토니 모리슨의 『집』

Toni Morrison's Home: a Variation of Picaresque Novel, a Racial Picaresque Novel

This study reads Toni Morrison's Home from a perspective of a variation of a picaresque novel in terms of the protagonist, the travel, and the ending. The features of the traditional picaresque novel often include first-person narration, strict realism, social satire, a protagonist of low class, a struggle for existence in hostile and chaotic world, and a spiritual renewal and purification ending. However, since its beginning, the genre has been changed, adapted, and mutated. It often includes first-person narration and(or) third-person narration, realistic perspectives, and feministic, postcolonial, homosexual, or racial picaro. In Home, Frank Money is Morrison's racial picaro. In his early childhood, his family were exiled from their home by racial separatists. He, with his parents, moved to his grandparents' in Georgia. While staying at his grandparents' for three years, he, with his new-born sister Cee, was persecuted by their grandmother during his parents' absence. Even when he lived in the newly rented house, he had to endure broken family bonds because his parents had to work too hard to take care of their children. Just as the picaro travels around the hostile and chaotic world, Frank travels into the 1950s American society, which is resonant with racial distinction and oppression. His journey occurred at the age of 24, when he came back from the Korean war. The journey aims to rescue his sister Cee who suffers at the hands of Beauregard Scott, a deranged scientist, physician, and holdover from the Old South regime, and then to return to his hometown, Lotus. During the process, he meets Reverend Locke, like a moral adviser in the picaresque novel, who offers critical perspectives on integrated army and its veterans. He also witnesses the racial-societal brutalities, such as attack against a black couple and a victim of the police shooting, through realistic perspectives. He reconstructs them from the point of the marginalized subjects, as the picaro does. However, he is also a variation of the traditional picaro. His journey is a psychic return to the past directing him to the traumatized past. He brings to mind childhood memories of endless toil in the fields, dislocation, broken family bonds, lynching, and war trauma. His journey, after rescue of Cee, ends with returning to his hometown, a place leading him to not only relieve himself of the traumatized past but also resurrect home and family bonds. The end is not an happy ending, but a fruitful ending as is that of the picaro. As a racial picaro, Frank attains reawakening of family and African American community while the traditional picaro do a spiritual renewal and inner purification. He also attains a psychic ending, relief of the traumatized past.