“Memory to All That Howling Space”:DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Artist after 9/11

Abstract

This essay discusses how Falling Man reveals Don DeLillo’s own dilemma as a writer who used to depict the atomic culture during the Cold War era, criticize multinational capitalism, and assume the artist’s role to attack and affect the viewers’ consciousness. After 9/11, the U. S. gave up the containment foreign policies and claimed a war on terrorism, and the American society could not afford even an artist-terrorist as a metaphor; DeLillo faced a new reality in which now he should speak for what his artist-terrorist characters had been criticizing in the 1990s. DeLillo had to pursue two separate goals at once: first, he felt a responsibility as an American writer, in a time of trauma on the collective level in the U. S., to create a “counter-narrative” against terrorism; second, he had to maintain his integrity as a writer who had criticized the global capitalist system. To provide solace to the traumatized American readers, he reconstructed Keith Neudecker, a fictive survivor’s memory as a counter-narrative. The story of the victims reconstructed in the novel escapes the terrorists’ script and creates a human beauty out of it, a meaning to hold on to. On the other hand, DeLillo created David Janiak, an artist-terrorist who refuses to tame the attacks into the Symbolic. Janiak, a so-called “falling man” in the novel, reminds the spectators of the falling man in Richard Drew’s picture by haunting New Yorkers’ everyday space. Though he retains the terrorists’ way of affecting human consciousness, the political meaning of his art is obscure. DeLillo has created Janiak for his artistic integrity, but Janiak’s inability to criticize the global capitalist system whose giant emblem has just collapsed reflects DeLillo’s own dilemma.