Falling man

Since the catastrophic events of 9/11 and its aftermath, the discourse of terrorism has become one of the dominant preoccupations
of American literature. Don DeLillo is one of the preeminent masters of contemporary fiction whose novels of terror, both before
and after 9/11, have spurred a great deal of criticism. What distinguishes his novels from the spate of 9/11 fiction is his obsession
with the terrorist narrative long before the day “silver cross[ed] the blue.” This study will focus on his Falling Man, which directly
gets to grips with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and is credited with being one of the most genuine responses to it to date. In this
novel, DeLillo (2007) manifestly identifies terrorism with Islam. Adopting an Orientalist position, the writer tells the story of a
group of Muslims who blatantly conduct the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in an attempt to take revenge on the West for its unrestrained
growth in the course of modernity. As such, he lays the blame on Islam as being incompatible with the West’s history of
civilization. Thus, in his putatively historiographic rendering of 9/11, DeLillo, focusing on the American, or generally speaking,
“hegemonic” side of the event, complies with the governmental discourses, thereby presenting a totalizing reading of it. Drawing
on Edward Said’s theories, this paper aims to shed light on DeLillo’s inscription of Orientalist discourse in Falling Man.

This term paper constitutes the attempt to display the emergence of fiction written after the terrorist attacks with regard to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Not only, will it focus on the novel as an embodiment of the dramatic aftermath for the American society, but first and foremost on the effects this event has had on the characters of the book. The paper will examine how the atmosphere of melancholia and hopelessness is created and will for that focus on lexical aspects rather that stylistic devices. Falling Man provides an impression of the numbness, confusion and trauma1 the survivors of the attacks lived through which is only one of the reasons it has been criticized by people ever since the novel was published in 2007.

Although Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007) has been one of the most influential 9/11 novels written to this day, it did not meet the expectations of reviewers when it was published. It is necessary to bear in mind that 9/11 can be understood both as a psychic/personal trauma and a cultural/collective one since it was a wound not only in the mind of those directly affected by the tragedy but also in the nation’s sense of identity. Despite DeLillo’s previous interest in cultural issues, he chose to write a 9/11 psychic —rather than cultural— trauma novel. Th is paper analyses the literary techniques and means of representation used in the novel to reflect the effects of traumatic memory and ponders the advantages and shortcomings of psychic trauma novels in the representation of traumas that affect society at large.

KEYWORDS: trauma studies; Falling Man; Don DeLillo; trauma fiction; 9/11 fiction; contemporary American literature

The horrid sight of people jumping from the burning towers on 9/11 has been identified as one of the major causes of posttraumatic stress disorder related to the attacks.  One photograph, capturing a man falling headfirst as though performing a dive appeared in hundreds of newspapers the day after the tragedy but soon became a taboo never to be published again. Reverberations of its traumatizing effect as emblematic of the horrors of 9/11, however, can be felt in a number of artworks. 
By applying Roland Barthes’s terminology as an analytic tool my purpose is to reveal inherent ambiguities in the photograph’s iconography that render its “verticality and symmetry” a palimpsest of significations in which the man’s composed posture is configured both as aesthetically redemptive (the body that controls its surroundings) and simultaneously allusive of the leap by which he gives himself to the void (the body controlled by its surroundings). Cognizant of the centrality of this ambiguity I will proceed to examine its reverberations in Kerry Skarbakka’s photographic performances, Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, and James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire.

The distressing sight of people jumping or falling out of the World Trade Center has become an integral part of our collective imaginary of 9/11. Photographs capturing their jump and subsequent fall into the abyss have burned into our memories. Although such traumatizing images were quickly taken out of circulation in print media, they have had a long afterlife on the Internet and in the arts. In the realm of literature, a number of texts, especially novels, have addressed 9/11’s falling bodies, or “jumpers,” as they were also called: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) are perhaps the most well-known. Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), although rarely discussed as a 9/11 novel, and even less so in relation to the falling bodies, also evokes images of the falling people, albeit differently from these novels. This chapter compares Cunningham’s and DeLillo’s novels on the basis of the techniques they employ to represent images of the 9/11 jumpers.
The notion of ekphrasis will serve as a lens through which to compare the two novels. An ancient rhetorical tool for describing visual images through words, ekphrasis has been defined and applied in a variety of ways (Hagstrum 1958; Krieger 1967; Heffernan 1993; Wagner 1996). Most significantly for my purposes in this chapter, W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) distinguishes three moments of ekphrasis: indifference, hope, and fear, each of which describes the writer’s emotional disposition towards the image/text dialectic. After discussing the problematic relationship between image and text in relation to photographs of the jumpers, I use Mitchell’s terminology to look at ekphrasis as a means of verbalizing terrorizing images. Subsequently, I introduce the term “phantomogenic ekphrasis” to examine how Specimen Days and Falling Man approximate images of the 9/11 jumpers.

Richard Drew's photograph of "The Falling Man" has become the iconic representative not only of the 'jumpers' but of all the victims who where killed that day (“The Falling Man”). Despite the relative recency of the event of 9/11, the photograph of a man falling headfirst from the North Tower has already been the subject of an extensive and ongoing debate. Historians and journalists have studied and analyzed the image's controversy, including its tabooization in the US media .This paper identifies the factors that caused the controversy and to support my claim that the "Falling Man" photograph is not merely deceptive in its description of the subject; it disrupts the framework within which the event of September 11 was narrated. The "Falling Man" defies the dominant narrative in following ways: it debates the problematic of innocence and raises ethical issues. In addition, the anonymity of the subject rejects mourning as the only possible response, while the lack of scale and perspective disables the viewers from apprehending the terror and the extent of destruction.

In “Trauma and Experience” Cathy Caruth suggests that “the truth of traumatic experience [...] forms the center of its pathology or symptoms,” including not only “falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (1995, 5). This leads to an ineluctable elusiveness in coming to terms, factually and emotionally with the traumatic trigger. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge illustrate this psychic and cultural disconnect between memory and history in their implicit and explicit ekphrastic presentation of fine art and iconic journalistic photography and footage. While Falling Man concerns a survivor of the attacks and his following trauma, Bleeding Edge takes a more distanced approach to the terrorist attacks, and instead focuses on 9/11 as a news event that shocked people, and was something "postmodern sublime, an event (technologically mediated and effected) for which no expression is adequate to describe" (Conte 2011). Both work illustrate this psychic and cultural disconnect between memory and history in its implicit and explicit ekphrastic presentation of fine art, iconic journalistic photography, and the discourses of new news media.
The modern classic still lifes of Giorgio Morandi have a privileged place in the Delillo’s narrative, the book takes its title from Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s image of a man plummeting from the World Trade Center head first, which first appeared on page 7 of The New York Times on 12 September, 2001. In spite of the iconic status of the photo, even as DeLillo was writing this book, the image is conspicuously absent from the novel; instead, imaginary performance artist David Janiak is inserted into the narrative as a place holder for the journalistic photograph, buffering the keen edge of emotion and memory associated with the image, while simultaneously enabling it to be included. As Sven Cvek notes, “While trauma is a fundamental concept for the understanding of the novel, it is important to stress that Falling Man also insists on the openness and unfamiliarity of the national historical moment, and refuses to painlessly work through traumatic events by enclosing it in a definite narrative account” (2011, 184). Indeed, the psychic foregrounding of the news-photo without its actual ekphrastic representation contributes to DeLillo’s tempered narrative engagement evident in this novel and Cosmopolis, giving it the eery quality of so much of highly mediated events, as Slavoj Zizek quips “our reaction to many a spectacular ‘event’ can only be: ‘It did really happen, but it isn’t true” (2014, 16). This contrasts dramatically with the hard referent quality that the photograph possesses, and invites a comparison with Morandi’s paintings.
While the protagonist in Falling Man is traumatized by being physically violated by the attacks, his family, as well as the characters in Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge witness terror exclusively through media, be it on television or the internet. Both novels comment not only on how terrorism traumatizes through acts of physical violence, but also how terrorism terrorizes witnesses through live and still images of horror. Thus, 9/11, being also a global media event through television, newspapers and the internet, demonstrate how mere images are able to traumatize (Mitchell 2010). The texts’ ekphrastic approaches to terrorizing images are therefore interesting not only with regards to exploration of how the textual relates to the visual, but also how the terrorizing images of the attacks and it's aftermath are subconsciously repeated and transferred through seeing tower-like and plane-like objects in daily life. Interestingly, Bleeding Edge also features new kinds of victims, namely the “virtual” victims of the dotcom crash, and victims of hacking and other kinds of digital intrusion and attacks.

The book investigates relations between the 'East' and 'West' which have been forming and evolving from the Enlightenment until the present times. On the basis of material covering a selection of American, British and Turkish literature, as well as examples of Western Orien-talist painting and musical (operatic) illustrations of analysed issues, the study aims to usher in a deeper and more nuanced understanding of post/colonial phenomena and their broader socio-cultural implications. The work attempts to accentuate the resonances and dissonanc-es between various arts and disciplines, with the view to illuminating the organic nature of both inter-and intra-cultural relationships. The rationale behind such an orientation in research and methodology has not been to arrive at a final eclectic perspective, but rather, to promote a more comprehensive and diverse approach towards the 'Other.' Julia Szoí tysek completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of Wrocí aw, Poland. She currently lectures at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her academic interests include literary and artistic representations of the Middle East, travel discourses, racial/ethnic theories, and opera studies.

This paper shifts the terms of art historical inquiry concerning the iconography of falling, asking how this subject matter could challenge or extend the stakes of images in the early modern period. Moving beyond a moralized spatial metaphorics, this paper argues that falling bodies were crucial sites for the reconfiguration of the relationship between the body and the world in moments of epistemological rupture. Falling bodies could interrogate the material presence of illusionistic visual images at a moment when new knowledge about bodily weight emerged as a problem in art theory, natural philosophy, and theology.

Focusing on Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Fall of Simon Magus (1571) in the Foppa chapel of Milan’s Church of San Marco, I will argue that the stakes of Lomazzo’s painting extend well beyond symbolic meaning of a heretical threat. In the Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590), Lomazzo introduces the concept of moti, or movement, which relates to the depiction of falling. In fact, moti suggests an attempt to reconcile visual images with more embodied notions of epistemology that were emerging in competing debates about bodily movement in art treatises. Giulio Mancini, for example, would reflect on the importance of movement to images through the painting The Fall of Simon Magus Before Peter and Paul by Francesco Vanni (1603) in Rome. In the Considerazione sulla Pittura (1621) Mancini writes that Vanni’s painting was an image that “we imagine will move and come crashing down.” Ultimately, the physicality of the falling body ruptures the order of pictorial space and, in doing so, destabilizes the relationship between the beholder and the image.

In his book, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson recognizes the political work of violence, suggesting “[w]ar cannot easily survive the capacity to imagine oneself in the body of the other.” As Simpson infers, the notion of being embedded in the life of another poses significant challenges to the perpetuation of violent acts. In this paper, I offer a re-theorization of violence that takes up the metaphor of “organic shrapnel”, a phenomenon in which human flesh from a suicide bomber or victim is driven under the skin of a survivor. What organic shrapnel suggests is not only that the body is simultaneously permeable and weaponized; the image also constructs trauma as a relational and possibly ethical experience. Using the figure of organic shrapnel, I argue for a broader understanding of the term violence itself – one that addresses its unfolding in both space and time rather than as an absolute and single act. Working through several ways of re-theorizing violence with regard to hospitality, the body, its spatial and temporal threshold and the significance of the other, the paper asks: what might it mean to reconsider violence as a site of potential ethical formation and address rather than the foreclosure of relational bonds?

Within the many literary representations of, or related to, the 9/11 and its aftermath, Don DeLillo’s works not only allow a comprehensive approach to post-9/11 literature but they also refer to the emergent social conditions of globalization. My analysis of Falling Man, while taking into account elements from the so-called “novels of globalization” (Annesley 2006), based on economic and technological changes, attempts to address those transformations that have affected both cultural representation and the social perception of a world of global uncertainty (Beck 1999).