폴 오스터의 『월궁』: 우연의 서사, 우발적 제국

Abstract

This paper explores Paul Auster’s unique narrative strategy which emphasizes the significance of contingency and randomness as ultimate principles underlying every aspect of our lives. By using what might be called the “aesthetic of chance” as a narrative propellent, Auster undermines the official ideologies that have propped the establishment in the Euro-America. He is also a commercially successful writer despite the fact that his narrative includes such ponderous epistemological baggages as uncertainty, undecidability, deconstruction, and non-linear narrative, only because he foregrounds these concepts in ways much friendly to the common readers. While tangentially undermining the official cultural ideologies of the advanced capitalist societies, particularly by deconstructing the formulaic genre of the detective story, he thus paradoxically takes advantage of the capitalist system itself. In Auster’s Moon Palace, the protagonist meets his forgotten and presumably dead father and grandfather just before they die in front of him. By parallelling this tragic family story with the national history of America expanding into the West, Auster criticizes its expansionist thrust and the capitalist mode of production. His critique of American expansionism and capitalism, however, remains a half success because his narrative itself has an expansionist thrust much analogous to that of American civilization. In other words, Auster seems to unconsciously ratify the expansionist drive of American civilization by mimicking its logic through his unique aesthetic of chance. Auster’s aesthetic of chance somehow provides a failed homeotherapy to the collective desire of American culture.