For the CEA conference in Pittsburgh March 26-28 next year, my proposal for a paper has been accepted. The abstract is below.
Although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible. The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.
A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.