Falling Man and the Aesthetics of Terrorism

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man as an influential example of post-9/11 literature. This novel, in describing the shattering impact of the destruction of the symbolic reference points that determine our experience of reality, has undoubtedly contributed to defining a “before and after 9/11” cultural scenario, where the new era is abruptly marked by the presence of new meanings, new attitudes, new spaces and new categories. This complex reframing of reality has engendered a new approach to the role of art, and especially of literature, in the Western world. This paper demonstrates that Falling Man can be read a site of political (re)configuration, in which the return to the link between the creative process and the issue of terrorism – a theme that runs through much of DeLillo’s writing – leads to a move beyond established categories and concepts. Such a move responds to a public need for a reconceptualisation of paradigms of terror/horror. I argue that the novel’s narrativisation of terrorism has introduced important suggestions into the contemporary cultural panorama, which now allow us to identify both a new form of terrorism that is closely connected with the emergent metamodern sensibility, and new aesth-ethical concepts that are better suited to describing contemporary violence.