수잔-로리 팍스의 『그레이스의 책』에 재현된 증인되기의 상상력과 윤리적 관객성

초록

This paper analyzes the ethico-political significance of witnessing and audience response in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Book of Grace. The play depicts Grace’s journal writing and Buddy’s vlogging as their bearing witness to domestic violence. Vet, preoccupied with border control, otherizes as “aliens” those who are outside his ego/national boundary, reducing his own family members to the objects of his surveillance gaze. In contrast, Grace embraces the forsaken, helpless “aliens.” Her eponymous diary in this sense represents her witnessing subjectivity. Grace and Buddy address their imaginary audiences and, by doing so, implicate the spectators in the mise en abyme of meta-spectatorship. In this stage-auditorium dynamic, the play invites audience members to reflect on themselves as witnesses to the characters’ witnessing. The play thus dramatizes the witnessing imagination whereby the audience participate in the chain of witnessing and respond to the characters’ suffering in an ethical way.

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