ABSTRACT
This chapter turns from the fictions of factual international relations literature to the factual sources and implications of international relations fiction. It opens by noting several famous novels about real international political events, especially wars, and then selects a case study: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, respectively a watershed moment in contemporary international relations and its preeminent novelistic account in contemporary American fiction. The chapter sets up the discussion of the plot, characters, and structure of Falling Man by first elaborating DeLillo’s conception of the novel as emancipatory historiographic metafiction engaged in immanent critique of the state and society. With this conception in the background, the chapter then explains the main political implications of DeLillo’s book: a deconstruction undercutting the official (state-propagated) 9/11 narrative by revealing its plasticity and artificiality, coupled with a subversive counter-narrative collapsing the popular distinction between benevolent Americans and their evil Islamic enemies by pointing out the terror latent in American-led globalization. By virtue of these elements, and notwithstanding its reception by most literary critics as nothing more than a psychological trauma novel, Falling Man surfaces as a prime example of political activism.
