JAC : A Journal Of Composition Theory ISSN : 0731-6755
THE WILL TO LIVE IN DON DELILLO’S THE BODY ARTIST
J. Britto Jenobia PhD Scholar, Department of English National College (Autonomous), Trichy-1 Affiliated to Bharathidasan University E-mail:[email protected]
Dr. V. Sekar Associate Professor of English National College (Autonomous), Trichy-1 Affiliated to Bharathidasan University E-mail:[email protected]
Abstract:
“The Will to Power is an instinctive striving for conditions in which the agent achieves his maximum felling of power.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power is one of the famous concepts of Nietzsche. The Will to Power gives a psychological dimension which explains the human nature, need and desire. The Will to Power leads to search for power. Search for power includes search for pleasure and for survival. Survival plays an important role in Nietzschean philosophy. The Survival ends with ‘The Will to Live’. The novel taken for analysis is Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. The main character in the novel is Lauren Hartke. The novel was published in 2001. The novel is about Lauren who searches her new self from shattered alienated self through her Body art performance ‘Body and Time’. This article focuses Laurens transformation from her shattered self to self-awakening will to live. The concept used to analyse the character Lauren is the will to power.
Key Words: Nietzsche and his concepts, Alienated self, catalyst, Will to Power, Superman, Body Art Performance.
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Introduction:
“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can
be turned around: out of every ditch, a path if you can only see it.”
- Hilary Mantel
The Will to Power is one of the famous concepts of Nietzsche. The Will to Power is defined as “an
instinctive striving for conditions in which the agent achieves his maximum felling of
power.”(Nietzsche) The Will to Power gives a psychological dimension which explains the human
nature, need and desire. The Will to Power leads to search for power. Search for power includes
search for pleasure and for survival. Survival plays an important role in Nietzschean philosophy. The
Survival ends with ‘The Will to Live’. The novel taken for analysis is Don DeLillo’s The Body
Artist. The main character in the novel is Lauren Hartke. The novel was published in 2001. The
novel is about Lauren who searches her new self from shattered alienated self through her Body art
performance ‘Body and Time’. This article focuses Laurens transformation from her shattered self to
self-awakening will to live. The concept used to analyse the character Lauren is the will to power.
Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher, essayist and a cultural critic. Nietzschean
scholars believe that much of his concept is finding the self. He calls the self as ‘becoming what one
is’. Many critics suggest that the main concept of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to reaffirm life by
rethinking the nature of human existence. In order to find the self, Nietzsche insists to encourage
one’s instincts and cognitive abilities. His famous controversial idea is ‘God is dead’.
Don DeLillo is a famous American novelist, whose journey as a writer began in 1960. He
was greatly influenced by John Dos Passos and Thomas Pynchon. Quoting Lionel Trilling words,
Don DeLillo exhibits a “perpetual quest for reality” in his writings. Don DeLillo as a writer has
written many short stories along with the novels. His first novel Americana was published in 1971.
He has written seventeen novels till 2016. His other novels are as follows: End Zone(1972), Great
Jones Street(1973), Ratner’s star(1976), Players(1977), Running Dog(1978), Amazons(1980), The
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Names(1982), White Noise(1985), Libra(1988), Mao II(1991), Underworld(1997), The Body
Artist(2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man(2007), Point Omega(2010) and Zero K(2016).
The novel The Body Artist (2001) is the shortest one among his novels. The novel is a ‘work
of silence and emptiness’. The novel portrays the traumatic mourning and the new journey of Lauren
Hartke to find her existence in the society after the suicide of her husband Rey. The main character
of the novel is Lauren Hartke, the body art performance artist. The plot of the novel moves around
the character Lauren Hartke and her inner self.
Alienated Self:
Lauren Hartke, the main character of the novel The Body Artist lives in a self-imposed exile.
Grieving and an attempt of recovery from the loss of her husband Mr.Rey leads to alienation. In the
beginning of the novel, Lauren and Rey silently struggle to find meaning in their ordinary life. Even
though they know their routine life, they could not say what it is and they separate themselves from
their regular actions. This explains the alienation they face with in the family. Though they were
called as family, they never react as family. As an individual they search their own identity and felt
alienation in their routine work. Lauren’s conversation with Rey is mundane.
After Lauren’s husband death, she does not realise what has to be done. “The world was lost
inside her.”(TBA 57) Lauren always depends on others to hold herself in the world. After her
husband’s death, she understands the loneliness in her life and decides to move on. The way she
chooses to move is watching an empty road for cars at Kotka, Finland in a TV show. She tries to find
something from nothing. Lauren tries to overcome her loneliness by concentrating on the daily
households. But she fails to cope with her everyday duties. She even stops answering the phone calls.
Catalyst:
The catalyst Lauren chooses in the journey of finding her new self is an imaginary character
Mr.Tuttle. The characteristics and voice of Mr.Tuttle resembles Rey. Mr.Tuttle is an interlocutor
who helps Lauren in order to find her new self. Lauren’s conversation with Mr.Tuttle is like talking
with Rey. Conversation with Mr.Tuttle gives Lauren awareness on time. She learns how to overcome
the past and to move on towards the future. Mr.Tuttle is a mysterious man. He is neither real nor
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unreal. The name Mr.Tuttle was given by Lauren from her childhood memories. He does not have
proper identity. Throughout the novel Lauren searches for him. Suddenly he appears and leaves the
house without any intimation. The existence of the mysterious men is questionable till the end of the
novel. Though his identity is not clear, he is the real catalyst behind Lauren in her new journey of
life.
The Will to Power:
Nietzsche is famous for his concept ‘The Will to Power’. Based on the power concept, he created a
new character ‘Ubermench’ or ‘The Superman’. The Superman is characterised by a feeling of being
unafraid. He uses his natural gifts of physical strength, intelligence and instincts in order to gain the
best within the self. By doing so, man reawaken his instincts and inspire him to live in the world. The
Superman is a superior individual who is confident and result oriented. His strength refers not only to
the physical strength, but also the stubborn will that allowed him to face several difficulties in his
life. He proved to be loyal and hardworking and is always prepared to do anything for his self-
awakening. Loss and the constant struggle in the life made him stronger.
Lauren is the central figure in the novel The Body Artist. She is compared with the superman.
The first decision she takes after her husband death to face the loneliness. The decision to stay alone
proves that she starts to fight back against her alienated self. According to Lauren, darkness
perceived only from the outside world. Even Lauren’s friend asked her to leave the house after Rey’s
death. But she insists to stay in the rented house and she expressed “it felt like home, being here”.
(TBA 30) The decision Lauren takes to stay in the rented house alone for 2 months is experimenting
herself to find her new self from er shattered self.
The isolation from the society taught Lauren how to be strong and how to balance body and
time. After Rey’s death, Lauren’s sorrow reached the unbearable level. But Lauren was patient with
her weakness. She managed to live with her sorrow. Living with sorrow does not mean she searches
her life through remembering Rey’s memories, rather she recalls her own self to find a self-
awakening with in herself.
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To overcome grieving, Art helps Lauren to find meaning of her existence. The tool she has
taken to overcome her pain is body work. She commits herself to the ‘gyrate exaggerations’, yoga to
make herself physically strong to the world. She exercises all day long and enters into a new world
where Lauren measures her with no others help. She took this as will to power and heads towards
creativity. She was able to find her strong inner self through her performance. She learns to release
her pain through her performance.
Performance:
‘Body Time’ is the title of Lauren’s Performance. Through the performance, Lauren tries to
renew her body and time to attain her will to live. Her performance ‘Body Time’ as Laura Di Prete
notes, “Lauren’s body is empty page, a clean canvas on which to project a new self”. Feeding the
birds, driving, watching TV show and waiting for car in it, conversing with Mr.Tuttle, denying to
attend phone calls, listening to the recorded tape recorder, along with her painful outburst of her past
shattered self are the elements of Lauren’s body art performance. The past dreadful incidents Lauren
experienced in her life are expressed by the repetitive actions in the performance. All these actions
are the part of reawakening to regain Self-consciousness. Lauren’s performance is slow and painful.
Don DeLillo elaborates how the body allows us to understand the inner workings of the human spirit.
In the performance, Lauren look forward for steps, faces her fear and found deep connection with her
inner self and found that, “You are made out of time”. (TBA 92)
Conclusion:
The essence of every individual’s existence is the will to dominate and to exert power. Every
day was a battle in Lauren’s life. She dominates her weak inner-self and created her new self-
awakening self. Don DeLillo has shown the shattered self of Lauren by conveying the events in past
tense. Though everything happened in the past, the events still happens in the present and even
reproduced by neither real nor unreal character Mr.Tuttle. Lauren as an artist “wanted to create her
future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline”. (TBA 106)
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Usually after the loss everyone decides to move on forward. But Lauren is a person who
decides to convert her pain into strong will to live. She wants to create her own future than to live in
the created one. Though Mr.Tuttle helped her to analyse the past and future, she is one who takes
final decision to live her present with fulfilled heart through her performance and she achieved it.
She reconstructed her identity as an artist.
In the beginning she calls her exercises and movements as body work. It is her daily routine.
At the end it turns into her self- acknowledging expressions. The process is painful. Lauren’s
strength refers not only to her physical ability, but also her stubbornness towards attaining a new self
helped her to gain the will to live. At the end, her body work performance is one of the masterpieces,
where she depicts the role of male, her imaginary character Mr.Tuttle. Opening the window onto the
outside world at the end of the novel depicts that Lauren’s realisation of her new existence and brings
new beginning to life.
At first Lauren was shattered, lost control of her inner self, dependent towards others. At the
end, she regains her inner self. She was able to put back all the shattered pieces and reshaped them.
Lauren created a new will to live at the end through her power.
References:
DeLillo, Don . The Body Artist. 2nd edn. London: Picador, 2011.
Di Prete, Laura (2005). «Don DeLillo’s “The Body Artist”: Performing the Body, Narrating
Trauma, p. 483-510.
Gane, Laurence, and Piero. Introducing Nietzsche. Ed. Richard Appignanesi.Cambridge,
2007.
Leiter, Brian. Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge, 2002.
Tanner, Micael. Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994.
Wicks, Robert, "Friedrich Nietzsche", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring
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2013 Edition), Edward N.Zalta (ed.).
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