ABSTRACT |
Don
DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) has been described by several
reviewers and by the author himself as “an ascetic book”. The aim of
this paper is to examine how that “ascetic” quality works in the novel
on different levels, from its plot to its epigrammatic style. I will
take as a departure point the definition of the ascetic as the practice
of self-discipline and self-denial for spiritual improvement. The story
of Lauren Hartke, recently widowed and renowned body artist, can be read
in this light as a spiritual search beyond the limits of conventional
language and time. The novel, moreover, is filled with reminiscences
from Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and others that contribute to create a
modernist hermeneutic horizon according to which the process of
“ascesis” portrayed can be read as a way towards the revelation of
hidden meaningfulness in the sense of Joyce’s epiphanies or Woolf’s
“moments of being”.
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