Table Of ContentTerrorism, Media, and
the Ethics of Fiction
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Terrorism, Media, and
the Ethics of Fiction
Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo
Edited by
Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2010 Peter Schneck, Philipp Schweighauser, and contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-3993-1 (hardcover)
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America by Thomson Shore, Inc
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The American and the European DeLillo 1
Philipp Schweighauser and Peter Schneck
Part 1: Memory Work after 9/11
1. The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s “In The Ruins of
The Future,” “Baader-Meinhof,” and FALLING MAN 19
Linda S. Kauffman
2. Grieving and Memory in Don DeLillo’s FALLING MAN 40
Silvia Caporale Bizzini
3. Collapsing Identities: The Representation and
Imagination of the Terrorist in FALLING MAN 51
Sascha Pöhlmann
Part 2: Writers, Terrorists, and the Masses
4. 6,500 Weddings and 2,750 Funerals: MAO II,
FALLING MAN, and the Mass Effect 67
Mikko Keskinen
5. Public Image and Self-Representation: Don DeLillo’s
Artists and Terrorists in Postmodern Mass Society 81
Leif Grössinger
6. The Art of Terror—the Terror of Art: DeLillo’s
Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi,
Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art 93
Julia Apitzsch
Part 3: Don DeLillo and Johan Grimonprez
7 Grimonprez’s Remix 111
Eben Wood
8 Dial T for Terror: Don DeLillo’s MAO II and
Johan Grimonprez’s DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y 130
Martyn Colebrook
vi Contents
Part 4: Deathward and Other Plots
9 Terror, Asceticism, and Epigrammatic Writing in
Don DeLillo’s Fiction 145
Paula Martín Salván
10 The End of Resolution? Reflections on the
Ethics of Closure in Don DeLillo’s Detective Plots 158
Philipp Schweighauser and Adrian S. Wisnicki
Part 5: The Ethics of Fiction
11 SLOW MAN, DANGLING MAN, FALLING MAN: DeLillo
and the Ethics of Fiction 173
Peter Boxall
12 FALLING MAN: Performing Fiction 184
Marie-Christine Leps
13 “The Great Secular Transcendence”: Don DeLillo
and the Desire for Numinous Experience 204
Peter Schneck
Part 6: Coda
14 The DeLillo Era: Literary Generations in
the Postmodern Period 223
David Cowart
Contributors 243
Index 245
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The book you are holding in your hands received its initial impetus from an
international conference on Don DeLillo’s work. “Terrorism, Media, Literature:
Don DeLillo and the Ethics of Fiction” took place at the University of Osnabrück
from April 25–27, 2008 and brought together a number of established DeLillo
scholars as well as promising younger academics who had done previous work
on this eminent contemporary American writer. As co-organizers of that con-
ference, we wanted to initiate a dialogue between DeLillo scholarship in Europe
and the United States. The present volume continues and intensifi es that dia-
logue in ways that sometimes confi rm and sometimes contest our initial suspi-
cion that DeLillo is read and understood very differently on opposite sides of
the Atlantic.
The dialogue we began at Osnabrück brought together not only people
from different places on the map, but also people from different areas of liter-
ary activity. On the third day of the conference, we hosted a panel chaired by
DeLillo’s German translator Frank Heibert. The panel featured not only two
academics who had given papers at the conference—Eben Wood and Philipp
Schweighauser—but also DeLillo’s German discoverer and editor (Bärbel Flad),
a theater director who had staged DeLillo’s The Body Artist (Jan Langenheim),
and an actor and fi lm director who has engaged with the author’s work
(Michael Ostrowski). Julia Apitzsch, who also contributes an essay to our
volume, knew these people and brought them into a dialogue. For that, we
thank her.
We are also greatly indebted to a number of people who made those dia-
logues possible in the fi rst place. Sara Duana Meier, Devin Zuber, Stefanie
Krüger, and Jann Krüger at Osnabrück not only ensured the conference’s suc-
cess but also set the collective spirit, which has made this publication possible.
At the University of Göttingen, Frederike Rathing and Rebecca Scorah assisted
with the panel organization and graciously helped out wherever they were
needed at the conference itself. At Basel, Chantelle Kley-Gomez made sure
this volume was in good (Chicago) style and proofread large parts of the man-
uscript—as did Sarah Bartholomäus at Osnabrück.
Our thanks also go to the Thyssen Foundation, which provided essential
fi nancial support for the conference and to the University of Osnabrück and
the Universitätsgesellschaft Osnabrück for providing logistic support and
important lateral funding.
viii Acknowledgments
With one exception, this is a collection of original essays. We are grateful for
permission to reprint Linda S. Kauffmann’s “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s
‘In the Ruins of The Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man,” which was
originally published in Modern Fiction Studies, (54.2 [2008], 353–77).
We would also like to acknowledge and thank for permissions to reproduce
the following media:
(in Sascha Pöhlmann’s contribution): “Jihad.” Music and text by Jeff Hanneman,
Tomas E. Araya, Dave Lombardo. ©Universal Music—MGB Songs,
Pennemunde Music, SS810 Music, Death’s Head Music. SVL: Musik Edition
Discoton GmbH (Universal Music Publishing Group Germany).
(in Marie-Christine Leps’s contribution): Seventh in a series of eleven—A per-
son falls from the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center Tuesday
Sept. 11, 2001 after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the World
Trade Center and brought down the 110-story towers. Associated Press/
Richard Drew. President Bush fl ashes a “thumbs-up” after declaring the end
of major combat operations in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier
USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, Thursday, May 1, 2003. The
carrier will arrive in San Diego May 2, 2003, following a record 10-month
deployment including “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Associated Press/J. Scott
Applewhite.
(in Eben Wood’s contribution): Five stills from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004,
by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Rony Vissers. Courtesy of Zapomatik.
Now enjoy.
P.S. and P.S., April 2010
Introduction
The American and the European DeLillo
Philipp Schweighauser and Peter Schneck
In Mao II (1991), Don DeLillo lets his protagonist, the novelist Bill Gray,
speak words that have been read as eerily prophetic in the aftermath of 9/11:
“Years ago [. . .] I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner
life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
They make raids on human consciousness” (41). While the collective imagina-
tion of the past was guided, DeLillo seems to suggest, by the creative order and
ethos of narrative fi ctions told by novelists, our contemporary fantasies and
anxieties are completely controlled by the endless narratives of war and terror
constantly relayed by the mass media. Where terrorists make the headlines,
using global mass media to publicize their message, the ethical craft of the
novel has become obsolete, an almost pathetic remnant of the past. And indeed,
as many commentators drawing on the work of French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard have pointed out, the fi ctional worlds of Americana (1971), Players
(1977), Running Dog (1978), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II
(1991), Underworld (1997), Valparaiso (1999), and Cosmopolis (2003) are
saturated with mass-mediated images to such an extent that the very distinc-
tion between fact and fi ction is almost erased. As one of our contributors,
Martyn Colebrook, notes,
[i]n DeLillo’s work, the camera—be it that of the photographer or that of the fi lm
director—is a constant presence: in Libra, it records the killing of Lee Harvey
Oswald; in Running Dog, murderous confl icts ensue over the search for a fi lm
that has the fi nal moments of Adolf Hitler captured on a grainy piece of celluloid;
in Americana, the advertising executive David Bell records himself on a personal
odyssey; and in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer watches a personal preview of his own
death.
DeLillo’s incisive analyses of the performative force of media images, the visi-
bility of terror, and the collapsing division between reality and simulation
are more than mere illustrations of theoretical positions in contemporary
media studies. To take DeLillo’s literary refl ections on media, terrorism, and
literature seriously means to engage with the obvious ethical implications of
his media critique. In exploring DeLillo’s negotiations of the intricately related
issues of terrorism and the place of literature within late-twentieth- and early-
twenty-fi rst-century media cultures, this essay collection begins with the premise
that there is a need for a broader investigation of the ethical dimension in (and
of) DeLillo’s works.
To launch that investigation, we have invited DeLillo scholars from both
sides of the Atlantic to share their thoughts on these timely issues. What has
