식민도시의 상징과 잔여 - 염상섭 소설의 在京城일본인, 그 재현 (불)가능의 장소들

Abstract

This study aims to consider the way that the Japanese became collective ·personal colonizer/the other by the Korean colonists while they were getting the possession of the city in the process of reorganization of Seoul into the colonial city of the Japanese Empire. Especially, when recalling the fact that the figure of colonizer remained blank within the literary texts in the 1920-30s when the formation of colony of Seoul was concentrated, Yŏm Sangsŏp’s texts of the same period retain very distinctive status. As the Japanese Government General’s development project and its statistics for city planning were being accumulated, ‘population’, neither an individual person nor a subject emerged as an object of governmentality. Space division of Seoul was imagined by the dynamics of sovereign power that creates and manages population and the colonists’ fear toward it. The end of Two Minds (1928) shows the breakdown which appears when colonists enter into the divided space. In the Love and Sin (1927) and Fig (1931),Japanese appear as an unofficial surveillant entrusted a tacit power from the colonial sovereign power. Meanwhile, the Japanese appeared for filling up a vacancy of socialists that form an important axis within the works of Yŏm Sangsŏp acted standing in for their class·gendered·intellectual status. The Japanese within Yŏm Sangsŏp’s novel insinuate the fact that colonist’s anxiety flowing throughout the work is coming from the rivalry(tension) relation of solidarity and hostility between colonizer and colonists that is generated in the space of colonized city. However, condition that makes this possible is resulting from the feature of space that activates the logic of tricky violence and exclusion while attracting Korean colonists. Korean colonists were able to meet the Japanese within the secret spaces such as houses owned by the Japanese, hotel and cafe and attracted by them but become to be pestered by the unconscious anxiety that their ‘something’ may be uncovered on the other hand. However, while the meeting between colonizer and bourgeois colonist was being made within the space of consumption and enjoyment, illegally entered socialists or opium addicts were stealing into the other illegal/ghetto secret rooms, which made it impossible to narrow the gap between the two spaces throughout the colonial era.