This paper examines Don DeLillo's now-cult 9/11 novel, Falling Man. It provides a framework for reading the novel, arguing that to simply treat it as a literary expression of trauma is inadequate, given the layers that DeLillo gives his narratives. Building on a variety of theoretical concepts, specifically Freud and later psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists such as Nicholas Royle, on the uncanny, and Christine Battersby, Kimberley Segall, and others on the sublime, the paper argues that DeLillo's central trope of dematerialization recalls the uncanny and in fact treats the events of 9/11 as uncanny, with its ghostly doublings and the central image of fading and transience. Having established the uncanny's dematerialization as a synecdoche for the events of 9/11, DeLillo, the paper argues in its second part, suggests a traumatic sublime. The traumatic sublime emerges in the novel from the condition of uncanny perception (of 9/11) through the presence of two components: repetition and incorporation of the foreign.

One of the first things that strike you in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) is the number of references to transience, obscurity, shadows, hazy visuality, and insubstantiality. Every page of the novel has at least one image (usually more) of transience, poor visibility, fading, and the vague. DeLillo, this paper argues, heightens the sense of what happened on 9/11 by focusing on a particular set of tropes of transience and insubstantiality. Dematerialization, Linda Kauffman (2008, 367) suggests, is the key trope of the novel, treating even Alzheimer's and its disintegration of language as a metaphor for 9/11. It seems apposite that a text dealing with the collapse of the twin towers deploys the trope of dematerialization. But DeLillo, as this paper demonstrates, has a larger agenda.

This paper argues that DeLillo's theme and key trope of dematerialization take recourse to the uncanny, whose features then enable him to fold, or shade, the uncanny into a sublime of the traumatic experience of 9/11. While both the uncanny and the sublime are about perceptions—the sense of the familiar/unfamiliar in the case of the uncanny and the sense of awe/wonder/incomprehension in the case of the sublime—DeLillo's novel calls attention to the cultural and social frames of this perception.

These are the images from the first few paragraphs of Falling Man. The emphasis on vagueness, unclear vision, and haze (ash and its concomitant color, gray, incidentally, seems to be the dominant motif of the novel) is striking. Keith Neudecker, the survivor-protagonist, walks out of the first tower into this world of ash and gray. He thinks the things around him are "unseen" (5). But the point DeLillo makes is that never again will things be `seen' as they are. All events, things, and people will hereafter be dematerialized into something insubstantial, because the events of 9/11 render everything, everybody as insubstantial. (And yet they are not insubstantial either.) In order to document the dematerialization, DeLillo takes recourse to the uncanny. The uncanny, the name of the simultaneous experience of the familiar and the unfamiliar, here is about the perception of loss: it shows a fading of the material into the immaterial, substance into insubstantiality.

American Literature Journal, Don DeLillos Falling Man, Dematerialization, Social Frames, Concomitant Trauma, Traumatic Sublime, American Culture, Foreign Policy, Kimberley Segall, Metaphysical Grounds, Epistemological Grounding, DeLillo Works.