Abstract

This article looks at the dismantling process of temporality in modernist and postmodernist fiction. By analysing the chronotope anomalies that through the game of difference and repetition challenge the narrative modes, the linear temporal series and the typological space, this article grounds the narrative perspective in the context of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Due to the representation of time with the help of spatial images seized «at the barb of the arrow of time», Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Stefano D'Arrigo's Horcynus Orca can be considered, from a narrative approach, as the centre of gravity of a complex, rich and fertile area in which the extremely tangled nexus between the «order of things» and the «order of thoughts», as well as between the «nesting text» and the «nested text» not only challenges the perception of reality, but above all dismantles and rearranges the traditional chronotope structures.