식민자의 미학과 피식민자의 문학: 전체화하는 자본, 식민지 모더니즘의 문학주의

Abstract

This paper regards Korean modernist writing during late colonial period (1937∼45)as literarist practice, which I understand as the only viable option to resist the Japanese empire’s totalitarianism. The meaning of the era in Korean history is often epitomized with the slogan of “Naisenittai” (Naesŏnilch’e, Japan and Korea in one united body), whose primary purpose was Korea’s complete integration into Japan. From Korean nationalist viewpoint, the era must be defined as the opposition between nation and empire. However, this was the era of the world war that culminated the macroscopic measures to overcome structural contradictions of capitalist modernization throughout the world. In this sense, the opposition of capital vs. totality becomes much more crucial than that of empire vs. nation. The mainstream Japanese ideologues believed that capitalism’s main defect was its principle of individualism, which ignored society’s essential totality, and proposed the political totalitarianism as the only viable solution. Miki Kiyoshi, the representative figure of this line of thought, converted from Marxism to this sort of totalitarianism. In his opinion, capitalism became irreparably self-destructive because it ignored the reality of society’s self-evident totality and gave in to the abstract ideal of individual autonomy. Miki’s plan of revolutionary transition from this pitfall was political realism that restored the value of totality in every individuals of society. However, he ignored the fact that capitalism is essentially transcendental in the sense that it establishes itself by actualizing the image of the individual whose only concern is to pursue one’s own profit. Once this image is realized, capitalism perpetuates itself by concealing the image’sorigin. Therefore, it is necessary to reveal the theoretical character of capitalist modernization, not to actually overcome it with practical-realist strategy. In other words, capitalism’s theory of self-generation is dramatization, by which it reduces everything transcendental to itself. To resist against capitalism, therefore, one needs a theory of re-dramatization, by which one reduces itself to capital’s theory of movement. What I mean by literarism is this re-dramatization and it is what I read from Ch’oe Myŏngik’s 1937 modernist fiction, “Musŏnggyŏkcha” (Man without Character).