ABSTRACT
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) offers a dialectical critique of the transnational politics of globalization and terrorism through the figures of Keith Neudecker, a traumatized survivor of the fall of the towers, his wife Lianne, a proximate witness to the attacks, David Janiak, a performance artist known as the Falling Man who recapitulates the spectacle of horror on 9/11, Martin Ridnour, a former member of the radical group Kommune 1, and Hammad, a young jihadist bent on martyrdom. If al-Qaeda terrorists seized the world narrative on that day, DeLillo’s novel offers a counternarrative in the novel’s tripartite recursive form and in the eponymous Falling Man, whose unannounced plunges over shocked commuters turn the tactics of terrorism into performance art. Each of the novel’s three parts is titled with a metonomasia, the substitution of a misleading name for a proper noun, or vice versa: Bill Lawton; Ernst Hechinger; and David Janiak. The Falling Man is an unidentified jumper from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, in a photograph taken by Richard Drew. Janiak’s performances emulate the figure of the Hanged Man in the Major Arcana of the Tarot. His pose expresses not death and retribution but meditative reflection.
