Jump to: navigation, search

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2015) - Media Violence, Catholic Mystery, and Counter-Fundamentalism: A Post-9/11 Rhetoric of Flexibility in Don DeLillo's "Point Omega"

Details

Links

Abstract

This article considers Don DeLillo's Point Omega as a tacit response to 9/11 in which violence assumes an aura of Catholic mystery. In the novel, DeLillo screens violence from view to critique replayed, on-screen media violence and fanatical fundamentalist terrorism. He thus reinvigorates the novelist as a visionary rhetorical force that fosters contemplation via questions and advocates for compromise rather than extremism.

Article

Media Violence, Catholic Mystery, and Counter-Fundamentalism: A Post-9/11 Rhetoric of Flexibility in Don DeLillo's "Point Omega"

As works like Falling Man (2007) and "In the Ruins of the Future" (2001) suggest, Don DeLillo came to conceive of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 as transformative of American if not world history. As he remarked in an interview published on April 15, 2003, by the Los Angeles Times, terror "is now the world narrative, unquestionable. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything" ("Finding Reason"). Yet blunt, universally felt terrorism like that which occurred on 9/11 sustains an aura of mystery for DeLillo. Despite its visible and pervasive effects and its endless replay on television, it remains, according to DeLillo, "outside the absorption machinery, " perhaps along the lines of what Marc Redfield terms a rhetorically "virtual trauma" that trembles "on the edge of becoming present: one that is not fully or not properly 'actual'" ("Finding Reason"; Redfield 2). Deemed "a man of frightening perception" who, in many ways, anticipated the attacks via his fiction1 and deemed, too, "an all-American writer who sees and hears his country like no other, " DeLillo remains puzzled by terror and violent acts broadly construed — regardless of how deeply or how often he looks at them, regardless of how often the media replay them (Oates 340; "Don DeLillo: I'm Not Trying"). Violent acts, especially those that terrorists manifest, remain felt yet beyond the threshold of perception, seen yet unseen and perhaps un-seeable.

This essay considers the dissonance between violence and perception as DeLillo represents it in Point Omega (2010), a novel that tells two intertwined stories: one of filmmaker Jim Finley's interactions with second Iraq war strategist Richard Elster and the mysterious disappearance of Elster's daughter, Jessie, and the second of a nameless "man at the wall" of an art gallery who sees Finley, Elster, and perhaps Jessie in the gallery and who might be Jessie's killer (4). In the novel, which I read as a tacit response to 9/11, violence, like art, takes on an aura of mystery as Catholics might conceptualize it. As Amy Hungerford has argued, DeLillo uses the screens and barriers of the Latin mass that he knows well from his Catholic upbringing2 to mystify the language of his novels, 3 and I suggest that he also uses them and Catholic theology to represent violence as screened and thereby juxtaposed with screen-mediated violence that saturates the masses via banal and routine replay. DeLillo's unseen violence as provocative mystery builds on and perhaps attempts to transcend the work of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993), an art installation represented in Point Omega's frame tale. Whereas Gordon's piece slows down the endless replay of on-screen violence, DeLillo renders visible not real-time violence or violence in slow motion, but apparent inaction — "nothing happening, " to appropriate Jessie's words, violence that may or may not exist (Point Omega 47). Screening violence from plain sight and cultivating a sense of value in uncertainty allows DeLillo to dovetail Point Omega with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Man (1964), a theological text in which Teilhard addresses the omega point and imagines possibilities for communing developments in evolutionary theory with religious orthodoxy. Teilhard sees possibilities beyond or between extremes, and so, too, does DeLillo: he counters both the culture of mindless media replay in America and the narrow-minded, violent narrative that terrorists driven by fanatical fundamentalist faith propagate. DeLillo thus reinvigorates the novelist as a visionary rhetorical force that fosters continuous evolution of thought via questions in the twenty-first century.

On, around, and behind the Screen: Critiques of Media Violence in DeLillo's Fiction

Before the September 11 attacks to which I argue Point Omega tacitly responds, DeLillo consistently represents violence as a spectacle that opens itself to continued and often less than wholly productive rumination. As Guy Debord suggests, "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation, " and DeLillo manifests Debord's thesis in fiction that showcases the lived experience of violence as on screen and routine — the stuff of endless replay that pervades households via the TV news (12). InWhite Noise (1985), the Gladney family ritualistically watches the violence of "floo...

[ to view the rest of the article, please try one of the links above ]

Notes

  1. ↑ Consider, for instance, Tom Junod, who observes that DeLillo "has been writing the post-9/11 novel for the better part of four decades, and his pre-9/11 novel, the magnum-opusy Underworld, was prescient enough to put the looming towers on its cover, standing high and ready to fall" ("The Man Who Invented 9/11").
  2. ↑ DeLillo was raised in an Italian Roman Catholic household by parents who immigrated to New York City from Italy. He attended Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic boys' school in the Bronx, and he also attended Fordham University, a Jesuit institution. While at Fordham, he majored in communication arts and also studied theology.
  3. ↑ As Hungerford explains, "DeLillo [...] transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one [...] through the model of the Latin mass, " which historically has been "described by its opponents and its advocates in similar terms: both spoke of 'screens' and 'barriers' and lack of transparent meaning" (343, 357).
  4. ↑ As Jack first makes mention of his plan in White Noise,
    [h]ere is my plan. Drive past the scene several times, park some distance from the scene, go back on foot, locate Mr. Gray under his real name or an alias, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim's sticky hand, find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the full-length mirror, take the victim's supply of Dylar tablets, slip back to the car, proceed to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, get off at the old river road, park Stover's car in Old Man Treadwell's garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and fog. (Falling Man 304)
  5. ↑ As DeLillo puts it, "[e]very time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching" (Falling Man 134).
  6. ↑ As DeLillo explains, "I went back [to the Gordon installation at the Museum of Modern Art] four times, and by the third time I knew this was something I had to write about" (McGrath).
  7. ↑ As Laist suggests, "Eric's collapse and the collapse of the World Trade Center are presented as eerie analogues of one another, both indicating suicidal tendencies in the heart of homo technologicus" (258).
  8. ↑ For instance, as Elster "follow[s] him into the kitchen speaking about a problem with the stove, " he "look[s] out toward the chalk hill and frame[s] himself from that distance, clinically, man in landscape across the long day, barely seen" (Point Omega56). Similarly, Finley sees his experiences as existing in a movie when Jessie goes missing. As he puts it, "[t]he day before, with all the phone calls made and everyone alerted, I'd stood outside and seen a car on the horizon floating slowly into motion, rippled in dust and haze, as in a long shot in a film, a moment of slow expectation" (81).
  9. ↑ Elster calls the house in Anza-Borrego "a spiritual retreat, " and Finley portrays Elster as "silently divining" while there (Point Omega 23, 20).
  10. ↑ As Malise Ruthven explains in a discussion of traditional religious fundamentalism,
    [f]undamentalists everywhere tend towards a literalist interpretation of the texts they revere. A survey by the Gallup organization in 1980 found that 40% of the American public claimed to believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. Similarly, most believing Muslims, not just those described as Islamists or militants, are fundamentalist in the sense that they take the Koran to be the literal word of God, as dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the agency of the Angel Gabriel. (40)
  11. ↑ For a reading of the Internet's function in Underworld, see Liliana M. Naydan's "Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo'sUnderworld."
  12. ↑ As Ruthven explains, "[o]ne of the major cultural events of 20th-century America, the Monkey Trial precipitated what might be called the 'withdrawal phase' of American fundamentalism—a retreat into the enclaves of churches and private educational institutions, such as Bob Jones University in South Carolina" (15).
  13. ↑ As Finley explains, Elster
    told me that he had all-source clearance, or access to every sensitive sliver of military intelligence. I knew this wasn't true. It was in his voice and face, a bitter wishfulness, and I understood of course that he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here [...]. I was his confidant by default, the young man entrusted with the details of his makeshift reality. (50)
  14. ↑ Coach Creed observes that he has a picture of Teresa of Ávila, "a remarkable woman. A saint of the church" (End Zone 202).

Works Cited

  1. Abel, Marco. "Don DeLillo's 'In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 118.5 (2003): 1236–50.
  2. Allison, Rebecca. "One year on: 9/11 wicked but a work of art, says Damien Hirst." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2002: 4.
  3. Conte, Joseph M. "Don DeLillo's Falling Man and the Age of Terror." MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 557–83.
  4. Cowart, David. "The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo's Point Omega." Contemporary Literature 53.1 (2012): 31–50.
  5. Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.
  6. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994.
  7. DeLillo, Don. Americana. 1971. New York: Penguin, 1989.
  8. DeLillo, Don. "Baader-Meinhof." The Angel Esmerelda and Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011. 105–18.
  9. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2003.
  10. DeLillo, Don. "Don DeLillo: A Conversation with Thomas DePietro." Interview with Thomas DePietro. Barnes & Noble Review1 Feb. 2010. 21 June 2013 <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/don-delillo/>.
  11. DeLillo, Don. "Don DeLillo Deconstructed: In an In-Person Interview, Author Don DeLillo Talks about His Inspirations, His Writing Methods, and the Idea of Time and Extinction." Interview with Alexandra Alter. Wall Street Journal (Online) 29 Jan. 2010. 21 June 2013 <http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703906204575027094208914032>.
  12. DeLillo, Don. "Don DeLillo: 'I'm Not Trying to Manipulate Reality—This Is What I See and Hear.’" Interview with Robert McCrum. The Observer 7 Aug. 2010. 21 June 2013 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview>.
  13. DeLillo, Don. End Zone. 1972. New York: Penguin, 1986.
  14. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.
  15. DeLillo, Don. "Finding Reason in an Age of Terror: Author Don DeLillo Surveys a Landscape Forever Changed by Violence and Anxiety." Interview with David L. Ulin. Los Angeles Times 15 Apr. 2003: E1.
  16. DeLillo, Don. "In the Ruins of the Future." Harper's Dec. 2001: 33–40.
  17. DeLillo, Don. Libra. 1988. New York: Penguin, 1991.
  18. DeLillo, Don. Mao II. 1991. New York: Penguin, 1992.
  19. DeLillo, Don. "'Maybe I See Some Things More Clearly and Earlier than Others’: The American Author Don DeLillo on the Prophetic Power of his Novels, September 11, Friendship among Fellow Writers, and His New Novel Cosmopolis." Interview with Peter Henning. Trans. Julia Apitzsch. Don DeLillo's America. 20 Nov. 2003. 21 June 2013 <http://perival.com/delillo/interview_henning_2003.html>.
  20. DeLillo, Don. Point Omega: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2010.
  21. DeLillo, Don. "The Starvling." The Angel Esmerelda and Nine Stories. New York: Scribner, 2011. 183–211.
  22. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
  23. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. New York: Penguin, 1986.
  24. Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
  25. Gordon, Douglas. 24 Hour Psycho. 1993. Exhibited 2006, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  26. Green, Jeremy. "Disaster Footage: Spectacles of Violence in DeLillo's Fiction." MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999): 571–99.
  27. Green, Jeremy. "Last Days: Millennial Hysteria in Don DeLillo's Mao II." Essays and Studies 48 (1995): 129–48.
  28. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. The Lady Vanishes. Gainsborough, 1938.
  29. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. Paramount, 1960.
  30. Hungerford, Amy. "Don DeLillo's Latin Mass." Contemporary Literature 47.3 (2006): 343–80.
  31. Junod, Tom. "The Man Who Invented 9/11." Esquire 7 May 2007. 21 June 2013 <http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/delillo>.
  32. Knight, Peter. "Mao II and the New World Order." Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man. Ed. Stacey Olster and Sarah Graham. New York: Continuum, 2011. 34–48.
  33. Laist, Randy. "The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.3 (2010): 257–75.
  34. McClure, John. "DeLillo and Mystery." The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 166–78.
  35. McGrath, Charles. "Don DeLillo, a Writer by Accident Whose Course Is Deliberate." New York Times 3 Feb. 2010. 2 June 2013 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/books/04delillo.html?_r=0>.
  36. Micks, Marianne H. Loving the Questions: An Exploration of the Nicene Creed. Cambridge: Cowley, 1993.
  37. Morris, Errol, dir. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Sony Picture Classics, 2003.
  38. Naydan, Liliana M. "Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23.2 (2012): 179–201.
  39. Oates, Joyce Carol. "Don DeLillo's Americana (1971) Revisited." Uncensored: Views & (Re)views. New York: Ecco, 2005. 339–40.
  40. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
  41. Redfield, Marc. The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham UP, 2009.
  42. Ruthven, Malise. Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
  43. Serratelli, Bishop Arthur J. "The New Translations of the Suscipiat, Preface and Sanctus Invite us to Deeper Participation at Mass." Knights of Columbus 28 Oct. 2011. 21 June 2013 <http://www.kofc.org/en/columbia/detail/2011_11_roman_missal.html>.
  44. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
  45. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Trans. Norman Denny. New York: Image, 2004.
  46. Updike, John. "The Talk of the Town." New Yorker 24 Sept. 2001: 28.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Critique:_Studies_in_Contemporary_Fiction_(2015)_-_Media_Violence,_Catholic_Mystery,_and_Counter-Fundamentalism:_A_Post-9/11_Rhetoric_of_Flexibility_in_Don_DeLillo%27s_%22Point_Omega%22&oldid=184538’