“a Sense Of Being Inside The Moment”: Individual Trauma And The Spatialized Psychological Time In Don Delillo’s Body Artist

Résumé: This paper sheds light on the spatialization of psychological time in postmodernism. It demonstrates that memory, as one aspect of the psychological time, is the main cause leading to the simultaneous juxtaposition of both past and present, and thus to the spatialization of time. Particularly, this paper focuses on traumatic memory, whether it is cultural or individual, and how it compels the characters to immerse themelves in the spatialized psychological time. Furthermore, it finds out that memory, in postmodernism, becomes an involuntary voice of its own, interrupting the flow of events. Moreover, this paper provides the reader with a glimpse of the origins of psychological time, and at the power of memory to spatialize it. To understand this, it adopts Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist(2001) as an illustration of how traumatic memory causes a spatialization of psychological time, taking into consideration that its representation differs from one novel to another.It is marked as Don DeLillo‘s most intriguing works that choreograph the effects of traumatic memory on the individual and society. The character Lauren is trapped in a spatialized world where her traumatic memories still live involuntarily in her present in a form of a ghost, shaping her language, identity, behaviors and environment.

Publié dans la revue: مجلة البحوث و الدراسات الإنسانية