최윤 소설의 타자 재현 연구

Abstract

Throughout her works, Ch’oe Yun’s tries to represent the Other through the narration of a variety of characters. In this process, the (un)representability of the Other is revealed, and this (un)representability indicates the narrator’s perception of the Other while opening up new possibilities of representing the Other. This thesis analyzes the narrative of the Other in Ch’oe Yun’s novel through a narratological approach. Chapter 2 first examines narratives that recall past events. These narratives of reminiscence proceed as they give meaning to past anecdotes that missed them at the time. This new meaning assignment also works when representing the Other in the reminiscence. In Grey Snowman, we can see that reminiscence through the narrator’s ‘voice’ describe past events and the Other clearer than when in the present. This work shows the position of two female characters in the activist groups in the 1970’s and the relationship that they have by ‘caring’ for each other. On the other hand, the possibility and impossibility of such representation of the Other can also be confirmed in The Last of Hanako. In this short story, the object to be represented is the Other named ‘Hanako.’ A narrator who does not appear directly in the work describes the Other through the memory and viewpoint of a character who was in the position of the ‘perpetrator’ in the past. At this time, a new meaning is given to the Other due to the time lag in reminiscence, but the representation is directly denied by ‘Hanako’ herself. Chapter 3 examines the method of representing the Other through a narrative that indicates an object with a second-person pronoun. The narrator of Pandora’s Bag tries to address the reader by calling the reader in the second person pronoun ‘everyone.’ The fact that what the narrator wants to convey is not only his story, but also a story about the ‘ethics of narrative’ that represents the Other is also suggestive. In the work, the narrator tries to show the appearance of the Other as himself with speaking to the reader in real time. On the other hand, in the short story The Poetry of Despair, the second person pronoun ‘you’ is used, which refers to a specific character in the work. In the work, the purpose of the narrator is not to convey something to ‘you’, but to represent the Other ‘you.’ While the narrator narrates about ‘you’, he also develops a narrative that overlaps ‘you’, the narrator, and the ‘implied reader’ inherent in the text. In this narrative, we can also see that the Otherness of the narrator and that of the reader are overlapped. However, at the end of the story, the narrator feels the absolute Otherness of ‘you’ again when facing the death of ‘you’, and describes the need for an ethical response to it. In the works examined in Chapter 4, ethical concerns and responses to the Other are narrated through a ‘montage’ narrative that moves beyond time and space. At this time, the narrator hopes that the reader will reassemble the complex structure while proceeding a narrative that moves between the past, the present, and the future. In the novel Parangdaemun, the narration of the two characters alternate in each chapter, confirming the structure of montage that moves between various time and space. This montage narrative begins with the miscarriage of a baby in which the protagonist was pregnant. It is proceeded in ethical concerns about the child as the Other of yet to come. On the other hand, in Wars: A Child Scared of Home, a character who wants to implement an ethical response to the Other who has not yet been born in this world can be captured through a montage narrative. This work also has a montage format in which anecdotes about the Other faced in the past and narratives about the emotions that she feels are alternately inserted, but what is more eye-catching is the aspect of ‘citation montage’ that inserts actual newspaper articles throughout the work. This ‘citation montage’ provides a richer ‘time of creation’ while inducing the reader’s attention to texts or events outside the story. Through various montage narratives such as these, the protagonist agonizes over an unspecified number of the Other and practices an ethical response to the future Other as a child at the end. Meanwhile, There a Petal Silently Falls can confirm all the characteristics of ‘reincarnation’, ‘second person’, and ‘montage’ that this thesis has focused on. It is Ch’oe Yun’s first work that embodies what she thinks the novels can do, that is, “verbalizing what cannot come to be in words.” This can be seen as an attempt to contain the unrepresentable Other in the novel with a different format from the ‘complete story.’ One can say that writing based on an awareness of the Other is what made Ch’oe Yun into novelist and is the essence of Ch’oe Yun’s novel.