The second part of the novel , ‘Ernst Hechinger’, takes the reader back to the morning of 11 September 2001: ‘when he appeared at the door it was not possible, a man coming out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face’ (FM 87). Paradoxically, an analepsis referring to Keith’s poker games with his friends (some of them, dead or injured in the attacks) is what actually announces the future obsessive gambling of the character , seen, from a psychological perspective, as another fall—for Keith is, indeed, one of the three hypostases of the ‘falling man’, together with the man Keith actually sees falling from the tower, and with the performance artist who stages this fall over and over again, appearing without notice in various places in New York. As Kauffman asserts, Keith devotes himself to gambling ‘with the reckless ferocity of someone who cheated death. […] But Keith’s addiction has nothing to do with money. Money is symbolic and Keith has a strong aversion to symbols. He seeks out the “crucial anonymity” of the casinos, “the mingling of countless lives that have no stories attached”’ (2008, 369, quoting FM 204).
This second part of this novel begins with a discussion of terrorism and otherness (distinction is made between our [Western] terrorism and their [Muslims’] terrorism) through the insertion of the German art dealer going by the name of Martin Ridnour (a forged identity, since his real name gives the title of this second part of the novel ). The reader gathers, from the fragmented bits of information offered (the entire novel is made of fractured sequences which seem to flow from one to the next without apparent logic), that the inoffensive art dealer was involved in his past in a radical movement in West Germany, Kommune One, most probably pursuing acts of terrorism and counterespionage against his state. Interestingly, he is not considered alien or dangerous, as is the case with the Muslim terrorists , only on the grounds of his Western identity: ‘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’ (FM 195). Another function of this character is to add to the text a more objective perspective through the stereotypical hetero-image he has of the Americans.
Mirrored in the coda dedicated to Hammad, the rhetoric of otherness acquires a surprising dimension: the Other , inasmuch as s/he even exists, is just a construct meant to support the self in its pursuits:What about the others, those who will die? […]
What about the others?
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)
In the Western understanding of alterity (as long as it is not of a definitive type), and also in the Easterner’s complete overlooking of the Other as irrelevant, one may decipher the imprints of social and cultural conditioning: the ‘mental software ’, as Hofstede et al. (2010) names this process, is programmed to accept and appreciate one’s peers, on the strength of (ir)religious, racial, geopolitical and social affinities.
American trauma is represented by the acrobatic spectacle of a ‘performance artist known as Falling Man’ (FM 219) who re-enacts (to the horror and disapproval of the New Yorkers who struggle to resume their lives as they used to be before the attacks) the fall of the man from the North Tower building, caught in the world-famous photograph by Richard Drew, photojournalist of Associated Press. The artist’s identity remains unknown until towards the end of the novel, when he is expedited in a short, impersonal obituary from where Lianne, Keith’s wife, learns that his name was David Janiak, that he was 39 years old, and that he apparently died of natural causes. Symbolically, the death of this embodiment of ‘the post-9/11 human condition’ (Kauffman 2009, 652), after his having repeatedly arrested the gaze of the New Yorkers for a period of almost four years, may suggest closure and an end of disorientation, a cue that the startling and traumatic mourning has finally reached its consummation. Perhaps it is exactly this impending closure that makes contemporary novelists go back to 9/11 again and again, and it may be in this spirit that DeLillo’s novel ends circularly, a few minutes earlier than it began (earlier than the moment when Keith Neudecker stumbles in the street), with a visual description of the moment of the impact: ‘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’ (FM 239). Focalisation shifts from Hammad to Keith almost in mid-sentence. The latter’s inability and unwillingness to overcome trauma , his need to revisit the moments after the attacks (engaging in a relationship with Florence, a woman who also escaped from the North Tower) are, in keeping with the entire structure of the novel , resolved only on the last pages, which bring in the additional information that Keith had witnessed the death of his friend, Rumsey, one of the mates he used to play cards with before 9/11.
Kauffman’s observation that ‘now everything is either ‘before’ or ‘after’ 9/11’ (2009, 653), inspired by DeLillo’s own ‘everything now is measured by after’ (FM 138), is supported by the actual (chronological) open ending of the novel (as already stated, the chapters that focus on the Islamists are disruptive of the novel’s structure and timeframe—they are, as a matter of fact, set before, and not after 9/11). The conclusion of the representation of the fall of American identity occurs in the last but one chapter. Not surprisingly, it does not concentrate on Keith, who remains in Las Vegas, in ‘a kind of deep sleep, a narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down’ (FM 216), but on his wife, who, after having attempted, throughout the entire novel, to cope with trauma , resolves all her doubts and questions on the motivation of the terrorists , on divinity, on Muslim culture and mentality, and so on, with a single wish: ‘to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue’ (FM 236).
Moving on to the investigation of the characterological representations in Falling Man, one may assert that they become apparent as soon as one manages to gather from the sparing information the novel provides that the family Keith goes to after having escaped alive from the tower is, in fact, no longer a nuclear family (mother, father and child/children), the American ideal during the country’s stages of greatest development (after the Second World War ), but a dissolution of this sociological unit(y). On 11 September 2001, Keith Neudecker and Lianne Glenn had been separated for over a year, thus, they may be said to represent what Shorter termed, as early as 1975, a ‘postmodern family’, a family whose values have changed, as he puts it, with the liberation of women, and which manifests strong predispositions towards instability and divorce (in Zeitlin et al. 1995). It is interesting, however, that the two ‘resume a semblance of family life’ (Kauffman in Olster 2011, 135) after the attacks, although their conflicts remain unresolved, and although Keith ‘was not quite returned to his body yet’ (FM 59). Throughout the novel, the Keith character is constructed as a synecdoche for trauma, but a trauma that is hardly representative of the entire American nation which, although shattered, has had a mediated experience and understanding of what people on the planes and in the towers lived on that day. Even his thoughts acquire a metafictional dimension at times, which points to unreality and unreliability: ‘in the movie version, someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups’ (FM 27). It is clear that Keith and his suspended animation existence can only be analysed in terms of trauma , which makes this character less suitable for the purpose of this chapter.
Much more interesting from this perspective proves to be the wife, Lianne, an editor working for an academic publishing house, who tries to make sense of the world after 9/11, ‘a world in which the unimaginable—people falling from the sky—becomes the actual’ (Carroll 2013, 111). Lianne is, much more than her estranged husband, the representation of the American who seeks to understand
what has befallen them: it is true that she also develops compulsions but, if Keith is the embodiment of Freudian melancholia, as Kristiaan Versluys notes (2009, 20) in his work dedicated to 9/11 fiction from the angle of trauma studies (Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel), Lianne may be construed as the image of the American working through trauma.4 She starts reading everything she can get hold of about Islam , she even tries to read the Qur’an , she ‘reads everything they wrote about the attacks’ (FM 67), and develops a morbid penchant for the extended obituaries—‘she read newspaper profiles of the dead’ (FM 68)—published by The New York Times under the heading ‘Portraits of Grief’. This auto-image of the American after 9/11 constructed by DeLillo seems to match the remarks made by novelist Joan Didion’s in her book, Fixed Ideas: America since 9/11 (2003) with regard to the Americans’ quest for understanding Islam and the American involvement in that world in the moments following the attacks. During a book promotion tour, the novelist noted that people ‘were making connections [she] had not yet in [her] numbed condition thought to make: connections between that political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take’ (2003, qtd. in Kauffman 2009, 647). This empirical sociological observation does not point to a defined trait of the Americans as intellectually inquisitive and fond of political participation, but rather acknowledges a temporary state, which is the reason why the reaction cannot be described as stereotypical, which is natural, since the event that triggered it is singular. Lianne, on the other hand, is intellectually inquisitive by the nature of her occupation, and her intellectualism (together with her mother’s preoccupations with art) may be an attempt to subvert the persistent stereotype of the unwise, uninterested, infantile American citizen who knows nothing about the world beyond their own borders.
Even this newly found identity of the Americans , interested in their role in the world after having been stricken with ‘terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and un-restrained retribution’ (The Observer 16 September 2001) is shaped by the representations brought to them by the media . As Hamilton Carroll argues, Falling Man explores the relationship between the event and its representations, ‘a reflection on the capacity of narrative fiction to produce a counter narrative to the events of September 11’ which contains ‘moments of ekphrastic description that are central to its meaning-making apparatus’ (2013, 116). Reality , as Linda Hutcheon remarks, is accessible only inasmuch as it is produced and sustained by its cultural representations , which is why ‘ekphrases (or verbal representations of visual representations) […] have central representational functions’ (2004, 121). In this light, Lianne may be read as a fictionalisation of the average American addressee of the cultural representation of reality produced and delivered by the media . Her obsession with the video footage of the attacks, her inability to let go of the images ‘that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin’ (FM 134) point to her accessing the crashes and collapse from a mediated position, either through television or through her husband’s memories. In Carroll’s opinion, Lianne’s compulsive viewing of the footage replicates ‘the seemingly endless repetition that characterised the media coverage in the early days after the attacks’ (2013, 118), while the fact that her memories seem to differ from what the images show her, this contradictory juxtaposition of television record and narrative memory, is a disruption of the ‘representational truth of the televisual images’ (119). What needs to be stressed once more is that Lianne’s memories have been mediated from the very beginning, as was the case with the vast majority of the Americans , not to mention the other nations.
Another element defining the paradigmatic shift in the American mindset is Islamophobia . The episode in which Lianne wants to confront her Greek (!) neighbour for listening to oriental music is conclusive in this respect: the Americans’ sensitivity to all things Middle Eastern has reached a paranoid level: ‘she was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on the door and saying something’ (FM 67). It is not the Easterner who is stereotyped in this xenophobic attitude but the average American , who, although s/he may understand cultural and religious differences (and similarities, as later in the novel Lianne comes to the realisation that as ‘others were reading the Koran, she was going to church’ (FM 233)), reaches unparalleled levels of bias targeted at the Other, perceived as wholly violent and threatening, and disregards the good judgement that ‘there isn’t a single Islam: there are Islams , just as there are Americas’ (Said 2001).
A novel with a fractured structure, a ‘race against reality’, as characterised by novelist Andrew O’Hagan in New York Review of Books (2007), which addresses referentially and (ekphrastically) the many representations of 9/11, and which ultimately dwells on trauma , Falling Man provides, nevertheless, a surprisingly realist image of the twenty-first century average American through its subtle criticism of America’s failing to comprehend global dynamics and its cultural isolationism. Unable, however, to render this inability through an objective American lens, as if the American characters were too blind to see the shortcomings of their politics , DeLillo introduces an alien character , Ernst Hechinger, alias Martin Ridnour, a German, whose most obvious role in the novel is to explain the attacks on America as being not a result of religious fundamentalism but merely an effect of American imperialism . In one of the very few instances of actual political discourse present in Falling Man, Ridnour debunks Lianne’s and her mother’s assumption that the terrorists have no other goals than killing innocent people, and that they are driven exclusively by religious excesses: ‘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’ (FM 46). His anti-American bias is made obvious in a few instances. For example, he considers appropriate the fact that Keith once owned a pit bull, ‘a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill’ (FM 44). The association suggests that the foreigner has a metonymical representation of the Americans in his mind, as being aggressive. Later in the novel , at the memorial of Nina , his former lover and Lianne’s mother, Ridnour will voice this opinion without hiding behind figurative language, by declaring in unequivocal terms that ‘we [Europeans] are all sick of America and Americans , the subject nauseates us’ (FM 191), and that America becomes irrelevant precisely through and because of its dangerous imperialism:There is a word in German. Gedankenübertragung. This is the broadcasting of thoughts. We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only center it occupies. (FM 191)
The retort of the American interlocutor, a library director, is relevant for the sense of superiority the Americans have acquired with the expansion of their cultural hegemony . He points out that Europeans can no longer ignore America , since they go to American movies, read American books, listen to American music and speak American English. Without contesting the reality comprised in the words of the American , the European bitterly (and inconclusively) replies that he does not recognise ‘this America ’ anymore: ‘there’s an empty space where America used to be’ (FM 192–3).
In fact, this feeling of emptiness, of unexpected and shocking defeat, of an empire falling—from the symbolic representation of the fall, exacted through the actual fall of the two towers, to the decline of the notions of family and identity—is just what permeates DeLillo’s novel , from its opening in what ‘was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night’ (FM 3), up to its circular ending with the image of the man falling ‘like nothing in this life’ (FM 246). Although the novel has receive
d mixed (mostly negative) criticism, many hinting at its being much less accomplished than his earlier successes, partly owing to an assumed lack of cohesion, it is precisely this fragmentation that enables the accurate representation of the image of America after the fall.
Artpolitik and Journalistic Manipulation in Amy Waldman’s The Submission
When one opens a book and reads ‘Amy Waldman was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of the New York Times and a national correspondent for The Atlantic’ (The Submission , 2012), one might easily expect to find an elaborate pseudo-journalistic undertaking disguised as a novel . All the more so as it is the first novel by this author , and one could reasonably presume that her journalistic skills could not be completely put aside while writing fiction . This is but one of the reasons why Amy Waldman’s debut, The Submission (2012), has been selected to provide an alternative to the way a postmodern novelist such as Don DeLillo envisages America ‘after the fall’. Rather than just looking at the New Yorkers’ endeavours to cope with trauma and resume their lives, Amy Waldman delves into a new-media form of realism, somewhat related to the news post in social media, which makes her writing a useful tool for the case for a twenty-first century neorealism that this book is trying to make. This is an instance of yet another rebuttal of the famous Barthesian dictum on the death of the author. ‘To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is explained’ (Barthes 1977).
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