26 - DeLillo’s Performances of Abjection

Summary

Drawing on Julia Kristeva's theorisation of abjection as the subjective experience of the porosity between self and other, and of what is cast out of the symbolic order, this chapter examines Don DeLillo's engagement with abject art in his later fiction, focusing primarily on his 2007 novel Falling Man. Although the novel has assumed canonical status as an exemplary ‘9/11 novel’, it is a novel of crisis and continuity, not a novel of exception. Engaging with broader questions of ontological existence, the limits of human consciousness, and enduring themes in DeLillo's pre- and post-9/11 work, Falling Man is a timeless counternarrative to tired trauma narratives of 9/11. Following a brief exploration of the recurring ruin and rubble in DeLillo's oeuvre, this chapter critiques the abject body art of the Falling Man's predecessor: The Body Artist's Lauren Hartke. It then turns to its primary concern, the ‘marginal story’ of Lianne's grief and experiential encounter with abject art in Falling Man. Following DeLillo in ‘thinking along the margins’ of abject bodies, the chapter also thinks along the margins of Zero K, drawing some points of connection and continuity between the novels. Despite stylistic differences, abject aesthetics form connective tissue across DeLillo's literary corpus, revealing the miracles of the marginal and the ‘awful openness’ of grieving bodies.

The Abject

In her seminal text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva defines the abject as ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ that ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’ and ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (4, 2). The abject confronts the individual with the insistent materiality of death rather than the knowledge and meaning of death, both of which can emerge from the symbolic order. She writes:

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.