Decluttering the spatial imagination: engendering topophrenia, sense of place, and psychonarratological perspectives in the select works of Damon Galgut

Abstract In the work “Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination,” Robert T. Tally Jr. (2018) initiated topophrenia or ‘placemindedness’ as an explanatory framework for analysing the places within the literary texts and the subjects’ relations with those places. From the perspective of spatial narratives, this paper studies the logic of ‘topophrenia’ (Tally, 2018) and ‘sense of place’ (Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu’s, 2016) in Damon Galgut’s select novels The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010) to understand the external intrusions created by the writer in setting the living places of the characters to create a sense of place in reader’s mind. Furthermore, the paper examines how Galgut directs the reader towards a particular emotion through select spatial metaphors and narrative techniques, which facilitate the reader’s spatial imagination. These objectives guide us to consider how the interconnectedness of physical, mental, and emotional dimensions is intrinsically embodied in the reader’s perception of a place. Galgut’s choice of spatial metaphors and narrative techniques directs readers towards an intended emotion, effectively circumscribing the range of interpretive possibilities of the place available to the readers. This paper concludes that readers have the freedom to imagine a place restricted within an intended emotion as directed by the author.