“잘 먹기”, 잘 읽기: 마리즈 꽁데의 탈식민 윤리 —『식육 여성 이야기』(The Story of The Cannibal Woman)를 중심으로

Abstract

Maryse Cond's humanistic "ethical universal" aims at achieving the hybridity of cultures, races and sexes and preparing a third space where the global dimension of human experiences is fully captured. To this ethical frame a new formula has been added, that is, "eating well," reading well and writing well on the indeterminate horizons, which comes from Cond's vision of "literary cannibalism", "a rewriting and magical appropriation of the literature of the other." as she defines. In Cond's latest The Story of the Cannibal Woman, she creates the third space where she "rehabilitate(s) the appellation 'cannibal', once a term of opprobrium, and transform(s) it into a symbol of a new, noncolonized self." Thus Roselie, "the invisible woman" narrator, after "cannibalizing" and appropriating Fiela the accused cannibal woman as her alter ego, becomes her own self as an enthusiastic painter, even though she has to move through painful losses to self-knowledge. As Rosello properly puts it, Cond invents a story of "post-cannibalism" "which successfully reworks the difference between colonizer and colonized by remapping it over an ambiguous and reversible continuum between the figures of the one who eats and the one who is eaten, the cannibal and the cannibalized," and a third space of post-colonial humanistic ethics is made possible.