Memory Trauma History and Representation (Book Review Sample)

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Memory, trauma, history, and representation are terms that tend to be closely related to one another. Memory according to the English dictionary is something that one can recall. Trauma is a negative experience that brings about feelings of sadness, shock and fear. History is that whole of the period before the present and all activities that happened between then and now. Representation is that sign, symbol or artifact that symbolizes a certain event that occurred in this case. This terms tend to be related in that a historical event occurs, and it may or may not be traumatizing that calls for construction of a monument or an object that enables people to remember the event in time. This project major text will capture Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the artifact being the falling man using the nature of memory, trauma, history, and representation to compare the two.
Giving a brief plot of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Falling Man tends to concern itself with the survivor of the attacks in 9/11 and those impacts on his life after his experiences on that dreadful day. We find a thirty nine year old lawyer, Keith Neudecker, working in the World Trade Center who escaped injured slightly from the building and walking into an apartment he shared previously with his wife and son Lianne and Justin. Keith, after some time of recovery from the mental and physical trauma he experienced, tends to resume to his domestic usual with Lianne while approaching a romantic relationship towards Florence. She was another one of the survivors. Lianne tends to be frustrated by a neighbor who plays loud middle-eastern music. She also witnesses the disbanding of a writing group she had ran for and tends to spend quality time with her elderly knowledgeable mother and her boyfriend Nina and Martin respectively. Martin her boyfriend’s occupation was that of an art dealer and he was believed to have been in Kommune 1 Germany in the 1970s. As the novel continues, we view Keith renouncing his domestic life that he had resumed, and adopts touring the world as he played poker tournaments that were professional full-time and remembers his poker nights that were weekly with his co-workers. He also remembers one co-workers death he witnessed on the dreadful day. Lianne tends to see a performance artist throughout the book, labelled “Falling Man” in several areas of the city. Clad in business apparel, he tends to suspend himself upside down using a rope and harness posing like a man in the famed photograph of the similar name by Drew Richard. The novel tends to be thematically fixated on the symbolic trend of terrorism violence that tends to be presented via the mass media. Don DeLillo tends to examine the probability of reinventing people’s identity and also the likelihood of people to create their identities via group mentality (DeLLillo, 2007).
According to Adorno, in the Monuments and Holocaust Memory, in a Media Age, Remembrance tends to form peoples links to the past, and the means we recall describes us in the present. As individuals and societies, we need the past to construct and anchor peoples identities and to nurture a vision of the future. Trauma therapy tends to refer to that means of recovering memories from the past in order to reconstruct the reality that tends to be banished by tragic events in individual lives. Recalling tends to be seen as a way to reconstruct a lost world and a lost opinion of self. In a different disciplinary setting, but with the rise of tyranny in mind, there is a need to focus on the Importance of tradition and remembrance in the opinion of an individual’s identity, comprehended both as a feeling of belonging to a community and individual awareness of self. A person’s consciousness starts from the dialogue that we sustain with our past, and that places us in the present.
When we tend to be deprived of these points of reference, a crisis results. Don DeLillo's Falling Man tends to make a political statement in its negotiation of these two concepts: remembrance and storytelling. Furthermore, DeLillo's novel moves away from more classical conceptions of narrative in order to focus on a small group of characters whose struggles stand in for a joint condition. Falling Man tends not to represent joint paranoia but seeks to comprehend, through depictions of memory and grief work, the proceedings that occurred on September 11, 2001, thus changing them to mutual memories and commencing the healing process (Jones, 2007).
According to Caporale, DeLillo's novel is an unclear text, a replication in progress that proposes to the reader the insecurity, chaos and uncertainty of the Western societies in the wake of 9/11. Falling Man, therefore, does not aim to tell a story that tends to be centered on the spectacle of terror and terrorism, though retaining most of DeLillo's fictional themes and theoretical nodal points such as the analysis of postmodern society or his interest in the power of images, in language, and in cultural history. Rather, DeLillo's 9/11 novel probes how we react to terror and how we seek reasons in order to come to terms with a reality that is falling to pieces not only metaphorically but also physically.
This tends to be exemplified by the beginning of Falling Man and of Keith Neudecker's story. The text starts with a third-person narrator and with short\ and broken sentences in order to stress the sensation of chaos and loss of understanding (DeLLillo, 2007). In this apocalyptic context, storytelling and writing become both the means of a verbal reconstruction of tradition and the real and the point of contact between characters that people an apparently choral novel but who inhabit different existential spheres. In Falling Man, each of the main characters carries out a solitary negotiation with a reality that has been shattered by a barbaric act of seemingly nonsensical cruelty and the resulting feeling of defenselessness. In such a traumatic context, memory tends to be transformed into something real through the "narrative drive"
For instance, once a week, Lianne, Keith's wife, tended to meet a small group of people who tended to suffer from first symptoms of the disease known as Alzheimer's. Therapeutic session tended to focus on recalling their lives, most likely the last chance they will have to be able to connect their present with their past before both fade for good.
According to Kunst, Space and the collective memory, Religious groups may recall certain remembrances on viewing particular buildings, objects or locations. This should cause no amazement, for the basic separation between the sacred, and the profane made by such groups is realized materially in space. The believer entering a church, cemetery, or other consecration place knows he will recover a mental state he has experienced many times. Together with fellow believers he will re-establish, in addition to their visible community, a common thought and remembrance formed and maintained there through the ages. This assists us in understanding how the artifact the falling man reminds us of the terrorist attack 9/11.
DeLillo tends to offer the reenactment of traumatic effects of the proceedings in the minds of survivors and those traumatic costs borne of the event and its aftermath. We tend to understand that for the survivors to be able to overcome the trauma there is a need for them to integrate the traumatic memories in their current mental schemes and thus convert them to narrative memory. That is there is a need for them to be able to put what happened to them in words. For example, in the Falling Man, we identify various characters who are traumatized and as they try to convert their traumatic memories to narrative ones, and as they tend to struggle with the need to know and urge to know (Allue, 2012).
According to Kunst, Space and the collective memory, although one may think; otherwise, the reason members of a group remain united, even after scattering and finding nothing in their new physical surroundings to recall the home they left, tends to be that they think of the previous home and its blueprint. Even after the expelling of the nuns and priest of Port-Royal, nothing was really affected as long as the buildings of the abbey stood, and those who recalled them were not dead. Therefore, we comprehend why spatial images play so vital a role in the collective memory. DeLillo’s Falling Man represents how characters tend to struggle with memories of the happenings inside the towers.
According to Cumming, when the DeLillo’s novel Falling Man was published, various reviewers tended to note that his earlier books appeared to predate the events of 9/11. They also antedated the atmosphere of unreality and dread that followed. He seemed prophetic not only because of his prediction of the future but also because he tended to put focus on the history that seems to have disappeared from the American culture memory. That is assassinations and abductions by Marxists splinter groups, Irish Republican Army cops shooting, embassies attack by Baader-Meinhof gang, brigades and red armies, the gunned down tourists across Europe and in America, several liberation fronts bombing hotels and planes and terrorism in the 1970s. We see that DeLillo’s work tends to preserve the aura of that time, and thus seemed to foretell a later era of prevalent menace.
Even though being common, gun massacres and terrorism attacks tend to seem exceptional ...