E. M. 포스터의 「목신을 만난 이야기」 다시 읽기 —다나 해러웨이의 사이보그 페미니즘과 목신의 정치학

This paper examines E. M. Forster’s earlier, rather obscure short story entitled “The Story of a Panic.” It pays particular attention to the figure of Pan as a hybrid subject, and to Eustace as the embodiment of Pan. Existing research has been conducted on this work, often in passing, in the vein of a shallow fantasy, or have treated it simply as an allegory that satirizes middle-class English snobbery or prioritizes Hellenic freedom over modern Christian civilization. However, instead of reading this story in the frame of a simple allegory founded upon binaries, I argue that there are multitudinous ironies to be found within the narrator’s class-saturated, gender-driven, and racially-biased narrative. We can read this story in terms of Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and its political method, disrupting normalized heterogeneity and adopting the logic of the monster and its accrued pollution of a homogeneous community. Forster’s figure of Pan shares the disturbing force of Haraway’s figures of the cyborg and the coyote that are disseminated in various images, such as tricksters, monsters, Centaurs, or hybrid subjects. Eustace, an incarnation of Pan, emerges as a trickster artist who transgresses the boundaries of the binary oppositional structure nurtured in male-dominated society, across the dangerous border of the animal and the human. The trickster Pan with its powerful monstrosity emerges against the backdrop of the primitive, heterogeneous, and protean atmosphere where homosexual desire finds freedom, though obscure, and a certain challenging force constructs situated knowledge. Eustace anticipates a Harawayan hybrid monster whose power lies in reconstructing a wandering, somatic, and sensitive subject, and thus, re-imagines a borderline community, with playful ironies that operate without gender or genesis, which opens up a new political vista.