보편, 혹은 아직 일어나지 않은 사건 : 이상, 조이스 그리고 지금 여기

Abstract

“Have you heard,” famously begins Yi Sang's short story Nalgae, “of the ‘genius who turned into a stuffed specimen’?” The initiating sentence is so well-known that to anyone familiar with modern Korean literature, it would be difficult to dispell the feeling that the quote has turned into a cliche in its own right, something of a stuffed specimen, in effect, laying bear not only the reified spirit of nascent Korean literary modernism but even the timeworn idea of the literary as such. Yet on a closer look, this sense of overfamiliarity belies a set of irresolvable aporias foregrounded by the statement itself or, more specifically, by the deployed quotation marks whose essential ambivalence problematizes not only the authenticity of the reported event (the transformation of the genius into stuffed specimen) but the priority of the interpretive act of reading (the visual) over that of hearing (the auditory) and vice versa. The difficulty of interpretation is further compounded by the possibility that the seemingly self-reflective figure of genius may in fact refer to Akutagawa Ryunoske, the legendary Japanese writer who, according to some critics, is said to have inspired the central motif of genius and stuffed animal and who, furthermore, had become by the time of Yi Sang's writing the mere shadow (i.e., a stuffed specimen par excellence) of a legend after six years following his death. Whether such interpretive dilemmas may ever find answers is in itself an additional source of mystery but a more intriguing purview presents itself when one recalls a pair of Yi Sang's later, equally well-known remarks, the remarks which the author made during his fateful visit to Tokyo and which, unlike the earlier statement,highlights the sensory realm of smell: “This city reeks of gasoline ordor,” etc. Indeed,it is as if the long-awaited encounter with the capital of the Imperial Japan had finally triggered the return of the repressed in a writer whose indefatigable strife toward cosmopolitan literature had hitherto primarily privileged the dual sensory registers of the visual and the auditory (the two sensory realms that primarily constitute a literary text) at the expense of other sensory organs. Interestingly, a similar case of the return of the repressed is recognizable in a near contemporary Western modernist,namely, James Joyce, whose youthful flight to Paris provoked a powerful sense of disillusionment and ended up leaving its trace in the form of olfactory description in Ulysses and Giacomo Joyce. Uneven development of senses is a phenomenon discussed and analyzed in many areas of study; in terms of literature, it certainly sheds an unexpected new light on the formation of colonial literature and modernism. Yet the more significant question, at least from the dual perspective of Yi Sang and Joyce's exceptional legacies, seems to boil down to how to revive the eventfulness of the traumatic experience that propelled their incommensurable literary oeuvre. Would excavating and recovering the pungent ordor the two authors respectively experienced be possible?Or would we have to find a wholly new medium, not of olfactory this time but perhaps even on an extra-sensory register that may approximately revitalize the intensity of the bygone experience? The present inquiry suggests that two recent events from East Asian region provide the essential paradigm from which such questions may be posed: the late nuclear meltdown in Fukushima and the 2008candlelight rally in Seoul.