Truth-telling Fiction in a Post-9/11 World: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine

Abstract

Although this book focuses on a new kind of truth-telling historical fiction that emerged in the 1990s, I have suggested throughout that the dynamic of amnesia and truth telling, which grew out of that decade’s “turn towards truth,” continues to be a vital strain of the current cultural climate. Like the fiction itself that evokes this dynamic, the cultural work of the novels must be understood in relation to so many recent events that manifest it: the 2006 Iran Holocaust denial conference and the international criticism of it; the disclosure of the Japanese army’s use of “comfort women” during World War II and the ensuing documentary histories and victim testimonies that belie Japan’s half-century of denial; the surge of interest in the historically neglected Bataan Death March and in the Pacific theater of World War II; newly formed truth commissions to redress histories of mass violence in a number of countries; and the paradigmatic shift in American studies to a transnational perspective of history and a broader collective sensibility that reflects this. Positioning truth-telling historical fiction within this rich matrix reveals the many fields in which a paradox of denial and truth telling plays out.