‘풀씨’와 ‘편지’: 멜빌의 「필경사 바틀비」와 핀천의 『제49호 품목의 경매』에 나타난 희망의 음모

Abstract

This paper aims to read the conspiracy of hope in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Crying of Lot 49. Although the two texts, which were written across more than ten decades, respectively represent early modern and postmodern American fiction, they share similar concerns about how hope could be possible under the capitalist system of the United States that has dehumanized its subjects and has collapsed community into an irrevocable crisis. ‘Conspiracy’ implies the mode how hope is structurally embedded within the texts and a hermeneutic desire for hope that they prompt readers to exploit in searching for another order of meaning. In Melville’s work, the symbols of grass-seed and letters serve for the conspiracy of hope that the narrator contains with his conspiratorial discourse of Providence and seals up by benevolently mourning Bartleby’s death. Interestingly, the metaphor of mail delivery that led the narrator to stigmatize Bartleby as a dead man comes to the front in Pynchon’s work as an alternative system of the dispossessed. Against the cultural paranoia of the Cold War era, Pynchon disturbs its binary structure to explore a possible territory of flight of hope that the excluded middle retains.