This essay attempts to investigate the idea of haiku presented in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega. In the novella, a defense intellectual named Richard Elster proposes a theory of the end of history and suggests a peculiar vision of “haiku war” that he believes may help to retake the future in the face of post-9/11 global challenges exemplified in the Iraq War. Elster’s conceptualization of the omega point of history and haiku war evokes Alexander Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel and, particularly, his theory of post-historical art form inspired from his trip to Japan. Point Omega is a novelistic haiku, through which DeLillo interrogates and discloses the desire to escape from history and moral responsibility beneath Elster’s grand theories of history and war. In his ekphrasis of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a video installation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, DeLillo points to the possibility that his quaint poetics of literary asceticism and ahistorical spirituality could steer us toward what is truly real and, paradoxically, historical. DeLillo’s novelistic haiku examines the inherent complicity between art and politics in order to imagine the future of art relevant to historical realities.
Ⅰ. Introduction
Ⅱ. The Omega Point of History
Ⅲ. The Novelistic Haiku
Ⅳ. Conclusion
Works Cited