도시 사물성과 충격의 미학: 허먼 멜빌의 「필경사 바틀비, 월 스트리트 이야기」

Abstract

This article aims to read Herman Melville’s urban short fiction “Bartleby, the Scrivener: The Story of Wall Street” through the thing theory Bill Brown systematized in literary studies, and then shows that this reading leads “Bartleby” to be an allegory of city conceptualized by Walter Benjamin. The thing theory tries to focus on the concrete material objects of literary text, which proves that these things are not “mere presentation” but “gathering of multiple functions and realities into one time-bound object” (Heidegger 167, 174). Things of city in “Bartleby”—the office building of the Wall Street, its interior, the Tombs, Trinity Church, Astoria, Bartleby’s belongings, and etc.—are not mere factual objects but special things of multiple meanings and realities. Reading “Bartleby” through the thing theory reveals the propertization of space which the New York Commissioner’s Plan had precipitated since 1811 and a new social conflict between landlord and tenant. The process of conflict between the lawyer as a landlord and Bartleby as a tenant is so problematic as to be ‘shock’ which disrupts the lawyer’s hegemonic logic of instrumental rationality and economic profit, and provokes the involuntary recollection hidden in his unconscious that human beings are all “sons of Adam” (“Bartleby” 36) and bound to each other.