목격자와 전달자, 그 서사론적 가능성

Abstract

Not all events can be always narrated. In this article, I tried to examine the process for certainevents being narrated and transmitted with a focus on the concept of a ‘witness’ and‘transmitter’. The existing narrative theory has already provided useful methods to explainthe texts which are composed of linguistic narrations. Further, I took the idea that the‘events’ exist before they are made up of linguistic narrations as a starting point. For this reason,I attempted to theorize the role of the ‘witness’ who experienced and witnessed theevents directly in the field and the ‘transmitter’ who conveyed the events to other time andspace. Of course, witnesses and transmitters are usually combined with narrators. In the premodernnarratives, witnesses and transmitters were completely different from narrators, yet,they had to secure artistic independence and re-established into a convoluted form correspondingto more complicated social structures. The general conclusion of this article is thatthey had to prove their existence through their own language and functioned significantly inmodern narratives by taking complex and multi-layered structures occasionally. Furthermore, ‘witness’ and ‘transmitter’ contends incessantly with the force that precludesthe transmission in that, essentially, the narrative has a possibility or impossibility oftransmission. While the forces which exist inside and outside impede the transmission bytaking various forms, this can be regarded as one of the elemental factors in narratives in that,although it is delayed, it must be transmitted.