AESTHETIC MOURNING AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF TIME IN DON DELILLO’S THE BODY ARTIST

Abstract

This article reads Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) as a defining work of late-postmodern mourning, one in which grief is not organized through narrative progression but reimagined through an aesthetic suspension of time. Focusing on the notion of “Body Time,” the study argues that DeLillo dissolves linear, sequential temporality into a spatialized experience of duration that formally registers the psychic disorientation of bereavement. Engaging recent critical work by Philipp Wolf, Stefania Iliescu, Peter Boxall, and Tom Muir, the article shows how temporal deceleration, narrative stasis, and shifts in scale operate as deliberate aesthetic strategies. Rather than guiding mourning toward resolution or meaning, DeLillo’s late style renders grief as a condition to be endured—an ongoing presence marked by stillness, repetition, and suspended time. In The Body Artist, loss becomes neither narratively recoverable nor symbolically resolved, but inhabitable and unresolved, structured as a permanent architecture of temporal arrest.