파국의 기억, 유년의 상상력

Abstract

What does Mark Haddon‘s 2003 runaway international bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time have in common with Martin Amis' much-anticipated (albeit ambivalently received) tenth novel Yellow Dog published in the same year? The answer, as my paper contends, lies in the two fictional works' respective treatment of the bifocal themes, catastrophe and childhood. Although the thematic convergence may appear coincidental at first—the sheer incommensurability of the texts' formal aspects being only comparable to the disproportionate statures of the authors themselves—what these two texts divulge, via probing of autistic child's world-view in Haddon's and those of multiple personae selected from the wide social circle of modern Britain in Amis' (a television star, the fictive king, a tabloid journalist, not to mention an unidentifiable narrator reporting on the Cig-Air 101's precarious trans-Atlantic flight), is how Britain's unstable national situation in the beginning fo the 21st century, together with constricting pressures of the global phenomena called 'disaster capitalism' (Klein), functions to simultaneously generate and intensify the revived sense of catastrophe, in regard to which the two texts' common resort to childhood as their central theme may be seen as a symptomatic response. One way of interpreting this textual gesture is to view it as articulation of the general public's psychic regression which, as Klein reminds us, so often follows upon disastrous events (natural or otherwise) of large enough magnitude and in whose wake regimes of neoliberal order implement their radically antidemocratic agenda. More persuasive, and certainly more challenging in times like ours, would be to recognize the power of impassive vigilance (which, in itself, is far from inactive) in which texts as disparate as Haddon's and Amis' invite us to rethink and reconfigure our ontological position vis à vis the omnipresent forces of markedly dehumanizing and denaturalizing late capitalism.