제국의 아상블라주와 사건의 정치학: 무라야마 도모요시(村山知義)와 조선

Abstract

This article aims to study the way in which a Japanese playwright and theater director MURAYAMA Tomoyoshi(村山知義) encountered with colonial Korea and its people, where he had toured with Shunkõten(春香傳), a play adaption of Korean traditional tale ‘The Story of Chunhyang’. And it also tries to consider the ‘eventness’ that this cultural event could generate in the colonial/imperial regime, focusing on the thwarted confluence between Murayama and colonial Korea. He had applied many techniques and aesthetic modes from the paintings into the realm of drama, including European Avant-garde movement and Proletarian theatre movement. During his leading of the theater company Shinkyõ(新協), he experimented with the assemblage of Korean traditional tale and Japanese traditional theatrical style of Kabuki(歌舞伎). He sought to deconstruct the context of temporality-spatiality-corporality that ‘The Story of Chunhyang(春香傳)’ and the mode of Kabuki layed, and to place Shunkõten(春香傳) on a new horizon beyond class and race boundaries through distribution and recontextualization. However, the Korean Peninsula tour of Shunkõten(春香傳) failed, differently in Japan where Shinkyõ could draw the relatively diverse reception and box-office hit. It was the reason that Shunkõten of Shinkyõ was interpreted in the completely different mode from Japanese one. Murayama’s avant-garde experiment of decontextualization on ‘The Story of Chunhyang’ was only regarded as the cultural misappropriation that the cultural power of imperialism embezzled ‘the Koreanness’, by particularly Korean cultural elites. Their criticism overlooked that the experiment of assemblage would pose the possibility beyond the identity, and raised objections to its experimental performance in the limited level of the politics of identity. In this sense, Murayama’s intention went basically athwart what was accepted to his audience, colonial Korean people, and they couldn’t reach an agreement. After he had gone through this ‘disagreement’, Murayama reflected his own experience of encounter with the other in the novel Dancheong(丹靑)(1939). The event of ‘disagreement’ which occurred in the tour of Shunkõten indicates the diversity of the outside in the colonial/imperial regime. This outside could emerge only from the disagreement that Murayama and colonial Korean elites didn’t reach on the same level. This encounter with disagreement profoundly manifests that the colonial/imperial regime could be no better than the world composed of discord among the things incommensurable.