52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
14. Point omega.
The Art Installation, that hard-to-define blend of mixed-media, space and event, can be an attention hog. The strangeness, the size, the ill-defined requirements of the viewer are all in play, bringing you to the table and then daring you to figure out what it is, exactly, that you’re eating. The viewer’s mind often slides over the thing and the concept at the same time, desperate for purchase on the smooth, indifferent surface, theorizing, guessing and reguessing at the point. Or, the Point, as it were.
DeLillo frames Point Omega (2010, NY: Scribner) with an Installation, 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon, installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006. The piece plays Hitchcock’s famous film, slowed down to a running time of 24 hours, so that each frame hangs for a (relative) eternity. Attending this installation in marathon bouts, day after day, is an unnamed narrator. He is both obsessed with the work and stuck in a feedback loop of his thoughts:
“The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning escaped him. He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him… He began to think of one thing’s relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real… Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not.” (pp. 11, 13)
Two visitors to the installation go on to star in the middle third of the novel: Jim Finley, a would-be documentary filmmaker and Richard Elster, an aging academic and consultant to the Pentagon during the invasion of Iraq, and the would-be subject of Finley’s film. Finley follows Elster out to the desert, and spends ages with him attempting to win his consent to star in his film, a talking-head documentary, “just a man and a wall,” recording Elster’s thoughts about his role in the war. Later, Elster’s daughter Jessie joins them, and then disappears, and… that’s it.
Finley and Elster drink, stare. Elster speaks occasionally, theorizing:
“‘Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point,’ he said. ‘Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.’” (p. 72)
Slowly, slowly, certain disparate strands of the very slight narrative begin to cohere and certain meanings become explicit — the connections between the framing device and the central story come into focus at just the right pace, for instance. But even as this happens, another intention also surfaces: DeLillo is concerned with our relentless drive to make meaning out of nothing at all. The intellectual conceits of the novel, the big ideas of its characters, are fatuous, vacant. The characters work and work over the slightest, the most intellectually vague and intractably theoretical raw materials, to construct some kind of… something, and imbue it with value. Finley’s intended film, for example, rests on the flimsiest of conceits, but he pursues it with almost fanatical faith in its importance. I wonder if DeLillo isn’t having a joke at our expense. Reviewers have been lamenting his decline into insubstantiality for years now, expecting less and less from his newer work. Maybe he’s tired of being an idea man.
The novel ends revisiting Jessie and the visitor to the Installation, who stays to the bitter end of the film — at least, as much of the film as can be screened before the Museum closes for the night. No more meaning can be wrung from the viewing than that, if there was any meaning there to begin with.
