『내가 죽어 누워 있을 때』 : 비천한 어머니의 기호계와 말하는 주체

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore an abject mother and the interrelation between the semiotic and a speaking subject in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner centers dying(dead) Addie Bundren's monologue in the text. Her maternal authority, which embodies the semiotic, violates the border of the symbolic and disrupts the identity of a symbolic subject. As Addie's corpse breaks all of the boundaries and seriously has an effect on the Bundrens, the influence of the semiotic is found in the identity of her children and their use of poetic language. During the funeral the children underwent hardships by water, which this abject mother wields. Among the children Dewey Dell and Darl's monologues show the crisis of the eruption of the semiotic within a speaking subject. The self must give up their maternal body in order to enter the symbolic world, while Julia Kristeva claims the mother never be eliminated from the symbolic subject. In a case of Dewey Dell and Darl, their use of poetic language proves a threat of the semiotic. Although Faulkner represents the subversive power of abject mother through Addie, he doesn't simply give the semiotic a priority over the symbolic, but emphasizes the balance of the two. According to Kristeva, the semiotic system that proves a speaking subject, which has a creative power, ultimately leads to the signifying process of a subject. Therefore, Faulkner realizes the revolution of a poetic subject through Cash's transfiguration process; his reaction to the music mirrors well that he releases the pulse and rhythm of the semiotic into his rigid symbolic subject. A speaking subject should be the one who creates the signifying process of an artistic revolution controlling and accepting the impulse of the semiotic flexibly not being buried in the extremes of the semiotic or symbolic. In the end Cash replaces Darl as a speaker of the novel to place himself on the symbolic world.