이름 없는 자의 캠핑(Camping): 이셔우드의 비현실적 세계와 “퀴어 수행성”

Abstract

The World in the Evening(1952) by Christopher Isherwood is most often referred to when discussing the concept of "camp." However, the novel describes the awkward life of the narrator-protagonist in a very bland, almost realistic way, contradicting the widely understood characters of "camp", being extremely stylish and facetiously exaggerative. This study argues that such narrative insipidity on the surface is nothing but a manifestation of the ambivalence of "queer reality" which is only to be identified as distanced from the magnified real world. The World in the Evening signals a critical turning point in Isherwood's writing practices, in which he finally renounces the limitation of self-identity to deal openly with gay themes. In this novel, the queer identity is acknowledged (as every other identity might be so) as a gesture of acceptance of a "title" which does not carry any substantial "content." Albeit being a quasi-autobiography, The World in the Evening performs the queerness without exaggerated attention to the "self". Having an interlaced structure of unrealistic worlds, the novel reveals the common denominator of camp and the queerness, which is the affectation of self-identity. It is no more than a transient sensibility. Isherwood's "camp" does not just play with the artifice itself. As articulated by Charles Kennedy in the novel, one cannot "camp" about something he or she does not take seriously. At the same time, in "camp" the seriousness from the origin of value should be eliminated. In the sense, the novel summarizes what Susan Sontag extensively elaborates on camp: camp involves a novel relation to "the serious" by allowing detachment to avoid hyperinvolvement by surmounting the antithesis of the playfulness and the serious. The meaning of "camp" in the world of Monk/Isherwood cannot be grasped without reversing novel's encompassing structure. The ostensible self-centeredness of Monk is no less than his derisive indifference not only to the world but also to his "self." Therefore, the distance Isherwood/Monk felt from his daily life confirms that Monk's vague self-existence clearly designates the eponym of the camp, in the sense that his identity is shared only transiently through temporary shelters. Through the notion of camp, The World in the Evening discloses the contradictions of the real and the identity, which are recognized only in reverberation as reflected upon the spheral mirror that has nothing inside but merely reflects the distorted image of the surrounding world.