흔적의 스토리텔링: 『물의 아이들』과 『워터랜드』 동화로 읽기

Abstract

This paper aims to examine Charles Kinsley’s The Water-Babies and Graham Swift’s Waterland on the basis of a common characteristic, a fairy tale. Superficially, these two texts seem different but they are both about water as a background and a plot. Combining trace with storytelling, the story enables these two texts to be researched from a new viewpoint. The Water-Babies is neither a text based on Christian world view nor a fairy tale only for children, intending to give a lesson. This is both a fairy tale and a story about fairies, at the same time, is not only of a fairy tale certainly. Also, though Waterland has been studied as a Bildungsroman, a history novel or metafiction, this can be a new text becoming according to storytelling using elements of fairy tales. The Water-Babies and Waterland borrow the mode of fairy tale, and deliver various meanings about growth and so on through multi-layered storytelling presented from a fantasy. The two texts seek to generate a larger meaning, starting from tiny stories that match changes in social and cultural needs moving from grand narrative to micro narrative. The Water-Babies and Waterland demolish the boundary which has existed both inside and outside the text and pinned us down on difference that can’t be reverted back to an identity, make no distinction among a history, a myth and a fairy tale. Storytelling lets us think over the various implications through difference and becoming. These two texts taking the space of water bring in distinction between water and land, then yield an undertone, instead of dividing the space of reality and fantasy. Tracking the hazy trace slowly, The Water-Babies and Waterland pursue storytelling novel. In the process of the trial, the boundaries come to tear down, simultaneously another generative meaning is exposed at last.