창조적인 비희생자-되기: 애트우드의 『 떠오르기 』에 나타난 생존의 전략

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how the nameless female narrator overcomes victimhood complex, refuses to be a victim, and becomes a creative non-victim based on the concept of "becoming-animal" developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. The narrator, who visits Quebec in search for missing father, feels uncanny when she faces the villagers speaking French on her home ground, foreign territory. According to Freud, the uncanny is in reality something familiar and old-established in mind but becomes alien from it only through the process of repression. The narrator recalls her memories related to death and violence as a hidden force. She only admits herself as a victim and victimizer, who aborts her baby, but also tries to explain this as the dictates of biology, namely, due to her false husband’s coercion. Also, she experiences violence and evil done by Americans such as killing a heron like a lynch victim and trying to occupy the islands. After perceiving her past fault and the origin of the great evil, she refuses the assumption that she is a victim. Finally, she performs to become a creative non-victim, which means beyond overcoming victimhood. The narrator’s free movement and metamorphosis through becoming animals, plants, things and places can allow herself to recognize her anguish as a victim, revise her memories correctly, and conjoin different genealogies in the wilderness in Canada. The narrator transforming into all the different things means that she immerses herself in the flow of the perception of life, which expands to its highest power by becoming hybrid. She expands to what is more than herself through transforming to be hybrid, open to “the event of becoming”.