Between Bodies / Bodies Between

Description

"What Is Ghostly in DeLillo's The Body Artist?"

The anadiplosis of “Between Bodies Bodies Between” is linked in this paper to reflecting sentences in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: “I want to say something but what” “what am I supposed to say?” These words of forgetting and repeating, spoken by Rey Robles and Lauren Hartke, husband and wife, have to do with the relation of the self to self and other, and with the connection, and distance, between bodies. Indeed, the question of the limit of the self is articulated around this “what” which places the other at an impossible distance and yet also finds his or her words in my mouth.

This paper argues also that what is between is, for DeLillo, ghostly. The ghost is “in the walls,” he says, between an inside an outside, between here and there, between now and then, and giving rise to the very structures within which we understand an inside and outside, whether of a house or of a body. The ghost in The Body Artist, known as Mr Tuttle, is therefore, like the repeated “what,” found between Rey and Lauren, brought into the fold from his very first word: Mr. Tuttle “said something. She said, ‘What?’”

Period	2013
Event type	Conference
Location	Maynooth , IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International