earticle

영어

The Sound and the Fury, acclaimed as the epitome of Western modernism, resonates with the historicity of the early 20th century when fascism and exclusion of dehumanized human beings occurred in both reality and ontological topography. This paper aims to explore correlation between the novel and historicity of humanity. As a theoretical scaffolding, this paper uses Giorgio Agamben’s insight of the dire consequences of ontological and political scission between humanity and animality. After briefly and critically exploring several philosophers’ metaphysical endeavors to differentiate humanity from animality in Western philosophy, this paper reveals the limit and predicament of this ontological differentiation, which also results in the emergence of bio-politics mediated by ‘anthropological machine of exclusion.’ The novel embeds this ontological darkness and remaining hope Faulkner projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy, a mentally-challenged character, play a role to reflect ontological status of dehumanized being. Faulkner uses Benjy not so much as a human character as an animalized metaphoric agent probing into the human condition in which bare life (zoe) is differentiated from political life (bio). Benjy remains as a ‘being with voice’ deprived of language though this voice as an ontological locus between language and sound reverberates to ontological ethos (ontological space) of being. Meanwhile, Quentin, a pseudo-tragic hero, embellishes the idea of tragic death so much that he even tries to dehumanize himself, as an imaginary exit to apotheosis. Both Benjy and Quentin are tethered to their ontological circle, or ‘the open’ as human-animals. Unlike other characters in the novel, Dilsey, a African American housemaid, represents universal humanity without scission between animality and humanity, which Agamben calls “form-of-life.”