타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비

@article{ART002490834},
author={ 윤조원 },
title={타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비},
journal={미국소설},
issn={1738-5784},
year={2019},
volume={26},
number={2},
pages={55-81},
doi={10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003}

TY - JOUR
AU - 윤조원
TI - 타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비
T2 - 미국소설
PY - 2019
VL - 26
IS - 2
PB - 미국소설학회
SP - 55-81
SN - 1738-5784
AB - Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a tale borne of Bartleby’s strange desire—a desire barely discernible, yet discernibly aspiring to negativity. This study is a foray into the modes of inscrutability that Melville mobilizes in Bartleby the character as well as in the tale itself. For this, I question implications of a wide-spread reading that relies upon the uncorroborated rumor regarding Bartleby’s career at the dead letter office. For such a reading complies to, and replicates, the lawyer-narrator’s suggestive strategy of reading Bartleby within the limits of normative and normatizing epistemology. Borrowing Leo Bersani’s critical notion, I view the lawyer’s ineffectual yet stubborn attempts to diagnose Bartleby, identify the etiology, and cure his malaise as a “redemptive” project. A redemptive approach assumes that an opaque text’s hidden meaning is in need of redemptive excavation. This hermeneutic model operates under the premise of transparent meaning while subjugating the enigmatic otherness into the category of the incomplete/pathological/abnormal. The enigma of Bartleby is a kind of perversion, insofar as perversion in the Freudian scheme is a refusal or failure to complete or adhere to the teleological trajectory of heterosexual productivity. Bartleby neither conforms to the teleological mandates of the lawyer’s Wall Street law office, nor falls into conceptual categories or (ab)normality readily available to him who complacently inhabit such a space. The narrator is both terrified and fascinated by Bartleby, but his fear of Bartleby’s unmanning effect compels him finally to subsume Bartleby into his order by sneakily resorting to the ungrounded rumor of Bartleby’s association with dead letters. By pathologizing what can only be termed Bartleby’s queerness, the narrator explains away his negative desire and thereby coerces sense out of what defies sense; and it is this redemptive hermeneutics of the narrator that structures his narrative. “Bartleby,” then, is an exemplary queer text which lays bare the very process in which queer becomes pathological for its very incommensurability—the process in which hegemonic epistemology attempts to domesticate an enigmatic text/other by turning it into a pathological object for redemption and lamentation.
KW - Herman Melville, Bartleby, queer theory, desire, Sigmund Freud, Leo Bersani, normativity, negativity, perversion, pathology
DO - 10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003
ER -

윤조원 (2019). 타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비. 미국소설, 26( 2), 55- 81.

윤조원 . 2019, “타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비”, 미국소설, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 55-81. Available from: doi:10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003

윤조원 “타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비” 미국소설 26.2 pp. 55-81 (2019): 55.

윤조원 . 타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비 미국소설 [Internet]. 2019; 26( 2), : 55-81. Available from: doi:10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003

윤조원 . “타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비” 미국소설 26, no.2 (2019): 55-81. doi: 10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003

홈 권호 목록 논문 목록 논문 상세

타자/텍스트의 불가사의(enigma)와 퀴어한 읽기: 「바틀비」와 바틀비

미국소설

약어 : AFS

2019, vol.26, no.2, pp.55 - 81

DOI : 10.34240/amf.2019.26.2.003

발행기관 : 미국소설학회

연구분야 : 영어와문학

윤조원¹

¹고려대학교

인용한 논문 수 : 4 서지 간략 보기

초록

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a tale borne of Bartleby’s strange desire—a desire barely discernible, yet discernibly aspiring to negativity. This study is a foray into the modes of inscrutability that Melville mobilizes in Bartleby the character as well as in the tale itself. For this, I question implications of a wide-spread reading that relies upon the uncorroborated rumor regarding Bartleby’s career at the dead letter office. For such a reading complies to, and replicates, the lawyer-narrator’s suggestive strategy of reading Bartleby within the limits of normative and normatizing epistemology. Borrowing Leo Bersani’s critical notion, I view the lawyer’s ineffectual yet stubborn attempts to diagnose Bartleby, identify the etiology, and cure his malaise as a “redemptive” project. A redemptive approach assumes that an opaque text’s hidden meaning is in need of redemptive excavation. This hermeneutic model operates under the premise of transparent meaning while subjugating the enigmatic otherness into the category of the incomplete/pathological/abnormal. The enigma of Bartleby is a kind of perversion, insofar as perversion in the Freudian scheme is a refusal or failure to complete or adhere to the teleological trajectory of heterosexual productivity. Bartleby neither conforms to the teleological mandates of the lawyer’s Wall Street law office, nor falls into conceptual categories or (ab)normality readily available to him who complacently inhabit such a space. The narrator is both terrified and fascinated by Bartleby, but his fear of Bartleby’s unmanning effect compels him finally to subsume Bartleby into his order by sneakily resorting to the ungrounded rumor of Bartleby’s association with dead letters. By pathologizing what can only be termed Bartleby’s queerness, the narrator explains away his negative desire and thereby coerces sense out of what defies sense; and it is this redemptive hermeneutics of the narrator that structures his narrative. “Bartleby,” then, is an exemplary queer text which lays bare the very process in which queer becomes pathological for its very incommensurability—the process in which hegemonic epistemology attempts to domesticate an enigmatic text/other by turning it into a pathological object for redemption and lamentation.

키워드

Herman Melville, Bartleby, queer theory, desire, Sigmund Freud, Leo Bersani, normativity, negativity, perversion, pathology

참고문헌(19)

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[단행본] Derrida, Jacques / 1995 / The Gift of Death / U of Chicago P
[단행본] Foucault, Michel / 1990 / The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol.1 / Vintage
[단행본] Freud, Sigmund / 1953 / The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols / Hogarth : 123 ~ 243
[학술지] Jonik, Michael / 2011 / Murmurs, Stutters, Foreign Intonations: Melville’s Unreadables / Oxford Literary Review 33 (1) : 21 ~ 44
[학술지] Knighton, Andrew / 2007 / The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby’s Idleness / ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53 (2) : 184 ~ 215
[단행본] Lacan, Jacques / 1998 / The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Book XI / Norton
[단행본] Laplanche, Jean / 1989 / New Foundations for Psychoanalysis / Blackwell
[단행본] Melville, Herman / 1987 / The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 / Northwestern UP : 13 ~ 45
[학술지] 신혜원 / 2015 / Boundless Despair as the Way to Salvation: Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” / 근대영미소설 22 (2) : 139 ~ 157