문순태 소설에 나타난 감각의 의미 연구— 「늙으신 어머니의 향기」를 중심으로

Abstract

‘Sensing human beings’ in novels reproduce their existence methods and awareness of a reality using their daily senses. As senses are socioculturally organized when narrated, they involve the social perceptions and emotional responses by the main agents of sensation. This paper takes notice of these characteristics of sensation and tries to analyze the conflict aspects in the novel about an old woman, “The Scent of My Old Mother” written by Moon, Soon-tae and the writer’s thematic consciousness. The motifs of this novel is ‘scent’. The narrator describes the mother as with an odd taste and a disgusting smell and makes the foreground of her alienated image with the olfactory dominance relationship. The shape of the visualized olfactory sense, the bad smell, flat out reveals the narrator’s own disgust at and avoidance from the old age. This sensory struggle is described as if it were a material, in which a formless smell occupies space, and becomes one of the major causes of the conflict that has the property of the force. The son, the main agent of narration, has a new understanding of his mother through the synesthesia. The cognitive contact between ‘me and my mother’ is reduced to the ‘blood relationship’ and ‘motherhood’ centered on the sense of touch. This is the writer’s intentional narrative device to resolve the issue of the alienated elderly by restoring the relationship and using the sensory communication. The writer presents the recovery of sensibility by using the narration of division and integration of the senses. The narrative transition, which replaces the mother’s smell with the scent, results from the transition of narrator’s consciousness toward recognizing and empathizing his mother’s life itself. The writer sensuously expresses in the novel the ideology prevalent in our society that seeks to define and limit the life of the old age . The senses reveal our society’s institutionalized fixed idea and prejudice that characterize the old age while, at the same time, symbolizing the biased power given to the main agent of sensation. Routine and down-to-earth as they are, bodily senses are closely linked to the issues of the daily life. They are too intimately linked to our life to be dismissed, just because they are simply subjective, individual, and unsubstantial. Thus, it will be more meaningful to approach the true nature of the senses that conceptualize the world we belong to by analyzing their motifs revealed in the individual works rather than excluding them from the study on the literary works simply because they are irrational. By expanding the discussion on the senses. I will in the future make up for the narrow-sighted and insufficient research viewpoint and limitation resulting from analyzing no more than one short story.