소진된 서사: 돈 들릴로의 『바디 아티스트』의 체화된 언어

Abstract

The Body Artist(2001), at first glance, stands as a curious anomaly, a radical departure from DeLillo’s other works in terms of its theme and length. Unlike DeLillo’s other big scale, sprawling novels about individuals caught in the crucial junctures of history, Libra(1988) and Underworld(1997) in particular, The Body Artist instead unfolds a novella-length narrative about an individual’s struggle with personal trauma without any ostensible connection to sociohistorical circumstance. The usual verbosity and a sense of excess found in DeLillo’s writing are here replaced by the bareboned descriptions and slow pace of plot(or lack thereof) which impart almost the Beckettian mood. Notwithstanding this deflation detected in its length and prose, The Body Artist deals with the problem of literary representation in the end times, which has formed a constant current in DeLillo’s entire œuvre. This essay advances a reading that The Body Artist amasses a new source of energy from embodiment to resuscitate the vitiated and exhausted language that cannot fully give dramatic shape to intense affects such as mourning and trauma. To illustrate this, I will show how DeLillo’s experiment with the limits of narration in the novel is productively symptomatic of Deleuze’s conception of langue III elucidated in “The Exhausted,” his exposition of Beckett’s TV dramas. In Beckett, Deleuze finds the language that extends the boundaries of literary representation, the kind that exhausts itself and stages its own unraveling in order to free itself from the sociosymbolic order. In a similar way, The Body Artist can be said to bring Deleuze’s notion of exhaustion to light. through the narration and performance of its main protagonist, Lauren Hartke who is a body artist. In the wake of her husband’s suicide, Lauren enacts a series of acts to denude herself of her singularity and allow Other’s voice to reside in her. Lauren’s embodiment of the state of impasse can itself be understood as a new narrative form attuned to the media saturated society. Speaking through Lauren’s body in mangled, unintelligible language, Mr. Tuttle, who inexplicably sneaks into Lauren’s house and ends up living with her, works to intensify the novel’s dismantling of conventional narration. Together, Lauren and Mr. Tuttle magnify the fissure between different temporalities and spaces. The embodied narrative of The Body Artist finds its culmination in Lauren’s performance in the end which stages the explosive energy of art that exhausts all its potentialities by ceaselessly displacing itself to gaps between inside and outside of language.