존 바스의 『카이메라』: 대수학적 나선형의 구조

Barth's Chimera: A Logarithmic Spiral Structure

Confronting the situation of the exhaustion of possibilities in the narrative art form, John Barth has tried to turn the felt ultimacies into material and means for his work. In an effort to embody his perspective on the new mode of writing, he used innovative devices such as the parody of traditional hero myth, the frame-tale formula of endless return, and logarithmic spiral structure. This study illuminates that Barth's obsession with "writer's dilemma" finds a new shape in Chimera with logarithmic spiral structure, Like the Chimera of classical legend, Chimera is composed of three parts, "Dunyazadiad," "Perseid," and "Bellerophoniad," which twist upon themselves as a spiral does but eventually come out artistically and thematically upwards through their intermingled and complementary relations, "Bellerophoniad," a compendium of all the stories Barth has told before, stops in the middle with one end of the spiral loop opened to another possibility and with our practiced notions of reading reexamined. In this clever and scurrilous rewrite of classic myths, Barth lectures not merely on the nature of fiction but also on the relationship between writer and reader and argues that meaning can be found in the process of exploration conjoined by the teller, the told, and the tale becoming one by means of imagination, Searching for the new possibility to replace the old, Barth sets out on a journey into the past and then eventually to the present and acquires the necessary imagination to rejuvenate literature. He vivifies old stories with imaginative freshness and opens them up to new ways of understanding, Thus, "the key to the treasure is the treasure" and the novelist's untiring struggle to write in the face of frustrating difficulties is the key to the possibilities of a new kind of fiction.