III. The Role of Technology

The symbolism used to alter the initial distance between the protagonists is of a technological nature, in both The Body Artist and in Tristan and Isolde.

The Body Artist

With regards to The Body Artist, technology not only affects the relationship between Lauren and Rey, it is used to convey the message of that changing relationship to the surviving protagonist. Rey commits suicide, in his first wife’s apartment, using a gun. Therefore, he selects a very modern method of ending his own life and in so doing, entirely alters the relationship with his third wife, Lauren. By virtue of dying, an inestimable distance is brought between the couple. Before, Lauren and Rey were mentally separated, but physically within the same realm. Now, technology has been used to permanently put them in a different world, and the distance between them cannot be reduced.

Additionally, the reader learns about Rey’s death through the medium of print, another modern technological invention. Between the first and second chapter, a newspaper article, outlining the details of Rey’s suicide, is inserted. The article, then, plays an essential role in describing the new, distanced relationship between husband and wife and effectively conveys the information the author wishes to share.
In The Body Artist, two technological symbols are used to alter, and describe, the level of distance between Lauren and Rey: the gun and the newspaper article.

Interestingly, neither objects are outright mentioned, but their presence is inferred. When it comes to the gun, the situation is described so as to leave no alternative impression. In the article, is it written that “the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police who were called to the scene” (27). Similarly, the physical format of the newspaper article is familiar to anyone who has ever read a newspaper. Despite the lack of direct reference, the role of these technological symbols is essential to the alternation of Lauren and Rey’s relationship to distance. The gun irrevocably tears the couple apart, and the reader is made aware of this separation through the medium of the newspaper. Technology, though indirectly alluded to, has a reverberating effect on the distance between The Body Artist’s protagonists.

Tristan and Isolde

Relatively speaking, technology plays an equally important role in Tristan and Isolde. Because of the time period, technology, so-to-speak, is not nearly as evolved as it is in The Body Artist, but the symbolism it conveys is essential to the alteration of Tristan and Isolde’s relationship. Because of technology, strangers who weren’t meant to fall in love are brought together, thus greatly reducing the distance between them. The technology in question is the love potion the queen prepares and asks Isolde’s lady-in-waiting, Brangane, to pour for Isolde and Mark, once married. Yet events do not go as planned: Tristan finds the potion, drinks some of it and offers it to Isolde, thinking that it is wine.

What happens next completely alters their relationship, and the emotional distance they had kept between them is entirely reduced. Because of the love potion, “that arch-disturber of tranquility… they who were two and divided now became one and united. No longer were they at variance: Isolde’s hatred was gone” (Gottfried, 154). It is clear, then, that the potion, the technology the Queen wished to use to help her daughter fall in love with her lawful husband, fused Tristan and Isolde together, completely annihilating the earlier, palpable distance, fueled by Isolde’s hatred and Tristan’s honor.

This symbol is explicitly described, unlike the gun or the newspaper in The Body Artist, and its effects are clearly outlined: “the…queen…was brewing in a vial a love-drink so subtly devised and prepared, and endowed with such powers, that with whomever any man drank it had to lover above all things, whether he wished it or no, and she loved him alone” (150). Through the powerful language employed, the reader understands just how powerful the love potion is. Technology is explicitly described, and its impact on Tristan and Isolde is inestimable.