Delillo - Trauma / resistance to time Flashcards
“Her mouth was still twisted…”
“Her mouth was still twisted from the experience of sharing some unknown food handler’s life”
‘Twisted’ - Lauren feels traumatised as she is confronted by ‘some unknown food handlers life’, and exposed to the disparities of life caused by capitalist development
- according to Frederick Jameson, this is also a confrontation between modernism and postmodernism. For Jameson, postmodernism polished over the wrinkles caused by capitalism.
Here however, Lauren, who lives in a rural area away from the city, is confronted by a hair belonging to a food processor who will lead a vastly different life from the protagonist. - thus, the hair I’m Lauren’s mouth causes a rupture of the post modern structuring of reality as the ‘co existence of realities from radically different moments are exposed’
P9
“He is survived…”
“He is survived by his third wife, Lauren Hartke”
‘Survived’- Ray’s life being preserved through Lauren’s memory
- Edward Said interpretation on late style
Taken from the newspaper article on Rays life, p27
“Now he was the smoke…”
“Now he was the smoke. The thing in the air, vapours, drifting into every space… unshaped”
P31
How does trauma impact the narrative?
- how does this link to time?
Ray’s suicide was experienced so suddenly that it ruptured Lauren’s sense of time and space, which had the effect of distorting her reality. Moreover, the death was so profoundly disturbing to Lauren that it left a scare on the home they shared, as she ‘felt him in the rooms’. A Freudian analysis of this would suggest that the trauma of the event was so sudden and unexpected that it could only be comprehended with retrospect, as the memory of Rey reimposes itself through the smoke in the air, causing him to become “the thing in the air, vapours, drifting into every space, unshaped”
What followed from Lauren was a display of defiance, residence against time as she wanted to ‘organises time until she could live again’
According to Cath Caruth, how did Freud depict trauma?
Traumatic events are experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and are therefore unavailable to consciousness until they impose themselves again, repeatedly in the nightmares of the survivor
- trauma can only be experienced retrospectively
“She raced through the days with their ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organised…”
“She raced through the days with their ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organised but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentered, days that moved so slow they ached”
Repetition of ‘days’ reiterating how they’re repetitive and routine
- also repetition almost simplistic, boring and dull to read, like the days themselves
