해방 후 이광수의 ‘자기서술’과 고백의 윤리

Abstract

The present study explores Yi Gwang-Su’s confessional writings after the National Liberation, focusing on the problem of self-narration as intellectual, and theory/sensibility contained in his discursive acts related to ‘pro-Japanese’ activities during the Pacific War. The primary texts used in the study are Yi Gwang-Su’s “I” (Na) and "My Confession" (Na ui gobaek). By analyzing the probable intentions (interiority) of Yi Gwang-Su together with his strategies in producing the two texts in their order of appearance, the study problematizes Yi’s ‘politics of memory’ in response to changes in external conditions, in which he reconstructs his personal history through a self-rationalizing logic and an emotion-laden appeal to public empathy via segmentation and transformation of experience, After the Liberation, and contrary to the expectations of the public, Yi preceded his ‘confessions’ as a pro-Japanese collaborator with an autobiographical novel called “I”. “I” seeks to promote an emotional understanding of ‘Yi Gwang-Su the human being’ through a telling of his early pain as an impoverished orphan and his agonies as a youth wavering between idealism and reality. Here, separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, both in his confession of guilt to an immoral illicit love affair and through stories of his inability to find “real” love in his objective reality, must be noted. The appeal to public empathy inherent in the narrative’s separation of ‘mind’ as locus of the genuine, and ‘body’ dominated by negative limitations, is subsequently deployed as a logic for explaining his ‘pro-Japanese’ activities in “My Confession”. As a space for a unique ‘self-narration’ fusing spatial history and private memory, “My Confession” takes on the appearance of a confessional but in fact, it is far from being a confession of guilt. Rather, by equating the history of the Korean people (fate) with his own life, he takes the tragedy of the people to be his own tragedy, and uses this in place of a ‘confession of guilt’. Thus, post-Liberation Yi Gwang-Su’s ‘self narration’ bears no trace of either self criticism or earnest self-examination. This is in stark contrast to the novelistic characterization of Yi Gwang-Su by Choi In-Hoon in the 1960s as truly ‘self-critical’. Choi’s intention in having Yi confess once again may be seen as a kind of re-understanding of the pain of Korea's modern literary/intellectual history, and as an appropriation of Yi for a healing process for Korea. Yi Gwang-Su, who sought to escape personal blame by homogenizing the entire colonized people as ‘collaborators’, is reborn as a self-critical subject in Choi's fictional novel.