하워드 제이콥슨의 『샤일록은 내 이름』: 홀로코스트 이후의 샤일록 (Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name: Shylock after the Holocaust)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학연구 / 32호 / 35 ~ 58페이지
· 저자명 : 김영아

초록

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is one of the most controversial plays and at the center of its turmoil stands Shylock, the most influential Jewish character in English literature. During its 400-year history, the play has been reviled as anti-Semitic by some while admired as a critique of anti-Semitism by others. Not surprisingly, the Holocaust has rendered it more problematic and all the post-Holocaust rewritings are also explorations of what global civil society has learnt from the Holocaust, the greatest human catastrophe in history. This essay discusses Howard Jacobson’s novel Shylock Is My Name as an intervention in a long running debate on the memorialisation and contested ethical and political legacy of the Holocaust. While some critics have argued that the Holocaust enables us to find “ways of extrapolating from one’s own history of dispossession to understand and oppose the dispossession of others,” Howard’s novel, I argue, is an example showing how memories of the Holocaust often lead to “regressions of states of collective narcissism and paranoia.” The novel is informed by the discourse of a ‘second Holocaust,’ in which the Holocaust is invoked to express the fear of collective destruction and to justify violence as self-defence. Unlike Shakespeare, the novel understands the conflict between Antonio and Shylock as ahistorical, thereby positioning the history of anti-Semitism outside the social, political, and historical processes. The English society is depicted to consist of two groups, Jews and anti-Jews, and the only way the novel finds for the 21th century Jews to live in this society is the need for ethnic solidarity. The novel is aesthetically constricted by its obsession with alarmist edification, deploying character and incident only to highlight the dangers of a “second Holocaust.”

영어초록

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is one of the most controversial plays and at the center of its turmoil stands Shylock, the most influential Jewish character in English literature. During its 400-year history, the play has been reviled as anti-Semitic by some while admired as a critique of anti-Semitism by others. Not surprisingly, the Holocaust has rendered it more problematic and all the post-Holocaust rewritings are also explorations of what global civil society has learnt from the Holocaust, the greatest human catastrophe in history. This essay discusses Howard Jacobson’s novel Shylock Is My Name as an intervention in a long running debate on the memorialisation and contested ethical and political legacy of the Holocaust. While some critics have argued that the Holocaust enables us to find “ways of extrapolating from one’s own history of dispossession to understand and oppose the dispossession of others,” Howard’s novel, I argue, is an example showing how memories of the Holocaust often lead to “regressions of states of collective narcissism and paranoia.” The novel is informed by the discourse of a ‘second Holocaust,’ in which the Holocaust is invoked to express the fear of collective destruction and to justify violence as self-defence. Unlike Shakespeare, the novel understands the conflict between Antonio and Shylock as ahistorical, thereby positioning the history of anti-Semitism outside the social, political, and historical processes. The English society is depicted to consist of two groups, Jews and anti-Jews, and the only way the novel finds for the 21th century Jews to live in this society is the need for ethnic solidarity. The novel is aesthetically constricted by its obsession with alarmist edification, deploying character and incident only to highlight the dangers of a “second Holocaust.”

참고자료

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