사물 이론과 존재 윤리: 토니 모리슨의 『솔로몬의 노래』

Abstract

This article is to read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon through the lens of thing theory that Bill Brown establishes for literary studies. Brown, who has developed the theory on the basis of Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects, proposes that literary study return to the manmade material object as a way of grounding a “gritter, materialist phenomenology of everyday life”(Sense 3). Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a text of things in a context that it is full of material objects represented not as “mere representation” but as “a gathering of multiple functions and realities into one time- bound object”(Heidegger 167, 174). Considering the previous tendency of criticism on Toni Morrison mainly to reduce her fiction to racial identity or feminist spheres, we need a new methodology by which to read Song of Solomon as a text of things. A close reading of Song of Solomon through thing theory illustrates thing theory’s potential as a proper tool to interpret the multiple layers of significance encompassed in things of the novel, and to clarify Morrison’s artistic vision. By examining the role of objects such as Macon Dead’s two cars, Pilate’s yellow green sack, and the woods of Blue Ridge Mountain, this article first demonstrates that the things open “the indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like”(Brown Sense 13). Then it insists that Morrison’s artistic vision is primarily freedom of nonbeing, which is achieved through the transformative process of self-“deprivation, wounding, and dying”(Lee 69). This literary study, which posits material objects in the center of interpretive concern, is ethical because as Brown insists(“Thing Theory”12), accepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting otherness as such.