타자 지향의 담론: 핀천의 "브이."와 블랑쇼의 "바깥"

Other's Discourse: Thomas Pynchon's V. and Maurice Blanchot's "Outside"

Thomas Pynchon manipulates the wide range of his heroine's characterization in V. from the different shapes of a woman to the various phenomena or forms of inanimate things, that is from Victoria Wren, Veronica, Vera Meroving to the name of a volcano, Vheissu. Pynchon's metamorphoses of V. characters are his discursive tactics in order to raise the question of human being's existential ontology through the house of language like Martin Heidegger's. Pynchon's such a linguistic tactic is like Maurice Blanchot's view of the essential feature of literature because of their same spirit to create works. The urgent thing is, for Pynchon, what V. means by. He believes that it all embraces various facts or clues, animate and inanimate organs, even ideas of polarities, ultimately to the annihilation of sameness and difference. So, if V. is a shape or has an identity, at the same time, it is a no-shape or doesn't have an identity. Also it is a meaning or has a meaning, but simultaneously, vice versa. In a word, it is a linguistic tactic of Other's otherness unconcernedly different from others' discourses. Furthermore, Pynchon's concept of this linguistic tactic is equivalent to that of Blanchot's "Outside" in The Space of Literature. In it, his "Outside" is related to the concept of space. He asserts that 'the other night,' neither night nor day, occupies an indeterminate space between them, an impossible space that is also "Outside", absolutely Other to the dialectic of affirmation and negation contained in image, indicating that his "Outside" emerges in the space between symbolic oppositions and exceeds their limited distinctions. Moreover, it is neither presence nor absence, real or imaginary, day or night. His "Outside" is all and none at once. "V." is like "Outside." Differently, "V." is the Other or the Other's otherness. Therefore, Blanchot's limitlessness, which the limit pursues to the endlessness, in his text becomes the "Outside" exactly. In here, Blanchot's literary text and Pynchon's V are on the same line. To conclude, Blanchot's literature is affirmation and simultaneously negation as "Outside." Such an attitude towards literature is the only way to find the impossibility in the possibility, namely, the origin. It is also true of Pynchon's V.