분노, 복수, 복수 비극의 역사

Abstract

Discussions of the literary topos of revenge have centered on the configurations of the ideas of justice and retribution obtained in religious and legal histories. I argue in this paper that the topos needs to be resituated in the context of the history of emotion. Revenge is an especially serious social issue in the periods when tribal code and state law, private and public justice, reason and emotion, are not separated from each other or still in a process of separation. The literary topos of revenge represents the fault lines of the historical process of that separation and, as such, should also be read as a part of the history of emotion as distinguished from other branches of socio-cultural history. In ancient philosophical discussions, the desire to repay the insult suffered is defined as a function of the emotion of anger or as the emotion of anger itself. In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger as an “impulse … to a revenge.” In Nicomachean Ethics, he makes allowance for an idea of “right” anger and thus “just” revenge with the aim to restore the “normative” social and ethical order. Aristotle’s anger, then, is very much a social measure used to defend one’s position in a hierarchical society such as represented in Homeric epic or in Greek tragedy. In De Ira, Seneca also defines revenge as a burning desire for a revenge. He, however, denies the possibility of a just revenge, condemning anger as a destructive emotion that should be restrained, controlled, and ultimately cleansed out of one’s soul. Anger is to be confined in the little world of a Stoic’s soul, where his self‐examining inner eye takes over the role of the public eye of the bigger world outside. Represented in the “I” of De Ira is, I would argue, a self-examining and self-controlling Stoic self, if not exactly a self-fashioning Foucauldian self. The scenes of anger and revenge in Greek tragedies—Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Hecabe, for example—seem to endorse the Aristotelian idea of right anger and just revenge. Both Orestes and Hecabe kill to defend and to insist on what they conceive to be the nomos of their worlds. Seneca’s tragedies show the same preoccupation with self as his De Ira. Seneca’s tragedies—Medea and Thyestes, for example—show those revengers who furiously try to impose their will on their worlds. In furor, they sweep aside all rational restraints, uncreating the world to bring back Chaos again; in furor, that is, they find the only way to achieve and to assert their absolute power over the world. Furor, in these tragedies, rules the world. Revenge tragedies in the English Renaissance, from Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Thyestes, is Senecan in their use of classical materials and in their taste for blood and violence. Their ideas of anger and revenge, however, fluctuate between Senecan self-assertion and Aristotelian right anger. In the last scene he added to Seneca’s Thyestes, Heywood shows a strong interest in the psychology of the victim of a revenge, especially in his will, tinged with anxiety and desire, to believe in divine retribution. The Senecan revenge tragedy coming after Heywood’s translation—Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for example—exhibits an interest in the predicament of a revenger who is also a victim of tyranny and corrupt public justice, and who takes on himself the role of the scourge and minister of God. His anger is directed not only toward the perpetrator of the crime but also toward those in power who should administer justice as God’s viceroys but refuse to do so. His revenge, thus, becomes a Baconian “wild” justice. These new tendencies culminate in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in Hamlet’s way of turning anger into melancholic meditations on the universality of mortality and corruption, in his questionings about the ethicality of anger and revenge, in his final acceptance of the idea of divine providence, and in his deconstruction of the premises of the Senecan revenge tragedy.