라캉적 글읽기 - 『 더블린 사람들 』 을 중심으로 = A Lacanian Reading - With Reference to Dubliners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study investigates how Dubliners can be viewed through Jacques Lacan`s thought. Many critiques have researched how Joyce alludes to the Dubliner`s moral paralysis in Dubliners. Joyce had written a letter in which he wanted to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which considers a city. In Dubliners, many of the characters act according to their own desires, but these desires are reflections of the desires of others. Many characters have their own gaze but no eye; likewise, there are many characters for whom the opposite is true, characters who have an eye but no gaze. For example, we see this in Araby, where one boy ardently wants to go to the bazaar, but in reality this is Mangan`s sister`s desire. It is she who wants to buy presents and other goods. The boy, then, represents one example of reflected and refracted desire. In Dublin, the city limits people`s lives like a net, represses their desires, confines them from escaping. In a sense, then, Dublin is a prison from which many of the characters simply cannot escape. This is significant in terms of theories about repressed desire. The Dubliners have no space for the expression of their desire because these desires are stifled by other characters and by the socio-economic structures that define the city. Though the characters live, metaphorically they are the dead. They live a death-in-life, in a no-man`s land, and they are not re-covered. Joyce insists that these kinds of people have a kind of paralysis and live in a gnomon`s situation. But in the last chapter, The Dead, we find the main character, Gabriel Conroy, having escaped from this situation. In the last chapter, it is only Gabriel Conroy who manages to escape from himself, to escape from the psychological paralysis that afflicts the other characters, and changes his unconscious world. Gabriel has escaped from what Lacan calls the pre-mirror stage, animal life. If we view Dubliners in light of Lacan`s theory, we can understand the Dubliners` unconsciousness. While they are limited in action or thinking, we can find the moral background. In Lacan`s famous formula: The unconscious is structured like a language. Lacan typically means several things. Firstly, Lacan interprets consciousness as being inextricably bound up with the unconsciousness. Secondly, Lacan pictures the unconscious as operating in terms of laws which resemble the laws of linguistics. In Dubliners, Joyce is interested in language, especially in the concept of paralysis. If we view language in Dubliners, we are offered very unique vantage points on the collective unconscious of Joyce`s Dublin.