The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist": Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma Author(s): Laura Di Prete Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 483-510 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489128 . Accessed: 20/02/2014 05:06
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Don DeLillo'sThe Body Artist: Performingthe Body, Narrating Trauma

s Don DeLillo's short novel The Body Artist (2001) opens, LaurenHartke and her husband Rey Robles are at the breakfasttable of their rented seaside house in an unnamed coastal town, in what seems an ordinary an scene on ordinary day. While stirring coffee, reading the newspaper, pouring orange juice or milk from the carton, waiting for the toast, and exchanging brief, distracted remarks, the couple performs an apparentlyfamiliarritual.But this is not to be an ordinary day. Rey, a sixty-four-year-oldfilm director,is about to leave for New Yorkand die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his first wife's apartment. Lauren, the body artist of the title, will return to the isolated cottage by the sea to mourn her traumaticloss. She will find in an empty room on the third floor a strange, unstable, possibly retardedman who may have been there throughout her entire stay with her husband. TheBodyArtist, as a narrative that stages a scenario of traumatic loss and return through the phantasmatic figure of a "madman in the attic," explores dynamics of psychic intrusion (of an unassimilable presence) and interconnectedness as the consequence of traumatic experience. Not unlike Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), DeLillo's narrative imagines trauma as necessarily bound to the emergence of a "foreign body," a phantomlike figure in full flesh that makes the workings of traumatic memory accessible. In consistence with the author's interests and areas of investigation, though, the project primarily engages with the potential-in spite of acknowledged representational limits--of a language of bereavement. Thus narrating a traumatic crisis, such as the incomprehensible loss of a

Literature 0010-7484;E-ISSN 1548-9949/05/0003-0483 XLVI,3 Contemporary ? 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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loved one, means for DeLillo necessarily searching within language for new echoes, nuances, and rhythms that might capture the truth of an experience lived primarily within the skin. As DeLillo's writing plunges into a dimension of distorted temporality and spatiality that shatters conventional language, his project engages in the difficult task of articulating relations among the key terms that structure the experience of trauma: the self, the voice, and the body. How, TheBodyArtist asks, can one tell a story of trauma, a story in which the known is deeply imbricated in the unknown? DeLillo's answer concerns a notion of "voice" that departs from conventional parameters of language and attends to nonverbal, physical perceptions and a notion of "body" that, tongued and in touch with what the mind cannot know, will voice its unspoken truth. Thus conceptualized, voice and body function synergistically to force trauma into representation, to make it accessible in the recognition of its expressive limits, and to explore viable forms of working through.

The Phantomas "EmbodiedVoice"

Lauren nicknames the strange little man Mr. Tuttle. "Smallish and fine bodied," he seems to her at first encounter "a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe" (41). Of indefinite age, mentally and psychically impaired, unable to express himself in a conventional language, Mr. Tuttle is indeed an enigmatic figure. Confronted with his sheer strangeness and ambiguity, the reader is doomed to fail in an effort to decode or fully explain such a figure.1Yet in what will be by necessity a partial and insufficient reading, I would like to propose that, as simultaneously an embodied voice and a talking body, Mr. Tuttle is at the heart of DeLillo's larger project of staging traumatic reenactment. Like an alien hair in one's mouth (a recurrent figure in the text), Mr. Tuttle's "foreign
1. Reviewers and critics have offered an almost comic variety of descriptive terms for him: "autistic," "alien," "ghost" (Begley); "inmate wandered off from a local mental institution," "figment of Lauren's imagination" ("Body Artist"); "shadow of a man" (Roncevic); "ageless, babyish homeless" (Evans); "medium," "psychotic" (Jones); "pure cipher" (Amidon); "Lauren's projected identity," "ghostly embodiment" (Simon); "figure of the double" (Gorra); and "emissary from beyond," "projection of a troubled mind," "heteroclite muse" (Cowart).

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body" or "phantom-body" suddenly materializes on the scene similarly to how traumatic memories that occupy the psyche without being absorbed or assimilated compulsively return. Mr. Tuttle's presence is marked not only by the mysterious materialization of his body, however, but also by his continuously returning voice. Simulated, repeated, recorded, doubled, Mr. Tuttle's voice insistently addresses Lauren in her struggle for survival. Nicolas Abraham has theorized the relationship between the voice (as sound, words, language) and traumatic experience in a way that seems useful to this discussion. With the notion of the "phantom," which he describes as a metapsychological construct "meant to objectify, even under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object's life," Abraham addresses the phenomenon of the secrets, silences, and traumas of others buried within the self (172). The phantom points precisely to the transpersonal consequences of silence, as the subject unwillingly hosts what she has not been told by others. The content of these silenced traumas will inevitably and compulsively return to haunt the living. What I find significant in Abraham's definition of the phantom is the role he assigns to language (the language of the patient, for instance, or of folklore narratives) as it "objectif[ies]" the psychic interruptions that unassimilated silences have produced (172). Those gaps, in other words, unspeakable for the love object, emerge in the language of the unwilling host, where they become embodied. Abraham associates the concept of the phantom, in its latency, to throwing the voice: "The phantom's periodic and compulsive return works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject's own mental topography" (173). Appropriating and distorting the subject's voice, this "stranger" or "foreign body" points to what the subject does not know but still unwillingly produces (175). If the simile of the phantom's ventriloquism suggests the self's inner division and fragmentation, it also points to the function of wordswhat Abraham calls "secreted words," "phantomogenic words," and "staged words"-in making subjectivity heterogeneous (175, 176). Operating within the subject's language, however, such "verbal stirrings" radically undermine the phantom's coherence and structural logic (173); or as Abraham puts it, they function as

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"invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression [and] elude rationalization" (175). The analyst, then, faces the task of reading and decoding, within the frame of this linguistic breakdown, the signs of phantomogenic secrets, "text[s]"with a "content" inscribed in the patient's unconscious (174). In "The Wound and the Voice," the introduction to Unclaimed (1996), Cathy Caruth also links the dynamics of traumatic Experience and haunting latency to the idea of an uncanny "voice." She does so by rereading Freud's reference to a scene from Torquato Tasso's Liberata.In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introGerusalemme duces the concept of repetition compulsion through Tasso's account of Clorinda's death and her return in the ghostly form of a tree:
Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.
(24; qtd. in Caruth 2)

Whereas Freud introduces this double wounding as part of his argument that in traumatic neurosis "there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle" (24), Caruth points to what has not been made fully explicit: "In repeating [his act], [Tancred]for the first time hears a voice that cries out to him to see what he has done. The voice of his beloved addresses him and, in this address, bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated" (2-3). According to Caruth, it is when Tancredhears the sound of his beloved's voice that he fully experiences a "phantasmatic"return, the return of Clorinda but also of his trauma of loss and guilt.2 Moreover, and maybe more importantly,
2. I am aware that Caruth'sreading of Tancredas the traumavictim, ratherthan the is problematic.Yet I think Tasso intends to complicate the dichotomy of permurderer, petrator/victimby focusing on Tancred'sexcruciatingpain and emphasizing his shock after committinghis tragic, unwilled act. The pain Tancredand Clorinda share allows Tassoto representtraumain its complexity,without obscuringthe ethicalimplicationsof actions. the characters'

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Caruth reads Clorinda's voice as what attests and bears witness to the ungraspable truth that Tancredhimself "cannot fully know" (3). The nexus between Abraham's notion of the phantom's language and Caruth's "voice" becomes apparent. As the former gives voice to unassimilated "silences" or gaps buried in the subject's unconscious, so the latter bears witness to memories, unknown and ungraspable, yet already within the subject's psyche. Just as the phantom's language shatters conventional language, so Caruth's "voice" conveys the impact of the event's very "incomprehensibility" (6). But Caruth's contribution proves especially valuable as it takes into account the intersubjective dimension of trauma, for bearing witness to the voice demands a response. Emphasizing that the voice that speaks is not Tancred's but Clorinda's, Caruth provides a double reading. On the one hand, the voice of the slain beloved stands for the other within the self, the inner "foreign body" or "phantom" that knows the traumatic content of an event inaccessible to the host mind; on the other hand, and according to Caruth more interestingly, Clorinda's voice stands for the intersubjective dynamic by which the subject, listening to a disembodied communication, bears witness to the trauma of another. This attention to the voice that speaks the other's trauma is for Caruth the task of psychoanalytic theory and practice. For her, too, the voice so defined ultimately encompasses those linguistic and representational responses to-as well as other attempts to come to terms with-testimonies of traumatic experience. The notion of traumatic voice provides an interesting point of access to DeLillo's novel. Abraham's and Caruth's reflections can help us to grasp, at least partially, the novel's preoccupation with the characters' voices. From the beginning, Lauren receives the sudden materialization of Mr. Tuttle as the somewhat unavoidable return of a voice. "In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable," as her first words, spoken slowly and clearly to him, "hang in the room, predictable and trite" (41, 43). More shocking, like Tancred'shearing the plangent voice from the bark of a tree, is Lauren's discovery of Mr. Tuttle's vocal gift, his ventriloquism. At first a mere mechanical repetition of her words, Mr. Tuttle's language presently turns into something more than immediate, unprocessed imitation. Detecting in Tuttle's words "elements of her

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voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound," Lauren witnesses herself "being spoken" by a stranger, an experience that she perceives as "deeply disturbing" (50). The realization that Mr. Tuttle's appearance is indeed a "return" comes when Lauren detects in Mr. Tuttle not only her own voice but, to her dismay, her husband's. "[T]alking about cigarette brands, Players and Gitanes, I'd walk a mile for a Camel," Mr. Tuttle reproduces monologues taped by her husband as well as "Rey's laughter, clear and spaced," and possibly overheard conversations between husband and wife (61). The power of this haunting voice lies in its intimation of corporeal presence or return: from "air to sounds, sounds to words, words the man" (62). I believe that Mr.Tuttle'sventriloquism objectifies a profound split in Lauren, a division directly linked to the traumatic loss of her husband. Like the voice of Clorinda reminding Tancredof having killed her, that of Mr. Tuttle, as it mimics a dead man's words, renews and compulsively repeats in Lauren'spsyche the trauma of an intolerable loss. But the vocal fluidity of the text, the shifting from Rey's voice to Lauren's, places emphasis especially on the internal nature of this conflict, on the presence in Lauren's psyche of a foreclosed knowledge, internal yet unassimilated. Put repeatedly in a position of witnessing herself from without, Lauren faces her internal divisions, struggling to confront the insistently ungraspable fact that Mr. Tuttle/Rey is a psychic formation within her own unconscious-is, indeed, herself speaking what she cannot know. This becomes literally true as Lauren,newly a ventriloquist, gradually learns to model her voice after that of Mr. Tuttle, who paradoxically speaks only to echo her or her husband in the first place. Her voice on the phone slowly becomes "his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird humming on her tongue" (101). Lacking a clear antecedent, the pronoun here ("his")signals, in an endless play of doubling and mirroring, the breakdown of difference between Mr. Tuttle's voice and Rey's. This polyphonic fluidity and confusion of the text, which radically undermines the singularity and separateness of its three key figures, enacts precisely the blurring-symptomatic of a traumatic crisis-of all distinctions between self and other. One may read the novel's overdetermined ventriloquism, then,

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as the manifestation in language of what Lauren knows but cannot face. Even before the phantom's materialization (even before Rey's death and the resultant traumatic crisis, that is), The Body Artist hints at the presence, in Lauren's unconscious, of phantasmatic gaps. The hair in Lauren's mouth, for instance, seems to function as one of these cryptic constructions. Rey jokes that "maybe [she had] been carrying it since childhood" (11). A later reference to the death of her mother when Lauren was still a child, which "had nothing to do with her" (124), hints at once at an early trauma not completely worked through and the possibility of transgenerationally transmitted secrets, conflicts, and traumas within the mother. The silence around the death of her mother seems to frame the other, more central silence around the death of her husband. His obituary, his autobiography, and his first wife's testimony remind us of "phantomogenic texts" that foreclose access to his pain, even as they disclose more gaps and secrets. It is unclear what happened during the time (itself unquantifiable) that Rey as a young boy spent in the Soviet Union after the Spanish civil war. We do not know if he was ever reunited with his mother, and little is known about his life in Paris and New York as a young man. His "bullshit autobiography," as Lauren defines it, boils down to a collection of "tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperations not always clear to her" (32). After the funeral, Lauren gleans from Isabel, the first wife, only obscure hints of Rey's aggressiveness, self-hatred, and despair. These gaps in Lauren, Rey, and their families are ultimately incorporated, made audible as it were, in the complex vocal articulation of the novel. Rather than merely objectifying and bearing witness to what within a traumatic crisis remains unknown, the continuous modulation, reproduction, repetition, and overlapping of voices in the text construct Lauren's experience as a quest for foreclosed knowledge and allow for the formation of what trauma systematically erases: an internal witness. Lauren's interaction with Mr.Tuttle/Rey, her tedious and systematic recording and transcribing of his words, and her insistent demand for information prove precisely the concrete yet evanescent nature of traumatic memories as they

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return.3At the same time, however, this is a quest for the very possibility of bearing witness to oneself, what Dori Laub calls the search for "a witness from inside" (66). Though Lauren's investigation in her role as interviewer and listener unmasks her intrapsychic divisions, it also allows her to approach the terrible fact of her husband's loss, for which she had been so unprepared psychologically. In the exchanges with Mr. Tuttle and in vocal impersonations, she becomes at once the teller of a story she cannot tell and a listener to what she cannot understand. Reflecting the nonimmediacy of knowledge within a traumatic crisis, its necessarily mediated nature and expressive limits, the split of the relationship between Lauren and Rey into the triangle Lauren-Mr. Tuttle-Rey allows for the double formation of a teller-listener and sets in motion a process of internal testimony.4 Paradoxically representing the very limits of expressivity, Mr. Tuttle's voice enacts the imbrication of the known with the unknown in language. When Mr. Tuttle says, "I know how much.... I know how much this house. Alone by the sea" (48), the twice repeated "I know" seems to place him, as the possessor and provider of knowledge, at the other end of Lauren's epistemological quest. As Lauren engages in the act of decoding, she indirectly recognizes the intrinsic connection between her traumatic experience and his words:
was in fact, coming from Mr. Tuttle, a for[T]he last cluster of words... mulation she heard in its echoing depth. Four words only. But he'd placed insides and of simultaneous her in a set of counter-surroundings, outsides. The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone

3. Lauren's epistemological quest is structured around a number of returning questions and demands: "Talk to me" (46), "Tell me something" (48), "Did you ever talk to Rey?" (62), "When did you know him?" (62), "Did you know Rey?" (65), "You know him from before" (66), "Talk like him.... Do it for me. Talk like him.... Speak in his voice. Do Rey. Make me hear him" (71), "Who is Rey?" (75). 4. What Laub observes of Holocaust survivors may hold as well for those who experience other forms of trauma: "The very circumstance of being inside the event [makes] unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist" (66). "Being a witness to oneself within the experience" (61), however, is in Laub's view crucial to the possibility of traumatic experience being told and, in the telling, known. Laub stresses the productive implications of this process of internal "testimony," which he defines as "the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness: reconstitutes the internal 'thou,' and thus the possibility of a witness or listener inside himself" (70).

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referredto her and to the house and how the word seareinforcedthe idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self. (48)

In their elusiveness, Mr. Tuttle's words point to the paradoxical status of traumatic memory and knowledge. Simultaneously "insides" and "outsides," they point to an experience that, notwithstanding their having breached the boundaries of the self, cannot be integrated. Like "phantomogenic words," they necessarily look inward, toward the self and its inner fractures, even when apparently addressing an external referent. The word "alone" forces "house," "sea-planet," and "counter-surroundings" to define no more than the "book-walled limits of the self," the psychic entrapment caused by traumatic experience and the consequential failure of language to move beyond pure self-referentiality. If, in the effort to grasp the truth they promise, one attends to the resonant, "echoing depth" of Mr.Tuttle's words, however, they also promise, as in the word "sea" in Lauren's interpretation, to provide "a means of escape" from the referential cul-de-sac. DeLillo returns often to this idea in his effort to define Mr. Tuttle's language. Lauren detects in Mr. Tuttle's reproduction of Rey's
words "something raw ... open-wounded [which] bared her to

things that were outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same time" (63). Called into being by the open "wound" of trauma, that is, Mr. Tuttle's voice speaks a language that, by carrying the marks of inner gaps, prevents a clear positioning of the referent outside the self. "[O]utside" yet "central,"within us yet unavailable, the knowledge of traumatic experience haunts in its radical elusiveness, and DeLillo constantly gestures toward this essential paradox: "like moons in particular phases" (48), the phantom's words strike Lauren as "sensuous and empty" (75), "hollow-bodied" (101), something she might "lean[] into" (74), rather than on. Reified yet empty, embodied yet hollow, visible yet vanishing, words seem to be able to recover in some fundamental and life-giving way a relation with experiential reality, while simultaneously failing to keep this promise. Mr. Tuttle's embodied voice also provides a different framework for the analysis of Lauren's crisis: it simultaneously enacts and

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unmasks the distorted temporality of trauma. Outside linear time, with no "narrativequality" and lacking "rhythmic intervals or time cues," the visitor's monologues, as well as Lauren's and Mr. Tuttle's verbal exchanges, appear like instances of what the narrator calls "unadjusted words" (65). Within this temporal framework, past, present, and future overlap in a dimension that Lauren tries to conceptualize as "simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, unoccurring" (77). This apparent timelessness or time stagnation uncovers the temporal structure of trauma-and not merely a different, anomalous, or extraordinary time dimension. In at least two clear instances, Mr. Tuttle displays what at a first glance might be read as signs of prescience, the ability, that is, to anticipate the course of events. When Mr. Tuttle abruptly and enigmatically refers to Lauren's living in the rented house, alone, by the sea, for instance, he specifically adds that she "did not leave" (49). Lauren promptly responds with a tense shift that-an event yet to happen-she will indeed leave at the end of the lease. Toward the end of the novel, however, the narrator confirms Mr. Tuttle's paradoxical prediction: "she is here again, in the house, as he'd said she would be, beyond the limits of the lease agreement" (112). On another occasion, Mr. Tuttle seems to know about a trivial domestic accident that the text has not yet recorded, when he suddenly cries out, "'Don't touch it,... I'll clean it up later"' (81). The words prove to be identical to those uttered by Lauren a few days later, when her strange guest drops a glass of water. In another example of identification with Mr. Tuttle, Lauren herself seemingly displays the ability to anticipate the future. When in one of her reveries she imagines "a man showing up unexpectedly" (78), the owner of the house, telling her the real-life story of Mr. Tuttle, she seems to foresee an encounter with the landlord, apparently months later, when he stops at the house to reclaim a chest of drawers. Rather than evidence of prescience in Lauren and Mr. Tuttle, these examples show their positioning within a temporal structure in which past and future converge-and flatten-in a static traumatic present, a dimension shaped by the compulsive repetition and surfacing of fragments of traumatic memories. Behind what the narratorwould call the "unadjusted words" (65) of Mr. Tuttle's past

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tense ("You did not leave") and Lauren's future tense ("I will leave") lies the distorted temporality that, in trauma, manifests itself as perceptual belatedness. What Lauren does not know (that she will stay in the house) has already happened (as Mr. Tuttle's language suggests) but has not yet made its way into Lauren's consciousness. The tense clash unmasks her inability to assign to events that carry the knowledge of her painful loss their proper temporal collocation in the past. Thus the phantom's language merely announces what cannot be known yet, what Lauren can acknowledge only later in her effort to grasp the meaning of those haunting words: "You said I'd still be here, I think, when the lease. Do you remember this? When I'm supposed to leave. You said I do not" (56). Therefore, if Mr. Tuttle's remark is a self-fulfilling prophecy, if it was not "circumstance"or "chance" but "the remark itself" (112) that kept her there, it is because his words address what has already proven true. The second example confirms this pattern. Mr. Tuttle's remark"Don't touch it"-repeats that of the bereaved woman, and it comes back compulsively in her mind (81, 93, 98, 100). Aware that "[t]here was something in that moment she needed to keep" (93), Lauren cannot do so, at least not "then." When, "later," the inchoate and fragmented knowledge returns, Lauren articulates it in its paradoxical complexity: "This is a man who remembers the future. Don't touch it. I'll clean it up later" (100). Mr. Tuttle remembers-and bears witness to-past events to which Lauren cannot assign a status of pastness and closure. Thus they seem still to belong to the "unknown" and "to come." Indeed, rather than lying in front of her, still unshaped and open, her future unravels as the mere reenactment of a past that has not been cognitively processed. "She wanted to create her future," the narrator observes, "not enter a state already shaped to her outline" (98). Even when engaged in her fantasies and reveries, Lauren, trapped in a dimension of compulsive repetition, experiences the return of her trauma. In the apparently made-up story of the owner's visit, for instance, she describes an episode (the appearance of the landlord at the house to reclaim a piece of furniture) that in reality has already occurred, an episode revealed as real only at the end of the narrative, where it reproduces the temporal delay typical

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of trauma, as becomes apparent when one looks closely at the language that articulates the fantasy:
She thought of a man showing up unexpectedly.... a man appearing suddenly,as in a movie, and he is shot from below.... so that he looms. It the way it's done, a man at the door, lighted in such and comes as a shock, such a way, menacingly,for effect.... It is the shockof the outside world, the blow,the stunof intrusion, and the moment is renderedin a way that's to two deeply threatening people who have been living reclusively, in self-involved circumstances.
(78; emphasis added)

As the italicized words suggest, the narrative here recapitulates the story of the trauma of her husband's demise, for which Lauren is so psychically unprepared. Coming "unexpectedly" and "suddenly," the death of Rey Robles hits her mind as a "blow" that catches her off guard and produces a "shock." The cause lies outside Lauren's mind ("the outside world"), yet it penetrates her psychic boundaries and, unassimilated, will be doomed to return, as in this fantasy. Ultimately, the traumatic crisis shatters the precarious safety of her married routine, the reclusive existence she shared with Rey. Lauren reels from the shock of having survived her husband's death, and she is haunted by the incomprehensibility of an event that she feels compelled to rehearse to begin to apprehend. Now perceived as terrifying, threatening, and ungraspable, the harmless episode of the encounter with the landlord is framed retrospectively within the limited scope of her traumatic experience.5 It becomes apparent, therefore, that the temporal immobility and fixity of Mr. Tuttle's time, its being "overwhelmingly there, laid out,
5. Through the cinematic quality of Lauren's fantasy, DeLillo enables the reader to visualize the workings of traumatic memory and its discontinuous, fragmented resurfacing. He simultaneously captures a fundamental truth about the shock value of traumatic events. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for instance, claims that "the chief weight in [the] causation [of traumatic neuroses] seems to rest upon the factor of sur-

as "thestate a person gets into when he has run prise, of fright"(11).He defines "fright"
into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise" (11). Along these lines, Caruth defines trauma as an event "experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known... not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor" (4). Jean-Franqois Lyotard, in Heidegger and "thejezos,"describes the temporal belatedness of trauma in language that brings us back to DeLillo's passage. In trauma, he believes, the survivor

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unoccurring" (77), capture Lauren's entrapment in a dimension of compulsive repetition that jeopardizes the possibility of a genuine future, unknown because it has yet to happen.6 As short-circuited temporality impacts language, DeLillo's theory of referentiality within the framework of traumatic experience emerges clearly. In Mr. Tuttle's monologue-in the oddly scrambled speech, the mismatched words and incongruent sounds, the unrestrained flow of thoughts-language collapses into a heap of obscure, impenetrable, merely juxtaposed fragments:
Being here has come to me. I am with the moment, I will leave the moment. ... From the moment I am gone, am left, am leaving. I will leave the moment from the moment.... Coming and going I am leaving. I will has to and come me. We all, shall all, will all be left. come. Leaving go Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where between me. (74) I will be. Because nothing comes

experiences two "blows": "the first blow.., strikes the apparatus without observable internal effect, without affecting it. It is a shock without affect," while "with the second blow there takes place an affect without shock" (16). Lauren's story, while telling about the experience of the first "blow" (Rey's sudden, unexpected death), enacts, in the telling itself-both directly and indirectly, as in this fantasy-Lyotard's "second blow." In this tortuous way, experiences, unrecorded as they occur, struggle to rise to consciousness. 6. David Cowart, in investigating the relation between time and language in The Body Artist, discusses what at first glance might seem Mr. Tuttle's and Lauren's ability to anticipate the future as indeed examples of prescience. In a compelling reading of the second and third examples in my description, he observes, "Mr. Tuttle seems a modem version of what, in primitive societies, is taken as a figure of great mystery-a being directly in touch, like the lunatic or epileptic, with what ordinary people cannot see, hear, experience" (203), an "emissary from beyond" (204). Interestingly, he also views the "temporal enigma" (204) that connects Mr. Tuttle and Lauren as the mystery at the core of creative and artistic activity. Thus, in his words, "if one resists identifying the damaged Mr. Tuttle with an artist fully in command of his faculties, one can say that in Mr. Tuttle Lauren encounters, as a projection of her own unconscious, the artist in herself, temporarily obtunded or disoriented by late catastrophe" (206). In the connection between an "unrecognized prescience" in Lauren and "psychic distress and hallucination" caused by trauma, Cowart detects a first, unorganized manifestation of Lauren's creative powers. In my view, what seems prescience is in fact the reenactment of a past event that escapes understanding. I believe that even Lauren's creativity is inevitably shaped by repetition and traumatic temporality. At the end of the novel, through her performance piece, Lauren seeks to master her trauma on the stage by willingly and consciously performing it.

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Like a Beckettian Lucky, Mr. Tuttle surrenders to a logorrhea in which time runs amok and rules pertaining to logical syntax, tense consistency, and lexical appropriateness cease to operate. In its antinarrative quality, language altogether refuses the logic of linear time, the movement from past to present to future: "Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen" (98-99). Here the "I am" coexists with the "I will be," the "I am left" with the "I am leaving," the "have seen" with the "will see," the "here"with the "where." As self-referential fragments proliferate in the text ("Talkto me. I am talking" [46]; "Say some words to say some words" [55]; "I said this what I said" [56]), drawing attention to the act of speaking per se, one encounters DeLillo's suggestive notion of a language of bereavement, a language that in turning inward articulates the inaccessibility of knowledge in the aftermath of trauma.7But does such language point to the intrinsic opacity of language in general in its continuous referential deferral? Does it point, to put it differently, to what is structurally traumatic in the fracture between the word and the referent in representation? The former possibility is considered, and rejected, by David Cowart, who argues against a simplistic understanding of DeLillo's relation to language: "DeLillo does not defer to the poststructuralist view of language as a system of signifiers that refer only to other signifiers in infinite regression. DeLillo's texts in fact undermine this postmodernist gospel. Fully aware that language is maddeningly circular,maddeningly subversive of its own supposed referentiality, the author nonetheless affirms something numinous in its mysterious properties" (5). Thus in Cowart's view DeLillo seeks in language evidence of an epistemological depth that poststructuralist theory generally denies. This is borne out by The Body Artist, in which the endless deferral of meaning in language is countered by DeLillo's belief in an episte7. In a recent article, J. Heath Atchley also focuses on the function of language in The Body Artist. He reads Mr. Tuttle's language, and by extension the novel's language, as DeLillo's literary endeavor to tell through language what it means to mourn "at precisely the time when we are mourning so badly" (338). In Mr. Tuttle's speech, in particular, Atchley detects "a loss of language through language." The stranger's nonsensical monologues embody a loss that happens to language and not exclusively outside of it. "A loss of language" but also "a language of loss" (340), the stranger's speech would allow Lauren to mourn and recognize her grief.

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mological core. The point for DeLillo is not that all language is intrinsically traumatic, as it opens and sustains gaps, but that as radically shattering as an experience of loss and grief can be in uprooting all epistemological certainties, the language of bereavement can mysteriously and magically provide access to "the old deep meaning of the word" (75). Unfathomably,language can take us to a dimension outside linear time, outside the structures of the civilized, rational, socialized world that make life possible; yet precisely within this unstructured dimension, the subject can recover a relation to itself and the world otherwise not accessible. Language, therefore, both sustains and undoes subjectivity;it pulls the self into the depths of its own erasure yet reinstates the knowledge that restores life.8 The narrative logic of TheBodyArtist substantiates a claim about DeLillo's regard for language as what might ultimately ground subjectivity and help Lauren recover a position in the world that relies on a functional, socialized self. As the text moves from a beginning preoccupation with what Lauren can learn or detect from the broken pieces of Mr. Tuttle's language to her conscious attempt to experiment with a different kind of language (her body language), one detects DeLillo's belief that language, in all its forms and modulations, can teach a valuable lesson about loss. Mr. Tuttle's central monologue, if one follows other associations that the text encourages, can provide a valuable clue as to the existence of an epistemological core that, even though terrifying, might ultimately enable survival. Lauren plunges, as into pure water, into the depths of Mr. Tuttle's "transparent" "chant" (74): "Was he telling her what it is like to be him, to live in his body and mind?" (75). Her immersion in Mr. Tuttle's words implies her abandoning structured, linear temporality to experience a full "displacement of self." Then, in what seems an experience at once totalizing, ecstatic, and terrifying, Lauren comes to terms with the truth of her trauma. DeLillo does not provide any reassuring certainty as to the nature of "the old deep meaning of the word" in Mr. Tuttle's monologue. Yet as verb tenses clash and short-circuit, we hold on to the base
8. Philip Nel also reads The Body Artist as a text that affirms belief in the recovery of an epistemological core through language. The novel is, in his words, DeLillo's "homage to modernist poetics," "a lyrical meditation on language, memory, and the modernist (and romantic) project of bridging the gap between word and world" (736).

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forms of the recurring verbs: "come," "leave," "go," "be," and "see" (74). They all converge and coexist within the immobile present of traumatic repetition, voicing an ontological dimension of presence and absence in which being, coming, and seeing (that is, witnessing) coincide with not-being or being absent (leaving and going). The direct correlative to this experience comes shortly afterward, when Lauren imagines, along the lines of Mr. Tuttle, that she can circle back in time, witness again Mr. Tuttle/Rey's departure for New York, and stop him from leaving both the house and this life: she seesherselfcrawling towardhim.Theimageis there Shesawherself, in frontof her.Sheis crawling across the floorandit is nearlyrealto her. has separated, Shefeels something softlycomeunfixed,and she triesto pull him down to the floorwith her,stop him,keephim here,or crawls or only lies proneand sobsunstopup ontohim or intohim,dissolving, by herselffromabove. pably, beingwatched
(87-88)

An analogue of the "terror"and "displacement of self" she experiences through Mr. Tuttle's "chant," the passage marks Lauren's immersion in Mr. Tuttle's traumatic temporality, as she comes closest to the reenactment of her actual loss. The opening tense shift (she "saw" yet "sees") announces this experiential framework as repetition. Radically split and doubled, Lauren at once acts and watches herself acting. Her doubling, a sign of an internal division governed by trauma, simultaneously marks the emergence of an internal witness. Significantly, the object of her witnessing is incongruent and elusive. On the one hand, she sees herself "crawling" and desperately trying with her body to hold his body down and stop him from leaving. On the other, she "lies prone and sobs" in the room Rey has already left or never occupied in the first place. DeLillo seems to imply that there is something precious and epiphanic in this moment (as in Mr.Tuttle's monologue); just as Lauren's self is at the point of collapse and dissolution, some fundamental knowledge announces itself to consciousness. The narrator elaborates through an analogy, which I will quote extensively, as it helps shed light on the nature of such knowledge: Youstandat the tableshufflingpapersand you dropsomething. Only you don'tknowit. It takesa secondor two beforeyou knowit and even

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then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances.You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip.You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know you dropped it, you rememberhow it happened, or half remember,or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-endbounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there.
(89-90)

The analogy of the paper clip falling articulates DeLillo's insights about the workings of traumatic temporality and the complicated journey to knowledge. The story is simple. A paper clip falls from the edge of a sheet to which it was fastened. The mind does not know that the paper clip has dropped, that it is no longer where it is supposed to be. However, the body does know, as "the teeming space" around it undergoes some sort of distortion and transformation because of the paper clip's absence. The body knows what the mind does not. The body then conveys this knowledge to the mind, which at this point hears something hit the floor. This time the mind knows what has happened but-and DeLillo's word is crucial here-only "belatedly." It takes two sounds, the second repeating the first, for the mind to acquire a delayed knowledge of the event: the first sound has really taken place without the mind's knowing it; the second, a little bit later, does not really happen even though the mind registers it. Thus the "memory of the drop" has been stored in its unassimilated form until the repetition of the sound makes the mind aware of its presence. As the body responds to this belated knowledge, one bends to pick the paper clip up, only to discover that the paper clip at this later time is already somewhere else. This final knowledge reflects the epiphany that attends Lauren's immersion in Mr. Tuttle's language and her reenactment of the departure scene. The subject learns not that the paper clip is falling,

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or that it has just fallen, but rather that it had fallen in the past, and only its loss, its actual absence, belongs to the present. As a discovery, the fictitiousness of the second sound mirrors the image of Rey's body in Lauren's reverie. As the paper clip is not on the floor, Lauren becomes aware of the absence of Rey's body in her traumatic reenactment as well as in her life. This is the terrifying yet also life-giving knowledge that traumatic reenactment discloses, as the subject learns to assign to the experience of death its "pastness" and closure. In linking these three elements-Mr. Tuttle's "chant," Lauren's fresh encounter with loss, and the paper-clip analogyDeLillo deliberately points to the distinctive way in which language can teach about the meaning of loss by carrying the subject to the place of such realization. Language-the site where knowledge about death and life, loss and recovery, trauma and survival, and the mysterious possibility of their coexistence emerge-proves central to the quest that the novel enacts even at the end. Here, with Lauren staging her performance piece Body Time, DeLillo experiments with the modulation of both the voice and the body in his endeavor to recuperate through language-both verbal and corporeal-a genuine, more grounded relationship to reality.

The Phantomas "Speaking Body"

I would like to return briefly to Tasso's scene of Clorinda's death, which as read by Caruth has helped articulate the function of the phantom's voice in DeLillo's text. One recalls that whereas Freud points to this scene as an example of repetition compulsion, as Tancredwounds his beloved twice over, Caruth extends his reading to include her notion of "voice" as what in traumatic experience bears witness to a still foreclosed knowledge. I would like to suggest that in her emphasis on the voice, Caruth fails to notice the other crucial dimension of this phantasmatic return, that of Clorinda's transformed and therefore unrecognizable body. Tancred accidentally wounds Clorinda twice, because both times she is unrecognizable-at first in the guise of an enemy knight, then in the form of a tree in which her soul is trapped. At the core of trauma, therefore, is a failed recognition (or misrecognition) that uncovers the epistemological gap in the subject's consciousness.

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Furthermore, Tasso seems to imply, trauma has to do with a transformation-Clorinda's metamorphosis from woman to man to tree-as the counterpart of a psychic split or breach that alienates the subject from itself. To put it differently, what Caruth fails to notice is that, "released throughthe wound"(2), the voice issues from an unrecognizable "foreign body." Similarly to Tasso, DeLillo confers on corporeality a central role in his tale of loss and recovery. For DeLillo, it is as important to take notice of what transformed bodies, physical sensations, and corporeal performances tell us as of what actual voices say. In fact, Mr. Tuttle retains his fascination because he is simultaneously an embodied voice and an omnipresent "speaking body." In a traumatic crisis, DeLillo suggests, the body knows about the truth of an experience long before the mind can process it. It is not an accident that, listening to her visitor on a number of occasions, Lauren seems to recover a flow of fragmented memories that resemble what the narrator calls "sense memory" (11). These are memories "of tossing sensation, drifts of sex, confession and pale sleep" (61), of "an erotic of see and touch," but also of the void left by Rey's death, as Lauren "miss[es] him in her body" (49). As the paper-clip analogy makes clear, the body preserves unavailable memories of loss before one can call the lost object with its name. If this truth holds for a paper clip, how much more so for a husband? But a body that knows about loss before the mind does is a foreign body, a body the traumatic experience has taken away. When Lauren comes back to the rented house by the sea, alienated from her psychic and corporeal reality, she is unable to recognize herself. "Her body felt different. ... Tight, framed, she didn't know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar" (33). What is foreign, of course, is the pain, the affect, problematically banned from consciousness. At this point she can ask certain questions but not answer them: "why do I look different?" (63), Lauren asks herself as "[s]he looked at her face in the bathroom mirror" (63). Her "foreign" doubling becomes apparent as Lauren catches herself looking from the position of the functional ego that performs the routine tasks of survival-cooking, cleaning, sleeping, waiting for another day-to "a smaller hovering her in the air somewhere, already thinking it's tomorrow" (34).

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Like Tasso, DeLillo dramatizes this experience of radical estrangement most powerfully through the return of a transfigured, unrecognizable, phantom body that occupies the space between sameness and difference, the boundaries of traumatic crisis. This body, which takes the form of an anonymous man, announces Mr. Tuttle's foreignness, but its voice, the perfect reproduction of Rey's and Lauren's, opens the gap of trauma's epistemological paradox: one knows what seems unknown and does not know what seems familiar. The interaction with Mr. Tuttle renews this impaired recognition, which the dissonance between voice and body sustains. In fact, Mr. Tuttle's materialization, his becoming body, does not fix or center identity; rather, it retells the story of traumatic displacement. As it transforms itself from child to old man in front of Lauren's eyes with "the scant act of head-raising, a simple tilt of chin and eyes" (43), Mr. Tuttle's body projects the liminality and metamorphic elusiveness of traumatized subjectivity. Mr. Tuttle's face has an "unfinished look" (45); his "aspect" is "elusive" (46); Lauren needs "a reference elsewhere to get him placed" (45); and his body inhabits, in Lauren's definition, the space of the "as if," a precarious and ever-changing territory. Not unlike the ventriloquist's voice, Mr. Tuttle's body replicates from without a lifeless, dehumanized version of Lauren's. "A dummy in a red club chair" (48), "a cartoon head and body, chinless, stick-figured" (62), compulsively repeating machinelike, rhythmic movements, "like the first toy ever built with moving parts" (62), Mr. Tuttle becomes here the objective correlative for a subjectivity shaped and governed by trauma and traumatic temporality, a subjectivity, DeLillo seems to imply, that denies a center, as Lauren detects "no stirrings of tremulous self" in his eyes (85). In foregrounding a representation of Mr. Tuttle as nothing but the sum of his corporeal functions, needs, and instincts, the text performs a representational shift, from the phantom as "embodied voice" to "speaking body." Lauren feeds, washes, comforts, and even sexually pleases Tuttle.She feeds him soup while he sits on the toilet (95), cleans the car where she finds him "sitting in piss and shit" (64), reads him a book about the human body and childbirth (60), and washes his body while carefully naming each part. Yet the more it becomes matter, the less centered such a subject appears. In

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Lauren's eyes, Mr. Tuttle looks "[1]ikesomeone you technically see but don't quite register.... Like someone you see and then forget you see" (95). Not unlike the words he utters, his body is material yet immaterial, visible yet invisible, remembered yet forgotten, internal yet external. By nurturing Mr. Tuttle's body, providing for its needs, and imparting knowledge about its parts, structure, and internal processes, Lauren subverts the nature of her relation to Mr. Tuttle's voice. In her approach to the physical, it is Lauren, the body artist, who provides knowledge, and-in spite of her radical estrangement-it is to her own body that she turns in her struggle for resistance and survival. Even if her mind may not yet grasp her experience, her body already knows. A privileged medium in its contingent relation to space and time, a flexible structure easily forgeable and malleable, a dynamic system endowed with great expressive potential, the body is for Lauren a precious source of empowerment. But the body is above all the territory on which to reconquer a genuine relation to linear time, which her "bodywork" (37)-a rigorous regimen of breathing exercises, methodical contortions, cat stretches, headstands, neck rolls, crossovers, pelvic stretches, and repetitions of everyday gestures-enables. If these tiring practices, on the one hand, show Lauren's will to reappropriate her body and exert her control over it, they primarily reeducate perception in the ways in which time sustains life in the body. In reenacting ritualized gestures that uncover human reliance on linear time, such as the act of checking the time on her wrist, Lauren dramatically and theatrically defends linear time against the seduction of Mr. Tuttle's uneventful, static present. Whereas Mr. Tuttle, as a "walking talking continuum" (91), refuses arbitrary differentiations in his time structure, Lauren knows that time, in a "reassuring sequence" (77), "makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it" (92). Linear time, therefore, sustains working through and the reconstitution of the self out of its shattered pieces. In the cosmetic and grooming practices that she performs on her body, Lauren seemingly betrays her survival effort. With astringents, files, bleaches, plastic strips, wax, scissors, clippers, creams, and pumice stone, Lauren works on her body to "alter the visible

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form" and remove any signs of physical distinctiveness and individuation (97). Now a "blankness, a body slate" purged of the marks of time (84), Lauren's body is an empty page, a clean canvas on which to project a new self. Her ritualized attempt at self-erasure, her wish to become practically"unseen"(84),points to another dimension of her project, fully uncovered only at the end of the novel. Her invisibility, complementing her imitation of Mr. Tuttle's voice, now turns her visually into the phantom, the man whom, as Lauren has put it, "you see and then forget you see" (95).9An ambiguous exercise in body control, mastery, repetition, time perception, and transformation, Lauren's bodywork gains retrospective clarity-proves at once constructive and destructive-once placed within the conceptual framework of Body Time, the performance piece with which DeLillo's novel arrives at its conceptual destination.

The Voice and the Body Body Time:

In her essay "Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling," Roberta Culbertson argues that although it is imperative for the traumatized subject to tell her story to reestablish a relationship with the world, this task poses the problem of what it means to tell a story "not known in words, but in the body" (170). This unprocessed corporeal knowledge, which she calls "body memory" (a concept resembling DeLillo's "sense memory"), "obey[s] none of the standard rules of discourse." As "the self's discourse with itself," obscure conversations "occupy that channel between the conscious and the unconscious that speaks a body language" Here one discerns another version of Abraham's definition (178).10 of "phantomogenic words." If one reads Mr. Tuttle's outbursts or
9. Linda Simon in her review defines Lauren's bodywork as a set of practices "closer to torture than pleasure," through which Lauren tries "to erase her selfhood." Whereas I concur that self-erasure is part of the project, as is apparent in her final piece, I believe that Lauren's is rather a ritualization of "self-erasure," an exercise in controlled and mastered self-denial. 10. Culbertson's notion of "body memory" seems indebted to Freud's definition of traumatic memory. Not accidentally, in Studies on Hysteria (6) and Moses and Monotheism (121), Freud calls this type of memory a "foreign body." Culbertson's concept appears useful, however, in the way it directly addresses a knowledge foreclosed to the mind but accessed by-and stored within-the body.

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mechanical repetitions in the light of these observations, they appear to be an antinarrative that carries with it unexpressed body/sense memories. This antinarrative needs to be apprehended in connection to the body and what the body tells in order to become, if only partially, readable. Yet only at the end does the text bear witness to Lauren's direct, conscious commitment to the imperative of telling and bringing her private experience into the social realm. In the performance piece Body Time, a mise en abyme, Lauren stages a narrative in which the body speaks the otherwise ineffable language of trauma. Unlike her solipsistic conversations with the phantom (Culbertson's "self's discourse with itself," one might argue), the performance piece frames trauma within the intersubjective domain of artistic production and reception and thus opens up a space for witnessing and working through. Representing a distillation of all that has passed between herself and Mr. Tuttle (that bizarre corporealization of inarticulate grief), the public performance ultimately enables-or at least opens a space for-retrospective mastery of both the trauma and the oppressive psychopathology it fosters. Body art seems particularly to suit the project of articulating traumatic experience and staging forms of textual working through. the Subject(1998), for instance, Amelia Jones, in BodyArt/Performing argues that what characterizes body art is its commitment to the performance of the subject in its shifting, transforming nature, but also in its locatedness and contingency. "[A] set of performative practices, that through... intersubjective engagement, instantiate the dislocation or decentering of the Cartesian subject of modernism" (1), body art contributes to the postmodern challenge to conventional structures of gendered, sexual, ethnic, and racial subjectivity. It contributes, that is, to the dispersal, fragmentation, and dissemination of an illusorily centered, stable self. In seeing the body as a fundamental "site of interpersonal exchange and interaction" (228), the body artist knows that the "multiplicitous and dispersed" (18) subject is by necessity also, in its corporeality, "fully embodied" and embedded in the social and the political. As Jones puts it, "Body art ... places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political domain"(13) and confirms "what phenomenology and psychoanalysis have taught us: that the subject 'means'

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always in relationship to others and the locus of identity is always elsewhere" (14). Within this framework, both the artist and the spectator are marked as contingent. If one turns to Lauren's performance piece, Body Time,it becomes apparent that body art is a privileged medium in narrating trauma, not only because it facilitates access to what only the body knows but also because it insists upon the mutuality of artist and viewer. More than other forms of artistic representation, body art makes of immediate intersubjective exchange its structuring principle, thus allowing for what a story of trauma needs but systematically erases-a witness within the self that can share its experience with an external witness. Moreover, in line with the scope of body art in general, Body Timeperforms the subject "always in the process of becoming another" (105). In this piece Lauren dramatizes her otherness less within the context of identity politics (evidently the thrust of her previous performances) than as part of the struggle for survival that the novel has witnessed.11 With the "bodies" (107) of stage personae, Lauren projects, objectifies, and controls on the stage the alienation from the body/self that the novel has voiced; she reappropriates and recapitulates what trauma had turned foreign and unfamiliar. Lauren's chance of working through her trauma lies in the space that separates performing otherness from compulsively and unwillingly repeating it. In Lauren's piece, the body is literally transformed. The reviewer mentions three metamorphoses or "bodies" Lauren puts onstage: an old Japanese woman, a businesswoman who checks the time and hails a taxicab, and the figure who brings the piece to a close, "a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something" (105). These "bodies" answer to a very specific purpose: to make the artist's audience "feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully" (104). But for the audience to apprehend linear time,
11. Lauren's other selves in previous performances quote those of notorious body artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, Yayoi Kusama, and Bob Flanagan. "The woman who makes paintings with her vagina" (105) reminds us, for instance, of Schneemann's and Wilke's feminist bodies, while "the man who drives nails into his penis" (105) repeats one of Flanagan's performances, thus placing Lauren's art much more directly in the context of a challenge to normative gendered subjectivities. See Jones for a discussion of the main figures in body art.

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Lauren needs to force it to experience distorted, traumatic temporality, which she writes on her body. Rather than being mere receptacles of unprocessed memories, her figures literally incarnate Lauren's body memories or "sense memories." They are themselves corporeal memories turned inside out for the audience to see. The Japanese woman enacts the return of a "body memory" of a brief encounter. Fragile, vulnerable, weightless, like "gift wrap" (36), the old woman waters her plants with a garden hose she holds for what seems an eternity. In the old woman's hands, time stretches, dilates, breaks from its linearity in an endless series of repetitions yet becomes essential and naked. Through the woman's experience of time, Lauren reproduces traumatic temporality in all its intensity and urgency. After all, the Japanese woman is, in Lauren's words, "a beautiful and problematic thing," like time itself. The "second body" brings to the stage one of the figures in Lauren's routine bodywork, the businesswoman who repeatedly checks the time and tries to stop a taxi. Supposedly the perfect example of reliance on linear "business time," the woman's actions, iterated obsessively "many times, countless times" (106), reenact compulsive behavior in trauma. Yet rather than empty and boringly repetitious, this performance is for Lauren "too eventful," for it registers the way a traumatic event exceeds understanding and becomes a disruptive mental plenum. The body's final transformation-the phantom's body and voice-brings onstage Lauren's most direct attempt to give structure to and contain her experience: "The naked man ... stripped of recognizable language and culture... moves... as if in a dark room, only more slowly and gesturally" (107). Lauren's physical selfeffacement through her cleansing practices has prepared her body for Mr. Tuttle's nakedness and near invisibility. "Colorless," "bloodless," and "ageless," "rawboned and slightly bug-eyed," her hair "not trimmed but chopped" (103), Lauren stages her radical otherness as the necessary denial of a constitutive self and body. Yet this foreign body in its uncompromising exposure forcefully confronts the audience from the stage and tells a story that words cannot. "He wants to tell us something. His voice is audible, intermittently, on tape, and [Lauren] lip-syncs the words" (107). Language, the tape-recorded phantom's language, comes back obscure,

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mediated, simulated. The monologue, made of "verbs and pronouns [that] scatter in the air" (108), opens the way to another experiential, temporal level, by now familiar to The BodyArtist's reader. Yet unlike Mr. Tuttle's first outburst, Lauren's performance takes traumatic haunting and disrupted temporality into the social and aesthetic, undertakes, as Abraham would say, "to stage a word" or "an attempt at exorcism... by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm" (176). In taking the phantom on the stage, Lauren repeats words and movements no longer limited to the modeling of psychic conflicts and gaps, as they model now the once-impaired subject's mastery and control. When the body, in total synchrony with language, "jumps into another level" and "flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly" (108), the corporeal and vocal weave the known and the unknown and start telling a shared story of trauma, distorted temporality, and foreclosed knowledge. Body Time marks Mr. Tuttle's disappearance as a body "other" than Lauren's. The "two bodies in a room" (85) we had encountered in the rented house before Lauren's performance now become one. During her interview with Mariella Chapman, Lauren suddenly switches to the naked man's spooky voice, while her body, now seemingly "equipped with male genitals" (109), looks like his. Performed, displayed, carefully designed, and constructed, Mr. Tuttle originates from the artist's commitment to "work toward and build on" "emptiness" (104). This transformation of a figure who has been so ambiguous throughout the novel seems the most significant. At times unwillingly hosted, at other times desperately and forcefully wanted, and finally carefully impersonated, Mr. Tuttle affirms the need for communication, interconnectedness, and sharing against the annihilating power of grief. But through the very end of the novel, he remains indefinable. In her final sexual reverie, as she approaches her husband's bedroom and imagines finding Rey "intact, in his real body" (121), Lauren hears "in her chest and throat" a "chant, a man's chanted voice" (120). It is, once again, the seduction of the voice of trauma that addresses the unspeakable reality of her loss but that ultimately, and only belatedly, confronts her with the truth of such "realization": "The room was empty when she looked" (124). Yet when the man "trying desperately to tell us something" is fully identified with the artist,

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naked in front of her audience to communicate her otherwise untellable experience, DeLillo seems to assign to art and language-spoken, written, body language-a special place in the search for a center and a temporary anchorage in the disorienting reality of trauma. In this sense, Body Timefunctions metanarratively as a commentary to what on a larger scale The BodyArtist seeks to do, as it internally recapitulates DeLillo's claim about the power of language in grounding and stabilizing identity. It is not accidental that Body Time reaches readers only in the mediated form of a review. Subtly, DeLillo confronts us not only with the content of the piece (the bodies Lauren becomes) but with the reaction and response to this content of the reviewer and the audience. It seems, therefore, that the review does not so much convey information otherwise inaccessible as it bears witness to the difficulties of Body Time's audience and, by extension, of The Body Artist's readers in accessing knowledge about trauma. DeLillo constructs both The Body Artist and Body Time as sophisticated metanarrative reflections on the relation between the known and the not known in the language of bereavement, on what telling and receiving a trauma narrative entails. In both instances, DeLillo insists on the need for a contingent, urgent, and direct relationship between a teller and a witness both internal and external. The reviewer of Body Timeputs it best when she concludes: "It is about you and me. What begins in solitary otherness becomes familiar and even personal" (109-10). Art can effect this transformation: it externalizes what is internal, opens it to public consumption and to witnessing, and brings it back, once shared, as something one can reappropriate and safely place within the self. Yet what Mariella Chapman is also saying is that by performing her radical otherness, Lauren opens a public space where everyone can recognize the profoundly human, true, and contingent nature of grief and mourning. DeLillo's story of metamorphic bodies and voices reminds us of the extent to which subjectivity is necessarily articulated in relation to others, and of how this is particularly true within the boundaries of a traumatic crisis. A story of bodies and voices, The BodyArtist concerns the telling and sharing of what is not known to be knowable. Rome,Italy

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CITED

Abraham, Nicolas. "Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology." The Shell and the Kernel. Ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 171-76. Amidon, Stephen. "Tasting the Breeze." Rev. of The Body Artist. New Statesman 5 Feb. 2001: 52. Atchley, J. Heath. "The Loss of Language, the Language of Loss: Thinking with DeLillo on Terror and Mourning." Janus Head 7 (2004): 333-54. Begley, Adam. "Ghostbuster." Rev. of The Body Artist. New York Times Book Review 4 Feb. 2001: 12. "The Body Artist." Rev. of The Body Artist. Publishers Weekly20 Nov. 2000: 43. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience:Trauma,Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. Culbertson, Roberta. "Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self." New Literary History 26 (1995): 169-95. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. Evans, Paul. "The Body Artist." Rev. of The Body Artist. BookJan. 2001: 63. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the PleasurePrinciple. 1920. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. . Moses and Monotheism. 1939. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage, 1958. Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. 1895. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 1957. Gorra, Michael. "The Body Artist." Rev. of The Body Artist. TLS: Times Literary Supplement 16 Feb. 2001: 21. Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Jones, Malcolm. "Dark Tale." Rev. of The Body Artist. Newsweek 15 Jan. 2001: 61. Laub, Dori. "Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle." Trauma: Explorationsin Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 61-75. Lyotard, Jean-Franqois. Heidegger and "the jews." Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Morrison, Toni. Beloved.New York: Knopf, 1987. Nel, Philip. "Don DeLillo's Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Literature43 (2002): 736-59. Artist." Contemporary Roncevic, Mirela. "The Body Artist." Rev. of The Body Artist. LibraryJournal 1 Jan. 2001: 152. Simon, Linda. "Grief." Rev. of The Body Artist. Worldand I Oct. 2001: 253. Tasso, Torquato. GerusalemmeLiberata.1581. Modena: Panini, 1991.

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