When one looks back through the lens of time at the 9/11 attacks, it is easy to reduce one’s response to those bombings to hatred for Muslim terrorists. It is also easy to reduce one’s response to a belief that the federal government somehow pulled off a hoax in order to motivate the public to support war against al Qaeda and, eventually, Saddam Hussein. However, Dom DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future” and Falling Man pull the reader back to the fear of those days after the attacks. For the first time in the history of the United States, all aviation activity was grounded. People were separated from their loved ones, in many cases by multiple time zones, and it took hours, if not longer, for them to be able to find out that they were safe. Both DeLillo’s essay and novel relate to how people respond to things when they actually happen, rather than looking back from a later viewpoint as to why things were not different, or why things had to happen the way that they did; in Falling Man, the observation that “what you see is not what we see [but] what you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years” (DeLillo 45) is a poignant one. It is possible that this sort of reclassification after the fact is simply part of human nature, but the response of the moment is often the most visceral, and longest lasting, part of our response to this sort of trauma, and both of DeLillo’s works highlight that significance. The issue that emerges in “The Ruins of the Future” for DeLillo is that he has a problem with the speed of representation. It is clear that he refers to representation as an insistence that things make sense and have clear causal chains when what is important in representation is the impact itself.
This is why Falling Man is much more about the ways that people had to allow the events of that awful day to sink in than about the assignment of guilt, about the creation of meaning around the event. His book, then, is a recreation of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, taken from the mind of those who survived it, as well as the tragic results of the attack right after it happened. When “these are the days after [and] everything now is measured by after” (DeLillo, 12), then one sees how measurably the world views of the characters have shifted.
When an event like 9/11 happens, a search for truth in connection to the event always comes next. Once the ground has stopped shaking and the bodies have stopped falling from the sky, we start digging through the rubble, both literally and figuratively. We want to find out what caused this attack; we want to find out who the responsible parties are; we want to find out what caused them to want to carry out this sort of atrocity.
However, in those initial moments, we do not want to resolve this into some sort of 140-character rant to blast out to our Twitter followers. Instead, we simply roil in the sensory elements of the moment. This is why so many of us sat in front of television screens, watching those planes hit the buildings over and over again, watching smoke billow through the streets of New York City, watching those sad bodies dropping from the sky, as the people in the buildings above the damage decided that they would rather die on their own terms instead of letting the collapse of their skyscraper determine that for them.
This does not mean, of course, that we devolve into a sense of moral relativism, though, just thinking about the event rather than assigning any sort of blame. We start to assemble a sort of truth about the event, but we start at a much more basic level. So we see things, in a gradual montage, rather than processing the event.
Even when we see, what we perceive comes at us through the network of presuppositions and experiences that comprise our semiotic nexus, but in an event that involves so much shock and fear, we are not as consciously aware of how our biases may be contributing to our processing of the stimuli before us. This is why so many of us sat and watched the same footage, over and over, listened to the talking heads saying the same things over and over, talking more about what we did not know (because we did not know much, not for quite a while) than what we did know, talking just to keep the show going, to keep us paying attention, even if we were listening at the television more than listening to what the words coming from the speakers actually were.
Part of the process of recovery for survivors involves finding ways to integrate the memories they just had into their existing frameworks for dealing with reality and then turning them into memories. This means that they need to come up with words to explain what happened to them. Much of what happens in Falling Man involves characters who have to fight between a need to know what happened and a need to deny the hideous nature of the events. This is why “she was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers” (DeLillo 79). If one tries to imagine the chaos and horror that went on inside those two buildings from the moment of impact to the moment of collapse, it is impossible to put those ideas into human words in a fully adequate way without finding ways to shoehorn that terror into our existing mental framework. This is where explanation, assignation of blame and other mental tools allow us to process reality and move forward.
The idea that going through trauma is an experience that resists conversion into language or other forms of representation is a new one as well, but as awareness of trauma and its effects have grown over time, then the idea of bending trauma into a chronological narrative has become more and more problematic.
And so DeLillo’s novel reads much more like a movie than a story, and the essay paves the way toward that interpretation. There is a great deal of fragmentation at work in the storytelling of Falling Man, and that has a lot to do with the way that people process trauma. The idea that people would jump, in large numbers, off a skyscraper to their death reveals a desperation that is too difficult for those of us outside the situation to represent or perceive in a meaningful way. Instead, the image of the falling bodies simply stays in our interpretive nexus, causing us discomfort until we figure out how to assimilate that into the way in which we understand the world. DeLillo’s purpose is not to assist us in that assimilation, though. Instead, his purpose is to represent that initial process of taking the stimulus in and understanding what is happening.
One way in which the novel provides a fragmented representation of the story is through the use of four narrators – primarily the survivors Keith and Lianne but also from the survivor Florence and the terrorist Hammad. Each of the novel’s three main parts takes its name from one of the characters in the story. Each part includes a fragmented presentation of the actions, thoughts and viewpoints of the main characters as time goes by after 9/11.
This fragmentation is what torpedoes any sense of chronological order, especially in the sections narrated by Hammad, which occur back before the attacks but are the last section in each of the three parts. The story actually takes place in a chronological circle, as the story begins with Keith walking away from the scene just after the first tower has collapsed, still dazed from what has happened, and it ends at the point in time just before that, when Keith emerges onto the street, having made it out of the burning building.
DeLillo’s explanation of Keith’s mindset could well be an explanation of the novel’s structure as well: “He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience” (DeLillo 66). Clearly, Keith is still at this point having a difficult time assimilating what has happened into a cogent view of the world, and the novel’s structure represents that difficulty.
The choices that Dom DeLillo makes when constructing the representation of the 9/11 attacks are designed to help the reader understand what going through significant emotional and psychological trauma feels like. His purpose has nothing to do with making sense of the attacks, because that is not what his view on representation entails. Instead, he wants the reader to understand, in a very real way, what it is like to suffer, to go through the sort of tragedy that shakes one’s basic assumptions about the world to their very core.
The title “The Ruins of the Future” is an excellent image for this idea, because what 9/11 (and other significant forms of trauma also do) did was shake our nation’s assumptions about itself and its future. It also accomplished this on an individual level, most viscerally with those who initially survived the day but also with those who lost loved one, those who feared for loved ones who turned out to be all right, those who woke up with one vision of the world and found it to be incomplete in the worst sort of way.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor, 1998.
DeLillo, Dom. Falling Man. London: Picador, 2007.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, c2004.
