초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study is to discuss Morrison’s historical writing in A Mercy in terms of ‘dispersion,’ ‘discontinuity,’ and ‘continuity in discontinuity’ of the chapters and narrative voices. Morrison’s historical writing is about the discredited and neglected which have been buried in history. Its form is based on the dispersive, discontinuous, disqualified, and illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter and hierarchize them in the chronological order and in the name of truth. In A Mercy, set in Merryland and Virginia from 1682 to 1690, Morrison weaves together pronounced allusions to prenational documents that demarcated lines of race, gender, and class in the cause of the privileged ideology of whiteness. She then rewrites the story of the marginalized who had little economic means or domestic security and have been burried in the history of American origins. These include Native Americans, white European indentured servants, an abandoned white slave, and a black female slave. Of course, she also denies the rules and practices of historical writing which have been based on logic, scientifical causality, and explanatory hierarchy. In the novel, Morrison rewrites the history of the marginalized through the crossed and overlapping voices of first-person and third-person perspectives. The first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh chapters are narrated in the first person. The other chapters are narrated in the third person. The nameless chapters are individually dispersed and discontinued in terms of narrative form and structure. They alternate between Florens’s first person narrative and third person narratives from the perspectives of other characters. The voices complement and deepen one after another or one another to weave various dispersed and discontinuous facts into the texture of history of the marginalized. The final chapter is narrated in the first person voice of Florens’s mother. The voice explains her reasons for asking Vaark to take her daughter Florence instead of her little son. Her explanation is not for her daughter who harbors maternal abandonment in her heart as a trauma and hungers for her mother’s explanation of the reasons for asking Vaark to take her in the first chapter. However, the reenactment of the trauma is not resolved because Florens who is irrevocably separated from her mother by sale can’t receive her mother’s explanatory message. As the wide gap between the first and the last chapter shows. There is no possibility of repairing the breach with her mother nor coming to a new understanding of the original scene.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Morrison, Mercy, Historical Writing, Counter-history, American origins
