From the Uncanny to the Sublime: 9/11 and Don DeLillo's Falling Man.

This paper examines Don DeLillo's now-cult 9/11 novel, Falling Man. It provides a framework for reading the novel, arguing that to simply treat it as a literary expression of trauma is inadequate, given the layers that DeLillo gives his narratives. Building on a variety of theoretical concepts, specifically Freud and later psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists such as Nicholas Royle, on the uncanny, and Christine Battersby, Kimberley Segall, and others on the sublime, the paper argues that DeLillo's central trope of dematerialization recalls the uncanny and in fact treats the events of 9/11 as uncanny, with its ghostly doublings and the central image of fading and transience. Having established the uncanny's dematerialization as a synecdoche for the events of 9/11, DeLillo, the paper argues in its second part, suggests a traumatic sublime. The traumatic sublime emerges in the novel from the condition of uncanny perception (of 9/11) through the presence of two components: repetition and incorporation of the foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]