타자의 지평과 사랑의 윤리—이창래의 『제스처 인생』에 나타난 “어려운 사랑”

Abstract

Chang-rae Lee’s novel, A Gesture Life (1999), features a protagonist named Fanklin Hata, who opens the narrative introducing himself to the reader as a Japanese American living in Bedley Run, a New York suburb in the present day. The reader discovers well into the narrative that he is in fact Korean by birth, and that his national identification with Japan and assimilation in the American society was rewarding enough to give him the sense of comfort of “real personhood.” He served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II, and the equilibrium in his allegiance and identification with Japanese nationality is disturbed by the arrival of a group of Korean “comfort” women to his army post and his “love” for one of them named Kkhutaeh. Hata’s multiple and contradictory symbolic attachments pose a difficult ethical question when Kkhutaeh asks him to kill her in an act of mercy and Hata does not act. Hata’s inability to kill Kkhutaeh or his effort to preserve her life can be understood as a sign of love, but it also means the choice of her much more brutal death by the Japanese soldiers. Hata’s “love” reveals the disturbing intimacy between sexual idealization and domination as he admits that he allowed the events to occur because he wanted her unto death. Through his intimacy with Kkhutaeh, he could reconnect himself with his ethnic origin, and his life-long efforts for assimilation also follow the same psychological process of making and demanding ‘likeness’ from the others like Kkhutaeh or Sunny, his adopted daughter. In this sense, the convergence of the ego, sexual, and group ideals shows that the process of identification in the subject formation and in the relationship of love, in fact, an act of violence and domination. Kkhutaeh’s pointed criticism of Hata that it is her sex that he wants and if he could cut it from her and keep it with him like a favorite object, that would be all unpacks the fetishization and destructive narcissism behind Hata’s love. Lee’s choice of the love relationship between the two aims at more than a criticism of heterosexual male desire or fantasy. In her demand for Hata’s participation in her death, Kkhutaeh rejects to become a victim in the order of sexual, ethnic, and national symbolization. She was already involved in the economy of exchange as taking the place of her brother and being dragged into the battle field as a sex slave for the colonizer. Concurrently she is demanded to be a medium or a sign for the familial and ethnic purity in Hata’s drama of assimilation. The demand for purity and identification is in fact not just Hata’s individual desire as the process of colonization and assimilation is based on the same process of domination of the other, the daughter, and the female. Therefore, Hata’s love has a darker hue as he would rather have her dead than face the gap or the reality of the idealization in national. ethnic or individual identity formation. Conversely, Kkhutaeh demands Hata to take the responsibility beyond the interest in his subject position and his survival in the order of narcissistic identification. Following Alain Badiou’s distinction between the mimetic, narcissistic love and the love leading to “decide onto the undecidable” and open the other possibility, we can understand Kkhutaeh’s demand in love. In the name of love, she claims her right as a being and denies not to become a victim veiling the reality of the stability of subjectivity and identity, the narcissistic violence.