Foul deeds will arise ere the earth o’erhelm them to men’s eyes.
The perspective in Hamlet seems unlikely to be shared by the main protagonist of DeLillos’s new novel, a ‘desert in the woods’ academic policy wonk grinding out the linguistic and idea upholstery to the neocon ideologues of the former Bush administration. Enhanced interrogation, rendition; bulk and swagger; shocking and awful. The language and its attendant euphemisms are depressingly familiar.
This short novella starts, and is framed by, the image of an unnamed character watching Douglas Gordon’s slowed down, 24 hour screening of Hitchcock’s Psycho. We get to see Janet Leigh screaming from here to eternity, or at least for a much longer period than seems strictly necessary and, this being DeLillo, and when a film is being served up, it’s probably not going to be a slowed down version of Julie Andrews romping in an alpine meadow. That would be meaningless, whereas our unconscious immersion in the fear and the trembling; the Millenarianism and general disaster narratives, presumably make the reader half-believe that the Zombie-like state of the unnamed character in the ‘flicker’ of the slowed down film might have some kind of point. A person on to something and a person who, to use a phrase from Mao II, doesn’t simply go home and ‘pray to flies and bottle tops’
Or perhaps he does. Perhaps he’s just a lunatic.
And this being DeLillo we expect the signs and the symbols: the desiccated conjunctions that seem to pass for human relationships; the sense of an overarching framework that might possibly explain everything, and yet possibly explain nothing at all. A framework which might render unto us absolutely the things we need to know. Things to make sense of the mess we have made of the planet. In this short novella we get it all.
The question, perhaps relevant, perhaps not, is do we get anything else?
After the debacle of Rummy et al, Richard Elster retreats to a shack in the desert with a young film maker presumably intent on doing for him what Errol Morris did for Robert. S. McNamara. And this being DeLillo, the lessons taught are not necessarily the lessons learned. Elster wouldn’t dream of expressing himself in the downmarket terms used by McNamara. So instead of ‘proportionality’ and ‘empathy for your enemy’ we get specious stuff from Teilhard de Chardin: about Point Omega and a higher consciousness that we all wish to move towards. Elster sounds like DeLillo and thinks our consciousness is played out and that we all secretly wish to be stones in a field. In the novel he is represented as an august presence. Why then, you wonder, did he have no more backbone than a comb jelly? Why couldn’t he have done a grandstanding George Galloway? Why, if words mattered so much, couldn’t they have mattered in a moral sense? To use another phrase from Mao II Elster frequently comes across as a ‘bad actor doing weariness of spirit.’ And this rootless, affectless, played out and at the bottom of all things psychology, is, for DeLillo, coda for intelligence; of the literal, rather than cloak and dagger, bulk and swagger kind. And with the characters in this novel, as in many of the others, substance has given way to aura. We are in the play of the postmodern image culture and as James Wood has argued in writing about DeLillo, the effect may be subtraction not addition. If you like substance and not aura in your characters don’t read this novel.
Alternatively, literature should be a broad church and there are marvellous prose descriptions and evocations of the desert and the passing of time and the ‘big idea’ that seems to grip 73 year old Richard Elster, and after a brief rummaging around Teilhard de Chardin, is that we want to be reincarnated as insentient boulders. Perhaps this is the secret language of disaster folk tales. ‘Folk tales,’ such as climate change and meteor impact. We tell them to ourselves and others to somehow chivvy ourselves along. Consciousness and Chardin’s Omega Point where, ‘a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe seems to be evolving,’ has moved into the realm of not wanting to be; of wanting to return to matter. We’re not entirely clear what Richard thinks of this, but we aware that from his laconic, person-shaped-hole in the world perspective, it probably wouldn’t be such a leap. A more detailed account of the process through which Elster was presumably subverted may have added to the text, but this being a ‘late’ work, the suggestion of past inner turmoil is all we have.
Elster’s daughter arrives and is as abstracted as the others. She disappears. A knife is found in the desert, the book rotates back to the original installation scene. We are aware that the two men described through the lens of the unnamed character in the first scene were Elster and the film maker. The daughter may have met her killer. We do not know. Elster’s grand theorising is replaced with the pain of real loss which we also don’t see or feel. Elster gets the chance to become the grief numbed stone in the field.
Do we really care?
Phil Leeke