DON DELILLO AND PERFORMANCE

Session Organizer: Jesse Kavadlo
English Department, Winona State University
PO Box 5838, Winona, MN 55987
jkavadlo@winona.edu

American Aphasia: Performances in the Novels of Don DeLillo

Performances by characters in Don DeLillo’s novels share one quality: aphasia. Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star of Great Jones Street (1973), Lenny Bruce, the comedian of Underworld (1997), Lauren Hartke, the artist of The Body Artist (2001) and Brutha Fez, the Sufi rapper of Cosmopolis (2003) each exhibit some form of aphasia. The objective of this paper is to examine why these performers are aphasic and how their performances reveal the linguistic and cultural foundations of DeLillo’s fiction.

The most important example is Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street (1973) who performs songs like "Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw" consisting of nonsensical lyrics and "childlike babble." The linguistic incoherence of his music draws large crowds and makes him famous, which illustrates the influence nonverbal performances can have on mass American culture. Another exemplary aphasic performer is Lauren Hartke of The Body Artist (2001). Her performance is inspired by an enigmatic experience with a ghostly young man whose speech is either imitative or nonsensical--both aphasic qualities.

In order to understand the aspects of aphasia in performance DeLillo creates we must consider why performers like Wunderlick and Hartke are losing their ability to speak and what their aphasia might reveal about expression in America.

Elliott Riebman
Emory University
eriebman@yahoo

Performing the Body in the Fiction of Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s fiction is dominated by the search for an effective site of resistance against the dominant culture of late capitalism, postmodernism. DeLillo finds the potential for resistance against this culture in its marginalized groups, especially in women and artists, who share a self-consciousness of the extent to which pre-existing cultural narratives determine their identities. From Americana’s Sullivan to The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke, DeLillo promotes the idea of a bodily semiotic aesthetic, as a means of eluding these cultural narratives – at least temporarily. But DeLillo does not ascribe an uncomplicated prediscursive status to the body: instead he recognizes that the body is also susceptible to dominant cultural narratives. Political resistance does not lie in recovering the body, instead it lies in performing the body. This is exemplified in Lauren Hartke’s art in The Body Artist. Recognizing the capacity of the dominant culture to reinscribe any transgression, DeLillo promotes her avant-garde art, which is continually remade, as our only real hope for an effective political aesthetic. Her deliberate reconstruction of the body supports Judith Butler’s contestation that it is in the parodic or self-conscious repetition of a discursive identity, rather than in the recovery of a prediscursive self, that individual agency lies.

Anne Longmuir
Glasgow Caledonian University
a.longmuir@gcal.ac.uk

The Intruder and The Hostage: Performing Hospitality in DeLillo’s The Body Artist

This presentation looks at performance in The Body Artist via the scene of hospitality between Lauren Hartke and the man she names “Mr. Tuttle.” Tuttle is simultaneously thought of as l’intruse and guest, while Lauren is the prosthetic host and hostage to the question of Tuttle. Tuttle enters Lauren’s house, he intrudes on her space, time, language, and subjectivity. If he is unexpected, he is also “inevitable,” but perhaps only insofar as he is retrospectively so; in other words, Lauren does not anticipate his strange arrival/presence until he is already there, in the upstairs bedroom. Lauren attempts to “naturalize” the stranger through constructions of his origin and subjectivity but is deferred at each turn, a deferral that ultimately opens the way for an absolute hospitality. Lauren’s offering of hospitality oscillates between conditional and unconditional, yet her offering of hospitality comes under suspicion when we consider that she does not have the right to the title of master of the house. That is to say, her relationship to the “inside” is not direct and natural, making her the prosthetic owner, or host-as if, and it is as such that offers hospitality.

Tyler Kessel
University at Albany
tkessel2@nycap.rr.com