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.

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.

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.

映画作家パトリシオ・グスマンは母国チリの記憶をテーマにこれまで数々の作品を発表してきた。グスマンの作品における記憶の表象を扱った先行研究の多くはピノチェト独裁時代の被害の記憶を扱う1990年以降の作品を対象にしている。そのため彼の初期代表作である『チリの闘い』は「記録」の側面が重視され、「記憶」の視点から検討されてこなかった。本論文は、人々の証言によって構成される「証言映画」として『チリの闘い』を捉えることで、この映画が映し出す特異な記憶の様態を明らかにするとともに、この作品から証言映画の系譜に新たな視点を導き出すことを目的とする。第1節では証言映画の系譜の整理として、「表象不可能」な被害の記憶について『ショア』が提起した1980年代以降の議論と、同時期にラテンアメリカで起こった「証言の文化」を結びつけ、その流れに1990年代以降のグスマンの作品を位置付ける。第2節では1960～1970年代のラテンアメリカ映画運動における証言映画の働きを分析し、1980年代以降の証言映画との差異と共通の問題点を明らかにする。両時期の証言映画がこれまで別々に論じられ、『チリの闘い』はそれらの時期のはざまに生まれた作品であることを示したうえで、第3節では『チリの闘い』の制作経緯や証言の構成を考察し、当時の闘争を物語る人々の証言が、グスマンの主観性と結びつきながら新たな協働の可能性へつながれていくことを明らかにする。