Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 51 No. 1, 2025.
Original scientific paper
Time, Space and the Witness-Character Remember. Expression of Trauma in Contemporary Croatian Drama
Gabrijela Puljić
orcid.org/0000-0003-1061-4228
Abstract
The paper will attempt to analyze how the thematization of trauma and the (non)expression
of traumatic experience are reflected in the conceptualization of space and time. In the
context of contemporary Croatian drama, it will be followed how the ineffable traumatic
experience or thematic and conversational silence and denial are realized in Zajec’s That
which is missing and The Vanishing, marked by abstract nothingness, a witness-character
who witnesses traumatic events and also encourages reflection, and ultimately in characters
who talk about the trauma they have experienced, but with problems speaking. Although
from the perspective of psychiatry, the memory of trauma is spoken of as something that
is neither social nor purposeful, and is therefore the opposite of narrative memory, which
is fundamentally communicative in nature (van der Kolk; van der Hart 1995, van der Kolk
2023), one of the aims of the paper is to show that in the context of a dramatic text, trauma
becomes expressive, but almost always in inter-level communication, thereby creating a
kind of compromise between diegesis and mimesis. With the help of semiotic and metaphysical
understanding of space and time, we will try to present both the dramatic text
and the dramatic character as an event, i.e. space-time, as the unity of space and time. On
this occasion, the dramatic discourse could imitate the fragmented nature of the traumatic
memory, but on the discourse level it could unite the fragments into a coherent story.
Keywords
trauma; event; That which is missing; The Vanishing
Hrčak ID:
330801
URI
Publication date:
14.5.2025.
Visits: 519 *