Review: Point Omega

Point Omega by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I like to say of DeLillo’s Mao II that it’s the greatest novel written about the terrorist events of September 11 – yet he wrote it nine years before those events.

As I come back to Point Omega for at least the third time (yes, I’m teaching it, but I haven’t taught it in almost five years) I’m struck by the degree to which this foreshadows the ontological crisis of the Trump years.

Put more slowly, I see part of our shared cultural experience in the last three to four years as a crisis of ontology – of the ways in which we come to understand what we recognize as the truth. Whether for cynical or sincere reasons, many of the thinkers (I suppose I use the term broadly) behind the Trumpist view of the world have long challenged what they saw as the bias of the media, academia, and corporate consensus. Terms like “left-wing media” and “lamestream media” were outgrowths of the petri dish of Fox News pundits, Breitbart, and all the other dark places that have emerged uncomfortably into the light.

The cumulative point of all that was a concerted effort to make Americans doubt our “collective senses,” to doubt what we learned from the news, from our education, and at times from our firsthand experience. (The notorious episode around the crowd size at the inauguration was a telling case: with poor Sean Spicer having to defend what seems Trump’s wished-for-truth against that which our cameras showed as truth.) “Fake news” began as a moderate talking point; it referred to reports about events that we knew hadn’t happened, like Pizzagate. Within weeks, Trump had commandeered the term to refer to any news story whose content he didn’t like.

Those are just examples, but over time they have created a strange – for lack of a better word – ontological experience. Even for those of us who still “know” we know what we know, it’s unsettling to find that so many of our fellow citizens apprehend the world in a way we know to be false. Even if we hold true to what we know to be true, it’s a wearing experience. We have our umbrellas out to block the rain, but we see people everywhere pretending they’re dry. In such a moment, it’s hard not to peer around the edge of the umbrella – at least once or twice – to make sure of the precipitation we know is there. To bring it back, it’s hard not to wonder if maybe there is something wrong with the photos of the inauguration that simply don’t show what the President insists so persistently says was there.

In any case, if you read Point Omega carefully, it raises some of those same concerns. Our central characters are Elster – a professor of linguistics who, during the Iraq War, accepted an invitation to help narrate the war to a skeptical public – and Jim, a would-be filmmaker who wants to do a documentary on Elster.

Coming from different perspectives, both men are caught in the web of representation, of art. Jim dreams of a kind of film that will reveal the truth of the war, but he can’t escape his experience of film. He’s ultimately a voyeur, someone who can’t move from what he sees into the world beyond it.

Elster, on the other hand, refuses to apologize for his role in, effectively, lying to the American public about the purpose of the war, but he has developed a philosophy to move forward. He’s thought about the generally optimistic philosophy of the Jesuit Teilard de Charin, who postulates that all creation is evolving toward a point of collective self-understanding. He sees humanity as gradually arriving at a point where we can reflect to God the greatness of all creation. He imagines that are closing in on what he calls an “omega point.”

Elster, understanding that, wants nothing to do with it. He has taken from his experience of the war the sense that we are all at ontological odds with each other. He doesn’t apologize for his role because he sees that we in the West must set the terms of our understanding of the world because, if we don’t, our enemies will do it in our place. He wants, in other words, to push toward the opposite of the omega point, to push toward the titular Point Omega, as a time when we will shed consciousness and return to a pure reality outside art and representation, when we will become again as unaware of the larger universe as stones.

Just as Jim can’t escape the hold him has over him to do what he wants as an artist, Elster can’t entirely live out the philosophical point omega of his thinking. He likes his comforts and the company of others too much – which is why he has invited Jim to stay with him for an indeterminate time. He espouses a deep and lonely cynicism, but he loves his daughter and can’t imagine life without her.

Meanwhile, Jessie, the daughter, arrives to unsettle both men. While both aspire to an experience of the real unmediated by art and fail, Jessie has a powerful and primitive capacity for experience. In one telling scene, she goes to New York City for a gallery trip and then skips the galleries, choosing instead to wander the streets of the neighborhood.

Jessie is, in other words, someone capable of knowing the real in ways neither of the men is.

There is a foreboding dark side to all that, though. The novel is framed by a pair of scenes set in an art gallery showing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at one-twelfth speed. Those scenes are narrated by a voyeur who sits and watches, one who finds himself slowly merging with the consciousness of the murderous Norman Bates. He’s a man who seems even more deeply stuck in a world of representations – in an ontology that grows from art rather than the real – than Elster or Jim.

[SPOILER:] Late in the novella, Jessie disappears. The closest thing we find to a clue is a knife, one that in subtle and haunting ways, evokes the experience of the slow-motion Psycho that each of our four characters have watched. In the final scene, we get a handful of additional clues linking our unnamed narrator to a worrisome boyfriend who is the only suspect in what may or may not be Jessie’s murder. (Those clues include that the otherwise anonymous voyeur and the boyfriend are both incapable of speech unless they have rehearsed it as script; that the voyeur does pursue a young woman at the screening who seems very much to be Jessie; and that the voyeur concludes by describing his sense of inhaling the impulses of Norman Bates.)

There are many ways to read that twist, but I’m inclined to see it as a dark and depressing coda: even for someone like Jessie, a generally free spirit, it is impossible to escape the world as it comes to us through art and representation. Maybe de Chardin is onto something with the notion that we grow ever more capable of producing a collective reflection of the whole of creation, but, as individuals, we seem as trapped in the experience of how-we-know-what-we-know as ever. Our modernizing world is not giving us greater clarity and access to the real. It is, instead, subordinating us ever more to the narratives that the powerful tell in order to make their preferences into the truth.

All of that leads me to think of this as a powerful and all-too-relevant novel for the right now. I will acknowledge that it echoes some of what I think are the weaknesses of DeLillo’s mid-career work (most notably White Noise). This is a so much a novel of ideas that its human-ness wears away.

If you want great DeLillo, look at Mao II or at his masterpiece, Underworld. (Or, read the stand-alone start of Underworld, “Pafko at the Wall.”) For that matter, I think that the more recent Zero K is probably better than this as well.

Still, even B+/A- DeLillo is powerful literature, and this one – eight years before our collective ontological upheaval – offers some tools for understanding our contemporary experience in ways that (as I see it) writers like Jonathan Lethem and Patti Smith (and I am looking for more) are just beginning to do.


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