『피네간의 경야』: 꿈 텍스트로서의 소설

Abstract

Jacques Lacan has said that Finnegans Wake (henceforth FW) is not readable. Or is it? It is a general opinion that James Joyces last major work is hard to read. It may be true, though, that this novel may be hard to read, but may not be impossible to read. One of the main reasons why this novel is hard to read is that it is a dream text. While Ulysses shows the stream of consciousness of Bloom during one single day, 16 June 1904, FW describes the stream of the unconscious of one night of Harold Chimpden Earwicker (HCE). Because this novel is a recording of HCEs dream of one night, the best way to approach it is through the examination of his unconscious. Since the dream is not structured the way consciousness is structured, it is naturally difficult to read it. Freud has shown that dream work is constructed through condensation and displacement. Jacques Lacan has followed the basic idea of dream work of Freud, but he has revised it by actively applying current structuralist linguistic theories of Saussure and Jakobson to it. He has thus declared that the unconscious is structured like a language. In Lacans revised psychoanalytic theory, the two main axes of the unconscious become metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor, in this case, acts as a paradigmatic axis, and metonymy acts as a syntagmatic axis. These two axes are very useful in examining the contents of HCEs dream content. Since there are numerous portmanteau words and displaced descriptions in FW, Lacanian theory of psychanalysis is very useful in reading HCEs unconscious.