The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

I. Literature before 9/11: Mao II (1991)

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and the crash of hijacked United Airlines Flight # 93 on September 11, 2001, I received a call from a reporter at the New York Times. Emily Eakin was working on a story about modern literature’s response to earlier forms of terror, in particular the fictional representations of Russian revolutionaries in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871–72) and European anarchists in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). [209] Eakin reasonably assumed that great literature offers us means of coping with crises like September 11 and that this specific event was not historically unique. We talked by phone and email about the national agendas of early modern revolutionary movements and the global terrorist aims of al-Qaeda, including the aesthetic means required to represent these different political cultures and historical periods.

Dostoevsky, James, and Conrad were brilliant practitioners of psychological realism, which located meaning and value in the choices and actions of individuals, even when such individuals act as representatives of political or social groups. James’s Hyacinth Robinson “chooses” not to assassinate the Duke, thereby repudiating his relationship with the anarchists, but it is a choice that requires him to take responsibility for his actions by committing suicide. [210] Dostoevsky’s The Possessed culminates in the murder of Stavrogin’s wife, Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkin, and her brother by the revolutionaries, and the inevitable suicides by Stavrogin and his disciple Kirilov for their responsibility in this bloody conclusion. In Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Winnie Verloc kills her husband when she discovers that in using her brother, Stevie, in the anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory Verloc is responsible for Stevie unwittingly blowing himself up. Just as Winnie judges Verloc as fully responsible for the anarchists’ crime against her brother, so Winnie commits suicide both out of desperation and in apparent compensation for her own violent act. Repeating the newspaper story’s baffled conclusion about Winnie’s leap from a steamer in the middle of the English Channel, Conrad suggests that the “‘impenetrable mystery…destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair’” can be understood only by way of literary insight into the complex motives of the individual. [211]

What would these literary realists have understood in the acts of the al-Qaeda terrorists who lived in the U.S. suburbs, attended private flight schools, drank and smoked in local bars (while leaving snippets from the Koran for edification of the patrons), worked out at 24-Hour Fitness, and just as routinely hijacked four commercial airliners and drove three directly into their targets and a fourth into the ground? What “realist” account of such behavior is possible, except one that expresses utter bewilderment in the face of the terrorism of al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups around the world committed to a long, even losing struggle against the United States as the leading representative of Western capitalism and its neo-imperialist policies of “globalization”? In today’s Western press, “suicide bombers” remain inexplicable and deeply troubling, not merely because of the terrible damage they do to civilians but because conventional explanations that attribute their actions to “madness” or to religious “fanaticism” are obviously wrong.

“The future belongs to crowds”, DeLillo writes in Mao II, and this prophecy echoes throughout the novel, ushering us from the opening section, “At Yankee Stadium”, where a mass wedding presided over by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon displaces the “American Pastime”, to Part One. [212] The apocalyptic tone of “the future belongs to crowds” builds on DeLillo’s analysis in many previous works of how the postmodern condition has destroyed traditional meanings of the humanist individual, philosophical subjectivity, and psychological selfhood. Although Dostoevsky, James, and Conrad wrote in cultures historically poised on the brink of this transformation, they understood it only in partial, peripheral ways. There is a subliminal glimpse of the vanishing modernist subject in these writers, but at the center of their literary attention is the problem of the alienated, fractured, divided self and the various ways the new urban “masses” have contributed to this dilemma.

For these moderns, the self is attenuated and damaged, and they use imaginative means to restore and cure it. Thus their literary works generally conclude with the high drama of either self-sacrifice—the “suicides” that betoken individual responsibility in their three novels about revolution—or self-affirmation: the secular imitatio Christi in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Isabel Archer’s refusal of Caspar Goodwood and apparent decision to return to Rome at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, the possibility of individual idealism and nobility represented by Jim and Nostromo, set off emphatically by their human failure and corruption in Lord Jim and Nostromo. Embattled, threatened, but finally resilient, the self survives in modern art and literature, often by means of the author’s sheer act of imaginative will to repudiate what urban, industrial societies were in fact doing to destroy the self by stripping it of agency and any power to resist complete alienation from its intrinsic power.

DeLillo understands the postmodern condition to involve radically different notions of subjectivity, most of which cannot be simply opposed to or distinguished from mass phenomena and their representation. His characters are “distanced” from themselves and each other, rather than alienated, and this decentering of the self seems to be directly related to the social and cultural mediations through which experience itself is constituted. In Libra, Marina Oswald experiences Lee Harvey as “someone you see from a distance”, even “when he was hitting her. He was never fully there”. [213] Far from being an eccentric or a madman, DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald is the prototype of postmodern subjectivity, albeit a dystopic version. In the novel, Oswald’s best expression of himself is the famous photograph, taken by Marina and posed by Oswald one day before his assassination attempt on General Ted Walker: “It showed Lee dressed in black, holding a rifle in one hand, some newspapers in the other” (L, 290). As Oswald explains the photograph to George de Mohrenschildt: “‘It’s the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn’t understand before. […]. Maybe he sees the truth about someone’” (L, 289). Inscribed by Lee “To my friend George from Lee Oswald” and by Marina in Russian, “Hunter of fascists—ha ha ha!!!”, the photograph is multiply textual and composes thereby the character of Lee Harvey Oswald, a simulation composed by George, Lee, and Marina among many others (L, 290).

Mao II criticizes this sort of simulated identity as symptomatic of a postmodern, globalized world in which no one is at home. The reclusive novelist Bill Gray attempts to resist this tendency and protect the more traditional identity celebrated in the great tradition of the novel, but in his rural Hudson Valley home’s vast archive of writing he is surrounded both by his “old handwritten manuscripts, printer’s typescripts, master galleys” and by “stacks of magazines and journals containing articles about Bill’s work and about his disappearance, his concealment, his retirement, his alleged change of identity, his rumored suicide, his return to work, his work-in-progress, his death, his rumored return” (M, 31). Like Nicholas Branch in Libra buried alive in the vast and conflicting documents he collects to understand the truth of the Kennedy Assassination, Bill Gray is constituted ontologically by the archive he has built in place of a home.

Sentimentally drawn to an older, mythic America of baseball and books, Gray seems unaware that both professional sports and literary commerce have contributed significantly to the culture of celebrity he has attempted to elude. Long before the Reverend Moon rents Yankee Stadium for his spectacular mass marriages, Gray’s childhood heroes are swatting home runs and rounding the bases on radio and in the press in ways legendized by children and novelists. In the novel, Gray recalls how as a child he pretended to announce baseball games, suggesting that such imaginary work prepared him for his career as a novelist. Well before the photojournalist Brita Nilsson arrives at his upstate New York home, Bill Gray is already both effect and cause of the postmodern conditions for subjectivity that give us such historical variants as J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Lee Harvey Oswald and Osama bin Laden. Reluctant and intrigued at the same time to be photographed for Brita’s “collection” of writers, Bill Gray is far more prepared than he thinks to be framed by this world.

In the eighteenth-century European imaginary, the representative man organized different and conflicting experiences and data by means of his reason or “consciousness”. In the postmodern era, such cognitive means are no longer sufficient, as Paul Virilio has pointed out: “Mass phenomena do indeed elude immediate apprehension and can only be perceived by means of the computer and interception and recording equipment which did not exist in earlier times.” [214] The “crowd” in De Lillo’s future is not constituted by choices made by individuals to join a group movement, as in the collective formed to bring about revolutionary change, but instead by the alienation of individuals from their respective agency and the imposition of order and “belonging” from outside or above. If, as a conscious, rational subject, I choose to join the revolution (or the nation, neighborhood, company), the larger collective is always dependent on the reflective monads constituting it. In the “crowd” or “mass”, each subject is merely a synecdoche, which “represents” the whole, however uniquely this subject is employed. In Mao II, Bill Gray equates the end of modernity with the death of the novel and with the cognitive and communicative practices on which the novel depends: “‘Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative’” (M, 157). Bill is speaking in this scene with George Haddad, the character who poses as the negotiator who will exchange Bill for the French Swiss poet, Jean-Claude Julien, the terrorists are holding hostage and will eventually murder.

Bill Gray understands how and why the novel ends with Beckett in late modernity; George Haddad understands how this sort of postmodernity drives us toward the need for some absolute, totalitarian principle or ruler, to govern what no individual can command. Trying to flatter Bill into meeting with the Maoist terrorists in Beirut, George tells him:

Because DeLillo’s readers never actually read Bill Gray’s works, we cannot confirm or dispute Haddad’s contention, but it is clear that DeLillo thinks that literary representation can and should challenge the totalitarian impulses fueled by postmodern dislocation.

As we read Mao II, we learn that literature transforms us only to the extent that we respond to and communicate with it. The terrorist commodifies his hostages, who are targets and victims and symbols; the author compels his readers, those strangers, to talk back, thereby making themselves known, less to him than to each other (as teachers teach and literary critics interpret). DeLillo understands that the commercial and the avant-garde novel, as well as the novelist either celebrated on the talk-show or prized for reclusiveness, are parts of the problem, rather than the solution. The textual situation in which senders and receivers transform each other and accept the historically incomplete character of all communication in fact describes DeLillo’s utopian society, not the retreat of a few individuals into book-lined studies or their devoted fans into libraries. In Libra, DeLillo indicts Americans for having virtually invented Lee Harvey Oswald as a consequence of their mythic construction of John F. Kennedy as a substitute for their own civic responsibilities. John Johnston has argued that Libra deconstructs “the difference between the fictional and historical”, not in order to reaffirm the fictional foundations of historical experience, but to “open” fiction and its tidy conventions of coherent characters and meaningful plots “to precisely those forces outside prose fiction that these conventions were meant to internalize, and thereby to contain”. [215] In a similar fashion, Ryan Simmons has argued that DeLillo attempts in Mao II to demonstrate that “no one has a unique command over language” and that “no one owns language, but everyone is subsumed within language in the postmodern world“. [216]

As critics have observed about most of his fiction, DeLillo’s internal critique of the novel as an aesthetic form puts him in a very difficult position as a literary author. Simmons discusses how often scholars have confused Bill Gray and DeLillo, and this tendency is undoubtedly reinforced by the nostalgia in contemporary culture for literary and aesthetic “value” (Simmons 677). Given his criticisms in many works of how postmodern culture fetishizes and commodifies literature, DeLillo must take a certain satisfaction from those misreadings of his works that imagine he is mourning the related deaths of the novel and the author, in part because such misreadings expose their readers’ deepest fears. Yet such misinterpretations also risk aligning DeLillo with a cultural conservatism he certainly abhors. Nevertheless, it is fair to judge the metafictional double-binds and contradictions on which DeLillo’s novels typically rely to be very literary and perhaps too subtle and thus likely to be lost on today’s impatient readers.

DeLillo works hard to distinguish his aesthetic practices and values in Mao II from what we are told of Gray’s more traditional commitments to the “craft” of the novel. Each of the different sections of the novel are introduced by a photograph from the news that reinforces the title-page’s photograph of crowded Tiananmen Square in Beijing and its tacit message: “The future belongs to crowds”. They also remind us that DeLillo’s narrative follows global events prominent in the news, including such significant news stories as the 1983 terrorist attacks on the American Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Whereas Bill Gray imagines he can escape these media, DeLillo’s point is that television, film, photography, music, urban noise, different languages are the ineluctable media in which we live and work. These media makes us, just as they seem to “invade” and then organize the traditional form of the novel.

In Mao II, Bill Gray is drawn so relentlessly into the plot of the terrorists that he finally “chooses” exactly what they want without being forced or ordered to do so. Questioning George Haddad about how to find Abu Rashid in Beirut during the revolt of Shiite Muslims and Druse in West Beirut against the Lebanese army in early 1984, Bill follows the directions that will lead him directly into the current site of global anarchy and the control of the terrorists. [217] DeLillo complicates the pattern by making sure Bill Gray dies of “internal injuries” he suffers when a cab hits him in Athens and well before Gray reaches Beirut or the control of Abu Rashid. In a chain of miscommunications and accidents typical of DeLillo’s fiction, Brita Nilsson’s delivery of Charlie Everson’s message to Bill Gray leads Bill to London, where his public speech is postponed by a bomb blast, which directs Bill to Athens, where he is struck by an errant cab and George Haddad talks him into traveling to Beirut by way of Larnaca, Cyprus. By the time Bill dies of his internal injuries on board the ferry he has boarded for his journey to Junieh, Lebanon, the reader knows that Bill Gray has been overtaken by the very contingencies of life he had hoped to avoid by becoming a novelist. The connections of these events are either radically accidental or utterly motivated and plotted, but in both instances they represent Bill Gray’s loss of control over his life and its representation.

To be sure, he rationalizes the relentless concatenation of events and other people leading him to Beirut, the hostage, Abu Rashid, and the Maoist terrorists by claiming that he wants to write about the hostage and that this desire is lifting the writer’s block that had prevented him from finishing his last novel. But when he reflects on his new interest in the hostage, he betrays a certain futility: “He couldn’t remember why he wanted to write about the hostage. He’d done some pages he halfway liked but what was the actual point?” (M, 198). Of course, the usual explanations offered by the traditional novelist are available, and Bill Gray imagines he

Yet he never does say this to George Haddad, and it is just this failure we equate with his willingness to drift toward his own destruction as he wanders into the terrorists’ plot.

The terrorist plot in which Bill Gray becomes entangled differs little from the accidents and contingencies of an alienating world, which he cannot control, insofar as both Fate and Chance teach us the same lesson: we no longer have any effective agency. The traditional novelist, no matter how great his craft or genius, is no longer capable of representing those forces that secretly govern ordinary experience. When an old man with the cleaning crew finds Bill Gray’s body “lying in the bunk” of the ferry, he takes only Gray’s “passport and other forms of identification, anything with a name and a number, which he could sell to some militia in Beirut” (M, 216–217).

Bill Gray never reaches Beirut, even though the anarchy of its civil war is for DeLillo a metaphor for postmodern conditions. In the novel, many scenes in New York explicitly foreshadow Beirut, especially DeLillo’s treatment of New York City’s homeless as equivalent to people displaced by civil war, terrorism, and anarchy. Thus the novel’s concluding section, “In Beirut”, can easily be read as a pessimistic epilogue, in which the photojournalist Brita Nilsson reappears to confirm another often repeated sentence in the novel: “Our only language is Beirut” (M, 239). Arriving one year after Bill’s death and “on assignment for a German magazine […] to photograph” Abu Rashid, she has abandoned her avant-garde project of photographing literary authors, like Bill Gray, and returned to the photojournalism she had given up in the opening pages of the novel, because as she puts it, “‘No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end’” (M, 229, 235, 24–25).

Is there a way to overcome such aestheticism and its ideology? In the novel, Brita’s actions in Beirut have contrary meanings and the reader is left with the radical ambiguity DeLillo often employs to force us to communicate again and overcome our postmodern thralldom. On the one hand, Bill Gray’s death on the ferry to Lebanon and Brita’s reappearance with her cameras and assignments seem to suggest the triumph of commodity and celebrity culture. DeLillo’s account of why Brita decided not to “photograph writers anymore” and return to photojournalism seems characterized by her resignation to contemporary conditions: “She takes assignments now, does the interesting things, barely watched wars, children running in the dust. Writers stopped one day. She doesn’t know how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped being the project she would follow forever” (M, 229–230). Immediately following this passage, Brita notices “signs for a new soft drink, Coke II,[…] slapped on cement-block walls” and “has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group” (M, 230). Like Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Brita begins to see coincidences and signs everywhere, driving the characteristic paranoia of the postmodern subject.

Mao II and Coke II are quite rationally related, even if the corporate giant in Atlanta would disavow any ties to terrorist groups or militias in the Beirut civil war. In the ongoing “war on terrorism”, declared by President George W. Bush and continued by President Barack Obama, many critics have suggested we have not yet begun to target the transnational corporations whose exploitation of third-world labor and natural resources, manipulation of governments for “favorable” treatment, and aggressive global marketing of products are perceived by many of their subaltern victims as terrorist acts. In DeLillo’s response to September 11, 2001, he suggests that what “changed” on that day was the unequivocal identification of such corporate and technological terror with America: “The terrorists who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were not chanting ‘Death to Microsoft.’ It is America that drew their fury. It is the high gloss of our modernity. It is the thrust of our technology. It is our perceived godlessness. It is the blunt force of our foreign policy. It is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”. [218] Whereas “protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle and other cities want to slow down the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of consumer-robots and social instability”, the “terrorists of S/11 want to bring back the past” by naming and thereby targeting transnational capitalism “America” (Ruins 35). Of course, insofar as the United States, with its vaunted commitments to democracy and justice for all, has failed to challenge in the name of human rights such globalization, then “America” may well have earned the target it now wears.

In another sense, Brita Nilsson repudiates the technological sublime today exemplified by American foreign and economic policies, albeit endorsed by other first-world nations. Ryan Simmons argues that the character of Karen Janney, the young woman who works for Bill Gray, offers the best alternative to Bill Gray’s outmoded aesthetic, but Simmons points out in a footnote that “the photographer, Brita Nilsson, might also be said to fit” his characterization of Karen as better adapted to the postmodern world than Bill Gray: “Karen and the crowds she sees on the streets or on television are all part of a larger system which connects them but which is also limited—which cannot provide the depth of connection that she or Bill or anyone else might want it to. She is not an ‘author’ as Bill would define one because she does not try to control narrative” (Simmons 694n1, 684).

Simmons does not develop this aspect of Brita Nilsson, preferring to stress Karen Janney as DeLillo’s alternative to Bill Gray. DeLillo works out technically effective parallels between Brita’s photographic session with Bill Gray at the beginning of the novel and her encounter with Abu Rashid at the end of the novel. For example, Brita communicates with Abu Rashid through an interpreter, even though Abu Rashid speaks English directly to her as the interpreter “interprets” Rashid’s meaning, often in bizarre ways. In her earlier photographic session with Bill Gray, his assistant Scott also “interprets”, often concluding sentences with the refrain “quoting Bill”. Gray’s assistant, Karen Janney, leaves her position to surrender her identity to the Moonies early in the novel. In an analogous sense, the hooded young man who guards the door during Abu Rashid’s interview with Brita represents all the “children” who have dedicated their lives to Abu Rashid: “‘The boys who work near Abu Rashid have no face or speech. Their features are identical. They are his features. They don’t need their own features or voices. They are surrendering these things to something powerful and great’” (M, 234). Abu Rashid tells Brita that the young man is “‘my son. Rashid. […]. I call myself father of Rashid’” (M, 234).

Abu Rashid’s conversation with Brita recalls George Haddad’s talk with Bill Gray in Athens as the writer prepares to seek out the terrorists. The difference is that Brita resists Abu Rashid’s “eloquent macho bullshit”, especially his adulation of Mao’s leadership (M, 236). In the novel, Brita “says nothing because what can she say”, but she swerves suddenly from her assignment to photograph Abu Rashid and “walks over to the boy at the door and removes his hood. Lifts it off his head and drops it on the floor. Doesn’t lift it very gently either. She is smiling all the time. And takes two steps back and snaps his picture” (M, 236). The “boy hits her hard in the forearm and reaches in for the camera” as “she throws an elbow that misses and then slaps him across the face” (M, 237). Unlike the resigned, determined, and finally dead novelist, Bill Gray, Brita acts: “Feeling detached, almost out-of-body, she walks over to Rashid and shakes his hand, actually introduces herself, pronouncing her name slowly” (M, 237).

The photojournalist need not, then, merely render “pretty” by explaining and ordering the ugliness of social injustice in our contemporary world. She can expose the identities hidden behind totalitarianisms of all sorts, including those that work through our own psychologies as desires to escape the problems of this world. Brita affirms her own identity in the small but significant gesture of herself looking at the faces of the terrorists. She looks with her camera, because DeLillo knows we cannot escape the media through which we understand, however corrupted they may be. And we look through DeLillo’s novel, which refuses to render “pretty” what we see: our own responsibility for “global” problems, whether we name them “transnational capitalism”, “American imperialism”, or “international terrorism”.

Abu Rashid several times commands Brita, “‘Don’t bring your problems to Beirut,’” but DeLillo invites us to bring all of our problems to the novel. In his essay about 9/11, DeLillo notes that the terrorism that day ended conclusively the Cold War narrative, which “ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative” (Ruins 35). Brita’s symbolic actions at the end of the novel point toward such a counter-narrative, which in his essay DeLillo connects with the “hundred thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington and the world” in the aftermath of the terrorists’ acts. Interestingly, these stories, including the photographs of the missing and dead posted on buildings and in shop-windows near Ground Zero in New York, have entered formally into the public sphere through the publication of survivors’ accounts, the victims’ autobiographies, and countless documentaries and docudramas of varying kind and quality: “There are the doctors’ appointments that saved lives, the cell phones that were used to report the hijackings. Stories generating others and people running north out of the rumbling smoke and ash. […]. People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us” (Ruins 6).

In the novel, some of this storytelling is economically represented in the Beirut wedding Brita witnesses from her balcony in the early morning following her interview with Abu Rashid. The wedding party is preceded by a tank and “followed by a jeep with a recoilless rifle mounted at the rear” (M, 240). Whether the revelers are simply caught in a military action or being protected by some militia we never know, but what is clear is that we are meant to draw hope from an unquestionably ironic scene: “The bride and groom carry champagne glasses and some of the girls hold sparklers that send off showers of excited light. A guest in a pastel tuxedo smokes a long cigar and does a dance around a shell hole, delighting the kids. The bride’s gown is beautiful, with lacy appliqué at the bodice, and she looks surpassingly alive, they all look transcendent, free of limits and unsurprised to be here” (M, 240). Brita needs no interpreters to toast the newlyweds from her balcony in a smattering of different languages: “‘Bonne chance’ and ‘Bonheur’ and ‘Good luck’ and ‘Salám’ and ‘Skål,’ and the gun turret begins to rotate and the cannon eases slowly around like a smutty honeymoon joke and everyone is laughing” (M, 240).

II. Literature after 9/11: Falling Man (2007)

Sixteen years after Bill Gray in Mao II wanders from his aesthetic seclusion in Connecticut to New York City, London, Athens, Cyprus, and then dies in his bunk on the ferry to Beirut, Keith Neudecker in Falling Man stumbles blindly out of his collapsing office in the World Trade Center back into his dysfunctional family life, an aimless affair with another 9/11 survivor, and then into the bathos of international poker competitions. Initially sympathetic characters, versions of a waning humanism, Gray and Neudecker degenerate into specters of their terrorist antagonists: aimless, stateless, socially determined beings following others’ orders. Sixteen years later, reeling from four years of the U.S. military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing civil and anti-colonial wars in both regions, and a succession of post-9/11 terrorist acts around the globe, U.S. readers have forgotten the cheerful irony of Brita on that balcony in Beirut.

Brita challenges Abu Rashid, unmasks and photographs his faceless “children”, introduces herself, asserts her femininity by slapping the “childish” guard, and reaffirms the possibility of subjectivity, even in the differently mediated, postmodern conditions she comprehends in Mao II. In 1991, DeLillo still thinks it is possible for Western liberal subjectivity to “survive”. The wedding party Brita toasts must be Christian, of course, because they are drinking Champagne, so the Druse Christians DeLillo uses at the end of Mao II anticipate his more sustained reversion to Western concepts, including Christianity, in Falling Man. Both Gray and Neudecker are far more existentialist than their terrorist Doppelgänger; each meditates on the randomness that terrorism both exposes and exploits. However goal-oriented Abu Rashid and Mohamed Atta, the historical al-Qaeda terrorist fictionalized in Falling Man, may be in the cause of radical Islam, DeLillo makes clear that both serve the much higher purpose of metaphysical contingency. Against his best intentions, DeLillo ends up contributing to the cultural colonialism whereby global terrorism is internalized and accommodated. Falling Man is a classic instance of the famous Pogo aphorism: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” [219] On the one hand, such a recognition offers the possibility of engaging the issues that global “terrorists” insist we repress unless they are brought violently home to us. On the other hand, DeLillo may be offering us yet another “misrecognition”, in which all we see are reflections of ourselves, rendering the non-Western subject as invisible. Just how we sort out these cultural representations of the other remains crucial work for the cultural critic and the primary task of cultural politics.

In Falling Man, Atta is clearly identified in the novel by DeLillo by his given name “Amir”—“Amir spoke in his face. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayed Atta”. [220] Yet despite his effort to personalize the best-known of the 9/11 hijackers with this “given” name, DeLillo represents al-Qaeda primarily through the character, Hammad, not Mohammed Atta. An Iraqi veteran of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), “a baker, here in Hamburg maybe ten years”, who “prayed in the same mosque” as Hammad, tells him his war stories, especially about the boys the Iranians sent in waves of assault on the contested borderland between Iraq and Iran (FM, 77). The nameless baker concludes that “Most countries are run by madmen”, and as Hammad listens distractedly “was grateful to the man” (78). Hammad’s attention is not on macropolitical issues but women and sex—“he kept thinking that another woman would come by on a bike, someone to look at, hair wet, legs pumping” (78), even though he knows he must suppress such desires, especially for German women. When he does satisfy his sexual desires, he does so with a Syrian immigrant to Germany, but even that relationship seems foreign to him. Hammad’s gratitude to the baker seems less for the specific lessons to be learned from the futile Iran-Iraq War and more from the bare human contact such conversation provides.

DeLillo’s analyses of al-Qaeda’s motives and the personal and social psychologies of the terrorists are brief, scattered through the novel in two chapters (“On Marienstrasse”, 77–83; “In Nokomis”, 171–178) and a portion of the concluding chapter “In the Hudson Corridor” (237–243), in which the actual impact of Hammad’s flight on the World Trade Center is represented. DeLillo is careful, however, to make sure each of the three parts of the novel—1. Bill Lawton, 2. Ernst Hechinger, 3. David Janiak—includes some part of the terrorists’ story. Even so, less than twenty pages of a 246-page novel deal with al-Qaeda, most of them focusing on Hammad’s distraction and confusion, torn between basic human desires for social and sexual contact and the false society of al-Qaeda. DeLillo seems to stress Hammad’s ordinariness, his lack of intellectual sophistication, both as part of his common humanity and his willingness to be recruited. When Hammad asks Amir Atta about “the others, those who will die?” he is told: “[T]here are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying”. DeLillo can only conclude: “Hammad was impressed by this. It sounded like philosophy.” (FM, 176)

DeLillo trivializes the terrorists by minimizing the attention he pays to them in the novel, reinforcing his arguments in Underworld (1997) and Cosmopolis (2003) that first-world, hypercapitalist nations, especially the U.S., have created their own antagonists in al-Qaeda and any other “terror” (domestic or foreign) we might experience in our postmodern condition. The currency trader in Cosmopolis smugly watches on television the Seattle demonstrators opposing the global economic policies of the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund as they chant, “A specter is haunting the world…” [221] For the currency speculator, the symbolic action of the demonstrators is pure theater, mere entertainment, not a symptom of the impending collapse of global credit markets, admittedly historically ahead of any of these novels and yet systemically predictable, given the conditions of vastly growing disparities in wealth and poverty dividing individuals, institutions, and nations. Unintentionally recalling Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), DeLillo approximates its argument: we need a new intellectual-activist paradigm and a new international to overcome the failures of Marxism and the impending collapse of global capitalism. There is no difference between the home-grown American assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the imported terrorists of al-Qaeda: terror is the inevitable by-product of a system built upon unstable master-servant relations that inevitably prompt the servant’s rebellion. Keith Neudecker’s son, Justin, hearing the endlessly repeated news stories about Osama bin Laden begins looking for “Bill Lawton”, the homophonic resemblances between the Arabic and Anglo-American name at first lost on his family.

“There is no purpose, this is the purpose” are Atta’s words, and they echo in Hammad’s head throughout his brief appearances in the novel, but they also function as a sort of horrible leitfmotif in the same way “The future belongs to crowds” organizes Mao II (FM, 177). Once the veneer of social organization and the symbolic structures of affiliation—family, neighborhood, religion, nation, et al..—collapse, then each of us is exposed to what Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life”, a condition that can be simulated by totalitarian regimes but is also the fundamental condition to which we respond in our efforts to “be human”. Of course, the application of Agamben’s term “bare life” to the characters in DeLillo’s novel seems at first immoral, insofar as Agamben uses the phrase to represent how the Nazis reduced their victims to the most minimal existences to justify their extermination. Atta’s contention that the “others” exist only for al-Qaeda’s purposes recalls Nazi rationalizations of their genocide.

Agamben develops the concept of “bare life” in part out of Hannah Arendt’s notion in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) of the “naked life” experienced by refugees of all sorts displaced by World War II. [222] Even before we witness Keith Neudecker escape the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks, we know him to be a “refugee”, deeply traumatized and displaced, incapable of dealing with his family life and work, finally driven relentlessly by forces he does not understand to the triviality of competitive poker. Drifting from pre-9/11 poker games with friends as a mere social pastime to the gambling parlors of Atlantic City and Northeastern Indian casinos after 9/11, finally pursuing competitive poker as his vocation in Las Vegas, “Neudecker” does indeed get a “new deck” or “new cover” that actually exposes to the reader the randomness of everyday life. The existentialist as fundamentally alienated can thus connect with other “refugees”, such as the African American woman Keith meets when he identifies her name inside a briefcase he has carried out of the Tower.

The brief affair between Florence Givens and Keith Neudecker is possible only because of their shared bond of post-traumatic stress:

Florence is described as a “light-skinned black woman”, whose “odd embodying of doubtful language and unwavering race” suggest a community outside Neudecker’s society, even though she lives just across Central Park (admittedly a proximity that also suggests class distinctions of the East and West sides of New York). DeLillo just barely eroticizes her ethnic identity, albeit strictly through Neudecker’s perspective: “[W]hen she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling” (92). And she is predictably in tune with the Brazilian music she plays on her CD player for him, “clapping her hands to the music” and finally dancing “arms up and away from her body, nearly trancelike, […] facing him now, mouth open, eyes coming open” until Neudecker “began to crawl out of his clothes” (92–93).

“‘I’ve never been to Brazil,’” Florence admits, but it is her racial identity in the novel that permits her to respond, however awkwardly, to music that finally moves Neudecker out of his middle-class propriety. The music (and thus this possible contact between the two characters) was what was inside the briefcase Neudecker returns to Florence: “’This is the disc that was in the player that you carried out of there,’” she tells him (93). Three pages from the end of the novel, as Neudecker makes his way down the stairways of the Tower, an “old man, smallish, sitting, […] resting”, hands him the briefcase, explaining, “‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. She fell and left it’” (244). Parodying some classic detective plot, DeLillo gives us the “treasure” inside that briefcase as the Brazilian rhythms of Samba or some hybrid musical form, intended to liberate us from the confines of capitalism, print-knowledge, Western Civilization: “He heard the music change to something that had a buzz and drive, voices in Portuguese rapping, singing, whistling, with guitars and drums behind them, manic saxophones” (92). Neudecker, the real estate investment banker—“‘[s]mall outfit called Royer Properties […]. We were Royer and Stans. Then Stans got indicted’” (53)—can only respond professionally: “‘I’m talking to somebody. Very early in the talks. About a job involving Brazilian investors. I may need some Portuguese’” (93).

Like the white man drumming his fingers methodically on the juke joint’s table in Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Neudecker never really makes contact with Florence, even if they do have a brief sexual relationship. “Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him”, Hurston writes, “He has only heard what I felt […]. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored”. [223] But DeLillo does not draw this conclusion, even if he gestures in the direction of Keith’s and Florence’s cultural, ethnic, and class differences, overlooked briefly as a consequence of a shared, but passing post-traumatic stress. Their undeveloped interlude is strange indeed in the novel, because it is one of the very few times characters in the novel actually cross the boundaries of their small worlds, apart from the framing act of al-Qaeda’s attack, in itself a fundamental transgression of realms. At some level, DeLillo suggests that these personal failures—Keith’s inability to hear the Brazilian rhythms Florence so clearly feels—are symptomatic of our national problem and explain in part our susceptibility to terror.

The other instances of transgression in the novel are either fantastic, trivial, or merely reinstate the boundaries they threaten. Hammad longs for the German women cycling in the street, but then sleeps with a Syrian woman. Lianne angrily tells her neighbor, Elena, to turn down the Arabic sounding music—“women in soft chorus, singing in Arabic” (119)—shortly after 9/11, complaining, “‘The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding?’” (FM, 120). Lianne’s mother, Nina, has a twenty-year long relationship with a mysterious German art-dealer, Martin Ridnour, aka Ernst Hechinger, who is rumored to have been associated with Kommune 1 in Berlin and the Red Brigades in Italy (146). Linda Kauffman has argued convincingly that Falling Man draws on DeLillo’s nonfictional prose, both before and after 9/11, to comment on the relationship between 1960s radical protest movements in Europe and the U.S. to contemporary global terrorist movements. [224] Like Antonio Negri, convicted in absentia for his role in the Italian Red Brigades’ kidnapping and murder of Christian Democratic Prime Minister Aldo Moro, Ridnour/Hechinger represents the intersection of radical politics and culture.

DeLillo explicitly identifies Ridnour/Hechinger with “Kommune 1”, not Baader-Meinhof, although Nina also suggests “he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know” (146). Kommune 1, or “K 1”, was a short-lived political commune founded in Berlin in 1967 by a group of radicals led by Dieter Kunzelmann, Rudi Dutschke, Bernd Rabehl, and including Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ex-wife, Dagrun, and his brother, Ulrich. By 1969, this anti-government student activist group had fallen apart, but in its heyday was known for planning and occasionally carrying out Dadaist style “performance” acts of social satire. Such acts included the planned “Pudding Assassination” of Vice President Hubert Humphrey during his visit to Berlin in April 1967—so-called because one plan called for attacking him with pudding, yogurt, and flour—and the famous K 1 photograph of communards’ buttocks posed against a wall with the headline: “Das Private ist politisch!” (“The personal is political!”). The symbolic actions of Kommune 1 were usually linked to specific political acts, such as their demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin on June 2, 1967, but they were often criticized by German left-activists as more interested in publicity than in political change.

Kommune 1 nevertheless comes close to DeLillo’s earlier versions of the radical artist, and their leaders were headlined as “Eleven Little Oswalds” in Die Zeit’s coverage of the abortive “Pudding Assassination” plot. Thanks to their members’ connections with well-known German writers, Kommune 1 members lived for a time in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Berlin apartment and later in Uwe Johnson’s studio apartment until Johnson, abroad in the U.S., grew alarmed at the negative publicity Kommune 1 had attracted and asked his neighbor, Günter Grass, to have them evicted. Whereas the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof in Germany really did commit urban terrorist acts with lasting consequences, Kommune 1 worked primarily through symbolic actions. However different these political activist groups are, they still have in common their origins in 1960s European left politics and their associations with the 1960s Left in the U.S.

DeLillo includes very few political debates in the novel and all of them take place among the scholars and artists surrounding Lianne’s mother, Nina, the distinguished Professor of Art History, and her lover, Martin/Ernst, the cosmopolitan art-dealer and former radical. At the lunch following the memorial service for Nina, Martin announces “the thought […] of American irrelevance”, of “the day [that] is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings”, that “America is losing the center” (191). Martin’s different thoughts are in fact the same for DeLillo: irrelevance equals marginal; marginal equals dangerous. These equivalences suggest the ultimate one: America = terrorism. This conclusion, of course, comes predictably from the suspected 1960s’ radical, Ernst Hechinger (aka Martin Ridnour), pontificating on a subject we are led to believe he knows too well.

But what, then, should we conclude about the brief, undeveloped relationship between Florence Givens and Keith Neudecker, whose German surname adds to his vague family relationship to Ernst Hechinger through Keith’s mother-in-law, Nina? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude Empire (2000) with a final section, “The Multitude against Empire”, in which they predict an emerging coalition of oppressed peoples rising against the EuroAmerican Empire that has caused so much human misery in the names of modernization, progress, freedom, and selfhood in the previous 500 years. [225] If it does arrive, Hardt and Negri argue, it will not come from within the system of EuroAmerican hegemony and privilege. “What comes after America?” Martin asks Nina’s mourning friends and her daughter, but he has no more idea what to do with this knowledge than did the historical members of Kommune 1 (192). Lianne understands the problem: “Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her—one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white” (195).

Why, then, does DeLillo so marginalize his other characters, his characters of otherness, ranging from the ordinary but nonetheless ethnically specific Florence to Hammad and Amir Atta, the terrorists? Florence Givens’ surname suggests the various gifts with which she is associated, ranging from the suitcase (with its CD player and its Brazilian music) to the human contact she gives Keith, perhaps hinting at a new “gift economy” of human relations, rather than social relations based on property and commodities. Yet DeLillo, like Keith, seems merely to entertain her as an impossible alternative, a means to non-Western knowledge she implies in her yearning, albeit clumsy, dance to those Brazilian rhythms. Keith Neudecker’s response is finally trivial, personal: he will confess his affair to his estranged wife, Lianne, and she will “get a kitchen knife and kill me”. Trivializing any revolution from within the first-world system, DeLillo refuses to explore the possibility of any transvaluation from outside, apart from the dogmatism of the terrorists, represented as the nearly perfect opposite, the inevitable product, of Western ambiguity and doubt.

In his representation of a specific terrorist, DeLillo gives some human definition to Hammad only to westernize him, a strategy reinforced by the fact that Hammad is fictional, whereas the historical Amir Mohammed Atta is dogmatic and totalitarian. Hammad stumbles along in Hamburg, Afghanistan, Nokomis (Florida), even on board the jetliner hurtling down the Hudson Corridor toward the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He has his doubts about the use of children in the Iran-Iraq War, the promise of salvation to all martyrs in the jihad against the West, the prohibition against sex for the terrorists, even the demand that Muslim men grow beards. Critical of most of these lessons, he nonetheless accepts the basic premises: that the West is making war on Islam and that a blow against Western dominance shows “how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies” (46). And yet those final words are spoken by Martin/Ernst, the descendant of the 1960s EuroAmerican left, not by Islamic fundamentalists or such groups as Hezbollah and Hamas, who repeatedly condemn EuroAmerican support of what they consider Israeli imperialism in the Middle East.

DeLillo understands fully how the existentialist aura of modernity, in which he and I were both educated, does not adequately motivate the social bond. To argue as philosophical existentialism did that the fundamental absurdity of our existence as humans, our insurmountable alienation from the external world, is what calls us together and thus should motivate us passionately to create human habitation and social institutions, is too abstract and paradoxical to motivate the ordinary person. DeLillo cannot transcend his earlier education, and he still believes in the fundamental abyss, the randomness of existence that the mind transforms into patterns, plots, characters, destinies, and empires. Behind the dogma of Amir Atta lies the skepticism of Hammad, so that even the jihadists will be tricked into nothingness in the end. But DeLillo no longer believes that this universal truth of human contingency can motivate anything beyond the ceaseless history of a will-to-power that thrives on warfare and the production of subalterns who deserve our domination (whoever “we” may be in the particular historical moment).

Lianne “loved Kierkegaard in his antiqueness, in the glaring drama of the translation she owned, an old anthology of brittle pages with ruled underlinings in red ink […].He made her feel that her thrust into the world was not the slender melodrama she sometimes thought it was” (118). But Lianne’s life is “a slender melodrama”, only expanded into significance by the suffering of untold others, victims of foreign policies, wars, economic cheats, whereby Lianne lives in relative comfort and Hammad remembers nothing but crowding, narrow rooms filled with other lodgers, and ceaseless displacement. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Hamburg, Florida, New York, the Hudson Corridor—Hammad is always in some foreign place, experiencing to be sure the fundamental estrangement of DeLillo’s and modernity’s existentialist thesis. Are we all strangers? Yes and no; Hammad more than Lianne. Does Lianne recognize this impasse when she turns oddly, unpredictably, casually to religion in chapter 14, just a few pages before Hammad and Atta begin their fateful flight toward the North Tower? “She wanted to disbelieve”, perhaps because her father, Jack, a suicide, believed so passionately and contradictorily “that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light”, as if this gave purpose to his own career as “an architect, an artist”, someone in the business of producing order (232).

But it is not the “will to disbelieve” that motivates her; instead, Lianne turns to Catholicism, as if in direct reply to the passionate will to believe DeLillo attributes to Atta: “Others were reading the Koran, she was going to church. […]. She followed others when they stood and knelt and she watched the priest celebrate the mass, bread and wine, body and blood. She didn’t believe this, the transubstantiation, but believed something, half fearing it would take her over” (233). Lianne’s religious conversion is still some version of Christian existentialism, a lingering trace of the antiquated Kierkegaard she loved in college and before 9/11, but it is nonetheless Catholicism, especially when it says: “God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here’” (236). Although Lianne waffles between several versions of Christianity in a few pages, her conversion does enable her “to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid”, apart from Keith, who has chosen the radical contingency of hyper-capitalism (236).

Displaced from the North Tower to Florence’s apartment “across the Park” to the Sport and Gambling clubs of Atlantic City, then finally to Las Vegas, where he “works” fitfully as a competitive, compulsive poker player, Keith Neudecker acts out hyper-capitalism’s response to the existentialist predicament. If it is all a lie, merely a passing game, then we can only expose the fiction by ceaselessly demonstrating it, always living on the edge, facing every day the sheer contingency thinly veiled in the “risks” of the stock, credit, and currency markets of the Wall Street world where Keith once felt secure. Almost forty years ago, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) appeared as a postmodern manifesto, even if its title underscores the irony that serious architecture and urban planning should follow the lead of Las Vegas’ kitsch. [226] DeLillo’s conclusion in Falling Man is that Las Vegas has only led us to the bathos of capitalism, the absolute point of contradiction when the system can no longer hold, and he turns Las Vegas into the capital of America’s “own shit” (191), recalling the main argument of Underworld (1997). [227]

The dilemma staged in DeLillo’s Falling Man is exemplified in the eponymous act of David Janiak, whose repeated enactment of “falling” reminds New Yorkers of the pathos of the American “fall”. Of course, what he stages is literally a “memento mori”, that old poetic trope, of the several victims of 9/11 who chose to throw themselves from the top of the towers, rather than be incinerated or asphyxiated within. Much has been written about these “falling” people, whose peculiar positions were primarily the consequence of the basic physics involved, rather than any final gesture in response to the horrifying events of 9/11. Lianne witnesses one of Janiak’s performances when she picks up Justin at school and chances on Janiak “falling” from an elevated subway platform visible from the schoolyard. Years later, she comes across his obituary, then searches his history on the web. A trained actor with “a heart ailment and high blood pressure” (230), he is found dead at 39 years old in Saginaw County, Michigan, “more than five hundred miles from the site of the World Trade Center” (223), perhaps preparing to perform his “last jump” without a harness.

The performance art DeLillo stages in the novel invokes the rich history of street performance in New York City and recalls the specific act of the French aerialist, Philippe Petit, who on August 7, 1974 defied security at the World Trade Center, still under construction, to stretch a cable between the towers and tight-rope walk between them. Celebrated and criticized in James Marsh’s recent documentary, Man on Wire (2008), in which no reference to 9/11 is made, Petit anticipates DeLillo’s Janiak, just as Marsh’s documentary offers an unwitting commentary on DeLillo’s mysterious figure. Both call attention to the human being in the overwhelming scale of late-modern urban space; both depend upon the World Trade Center as a symbol of modernist dehumanization, pitting either Petit’s daring or Janiak’s victimized human form against such a cityscape.

Yet even as news photographs of Petit’s daring act circled the globe and Janiak leaves New York City, presumably to spread his own news to the Midwest and across America, both figures occlude the events of 9/11. Americans did not attack themselves on September 11, even if DeLillo argues convincingly that Americans contributed to the global conditions that have prompted the rise of numerous anti-imperialist, non-state affiliated, politically radical groups at war with first-world nations and global financial powers since the end of the Cold War in 1989. Understanding “our fall” as a powerful nation, which has abused its moral and political authority in that same historical period, is certainly an important task. Falling Man contributes to this ongoing analysis by left intellectuals around the globe by detailing the instability of the values on which the U.S. has based that moral authority: religious tolerance, the nuclear family, intellectual and cultural criticism of the state, equal opportunity, anti-imperialism, and universal human rights. Janiak “falls” in the novel to demonstrate our failings in each of these areas. Islamic terrorism drives Lianne to Catholicism. Lianne and Keith’s shaky marriage only briefly recovers after his escape from the North Tower; as he struggles with post-traumatic stress, the marriage totters and falls again. Nina and Martin/Ernst’s artistic circle typifies the “radical chic” that no longer has any traction in global politics. Neither Kommune 1’s pranks nor serious art can change the system from within. The white walls of the art-dealer Martin Ridnour’s apartment suggest not only his impermanence but also the erasure of aesthetic and intellectual critique. Postmodern intellectuals and artists have been contained by a pervasive U.S. anti-intellectualism, as well as by their own complicity in the global class/caste system. Like those elegant Giorgio Morandi paintings that hang in Nina’s apartment in which slender bottles and spare boxes barely appear against white backgrounds, contemporary art criticizes late capitalism merely by stressing our impoverishment and commodification. In Morandi’s paintings, we are those bottles and boxes, still-lives without natural referents, distilled into useless, expensive objects in a shop window.

But none of this explains Atta and al-Qaeda. Hammad’s westernized desires and confused soul do not adequately represent the rage or the violence directed against the U.S. by groups and individuals who are willing to die for the barest chance to “speak out” against first-world arrogance. The ten rural peasant youth who carried out the attack on Mumbai between November 26 and 29, 2008, paused in the lobby of Taj Mahal Hotel and Tower to wonder at the television screens, personal computers, and vast array of technological devices available to the hotel guests. Those young revolutionaries were witnessing a disparity of global wealth also evident in the social and economic inequities of rapidly modernizing Mumbai. Of course, the motives of their Pakistani-based militant organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, are in part driven by religious differences between Muslims and Hindus in South Asia, but the attack also indicated how these local religious politics are now inflected with a deep anti-Semitism that seems to bind together globally Islamic terrorist groups. The religious, political, economic, social, and personal cathexes of global terrorism cannot be represented adequately, much less successfully analyzed and criticized, entirely within the framework of EuroAmerican ideologies. British imperialism in the Subcontinent, U.S. neo-imperialism around the world, and global capitalism of the first-world nations are all to blame for the production of terrorism, but terrorism is neither a unified global movement nor entirely the effect of these causes.

Written before 9/11 and published in the same year, Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) does attempt to understand the psychology of the minoritized non-European faced with first-world economic, political, and personal hegemony. Rushdie’s protagonist, Malik Solanka, is not a poor peasant from an undeveloped country but a Cambridge-educated Bombay millionaire, whose invention of the doll, “Little Brain”, has brought him fortune and fame. Perhaps for all of these reasons, Solanka feels an overpowering “fury”, which he fears he will wreak violently on his own family, so he exiles himself from London to New York. Yet in New York City, he reads compulsively newspaper stories about a serial killer Solanka fears may be himself, acting out his uncontrollable rage in some repressed or somatic state. [228]

Malik Solanka turns out not to be that psychopathic killer, but Rushdie makes clear that his character’s anger against the West is so real, so palpable even to him, that it may erupt at any moment. When on November 5, 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist at Fort Hood, Texas entered the Soldier Readiness Center, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and opened fire, wounding forty-three and killing thirteen people, his fury adds to that of the 9/11 terrorists and others, whether al-Qaeda inspired or not, bombing trains in Madrid and London, nightclubs in Bali, foreign naval ships in Yemen, resorts in Egypt and Israel, as well as the countless foiled attempts to bomb public transport and spaces throughout the imperialist first-world. Was Major Hasan a “terrorist”? Did his cell-phone and email contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen prove that Hasan was part of this “global war”, or was he just another psychopath, a “madman” ironically trained to treat others’ post-traumatic stress disorder?

Rushdie’s pre-9/11 attempt at a literary interpretation of the “consciousness” of third-world fury by no means “covers” the issue, which today is at the center of our global anarchy. John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) brilliantly captures the inner fury of Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the eighteen-year-old Northern New Jersey convert to Islam who was raised by an Irish-American mother abandoned by her Egyptian husband when Ahmad was three. Sentimental in its conclusion when Ahmad changes his mind while driving a truckload of explosives into the Lincoln Tunnel, Terrorist nevertheless is a valiant effort by a thoroughly bourgeois writer to employ the techniques of the novel to help American readers comprehend this otherworldly fury. It is not, then, the “failure” of the novel as a genre that makes it so difficult for us to “represent” terrorism and terrorists. Whatever its limitations, the novel can still help us think through an “other”, however fraught with problems of language, style, cultural and religious differences, and reader competency this process may be.

The fatal impasse in DeLillo’s Falling Man is not the fault of the literary genre, but DeLillo’s excessive reliance on the U.S. national form. Throughout his career, DeLillo has been one of our greatest critics of the limitations of thinking only from inside the U.S. I began this essay by arguing that DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald cannot be understood in exclusively national terms. America “changed” the day Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy, because from that moment on we could never again understand “America” apart from Mexico, Cuba, Japan, the Soviet Union. Should we ever have thought of “America” in a culturally isolationist way? In recent years, American Studies has turned significantly toward transnational and international work to demonstrate that “national” knowledge—the old “American Exceptionalism”—has blinded us to the historical and geopolitical scope of U.S. imperialism, its global deployment of domestic racial and ethnic and sexual stereotypes, class and related economic inequities, and its extension of slavery “by other means”.

Rushdie’s Malik Solanka in Fury is never tricked into believing that New York City is some cosmopolitan or multicultural utopia. Worse even than that old imperial metropole, London, New York City poses as egalitarian, inclusive, diverse, and functional, when in fact Solanka clearly sees it as a microcosm of the inequities, political barriers, and occupied territories that continue to enrage so many outside the “first world”. In “Edward Said and American Studies”, I argued that even Said, one of our most important postcolonial theorists, was himself lured by the cosmopolitan promise of New York City. But Rushdie understands New York to be a thoroughly American metropolis, well before it was targeted as such by al-Qaeda. DeLillo’s Harper’s essay, “In the Ruins of the Future”, published in December 2001, only three months after 9/11, predicts accurately what he would write in Falling Man: a searching criticism of our national failings without a complementary understanding of the global forces we have helped to produce and yet have exceeded our cultural, political, and military control. In this respect, both his nonfictional and fictional responses to 9/11 contribute to, rather than challenge, what I have termed the “hypernationalism” whereby the U.S. state has attempted to incorporate and thereby domesticate global problems. That one of our most powerful social critics and insightful writers could be so captivated by the national form is another reason why we so desperately need ways of thinking beyond the nation to theorize anew the political, economic, and human relations of a genuinely global order of things.

The agenda for a progressive cultural politics, whether in the established discipline of American Studies or such related fields as Ethnic, Postcolonial, Indigenous, and Cultural Studies, must be post-nationalist and offer models of social, political, and economic affiliation that exceed the national form. The contact zones with other, non-U.S. communities need to be determined by scholars working together in a variety of fields, but for a cultural politics conceived in post-national terms we need a new comparatism that will go far beyond an older, Eurocentric “world literature” and consider the relations between exilic, dissident, and marginalized writers and intellectuals within the U.S. and beyond its borders. By the same token, we cannot ignore the importance of studying the U.S. as a global power, especially as it exercises such power through cultural practices. It is no longer sufficient to criticize “American Exceptionalism” at home, but today we must also reveal how such Exceptionalism is exported and thereby works its way through many different local networks beyond our borders. How are U.S. films and literature received in Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Jerusalem, and Nicaragua? Which consumer goods, computer software, Internet content, and related “cultural work” are available in those nations with large U.S. military bases and balance-of-trade imbalances? Demystification of U.S. power, especially in the guise of “freedom and opportunity”, remains a central task, even as we must learn more about those communities, states, and peoples most threatened by U.S. global hegemony. As we have learned from the enormous immigrant populations displaced by the Vietnam War, our military, political, and economic powers of globalization often bring significant new populations to our nation, so that immigration and its cultural consequences must be studied in conjunction with the cultural foreign policy I have proposed. The “American novel” can no longer be read in isolation or in terms solely of its representations of a national symbology that is impossible to think apart from its transnational, postnationalist circuits.