What
is the relation between the hospitable house and the haunted house? This is the
question raised by Don DeLillo’s The Body
Artist, a short novel which opens itself to Jacques Derrida’s account of
conditional and absolute hospitality. The conditions attached to the law of
hospitality draw a line through “the double sense that the French hôte has of guest and host” (Derrida,
Aporias 8), placing guest and host
either side of a threshold that ensures the master of the house “maintains his own authority in
his own home” when he invites the stranger in (Derrida,
“Hostipitality” 4). DeLillo’s novel, however, unlike many examples of
hospitality in American fiction, gestures to an absolute rather than
conditional hospitality as it asks “Who invites who in?” (DeLillo 118),
questioning the identity of guest and host. Ostensibly, the host is Lauren
Hartke and the guest is a Mr Tuttle but, as Tyler Kessel argues, Tuttle arrests,
or trespasses upon, the possibility of hospitality. In his reading of DeLillo’s
text, Kessel arrives at the conclusion that “Lauren is now ready to welcome
Tuttle as absolute stranger” but “only after he has vanished” (200).
What this paper argues, however, is
that the question of Tuttle as absolute stranger is also the question of Tuttle
as ghost. What does this ghostly figure mean for hospitality? The ghost, “which is neither present or
absent” (Derrida, “Following Theory”), is, for DeLillo, always between. The ghost is “in the walls” (DeLillo 18), between an
inside an outside, here and there, now and then, and therefore gives rise to thresholds,
to the very structures within which we understand an inside and outside, a host
and guest. The question of hospitality for DeLillo is inseparable from the
question of the ghost, as it is also for Derrida, for whom the “foreign
guest appears like a ghost” (On
Hospitality 37). The ghost’s appearance is a visitation but it is not just,
as Kessel puts it, that the “stranger is inevitable. He will come” (189), but
also that the stranger as ghost will “have been here” (DeLillo 43). It becomes
impossible to distinguish between “the figures of the arrivant, the dead, and the revenant
(the ghost, he, she, or that which returns)” (Derrida, Aporias 35).
This paper, engaging with “the
series constituted by hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist” (Derrida, Aporias 60), will address these considerations also in the context
of Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Housekeeping, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Robinson’s Home features a prodigal son who returns home as if from the dead,
“like a ghost” (32), leading his sister to observe that, “He makes me feel like
a stranger in my own house. But this isn’t my house” (46). Robinson’s concern
with the crossing of thresholds takes a different form in her Housekeeping, a meditation on physical
and spiritual belonging. Here, the waters of a lake in which a mother has
drowned herself provide for various liminal spaces (a railway bridge, a stolen
boat), until finally they flood the house of the woman’s daughters so that the
“water poured over the thresholds” (Robinson, Housekeeping 61). The ghostly aspect of water is one of the
connections between Robinson’s Housekeeping
and Morrison’s Beloved, whose ghost
“walked out of the water” (62), who “gulped water” (63), and who provokes in
her mother a reaction like “water breaking from a breaking womb” (63). And, of
course, both Robinson and Morrison are also concerned with the place of black
Americans, with the question of the thresholds of the haunted house of America,
with racial politics. As Derrida argues, “there is no politics without . . . an
open hospitality to the guest as ghost .
. . , whom one holds, just as he holds us, hostage” (Aporias 61-62).
Derrida shows that “there is no hospitable house” for “if
there is a threshold, there is no longer hospitality” (“Hostipitality 14). This
paper can only conclude that there is no hospitable house that is not also a haunted
house.