위화(余華)의 『제7일(第七天)』 ― 공간사유, 상상력의 특징과 희망의 정념

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the aesthetic characteristics of Yu Hua’s recent novel The Seventh Day by explicating the elements of space imagination in the novel and showing the author’s pathos about those regarded as the ‘not-yet-being’ that works behind the author’s imagination. One of the most conspicuous characteristics of The Seventh Day is that the author’s view on life and death clearly move from time to space, differentiating itself from his earlier novels in this aspect. Death and memory, which become the central elements the narrative of The Seventh Day revolves around, are all dealt with as spatial, rather than temporal, events. Among the notable characteristics of The Seventh Day in terms of space imagination is that objects such as ‘mists’ and ‘snowflakes’ that move in and out of the boundary between being and non-being are frequently used in order to aesthetically represent the phantasmic chronotope of the borderline between life and death, along with the fact that metaphors and figurative descriptions which lead the represented space of the novel to be imagined in water are found effusively throughout the novel. Another important characteristic is that, along with these elements of the imagination of water, descriptions that blur the distinction between emptiness and chaos, as well as between day and night, which can be read as the manifestation of the imagination of the book of Genesis, repeatedly appears and spurs the entire spatial setting of the novel to be imagined as a gigantic and mysterious time space of the days of Genesis. Significantly, this imagination of water and Genesis combines with both the author’s resistant feeling to the irrationalities and injustices of life and his strong pathos about the ‘not-yet-being’, which then results in the birth of a paradoxical representational space, ‘the land of no land’. This paradoxical land is the land prepared for those who do not have the space to rest even after death, through the creation of which the author subverts the traditional thinking that believes these people to be cursed and radically changes the miserable condition of those still left homeless after death to a blissful and beautiful fate within the represented space. The Seventh Day can be read as a novel which, through space imagination, plays a unique role allocated for art as a space of revelation of the ‘not-yet-being’ in Ernst Bloch’s meaning of the term. The novel has some weaknesses in that the way the author looks at human beings and life seem too moralistic and even binarist at times and that this ‘beauty’ the author realizes through ‘the land of no land’ seems too secular and unable to move beyond simplistic understanding of beauty. Despite these problematic aspects, The Seventh Day still manages to reveal the concrete contents and meanings of the aesthetic challenge the author took up.