Resumen de An ascetic book: Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist"
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".
