Teletechnologies of Death and Mourning in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt

Abstract

Teletechnologies are changing the way we cope with loss and grief. Apart from their romanticized relationship with death in the history of literature, teletechnologies also figure prominently as productive metaphors in critical theories. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction view telecommunication in its various forms as intricately connected to notions of telepathy and the unconscious, a point shared by Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt. Both novels attach great importance to how the process of individual mourning, in the presence of different forms of technologies, is inscribed with a distinctive telepathic effect. Specifically, DeLillo’s text portrays the radio as an uncanny harbinger of death, and Quilt forges a link between the faltered telephone communication and the spectral moments when the dead is calling. The article proposes to conceive, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the subject of teletechnologies as a critical starting point to address related issues of telepathy and telecommunication and to understand death as loss in the contemporary age.