Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, the Anthropocene, and the Scales of Literature

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Notes

¹ Dating the start of the Anthropocene to the 18th century is not uncontroversial, and will remain contested as the term awaits official recognition as a distinctive stratigraphic unit. Crutzen’s and others’ idea that the Anthropocene was inaugurated around 1800 is challenged by the contention that it began with the mass clearing of forests for agriculture about 8,000 years earlier. For a good sketch of these and other issues surrounding the use of the term, including the option of subdividing the period in different stages, see Szerszynski (2012).

² Noma Bar’s cover illustration for the Picador edition of the novel, which is only one in a series of stunning covers he has made for recent issues and reissues of DeLillo’s novels, captures this challenge to present a disjunction at the heart of the human. On the model of the famous “duck-rabbit illusion,” it presents a desert landscape with a lizard that, on closer inspection, also outlines two contiguous human faces. The lizard serves as the eye of the most prominent of these faces, which can be read as a way to bend the traditional image of the eyes as a gateway to the soul toward a recognition of evolutionary time at the heart of the human. Bar’s illustration points to the necessity as well as the difficulty of seeing human life simultaneously in terms of intersubjective relations and in terms of its irreducible implication in biological and geological time.

³ For a reading of the novel that does present it as “a return to the natural world and to the rhythms inherent within it as an antidote to the poisons of technological overkill” see Butler (2011: 102–103). De Marco incorrectly reads Elster’s turn to the desert as a disavowal of “extinction understood as death produced by the conflict in Iraq” (2012: 21). See also Dunst’s related argument that “Point Omega is set in a traumatized present outside of history” (2012: 60), rather than, as I am arguing, engaging in a more radical reimagining of temporality.

⁴ Mary Favret usefully distinguishes between the concepts of “wartime” and “war” when she defines wartime as “the experience of those living through but not in war” (2009: 9). “Wartime” underlines how “war at a distance” becomes part of the barely registered substance of everyday life in countries that are at war abroad. While Favret’s book draws on a romantic archive, one difference with the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the latter take place in a globalized world where the relative distance of wartime can at each moment spill over into war at home – where, indeed, the threat of such a shift sustains the normalization of wartime as a general condition. For U.S. audiences, then, contemporary wartime has a structure that is comparable to that of the Anthropocene; wartime, like the Anthropocene, is an assemblage in which one is minimally implicated as an agent, and which can never be definitively outsourced. For an evocation of the resonances between the Iraq campaign and the Anthropocene, see Scranton (2013).

⁵ The novel subtly undercuts the irruptiveness of this event by already mourning Elster’s daughter Jessie before she disappears. I am thinking especially of the elegiac tone in passages such as the following, in which the combination of the past tense, the suggestion of iterative narration, and the emphasis on Jessie’s fleetingness already seems to present the cohabitation of Elster, Finley, and the daughter as complete, as decidedly a thing of the past: “We shared a bathroom, she and I, but she rarely seemed to be in there. A small airline kit, the only trace of her presence, was tucked into a corner of the windowsill. She kept soap and towels in her bedroom … Her bed was never made. I opened the bedroom door and looked several times but did not enter” (2011: 62).

⁶ Acceptance here also means facing up to the temporality of the desert, and refusing the pathetic fallacy that reads the landscape as a reflection of human concerns. If initially, “every passing minute [was] a function of our waiting” (2011: 110) and the desert seems “clairvoyant” (2011: 109), Finley comes to accept that it is indifferent to human concerns: “[i]t was too vast, it was not real… the indifference of it,” as it refuses to yield an answer or a corpse (2011: 116).