Clashing and Hybridizing Chronotopes in Zero K: Between Speculative Transcendence and Historical Immanence

According to Bakhtin, chronotope is a device involved in structuring the plot, as an organizational center around which the sense of the text is condensed through an intersection between topology and chronology. Furthermore, spatiotemporality can also determine the genre of the literary work itself. This is particularly evident in Zero K (2016) by Don DeLillo, a novel divided into two distinct sections set in two antinomic chronotopes, one of transcendence and one of immanence. Consequently, the text is similarly divided into two different narrative genres: one related to the utopian and catastrophic novel, where the environmental dimension is central; and the other related to the urban and sociopolitical novel, where the main themes concern war, family, love, etc. The protagonist, Jeffrey Lockhart, is a sort of chronotopic Wandersmann who walks through both textual sections mixing the two worlds represented and the relative spacetimes and genres. This paper aims to investigate the chronotopic architecture of Zero K through a close reading capable of highlighting the hybridization between different spaces and times and thus between different literary genres - or, as it would be more correct to say, modes.