where ghosts live

Description

"The Art of Everyday Haunting"

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist is described on its front cover as “a ghost story for the twenty-first century.” At its centre is a haunted house, physically isolated, and further distanced from the real world in the telling of the story, which uses framing material, newspaper articles, and scenes of the everyday, to bound its unreal space. In this house, Lauren Hartke, immediately following the suicide of her husband, is herself dead to the world, planning “to organize time until she could live again” (37). Gradually, she begins working again as “the body artist,” finally producing a performance piece which may result from, but doesn’t quite encompass, her loss, and her mourning of that loss, and in which she is not possessed by, but possesses, other bodies and other identities.

However, this artistic practice is also clearly figured by DeLillo as a form of ghostliness, for Hartke is haunted in the house by the ghostly figure of Mr. Tuttle, who, through repetition and mimicry, her own artistic devices, becomes a double of her deceased husband. This mirroring spreads also into the framing narratives, and especially the account of Hartke and her husband, to reveal the ghostly in everyday life, in the disembodied voices of the answering machine and radio, in “spiritual transmigration” through the webcam, in the persistence of memory, and in the mutual haunting of intimacy. This paper will look at the way in which the haunting repetitions of domestic routine relate to those of the artistic work, the way in which a ghostly presence relates to a ghostly absence, and the way in which art contains a dead past in order to return one to the living, turning the haunted house into a haunted home.

Period	Sep 2009
Event type	Conference
Location	Cork, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International