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The Peculiarities of Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s Novel

“Falling Man”

Ella Asatryan
Yerevan State Linguistic University

Don DeLillo is a prominent novelist of American postmodern literature who start-ed his literary career in the 70s of the 20th century, and still creates new works
for his audience.  His first book, Americana, which was published in 1971, was followed
by Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man
(2007), Point Omega (2010) and some other works. Preserving the main traditions of
postmodern literature,  DeLillo puts forward the essential and actual problems of current
times such as the state of an individual in post-war world, the nuclear war, the influence
of Mass Media on an individual and manipulation of the society through it, religious wars
and terrorism. DeLillo’s works reveal the possibilities of development of American society
and also give a full image of changes occurring inside the society in the borderline of the
20-21st centuries.

In 2001 the whole world was shocked because of the terroristic attacks that took place
in New York on September 11. After these tragic events, when the World Trade Center
was completely destroyed and nearly 3000 people were dead, the theme of terrorism
obtained a worldwide interest and actuality. Authors of different nationalities dedicated
their works to this topic, among them the scandalous contemporary French writer
Frederic Beigbeder with his book Windows on the World, the Algerian writer Yasmina
Khadra with his Terrorism, the English writer John Updike with his short-story Varieties
of Religious Experience, and many other writers. Being an American and having wit-
nessed the events, DeLillo also introduced a book concerning terrorism and its conse-
quences which gives the overall picture of terroristic events of 2001. The book was called
Falling Man. It was released in 2007. The American press was immediately over-
whelmed by critical articles acknowledging Falling Man as the best 9/11 novel. In fact,
DeLillo has written the first major 9/11 novel which is more than a novel. It is a docu-
ment of America’s progress as a nation, civilization at this particular place in time. It is
a well-crafted artistic interpretation of a major event that has, for better or worse, helped
shape the nation (Shindler 2007:4).

So Falling Man is a 9/11 novel depicting the state of an American family which car-
ries the influence of terroristic events. In this novel the author discloses the problem of
terrorism passing from a private point (an American family) to universal point, and
stressing the changes that occur in American society’s world perception. In Falling Man
the concept of time/place acquires a new qualitative status and becomes a means that
directly influences an individual’s life, decides his identity and claims problems existing
in today’s world. This fact makes the author’s work even more significant and provides
good material for analyses. The aim of the present study is to give the image of an
American society as expressed through literature and to analyze the concept of chrono-
tope within the frames of the novel Falling Man.  During the study the following issues

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are to be analyzed:  the concept of chronotope, the reflection of the chronotope in the novel,
the problem of terrorism, its influence on a whole society, the vision of a new society.

After the events of 9/11 Don DeLillo was called a prophet writer since in his previ-
ous books, mainly in Mao II, he expresses his anxiety concerning the skyscrapers. The
author’s prediction, unfortunately, appears on the reality layer. It must be stressed that the
horrible events of 9/11 marked the start of a new world. After 9/11 the world was divid-
ed into two parts; before and after. 

Everything now is measured by after.                    (DeLillo 2007:138) 

So this very thought is carried by the members of American society, the heroes of
DeLillo’s work among them.

Before turning to the main analyses, it is indispensable to pay attention to the title of
the novel. Why did DeLillo call his novel Falling Man? The question can be observed
from different points of view. First of all, by entitling the novel so, the author could mean
the man who fell down from one of the skyscrapers during the terroristic acts, and whose
photo appeared on the first pages of all American and non-American magazines.
Secondly,  the falling man could be the artist who was trying to imitate the people falling
down or jumping from the buildings through his art. 

She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d
appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the
city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing
a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark
moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. 

(DeLillo 2007:33) 

As a matter of fact, the novel is full of overwhelming numbers of falling men. Each
of the heroes of the novel can be regarded as falling man such as Keith, the main hero,
who survived the terrorism but preserved his existence carrying inside parts of terror.
Another falling man is his wife Lianne, who was not a direct survivor of the events, but
who carried its consequences. Falling man are all the people who passed through terror-
ism, who witnessed it and who make a new society, where terror and fear dominate. It
must be stressed that the title includes a deeper interpretation, as the falling man is the
USA itself.  It is the US fall from grace that occurs when the nation’s abuse of moral
authority is set against the values on which it claims to be based (Olster 201:119).

The novel consists of three parts. The first part is entitled Bill Lawton which is the
encoded variant of Bin Laden, the second one is Ernst Hechinger, one of the heroes of
the novel, ex-member of a terroristic group,  who contemplates about religion and the
Muslims all the time. Through this character the author claims that the USA is responsi-
ble for the tragic events. His contemplations can be summed up in one thought.

We have met the enemy and it is us.                                (Olster  2011:120)

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The last part of the novel is called David Janiak. This part concerns the man, the per-
formance artist who appears in different parts of New York and imitates the flying peo-
ple from the tower during the terroristic acts. The falling man represents art through
which he shifts individual’s attention to those tragic days, never letting it become past.

There was one thing for them to say, essentially. Someone falling.
Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this
way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes.

(DeLillo 2007:165)

Though the three parts of the novel concentrate on different problems and issues, this
should not confuse the reader, as these parts are inseparably connected to one another,
and make one entity having one and the same question in the cornerstone. What should
they do after? There was collision, there was break and people were to understand its
meaning and its influence on each of them and what was going to be after? 

The whole existence frightens me. She saw herself in this sentence.
(DeLillo 2007:118)

Each member of the terrorized society tries to find answers to such questions and find
his/her place in the distorted world. All the time the heroes of the novel want to find an
answer to the simplest question whether they are already strangers to that new space or
not. The world they were living in was already strange and unknown to them.

Even in NEW York – I long for New York.
(DeLillo 2007:34) 

In literature the unity of time and space is called chronotope. The term was coined by
M. Bakhtin to show the way time and space are described by language, and, in particu-
lar, how literature represents them. The peculiarities of time become natural for place,
and place, in its turn, obtains new meaning through time and is measured by time.
According to M. Bakhtin, these two categories constitute a fundamental unity as in the
human perception of everyday reality.

In literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused
into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens,
takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise, space becomes
charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.

(Bakhtin 2004:85)

This gives the idea that narrative texts are not only composed of sequences of events
and speech acts, but also of the construction of a particular fictional world or chronotope.

The events of the novel theoretically occur in the same place, in New York city, yet

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there are temporal and spatial flights from one time layer to the other, which is peculiar
to postmodern literature. It is seen from the very first lines of the novel:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash
and near night. (DeLillo 2007:3)

A qualitative change of space can be observed, passing from the notion street to
notion world. Space ceases to be a private point and becomes a universal one, the
carrier of terrorism. So, as a center of terroristic acts, the street turns into a world which
carries the features of a terrorized street. Carrying the features of terrorism, space
becomes the terrorism itself and all the spatial layers are united into a single one. The
author recovers the distorted spatial layer. There is no world outside the terrorism and
there is no other choice. There exists only one space which is called terrorism.

The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around
them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.

(DeLillo 2007:4) 

As it can be viewed, leaving the center of events, the main hero is not able to escape
it. He is always directed to the skyscrapers as there is already one spatial unity - a new
world, a world of terrorism. DeLillo’s heroes and all other Americans and foreigners who
are already the carriers of a changed and terrorized way of thinking are living exactly in
such kind of world. 

The concept of time also suffers qualitative changes. In the novel some contradiction
comes to the core. On the one hand, time appears as a puzzle. There is no unity of time,
instead, one can witness flights from present to past and vice versa and these flights are con-
nected to terrorism. On the other hand, the unity of time is extremely vivid. The terroristic
acts took place in the past, yet they are never past, as their influence is undeniably felt in the
present and even in the future. So, past is never past, it becomes present and dooms future.
This gives birth to a new temporal dimension: present absorbed in past.  It is worth mention-
ing blessed Augustine’s famous theses that there is no time distinction into past, present and
future: there is only present which contains past, present and future (Pusey 2005:158). The
analysis of the novel brings to the light the idea that past has so huge influence on an indi-
vidual’s life that it is fused with present. So, in his novel Falling Man Don DeLillo creates
a new world, new time which correspond with the concept of terrorism.

It is necessary to mention that in the frames of the unity of time which is expressed
by the idea that there is only one time dimension where time and terrorism appear on the
same level, the author suggests distinguishing between inner and outer time of human
beings. This approach is clearly seen when we analyze the character of the main hero of
the novel, Keith, who is a 9/11 survivor. 

Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It
happened everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows
smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage.

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He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched
from sprinkler system. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags
and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood.                                                       

(DeLillo 2007:4)

There is a vivid contradiction between the hero’s inner and outer time. In inner time
nothing exists and everything is stopped, while in the outer time everything moves and
something happens which is the result of tragic events. In inner time everything is
stopped, while in outer time everything goes on.

The novel Falling Man presents a very interesting case, as it is a novel which ends at
the point where it starts. The reader appears in a closed circle where the beginning and
the end have the same event in their base. The beginning of the novel claims the confused
state of people after terroristic events. 

There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this,
aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high
smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again,
down toward the river.                                                 (DeLillo 2007:5) 

The ending of the novel again claims the confused state of people after the terroristic
events. 

He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran
by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and
clothes. That’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street
signs, people, things he could not name. Then he saw a shirt come down out
of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.

(DeLillo 2007:246) 

So, all the events of the novel develop within these events - from terrorism to
terrorism, which is the same event. This comes to prove that lives of people who
witnessed the tragic events are enclosed in a circle where time has somehow
stopped, there is no present, as it has already been mentioned above, but a new tempo-
ral dimension - present absorbed in past.

One of the most interesting points of the novel is the case when the author gives
parallels between art and terrorism. Art becomes a means through which the real state of
terrorized society is observed. Art becomes the carrier of time and space. In the novel
Don DeLillo turns to the paintings of the 20th century Italian painter Georgio Morandi.
Morandi’s paintings represent the art of Still Life (Natura Morta). When observing
Morandi’s paintings one can see that most of his works are a series of inanimate objects
such as jars, vases and bottles. The philosophy of Morandi’s art claims that these objects
are inanimate, yet they come to satisfy human needs and reflect the possibility of changes
in human relations (Schweighauser,  Schneck  2010:101). DeLillo transferred these ideas

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into a literary area and touched upon the works of this painter since his paintings remind
the destroyed skyscrapers.  

The painting in question showed seven or eight objects, the taller ones
set against a brushy slate background. The other items were handled boxes
and biscuit tins, grouped before a darker background. They looked togeth-
er. Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and
smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle.
The bottle was a bottle, white.  “What do you see?” he said. She saw what
he saw. She saw the towers. (DeLillo 2007:49) 

The art of Still Life, in this case, comes to show that the consequences of terrorism
are still alive and they make the present of the American society.

So, the overall analyses of the theme gives us the opportunity to claim that, staying
faithful to the main traditions of postmodern literature,  Don DeLillo is the best to give
the full image of American society after 9/11. In the novel Falling Man the concepts of
time and space obtain new qualitative features and they come to decide the role of  a
human being in the world. DeLillo changes all temporal and spatial images, breaks all
the borders giving the unity of time and space. This unity is the terrorism itself. Time and
space appear on the same level with terrorism. So, literature becomes a means through
which we see that 9/11 has become a borderline between the life before the events and
the life after the events. In the life after humans try to reestimate their life, find their lost
ego, understand their place and role in the distorted world, in the world obsessed with
fear and despair. The heroes of DeLillo live in this very world. They represent the model
of American society, each member of which is the carrier of terroristic events who do
not exclude the possibility of the repetition of 9/11 at any place in the world and at any
time.

References:

1. Bakhtin, M. (2004) The Dialogic Imagination. // Four Essays. Austin: University of
Texas Press.

2. Blessed, A. (2005) The Confessions of Saint Augustine. / Tr. by E. Pusey. New York:
Random House, Inc.

3. DeLillo, D. (2007) Falling Man. New York: Scribner.
4. Olster, S. (2011) Don DeLillo. Mao II. Underworld. The Falling Man. New York:

Continuum. 
5. Schweighauser, P.; Schneck, P. (2010) Terrorism, Media and the Ethics of Fiction:

Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo. New York: Continuum.
6. Shindler, D. “Falling” Towers as Fiction.  The Denver Post. 03 March 2007

http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_6047985

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