Le trauma transfiguré dans le roman

Abstract

Le théorème d’Almodóvar is an autobiographical novel, an autofiction, in which the narrator Antoni Casas Ros tells the story of a car accident which will lead the atrociously disfigured narrator to isolate himself and to live his trauma as a fable. Through the filter of mathematics and indisputable prose, he describes his inner world and the world around him in a particularly fantastical way. The trauma of the accident is not “overcome” but rather “transfiguration”. This paper argues that this transfiguration is a way for the narrator to make sense of the reality of the accident and the trauma he experienced. That reality—of the physical trauma of losing one’s face, of the psychological trauma caused by the “accident” and the loss of a loved one—is apprehended through the abstraction of physics, mathematics and arts. The imaginary presence of the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, of a hermaphrodite transsexual—the sultry Lisa, and of the deer—the animal that caused the accident and will become his pet—seem in turn to refer to the idea of a “transitional” reality (Winnicott, 2008), between his fantasies and the reality of the event. The aim of the paper is to read this in-between reality as a process of self-healing and of identity reconstruction suggested in this remarkable autofiction.

Keywords

• accident
• Almodóvar
• disfiguration
• tale
• phantasm
• identity