디킨즈, 사물화, 자본의 씨뮬라크르: 『우리 둘 다 아는 친구』를 중심으로

Abstract

Nam-soo ChangCompared with his previous masterworks like Bleak House or Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last completed work catches the new features of the modernity in the wake of the development and growth of the Victorian capitalist economy. Actually, the presence of Veneering itself witnesses Dickens's acute awareness of the transformation of society. Veneering, as his name suggests, exists as a thin surface. Every guest around him comprises an empty image devoid of the inner solidity.The reification of the modern period is generalized, together with the spirit of speculation in shares, to the point that everything becomes an image or a spectacle. Every person is reduced to a mere thing like a plate in the Veneering dinner party. Dickens's method of caricature, as shown in this party, appears to be an efficient way of reflecting and evaluating the reality of fragmentation and abstraction. The full meaning of this work seems to become more vivid, once we are experiencing so-called the postmodern age. It is interesting enough to see, for example, the end of the stable bourgeois ego, as evinced through John Harmon and "the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness," as shown through the Veneering dinner party or the marriage life of the Lammles. Undoubtedly, this work cannot include the fully-blown postmodern reality. Dickens, however, is able to prefigure the problems of the contemporary society, which comes from the intensification of the 19th century reality.