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From This Point on It's All about Loss: Attachment to Loss in the Novels of Don DeLillo, from Underworld to Falling Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2012

ALAN MARSHALL
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Abstract

Between 1997 and 2007, Don DeLillo published three novels concerned with loss and mourning. Two of these, Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), revolve around unique historical events in which the question of American exceptionality is foregrounded, and both relate this question of exceptionality to the experience of loss. This essay argues that while DeLillo accepts the historical specificity of the events of 9/11, his novel Falling Man is wary of any claim to their exceptionality. It argues further that while Falling Man and Underworld both contain moving explorations of the vicissitudes of loss, Falling Man is more concerned with the loss of loss, the end of mourning, an idea which illuminates the novel's arresting juxtaposition of Søren Kierkegaard and T. S. Eliot. As the three novels appeared, DeLillo seemed increasingly concerned to explore the overcoming of grief, the loss of loss, in the context of female subjectivity, and to trace the failure to overcome it to the masculine psyche, and I draw upon the work of Julia Kristeva in order to address this. The pattern is at its starkest in The Body Artist (2001), with which the essay briefly concludes. We begin by looking at Underworld, where loss seems to be the presiding masculine emotion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 621 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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References

1 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Penguin Freud Library, Volume XI, On Metapsychology, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1991), 245–68, 253, 267.

2 Ibid., 267.

3 “In normal mourning early psychotic anxieties are reactivated,” Klein wrote. “That is to say, any pain caused by unhappy experiences, whatever their nature, has something in common with mourning. It reactivates the infantile depressive position; the encountering and overcoming of adversity of any kind entails mental work similar to mourning.” Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), in idem, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, with a new introduction by Hannah Segal (London: Virago, 1988; first published 1975), 344–69, 354, 360.

4 Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 5Google Scholar.

5 DeLillo, Don, Underworld (London: Picador, 1999), 233–34Google Scholar. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

6 Klein, 348.

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8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Fontana-HarperCollins, 1992; first published 1973), 211–44.

9 Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper's, Dec. 2001, 33–40, 39.

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11 Kauffman, Linda S., “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo's ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader–Meinhof,’ and Falling Man,” Modern Fiction Studies, 54, 2 (Summer 2008), 353–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 368.

12 Ibid.

13 Gray, Richard, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing in a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (Spring 2009), 128–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 134. Michael Rothberg, writing in the same journal, largely accepted Gray's “diagnosis” of what he too calls “the post-9/11 condition.” Rothberg, Michael, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (Spring 2009), 152–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 153, 156.

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15 DeLillo, Don, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2008), 31Google Scholar. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

16 Gray, 132.

17 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 265.

18 In a more pessimistic reading than the one presented here, Kristiaan Versluys argues that in “psychoanalytical terms” Falling Man “describes pure melancholia without the possibility of mourning.” Versluys, Kristiaan, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Kristeva, Julia, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

20 Kristeva, Julia, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 187–213, 203Google Scholar. For the ongoing significance of Kristeva's essay with reference to the events of 11 September 2001 and the Iraq War, see the essays collected in Hesford, Victoria and Diedrich, Lisa, eds., Feminist Time against Nation Time: Gender, Politics, and the Nation-State in an Age of Permanent War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

21 Kristeva, “Women's Time,” 192.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 For an account of Falling Man in relation to American performance art after 9/11 see John N. Duvall, “Witnessing Trauma: Falling Man and Performance Art,” in Stacey Olster, ed., Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man (London: Continuum, 2011), 152–68.

26 Kauffman, “The Wake of Terror,” 353.

27 Ibid., 368.

28 DeLillov, “In the Ruins of the Future,” 39.

29 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in idem, On Metapsychology, 269–338, 284.

30 Kauffman teases out the connections in “The Wake of Terror.”

31 Catherine Morley writes that “both falling men invoked by the title, Keith and Hammad, come to resemble each other physically in the growth of their beards, psychologically in their retreat into themselves and in their admiration of male compatriots.” Catherine Morley, “Writing in the Wake of 9/11,” in Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley, eds., American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 245–58, 253.

32 Kauffman, 355.

33 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in idem, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London and New York: Methuen, 1983; first published 1920), 95–103, 100, original emphasis.

34 Ibid., 101.

35 Three years earlier, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” 255, Freud classed Hamlet as melancholic.

36 Eliot, 101.

37 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968; first published 1846), 268.

38 Ibid., 276.

39 Ibid., 279.

40 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 266.

41 For a detailed reading of the novel in this regard, see Di Prete, Laura, “Don DeLillo's The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma,” Contemporary Literature, 46, 3 (Autumn 2005), 483–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 DeLillo, Don, The Body Artist (London: Picador, 2011), 31Google Scholar. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

43 Prete, 501.