『댈러웨이 부인』: 비어있는 중심의 미학 (The Aesthetic of Empty Center)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국제임스조이스학회
· 수록지 정보 : 제임스조이스저널 / 13권 / 2호 / 155 ~ 188페이지
· 저자명 : 정명희

초록

In Virginia Woolf, the problem of reality and its perception is a deeply innate one. Just as Woolf, as a writer, suffers from the limitation of representing reality, her narrator and characters are perplexed with the impossibility of explaining it. Although they all aspire to reach for the center of reality, it is seemingly evasive. The Woolfian narrator fails to draw together fragmentary and contradictory parts of the narrative: the stories of Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, life and death, and sanity and insanity. In the same way, the characters cannot recover what they have lost, nor achieve a unity within or around themselves. The omniscient narrator has no authority to distinguish between truth and falsity and Mrs. Dalloway’s party becomes a mere snobbish social fiction.
Still the dynamic fluidity of the Woolfian narrative and its repetitive and fluctuating rhythm continue throughout the novel and compensate the obvious discontinuity on a thematic level. Her narrative connects and overlaps the usual binary opposite categories: such as private and public, self and the world, past and present, life and death, as well as sanity and insanity. Her omniscient narrator succeeds in constructing a seamless uniformity of the style. He is able to move freely in and out of characters and filters their emotions and thoughts through his own narrative consciousness. Woolfian characters are simply a component of the narrator, not just simple characters in the traditional sense. The narrator, however, is also a marginal force who never occupies the center. He composes his own narrative passively by juxtaposing and accumulating the individual narratives of characters.
Ahead of her time, Woolf understands Derrida’s notion of differance: we are born into the world of language and our being and reality itself are weaved out of that linguistic and cultural system without any substance. On the level of both form and content, the center is empty. But she appropriates this frustrating realization into a chance to devise a new kind of narrative. She is a strong modernist who can transform the empty center into an origin of creation. Her imaginative prowess despite everything can affirm and assemble a whole new structure out of nothing.

영어초록

In Virginia Woolf, the problem of reality and its perception is a deeply innate one. Just as Woolf, as a writer, suffers from the limitation of representing reality, her narrator and characters are perplexed with the impossibility of explaining it. Although they all aspire to reach for the center of reality, it is seemingly evasive. The Woolfian narrator fails to draw together fragmentary and contradictory parts of the narrative: the stories of Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, life and death, and sanity and insanity. In the same way, the characters cannot recover what they have lost, nor achieve a unity within or around themselves. The omniscient narrator has no authority to distinguish between truth and falsity and Mrs. Dalloway’s party becomes a mere snobbish social fiction.
Still the dynamic fluidity of the Woolfian narrative and its repetitive and fluctuating rhythm continue throughout the novel and compensate the obvious discontinuity on a thematic level. Her narrative connects and overlaps the usual binary opposite categories: such as private and public, self and the world, past and present, life and death, as well as sanity and insanity. Her omniscient narrator succeeds in constructing a seamless uniformity of the style. He is able to move freely in and out of characters and filters their emotions and thoughts through his own narrative consciousness. Woolfian characters are simply a component of the narrator, not just simple characters in the traditional sense. The narrator, however, is also a marginal force who never occupies the center. He composes his own narrative passively by juxtaposing and accumulating the individual narratives of characters.
Ahead of her time, Woolf understands Derrida’s notion of differance: we are born into the world of language and our being and reality itself are weaved out of that linguistic and cultural system without any substance. On the level of both form and content, the center is empty. But she appropriates this frustrating realization into a chance to devise a new kind of narrative. She is a strong modernist who can transform the empty center into an origin of creation. Her imaginative prowess despite everything can affirm and assemble a whole new structure out of nothing.

참고자료

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