기계 속의 영혼 : 밀란 쿤데라의 소설 『참을 수 없는 존재의 가벼움』과 『불멸』에 나타난 개인정체성의 문제

Abstract

As is well known, the czech writer Milan Kundera has been settled in France since 1977 after leaving his country under the repression of the regime. Kundera's work is generally divided into three periods based on exile. His representative novels The Book of Laughter and Oblivion (1978), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982) and Immortality (1988) belong to the second period. The continuity and discontinuity of Kunderas oeuvre is especially evident between the last two novels. These novels were written in France, where he is an asylum, but are in Czech. The former is based on the Czech Republic, while the background of the latter is France. However, we can not overlook the commonality of two novels: both deal with the issue of personal identity centered on the relationship between human self and body. They have also similarities in motifs. In this paper, I try to compare two novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, mainly on the issue of personal identity. The theoretical basis is the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor. According to his theory, it is the Cartesian model of the disengaged self and the self-model of romantic expressivism after Rousseau that shaped European culture since the modern era. It is the self-model of romantic expressivism that dominates with Teresa, the heroin of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Theresa's attempts to achieve self-realization by expressing his unique soul face repeatedly obstacles. The frustration of her expressivistic project indicate the duality of soul and body as human fundamental condition. At the same time, it has the character of accusation of depersonalization and indiscrimination of human in totalitarian society. Agnes, the protagonist of Immortality is close to the Cartesian self-model. She is isolated and explores the essence of the self in the distance from the outside world. The emphasis of Cartesian mechanical body-view shows Kundera's pessimism in relation to the tragic duality of human existence. It is also a critique of the distorted form of the romantic expressivism that equates self-realization with body-cult and reduces personal identity to physical characteristics. Kundera's criticism of body-cult and image-fetishism and his warnings about the crisis of individual autonomy are still relevant today, where self-camera, body styling, and cosmetic surgery are commonplace, and screen and cctv are ubiquitous. However, even if the iconoclasm of the self in Immortality is a reaction to the fetishization of the body and the image, it is also true that the danger of the substantialization of the self cann be seen in the extreme inner-direction of the main character.