현대 서사의 불안: 『프랑스 중위의 여자』에서의 역사주의와 반역사주의 사이의 긴장 = The Anxiety of the Modern Narrative: Tension between Historicism and Anti-Historicism in French Lieutenant`s Woman

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman offers a historical narrative whose formal and ideological uncertainty tends to frustrate critics that foreground critical theories and methodologies. This paper explores the complicated ways in which the novel evokes the historicity of human life and the textuality of history itself at the same time, while underscoring the specific points at which Fowles’ conception of art and history diverges from both realism and postmodernism. In the course of the narrative the self-conscious narrator declares that the author in modern times is no more a dictating god, but one that gives freedom to his creatures, i.e., his characters. They are free, we can infer, not only from the author but also from the allegedly ‘objective’ reality to which characters in a realist novel are still tightly bound. Nonetheless, their freedom is not unlimited because absolute freedom in characters and characterization means paradoxically the arbitrariness or omnipotency of authorship. The ‘reality principle’ thus returns to the new, ‘liberal’ godhead. Here lies Fowles’ dilemma. He is anxious to free his characters as fictive beings, and yet he has to respect their autonomy as if they were real beings. He wants to show the fictionality and reality of history in one and the same narrative. Accordingly, the narrative voice is torn between a parodic intention as regards the conventional, realist representation of temporalities and an enduring concern in the historiographical narrative that resists a sheer pastichization of the past. Through a variety of narrative devices the narrator intermingles the past and the present, fiction and reality, but the result is not an instantiation of the ‘self-flaunting anachronism’ (McHale) characteristic of postmodernist fiction. What we see in Fowles’ narrative, instead, is an attempt to evoke a new sense of history in which possibilities have as substantive significance as actualities. Of course, he does not work out this sense of history fully enough-his experiments with a historical vision remain unstable.