Terminal Lucidity: Ways of Seeing and Thinking About Don DeLillo’s Late Style
An image. I am nineteen and finishing Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld on Alden Library’s main floor and can barely see the last paragraphs through tears. I had read most of the book that August between dishwashing shifts and in between Kool Blues smoked on the roof and while on my back in bed, the novel’s tome-y heft strengthening my forearms while hollowing me out.
Another image. Eight years before this fit of discordant weeping I am sitting in a living room in a little chair and watching Family Guy. I had spent that day like every other summer day, trawling IMDB forums and /tv/ and then, in the early evening, when I knew the other kids on the street were inside, I biked to the library to take out five, six DVDs at a time. And after this episode of Family Guy I would watch those DVDs through the night and into the morning to remain conversant with my friends online, the only people with whom I regularly interacted. And watching Family Guy in the little chair, I realize with seemingly no external input that I do not have to believe in God, and that this means I can kill myself, an option I have heretofore not considered. Though the initial realization is banal, an inevitable thing any angry kid eventually concocts, the conclusion to which it led paralyzed me.
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Underworld was the first book I read by Don DeLillo, and finishing it in Alden represented the first time I had cried reading a book since Marley & Me ten years earlier. Cried hard and in public and at an age where weeping in public marks you forever as the sort of guy who weeps in public. The book still hits, and rereading that last paragraph is still the easiest way to quicken emotion out of me, and so I rarely reread it, an attitude itself articulated at the beginning of Underworld: “Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock.” It was also the first time, for me at least, a contemporary novelist had addressed that fundamental unbelief I’d produced as a lonely youth, an unbelief whose logical conclusions were by now structuring more than a philosophical thrust or burgeoning aesthetic taste, but were rather determining how much I looked at my phone, what and when and how much I ate, whether or not I left the house that day. And this is, I suppose, how I first came to writing this. Perhaps a saccharine starting point, but Don DeLillo is the only writer who regularly makes me cry: the awed crowds of Falling Man, the final images of Point Omega and Zero K, Brutha Fez’s funeral in Cosmopolis, Karen’s impressionistic descent into schizophrenic homelessness in Mao II—“Spare a little change, love you.” Though there is often critical reference made to the sheer song of DeLillo’s prose, his sublime lyrical precision, there is typically an overwhelming focus placed instead on adjectives like “chilly” and “clinical.” Sure, his characters can talk like robots; sure, his narrators’ supreme intelligence produces the sort of glassy, ironic distance people tend to dismiss as aimless or generic postmodernism. But I would like to instead focus on the overwhelming humanity of his work.
Specifically, I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it. His enunciation of characters pinned down within themselves, abstracted from the familiar rhythms of everyday life, unable to invest meaning in anything, much less extract it. My fondness for him has remained steadfast; he is one of the only writers of whom I have never tired, whose tropes and obsessions prompt not an eyeroll at their predictability but an appreciation similar to how it feels to sit with a high school friend and, after maybe a stuttered few minutes of catch-up, fall into regular patterns of interaction. I read or reread many DeLillo books a year, and often spend evenings mindlessly flicking through a stack, not chasing anything particular, just sort of stopping when a word or phrasing grabs my attention.
What I am also interested in outlining is how my relationship with his work has changed. My relationship with Thomas Pynchon, for instance—my other guy from this early era (and still a favorite, mind you)—has remained relatively static. While I now know more than I did and so can interact with his work a little more deeply, I have not decided his late work is dramatically different from earlier work, have not cultivated a take hotter than “Vineland owns bones,” and do not think his primary thematic concerns or the formal adumbration of said concerns have shifted all that much. I read Gravity’s Rainbow today similarly to how I read it at eighteen.
I cannot say the same for DeLillo. While I would never call him a particularly cheerful writer, I find his later work positively threnodic. Though earlier work levies a sustained attack on all those parts of American life that enervate and from which one desires to escape, these novels also end with some degree or concrete image of sour optimism, a gesture toward the innate ability of people, no matter how broken, to build community, to articulate new forms of belief, new rites by which this belief expresses itself. There is a meditative beauty to these novels; later work is almost overwhelmingly suffused with a dull anger, the intensity of a meditative panic. It is more common for these novels to end with an image of someone sundered from human community and unable—or unwilling—to regain entry.
My emotional fondness for his books is directly related to how modes of belief are represented within them. Belief is situated as a collective hallucination, a habit, a way of seeing and thinking about the world, something to reproduce without ever considering the logic behind its reproduction. It’s just something you do. It’s likewise something that you must participate in to remain incorporated in the broader rhythms of human collectivity.
Belief in the DeLillo of the ’80s and ’90s (comprising, in chronological order, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld, his “golden age” middle-era run) is treated as a sort of materialist tautology: “We believe in things because we execute the material processes by which belief is expressed.” His characters in these books contend with unbelief. Not nonbelief, for that prefix connotes cancellation and foreclosure, and represents a total retreat from a greater chain of meaning. Unbelief implies a reversal and therefore a fluidity, a dialectical relationship with wider processes of belief. That is, though the characters at the end of each novel in this five-book-run remain skeptical of the processes by which we collectivize socio-cultural meaning—viz., marriage, history, religion, family, consumerism, the nation, language itself—the end result is of unbelief, paradoxical in the strength of its flimsiness: a brainless rehearsal of activity perceived as the correct thing to do, though it cannot be articulated just why its correctness is so redoubtable.
In working my way backwards from Underworld I identified this same stance towards unbelief in all his work. A position that was neither mere atheism, nor a middlebrow “If-you-can’t-believe-in-anything-then-at-least-believe-in-each-other” type thing (which Baumbach seems to think White Noise is about, diluting the novel's existential sadness and instead playing every card you’d expect a Gen X’er to play). Rather it was a reflection of how the need for belief—its presence, its hum, a din we don’t notice but would discomfit us if it were to disappear—is stronger than raw belief itself. We see this in the now-famous nuns at the end of White Noise, who enact the processes of belief to make everyone else a little more comfortable. But I like Mao II a little more (and have reread it a little more recently), so let’s examine a wedding procession that closes that novel.
The novel’s third-person narrator describes a tank-accompanied wedding procession through a war-stricken Beirut, a wedding party accompanied by guerrilla soldiers and punctuated by celebratory small-arms gunfire into the air. The gun of the tank swivels suggestively. The scene is witnessed by Brita, a Western photographer. The narrator speaks of the bride and groom: “They make it seem only natural that a wedding might advance its resplendence with a free-lance tank as escort.”
I am intrigued by that hyphen between “free-lance.” By the early 1980s “freelance” as one word was already standard phrasing; and in a 1991 New York Times interview with DeLillo—the same year Mao II is released—“freelance” is written as one-word, firmly ensconcing DeLillo’s hyphenation as editorially out-of-time. Moreover, DeLillo is a writer who does not always insist on a hyphenated compound. On this same page alone we can find, for example, “bridegroom,” “checkpoint,” “newlyweds,” etc. The insistence on the hyphenated “free-lance” is not an archaism, the way a hyphenated “check-point” might be, but is a deliberate choice.
In cleaving this word with a hyphen, DeLillo, a writer notoriously attuned to the way words “look,” directs our gaze to its odd appearance. We can look first to “lance”: insofar as one first imagines the lance as the weapon of the knight-escort, this hyphen undergirds a chivalric violence. Though the warfare is contemporary—the tank a far cry from a horsebound knight—it carries the same meaning of a knight in bloodcoated armor rescuing his lady. This is a cultural meaning of deep romance and nobility, a meaning older than the printing press and common literacy.
The hyphen does not only direct our gaze to the horseback weaponry of knighthood. Likewise spotlighted is “free.” We can consider this to be “free” i.e. “removed from” or “abstracted”: free from a consideration of the violence embedded in this scene. This rhetorico-thematic removal is spatially represented within the text itself. Brita, abstracted and watching from a nearby balcony, is initially wary of the tank and its threat. However, she realizes that this is a wedding procession and runs inside, pours a glass of midori, and toasts the couple, calling down “Good luck!” in as many languages as she knows. Though this moment is at first electrified by the absurd presence of the tank, Brita’s fear evaporates once she realizes all involved (including herself) are participants in a legible romance. Thus, the initial horror of real death is blunted by a lurch into immediate symbolic comprehensibility. That is, Brita first contends with symbolically illogical raw violence; however, once she realizes that these tools of violence are deployed in service of a recognizable ritual, she cooperates fully, cancels her previous misgivings, and disregards the preverbal emergency of the real: for look at how romantically it has been done up.
So, ultimately, the hyphen draws our attention to the word in which it is embedded. Not only are we attracted to the word “free-lance”—how odd it looks articulated like this, how archaic…—but by being representationally cleaved we are invited to consider the two words as separate units, units then made to relate to one another through the rhetorical operation of the hyphen itself. When treated as two separate units, there is a suggestion of both violence as well as removal or abstraction or ignorance; while the hyphen—that which connects two separate words and synthesizes discrete concepts—suggests that certain forms of violence are inextricable from a sort of willed ignorance. This scene locates the function of ritual in DeLillo’s middle era, in this specific case the function of the wedding-ritual as the legibilization par excellence of commitment and romance. Ritual for DeLillo is a system of belief, a collectivized meaning, a feedback loop from which we draw energy and to which we likewise provide energy. It is a static-textured white noise crocheted atop a hole-y real, a flickering organ lighting the dark of one’s insides.
In DeLillo’s middle era, he regularly orchestrates setpieces around crowds. In Mao II specifically, by focusing on the wedding (the novel famously opens with a wedding, too)—perhaps the world’s most ubiquitous ritual, aside from the funeral—DeLillo ultimately articulates the function of ritual. Ritual is a metonym of individual faith. It represents a belief in something greater than the individual. It is an escape from solipsism and facilitates access to a greater human community of shared meaning. However, “community” is demonstrated repeatedly to be a symbolic laminate rather than an essential truth of existence. Ritual and belief are only there to nurture, to numb symbol-processing minds via a process of collective legibilization, covering the inarticulate real with a coat embroidered and stitched out of old mythologies.
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For a while my relationship to the work was with these five novels alone. Five novels that meant more to me than most other novels for having so literarily represented a search for meaning. These novels did not wallow in cheap empathy; they evaded pithy humanism, elided snappy dialogue exchanged between melancholic nihilists. They were novelistic, writerly, beholden to and respectful of their form. They encouraged close reading: a careful attention paid to structure, an almost spatial awareness of how meaning in a text is produced imagistically and formally as much as it is through content. Despite the verbosity of DeLillo's characters, they never just stand around and say the point of the novel at one another. Meaning was not dispensed prescriptively; the work wasn’t reverse-engineered from one Big Thematic Statement. If you didn’t pay his work the respect it demanded then it could calculate as masturbatory or as centripetal and bluntly satirical. While sitting at the kitchen table with a DeLillo book spread flat and marking it up with a ballpoint pen those early years of fandom I would often think to myself: “This is meaning.”
Corny, yes. But true too.
It didn’t matter that such a sustained exegesis of those five novels was hermetic, only for me. After all, I was not positioning myself as a DeLillo scholar. I was just a fan. That it was disconnected from a careerism only increased the extent to which it meant something to me. It was just a hobby. Garage carpentry, or basement models, or man-cave Legos—or kitchen-table DeLillo. A pastime, like casual sports played between friends. It was a silly expression of something larger, something around which whole industry is lumbered—the billion-dollar industry of professional sports, the couple-hundred-dollar industry of literary criticism—and which small-scale like this results in basically no fetishizable output, a small relief in itself.
And for a long time I only really cared about the Big Five. I eventually sampled an early DeLillo (Great Jones Street) and thought it fine, if derivative. Then The Silence was announced and it looked like a sort of Boomer What-if-no-phone? novel and I thought I’d probably avoid his more recent work too. This decision was ballasted by how people, especially people online, tended to discuss said recent work. There were no fawning prefaces or monographs. Zero K had come out and the Don DeLillo subreddit didn’t like it and the people over on /lit/ thought it was corny. In a 2012 interview with DeLillo hosted by Jonathan Franzen, Franzen referenced the then-recent Point Omega as being stellar, as having received a “raw deal, critically speaking”—too bad: I’d already decided I thought Franzen was a hack. Falling Man and Cosmopolis received little fanfare, if any. And Karl Ove Knausgaard indirectly denigrates The Body Artist in My Struggle: Book Two.
This middling reception made sense to me at the time. I presumed the self-positioning that makes DeLillo’s middle career so wonderful—the artist against the grain, the Bill Gray figure in Mao II, an oft-quoted 1993 Paris Review interview in which DeLillo says: “How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature”—was rendered less coherent a perspective the more he became a literary powerhouse, Sandra Bullock’s favorite author in The Proposal, indie bands and nerdcore rappers catchphrasing his work. How could he, a literary institution-in-himself, work from the hinterland margins when he could no longer claim feasible citizenship here?
I imagined a DeLillo familiar with the iPhone. With the app store, with social media. With pre-formula-change Four Loko, with vape juice, mentholless Juuls, kratom, podcasts, OnlyFans and Fortnite and cold meat bike-delivered at the convenient speed of now. Or with Donald Trump. From a Zero K–era interview: “I think it would take a great shift of events for the country to restore its balance, to restore its consciousness, and to think about things the way we did during the Obama administration.” A lib with boring thoughts about phones, I thought, the opinion of any bookish Chapo-listening twenty-year-old. I assumed every electrically perspicacious writer must have politics sympatico with my own; either that or politics dramatically idiosyncratic and, thereby, interesting.
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I cannot remember why two years ago I picked up Point Omega, DeLillo’s 2010 novel and the one that is now, gun to my head, my second-favorite of his. I was (and still am) living in Toronto, a proper city, the kind DeLillo often writes about: “It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat.” But the first winter there I was not captured by the heat but by the cold: by an old raw wind flung through the enfilade of streets, a city salt-rimed and lunar.
In February 2022 I lived alone on the outskirts of Toronto in the middle of a hardcore COVID lockdown. All my graduate MA courses were on Zoom and the only people to whom I regularly spoke were the Akron groupchat.
I shuffled through my days to drink all night. I wasn’t living toward anything beyond the acquisition of a rarefied piece of paper I would ultimately go into debt for (and which has still proven largely useless), nothing beyond the inevitability of bored anxiety, of having to learn small talk and lifehack-y ways to relate to and ingratiate myself with other people. I kept the Elm Street series on but muted at all times like a campfire. I awaited NFL gamedays so I could do something at the same time as my friends and comment on it in the groupchat every Sunday (though sometimes Mondays and Thursdays) but then the Browns missed the playoffs so the end of the regular season meant the end of these collective habits, so no, now nothing to look forward to, nothing beyond the stark inwardness of my own existence, no way to define a ritual that could occupy me longer than a few days, no way to define any ritual, ritual being collectivized meaning after all and my insularity preventing ritual from ever collectivizing in the first place and thus any rhythm I could define would be singular and idiosyncratic and thereby unshareable, and so remaining alone and having lost 40 pounds since I moved and smoking inside now and unable to sleep more than four or five hours a night and daily creating obscure tasks, grouting the kitchen tile and scouring the bathtub, ranking the kills in the Elm Streets, perfecting the broth in which you soaked and boiled seitan to make it taste as close to meat as possible. Learning how to make seitan, shoplifting the requisite chickpea flour and wheat gluten from the Bulk Barn, rendering different varieties of flour into something that tasted remarkably similar to offal.
A series of images now. One evening I spend a few hours drinking most of a 750ml bottle of gin and trying to find that one specific Family Guy episode to maybe jump-start a reverse epiphany, as if that episode seen fifteen years ago had installed a Videodrome-type tumor right behind my eyes and the antidote was just a second dose of Videodrome, and then, luckless, at midnight I pour the remainder into a water bottle and strike out east on the six-mile walk to the Prince Edward Viaduct, a thirteen-story-high truss-arch bridge where Bloor becomes the Danforth and where the two-line rumbles vertiginously on the elevated track within the trusses, sipping as I go and at 2am I toss the bottle over the side of the bridge and stand and sway atop the bridge, looking down into the concrete I know is below but can't descry in the weak light. I work up the courage for five, ten, now fifteen minutes, then longer, twenty, thirty, forty-five, and close my eyes to the blue Toronto skyline and see its pale blue radiance limned on that palpebral screen or maybe just think I see the imprint of the pale blue radiance or maybe I think I actually see numinous movement and the shatter of pale blue city lights going on then off then on again, and then suddenly I feel so embarrassed, so predictable—so corny—and then know nothing will happen, that I will head back home and, halfway there, overcome by drunken exhaustion, will lie down in a secluded part of Christie Pits park for a bit despite the blackly freezing cold and then realize I cannot even doze, that of course my body will not let me fall asleep, and so will shamefully pick myself back up and put on Bladee and carry myself home, embarrassed for not even being able to play the part of the end-of-my-rope loser correctly, and then get out of bed at 9am to smoke a few cigarettes and stare bloodeyed and forehead-taut and -yellowed into my own reflection on Zoom.
A few months later, having graduated and found at least a little stability, I finished Point Omega on the subway. Something about doing so underground felt correct. As if I were a scrambled transmission, beamed from one pole to the next, receptive to codes broadcast by others. Singular codes that percolate through only when you yourself are unknowable. When I entered the humanities building or the open-floor-plan office, I automatically recoded myself into what I felt I needed to be. A good student, a good third-party HR consultant. Reading novels in these places always felt a little inappropriate, like it was someone else reading them and deciding what they meant.
I thought about what I saw as the crux of the book: the tendency of thought to stack on top of itself. How eventually introspection reaches such an inwardness, becomes such a confused and directionless intensity, that it convulses into something kaleidoscopic, something in which your amygdala becomes an Adam’s apple and your shoulderblades a pair of anterior deltoids.The prospect of upheaval felt glimmering. I wondered if on the other side one would find only a silence, a longed-for retreat from speech entirely.
I could not at the time identify why Point Omega felt so radically different from the Big Five. Nor why it stuck with me so intensely. Though I had by now decided Franzen could think whatever he wanted, it was a novel people never really talked about with more amplified an admiration than: “It’s good! It’s good.” DeLillo himself in a 2020 interview said he “maybe could have done better with The Body Artist [and] Point Omega.” Yet the obscurity of this one hundred and twenty-page book, the subtle ways it differed from the now-recognizable DeLillean pitch, claimed my attention fully.
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Point Omega has all the recognizable traits of a DeLillo novel: circumlocutory and heady dialogue; slick, lyrical syntax; and a crystalline structure that increasingly diffracts your gaze the deeper you look. However, the way it made me feel at the end (maybe not a particularly rigorous starting point) was different from how I’d felt at the end of other DeLillo books. Though there are some superficial differences, there is also a fundamental discrepancy between a novel like Point Omega and a novel like Mao II. Mao II features characters embedded within a wider discourse that allows them comfortable self-positioning. E.g., though Mao II’s wedding procession is absurd, Brita calls down “Good luck!” in as many languages as she knows. In the unknown flatlands of a war-torn other-space, the contribution to a recognizable image-system provides stability.
DeLillo’s late style, however, centers on characters who have retreated from a belief in wider discourse entirely. We can understand discourse here as not just “ideology,” but rather as the ways in which ideology determines what we see and how we think about it. It is the language and terminology by which we describe the world. This work focuses on characters who design wider discourse and so exist outside of it. They are powerful figures in terms of recognizable material markers—the stuff they own, the stuff they can afford to own—but also in terms of an almost artistic ability to determine people’s everyday relationships, behavior, and modes of belief. We can classify Point Omega here along with Cosmopolis, two novels in which men of great power (rhetorical–ideological power in the case of Point Omega’s Richard Elster and purely capitalistic in the case of Cosmopolis’s Eric Packer) determine whole swaths of the future. Not only the trajectories of things but crucially how we understand these trajectories. These men sublate intricate and random thickets into an arc containing actants and autonomy, divested of chaos; they determine the shape of the present and in turn “own the future.” To avoid the harmful effects of their creation, the creators of these worlds insulate themselves—or attempt to—from their own discursive systems: Cosmopolis follows Eric Packer on a cross-town limousine ride and rarely strays from this setting, Point Omega places Richard Elster on his desert ranch and rarely strays from that one.
This dramatic insulation is one of the qualities that renders these later novels so different. DeLillo’s later work is more interested in power, true power, than earlier work. Power for the late DeLillo is not necessarily held by figureheads and representatives of the State. It is held by people who, like an artist, sub rosa define our relationship with the world. True power is abstracted and operates at a removal from official symbols of power. The figural distance within these novels is geographically reified: the isolation of the desert, the leathered hermeticism of the limousine.
This work also often strikes a Beckettian note, focusing on characters dramatically sundered from discursive systems and who being so are disabled from situating themselves within a legible narrative. Think here of The Body Artist, Falling Man, and The Silence. The aggrieved relationship these characters have with narrative and how it helps you determine who you are and what to think about it is reflected in these novels formally through a sort of refined attenuation. While DeLillo doesn’t do conventional “plot,” these books in particular are quite shaggy, and read as loose collections of scenes and prose riffs; Falling Man especially feels as if it was conceptualized as a congeries of paragraphs, the flow of narrative time incidental to the textual petri dish before you.
(Zero K occupies the middle ground between the two. It is likewise I think the strangest novel of DeLillo’s career, his most opaque, maybe the angriest but also maybe the most mollified, the most resigned; it’s definitely top five for me; it’s certainly the last one I’d suggest a newbie to start with, barring The Silence and some of the ‘70s work he’s dismissed as “unserious.”)
The later DeLillo is, broadly, angrier, more elegiac, and far more isolated. It finds people unable or unwilling to re-enter collectivized legibility, to re-learn the terminologies of the famous and the dead. Characters either define the terms of mass belief or struggle to accept belief entirely. In either case they are held at a stark remove from what “other people” do. All of DeLillo’s books are about one’s relationship to systems of meaning, the extent to which one believes in symbolic indices. But past work is about reconciliation, the rehearsal of ideological movement, trusting that consistent repetitive movement looks like a belief in something, and for looking the part maybe you’ll be rewarded with stability. Later work is about abstraction from these structures entirely. Your removal from these structures is violent, re-entry almost impossible. No late-style novel is more explicitly about this than Point Omega.
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In examining the concluding image of Mao II, we considered the dialectical inextricability of romance from violence , and how we might rhetorically be guided to this consideration via practices of close reading. If this moment of Mao II crystallizes the existential comfort of ritual and belief, then Point Omega is about the people who produce these discourses of belief in the first place, allowing us everyday comfort.
Point Omega’s Richard Elster, once a sort of internal propagandist for the Iraq War, is now retired and secluded on a desert ranch “somewhere south of nowhere.” His duty when in government was to apply a “conceptualization” to warfare. He understood this conceptualization as an artful one: his impulse was to make war cohere as something poetic rather than standardized, to create what he calls a “haiku warfare.” Jim Finley, first-person focalizer of most of the novel, is an experimental documentarian, a sort of pop culture collagist whose one completed film is a stitched-together clip show of Jerry Lewis’s most frenzied freakout moments, disconnected from context; Jim finds “something religious, rapturous” in this “surreal” collage but is unable to make it connect with anyone. He travels to Elster’s ranch to convince him to be the subject of his next film, envisioned as a single take of Elster standing against an exposed wall and theorizing about his time making war. When Jim arrives, the two avoid filmmaking and instead drink and make winding, philosophical conversation. Elster’s withdrawn daughter, Jessie, eventually joins them. The short novel is, even by DeLillo standards, prolix and circumlocutory, and consists largely of two intelligent characters conversing until their heady back-and-forth is interrupted by the sudden disappearance—and possible murder—of Jessie. It ends with Elster’s collapse into infantile catatonia, retreating further into speechlessness the more hopeless the search for Jessie becomes.
Before Elster’s collapse, he discusses with Jim Finley, his eventual caretaker, his understanding of this “haiku warfare.” “[I wanted] human consciousness located in nature,” Elster explains when pressed as to what exactly “haiku” means here: “[I wanted] A war in three lines . . . a prescribed syllable count.” His job was to make legible the “blat and stammer of Iraq.” These two descriptors imply a kind of aphasia, an animal inability to produce comprehensible meaning. Correspondingly, “creating a new reality”—Elster’s responsibility as a “defense intellectual”—begins with legibilizing imperial dominion into a symbolically recognizable form. Into a haiku—“a war in three lines.” Or even an advertisement: “careful sets of words . . . resembl[ing] advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability.” Words that mean little, perhaps even nothing—but that stick with you. Elster’s understanding of his responsibilities indicates an artistic consideration, an earworm approach to the production of wider belief. Belief in this case being the full-throated belief in the necessity of both the Iraq War and American exceptionalism. Blat and stammer are assimilated into national purpose.
The artful approach adopted by Elster is contrasted with the traditional tacticians and propagandists he worked with. He speaks of them similarly to how one imagines a New Cinema director might speak of “suits”: unimaginative money men, incapable of accessing the ecstatic (even sublime) truth art can facilitate. They favor “statistics, evaluations, rationalizations”; that is, they favor cogent structure, the cause-and-effect intrinsic to linear rhetoric. War for these other strategists is “projection, contingency, methodology,” operating according to normative systems of meaning and expectation. In “thinking they’re sending an army into a place on a map,” they expose an over-reliance on outdated representational modes, ultimately betraying a submission to normative coherence. Elster regards this coherence as middlebrow, derived from the easy sensicality of “dead despotic traditions” and unable to provide us with “new ways of seeing and thinking about the world.” An expectation predicated on rote analytics and precedent begets a conservative coherence, one which is always perforated by the New. A century ago, it was the task of the modernist to break from brittle tradition, to anticipate forms that better reflect our sense of being in an always accelerative world. With the present-day devaluing of the experimental artist, this mantle must be picked up by the war propagandist.
And so Elster is not just any artisan. He is an artist, a high modernist, who, like many a modernist, believes in the alchemical power of words. “Words [are] not necessary to one’s experience of the true life,” he articulates, an approach not Joycean (who could always be “decoded,” so to speak, and in fact encouraged it) so much as it is Artaudian: words and their traditional meanings represent a degradation; they are gnostically bespattered with the residue of the self and thus not a reflection of the real, of the “true life.” For Elster, words are contiguous with “organic matter”; they froth and toddle, and so are in direct discordance with the “dead” tradition he accuses other statisticians of worshiping. Words are capable of “creating new realities,” provided the wordsmith in question ventures “beyond the agreed-upon limits of interpretation.” In effacing their normative representational schema, words create unknown realities, realities for which there is “no map.” For being freed from their denotative confines, words can now “yield pictures . . . and become three-dimensional.” (DeLillo is perhaps here playing with the magical Kabbalistic notion of Zohar, which posits that words possess meaning independent of their ostensive definition, defined instead by how a word looks on the page, how it sounds spoken aloud.)
As such, Elster’s rhetoric indicates a surrealist poetics, one that, in detaching signified from stable signifier, expands the imaginative potential via a collagistic approach to meaning. Similar to how the Surrealists produced meaning through a juxtapositional collage of things ripped from their contexts, to how Walter Benjamin, the modernist par excellence, found deepest meaning in the opaque positioning of a fragment—so too does Elster treat his words: they are rived from rational stability, positioned just so, and thereby engender not just simple “maps” but three-dimensional architectures, synaptic environments typically accessible only via death, transcendence, madness, or drug use. His words create a “haiku warfare,” a “war in three lines”: an image within the mind’s eye produced by language and yet bereft of heuristic meaning. Linked to “transient things,” the image stands strong against the attack of hermeneutics. It does not have to mean in a 1:1 manner. It can simply perch non-Euclideanly, beckoning and haunting and signifying all the more powerfully for its alien silence.
The images produced by Elster can be best understood as akin to the sort of ecstatic image spoken of by Werner Herzog, the production of which image he (Herzog) defines as the ultimate goal of cinema. Herzog establishes that, “like a poem,” this is an image that resists analysis, containing instead an “ecstatic truth”: this“deeper stratum of truth” is “mysterious and elusive,” and ultimately attained “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Herzog distinguishes this from “superficial truth”—the “truth of accountants.” Or the truth of Elster’s co-tacticians, a truth contingent on “statistics, evaluations, rationalizations,” contingent on a well-worn map. Elster more carefully defines what he means by “haiku warfare” beyond generic formal constraints. “A pond in the summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature.” This resonates with Herzog’s definition of an ecstatic image. An ecstatic image is not discount Transcendentalism, nor a nature documentary. Rather, to become ecstatic—to reveal a truth deeply human—it first must be gently manipulated by some symbolic order. Without “imagination and stylization,” it can mean nothing to us; without situating a “human consciousness located in nature,” there is no resonance, no evocation, and meaning passes us by.
Elster does not believe in art as a means to an end, a way of summing up the gist of the real. For a plot summary does not resonate the same way as a careful treatment of language and image. Eschewing the brute instrumentalization of language, Elster aspires to justify war through the discursive production of images and invoking the ineffable sublime contained within an Herzogian ecstatic image. The burning house of Tarkovsky’s Mirror; the man and child and dead goat at the center of Varda’s Ulysse; the sightless grasping of the premature infants of Herzog’s Stroszek. These are images that stick with us, even make us cry, though we cannot articulate why. They move us, regardless of whether or not they are attached to an immediate and linear narrative. Though belief in God or ideology or the other seems at times a struggle, with alienation all but assured, we can depend on the power of these images. They are the expression of something true, something inarticulable and deeply human. Corny as it sounds, ecstatic truths suggest an ineffable substantive contiguity; they bind you to something bigger than yourself and thus possess that rare power to change your life. An image does not have to be an instrument, the means to a narrative end. It can carry an alien meaning, a poetic and sublime resonance epiphenomenal to its bare existence.
In the singularity of his effort to reshape the landscape of the mind through an idiosyncratic symbolic index alone, Elster’s undertaking is almost Artaudian—almost. What keeps it from being definitively Artaudian is its subservience to an intrinsically political project. Where Artaud breaks with the Surrealists for their political support of the Communist Party, arguing for a more “essential metamorphosis” of society than that offered by politics, Elster eagerly joins the expropriative war machine. Money is not the catalyst here; neither is status or acclaim. Speaking more like an acolyte than a simple advocate of America’s imperialist purpose, the classical neoconservative explains: “I still want a war. A great power has to act. We need to retake the future. The force of will, the sheer visceral need. We can’t let others shape our world, our minds” (emphasis mine). Thus, despite the liberation of words from the fetters of immediate legibility, they remain shackled by political exigency. His project is dishonest. He is lying to himself. Though he, like the modernist, envisions his work as producing “new ways of seeing” the world, what is ultimately produced are not brand-new ways so much as augmentations of the old ways. New ways of understanding the old ways. And perhaps this new understanding allows you to remain placated with the old ways, though you cannot express the precise reasoning behind your ecstatic adherence. For the belief is inarticulable.
The modernist project is to produce new modes of discourse: new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Benjamin did not just fetishize little pieces of garbage like some bird brainlessly pecking at shiny trash; he encouraged one to see the complicated whole contained within the juxtaposed fragment, to access the truth contained therein. Artaud did not babble like an infant to adumbrate his own schizophrenic despair; he encouraged one to recognize the myriad ways in which the self is institutionalized into a physically legible thing. The duty of the modernist figure is not to uphold doxa. Their duty (Romantic in its heroic calling) is to rage against received ideas. Not falsify within said ideas some ineffable profundity.
Elster is not the modernist hero of our time. In outlining Elster’s failures, the book posits that there cannot be a modernist hero of our time, so deeply engrained are the old ways, those dead despotic traditions, “older than human memory.” Art and ideology are situated in a tautological dialectic, the upshot of which is discourse. Ideology informs art because art informs ideology; the infinite syntheses of this relationship are the ways we speak about and understand the world. Such a dialectic entails that art and ideology forever taint one another; the interminable churn between the two blurs the boundary between both. Gone is conceptual purity, gone are the ways of talking about one without an implicit invocation of the other. Only in a distant prelapsarian memory can such a purity exist.
Elster is not the modernist hero of our time. Disregard that he fulfills almost every generic criteria: the grumpy solitude; the strained family relationships; the copious scotch consumption; and that he––like a Kabbalist reading words numerologically to decode some Text––manipulates the symbolic order that allows us to share meaning, believing some alchemical combination, the exact precise one, will proffer a religious experience. But how can he hope to produce something ineffable when his work is, by virtue of its own existence, immediately assimilated into doxa?
So maybe it is more accurate to call him the postmodern . . . well, no, certainly not hero, but maybe postmodernism as a cultural condition has accelerated us past Romantic notions of artistic heroism, notions of a psychical frontier, a psychological terra nullius, blank spaces on the cerebral map, a noble surveyor heroically wandering into the crux of that heart of darkness, accepting of, no, even inviting the madness concomitant with going native within one’s own imagination: and then receiving their subterranean praise and acclaim with mock diffidence.
Elster is the postmodernist par excellence. His work requires the same stylized rigor, the same imagination as figures past. But what separates him is not just that his work is marketable: Joyce’s dirty words, Woolf’s rushes of insight, Faulkner’s haunted dialect: though these did not always sell, you could at least imagine a pitch. And it is not just that his work does not challenge bourgeois mentality: straight-to-streaming bullshit slashers get thrown onto Netflix every day—and that's okay, I’ll still keep watching that garbage, finding it boring or even retrograde but never dangerous. No, it is that his work produces violent, expropriative disparity by dint of its creation. Elster’s project is thus an analogy for producing art in the twenty-first century. He is the ghoul of contemporary literature, given that the landscape of contemporary literature is an Althusserian hellscape. That is, he cannot be outside of the landscape and find reasonable vantage point from which to comment on the landscape, cannot find comfortable purchase at the margins: for those wooly margins have since been effaced, subsumed and assimilated into the center.
Point Omega thematizes the devaluation of the writer under contemporary capitalism, in which profit generated by art indirectly fuels the American war machine: in which the old ways are so deeply engrained that they cannot be transcended. DeLillo argues that ideology’s insuperability is a byproduct of its inseparability from art. In a 2005 interview, DeLillo famously states that the writer “must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state,” that the writer “must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.” In Point Omega he locates the cruel irony intrinsic to such an argument. The artist’s abstraction from common discourse no longer simply requires an artist’s discipline, the sustained (and frankly often dull) effort required to sit in a room by yourself and mouth words under your breath as you write them. A willful abstraction from discourse is impossible, begging the question: What if the contemporary condition blurs artistic opposition and statist imposition? What if the writer is incapable of revealing new ways of thinking, of seeing? The once-expository radiance of the writer now resembles the bored guarantee of the sun’s presence, the dead tradition of its everyday rising: the sun rises and shines, having no alternative, on nothing new.
So what is to be done?
My impulse here is to set Point Omega down and pick up DeLillo’s subsequent novel, Zero K. I like how the cover art is dominated by one shade of blue, a chilly and futuristically blue plane, I like how the soft imprint of the face emblazoned on the cover is realized through gradated shading rather than thick obvious lines; I like the sharp yellow of Don DeLillo justified bottom, the black and comparatively austere Zero K justified top; I even like how the book feels in my hand, the cover is not glossy but matte and dense, the book thicker than one expects of the typical late-style novel. And I like the words in the book quite a bit, though to some they feel like DeLillo doing self-parody. And I like the final image the novel leaves us with. Quite a bit. Flipping through I stop occasionally at phrases that catch my eye (“the forefront of a new consciousness . . .”; “the voice commands and hyper-connections that allow you to become disembodied . . .”; “living within the grim limits of self . . .”) and then reread the last page, once and then again. In it, Jeffrey Lockhart, first-person narrator of Zero K, sits on a bus in Manhattan. The sun begins to set behind the bus but its particular radiance today is impossible to ignore, glorious and sublime, different than usual: it is the rare Manhattanhenge, when the sun, “balanced with uncanny precision between rows of high-rise buildings,” aligns perfectly with the city’s east–west street grid. A small boy at the back of the bus begins “wailing . . . with awe.” Jeffrey gets up and takes brief notice of the sun but eventually opts to sit back down and face forward and experience the everyday miracle secondhand, filtering the raw real through the boy’s experience of it. “I went back to my seat and faced forward,” the novel ends. “I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.”
This final image interrogates what it is in art that actually moves us, offering a more optimistic vision than that found within Point Omega (which latter is, admittedly, a far more political novel, and it's not like Zero K is apolitical or anything). When we, for instance, find ourselves overwhelmed by an image containing an Herzogian ecstatic truth, what are we overwhelmed by? What is the source of that truth? Maybe the beauty of Tarkovsky’s burning house is not the beauty of the house in and of itself. Maybe the beauty lies in the ability of a thing as frail and centripetal as the human self to capture an image at all. Maybe we can abstract an image from its context and take comfort in the fact that another human being has articulated this at all. Elster is only a metonym, after all, a tool of a master novelist to adumbrate the impotence of the artist to produce change on a political or material level. There is still space in real life to be haunted by individual images, to be haunted by expressions of the deep truth of things: to be haunted by cries of wonder. Emitted by others, these inarticulate cries promise some numinous radiance, a radiance encoded within the plangent report containing it. Cries and signs of wonder.
•
A last image. Shortly after realizing the ease with which I could kill myself, I am in the little chair watching John Carpenter’s Halloween. In contrast to an internet consensus, the film is for me a fidgety boredom. I am frustrated by Michael's lethargic movement, by the quaintness of the film’s murder, and by the blueprint predictability of its scares. I chalk up this dislike to the film’s lack of gore, especially compared to The Thing and Elm Street. Though these two films did not scare me, they did at least force me to feel something, an anxiety over imagined pain. I determine that messy violence is the real horror, that its on-screen representation trounces a rarefied metaphysical terror that doesn't yet really mean much to me. So what that the baby’s pram is jet black? Horror lies in annihilation, in the split-second where a subject becomes a mute object. I think of The Thing; I think of an organ, how we imagine it inside us as lambent and pink, criss-crossed with electric veinwork and coursing with rich purpose; how it in reality just grayly festers, a brainless systolic operation, one that simply functions without any deeper meaning in the permanent darkness inside a body. Horror is exposing this brute utility to the outside light. This conclusion makes sense to me. I am, after all, more afraid of the other kids on the street smashing another basketball into my face than I am of their comparatively petty school bus ostracization. There’s something about a body, specifically its annihilation, the damage it accrues, that proffers something real: it is dumb function and utility. It either works or doesn’t. Nothing more to it.
Later I lie online about liking Halloween to seem more world-weary than I am.
•
And now a memory, containing within it manipulated images.
I didn't see Halloween for a second time until years later. Likely at least eight, as I remember thinking during that second viewing: “This is kinda like DeLillo.” Believing that meaning could only reside in violence, that representational cruelty was a spasm of the real of real violence and cruelty, I spent my teens agog in gore flicks, those grainy abattoirs: Pieces, The Mutilator, The Prowler, Cannibal Holocaust, Sleepaway Camp, Basket Case. I was in search of something that frightened the way my friends on forums claimed Halloween frightened. I wanted something that haunted, I wanted to find a deeper truth, something real, embedded within the fiction.
The second time I saw Halloween, years after tracking down all the gore trash I could, its austerity scared the shit out of me. The vacuity, the emptiness of its suburban setting. Laurie Strode panicked knocking on the door of a house, the porch light turning on but no one coming out. Michael Myers lurching unstoppable, scary bland, sitting up from a dead-lay like The Undertaker, out of focus, presumed vanquished. Donald Pleasence, likely drunk on-set, pursuing Michael, following a string of bodies. Then at the end of the film he catches and shoots Michael. Michael reels and falls out of a second-story window and lies on the ground while Pleasence turns around for just a second to tend to Laurie. When he looks again Michael is gone and the 5/4 piano riff kicks in. Pleasence’s eyes widen and he gazes into the horizon. The second time I saw Halloween was on VHS, on an old CRT I got at the Goodwill so I could practice Melee tech without any input latency. Something about watching it like this just felt right, those horizon-line-wide Carpenter lenses compressed to the TV’s perimeter, the velvety flatness of the black and shadow, simultaneous warmth and formal distance. And this in conjunction with the almost metaphysical narrative (any more minimal and we’d have a Beckett one-act or a Lydia Davis one-pager) lent the film an oneiric quality, my brain stem an antenna beaming a signal to the TV precariously perched on my mattress. I was unable to shake this impression and, for weeks afterward, replayed the film’s closing moments in dreams, occasionally modified to fit my sleep.
Sometimes in these dreams the film ends as normal. We see everything we expect to see.
But sometimes we do not see Pleasence at all. Sometimes there is no climactic drama, no last-second life-saving gunshot, and the dream starts and Michael’s body is already on the ground and we just watch it slowly disappear, a cross-dissolve into nothing, leaving only an imprint on the grass, and this is silent, no piano riff, no Pleasence puttering or tearful Curtis murmuring, just a splayed body disappearing atop a night-darkened Midwest lawn.
And sometimes after he shoots Michael the camera lingers for what feels like hours on Pleasence’s face, and he does not unwarily avert his eyes here but steadily holds his gaze down at Michael, and then his eyes widen the same, and we cannot see what he sees but the riff kicks in the same and he raises his gaze to the horizon the same and for a moment we wonder if spirit can be seen: and then a peace melting across his face, deep as dreamless sleep, eyes half-lidded to an electric moonlight.