자살의 자격, 소설 쓰기 방법으로서의 종생: 아쿠타가와의 「어느 옛 벗에게 보내는 수기(或舊友へ送 る手記)」를 통한 이상의 「종생기」 재독

Abstract

This paper focuses on Lee Sang’s Jongsaenggi and Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s A Note to an Old Friend (「或舊友に送る手記」). The focus is on a comparison of the two pieces of writing, exposing the distinctive feature of Lee Sang’s writing that describes the anxiety of Modernity and responds to it. In Jongsaenggi, Lee Sang overtly quoted from A Note to an Old Friend for his strategic purposes. The anxiety of Modernity originates from the frustration caused by repeated as well as failed attempts to maintain the self-identity of a cognizant subject - on the relation with the others - who is separated from the ‘World’. At this point, the ‘suicide’ confronts ‘I’ with ‘myself’ as one of the others through the form: the subject that kills and the objective that is killed. A Note to an Old Friend designed the ‘suicide’ as a particular act that needs specific plans, the power of execution, at the same time, an aesthetic object. On the other hand, Jongsaenggi stood for ‘Jongsaeng (ending up life)’ to put up an imitation of ‘suicide’. The relation between two personae, ‘Lee Sang’ and ‘Jeong-hee’, was a foundation of the ‘Jongsaeng’. When the personae were penetrated by each other, ‘Jongsaeng’ occurred. Basically, this composition was devised for intensifying the metaphor from A Note to an Old Friend, ‘double suicide’, a woman as a ‘spring board’ for committing a suicide. However, repeated ‘Jongsaeng’ and endless ‘Jongsaenggi (a record of ‘Jongsaeng’)’ were both drawn from a negation of ‘I’ who saw through the others’ personae inevitably. In Jongsaenggi, Lee Sang’s strategies were appeared in two different ways: he disclosed ‘Lee Sang’, the articulator, and ‘Lee Sang’, the articulated, for derangement; he described scenes occurring in the future as that in the past. Constructing of Jongsaenggi, Lee Sang showed a mechanism in which the consciousness only for negation could be performed. Also, what was revealed here was also a writer’s consciousness that carried out the way of modernity’s operation that could not be the original in a chain of citations as a method of writing novels.