Kotka: The gateway to authenticity
“the dead times were best... the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road and approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at ones, and the number changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she say and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway” (Delillo 41)
Kotka, in The Body Artist, is the channel by which the body artist is able to 'tune' into reality. She constantly stands in front of the "unyielding frame... (into) another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes, and seconds" (40). Reality is real for her when it has already been digested and broken down- organized- into discrete units that she can hold in her mind. She says the numbers ticking represent a reality she recognizes as happening in the 'now', thus providing as a channel away from the heaviness of her husband's death.
Kotka, thus, develops a significance for the body artist deeper than any tangible reality. She realizes that the flimsiness of actual existence- the transience of human life- calls for another transcendental existence beyond the here and now. The screen of Kotka provides her with the illusion of a transcendental existence within yet above reality. It is the world through a single eye, soulless, flowing "in disassociated motion... in a white hum" (31) like the ether of the Gods.
However, it is ultimately false- it is the world mediated through technology; a world rendered grey and grainy. As such, it is only able to provide her with a certain degree of relief from reality of the touch-and-feel.
This becomes accentuated when the body artist encounters Mr. Tuttle- the being that comes out of the Kotka screen. Their meeting is empty of any linguistic, literary meaning. The body artist- through the channel of Mr. Tuttle (arguably in himself technology distilled through a human body, akin to a cyborg) is able to interact on the material level. She, thus, realizes that all that remains after technology's ravaging is the body whole and essentially unspoiled. The body, thus, becomes a channel by which the body artist escapes the mental confines of a technologically constrained universe into a freer world.
