목소리와 문학: 『하우스키핑』에 나타난 혼의 목소리

This essay examinesand uncovers the ontological quality of voice in Marilynne Robinson``s Housekeeping. My ideas of vocal afterlife and the reversal of death are indebted to those of the critics like Stanley Cavell and Michal Grover-Friedlander. The voice of Ruth in the novel not only relives the memory of the dead but maps out the ontological relationality of different times and generations. With this theoretical principle of voice, I first try to show how the fictional voice constitutes the liminal space between inside and outside, or between interiority and exteriority. The voice haunts and wanders somewhere between the worlds of fantasy and reality, or of materiality and immateriality. Second, the voice embodies and disembodies singularity and communality around the village of Fingerbone and beyond as it fashions connected and/or disconnected relationality via recollecting and resurrecting the memories, images, and even the lives of the dead. Third, the voice configures the ontological event which is made (im)possible through its physical absence and ontic negativity. And the physical absence is paradoxically engineered by the pervasive presence of its empty formality just as the etherial form shaped after death. Thus, the voice of Ruth is the subject of singularity, the event that invokes the ontic relationality of different beings, and also the transitional or ephemeral space where they are accidently interconnected. (SungKyunKwan University)