무덤의 낙원과 죽음의 유충: 쿳시의 고딕적 세계

Abstract

This study considers the ways in which J. M. Coetzees early novel In the Heart of the Country shapes the contours of (post)colonial Gothic. The story has raised many disconcerted critiques regarding the reliability of its narrator, Magda, and the narrative as a whole is most often considered as no more than a meaningful failure. Coetzees Gothic characteristics, however, challenge such reading of the text by foregrounding the narrators Gothic subjectivity and its defying quality. In tandem with, but not wholly identical to, the western Gothic tradition, In the Heart of the Country grapples with the social and political issues in its own way. Indebted to the recent studies on the (post)colonial Gothic, this paper will trace the Gothic features in the novel that comprehensively appear through character representation and narrative structure. As a ghostly figure who raises the undead father by reiterating and rewriting ones own life story, Magda parodies and complicates the sequential narrative to question the traditional way of writing which, in Coetzees view, unpleasantly soothes the shattered colonial history. By portraying the Gothic subject living in the garden of death, Coetzees novel suggests alternative ways of imagining the speculative history of a colonial world.