earticle

영어

This paper examines Don DeLillo’s literary engagement with still life in his pieces on 9/11: “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (2001), “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), “Still Life” (2007), and Falling Man (2007). DeLillo’s flexible rendering of still life transforms its pictorial quality into an aesthetic strategy that interrupts the infinite proliferation of the 9/11 spectacle. As visual counter-narratives to the excesses of the image-event, instances of still life in these texts function as temporal and epistemological pauses in which damaged small things and marginal stories appear. Delillo’s pieces on 9/11 provide a nuanced critique of the obscene consumption of 9/11 as an image-event and of the myopic commitment to a single plot that both the terrorists and the Bush administration shared. However, his version of still life obscures the distinctive trauma of terrorism in which the brutal entanglements between organic and nonorganic bodies force us to rethink trauma as a way into the zone of the Other. In sum, DeLillo’s literary translation of still life succeeds in collecting anti-9/11 spectacle images at the risk of overlooking the epistemological and ontological reorientations that the trauma of terrorism enables.