The essence of the word is relation, and that is why it is the key, the momentary incarnation of everything which is relative. Every word engenders a word which contradicts it, every word is a relation between negation and affirmation.
(Octavio Paz: ‘Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction’.)
Each and every word we utter is a singularity which absorbs the whole of our reality into itself. From each singularity emerge new universes of meaning which are in turn absorbed by new singularities; a multiverse of microverses.
The very title of Delillo’s crisp and shattering portrayal of humanity suspended above the abyss of our unknowing incarnates a concatenation of sometimes contradictory, sometimes coexisting visions of nothing less than the fate of the universe and our destiny within and, perhaps, beyond it.
Singularities at the beginning and the end of time are the stuff of much contemporary cosmology and theology. A singularity (or black hole) is the final state into which a dead star falls; its mass becomes so dense that nothing can escape, including light (which is why they cannot be seen). It would seem that the normal operations of space and time (insofar as they are understood) are suspended, and therefore what happens inside a black hole — assuming our categories of explanation to have any meaning in such an environment — can only be a matter of speculation. Some cosmologists suggest that black holes give birth to new universes parallel to ours; this universe, therefore, could be the child of a black hole arising in some other cosmos. Whatever the truth of this it seems that ‘our’ cosmos could itself end in a singularity — a cosmological Point Omega.
This brings us to Norman Bates. The main story in Point Omega is bracketed by scenes in which an unnamed man watches for hour after hour an art installation which consists of Psycho repeatedly screened and rescreened in slow motion. His aim seems — his motives are never entirely clear — to be to achieve a knowledge of the film so detailed and so deep that it enters into his consciousness and fuses with it. There is in this perhaps a parodic allusion to one of the theories about the end of the universe. In this version of the End, the universe is expanding but more and more slowly the older it gets. As time is also slowing down, the subjective experiences of any sentient beings left at that point appear to last for increasingly long periods until, as the cosmos grinds to a halt and begins to freeze, they seem to last for ever. Presumably, those experiences would be the stuff of nightmares, as is Psycho. Delillo based this part of the novel on the installation ‘24-Hour Psycho’ by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon in which a slow-motion version of the film played on a loop at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The ‘immortality’ achieved as the cosmos becomes an inert lump would, of course, be illusory, no more than a trick of the laws of time and space. Indeed, if the cosmos ends, whether in fire or ice, and there is nothing beyond it then everything we consider important will turn out not to matter at all, to signify nothing beyond itself, to be no more than a feather on the wind. The best we could say is that, on balance, it is better to have existed than not and that our unintended and intentionless universe has exhibited what Albert Camus’ narrator in The Outsider calls ‘benign indifference’. For the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in another title full of meaning, this belief in our ultimate insignificance gives rise to the playful yet profound notion of the unbearable lightness of being. Only if Nietszche were right and the life of the universe were on an endless loop, replaying itself and everything that had ever happened forever, the ultimate ’24-hour Psycho’, would the burden of responsibility be onerous. Of course, Psycho, being entertainment, signifies nothing beyond itself, it is what it is and no more; in that way it is like haiku.
“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
(Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
(Guy Debord: ‘Society of the Spectacle’)
What Psycho is is the representation of a fiction; an entirely imagined story; mental images transformed via celluloid into stored images in millions of (fading) memories. Is something like this true of all human activity? That Point Omega is about the idea that everything we create is, in the end, no more than representations of imagined realities with no connection to any meaning outside themselves is suggested by references to the films Russian Ark and The Pity of War as well as to Psycho and to haiku.
Both Russian Ark and a film not referred to by Delillo, Falling Down, deal with large themes; the images by which societies live and seek to justify themselves; the relationship between society and its past; the ways in which societies imagine the future; and the relationship between the individual and his society both as it is and as it imagines itself to be. Jim Finley, the filmmaker in Point Omega, explains that he wants to shoot a documentary film about Elster, one of the novel’s characters, a war strategy planner who worked on the invasion of Iraq, in a single, uninterrupted take, the method used in Russian Ark. Beyond that the two projects could not appear to be more different. The similarities are in their themes and these are mediated in part through implicit allusion to Falling Down which, like Point Omega, has a defence worker at its heart.
The film about Elster is to focus throughout only on him; there will be no ‘distracting’ shots of the actual conflict. This is a clear contrast with The Pity of War, documentary about Robert McNamara, the very archetype of the technocratic defence intellectual, who laid down US strategy in the opening years of the Vietnam War. The film consists of McNamara in old age talking about his involvement in the war interspersed with archive footage. A striking aspect of Pity of War is the contrast between the cool confidence of the younger McNamara as Secretary of Defence and the thoughtful, restrained air of tragedy (in the Aristotelian sense of the term) of his old age. At the end, the film focuses on McNamara’s journey to Vietnam and his meetings with officials of the victorious Communist government and on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, America’s casus belli.
The focus at this point is on trying to establish precisely what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. According to the Americans at the time there were two attacks by the North Vietnamese on US Navy ships. In fact, as the US Navy’s official histories accept, there was only one and the North Vietnamese came off worse by far. The second attack was a creation of confused intelligence and that old enemy the fog of war plus the widespread conviction that Communists were out to conquer the world and had a plan for doing so that involved picking off one country after another. The result was that Congress voted the President unlimited power to deploy US military forces in Vietnam as he saw fit. The rest we know.
Or we think we do. The difficulty involved in defining what we can be said to know is at the heart of Point Omega and is constantly hinted at. The anonymous spectator at ’24 Hour Psycho’ desperately tries to pin down the exact number of shower rings ripped from the rail as Janet Leigh collapses with multiple stab wounds. He cannot achieve certainty even on that simple point of observable detail. Anyway, it is not Janet Leigh who dies in terror, it is a body double, an actress who went on to star in soft porn films.
Like Elster, Robert McNamara believed that he could plan a war that could be conducted clinically, scientifically, with all eventualities allowed for and with the ratio of benefits to costs precisely calculated. In McNamara’s case the delusion of technocratic omniscience and omnipotence was fed by the so-called ‘science’ of systems analysis; contemporary readers will spot the similarities to Donald Rumsfeld’s faith in his ability to calibrate exactly the minimum level of force needed to overthrow Saddam and occupy Iraq. What is intriguing about ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ is that very little close analysis of what might happen after the war and what should be done by the occupying powers was carried out, and that little was ignored. There seems to have been an expectation that adoring Iraqis would cheer themselves hoarse as the Marines marched into Baghdad; perhaps such expectations were fed by newsreel footage of the liberation of Paris in 1944. Perhaps, too, Tony Blair hoped for a repeat of the scenes, doubtless skilfully orchestrated by the ‘freedom’ fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, in which he was mobbed by apparently ecstatic Kosovars as he graciously accepted their gratitude. It was certainly important in feeding his belief that he could do more than merely end the worst and most blatant manifestations of the world’s capacity for evil, he could inaugurate a new Earth, if not a new Heaven.
The stories we tell ourselves about the past often say far more about what we hope for in the future than about what actually happened in history. Of course, frequently, the past is simply ignored; witness the confection that was ‘Cool Britannia’. More seriously, there is no sign that the awkward realities of Mesopotamian/Iraqi history ever fouled the sterile air of Elster’s war planning laboratory.
‘”Everyone knows the future but no-one remembers the past.’”
This mordant observation on Russian history comes from the film Russian Ark which Delillo’s documentary-maker wants to imitate in his film about Elster. Like Point Omega (and, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, like all myths) ‘Russian Ark’ is a system of signs which is entangled in myriad ways with millions of other signs and systems throughout the human universe. The comment above encapsulates Russia’s experience under successive rulers — Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev — Tsars of one sort or another who sought to deny and obliterate Russian history and culture and recreate the country in someone else’s image. The borrowed visions are taken from Europe — its high culture, its Enlightenment and from Marxism, European imperialism’s half-denied, half-accepted offspring and would-be Nemesis.
Ironically, this meditation on Russia’s self-alienation is set in the Hermitage which was intended as a window through which Russians could gaze on the glories of the superior and more advanced civilisation to their west and Europeans could see how much the Tsars had succeeded in civilising their people. The Bolsheviks took over the idea, preserving St. Petersburg’s/Leningrad’s most famous museum and rebuilding other Imperial palaces destroyed during the Nazi siege. Arguably, this involved a double alienation since Bolshevism both denied the moral legitimacy of the cultures which had spawned the great cultural artefacts on display, and wanted to transcend them, creating, in the process, a society and form of human being in which the dialectic was ended, all contradictions resolved and good and evil, for all practical purposes, abolished. One character, acknowledging the nagging of the older Russian heritage and its public absence, says mournfully, “It’s like being in someone else’s house”. It is a comment that is also clearly meant to apply to what Russia has become since the fall of the Communist Party.
Milan Kundera compares the official ‘socialist realist’ art and literature of the USSR and other state socialist countries (Unbearable Lightness of Being is set in Czechoslovakia) to kitsch.
‘kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.’
The distinctively improbable artwork of the Jehovah’s Witnesses comes to mind. Stalinist hero-workers and cartoon paradise-dwellers deny a central reality; without conflict and contradiction at the deepest roots of our being we are unimaginable and so meaningful, let alone high, culture is impossible. In large part, high culture emerges when people grapple with the contradictions implicit in reconciling sublime visions of the future (which we need if life is to be worthwhile) with the facts of human nature and the inescapable reality that our inheritance, as far as we know it, must be acknowledged both for its evil and its goodness. Denial and ignorance are fatal to culture and, therefore, to society. As he reflects upon the lack of substance behind the shell of what Kundera calls ‘communist kitsch’ one of Russian Ark’s characters says of the authorities’ cultural policies, “They want acorns without oak trees”.
There are scenes in Russian Ark in which modern Russia is likened to a stage set. Does that describe the whole modern and postmodern world?
Perhaps Kundera is not entirely right about kitsch. It seems he might have underestimated our postmodern society’s ability to repackage anything at all into a momentarily entertaining spectacle (the state socialist societies were, in many senses, the quintessence of a certain kind of post-Enlightenment modernity with their technocratic, pseudo-scientific belief in progress allied to a quasi-religious metanarrative). American artist Paul McCarthy created an installation consisting of giant inflatable dog excrement which has appeared in serious museums and galleries around Europe and which much resembles a bouncy apparatus for children. Like much of contemporary art the message, both literal and figurative, would seem to be that there is nothing so bad (or, by implication, so good) that it matters in any way except as a means of making money — the main function of the art industry. Taking the shit out of shit; the ultimate kitsch. McCarthy’s ‘work’ and that of his fellow con-artists (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al) is, of course, a monument to the absence of our own oak trees.
In a sense Delillo balances Kundera’s reflections on life under ‘existing socialism’ by chronicling the results of the spiritual and cultural self-emptying and self-denial (in the worst sense) of the contemporary Western, consumerist, ‘liberal’ world especially America. In Delillo’s America anomie and alienation rule as they do in Michel Houllebecq’s Europe (in his novel The Possibility of an Island Houllebecq relentlessly traces the collapse of an ancient, unifying civilisation to its logical conclusion). As in Houllebecq’s fictions many of Delillo’s characters are often socially isolated and sometimes quite sociopathic in their behaviour. In Point Omega the reader senses this in the anonymous Psycho addict and in the strangely distant, sterile relationships (the documentary does not materialise) between the three main characters in the middle section. The aridity of their lives is reflected in the desert landscape in which Elster goes to live after leaving defence planning. In their evocation of lives lived in the midst of a form of modernity which guts societies of cultural depth and which denies all possibilities of transcendence Delillo and Houllebecq are in a line of descent which takes in such writers as diverse as Beckett and Eliot.
The question inevitably arises as to whether such societies are worth killing and dying for. This touches Elster, of course, and implicates all of us in the post 9/11 world. What are we defending and is it worth it? Is the way we live something of such moral worth that it should be actively promoted to others, even imposed by force? In the film Falling Down a divorced, unemployed defence worker with the moniker D-FENS and obviously consumed by deep anger from the opening moment of the story onwards abandons his car in the middle of a vast gridlock and embarks on a journey across town that becomes a quest to find the heart of America. He is trying to reach his daughter’s birthday party; the break-up of his marriage mirrors the undermining of that pillar of the American Dream, the Family. Other pillars — the melting pot for all cultures; the freedom to roam brought by the car; the right to bear arms with its echoes of the frontier pioneers; freedom of expression; and sturdy individualism — also look decidedly unsteady by the end of the film. The prelapsarian dream of America, the shining city on a hill, has given way to the world of the Fall, the world of nihilistic liberal postmodernity. To volunteer to unleash death in defence of such a world is to assume the heaviest moral responsibility of all.
Yet Elster does not seem concerned with such preoccupations. Instead, he philosophises about the purity of the thought involved in planning a project such as Iraq and how it seemed to represent the extent to which people are now able to escape the all too grubby and tedious realms of mere necessity. Indeed, he has concluded that human consciousness has evolved as far as it can. Entangled in what Iris Murdoch called the net of language and of abstraction, and sensing that there is no metaphysical meaning discoverable within or beyond this world, we can go no further. He seeks, he says, to achieve the state of being of a stone. It is the logical culmination of a life lived in a cloud of abstractions, policy analysis, computer models; where what matters is what works. He seems to have no roots in, or any regard for, the everyday world, the world of human sensation, the only exception being — possibly — his daughter Jessie. This is, he says, our evolutionary destiny. Elster seeks an ontological reversal, an obliteration of the self not in the Buddhist sense of joyful release into Nirvana but in the sense of a radical denial of the continuing worth and point of being sentient, human and responsible (“We’re all played out”). It is the Point Omega of metaphysical nihilism.
Significantly, he lapses into near-total silence after the disappearance of his daughter and lingers in the story as little more than an increasingly diminished physical presence; he seems to be shrinking into self-willed non-sentience and non-existence. To make the link to Jessie’s vanishing still more eerie, Finley is represented at one point as being haunted by hints of an idea that perhaps she has turned herself into one of the stones of the desert in which he is searching for her (a hint too of an allusion to the literary genre of magical realism?). For religious readers, at least, there is an implied contrast with the role the desert plays as a site for divine revelation which is the supreme way to the heightening of human consciousness and its purification in the fires of God (Moses, made to confront his misunderstandings of the nature of God’s love; Jesus, fighting off the temptations of Elster’s world; and, for Muslims, Muhammed).
In Elster’s ruminations on the pointlessness of sentience and Jessie’s possibly self-willed disappearance (it’s never clear: she might have been murdered, perhaps stabbed) there is an echo of representations of hell. In Dante’s Inferno the damned suffer the torments they have inflicted on others or endure physical suffering analogous to the spiritual harm they have done themselves and others. In his Theology of Auschwitz Ulrich Simon, one of the first to grapple with the implications of the Holocaust for Christian faith, suggested that, through their undeviating pursuit of ways of inflicting mass death, the Nazi leaders had willed their own annihilation in the hereafter. The point of such suffering is to bring home the nature of sin to the sinner. Sartre, the would-be prophet of atheist existentialism, suggested that hell arises when people turn themselves into frozen representations of the false, fixed images which they have created for themselves and tried to impose on others (the famous example being semite and antisemite) in order to avoid facing up to the need to make authentic commitments based on free choices and the challenge of living with the radical freedom of others. One way or another there is no escaping the responsibility for the consequences for ourselves and others of what we have chosen.
Is Elster, in fact, attempting to avoid facing up in full to the specific human consequences of what he has been involved in? Is he guilty of Sartrean ‘bad faith’? The war planned by Elster and made possible by people like D-FENS is, according to Elster, meant to be a haiku war — over in three lines and conducted according to strict rules and with even stricter economy of means. Haiku, of course, is a poetic form much loved by Buddhists and the point of it is to bring home the transience of things and the idea that nothing exists as a means for us to accomplish our purposes. Excessive attachment, especially to our self-images; desire, such as the yearning for significance; and illusion, for example, that we are in charge of events; are all targets of Buddhist teaching. Given that the planning of the Iraq War and, in the minds of many, the whole idea of the invasion were the products of all these distortions of the mind, comparing it to haiku is horribly ironic.
No wonder that the full horror of what happened is only hinted at; no more fleshed out in Elster’s conversation than it is intended to be in Finley’s film. The terror of Norman Bates’ carefully stalked victim, on the other hand, is placed on full display over and over again, and she’s not real!
This counterpoints the vision of the omega point propounded by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to which Delillo’s title is a reference. The end of time is the beginning of truth. All will be known and all will be well. Ultimate meaning (and this is a recurring theme in much theistic thought) is signposted in the deep structures of the cosmos (Christian philosopher Keith Ward points, for example, to the beauty and precision of the mathematical laws underpinning material reality) and so our capacity for abstract thought does not trap us in a metaphysical and linguistic cul de sac, as Elster (Delillo too?) supposes: it is one route to transcendence, knowledge of God and a concomitant transformation of our understanding of the nature and purposes of the cosmos.
De Chardin was a Christian priest and theologian who is best known for his book ‘The Phenomenon of Man’. His theology is one of many responses by Christian and other theistic thinkers to the challenges to belief posed by science especially evolutionary theory and theories about the origin and likely end of the universe. He sees evolution in hopeful terms not least because, by engendering intelligent consciousness, it shows the means by which this broken creation can be transformed.
“whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world…. The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind…will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us…. All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us…. Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future.”
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: ‘The Phenomenon of Man’, emphases in the original)
Curiously, the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins has also written of a sense in which humans have broken free of ‘blind’ evolutionary forces through the development of conscience and consciousness although he is unclear as to the mechanism that makes this possible or even that helps it make sense. Both he and de Chardin end up stressing that consciousness necessarily implies choice and the exercise of will and, therefore, the burden of responsibility. For de Chardin, hope lies in the extent to which humans conform themselves to the person of Christ and in the belief that, as we evolve and our understanding of the universe grows, the nature of God will be gradually disclosed to us. The end-point, the omega point, is the full revelation of the mystery of God to his creation and its transfiguration as God’s grace fills the cosmos; everything is swept up into the Godhead. The power of the good we have done will be multiplied beyond our imagining; our failures and the evil we have caused will be redeemed, forgiven and rendered powerless. All illusions will be exposed and destroyed; at the same time our need for comforting, ego-boosting or escapist images will also end. There will be no alienated non-relationships. It is a process in which we will joyfully participate. De Chardin’s eschatology is a modern take on the words ascribed to Jesus in the Book of Revelation: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’. One can see from where Karl Marx derived his ideas for the communist paradise.
Delillo seems to have arrived at a point where words cannot describe the dilemma he sees as affecting contemporary humanity. Our postmodern condition seems to have cut the ground of certainty from under the feet of all metanarratives especially the ones, atheist or religious, which promise meaning and Paradise yet the hunger for significance and transcendence remains. He evokes (for example, in ‘Americana’) the aridity of much of our disenchanted modern life and implies that our civilisation seems to have emptied itself of everything except its capacity for, on the one hand, the creation of vapid celebrity spectacle and sensation and, on the other, the multiplication of systems of abstract concepts and plans which have no references and no purposes beyond themselves. Counterposed to this, and acknowledged by Delillo, is the older tradition within our culture which has belief in transcendent meaning at its heart. Our understanding of the universe can be interpreted as pointing in both directions at once, as evidence for belief in a divine order and for belief in ultimate purposelessness. Whatever the hard facts and ruthless logic might say our nature yearns for order, beauty and meaning. We think in abstractions yet we are at the mercy of our physical nature; a point emphasised by Delillo in his descriptions of people many of which come close to portraying human bodies in mechanical or chemical terms as if to emphasise our origins in inanimate matter.
Delillo exemplifies these bifurcations in our existence in the character of Ilgauskas in the short story ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’. He says he believes that there is no order or truth outside the realm of logic yet reads the novels of the great Russian moralist and mystic voraciously and continuously. The mystery of Ilgauskas’ identity and motives is not fully solved; his personality, like those of many characters in Delillo’s later fiction, is opaque and understood only in fragments. Ilgauskas’ students speculate that the often seemingly eccentric logician’s behaviour is “a neurological condition…a matter of neurochemistry”. At another point the narrator describes the teacher’s eyes as “swimming with neurochemical life”.
Delillo has brought us to the boundaries of language. Science is not (yet?) adequate to the task of describing the state of things before the Big Bang or what might happen at the end; it cannot (yet?) find the means to account for or describe our consciousness and self-consciousness. Our metaphysical horizons are likewise hazy. Consequently, both our ancient cultures and our glittering postmodern society of the spectacle seem more a source of confusion than clarity, both, perhaps, composed of nothing more than elaborate illusions. Beyond the horizons is silence; within, we are left with what Eliot called ‘these fragments’ shoring up the ruins…
Brilliant! I haven’t read an article for a long time that made me think so much about so many different things: literature, history, philosophy and religion. These may be only ‘fragments’, but they’re brought together in a marvelous whole.