문학텍스트와 사진이미지의 상호매체적 관계 연구 : 앙드레 브르통의 『나자』를 중심으로

Abstract

As a literary text with picture images inserted, Nadja (1928) written by André Breton, a surrealist poet and poetic theorist, represents aesthetic explorations by surrealists who sought the possibility of unified arts by traveling freely across the boards of art mediums and genres such as novels, essays, automatist writing, paintings, films, and photographs. This paper aims to identify the relationship between the literary text and the picture image in Nadja with the help of "intermediality theory" whose primary concern is to examine reciprocal discourse held among the heterogeneous mediums. The reciprocal infiltrations and interferences of the different two mediums brings about medial transformation, creates multiple meanings, and yields a new aesthetics. The signs appearing in the photographs are the symbols to crack meanings. Texts fragmented by the frames of signboards like "Coif⁄feur," letters like "Mazda/Nadja" or "Hachard/hasard/hagard" that lead to visual and auditory illusions, enable us to realize the unconsciousness hiding in ordinary texts and images. Also showing the productivity and creativity that 'misreading' can call forth, the signs in the pictures overthrow the conventional ways of reading texts and images. Breton guarantees the room for new meanings, using some syncategoremes which are symbols with null meanings. Those syncategoremes include darkened spaces appearing in photos, arrows, figures' gazes, signboards indicating directions with texts. He particularly employs the word "index" to denote these prophetic tokens. "Index" establishes the relationship between signifier and signified on the physical and spacial axis and therefore pictures acquired by the photochemical process themselves become indexes. Breton places the "index" which is one of the major characteristics in photo in the center to put life, text and image together. In other words, applying "index," a feature of photo, to text and life causes transformations in text and life, and in turn, the transformations themselves alter the way of reading images. The intermediality between text and image transforms the original meaning of '"documentary." The photos inserted in Nadja are not the ones that present the reality as it is, but the ones to represent "potential reality." The pictures in this sense become a mediating medium to show the invisible side of the reality, so to speak, a medium to display what we have never seen before. The "documentary" to record the other side of life beyond our perceptions shift the reality we have perceived into some other visions by making us to stare at the inner and the outer side of the life and at the points where I and others meet.