaningless to Lianne’s mother, at least until her neighborhood comes under attack. Only then do the current political beliefs and past conduct of her lover become a matter of enough significance to cause a falling out between them. In a heated exchange about the possibility that Martin was an urban guerrilla/terrorist, Lianne asks her mother: “ ‘Don’t you pay a price for not knowing?’ ‘It’s my price. Shut up,’ her mother said” (148). However shocked she may be by her mother’s long-term, willed ignorance, Lianne adopts a similar attitude when she lies in order to avoid jury duty in the trial of the “Blind Sheik’s” lawyer: mother and daughter both reject any personal implication in politics or justice. Falling Man insists that the costs of such individual refusals get compounded throughout the network of power/knowledge relations, as indeed past historical events show to readers who are called upon to remember. The actual Lynne Stewart, the radical human rights attorney who represented Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, was disbarred and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Lest we forget, Klaus Croissant, the attorney for the Rote Armee Fraktion, was extradited from France (where he had petitioned for political refugee status) in 1977, delivered to the German Justice System, and equally sentenced to 28 months in prison for similar charges. The left intellectual Antonio Negri underwent four-and-a-half years of preventive detention in Italy, and was sentenced to 17 years in prison for subversive association, plotting against the state, and armed insurrection, to name only a few of the most prominent cases. The pattern of purposeful ignorance enacted by Nina and Lianne is reiterated to opposite effect by Hammad, the “Hamburg cell’s” fictionalized member. His plan to participate in the destruction of the New York Trade Center is correlated by the text with past conflicts and cruelties. A baker who used to be a soldier in the Iran–Iraq war tells Hammad of his memories of mowing down the Ayatollah’s boy soldiers, who ran to their deaths “wearing keys to paradise around their necks” (80). Preparing himself to perform a variation of this story, Hammad needs to have it rationalized by the leader of the cell who thinks “clearly, in straight lines, direct and systematic,” and always has an answer, which sounds “like philosophy” to justify war (175–6). The plot remains difficult for Hammad to accept, yet he eventually does manage to forget the costs of

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 189

5/13/2010 8:47:59 AM

190

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

aggression (“the shouts of the boys, the high-pitched cry” [78]) by embracing self-discipline and the practice of rituals. Loss of memory, a nightmare scenario when inflicted on an individual by disease, can be actively sought for when politics and ethics are concerned. Entailing past conflicts and wars to today’s “global civil war,” Falling Man works against individually and collectively manufactured amnesia, using memory to draw lines of implication in the varied, everyday “conduct of conduct” that leads to death (Foucault 2000, 341). Like Foucault, DeLillo thus aligns the practices of biopolitics (the government of life) to those of thanatopolitics (government by death). Because plots close “the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point” (DeLillo 2007, 174), the reader of Falling Man is not presented with an overall analysis, a final truth, based either on universal principles or on “statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts” (138), which would make world economic and political movements coalesce into a whole that would somehow rationalize, explain, make the events of September 11 make sense—the book Lianne longed to read, and edit, the book Hammad knew by heart. Instead, the reader is placed in the midst of a mobile and transformative assemblage of memory and forgetting, and made to stand dead still, and look, and experience, and remember.

2. Measuring Giving memory is but one stratagem brought into play by the novel and its characters: Martin suggests measuring as an alternative to reading poetry or newspapers in response to events: “ ‘Study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements,’ he said. [. . .] ‘Do not let it tear you down. [. . .] There’s the event, there’s the individual. Measure it. Let it teach you something. See it.’ ” (42). Unsurprisingly, Martin/Ernst is the one who can see from the other’s point of view most clearly, in analytical terms, but the technique itself is far from foolproof: although Nina seems “to be thinking into some distant matter, not remembering so much as measuring [. . .] the meaning of something” (148), the “So-and-So professor of Such-and-Such” (9) never manages to get past clear and largely reassuring binary oppositions of “them” against “us,” which makes Martin “guilt[y] by association” (191) and eventually render their relationship untenable. Yet through a series of aesthetic correlations, patterns, and collages, the novel treats such stark antinomies as “symptoms of contradictions” (to use Fredric Jameson’s terms) that need attention (Jameson 1994, 4).3 The first two parts of the novel begin with Keith’s progress out of the towers, and they end with Hammad’s progress toward them. The final section, entitled “In the Hudson Corridor,” stages the moment of history’s violent integration into individual lives, Hammad’s death leading to Keith’s near disintegration. Previous sections identified spatially (“On Marienstrasse;” “In Nokomis”) had marked the temporal process of Hammad’s arduous normalization into a brotherhood of faith, rituals, and blood, engaged in a plot leading to the point

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 190

5/13/2010 8:47:59 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

191

“when there is nothing left to think about” (178). Hammad’s story ends as he explodes with the plane and Keith is propelled against the wall. But up until then, most of the novel showed parallel processes of normalization taking hold within Keith and Lianne, who gradually reassembled themselves through a willful reentry into the routines of everyday life. Keith finds security and solace in rituals: he religiously repeats his physiotherapy exercises, according to instructions he has memorized, forming his hand into a “gentle fist,” long after the injury has healed, “four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice” (59). He and Lianne gradually grow into their proper roles as “husband and wife” (70, 96) until the day Lianne suddenly feels or, more precisely, smells herself, back into her old body and place, able once more to “be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day” (236). Returning to card playing, but this time as a way of life, Keith narrows his line of sight to the here and now, and finds himself, much like Hammad, “fitting into something that was made to his shape” (225) and “becoming the air he breathed” (230). From the beginning, the reader had been warned that Keith Neudecker would always resist becoming “New,” by his habit of always secretly correcting “one letter in the first syllable of his last name” on his mail, a private ritual that “he had to do” and “would keep doing [. . .] down the years and into the decades” (31–2). The logical extension of business is murder. (Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis)

This willful subjection to recognized norms—as though September 11 had meant nothing, had not “changed the world forever,” as the expression goes— has angered reviewers hoping for a novel that “addresse[s] the way 9/11 changed a nation and affected the world,” and finding only the woes of “one, self-absorbed NYC couple” (Wilson 2007). Yet this couple allows the reader to measure how the invisible routines of everyday life, and the power/knowledge relations they entail, operate as warlike strategies. DeLillo’s work (again like Foucault’s) demonstrates how the peace of biopolitics is war by other means. Conversely, when normal expectations are upset, characters resort to violence unthinkingly and as a matter of course. Lianne literally gets in the face of anyone disrupting her family circle: she bullies a child into stopping the Bill Lawton game by leaning into Katie’s space, then holding her face, “cradling it, caging it, ear to ear” (DeLillo 2007, 153); she punches her neighbor Elena in the eye for playing middle-eastern music, “under the circumstances” (119–20). Keith assaults a man in the middle of the mattress department at Macy’s, simply “because if anyone said a harsh word to Florence, or raised a hand to Florence, or insulted her in any way, Keith was ready to kill him” (133). Keith’s life as a gambler measures the relations between peace and war games perhaps most vividly. The parallels are well-known, and can be summarized quickly: like war, poker is a huge global business inextricably linked to both

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 191

5/13/2010 8:47:59 AM

192

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

government and criminal organizations. Like war, it is a game of probabilities and chance. Even when they know that the odds are against them, players can still hope that chance will let them win and survive. Poker and war involve sizing up and manipulating your adversaries, bluffing them into taking unmanageable risks, using “cold-war risk analysis” (97) to force them into losing positions, and yes, scaring them down with imposing displays of strength: “men rolling their shoulders, hoisting their balls, ready to sit and play, gamefaced, testing the forces that govern events” (96). Falling Man foregrounds how the culture of war infuses that of poker: both thrive on the love of tradition and hero-worship, self-discipline, and subjection to arbitrary rules, ritual, and camaraderie. For example, Keith and his poker mates, “in the name of tradition and self-discipline,” (96) constantly instate and revoke sets of arbitrary rules to govern their friendly game, to narrow their field of conduct, and “with the shrinking of choice [comes] the raising of stakes” (97). They all love the mythical story of another group of German card players who followed tradition down to the spatial disposition of their graves; they love repeating “five-card stud,” as “the words [become] a proud ritual, formal and indispensable, [. . .] and they lov[e] doing this, straight-faced, because where else would they encounter the kind of mellow tradition exemplified by the needless utterance of a few archaic words” (99). Where else indeed, except perhaps in the army, in a church or a mosque, in school, at home, at the gym, every day. This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. (Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis)

And yet, you may ask, after September 11, how could one lose one’s direction so completely, and head for the desert to play a losing game, against an unknown adversary? Who would do that? The quick answer, of course, is “the U.S.-led ‘coalition of the willing.’ ” A few months before the fictional Keith headed out for another desert to play cards, the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a set of “Personality Identification Playing Cards” to its troops in Iraq, to turn their favorite pastime into an exercise in enemy identification (see Figure 12.2). According to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jim Brooks, playing cards have been issued in “theatres of operation” since the American Civil War (Burgess 2003). And so the practices of peace, with their attending rituals and desires, can be articulated to the practices of war rather readily—and vice versa. Keith sits at the card table because “[n]othing else pertain[s]. Only this has binding force. [. . .] Make them bleed. Make them spill their precious losers’ blood” (DeLillo 2007, 230). Lianne sees that Keith “look[s] like army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life” (18); she can feel “in his skin” why he needs to be a card player, and what he wants: “You want to kill somebody”(214). “Too bad I can’t join the army. Too old,” says Keith, “or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family” (214). The novel measures the relations between everyday life and everyday

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 192

5/13/2010 8:47:59 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

193

Figure 12.2 Personality Identification Playing Cards. Courtesy of the US Department of Defense war in an overt and ironic manner, perhaps nowhere more clearly foregrounded than in Keith Neudecker’s family name, which contains both “deck” (as in “card deck”) and “decker” (as in a gun that sits on a warship’s deck). Other characters toe the line: remember Justin’s compulsive surveillance of the skies, complete with the invention of secret codes and the development of the Bill Lawton myth, all serving to reinterpret the past for the better while claiming the worst for the future? Such rituals (which parody and infantilize

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 193

5/13/2010 8:47:59 AM

194

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

the Bush administration’s production of an elaborate bin Laden myth) worry his mother: She couldn’t locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. (102)

Perhaps the dread Lianne feels comes from a sense of déjà vu, when governments routinely make the immediate past better, while using constant fear, and fear of fear, to justify current policies. Remember President Bush proclaiming the Iraq “Mission Accomplished” in May 2003 (see Figure 12.3), while his administration still (and through to its last days), constantly assessed looming “threat levels” in shades of yellow, orange, and red? Correlating these many private and public behaviors, DeLillo’s fiction makes the reader experience everyday life as war by other means. Falling Man stages the inscription of biopolitics on the body, and manifests how the love of power and subjection can lead to ritualistic understandings that narrow life, onto death.

Figure 12.3 President Bush flashes a “thumbs-up” after declaring the end of major combat operations in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, Thursday, May 1, 2003. The carrier will arrive in San Diego May 2, 2003, following a record 10-month deployment including “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Associated Press/J. Scott Applewhite

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 194

5/13/2010 8:48:01 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

195

For a brief moment, Hammad and Keith, and all other characters, find themselves in an altered world, with “a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen” (94) or take the risk of changing course: all choose to fall back into the already-known.

3. Facing Others, Otherwise This ultimate refusal to know differently is perhaps best exemplified historically and in DeLillo’s fiction by the most common reaction to a particular series of events on September 11, when nearly 200 people jumped from the burning towers. There were many still photographs taken of them, but the cameras broadcasting live refused to turn in their direction. When Drew’s “Falling Man” photograph was published on September 12, it provoked such outrage that it was seldom reprinted, even though its aesthetic composition “set it apart” from all others, as it projected a “stillness,” which somehow expressed the tragedy of the circumstances (9/11: The Falling Man).4 Press censorship was imposed not from above, by government or press bureaucracies, but from below, by untold numbers of readers who were outraged by the visual recording of the event. Even journalists who chose to investigate the photograph or its censorship only managed to reiterate the usual, already-known truths: Peter Cheney of the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail took the well-travelled “life story of the innocent victim” approach (which, as it turned out, was a good story, but not the one of the man in the picture), while Tom Junod (whose article for Esquire served as basis for the Singer documentary 9/11: The Falling Man) realigned the events into a traditional narrative of great, national warfare: Falling Man was the unknown soldier, and the picture his cenotaph (Junod 2003,199). DeLillo foregrounds this controversy with the performance artist David Janiak. His act is first glimpsed by Lianne ten days after the planes, near Grand Central Station, when New York still looked like “a city somewhere else, under permanent siege” (DeLillo 2007, 25); the second time she sees him, 36 days after the planes, his fall is staged so as to position the passengers on a train “flying” north, “slamming through,” suddenly to come face-to-face with his dangling figure, in an eerie replay of the planes striking the towers, but in a reversed timeframe (158, 164–5, 167–8); the third appearance, three years after the planes, is in the Obituary section of a six-day-old newspaper, in a paragraph that explains, laconically and ironically, that he suffered from “chronic depression due to a spinal condition” (222), and states that he had planned to perform his final jump without a harness. Press reports manifest the usual rush to normalization: he had been “arrested by police,” “beaten by a group of men outside a bar in Queen’s,” made the subject of a panel discussion at the New School (“Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror” [220]), invited by the Guggenheim Museum to perform at regular intervals, and peremptorily judged by public officials, in summative press banners in capital letters: “MAYOR SAYS FALL MAN

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 195

5/13/2010 8:48:02 AM

196

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Figure 12.4 Tarot card—the Tower. Public domain

MORONIC” ( 222). In all three appearances, Lianne can never bring herself to look at him beyond a rapid glance, and can never know him: “The man eluded her. [. . .] She could believe she knew [. . .] all the others she’d seen and heard that afternoon, but not the man who’d stood above her, detailed and looming” (224). The best Lianne can do is surmise that his name “could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy sky” (221). Two tarot cards indeed come to mind, the Tower and the Hanged Man (see Figures 12.4 and 12.5). Both cards indicate punishment reigning down, but the Hanged Man can also mark the possibility of wisdom, as intimated by the peaceful demeanor of the face, the aura surrounding it, and the apparent calmness of the pose. The number 12 card can also signify an “in between” state, before a new understanding or direction is taken (see Figure 12.6).

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 196

5/13/2010 8:48:02 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

197

Figure 12.5 Tarot card—the Hanged Man. Public domain

Lianne cannot (will not) know the artist or understand his performance; she can only intuit his significance by associating him with age-old rituals, playing cards turned into magic windows into the future. DeLillo’s text eschews any kind of predictive or prescriptive work, instead installing the reader in the midst of multiple, troubled and troubling relations of knowledge (and power). The abstraction of violent death is something like the dialectical correlative to this world without time or history. (Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time)

How does this eponymous figure function in the novel? Most obviously, it reproduces the text’s aesthetic: both the novel and its character David Janiak perform a fictional stillness designed to give memory and provoke new modes of knowing. More specifically, by publicly performing what will not be seen,

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 197

5/13/2010 8:48:03 AM

198

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Figure 12.6 Tarot card—L’Apesso. Public domain the falling man in Falling Man not only questions but reframes what is recognized as true or inevitable; by remembering and repeating a trauma, it calls for a different form of relation to the other, born of ethical responsibility rather than reason alone. In other words, like the novel, it works to give memory, to measure the impact of the event on the individual, and to call upon the reader to face others otherwise. By reproducing live the banished Drew picture, the artist’s performances simultaneously refocus those that were widely welcomed and cherished, the ones picturing heroism and service to the nation. There certainly were enough

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 198

5/13/2010 8:48:04 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

199

Figure 12.7 Heroes 2001 stamp unveiled at the Oval Office. Courtesy of the White House acts of enormous bravery and selfless assistance to be documented. One photograph, however, was chosen as emblematic, transformed into a hero stamp, and launched from the White House by President Bush on the six-month anniversary of the attacks: the Thomas Franklin picture of three firefighters raising the American flag on Ground Zero, which reminded everyone of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Joe Rosenthal photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima (see Figure 12.7). Like its predecessor, the photograph was used by the government to rally the nation and raise funds. There was no money to be made with Drew’s photograph, no way to turn it into a morale- or fund-raising instrument—which perhaps explains DeLillo’s ironic slant on the picture, dressing Janiak in a business suit (try to spin this one!) But why such reluctance to witness this scene, when so many pictures of victims (victims of accidents, of violence, of natural disasters, of war), equally disturbing, are constantly and profitably disseminated? Perhaps because the sight of a person left to die, totally beyond the reach of assistance or security measures, points to complete system failure for contemporary states that stand on their ability to foster the life of each individual and the nation as a whole. Current welfare states promise to guarantee individual, inalienable rights (to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) through infinite interventions in the everyday, with measures fostering the health, education, work, and leisure of the one and the many. As argued by Foucault, the pact between contemporary Western states and their populations is one of security. Terrorism attacks the state in this primary role and thus constitutes a “political action that ‘insecures’

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 199

5/13/2010 8:48:05 AM

200

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

not only the life of individuals, but the relation individuals have to all the institutions that until then protected them” (Foucault 1994, 386; my translation). Like other famous system failures, however, those of September 11 were strategically redeployed to the benefit of the state: in the name of counterterrorism, governments around the world issued various decrees establishing “states of exception,” suspending constitutionally established individual rights in order to safeguard them. Apart from the Patriot Act passed on October 26, 2001 by the Senate, President George W. Bush issued a “military order” on November 13, 2001, which authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities. The strategy was not new. As Foucault notes and Giorgio Agamben further demonstrates, Western governments regularly function by coup d’état. Devised by revolutionary-democratic movements, fictive “states of siege” or “exception” have been invoked routinely during the last 100 years or so, suspending individual rights and parliamentary power in order to protect democracy and freedom. It is ironic, Agamben notes, that “[a]t the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon” (2005, 17–18). While so-called “detainees” are imprisoned and tortured, out of sight and out of judiciary bounds, indefinitely, DeLillo’s Falling Man repeatedly presents the sight of individualized life as death—but only for a moment, before it is quickly recuperated and normalized in discourse. Getting back to normal, this overtly modest novel suggests, cannot save us, as “normal life” is what brought us to September 11 in the first place. It might be worth remembering in passing that other notable and perhaps not unrelated “foreign affairs events” took place on other September 11s since the 1970s: for Chileans, “el once” refers to a 1973, US-backed military coup, which deposed the democratically elected Salvador Allende and replaced him with General Augusto Pinochet, who remained in power for roughly 17 years, that is almost up until September 11, 1990, when President George H.W. Bush (the father) used the now infamous “New World Order” phrase for the first time, while threatening the use of force against Iraq—and then there was the other one, in 2001. But what is inside the form and structure? (Don DeLillo, Falling Man)

How should one respond? Perhaps one should begin by discerning limits: limits to reason, limits to art. Throughout the novel, the possible dangers and restricted reach of reason are constantly noted by characters who willingly admit: “I know that most lives make no sense. I mean in this country, what makes sense?” (215). Moreover, the power of art to alter “circumstances” is rather constrained; art, music, and poetry are all shown to serve as background noise or as commodities, to serve religious indoctrination and encourage subjection as much as to alter or inspire: “Writing is sweet music up to a point.

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 200

5/13/2010 8:48:07 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

201

Then other things will take over” (60). Perhaps one should also begin by noticing that in the novel, pleasure and support come from different kinds of relations, physical, silent, receptive, and responsive. In his essay “The Rights of Man and the Rights of Others,” Emmanuel Levinas describes this type of relation as a “non-in-difference” to the other. He suggests that reason alone cannot suffice to protect individual rights and freedoms, for in truth and justice, the rights of others will always appear as limits to one’s own. Ethical existence begins with personal responsibility for the rights of others, whose truths are alien to one’s own. This is, as Levinas insists, an “inexhaustible responsibility, for one can never be quits toward others” (1987, 170; my translation). DeLillo’s Falling Man calls for this kind of response by offering its readers something more, something its characters repeatedly refuse: the experience of unexpected learning and unusual empathy, in a modest effort, against all odds, to actualize an alternate “now” from the ruins of the past and future. *** Of course, DeLillo readers could have seen this coming. The project of returning to the past to alter the future animated Lauren Hartke, the body artist trapped in the after-days of her husband’s suicide. Because she knew (because physicists teach us), that time only “seems to pass” (DeLillo 2001a, 4), because she knew that “there is no sequential order except for what we engender to make us safe in the world” (85), she variously tried to alter her time-space, to go back and stop her husband from taking his car keys to drive to New York to kill himself (125)—except that she could not, and she knew she could not “all along but was only catching up” (126). Living the “terror of another ordinary day” (17) also structures Cosmopolis (2003), in which Eric Packer, a young billionaire asset manager, wreaks financial havoc and death simply by pursuing the “idea we all live under [. . .] destruction” (92). This novel’s constant forward movement in time and space was twice interrupted by a second story, The Confessions of Benno Levin, told in reverse chronological order. Levin confesses that he has killed, and then confesses that he would kill him, Packer, because of the sheer excessive provocation of his arch-capitalist way of life (“the huge ambition. The contempt. [. . .] Mistreat some, ignore some, persecute others. The self-totality” [191])—but the moment of impact, the actual death, is suspended indefinitely by the narrative. Falling Man reconfigures all of these elements: the grieving after traumatic death, the inscription of the future in the past and of the past in the future, the terror of both capitalism and its destruction, and the figure of stillness—in momentary suspension before death, both fixed in an immediately recognizable time-space, and performing a more general state of being, characterizing all of us, the readers, the governed in (constantly reiterated) states of exception. Except this time, the narrative structure positions the reader more urgently, in the very process of forming meaning. If DeLillo’s characters love to live

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 201

5/13/2010 8:48:07 AM

202

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

within clear antinomies (us and them; before and after; peace and war; “the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are” [212]), his novel’s reader is reminded of other possibilities, born from reframing contradictions, over and over. If Falling Man is haunted by the number two,5 its overall tripartite structure, its multiplication of referential fields, as well as its legions of motifs and small narrative tactics work to swerve away from these straight lines of opposition, and bring the reader to consider the possibility of an outside, “like nothing in this life” (246).6

Notes 1. See Abel for a brilliant discussion of DeLillo’s essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” which argues that its style (or what Abel calls the “ethical how”) “slows down the impetus to declare what an event is” and “creates a suspenseful rhythm that might slow down the rapid speed of judgment” (Abel 2003, 1236–7). 2. For a related discussion of DeLillo’s use of Morandi’s still lifes, see Julia Apitzsch’s essay in this volume. 3. Jameson uses antinomy to mean “two propositions that are radically, indeed absolutely, incompatible, take it or leave it,” while a contradiction “is a matter of partialities and aspects”: “contradictions are supposed [. . .] to be productive; whereas antinomies [. . .] offer nothing in the way of a handle, no matter how diligently you turn them around and around” (1994, 1–2). 4. These words are Naomi Helperin’s of The Morning Call, one of the hundreds of newspapers that published the picture. Helperin’s words are quoted in Henry Singer’s documentary 9/11: The Falling Man. 5. Some of the binaries in the novel are historical: two towers (11, 116); two planes (135). Characters are described as having a sense of being double: Keith looks for “a way to stop being double in himself” (161), and Lianne “was doubled over, like there were two of her [. . .] A couple of girls sat on a tenement stoop nearby, watching” (169). Others are thematic motifs, scattered everywhere: Nina retired “two years ago” (9); she has two still lifes by Morandi; Justin is friends with the two “Siblings”; Lianne takes “two steps to the door” to hear middle-eastern music coming from the second floor (20); the Marienstrasse mosque is on the second floor (77); Keith’s name is “misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail” (31); Lianne cannot remember a haiku completely as “the second line was missing” (32); Florence Givens tells her story twice (58); “They killed your best friend [. . .] Two friends, two friends” (74); the baker is “twice regretful” for killing the boys (78); “Keith seeing a woman with two kids” (122); high-low poker games have “a second level” (128); Cheng made two columns of chips, but “he did not want columns so high they might topple” (128); “Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes” (129), and so on. 6. These final words refer in the novel to a shirt Keith sees coming “down out of the sky” as he is walking away from the burning towers: “He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.” Readers are reminded that several pictures were taken of “The Falling Man,” and that the others in the series graphically demonstrate how fictional his famous stillness was: the fall tumbled him violently, literally ripping the shirt off his back (Junod, Singer).

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 202

5/13/2010 8:48:07 AM

Falling Man: Performing Fiction

203

Works Cited 9/11: The Falling Man. (2006), Documentary filmed by Richard Numeroff. Dir. Henry Singer. With Steven Mackintosh. Roadshow. Abel, M. (2003), “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the ruins of the future’: Literature, images, and the rhetoric of seeing 9/11.” PMLA 118.5: 1236–50. Agamben, G. (2005), State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, M. (1990), “Author and hero in aesthetic activity,” in Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (eds.), Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, 4–256. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Block, M.(2007), “Falling Man maps emotional aftermath of Sept. 11.” Transcript of interview with Don DeLillo. All Things Considered. Washington: National Public Radio. June 20. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11223451. Burgess, L. (2003), Buyers beware. Stars And Stripes (European edition) April 17. www. stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=14311&archive=true DeLillo, D. (2001a), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2001b), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s, December: 33–40. —(2003), Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Foucault, M. (1980), “Two lectures,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 78–108. New York: Pantheon Books. —(1994), “Michel Foucault: la sécurité et l’État,” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 3, 383–8. Paris: Gallimard. —(2000), “The subject and power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, 326–48. New York: The New Press. Jameson, F. (1994), The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Junod, T. (2003), “The falling man.” Esquire, September: 177–99. Levinas, E. (1987), “Les droits de l’homme et les droits d’autrui,” in Hors sujet, 157–70. Paris: Fata Morgana. United for Peace and Justice. (2009), United for Peace and Justice Unity Statement, July 20. www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=1871. Wilson, J. (2007), “DeLillo’s 9/11 take slim, small in scope.” Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. Winnipeg Free Press, June 3, 2007 D.O.

PSchweighauser_12_Final.indd 203

5/13/2010 8:48:07 AM

Chapter 13

“The Great Secular Transcendence”: Don DeLillo and the Desire for Numinous Experience Peter Schneck

1. Introduction The strong interest in spirituality and religion shown by many writers in postmodern American literature since the 1960s has been noted and discussed rather frequently by readers and critics alike. For John A. McClure, the fact that “many postmodern texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns” (1995, 143) must be read in contrast and opposition to an understanding of postmodernism as a “period [. . .] thoroughly and satisfactorily secularized” (1995, 142–3). As McClure argues convincingly, what for critics and theorists like Brian McHale, Jean-François Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson appears to be postmodern in the texts of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ishmael Reed, Tony Kushner, and others, is in fact a sign of “a spiritually inflected resistance” to the postmodern moment and its specific “secular constructions of reality” (1995, 143). Thus according to McClure, a substantial part of postmodern American literature uses literary techniques and narrative strategies commonly identified with postmodernist literary strategies precisely in order to counter the hegemony of “postmodern secular realism” and to turn back to premodern concepts of the magical, the miraculous, and the metaphysical. McClure concludes: [T]heir assaults on realism, their ontological playfulness, and their experiments in the sublime represent a complex and variously inflected reaffirmation of premodern ontologies—constructions of reality that portray the quotidian world as but one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos, or as hosting a world of spirits. [. . .] some of the very features of fiction which secular theorists have singled out as definitely postmodern must at least in some cases be understood in terms of a post-secular project of re-sacralization. (McClure 1995, 143–4)

While being completely sympathetic to McClure’s insistence in regard to the obvious and significant interest in the spiritual, which surely can be detected in postmodern American literature, I nevertheless think that the strong opposition that he establishes between the secular and the spiritual and, accordingly, between the rational and the irrational, is not very helpful. In fact, I would argue that it tends to distort the perception of the particular negotiation of the relation between these positions, which is at the center of these fictions. This is especially true for the novels of Don DeLillo, whose intense interest in religious and mystic experience has been a constant aspect in his work from the 1970s till today.

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 204

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

205

Thus, in the following discussion my basic thesis will be that it is not the “post-secular project of resacralization” which drives DeLillo’s intense interest in various forms of religious and spiritual rituals, practices, and experiences. On the contrary, I would like to suggest that DeLillo’s perspective on the contemporary resurgence of spirituality and religion in its various ways is informed by an understanding of the mutual dependence—the “complementarity,” as it were—of the secular and the sacred as the inescapable correlation of rational and irrational dimensions of experience. I use the word “experience” advisedly here, since in extension of my basic thesis, my argument subsequently insists that in the literature of Don DeLillo, the secular and the sacred are less understood and presented as opposite ontological realms but, rather, as specific modes of experience which, despite their fundamental differences, cannot be separated since they are mutually dependent on and inform one an other.1 In order to discuss the appearance of the mystical and the spiritual in DeLillo in terms of experience in the concluding part of my essay, I will make reference to Rudolf Otto’s concept of the holy (the numinous) and its experience (numinous experience), respectively. The reference to Otto’s highly influential—and highly controversial—concept is not meant to suggest here that DeLillo’s ideas of religion and his literary negotiations of spirituality and belief are in any way influenced by Otto’s modernist religious phenomenology. Even where one might feel one detects a strong affinity between Otto’s descriptions of numinous experience and DeLillo’s representation of his character’s mystical engagement with the world, this affinity, I would readily presume, results mainly from the more or less incidental similarity between Otto’s and DeLillo’s perspective on the particular nature of religious experience and the inescapable relation between the rational and the irrational that characterizes the experience of the holy. However, I will argue, this similarity could indeed be useful for a better understanding of DeLillo’s particular negotiations of the place of the holy and its experience in contemporary culture.

2. DeLillo the Mystic In his seminal article on post-secular American literature, McClure celebrated Thomas Pynchon as the most “exciting religious novelist of our time” (1995, 153), while stating that, in contrast, Don DeLillo’s assessment of the new spiritualities was more “tentative and less comical,” and as a whole “tends to the sour” (1995, 153, 157). In a more recent discussion of DeLillo’s works, McClure presents a much more detailed discussion of the latter’s “Catholic mysteries,” arguing that DeLillo’s intensive interest in “religious narratives” (2008, 168) and his frequent representation of mystical experiences must be seen as attempts to disturb and in effect dismantle the particular correlation of mystery and mastery inscribed in these narratives. In other words, DeLillo’s obsessive interest in modes and moments of experience that elude conventional frames of rational explanation and which are thus characterized by diffuse but nevertheless intense emotional revelation rather than cognitive reflection and

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 205

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

206

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

assessment, is informed by a fundamental critical skepticism towards mystical modes of experience and their validity. As McClure writes in conclusion: DeLillo dramatizes religiously inflected rites that produce a complex experience of partial redemption, an experience compounded of a mysterious sense of communion and a profoundly painful acknowledgment of fragility, finitude, and brokenness. But even as DeLillo fashions these powerful representations of postsecular mystery, he questions their validity, suggesting that they may represent in the end nothing more than one more mode of self-mystification. Each scene contains within it possibilities for irony. (2008, 176)

I will return to the “possibilities for irony” contained in these scenes at the end of my essay; at this point, I merely want to propose a shift in perspective on the representation of mystical experience in DeLillo in questioning its character as merely mystical or even self-mystifying. In a similar vein, Amy Hungerford has discussed DeLillo’s fictions in reference to his Catholic upbringing, arguing that “DeLillo ultimately transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one” using the “model of the Latin mass” (2006, 343) to make this transformation of mysticism into literature—or more precisely, literary language—possible. In contrast to McClure and other critics who have discussed DeLillo’s literary mysticism in relation to postmodern reappraisals of religious belief and the resurgence of spiritualism, Hungerford shows how DeLillo’s specific brand of post-secular literature can be seen as deeply rooted in long established Catholic rituals and traditions. The central tradition that informs DeLillo’s mystical writing is the Latin mass “as a linguistic and spiritual practice” which, as Hungerford states, even after the introduction of its vernacular version in the 1960s “persisted in the imagination of Catholic writers for decades after its replacement” (347). Hungerford’s instructive discussion of DeLillo’s writing in light of his Catholic background and his specific notion of the reference between language and belief, between writing and transcendence, is a significant achievement in the discussion of DeLillo’s negotiation of spiritual experience. What make her observation important is the connection she reveals between DeLillo’s representations of intense moments of mystical and spiritual experience and his own idea about language in general and the process of literary writing in particular. Thus Hungerford writes that DeLillo’s “turn to language as the site of the mystical, and his embrace of a writing practice based on this notion, demonstrates an individual’s transposition of religion from its traditional setting to the realm of art” (345). Hungerford finds the reason why DeLillo would attempt such a transposition of the religious into the literary in a specific traditional Catholic understanding of “immanent transcendence”: “DeLillo’s novels translate religious structures into literary ones without an intervening secularism because they imagine language in a way that preserves a specifically Catholic understanding of transcendent experience while drifting far from Catholic traditions and themes” (347).

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 206

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

207

Hungerford’s sensitive reading marks a significant shift from McClure’s emphasis on the dominant ironical distance which DeLillo draws between himself and the spirituality of his characters. Like David Cowart, Jesse Kavadlo, and Mark Osteen, Ann Hungerford belongs to a group of critics of DeLillo’s work who have recently begun to discuss DeLillo’s sincere (and even sympathetic) representation of contemporary spiritual needs and the longing for transcendence, redemption, and salvation, which characterizes his own ambivalent postmodern and post-secular moment. I agree that one has to do justice to both the irony and the sincerity with which DeLillo approaches the problem of spirituality in a postmodern world, and I would also agree that what we find at the core of both the irony and the sincerity is, in Hungerford’s words, “the insistence on something like the immanence of transcendent meaning in the material of daily life, and especially in the language we use” (346). However, I do not see, as Hungerford does, that this should be understood as a particularly “Catholic solution” (346) to the tension between spiritual belief and religious fundamentalism, which arguably has become one of DeLillo’s central concern since the 1990s. Neither general mysticism nor the Catholic version of transcendental longing may be sufficient to explain the particular negotiation of spirituality and mystical experience that DeLillo’s novels present. For what both McClure and Hungerford fail to address is the particular focus of these negotiations. Both mysticism and Catholicism may aim—in very different ways, to be sure— at transcendence. Yet this is not an end in itself. More precisely, transcendence as an experience or an altered state of being and consciousness is triggered by another experience, or another object, as it were; it cannot be achieved by itself. What is more, transcendence hardly ever succeeds in DeLillo’s novels, in fact one may argue that what presents the most fundamental obstacle to his character’s longing for spiritual fulfillment and religious transcendence is the feebleness of their own belief or faith. In what follows, I want to discuss a few examples from DeLillo’s fictions—a small sample from a rich ensemble of comparably representative scenes which one could find all over his work. These moments can almost be taken for themselves, in isolation, as meditations on the problems of mystical or spiritual experience, shared by the various characters. That does not mean, however, that these scenes can or should be read completely out of context: as ever so often, the calculated effect of these moments of “lingering transcendence” has to be measured and felt in contrast to their respective narrative frames. Nevertheless, I want to look at these examples and discuss them with the help of the conceptual framework of the numinous and of numinous experience, developed by Rudolf Otto in the early nineteenth century. As I pointed out earlier, I do not mean to suggest that there is a direct influence of Otto on DeLillo’s work in general. What Otto’s concept of numinous experience—the experience of the holy—may offer, however, is an understanding of the objective of DeLillo’s negotiation of these modes of experience beyond the tradition of Catholic sacraments and mysteries, and beyond other forms of mysticism.

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 207

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

208

3. “Reaching, but not grasping”: Experiencing . . . it” As McClure, Hungerford, and a host of other critics have observed, DeLillo’s literary mysticism operates on two levels. On the one hand, the reader often is confronted with characters’ experiences that exceed the limits of their quotidian consciousness and effectively lift them out, for a moment at least, of their familiar frames of meaning and reference. These moments appear like epiphanies, even though their respective source or subject can only be determined rather vaguely and ambiguously. This particular quality results in part from the specific language DeLillo uses to make these moments emerge out of the flow of the narrative that surrounds them. Sometimes, the experience is related second hand by a narrator who may inject some caustic or even skeptic commentary, thus increasing the ambiguity of the experience described. Sometimes, there is a marked shift in tone, tense, or address that sets these passages apart from the passages that precede or follow them, characterizing them as moments of an altered state of narrative consciousness. Taken together, one can observe that in these moments’ most intense and effective forms, the two levels overlap and interact, so that the mystical experience of a character in the novel becomes inscribed onto the form and the language of the text we are reading. Changes on the level of narrative consciousness are thus rendered on the level of linguistic form: the language of the text becomes a kind of record or register of the spiritual revelations DeLillo’s characters experience. Comparing three passages from three different novels, one may get a sense of not only the range of variations DeLillo is able to present, but also of what holds these moments of spiritual experience together as experience. I have slightly shortened the quotes to make them more manageable and I have left their sequence without comments in between. The point is to read them as if they belonged to a larger overarching theme and a specific mode of representation that can be found in all of DeLillo’s novels.

Example 1 In his memory he was a character in a story, a colored light. [. . .] Owen believed that memory was the faculty of absolution. [. . .] These early memories were a fiction in the sense that he could separate himself from the character, maintain the distance that lent pureness to his affection. [. . .] But it was necessary to get the details right. His innocence depended on this . . . he had to remember correctly. The man who will preach today is young and dark-haired and has about him a hard-set radiance. [. . .] The resolute young man strokes the air as he speaks, then cuts it with emphatic gestures. In this room of bare wood and dying light he is a power, a stalking force. [. . .] He moves among them touching a shoulder here, a head there . . . there is a Spirit lurking here. Show me the scripture that says we have to speak English to know the joy of talking freely to God. Ridiculous, we say. There’s no such document. Paul to the Corinthians said men can speak with their tongues to the angels. In our time we can do the same.

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 208

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

209

Do whatever your tongue finds to do. Seal the old language and loose the new. The boy is spellbound by the young man’s intensity and vigor. [. . .] Owen’s mother is saying Jesus Jesus Jesus, softly, in her seat in awe, exalted. Get wet, the preacher says. Let me hear that babbling brook. [. . .] Be yourself, that’s all it is. Be free in the Spirit. Let the Spirit knock you free. [. . .] Get ready, it’s round the bend, it’s turning the corner, it’s running the rapids, it’s coming like nobody’s business. [. . .] A silence. The sense of expectation is tremendous. The boy is chilled. [. . .] In the bin, the inverted lunar urn, he wondered about the uses of ecstasy, see the Greek, a displacing, a coming out of stasis. [. . .] Normal understanding is surpassed, the self and its machinery obliterated. Is that what innocence is? Is it the language of innocence those people spoke, words flying out of them like spat stones? The deep past of men, the transparent word. [. . .] Bless them. (DeLillo 1987, 304–7)

Example 2 In the bedroom downstairs Karen sat up watching TV. [. . .] She was watching the world news of the day [. . .] it was mainly the film footage she wanted to see and she didn’t mind watching it without sound. It was interesting how you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to picture only. She sees men and boys at first, a swarming maleness, a thickness of pressedtogether bodies. Then a crowd, thousands filling the screen. It looks like slow motion but she knows it isn’t. It is real time with bodies pressed and heaving, like bodies rolling in a sea swell, several arms raised above the crowd. They show bodies at odd angles. They show men standing off to the side somewhere, watching sort of half interested. She sees a great straining knot of people pressed to a fence, forced massively forward. They show the metal fence and bodies crushed against it, arms upflung. [. . .] The camera is just outside the fence shooting straight in through the heavy-gauge steel wire. [. . .] She sees the crowd pushed towards the fence and people at the fence pressed together and terribly twisted. It is an agony of raised and twisted arms and suffering faces. They show men calmly watching. [. . .] She sees a boy in a white cap with a red peak and he has an expression on his face of what a nice day or here I am on my way home from school and they are dying all around him with open mouths and bloated tongues showing. [. . .] She sees the fence up close and they stop the film and it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church, it is composed and balanced and filled with people suffering. [. . .] In people’s faces she sees the hopelessness of knowing. They show men calmly looking on. They show the fence from a distance, bodies piling up behind it, smothered, sometimes only fingers moving, and it is like a fresco in an old dark church, a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it. (DeLillo 1991, 32–4)

Example 3 A madder orange moon hangs above the city. [. . .] They follow the crowd’s stoked gaze. They stand and look. The billboard is unevenly lighted, dim in spots, several bulbs blown and unreplaced, but the

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 209

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

210

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

central elements are clear, the vast cascade of orange juice pouring diagonally from top right into a goblet that is handheld at lower left—the perfectly formed hand of a female Caucasian of the middle suburbs. [. . .] But it is the juice that commands the eye, thick and pulpy with a ruddled flush that matches the madder moon.[. . .]. They stand and watch the billboard. They stare stupidly at the juice. [. . .].

The train She feels the words before she sees the object. She feels the words although no one has spoken them. This is how a crowd brings things into single consciousness. Then she sees it, an ordinary commuter train [. . .] [t]he headlights sweep the billboard and she hears a sound from the crowd, a gasp [. . .] and the cry of some unnamable painful elation [. . .] the holler of unstoppered belief. Because when the train lights hit the dimmest part of the billboard a face appears above the misty lake and it belongs to the murdered girl. A dozen women clutch their heads, they whoop and sob, a spirit, a godsbreath passing through the crowd.

Esmeralda [. . .] Sister Edgar moves, she tries to edge and gently elbow forward, and people make way, they see her—a nun in a veil and a full habit and dark cape [. . .] Her presence is a verifying force—a figure from a universal church with sacraments and secret bank accounts and a fabulous art collection. They embrace her and let her pass and she is among the charismatic band, the gospellers rocking in place, when the train lamps swing their beams onto the billboard. She sees Esmeralda’s face take shape under the rainbow of bounteous juice and above the little suburban lake and there is a sense of someone living in the image, an animating spirit—less than a tender second of life, less than half a second and the spot is dark again. She feels something break upon her. An angelus of clearest joy. [. . .] Everything feels near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory [. . .] and a force at some deep level of lament that makes her feel inseparable from the shakers and mourners, the awestruck who stand in tidal traffic—she is nameless for a moment, lost to the details of personal history, a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd. (DeLillo 1997, 820–3)

Although these scenes are taken from completely different narratives in which they assume rather distinct positions, there is clearly a common underlying structure or rather compositional logic that they share. This shared structure or logic makes them recognizable as belonging to the same category, as it were, of a rather specific type or modus of experience that is central to DeLillo’s notion of the psychological reality of his characters—and quite likely human beings in general. The particular experience DeLillo is describing clearly features a rather potent mixture of expectation, mystification, elation, and near transcendence, but also dread, anxiety, horror, and a certain loss of individual self-hood compensated in turn by a heightened sense of collective

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 210

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

211

identity and communal experience. The present tense in which these scenes are rendered (and which in most cases noticeably sets them apart from the rest of the narrative) stresses their basic nature as intense and prolonged moments of intense emotional and cognitive involvement—despite the fact that DeLillo characteristically undercuts the intensity through a detached, slightly laconic tone. Thus all these passages are similarly characterized by a mixture of descriptive elements that mark the respective experience as intensely sensual and, therefore, potentially aesthetic, with other elements that mark the experience described as belonging to the category of the religious and the spiritual. That is, the intensity of impression and sensual and emotional engagement are complemented by a charge or surge of significance and meaning—even though this significance and this meaning are beyond (or better: “before”) description at the time being. Thus these passages could be read both in terms of a literary sublime and a heightened sense of religious experience and spirituality. In fact, they read like revelations or, better yet, epiphanies. It appears difficult to detect any irony in these scenes; in fact, they seem completely undisturbed by it. If DeLillo adds reflections and remarks, which would allow for an ironic deflection of the intense experience described, they are added only after the fact, and thus can unfold their effect only in retrospect. Sometimes the reflections offered by DeLillo as retrospective comments can hardly be called ironic at all, as in this well-known passage from Underworld (which appears just a page after the scene described in Example 3 earlier): The next morning the sign is blank. What hole it makes in space. People come and don’t know what to say or think, where to look or what to believe. The sign is a white sheet with two lonely words, Space Available, followed by a phone number in tasteful type. When the first train comes, at dusk, the lights show nothing. And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth—all nuance, and wishful silhouette? Or does the force of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt? (DeLillo 1997, 824)

The question whether this passage can be—or even has to be—read as a deliberate ironic subversion of the miracle scene that precedes it, is an open one: It may completely depend on the reader’s own engagement with the “miracle” or at least with the experience of the protagonist (Sister Edgar). Taken in isolation, each of the passages would appear strangely histrionic, the first rather absurd, the second rather pompous and pseudo-philosophical. Together they establish an uncomfortable balance between a fascination with the force of belief and the “miraculous” experience it may offer, and its denouncement as a rather desperate form of self-mystification.

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 211

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

212

4. Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans: Rudolf Otto’s Concept of Numinous Experience I do not wish to determine the nature of DeLillo’s literary mysticism, and I resist interpreting these scenes in their particular representation of mystical engagement and spiritual intensity as signs of a resacralization for which DeLillo’s work could be taken as representative. The most immediate question concerning these passages (and their obvious presence throughout DeLillo’s work as a whole) is whether it is sufficient to describe DeLillo’s moments of “lingering transcendence” in terms of either medieval mysticism (e.g. McClure’s discussion of “The Cloud of Unknowing”) that have finally to be read as ironic inflections of contemporary spiritualities or in terms of DeLillo’s allegiances to Catholicism and his interest in “Catholic mysteries” as Hungerford maintains. Although it is certainly possible to find evidence for both of these readings, a strong emphasis on the phenomenological logic or dynamic underlies or unfolds in all of these and similar scenes. What is at stake here, one could argue, are the fundamental phenomenological conditions of belief. These conditions, I argue, can neither be fully and adequately described as various manifestations of mystical experience, nor as Catholic mysteries. Despite the differences and the variations between the scenes there is a sense of a common objective, a shared trajectory of belief—which becomes more poignant if for the moment we translate this as religious desire. However we strive to characterize this desire in any given case, its common object may be even more universal than practices and concepts that could be related to specific religious traditions and rituals: “something” holy, precisely. To ask for the conceptualization of the holy as a universal category of belief—that is, as the essential condition of the possibility of religious feeling and value and thus as a meaningful experience in itself—also means to revise the perspective on DeLillo’s “literary mysticism” and to focus more on his specific negotiation of the relation between the rational and the irrational, which I see as a strong, continuous dimension of his writing from the very beginning. In order to understand the nature (and probably the ends) of this negotiation more clearly, let me introduce a conceptual framework which I find rather useful to describe and assess more accurately DeLillo’s position within the project of resacralization as a counter-project to postmodernity. This framework can be found in Rudolf Otto’s (1869–1937) important discussion of Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917). Probably the best-selling theological work of the twentieth century, and highly successful among its contemporaries, Otto’s analysis of the concept of holiness drew considerable criticism from theologians like Barth and Bultmann. It influenced and attracted the attention and the appreciation of figures as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Carl Jung, Romain Rolland, C.S. Lewis, and Gandhi (Gooch 7). As the title of Otto’s

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 212

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

213

book announces, its objective is the negotiation of the relation between rational and irrational dimensions or aspects in the formation of religious belief. It is clear that Otto’s attempt is driven by a pronounced conservatism in face of the triumph of modernization and rationalization as the full realization of a secular system of belief. Otto’s insistence on the irrational core of the idea of holiness and its subsequent evolution into rational systems of belief can be read as a counterreaction to modernity. However, as Melissa Raphael has shown convincingly, an almost postmodern openness characterizes Otto’s word and puts him in opposition to other modern conceptualizations of Christian faith more attuned to the secularized orthodoxies of rational theology. As Raphael writes: Certainly, Otto’s project is characteristically modern in its claim to timelessness and its pursuit of the universal and the general—qualities whose value postmodernism has precisely set in reverse. But the disembodiedness of Cartesian reasoning is absent here: religious truth is born of a reaction to God that is experienced in the body and through all the senses—just as postmodern spirituality is insisting it should be. [. . .] The Idea of the Holy represents a confluence of classically modern preoccupations, the romantic criticism of modernity, and elements that anticipate postmodernity, it is not a period piece; indeed it eludes precise classification within the history of ideas. (2006, 5)

At the center of Otto’s theological inquiry into the foundations of religious belief stands the idea or concept of the holy—the numinous—which forms the irreducible irrational core of any religious system of belief, however rationalized it may appear. By going back before the development of any conceptual or rational order, Otto isolates the anthropological constant of any religious system of belief. This constant is based on the assumption of a shared disposition or a priori category of experience—the sensus numinis—and the more or less invariable nature of numinous experience itself. In short, Otto formulates an anthropological phenomenology of religious experience in the Kantian tradition that allows him to establish a comparative approach to various religions and practices of spirituality that was not bound to the evolutionary perspective prevalent at his time, which attempted to order religious practices according to their more primitive or more advanced character. In contrast, Otto tries to describe and define an independent category of religious experience and value, which could be understood as the common core of all religions. This common core must be seen as the coincidence of a conceptual disposition—the sensus numinis—with a specific mode of experience—numinous experience—accordingly. The coincidence is neither fully rational nor fully irrational since both these dimensions are present and effective in the formation of the idea of the divine: We mean by the “rational” in the idea of the divine that part of it which is amendable to [. . .] the clear comprehensibility of our conceptual faculty, to the domain of familiar and definable concepts. Furthermore, we claim that around this

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 213

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

214

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

domain of conceptual clarity there lies a mysterious, obscure sphere, which withdraws from our conceptual thinking, though not from our feeling, and which we call to that extent the “irrational.” (qtd. in Gooch 2000, 104; transl. from the original Otto 2004, 76)

In regard to my discussion of moments of “lingering transcendence” in DeLillo, there is clearly a tension between the rational and the irrational in the formation of the idea of the divine here. This tension becomes obvious on the one hand in the oscillation between the attempt at conceptual categorization in the act of recording and narrating, and on the other hand in the sheer intensity of immediate fragments of experience, which elude ready conceptualization in this manner. The basic contrast or opposition becomes even more poignant when we look at the phenomenological description of numinous experience presented by Otto in his analysis of the formation of religious belief. The formula for this particular experience is given by Otto in the definition of numinous experience as a “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” which could be translated as a yet incomprehensible experience that is frightful, threatening, attractive, and even delightful. The term “mysterium” refers to the form, the two other terms, “tremendum” and “fascinans” to the content. The tension between the latter two forms the energizing “contrast-harmony” (Kontrastharmonie) at the core of the mystery—which remains a mystery precisely since the tension is not yet resolved by any act of rationalization or mystification. Todd A. Gooch gives an elucidating description: While the term “mysterium” refers to the form of the numinous, the positive content of the numinous is composed of a peculiar “contrast-harmony” [. . .] to which the entire history of religion, according to Otto, bears witness. This contrast-harmony consists of the simultaneous presence of the two antithetical tendencies that can be observed in the kinds of reactions to which the numinous gives rise. The numinous is both terrifying and fascinating. It exhibits a power that is simultaneously repulsive and attractive, threatening and captivating, horrendous and alluring. It is this bipolar structure of the numinous that is indicated by the designation mysterium tremendum et fascinans. (2000, 113)

At least two things that have to be pointed out. Firstly, the peculiar nature of Otto’s concept of numinous experience as a desecularized version of the sublime links his idea of the holy to the fate of aesthetic experience and art within the larger framework of processes of secularization. Secondly, Otto’s concept allows for a more precise analysis and interpretation of DeLillo’s literary mysticism as an aesthetic counter-spirituality, which despite its skepticism and irony—or maybe precisely because of its skepticism and irony—succeeds in preserving the idea of numinous experience as the shared core element of various and different forms of postmodern spiritual desire. As my comparison of some selections from his novels has demonstrated, DeLillo’s interest in various forms of spiritual desire and experience is twofold. On the one hand, it is obviously driven by a fascination with the formal structure

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 214

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

215

or logic these moments of experience share—which is why Otto’s phenomenology of numinous experience can be used to reveal DeLillo’s similar attempt to grasp the phenomenological dimension of the experience of “lingering transcendence.” This formal fascination is most emphatically reflected in DeLillo’s aesthetic interest in the careful rendition of these moments, thereby enforcing their presence and immediacy on the reader. On the other hand, however strong the similarities between Otto’s and DeLillo’s descriptions of numinous experience may appear, they cannot close the distance between their specific historical positions and their different understanding of the role of religion and belief in their times, respectively. DeLillo may approach the experience of the holy with a care and an intensity of interest that comes close to Otto’s. Yet, in stark contrast to the latter, DeLillo’s engagement with belief is neither theological nor philosophical, but literary and cultural. For lack of a better term, we could call the focus of DeLillo’s approach to and search for this special mode of experience, a distinct and somewhat paradoxical form of transcendence: an experience, which is both secular and sacred, both physical and metaphysical; an experience which, as DeLillo writes in Mao II, had always been the essential raison d’être of the novel and of narrative fiction: “The novel used to feed our search for meaning [. . .] It was the great secular transcendence” (1991, 72).

5. Secular Transcendence and the Raid on the Inarticulate Taking the interest in the fate and nature of the experience of transcendence as a major concern of DeLillo’s work, one could argue that his novels over the decades have become increasingly less ironic and more concerned and engaged with the tension I have described. Forms of postmodern returns to spirituality as an attempt to regain the intensity of numinous experience in a cultural environment dominated by technologies of re-presentation and the immanence of meaning already appeared in novels as diverse as Americana, The Names, and White Noise, and mostly they were presented as misguided, often absurd and sometimes ridiculous endeavors that DeLillo negotiated in a sort of subtle wryness, which developed into a rather characteristic novelistic idiom of his own. The search for meaning and secular transcendence in DeLillo’s novels up until White Noise appears obsessive, futile, tragic—but also comical, as it is often presented by means of ironic deflection rather than direct observation. There is, however, a more or less marked shift in stylistic preferences that goes hand in hand with an increasingly poignant concern on DeLillo’s part with the underlying motivation, which drives the urge for transcendence in our time rather than with the eccentric forms this pursuit for numinous experience might assume. Even Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, probably DeLillo’s most cynical character, appears more a tragic than a ridiculous figure; despicable, yes, but despite all his sordidness a pitiful existence. It is this concern with the transcendental neediness of his characters that emerges as a dominant impulse after White Noise and which connects

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 215

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

216

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

DeLillo’s most epic perspective on history in Underworld with his most intimate meditations on individual loss, mourning, and the function of art in The Body Artist. Both tendencies find their culmination in DeLillo’s response to the horror and the tragedy of 9/11, and my discussion could not possibly be complete without some remarks on the texts that “frame” that response and which have to be read along the lines of what I have tentatively called DeLillo’s counter-spirituality. Arguably, there are two responses with a long break in between, since the first, DeLillo’s essay “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” appeared as one of the earliest non-journalistic reflections in the December 2001 issue of Harper’s, while the second, the novel Falling Man, appeared only in 2007 after a silence that lasted more than five years. Much has been written about both the essay and the novel, yet the intricate lines of resonance and correspondence that run between the two texts still need to be explored in order to understand how DeLillo tried to deal with the plight of representing the unrepresentable. As Marco Abel observed in his brilliant discussion of “In the Ruins of the Future”: “DeLillo’s essay demonstrates the impossibility of saying anything definitive about 9/11—especially anything that captures the event’s meaning” (2003, 1237). From this perspective, Falling Man appears like a paradox, since it is both futile and consequential: futile since even five years after 9/11 it was hard—if not impossible—to say anything definitive about the event; consequential in that Falling Man refuses to talk about the “meaning” of the event and concentrates solely on its effects and reverberations in the life of a number of characters who stand in for an entire collective. What is more important from the perspective of the argument I have been pursuing about DeLillo’s continuing interest in “secular transcendence” is that the challenge for any reading of the novel or the essay lies in the “perverse” position they have to assume in relation to DeLillo’s other writings. Thus Falling Man, while it presents a response to an actual trauma caused by a real and unique event, could also be read as a continuation of the fictional narratives about terrorism and fundamentalism, which have formed a central thread in DeLillo’s oeuvre. Likewise, “In the Ruins of the Future,” which certainly is a more direct account of DeLillo’s experience of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, still strongly resonates with his “prophetic” fictions about terrorism’s “raids on human consciousness” (1991, 41), as he termed it in Mao II. From my perspective, there are two points of intersection between the essay and the novel, both of which reveal a shared stylistic logic and a common ethical concern that also links the texts to the particular spiritual dimension that I identify as a central driving force in DeLillo’s writing. The first link is obvious, since it merely reflects, both in the essay and in the novel, an understanding of the motivation of the terrorist act as being based on absolute devotion and submission to the reality, the promise, and the perseverance of belief. 2 This is probably why the terrorists in the essay (a nameless “they”) appear quite as abstract as their counterparts in the novel—and it would be interesting if not challenging to ask why they should come across less convincing as characters

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 216

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

217

in the novel and more convincing as psychological abstractions and generalizations in the essay. This is where the second connection between DeLillo’s two responses to 9/11 comes in, even though it may not be as obvious as the first. For what holds the two pieces together is essentially the question about the nature and the consequences of different and conflicting notions of God—the most obvious and legitimate name for “the holy.” Numinous experience in most religions is associated with the potential presence of God, or at least, the experience of the numinous is most likely taken as a sign for some sort of divine presence and/or order. In one of the most celebrated and stunning moments of Falling Man, the character of Hammad, one of the attackers in the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, at the moment of impact collapses, as it were, into Keith Neudecker, the novel’s protagonist: Every sin of your life is forgiven in the seconds to come. There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come. You are wishing for death and now it is here in the seconds to come. [. . .] A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it [. . .] before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, the fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. (2007, 239)

This stunning passage is notable for its disturbing effect on the reader who at one moment is sharing the final thoughts of Hammad the terrorist in the plane approaching the towers of the World Trade Center and with the force of the blast is blown out of Hammad’s consciousness into another, that of the victim and survivor, Keith Neudecker. The aspect of force—the force of words, to be precise—is important because it impresses a trajectory that leads from Hammad’s thoughts about death and dying to Neudecker’s struggle to live and survive; in fact, this passage describes a movement of literary consciousness from death to life, which at the beginning is charged with religious ideas of transcendence (“forgiveness”, “eternal life”) and in the end finds itself in a world of utter chaos, destruction, and uncertainty: “a shift in the basic arrangements of parts and elements” (240). In a very powerful way, DeLillo forces us to experience this move as a connection between Hammad and Neudecker that far exceeds the sheer causality of the terrorist attacks and the victim’s trauma. It also links the promise of religious transcendence, the promise, in fact, of life after death, with the struggle for survival in this world. The passage thus substitutes religious with secular transcendence since it presents a kind of magic “transubstantiation,” which is only possible in literature and only with the help of the force of words, carefully chosen and constructed to escape death and to survive. It is not only the force or charge of the archaic figure of resurrection and survival that gives this passage its particular weight and function. The moment

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 217

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

218

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

at which the consciousness of imminent death turns into the consciousness of struggle and survival also marks both the end and the beginning of the novel’s plot. As the reader soon realizes, the remaining parts of the novel connect almost seamlessly with the beginning of Falling Man so that the whole narrative again conjoins the end with a beginning. There is certainly more than one way of reading this circular movement—for instance, in terms of traumatic experience and its repetition. Yet within the logic of what I have called the search for transcendence and numinous experience, one could (and probably should) read this central gesture as another form of insisting that the novel does not and cannot substitute one promise of transcendence with another, one universal “meaning” with another. In face of the unrepresentable, Falling Man does not attempt to give meaning to an experience that is both incomprehensible and real at the same time; “the great secular transcendence,” which the novel once appeared to offer has become impossible and it seems that what is left in the end (which is also the beginning) is sheer immanence: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night” (2007, 3). And despite the obvious apocalyptic note of destruction and chaos, it is a world: this world, the world in which and out of which the novel finds its way back to life. As a writer interested in all forms of experience, but especially those that are induced by various modes of belief and the desire for spiritual engagement with the world, DeLillo’s fictions present intense negotiations of the numinous in a postmodern climate of belief characterized by the tension between fundamental anxiety and ironic deflection. If today terrorists make “raids on human consciousness,” the office of the novelist, DeLillo seems to argue—especially in his response to 9/11 in Falling Man—is to describe the fullness of our predicament and our experience instead of reducing them to one meaning. Such an attempt can never be without failure, as T.S. Eliot once put it: “Trying to learn to use words [. . .] every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure [. . .] [a]nd each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment” (“East Coker” 1974, 202–3).3

Notes 1. In extension, the negotiation of these modes of experience furthermore must also be seen as more or less explicit reflections of the limits and power of literary experience: The interdependence of secular and spiritual experience in DeLillo thus marks both the difference as also the interdependence of non-literary and literary representations (realizations?) of experience per se. Given the limited space of this article, however, I will only be able to develop the first line of my argument in more detail. 2. It is amazing how much DeLillo’s novels resonate with Lawrence Wright’s celebrated account of the background of al Quaeda and the pre-history of 9/11. Of course, Wright is not interested in the logic of the affective force of statements of belief and their psychological effectiveness, yet he readily acknowledges their role in recruiting an ever growing fellowship to the cause. Especially in describing Osama bin Laden’s character, Wright resorts to categories of experience and desire that appear close to

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 218

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

The Great Secular Transcendence

219

those of some of DeLillo’s characters: “[t]here was [. . .] in his nature a romance with the spirituality of the desert, humble and stripped of distraction. Throughout his life he would hunger for austerity like a vice: the desert, the cave and his as yet unspoken desire to die anonymously in a trench in warfare”(2006, 88). 3. DeLillo’s interest in the possibility and nature of spiritual transcendence

obviously continues in his latest novel, Point Omega, whose very title points to a concept of spiritual convergence. Unfortunately the novel appeared while this manuscript was already being processed for publication, and thus there was no time to include it in the discussion.

Works Cited Abel, M. (2003), “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the ruins of the future’: Literature, images, and the rhetoric of seeing 9/11.” PMLA 118.5: 1236–50. DeLillo, D. (1971), Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —(1985), White Noise. New York: Viking. —(1987), The Names. 1982. London: Picador. —(1991), Mao II. London: Vintage. —(1997), Underworld. New York: Simon & Schuster. —(2001a), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2001b), “In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September.” Harper’s December: 33–40. —(2003), Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. —(2007), Falling Man. New York: Scribner. —(2010), Point Omega. New York: Scribner. Eliot, T. S. (1974),Collected Poems, 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber. Gooch, T. A. (2000), The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion. Berlin: DeGruyter. Hungerford, A. (2006), “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.” Contemporary Literature, 47.3: 343–80. McClure, J. A. (1995), “Postmodern Post-secular: Contemporary fiction and spirituality.” Modern Fiction Studies, 41.1: 141–63. —(2008), “DeLillo and Mystery,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 166–78. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Otto, R. (1958), The Idea of the Holy. John Harvey, trans. London: Oxford University Press. —(2004), Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. 1917. München, Germany: Beck. Raphael, M. (1997), Rudolf Otto and the Idea of Holiness. Oxford: Clarendon. Wright, L. (2006), The Looming Tower: Al-Quaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Vintage.

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 219

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

PSchweighauser_13_Final.indd 220

5/13/2010 8:47:49 AM

Chapter 14

The DeLillo Era: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period David Cowart Reflecting on the idea of literary generations in, say, the last five or six decades, one swiftly moves beyond isolated instances of the filiation that Harold Bloom sees as so problematic and vexed. One engages larger—and what may appear untimely—questions of periodization. As Brian McHale points out in a witty discussion in the electronic book review, postmodernism differs from its predecessors in that it was always already self-periodizing. “Periods in literary history are typically constituted retrospectively,” he remarks. “Modernism,” for example, “can ‘appear’ as a period with a canon of its own only forty years after the fact, around 1960.” But “[f]rom the very outset, postmodernism was self-conscious about its identity as a period” (2007). Perhaps, then, readers and critics these days must expect a certain speeding up of literary history, even as they accept the acceleration of other historical processes. What remains unclear, however, is whether postmodernism’s successor will be as “self-conscious about its identity as a period.” Can the cultural historian, through thoughtful and attentive scrutiny of contemporary letters, discern the kind of shift in literary energies that normally, according to McHale, becomes plain only in retrospect? Are we, early in the twenty-first century, witnesses to the displacement of postmodernism by some kind of post-postmodernism? Conversely: might what swims before our optics be a repudiation of all the pastiche, all the ironic self-referentiality, all the incredulity toward metanarratives, and all the hand-wringing about representation? If so, are we in for mere literary retrogression—to remodeled modernism, perhaps, or to realism revisited? If not, what continuities will manifest themselves, what prospects for an aesthetic with “legs,” as they say in the entertainment business? These questions are not new to me. My work on Pynchon and DeLillo grounds my thinking about their literary sons, daughters, and grandchildren. By the same token, curiosity about the grammar of periodization anchors my long-standing interest in the mechanics and meanings of allusion, in history and the novel, and in what I call “symbiotic” writing—the practice of contemporary authors, from Jean Rhys and Tom Stoppard to John Gardner and Jane Smiley, who reframe (or appropriate and rework) characters, actions, and whole plots from the great bran pie of prior literature (I borrow that figure from Virginia Woolf). My most recent work, on contemporary immigrant fiction, also engages with questions central to the present study. Dwelling in one or more of postmodernism’s parallel universes, Chang-rae Lee, Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid, Wendy Law-Yone, Aleksandar Hemon, and other immigrant

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 223

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

224

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

writers take naturally, I have found, to an aesthetic predicated on apprehensions of alterity, on the lability of self, on the constructedness of identity, and on ontological provisionality. Every immigrant knows at least two worlds, two selves, two realities. Thus I find myself in disagreement with Rachel Adams’s observation that the immigrant author “reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents” (2007, 251). I would argue, rather, that the postmodern project naturally subsumes writing from the margins, whether it comes from the pens of immigrants, ethnic minorities, women, or other subalterns. I am mindful, nonetheless, of how atomized, balkanized, and globalized contemporary writing has become. The literary historian must keep in mind that the post-1945 literary fashion was never wholly “postmodern.” Modernism took its time dying (it staged something of a comeback it seems to me, in the shock-the-middle-class aesthetic of the Beats). Meanwhile, realist and naturalist fiction continued to be written, with authors such as Bellow, Updike, Oates, and the early Mailer vying honorably with the glamorous iconoclasts (Barth, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and company). One thinks, too, of what has been called the New Yorker school—Salinger, Cheever, Updike, Ann Beattie, and the Nabokov who published fiction and memoir in that magazine. When one considers the great outpouring of fiction foregrounding the experience of women, the increasing prominence of gay and lesbian writing, and the vitality of various ethnic, immigrant, and transnational literatures, one recognizes the profound branching or eddying of whatever might once have figured as literary mainstream. This manifold division or furcation, of course, merely bears out one of postmodernism’s basic premises: the multiplicity of cultures and realities, and aesthetic legitimacies. But the literary scene remains a tangled bank, its denizens in busy competition for readers, sales, attention, prizes, fame, and, yes, canonical status. Generational conflict may or may not figure, but we err to think that the many voices will naturally blend together, as Thomas Pynchon once said, “like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch.”1 I come to this discussion in hopes of moving beyond my special interest in certain writers who have the power, over and over, to move me with their language, their insight, their originality, and their attunement to the circumstances of life at a millennial cusp. My pantheon is personal, but its gods have spoken to one who has been reading and writing about contemporary fiction, however quixotic the enterprise, for several decades now. Among the happy few who share my passion, there is some agreement about the stature of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. Any given reader will have her or his own additions: Toni Morrison for many, the Canadian Margaret Atwood for me. I am, however, a member of that minority which never really took to Philip Roth. I am also among those who continue to affirm the importance of Norman Mailer. One cannot gainsay Updike’s importance, even though he seems, like Joyce Carol Oates, to be overcommitted to what Andreas Huyssen calls “the

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 224

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

225

dogma of mimetic referentiality” (1986, 170, 173). These names constitute a generation, beyond which lies a kind of literary terra incognita—or at least a conspicuous lack of consensus. As Andrew Hoberek has observed, “[t]he pleasure and the danger alike of thinking about contemporary literature lie in the tenuous nature of any hypotheses we might put forward—a fact that we should keep in mind but that should not stop us from proceeding” (2007, 237). One can only keep one’s ear to the ground, read the reviews, talk to others who specialize in the study of current fiction. Ultimately, one reads as widely as possible and gauges one’s honest responses.

1. Ulysses or Telemachus According to a Chinese proverb, “One generation plants the trees, and another gets the shade.” Unless, of course, the trees fall to axes wielded by a generation wanting its place in the sun. Thus it is, sometimes, with literary generations. Younger writers, finding all pedestals on Mt. Parnassus taken, may resort to toppling certain of the more recent monuments. Such ruthlessness in making space for themselves suggests the need to amend T. S. Eliot’s picture of young artists gently immersing themselves in the great river of literature. Eliot famously affirms that “tradition” accommodates “individual talent.” Harold Bloom, however, asserts that the literary past produces an “anxiety of influence” in young writers. Arguing that these “ephebes” (a decidedly noninclusive term, one notes) must realize themselves by repudiating, subverting, or rewriting their predecessors, Bloom has proposed an elaborate typology of the literary displacements occasioned by filiation. Though he characterizes the relationship of ephebe to precursor as “filial,” the word seems, in the Bloomian lexicon, not to imply much in the way of “dutiful,” “respectful,” or “loving.” Bloom, after Freud, emphasizes the combative relationship between offspring and parent. One wonders, then, whether Bloom’s model takes properly into account the ways in which certain artistic generations, “filial” in a more positive sense, might be disinclined to subscribe to an aesthetic of subversion and displacement. One wonders, too, whether breaking with an inherited aesthetic should be viewed as intrinsically superior, somehow, to artistic activities aimed at building on the achievements of a parental generation. Ulysses and Telemachus, as they appear in the familiar Tennyson poem, may figure for readers the two kinds of literary sensibility under consideration here. Tennyson, one recalls, makes his Homeric figures appeal to the imagination of an age much exercised by the problems of empire. As the metaphorical distillation of a particularly Victorian contrast, father and son embody twinned ideals: the risk-taking, heroic explorer on the one hand, the responsible consolidator of civilization on the other. By the same token, the literary historian should recognize that a Telemachus of letters can do as much to advance literary art as some bold, bourgeois-shocking, manifesto-writing Odysseus. But anyone scrutinizing generational identities among writers publishing in the decades

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 225

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

226

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

after, say, 1945 may well ask: does postmodern literary art owe less to its Telemachuses than to its Odysseuses? Which is to say: must sons always slay fathers? Are literary mothers, for that matter, exempt from the oedipal violence? In the literary culture of “democratic nations,” de Tocqueville observes, “each new generation is a new people” (2007, 418). Ortega y Gasset, however, argues against the idea “that the life of each generation consists of struggling against the previous generation” (1958, 52), and Hélène Cixous urges criticism to “get away from the dialectic which has it that the only good father is a dead one” (1976, 890). What, then, of the mechanics of literary filiation in our time? Do they foster anxiety or Bildung? For that matter, does our age foster the kind of bold pronouncements that characterized notable literary paradigm shifts in the past—the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Woolf’s “Modern Fiction,” or the pronunciamentos that issued from the pen of Ezra Pound, each dedicated to butchering some sacred cow of Victorian or Edwardian literary aesthetics? Postmodernism, as it happens, left the polemics to the critics, who made reputations with book titles such as What Was Literature? and Against Interpretation. (In the previously noted “What Was Postmodernism?” McHale argues—mischievous title notwithstanding—against premature pronouncements about the directions taken by contemporary letters.) Setting aside On Moral Fiction (John Gardner’s prickly plea, in 1978, for a literature of affirmation, with characters recognizable, like those in classic literature, as “models of virtue”), the closest thing to a bourgeois-shocking iconoclast among the real literati was probably John Hawkes, who in 1965 denounced “plot, character, setting, and theme” as “the true enemies of the novel” (Enck 1965, 149). John Barth’s highly influential and frequently cited essays “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980) were by contrast not incendiary but rather explanatory, even apologetic. If more recent disquisitions tend, still, toward the polite and mannerly, we may deduce that the dominant aesthetic remains viable—and ready to accommodate new practitioners as yet unready to declare themselves oppressed. But styles evolve, and the young cannot indefinitely reframe the questions of the old. I undertake, then, to consider whether that old ghost, influence, continues to haunt the inheritors of a greatness that, having announced itself first in the 1960s, continues to monopolize readers decades later. That greatness, by the way, complicates the task of the would-be assessor of the younger generation’s work. As one tries to gauge the achievement of a Richard Powers or a David Foster Wallace or a Gloria Naylor, out tumble fresh masterpieces from Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, Oates, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy—masters undiminished, who give every indication that, out-Bellowing Bellow, they will continue to publish significant fiction for years to come. But sooner or later these exemplars (all born in the thirties) will join the late Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, William Styron, Ronald Sukenick, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, and Gilbert Sorrentino (all born in the twenties) in the effulgence or obscurity of the hereafter. It is instructive, by the way, to consider our

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 226

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

227

perceptions of post–World War II writers who died betimes, for example, Flannery O’Connor (born 1925), Donald Barthelme (born 1931), John Gardner (born 1933), Raymond Carver (born 1938), Kathy Acker and Octavia Butler (both born in 1947), and David Foster Wallace (born 1962). Because of their premature deaths (O’Connor died in 1964, Gardner in 1982, Barthelme in 1989, Carver in 1988, Acker in 1997, Butler in 2006, Wallace in 2008), these writers can seem temporally disconnected from their surviving contemporaries, who continued—and continue—to write and publish. One comes to balk at the thought of John Gardner, say, as a member of the generation born in the thirties (admittedly, Gardner attempted to define himself against the trends of his time). Gardner’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident, along with the eclipse into which he drifted, creates something of the perception one hears about from old combat veterans: their fallen comrades remain, in memory, forever youthful and red-cheeked. As Laurence Binyon wrote: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. (“For the Fallen” 77)

2. Tradition and Love-Lies-Bleeding Perhaps (if the military metaphor will allow one more inflection) one may imagine DeLillo as an old campaigner, unlikely to “fade away” in the manner described by General MacArthur. On the literary battlefield, as on its real-life counterpart, survival depends on certain basic forms of discipline, on tactical innovation, on something like “covert ops,” even. Or so Martin Amis has suggested. Reviewing Underworld (1997), Amis observes a facet of its author that remains underappreciated: “DeLillo has always been a literary writer; deeply literary, and also covertly literary” (1997, 12). What I have discovered in reading and thinking about DeLillo for a number of years confirms this insight, but I resist that second, italicized adverb, which implies something more furtive, more under-the-radar, than is quite the case. What is at issue here may be less the imputed authorial stealth than some wider attenuation, among readers, of literary expectation. Few readers, that is, look to DeLillo and company for anything like the foregrounded intertexts of a Joyce, Eliot, or Pound. Yet DeLillo’s allusiveness represents an important point of continuity with his modernist predecessors. A case in point: the 2005 play Love-Lies-Bleeding, which takes up the disturbing topic of home-schooled euthanasia. The allusions in this play—from Diogenes Laertius to Giuseppe Ungaretti—invite the reader or playgoer to make a host of meaningful connections. As one might expect with DeLillo, these connections tend to illuminate fresh thinking about the mechanics of language, especially as traceable in the uncanny dynamics of names and naming. Love-Lies-Bleeding features another DeLillo character

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 227

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

228

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

who discerns the poetry in names. Like Lauren Hartke of The Body Artist (2001) or Klara Sax of Underworld (1997), Alex Macklin operates, as artist, at the postmodern periphery. As his son recalls, he “gave up easel painting [. . .] to do land art in the West” (DeLillo 2005, 25). One savors, as one of the play’s most affecting passages, the stichomythic exchange in which two of those closest to the moribund Alex recall his delight in the evocative “names of desert plants. [. . .] He thought there was something inevitable in these names. They don’t seem made up” (33–4). Though capable of “[r]eciting [. . .] name, type, genus, species” (34), Alex evidently took particular pleasure in the way folk nomenclature transforms the landscape itself into a poem: parish larkspur, barrel cactus, jumping cholla, fairy duster, Indian paintbrush, paloverde, Apache plume, Joshua tree, night-blooming cereus, desert mariposa, and of course love-lies-bleeding, the plant that lends its name to the play and orients it to mythology and the literary art of the past. But scientific names also contain poetry: the Latin Amaranthus, genus of love-lies-bleeding, derives from the Greek for “unfading” or “never wasting away,” and how bitter, in a play about dealing with the failure of a stroke victim to waste away at a rate convenient to the healthy, this taxonomic recollection of the immortal flower that carpets Elysium. One thinks, too, of the play by Beaumont and Fletcher (Philaster, or Love Lies A-bleeding) and, perhaps more importantly, of the poem in which Wordsworth, recognizing in it the “semblance of unpitied smart,” salutes this “flower how rich in sadness” as an emblem of what the ancient Latin poets called lachrymae rerum, the tears in things (1936a, 134). The sadness figures also in the obsequies for Alex Macklin, euthanized by his first wife, their son, and the reluctantly complicit fourth wife who was on hand for the two strokes that left him in a “[p]ersistent vegetative state” (DeLillo 2005, 27). Eulogizing Alex, his widow laments: “He goes nowhere now, into nothing” (83). She seems to distill the terrible negation of another poem by Wordsworth, the valedictory for Lucy: No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees. (1936b, 149)

In a sense, Wordsworth, too, does “land art.” What might one conclude from such intertextual encounters? Insofar as our sense of literary continuity has been imperilled by certain elements or features of postmodern praxis, I would say that with DeLillo we learn anew how to connect texts and writers with their antecedents. This writer “makes it new”—indeed, makes it postmodern— without feeling obliged to conform or defer to the more tendentious pronouncements of critics and theorists. Postmodernism, after all, is not what politics, sociology, theory, or criticism prescribes—it is what a certain kind of the contemporary artist does.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 228

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

229

3. Defining Generations Artists cannot seal themselves off in some social or professional equivalent of Proust’s corklined room. They must interact with their contemporaries and with predecessors—many of them still living. If a literary tradition or style proves robust, with more than a single season of legitimacy, one may wonder about the locus of maximum energy and purpose: is it in the founding generation or in its successors? One wonders, too, how to characterize or define a generation—especially a postmodern one. Although a uniform generational time span has always eluded precise quantification (20 years? 30?), attempts to theorize this problem have yielded some worthwhile considerations. Certainly the idea of generations has fascinated culture critics for a long time. A quick survey reveals that it exercised Wilhelm Dilthey, François Mentré, Ortega y Gasset, Eduard Wechssler, Henri Peyre, Wilhelm Pinder, Julius Petersen, Karl Mannheim, Julián Marías, and Auguste Comte. If in recent years we seem to have abandoned attempts at definition, we may still situate ourselves to advantage if we think beyond mere sequentiality or contemporaneity with regard to established and emergent authors. Most of those scrutinizing this question agree that those born or living at the same time do not necessarily constitute a generation. Early and late, analysts view the shared experience of important historical developments as crucial to a generation’s ability to recognize itself and speak with something like a collective voice. The struggle to theorize generations seemed to become more urgent early in the twentieth century. In 1910, the Spanish writer who called himself Azorín coined the term “Generation of ‘98” to describe certain of his Spanish contemporaries early in the twentieth century (Azorín 1954a, 1139). Here and in subsequent essays, notably “Generaciones de escritores” (1954b) and “La generación de 1898” (1975), he suggested that a literary generation might be recognized through the refurbishing or refashioning of styles and forms on the part of its members, through their penchant for social and political analysis and criticism, and through the group’s eventual rethinking or reframing of the larger patterns of literary history. In 1923, Ortega y Gasset augmented Azorín’s analysis: “The changes in vital sensibility which are decisive in history,” he observes, “appear under the form of the generation. A generation is not a handful of outstanding men, not simply a mass of men; it resembles a new integration of the social body [. . .]. The generation is a dynamic compromise between mass and individual, and is the most important conception in history” (Ortega y Gasset 1958, 14–15). In Germany, meanwhile, sociologists Julius Petersen and Karl Mannheim engaged in their own version of this discussion. Petersen undertook to devise a kind of grammar of the cohort: he affirms with his predecessors (notably Dilthey) that those within a given generation have witnessed certain events important to their nation and the world; they are shaped by similar educational experience (Bildungselemente); they often share perceptions of a stiffening up (erstarren) in the preceding generation; they address themselves, as

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 229

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

230

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

artists, to similar themes; and they speak—in both the literal and the figurative sense—a common language [Generationssprache] (Petersen 1930, 161–82). Mannheim, like Ortega y Gasset, argued that “[m]ere contemporaneity becomes sociologically significant only when it also involves participation in the same historical and social circumstances.” Mannheim suggested, moreover, that some age groups falter in creating their own “entelechies”: they attach themselves to older or younger generations. [I]t is characteristic of cultural life that unattached elements are always attracted to perfected configurations, even when the unformed, groping impulse differs in many respects from the configuration to which it is attracted. In this way the impulses and trends peculiar to a generation may remain concealed because of the existence of the clear-cut form of another generation to which they have become attached. (1952, 298)

Recognizing the staying power of certain cultural developments, both historic and artistic, Mannheim implies that criticism need not disparage the integrity or originality of artists who of necessity enlist under the banner of their age’s dominant aesthetic. Within any such dominant, of course, artistic growth eventually peaks, and often one sees a slide into mannerism—the easy, unfresh consolidation of a once powerful style. The epigone displaces the genius. But this routinization is not—at least historically—the work of two or three decades. What follows a particular climacteric in the history of any art, in other words, can as easily be the fuller realization of something present only as potential in the work of the innovator’s generation. One thinks of the comprehensive fulfillment of Giotto’s promise in the full efflorescence of the Quattrocento in Florence, followed in its turn by the high Renaissance of the Cinquecento. (Nor was late fifteenth-century mannerism such a decline if it could boast a Greco, a Tintoretto, and a Bronzino). If one discerns successive generations building on the work of their predecessors here, why not in contemporary literary art? In other words, what prospects are there for surpassing the achievements of the first-generation postmodernists, those who, in the 1960s, shaped the new literary aesthetic? Before trying to answer that question, let me be a little more specific about that first generation. Consciously or unconsciously realizing tendencies annunciated by Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov, they charted a somewhat different literary course from that of their contemporaries, the Beats—whose prodigal energies were so obviously self-consuming and self-exhausting. Though mindful of an element of difference in their achievement, I group writers born in the 1920s (Joseph Heller, Grace Paley, Flannery O’Connor, Paule Marshall, Kurt Vonnegut, Gilbert Sorrentino, Norman Mailer, Ursula LeGuin) with those born in the 1930s (Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Robert Coover). I realize that the work of the first group may seem slightly more tentative than that of the second, in which the full paradigm shift manifests itself. I realize, too, the temptation to recuperate the

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 230

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

231

early fictions of Heller, Hawkes, Gaddis, et al. to late-phase modernism—and those of writers a decade younger (Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy) to a somehow more valid or recognizable postmodernism. I am uncomfortable, however, with the notion of claiming separate generational status for these two neighboring decades—especially when both gave us writers who in the 1960s published work that established the new, postmodern aesthetic. By the same token, setting aside the Dos Passos-influenced Naked and the Dead (1948) and the Joyce-influenced Invisible Man (1952), I sometimes think I discern more traces of residual modernism in the work of Pynchon and DeLillo than in the work of predecessors who, though a decade or so closer to the moderns, would probably not have encountered them in the course of their formal education. (One recalls that anecdote about Thomas Pynchon and his friend Richard Fariña gotten up as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, respectively, for a costume party at Cornell). Given the exuberance of the first postmoderns, it can seem that their successors—those born in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies—must represent a falling off. But who are they, these second and third generation postmodernists, and have they erected new wings to—or attempted to bulldoze—the splendid edifice erected by Heller, Paley, Pynchon, DeLillo, and company? Or have they settled into a merely custodial relation to the achievements of their predecessors? Whose is the voice of the new generation? Lev Grossman recently speculated in the pages of a popular news magazine about whether one could discern a single voice (or voices) amid the under-forty generation of novelists. In the past, the generational voice was always that of some white male—now Fitzgerald, now Hemingway, now Salinger, Kerouac, Heller, or Vonnegut. But Grossman wryly notes the essential puerility behind any such notion. “The paradox of every Voice novel,” he says, lies in its gathering “a generation of readers together around the idea that they alone are the single badass misfit truth teller in a world full of phonies.” Grossman eventually decides that ours is not an age congenial to the Voice novel. But “[i]f the novelists under 40 have a shared preoccupation, it is—to put it as dryly as possible— immigration. They write about characters who cross borders” (2006, 63). Although Grossman seems to mean borders of all kinds, he may be credited with recognizing that the storytelling of immigrants constitutes a real literary phenomenon in the United States (one observes parallel trends in England, Germany, and France). Publishers have caught on to the seemingly insatiable appetite of readers for narratives of the border-crossing experience, and fictions by new immigrant literati seem to turn up in every issue of the New York Times Book Review. Immigrant writers have won all of the major literary awards, including MacArthur grants (Charles Simic, Walter Abish, Aleksandar Hemon) and even the Nobel Prize (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott). Moreover, as previously noted, the postmodern seismograph spikes every bit as sharply at immigrant fictions as at those of native born literati—who might be thought to enjoy greater ludic latitude, more license to experiment.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 231

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

232

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

4. A “Great Divide” As I set to work on this project, my pulse quickened at a line in Andreas Huyssen’s superb 1986 study, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism: “I will now suggest a historical distinction between the postmodernism of the 1960s and that of the 1970s and early 1980s.” If not exactly the project I was undertaking, the proposed “historical distinction” might, I thought, yield a useful methodology or terminology. Describing, first, the vexed relationship between modernist high art and mass culture, Huyssen emphasizes the ways in which postmodernism mediates or transcends this “great divide.” Initially part of an avant-garde (in the 1960s, that is), postmodernism presently—in the 1970s and 1980s—evolved fresh forms to register “the emergence of a culture of eclecticism” that to some degree obviated “critique, transgression or negation.” At the same time, along a parallel track, postmodernism continued its “resistance, critique, and negation of the status quo in non-modernist and non-avantgardist terms.” I am not altogether convinced, however, that “the postmodernism of the 1960s tried to revitalize the heritage of the European avant-garde and to give it an American form along what one could call in short-hand the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis” (Huyssen 1986, 188). I resist the implicit characterization of early postmodernism as warmed-over Dadaism, which could at times make common cause with its more strategically disruptive cousin, mainstream modernism. As Huyssen himself points out, avant-gardist intersections with modernism took place largely in Europe, where the unimaginative middle classes had co-opted high art as a validator of social status. Because high art in the United States never enjoyed the status it enjoyed in Europe, he observes, American modernists remained especially passionate in their claims for art’s legitimacy and importance—they took relatively little interest in the European avant-garde’s attacks on the cosy relationship between art and bourgeois culture. Rather, as one sees in the musings of the dying writer in Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” American modernists reproach their native culture for its general philistinism. For the student of current trends in American literary art, then, the historicizing of questions about the avant-garde’s role in postmodernism can seem oversubtle (except insofar as one thinks of the Beats as both avant-garde and postmodern). But even if Huyssen offers little help with the question most under scrutiny here—what differentiates the writers who came to prominence in the 1960s from the succeeding generation or generations?—one should note some of his more cogent observations. An example: “Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture” (188). In the 1960s, he continues, “[t]here emerged a vigorous, though again largely uncritical attempt to validate popular culture as a challenge to the canon of high art, modernist or traditional” (194). Thus, he concludes: “the great divide that separated high modernism from mass culture and that was codified in the various

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 232

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

233

classical accounts of modernism no longer seems relevant to postmodern artistic or critical sensibilities” (197). These pronouncements would seem to be borne out when a Thomas Pynchon—arguably Zeus in the postmodern Pantheon— can supply the voice in depictions of himself on The Simpsons or when curmudgeonly Cormac McCarthy agrees to an interview—his first in 15 years— with Oprah Winfrey, the same daytime television personality whose embrace so troubled Jonathan Franzen (about whom more presently). Certainly one discerns abundant cross-fertilization between the contemporary novel and popular genres. One has seen what Don DeLillo can do with the thriller (Running Dog); or John Gardner with the spirit of Disney (in Grendel and The Sunlight Dialogues); or Thomas Pynchon with cartoonist/animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery (in The Crying of Lot 49), with film culture (Gravity’s Rainbow), with television (Vineland), and with the detective novel (Inherent Vice); or any of a number of writers with the idea of the theme park (I think of Pynchon again—Zwölfkinder in Gravity’s Rainbow—or George Saunders in the title story of Pastoralia, or Richard Powers in Prisoner’s Dilemma, or, less seriously, Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park). This granted, I squirm to read novelists who reveal cultural poverty (rather than some principled postmodern egalitarianism) in their inability (not, that is, unwillingness) to include some reference to art and ideas outside the pop cultural matrix. There is, alas, a body of work—sometimes taking itself quite seriously—that references only brand names and the productions of recent popular culture. I was struck, some years back, while enjoying Stephen King’s The Stand, to realize that the range of high-cultural reference in it amounted to a single, rather predictable echo of Yeats. By the same token, the hackneyed apocalypticism of the novel’s conclusion (complete with the staging of a new Calvary) made me nostalgic for the day when biblical allusion actually carried some conviction. O Tempora! O Milton! Still, the much discussed 2001 case of Franzen contra Oprah may in fact be understood as a vestige of what Huyssen calls “the modernist dogma that all mass culture is monolithic Kitsch, psychologically regressive and minddestroying” (1986, 198). Franzen’s alarm at the prospect of mass media commodification, along with his apparent conviction that a popular book club posed a threat to his artistic purity and autonomy, does seem to be the reassertion of an older, pre-postmodern contempt for or fear of mass culture. In Franzen’s own words, “[T]he artist who’s really serious about resisting a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image must resist becoming an image himself” (1996, 50). However, ungracious, Franzen poses an interesting problem to the literary historian. His case prompts one to perpend the passionate attention to craft on the part of many of our most serious contemporary writers. Can the artists themselves have become a little uncomfortable with the collapse of boundaries? The correspondence between Franzen (born in 1959) and Don DeLillo (born in 1936) suggests a quiet—or not so quiet—insistence on discrimination. Authors write, DeLillo told Jonathan Franzen, to deliver themselves from “mass identity” (qtd. in Franzen 54). Thus DeLillo speaks sympathetically,

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 233

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

234

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

in an interview, of the “writer [. . .] working against the age,” the writer who “feels some satisfaction at not being widely read,” the writer “diminished,” even, “by an audience” (LeClair 1983,87). Franzen is not alone in seeking inspiration and example (if not outright mentorship) among writers of the older generation. A central character in Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) declares Thomas Pynchon his “favorite living novelist” (Powers 1991, 468), and the novelist-narrator of Galatea 2.2 (1995) (who calls himself Richard Powers) mentions having read Gravity’s Rainbow in high school. Among the innumerable counterparts of these fictional sons of Pyn, one includes the real-life Powers, along with George Saunders, Ricky Moody, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Joanna Scott, Percival Everett, Tom Robbins, Kathryn Kramer, Carter Scholz, Trey Ellis, Jim Shepard, Emily Barton, Jay Cantor, and Steve Erickson—all contributors to the 2005 special issue of Bookforum devoted to Pynchon. These writers practice discipleship in various ways. Delighting in the anatomy, the catalogue, and the endless list, many write fictions of “encyclopedic” inclusiveness, often embedding salutes to the master in their texts. One notes, in passing, that Pynchon occasionally returns the compliment—and not just in the blurbs that his bibliographers cherish like the fewmets of some elusive literary prey. In Against the Day (Pynchon 2006, 964) for example, he pauses at one point over stories that disguise ancient atrocity, as if to tip his hat to the Richard Powers of Operation Wandering Soul. In much the same way, when a character in Against the Day (1055) wakes up beside the body of his victim in a surreal Los Angeles, one recalls the similar scene in Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X (1993, 52). In a 1996 article, the critic Tom LeClair speculated on the emergence of a post-Pynchon, post-DeLillo poetics, especially visible in the work of younger writers “educated in the Age of Information.” LeClair notes that “Powers, born in 1957; [William] Vollmann, born in 1959; and [David Foster] Wallace, born in 1962,” all profess in various ways to admire and look up to Pynchon, 20 or so years their elder. But where polymathic Pynchon tore down the wall between science and the humanities, his successors were born, as it were, into the information culture, which they take for granted and manipulate in ways that seem impossible to authors whose demographics make them prisoners (one is tempted to say “virtual” prisoners) of an analogue sensibility (LeClair 1996, 12–13). Supremely comfortable with the new technology and the new science, the postmodern ephebes are the literary equivalents of kids who can program the DVD player to interface with the stereo system, the cell phone, the digital camera, the camcorder, and the MP3 player. Powers is a kind of reverse version of Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy champion who majored in English and became a software engineer. The author of the immensely original Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1987), the stunning Gold Bug Variations (1991), and the disturbing Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Powers has worked as a programmer but found his real calling as one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation. His characters often share his background in or aptitude for computer (and other) technology.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 234

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

235

But a single swallow (or even three) does not make a summer. One must remember that many important younger authors take relatively little interest in information technology. Many, in fact (Tyler, Beattie, Haruf, Smiley), flourish as writers of what might be called the postmodern novel of manners. Again, we are left with the problem of competing postmodernisms, tidal pools instead of the tide itself. I do, however, see considerable continuity between the David Foster Wallaces, the William Vollmanns, the Mark Z. Danielewskis and such older writers as Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo. In that they perfected a style that remains fresh in the hands of their successors, the first postmodernists resemble such great modernist counterparts as Joyce and Eliot (though not, perhaps, the Hemingway whose style, often characterized as influential, actually resists imitation, except to parodic ends). Thus Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, and McCarthy may plausibly be said to inspire Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and, less convincingly, Tom Robbins or Chuck Palahniuk. Certainly one sees, across this spectrum, an immense and unflagging delight in the possibilities afforded by an extensive vocabulary, deployed with wit and precision. Not that clever wordsmithing always translates to great achievement. An ability to pyrotechnicalize on the page cannot obviate the need for passionate ideation and a larger artistic vision. But the best of our younger writers, as I have noted previously, strive to write fictions of encyclopedic scope, novels with “Menippean” credentials. Subject to what Janette Turner Hospital calls “the God itch” (Greiner 2007, 334), all delight as much in creating worlds as in representing them. If in fact they view referentiality in language as problematic, language yet remains for them the tool to keep ever sharp. The younger postmodernists, like their older counterparts, delight in supple, ludic, performative prose.

5. Tracing the Mainstream My problem here turns out to be the conflict between a perceived atomization of fictive practice and a felt need to discern some kind of larger continuity—the continuity that will presumably become plain to later observers and literary historians. After all, we seldom think of previous periods of literary history as congeries of competing aesthetic visions and goals—in retrospect, at least, the contending politics (University Wits–Upstart Crows, Catholic–Protestant, Roundhead–Cavalier, Whig–Tory, and so on) are subsumed within the larger, epistemic order. With the passing of the years, a true dominant emerges, an entity that mutates, adapts, and survives to redirect the trajectory of culture. As Wilhelm Dilthey would have said, “entelechies” materialize and gather in the disparate strands of the cultural moment. But how long do artistic or musical or literary styles hold their own? Do their life spans become progressively shorter as time goes on? Can one still imagine the emergence of an era that, in its music, its art, and its literature, might vie in authority and longevity with, say, the Renaissance or the Augustan

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 235

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

236

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Age or the Victorian period? Are new movements—black humor, surfiction, minimalism, Kmart realism—doomed to brief transits across the cultural heaven? Does even genius get only 15 minutes? Every literary age has its shortlived sensations, but our own can be especially quick to dismiss. How troubling to think of all the gifted, often prolific writers who have in recent years proved to be meteors, not new planets: William Goyen, John Gardner, D. M. Thomas, Donna Tartt, Rachel Ingalls, maybe even Charles Frazier or Kaye Gibbons. Along with these, one ranges the one-book wonders, living proof of Fitzgerald’s dictum, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Ross Lockridge comes to mind, along with such admitted titans as Ralph Ellison, who achieved planetary status on the strength of a single great book, or Joseph Heller, who wrote several novels but only one great one (much the same can, of course, be said of Melville). It can be instructive to ask colleagues who study, teach, and write about contemporary fiction to name the authors whose work they feel obliged to read promptly, as soon as it appears. Which authors do they merely sample? How much of a sample do they consider adequate? Which respected authors do they gradually stop keeping up with? The other day, asked whether I had yet read the latest Paul Auster, I found myself thinking: no—I have read all the Auster I need to, especially when I consider all the as-yet-unsampled authors who await my attention. As for the authors whose books I myself always read as soon as they appear (or, by going online in search of “ARCs” or Advanced Reader’s Copies, before they appear), the list bears repeating: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, Chang-rae Lee. (I have included, in the appendix, some responses to this question.) Not that reliable prognostication always figures in the likes and dislikes of specialists in contemporary fiction. Doubtless, we have neglected our share of Chattertons and Melvilles, and doubtless we have embraced this or that equivalent of Colley Cibber or James Branch Cabell. Indeed, reflection on the last two, both famous literati in their day, should prompt worried questions about which of our current stars will, a hundred or two hundred years hence, elicit incredulous chuckles among those who read the classics—if such things still exist—of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. The unrecognized, of course, we have always with us. One thinks of John Kennedy O’Toole as our Chatterton, that marvelous boy. What might he have accomplished had he not given up and committed suicide? Others, perhaps equally gifted, survive amid exiguous applause from a tiny readership: Rachel Ingalls, perhaps, or Curtis White, or almost anyone published by the visionary folks at Dalkey Archive Press. By way of conclusion, I should like briefly to comment—with particular reference to DeLillo—on the narrowness of my focus. I realize that much artistic energy has been shunted into film, contemporary music, graphic fiction, and other genres, but my interest remains fixed on the contemporary American novel, however precarious its appeal to consumers of literary and other art. I do not, that is, repine at the thought of merely documenting the decline of

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 236

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

237

a once robust form. After all, “[i]f serious reading dwindles to near nothingness,” as Don DeLillo has remarked, “it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end” (qtd. in Franzen 54). I would be more worried, of course, if the novel were not so frequently—and prematurely—pronounced dead; nor is it particularly worrisome if the fictions and authors adduced here subsist at the margins. “If I were a writer,” says Owen Brademas in DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names, “how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception” (DeLillo 1982, 77). These sentiments seem to echo those of the author himself: Adam Begley observes that “[i]f everything in the culture argues against the novel, that’s what DeLillo’s going to make. If celebrity is the expected path, he’ll find a detour. He chooses to set up shop on the far periphery, in the shadows—out of sight, but with a clear view of the center” (1997, 490). The margins, then, afford a good vantage from which to observe a culture, and the critic, one hopes, may profitably share that perspective with the serious novelist. Thus, one makes no claims regarding the ability of contemporary literary artists to be, as it were, “players” (the word echoes another DeLillo title). Indeed, the inability really to shape public perception—or even to aspire to do so—may constitute another of those modern–postmodern demarcations that critics from Ihab Hassan to Fredric Jameson like to enumerate. As recently as 1959, Norman Mailer could aspire to effect, single-handedly, “a revolution in the consciousness of our time” (20, 15), but by century’s end such vaunts gave way to recognition, in some quarters, that certain tectonic shifts in the culture had sidelined its most gifted literary artists, however cogent and perceptive their thought. DeLillo’s Bill Gray makes the point most trenchantly: “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of a culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness” (DeLillo 1991, 41). This painful recognition recurs in his thought: “For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game. [. . .] What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous” (156–7). Critics rightly decline to see Bill Gray as DeLillo’s Mauberley-like self-portrait. In the end, the fictional writer in Mao II enacts an authorial paralysis that seems never to have troubled his creator. Bill’s oft-quoted remarks, however, suggest that he has been brought low by the great paradox of modern and postmodern poetics: politicized expectation diminishes the art it affects to take seriously. Bill remembers Beckett but forgets Sir Philip Sidney, who understood that “the poet nothing affirmeth.” To paraphrase that famous line from Auden, the novel makes nothing happen. That said, one can also paraphrase William Carlos Williams and say: “It is difficult / to get the news from [novels] / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there” (1968, 150–1). Great fiction, like the poetry to which Sidney and Auden and Williams actually refer, captures human experience

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 237

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

238

in definitive ways and offers valuable insights. Great contemporary fiction, by the same token, orients us to the business of living with and in the sprawling, vital, endlessly vulgar culture of the American moment. In 1923, T.S. Eliot imagined that the modern novel, as newly configured by James Joyce, might give its readers a handle on “contemporary history,” which the author of The Waste Land characterized as an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” (1923, 482). In 1961, Philip Roth lamented that the contemporary novelist “has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible” an “American reality” that so “stupifies, “sickens,” and “infuriates” that it becomes “a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination” (1961, 224). Half a century later, the “American reality” has become, if anything, even more appalling. But whatever its capacity for beggaring the imagination, it continues to register—often in unique ways—on the constantly calibrated instrument that is the contemporary American novel. Those of us who read serious fiction have at least the comfort of a heightened knowledge, however Cassandra-like and apologetic our pedagogy. Beyond these considerations abide the questions of who or what comes next. One often hears (in Walter Jackson Bate, in John Barth, in Harold Bloom) that every succeeding literary generation has to come to terms with its sense of inadequacy before the achievements of its predecessors. Goethe, one recalls, was relieved not to have been born an English writer—having to make it new after Shakespeare would have been, he felt, just too daunting. But our theorizing such anxieties (to use Bloom’s still-compelling word) must avoid selling literary creativity short. Genius always delights in throwing over its models and refurbishing—or reinventing—the language.

Appendix A: A Selection of Contemporary American Fiction Writers by Birth Decade 1920s: William Gaddis (1922), Grace Paley (1922), Kurt Vonnegut (1922), Jack Kerouac (1922), Joseph Heller (1923), Norman Mailer (1923), James Baldwin (1924), William H. Gass (1924), John Hawkes (1925), Flannery O’Connor (1925), David Markson (1927), Ursula LeGuin (1929), Paule Marshall (1929), Gilbert Sorrentino (1929) 1930s: John Barth (1930), Paul West (1930), Walter Abish (1931), Donald Barthelme (1931), Toni Morrison (1931), Robert Coover (1932), John Gardner (1933), Cormac McCarthy (1933), Philip Roth (1933), Joan Didion (1934), N. Scott Momaday (1934), E. Annie Proulx (1935), Don DeLillo (1936), Thomas Pynchon (1937), Ishmael Reed (1938), Raymond Carver (1938), Lynn Sharon Schwartz (1939) 1940s: Maxine Hong Kingston (1940), Bobbie Ann Mason (1940), James Welch (1940), Rachel Ingalls (1940), Anne Tyler (1941), John Edgar Wideman (1941), Rikki Ducornet (1943), Kent Haruf (1943), Richard Ford (1944),

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 238

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

239

Eric Kraft (1944), Alice Walker (1944), Michael Dorris (1945), Jim Dodge (1945), Tim O’Brien (1946), Stephen Wright (1946), Paul Auster (1947), Kathy Acker (1947), Ann Beattie (1947), Ron Hansen (1947), Octavia Butler (1947), Lydia Davis (1947), Marilynne Robinson (1947), T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948), William Gibson (1948), Leslie Marmon Silko (1948), Dorothy Allison (1949 ), Richard Russo (1949), Jane Smiley (1949) 1950s: Kate Braverman (1950), Steve Erickson (1950), Charles Frazier (1950), Gloria Naylor (1950), Oscar Hijuelos (1951), Ted Mooney (1951), Curtis White (1951), Amy Tan (1952) Sandra Cisneros (1954),Louise Erdrich (1954), Jay McInerney (1955), Mark Richard (1955), Mark Leyner (1956), Carole Maso (1956), Lorrie Moore (1957), Richard Powers (1957), George Saunders (1958),William Vollmann (1959) 1960s: Charles D’Ambrosio (1960), Joanna Scott (1960), Rick Moody (1961), Mark Costello (1962), Chuck Palahniuk (1962), David Foster Wallace (1962), Michael Chabon (1963), Randall Kenan (1963), Ann Patchett (1963), Jonathan Lethem (1964), Bret Easton Ellis (1964), Sherman Alexie (1966), Mark Z. Danielewski (1966), Claire Messud (1966), Allegra Goodman (1967), Sam Lipsyte (1968), Colson Whitehead (1969) 1970s: Dave Eggers (1970), Nathan Englander (1970), Nicole Krauss (1974), Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) The immigrants: Bharati Mukherjee (1940), Janette Turner Hospital (1942), Ursula Hegi (1946), Wendy Law-Yone (1947), Art Spiegelman (1948), Jamaica Kincaid (1949), Julia Alvarez (1950), Ha Jin (1956), Achy Obejas (1956), Anchee Min (1957), Cristina Garcia (1958), Lan Cao (1961), Mylène Dressler (1963), Aleksandar Hemon (1964), Chang-rae Lee (1965), Jhumpa Lahiri (1967), Junot Díaz (1968), Edwidge Danticat (1969)

Appendix B: An Email Query Concerning Contemporary American Writers Dear Friends and Colleagues: Someone asked, the other day, if I’d read the latest novel by X, and I found myself thinking: I’ve read enough by X. I then asked myself (it’s part of my literary generations project) what living American novelists I consider essential. Don’t know about you, but I have a hard time keeping my head above water—and I seem to read more and more slowly. I’m always feeling that there’s a world of terrific new fictions out there that I’m steadily falling farther and farther behind on. Dodgy, very dodgy. I’m interested, though, in which novelists—for you—meet this criterion: a new book comes out and you read it more or less immediately (or maybe you try to procure an advance copy). I don’t mind admitting that my own list is short: Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Atwood, Richard Powers, Chang-rae Lee.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 239

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

240

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

I realize that some of you are immersed in projects on poets, so my question will not be particularly compelling, but I’d like to hear who’s on your short list of living American novelists.

Some Responses (All but one of these come from well known figures in the field of Contemporary American Fiction) 1. Chang Rae-Lee. Mark Richard. Denis Johnson. Cormac, of course, along with Powers. Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers are strong up-andcomers. Waiting for a truly great book from Lorrie Moore. John Updike and Walter Mosley and Richard Ford and Roth have all become erratic in profligate production, but still highly worthwhile, albeit less consistently so than the aforementioned. [In a follow-up email, this correspondent added Chas D’Ambrosio.] 2. [n]ot many high culture authors. Pynchon. I’m increasingly impressed by Powers, and while I haven’t read his latest yet, I will. The authors I tend to get instantly, even order in advance of publication from Amazon, tend to be pop—certain fantasy writers. 3. My shortlist of authors whose new books I read immediately (i.e., I shell out for the hardback instead of waiting for the paperback) is even shorter than yours (and includes a poet): Pynchon, Gibson, Ashbery. The rest can wait (sometimes forever). 4. Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, Moore, Didion, Russo. I confess that I buy each Vollmann book as it appears, but I also confess that the sheer length of his books often encourages me to postpone reading them. 5. If the key word is “essential,” then my list would be very much like yours. I’d add Morrison and Barth, although in my opinion Barth’s last truly significant work was On with the Story (1996) and Morrison’s was Beloved (1987). I’d also include David Foster Wallace, although I suspect that Infinite Jest will have the same impact on his subsequent work as Gravity’s Rainbow has had on Pynchon’s, becoming a standard whose measure the later works cannot reach. Among the younger set, I continue to read Colson Whitehead, Johnathan Lethem, Johnathan Safran Foer, Steve Erickson, and, to a lesser extent, Michael Chabon—but, except for The Intuitionist, Erickson’s early novels, and possibly Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, I see little evidence that any of their books will ever become “essential.” The wait for Carole Maso’s promised major novel The Bay of Angels has become about as long as our wait for The Tunnel was, and I’ll certainly read it if and when it appears (I consider Maso’s AVA and The Art Lover to be significant works). If Carol de Chellis Hill ever writes another novel, I’ll read it, too, because I remain so impressed with her early Henry James’ Midnight Song. Gass and Coover seem to have written themselves

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 240

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

The DeLillo Era

241

out, and I’ve long ago lost interest in Updike, Roth, and most other realists. Mmmm . . . . There must be others, but the fact that they don’t come immediately to mind would seem to suggest that I don’t consider them all that important.

Note 1. This was the blurb Pynchon supplied for his friend Richard Fariña’s 1966 novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

Works Cited Adams, R. (2007), “The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism.” Twentiethcentury Literature, 53.3: 233–47. Amis, M. (1997), “Survivors of the cold war.” Rev. of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. New York Times Book Review, October 5, 12–13. Azorín [José Martínez Ruiz]. (1954a), “Dos generaciones.” Obras Completas, vol. 5, 1136–40. Madrid: Aguilar. —(1954b), “Generaciones de escritores.” Obras Completas, vol. 9, 1140–3. Madrid: Aguilar. —(1975), “La generación de 1898.” Clásicos y Modernos. in Obras Completas, vol. 12, 1125–35. Madrid: Aguilar. Barth, J. (1967), “The literature of exhaustion.” The Atlantic Monthly, August, 29–34. —(1980), “The literature of replenishment.” The Atlantic Monthly, January, 65–71. Beaumont, F. and John F. (2003). Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, ed. Andrew Gurr. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Begley, A. (1997), “Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld.” Southwest Review, 82, 4: 478–505. Binyon, L. (1922), Selected Poems of Laurence Binyon. New York: Macmillan. Bloom, H. (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press. Cixous, H. (1976), “The laugh of the Medusa.” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1: 875–93. DeLillo, D. (1982), The Names. New York: Knopf. —(1991), Mao II. New York: Viking. —(1997), Underworld. New York: Scribner. —(2001a), The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. —(2005), Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner. De Tocqueville. (2007), Democracy in America, Isaac Kramnick, (ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. Eliot, T.S. (1923), “Ulysses, order, and myth.” Rev. of Ulysses, by James Joyce. The Dial, 75,5 : 480–3. Enck, J. (1965), “John Hawkes: An interview.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6: 141–55. Erickson, S.(1993), Arc d’X. New York: Poseidon Press. Fariña, R. (1966), Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. New York: Random House Fitzgerald, F. S. (1941), The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel. New York: Scribners. Franzen, J. (1996), “Perchance to dream.” Harper’s Magazine, April, 35–54.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 241

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

242

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Gardner, J. (1978), On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books. Greiner, D. J. (2007), “‘The God itch’: An interview with Janette Turner Hospital.” Critique, 48.4: 331–43. Grossman, L. (2006), “Who’s the voice of this generation?” Time, July 10, 60–3. Hassan, I. (1982), The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward A Postmodern Literature. Madison, WI : University of Wisconsin Press. Hoberek, A. (2007), “Introduction: After postmodernism.” Twentieth-century Literature, 53.3: 233–47. Huyssen, A. (1986), After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jameson, F. (2001), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. King, S. (1991), The Stand. New York: Signat. LeClair, T. (1983), “An interview with Don DeLillo.” in LeClair and Larry McCaffery, (eds.), Anything can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, 79–90. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. —(1996), “The prodigious fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique, 38.1: 12–37. Mailer, N. (1959), Advertisements for Myself. New York: Berkley Medallion. Mannheim, K. (1952), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Paul Kecskemeti. New York: Oxford University Press. McHale, B. (2007), “What was postmodernism?” electronic book review, December 20, thread. www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/tense Ortega y Gasset, J. (1958), Man and Crisis. 1933, trans. Mildred Adams. New York: W. W. Norton. —(1961), The Modern Theme. 1923, trans. James Cleugh. New York: Harper & Brothers. Petersen, J. (1930), “Die literarischen Generationen,” in Emil Ermatinger (ed.), Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft, 130–87. Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag. Pound, E. (1934), Make it new: Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Powers, R. (1987), Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. New York: Beech Tree Books. —(1991), The Gold Bug Variations. New York: William Morrow. —(1993), Operation Wandering Soul. New York: William Morrow. —(1995), Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pynchon, T. (2006), Against the Day. New York: Penguin. Roth, P. (1961), “Writing American fiction.” Commentary 21: 223–33. Williams, W. C. (1968), “Asphodel, that greeny flower,” in Selected Poems, 142–55. New York: New Directions. Woolf, V. (1953), “Modern fiction.” The Common Reader, First Series, 150–8. New York: Harcourt Brace. Wordsworth, W. (1936a), “Love Lies Bleeding,” in Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (eds.) Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 1904, rev. ed. 134. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1936b), “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” in Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (eds.), Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 1904, rev. ed., 149. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1974), “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds.), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, 118–59. Oxford: Clarendon.

PSchweighauser_14_Final.indd 242

5/13/2010 8:47:41 AM

Contributors Julia Apitzsch is a Research Fellow at the University of Bonn, Germany. Silvia Caporale Bizzini is Associate Professor at the University of Alicante, Spain. Peter Boxall is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK. Martyn Colebrook is a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Hull, UK. David Cowart is Louise Fry Scudder Professor at the University of South Carolina. Leif Grössinger is a postgraduate student at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Linda S. Kauffman is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mikko Keskinen is Professor of Literature at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Marie-Christine Leps is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sascha Pöhlmann is a Lecturer in American Literary History at the LudwigMaximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. Paula Martín Salván is a Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Córdoba, Spain. Peter Schneck is Professor (Chair) for American Literature and Culture at Osnabrück University, Germany. Philipp Schweighauser is Assistant Professor and Head of American and General Literatures at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Adrian S. Wisnicki is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of London, Birkbeck College, and a Visiting Scholar at Fordham University. Eben Wood is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, the City University of New York.

PSchweighauser_Contributors_Final.indd 243

5/13/2010 8:47:33 AM

PSchweighauser_Contributors_Final.indd 244

5/13/2010 8:47:33 AM

Index Page numbers in bold denote words that appear in figures.

110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (by Ulrich Baer) 42 9/11 1, 2–6, 12, 19, 21, 22, 24, 33, 35, 41, 51–4, 57–60, 63, 71, 72, 75–7, 78n. 6, 85, 88, 93–4, 96, 97, 101–3, 106, 115, 145–8, 154, 155n. 1, 168, 175, 181–2, 184, 191, 195, 202n. 4, 216–19 Alzheimer’s as metaphor for post-9/11 condition 31 art after 100–4 mourning after 11, 35, 42, 98, 148, 169n. 7 post-9/11 fiction 27, 28, 41, 52–3 still life of 93 trauma after 51, 53, 93, 94, 96, 99, 147, 168, 184, 198, 201, 216 victims 22, 35, 51, 53, 55, 57, 93, 101, 199 9/11: The Falling Man (by Henry Singer) 195, 202n. 4 Abel, Marco 36n. 4, 94, 97, 100, 202n. 1, 216 Abu Gharib 25 Acker, Kathy 227 Adams, Tim 5 Adorno, Theodor W. 6, 127n. 8, 167 aesthetics 6, 12, 34, 114, 127n. 8, 180, 224, 225, 226 After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (by Andreas Huyssen) 232 Against Interpretation (by Susan Sontag) 226 Against the Day (by Thomas Pynchon) 234 Agamben, Giorgio 200

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 245

The Alchemist (by Paulo Coelho) 52 allegory 24, 116, 123, 125, 127n. 10, 132 and irony 115, 118 see also parabasis al-Qaeda 19, 22, 218n. 2 Altes, Liesbeth Korthals 67 Althusser, Louis 55 Amaranthus 228 Americana (by Don DeLillo) 1, 136, 146, 215 Amette, Jacques-Pierre 3 Amis, Martin 62, 227 anamorphosis 29 Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy) 69 antinomy 201, 202n. 3 anxiety of influence 223, 225–7, 238 Apitzsch, Julia 6, 12, 93, 126n. 1 Araya, Tom 61, 62 Arc d’X (by Steve Erickson) 234 Arendt, Hannah 40, 44, 46, 50n. 2 Arensberg, Ann 88, 130 art 22, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 82, 88–91, 93, 101, 105, 127n. 9, 177, 232–3, 235–7 and commercialization 29 function of 30, 100–4, 180 of seeing 101 status in DeLillo’s fiction 82 of terror 93, 96 “The Artist Naked in The Cage” (by Don DeLillo) 131 asceticism 145–6 ascetic process 12, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153 as a way of life 146–9 writing as 152–5 Ashcroft, John 20 Asselberghs, Herman 124 Atlas (by Gerhard Richter) 30

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

246 Atlas Group 121, 125 Atwood, Margaret 224, 236 Auden, W. H. 237 Aust, Stephan 23 Auster, Paul 3 Austin, J. L. 68, 69 avant-garde 118, 125, 126, 232 Azorín 229 (Ruiz, José Martínez) Baader, Andreas 23 Baader-Meinhof 19, 21, 23, 36n. 8, 36n. 9, 94 The Baader-Meinhof Cycle (by Gerhard Richter) 104 The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (by Stefan Aust) 23 Bacon, Francis 164, 169n. 6 Baer, Ulrich 42 Baker, Peter 81 Bakhtin, Mikhail 186 Bal-Blanc, Pierre 136 Barra, Allen 8 Barron, Jon 7 Barth, John 226, 230, 235, 238 Barthelme, Donald 227 Barthes, Roland 42, 164 Bate, Jackson 238 Baudrillard, Jean 1, 4, 5 Bawer, Bruce 2, 7, 9, 10 Bay, Michael 52 Beale, Lewis 8 Beaumont, Francis 228 Beckett, Samuel 119, 127n. 7, 127n. 8, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183n. 1, 230 Begley, Adam 88, 237 Bellow, Saul 73, 78n. 10, 107n. 1, 173, 178, 180–1, 224, 226, 231 Benjamin, Walter 22, 25 Berger, James 41 Bergson, Henri 70 Berman, Paul 28 Bernard, Catherine 117 Bersani, Leo 165 Between Past and Future (by Hannah Arendt) 44 Binyon, Laurence 227 biopolitics 190, 191, 194 see also body and thanatopolitics Bizzini, Silvia Caporale 11, 40

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 246

Index Bleak House (by Charles Dickens) 158 Bloom, Harold 225, 238 body 33, 35, 48, 56, 71, 73, 98, 99, 100, 105, 113, 135, 174, 178, 179, 180, 191, 194, 234 see also biopolitics The Body Artist (by Don DeLillo) 7, 97, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 168, 216, 227, 228 Böll, Heinrich 28 Boxall, Peter 12, 173 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (by John Boyne) 52 Boyne, John 52 Brecht, Bertolt 127 Brigate Rosse (BR) 26, 81 Broodthaers, Marcel 127n. 11 Brooks, Peter 149 Buchloch, Benjamin 127n. 8, 127n. 11 Bush, George W. 20, 27, 36n. 1, 182, 194, 194, 199, 200 Cabell, James Branch 236 camera 1, 73, 74, 96, 97, 117–18, 122, 124, 134–6, 138, 140, 175, 195, 209 see also photography and still lifes canon formation 59, 223, 232 capitalism 21, 22, 58, 87, 137, 174, 192, 201 see also globalization Carver, Raymond 227 censorship 97, 101, 195 Cervantes, Miguel de 5 Chaplin, Charlie 70 Charleston Gazette 7 Chesterton, G. K. 161 Chevrier, Jean-François 127n. 8, 127n. 11 Chicago Sun-Times 7 Cibber, Colley 236 cinema 113, 116, 133, 134, 136, 180 Cixous, Hélène 226 Clavel, André 5 closure see also resolution epistemological 160, 164, 167 narrative 12, 158, 164, 165 psychological 160, 167 Coelho, Paulo 52 Coetzee, J. M. 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 28 Cole, David 27 Colebrook, Martyn 1, 4, 12, 130

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

Index Collins, Wilkie 158, 161 commodification 4, 29, 44, 130, 233 Comte, Auguste 229 Conan Doyle, Arthur 158, 166 Connor, Steven 179, 182 conspiracy 20, 59, 83, 85, 149, 150, 158, 159, 161 conspiracy theory 8, 10, 96, 159 see also paranoia contemporaneity 229, 230 Coover, Robert 230 Corty, Bruno 5 Cosmopolis (by Don DeLillo) 1, 3, 149, 150, 168, 201, 216 Jacques-Pierre Amette’s review of 3 The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings 131 Cowart, David 3, 5, 9, 12, 207, 223 Crom, Nathalie 3 The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon) 160, 162, 169n. 5, 233 culture 1, 3, 10–12, 21, 27, 87–8, 91, 113–14, 115, 120, 123–5, 126n. 2, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 145, 154, 178, 192, 200, 205, 224, 226, 229, 232–5, 237, 238 mass 232–3 see also commodification popular 5, 124–5, 127n. 8, 232–3 Dadaism 232 Dangling Man (by Saul Bellow) 78n. 10, 107n. 1, 173, 177 and Beckett’s Murphy 176 Danielewski, Mark Z. 52 Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (by Rudolph Otto) 212, 213 David, Catherine 127n. 8, 127n. 11 Däwes, Birgit 54 DeLillo, Don 1, 35n. 1, 78n. 10, 107n. 2, 127n. 7, 127n. 9, 141n. 2, 169n. 3, 173, 176, 204, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 237 see also under titles of individual novels and Bellow 173–6 camera as constant presence in 136 characters 47, 89, 123, 147, 148, 201, 208, 219, 227 as ‘consumerland writer’ 10

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 247

247

critics of 7–10 cultural critique by 5, 6, 10, 11, 45–7, 82, 147–8 DeLillo era 223–41 economic critique by 22 and Grimonprez 109–40 Mao II and Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y 130–40 language critique by 5–6, 85, 94, 97, 152–5 media critique by 1, 5, 6, 10, 11, 84, 123 mysticism 76–7, 145–6, 151, 159, 204–10, 212, 214 narrative structures in 149–52 political critique by 2, 8–11, 20, 22, 29, 31, 34, 40–1, 122–3, 125, 131–2, 168, 180, 189–90 prizes, literary 4, 7 reviews, American (of DeLillo’s work) 6–9 reviews, European (of DeLillo’s work) 2–6 style 2, 3, 9, 152–5 tradition in 44–5 writing as seismographic in 5 de Man, Paul 127n. 5 Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (film by Uli Edel) 36n. 9 Derrida, Jacques 165 detective fiction 158–60, 162, 166, 167, 168n. 1, 169n. 4 detective patterns 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168 Victorian 12, 158, 159, 160 Dewey, Joseph 47, 48, 49, 145, 147 Dialectic of Enlightenment (by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno) 167 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (by Johan Grimonprez) 112, 115, 116, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126n. 1, 127n. 4, 127n. 9, 127n. 10 as documentary 127n. 4 Díaz, Junot 223 Dickens, Charles 158 Diez, Georg 5 Dilthey, Wilhelm 229 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (by Michel Foucault) 164

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

248

Index

the documentary 12, 23, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 130, 135, 140, 195, 202n. 4 documentary culture 114 Documenta X 127n. 8 Don DeLillo’s America (website) 7 Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (by David Cowart) 5, 78n. 11 Dos Passos, John 231 Doyle, Arthur Conan see Conan Doyle, Arthur Dream of Fair to Middling Women (by Samuel Beckett) 179 Drew, Richard 88, 100, 107n. 3, 174, 175, 184, 187, 188, 195, 198, 199 see also Falling Man, and Richard Drew’s “Falling Man” photograph Eleutheria (by Samuel Beckett) 176, 179 Eliot, T. S. 8, 218, 225, 227, 235, 238 Ellis, Bret Easton 3 Ellison, Ralph 236 Ellroy, James 3 End Zone (by Don DeLillo) 146, 180 Ensslin, Gudrun 23 Erickson, Steve 234 Esquire 169n. 7 ethics of fiction 6, 11, 12, 67, 123, 125, 158, 168, 173–204 Eureka Street (by Robert McLiam Wilson) 60 Euskadi Ta Akatasuna (ETA) 81 euthanasia 227 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (by Jonathan Safran Foer) 52 Falling Man (by Don DeLillo) 2, 9, 19, 31, 32, 36n. 7, 78n. 5, 78n. 8, 78n. 10, 81, 82, 103, 107n. 1, 145, 147, 149, 155n. 4, 158, 168, 169n. 7, 173, 175, 180, 184, 185, 189, 194, 200, 216, 217, 218 artists in 12, 88–9 asceticism in 145–6, 147–9, 153–5 and “Baader-Meinhof” 26–7, 34 and Beckett 176–8 and Bellow 173–6 binaries in 202n. 5 biopolitics in 190, 191, 194 closure in 168 and Coetzee 178–80

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 248

and Richard Drew’s “Falling Man” photograph 55, 75, 88, 97–8, 100, 107n. 3, 174–5, 184–5, 187–8, 195, 198, 199 falling motif in 97, 188 and Franklin’s Heroes 2001 stamp 199 funerals 72 grieving in 40–9, 201 Hammad in 2, 21, 31, 34, 47, 59–60, 87, 95, 106, 146, 148–53, 155n. 1, 191 ideology in 55–6 and “In the Ruins of the Future” 21–3, 34, 94, 216 Islam in 22, 30–1, 44, 51–61, 62–3, 87–9, 148, 150, 153–4 and Mao II 29 marriages in 70–1 mass(es) in 68–76 media in 96 memory in 40–9, 185–90 metaphors in 96 and Morandi 101–4 mourning in 40–9, 201 Orientalism in 51–5, 57–63 reception of 4, 9, 101, 145, 148–9, 152, 169n. 7 religion in 76–7, 151, 216–17 and Richter 104–7 slowing down in 107n. 4, 173–83, 184 spirituality in 76–7, 151, 216–17 tarot cards in 72, 78n. 6, 196, 197, 198 terrorists in 20–1, 31, 53–5, 57–63, 72, 85–7, 147–50, 153–5 trauma in 35, 40–6, 48, 49, 56–7, 71, 89, 94–6, 99, 101, 102, 107, 147–51, 168, 198, 201, 216–18 war on terror in 94, 176, 189, 192, 194–5 Falling Man (the performance artist in DeLillo’s Falling Man) 6, 12, 33, 73, 76, 82, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 174, 175, 177, 198 and Lucifer 33 “Falling Man” (Richard Drew’s photograph) 188 see Drew, Richard “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children” (by James Berger) 41

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

Index Fariña, Richard 231 fascism 19, 20, 23 Fischer, Joschka 28 Fischl, Eric 101 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 169n. 4, 231, 236 Fletcher, John 228 Foer, Jonathan Safran 52 foreign policy, U.S. 20, 22, 23, 31, 192, 194–5 Forster, E. M. 68 Foucault, Michel 164, 185, 190, 191, 199, 200 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (by Jacques Lacan) 37n. 13, 118 Franzen, Jonathan 3, 233, 234, 237 Frazier, Charles 236 Freud, Sigmund 225 on the unconscious 118 Friedman, Shannon 7 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) 81 Fukuyama, Francis 127n. 10 fundamentalism 19, 20, 29, 36n. 2, 133, 207, 216 see also religion Islamic 22, 30–1, 44, 51–61, 62–3, 87–9, 148, 150, 153–4 Funeral (by Gerhard Richter) 25, 26, 30, 33, 106 funerals 72, 73, 77 see also mass funerals Gaddis, William 226, 231, 235 Galatea 2.2 (by Richard Powers) 234 game(s) 32, 47, 49, 67, 77, 78n. 6, 94, 103, 117, 148, 187, 191, 192, 202n. 5 Game 6 (by Don DeLillo) 8 Gandhi 212 Gardner, Curt 7 Gardner, John 223, 227, 233, 236 “Generaciones de escritores” (by Azorín) 229 generations, literary 223–38 Genoa 21 Germany in Autumn (by Rainer Werner Fassbinder et al.) 36n. 9 Gibbons, Kaye 236 globalization 12, 174, 224 see also capitalism Glucksmann, André 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 238

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 249

249

The Gold Bug Variations (by Richard Powers) 234 Gooch, Todd A. 212, 214 Gough, Maria 126n. 1 Goyen, William 236 Gravity’s Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon) 233, 234 The Great Gatsby (by F. Scott Fitzgerald) 169n. 4 Great Jones Street (by Don DeLillo) 146 Grendel (by John Gardner) 233 Grimonprez, Johan 12, 109, 111, 112, 114–26, 126n. 1, 127n. 6, 127n. 9, 134 Grössinger, Leif 4, 6, 12, 81 Grossman, Lev 231 ‘ground zero’ 6, 31, 54, 62, 85, 94, 97, 199 ‘Ground Zero Literature’ 54 Guantanamo 25 The Guardian 105, 155n. 1 Hägler, Andreas 168n. 1 Hamlet (by William Shakespeare) 178 Hanneman, Jeff 61 Happe, François 152 Hassan, Ihab 237 Hawkes, John 226, 231 Heidegger, Martin 102, 166, 212 Heller, Joseph 226, 230, 231, 236 Helperin, Naomi 202n. 4 Hemingway, Ernest 231, 232, 235 Hemon, Aleksandar 223 Herbert, Zbigniew 93 Here is New York 51 Heroes 2001 stamp 199 heroism 198 hijacking 117, 118, 120, 125, 136, 139 history 10, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 30, 31, 35, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 58, 62, 86, 87, 95, 96, 118, 119, 125, 126, 127n. 10, 130, 134, 136, 146, 147, 150, 154, 155, 184, 185, 186, 190, 210, 213, 214, 216, 223, 229, 230, 232, 235 “contemporary history” 238 plane as a metaphor for 111 Hoberek, Andrew 225 Hobsbawm, Eric 121 Homer 225 Horkheimer, Max 167

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

250

Index

Hornung, Alfred 54 Houen, Alex 42 The Hound of the Baskervilles (by Conan Doyle) 166 House of Leaves (by Mark Z. Danielewski) 52 How to Do Things with Words (by J. L. Austin) 68 The Human Condition (by Hannah Arendt) 40, 50n. 2 Hungerford, Amy 76, 206, 207, 208, 212 Hutcheon, Linda 6 Huyssen, Andreas 224, 232, 233 The Idea of the Holy (by Rudolph Otto) see Das Heilige ideology 8, 10, 30, 42, 51, 60, 62, 63, 84, 87, 103, 121, 124, 126, 132, 163, 164, 165, 168 Ingalls, Rachel 236 Inherent Vice (by Thomas Pynchon) 233 Intelligencer Journal 7 “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (by Don DeLillo) 19, 21–3, 34, 49, 78n. 5, 93, 94, 149, 202n. 1, 216 Invisible Man (by Ralph Ellison) 231 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 81 irony 56, 101, 115, 118, 123, 206, 207, 211, 214, 216 Islam 2, 21, 22, 30–1, 36n. 3, 44, 51–61, 62–3, 85, 87–9, 148, 150, 153–4 James, Henry 24, 161 Jameson, Fredric 127n. 10, 190, 197, 202n. 3, 204, 237 Jesus Christ 20 jihad 20, 30, 60, 62 “Jihad” (Slayer song) 60, 61–2 Joyce, James 227, 231, 235, 238 Jung, Carl 212 Junod, Tom 107n. 3, 145, 169n. 7, 195 Jurassic Park (by Steven Spielberg) 233 Kafka, Franz 131 Kakutani, Michiko 7, 10, 152 Karnicky, Jeffrey 130 Kauffman, Linda S. 2, 11, 19 Kennedy, John F. 137 Kermode, Frank 149

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 250

Keskinen, Mikko 12, 67 Kihlstrom, John F. 40, 50n. 1 Kincaid, Jamaica 223 King, Stephen 233 Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter (by Johan Grimonprez) 124 Kouchner, Bernard 28 Kubiak, Anthony 42 Kushner, Tony 204 Kuzma, Lynn 81 Lacan, Jacques 37n. 13 lachrymae rerum 228 “La generación de 1898” (by Azorín) 229 Law-Yone, Wendy 223 LeClair, Tom 89, 234 Lee, Chang-rae 223, 236 LeGuin, Ursula 230 Leith, William 132 Leps, Marie-Christine 4, 12, 184 Levinas, Emmanuel 201 Levy, Bernard-Hénri 28 Lewis, C. S. 212 Libra (by Don DeLillo) 1, 2, 8, 95, 137, 141n. 1, 149, 150, 155n. 2, 158, 160, 162, 168, 169n. 2 “The Literature of Exhaustion” (by John Barth) 226 “The Literature of Replenishment” (by John Barth) 226 literature, social functions of 1, 2, 5–6, 8–11, 12, 20, 22, 29, 31, 34, 40–1, 45–7, 67, 82, 84, 85, 94, 97, 122–3, 125, 131–2, 147–8, 152–5, 158, 167, 168, 173–204 Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov) 5 Long, Michael 7 Longmuir, Anne 44 Love-Lies-Bleeding (by Don DeLillo) 227, 228 Lyotard, Jean-François 204 McCarthy, Cormac 224, 226, 231, 233, 235, 236 McClure, John A. 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212 McHale, Brian 160, 204, 223, 226 magic 204, 217 Mailer, Norman 224, 226, 230, 237

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

Index mainstream, the 235 Mannheim, Karl 229, 230 “The Man Who Invented 9/11” (by Tom Junod) 145 The Man Who Was Thursday (by G. K. Chesterton) 161 Mao II (by Don DeLillo) 1, 19, 29, 67, 78n. 11, 81, 88, 94, 97, 114, 117, 127n. 4, 127n. 9, 130, 132, 133, 134, 141n. 1, 141n. 2, 148, 158, 162, 168, 216, 237 Marguerin, Matthieu 136 Marías, Julián 229 Márquez, Gabriel García 52 Marshall, Paule 230 Marx, Karl 34, 120, 126 mass 68–76 mass (Catholic) 76 mass culture see culture, mass mass effect 67, 68 mass(es) 67, 68, 70 mass funeral 73 see also funeral mass killing 31, 33, 36n. 7, 42, 49, 53, 71, 72, 77, 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 103, 107n. 3, 115, 151, 184, 187 mass media 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 20, 30, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96, 97, 118, 124, 125, 131, 134, 139, 140, 233 mass production 74 mass society 12, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86 mass wedding 68, 69, 70, 71, 119 The Master of Petersburg (by J. M. Coetzee) 178 mediation 12, 42, 54, 117, 126, 133, 134 Meinhof, Ulrike 23 Meins, Holger 23 memory collective 6, 44, 93, 138, 180, 184, 185–90 individual 31, 40–9, 94, 96, 97, 198 repression of 19, 29, 30, 35, 168 “Memory, Autobiography, History” (by John F. Kihlstrom) 40 memory work 11, 41, 42, 49, 168 Men in Dark Times (by Hannah Arendt) 40 Mentré, François 229 metaphysics 76, 204, 215 Miller, D. A. 165

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 251

251

Miller, J. Hillis 79n. 13, 149, 165 Miller, Paul D. 113, 126n. 2 see also Spooky, DJ Millward, Kenneth 133 Milton, John 31 “Modern Fiction” (by Virginia Woolf) 226 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) 23, 24, 25, 105 monopoly on violence 23, 25 Moody, Rick 3 Moonism 19, 20, 28, 35n. 1, 68, 69, 74, 76, 77n. 1, 132, 133, 164 The Moonstone (by Wilkie Collins) 158 Morandi, Giorgio 37n. 12, 78n. 8, 101, 202n. 2 The Morning Call (by Naomi Helperin) 202n. 4 Morrison, Toni 224, 226, 230 The Murders in the Rue Morgue (by Edgar Allan Poe) 166 Murphy (by Samuel Beckett) 179 Museum of Modern Art see MoMa Muslim see Islam Myers, B. R. 7, 10 My Neck is Thinner than a Hair (by the Atlas Group) 121 Nabokov, Vladimir 5, 230 Naipaul, V. S. 93 The Naked and the Dead (by Norman Mailer) 231 The Names (by Don DeLillo) 45, 148, 168, 215, 237 narrative 1, 12, 19, 20, 31, 41–3, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 68, 95, 97, 100, 105, 106, 114, 115, 118, 119, 123, 125, 126, 131, 134, 137, 140, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 159, 160, 181, 182, 187, 195, 202, 204, 207 see also storytelling of retreat 145 traumatological 44, 71 see also trauma natura morta 78n. 8, 96, 97, 102, 104, 106, 107, 188 see also paintings Naylor, Gloria 226 Nazi-era 23 negativity 6 The New Yorker 131 The New York Times 155n. 1 The New York Times Book Review 7

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

252

Index

nostalgia 20, 123, 146 novel of manners, postmodern 237 numinous, the 204, 205, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 numinous experience, defined 214 Oates, Joyce Carol 224, 226 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich 127n. 4, 127n. 9 The Observer 5 O’Connor, Flannery 227, 230 October 18 1977 (by Gerhard Richter) 23, 105 Oedipus the King (by Sophocles) 162 One Hundred Years of Solitude (by Gabriel García Márquez) 52 On Moral Fiction (by John Gardner) 226 Operation Wandering Soul (by Richard Powers) 234 Orientalism 2, 11, 51–5, 57–63, 78n. 3, 153, 155n. 1 Ortega y Gasset, José 226, 229, 230 Osteen, Mark 145, 207 Otto, Rudolf 205, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215 concept of numinous experience 207 see also numinous, the Owens, Craig 29, 37n. 15 paintings 19, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36n. 6, 47, 72, 78n. 8, 94, 96, 101–6, 188 see also still lifes and natura morta Palahniuk, Chuck 235 Paley, Grace 226, 230 parabasis 115 Paradise Lost (by John Milton) 31 paranoia 5, 41, 60, 83, 160, 162, 167, 211 see also conspiracy theory Passaro, Vince 4, 81 Pastoralia (by George Saunders) 233 Patriot Act 27, 36n. 8, 200 Paulus, Tom 134 Pearl Harbor (by Michael Bay) 52 Peck, Dale 7, 8 performative utterances 68, 77n. 1 Persian Gulf War 22 Personality Identification Playing Cards 193 Petersen, Julius 229

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 252

Peyre, Henri 229 “Photograph from September 11” (by Wislawa Szymborska) 78n. 9 photography 27, 70, 74, 75, 97, 118, 132, 136, 137, 138, 175 see also camera and Drew, Richard Pinder, Wilhelm 229 Players (by Don DeLillo) 1, 81, 82, 141n. 2, 146, 147 artists in 89–91 terrorists in 82–4 plotting 12, 149, 150, 161, 189 Poe, Edgar Allan 158, 166 Pöhlmann, Sascha 2, 11, 51 The Politics of Postmodernism (by Linda Hutcheon) 6 postcoloniality 114, 115 postmodernism 8, 54, 160, 166, 204, 223, 224, 226, 228, 231, 232, 235, 237 postmodernity 158, 212, 213 post-secular, the 204, 205, 206, 207 see also resacralization post-structuralism 164–5, 167 see also structuralism Pound, Ezra 226, 227 Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (by Paul Berman) 28 power/knowledge relations 185, 189, 191 Powers, Richard 3, 226, 233, 234, 235, 236 Prague 21 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) 226 Prends Garde! A Jouer au Fantôme, on le Devient (Beware! In Playing the Phantom You Become One) (by Johan Grimonprez and Herman Asselberghs) 125 The Princess Casamassima (by Henry James) 161 Prisoner’s Dilemma (by Richard Powers) 233 Pynchon, Thomas 8, 53, 93, 160, 161, 162, 204, 205, 223, 224, 226, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236 The Qur’an 62–3 “The RAF: The Myth” 30 Raspe, Jan-Carl 23

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

Index readerly 164 realism 9, 52, 54, 127n. 10, 131, 165, 204, 223, 236, 241 reception of DeLillo in Europe 2–11, 28 reception of DeLillo in U.S. 2, 4, 6–9, 10, 11 Red Army Faction see Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) Red Brigades see Brigate Rosse Reed, Ishmael 230 Regarding the Pain of Others (by Susan Sontag) 93 relativism 121 religion 20, 27, 29, 34, 46, 57, 60, 62, 67, 76, 77, 132, 134, 137, 153, 163, 191, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217 see also fundamentalism, Islam, mysticism, numinous, post-secular, resacralization, secularism, secular transcendence, spirituality, and transcendence remixing 112, 113, 115, 118, 121, 123, 125 “Report from a Besieged City” (by Zbigniwe Herbert) 93 representation 11, 27, 30, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 81, 82, 85, 94, 114, 120, 130, 140, 146, 148, 153, 205, 206, 207 problems of 63 of terrorism in DeLillo 81, 84, 85, 87 of terrorism in the mass media 1, 2, 6, 12, 30, 82, 84, 85, 134, 139 resacralization 205, 212 see also post-secular resolution see also closure epistemological 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126 narrative 114, 118, 159, 167 optical 114, 116 Reverend Moon see Moonism Rhys, Jean 223 Rich, Frank 155 Richter, Gerhard 19, 22, 37n. 11, 94, 104 Ricoeur, Paul 42 “The Rights of Man and the Rights of Others” (by Emmanuel Levinas) 201 Rilke, Rainer Maria 107n. 5 Robbins, Tom 235

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 253

253

Rohl, Bettina 28 Rolland, Romain 212 Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) 23, 81 Roth, Philip 224, 226, 238 Rowe, John Carlos 27, 81, 133 Running Dog (by Don DeLillo) 1, 133, 146, 233 Rushdie, Salman 131 Sacramone, Leanne 127n. 6 Said, Edward 53 Salmon, Christian 4 Salván, Paula Martín 4, 12, 76, 145 San Diego Union-Tribune 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul 166 The Satanic Verses (by Salman Rushdie) 131 Savigneau, Josyane 5 Schneck, Peter 1, 12, 126n. 1, 204 Schweighauser, Philipp 1, 4, 51, 126n. 1, 127n. 10, 158 scientia ipsa potentia est 169 Seattle 21 secularism 5, 12, 204, 205, 206, 213 secular transcendence 204, 215–18 Seggern, John von 113, 127n. 3 Shakespeare, William 238 Sidney, Philip 237 Simmons, Ryan 81 The Simpsons 233 simulacrum, the 113, 161 slow going 180, 182 see also slowing down, slowness and time slowing down 12, 107n. 4, 202, 202n. 1 see also slow going, slowness and time Slow Man (by J. M. Coetzee) 178, 180 slowness 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 see also time Smiley, Jane 37n. 16, 223 Sontag, Susan 70, 93 Sophocles 162 Sorrentino, Gilbert 226, 230 Spanos, William V. 165, 166, 167, 168, 168n. 1 spectacle 2, 11, 19, 41, 43, 49, 83, 84, 88, 113, 114, 134, 135, 136 spectacular authorship 135, 140 spirituality 5, 12, 49, 77, 204, 205, 207, 211, 213–16, 219

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

254

Index

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 115, 118, 127n. 5 Spooky, DJ 113, 126n. 2 see also Miller, Paul D. The Stand (by Stephen King) 233 state of exception 200, 201 Stein, Gertrude 230 Stern 28, 30 still lifes 37n. 12, 78n. 8, 94, 101, 102, 106, 202n. 2 see also paintings and photography stillness 102, 118, 187, 188, 195, 197, 202n. 6 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 33 Stoppard, Tom 223 storytelling 40, 42, 49, 105, 154, 231 see also narrative Strauss, Leo 212 Streitfeld, David 7 structuralism 45 see also post-structuralism Styron, William 226 Sukenick, Ronald 226 The Sunlight Dialogues (by John Gardner) 233 suspension 177, 178, 179, 180, 181 synecdoche 71, 75 Szymborska, Wislawa 78 Tanner, Tony 169n. 5 tarot cards 72, 78n. 6, 196 L’Apesso 198 the Hanged Man 197 the Tower 196 Tartt, Donna 236 Tennyson, Alfred 225 terrorism 1, 2, 6, 11, 12, 22, 25, 26, 30, 34, 41, 42, 44, 52, 62, 81–7, 89–91, 94, 103, 105, 106, 123, 130, 131, 134–6, 139, 140, 145, 150, 154, 158, 174, 189, 199, 216 Tew, Philip 41 thanatopolitics 190 see also biopolitics Thomas, D. M. 236 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (by Richard Powers) 234 time 174, 178, 179, 180, 182, 201 see also slowness, slowing down, and slow going tradition 40, 42, 44–5, 46, 47, 49

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 254

transcendence 206, 207, 210–15 see also secular transcendence trauma 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57, 71, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 107, 119, 147, 148, 151, 168, 184, 198, 201, 216, 217, 218 trauma-culture fiction 41 The Triumph of Death (by Pieter Brueghel) 72 Tumbling Woman (by Eric Fischl) 101 “ultra liberal utopia” 121 un-American 10 Underworld (by Don DeLillo) 1, 2, 7, 67, 78n. 5, 97, 150, 216, 227, 228 Unknown Quantity 127n. 6 The Unnamable (by Samuel Beckett) 183n. 1 Updike, John 224 USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts (website) 63 “utopia” 22, 28, 121–2, 181 Valparaiso (by Don DeLillo) 1 video art 22, 114, 122, 124, 126 Vineland (by Thomas Pynchon) 233 Virilio, Paul 127n. 6 voice-over 114, 117, 119, 120, 135 Vollmann, William 234 Vonnegut, Kurt 226, 230 Walid Raad 121, 125 Wallace, David Foster 3, 226, 234, 235 Warhol, Andy 74, 78n. 11 war on terror 94, 176, 189, 192, 194–5 The Washington Post 7, 27 The Washington Times 35 The Waste Land (by T. S. Eliot) 238 Wechssler, Eduard 229 Weinstein, Arnold 152 West, Nathanael 230 What Was Literature? (by Leslie A. Fiedler) 226 White Noise (by Don DeLillo) 1, 8, 78n. 5, 86, 114, 117, 127n. 4, 134, 145, 149, 168, 215, 216 Wildt, Jan 7 Wilkin, Karen 37n. 12 Will, George 2, 7, 8, 10, 11

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM

Index Williams, William Carlos 237 Wilson, Robert McLiam 60 Winfrey, Oprah 233 Wisnicki, Adrian S. 4, 12, 158 The Woman in White (by Wilkie Collins) 158 Wood, Eben 12, 111 Woolf, Virginia 223, 226 Wordsworth, William 228

PSchweighauser_Index_Final.indd 255

255

Wright, Lawrence 218n. 2 Writing Degree Zero (by Roland Barthes) 164 Yardley, Jonathan 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 152 Yeats, W. B. 233 Zapomatik 126 Žižek, Slavoj 127n. 4

5/13/2010 8:48:56 AM