초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This essay aims to explore the oppressiveness of meta-discourse, such as traditions, socio-politics, economics, etc. behind six main characters’ traumatic lives in Cristina García’s novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, moving beyond Freudianism in Bakhtin’s viewpoint, in an attempt to interpret all the mental activities in the external context. In this novel, García successfully maps the geographies of her multi-hyphenated characters’ trauma, which extend from Hotel Miraflor, in the capital of an unknown Central American country, to as many transmitted and transmitting countries as her characters. She sets this novel in an unknown place as a way to minimize censorship, examines her characters’ dreams or daydreams, and lets them talk about their traumatic experiences. While this setting reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s dream-interpretive framework, García treats her characters’ trauma as the oppressiveness of transmitted and transmitting countries’ meta-discourses. Those García denounces here are the Japanese culture compelling women to be obedient, the Korean Confucianism forcing children to hold family obligations above personal fulfillment, the Caribbean split state systems under oppressive political ideologies, and the money-power-centered Western society. In this regard, this novel practices the Bakhtinian sociological poetics, stating that a literary work is essentially a product of social interaction.
