초록 열기/닫기 버튼
D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod records the main character Aaron Sisson’s breaking away from ‘home’ and the subsequent nomadic adventure in a strange country. The abrupt dislocation, as if a total negation of ‘home’, creates a structural rupture in the novel. The second half of the novel is featured by the intrusive and self-referent narrator. The disjunctive and jerky narration exposes the failing authoritative narrative which cannot configure Aaron’s adventure. Yet the structural complicity of Aaron’s Rod defeats any easy application of postmodern narratology which is predicated on the notion of the novel as a linguistic autonomy constitutive of the endless deferral of meaning. This structural oddity rather reveals the nature of the writer’s quest for a new mode of representation, which revolves around the concerns about community and individuality. The conflation of structural oddity and theoretical engagement with community invites Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflection on ‘unworking’ and totalitarianism in connection with the Western metaphysics. Nancy’s totalitarianism denotes the tendency to view a community as an embodiment of the essence or spirit. Nancy suggests the immanence of totalitarian worldview will be destroyed by reviving ‘a thinking of community’. Nancy calls this process ‘unworking’ of community, which belongs to the anti-philosophical tradition of ‘ungrounding’. In so doing, Nancy alludes ‘unworking’ to the ‘unended and unending’ literature. Here Nancy’s anti-philosophical notion of literature, with a strong resonance of Lawrence’s reiteration of the novel as a means to debilitate totalitarianism, sheds new light on the the intrusive narrator of ‘word-user’.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
co-existence, discursivity, dislocation, home, totalitarianism, community, unworking, ungrounding, literature
