The Body Artist
A Novella by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, 2001, Scribner, ISBN 0-330-48495-8, deals with loss and recollection, and our lack of control over either. Noting with astute clarity the contrast between the last minutes the protagonist spends with husband before he drives to New York and commits suicide and the weeks spent afterwards, coming to terms with it. Each state is communicated in the language of the text, moving from a tight omniscience to a loosened uncertainty which explores what she missed and how she misses.
Loss and Subversion
The first chapter, a breakfast scene between the body artist and her husband, is a third person limited narrative so tightly held that not a thought, movement or nuance in the body artist is missing. It details every piece of her mind in those minutes, every loaded tendril she extends to him and every intent she reads coming from him. This hyper-awareness, however, does nothing to reveal what it is he is about to do. This mode of narration is accordingly discarded and never again picked up.
For the next six chapters of the novella the text slips between an authorial voice who details impartial and the cognizant mind of the body artist communicating through. She often tends to speak out of the third person in moments when a conclusive definition is at hand, when some key elucidation is taking place. She arrives to subvert the statement, breaking apart the language, second guessing the words and deconstructing the narrator’s pattern of sure conclusion:
‘She didn’t know how to think about this…it bared her to things that were outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same time.
Somehow. What is somehow?’
Mr. Tuttle and Recollection
The content of this section concerns the appearance, or rather, the discovery of a vaguely mentally disturbed man in her house. He is unable to talk in coherent, responsive terms and seems to have absorbed the exact timbre of her husbands voice, along with the extended monologues and dialogues he gave during his time in the house. There is no way the body artist can control when he speaks or what he chooses to say. This man, given the title Mr. Tuttle, is her attempt at recollecting her husband, giving him life again:
‘She began to understand that she could not miss Rey, could not consider his absence, the loss of Rey, without thinking along the margins of Mr. Tuttle’
This connection, perhaps, leads to the supposition that under intense scrutiny her insight into Mr. Tuttle, his purpose and character, will be misled or clouded, as her foresight into her husband was. Mr. Tuttle then, remains resolutely indefinable. She tries many times to provide some accurate encompassing term to fit his description and function but each is superseded and denied by the next. She believes he exists outside time, but then again he might just be psychotic:
‘She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality. What else did she think? She sat in the nearly bare office and didn’t know what else she thought’
Ambiguity and Letting Go
That this woman is a body artist, that she has the uncanny ability to become another, to “capture” something in her body that can be re-communicated to others is the notion that the novel hinges upon. The ambiguity of whether her act is simple mimicry or does in fact grasp a real understanding of another being is amplified by the presence of Mr. Tuttle, whose true nature, whether that of puppet mouth-piece or true oracle, is never made explicit.
Clearly, this is a complex issue, and not one in which we are encouraged to find a penultimate conclusion, lest it escape from our grasp and cancel itself out.
Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, four plays and a screenplay. In 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.
The Body Artist
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