서울과 뉴욕의 근대적 풍경에 나타난 자본주의의 생리학적 골상학: 박태원의 『천변풍경』과 존 도스 패소스의 『맨해튼 트랜스퍼』 비교연구

Abstract

This essay attempts to compare Park Tae Won’s A Scenery of the Creek Side(or Cheon Byeon Pung Kyeong in Korean) with John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer in terms of the way how they portray physiological physiognomies of modern capitalism in Seoul and New York, the two representative metropolises of the early twentieth century. By means of such modernist narrative politics as fragmented and intermittent stories of montage and the Camera-eye like naturalistic descriptions, both novels try to present the literary portrayals of metropolises in order to bring up their own physiological physiognomies of modern capitalism. The term “physiognomy” means the static principle of capitalism by which the spatial territory of the metropolis has been divided and compartmentalized into monadic fragments of space in line with the social strata. On the other hand, the physiology of the metropolis indicates the dynamic circulations of capitals and commodities by modern capitalism. One of the crucial features that Park’s A Scenery of the Creek Side and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer have in common is that both novels employ the narrative perspective of Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur, a leisurely stroller who walks along the streets of metropolis while watching various aspects of metropolitan streets and people, for portraying a physiological physiognomy of modern capitalism. Their literary objectives of portraying the physiological physiognomy of Seoul and New York by employing flaneur-like moving points of view lie in their deep rooted aspirations to overcome the commodity fetishism of modern capitalism. Whereas the novel of Park inspires to maintain humanistic bondage between people beyond the commodity logic of capitalism, Manhattan Transfer is full of helpless despair and disillusion with the pretentious everyday lives of New York. The somewhat preindustrial romantic humanism of A Scenery of the Creek Side shows that Park has not thoroughly recognized the overpowering physiology of modern capitalism; however, Manhattan Transfer proves that John Dos Passos has been well aware of how the central principles of modern capitalism operate in New York.