The mapping of Paris in Dražen Katunarić’s novel Fatal Images
The mapping of Paris in Dražen Katunarić’s novel Fatal Images

Summary/Abstract: Imagination can (re)create a well-known space through literature and thus this space becomes the product of an individual, sensory and susceptible experience of a singular aesthetic elaboration. Fatal Images, written by Dražen Katunarić, is a novel about an unknown Parisian painter of nudes named Hamelin who leads a debaucherous life. By introducing in the novel the character of a Croatian writer who writes about Hamelin, the author does not only shift the perspective of the narration, but he also navigates between eastern European and western European space – Zagreb and Paris. As postmodern thought has emphasized, in literature, this product of aesthetic elaboration – space – is not a mere background since literature figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations and therefore it is imbued with significance which gives way to interpretation from different perspectives. The appearance of geocriticism has enabled novel ways of seeing literary texts, providing at the same time the necessary tools to understand, explore and analyze literature in relation to space and place. In this paper, we will use two concepts of the geocritical method – topophrenia and stratigraphy – to navigate, investigate and analyze the mapping of Paris in the first part of the first chapter of the novel. Here, navigation is a figure for this seemingly confessional prose where the main character attempts to uncover the deep truth about himself by performing a kind of cartographic activity in the shape of a biographical map. We will show that mapping in this novel establishes a meaningful framework with points of reference for talking and thinking about oneself.

• Details
• Contents