Unweaving the Shroud of Mourning: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) presents Lauren Hartke’s (36), a body artist, work of mourning in the form of a stage performance called “Body Time”. The experimental narrative of the body performance reflects the collapse of the boundaries between subject and object, internal and external, body and mind, time and space, and memory and art. Lauren cannot overcome the shock over her husband’s, Rey Robles (64), loss because he tragically commits suicide. After her husband’s death, she discovers an uncanny stranger, Mr. Tuttle, in her house, who mechanically repeats words in a nonsensical context, dissolves the boundaries between space and time through confusing grammatical tenses, and reanimates the conversations between Lauren and Rey by mimicking their voices. Signifying simultaneously an external and an internal other, Mr. Tuttle exhibits Lauren’s subjectivity-in-crisis. When Lauren’s work of mourning is analysed by using Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytical theories, it is observed that Lauren is not detaching herself from her lost other, as is in Freudian definition of the work of mourning, by healing herself through art. On the contrary, she detaches herself from her lost other to re-attach herself to the other in order to construct a new form of subjectivity. Laplanche discusses this process by drawing an analogy between mourning and Penelope’s weaving/unweaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. For him, Penelope is weaving/unweaving this shroud to mourn Ulysses, not Laertes. By identifying a similar relation between Lauren’s mourning and her body art, this article argues that what renders Lauren’s mourning traumatic is the feeling of guilt she represses in the face of loss. Through the use of Laplanche’s theoretical concepts such as “enigmatic message,” “afterwardsness,” and “weaving/unweaving,” this article further discusses how Lauren’s body art unweaves her childhood trauma, her mother’s early death, to weave her subjectivity in relation to her dead others.