루쉰 역사시학의 재구성 — 과거로 향하는 진보와 ‘지금시간’으로 도래하는 미래로부터의 타자들

Abstract

This paper seeks to reconstruct Lu Xun’s poetics of history from his thoughts on time and history reflected in his literary works. In that he sought counter-modernity within modernity through literary writing which he viewed as ‘useless’ and ‘powerless,’ Lu Xun can be classified as a cultural modernist. Just as other cultural modernists, he, too, paid attention to the ‘now-time,’ which had been regarded as completely subordinate to the Telos of history from the linear view of time. However, Lu Xun‘s attitude toward the ‘now-time’ was quite different from that of other cultural modernists. Instead of trying to ‘seize’ it, he sought to leave it empty for the others coming from the future by destroying everything that belongs to the past, including himself. Its clearest thought-image, in my view, is found in his “Forging the Swords.” Allowing the unpredictable and unknown others, or ‘sheer newness,’ to occupy the now-time emptied out by the self-destruction of the subject, Lu Xun’s poetics of history also shows the potential to get out of what Nietzsche calls “the eternal return of the same.”