chapter 11 9/11 as Memento Mori: Still-Life and Image in Don Delillo’s Ekphrastic Fiction
Devin P. Zuber
Abstract
Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007), shows a sophisticated engagement with the contested swirl of images and politics that came in the aftermath of 9/11. The novel’s complex strategies of ekphrasis – of verbally, linguistically representing visual codes and optic frames of reference – explicitly stage questions of representational form in the aftermath of collective trauma. DeLillo’s ultimate choice of performance art as the medium through which his novel’s characters encounter authentic re- presentations of 9/11 functions as a fictional engagement with New York City’s conten- tious public arguments about collective memory, urban space, and memorials. I argue that ekphrastically embedding bodily performance within fiction critically enforces a slowing down of the perceptual process of representation, and attempts to arrest the speed at which the imagery of 9/11 (falling bodies, burning towers) became reified into state power.
The event we call 9/11 has a past that we can rediscover, a present that we must monitor, and a future we can project.1
Though it has often been said that New York writer Don DeLillo has been writ- ing 9/11 novels for the past thirty years, given his almost obsessive exploration of terrorism in a media-saturated, postmodern culture, the final appearance of his Falling Man in 2007 has met, at best, with a mixed reception. The majority of the mainstream reviews found it “terribly disappointing” in the words of The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani,
a spindly novel … that leaves us with two paltry images: one of a perfor- mance artist re-enacting the fall of bodies from the burning World Trade Center, and one of a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and
1 David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, Chicago, 2006, 13.
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ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert.2
Falling Man has found somewhat better reception in Europe, though by and large, the usual consensus and professional buzz that has greeted previous works from DeLillo, such as Underworld, Mao ii, and White Noise has been con- spicuously absent around Falling Man. The academic reception of Falling Man has fared little better. In his important 2008 survey of “American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis”, Richard Gray complains that
[the novel’s] structure is too clearly foregrounded, the style excessively mannered, and the characters fall into postures of survival after 9/11 that are too familiar to invite much more than a gesture of recognition from the reader.… The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated. “All life had become public”, that observation made by a central character in Falling Man, is not underwritten by the novel in which it occurs, nor in any of these novels. On the contrary, all life here is personal: cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists.3
Some of these claims about the flatness and collapsed domesticity of the char- acters in Falling Man seem apt, even as such critiques evince an unarticulated assumption about the need for a ‘9/11 novel’ to perform in a certain way that hinges on a narrow kind of neo-realism. The fall of the characters in Falling Man into claustrophobic American domesticity is certainly DeLillo’s avowed intent. As the character Keith Neudecker says at the end of the fifth chapter, “[w]e’re ready now to sink into our little lives”,4 with none of the usual DeLillo irony intended. As Marie Christine Leps aptly observes, “if DeLillo’s characters [in Falling Man] love to live within clear antinomies (us and them; before and
2 Michiko Kakutani, “A Man, a Woman and a Day of Terror”, The New York Times, sec. Books, 9 May 2007, 12 October 2013,