Earticle

초록

영어

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.

목차

I. 불안: 낯선 그와의 조우
II. 병증(病症): 치료의 (불)가능성과 구제의 당위성
III. 도착(倒錯): 퀴어한 그의 치명적 매혹
IV. 파국(破局): 의미의 와해
인용문헌
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 윤조원 [ Joewon Yoon | 고려대, 교수 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813