포스트모던 바이오픽션의역사성 읽기: 줄리안 바안즈(Julian Barnes)의 플로베르의 앵무새(Flaubert’s Parrot, 1990)

Abstract

Sooyoung ChonPostmodern Biofiction(biographical fiction) can be classified as a sub-category of postmodern historiographic metafiction. As an entertaining and creative specimen of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. At the same time, it tries to rewrite history partially from the perspective of a minority group, which has been excluded from the power center and to explore the possibility of alternative history or to reconstruct events which may have slipped through the net of historical account. As a biofiction, it challenges the biographical conventions such as the linear and thorough temporal coverage of a person's life, rendering of a consistent life story, and ways of dealing with privacies. However, the novel does not stop short of being deconstructive but develops a new and creative model for a fictional life writing of historical Flaubert. The fragmented, decentered, and diffuse biofiction dynamically recreates cubistic pictures of Flaubert's powerful life. Moreover, the various questionings of the authenticity of historical facts does not result in completely invalidating the idea of truths but lays out more careful ways of securing truths. Contradictory impulses of deconstruction and construction, scepticism about the existence of historical facts and figuring out ways of determining historical validity maintain a subtle banlance throughout the novel.