Description
In the opening and, again, closing pages of her Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders quotes from Jacques Derrida’s The Ear of the Other, where he says, “Perhaps the desire to write is the desire to launch things that come back to you as much as possible in as many forms as possible.” This paper concerns itself with Derrida’s remarkable “The Double Session” from Dissemination (1981 [1972]), arguing that it has “come back” in the form of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), an uncanny instance of a literary adaptation of a theoretical body.DeLillo’s short novel is about the body artist, Lauren Hartke, whose performance is here seen as the natural successor to a mime by Paul Margueritte which itself draws on his Pierrot Murderer of his Wife and a long tradition of Pierrot texts, and about which Mallarmé writes in his short piece Mimique, the textual object at the heart of Derrida’s “The Double Session.” Mallarmé’s characterisation of the mime as “a yet unwritten page,” however, immediately problematises easy assumptions of adaptation and repetition.
DeLillo’s text engages, therefore, with questions of speaking for, or in place of, the other (text), and its attendant questions of fidelity and betrayal. Reading adaptation through DeLillo and Derrida, it will be seen, means answering Sanders’s call to add to the “rich and various” “vocabulary of adaptation,” taking in the supplement, inheritance, echo, graft, and ghost or revenant, which, of course, like the adaptation, is always going to “come back.”
Period | 16 Jun 2012 |
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Event title | Reform, Reuse, Recycle: Comparative Literature Perspectives on Adaptation, Second International Symposium on Comparative Literature |
Event type | Seminar |
Location | Yokohama, JapanShow on map |
Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Jacques Derrida
- Don DeLillo
- Revenants
- Mimesis
- Adaptation