都市游荡者―以酒徒的堕落看香港文人的困境

Abstract

Liu Yichang came to settle in Hong Kong in 1948, and is a representative of Hong Kong literature. Influenced by the experience of urban culture in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Liu Yichang’s urban novels at different stages of his creation are worthy of further investigation in terms of the characteristics of his urban writing, the complex course of cultural and psychological changes, and the openness of his literary vision across many cities, as well as some reflections behind his writing. Therefore, this article is divided into three chapters to discuss these issues. The status of “The Drunkard” as a masterpiece of Liu Yichang’s personal and Hong Kong literature is self-evident. Due to the fact that the study of Liu Yichang’s The Drinking Apprentice, to the whole of Hong Kong literature still has a large gap in the Korean academic community, and not many people are familiar with Hong Kong literature, the first chapter starts with a brief introduction of Liu Yichang’s life and literary experience, the relationship between “The Drunkard” Apprentice novels and Liu Yichang as well as Liu Yichang’s status in the Hong Kong literary community. The second chapter adopts a close reading of the text, focusing on the personal degradation of the drunkard, attempting to analyze the reasons for the gradual degradation of a passionate intellectual and his eventual desire to commit suicide, as well as examining the influence of the commercial environment of Hong Kong in the era on the creativity of the literati. The third chapter, in connection with the images of other contemporaneous Hong Kong writers of literati writers, all of whom are in a similar creative predicament as the drunkard, concludes that the drunkard is only a microcosm of the commercially-dominated society in Hong Kong, and that the situation of the intellectuals is a malady of the times. In Chapter 4, by linking the characters in other works of Liu Yichang, it is pointed out that they share the mentality of urban wanderers with the drunkard. The “Writers Emigrating from the Mainland to Hong Kong” is a characteristic product of an era, and this is also the characteristic of Liu Yichang’s works as a member of the “Writers Emigrating from the Mainland to Hong Kong”. The isomorphism between the characters of the novels and the writer himself allows us to see the identity and cultural recognition that Liu Yichang presents through his own characters. Being in Hong Kong, with his heart tied to the mainland, both he and his image of the urban wanderer have a kind of detachment from Hong Kong’s culture, which is also a portrayal of the mood of the southern writers in common.