New Voice

 ”Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson 

There is a great deal to go on in Don DeLillo’s taut, contemplative new novel (or novella) Point Omega, only some of which I will comment on here.  I have no wish to review the book, or summarise its contents.  In the opening pages the author, always an accommodating if often misjudged, guide, teaches us how the book should be read, and how much can be gleaned from its apparently slim leavings.  A lone figure in the cool darkness of a gallery space is focusing on the art installation 24-Hour-Psycho: “It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception.  He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required.  The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.  The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded” (p5).  His stillness is contrasted with the other visitors “wandering … in a daze” (p3). 

In other words, take it slow.  And if we fall in with the deliberate, halting rhythms of these finely tuned sentences, there is no other way to proceed.  Details may emerge that we would otherwise miss.  The world, with its “shower of innumerable atoms” (to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase) will no longer pass us by, at least in part, and for a while.  We, like Whitman’s poet, become passers-by, our eyeballs peeled in Emerson’s great image.  America’s striving for transcendence is all over this book.  Yet, now it is not the continuing birth of a nation that is under consideration, but its “dwindling” (p35). 

Although the object of contemplation is a visual artwork it takes a writer’s sensibility, and verbal dexterity, to extrapolate so stirringly.  When DeLillo’s figure, (and this is contrary to his own expressed mistrust or lack of faith in words), sees Anthony Perkins’ eyes “in slow transit across his bony sockets” (p7), his experience, and our own as readers, is so vividly acute because he has the words to describe what is before him.  In the final part of the book, Norman Bates is succinctly captured in two perfect words: “scary bland” (p101, and p115).  Exactly. 

The figure worries that he might be “seeing too much” but soon accepts that “it was impossible to see too much.  The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw” (p5).  It is not the artist’s intention that is vital to the artwork but the work itself and its reception.  As with the world, the work is made and remade anew by each individual.  And to extend what Maurice Blanchot said of the literary text, this gives rise to the “wonder of its constant genesis”.  

There is, however, a warning within these pages.  What happens when the petulant man of words sides with the petulant men of action?  He implicates himself in their misdeeds, excuses their abuses, and sanctions the violence perpetrated now in his name.  We all need to appropriate the world, to make it our own, but this need can, to employ the cliché, get out of hand, as it did for the Bush administration. They felt entitled, as Paul Wolfowitz said, to make their own reality.  

Elster’s (DeLillo’s neo-con “tribal elder” in this novel) reference to “the reality we were trying to create” (p28) clearly echoes that statement.  We can see this tendency in his refusal, or inability to listen to or take heed of others, except insofar as they are mirrors in which he can see himself affirmed.  His “teeming ego forgets to attend to such details” (p25).  Like a toddler, everything depends “on the play of his mood, in his good time” (p25).  He is delighted at the idea that his daughter would mouth his every word: “When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying.  She’d look very closely.  I’d speak and she’d look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable.  Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine.”  This showed that she was “[s}omeone who truly listens” (p48).  In fact, she served as a sort of Lacanian mirror-stage mother confirming his existence, just as Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates does for the figure in the gallery: “Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor’s eyes? Or did the actor’s eyes seem to be searching him out?” (p7). 
 
Elster admits they went too far, but insists on the propriety of the project: “But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation.  Lying is necessary.  The state has to lie.  There is no lie in war that can’t be defended.  We went beyond this.  We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability.  These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional” (p28). 

We tell ourselves the story of the world: “To Elster sunset was a human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder” (p18).  Not content to create a workable reality for himself, he has sought to remake the world or part of it.  “We can’t let others shape our world, our minds”, (p30) Elster says.  But he wants to shape the minds of others, and their world.  DeLillo’s novel offers a counterpoint to this desire.  It does not seek to control our response; it has no designs on us, yet compels quiet, considered attention.  It is not trying to rule the world, or part of the world, or even the solitary reader.  DeLillo suggests “new ways of thinking and seeing” (p29) without the intention to coerce.  He allows room for the reader, guides and leads, but never over-explains.  He gives just enough for the imagination to go on. 

Those reviewers who claim that DeLillo has said the same things before and said them better neglect the concise recontextualisation of previously drawn upon elements.  Among many echoes of earlier work, Elster’s thoughts on war recall End Zone’s war game: “Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies” (Point Omega p27).  “Their war is abstract.  They think they’re sending an army into a place on the map.”  Which is precisely what Gary Harkness and “the major” do in the 1972 comic masterpiece – send armies to places on a map, imagining a Cold War come to the boil.  

But the fear and paranoia has moved from inside the mind of a young football player, and is now being played out “on the ground”, as the saying goes, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  DeLillo’s work traces these movements, the evolutions or revolutions of contemporary America, what is lost and what remains, whilst hinting at how one may attempt to counteract the ensuing confusion.  By taking your time, by remaining open to language in all its nuanced subtleties, and by resisting the urge to impose the products of your solitary ruminations on all and sundry.