Mnemonic Heterotopia: Beckettian Mental Space in That Time (English)

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University,Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This article examines heterotopia as a multimodal frontier in Samuel Beckett’s play That Time (1976), defining the concept through a Foucauldian lens. The article investigates the text of the play as a critical site that accommodates internal and external modes of spatial criticism, introducing mnemonic and external heterotopic sites, respectively. The play transforms into a critical locus that enables the artist to reconfigure spatiality and temporal locationality of certain places in Ireland by revisiting them through three fragmented voices. The article argues that the play not only disrupts conventional modes of storytelling set against a backdrop of descriptively relatable places but also challenges the audiences’ relationship with how memorialized times and spaces can reshape the historicity of lived experiences. The reshaped place is neither pure fabrication nor a byproduct of real-time simulation, but a product of conscious re-imagination cast across space-time continuum. As such, time is stretched across spatial continuum as much as one's memory deems necessary. The synchronic entanglement of memory and temporality transforms That Time into a site of epistemic inquiry, and changes the conventions of temporal progression. The play, the article concludes, expands spatial and temporal horizons simultaneously by considering episodic memories as well as visceral experiences.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 30, Issue 2
September 2025
Pages 315-337

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