FINAL BLOG ESSAY

FINAL BLOG ESSAY

Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man”, “Project Rebirth” and Roland Barthes’ “Mythologies”:

Mythologizing the Signs of 9/11

The events of September 11, 2001 altered the sociological, economic, and political landscape of the United States forever. For many weeks and months after the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, people walked the streets of New York City in a suspended state of unprocessed grief. It seemed as though as a New Yorker, the emotional core of all of us was temporarily removed—and we were left to our own devices as to how to effectively process our grief. We had the sensation that time had halted, our innocence was destroyed, and that the nation was traumatized almost beyond repair. People didn’t seem to be able to express their grief, and were left without a system of signs and signifiers to give this event meaning.

Personally, I will never forget hearing the everyday sounds of the birds chirping that day as I exited a taxi that I was lucky enough to secure to transport me from my office near Lincoln Center to my home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. It struck me then that I had no prior proficiency on how to process something so devastating and violent, and I found myself staring at CNN literally for 3 days nonstop.

With an event so catastrophic, the national feeling was that we needed a national commemoration, something to physically remember all of the people in our lives who were lost. This collective desire to memorialize elevated 9/11 into a nationalist mythology, preventing its integration into a more thought provoking historical narrative. Barthes discusses this in Mythologies when he notes that myth “postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions”, yet when “it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains” (Barthes, 1972, p. 117).

Myth, according to Barthes, “is a type of speech defined by its intention…much more than by its literal sense… in spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense” (Barthes, 1972, p. 124). He goes on to state “myth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society” (Ibid, p.142). The object of the mythology functions to frustrate purpose and meaning. Myth causes a duplicity of meaning, for its function “is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence” (Ibid, p.143).

To quote Barthes:

"A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance". (p. 143)

According to Barthes, the object of the mythology does not bestow meaning upon itself, but upon the event of object to which it gestures (in this case the victims of 9/11 or the events of 9/11 itself). Barthes designates myth as a triad (or 3 pronged) pattern of semiotics instead of the dual pattern (Barthes, 1972, p.113), which consists of the signifier (the form of the myth), the signified (the mythical concept) and the sign (the myth’s signification-an amalgamation of signifier and signified).

The myth of the “faceless victims” of 9/11 was given meaning through the mainstream media with the image of the “Falling Man”. Based upon a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. "Falling Man” became a symbol of all the people who decided to take control of their own fate and die the way they wanted, not in the way the terrorists intended. There were several attempts to identify the “Falling Man” and although it cannot be completely confirmed, many people believe the man to be Jonathan Briley, a 43 year-old employee of the Windows on the World restaurant.

The Falling Man seemed to be one of the pivotal myths of that day, because it "removed things from their human meaning as to make them signify a human insignificance". It pointedly demonstrated that human life can be exterminated at any time and at any place (a normal day at work), and the power lies in the fact that it made all of us think about what we would do in the same situation.

In Don DeLillo’s novel, Falling Man, the mythology of the “Falling Man” takes on a different form through the work of a performance artist. The performance artist recreates the look of the famous photograph by strapping himself into a harness and suspending himself from a high building in a heavily trafficked area, thereby hanging in the Falling Man’s well known pose. He appears several times throughout the novel, seen by the character Lianne. He seems to by a symbol of the day that Lianne and her family are trying desperately to avoid, yet their attempts are repeatedly rendered futile.

The plot of the novel centers on one family’s attempts at coping with the traumatic events of 9/11. The family uses myth to help them evade the reality of the attacks. The child of the protagonist couple (Lianne and Keith) and his friends spend their time looking towards the sky for a man named “Bill Lawton” (a modified version of “Bin Laden”), who “has a long beard. He wears a long robe” (DeLillo, p.74).

Justin (Keith and Lianne’s son) believes that the towers were hit but that they did not collapse even though his parents had told him the truth. He is creating his own mythology of the event in order to "empty reality" (as Barthes puts it) that is too painful for him to face.

Protagonist Keith Neudecker seems to be the character that was traumatized by the events of 9/11 more than the others in the novel since he witnessed them and lost several of his work colleagues and poker buddies. He seems to want to deny and avoid his feelings by gambling excessively in Las Vegas casinos and carrying on an extramarital affair with a woman named Florence. To Keith, the signs of the world he was used to no longer exist in the same way. Everything around him was different. As DeLillo states:

“It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash”. (p. 103)

DeLillo seems to constantly stress the interrelated nature of memory and language, and the loss of both that can come from living through such a traumatic event. In the narrative of Keith's escape from the site of the attacks, he never mentions speaking (a loss of language) to anyone until he gets to the hospital and is being examined (pp. 3-6). Keith seems finally able to recover his traumatic memories of 9/11 towards the very end of the novel. To quote the text:

“Things came back to him in hazy visions, like half an eye staring. These were moments he’d lost as they were happening and he had to stop walking in order to stop seeing them”. (p. 243)

Part of the mythologization of the events of 9/11 seems to be centered on the creation of a set of standard narratives (i.e. the hero accountant, the hero firefighter, the unsuspecting wife who received the final phone call from the husband or wife, the person who decided not to go to work that day). Each one of these narratives holds the promise of some type of redemption: the creation of the narrative of the hero used in the realm of public discourse or in the narrative world of a novel in one character’s attempt to reclaim his history through recovered memory.

The narrative of the redemptive hero and the narrative of the American spirit of rebirth are both prominently featured in the documentary, “Project Rebirth”. The film shows time lapse photography to demonstrate the rebuilding efforts around the World Trade Center Site, and interplays this footage with a series of compelling stories of people who lost family members or close friends on that fateful day. Each interviewee is followed over the course of several years, always interviewed on the anniversary of the attacks.

In the film, one of the most effective stories for me personally was told by Tim, a NYC Fireman who lost his best friend and boss in the attacks. In one clip, his grief has caused him to detach from his life purpose in much the same way as Keith Neudecker from “Falling Man”. One quote that sums up this well:

“I feel like I’m….I lost my track, and I don’t know…I am afraid I won’t find a track again. I’m kind of all over the place, you know? And I used to be very focused on my life, and now I just have no idea”.

The simple phrase “9/11” has become the symbol that engenders a series of images and narratives that on one hand emphasize the suffering of the American populace, and on the other hand elevate our role as a victimized nation into a redemptive hero myth that reinforces a tenacious and victorious national identity. The image of the “falling man” and other famous images from that day have taken shape in our culture to signify more than the actual visual content of the image-they allow us to process our collective memory and to collectively grieve for he memories of the patriotic loved ones who died as unsuspecting victims from simply going to work on that day.