Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
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A Confusion of Tongues / David Simpson
Abstract: Don DeLillo's 'Falling Man' alludes with subtle indirection to the Babel myth, without endorsing a crude reading of the fall of the towers as justifiable punishment. The apparent chronology of the biblical myth itself, with its strong distinction between before and after the building and abandoning of the towers, is already scrambled by repetitions and prefigurings in the Authorized Version (King James ) narrative. DeLillo also suggests that linguistic coherence was absent before 9/11, so that what has happened since is coherent with what came before. Often, the protagonists' comments cannot be clearly defined as before or after 9/11. Names are especially unreliable, but their confusion also precludes any form of monotheism becoming established. The novel does not endorse 9/11 as an absolutely life-changing event, but it does not demean its tragic dimension: the disaster brings out what is already there and further expresses situations latent in the culture of the homeland. There never was an original innocence to be lost; DeLillo's figures are already caught in a cycle of loss and repetition when 9/11 interrupts their lives.
Keywords: Literature, Poststructuralism, Globalization
<1> There is much that still cannot comfortably be said about the events of 9/11. You still cannot suggest, as Karl-Heinz Stockhausen did to his considerable cost, that the falling towers had about them anything of a work of art or a terrible beauty. You cannot say without risk that ‘we’ had it coming, reasonably so given that those to whom it did come, the workers in the World Trade Center, were not guilty of individual misdeeds. America’s enemies claimed that because of their workplace the victims of the attack were appropriate victims. This seems to most of us implausible. But the refusal of the patriotic consensus to acknowledge any national misdeeds at all, or to attribute to the terrorists anything more than mindless aggression and resentment, is almost as unsatisfactory.
<2> Much too cannot be shown, most notably the images of falling bodies that were all over the media in the first hours after the tragedy but were then rapidly taken out of circulation and accorded something like the status of pornography, withdrawn from sight by both official and unofficial fiat and condemned as distasteful, defamatory and defeatist [1]. The motives for this tidying away of the evidence of persons about to die horribly were surely many and various, but one of its unintended effects was the isolation of the TV footage of planes hitting towers and towers falling, shown over and over again in the weeks after 11 September 2001, as the principal icon and evidence of an event that thereby took on a certain automatism: one plane, then the next, one tower, then the next, all seen at a distance as if in the virtual environment of the cinema or video game, and above all unmarked by any images of persons, whether alive, dead, or in the process of dying. One particular photograph of a falling figure has however achieved iconic status, largely owing to its bizarre appearance of having been posed or intended; it looks, in other words, as if it might be a work of art, and as such both dignifies and travesties the reality it obviously captures. It suggests that life can imitate art even when we might prefer that it did not [2].
<3> Another photograph of a figure falling from the towers, this one taken by Lyle Owersko, figures at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, published two years later, subsists by a related but stunningly different invention: it makes use of a fictional performance artist who repeats acts of falling from high places all over Manhattan. The art of DeLillo’s book lies in its command of indirection. What falls at the beginning of the story, which opens like an epic in medias res, just after its protagonist has escaped the burning tower, is not a person but a shirt, and the novel ends with the same shirt, its arms “waving like nothing in this life” [3]. It is the shirt that is the embodiment of Keith Neudecker’s trauma, the shirt that “he could not stop seeing” (p. 242). It is almost a falling man, with its “hand up,” but not quite. Shirts do not have hands, only sleeves through which hands protrude when someone is wearing them. This shirt with its hand up stands in for the human body that cannot be seen or mentioned except as translated after the event into the realm of performance art.
<4> Another word that cannot be spoken without risk but which is surely on the top of everyone’s tongue, if only by force of metaphorical habit, is Babel. Everyone knows (or thinks they know) the story of Genesis XI: some of the descendants of Noah build a great tower that they intend to reach to heaven, and a punishing god destroys it to put them firmly back in their place. To think of the World Trade Center as twinned towers of Babel would be to voice the enemy’s narrative, whereby these megaliths reaching so high into the sky that their tops not infrequently disappeared into the clouds were the graven images of a depraved secular-American tribe which challenged god by seeking to impose a one-world system of its own called global capitalism. That same global capitalism sought to bypass the confusion of tongues that was the punishment for previous ambitions by putting in place a universal language of internet trading backed up by international business English, whereby the “whole earth” might once again be “of one language, and of one speech” (XI: 1). The teams of terrorists, according to this telling, were performing nothing less than god’s work in bringing down these idols of the modern world and restoring an empty space within which the greatness of their own one and only god could be properly understood.
<5> There is much more to the biblical Babel narrative than has entered the popular imagination; the god who punished the Shemites can seem little more than a jealous god acting to preserve his own unique power, and the desire the Shemites express for a “name, lest we be scattered” (XI: 4) can seem humanly sympathetic to say the least. The paradox whereby the tower is produced by the fear of what its erection appears itself to bring about—loss of name and place—has not been lost on some of the more astute readers of Genesis. In the common understanding of the incident it is however pride that is punished, and punished not only with the destruction of a built environment but by being consigned to separate languages, guaranteeing at once the perpetuity of misunderstanding and the need for perpetual (mis)translation between different human cultures. Enter Don DeLillo, with a book that is all about misunderstanding and translation as facts of life.
<6> Falling Man is full of improper proper names. The three parts of the novel are marked by names, and only one of them is ‘true’ (whatever that means in a work of fiction). Part One is subtitled Bill Lawton, the transliterated consequence of Keith’s son’s effort at comprehending the identity of Bin Laden, who must be misunderstood even as he is understood. Part Two is called Ernst Hechinger, which we only gradually learn is the ‘real’ name of a character who is first introduced as Martin Ridnour, a cosmopolitan German who had ties to Baader-Meinhoff that were close enough to warrant his concealing his identity. Part Three appears under the name of David Janiak, which is revealed as that of the falling man performance artist only after his death. In each case something is revealed while something is concealed; the names are either not right or come too late. There is no transparency. People are not who others think they are. A name can be the name of another, or it can be a memorial, something bestowed after death, and now an empty sign. Keith finds his name constantly misspelled on the mail that he receives, and he selectively corrects this even though the mail has already arrived: he “didn’t know why he did it” but he does it compulsively and “would keep doing it down the years and into the decades” (p. 31). He does not do it when others are watching but he regards it as resistance to a world in which junkmail is trying to “presort the world’s identities into one” (p. 32). He wants to be a name, like those who offended the god of Genesis, and a name correctly spelled, not reduced into the one of imposed identity. The correction he makes is always in the first syllable of his last name (p. 32), thus the E or the U of Neudecker, and thus a preservation of the Germanic origin of his lineage in a new world far from the European Union (EU; he does not want to be spelled NEW). He wants his proper name, and he is not prepared to accept the particular confusion of tongues created by the mass mailing industry or by the indifference of strangers.
<7> But he too loses the power of naming: the trauma of surviving the fall of the towers produces in him a repetition of the experience of seeing “things he could not name” (p. 246). Forgetting names is likewise the marker of his wife Lianne’s Alzheimer’s patients and of her own experience (or imagined experience) of the early onset of the same disease, the one that drove her father to suicide and that now haunts her every moment as she forgets the name Bill Lawton: “She tried to remember the name but could not do it” (p. 153), a prelude to the imagined loss of “every fixed grid of memory” (p. 156). All of this is before 9/11. The overwhelming imperative issued by custodians of the events of 9/11 is to remember, to never forget. But people are forgetting all the time, whether before or after the event. The very profile of Keith’s trauma of remembering is to be unable to remember fully or correctly. The language of the novel is, correspondingly, heavily marked by sentence fragments, by incompleted thoughts and phrases left hanging, and by uncertain pronominal transitions.
<8> The fall of Babel’s towers demanded, it is said, the invention of translation. Lianne is working for a publisher as copy-editor of a book on ancient alphabets written in English by a Bulgarian (p. 22). Bin Laden is said to speak thirteen languages (p. 74). Amir (this is the nom de guerre of Mohammed Atta) scornfully asks one of his reluctant co-conspirators “Am I talking Chinese?” (p. 83). Babel is among us already. This is also one implication of one way to read Genesis—that the tribes are already scattered, already named as separate, already speaking different tongues, so that the punishment reinstates what is already there in Genesis X: “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after the families, in their nations” (X: 5). Here Babel is already named as one part of the kingdom of Nimrod (X: 10). So there is confusion in the name of Babel; Babel is both the precursor of confusion and the confusion itself, as if time is scrambled, just as it is for Keith in his remembered experiences of September 11: “he walked away from it and into it at the same time” (p. 4). There is no entrance to or exit from the moment of Babel, which is at once its own aftermath and its own precursor. Keith and Lianne’s son Justin holds on to the imagination that the towers are still to fall even though they have already fallen. Bill Lawton tells him so: “This time coming, he says, they’ll really fall down” (p. 102). The falling has already happened but is always to come. Throughout the novel Justin enacts a linguistic constraint that is far more than simply an imposed school assignment to speak only monosyllabic words (p. 66). This is intended to rehearse a primary experience of fitting words to thoughts, but it is bookended by periods of “semi-gibberish” (p. 16) and of “utter and unbreakable silence” (p. 101). It is as if language must somehow be remade, but isn’t doing very well. DeLillo does no more than to suggest this, but it is plausible to suspect that the curse of inarticulation and/or of beginning again falls after all upon the nation that built the towers. He does not force us to conclude that we are sinners worthy of punishment, but neither does he reproduce a rhetoric of exoneration in the form of a renewed linguistic integrity. He does not make a clear distinction between before and after 9/11.
<9> The issue of who we were and what we did before 9/11 comes up in serio-comic form in Keith’s retrospective account of his poker circle. Terry Cheng—”Am I talking Chinese?”—was the best player and presiding spirit of the group, and had a compulsive habit of stacking the chips into two columns of the same value but of different heights: “He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike” (p. 128). In other words (at least as Keith tells it) he did not want to invite the god of the poker table to look vengefully on his efforts or to punish the expertise that gave rise to “unspoken respect and semi-awe” (p. 128) among his fellow players. He did not want his columns destroyed, and he did not wish to flaunt his talents by mimicking the World Trade Towers, two too-tall things that looked exactly alike. This now seems meaningful to Keith, for it had been Terry who had accused his friends of not being serious: “Terry Cheng said they were shallow people leading giddy lives… He said, Get serious or die” (p. 98-99). Sounding rather like Amir in his contempt for the rotten moral fiber of the West, Terry had tried to ban TV, sports talk and variant forms of the game in order to set the focus on the one pure god of poker. But his comrades were not up to it. After short-lived efforts to observe a notion of “tradition and self-discipline” that extended even to dietary restrictions (p. 96-7), “prohibitions fell, banned words were reinstated” (p. 100). They cannot not keep to the word of god. They are like Hammad, the terrorist who has trouble toeing the line set by Amir (Muhammed Atta), and who “has to fight against the need to be normal” (p. 83).
<10> Are we to be glad that we Americans struggle with punishing ascetic rituals only in the relatively trivial context of a poker game, so that the failure to observe them resounds oddly in our favor, or are we to reflect on our utter disconnection from any seriousness that might be called moral? DeLillo does not decide for his readers, any more than he insists on a clear way of reading the other now-portentous coincidences and overlaps that mark out a world in which the foreign, alien element is already within and among us. Lianne’s neighbor constantly plays loud Arabic music; “every cabdriver in New York was named Muhammad” (p. 28). The keffiyeh-clad heads of the post-9/11 iconic enemy, called “towelheads” in soldiers’ jargon, are mimicked and/or prefigured in the “men with toweled heads” (p. 246) who run from the burning buildings, trying thus to shield themselves not from the desert sun but from a man-made source of unbearable heat. On the antiwar March in New York, Lianne finds herself remembering her time in Cairo (p. 184). Martin is preoccupied with the parallel between the nineteen German terrorists on his poster and those who flew the planes on September 11 (p. 147). The manuscript that Lianne’s publishing friend will not, out of concern for her feelings, offer her for editing is one that seems to predict the events of 9/11 (p. 139). The same friend had sent her a postcard from Italy depicting the cover of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam: a “simple coincidence, or not so simple” (p. 8).
<11> As if at the service of apocalyptic time itself, prefiguring and after-repetition seem to be everywhere in the book, just as Babel is both before and after the building and destruction of the towers. This is what the performance artist as falling man enacts—a time out of time, a one-time moment that repeats itself. Those who are “outraged at the spectacle” (p. 33) are, among other things, responding to a perceived infraction of the principle of exceptionality; as there is no god but god, so there must be no 9/11 but 9/11, and its graven images must include no about-to-die persons. Those Israelis who responded to 9/11 by claiming that Americans were now just like the Jews—claims that were quickly silenced—outraged the exceptionalist factions within both cultures. 9/11 has joined the Shoah in the minds of many as an event to which nothing can be compared, something immune to translatability. The history of precursors and analogues at home and abroad—Beirut, the USS Cole, the 1993 WTC bomb, Oklahoma City—has been pushed aside, as indeed the third plane hitting the Pentagon and the heroism of the passengers over Pennsylvania have been made quietly secondary in both media memory and official memorialization. The general elision of plausible contexts and analogues for the New York segment of the 9/11 events has played a part in the imposition of absurdly disconnected consequences, most noticeably the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq and the ongoing destruction of Iraqi civil society.
<12> DeLillo’s careful interweaving of connecting patterns in the behavior of the homeland and its enemies does not seem intended to (and I think does not) imply a moral or empirical equivalence between the two, but it does suggest a mixed-up world impervious to the monotheisms of the terrorists as well as to the vengeful patriotisms of the homeland. Martin Ridnour discovers in the event a validation of his own dormant revolutionary purity whereby “America is going to become irrelevant”…“an empty space” (pp. 191, 193). Its name and place will be erased, its towers lost to history, a new Babel destroyed all over again. This is no more than wishful thinking, but it does as such recover a terroristic component to the tradition of the West and remind us that Amir and his co-conspirators are not alone [4]. Amir too says things that to Hammad sound “like philosophy” (p. 176). But the death of falling man David Janiak establishes a role for historical (not apocalyptic) time at the end of the novel. There will be no more nasty reminders on the streets of Manhattan of 9/11 and the bad faith it sponsored, no more performances (excepting of course that enacted by the publication and circulation of DeLillo’s book). The book says that performance art will no longer keep alive and make repeatable the sight of falling persons, and in this sense the biological time that demands the artist’s death seems to represent a victory for the orthodox myth makers who always wanted to get him off the streets. According to his brother, Janiak was anyway planning a final, suicidal jump without a harness, an ultimate bringing together of his art with what it commemorated and reenacted (p. 223). But the book, in its disguise as other than pure fiction, as somehow real, keeps this moment at bay for the time of its reading, a reading that can always be repeated. Falling man thus dies off but will not go away; he can be accessed between the covers of the novel, he has an afterlife. So too does Richard Drew’s photograph (and others like it), which can be searched and accessed on the Web [5].
<13> The towers have fallen, another tower will be built, and its name was to be Freedom Tower: it is now more modestly renamed One World Trade Center (“let us make us a name”). It will be even taller than what it replaces (“lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the whole earth”—Genesis, XI: 4). But how will its name really sound to others speaking other tongues? Martin Ridnour predicts that America will subsist only as “the center of its own shit” (p. 191), that it will otherwise be an empty space, a place of no graven image worshipped anywhere but here. There are no signs in DeLillo’s novel of a recuperative moment such as the New Testament provides in the miracle of speaking with tongues (Acts II)—though we must note that this miracle is itself purely in the service of the conversion imperative of Christianity and the implicit punishment of nonbelievers. Babel is before and after the fall of the towers and the building of the new tower, before and after the fall from god’s good books that brings about what was already there, the dispersal of human communities and the obligation to acts of translation that can never succeed.
<14> The name of Babel is itself confusion: it ‘means’ confusion—“because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth” (XI: 9)—while also meaning ‘city of god’ (ba-bel) and yet more specifically the city called Babylon. Babylon and/as ba-bel exist ‘before’ the imposition of the confusion which they also prefigure. Babel as proper name cannot itself be translated, it is a placeholder at once inside and outside language, or as Derrida says “at the edge of language” [6]. Like the name of the father who names it, Babel is untranslatable even as it imposes the necessity of (mis)translation itself. The two operative monotheisms in Falling Man are Islam and capitalism. Islam is divided in and from itself according as it does or does not invite violence and/or conversion (the victims of 9/11 have already missed their chance), while capitalism lives by conversion and convertability, but only by withholding personal choice and with the ultimate aim of a radically unequal accumulation of wealth. Like Nimrod, whom Milton marks out as the leader of the biblical tower-builders, capitalism claims “second sovereignty” only in order to generate a “jangling noise of words unknown” (Paradise Lost, 12: 35, 55). Another such word, hiding itself in the vapid transparency of the over-familiar, is “freedom,” which may well remain in folk memory as the first given name of the tower to come.
End Notes
[1] On this topic see Susan Lurie, ‘Falling Persons and National Embodiment: The Reconstruction of Safe Spectatorship in the Photographic Record of 9/11’, in eds. Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2006), pp. 44-68.
[2] The picture was taken by Richard Drew and is now familiar worldwide. See Tom Junod, ‘The Falling Man’, Esquire (September 2003), 177-81, 198-99.
[3] Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), pp. 4, 246. DeLillo’s nonfictional response to 9/11 appeared three months after the event: see ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, Harper’s Magazine (December 2001), 33-40, also published in The Guardian, 22 December 2001.
[4] On DeLillo’s connection between 9/11 and the Baader-Meinhoff movement, see Linda S. Kauffman, ‘The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, ‘Baader-Meinhoff’, and ‘Falling Man’’’, Modern Fiction Studies, 54 no. 2 (Summer 2008), 353-77. Note, however, that this important essay conflates two different Gerhard Richters, the painter and the literary critic, into one—another confusion over names!
[5] Eric Fischl’s controversial sculpture ‘Tumbling Woman’, which was briefly installed at Rockefeller Center in September 2002, has been more successfully ‘disappeared’ owing to its existence in large, non-virtual form. But it too lives on on the Web.
[6] Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. Joseph F. Graham in Acts of Religion: Jacques Derrida, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 104-34; p. 118.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.
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