들뢰즈와 베케트--철학과 문학의 공통 기호들(II): 모나드의 정원, 『몰로이』

Abstract

This paper argues that Samuel Beckett's Molloy bears a literary affinity to Gilles Deleuze's philosophical ideas explicated in The Fold. Deleuze demonstrates that the realized objective world(body, matter) coexists with the immanent virtual one(soul, monad). Without losing any of their own property, each of these two levels of the world is folded following its own manner and connected into the other creating series of folds pleated and doubled on two levels. Molloy is a literary embodiment of the concept of the fold. Unlike most characters of conventional novels, Molloy, the main character of the first narrative, illustrates an indiscernible area between the actual and the virtual. By the process of elimination(memory, history, family, language, even himself) he dissolves into a blurred contour and then slips into concatenation of 'becoming-world' as pure event. Thus he is a fold which, on the one hand, is always reduced to informal texture of the dark basis(the virtual), and, on the other, explicates itself for the world. While Molloy becomes a fold by being included in and including the world, Moran, the main character of the second narrative, does so capturing Molloy in and out of himself. He chases Molloy who appears not only in his mind but also exists somewhere in the world. Moran comes to the place of the 'point of view' on variation, following the line of the inflection of Molloy: Seeking Molloy, he becomes one with Molloy. Molloy and Moran are not names of individual persons but of 'an Each, an Every.' They designate neither a person nor a character to narrate or to represent the empirical world. They are instead 'agents' as "subjects of expression" to take over every point of view of monad, shifting constantly from one predicate to another. Their writing is no more than a record of this trajectory, and along with it the world is "becoming" from within. Molly and Moran, each a relative term to the other, are artistic contrivances to render 'the dark basis' visible and to express the reciprocal inclusion between the virtual basis and the actualized apex.