The art of everyday haunting

peer-reviewedThe question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo s novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida s Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo s text, I want to say something but what , a quasi question directed to Lauren by her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of what , or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an infinite remove , even if it is one s self. It is Rey s suicide, and Lauren s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo s phrase within the context of Derrida s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren s question, What am I supposed to say? Derrida replies, Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence . Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe