The omega point

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The Omega point (English original title: Point Omega ) is a novel by the American writer Don DeLillo . It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 2010 . In the same year Kiepenheuer & Witsch published the German translation by Frank Heibert . The title of the novel refers to the omega point in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's philosophy , the end point of human development.

content

In September 2006, a man looks at a museum, the video installation 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon , in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho with Anthony Perkins plays a serial killer Norman Bates to a running time of 24 hours stretched. The work of art leads him to questions about perception and time. In addition to the screen, he also observes the other visitors, among them a young and an old man, who only stay in the room for a short time. However, he actually longs for a woman with whom he could talk about the installation.

The 37-year-old filmmaker Jim Finley visits the reclusive 73-year-old Richard Elster in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in the California part of the Sonoran Desert . The interdisciplinary scientist was a secret advisor to the American government during the Iraq war in order to develop public concepts and explanatory models for the war as an intellectual outsider. His suggestions, such as the comparison of war with a haiku or the linguistic investigation of the word “ rendition ”, however, met with little response from the military strategists of the Pentagon . After two unsuccessful years in an alibi function, he withdrew to the desert in which he still lives.

Finley, who so far has only had a little-noticed montage of old Jerry Lewis films , is planning a documentary through Elster in the visually simple style of Errol Morris ' The Fog of War . In an initial conversation he leads the war advisor to the installation 24 Hour Psycho in the Museum of Modern Art , but senses Elster's defense against the work of art. Now he visits the old man at his retreat to convince him of the project. But the longer he stays in the desert, the more the planned film takes a back seat to the massive personality of its host and the impressive nature surrounding it. Finley listens to the philosophical insights of the man who ponders the omega point, the end and destination point of human development, the leap of exhausted consciousness into inanimate matter.

After twelve days, the togetherness of the two men is interrupted by Elster's daughter Jessie. She retreats into the desert to escape a pushy admirer named Dennis, whom she met while visiting a museum that her father encouraged her to do. She is not only loved possessively by Elster, the young filmmaker soon directs his erotic desires towards her. One day it disappears inexplicably and without a trace. Only one knife is found in a nearby ravine. The previously so indifferent magpie is badly hit by the loss of his daughter. Mentally and physically he is falling into disrepair, while the two men wait in vain for the young woman to return. Eventually Finley gets the old man to leave the house in the desert, to which he will not return.

The nameless man visits 24 Hour Psycho on the following day, as on all previous days , in order to be drawn into the spell of the slowed-down film. Like Norman Bates, he too had a close bond with his late mother, while otherwise having difficulty getting in touch with people. But on this day a young woman speaks to him. They chat about the video installation, and when she leaves the museum, she gives him her phone number. Left behind alone, the man feels how he is absorbed by the oversized Norman Bates picture, how he dissolves into the film character.

background

The starting point for the novel was Don DeLillo's own visit to the video installation 24 Hour Psycho in the Museum of Modern Art . DeLillo was so taken with Douglas Gordon's work that he visited it several times and finally wanted to write about it, although at the time it was not clear to him whether this should be done in the form of an essay or a fictional representation. To express the questions about time, movement and perception raised by the installation, he introduced the figure of an observer looking at two other visitors. These two characters eventually became the novel's protagonists, Richard Elster and Jim Finley.

DeLillo had the intention "that the film and my novel flow into one another [...] that motifs intertwine, separate from one another and later reconnect". In fact, the film and the novel share various elements: the figure of the sheriff, the knife, stairs, the man in front of a wall. DeLillo described the development of the material towards his novel: “At first it was a real event. Then a newspaper report. Then a novel. Then a script. Then Hitchcock's «Psycho», which became «24 Hour Psycho», and this adaptation has now inspired my novel. "

DeLillo explains about Elster's philosophy, which is influenced by his living environment in the desert: “Elster is about something more abstract than destruction by microbes, tidal waves or meteorites [...] He is concerned with the exhaustion of human consciousness, with its ultimate extinction in a more mystical way Regarding the vision that time itself is coming to its end. ”But although he is concerned with“ the extinction of consciousness, the extinction of species, the longing of mankind to become dead rock in the field again ”, if he cannot cope with the loss that hits him personally, "he falls into a kind of trance because he cannot face reality."

interpretation

The omega point , which according to Gregor Dotzauer is more of a novella than a novel, is divided into three parts like a triptych . As is often the case with DeLillo, it is "the testimony of a struggle of image against word and of reality against hyperreality". "Unreliability of the place, contingency of details" made it "full of blurring and uncertainties". Even the greatest mystery, the daughter's disappearance without a trace, remains unsolved. As the prose equivalent of a haiku , the middle section is the longest. According to Thomas David, the motifs of the story are already fully laid out in the prologue .

In DeLillo's work, The Omega Point is the narrowest and, according to Thomas Klupp, also the least typical novel. Never before has he, whose previous novels always measured the "epicentres of contemporary American history", strayed so far from contemporary American society. For Angela Schader, the novel seems like the negative image of another novel, the 2001 body time . While there the experience of loss is at the beginning, it is now at the end of the plot. In both works, "Topics such as time and timelessness, artistic alienation and identification processes and the emptiness lurking in the heart of human existence are negotiated."

Uwe Wittstock describes the novel as a chamber play, despite the endless desert landscape in which the story is set . He is totally focused on his two main characters, two “typical DeLillo creatures”: Finley, at the age at which DeLillo published his first novel, is an alter ego of the author, an “observer who is basically more in favor of atmospheric Details are more interested in his hero ”. Elster, DeLillo's age at the time the novel was published, shares with its author that he is not interested in binding truths, but "in more or less credible drafts of truths". In his role as war advisor , DeLillo not only criticizes the manipulations of the Bush administration during the Iraq war, but also discovers a worldview in these manipulations that he also shares as an author. "Both people embody varieties of the ambivalent desire to use literary and intellectual means to design world views whose charisma reality cannot escape."

The connection between the three male characters, who are all on a spiritual quest, is for Christopher Schmidt Jessica, who walks through the book with an “ethereal untouchability of an angel”, “as if she had already partook of the enlightenment that the three of them were aiming for Men in the loneliness of the museum or the desert hope ”. The novel is about "the uprising of signs against what is designated, the great indifference", for which, among other things, the shower scene in Psycho , in which the blood is washed off, is a metaphor. As a mirror of American society, The Omega Point shows a paranoia that has become universal “through the inflation of signs and references in an increasingly secondary world in which everything means something and yet nothing and war is only a simulation on the computer”.

According to Sigrid Löffler , The Omega Point is “another foray into the extreme, into the philosophical regions of the untoldable, a meditation on time and death and the end of civilization.” For Thomas David “DeLillo developed a picture of the last days of humanity, the apocalyptic vision of the extinction of all consciousness. "In the moments when" looking and being, observer and observed fall into one ", the novel becomes meditation for Thomas Klupp and comes to" the indeterminable relationship between man and world, from consciousness and suddenly very close to external reality ”.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomas David: End times in America . In: The World Week of February 25, 2010.
  2. ↑ a b Angela Schader: In the beginning was the word . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from February 20, 2010.
  3. ↑ Gregor Dotzauer : The hour of the stones . In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 28, 2010.
  4. ↑ Jesse Kavadlo: "Here and Gone" Point Omega's Extraordinary Rendition . In: Jacqueline A. Zubeck (Ed.): Don DeLillo after the Millennium: Currents and Currencies . Lexington, Lanham 2017, ISBN 978-1-4985-4866-3 , p. 74.
  5. ↑ Thomas David: Do we all share the same secret without knowing it? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 5, 2010.
  6. ↑ a b Thomas Klupp : Watching the universe die . In: Die Welt from February 28, 2010.
  7. ↑ Angela Schader: The Empty Heart of the World . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from February 20, 2010.
  8. ↑ Uwe Wittstock : Do we want to be stones in the field? In: Die Welt from February 20, 2010.
  9. ↑ Christopher Schmidt : The trace of the stones . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from March 1, 2010.
  10. ↑ Sigrid Löffler : Showdown in the desert . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur from February 22, 2010.