Tra(u)ma: racconto della perdita e perdita del racconto nella narrativa statunitense metamoderna

Metamodern novel, «like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relationship between knowing and not knowing» established by the loss of traumatic memory and it is «at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet» (Caruth). The apotropaic, restorative, compensatory character of the plot, describable in Freudian terms as a consequence of a victory, albeit circumscribed and/or veiled, on the repression by becoming conscious of what has been repressed, reminds us that, «if the trauma is a crisis of representation, then this generates narrative possibility as much as impossibility» (Luckhurst). During the last decades the exploration of these possibilities has been so intense and frequent as to create a new literary genre focused on the theme of trauma (the so-called trauma fiction) and characterized by recurring stylistic features. After the reconstruction of a theoretical framework that connects the birth of trauma studies with that of literary hermeneutics, this essay analyzes two recent examples of metamodern narrative representation of trauma: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan Safran Foer and A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara.