• 5 The whole of chapter 3 of Mao II is important in this regard. After the 9/11 attacks, DeLillo rephr (...)

There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists […] Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (DeLillo 1991, 41, my emphasis)5

4Alluding to the “War on terror” and often indulging in speculation, Point Omega does not contradict this stance. This short novel, DeLillo’s fifteenth, opens and ends with sections about a man who visits and revisits Gordon’s work at the MoMA where it was installed in the summer of 2006. Respectively entitled “Anonymity” and “Anonymity 2,” these sections offer the man’s comments as well as ekphrastic descriptions of the slow-motion images, including Hitchcock’s famous shower scene, or detective Arbogast’s fall down the stairs:

The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. [...] it was not like anything. Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck. [...] The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. (PO 5)

6The intriguing interweaving of description and introspection allows the narrator to record an adventure of the mind and convey the visitor’s contradictions, his intensity and self-awareness. Furthermore, his musing about forgetting and remembering also problematizes the quotational intersemiotic system: “He wanted to forget the original movie or at least limit the memory to a distant reference, unintrusive” (PO 11), while repetition is both suggested and performed: “he could not recall on which day he’d watched a particular scene or how many times he’d watched certain scenes.” (PO 101) A textual challenge reduplicates the visual one, calling for the reader’s participation and memory (of the film and of the installation), and producing a complex experience of time in spite of an apparently simple organization.

A Deceptive Simplicity

7Both simple and complex, the structure of the novel has been compared to that of haiku poems, supporting the illusion of self-contained meaning – as one character calls for a “haiku war, a war in three lines.” (PO 29) Thus lines one and three (on September 3 and September 4) focus on the man at the MoMA, and invite us to observe variations and differences. On the last day, he is still fascinated but he also grows impatient and “thinks ahead,” “jumping scenes, speeding through scenes mentally, visually, with closing time not far off."”(PO 101) Moreover, the novel’s opening section is a silent one, mimicking Gordon’s strategy, as we only share the viewer’s mental process in a third-person narrative; on the contrary, the closing section, “Anonymity 2,” includes bits of dialogue: in this striking narrative something unexpected happens and the man is able to share his impressions with a young woman whom he plans to see again. In-between, in line two of the haiku, the main “action” (taking place later) revolves around Richard Elster, a retired “defence intellectual,” formerly involved in the Iraq war, and Jim Finley, a film-maker who is going to devote a documentary to his testimony. The men’s retreating to the Californian desert, where they are joined by Jessica, Elster’s daughter, leads to a series of reflections on nature and culture, war ideology and geological time. Then Jessica disappears, never to be seen again, an event which brings about a radical recontextualization.

8Simplicity seems to prevail in the four chapters of this main narrative that evince a fragmented structure, and read like a series of short film sequences, the opposite of Jim Finley’s project of a one-take film, shot in a loft in Brooklyn, “Just a man and a wall.” He describes that film in the present tense: “The man stands there and relates the complete experience, everything that comes to mind, personalities, theories, details, feelings. You’re the man.” (PO 21) Jim is the author of an experimental film based on archives and featuring only Jerry Lewis, and he seems obsessed by his medium. We thus learn that, when going to the movies, he used to sit through all the credits (PO 63-64) and he remembers the case of a major Hollywood production whose credits rolled for fifteen minutes: “It was […] a spectacle of excess nearly equal to the movie itself, but I didn’t want it to end. It was part of the experience, everything mattered.” (PO 64) In that respect he proves as patient and committed a spectator as the museum visitor.

9Critic Leigh Anne Vrabel praises “the novel’s film-related framing device, which wraps around the main action like a blanket and unifies the whole with a painful, poignant grace.” (Vrabel) It is also worth noting the persistance of the metapictorial motif that provides the novel’s continuity. Thus, Jim and Jessie talk about “old movies […] where a man lights a woman’s cigarette” (PO 46) and the dialogues between Jim and Richard Elster also include learned references to cinema d’auteur, in keeping with DeLillo’s acknowledging the influence of European cinema of the 1960s on his writing as well as his particular interest in Godard, Bergman and Antonioni. (see Bou and Thoret 95) Indeed, the characters discuss Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (PO 22) and Jim later compares his representation of Elster to "a soul in distress, as in Dreyer or Bergman, a flawed character in a chamber drama." (PO 99)

10Not only is the diegetic structure simple, but syntax is pared down in the extreme, as is often the case in DeLillo’s recent novels. The narrator resorts to short sentences that often morph into nominal clauses, and relies on the impact of terse equative structures such as these: “Film is the barricade,” “Every lost moment is the life,” “On film the face is the soul.” (PO 45, 63 & 99) The following passage shows his use of deictics and existential surveys to record Jim’s perception of the situation:

This was desert, out beyond cities and scattered towns. He [Elster] was here to eat, sleep and sweat, here to do nothing, sit and think. There was the house and then nothing but distances, not vistas or sweeping sightlines but distances. He was here he said to stop talking. (PO 18)

11The character briefly focuses on spatial distances, “nothing but distances,” but on the screen of our consciousness the text mostly investigates our relation to time and change, a strategy which is worth examining.

Of Time and the Novel – or, Nothing Happens?

12In Point Omega, the old scholar eloquently dwells on the different perceptions of time, contrasting what he usually experiences in the cities and what he feels in the desert:

“Day turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror. It’s different here, time is enormous, that’s what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us.”

[...] “Doesn’t happen here, the minute-to-minute reckoning, the thing I feel in cities.” [...] time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. (PO 44-45)

13Elster seems to take up Henri Bergson’s distinction between two conceptions of time, i.e. chronological time and time as duration. While the philosopher rejects clock-time, he elaborates on time that endures, time that flows. For Bergson, pure duration “excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal externality and extension.” (Bergson 12) If to exist is to endure, DeLillo’s reader, like his characters, is made to feel how time stretches when almost nothing happens, and how it becomes more compact in periods of crisis.

14It could be argued that, if Gordon explores effects of duration by stretching the time of the screening, DeLillo experiments with chronology and fragmentation, shifting back and forth in time. Yet this spare enigmatic novel also plays with deceleration, emulating Gordon, or conversely with acceleration, owing to variations and repetitions. Admittedly, duration and narrative pace are more difficult to measure than narrative order, as Gérard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan have acknowledged, yet the latter ventures a definition:

• 7 See Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit”, in Figures III, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Ficti (...)

The effect of acceleration is produced by devoting a short segment of the text to a long period of the story […]. The effect of deceleration is produced by the opposite procedure, namely devoting a long segment of the text to a short period of the story. The maximum speed is ellipsis (omission), where zero textual space corresponds to some story duration. […] On the other hand, the minimum speed is manifested as a descriptive pause, where some segment of the text corresponds to zero story duration. (Rimmon-Kenan 52-53)7

18Appearance and disappearance might not even be very distinct phenomena, and the words might not even be adequate, as Jessie is often referred to in terms of a disembodied presence. As a child, “her body was not there until she touched it [...] she was imaginary to herself.” (PO 71) Jim later responds to this emptiness at the center of the crisis: “I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air.” (PO 83) Verbs seem to vanish in this second sentence, as the ellipsis enhances the character’s powerlessness. Abstraction, almost like chemical sublimation, is emphasized at the beginning of the same chapter, leading to intellectual aporia:

Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for, two full days, no word, no sign. Had she strayed past the edge of conjecture or were we willing to imagine what had happened? (PO 81)

19Even if, for Elster, the desert is “clairvoyant” (PO 87), no clue is actually provided in spite of the focalizer’s effort to come to terms with the brutal fact of disappearance (“two full days, no word, no sign”) and to transform it into a more acceptable mental itinerary. Nothing is found except a knife in a deep ravine, with no trace of blood – unlike the knife used by Norman Bates in Psycho. The man Jessie “saw” in New York according to her mother may or may not be involved, may or may not be a stalker, and the reader is left with conjectures. No wonder the text has been called “hauntingly elliptical.” (Kirkus Reviews)

20According to Jessica Elster, “we need time to lose interest in things” (PO 107), something this short novel does not really grant us. Both DeLillo’s reader and Gordon’s viewer are confronted with the need to change perspectives and adapt to the redefinition of events. Problematizing the notion of what “happens,” the two works question the way meaning is constructed with repeated motifs, reverberating and recontextualizing effects.

21Significantly, whatever action is left in the novel revolves around contemplation and loss, experiencing duration and waiting. Thus, the man at the MoMA realizes “he ha[s] been waiting for a woman to arrive, a woman alone, someone he might talk to.” (PO 14) Later, in “Anonymity 2,” he is waiting for her to ask predictable questions, then waiting for a particular scene in the film. In the desert section, Jessie, who does volunteer work with elderly people, mentions that she does not mind sitting in waiting rooms with them. (PO 40) After her disappearance, Jessie’s mother remembers repeatedly waiting on the phone with a silent caller, “We are playing like it’s a stupid game. I wait, he says nothing. He waits, I say nothing. Full minute” (PO 85); as to the narrator, he focuses on the waiting men, “every passing minute a function of our waiting.” (PO 88)

22How does one share such states of consciousness? Foregrounding waiting and watching, the text dramatizes the gaze. While Psycho, itself based on a novel by Robert Bloch, is often considered as a film about watching and voyeurism, Gordon’s work offers an exhausting visual experience to its standing audience, and DeLillo’s text conspicuously plays with embedded gazes. At one point his focalizer responds both to the presence of two other visitors in the gallery and to the images on the screen:

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress.
Nobody was watching him. (PO 8)

23Remarkably, this dynamic is taken up in the main plot where Jim, a film-maker, also watches Jessica in the bathroom and in her bed, and, in one occurrence, belatedly realizes that she silently watches him too. (see PO 55, 60 and 73-74) Yet, in the end, no corpse is found, no love scene is to be watched. Sexual relations are mentioned but only ambiguously imagined. Like Norman Bates spying upon Marion Crane, Jim Finley sometimes acts like a voyeur, and the text perversely lingers on erotic images that are not even presented as fantasy:

The bathroom door was open, midday, and Jessie was in there, barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and briefs, head over the basin, washing her face. I paused at the door. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her to see me there. I didn’t imagine walking in and standing behind her and leaning into her, didn’t see this clearly, my hands slipping under the T-shirt, my knees moving her legs apart so I could press more tightly, fit myself up and in, but it was there in some tenuous stroke of the moment, the idea of it, and when I moved away from the door I made no effort to leave quietly. (PO 55)

24“I didn’t imagine,” “I didn’t see this clearly” – the paragraph teases us, conjuring up images and simultaneously dismissing them. For Jim Finley, the "idea" replaces action, but for the reader the verbal evocation is enough to create a virtual image. It is worth pointing out that the last section of the novel provides an echo to this passage when the anonymous focalizer considers pinning the female visitor to the wall. But, for him, what is at stake is not initiating sexual intercourse but watching the video together, that is preventing the woman from leaving. The film’s slow-motion seems to require immobility:

He imagined turning and pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless, the film is still running, the woman pinned, also motionless, watching the film over his shoulder. (PO 112)

25Neither of these fantasies is acted out, but the system of echoes emphasizes the need for slow reading as a correlate to the slow-watching. Admittedly, “It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at” (PO 13), but reading Point Omega is also a time-consuming task, all the more so as the text often erases the boundary between embedded fictions (a fact that culminates in the last pages with the references to “his own mother” and “Mother,” taken up by a feminine pronoun [PO 115-116]) and between fiction and theory.

Theory Becomes the Story

26As is often the case in DeLillo’s novels, we are confronted to philosophical dialogues and made to consider intellectual affiliations. If Gordon’s appropriation expresses his affiliation to Hitchcock’s film and his interest in Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinema, DeLillo’s book functions like a dialogue with Gordon and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, among others.

27Indeed, the book often sounds like a philosophical meditation, conveying its characters’ attempt to reach truths and definitions. This has partly to do with the insistant references to French Jesuit thinker and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and his “omega point. A leap out of our biology.” (PO 52) In chapter 2, Elster faithfully presents Teilhard’s theory of evolution (PO 51-53), explaining that he introduced the motif of “introversion,” after the expansion of matter, and the possible transformation of mind and soul. He sums up: “He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare.” (PO 51) This reflection is taken up in chapter 3, in terms of internal transcendence (PO 72). Admittedly, the impact of the theory is eventually challenged by the intensity of Elster’s grief and reduced to “so much dead echo now” (PO 98), yet its seductive power lingers, in keeping with the temptation of the sublime and the limits of mental exploration conveyed in extremely condensed prose. DeLillo himself refers to it in an interview, stating that “the ‘Omega point’ of the title [is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable.” (DeLillo in Alter)

28This paroxysm or sublime moment may even be what the anonymous viewer is striving for in the museum gallery: “thinking into the film, into himself. Or was the film thinking into him, spilling through him like some kind of runaway brain fluid?” (PO 109) The choice of the preposition points to a process of assimilation and projection, erasing the difference between the self and the other, and between time schemes as, earlier, the man wonders: “How long would he have to stand here, how many weeks or months, before the film’s time scheme absorbed his own, or had this already begun to happen?” (PO 6)

29Instead of narration, one could argue that many passages of this text belong to the genre of the theoretical essay or art criticism, with characters explicitly addressing aesthetic and epistemological issues and discussing cinema, perception and time. To some extent, like Deleuze in his books on cinema, DeLillo shows that the boundaries between disciplines are not relevant. Thus, the museum visitor shares his understanding of the necessity of black-and-white for “film as an idea, film in the mind” (PO 10), and it seems that all the protagonists have seen Gordon’s installation and discuss one another’s responses. In the prologue, the focalizer registers the brief presence of two men in the gallery whom he identifies as film scholars (PO 7-8) and indeed, in chapter 2, Jim tells Jessie that he took Elster to see 24 Hour Psycho, “a conceptual art piece.” Jessie then quotes her father’s comments, which incited her to go the next day, and then expresses her own views:

“He told me it was like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years.”

“We were there ten minutes.”

“He said it was like the contraction of the universe”

“[...] I thought I might want to see it. The whole point of nothing happening,” she said. “The point of waiting just to be waiting. [...] Because even when something happens, you’re waiting for it to happen.” (PO 47)

30The network of echoes keeps expanding as the same chapter ends with a flashback, in which Jim remembers Elster’s resistance, which may resemble ours: “Something was being subverted here, his traditional language of response. Stillborn images, collapsing time, an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection.” (PO 61)

31This strategy might lead us towards an intellectual dead-end: are we facing the failure of metalanguage? Is abstraction a trap for ambitious readers or is there a way out? For the enthusiastic viewer of 24 Hour Psycho in DeLillo’s novel, “real time is meaningless. The phrase is meaningless. There’s no such thing.” (PO 115) Instead, he praises the pace of the video, but also indirectly draws our attention to stylistic rhythm, as exemplified in this long sentence near the end of the prologue:

It felt real, the pace was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real. (PO 14)

32It is worth observing how the sentence carefully expands from its simple initial clause, thanks to the accumulation of juxtaposed elements modified by adverbs, while various effects of phonetic proximity (pace, paradoxically; bodies, barely; moving, musically; drastically, drawn) reinforce the semantic repetition. In that respect, the music of form itself may be more “real” than the truth the man aims to capture.

33As we gradually come to understand, the emphasis on abstraction and theory may be misleading. Indeed, the text sometimes allows its characters to express theoretical notions the better to debunk them. Thus, the beginning of chapter 1 seems to take up the thread of abstract meditation on life and language, with views coined in a gnomic present and belatedly attributed to Elster. However, such certainties are soon destabilized by Jim who mentions that he “almost believed [Elster] when he said such things.” (17, my emphasis) Additionally, the fact that the old scholar was employed by the government to “conceptualize” the war sheds a dubious light on his intellectual production. Even the “point omega” motif loses its appeal after Jessica’s disappearance. Thus, critic Dan Fesperman praises DeLillo’s rendering of micro-moments of the inner life and his “laying bare the vanity of intellectual abstraction.” (Fesperman) Therefore, when the film scholars quickly leave the gallery, the anonymous viewer resents this betrayal and ascribes it to their limitations, though he also doubts the validity of his own conclusions:

They had to think in words. This was their problem. The action moved too slowly to accommodate their vocabulary of film. He didn’t know if this made the slightest sense. They could not feel the heartbeat of images projected at this speed. Their vocabulary of film, he thought, could not be adapted to curtain rods and curtain rings and eyelets. (PO 10)

34We might consider that DeLillo, like Gordon, both frames and deterritorializes academic discourse. The metafictional gesture challenges our own critical vocabulary, but does not seem to invalidate the philosophical reflection on cinema and images.

Perception, Relations, Bodies

35In his books on cinema inspired by Bergson’s philosophy, Gilles Deleuze shows how cinema enables us to think about time and movement. When considering films, he distinguishes between various types of images, perception, affection and action images, and he defines Alfred Hitchcock’s innovation in that context. According to him:

Hitchcock introduces the mental image into the cinema. That is, he makes relation itself the object of an image, which is not merely added to perception, action and affection images, but frames and transforms them. With Hitchcock, a new kind of ‘figures’ appear which are figures of thoughts. (Deleuze 203)

36As Deleuze explains, the fact of implicating the spectators in the film and creating characters who can be assimilated to spectators led to a crisis of the action-image (Deleuze 205). Thus, if Hitchcock’s cinema does not quite correspond to the time-image, it paved the way for it with its “logic of relations.” It could be argued that Gordon, by slowing down the film and making movement a rediscovered object, transforms the action-image into a kind of time-image. Indeed, for Deleuze, “the time-image does not imply the absence of movement (even though it often includes its increasing scarcity), but it implies the reversal of subordination; it is no longer time which is subordinate to movement, it is movement which subordinates itself to time.” (Deleuze 271) Gordon does seem to make the “aberrant” movement derive from time, and not the opposite.

37In that network of relations, one may wonder about the status of reflexivity. In Point Omega, the complex intersemiotic dialogue with Hitchcock and Gordon allows DeLillo to put perception under scrutiny, in terms of space and time.

39In Gordon’s work, physical interaction is redefined and the slowed-down murder scene becomes abstract (“Could they be called scenes, becalmed as they were, the raw makings of a gesture, the long arc of hand to face?” 102). Thus, by contrast we may be intrigued by the ambiguous, though topical, reference to torture in DeLillo’s novel. We learn in chapter 1 that Elster, the war theorist, once wrote a strange essay on “Renditions,” concentrating on the word itself and its various meanings, including “interpretation, translation, performance.” (PO 34) We may wonder whether Elster’s dissecting of the word is very different from Psycho in slow-motion, since murder is disconnected from its reality by clinical and abstract analysis (including the euphemistic reference to “enhanced interrogation techniques” [PO 33]). A disapproving Jim Finley sums up: “Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French, and torture by proxy” (PO 33), and, when quoting the essay, he focuses on the image of actors and the performance of an age-old drama:

Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory, [Elster] wrote, actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues, he wrote, is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours. (PO 34)

40When repeatedly attributing this awkward description to Elster, the narrator seems to reassert his own distance. However, the emphatic generalization and aesthetic detachment do not seem to make the impersonal scene less unbearable, or the rhetoric less bombastic. What kind of complicity does the very act of quotation involve? Through the image of an anonymous show and potentially interchangeable roles (actors naked/other actors), this novel of ideas broaches the ethical question of institutionalized violence, but avoids didacticism. Still, there are bodies over there.

42More surprizingly, the physical presence of the body is reasserted in the main narrative through very prosaic details, raising the question of abjection and the repressed. As the two men drive away from the desert, leaving Jessie behind, Elster almost suffocates and finally coughs up green mucus. The old man comments on the word phlegm – “one of the ancient and medieval humors” (PO 97-98) – , but the narrator zooms in on the ejected matter with incongruous insistance, reinscribing the body in non-aesthicized terms while introducing one of the rare references to color in this muted landscape: “he looked at it wobbling there and so did I, briefly, a thick stringy pulsing thing, pearly green. There was no place to put it.” (PO 97) In a sense, by showing Elster’s fascination and Jim’s need to conceal this obscene physical ex-pression, the text achieves the leap back into biology and makes fun of voyeurism.

43Ultimately, both Gordon’s and DeLillo’s works invite us to reconsider perception and performance, since, in the intersemiotic work, the reading/viewing event itself can be defined as a phenomenological experience. As critic Liliane Louvel puts it, “The intermedial transaction is an artistic negotiation which works on the oscillating mode, when image bargains its inscription with/in the text and demands transposition.” (Louvel) According to her, the word/image relationship provokes a phenomenon of “double exposure” that eventually gives rise to the “pictorial third.” Admittedly, Louvel does not specifically deal with the moving image, but the pictorial third is relevant here as a phenomenological effect, which the tension between deceleration and acceleration amplifies. It is a virtual image engineered by the text, but an image re-invented by the reader.

44While playing with slowness, both DeLillo’s and Gordon’s works foreground the mystery of the aesthetic experience, which the anonymous man puts in a nutshell: “He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him.” (PO 11) The end of the novel seems to celebrate the triumph of the slow iterative over the singulative in subtly evocative lines, opening onto the beauty of impalpable, decontextualized visions:

Sometimes he sits by her bed and says something and then looks at her and waits for an answer.

Sometimes he just looks at her.

• 13 I am well aware of the fact that both Michael Wood and David Cowart read the reference to birds her (...)

Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams. (PO 117)13