문학과 지성사

Wunderkammer is a book that explores each of our private “Wunderkammer,” often translated into English as “a cabinet of wonder,” a storage space within where the upper-class and intellectuals of early-modern Europe collected and exhibited various treasures and other precious objects. Beginning with a description of a wunderkammer, the book evokes faded images, memories, and texts from our own private wunderkammer. The scenery viewed through the window during one’s childhood, the first field trip and scavenger hunt, mother’s knitting, the adventure inside the closet in every relative’s house, the smell from a nameless German bakery, the darkness in Schwarzwald or the Black Forest, the uninterpretable dreams, Rabelais’s tall tales, Walter Benjamin’s chess-playing automaton, Roland Barthes’s tautology, and poems as gifts… Within the present desire and the aspiration toward the origin of anxiety, myriad stories emerge and take shape.

The author argues that a wunderkammer is the museum of an individual’s personal history and memories accumulated through interactions with the world as well as the emblem of the time-space of one’s mind. Likewise, the wunderkammers within our minds are not used to store the prototypes of precious artworks or the highly developed language of intellectual contemplation. Rather, there coexist the multifarious fragments of worthless, broken, and nameless words and images in a chaotic mix. The author tries to pick up these fragments, quilt them into a whole, and interpret it. However, such an effort is bound to fall through as language evades becoming a definite meaning. Therefore, the author lays out a panoramic view, not of the interpretations per se but of endless failures—she makes a somewhat reckless plan to share the intimate stories in wunderkammers, the emotions and senses radiating from the things language and text cannot capture, and willingly falls to the seduction of language to participate in the language game.