Trauma and mourning in Don Delillo's The Body Artist and Zero K

In his oeuvre, DeLillo's numerous works deal with trauma, art, technology, consumer culture, and capitalism. Thanks to DeLillo's ironic tone and fragmented techniques, DeLillo is regarded as one of the greatest postmodern writers. DeLillo, in The Body Artist (2001) and Zero K (2016), presents art and its relation to trauma and several ways of healing it from different perspectives. This thesis argues that in The Body Artist and Zero K, Don DeLillo presents trauma as an experience of ontological liminality between forms of process that are suspended until a transformation of subjectivity takes place by mainly subverting the conventional meanings of the notions of body, identity, time and art. In The Body Artist, Lauren, the body artist of the title, puts her traumatic experience into stage art after the suicide of her husband, Rey. Therefore, even though trauma is inexpressible, she uses her art as a response to or a coping mechanism for her traumatic experience. While expressing her traumatic experience, Lauren alters her body and identity multiple times throughout the novel. However, in Zero K, art is demonstrated through the Convergence setting and the cryogenic bodies created there. The protagonists in Zero K perceive art in multiple different ways. Artis Martineau, who is suffering from lethal illnesses, embraces transhumanist ideals and believes that preserving bodies is kind of a body art that is supposed to live immortally. By contrast, Jeffrey, the narrator, feels outcast due to the art represented in the Convergence which does not fit in his apprehension of art. Besides, he is unable to understand his father's (Ross Lockhart's) quest of joining Artis to be cryopreserved. The novel unveils that the narrator Jeffrey was traumatized by the loss of his mother, Madeliene, and the abandonment of his father, Ross, when he was a child. For Freudian trauma theory, Jeffrey's disorientation in the Convergence mainly points out his unhealed traumatic experiences. The novel also indicates trauma on a collective basis through Artis and the others in Convergence who attempt to skip death as an ultimate trauma. As a consequence, death stands as a counterforce for art in both novels. The protagonists of both novels attempt to use art as a tool for therapeutic healing or a solution to their traumas by employing distinct approaches.