게리 팍의 단편들에서 읽히는 장소들: 인류학적 장소, 비장소, 빈 공간, 다가올 장소

Abstract

This essay discusses Gary Pak’s two short stories, “The Valley of the Dead Air” and “The Watcher of Waipuna,” presenting them as the representative narratives that bring forth the question of the place with its essential connections with human life. My argument is indebted to recent anthropological studies, particularly to Marc Augé’s perspectives on the significant dimensions of place: the anthropological place and the non-place. The spatial backgrounds for Pak’s stories, the two Hawaiian villages function as the “anthropological places” for the villagers, who need to have “internal other” and their “empty places” against which they try to establish their unity and homogeneity, and eventually to realize that they all might be the same peripheral existences to the larger global/capitalist context. The internal other as such is embodied in the outcast, pathological conditions in Jacob’s and Gilbert’s life respectively. With their eventual potentiality to summon the ethical communal sensitivity, I argue that their negotiating, performative subjectivity in the face of the modern expansion of capitalist “non-places,” evinces that daily awakenings and performances of moral communality by individuals are integral to our new, yet-to-come place in which we will truly dwell.