환상 이론으로 실코의 『의식』 다시 읽기

Abstract

‘Fantasy’ is one of the major controversial issues in current academia. A culture theorist Slavoj Žižek, in his Looking Awry, states, “the gaze puzzled by our desire and anxieties gives us a distorted, blurred image” [a fantasy] which “does not exist for an objective gaze.” In The Plague of Fantasies, he asserts that fantasies result from the “‘exaggerated’, excessive, unbalanced fixation or ‘freeze,’ disturbing the ever-changing balanced flow of life.” Žižek’s fantasy theory freshly illuminates Native American literature because the ‘American Indian’ is one of the well-known fantasies, distorted by Christopher Columbus’s excessive focus on India. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American, Luguna Pueblo writer, in her Ceremony discloses and traverses the established fantasy of America and Native Americans, by means of its peculiar structure and characterization. Žižek’s theories of the fantasy lucidly demonstrates that Silko ultimately intends to liberate and cure her readers from the fantasies. In this paper, first, I will apply Žižek’s terms, “the ‘irrational’ fixation on some symbolic cause,” to the fantasies presented in Ceremony in order to analyze how and why Silke exposes those fantasies as a pure fiction. Second, in the light of Žižek’s theory that “the excess of ‘exaggeration’ undermines the falsity of the balanced totality,” I will examine how and why Silko reveals and subverts the lies which form ideological fantasies. Third, on the ground of Žižek’s suggestion that we should confront and “penetrate the ‘fundamental fantasy’ to be cured of the trauma the fantasy may have incurred,” I will argue that Silko’s curative effect comes mainly from her endeavor to invite her readers, as well as her protagonist Tayo, to face and get disillusioned about the fantasies, including the fundamental fantasies.