표현의 윤리: 루시디의 '악마의 시'

Abstract

This study explores the ethics of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses by identifying the aesthetics of its hybrid expression as the sublime. Rushdie expresses the hybridity of the immigrant in terms of grotesque images such as monsters, dreams, and archangels. It is significant to consider the immigrant's hybridity to be an expressionist image, which affects the readers powerfully. In this work, a monstrous image does not represent any of the immigrant personalities like stereotyped ethnicity images in other postcolonial works, but indicates a potential image of the immigrants' existential being itself. That is to say, the immigrant emerge into a completely different other like a monster or an alien when they claim their right to have citizenship and social identity in the dominant society. Thus they should be victimized or demonized in the form of aliens and monsters from the dominant point of view. Monster images in Rushdie's work vividly convey a sense of threat and alienation of the immigrant populations in the multicutural society to the readers. In this sense, the discourse concerning the hybridity of the immigrant should be extended into the emotional level to properly identify the ethics of the hybrid society. This is why I define The Satanic Verses as one of expressionist works. Most of all, the outstanding effect of Rushdie's expressionist image of a monster stimulates the hybrid sense of the reality in the images both shockingly threatening and awakening. I suggest the aesthetics of the sublime to explain this kind of the complicated sense of the reality brought out by the ambiguous and inexplicable image of works of art. The sublime is a discordant affection which we would suffer as overwhelmed at something immense and inexplicable in the level of reasonable understanding. From this discordant affection, I found an ethical vision of Rushdie's writing whose aesthetic style creates a heterogenous perception to affirm the differences and tolerate the socially marginalized others.