earticle

영어

History is a discourse that is contextualized by a historian's rhetorical purposes. So some historical data are chosen by a historian, and some are completely ignored or silenced. The master texts of history, in its traditional sense, are therefore discursive dialogs that silence the powerless voices. History-making certainly is a process of mystifying the violence toward the powerless. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities is a novel in which those who have been silenced in history in its traditional sense raise their voices to the extent that they can overthrow the whole system of society. Their force seems to be powerful enough to disconnect the major historical stream that has silenced the powerless. However, the seemingly new start of history is achieved by extreme violence and sets up the same kind of power system as before, the oppressors and the oppressed, with the only difference of the subject of oppression. History is a dialogical process rather than a dialectic process. Dickens reveals the false justification of “historical truthfulness” by inflicting self-violence upon his own narrative. He continually tells us that history is a repetition of the past, and at first the narrative seems to support the statement. However, as the story proceeds, there are a lot of contradictions that deny the statement. And the mystic ending where Sydney Carton dies for Charles Darnay completely destroys the narrative coherence. This testifies that history always defies any attempt to find a coherence in it and (de-)mystifies the violence in the process of history-making.