ABSTRACT
Falling Man, Don DeLillo’s much-awaited novel on the attacks on September 11, 2001, is a novel of precariousness in form and content; the attacks leave the protagonists adrift amid the debris of the towers, with a sense of loss and uncertainty that comes to encompass narrative itself. But above all, it responds to the specic challenges to perception posed by 9/11. Borrowing its title from Richard Drew’s photograph of a person falling from the burning World Trade Center, one of the most urgent reminders of how media spectacle and death became entangled on the day, Falling Man rewrites this visual impact by focusing on the embodied, psychical, and metaphoric condition of falling itself. Suspended between the impact of terror and a future obscured, DeLillo’s contribution to post-9/11 literature is an intimate meditation on trauma in the 21st century. Here, trauma is not so much a question of shock, but exposes the vulnerability of the human being confronted with the history of disaster, and of a poetics that has lost its anchorage in the certainties of representational language. This subtlety is this novel’s strength, and makes Falling Man a striking intervention in the aftermath of the attacks. By privileging slowed-down contemplation over ideological certainty, and ambiguity over clear-cut binaries, this text offers an alternative mode of response. It reects an ethics of witnessing that nds its basis in the acknowledgment of precariousness itself.
