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The worlding of the American novel

The first sentence of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) describes lower Manhattan in the chaotic minutes after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But it could also be read as a description of Falling Man itself, and perhaps also of the contemporary American novel in general. So read, the sentence would suggest that the American novel has recently become more worldly, whether because of 9/11 or in response to larger causes that 9/11 stands in for. This proposition is gently self-congratulatory, hence open to doubt. But there are also reasons for taking it seriously. The street is what most novels take for their subject most of the time. It is by watching society at street level, so to speak, that the novel reader’s sense of identity and relationship has mainly been formed. Most novels do not train our eyes to look very high or very low, or for that matter very far away; they do not encourage us to look at superstructures, or infrastructures, or the structuring force of the world capitalist system. There are notable exceptions – some of them discussed in Cecelia Tichi’s chapter in this volume – but as a rule, worldliness is not natural to the novel. This does not immediately change after 9/11. Like the protagonist in a suddenly darkened street that has been struck from above and from far away, the post-9/11 novel is first of all disoriented. If we can say that, like the street, the novel takes on the attributes of a world, the first meaning of this statement would have to be (this is how I understand Heidegger’s sense of worlding) that the event has created its own unique local surround, a restricted time/space that replaces and cancels out any abstract planetary coordinates. In this sense the worlding of the novel would leave it less worldly rather than more.