Americana
Volume XXIX Number 2 Summer 2011 ITALIAN AMERICANA, a cultural and historical review devoted to the Italian-American experience, is printed in cooperation with the University of Rhode Island, Feinstein College of Continuing Education, and the American Italian Historical Association.
EDITOR
Carol Bonomo Albright The University of Rhode Island
Feinstein College of Continuing Education Providence, Rhode Island
Editor and Review Editor Poetry Editor: Michael Palma
John Paul Russo Dana Gioia
University of Miami 1994-2003 Coral Gables, Florida
Associate Editor Bruno A. Arcudi
State University College at Buffalo
Founded by Ernest S. Falbo and Richard Gambino
An international peer-review journal, ITALIAN AMERICANA is published semi-annually at the University of Rhode Island, Feinstein College of Continuing Education, 80 Washington Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02903-1803. Manuscripts should be submitted in duplicate, conform to the revised edition of the MLA Style Sheet and be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage. Poetry is not read during July, August, or September. Distributed in the United States by B. DeBoer. ITALIAN AMERICANA is regularly included in Historical Abstracts; Film Literature Index; America: History and Life;and Abstracts as well as in the “Bibliography of Italian Studies in America” in Italica.
Subscription, rates: One year (two issues) individual, $20.00; two years, $35.00; three years,$54.00; institution, $25.00; student, $15.00; foreign, $35.00. Checks payable to Italian Americana. (Students must submit xeroxed ID for discount.)
C
ONTENTS
131 Letter
132 Notes on Contributors
133 A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo
FORuM ON DON DeLILLO
138 Writing Back, Moving Forward: Falling Man and DeLillo’s Previous Works by Daniel Shank Cruz
153 Systems & Sensibility (What’s in a Name?) by Mary Caponegro 167 The Achromatic Room: DeLillo’s Plays on and off Camera by
Daniela Daniele
181 New York City in Don DeLillo’s Novels by Alan J. Gravano POETRY
190 Featured Poet Dennis Barone 191 Here are the stones by Dennis Barone
192 Etruscan Tombs of Orvieto by Angelina Oberdan 192 Father in Neutral by David Masello
193 Adam’s Line by Ned Balbo
194 An American Dream by Daniela Gioseffi 195 Herod Antipasto by John J. Trause
196 Tomorrow It’s Asparagus by John J. Trause
196 Homage to the Tomato: A Prose Poem by Toni Giarnese 197 Annette by Pamela Rasso
198 Night Club Singer by Ron De Maris
199 utah: “One Wife for One Man” by Ron De Maris
200 A World War II “Italian” Diary of an Italian-American G.I. by Richard Gambino
211 Gifts of Grief (memoir) by Miriam Polli Katsikis 216 The Mountain of Artichokes (memoir) by Kathy Curto REVIEWS
218 Two Voices, One Poet: Lewis Turco and Wesli Court’s One Life in
Poetry: Review Essay
The Gathering of Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court/Lewis Turco.
Review by Ned Balbo
221 The Deeds of My Fathers by Paul David Pope Review by Salvatore J. LaGumina
224 La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales Review by Rinaldo Rinaldi
225 Sicilian Palimpsest: The Language of Castroreale and Its Territory by Ennio Italo Rao
228 Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo Review by Floriana Puglisi
229 Satyr’s Wife by Rita Signorelli-Pappas Review by Rochelle Theo Penn
230 My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered
South by Rosetta Costantino with Janet Fletcher
Review by Carol Helstosky
231 Fast Forward and Other Stories by Delia De Santis Review by Marie Saccomando Coppola
232 Walking on Air in a Field of Greens: An Italian American Collage by Emilio DeGrazia
Review by Christine F. Zinni
234 Pieces of Someday. A Memoir by Jan Vallone Review by Federico Siniscalco
235 Octopus Wars by Ezequiel Morsella Review by Stefano Maria Casella
236 The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems by Ned Balbo Review by Stephen Murabito
238 In Memoriam: Francis X. Femminella by Richard Juliani Dear Reader,
We have devoted much space in our current issue to the work of major American novelist Don DeLillo. We also present an interesting selection of memoirs: Suze Rotolo, the inseparable companion of Bob Dylan in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s, writes about her parents’ political views in an excerpt from her book A Freewheelin’ Time; Richard Gambino recalls his Uncle Joe, whose World War II diary focuses on his experiences as an “engineer-sapper” in North Africa and a member of the Counter-Intelligence Corps in Italy; Miriam Polli Katsikis wittily recounts her mother’s after death visitation, and Kathy Curto muses in the A & P on her mother’s death. Our regular poetry and reviews sections are included in this issue, as always.
We announce two recipients of the $600 Monsignor Geno Baroni Prize: Marc Fasanella, for his essay on the art of Ralph Fasanella, and Linda Reeder, for hers on Sicilian men’s code of honor. We warmly thank Fred Rotondaro of Washington, D.C., for his generosity in establishing this prize and supporting it for so many years. You may contact the journal’s editors by e-mail at [email protected] or
Be sure to visit our Web site www.italianamericana.com. Recently updated, it contains three supplemental additions to the newly published book American Woman, Italian Style, as well as new material in its various sections.
Sincerely, Joseph DeAngelis
Former Rhode Island Speaker of the House of Representatives
Notes on Contributors
Mary Caponegro is the author of the story collections Tales from the Next Village,
The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Her honors include the General Electric Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, the C. F. Kellogg Award, and the Bruno Arcudi Prize. The R. B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature at Bard College, she is currently at work on a novel, Chinese Chocolate, about growing up Italian American. Daniel Shank Cruz teaches at Northern Illinois University. Kathy Curto has published widely and was featured on NPR. She was awarded a K. Gurfein Writing Fellowship and is studying creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College. Daniela Daniele has written two volumes on contemporary American fiction, Città senza mappa (1992) and The Woman of the Crowd (2000). She is the editor of a book of interviews, Scrittori e finzioni d’America, an anthology of writings in response to 9/11; a special issue of Nuova Corrente on Don DeLillo; and, with Marisa Bulgheroni, of the new entries on contemporary American writers in the Garzantina della letterature (2007). Richard Gambino is a founder of this journal. He has written on a wide variety of subjects for Italian Americana as well as many other publications. His book Blood of My Blood is a classic in the field of Italian American Studies. Alan Gravano’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Review Americana, Gulf Stream, and Ellipsis. His essay “Recycling and Redemption in DeLillo’s Underworld” recently appeared in Italian Passages: Making and Thinking History. With Ilaria Serra he is co-editing Southern Exposures: Locations and Relocations of Italian Culture. Miriam Polli Katsikis received a fiction award from the Pen Syndicated Fiction Project. Her novel
Mothers like Gods was published in 2010. At the age of seventeen, Suze Rotolo met Bob Dylan, who was only a few years older than she and just starting to sing in clubs in Greenwich Village. A Freewheelin’ Time is her memoir of those days.
Our poetry contributors: Ned Balbo’s latest collection, his third, is The Trials of
Edgar Poe and Other Poems (2010). Featured Poet Dennis Barone has published three books this year: America/Trattabili (a study of Italian American narrative), Field Report (stories), and Parallel Lines (selected poems). Ron De Maris had three poems in the inaugural issue of the journal Little Star. Toni Giarnese has published in newspapers, journals, and magazines, and on the blog Words We Women Write (desperatehousescribes.wordpress.com). Daniela Gioseffi’s latest book is Wild Nights, Wild Nights (2010), a novel about Emily Dickinson. David Masello is a New York-based editor and writer on cultural topics. Angelina Oberdan has published several poetry broadsides with Yellow Flag Press. Pamela Rasso’s work has appeared in The Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Modern Poetry Studies, Gradiva, and other journals. John J. Trause is the author of two chapbooks, Seriously Serial and Latter-Day Litany; he has published widely in periodicals and on the Internet.
A Freewheelin’ Time:
A Memoir of Greenwich Village
in the Sixties
SuZE ROTOLO ©
QUEENS, NEW YORK
I was born in Sunnyside, Queens, across the bridge from Manhattan. My actual birth took place in Brooklyn though---in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital---where a sympathetic doctor took good care of young Communist women with little money who were starting families.
My parents had moved to Queens from an apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village around 1940, shortly after they were married. Like several of their friends who had joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s and were now married with children on the way, they moved to a complex of apartments called Sunnyside Gardens specifically designed for working class families by an architect who was the father of one of the couples. The apartments themselves were small, but had back doors opening onto little gardens that were a nice draw for growing families. My parents and their friends who went to live there were on the left, but the other resi-dents in general were politically all over the map, a mix of new and old Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and religions.
Several of our family’s friends moved away to modern homes they were building on a rural wooded lane in Rye, New York, in Westchester County. There they re-established the left-wing community they’d had in Sunnyside, but in more luxurious homes and surroundings.
The Rotolo family never made it to suburbia. My father was an art-ist but couldn’t support a family as a painter and instead found work at vari-ous factory jobs, joining the shop union or, if no union existed, organizing one. As a result he was fired often, and was on strike even more often. He felt very strongly about the importance of unions, for white and blue-collar workers alike. Working conditions were terrible in the early half of the last century, and the fight to establish unions that could guarantee eight-hour days, eliminate child labor, and deliver a decent environment for the work-ingman and woman was essential. So many benefits now taken for granted were fought for long and hard, and the story of this struggle has largely been ignored. It is a proud history that affected labor conditions worldwide for the better.
My father, Gioachino Pietro Rotolo, was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1912. In the 1970s I went to Bagheria, which by then had become a suburb of Palermo and was no longer the rock pile so many poor Italians had escaped from to find a livelihood in America and elsewhere. “Rock pile” is really a misnomer. Tony Buttitta, a writer I knew in Greenwich Village who was born in 1907 and died when he was well into his nineties, was also from Bagheria. He dispelled the notion of rock pile and told me about the many poets, writers, and artists born there who gained national fame in Italy and abroad. Most had left for someplace else, I reminded him, but I understood what he meant to convey.
In Bagheria, the Rotolo family worked as either bottai, barrel mak-ers for wine, or in ferro battuto, decorative ironworks. My grandfather Andrea Rotolo was in the latter trade and as a skilled iron maker found work fairly easily in the new country of America. He emigrated in the late 1890s and traveled back and forth to Sicily several times before finally settling in New York.
My father came to the United States in 1914 when he was two, with his mother, his older brother Filippo, and his older sister Francesca. They joined his father who had already established a home for them in a brown-stone at 321 Sackett Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood where many Italian immigrants had settled. Today the area is known as Carroll Gardens.
Gioachino, Joachim or Jack in English, chose to go by the name Pete, which was the translation of his middle name, Pietro. He grew up speaking Sicilian at home and English everywhere else. His mother, Marianna, acceded to her children’s wishes that she use their American names and called her youngest son Jack. I still remember her at his funeral years later, standing at his graveside as the first shovelful of dirt hit his coffin, calling quietly, Jack, Jack…
A skilled dressmaker, my grandmother found work in the garment industry even though she didn’t speak fluent English. She worked hard, as did the many other immigrants who came to America during the European immigration boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was fortunate not to have worked in the sweatshops of lower Manhattan, where the disastrous conditions resulted in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in which so many young Italian and Jewish women died. Instead she found work in the Garment District, farther uptown, where the conditions and pay were better.
My grandparents did well. The oldest son, Philip, became an engi-neer; Frances was an executive secretary (now her title would be executive assistant); and the youngest, Pete, my father, was an artist who won a schol-arship to Pratt Institute, unusual in those times for the son of an immigrant family.
My father always said that no job is worth doing if it is not worth doing well, and never to undervalue the importance of work. His dedication to these beliefs as a young man led him to the writings of John Reed. Sometime during the Depression he joined a John Reed Club, and there he found the Communist Party. His commitment to the importance of union organizing began then. When he met my mother, he proposed to her with the words, “I think I need to set up a picket line around you.”
He became a union organizer. That was his duty, his “Communist” work. He rarely painted, yet he did get a few editorial illustration jobs for the New York Times and other periodicals. After he died my mother told us that he had once turned down an offer to teach art at a school in upstate New York but had let her know about it only after the opportunity had long passed.
My parents had been radicalized by the class differences they saw firsthand, but especially and irrevocably by the fate of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants involved with the anarchist movement who were accused of a robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. After a tumultuous trial and worldwide attention to their case, they were put to death seven years later. Books, plays, movies and songs have been written about the prejudices of the presiding judge, the unfairness of the trial, and the terrible anti-immigrant, antiradical climate of the time. Growing up, both my parents were influenced by the terrible preju-dice against Italian immigrants, and the injustices surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti story.
My mother was an editor and columnist for L’Unita, the American version of the Italian Communist paper of the same name. She was paid very little, if anything, and times were very hard for my parents, especially with two children. During our childhood, my sister and I were sent to live with my mother’s relatives outside of Boston when times were especially diffi-cult. We were separated; Carla would be placed with one set of relatives, and I’d go to another. I remember being frightened by these stays away from home. The relatives who took me in were loving and attentive, but because I was a very shy and overly sensitive child, I was not easily comforted.
We moved from Sunnyside when I was about three, to another working class Queens neighborhood, Jackson Heights, populated predomi-nantly by white families from different backgrounds including Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Italian. My childhood recollections originate in this new neigh-borhood. The complex was called Garden Bay Manor, or, as my mother referred to it, Garbage Bay Manure in Jackson Frights. She frequently expressed her frustrations about living in Queens, which she felt was the outback.
The buildings were faux Tudor brick two-story attached apartments with basements. The long row of buildings faced each other from the back with a park-like space in between them that was a haven for all the kids in
the neighborhood. There were no backdoors leading to it, and the area wasn’t landscaped like a park or a playground, instead it was an open communal area with trees and grass and a scattering of benches in the center walkway. To get to the park you walked to the end of the long row of apartments and rounded the corner.
We lived on the ground floor somewhere in the middle. My father set up an electric saw in the basement of our building and made nearly every piece of furniture we had.
This was the 1950s, the height of the McCarthy era. I grew up watching my older sister trying hard to fit in where we so obviously did not belong. She attempted for a time to make herself over into the mode of the girls in the neighborhood, and to fight against the way she grew up. She wasn’t ashamed of how our family lived and what we believed; she was just at an age when it was important for kids to belong, to be like everyone else. We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 33 1/3 long playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn’t own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms.
Most families in the neighborhood went to a church or a temple, to Sunday school or to Hebrew school. My sister and I were raised with no formal religion, but we were taught to accept the beliefs of others. We were brought up not to believe in the superiority of any culture or religion over another, but rather to take people as they were, as individuals.
I tried my best. The Catholic girl next door attempted to save my heathen soul and teach me about God, telling me God was everywhere, saw everything and knew everything. She said that it was important to bow your head with every utterance of the name Jesus. I would challenge this God who was everywhere to come out from behind the prickle bushes to shake hands, and I would cruelly repeat JesusJesusJesus until she got dizzy from nodding her head so much.
The Jewish kids were somewhat more accepting, but a few of their parents made a point of ignoring me. They would say hello to the other chil-dren and not acknowledge my presence at all, either because I was the only goy or shiksa (as they called me) in the group, or perhaps because they knew of my parent’s politics, and were wary of associating with Reds and their offspring.
Outsider status was inevitable. Culturally we were Catholic, but my parents had long ago left the church for the idealistic, as opposed to the hardcore Stalinist wing, of the American Communist Party. The only thing that passed for a religious education was sitting in my father’s lap while he paged through a big book of Renaissance Italian paintings with many pic-tures of the crucifixion. I know I must have asked why that man was nailed to the cross -- and no doubt my father told me.
When my older sister was an infant our Sicilian grandparents man-aged to sneak off with her under false pretenses to their local church to have her baptized. After that, my parents never left me alone with them while I was a baby.
At the time I finished elementary school and Carla was starting high school, we moved several blocks away to the second floor of a small two-story attached row house owned by the Shills, fellow Communists, who were doing a good deed by charging us an affordable rent. This was a better situ-ation overall. The Shills had two daughters younger than we were, a TV set and a finished basement, in addition to a house full of books. It was a Commie kids refuge of sorts. I put on plays in the basement, painting the scenery on large sheets of paper and taping them to the walls. I lip-synched a production of Hans Christian Andersen using an album of the songs from the movie starring Danny Kaye. My father encouraged me and when West Side Story opened in 1957 he took me to a matinee performance at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway.
My memories of Queens reflect my general unhappiness as a child. I just never fit in and even if I’d tried, as my sister had, I would have failed; the other kids just thought I was weird. I found a solace in books and poetry and in making storybooks for myself filled with characters I created from an invented world. The good memories come from the culture I lived within, being around interesting adults from different backgrounds, all kinds of music, and all those books. Though we were economically working class and money was always an issue, we had a rich cultural upbringing that I relished; maybe that is what sustained me, compensating for the bad stuff later on. The relative wretchedness that we go through as wee ones notwithstanding, it is as adults that the real horrors of life are fully realized.
Writing Back, Moving Forward: Falling
Man
and DeLillo’s Previous Works
DANIEL SHANK CRuZ Northern Illinois University Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) is a public response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but the novel also responds to DeLillo’s previous work where terrorism plays an important role. Many of DeLillo’s novels written before 2001 explore the lure of violence – that is, what draws people to violence, especially large-scale violence like terrorism. DeLillo’s pre-9/11 fascination with terrorism seemed prophetic after 9/11 because the attacks were the same type of extreme, not-quite-believable event that DeLillo often wrote about.
So Falling Man confronts a bizarre problem. DeLillo writes about an event, 9/11, that is very similar to the type of events he usually writes about, except in this case he has not made it up, he is writing about a historical event. In Libra (1988), about Lee Harvey Oswald, and the “Prologue” to Underworld (1997),1 about Bobby Thomson’s 1951 pennant-clinching home
run, DeLillo shows that he is skilled at writing about historical events, but in Falling Man, he writes about an event that is unintentionally predicted in several of his novels, especially Players (1977) and Mao II (1991). Falling Man wrestles with the odd similarities between DeLillo’s earlier novels and 9/11, and in doing so it functions as a commentary on the previous depictions of terrorism in DeLillo’s work while also arguing about how Americans should respond to 9/11.
If we define terrorism as acts of violence perpetrated by groups2
against civilians for the purpose of causing public fear, terrorism is a sig-nificant element of the plot in four of DeLillo’s pre-9/11 novels: Players, Mao II, The Names (1982), and Cosmopolis, which was published in 2003, but takes place in 2000 and was mostly written before 9/11. According to DeLillo, Cosmopolis was not “affect[ed]” by the attacks (qtd. in Conte 179). Terrorism is mentioned frequently in Running Dog (1978) as well,3 though it
is not central to the narrative. Margaret Scanlan also shows that terrorism insinuates itself into DeLillo’s most famous novel, White Noise (1985), even though it is not about terrorism (33).
The fascination with terrorism in DeLillo’s works is in line with his position as a socially activist writer. His work focuses on the Western fetishizing of capitalism and technology and the alienation that results from this fetishizing. As a result, most of his characters are unlikable. His
charac-ters search for an escape from their alienated lives, and in this search they sometimes turn to terrorism as a diversion from their suffocating routines. In Players, Lyle joins a terrorist group after seeing one of their attacks thwarted in his office (28, 99). Lyle is not drawn into the group for ideological reasons, but simply because he is impressed by their arsenal of guns and explosives (101-3), and he wants to have sex with one of their operatives (91-92). For Lyle, terrorism is another hobby like golf or hiking rather than an act of vio-lence which kills unsuspecting non-combatants.
Terrorism-as-hobby is also present in The Names. James (who works for a business that sells ransom insurance to companies who worry that terrorists might kidnap their CEOs) becomes fascinated by a series of seemingly random murders that occur on the Greek island where he lives and in several other Middle Eastern countries that he visits on business. James tries to figure out the connection between the murders, but he does this because he enjoys solving brain-teasers (168-70), not because he wants to help catch the murderers (250). He becomes so involved in deciphering this puzzle that his acquaintance Singh accuses James of having joined the terror-ists responsible for the murders because understanding their protocol is so important to him (298), even though he remains uninterested in their philos-ophy--his interest is purely in the group’s victim-selection process. James is not disturbed by this accusation; like Lyle, he finds being associated with a terrorist group a small price to pay for a weekend diversion.
In Mao II, the novelist Bill Gray does not join a terrorist group, but he is so fascinated by a group of terrorists who have kidnapped a Swiss poet that he is willing to exchange himself for the poet in order to live with the terrorists and understand them better (155-56). Terrorism is an intellectual problem Bill wants to understand; he possesses a fascination for it like a child who is fascinated by an older sibling’s transgressions. Although Bill is a successful writer with a cult-like following, he is not satisfied with his suc-cess, and looks to the terrorists as a panacea for his disillusionment.
In Cosmopolis, Eric shares Bill’s view of terrorism as something that is merely intriguing rather than dangerous. When a group of eco-terror-ists try to shut down midtown Manhattan, Eric finds himself “enjoying” their actions (89), and when they attack Eric’s limousine, he can muster no stron-ger response than “a general sense of contemplation” (94). After the attack, although Eric thinks the eco-terrorists are “confused and wrongheaded,” he has “respect” for them because of the creativity of their attack, which includes spray paint, banners, and live rats (96). Eric is excited by the terror-ists because they draw him out of his clean-cut, easy life. In fact, he is so stimulated by the beginning of the attack that he is angry when his bodyguard makes him leave his vantage point in the street for the relative safety of the limousine (88).
has his characters take the drastic step of embracing terrorism in order to show the extreme ennui of American society which drives them to seek such radical alternatives. This embracing does not lead to improved lives for the characters because terrorism is, of course, a much worse life choice than membership in the decadent American upper class, no matter how unfulfilling that membership may be. Furthermore, none of the terrorists in these four books are successful in achieving their aims, a fact which causes Jon Roberts to assert that Players is an explicitly anti-terrorist book (51). This assertion is inaccurate because the terrorists in Players and the other three aforementioned books are not portrayed as villains. They are no more dislikable than the non-terrorist characters with whom they interact (in fact, Cosmopolis’s eco-terrorists seem more conventionally moral than Eric, who cheats on his wife several times and then kills his bodyguard for fun). There are no textual markers to guide readers toward the belief that terrorism is wrong; readers must bring this belief to the texts. In contrast, Falling Man takes special pains to portray terrorism as evil, as I show below. DeLillo’s previous portrayals of terrorism are one element of his work that Falling Man writes back to.
The second element of DeLillo’s work which Falling Man responds to is his work’s seemingly prophetic nature. Numerous critics have commented on this aspect of DeLillo’s work in recent years. For instance, Vlatka Velcic asserts that readers now view DeLillo’s work as “rather prophetic in hindsight” (407), and John N. Duvall writes that DeLillo’s “fiction seems to anticipate and to comment on cultural trends and tendencies, the full significance of which emerge only after his novels are published” (“Introduction” 1).4 This
is the case with regard to the treatments of terrorism in DeLillo’s pre-9/11 books. In Players and Cosmopolis, he depicts terrorist acts taking place in the United States rather than in some Third World country, and in The Names and Mao II, it is successful white Americans who are drawn to terrorism, not poor Middle Eastern rogues. DeLillo recognizes in these works, three of which were written even before the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, that terrorism is a global phenomenon which affects America even though most Americans just associated it with something they saw on the nightly news or at the movies before 9/11.
But it is not simply that DeLillo writes about terrorism which makes him look like a prophet. Players and Mao II contain passages that specifically connect terrorism and the World Trade Center (WTC); it is the uncanny similarities between these scenes and 9/11 which make DeLillo’s pre-9/11 work seem so prescient. In Players, Lyle’s wife Pammy works in the WTC, and she muses that “the towers didn’t seem permanent” (19). If we assume that Players takes place around the time of its publication in 1977 (and there is nothing in the book that insinuates it is taking place in the future), this sentiment is striking because it occurs only five years after the WTC was
completed in 1972. Pammy is not complaining about the impermanency of a run-down office building that is nearing the end of its usefulness; she is complaining about a state-of-the-art monument to technological progress. Despite the WTC’s architectural brilliance, Pammy already senses that it is a vulnerable, unnerving space. She describes the lobby as possessing a “tyrannic grandeur,” a place she must flee from to feel comfortable (24).
Pammy’s premonition that the WTC will not last long is echoed in the terrorist attack which Lyle witnesses in another center of international commerce, a Wall Street stock-trading floor (28). At this early date in DeLillo’s career, the connection between symbols of Western capitalist decadence and their appeal to terrorists as targets is already present in his fiction. DeLillo recognizes that terrorists view American wealth as a concrete target for them to hit even though most Americans would not, and as a result did not think before 9/11 that “it could happen here.” The dangerous combination of skyscrapers and airplanes is also alluded to in Players when Jack worries that a plane flying low over Manhattan toward one of the airports on Long Island is too close, and will “hit” one of the buildings in the skyline he is gazing at (84-85).
In Mao II, Brita echoes Pammy’s misgivings about the WTC in a conversation with Bill. While talking about how New York City is changing for the worse, Brita acknowledges that the WTC makes her “mad,” but Bill counters that “it’s already harmless and ageless.” However, Brita sees the towers as malevolent, arguing that their “size is deadly,” and she claims that they are making an undecipherable “comment” on society that is sinister because she cannot understand it (40). As an American, Brita cannot figure out why the WTC is objectionable, but she is attuned enough to the rest of the world to understand that the towers symbolize something that not everyone believes is “harmless.” Both Pammy and Brita recognize that the WTC is dangerous because something so big will inevitably attract a counterforce that wants to knock it down, but they are unable to communicate this recognition to Lyle and Bill, respectively, in an effective way, so the two men blithely ignore these warnings about the fragility of things and turn to terrorism instead.
DeLillo’s repeated reference to the WTC as a symbol for American capitalist excess is remarkable because he recognizes it as a terrorist target years before it first actually became one. This prophetic recognition is accentuated by the cover of Underworld, which is a photograph by André Kertész of the Twin Towers with their tops shrouded by fog and a large, dark bird flying toward them. It looks disturbingly like a photograph from 9/11 of the two towers surrounded by smoke just before the second plane hit. Mark A. Eaton reads the photograph as a hopeful image, explaining that he views the bird as a peace dove (156), but, aside from the fact that the bird is clearly too large to be a dove, the photograph’s grainy black-and-white coloration and
its haunting negative reproduction on the back of Underworld’s hardcover edition make it impossible to responsibly read the cover as anything other than foreboding, especially after 9/11. DeLillo probably was not the one who chose the photograph for the cover, but nevertheless, its eerie similarity to images from 9/11, coupled with his previous writing about the WTC, add to the prophetic aura of his pre-9/11 work.
I do not mean to argue here that DeLillo actually has extra-sensory powers that allowed him to predict 9/11 because he could see into the future, or that he is a prophet in the religious sense. The similarities between his writing and 9/11 are simply unnerving coincidences. Joseph M. Conte notes that DeLillo disagrees with claims that his books are “prophetic” (180), and Scanlan shows that DeLillo is not the only artist whose work may retrospectively be read as foreshadowing 9/11 (34). To his credit, DeLillo has never attempted to selfishly increase his fame by playing up the similarities between 9/11 and his work. But even though DeLillo does not like to think of his work as prophetic, these similarities are too uncanny to ignore.
Falling Man writes back to DeLillo’s prophetic work in a number of passages, some directly and some more subtly. The book highlights America’s gross unpreparedness for 9/11 early on. When asked by Keith’s wife Lianne what life will be like after the attacks, Lianne’s mother Nina replies “Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now” (10). Nina alleges that a large terrorist attack on the U.S. could have been predicted, but no one bothered to interpret the signs, and as a result no one realized that “[t]his was next.” She is angry that Americans viewed the 1993 WTC bombing as an aberration and assumed that it was the end of the story instead of asking “what’s next[?].” Americans complacently went back to an attitude of stupid fearlessness, and unfortunately paid the price for this negligence. But implicit in this passage for seasoned DeLillo readers is the knowledge that DeLillo’s previous treatments of terrorism do “sa[y] what’s next” in that they portray terrorism’s influence and presence in America. Many Americans thought that a terrorist attack “could never happen here” before 9/11, but DeLillo’s pre-9/11 novels show that of course one could because terrorism happens in the world, and America is in the world, not above it.
This connection between prescient writing and the attacks is also echoed in Falling Man when Lianne’s boss Carol tells her about a book she is editing that “seems to predict what happened” on 9/11 (138). Lianne wants to know more about the book, but Carol does not want to discuss it (140). As in the previous passage, this episode acknowledges that there were written warnings about 9/11, even though these warnings were impossible to inter-pret beforehand. However, this episode also admits that talking about these
warnings is unproductive; we must look to the complicated future instead of dwelling on the naïve past. Bemoaning the loss of pre-attack America does not solve the problem of how to fight terrorism responsibly now. Paradoxically, it is necessary to examine DeLillo’s pre-9/11 works to fully understand the response to 9/11 which Falling Man advocates. While the book Carol men-tions will not help any of Falling Man’s characters cope with 9/11, under-standing Falling Man correctly in light of DeLillo’s earlier works can help readers see how the book calls them to act in the age of a perpetual “War on Terror.”
Falling Man also includes several episodes which echo passages from DeLillo’s earlier books, and in doing so comments on terrorism-related issues and how they should be handled differently after 9/11. We see this echoing in the description of Keith’s weekly poker games. The games start out as casual affairs in which the dealer chooses what type of game is played, and ample refreshments are provided. Over time, however, the players decide that only certain poker variations are acceptable, and that no food is allowed, only hard liquor (96-99).
These modifications are reminiscent of a scene in End Zone (1972). Members of the Logos College football team begin a game of pickup football in the snow. The game begins with conventional rules, but as it goes on the players agree to restrictions that make the game more savage, first outlawing the use of gloves, then outlawing forward passes, and finally outlawing end runs, which results in each play being run straight into the center of the line of scrimmage (188-91). The game continues to its end with these primitive laws, and as a result many of the players are injured and nearly frostbitten (191-92). But in Falling Man, Keith and his friends eventually abandon their restrictions (100). This is an important difference because this rejection of draconian game rules is also a symbolic rejection of fundamentalism,5 the
basis of terrorist philosophy. The football players refuse to allow any ambi-guity in their game: the offense is required to announce the play they will run, and trick plays are disallowed (189-91). These rules cause the game to devolve into hand-to-hand combat. In contrast, the poker players’ willing-ness to change their rules and allow the dealer to make an individual choice about what will be played allows the men to increase their enjoyment, and suggests that fundamentalist violence is an avoidable outcome in all settings.
Falling Man also writes back to a scene in Underworld. The begin-ning of Underworld’s second “Part” describes a videotape of a man getting shot by the Texas Highway Killer that is constantly replayed on the news (155-60).6 The narrator depicts a hypothetical male viewer, “you,” who
watches the tape as much as possible and “practically forc[es his] wife to watch” (159). Not only does the tape show a violent act, but it causes the viewing process to become violent as well. The viewer learns nothing from this violence. Even though the tape “is real this time, not fancy movie
vio-lence” (158), and even though “[i]t demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings” (160), the viewer only watches it because the news plays it as “entertainment” (160), not because he wants to understand something about the motivation of serial killers or the fragility of life. The viewer anticipates his favorite part of the video, “where [the victim] gets it” (158), like one anticipates a favorite film scene. Watching the video is simply an aesthetic experience rather than an exercise of sympa-thy for the victim or disgust at the killer.
The callousness with which the viewer watches the video in Underworld is reformed in Falling Man when an unidentified “she” (prob-ably Lianne, but possibly Keith’s mistress Florence) and Keith watch replays of the airplanes flying into the WTC. The two are emotionally affected by their repeated viewings; the woman feels the video inside her “body […] beneath her skin” (134). She remains horrified by the television images despite their repetition because the knowledge of the many deaths occurring never leaves her (134). Unlike the Underworld viewer, televised images of random acts of violence never become entertaining or movie-like for her. They are always shockingly real despite their unbelievable nature. Keith also admits that he learns from the images, noting that “by the time the second plane appears […] we’re all a little older and wiser” (135). The images teach the two that death is always present, and that there is no certain refuge from political violence.
This episode also teaches readers that it is necessary to acknowl-edge the real violence in the world and to understand that the appropriate reaction to real violence (sadness, shock, anger at injustice) is different from appropriate reactions to the violence in films and television shows, a point which is not made in the Underworld passage. Joseph Dewey writes that “DeLillo addresses a culture certain that death will win, a people demoral-ized by a century that first created death on a scale that stunned the imagina-tion and then proceeded to render it both omnipotent and meaningless by an insanity of genocides” (64). We see this “certainty” about death in the viewer from Underworld, who is numb to the shocking death portrayed in the video because American society is so over-saturated with images of vio-lent death that he no longer notices them in a compassionate way. Death is “meaningless” to him because of the repeated fictional depictions of it, not just because of the real violence in the world, which no longer appears “insane” to him. But Keith and his viewing partner are able to fight through this meaninglessness to understand the insanity of the 9/11 attacks. Falling Man calls its readers to do the same.
Falling Man revisits the unease expressed about the WTC in Players and Mao II as well. Nina’s German lover Martin articulates Pammy’s and Brita’s vague sense of foreboding about the towers after Nina calls them “ruins” when he claims
But that’s why you [i.e., Americans] built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fanta-sies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fan-tasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. (116)
Martin names the hubris which the WTC represented, and which Pammy and Brita intuit, but he does it in a sinister way. Martin uses an “I told you so” manner that makes him sound as though he is happy that the towers were attacked because they deserved it. If readers have any doubts about whether they should disagree with Martin or not, these doubts are dispelled when it is revealed that Martin participated in terrorist activity in the 1960s (146). The scorn present in his statement about the towers is equated with the lack of emotion shown by terrorists willing to take civilian lives. No matter how reprehensible the values represented by the WTC might be, they are less so than the fundamentalist values held by the terrorists responsible for the attacks. Martin’s statement does not acknowledge this reality, and as a result the novel urges its readers not to accept his wrong-headed view of 9/11, and subsequently the similar views held by Christian fundamentalist preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson after the attacks.
Falling Man’s depiction of the 9/11 terrorists is another of its ele-ments which revisits a scene from DeLillo’s earlier work. In Cosmopolis, Eric’s killer Benno Levin is given a chapter to explain his motivations for wanting Eric dead. Unlike the rest of the book’s chapters, which are num-bered without names, this chapter is titled, but not numnum-bered. It should be chapter four, but the following chapter is numbered four instead. The chap-ter’s lack of numerical identity names the speaker as Other; he is outside of the book’s ostensibly sane discourse.
Despite this Othering, Levin is a rather sympathetic character, espe-cially when compared to Eric. Levin admits that he “want[s readers’] sym-pathy” (150), and it is hard to deny him this. Levin is clearly insane: he describes himself as “disoriented in my head,” and tells how his wife left him because of his obsessive-compulsive behavior (153), so he is pitiable rather than hateful. While Levin does end up killing Eric, he gives Eric every opportunity to get away from him or to shoot him first, but Eric decides to shoot himself instead (197), so Eric’s death is almost an assisted suicide.
Cosmopolis does not defend Levin’s actions, but it does not take pains to condemn them, either.
However, the terrorists in Falling Man are unquestionably con-demned. As in Cosmopolis, the terrorists are designated as Other through the use of three named, unnumbered chapters that do not disrupt the numbering of the other chapters about Keith and Lianne. This lack of numbering is a way of silencing the terrorists even as their perspective is given a voice because they literally do not count. Falling Man also shows the fallacy of the terrorists’ beliefs through their hypocrisy. Hammad, the primary character in the three terrorist chapters, disobeys the faith he is willing to die for by mas-turbating, failing to pray sometimes, and doubting that he and his co-conspir-ators will succeed in their mission (80, 173). If even Hammad cannot adhere to the philosophy he is espousing, it is clear that readers should also reject it. Some critics note the relationship between the terrorists’ ethnicity and their status as Other in DeLillo’s earlier novels,7 but ethnicity does not play a role
in the Othering of Falling Man’s terrorists. They are Other solely because of their violent fundamentalism.
Furthermore, unlike Levin, Hammad is portrayed as sane, but evil. He is so studious in his flight-school studying that the other terrorists make fun of him (175), and one of them tells him that he “think[s] too much” (177). Hammad’s portrayal as an intelligent person is important because the reader cannot dismiss him as a caricature or as someone with no control over his actions. Because Hammad is sane, his perspective is depicted as a legiti-mate alternative for readers to consider in that it must be wrestled with lectually, even though it must also ultimately be rejected. Despite his intel-ligence, Hammad believes “that death is stronger than life” (172), so he decides to be an agent of death. Falling Man rejects this belief via Keith’s willingness to go on with his life even though he is lonely and haunted by his 9/11 experiences.
Falling Man also rewrites the Cosmopolis episode by not allowing Hammad’s viewpoint to go unimpeded. While Levin is given a complete chapter to explain himself without any outside commentary, Hammad’s last chapter is taken over by Keith’s perspective (239-46), which silences the ter-rorists’ narrative and symbolically advocates for the superiority of a non-fundamentalist, secular narrative, flawed as that narrative may be.
In addition, Falling Man writes back to DeLillo’s earlier work via the Falling Man named in the title. The Falling Man is a performance artist who recreates the many 9/11 images of people falling from the WTC by jumping off of various edifices in New York City and hanging in the air suspended by a safety harness. Through the Falling Man, the novel explores the relationship between performance art and terrorism to help show what kinds of artistic responses to 9/11 are appropriate, as I will show shortly.
The relationship between art and terrorism is addressed previously in Mao II. Bill complains
that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game [….] What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensi-bility and thought. The danger they rep-resent equals our own failure to be dan-gerous [….] Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative. (156-57)
Bill is saddened by his loss of power as a novelist, which is why he wants to meet the terrorists. He laments novelists’ (and, by extension, all artists’) relegation from the realm of political relevance to the realm of entertain-ment,8 and argues that “the pen is mightier than the sword” is no longer true.
Although Bill’s lament is partly a critique of artists for no longer pushing societal boundaries, his solution to this important problem, which implies that artists should be more like terrorists in order to regain their relevance, is problematic. Bill does not understand that art has the power to move people because people have to choose to interact with it, and this work put in by the viewer is what creates the aesthetic experience which moves the viewer to action. Art teaches the viewer through her or his experience, but because ter-rorism is forced upon its victims it teaches nothing; it simply provokes sad-ness, rage, and fear, none of which lead to enlightenment.
Falling Man revises Bill’s erroneous thinking on the relationship between art and terrorism by revisiting this connection via the Falling Man and rejecting the notion that artists are politically irrelevant. The novel begins this revision by first elucidating the similarities between performance art and terrorism. Stephen J. Mexal explains these parallelisms in his article on the media coverage of the Texas Highway Killer in Underworld. Mexal asserts that terrorism “cannot […] exist without spectators” because it can only inspire terror effectively if someone sees the act and interprets it as frightening (318). Mexal argues that viewers of terrorism, whether they are primary viewers at “ground zero” or secondary viewers in their living room on television, are also terrorists because they participate in the terror “spectac[le]” of Mexal’s title (322). Viewers are implicated in the terrorist act because they allow themselves to be manipulated by the terrorists as a willing audience for terrorism. In effect, terrorism is defined here via the
equation ideologically-motivated violence+media coverage+consumption of media coverage=terrorism, and all three elements must be present for terror-ism to occur. While it is true that the violent act in this equation plays the majority role in terrorism in the same way that six does the most work in the equation 6+2+2=10, the roles played by the media and its viewers are neces-sary ones.9 After 9/11, many viewers around the world10 watched footage of
the planes flying into the WTC over and over like Keith and his partner do in Falling Man, and this is the reaction that the terrorists wanted.
This definition of terrorism is relevant to Falling Man because it also applies to some performance art pieces,11 and is therefore useful for
analyzing the Falling Man’s work. Marina Abramović is one artist who has exploited this theme of viewers’ complicity/participation in performance pieces which could be considered violent.12 In her 1974 piece Rhythm 0,
Abramović stood passively by a table that held various weapons, including knives, a whip, an axe, and a loaded gun, as well as various other objects, and allowed viewers to do anything they wished to her with the objects. The viewers cut all of her clothes off, and one threatened to shoot her with the gun, so other viewers insisted that the performance be stopped before it was scheduled to end (Warr and Jones 125). Abramović herself did not perform an act of idealogically-motivated violence in this piece, but she created a space for her viewers to do so. Rhythm 0 would not have had any effect if viewers had not participated in it. However, Abramović understood that viewers would play along, and as a result she was able to manipulate them into proving her argument that Western society is dangerously misogynist by letting viewers demonstrate their sexist ideology. This may be an extreme example, but it does illustrate the necessity of all three elements of terrorism/ performance art--Abramović needed viewers to participate in the perfor-mance with her, and she needed photographs of the perforperfor-mance taken so that the piece could acquire a secondary audience via photographic reproduc-tions in art periodicals and textbooks.
Like Rhythm 0, the Falling Man’s work contains an element of vio-lence which draws viewers in. Although the Falling Man’s performances do not include weapons, they are violent in one way that terrorism is violent in that they force their viewers to view them. The Falling Man appears in pub-lic spaces such as outside of Grand Central Station and on the Queensboro Bridge (33, 219). He also jumps from some elevated subway tracks in front of an elementary school in his most disturbing performance, which is the one that is given the most space in the novel. Lianne’s experience witnessing the performance is described intermittently over ten pages. The brokenness of this narrative symbolizes how troubling the piece is to Lianne and the other viewers.
The Falling Man climbs onto the tracks and waits while an audience assembles below him (159, 163-64). He jumps when a train comes past
where he is standing so that the passengers are able to see him fall, but are unable to see that he is wearing a safety harness (164, 167-68). He wants the passengers to assume that they are witnessing a self-destructive act. Although the Falling Man will be the only one physically hurt by this supposed vio-lence because of his primitive equipment (222), his viewers will be forced to carry the perturbing image of his act with them because they are literally a captive audience since they cannot choose to leave the space where the Falling Man performs--to do so they would have to be the ones jumping out of the train down to the ground below. Lianne is disturbed by the Falling Man even before he jumps. She feels violated as the performance is happening, but at the same time she cannot look away (163). She is forced into partici-pating by the Falling Man’s (mis)appropriation of a public space, but by remaining to watch instead of continuing to walk toward her destination (164) she becomes a participant in the act.
The Falling Man is attempting to use art to respond to 9/11, but he does so in a jarring rather than healing way. Falling Man signals to readers that the Falling Man’s actions are incorrect via the traditional literary device of showing disapproval for a character’s actions by killing him off (219). The novel is not calling for censorship of art like the Falling Man’s, because a non-fundamentalist13 society will allow space for all kinds of art no matter
how objectionable it is. As Joseph S. Walker asserts, the mere act of art cre-ation is significant because it shows a “refusal to be silenced in the face of the terror narrative that threatens to overwhelm all” (337). Any kind of resis-tance to terrorists’ fundamentalism is welcome, but Falling Man is espe-cially advocating for the creation of art that will reject terrorists’ narrative of fundamentalist violence by creating counter-narratives that affirm the possi-bility of a satisfying existence in defiance of terrorism instead of merely emphasizing terrorism’s random violence, which is what the Falling Man’s work does. This is the second step in Falling Man’s revision of Mao II’s skewed view of the relationship between artists’ power and that of terrorists.
Critics argue that DeLillo’s previous works are examples of these counter-narratives. John Carlos Rowe claims that Mao II teaches Americans how to create “social resistance” to the bloodlust that inspires both terrorists and the Bush administration’s disastrous “War on Terror” (42). Roberts agrees, declaring that, despite what Bill says in Mao II about novelists’ dis-placement by terrorists, “novels, especially when written the way that Don DeLillo writes them, may be said to constitute a response, a counterforce, to terror [….] novelists may be seen as anti-terrorists, as the originators of hab-its of reading that militate against the formation of a terrorist mindset” (50). Novelists and other artists can fight terrorists’ fundamentalism by creating work that affirms individuals’ right to choose how to live their lives. Western society may be the capitalist dystopia portrayed in DeLillo’s earlier works, but it is still better than the theocracy the terrorists are trying to establish.
DeLillo exhibits an awareness of the conflict between fundamental-ist narratives and Western secularism in “In the Ruins of the Future,” an essay published shortly after 9/11. He immediately names this ideological war as a war between narratives by acknowledging that “[t]oday, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists” (33). The attacks manipulated the world into paying attention to the terrorists and their vision of what existence should be. Vestiges of this manipulation are still visible in many areas, e.g., invasive airport security procedures.
DeLillo then ruminates on the mindset that allowed the 9/11 terror-ists to cause large-scale bloodshed. He contends that the terrorterror-ists are unable to “see” their victims (34). Marco Abel alleges that this passage acknowl-edges that terrorists have different narrative structures than Westerners do (1242). The terrorists’ fundamentalist narrative includes no room for dia-logue with the Other. DeLillo responds to this close-mindedness by asserting that Westerners must reaffirm “[o]ur tradition of free expression” by “creat[ing] the counter-narrative” (34). DeLillo realizes that narrative is a type of weapon, that (despite what Bill says in Mao II) it is just as important a weapon as military force.
Falling Man helps create an anti-terrorist counter-narrative, and in doing so it reclaims the power of art that is denied in Mao II. It creates a counter-narrative in part by giving the terrorist perspective a voice. Even though, as noted above, the novel ultimately rejects this perspective by silencing it, its inclusion is significant because it shows a willingness to lis-ten to the Other before deciding whether to dismiss them or not. This willing-ness acknowledges the Other’s humanity, something the terrorists’ narrative has no room for, which is why Falling Man argues that the non-fundamen-talist narrative perspective is better.
Falling Man is also an effective counter-narrative because it is a defiant statement that Americans will move on with their lives despite the terrorists’ best efforts. Whereas the intended audience for DeLillo’s previous novels was Americans and other Westerners, Falling Man also contains a message for the terrorists: their attempts to impose their fundamentalist ide-ology will fail. The novel acknowledges the pain caused by 9/11. Neither Keith nor Lianne recovers enough by the end of the book to have a satisfying life, and Linda S. Kauffman goes so far as to claim that Keith “is the falling man who has lost his moorings” (369). However, Falling Man contends that it is possible to cope with this pain because it urges readers to move forward just like Keith moves on to a new profession. He becomes a poker profes-sional in Nevada (197), a profession whose sinful reputation symbolizes an unwillingness to succumb to the terrorists’ oppressive religious moral stan-dards. Keith also defies fundamentalist morality by having an affair (137). Keith’s behavior may not be healthy, but it is important that he has the abil-ity to choose what is or is not healthy for him, and whether or not he will
engage in unhealthy behavior anyway.
Falling Man acknowledges that no one is safe from terrorism. This reality is present in DeLillo’s previous works, and Falling Man revisits this presence to create a hopeful counter-narrative which shows that it is possible to fight against the terrorists’ intolerant philosophy and bloodthirsty actions. Falling Man urges us to move forward, and shows us how.
ENDNOTES
1. This passage was reprinted as the novella Pafko at the Wall (2001).
2. That is, not individual serial killers, who also appear in several of DeLillo’s works. 3. For instance, 74, 138, 153.
4. See also Eaton (156) and Egerer (96).
5. It is important to note that religious fundamentalism of all kinds--not just that inspired by Islam--leads to terrorism, as the various assassinations of doctors who performed abortions and bombings of abortion clinics by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. have shown. Slavoj Žižek also notes that President Bush admitted that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were probably committed by “America’s own extreme Right Christian
fundamentalists” (44), and Linda S. Kauffman argues that DeLillo draws “link[s] between Christian fundamentalism and fascism” in Mao II (354).
6. This passage is also frequently anthologized as the short story “Videotape.” 7. Hardack, Saal, Egerer 105.
8. Robert Hughes argues that the belief visual art could change the world died after the horrors of World War I in Chapter Two of The Shock of the New (57-111).
9. In The Names, James describes a friend working for the International Monetary Fund who
understands the necessity of all three parts in this equation: “He was disturbed by the prospect that the riot or terrorist act which caused his death would not be covered by the media” (194).
10. I include myself in this group. I watched CBS’s coverage of the attacks literally all day on 9/11. I especially remember a clip of the second plane hitting which played repeatedly: recorded by tourists from across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the murmuring of voices exclaiming over the smoking first tower, the rising of voices as the second plane enters the shot from the left, the screams as the plane keeps going, the way the camera jolts as the plane hits, the anguished cursing that Dan Rather warned viewers was coming. I waited for each excruciating detail every time the clip played.
11, In fact, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen explicitly made this connection to the 9/11 attacks, calling them “the greatest work of art ever” (qtd. in Roberts 45). He retracted this statement shortly afterwards.
12, See Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s The Artist’s Body for many more examples by a
variety of artists.
13. I use this unwieldy term because, as Žižek notes, it is unclear what the acceptable opposite of terrorist fundamentalism is (3)--certainly it is not the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”
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Systems & Sensibility
(What’s in a Name?)
MARY CAPONEGRO Bard College “The first man was a golem before he gave names to things,”
Ratner said. “He was unformed matter waiting for a soul.” “She realized she’d never called him by his name. She spoke his name only when he was alone, talking into the tape recorder. Because of course, admit –the name is cute and condescending.” Don DeLillo seems to be every intelligent reader’s favorite writer, one of the few novelists favored by both mainstream and academy, by real-ists and by experimentalreal-ists. The master of the mimetic, he is nonetheless often linked in critical discourse to the avant-garde contingent of American novelists. But one would not consider him to be overtly a practitioner of formal innovation, tending as he does toward more oblique disruptions and reconstitutions; these in lieu of eschewing realist conventions, or of whole-heartedly embracing abstraction. He is not prone to the particular excesses practiced with impunity by card-carrying metafictionalists. Yet he is cer-tainly far closer to them than to those 1980’s darlings, the minimalists, for Don DeLillo is a realist who created his own category by pushing to extremes in ways that other realists didn’t dare. He continues to craft a vision that is both seminal and inimitable, unostentatiously original, not overtly self-reflexive in the manner of some of his peers--though he sometimes take his fictive universe to such extremes as to suggest the metafictional, bleeding beyond the borders of the real. In DeLillo’s work, mise en abyme is gener-ally implied more by content than by form, and is clarified by the cleanness of that separation, although a novel such as Ratner’s Star is harder to com-parmentalize in these terms. We need only recall its intricately configured irreal atmosphere:
People come to me to discuss their names, if interesting and strange. It’s my avocation, my serious amusement, the study of names. Naturally I have other work here, crystal structure, but often I wonder which is more useful, silly hobby or vital science…I like literally to segment a name until nothing remains. Few names yield completely to this practice. I remove one letter at a time, retaining meaning, it is hoped, until the very end (152).
