대표적 모더니즘으로 손꼽히는 책을 읽다가, 재미있는 표현이 나왔다. 나는 이런게 포스트모던 스타일이 아닐까?... 하다가 AI에 물어 봄.


"Small, inexpensive private school run on shrewd and efficient business lines did a roaring trade in black sheep"


이게 문제의 문장인데, 골칫덩이(black sheep) 아들을 벨기에에 있는 저렴한 사림학교로 보냈는데, 그 학교는 이익을 효율적으로 창출하는  기업처럼 운영 뙜다... 뭐 이런 의미임.


그래서 위 문장이 모던 스타일이면 포스트모던 스타일로 바꿔쓰기 하라고 주문함. 세가지 버전을 제시하더라.


1. Focus on Language and Self-Awareness (Meta-Fictional)

The narrator would step away from the straightforward satirical judgment and draw attention to the artifice of the description itself:


"We are expected, of course, to be appalled that the school the old man chose was run 'on shrewd and efficient business lines,' doing a 'roaring trade' in the commodity we must now refer to as 'black sheep.' But which is the real cliché here? The school, or my condemnation of it? This whole mora1istic paragraph is just a necessary convention, isn't it?"


이건 마치 상위 차원에서 내려다 보면서 서술하는 식. 즉, 원작에는 겉으로 드러나지 않는 도덕에 관해서, 하지만 그게 단순한 관습에 의한 것임을 지적하는 표현으로 바꿈. 어떻게 보면 독자의 해석의 여지를 창작자가 명확히 지정해 주는 방식.



2. Focus on Fragmentation and Subjectivity

The sense of a stable rea1ity is lost, presenting the event as just one possible, equally arbitrary perspective:


"The father sent him. Or did he? No matter. The school, in a town with a name that no one (including the postman) could pronounce, was merely a transaction. The brochure promised 'discipline,' but the receipts showed 'profit.' The black sheep—were they really black, or were they simply a market niche? All things, in the end, are just data points for a spreadsheet, aren't they?"



이번에는 객관적이고 일반화 되지 않은 단 하나의 사건이라는 식으로 표현. 학교에 대해 서술하고, 골칫덩이와의 관계, 그리고 데이터 혹은 돈벌이에 불과하다는 실질적인 의미를 파편적으로 건조하게 나열.


3. Hyperbolic Exhaustion of Meaning

The critique becomes so exaggerated that it stops functioning as satire and becomes an overwhelming, meaningless flow of information:


"Ulrich was dispatched to the inevitable Belgian institution, School #493, a subsidiary of Global Education Corp, which had perfected the financial modeling for monetizing filial disobedience. Its EBITDA was astronomical; its curriculum, entirely fluid. The boys were black sheep, yes, but also bronze sheep, sheep-adjacent, and, after a successful quarter, perhaps even post-sheep—a mere line item in the annual report, one unit of Humiliation-for-Profit."


마지막은 마치 생명 없는 사물만을 다루 듯 학교와 학생과 그 결과가 한장의 재무제표로 요약된 듯한 표현.



이런게 포스트모던이냐?