예술가 소설로 본 『바베트의 만찬』

Babette's Feast as an Artist Story

Babette's feast, one of Isak Dinesen's most deft and exquisite works, juxtaposes the self-sacrificing art of Babette's cooking with the health-harming art of the writer's creation. Babette's feast, in which theprotagonist invests all her lottery money, signifies a kind of communion and an Easter mass which transubstantiate the table guests into new beings of joy and bliss. At the feast every participant experiences, if temporarily, a happy communion of self-extension and ecstasy. Babette's self-consuming feast alludes implicitly to the ideal reading experience through which the possible reader eats up every letter and leave of a book and nourishes him/herself on them. In this story, Babette's dainties are transformed into the writer's creation. Babette is the mouthpiece and double of Dinesen's integral creation and devotion. Both Babette and Dinesen let themselves eaten up by their self-enjoying consumers. This feast of self-sacrifice is rather comic in that it enhances a sense of community based on communion. Through the feast every villager purges his/her repressed and silent past and comes into the light of talking and community. For this comic effect, the author employs such narrative techniques as fairy tales, fantasies and biblical allegories that transcend the boundary of verisimilitude. These narrative techniques provide the writer with a point of comic relief. So Babette's Feast , a fantastic product of Dinesen's imagination, is quite purely a comic and fanciful work, originally intended to be evanescently light as if played on a flute.