발화의 혼종성과 주체의 탈중심화 -『에세이스트의 책상』을 읽는 문체론의 한 방법-

Abstract

This paper centers on An Essayist's Desk by Bae Soo-Ah, a dialogic and polyphonic text, to seek a new stylistics method. By breaking away from the conventional perspective that considers the language of novel as the one that reflects the uniqueness of writer or a technical choice, the paper sees the language of novel as an intertwined, aggregated body of or an oscillated field of hetero-languages. The paper also tries to give examples of methods to describe non-monologic unity which is not integrated in a single enunciation of a single subject. Moreover, instead of confining the style in a rhetorical and decorative sphere, this paper regards the style as the one that is deeply integrated with the meaning and thus tries to reconstruct the meaning of An Essayist's Desk through the linguistic form of text. In the first chapter, the voices of ‘narrating I’ and ‘narrated I’ are mixed and overlapped through which we can examine the non-representative aspect of the narrator. This is also relevant with the fact that An Essayist's Desk is a record of mental activities that are passively produced by stimulation from the other in the novel. The following chapter reveals that such aforementioned aspect is also related to the otherness of M, a character in the novel, and tracks down the painful process through which the narrator writes down the separation from M, which still remains as trauma impossible to represent. This process is also a process of the narrator, who while trying to evade or delay the locutionary act, taking one step closer to separation. Through such writing, ‘I’ am reborn as an ethical subject who bares responsibility for irreversible days of the past. The last chapter of this paper examines how interfering dialogues of the other turn the locutionary act of ‘I’ into an arena of struggle of hetero-voices. This examination confirms an aspect found in An Essayist's Desk which is deepening the novel's meaning by disturbing the themes openly mentioned in the novel. Such analysis can be considered as one case of stylistics method that approaches polyphonic and dialogic texts. The following approaches can widely be used to analyze a dialogic text; an approach that mixes the locutionary act of the narrator with those of other characters in the novel; an approach that expresses the locutionary act of certain subject as a trace by evading or delaying the locutionary act; an approach that injects the dialogue of the other inside the narrator's locutionary act as common sense or general idea. Finding out ‘how’ and ‘why’ these approaches are created is a detailed work of stylistics that extracts meaning from the linguistic form of text.