동화와 전이: 이창래의 『제스처 라이프』

Abstract

Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life contributes to contemporary American literatures of immigration and assimilation in exposing the broad and complex context of trans-national, cultural and racial movements. Lee explores the complexity of transferential movements in the narrative of border-crossing experience and assimilation. The two narrative movements in Franklin Hata’s story, one facing towards the traumatic past experience and the other seeking belonging and closure for his life, show transferential interactions between the past and the present. Hata’s identity becomes multiple and complex with his movements over the border lines of nationality, ethnicity, culture and race and also by the drive of assimilation into the dominant cultures. With this multiple mechanism of identification and transferential/transcultural movements, A Gesture Life shows a failing of the reenfranchisement that the subjects of racial, ethnic, or other minorities claim. This work shows that the failure is the constitutive one of the paradigm of a unitary origin and stability of subjectivity. Hata’s attempt to mobilize a national identity through a rigid policing of both raced and gendered bodies exposes fissures in the assimilating drive. Rather Lee’s work attempts at the possibility of “newness” coming in transnational experiences and hybrid existences. As Homi Bhabha argues, borderline existences open up a cultural space where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension. The transferential movement in Hata’s narrative is the condition of his life, and the memory of K becomes where continuous reworking with the ethical consideration for a new or other possibility takes place.