Don Delillo’s Art Stalkers

Don DeLillo has been repeatedly drawn to a frightening scenario in which a man meets a woman at an art venue and proceeds to stalk her. Adopting the structure of repetition-compulsion displayed in these narratives, the present study moves back and forth between “Baader-Meinhof” and subsequent iterations of the art stalker theme in Falling Man, Point Omega, and “The Starveling.” What makes this scenario particularly disturbing are the links DeLillo draws between the subjective virtual effects art has on a spectator and the pathological extensions of those effects into real-world crimes.