Time and Again : The Outside and Narrative Pragmatics in The Body Artist(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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  • 藤井 光
    University of Tokyo:Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

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  • Time and again: the outside and narrative pragmatics in The body artist

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Don DeLillo's 2001 novel, The Body Artist, explores the question of time with a pragmatic view of the narrative act, which mutates the temporality that defines the identity of Lauren Hartke. Though critics focus on the theme of grief that, according to them, runs throughout the novel, the narrative in fact introduces another temporality that the mysterious man, Tuttle, inhabits. In bringing Lauren into encounter with this man, the novel problematizes Lauren's definition of the self, which is based on the linear temporality. Lauren's initial assumption of time privileges the "I" in the present that forms the inside realm; this scheme is shaken when she finds that Tuttle, with his helpless access to past-future events, points to the "outside" that inhabits the present. Instead of resorting to the inside/outside opposition, the narrative examines a place of "in-between" where the two realms interact with each other: the novel presents the body in the present as a membrane, rather than a stable ground of identity, which constantly touches on and mutates the outside. The body acts as a differentiator that converts outside events into different ones to form interiority. The past and the future are the potential for production of difference that the body in the present keeps expressing. By enacting and affirming this corporeal opening, Lauren overcomes the grief, and this process is inseparable from the narrative dynamic itself. Constituting a loop that revisits the past scenes to infuse the elements of the "outside" into them, the narrative itself practices the idea of the membrane through which a new beginning is made possible.

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