ABSTRACT

In both The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, entry into this new post-millennial temporality produces a kind of spectral disjunction. Both novels are haunted by a history that appears in ghostly form, but that cannot quite make itself present, cannot quite manifest itself. The time of the novels is the stretched, alienated, empty time of mourning; a mourning for the spirits that walk the halls, that speak to us from the last century, the last millennium, but that cannot enter into our space or time. As the time of Hamlet is an out-of-joint time4 – an unmeasurable, doubled and haunted time that is conditioned by the spectral presence of the father, who continues to appear even in the guise of his banishment – so the time of these novels is inhabited by a history, or even a form of temporality, that has become obsolete, and that can only be registered through the work of mourning. In The Body Artist, the mourning is personal, driven by the loss of a loved one. The novel enters into the nontime of bereavement, in which the protagonist, Lauren, refuses, like Hamlet, to cast off her nighted colour.5 As Hamlet continues, with ‘vailed lids’ to ‘seek for [his] noble father in the dust’,6 long after the official time of mourning has passed, so Lauren finds her dead husband still alive in ‘streams of sunlit dust’ (BA 124) that pour into their bedroom, alive in the stalled time of a refusal to relinquish a loved one. In Cosmopolis, the work of mourning is more overtly political. It is less focused and pure than in The Body Artist, finding itself refracted through the broken prismatic surface of a postmillennial city, a city that is entering into the spacetime of cybercapital. If, in The Body Artist, it is the experience of bereavement that leads Lauren to ‘think of time differently’ (BA 107), then in Cosmopolis it is the globalisation of electronic capital that leads to the need for a ‘new theory of time’ (C 86). If, in The Body Artist, the slack directionlessness of bereavement produces a ‘kind of time that had no narrative quality’ (BA 65), then in Cosmopolis it is the virtualisation of currency that collapses the teleological movement of history. In Cosmopolis, it is ‘money’, rather than time, that has ‘lost its narrative quality’ (C 77).