ABSTRACT
A cognitively informed analysis of narrative time reveals a new understanding of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) and its reflections on the embodied experience and interrelationships of time, consciousness, and language. The story takes place in the aftermath of loss: following the suicide of her husband, Lauren lives alone in their shared home. One day, she encounters a mysterious man, whom she assumes to be mentally unwell, living in her upstairs rooms. Increasingly, Mr Tuttle, as she calls him, seems, rather than disabled, to be adrift: inhabiting a liminal space in time, sliding between subjectivities. Instead of following a fixed, chronological trajectory, he lives through moments of the past and future from the perspective of other people. Eventually, Lauren begins to experience the liminal position in time which Tuttle embodies. The events of her life become ‘softly unfixed’ (88): like Tuttle’s, Lauren’s time seems to lose its ‘narrative quality’ (65). As her sense of time begins to shift into the fractured chronology of her guest, the patterns of mimicry, resonance, and synchrony resolve into an interactive narrative time which shapes Lauren’s journey and the trajectory of the novella.
