Out of the Blue

September 11 and the Novel

Kristiaan Versluys

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231520331
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writers have represented 9/11 and its aftermath with varying degrees of success. In Out of the Blue, Kristiaan Versluys focuses on novels that move beyond patriotic clichés and cheap sensationalism and provide new insights into the emotional and ethical impact of these traumatic events—and what it means to depict them. Versluys focuses on Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World, and John Updike's Terrorist. He scrutinizes how these writers affirm the humanity of the disoriented individual, as opposed to the cocksure killer or politician, and retranslate hesitation, stuttering, or stammering into a precarious act of defiance. Versluys also discusses works by Ian McEwan, Anita Shreve, Martin Amis, and Michael Cunningham, arguing for the novel's distinct power in rendering the devastation of 9/11.

1

AMERICAN MELANCHOLIA

DON DELILLO’S FALLING MAN

IN AN ESSAY ENTITLED “In the Ruins of the Future” published in the December 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Don DeLillo writes that, in the aftermath of September 11, the “sense of disarticulation we hear in the term ‘Us and Them’ has never been so striking, at either end” (34). The context clarifies what this cryptical phrase means: the 9/11 attacks pit a (Western, American) vision of the future against the wish of the terrorists to return to “medieval expedience, to the old slow furies of cutthroat religion” (37). The terrorists, who have pledged themselves to a destructive ideology and fail to recognize the humanity of their victims, dedicate themselves single-mindedly to one purpose: “Kill the enemy and pluck out his heart” (37). They want to go back to “what they used to have before the waves of Western influence” (38). To reach that goal, they narrowly conform to “a morality of destruction” (38).

DeLillo sharply observes how the events of 9/11 have ruined the future; that is, they have damaged American self-confidence and exposed an hitherto hidden vulnerability. But above all, he makes clear where his sympathies are. In the struggle between past and future, he sides with “modern democracy” (40), whatever its shortfalls, and he opposes the “global theocratic state, unboundaried and floating and so obsolete it must depend on suicidal fervor to gain its aims” (40). While the terrorist “pledges his submission to God and meditates on the blood to come” (34), democracy fashions a counternarrative. Redemptive words and gestures prove the “daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York” (40) and provide even “a glimpse of elevated being” (34). By furnishing a panoramic view of all the stories that circulate around 9/11 (the “stories of heroism and encounters with dread” [34], stories of good luck and bad), by relating in detail the story of his cousin Marc, who lived two blocks away from Ground Zero, by demonstrating how the diversity of New York accommodates and even welcomes milder versions of Islam, DeLillo creates a communion of telling, which somehow fills the void caused by the attacks and offsets the murderous intents of the terrorists.¹

Melancholia

Given the humanistic imprint of the December 2001 essay, it is surprising that, of all the 9/11 narratives, DeLillo’s novel Falling Man is, without a doubt, the darkest and the starkest. Unlike the Harper’s essay, it describes a trauma with no exit, a drift toward death with hardly a glimpse of redemption. In a way, Falling Man is the narrative that takes 9/11 most seriously, and, for that reason, it is the most gloomy of the 9/11 novels. In psychoanalytical terms, it describes pure melancholia without the possibility of mourning. The endless reenactment of trauma presented in Falling Man allows for no accommodation or resolution.

In a 1917 essay, Freud makes a vital distinction between melancholia and mourning. While the latter represents an active working-through of a traumatic loss, the former is characterized by inertia and self-hatred. The melancholic, Freud writes, is “apathetic, … incapable of love and achievement”(On Murder, 206). Totally possessed by the past, the melancholy mind is dead to the surrounding world. In the words of Dominick LaCapra, Freud “saw melancholia as characteristic of an arrested process in which the depressed and traumatized self, locked in compulsive repetition, remains narcissistically identified with the lost object” (History, 44–45). Or as LaCapra, elaborating Freud’s concept, puts it in a different essay: “Melancholia is an isolating experience allowing for specular intersubjectivity that immures the self in its desperate isolation…. [I]t is a state in which one remains possessed by the phantasmatically invested past and compulsively, narcissistically identified with a lost object of love” (History, 183).

Falling Man sets itself the task of articulating such a condition of total immurement. Dwelling without letup on a state of apathy in which individuality is rubbed out, willpower attenuated, and language barely functional, the novel illustrates how history claims lives and swallows up a whole culture. One of the ways in which the polysemous title reverberates is that Falling Man has the ambition of being an updated, early-twenty-first century version of the fall of man. The (post)modern condition evoked in the novel is one of drift. The aspirational culture, the characteristic American drive and can-do mentality have come to a grinding halt. More trenchantly, humanity, as it is traditionally defined, has vanished. The characters are so thin that their whole existence boils down to mere nomenclature. Personality has disintegrated into a mere semiotic mark, while the great achievements of modernity (romantic love, technology-driven prosperity, the small-group dynamics of happiness) are nullified by angst and mental paralysis.

In the opening scene of the novel, the main male character, Keith Neudecker—having survived the terrorist attacks—is staggering north just after the first tower has come down and minutes before the second one will collapse. Dazed and disoriented, he is entering a landscape of “rubble and mud” (3). Immediately setting the prevailing tone, the very first sentence of the novel describes a postlapsarian world of lost innocence: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night” (3). At Ground Zero, where streets have disappeared as part of recognizable reality and darkness has descended at noon, the confusion and the mayhem immediately convey the sense of the irremediableness of the situation, its utter finality. Keith’s confusion, widened to encompass all of time and space, is generalized into a symbol of the condition américaine.² September 11 is figured as the collapse of everything that is familiar, and, in its familiarity, comforting. The impersonal voice of the narrator intones : “This was the world now” (3). The terrorist attacks punctuate an era characterized by brokenness and unrelieved melancholia.

As an utterly aporetic and deliberately antiredemptive narrative, Falling Man figures acedia or tedium as the main characteristic of the post-9/11 time frame. The terrorist attacks in no way precipitate a cleansing or catharsis. Instead, the shock following the collapse of the Twin Towers acts as a catalyst, exposing modernity and its many discontents. Modernity is defined as existential emptiness, as a state of irremediable, total, and immutable mental immobility and numbness.

Death, as the ultimate form of this melancholy stasis, hovers over the novel as a grim certainty. To an unusual extent, the novel is death-driven. Keith’s father-in-law, Jack Glenn, committed suicide at the first signs of early dementia. Keith’s mother-in-law, Nina Bartos, a feisty former professor of art history, loses her zest for life after knee-replacement surgery. Her formidable energy falters. Self-indulgently, she settles into old age. Smoking too much, overmedicating herself, not following her physical fitness regimen, she deliberately courts death: “She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed, to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it” (9). Keith’s wife, Lianne, holds “story line sessions” (29) with Alzheimer patients in the early stages of the disease. They, too, are bound to slip into oblivion and finally death.

Most significantly of all, the novel is named after a performance artist, who, tethered to a primitive safety harness, jumps from buildings and viaducts. Having heard about these stunts, Keith’s wife, Lianne, thinks: “He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump” (33). More in particular, the fictional performance artist in DeLillo’s novel replicates the many falls taken by the real-life artist Kerry Skarbakka, whose 9/11 imitations mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York called “nauseatingly offensive.”³ The performances by Skarbakka, in their turn, allude to a famous photograph by Richard Drew, which shows a man plunging headfirst down along the shimmering columns of the World Trade Center towers on September 11. In an article published in Esquire, the journalist Tom Junod discusses this picture and gives it the name by which it has come to be known ever since and which DeLillo borrowed for the title of his novel: “The Falling Man.” “In most American newspapers,” Junod writes, “the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again” (Junod, “The Falling Man”). The reason for this act of self-censorship is that, though tens and maybe hundreds of people had no other choice but to escape the flames through the windows, “from the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption” (Junod, “The Falling Man”). Quickly, the newspapers ran pictures not of the victims but of the survivors and, more emphatically, of the rescuers. As James Berger puts it, “it was astonishing … how quickly the media’s focus was on triumph: of the nation’s spirit, New York’s spirit, our resolve, our community, our political system, the president’s oratory, our policies, our strategies, our weapons, our soldiers, our way of life” (“‘There’s No Backhand to This,’” 55). Or in the words of Susan Faludi: “By September 12, our culture was already reworking a national tragedy into a national fantasy of virtuous might and triumph” (The Terror Dream, 289).

Illustrating the true horror of the day and resisting heroization, Drew’s photograph—just as Skarbakka’s “nauseatingly offensive” performances—had no place in the instantaneous recuperation of the events by politicians and the media. By choosing an image of irredeemable death as the iconic moment that indicates the true place of 9/11 in the cultural repertoire of the nation, DeLillo indicates how his novel provides a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations. The falling man, standing in for the people who had no choice but to submit to their fate, is the symbol of the dark underside of 9/11, its enervating effect that the mainstream media tried to crush. As the critic Frank Rich puts it in a review of the novel: Falling Man “touches the third rail of 9/11 taboos” (Rich, “The Clear Blue Sky”). Says Lianne about the spectacle of the falling man: “There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all” (33).

In thus relentlessly focusing on September 11 as the symbol of irreclaimable melancholy, Falling Man unfolds as a series of ineffective holding actions against death and despair. If, in the normal course of events, death is feared because it is the negation of life, here life is defined as a state of near death or a state of barely escaping the condition of death. The characters are minimally alive in that they are numbed and they labor under the shadow of an overwhelming sadness that they cannot throw off. In article entitled “A Humanistic Approach to the Psychology of Trauma,” Ilene Serlin and John T. Cannon write: “From a humanistic perspective, a traumatic event is a disruption so serious that it threatens our existence, shaking the foundation of who we are and who we once were. It makes us face our basic helplessness and mortality. Trauma confronts us with the reality of death, ripping through our sanitized lives and our monumental denial of death” (314). Serlin and Cannon add that since the experience of trauma questions our ordinary perspective on life, it may allow us to grow. Victims can become survivors, and, by the grace of true grit (and some expensive psychoanalysis), survivors may become “thrivers.” In Falling Man, no such working-through or mourning takes place or is even possible. The “falling man” (standing for the fall of man) demonstrates the irresistible pull of gravity, the overpowering might of the downward plunge. Since the fictional performance artist uses primitive, backbreaking equipment, which causes spinal injuries and leads to “chronic depression” (222), and since he made “plans for a final fall, [which] did not include a safety harness”(221), his performances signify death on the installment plan (see Mars-Jones, “As His World”). As such, they are but the extensions of the other characters’ vaguely self-destructive lives.

Noninvolvement

After staggering out of the burning north tower, Keith Neudecker does not go back to his nearby apartment. Instead, for reasons he himself cannot fathom, he goes to the apartment, much farther north, where his estranged wife and his seven-year-old son are living. Instinctively, in the rush of events, he goes back to Lianne, looking for the shelter of the family. Soon he finds out, however, that the family idyll cannot be restored and the home does not function anymore as a safe haven. The passion between the spouses has long since disappeared, and it cannot be rekindled. They reconnect sexually but otherwise remain strangely aloof. Even moments of great intimacy indicate the distance that has opened up between them :

After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts and thighs stamped on the mirror.

(106)

After having given herself away, Lianne feels the need to make a weird gesture of self-repossession. She embraces her mirror image, as if to make sure she can hold on to herself. Keith, in turn, is made privy only to the quickly disappearing traces of her act of narcissism. He may have enjoyed access to her body, but his corporeal attentions are unable to alleviate her loneliness or break the spell of her lingering egotism.

The only moment of true intimacy occurs when the spouses jointly watch a rerun of the events of September 11 on television (134–35). But though Lianne is obsessed by the events of 9/11, steeping herself in the newspaper reports and the daily obituary profiles of the victims, and though she wakes up at night full of hatred for the attackers and indulging in dreams of revenge, she has no firsthand knowledge of the trauma that Keith suffered and, for that reason, she cannot begin to understand what he went through. They talk little about what they feel deep down, and, when they do, they talk at cross purposes. They want “to sink into [their] little lives” (75), but world events have made such retrenchment into the comforts of the home impossible.

Keith’s relation to Lianne is complicated by the fact that, shortly after their reunion, he starts an adulterous relationship with Florence, a black woman living on the other side of town and a fellow survivor of the terrorist attacks. Florence, who barely got out of the north tower herself, is in a position to provide the solidarity of the comrade-at-arms, which Lianne is unable to offer. Yet when Keith and Florence meet, “the sense of ill-matched people was not completely dispelled” (107). In an attempt to come to terms with the horror they experienced and witnessed, they talk extensively about what happened to them on the fatal day. In these exchanges, Keith is merely a sounding board for Florence. She wants to talk to “a person who might confirm the grim familiarity of the moment” (91), yet, in his presence, she basically talks only to herself. The company of Keith is a pretext for an act of auto-projection: “She was talking to the room, to herself, he thought, talking back in time to some version of herself…. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him” (91). Obviously, their growing intimacy comes from her need to hold forth about the day of the disaster and his willingness to listen: “This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women” (91). Even so, he grows tired of her; the mutual witnessing does not succeed in healing their wounded selves. Florence sees Keith as an actor (88). There is something stagey about his behavior, as if he were always playing at reality. Conversely, Keith calls his affair with Florence “unreal” (166). Neither of the interlocutors is fully present to him- or herself. Lacking a rock-bottom sense of identity, they cannot express themselves fully or authentically. Their feelings are articulated through clichés, borrowed mostly from the media or the movies. It is not that genuine declarations are proven to be false. It is genuineness itself that has become a staged condition. The characters are playing their own lives, as if they were actors on a movie set.

Throughout, the affair is characterized by a melodramatic quality and an eerie sense of déjà vu. When the relationship is sexually consummated, the seduction scene has an air of staleness to it and inevitability: a man and a woman find themselves in the same bedroom and one thing leads necessarily and dispassionately to another. The predominant feeling is not one of ardor but of lassitude. Similarly, when Keith arrives at her apartment, he is already anticipating the moment of leaving:

Later she would say what someone always says.

“Do you have to leave?”

He would stand naked by the bed.

“I’ll always have to leave.”

“And I’ll always have to make your leaving mean something else. Make it mean something romantic or sexy. But not empty, not lonely. Do I know how to do this?” …

She said, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”

But she would look at him in a way that made him feel he must be someone else, standing there by the bed, ready to say what someone always says.

(137–38)

The passage deserves to be quoted at length as a perfect illustration of the indirectness that characterizes human relationships in the novel. Ostensibly, the leave-taking of lovers is a moment of intimacy. Yet even such a highly personal and private occasion is predetermined by collective experience. People’s lives are prelived in the movies and so are shorn of a personal quality. Their experiences have the air of belatedness, of having been lived through before by others. Keith and Florence both have the sense that they have been expropriated, that their own lives have their centers somewhere outside themselves, somewhere distant and out of control.

This feeling of self-othering is supported by the diction of the passage. The many conditionals indicate that the sentences reflect not the exchange as it actually takes place but as Keith, knowing beforehand what predictably will happen, imagines that it will take place. The words express not what the lovers say but what, given the impossibility of authentic utterance, they are doomed to say by the ambient culture. Moreover, the meandering style—the one-sentence paragraphs in close succession, the uncertainty of reference in the personal pronouns, the bewildering use of conjunctions—is a function of indeterminacy, of marking time. The incoherence of the diction mirrors lives that are out of whack and relationships that have lost their focus.

The psychoanalyst Dori Laub has established that witnessing—in which the interlocutor becomes a coparticipant in the healing—is vital in the restoration of the mental health of trauma victims (Felman and Laub, Testimony, 57–68). By talking to someone who lends a willing ear, one is able to get control over one’s memories and thus to avoid painful flashbacks or nightma...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. 9/11: The Discursive Responses
• 1. American Melancholia: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
• 2. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: The Politics of Trauma
• 3. A Rose Is Not a Rose Is Not a Rose: History and Language in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• 4. Exorcising the Ghost: Irony and Spectralization in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World
• 5. September 11 and the Other
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index