ABSTRACT
Midway through Falling Man, Lianne, whose husband Keith has barely escaped the fall of the Trade Towers in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (“9/11”), reminisces about reading Kierkegaard huddled in her college dorm. DeLillo, it turns out, read the same volume. In a short letter, the author explains Kierkegaard’s influence and, at the same time, preserves its mystery, especially with regard to the philosopher’s role in Falling Man. “I’m not a full-fledged Kierkegaardian….I read his work decades back and still have an old Anchor paperback and a Kierkegaard anthology, second hand, falling apart, and, as described in the novel, with the original owner’s underlinings…I’m not sure how K. found his way into the novel.”1 However it happened, Kierkegaard solicited DeLillo where the power of aesthetics crossed into religion, an ambivalence familiar from Kierkegaard’s own writings.2 At issue was not the philosophical or theological what of the work so much as the ability to powerfully name, a forceful how of writing. “The titles of his work drew me in back then. The immensity of vision, the will to be equal to eternal themesfear, trembling, sickness, death. Maybe it was a Nordic extension of my Roman Catholic upbringing.”3 In place of the sublime art of the church, the vast blear of the heath where Kierkegaard’s father cursed God and his son’s tragedy began.4 The
1 Don DeLillo, Letter to the author. September 26, 2009. 2 See, for instance, Fear and Trembling’s discussion of the Merman, a sensualist, an aesthete who operates outside the bounds of the ethical, in the category of “the demonic.” The demonic, at least potentially, “has the same quality as the divine, namely that the single individual is able to enter into an absolute relation to it.” SKS 4, 186 / FT, 97. In a note, de silentio adds: “Of all the branches of knowledge, esthetics is the most faithless. Anyone who has really loved it becomes in one sense unhappy, but he who has never loved it becomes a pecus [dumb brute]. SKS 4, 187, note / FT, 97, note. For a lengthy argument of the view, see Joakim Garff, Den søvnløse. Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1995 and Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005, makes a similar case by different means. 3 DeLillo, Letter to the author. September 26, 2009. 4 See Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, pp. 7-46. By the end of his 21st year,
mystery of Kierkegaard’s role in Falling Man originates-like the novel, amidst the haze of pulverized towers-in an overwhelming of the human that is also the beginning of a life, the center of a world.
