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Don DeLillo's The Body Artist : Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma

Don DeLillo's The Body Artist : Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma L A U R A D I P R E T E s Don DeLillo's short novel The Body Artist (2001) opens, Lauren Hartke and her husband Rey Robles are at the breakfast table of their rented seaside house in an unnamed coastal town, in what seems an ordinary scene on an ordinary day. While stirring coffee, reading the newspaper, pouring orange juice or milk from the carton, waiting for the toast, and exchanging brief, distracted remarks, the couple performs an apparently familiar ritual. But this is not to be an ordinary day. Rey, a sixty-four-year-old film director, is about to leave for New York and die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his first wife's apartment. Lauren, the body artist of the title, will return to the isolated cottage by the sea to mourn her traumatic loss. She will find in an empty room on the third floor a strange, unstable, possibly retarded man who may have been there throughout her entire stay with her husband. The Body Artist, as a narrative that stages a scenario of traumatic loss and return through the phantasmatic figure of a "madman in the attic," explores dynamics of psychic intrusion (of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Literature University of Wisconsin Press

Don DeLillo's The Body Artist : Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma

Di Prete, Laura
Contemporary Literature , Volume 46 (3) – Nov 28, 2005
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Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
ISSN
1548-9949
Publisher site
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Abstract

L A U R A D I P R E T E s Don DeLillo's short novel The Body Artist (2001) opens, Lauren Hartke and her husband Rey Robles are at the breakfast table of their rented seaside house in an unnamed coastal town, in what seems an ordinary scene on an ordinary day. While stirring coffee, reading the newspaper, pouring orange juice or milk from the carton, waiting for the toast, and exchanging brief, distracted remarks, the couple performs an apparently familiar ritual. But this is not to be an ordinary day. Rey, a sixty-four-year-old film director, is about to leave for New York and die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his first wife's apartment. Lauren, the body artist of the title, will return to the isolated cottage by the sea to mourn her traumatic loss. She will find in an empty room on the third floor a strange, unstable, possibly retarded man who may have been there throughout her entire stay with her husband. The Body Artist, as a narrative that stages a scenario of traumatic loss and return through the phantasmatic figure of a "madman in the attic," explores dynamics of psychic intrusion (of

Journal

Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press

Published: Nov 28, 2005

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