Tick-Tock or Not: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and the Unreliability of Postmodern Time : A Barthesian analysis investigating the shifting meanings of ’writerly’ temporality

Abstract: Born out of an interest in the subjective perception of time, and a desire to test the possibilities of applying the structuralist/poststructuralist analytical framework laid out by Roland Barthes in his S/Z on a contemporary work of fiction, this essay is first and foremost a foray into the shifting meanings of time in Don DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega, and by extension the post-millennial era as a whole. Against a complex backdrop concerning the nature of time in postmodernity, gleaned from a review of articles by Mitchum Huehls, Frederic Jameson and Ursula K. Heise, the analysis in this essay investigates how, together, the different characters experiences of temporality in Point Omega suggest that time is an unreliable measurement of human experience.This essay identifies and explains the key concepts of Barthes’ analysis in S/Z, and describes the structure of his analysis. The description of readerly and writerly texts, the breaking apart of a text into lexias, as well as the definitions of Barthes’ five codes of meaning, are supplemented by a brief consideration of his final work, Camera Lucida, which is also relevant to this investigation of temporality in DeLillo. Though in the short time allotted for the writing of this essay it was only possible to emulate a fraction of the extensive detail achieved by Barthes in S/Z, the application of his codes to thirty excerpts selected from Point Omega within, coupled with an analysis of these excerpts, together produces a comprehensive image of time’s potential for having multiple meanings in the modern world. Though this essay is a work of some hybridity, its works to highlight some of the lasting possibilities, advantages and limitations of applying Barthes’ theory in a specialized reading of contemporary American literature. The conclusion that emerges from my analysis is that time is an often-changing, arbitrary concept.