"Like Nothing in this Life": September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo's Falling Man

The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile.

Don DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future"

When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not?

Jacques Derrida, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides"

Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Don DeLillo's post-September 11 novel, Falling Man (2007), takes its title from a now-famous photograph by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew that captured the falling body of a man who had jumped or been blown from a window of the south tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Set in stark relief against the backdrop of the Twin Towers' corrugated mass, the man, dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, appears arrested in the middle of an Olympic-style high dive. At the time of the photograph's publication in The New York Times on September 12, 2001, many commented on the aesthetics of the image and read heroic poise in the attitude of its subject. Within days, however, images such as Drew's became touchstones in the struggle for meaning that followed the terrorist attacks and were quickly suppressed in the mainstream media.¹ As some of the most graphic depictions of September 11, images of people falling from the towers defined the limits of the debates about representation—over what the events would mean and how they would mean it—that arose in the aftermath of the attacks.² The explicit reference to Drew's photograph in the title of DeLillo's novel, therefore, foregrounds this contested terrain and signals what I shall argue in this essay is the novel's central focus, not the events of September 11 per se but their representation. Falling Man, I argue, explores the relationship between the event and its representations and the novel is concerned, primarily, with charting the limits of representation in the face of the seemingly unrepresentable. If the events of September 11 produced a crisis of representation, I ask, how is that crisis manifest in contemporary U.S. narrative fiction and in DeLillo's novel in particular? How is that representational crisis itself represented? What are the representational limits of fictional narrative? How—if at all—can the event be recovered from its representations? DeLillo's novel provides a powerful site from which to engage these questions because they are central to it. In what follows, I address them through an analysis of the novel's form, its symbolic language, and its engagement with various types of visual representation.

Literary Representation

What constitutes an event is that for which there is no equivalent.

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

In a world of falling, reference could not adequately describe the world.

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience

In its engagement with the putative crisis of representation produced by the events of September 11, Falling Man works through an issue that preoccupied DeLillo in an earlier essay, entitled "In the Ruins of the Future," published in Harper's magazine in December 2001. It is worth rehearsing these concerns here not only because they preoccupied a number of American novelists after September 11, but also because they help to explain so much of the work that Falling Man does. For DeLillo, the terrorist attacks of September 11 produced both a rupture in the teleological progression of modernity and a crisis of representation in which the standard tools of the writer's trade were no longer sufficient, but in which writing was absolutely necessary. "The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile," DeLillo argues in "Ruins."

We have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted. But language is inseparable from the world that provokes...