House of Words and Home of Friday: Lacanian Approach to Foe
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Most critics who regard Foe by Coetzee as a post-colonial text also find in the novel gender criticism, pointing out the similarities between tongueless Friday and voiceless Susan. However, there is no decisive evidence that Friday’s tongue is cut by slavers, and Susan is deprived of her voice by the patriarchal society. Rather, they are contrastive figures belonging to totally different worlds: Susan who is obsessed with telling her own story belongs to the world of language, whereas Friday who does not even have notion of speech belongs to the world of silence, or rather, world of no-language. Each of their worlds can be explained in terms of Lacanian concept of the Symbolic order and the Real, since the Symbolic order is maintained and regulated by language, and the Real is a non-linguistic world, a world before the language/letter. Susan who tries to pursue her own identity through her story realizes that our story is not our own, but Other’s story written in Other’s language, and ultimately acknowledges herself to be a kind of a ghost without substance, or rather a fictional being written by Other/language. Friday, on the contrary, refuses to become a subject by rejecting the Symbolic Order/language. Thus, he maintains the fundamental self not subjected by the language. The reason why the anonymous narrator in the last section of the novel opens Friday’s mouth is that he/she wants to hear what Friday’s silent mouth holds, that is, the ultimate sound of the Lacanian Real which can never be “killed” by language/ letter.
Abstract
Most critics who regard Foe by Coetzee as a post-colonial text also find in the novel gender criticism, pointing out the similarities between tongueless Friday and voiceless Susan. However, there is no decisive evidence that Friday’s tongue is cut by slavers, and Susan is deprived of her voice by the patriarchal society. Rather, they are contrastive figures belonging to totally different worlds: Susan who is obsessed with telling her own story belongs to the world of language, whereas Friday who does not even have notion of speech belongs to the world of silence, or rather, world of no-language. Each of their worlds can be explained in terms of Lacanian concept of the Symbolic order and the Real, since the Symbolic order is maintained and regulated by language, and the Real is a non-linguistic world, a world before the language/letter. Susan who tries to pursue her own identity through her story realizes that our story is not our own, but Other’s story written in Other’s language, and ultimately acknowledges herself to be a kind of a ghost without substance, or rather a fictional being written by Other/language. Friday, on the contrary, refuses to become a subject by rejecting the Symbolic Order/language. Thus, he maintains the fundamental self not subjected by the language. The reason why the anonymous narrator in the last section of the novel opens Friday’s mouth is that he/she wants to hear what Friday’s silent mouth holds, that is, the ultimate sound of the Lacanian Real which can never be “killed” by language/ letter.
참고문헌 (22)
- Attridge, Derek, "Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century British Literary Canons", pp.212~238 (1992), U of Illinois P
- Bishop, Scott, "J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity", World Literature Today, 64, pp.54~57 (1990)
- Bongie, Chris, "‘Lost in the Maze of Doubting’: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of (Un)Likeness", Modern Fiction Studies, 39, pp.261~281 (1993)
- Carracciolo, Marco, "J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Embodiment of Meaning", Journal of Modern Literature, 36(1), pp.90~103 (2012)
- Coetzee. J. M, "Doubling the Point:Essays and Interviews" (1992), Harvard UP
- Coetzee. J. M, "Foe" (1986), Penguin Books
- Derrida, Jacques, "The Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prothesis of Origin" (1998), Stanford UP
- Dragunoiu, Dana, "Existential Doubt and Political Responsibility in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42(3), pp.309~326 (2001)
- Evans, Dylan, "An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis" (1996), Routledge
- Fink, Bruce, "The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance" (1995), Princeton UP
- Gauthier, Marni, "The Intersection of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", English Language Notes, 34, pp.52~71 (1997)
- Doležel, Lubomir, "Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds" (1998), Johns Hopkins UP
- Greenfield, Matthew, "Coetzee’s Foe and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:Confession, Authority, and Private Language", Journal of Narrative Technique, 25, pp.223~237 (1995)
- Korang, Kwaku, "An Allegory of Re-Reading: Post-Colonialism, Resistance, and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", World Literature Written in English, 32-33, pp.133~150 (1992)
- Lacan, Jacques, "Ecrit" (2007), Norton
- Lacan, Jacques, "The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, Book II: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan" (1991), Norton
- Macakill, Brian, "Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", Contemporary Literature, 33, pp.432~457 (1992)
- Peterson, Christopher, "The Home of Friday: Coetzee’s Foe", Textual Practice, 30(5), pp.857~877 (2016)
- Post, Robert, "The Noise of Freedom: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", Critique, 30, pp.143~153 (1989)
- Roberts, Sheila, "‘Post-colonialism or the House of Friday’―J. M. Coetzee’s Foe", World Literature Written in English, 31, pp.87~92 (1991)
- Spivak, G. C, "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe", Roxana, 1990, pp.7(2), 1~23
- Williams, Paul, "Foe: The Story of Silence", English Studies in Africa, 31(1), pp.33~39 (1988)