I've just returned from 3 weeks vacation in the deepest depths of beautiful Cornwall, where the only things that seemed to matter were the sea, sand & sun. In between catching some waves, I managed to read some books, including 2 great works of contemporary American fiction - Cormac McCarthy's The Road, & Don DeLillo's Falling Man. Both in their own ways are profound existential studies, McCarthy's concrened with being stripped bare of all its accutrements, DeLillo's more with the question of 'authentic' being. Equally, both sustain the respective authors' ongoing reflections on the violence at the heart of contemporary human existence, &, in particular, American society.
I think McCarthy's is a work of extraordinary importance, but for now, I wanted to offer a few thoughts about DeLillo. I don't know how the work has been received in the US, but here in the UK, the reviews have been fairly positive - though for the most part, as ever, slightly uncomprehending. The best review was by Mark Greif, in the London Review of Books (unsurprisingly!), & can be found at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/grei01_.html
Among many other things, 3 aspects of the book seemed to me to be striking. 1st, DeLillo carries on with his attempts to both present, & simultaneously reflect upon, the idea of spectacle, the presentation of the image, and the gradual transformation of events such that they are only authentic when they are in some way visually recorded (this is the source of his extended riffs on acting & living as if we are in movies). Thus, there's a stunning passage early in the book, as Keith is walking away from the first tower to fall, & 'hear[s] the sound of the second fall' (nb not the second fall itself, but the sound of the second fall).
He crossed Canal St and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.
This is writing & thinking of the highest quality & confidence. At the very moment where DeLillo appears to admit to the inability of language to express meaningfully events of singular magnitude, in fact, he finds a way precisely of doing so, through the reinvigoration of the old Berkleyan epiphenomenalistic paradox.
Which leads me to the 2nd aspect of the bok which struck me, namely its stylistic beauty. Falling Man sees DeLillo writing in his late style, first seen in The Body Artist. These are fundamentally quiet books, where little appears to 'happen'. Rather, in a limpid free indirect style, DeLillo reflects the continual attempts of his main characters to make sense of the series of minor events making up their being.
What gives this style its impact - & this is the 3rd aspect of the book which struck me - is the way that these 'minor' events gain in intensity through implicit associative contiguity with with the intensities of the books' 'defining' moments. In the case of Falling Man, this consists in the moment 'the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue'; in The Body Artist, the moment that Lauren's partner leaves the breakfast table.
What's DeLillo up to here? I think that for some time now, he's been working away at the question of the nature of the instantaneity of defining moments (cf. the shot that was heard across the world, in Underworld). That is to say, it's not the content of the moment so much as the nature of the moment qua instant. Of course, this question takes us to the heart of one of the most profound of all philosophical questions, posed as early as Plato's Parmenides, namely of the 'strange nature of the instant', which is only able to perform its function of rendering time continuous by dividing time up, seemingly in a discontinuous manner. Heidegger alights upon a similar paraoxicality in Aristotle's account of the now in the Physics, in his lecture course Basic Problems of Phenomenology. For Plato, the nature of the instant means that its being must be outside time (from where it is able, so to speak, to give time). I think that Deleuze & Serres may have something similar in mind when they discuss the temporality of the simulacrum in Lucretius, and that, intriguingly, there may be a link just here between this (a)emporal nature of the simulacrum & the more familiar Baudrillardian sense, which DeLillo's riffs about spectacle & movies gestures towards.
In Falling Man, the paradoxicality is, to put it crudely, embodied in the characters of Keith & Lianne - in his gradual reduction of his life to the repetition of more or less contentless instants at the poker tables of Las Vegas, Keith strips the instant bare to a point of almost absolute singularity. Lianne, on the other hand, appears to seek to enlarge the instant through her attempts to weave wider & wider webs of contextuality, which both define the instant's sense, but also serve to link it it up with the net of further instants.
If we want to understand our current way of being, and if we want to be able to begin to develop ways of thinking which can make sense both of the defining moments of our contemporary social & political being, and the way that we have, societally, responded to these events, then DeLillo appears to be sugesting that we must begin by thinking fundamentally about time itself. But, just as importantly, we must also reflect continually on the adequacy of our ways of thinking about time, and continually question where, in philosophy, we might find resources for thinking about what appears to be paradoxical about the temporality of time.
[Author: Robin Durie]
