루이스 어드릭의 『사랑의 묘약』과 “부재하는 내용”으로서의 공동체

Abstract

Suk Koo RheeLouise Erdrich's Love Medicine has received great attention from many critics for its narrative form. The use of multiple narrators, who tell mini-stories about their own lives, has been at the center of the critical debate. This narrative device has been attributed by critics, such as Helen Jaskoski, to the influence of William Faulkner, whom the author herself acknowledged as one of her mentors, while the same device has been explained by other critics as part of the oral tradition of the Native American community. Hertha D. Sweet Wong's criticism especially deserves to be mentioned here since this study was initially conceived as its rebuttal. Paying attention to the similarity between Love Medicine and the story-telling tradition of the Native Americans, Wong argues that the hero of Erdrich's narrative is not a single individual but the community itself. This view, according to Wong, is affirmed by the absence of any dominating character. Wong even goes to such a degree as arguing that the narrative in question represents the power of the relationships that resist colonial domination and try to recover the lost history of the community as well as individual identities. This paper, however, maintains that those relationships are far from being present in Erdrich's narrative and also that community is rather absent in this narrative. If community is a hero, it is an absent hero; if it is felt in this sorrowful narrative, it is because it is painfully absent. Inspired by Lyotard's thesis on the aesthetics of modernism, this paper draws the conclusion that community exists in this narrative as "the missing content," and that its being is excruciatingly inscribed in the text through its absence, or rather, through constant references to the tragic consequences of its absence.