Is There Freedom Afterwards? A Dialogue between Paradise Lost and DeLillo's Falling Man

The terrorist attacks of 2001 cast their shadow not only over contemporary literature, but also over the ways we read literature of the past. In Milton studies, for example, a major critical controversy erupted over the question of whether or not Samson Agonistes could be read as a work in favour of terrorism.¹ In this essay, I would like to read Milton's other masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), in the presence of Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), and vice versa, to read DeLillo's novel in the presence of Milton's epic. When read in the twenty-first century, both texts are transfigured by the events of September 11, 2001.² But read alongside each other, they also illuminate a countertheme: that no historical event, however apocalyptic, can determine our response to it. The activity of reading, in both texts, is dramatized as a discipline by which we come to know how fundamentally we are free, free to choose for ourselves what events can mean, or when they fail to mean. Coming to John Milton's epic post-DeLillo, and DeLillo's novel post-9/11, one discovers remarkable affinities between the two texts, as well as passages that richly interilluminate each other even when they diverge in argument or tone. Where they do converge, and with particular force, is in their unfolding of this countertheme: that by working carefully through (reflecting, writing, or reading) a moment of historical catastrophe one may unravel the sense of inevitability that accrues to it retrospectively. Or, to put it in seventeenth century theological terms, one may achieve that ultimate goal: to recover freedom, after having freely chosen not to be free.

In Falling Man, three characters stand looking at a still life painting, by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Himself a painter of second and third glances, Morandi produced a number of still lifes on the same theme, depicting the same cluster of objects, but it seems to be the 1956 Natura morta (fig. 1) which is described in the novel.³ There were: "seven or eight objects, the taller ones set against a brushy slate background. The other items were huddled boxes and biscuit tins, grouped before a darker background. . . . Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white."⁴

The three characters are in an apartment in New York City, and the time is shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of them is an art collector named Martin Ridnour, and he says to the other two, "I keep seeing the towers in this still life." Another character looks at the painting (she is Lianne Neudecker, who together with her husband Keith are the two main protagonists of the novel), and she agrees. Looking at "the two dark objects," what she sees are the Twin Towers (49). Similarly, when I show a pre-2001 photograph of the World Trade Center to my students, they tell me they already imagine an image of the towers being destroyed. This is a problem of perception in the aftermath of a historical catastrophe. Not only is the past irrevocably final, as offended Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but also, its complexity and depth collapse so that all we can see are premonitions of disaster.⁵

The problem of how we see things naturally also affects how we respond to the disaster. Many public commentators in Britain now agree that the war in Iraq was driven by a national thirst for

Fig. 1.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (1956). Musée Morandi, Bologna. By permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS),

© 2011, New York / SIAE, Rome.

revenge in the aftermath of 9/11. "In times of crisis, people need a scapegoat"; so a BBC Radio 4 presenter commented in December 2009, which shows the on-going relevance of René Girard's ideas about the function of the scapegoat, or le bouc émissaire, in modern as well as archaic societies.⁶ According to Girard, the scapegoat is sacrificed in order to break the cycle of mimetic desire that leads to rivalry and violence. In Falling Man, Martin argues that the two towers expressed "fantasies of wealth and power," which in their very construction produced an opposing "fantas[y] of destruction." As he says, "You build a thing like that, so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious" (116).⁷ Killing the scapegoat, or in this case, launching a war, initiates a new cycle of violence. According to the cultural critic W. T. J. Mitchell, the Twin Towers provided a precise emblem of the way terror operates by "cloning itself"; it produces an instantaneous, mimetic response that escalates like a virus.⁸

Read in the shadow of 9/11, Paradise Lost and Falling Man emerge as texts twinned in their determination to resist the fatalistic response to catastrophe. Both Milton and DeLillo were writing in the aftermath of a historical disaster. For DeLillo, the old New York City, the lost, pre-9/11, city had been unique in its commingling of rituals and beliefs from many diverse cultures. Milton thought the collapse of the commonwealth, and the return to monarchy in 1660, represented a backslide from a condition of freedom to one of enslavement.⁹ "Reason is but choosing," he asserted in Areopagitica, but if one's sanity is lost, how does one recover the capacity for free choice?¹⁰ For all their substantial differences—in religious faith, in attitude to military violence, in their understanding of the public function of the writer—both Milton and DeLillo dramatize how the way out of hell lies in developing new modes of perception (without this, one's sense of having escaped hell turns out to be a delusion, as happens to Satan). For example, later in Falling Man, Lianne's mother Nina looks again at the Morandi still life. She says, "these shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It's a work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in." A still life in Italian is called a natura morta. Nina thinks this is what the painting is about: "It's all about mortality . . . being mortal, being human" (111). Whether or not you agree with her insight, what is important is that her inward looking frees her from an automatic, overdetermined form of response. One might compare this to that passage at the opening of Paradise Lost, book 3, in which the narrator (like the author) regrets the loss of his sight: "Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day" (3.41-42).¹¹ By way of compensation he invokes celestial light to "shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes" (3.52-53; emphasis mine).

Morandi spent years (all the years of World War II, in fact) staring very intently at his bizarre collection of objects; he never seemed to tire of looking at them because he painted them many times, and each still life records a fresh discovery. Since the cure for responding automatically to disaster lies in rereading the detail, we are going to approach Milton and DeLillo's grand theme, the Fall, from a very literal and microscopic perspective. Perhaps rashly, we will set aside the larger ramifications of the Fall for the moment, to concentrate simply on how the body falls through space, and how it is observed to fall. It is in the minutest of such details, I suggest, that the two texts begin to unwind the fatalistic mindset that pervades in the aftermath of disaster.

What is the value of adopting this Janus-faced, comparative approach? Besides bridging two academic communities, it is especially apposite for these two texts, since they demonstrate paradoxically how the best close-up view is obtained by first stepping outside the frame. Such an approach may not produce an orthodox reading, but Milton and DeLillo are not orthodox thinkers. On the contrary, I would describe each text as deliberately imaginative, in the strong sense described by Edward Casey, where he characterizes the imagination as a distinctively autonomous mental activity, where the mind moves, unimpeded by ethical demands of the immediate present, "projecting and freely contemplating a proliferation of possibilities."¹² This can, of course, be taken as a criticism, and both texts have been accused of failing to address their contemporary political moment directly enough. In my argument, this imaginative detachment is rather to be understood as a strength, and a deliberate strategy that derives its impulse from a profound commitment to history and politics. Paradise Lost and Falling Man both use techniques of imaginative suspension in order to recast the story of the Fall into a narrative of descent: that is, a willed journey downward, and a conscious embrace of human finitude. The following discussion will attempt to illuminate that theme in both texts, by reading one against the other.

William Blake famously insisted that Milton was of the devil's party, but for me, still more arresting and persuasive is his recognition that Milton's imaginative vision is nearly always exercised downward: from heaven to hell, from heaven to earth, and from the earthly paradise down into the real world.¹³ Samuel Johnson wrote of Milton as having a "lofty and elevated" mind.¹⁴ Blake, however, imagined Milton thus: "as a wintry globe descends precipitant, thro' Beulah bursting, / With thunders loud and terrible, so Milton's Shadow fell / Precipitant, loud thund'ring, into the Sea of Time and Space."¹⁵ This poem collapses the author of Paradise Lost with the text itself and imagines a fate for Milton that evokes his depiction of the Son of God's, as well as Adam and Eve's, fall into the "sea of time and space." Because they were tempted by Satan, Adam and Eve's fall is reversible, while Satan's is not—or so God tells the assembled angels in book 3,

The first sort by their own suggestion fell,Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceivedBy the other first: man therefore shall find grace,The other none.

(PL 3.129-32)

At first glance, the decision of England's political leaders to recrown a monarch in 1660 looks more like a satanic fall than an Adamic one: "Self-tempted, self-depraved." In Paradise Lost, we never get a close-up view of how Satan tempted himself, perhaps because by the time we meet Satan it is already too late: he has always already fallen. But at what point does it become too late to exercise free choice? This point comes later than one might suppose, particularly for a reader who experiences the poem after September 2001, and perhaps, even more so, after reading Falling Man.

Satan's physical fall from heaven is narrated at length three times in the course of the epic: twice directly, 1.44-54 and 6.856-66, and a third time, by analogy, in the fall of Mulciber, 1.742-46. The iteration of this image, of a body falling physically through space, seems to me to underline the belatedness of Satan's existential condition. Once you're falling, all the important decisions have been made; les jeux sont faits, as Sartre reminds us.¹⁶ Or perhaps not. Each time Milton describes Satan's fall, or Mulciber's, he presents the scene from a different vantage point. As I hope to show, each time the fatality of the event becomes a little less fixed. Whether or not the eventual outcome is changed, the reader is invited to enter the imagination's pays du possible.¹⁷

In addition to these three major descriptions, there are a number of briefer allusions to, or reports of, the satanic fall. In line with his description in book 1, there is the narrator's reference to the satanic fall in the Argument to book 1 ("was by the command of God driven out of heaven").¹⁸ In book 2, Sin's recollection of the event is likewise that they were "driven" down by overmastering force: "down they fell / Driven headlong from the pitch of heaven, down / Into this deep" (2.771-73). Earlier in book 2, Belial has also vividly imagined the possibility of a repetition of the fall in the future: not only that "this firmanent / Of hell" should fall upon their heads, but that the fallen angels might sink still further, "Under yon boiling ocean" (2.175-83); this, too, would be a case of being physically overpowered. In contrast to these, there is the narrator's mention of Satan's fall in the Argument to book 6, where he adopts a markedly different perspective, seemingly in anticipation of Raphael's own description later in book 6. In the following discussion, I will focus on the three long descriptions of the satanic fall, both for the sake of clarity and because (in my view) the briefer allusions repeat and amplify the overall trajectory of the major descriptions, rather than introducing any countercurrent of their own.

Repetitions in epic poetry, perhaps especially in the work of a blind poet, are apprehended aurally; one hears and remembers hearing sounds one has heard before. But Paradise Lost is no less concerned with developing new modes of seeing, as the narrator's admiration for Galileo, "the Tuscan artist" with his extraordinary "optic glass," shows us from the start (1.288).¹⁹ Both he and his protagonists are engaged in an analogous process of seeing better, both farther and more inwardly. The Argument to book 10 describes Adam "more and more perceiving," thus signaling that the process of seeing anew has already begun. My argument here is that for the reader of Paradise Lost, the repeated sight (and sound) of Satan falling through space helps us to see farther, or more inwardly, into the meaning of historical disaster (this being, for Milton's readers, the failure of the republic, and the return to monarchy).

The first extensive description of Satan's fall occurs just 40 lines into book 1. The narrator relates how God crushes the rebellion of Satan and his followers:

    Him the almighty powerHurled headlong flaming from the ethereal skyWith hideous ruin and combustion downTo bottomless perdition, there to dwellIn adamantine chains and penal fire,Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms.Nine times the space that measures day and nightTo mortal men, he with his horrid crewLay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulfConfounded though immortal.

(PL 1.44-53)

Milton writes in English blank verse: that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. He chose not to write in rhyme, against the fashion of the day, because he wanted to restore to English verse what he called the "ancient liberty" of classical epic.²⁰ There's not much sense of liberty being expressed here, though. The trochaic inversions (him, hurled, headlong, flaming) beat downwards, on a figure who is remorselessly viewed from a vantage point high above the action. The narrator assumes the perspective of an omnipotent god, in that Satan is not only morally condemned by his description (the defier with his "horrid crew"), but also his anticipatory "there to dwell" presumes to know Satan's eternal future. In fact, although we may think we're reading about Satan falling, it turns out to be a description of his already having fallen: "Nine times the space that measures day and night" sounds like the description of distance being traveled, until we get to the main verb, "Lay vanquished." So for nine days, he has been lying there already. This is the most overdetermined account of Satan's physical fall.²¹

Later in the same book, the narrator recounts a similar scene, but with opposite effect. The analogy with Satan is implicit, but here the falling figure is Hephaestus, the Greek god of architecture. Milton calls him by his less familiar, Roman name, Mulciber. In Homer's Iliad, Hephaestus himself recalls how he had once been thrown out of heaven by Zeus, when he tried to defend his mother, Hera, from Zeus's jealous rage. This is how Milton retells the Homeric lines:²²

        how he fellFrom heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day; and with the setting sunDropped from the zenith like a falling star,On Lemnos the Ægæan isle.

(PL 1.740-46)

In contrast to the previous description of the falling angels, here the fall is cast in slow motion, with the beautifully symmetrical phrases "from morn to noon he fell," "from noon to dewy eve," echoing each other, across a midline caesura. The buoyancy of the rhythm contributes to the sense of the body being lightly suspended in the summer sky.

Unlike the earlier passage, this time the fall seems to be totally silent and painless. Looking up at the figure dropping toward him, the narrator seems entranced by the beauty of the image. He neither judges nor empathizes with it. And then he continues,

    thus they relate,Erring; for he with this rebellious routFell long before . . .

        nor did he scapeBy all his engines, but was headlong sentWith his industrious crew to build in hell.

(1.746-51)

Among Milton scholars, it has become obligatory to respond to Stanley Fish's reading of these lines, which he takes as emblematic of Milton's strategy in Paradise Lost to lure the reader's judgment to sleep, and then pounce, with a sudden revelation of the sin into which he or she has drifted.²³ Against this reading, it should be noted that the narrator begins with a disclaimer, "they fabled," so it cannot come as a complete surprise to the reader to discover that the following lines are not entirely true.

But, without wishing to rehearse the whole debate over Fish's proposed pattern of corrective reading, we could address the crux of the matter in brief: that is, how one interprets the placement of "erring" in the return of the line. If we concede that, having drifted away from his argument, the narrator sharply recollects himself, does it follow that this pattern of thinking is to be rejected by the reader as dangerous? My view is that, on the contrary, erring opens up the space for reflection, the value of which is repeatedly demonstrated in the poem as a whole.²⁴ For example, by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve sentence themselves to death, which they assume will be instantaneous, but it turns out they have plenty of time before the sentence falls. In the last two books of the poem, we see the whole of human history unfolding and the moment of absolute finality still hasn't arrived.

To "err" can mean to make a mistake, or to wander from the path, or to wonder, as in to "speculate freely." Erring, in all three senses, generally produces the most gripping drama and the most nuanced poetry in Paradise Lost. The last we see of Adam and Eve, they are leaving Eden "with wandering steps and slow." In any case, there is no theologically correct way to read the narrator's account of Mulciber's fall. The god—or is he an angel?—falls out of a Greco-Roman sky into a Christian hell. Why is this composite angel damned, and by whom? Was Mulciber really an angel tempted by Satan? Or, on the contrary, is Zeus's vengefulness being imputed to God? We don't know. But the aesthetic suspension allows us the space to reflect on various interpretations of the fall.

Turning to the third passage, we find Raphael narrating the fall of Satan to Adam in the garden of Eden. This description occurs in book 6, in the midst of Raphael's account of the angels' rebellion in heaven:

The overthrown he raised, and. . . . . . . .Drove them before him thunderstruck, pursuedWith terrors and with furies to the boundsAnd crystal wall of heav'n, which op'ning wide,Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosedInto the wastful deep; the monstrous sightStrook them with horror backward, but far worseUrged them behind; headlong themselves they threwDown from the verge of heav'n, eternal wrathBurnt after them to the bottomless pit.

(6.856, 858-66)

Several verbal echoes link this passage to the fall of Mulciber, and behind that, the earlier description of Satan falling: in all three passages, the angel falls "headlong," and the "crystal wall" of heaven recalls the "crystal battlements" of Jove.

In this passage, though, the punisher is not God or Zeus, but the Son of God, and Milton's Son is that aspect of divinity that turns itself toward humanity. Another sign of the more human scale of this account is that Raphael imagines how the angels felt as they hesitated on the threshold: he tells Adam, "the monstrous sight / Strook them with horror." Raphael is of the same order of being as the rebels, and he was there at the time, unlike the epic narrator. He places the listener on the same plane as the action, rather than above or below. Theologically, this is a risky strategy, because as John Carey has argued, once you give a devil human interiority, he becomes much harder to condemn.²⁵

Here is where reading Milton in a post-DeLillo context can make a crucial difference for how one understands the lines: "the monstrous sight / Strook them with horror backward, but far worse / Urged them behind." This is no longer merely verbal thunder, but the precise description of an actual, unbearable choice. The angels hesitate, and then they throw themselves into space. Why is this different than saying that they fell, as the narrator did before? Theologically, it helps Milton to absolve God from the charge of being vengeful if the devils themselves chose their own fate. As God tells the remaining angels, "Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell" (3.102). Milton thus stakes out his position in the great debate of seventeenth century religions: does God's omniscience imply that all our actions are predestined? With the Arminians, Milton replies, no, we are always free to choose.²⁶

Well, we already knew that Satan chose to rebel. But it is one thing to succumb to temptation when you're in heaven, and God is bizarrely disguising his omnipotence. It is quite different to know you have a choice, even when divine vengeance is crashing down on your head. It may not seem like much, but it is the very extremity of their position that makes the angels' choice—or, the fact they have a choice—important. Indeed, this is one of the rare passages in the poem in which the fallen angels are given a fully human dignity. For as Viktor Frankl wrote in another context, "the ability to choose one's attitude to a given set of circumstances" is "the last of human freedoms."²⁷

Even in the context of a poem about the Fall from paradise, Milton's attention to the concrete motif of a body falling through space is, at first glance, strangely obsessive. The repeated return to this image suggests to me that it becomes, for Milton, a symbol of the human imagination's potential to transform tragedy. In this sense, the passages we have considered above demonstrate the "logic of the imaginary" understood by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques as "the fantasy production of a society seeking passionately to give symbolic expression to the institutions it might have had in reality."²⁸ The "meaning" of the motif lies not in the image itself, but in the poet's repeated working over and working through the image so that with each recurrence we hear an increasing number of resonances, or better, dissonances, resisting closure at the very moment when the tragic outcome of historical reality appears most inevitable.

Don DeLillo's novel also asks us to imagine this Miltonic motif of the falling body, but with a post-9/11 awareness that things like this happen to human beings, in the actual, historical world. Falling Man was published in 2007, after quite a number of novels, films, and documentaries had already been made about 9/11. But given his previous fiction's preoccupation with terrorist violence, expectations were high that DeLillo's novel would deliver the definitive representation of 9/11.²⁹ Falling Man is a richly allusive work; among its literary ancestors are Bellow's Dangling Man (1944), Camus's La chute (1956), and Golding's Free Fall (1959).³⁰ But given DeLillo's title, none of these intertexts was as likely to be as immediately present in the reader's mind, in 2007, as the by-then famous photograph taken by Richard Drew of an unidentified man falling from one of the towers.³¹ While other novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) made a feature of this photograph, incorporating it into the fictional narrative, DeLillo excludes the representation itself and instead describes characters in the novel thinking about the image. For the problem that DeLillo sets out to address, and redress, is that 9/11 is an overdetermined subject, for which we already possess a mental library of abject images, and a narrative master plot of debilitating, collective trauma.³² However real these may be, they actually prevent us from thinking about the subject imaginatively; that is, in an autonomous frame of mind that resists the most obvious response to such images.

The first chapter of Falling Man describes the day of the attacks, from the point of view of Keith Neudecker, who was in one of the towers when it was struck. The narrative follows the lives of Keith; his estranged wife, Lianne; her mother, Nina; and Nina's lover, Martin, and various others such as a group of Alzheimer patients with whom Lianne works. This rather meandering narrative is cut through, at various points, by a subplot concerning Hammad and the terrorist group planning the attacks on the towers. While Keith and Lianne's story starts on the day of the attacks and moves forward in time, the terrorist subplot starts some years before and moves up to the day of the attacks. In the final chapter, the subplot catches up with the beginning of the main plot, and the novel ends on the day it began, with a repeat account of the catastrophe.

Despite the dramatic opening description, many of the novel's first reviewers found the rest of the novel disappointing. Adam Mars-Jones's review is indicative, when he writes that Falling Man "gives the . . . impression of having no kernel inside its various shells."³³ In its defense, some critics have argued that its hollow core constitutes an authentic representation of trauma. Linda Kauffman elucidates the features of clinical trauma that appear in the novel, such as repetition, mirroring, and doubling.³⁴ Thus, one could argue that the thin, unindividuated portrayal of the characters is deliberate because they have become incoherent to themselves. This is certainly a reading that fits with many other narratives about the destruction of the towers, so many, in fact, that they have been rechristened the "World Trauma Center."³⁵ But Falling Man is a work of imaginative speculation rather than mimesis—note the subtitle: A Novel. The narrator never refers to 9/11, or the World Trade Center; he refers instead to "the attacks" and "the towers," and the dates are not specified. Whereas the ground of the novel is indeed collective trauma, its real subject is the problem of perception in the aftermath of catastrophe.³⁶

DeLillo begins, "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night" (3). In the shift from street to world, the city seems to have dropped out of history into an afterlife as final and mythic as Milton's hell.³⁷ The wreckage of human existence rains down from the sky. Shoes, handbags, shirts, and office paper, emptied of human presence, have become "otherworldly things" (3). Despite the mayhem of flying objects, there is a flat finality to the whole scene: "the noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them" (4). In an undeniably traumatized state, Keith Neudecker is wandering, concussed and confused, back toward the tower from which he has just emerged. In passing, he barely registers seeing "figures . . . a thousand feet up, dropping into space." In other words, he fails to see them.³⁸

In the chapters that follow, DeLillo shows us a range of characters, all struggling to overcome a certain vagueness of perception. The Alzheimer's group provides one notable example. The narrator himself is groping for new ways of seeing; hence, the drifting, cobwebby surrealism of the middle chapters, which reveal him in the act of imagining, rather than presenting imagined objects in a finalized state. Edward Casey usefully distinguishes two phases of imagining: the "act phase," which refers to the mental process of imaging, and the "object phase," which refers to the image conjured by the mental effort.³⁹ DeLillo's novel gives us markedly more of the former than the latter. The hazy narration and characterization of Falling Man might also be usefully compared to Gilles Deleuze's notion of a "thinking image" (image pensée et pensante) in cinema, which would oppose itself to the traditional "action image" of traditional Hollywood film.⁴⁰

The title of DeLillo's novel refers to a performance artist who stages falls from various buildings around the city. While he never explains his intentions, the effect of his performances is to sharpen the perception of those who see him fall. We see his performance three times in the novel, each time focalized through Lianne, who is the Eve of this text. The first performance causes outrage and offense in the onlookers, because he appears to be imitating the pose in the photograph by Richard Drew. Lianne catches sight of him when he has already fallen. He is "dangling upside down," hanging by a safety harness from a rope. Wearing a business suit, he is holding "one leg bent up, arms at his sides" (33). Lianne is shocked, as she says, by the "awful openness of it, something we'd not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread" (33). She recoils from the sight.

The second time, Lianne finds herself trapped at a much closer viewing point. Janiak has positioned himself over a train tunnel, so that the people inside the train will catch sight of him at the instant he falls (the UK cover refers to this episode, with the photograph of a train strikingly pictured inverted onto a vertical axis, so that it rushes downwards). Lianne understands that Janiak wants his audience to be unprepared, but it isn't until the train arrives that we learn of another reason for his adopting this position: "The train comes slamming through and he turns his head and looks into it (into his death by fire) and then brings his head back around and jumps" (167-68). Beyond wishing to imitate the surface gesture of falling, as a photograph might, Janiak positions himself so that he can inwardly reexperience the choice on the threshold. Since, as we later learn, he will actually die of injuries sustained during these falls, this may be an instance of acting out, rather than working through, trauma. But in this instance, his performance has a further effect on his audience. Lianne catches sight of a threadbare old man whose "face showed an intense narrowing of thought and possibility. He was seeing something elaborately different from what he encountered step by step in the ordinary run of hours. He had to learn how to see it fit correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit" (168). There is the sense of the insertion of an enigma into the daily routine, which requires an adjustment in the gaze itself. Or, in Milton's terms, one could say the spectacle plants eyes in the observer. It irradiates inward, instigating a new way of seeing.

The third time, the falling man is no longer actually present. Lianne comes across his obituary in a newspaper. The journalist is speculating whether Janiak had been imitating a particular photograph when he fell in a particular pose:

She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.

(221-22)

It is important to recognize that what Lianne is recalling is unmistakably a composition, an imaginary reconstruction, prompted by the written account of an artist imitating a photograph imitating reality. This distance from reality is underlined by the insistence on the act of reflection: she thought, she thought. The falling figure appears to her to be set "almost precisely" within a frame of light and dark: so like the abstraction of Morandi's painting, the frame within a frame provides her with the mental space necessary to think through what she has seen.

Reading DeLillo post-Paradise Lost, one can hardly fail to hear an echo of Satan's fall in the poetic word "headlong" (elsewhere DeLillo uses the more prosaic "headfirst"). And then there is the unmistakably Miltonic, "he was a falling angel." Why an "angel"? In colloquial parlance, "angel" is often used to signify innocence (an innocent cherub, for example), and for some viewers, perhaps Drew's photograph did predominantly convey a sense of pathos for an innocent victim. In The Wake of the Imagination, Richard Kearney suggests that images of actual, political atrocity (he cites the example of photographs of child victims of Hiroshima) are a means of escape from the sterile circulation of depthless images of postmodern art, in that they demand an ethical response from the viewer toward the subject of the image, regardless of its medium or frame: "it demands moral outrage. It demands that we sit up and say, 'this must end.'"⁴¹ Maybe because the tiny figure set against its enormous frame implies a resistance to being finalized, like Satan's rebellion and fall from heaven.

Whatever the nature of the viewer's insight, it is achieved by dwelling on the image in the mind's eye, where it assumes the shape of an autonomous composition. Though one should also stress that the aesthetic suspension contains within it a movement toward abjection: angelic beauty strikes Lianne as horrific. So this is not a transcendent, modernist epiphany. Quite the reverse, it drives the observer downwards into a confrontation with the real. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen notoriously described the attacks of September 11 as "Lucifer's greatest work of art."⁴² Even if his remarks were misinterpreted as expressing admiration for the terrorists, it is easy to understand why people were offended by the very idea that terrorism could be art. And yet it is undeniably true that destructive acts do generate new realities and are in that sense creative. But DeLillo's falling angel is the victim of a terrorist act, not its architect, and in any case, his novel is not making the claim that horror is art. Rather, it shows how art contains the horror, both in the sense of being constituted by it, and in the sense of limiting and framing its effects.

Even though Janiak is no longer alive, his art "succeeds" with Lianne in the sense that her hazy memory is driven into sharp focus, and the thought of the falling man "pierces" her mind and heart. Later in the novel, in contrast to the terrorist who renounces the world for his god, Lianne concludes that "it's the world itself that brings you to God . . . Beauty, grief, terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas" (234; emphasis mine). For Lianne, the body in free fall thus becomes an image both of human mortality, and of our freedom to decide what this condition means to us. One might also consider this repeated motif of the falling body through space in the light of the "logic of the imaginary" described by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques as "the fantasy production of a society seeking passionately to give symbolic expression to the institutions it might have had in reality" (emphasis in original).⁴³ So in our case, the "meaning" of the motif of falling lies not wholly in the image itself, but in the writer's repeated working over and working through the image so that with each recurrence we hear an increasing number of resonances, or better, dissonances, resisting closure at the very moment when the tragic outcome of historical reality appears most inevitable.

Lianne's husband, Keith, is quite literally pierced by the eruption of the subplot concerning Hammad, into his own narrative in the final chapter of the novel. Thus far we have been following Keith and Lianne's lives after the attacks. If Lianne reaches some kind of understanding, Keith seems to be burying himself in a robotic, obscurely vengeful existence playing poker and causing other people to lose money. The narrative then shifts back in time to recount the terrorist Hammad's preparations for the day of the attack. We follow Hammad's thoughts through to his final moment of consciousness, inside the plane, where it explodes into Keith's office in the north tower. The arc of one extraordinary sentence takes us from Hammad's viewpoint to Keith's, as two separate timeframes collapse into one: "A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall" (239). The "he" of "he found himself" is now Keith. And there is a sense in which this piercing of one plot by another "finds" Keith, in a way that he has not yet been able to do in his own life thus far. As I said earlier, this chapter returns us to the first scene. But there, we met Keith witnessing the aftermath of the destruction from outside. Inexplicably, he was carrying a briefcase which turned out not to be his. In the final scene, we see him inside the towers, several minutes before that opening scene took place. He tries to save his close friend's life but is forced to leave the body and descend the stairs himself. As he descends, he listens to the conversations on the stairwell:

There were voices up behind him, back on the stairs, one and then another in near echo, fugue voices, song voices in the rhythms of natural speech.

This goes down.This goes down.Pass it down.

(245)

Here we are being invited to revisit the spectacular scene of destruction with which we began, in order to discover an interior scene if not of salvation, then of salvaging the human. Inside the traumatic scene of the already doubling, virally escalating fall, there is also unfolding the story of a willed descent. If the first chapter presented a violently dismembered world, through which Keith is wandering dazedly and alone, here objects are being handed downstairs, from one person to another. That Keith joins in this human chain is indicated by the presence of the unknown briefcase in his hand. Rather than stratified noise filling the air, there are human voices, blending into this Bach-like fugue.⁴⁴

This last chapter is also highly reminiscent of the final scene in Milton's Paradise Lost. The last two books of the epic have recounted at accelerated speed the cycle of human history from Genesis to the present, and each chapter, it seems, has ended heavily with a scene of apocalyptic destruction. At the end of time, there is the promise of final reckoning, but meanwhile Adam is strangely rejuvenated by the thought of the immediate task before him: to find Eve and descend from the garden of Eden into history. With a look back at paradise, over which flamed the brandished swords of the angelic guard, they begin their descent:

The world was all before them, where to chooseTheir place of rest, and providence their guide.They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,Through Eden took their solitary way.

(12.646-49)

By way of conclusion, we could turn back to the beginning of Falling Man, where Keith catches sight of something unexpected in the chaos. The novel ends, with Keith seeing this image, returning to this point in time. So is what he sees a sign of traumatic repetition, a demonstration of history as the eternal recurrence of the same? "There was something else . . . , outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifting and drifting, in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river" (4). This could be read as a deathly image, in the way it uncannily doubles for the human body, yet fragments and empties it of substance. But this isn't all there is to be seen. There is also the echo of a Miltonic suspension: "from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer's day; and with the setting sun / Dropped from the zenith like a falling star." The rhythm of DeLillo's sentence similarly holds the image, aloft. I take this to be an image of consciousness, whether of the writer, or the reader: a mental act that indicates our freedom to stand "outside" catastrophe, so that our response is not wholly determined by it. One might compare the British sculptor Andrew Gormley's exhibition, entitled "Event Horizon," which consisted of figures poised on the precarious edges of various tall buildings around London, looking down at humanity below, like the human Jesus of Milton's Paradise Regained. In the latter poem, heroism consists of standing and thinking, rather than precipitately taking action, which is likely to be vengeful even (or especially) if driven by pathos, as in the famous case of Virgil's Aeneas, who is stirred by the memory of a boy soldier's death to murder his own defeated and suppliant enemy.⁴⁵

The bodily fall of a man, or an angel, or a god, through space, appears at first glance to be a motif that signifies the inescapable belatedness of the human condition, for both Milton and DeLillo. Paradise is already lost, and there is no recovery from the trauma of the fall. But as has been emphasized here, both Paradise Lost and Falling Man are works about the importance of the second and third glance, where a new mode of perception develops out of the very awareness of human finitude. The autonomy that we possess is constrained by historical circumstance, but it is the very sense of limit and constraint that gives value to our freedom. And if the past is irrevocably past, still the perception of events can be imaginatively altered, and from that alteration flows the possibility of an unscripted future.