탈식민주의 · 생태 역사의 인류세적 서사화: 아미타브 고쉬의 『헝그리 타이드』

Abstract

Proposed originally as a geological term for an epoch, the Anthropocene now encapsulates the constellation of the ecological and planetary crises that humans face today. As its name (Anthropos/Cene) indicates, it tells us that humans have been profoundly disrupting the ecology of the planet earth which is now on the threshold of a series of unpredictable, catastrophic events precipitated by changes in the earth system. The idea of human beings as a planetary force thus raises fundamental questions about the anthropogenic dichotomies of man/nature, the human/nonhuman, subject/object, and human/planetary time. Literature, with its Cartesian roots, likewise faces the ontological and epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene, and is in need of new literary ways to represent Anthropocenic plights. Whether or not today’s literary forms can embrace such challenges is still an extended, open question; thus, Amitav Ghosh diagnoses the current state of literature as “the Great Derangement.” With the grounding question of how literary forms can cope with “the Great Derangement” of our age, this essay attempts to investigate how Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide engages with major issues of the Anthropocene. The essay argues that the novel’s multi-layered narrative structure reflects, and correlates with, its underlying thematic concerns, in its self-reflective interweaving of different entanglements between the human and nonhuman protagonists, between human and geoclimatological planetary history, and between the local and the global. The term “the aesthetics of entanglements” is coined to indicate the structural and thematic echoing of the novel’s narrative ways to raise such Anthropocene questions, as it epitomizes how the motif of entanglement seeps through the plurality of human and nonhuman narratives, enabling, in Ghosh’s phrasing, “unthinkable” encounters with the other-than-human to be “telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story.”