DeLillo's Falling Man may disappoint but it is still the best 9/11 novel to date

There isn’t a writer alive who is more talented or more prophetic than Don DeLillo. Even though his most recent novel, Falling Man, published in 2007, (which I completely by coincidence finished reading on September 11th which marks the eight year anniversary of the Horror) falls short of the work he has done in the past, it is still the best work of fiction dealing with the events of 9/11.

Long before “the planes,” DeLillo foretold the rise of terrorism explaining their mindset as “the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith,” aptly depicted the power of mass media and full public viewed death, the seduction of technology and popular culture, institutionalized paranoia, how a crowd can become “violent, history-changing mob,” and the conclusion that “the rules of what is thinkable” has and will change as these things come together.

Having established himself as, in your reviewer’s opinion, the greatest living American writer with his fingers firmly on the pulse of late-date American culture, it is not surprising that DeLillo’s 9/11 novel trumps those of say Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Or as New York Review of Books critic Andrew O'Hagan in his piece, “Racing Against Reality,” writes:

If the twin towers could be said to have stood in wait for the Mohamed Attas of the world, then the Mohamed Attas of the world were standing in wait for Don DeLillo. To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature—consider Kafka and the Nazis, Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age—but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival.

In other words, no one has been destined to write the definitive 9/11 novel than Don DeLillo, which to date, he has done.

The novel, which spends most of its time following Keith, who survived the attack of the North Tower but lost two friends from his weekly poker game, and his family as he falls deeper and deeper into a state of alienation that eventually leads him to a depression inducing life as a professional poker player in Las Vegas, is another great example of DeLillo’s ability to depict middle-aged male dissociation in traumatic situations heightened by a chaotic domestic environment that steels away the protagonist’s power and confidence. This perhaps especially true in Falling Man as the planes pile it on even thicker by giving Keith an excuse to remain blank with shock.

Also of note are an interesting portrayal of one of the hijackers in the time leading up to American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the tower and the ongoing image of a performance artist who re-enacts the iconic image of the 9/11 jumper nicknamed “The Falling Man.” These are some of the most attention grabbing sections of the novel and alone make the book worth reading.

Even so, DeLillo’s genius doesn’t manage to completely convey the events or the ways that they have made us crazy as a country in a profoundly accurate way. As New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, who of course hated it as she does pretty much anyone—Franzen (penned his memoir The Discomfort Zone an “odious self-portrait of the -artist as a young jackass” to which he responded by saying that “the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times”), Foster Wallace (tiresome, whiny), Amis (weak, risible) and most notably Mailer (silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical) whose fiction I’m not crazy about but nevertheless share in his Kakutani hatred although think it did go overboard at times like when he called her “a one-woman kamikaze” with a “hair up her immortal Japanese ass” and told Rolling Stone that the only reason the Times didn't fire her was because she was “a twofer”, in that she is “Asiatic” and a “feminist” saying that “she is a token” and “deep down, she probably knows it”—that should be considered genuinely innovative, wrote in her review of the novel “perhaps not even enough time has passed for any novelist to grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary.” This statement proved to be unexpectedly—believe it or not—spot on since even DeLillo fails live up to the real time, live pictures that we all saw on that lovely and terrible day.

My Second Favorite Writer (Jonathan Franzen) on My Favorite Writer’s (David Foster Wallace’s) Suicide

In the middle of September, when my literary hero, David Foster Wallace, committed suicide, I was a wreck. I was a wreck before and I have been a wreck since. But I didn’t know the man. Previously, I knew that Franzen and Wallace were friends, but I didn’t know they were best buds. Since learning that, I was anxious to hear what Franzen would say about his amigo’s death by hanging and the life that he lived. Furthermore, I always thought of Franzen as being a much angrier and sadder writer and guy than DFW; in other words, I thought of Franzen as being more like myself. But then DFW died and I felt like I had been deceived briefly and then I felt like I had lost a friend (when in truth I really hadn’t). So this is what Franzen had to say about the suicide before giving a “not-so-dark” account of what it was to DFW’s friend which he says was a “great happiness and privilege and endlessly interesting challenge.” Here it is, curtsey of Adam Begley of The New York Observer:

“And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind Midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life, and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote Infinite Jest), ‘So yo then, man, what’s your story?’

“One good, simple, modern story would go like this: ‘A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain. There was the person of Dave, and then there was the disease, and the disease killed the man as surely as cancer might have.’ This story is at once sort of true and totally inadequate. If you’re satisfied with this story, you don’t need the stories that Dave wrote—particularly not those many, many stories in which the duality, the separateness, of person and disease is problematized or outright mocked. One obvious paradox, of course, is that Dave himself, at the end, did become, in a sense, satisfied with this simple story and stopped connecting with any of those more interesting stories he’d written in the past and might have written in the future. His suicidality got the upper hand and made everything in the world of the living irrelevant.

“But this doesn’t mean there are no more meaningful stories for us to tell. I could tell you 10 different versions of how he arrived at the evening of Sept. 12, some of them very dark, some of them very angering to me, and most of them taking into account Dave’s many adjustments, as an adult, in response to his near-death of suicide as a late adolescent.”

The Medium is the Massage

Visually stimulating, Marshall McLuhan’s study The Medium is the Massage is, in a word, cool. When I purchased this little cool book back in April, I was working on a research paper dealing with the “electronic church” and how televising religious phenomenon undermines the meaning and the message of that phenomenon which I titled “The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer,” which I thought was clever.[1] It seemed like a book that would be popular among indy kids because of its cult status and coolness as well as for people like me who hate television, though McLuhan doesn’t seem to think TV is all that bad of thing. In this regard, I am more attune with Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death and, of course, DFW’s essay “E Unibus Pluram” but I do find this book to be informative and stimulating. It works in this way, by being stimulating and informative, the book which incorporates the work of graphic designer Quinton Fiore into the body of the text mimics the medium it is critiquing, critiquing in a more favorable way than I should like, probably. That is also sort of why I didn’t like it, I am sure, since I don’t think a book must resemble television to be relevant or popular, not to say that was really the intention of McLuhan, which it wasn’t, but I think its intention was to overwhelm us, if I am not mistaken, in the way that television overwhelms us. But as a product of a television culture, I don’t think anything can overwhelm us sensually. This is most likely the product of always living in a television culture as opposed to McLuhan’s “Age of Anxiety” where our mental faculties, at present that is, are much better equipped to sift the constant bombardment of images—it is all we know. The “mind control”[2] like images are well within our ability to handle.

In regards to the name of the book, the “Massage” here is not a typo on my part; it was actually a mistake on the part of the typesetter who originally made the mistake of setting the e in “message” to an a thus “massage.” When showed the mistake, McLuhan was reportedly thrilled with the typo since the book deals with the effect media has on all our sensory perceptions.[3] As McLuhan says “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”[4]

One of the main themes McLuhan explores in the text is the idea of a global community with the world becoming a smaller, more media dependent place as technology evolves and becomes more accessible to the world at large. He pretty much considers this a good thing, something I for the most part disagree with since this is somewhat presumptuous of us to assume everyone in the world want this—I mean this type of invasion was one of the reasons the media savvy Al Qaeda cited among others for the 9/11 attacks.[5] Such is the nature of community that determine and develop who we are. Children, for example, are no longer raised by only their parents, nor are they solely the products of their immediate surroundings, as McLuhan illustrates, technology means that “all the world’s a sage.”[6] He adds “electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism… Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ You can’t go home again.”[7] This comes in 1967, a full two and half decades before the internet totally obliterated the need for the two as we can now carry our information and community with us in high-speed-global-networking with technology allowing us instant access to all the world’s entertainment at any time and at any place, whenever we choose, 24/7/365, from “womb-to-tomb.” [8]

One of the areas McLuhan’s media theory is most genius and spot-on is with the idea that “all media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”[9] According to this theory, the wheel is an extension of the foot, just as the book is to the eye, clothing to the skin, electric circuitry is to the central nervous system and so on. I do agree with this assessment, however, this has the potentially scary implications that McLuhan seems to think more positive than I could ever admit writing “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense [perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”[10] The reason he sees these as being good things, and superior to gaining knowledge through “book learning,” is because they compel, according to him, people to interact with the medium and with others. Books, on the other hand, he believes are opposed to social interaction since they are read typically alone by solitary individuals and thus isolate and alienate the individual. I tend to agree that being a reader does alienate from others who are more of the television watching variety and I do believe that this is the product of new technology that has made our literature far less relevant, but I think this is a very negative development and instead of producing a more intelligent/connected community, in this case global, in its vastness in its bombardment of fragmented/contextless information, it destroys the real sense of community people once shared with their family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers because in this world of internet and television and cell phone and email dominance, the individual is left even more alone and silent only knowing a machine while fooling themselves into thinking they are actually part of a real community.

So when McLuhan, whose book I really like and agree with in terms of how we are shaped by our media though I am critical of some of his interpretation of their effects on modern society, makes statements like “[mass culture is] a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore”[11] and “information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously” and “as soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information “ and “our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition”[12] to illustrate that they are preferable to the old way of reading outright, I have to say he misses an important characteristic of mass culture and fails to see the significance of life that was known more fully and intimately before the whole technological revolution that is a product far newer than we can imagine with mass media having always been a part of our lives. In his view, people are unhappy because they are trying to use “outdated mental and psychological responses”[13] in order to experience and make since of the world which is complete horseshit. What would he have us do than, give up on such concepts as family and instead let our televisions, or worse yet, the internet, raise a child so things like love and understanding don’t get in the way of development in this postmodern, media addicted hyper-reality.

This idea, less naive than insane and twisted, also carries over into other areas of our lives such as our work and especially our education. To McLuhan, “today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute ‘adult’ news… and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.”[14] Here, again, one has to wonder what he would have us do about it, accommodate the child who he says is “growing up absurd” by integrating our educational system with technology, which is what has happened, and you have a media savvy little kid who can give you a lot of facts but you sacrifice theory and breadth in doing so. Of the television generation—i.e. those who are more or less raised by the set—he does say they are “a grim bunch”[15] but not for the reasons that one might expect. In this rare instance when he is somewhat critical of television but this is more of the crap being produced on it than of the medium itself, a development I found surprising considering the book is about media effects and such saying that “commercials” are the best reflection of understanding the medium since in them “there simply is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from earlier print technology.”[16] With that, he seems to be saying that we should embrace the fact that the medium and stuff we watch on TV is necessarily short and viewer friendly. However, he does make mention the medium in a somewhat critical way at least (and for as far as I can recall only) once when he talks about what is on the old tube, which he sort of defends saying “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” Thus in this assessment, the television medium has the potential to be a negative that reinforces itself self-referentially in that when used to process and distill information, it enforces its cultural authority simply by its own design, a design that I argue inhibits us from true dialogue. However, in a hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner type argument, he tells us defends television content wise by writing “You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing”[17] Despite the terrible and somewhat misleading analogy, he does have a point, yet he undermines it with the fact that most of what he has to say about the medium of television is overwhelmingly optimistic and even goes so far as to defend it against critics who miss the significance of the medium itself.

The defense, which I completely agree with in terms of theory but again disagree in terms of the way we see the results that are more or less the same in both of our assessments, illustrates his deep understanding of the television medium and also how he believes in it. Responding to a 1965 cartoon from The New Yorker with the caption “When you consider television’s awesome power to educate, aren’t you thankful that it doesn’t,” it states the following:

The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology… Critics of television have failed to realize that the motion pictures they are lionizing… would prove unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.

With this, assuming as it does that we actually prefer this medium because we conditioned to it, it is clear he is much more optimistic and far less critical of the medium than I am as a born, nay, conditioned cynic, which is true of most technology, I would imagine.

88 My own upbringing and subsequent adult life resulting from that upbringing, has virtually lacked all forms of mass culture, thus I am more adept than most at assessing and critiquing that culture, according to McLuhan, so maybe I have something here. He writes that “whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are.”[18] This may account for our differences in the way we perceive media effects—I am rather far from away from being “well-adjusted” and pride myself on being an individual immune to trends of fashion or thought or whatever—as I do have a decent ability to see things “as they really are,” or so I am told. Maybe I could be sort of like the Tocqueville of mass media or something; but that is a world I choose not to visit—or spend very much time in anyway. I don’t think I will ever conform to it because it is something I cannot imagine really finding pleasure in, thus to suddenly spend time watching and learning from a culture that I am thoroughly uninterested in would be paradoxical and lose for me the status of amateur. Don’t get me wrong, I do watch the occasional program and spend a lot of time thinking about them, Lost would be the best example here, but I never get my news from the box, preferring print media to all others with NPR a distant second and relegated to time commuting to and from work in my car—but even that is only when there are no good songs on the alternative station and ESPN radio is talking about I sport I don’t care about like baseball. And I never connect with or through that culture—about the only thing I can talk about and sustain a decent conversation in is in the world of books, which are clearly very important to me. But as uninterested as I am in television culture, I am interested a thousand times more so in media theory, which some find dissonant, however, all of the great media theorists in my mind are those that McLuhan would call “antisocial” in that they go against the popular grain and choose to live outside the box that dominates American discourse. Such greats, to me at least are the likes of DFW and Jonathan Franzen (neither of whom are media theorists per se but deal with television culture as a whole) and Francis Wheen and Neil Postman, and none of them share McLuhan’s optimism. In fact, those writers are as or even more critical of the culture than I am.

With all of that said, I think McLuhan is a genius and I think this work is genius even though I tend to disagree with some of the outcomes he sees from the visual medium so a part of our lives. Plus I find the concept thoroughly interesting and engaging—the collage type images and words mingled in book form—and think it well worth anyone’s time reading. Some of the most memorable images from the book, which I will close by discussing, are one that depicts a sculpture of a giant woman with people around it to give its size some perspective and an image of women sewing onto a quilt the phrase “Keep into circulation the rumor that God is alive.” The first image, depicting a woman 82-feet-long and 20-feet-high that is titled “The Biggest and Best Woman in the World”, is interesting because it shows that you can walk around inside her, entering through the vagina like sperm. The concept and picture, of which all I can say is it is cool and interesting, are intriguing and make you think about the strangeness of modern art. The second image, which references Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead” is meant to be ironic I think. I am not sure what these women who are quilting the piece are motivated by or intending to convey—I suspect that they are suggesting people still have a need for church even though technology has made God unnecessary or killed Him/Her or whatever. Regardless, it is very apparent that the “the groundrule of [our] universe,” namely God, “upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved”[19] and this quilt is meant as a representation of that fact. And it is for this reason and for making connection impossible that I find our media so toxic. Because even if religion is a fiction, I believe it is a necessary one for most of us, and keeping that in circulation can actually be a good thing so long as it is not tied in with the status quo, which means reinforcing that infernal piece of furniture.

See also:
http://lost-tv.tribe.net/m/thread/173fd275-6e25-40a3-ab56-dcf53109ca43
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html
http://masc1100.blogspot.com/2005/09/medium-is-massage-notes.html


[1] The title derives from the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming” which is one of my favorite poems. In this second line of the poem, Yeats uses the falconer and falcon as metaphors for man (or woman) and technological advancement respectively. Man’s inability to call forth the product of its own imagination to control its message is the point of using this as a title. So it is clever.
[2] It kind of reminded me of the “Reorientation Film” that poor bastard Carl had to watch in ABC’s Lost which moved by at breakneck speeds and flashed words and images on the screen. I am like 99% sure that the show’s director had this book in mind when creating the montage. In fact, Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly claims to have been given “secret documents” that suggest McLuhan’s work had even more influence on the show than with this one instance giving a version of the DHARMA Initiative’s mission statement, a mission statement I have never seen, that goes into specific detail about the effect of this work on the good old DI which can be found here. Plus there is a reference to mathematician Michael Faraday, the name of the guy that Lost’s Daniel Faraday gets his name from.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
[4] Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1967), p. 26.
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
[6] McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, p. 14.
[7] Ibid.. p. 16.
[8] Ibid.. p. 12.
[9] Ibid.. p. 26.
[10] Ibid.. p. 41.
[11] Ibid.. p. 61.
[12] Ibid.. p. 63.
[13] Ibid.. p. 63.
[14] Ibid.. p. 18.
[15] Ibid.. p. 126.
[16] Ibid.. p. 126.
[17] Ibid.. p. 142.
[18] Ibid.. p. 88.
[19] Ibid , p. 146.

Copernicus Called and You are Not the Center of the Universe: The Gen Y Problem

Until recently I always believed that it was possible to succeed in America with out making a lot of money. This seemed especially true in this day and age when all the people I associate with have at least a B.A. and can compete at about a AAA level when it comes to mental acrobatics. I was taught that money is easily found and there will always be sales jobs or whatever out there where the potential to make that all mighty dollar is almost limitless for those that are able to sell themselves. This may seem attractive; making a lot of money is pretty much the universal goal. Make money to buy shit, consume and you will be happy. Not so fast my friends, the money, the car, the hype, the fringe benefits are all consolation prizes for getting eaten alive. I could care less about moneys and live on something like eight grand a year. I am ok with this. However, my generation, the so-called millennials or gen y-ers, is in danger of becoming the most self-obsessed and despairing adults the world has yet to breed and i don't think most are even aware of it.

Right now I have the potential to start making a somewhat comfortable living; I have a degree and am in grad school at a supposed good school. But who cares. Not long ago, last fall to be exact, I was dejected: jobless, continuously drinking, my relationships were falling apart, addicted to television, living in a vacuum. The personal here was a mess and everything I did to try and fix it proved unhelpful. Significantly, I think, at this time I also came to the realization that salary is the only yardstick of cultural authority that matters to anyone and everyone and I would never make it the full yard. This comes as a crushing blow to my self-esteem. I know I do not have what it takes to be successful in the economic world of business where mercenaries get paid to trade hot stock tips. Film and books, places I could always escape to in times of despair, proved even more depressing. Remember that Will Smith movie that came out Novembers 2006? The Pursuit of Happiness? The “pursuit” in this piece was equated with getting a high paying job and basically shit.

This should be enlightening to us on the social level. This film's thesis would be something like make money, consume, be happy: the capitalist mantra. Is this what we are reduced to? Do we really want to be sending this type of message? Apparently so. Our parents for the most part, the baby boomers, are the ones that started this trend of consumerism as a type of social control with televised commercials for an infernal machine that is freaky and depressing. Even worse, look at the first children to spring from their loins. These children grew up and were responsible for the 80s. This time should be looked on as some of our darkest days—blind spending, sex crazed, 20something year olds that were reckless and cost us more than anyone cares to see or admit—and basically who cares. The 80s were the first time in American history where the young and irresponsible started making bank. Airlines have never had such success (not convinced, look at Pan. Am.) than in that ten year span; Reaganomics where supposed to end poverty, and we saw our first AIDS crisis in that decade (whatever the fuck that means, I am just saying).

Fast-forward past the gen x-ers and you get us, for Christ’s sake, the blind, illiterate, and culturally unengagable. What exactly has happened to the upper-middle-class-American-child? Part of this has to do with our unwillingness to read or listen. This is due to some extent to the fact that we are having a hard time getting past the personal and into the social. We see the world as being here for our amusement: alone. Our beliefs are the only ones that matter and we cannot even comprehend how anything can be interpreted in any way but the right way—which is to say—our way. This all happens while those with answers, the poet, the novelist, the what-have-you, have more and more to say while we have less and less desire to listen. We need our entertainment instantaneously, it has to be immediate now a days. “Technology attacked religion a long time ago and then it affected our fiction,” as the Jonathan Franzen saying goes.

The average American sees him or herself as totally unique. Cannot see what they possibly have in common with someone from another part of the country or someone across the street. But—news flash—we are all pretty much the same. There in lies the problem. We see in our selves something hollow and missing but we still fail to connect. It is way fucking easier to just roll your eyes and not give a shit. Still though, are any of us really happy? I have met few genuinely happy people and on the rare occasion I have it has been hard to take people like that seriously; you can’t help but look at them with a cynical eye or write them off as insane. So anyway, what happens is everyone consumes to the best of their means and look for remedies for their unhappiness in places that are diverse yet promise the same goal—ah la ending this existential nightmare. Zoloft, Ativan, therapy, changing majors, changing locals, changing appearances, getting a high paying job, etc. and you are still the same piece of shit only now with a dollop of whipped cream on top. Observations on human behavior: we all pay high prices, loss our hair, buy old products we think are new but just differently labeled. Looking through ads, you on Times Square, her in teen Vogue, me in everywhere I look, for solutions to problems we think are treatable by spending money.

Last year, I had been communing via e-mail (a media I hate) with a friend from college who was English major. When I asked her what she was reading she said not a thing. This is a girl who I always thought of as a life-long-reader but has now lost her drive, and we no longer have anything to talk about. The world has fallen on dark days when even the lit major has no need for books. The world is slowly and surely in decline due to a great deal to my generation but think of it as tough love because we are the future whether that is a good thing or not and we can’t really do anything about it. Or can we? Who knows? It all gets too depressing to even think about. So don’t if you don’t want to. I am just saying.