Dear Sarah,
I’m also glad for the opportunity to discuss this elusive and intriguing novel, though I must say that the book itself doesn’t offer much cause for optimism about the effectiveness of verbal communication. A fairly typical passage of dialogue goes like this:
She whispered, “What are you doing?”“I am doing. This yes that. Say some words.””Did you ever? Look at me. Did you ever talk to Rey? The way we are talking now.””We are talking now.””Yes. Are you saying yes? Say yes. When did you know him?””I know him where he was.”
The two speakers are Lauren Hartke and a strange man she calls “Mr. Tuttle,” who shows up in her rented house on the coast of New England just after her husband Rey’s suicide and who has the unnerving habit of replaying scrambled bits of Rey and Lauren’s conversations. Since The Body Artist is a kind of metaphysical ghost story–John Leonard, in The New York Review of Books, mentions The Secret Sharer and Beloved as antecedents; Poe and Hawthorne also come to mind, though not, obviously, with respect to prose style–we never learn who the man really is, or where he goes when he disappears. A rational explanation is half-heartedly offered–“If you examine the matter methodically, you realize that he is a retarded man sadly gifted in certain specialized areas, such as memory retention and mimicry, a man who’d been concealed in a large house, listening”–and quickly overruled: “This is a man who remembers the future,” we learn. “He violates the limits of the human.”
At another point, discounting the possibility that Mr. Tuttle emerged from, and may have returned to, an institution of some kind, Lauren observes that “he wasn’t mental.” This should be taken literally, to mean not that he isn’t crazy, but that he doesn’t seem to possess the interior conscious space we think of as a mind. He responds to verbal and some other stimuli, but he lacks the basic human ability to account for himself and, most crucially, to generate language. His speech is echolalia, as though he were a Skinnerian parrot instead of a Chomskian person. Similarly, though the novel, after the opening scene, finds Lauren in what one assumes is a state of grief and shock, it’s not mental either–that is, not psychological in the conventional sense, not about the states of feeling within an individual, or the affective connections between people, that furnish most stories. Instead, the novel pushes what I suppose are universal experiences–how we live in time, how we represent experience in language, how we dwell in bodies and in space–to a point of almost unintelligible (or maybe not “almost”) abstraction.
DeLillo seems, in composing this book, to have followed the writerly equivalent of Lauren’s bodywork regimen, which consists of rigorous depilation, exfoliation, and tongue scraping, as well as five-hour bouts of extreme yoga. By the way, historians of the future may note (or, following the novel’s suggestion of a dimension in which past, present, and future ovelap, may already have noted) that The Body Artist appears at the height of the turn-of-the century yoga craze, during which many thousands of people (myself included) who generally wear the old mind-body dualism like a comfrotable overcoat, periodically trade it in for… well, something else. The experience involves, as far as I understand it, a disciplined ascetism, a shedding of mental clutter.
And The Body Artist, for its part, seems purged–starved, maybe–of precisely the kind of mental clutter that has been one of DeLillo’s great subjects, as well as his stylistic signature. His novels are dense to the point of bursting with information, and the frenzied, terrified pursuit of data–scrambled signals, mathematical equations, entangled conspiracies, traceries of buried allegory and cosmic codes–drives his plots. It makes a certain kind of sense that after Underworld, a kind of summa not only of postwar American history but of the postwar American novel, paranoid-allegorical division, he would want to simplify, as though Melville, after polishing off Moby Dick, had sat down to write Emily Dickinson’s poems.
One question that keeps irking me as I try to sort out my sometimes impatient, sometimes admiring reaction to this book is what I would make of it if it were by someone else. Would I be better able to admire its spareness if I hadn’t been conditioned to expect another dizzy, dreadful ride through the undergrowth of the national security state? Or would I have given in more quickly to my irritation if this volume had arrived without the aura of a big reputation?
These questions will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m off to my yoga class.
Best,
Tony
