Sherry Chandler

From Tom Junod’s The Man Who Invented 9/11, a review of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man originally from Esquire, currently online at Powell’s:

Indeed, Falling Man, as both a post-9/11 novel and a novel by Don DeLillo, offers the best test-case yet for the idea that when the planes hit and the buildings went down we entered the “age of nonfiction,” when journalism, even journalism as modest in means as one of those Portraits of Grief [in the New York Times), is able to grasp what’s happened — and, more to the point, what’s happening — to us more than fiction can, even fiction by our most accomplished and ambitious writers.

I was struck by this statement in light of the conversation we’ve been having about the novel’s ascendency in literature today.

Is it possible that what the people need after an event like the attacks of September 11 is not a novelistic examination but a poetic one?

Or must we state, after Theodor Adorno, that any literature after 9/11 is barbaric?

“Poetry should be at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television.”

—Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard, 1992)

By which Bernstein was not saying that poetry should compete to be as entertaining as “American Idol.” To use “entertaining” and “American Idol” in the same sentence galls me, but there will always be an audience for schmaltz.

And there will always be an audience that will call schmaltz poetry.

But Bernstein was speaking of the skewed “reality” that television conveys to us, to the extent that

our images of each other, and of other cultures, seem to go from ignorance to sinsterly deluded fabrication, almost without any middle ground. Poetry can, even if it often doesn’t, throw a wedge into this engineered process of social derealization: find a middle ground of care in particulars, in the truth of details… But to achieve this end, poets would have to be as alert to the presents of their cultures as the designers of TV ads; which means a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats…

To this end, said Bernstein in 1992, we must invent new tools and forms for poetry, not as “progress” but as a reflection of changing reality.

Much has changed since 1992 but much has remained the same. As for the relationship between reality and television, I refer you to our (relatively) recent decision to invade Iraq. The internet has risen. Has it actually changed anything?

I don’t know.