주변에서 중심으로: 소수민족문학으로서 바스크문학 -베르나르도 아차가(Bernardo Atxaga)의 오바바 마을 이야기 Obabakoak(1988)

Abstract

Obabakoak (1988) consists of 26 short stories divided into three parts which have something to do with the imaginary town of Obaba in northern Spain. Each story looks independent like a collection of various stories, but it is organically connected in a virtual space Obaba. For example, in the first part, ≪Infancias≫, Obaba is the space of fiction, and in the second part, the background is a fictional village called Villamediana in Castile, but the protagonist is from Obaba, and sometimes he reminds the readers of his hometown full of terns and moss in his latent memories. Finally, the third part, which can be seen as the most essential of the work, is the journey of the protagonist with his doctor friend to Obaba to meet his uncle. In this journey each character tells various short stories based on from Oriental tradition to the modern Western literature. As a periphery or Otherness, Basque literature has not been independent of Castilian literature which has occupied its central or dominant position. But the two literatures have coexisted and influenced each other. This work, through innovative and experimental narrative techniques such as postmodern writings (intertextuality / metafiction), directs Basque literature from the periphery to the center of Spanish literature. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics and identity of Basque literature as a minority and peripheral literature through a small window of Bernardo Atxaga’s work. In order to carry out the proposed study, after a brief review of Basque literature from a diachronic point of view, I intended to analyze the revival of Basque literature from the 20th century up to this day and the tendency of the Basque novels since the 1950s. Finally, I tried to approach the overall meaning of the work through the analysis of intertextuality and metafiction. In relation to the intertextuality of the work, ≪El criado del rico mercader≫ refers directly to the title of the famous short stories. In ≪Acerca de los cuentos≫, the characters briefly summarize the contents of the famous short stories of Chekhov, Evelyn War and the Maupassant. ≪De soltera, Laura Sligo≫ is reminiscent of Heart of darkness, a novel of Joseph Conrad’s representative postcolonial novel. ≪Hans Menscher≫ seems to be related to Edward Munch and Van Gogh’s art life. The life of Dr. Thomas Sheldon, who left for the American Jungle in disillusionment with Western civilization, resembles the life of poet Rimbaud, who emigrated to Ethiopia. The short stories of the third part, ≪Para escribir un cuento en cinco minutos≫ and ≪Mé́todo para plagiar≫ show a method of metafiction in that they show the creative process of the work. Finally, in this study, I attempted to analyze the aesthetic meaning of novelistic space, Obaba village, which is a link between various short stories of our text. Obaba can be viewed as an emotional and psychological space created by the writer, not as an existing geographic place.