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1. Falling Man Fiction: DeLillo,Spiegelman, Schulman, and the Spectatorial Condition
- University of Nebraska Press
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1. FALLING MAN FICTION DeLillo, Spiegelman, Schulman, and the Spectatorial Condition David Friend’s visual record of post-9/11 New York, documenting and analyzing the stories behind the powerful images of that day, opens with the troubling sentence “The eyes were everywhere” (xv). This remark— initially meant to suggest the sheer number of cameras and recording devices aimed at the towers, as well as the stunned reactions of witnesses to the attacks—aptly describes literary representations of the 9/11 events. The attacks have gelled into stock images that recur obsessively in post9 /11 literature, pointing to a deep-seated traumatic reaction on both a visual and a textual level. Many literary depictions of September 11 can in fact be regarded through the filter of a single photograph, which, however , did not circulate widely in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. On September 12, 2001, the New York Times published Richard Drew’s picture of one man tumbling out of the North Tower straight down the side of the building (“A Person Falls Headfirst from the North Tower of the New York World Trade Center, Sept. 11, 2001”). The man is falling upside down in what looks like an uncannily peaceful—even graceful— position. The picture’s composition is perfectly symmetrical, the man’s body running parallel to the vertical girders of the World Trade Center in a harmonious gradation of blacks and grays. In highlighting the aesthetic qualities of the scene he witnessed, Drew runs headlong into a minefield of ethical problems, most eloquently formulated by Roland Barthes in his essay “Shock-Photos.” Such images, Barthes writes, fail to convey horror “because, as we look at them, we are in each case dispossessed of our judgment: someone has shuddered for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing—except a simple 59 60 falling man fiction right of intellectual acquiescence” (71). Drew, one could argue, not only arouses a prurient interest in the plight of 9/11 victims, but seems exceedingly invested in the compositional aspects of his picture as he tries to find beauty in the twisted forms of its anguished subject. The inherent danger is that this aestheticization of tragedy may ultimately anaesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it. Moreover by diverting attention from the sobering subject of the wtc jumpers and turning it toward the medium of photography itself, Drew may also be said to compromise his picture’s status as a historical document of the tragedy, thereby replacing evidence with spectacle. The image induces self-centeredness in the viewers , who get caught up in noticing how they react to its beauty, a beauty that becomes reflective and melancholy rather than immediate and distressing . Yet the picture is partly redeemed by the ways it questions the function of vision and visual representation in shaping a personal and collective response to 9/11. Importantly Drew’s image encapsulates some of the most visibly destructive and dehumanizing effects of the terrorist attacks. Two weeks after 9/11 Anthony Lane observed in the New Yorker that “the most important, if distressing images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging Towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges” (79).1 Whereas most images of the explosions and collapses display the spectacular vaporization of glass and steel structures, the falling man gives this destruction a material embodiment, evoking a tangible sympathy in viewers toward the events they witnessed from afar. The still photograph also suspends the body’s descent in time as if to prevent the tragedy from taking its indomitable course and allow viewers to entertain the irrational hope that death might not occur. In a culture of overwhelming media potency, Susan Sontag defended precisely this capacity of the photograph to break through a parade of atrocious images by capturing the intervention of death: “To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do, and pictures taken by photographers out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs” (Regarding the Pain of Others 59). Barbie Zelizer refers to [3.230.162.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:23 GMT) 61 falling man fiction this arrested position as the “about-to-die moment,” which she analyzes in light of the “subjunctive”—open-ended or speculative—dimensions of an image...