<p>Since 9/11, numerous media have repeatedly referred to the attacks as a “major event.” Though what makes it seem “major” is the Hollywood-like spectacle of planes crashing into the twin towers and their subsequent collapse, Jacque Derrida pointed out that it was also ascribed to the English language itself as “an idiom.” If so, then how is the English language able to represent the unspeakable, the unrepresentable event, and establish what Don DeLillo calls “counter-narratives” in a world in which cinematic spectacle prevails? To address this question, this paper explores four works by American writers in regards to “Bodies,” “Language,” and “Time,” focusing on the fact that various art works employ the most haunting images of 9/11; that is, the people falling from the WTC.</p><p>In the “eerily prescient” work of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, narratives are conveyed to the audience not only through words but also by the presence of speaking bodies. Kushner’s bodies are staged as metaphors of national territories, which are already violated and abused by military force; the body politics employed in this play denotes that there are no distinct boundaries between private and public or local and global. Both the multi-lingual performances and Homebody’s peculiar use of language emphasize the hybridity of language and the impossibility of translation: by so doing, it is not what the play’s characters speak, but rather the speaking bodies themselves that are foregrounded as “counter-narrative” against terrorism.</p><p>On the other hand, a distinctive feature of post-9/11 novels is the effort their narratives make to engage with traumatic time in a particular fashion, and those works that use falling bodies as their vehicle make a call to involve reader’s experiences in order to open another space for commemoration. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, parallels his father’s experience of surviving the Holocaust to 9/11, and when Spiegelman performs in “Olympic dive as the last act,” he lives his life once again, vicariously. His inner sense of time moves forward discontinuously, just as the flow of time in a graphic novel is narrated by leaping from one frame to the next. In the last fifteen pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extraordinary Loud & Incredibly Close, in which the photographs of a falling man are inserted in reverse, as if he had flown upward until he returned to the interior of the building, traumatic still-time is rewound by the reader’s hand turning the pages of the book. Through literally handing the narrative to his readers, Foer’s technique invokes the materiality of books as well as of bodies. When the performance artist in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man dies from repeated performances, and the end of the novel returns to where it began in a loop, it can be read as the refusal of easy understanding and incorporation of Otherness; in addition, it implies that post-9/11 novels no longer narrate consistent, linear stories. Just as witnesses of traumatic events often believe that they have seen them without knowing what they have seen, DeLillo’s work suggests that post-9/11 novels can only narrate enormous fragments of people’s lived stories without knowing what they are. In these works, American writers are confronting and interrogating their own subject position, asking themselves for whom and for what they speak, in a way that has the potential to transform the entirety of American literature.</p>