Tolkien's Dragon, Dwarves and Spider : Economy of Retention Minwoo Yoon (Yonsei University) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are all about the economy of losing, sharing, and forgetting. As an antithesis to the major theme of Tolkien's literature, the dragon, the dwarves and the spider all represent the desire to retain, thus standing antagonistic to that economy of expenditure. This economy of losing/possessing has much to do with the anthropological observation by Marcel Mauss that the donee's refusal to circulate a gift makes it come back as a poison to him, and Nietzsche's idea that the ‘weak’ never forget hurt or gift, and repay it on equal terms. Indeed, the dragons (Glaurung/Smaug) steal treasures only to hoard them without enjoying. The dwarves never forget their own treasure stolen by others such as the dragons; they swear revenge and nourish the “ressentiment,” awaiting a time to regain the treasure. Also, far from giving, the female spiders(Ungoliant/Shelob) devour everything entangled in their web, and their insatiable hunger goes as far as to consume even her own offspring and herself. The unforgetfulness can be said to have a close affinity to melancholia in Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Freudian melancholia is simply one's failure to forget the loss of an object, i.e., one's inability to break his excessive and subjective attachment to the object. Then, Freud relates the melancholia to the infantile oral and anal libidinal desires. The dragon's and dwarves' regressive desire for retention is analogous to the anal libido which comes from the fear that they may suffer from a lack. The anal libido is an infant's preliminary desire for possession and independence: by not conforming to the parents' call to discharge excrements, an infant experiences retaining something and resisting to parents. In turn, the spider is an embodiment of the great oral desire to engulf everything, even her own body. As Freud says in “Totem and Taboo,” the spider's sadistic destruction or eating of herself comes from her unforgetfulness of her own value―an extreme narcissism.
국제언어인문학회 [INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES IN LANGUAGE]
설립연도
2000
분야
인문학>언어학
소개
국제언어인문학회는 '언어를 통한 인문학 연구'의 필요성에 동감하는 여러 전공분야 학자들의 뜻을 담고 있습니다. 언어에 초점을 맞추는 것은, 다양한 전공분야의 참여에서 생겨날 수 있는 '이질적 집합'의 상황을 극복하기 위한 장치입니다. 현재로서는 작은 불씨를 지핀 것에 불과합니다. 그러나 이렇게 일구어진 불꽃이 새로운 학풍의 바람결에 커다란 섬광으로 빛나게 될 날이 올 것을 우리는 확신합니다. 우리의 학회와 학술지는 인문학 불변의 가치와 시대적 사명을 인식하는 국내외의 학자들을 향해 활짝 개방되어 있습니다. 특정 전공의 범위를 넘어서서 철학, 문학, 언어학, 종교, 역사, 문화, 예술 등의 시각에서 언어의 본질을 토론할 기회가 될 것입니다.