Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) offers a postmodernist discussion of the different modes of representation that recount the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Using the non-realistic art form of performance, DeLillo frames postmodernist aesthetics around a critique of the traditional `realistic' representation, which claims exact correspondence with events or reality. In such a performance, the strategic use of `iterability' or repetition of the same event in variation assumes a crucial role in critiquing homogeneity and advancing heterogeneous versions of the same event from different angles. Moreover, in postmodernism, performance often stands as a metaphor for intertextuality, since it is constituted through a web of associations involving the performer, the spectacle, and the spectator. Such a labyrinthine structure frequently questions the self-sufficiency of the text and forcefully advocates the notion that every text is a product of culture. This paper examines the performance art in Don DeLillo's Falling Man as a postmodernist, non-realistic mode of narration, which problematizes claims of truthful representation of events.

Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) systematically deploys the art of performance to structure a postmodernist aesthetics around the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. An inseparable part of many art forms, including drama, opera, concert and carnival, performance acquires a unique representational scope in postmodernism. While conventional art seeks to represent events realistically, the intertextual art of postmodernist performance employs repetition in difference as a tool for providing a non-realistic account of occurrences. Further, informed by the semiotics of culture, performance posits culture as a text, in a way that resembles Roland Barthes's notion of a text—"a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture" (1977, p. 146). This paper examines how DeLillo's Falling Man, in performatively repeating a traumatic event in American history, constructs a postmodernist aesthetics that involves a critique of allegedly realistic representations.

Through an unconventional use of repetition, the performance art in Falling Man undermines the rationale behind the allegedly realistic portrayal of events, unearthing multiple differential narratives of the collapse of the Twin Towers. If representation of an event customarily entails realism as the fundamental mode of narration, postmodernists, in critiquing the binary opposition between `original' and `copy,' question notions of truth and authenticity accorded to represented events.

American Literature Journal, Postmodernist Art, Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man, Postmodernist Aesthetics, Postmodernists, Communicative Language, Indexical Structures, Non-linguistic Paradigms, Phonocentric Structures, Phonocentric Discourses, Semiotic Framework.