“Thinking along the margins”: the choreography of trauma in The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo

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Les deux événements qui structurent The Body Artist, la mort de Rey Robles et la performance de Lauren Hartke, sont les deux ellipses autour desquelles se construit le roman de Don DeLillo. Deuil et performance sont alors intimement liés, dans un processus qui semble comme en suspens. C’est dans ce suspens que se nouent les blancs du textes, à la marge desquels le sens et le personnage tentent, malgré l’inexorable absence au centre du texte, de se reconstruire, malgré ou grâce à des traces qui se refusent au langage.

The two structuring events of The Body Artist, Rey Robles’s death and the performance of Laura Hartke, his grieving wife, are the indissociable ellipses around which Don DeLillo’s novel is built. Mourning and performing become therefore intimately linked, in a process that seems to keep the real in abeyance. It is within this sense of suspension that the blanks in the narrative take place, forming the margins along which the main character and the reader try to make sense of events that escpe the power of language.