Between 1997 and 2007, Don DeLillo published three novels concerned with loss and mourning. Two of these, Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), revolve around unique historical events in which the question of American exceptionality is foregrounded, and both relate this question of exceptionality to the experience of loss. The need to see the lost object as exceptional is characteristic of grief, and is, in psychoanalytical terms, a function of the narcissism that grief arouses. This essay argues that while DeLillo accepts the historical specificity of the events of 9/11, his novel Falling Man is wary of any claim to their exceptionality. In good dialectical fashion, however, DeLillo comprehends and sympathizes with the need people share to see 9/11 as exceptional. A central tenet of my argument is that while Falling Man and Underworld both contain moving explorations of the vicissitudes of loss, Falling Man is more concerned with the loss of loss, the relinquishing of grief, the end of mourning, an idea which illuminates the novel's arresting juxtaposition of Søren Kierkegaard and T. S. Eliot. As the three novels appeared, DeLillo seemed increasingly concerned to explore the overcoming of grief, the loss of loss, in the context of female subjectivity, and to trace the failure to overcome it to the masculine psyche, and I draw upon the work of Julia Kristeva in order to address this. The pattern is at its starkest in The Body Artist (2001), with which the essay briefly concludes. All three novels seem to bear out the idea, familiar from psychoanalysis, that every incident of loss essentially reactivates a more primordial condition of mourning. In order to underline this concept of the continuity of loss, I first summarize the psychoanalysis of mourning. We then turn to Underworld, where loss seems to be the presiding masculine emotion.
I
In his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud tried to distinguish normal mourning, in which one mourns the loss of the loved object, from protracted melancholia, where the self has lost all connection to the loved external object, but identifies with it – incorporates some likeness of the object into itself – and so, when it mourns, mourns for itself: “so by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.”Footnote 1 The work of mourning, as Freud called it, is common to mourning and melancholia and consists in the slow laborious process of the withdrawal of attachment. It is complicated in melancholia because the ego, in trying to detach itself, now attacks itself – that same self whom it loves. “The work of melancholia,” then, is mourning indefinitely protracted by ambivalence.Footnote 2
Melanie Klein undercut Freud's attempt to dichotomize mourning and melancholia by arguing that mourning is the default or constitutive emotional state of the self from early (pre-Oedipal) infancy. The first loss, according to Klein, is the maternal object, the breast from which the infant is weaned, and because this loss occurs before the ego has had time to fully establish itself, it is experienced as catastrophic. All subsequent experiences of mourning reactivate to some extent this first experience of mourning, which Klein called the depressive position.Footnote 3 The painfulness of the “depressive position” is that it takes the self back to a time when it was hardly a self at all. The psychoanalyst and critic Julia Kristeva accurately evokes the depressive position when she writes in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, “My depression points to my not knowing how to lose”:Footnote 4 the point being that there is no technique that makes loss easier, there is no knowing how to. Not “knowing how to” lose is a characteristic part of the feeling of loss. Depression is a state of mind, not a technique.
We can see a glimpse of the depressive position in the character of Albert Bronzini in DeLillo's Underworld, remembering how his wife abandoned him: “he began to see again how the loss of a friend, how any loss, was an aspect of Klara's departure, repeating the impact, the devastation”; for when Klara left him “it turned something loose, a rant, an unworded voice that incited feelings so varied and confused … that he felt helpless in its surge.” Klara's departure does not come first, as this passage initially suggests; rather it “turn[s] loose” some primordial loss, in whose surge the ego is itself lost (“unworded … varied … confused”).Footnote 5
However, despite the power and insightfulness of Klein's concept of the depressive position, I want to keep in mind Freud's idea of a temporal limit to mourning, as it provides a clue to the particular poetry of both Falling Man and The Body Artist.
II
If we look at the most richly drawn characters from the first 250 pages of Underworld, we see that most of them are haunted by loss. In addition to Albert Bronzini, consider Cotter Martin, Nick Shay, and Marvin Lundy.
As Cotter watches the play-off between the Giants and the Dodgers we are told that he “feels a mood coming on, a complicated self-pity, the strength going out of his arms and a voice commencing in his head that reproaches him for caring” (Underworld, 33). The torpor to which he is reduced corresponds to what Klein called the depressive position, with its “complicated self-pity” – where the libidinous energy of the self is compromised by its dependence on what Klein called “object relations.” Although Cotter is only a boy, the narrator makes it clear that he already has a rich knowledge of this “business of losing, being a loser” (33), which is to say, the business of “caring,” of finding oneself attached to something that, like every loved object, every part of the world outside the self, comes and goes. Thus when Bobby Thompson hits his famous home run into the crowd, Cotter “loses sight of the ball when it climbs above the overhang,” then it “appears again” (42). The ball comes and goes, is lost and found. This cycle of appearance and disappearance, presence and absence, recurs to Cotter later that evening after he tells his father about the ball: “The game was lost and then they won. The game could not be won but then they won it and it's won forever. This is the thing they can never take away. It is the first thing he will think of in the morning” (148). Whereupon, just two pages later, his father “takes the baseball” (150) while his son sleeps – using that very verb, “take” – and the narrative leaves the reader to imagine, for the rest of the novel, the pain of Cotter's loss (for we never see him wake), a mood with which Cotter himself, a practised loser, is already familiar, as we know. The baseball in his hands is associated through his sister with an apple and so with the Fall of Man (138). Young as he is, Cotter has already eaten of the tree of knowledge and is in consequence only “halfway hopeful” (11): one half of him hopes, one half, we might say, implicitly despairs. Somewhere between the two is “longing” (11), or, as Klein would say, “pining.”Footnote 6
“It's all about losing,” Nick Shay says, when he tries to explain why he felt compelled to buy this same lost baseball, which for Cotter was associated with victory, but for Nick, a fan of the losing team (the Dodgers), is much more powerfully associated with “loss,” “failure,” and “bad luck” (97). This symbol of loss – which, to compound the symbolism, has itself been lost for decades – is “the only thing in [his] life,” he tells us, that he “absolutely had to own” (ibid.). Loss is something Nick had to own. As Mark Osteen comments, “The middle-aged Nick obsessively restages his losses”: they are encapsulated in the baseball, which “brings back the past, but only insubstantially, and thus instantiates the irretrievability of loss.”Footnote 7 Nick has possessed himself of loss instead of trying to come to terms with why it possesses him. He prefers “the mystery of loss” to the resolution of it (97). As he remarks near the end of the novel: “Because I don't know what happened, do I?” (807). The question is an attempt to pass the buck, but his word order leaves him with the responsibility he shirks.
It is the irrationality of this need to own loss, which sounds like, but crucially is not, the psychoanalytic goal of getting someone to acknowledge, own up to, take responsibility for, loss, that Marvin Lundy recognizes in Nick: “Because this was Marvin's situation for a long time” (191), we might say for a lifetime:
For years he didn't know why he was chasing down exhausted objects … He finally understood it was Eleanor [his wife] on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. (191–2)
Marvin's whole relation to objects is a function of the “terror” of “unshoulderable loss.” “You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is” (170). Yet he, too, like Cotter Martin, has learned to dwell in loss, to accommodate himself to it, to find such consolation as there is in calling his condition by its rightful name. He uses the same word that the narrative keeps coming back to: “The state of loss, the fact, the facticity in its lonely length. This was a word he never thought he'd need to use but here it was … to elongate the loss” (192). The verb “elongate” incorporates within itself that word “longing” from the novel's third paragraph: “Longing on a large scale is what makes history” (11). History is made, that is to say, by people who variously bear or fail to bear “the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss” – who inhabit what Klein called the depressive position.
The novel's concern with loss is intimately linked to its concern with the question of uniqueness or exceptionality, a theme dramatized from the novel's opening pages by the vivid evocation of the 1951 play-off between the Giants and the Dodgers. “We'll never forget today,” as the television producer says to the commentator Russ Hodges (54). This feeling of the uniqueness of events is, in a sense, precisely what is lost. It is undermined on two fronts; first, by the passage of time: “It is all falling indelibly into the past” (60); and second, by what Walter Benjamin called technical reproducibility,Footnote 8 represented in Underworld by television and videotape: “The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day” (98). What DeLillo does, in effect, is to pit the storyteller's ability to imagine the specificity of events against this two-pronged tide of obsolescence, and he does it in part through the epic size, the monumental proportions of Underworld, proportions which play a vital part, as in Moby-Dick or Ulysses, in the novel's overall dramatic effect. The “Thomson homer” is pointedly Homeric.
It is difficult to read Underworld without remarking the ways in which it seems to anticipate DeLillo's encounter in Falling Man with the events of 9/11. “Nobody has a vocabulary for what happened this year,” as Toots Shor says in Underworld (18), anticipating DeLillo's observation in his essay “In the Ruins of the Future” that 9/11, as an “event,” had “no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile.”Footnote 9Underworld is haunted by visions of exploding aircraft, from aeroplanes “explod[ing] in mid-air” (88) to the flaming disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger (227). Astonishingly, the novel even contains a glimpse of a falling man, spotted in the baseball ground by J. Edgar Hoover: “another body dropping from the outfield wall, a streaky length of limbs and hair and flapping sleeves” (55). As the narrator aptly comments, “There is something apparitional in the moment” (ibid.). Nevertheless, while Underworld memorializes and monumentalizes loss, Falling Man is about letting go of loss, and its very slightness may be construed as part of the act of letting go. If Underworld is concerned with the massiveness of loss, Falling Man is concerned with the loss of loss: where mourning is no longer mourning for a lost object but is rather mourning for the transience of grief itself.
III
In the spring of 2010, the critical journal Modern Fiction Studies issued a call for papers for a special issue devoted to examining the various ways in which 9/11 had been represented, mourned and remembered.Footnote 10 The editors invited contributors to explore what Linda S. Kauffman called “the post-9/11 condition.”Footnote 11 “To what extent,” they asked, “might all fiction written after 9/11 in some sense be ‘about’ 9/11?”Footnote 12 The problem is that a special issue of this kind inevitably lends credence to the idea that there is a “post-9/11 condition” – a cultural moment that can be plotted from one specific date – and therefore presupposes the existence of the phenomenon it sets out to investigate. It is possible to see in the call for papers of Modern Fiction Studies the spirit of American exceptionalism merge hazily, if unintentionally, with that regard for unexceptional exceptionalism, in other words for specificity, that is a necessary part of all historical inquiry.
In an article published one year earlier, Richard Gray argued, in an oddly complementary way, that American prose fiction since 9/11 had so far failed to register, at the most fundamental formal and imaginative level, the contemporary historical crisis produced by 9/11. Reflecting on novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), John Updike's Terrorist (2006) and DeLillo's Falling Man, Gray contended that because their formal means were essentially familiar, without any “alteration of imaginative structures,” they failed to produce that “enactment of difference” which is a necessary part of the aesthetic recognition of a historical crisis.Footnote 13 “New events generate new forms of consciousness,” argued Gray, “requiring new structures of ideology and the imagination to assimilate and express them … And it begs the question of just how new, or at least different, the structures of these books are. The answer is, for the most part, not at all.”Footnote 14 The gist of Gray's argument is that the “events” of 9/11 were exceptional but the fiction that they generated was not. By “new forms of consciousness” Gray seems to mean what Raymond Williams would have called a new “structure of feeling”; that is, a “post-9/11 condition.” But I would suggest, as against Gray's position, that the evidence of the literature should give us pause. The best of it, such as DeLillo's Falling Man, stares down and deconstructs the very claim to exceptionality (“new forms of consciousness”), for the structure of feeling it traces is that of grief, in all its elusive continuity.
Falling Man explores not only the nature of grief, but also the need or temptation those in mourning feel to see their loss as exceptional; in other words, the novel explores, as part of its reflection on grief, what makes people identify, or identify with, a “post-9/11 condition.” Falling Man is indeed a novel about mourning and cultural memory. But what the novel mourns is not the specific events of 9/11; rather it mourns the fallibility, the tendency to fall or fail, of the memory of those events. It also demonstrates, more broadly, that while attempts to memorialize 9/11 may begin as part of the work of mourning, they also express a cultural resistance to mourning, a narcissistic cultural melancholy, which the novel's exploration of the vicissitudes of memory beautifully unpicks. I want to suggest that in so far as coming to terms with one's grief involves recognizing the ordinariness of grief – in other words, acknowledging the common nature of the experience, its mortal everydayness – then the apparent insistence in public discourse on the political and historical uniqueness of 9/11 is in conflict with the economy of mourning – which compels us to recognize our part in the repetitively ordinary, to see even the most distressing feelings as recurrent rather than exceptional phenomena. One has, as it were, to mourn mourning, to say goodbye to grief, to be willing to let go not just of the recall of its intensity, but also of any illusory claim to the specialness of that intensity.
Falling Man deliberately foregrounds the fact that in their desire to commemorate or make sense of the events of 9/11, many writers must have felt that they were acting under a compulsion as “insistent” as the one that moves the victims of Alzheimer's disease in DeLillo's novel.Footnote 15 The narrator tells us that there was one subject almost all of them “wanted to write about … They wanted to write about the planes” (31); they want to add their ten cents’ worth, to the “homemade memorials … In memory of, in memory of” (89). Nevertheless, the wish to commemorate an event is not the same thing as insisting on the exceptional nature of that event. To feel, furthermore, that a particular date marks an epoch in one's emotional life or personal experience, to feel that we are part of a story that is shaped by that date, as is the case for Lianne and Keith, the two main characters in Falling Man, is not automatically to suggest that this emotional or experiential epoch marks a historical paradigm shift – the transition to a “post-9/11 condition.” The emotions that are at stake, feelings like attachment and loss, were always already at stake, and the language or discourse in which they are described is not noticeably different from the language DeLillo had engaged in earlier novels.
Gray writes that
Falling Man is beautifully structured, playing with images announced by the title that are no less resonant for being obvious. But the structure is too clearly foregrounded, the style excessively mannered, and the characters fall into postures of survival after 9/11 that are too familiar to invite much more than a gesture of recognition from the reader.Footnote 16
The dismissive reference to generic “postures of survival” slights the novel's nuanced exploration of degrees of survival, where emotion is always more or less than its “postures,” of how mourning is educed from melancholy and the self tumbles free, for a time, of the depressive position. Gray's reading overlooks something that seems to be a fundamental part of Falling Man, which is the way it distinguishes, structurally, poetically and psychologically, between male and female characters and their respective attitudes to loss. Whereas Underworld explores the experience of loss principally through its male characters, Falling Man approaches it mainly through female subjectivity. I take this to be a deliberately stylized gesture on DeLillo's part, which has its own political and historical resonance, rather than an exercise in sexual essentialism.
As Freud sought to demonstrate in “Mourning and Melancholia,” there comes a point when the grieving subject finally accepts the “verdict of reality that the object no longer exists,” abandons the consolations and illusions of loss, and starts to attach itself again to existing objects in the real world.Footnote 17 DeLillo's novel is poised exquisitely on the cusp of that moment, when the subject begins to say goodbye to grief. It deals, that is to say, with the apprehension of the loss of the feeling of loss. As a clinical psychologist remarks in Falling Man, “From this point on, you understand, it's all about loss. We're dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns” (Falling Man, 60). The concept of “diminishing returns” also applies to loss. The feeling of loss runs down and runs out. The statement virtually repeats Nick Shay's words from Underworld: “It's all about losing.” But as Nick knew very well, we like to hang on to our losses. Every loss begets several and we have a nostalgia for our own hurt. Fifty pages after the psychologist makes his diagnosis, Lianne's mother echoes his words: “It's all about mortality, isn't it?” (111). In other words, mortality is all about loss, and loss, we could say, is all about mortality. But as Freud pointed out, life itself is not all about mortality: it is also about survival, of the individual and the species, and so about attachment, love and creation in their many forms.Footnote 18
Falling Man confirms that one of things that seems to be happening when we try to consider the impact of 9/11 is to memorialize the events of that day even as their apparent specificity slips further and further away, leaving only some startling but familiar images. The acceptance of loss requires us to understand that what is true of one moment is also true of all, even the biggest. Near the end of the novel, in our last encounter with her, Lianne experiences, momentarily, a revelation of her own finite physicality: “It was a small moment, already passing, the kind of moment that is always only seconds from forgetting” (236). She is still in the process of learning that this applies to all moments – for this is a process one is always in, a lesson that, unless one is a Buddhist or a saint, is never learned.
In order to shed some light on the distinction between male and female subjectivity that is played out in the novel, I want to draw on an essay by Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” which pre-dates Black Sun, her study of melancholy and depression in literature, and her book on Melanie Klein.Footnote 19 Here Kristeva reflects on the relationships among sexual difference, subjectivity and terrorism, as she tries to mark out a place for a woman's “affective life as a woman” within the “socio-symbolic contract.”Footnote 20 The essay was originally published in 1979 and explicitly cites movements such as Baader–Meinhof and the Red Brigade, movements to which DeLillo also alludes in Falling Man.
Like DeLillo, but more systematically and less intuitively, Kristeva invites us to consider what is going on when we try to punctuate history, to divide it into periods. I want to suggest that the desire to believe that 9/11 was a punctual and originative historical moment is a characteristic part of the response to 9/11 – just as the belief in the specialness of our loss is a characteristic feature of bereavement in general. But this wish to feel that a given historical moment is punctual and originative is fraught with paradox. On the one hand, it reflects a wish to think in terms of what Kristeva calls linear time, i.e. to think historically, where time means “project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression and arrival.”Footnote 21 On the other hand, the urgency with which one tries to situate a given moment within the continuum while claiming that this moment has ruptured or broken the continuum, reflects a desire to step out of time and history altogether – into some apocalyptic transcendental time (what Kristeva calls “monumental” time). It is to lay hold of eternity. It is just this kind of exalted thinking which strengthens the resolve of the terrorists in DeLillo's novel. As the plane approaches its target, one of the hijackers, Hammad, tells himself, “There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come” (Falling Man, 239). This is contrasted with Lianne's “normal morphology” (236), as it is described just a few pages earlier, her normal mortality, her desperately tempered resistance to eternity: “God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That's why she was resisting now” (235).
For Kristeva, men's time has traditionally been linear, i.e. historical and political. Women's time, by contrast, has always been either monumental or cyclical. “Female subjectivity … gives itself up to [an] intuition” of “repetition,” “eternity,” or both.Footnote 22 Kristeva thinks of motherhood as being the prototypical instance of the repetitiveness of women's time, but another good example is the experience of grief. “These two types of temporality (cyclical and monumental),” Kristeva writes, “are traditionally linked to female subjectivity.”Footnote 23 From this traditional perspective, then, a person who emphasizes the cyclical or monumental over the historical and political, an artist, say, who emphasizes grief, is apt to be considered a “hysteric.”Footnote 24
Where art is on the side of mourning, we may think of it as an attempt to make good that hysteria – to allow hysteria to speak composedly, subtly. The performance artist known as the Falling Man in DeLillo's novel is a case in point, who in his dignified intensity says nothing, but only falls again and again. He is reminiscent of Kafka's Hungerkünstler, the hunger-artist, who, by playing out, performing, the death of the body, the way the body under duress can hang by a thread, seems to be attempting to take the subjectivity out of it – the pure pain of selfhood – and to throw it in the face of everyone else. But he is also trapped in the melancholy cycle of his grief and his failure to let go of it kills him in the end.Footnote 25
Thus the novel is about the need to forget and the dread or terror of forgetting. Grief is a struggle with forgetting, and DeLillo's narrative foregrounds old age, senile dementia and Alzheimer's disease as extreme examples of forgetting – forgetfulness taken to its merciless biological endpoint. We are told that Lianne's father took his own life rather than submit to dementia: “My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was” (130). Lianne is already “troubled by memory lapses” (187), of which she can be excruciatingly conscious (153) – or comically unconscious. “But remind me,” she tells her son, “Because I forget” (183). Her father's decision to choose suicide over forgetting has for her become emblematical. What she dreads is having to face the day when she will no longer know when or what 9/11 was – when she will no longer be able to name that day. In one mood she thinks she knows that this memory “is inescapably secure, the day that has marked her awareness of who she is and how she lives” (218). But this is wishful thinking – knowledge that, considering what we know about her, and about both her parents’ struggles with old age and senility, the narrative can hardly grant her. In another mood, and, significantly, the last glimpse we have of her, she is, as always, adjusting to forgetting (236).
Kauffman argues that Falling Man is preoccupied with “the repression of memory and the memory of repression,”Footnote 26 and that Alzheimer's functions in the novel as a “metaphor for the post-9/11 condition,”Footnote 27 whereas I am suggesting that Falling Man explores the inevitability of forgetting as a vital part of the recovery from trauma. On this reading, fear of Alzheimer's functions as a metaphor for the terror, the existential dread, of forgetfulness – including the reluctance to let go of the idea of a specifically “post-9/11 condition.”
What is true for Lianne is also true in different degrees for other characters in the novel, such as the children who manage the trauma of 9/11 by fantasizing that the World Trade Center is still standing, who claim to have secret knowledge of another impending attack, which really will bring the towers down; or Lianne's husband Keith, who takes up gambling again in order not to feel “safe in the world” (216) – because it is not safe to feel safe; or the Falling Man himself, with his compulsively repetitive performances. Like someone in the grip of trauma, the narrative finds emblems of 9/11 everywhere – in the emergency telephone number 911, in a still life by Giorgio Morandi, in the innumerable images of falling that are sprayed across the narrative, and in the sly way the novel ends where it began with the “shock and horror” of the event.Footnote 28
However, it is through the subjectivity of the female characters in Falling Man that DeLillo creates a picture of the work of living as intimately connected to the work of mourning. The grief Lianne feels – for her father, then her mother, her marriage, and 9/11 – is given additional substance, subjectively, psychologically, by the losses endured by other women in the novel. Unknown to Lianne, her husband Keith, who was in one of the towers when the planes struck, has a short affair with a woman called Florence, another survivor from the same tower. The end of the affair is related in oblique general terms:
Later she would say what someone always says.
“Do you have to leave?”
He would stand naked by the bed.
“I'll always have to leave.” (137)
Keith leaves, but Florence is left. Keith leaves because, as he says, he'll “always have to leave”; because he cannot stay still – for the same reason that he gambles and does not live with his wife, even after the two of them have got back together. The gambling is symbolic – avoiding loss by playing at loss; like the small child in chapter 2 of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), who, as Freud says, “plays ‘gone.’”Footnote 29 It is the male prerogative to leave, as it is the male prerogative to act. Falling Man underlines the point by having Lianne's mother's lover, Martin, leave her – just as her husband left her by committing suicide. Just like Keith, Martin leads a double life. It is suggested he has had links to revolutionary organizations in Europe, including “German terrorists of the early seventies” (147).Footnote 30 The Falling Man, it transpires, was also planning suicide. The novel's other main suicide is Hammad, the suicidal hijacker, of whom DeLillo gives us only a limited sketch. However, we are told that this man leaves behind a woman, and we are even told her name (Leyla): “He told her that he was going away for a time, absolutely to return. Soon she would begin to exist as an unreliable memory, then finally not at all” (83). Both these men, Hammad and the Falling Man, choose, like Lianne's father, to die by their own hand (218). We are invited to join the dots – not just between events and actions but also between psyches, dispositions. The characteristic masculine action in the novel is death-dealing,Footnote 31 but it is the female characters who are left to absorb the impact of these deaths, who have to live life after death. They have to mourn and they have to live.
I should add here that my reading of the character of Hammad differs from that of Kauffman, who argues that DeLillo transforms the “thumbnail sketches of the terrorists” from his essay “In the Ruins of the Future” into “three-dimensional characterizations in Falling Man, tracing their background, psychology and evolution.”Footnote 32 In fact DeLillo devotes less than eighteen pages out of approximately 243 to the characterization of the terrorists. Even more conspicuously, in a novel in which the dialogue of the American characters is typically presented in direct speech, nothing the terrorists are reported to have said is enclosed in quotation marks – this mark of individuation is simply not granted them. It seems to me that it is really through the correspondences with other male characters in the novel that DeLillo tries to approach, very tentatively, the lethal mindset of someone like Hammad.
Halfway through the novel, there is a significant intellectual juxtaposition. Lianne is reading Kierkegaard in her “dorm room,” among her untidy things (118). We are told that she liked to think of them as the “objective correlative of an overflowing mind” (ibid.). “Objective correlative” is a concept made famous by T. S. Eliot in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems.” There is no direct mention of Hamlet in the passage from Falling Man, but it does cite Hamlet's fellow Dane, Kierkegaard, the Hamlet of existentialist theology. According to Eliot, the only way for art to express an emotion is by taking “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” which will then become the “formula of that particular emotion.”Footnote 33 The objects or events must be such that they “immediately” evoke the emotion; they must be adequate to it, equal to it, correlative with it. The problem for Hamlet the man – and therefore the problem with Hamlet the play, thinks Eliot – is that his emotions are out of all proportion to “the facts as they appear.”Footnote 34 As compared with his dramatic situation, his emotion is excessiveFootnote 35 – it has not found its objective correlative.Footnote 36 From Eliot's point of view, the mere idea of an objective correlative for an overflowing mind is an oxymoron.
For Kierkegaard, however, contrary to Eliot, existence, properly apprehended, already is excessive. For the truly subjective thinker, the thinker who is willing to think the ethical dilemma of his or her own existence, to exist requires the recognition that existence has no object, no formula, no external situation or chain of events that can adequately express the dilemma of existence. “The difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing.”Footnote 37 Existence is by definition in excess of the facts – “infinitely interested.” It has no “objective correlative.” And the existing individual (the individual who recognizes what it means to exist, and who cannot stop thinking about it) experiences, or rather thinks, the “difficulty” of his or her existence, passionately;Footnote 38 it “constitutes his reality.”Footnote 39
The point seems central to DeLillo's novel. For what Falling Man is exploring is what happens when all memory of the set of objects or of the event which is the occasion of our loss has disappeared, leaving behind perhaps only a feeling of loss – or of the loss of loss. The novel simultaneously explores and resists the temptation to see 9/11 as raison d’être. It is perhaps the novel's finest achievement to trace the digressive ways whereby grief loses itself, “bit by bit,” as Freud said.Footnote 40 There is no objective correlative for 9/11, DeLillo suggested in his essay for Harper's, which only exposes the problem of whether there ever was an objective correlative for us – for such human beings as continue to exist. In existential Kierkegaardian terms, living is excessive by definition, is always already surviving, living on, outliving; mourning and moving on. The superfluity of existence and its infinite significance are one and the same.
IV
This idea of being “infinitely interested in existing” (Kierkegaard), something which the process of grieving brings into relief, provides the compelling central figure in The Body Artist, the short novel DeLillo published between Underworld and Falling Man, and I will conclude with some brief reflections on how it illuminates or corroborates what has been said so far about loss, mourning and survival.
The novel relates the traumatic grief of Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the title, in the weeks that follow her husband's suicide, as she shares her house with a ghostly stranger called Mr. Tuttle, a man who can barely speak, and who seems to embody both her trauma and its inexpressibility.Footnote 41 The narrative demonstrates that just as death means the destruction of the body, this business of living on, surviving, outliving, is not just a matter for the spirit, or the reflective existential mind; it is also a matter first and foremost for the body: “Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand.”Footnote 42 The body is the scene of grief no less than the soul: “she got out of the car once and nearly collapsed … a small helpless sinking toward the ground, a kind of forgetting how to stand” (32). The question of how to live, how to go on when we have lost someone we love, is posed first and foremost at the level of the body. As Laura Di Prete puts it, “the body knows about the truth of an experience long before the mind can process it.”Footnote 43 Grief is staged right there and must be mediated somatically: “She was working her body, crouched on the cold floor, smelling herself” (98). And this body meanwhile will make its own demands: one has to eat, wash, defecate. “There's nothing like a raging crap, she thought, to make mind and body one” (34). At one point she finds Mr. Tuttle in her car, “sitting in piss and shit” (68), recalling the “mess” we are told her husband left when he shot himself in his first wife's house (62). The time grief takes is time the body inhabits. “Time is the only narrative that matters,” Lauren thinks as she exercises: “It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it” (98–99). Time is stretched like a body. The reluctance to let go of grief, the need to stretch it out, is measured by the body: “How much time is a long time?” (53). And mourning is for Lauren a process of reembodiment: “fitting herself to a body in the process of becoming hers” (128).
In The Body Artist the exploration of grief is not organized around an exceptional historical event, but has its starting point instead in a man's suicide. We are not told about the precise moment when Lauren learns of his suicide – as if to say in effect that there can be no such precise moment. An event is a phenomenon that is dispersed in its aftermath, whose truth sinks in over many moments (time, as Lauren notes, “stretches events”). The novel screens the private physical reality of shock behind a newspaper obituary. Once again, therefore, as in Falling Man and Underworld, there is the sense that grief is always bigger than its occasion – it is always potentially there, waiting for an occasion.
We saw in Falling Man that death and suicide in particular become the prerogative of male characters, which opens up the possibility that these men represent a more advanced stage of the destructive melancholy that haunts the male losers of Underworld. It is the women in Falling Man who are left behind to grieve, an idea that is strikingly anticipated in The Body Artist (it is not only in their names that Lauren and Lianne resemble each other). “Did I ever leave?” asks Lauren's husband's first wife (62). Lauren was his third wife – in other words, he was a serial leaver, who has left behind a lot of physical, emotional and financial “mess.” After his death Lauren is reluctant to “leave” the house that they shared (50). Gradually she uses her art, for which her body is the primary material, to work through her grief. The recurrent references to “work” in relation to the body recall, or rather embody, Freud's concept of the “work of mourning.” Mr. Tuttle eventually disappears – is in effect disembodied.
The novel's portrait of the grieving female artist may also provide an insight into the principal female character of Underworld, the artist Klara Sax, who in a novel full of losers is a conspicuous exception. Klara abandons things or leaves them behind, she changes or reinvents them, but she is never represented as having lost them. Despite their frequency throughout the novel, the word loss and its variants are not used in connection with her – as if to say that she processes loss at an altogether different level from the characters around her, in a way that is not visible to the ordinary naked eye. No experience is lost on her. Nothing is wasted. Everything feeds her art. Indeed Klara works with waste, which is a kind of cousin of loss – things lost to the world. The implication is that when we make art we process loss; the work of art can do the work of mourning.
