Revenge of the Flesh: The Return of Sexual and Racial Otherness in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

'육체의 복수' -포크너의 『압살롬, 압살롬!』에 나타난 성적, 인종적 타자의 귀환

This paper aims to revisit William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by focusing on the corporeal body and its role in dismantling the Southern ideology of white patriarchy. The latter, which is represented by Thomas Sutpen and his attempt to establish a white male dynasty, is a symbolic space in which the corporeal body turns into a symbolic one through the process of inscribing social ideologies on it. However, this symbolic space is also a contending site between the two bodies. The symbolic body of Sutpen cannot entirely erase its corporeal traces, and therefore the corporeal body, which is buried but nonetheless existent, threatens to undermine rules and premises of the symbolic order. Given that, this paper approaches Faulkner's critique of the Southern white patriarchal ideology from the tension that the corporeal body and the symbolic body create. The 'flesh' roughly corresponds to racial and sexual otherness, namely black flesh and the homoerotic desire of male body. Although they-as the matter of race and that of gender - function in different levels of signification, they still share a common purpose in revealing the logical paradox within Sutpen's symbolic order. The idea of pure whiteness that Sutpen subscribes to is a concept that prerequisites the existence of blackness. Likewise, his idea of male homosociality based upon patriarchal legacy stands precariously on the verge of disintegrating into homoetoricism. As internal otherness that Sutpen's symbolic order cannot fully incorporate, the corporeal body functions to indicate the limitation of Sutpen's Design and its body-signification process.