영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 불꽃
로버트 히첸스의 『불꽃(Flames)』은 19세기 후반에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 덕성과 욕망의 개념 사이에서 고투하는 청년 밸런타인 크레스웰을 중심으로 전개된다. 현대 런던을 배경으로, 밸런타인은 육체적 쾌락보다 지적 즐거움을 선호하는 거의 성인에 가까운 고결한 인물로 그려지며, 동시대인들의 욕망에 종종 당혹감을 느낀다. 서사는 밸런타인과 그의 친구 줄리언 애디슨을 통해 실존적 갈망, 유혹, 그리고 선과 악의 대비라는 주제를 탐구한다. 소설의 도입부는 금욕주의와 일상적 악덕으로부터의 초연함으로 특징지어지는 밸런타인 크레스웰을 소개한다. 다른 사람들의 삶을 지배하는 듯한 욕망이 왜 자신에게는 결여되어 있는지를 성찰하면서, 그는 자신의 순결함 속에서 일종의 고립감을 표현하며 현대 사회의 '성인'처럼 느낀다. 정반대의 기질을 체현하는 줄리언 애디슨과의 우정은 도덕, 유혹, 인간 경험에 대한 깊은 대화의 무대를 마련한다. 두 친구는 서로의 영혼을 교환하는 실험에 착수하며, 상반되는 본성에 대한 더 깊은 이해를 추구하게 된다. 이 초기 설정은 이야기가 진행됨에 따라 전개될 철학적 기조와 내적 갈등을 확립한다.
Classics Read in English _ Flames by Robert Hichens
Robert Hichens's Flames, published in the dying years of the nineteenth century, begins with a question that has no safe answer: what becomes of a man who has no appetite for sin in a world that runs on it?
Valentine Cresswell is that man — young, refined, almost pathologically virtuous. He moves through late-Victorian London like a monk through a marketplace, observing the hungers that drive his peers with a bewilderment that is equal parts innocence and affliction. He does not condemn desire; he simply cannot locate it within himself, and this absence, which others might call purity, he experiences as exile. Hichens draws Valentine not as a moral exemplar but as a psychological puzzle — a man whose goodness is so complete that it becomes its own form of suffering, a cage built from the inside.
Enter Julian Addison, Valentine's closest friend and his precise inverse. Where Valentine retreats, Julian advances. Where Valentine abstains, Julian indulges. Their friendship is the novel's engine, a collision of temperaments that generates the kind of friction only intimacy can produce. But Hichens is not content with mere contrast. He pushes the premise into the territory of the uncanny: the two men agree to an experiment — an exchange of souls, an attempt to inhabit each other's moral architecture from within. It is a Faustian wager dressed in the language of friendship, and from the moment it is struck, the novel's atmosphere shifts from philosophical debate to something far more dangerous. What begins as an intellectual exercise becomes an act of psychic trespass, and Hichens makes clear, with the quiet certainty of a man who has studied the Victorian soul and found it riddled with trapdoors, that some doors, once opened between two people, can never be closed again.
Among the contents
Refinement had more power over the soul of Valentine Cresswell than religion. It governed him with a curious ease of supremacy, and held him back without effort from most of the young man's sins. Each age has its special sins. Each age passes them, like troops in review, before it decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided to join any regiment. The trumpets of vice rang in his ears in vain, mingled with the more classical music of his life as the retreat from the barracks of Seville mingled with the click of Carmen's castanets. But he heeded them not. If he listened to them sometimes, it was only to wonder at the harsh and blatant nature of their voices, only to pity the poor creatures who hastened to the prison, which youth thinks freedom and old age protection, at their shrieking summons. He preferred to be master of his soul, and had no desire to set it drilling at the command of painted women, or to drown it in wine, or to suffocate it in the smoke at which the voluptuary tries to warm his hands, mistaking it for fire. Intellectuality is to some men what religion is to many women, a trellis of roses that bars out the larger world.
