비판의 ‘편향성’과 잊혀진 질문 ― 당대 중국의 ‘궈모뤄(郭沫若) 현상’

Abstract

The theory of aesthetic autonomy is the perspective which recognizes literature as an expression of individual sensibility independent from politics. As everyone knows, when each field would emphasize its own specialization, the rhetoric of ‘independent from politics’ was usually used in China, however, it does not mean that there is no relation with politics, rather, it should be seen as a strategy that the field would have a right to freely express its own view based on the specialty. From this point, the theory of aesthetic autonomy also required the right that without political bonds, writers could freely express their own views in literary way. Nevertheless, the problem in this view lies in how to valuate the works, such as Guo`s literature, of expressing the voice of the selfless relating to the nation-making beyond the self of the individual. When we uniformly apply the same standard to Guo`s literature, probably, his works may be valuated to be no literary worth, even, have a possibility to be excluded from literary category itself. For instance, so the logic of ‘progress in thought, retrogression in art’ was, and under such a logic, only <the Goddesses> in the May Forth period and as its way of literary thinking the Pantheism, came to have a literary value among the whole literature of Guo. But, from Guo’s own point, if this was the very process of socially expanding the individual by the imitation and appropriation of the western individualism, and through the resistance against suppressive reality, then, I think the way of valuation as that of the theory of aesthetic autonomy should be reserved. Ironically, Guo was a representative figure who claimed the theory of aesthetic autonomy in the May Forth period, and he also supported the literature of expressing individual sensibility and independence of art. However, as many critics point out, it is true that Guo`s real literary activities had a lot of inconsistencies with his claim. I think, one of the major reasons which gave rise to these inconsistencies is the difference of the way of understanding on ‘the inner’ of the individual as a writing space in Guo’s literature. Though Guo in his poetry enthusiastically expressed a rebellious spirit against outside world, however, in a practical life he was merely a weak individual, who was always frustrated by suppressive reality like figures in his autobiographical novels. Guo could not accomplish his ideal of building a liberal society in reality, instead, in his inside made a holy ground called the inner to desire to deconstruct a corrupt world and to realize individual freedom in an imaginary space. Guo`s literature in the May Forth period was created just in the inner as an aesthetic space of the self, however, the inner was never a pure aesthetic space separate from society and politics, but a critical place that in a position of the self superior to outside reality, Guo thought about the matters of individual emancipation, national salvation, peace of the human being and modern China. The inner was also the place in which modern Chinese Literature was born by the literary imagination of the self. The self in literature could freely express its own desire in a superior position, however, the suppressive reality continuously made the self feel its limitation by thoroughly frustrating the self`s ideal. Hence, while the project of aesthetic resistance based on the inner became increasingly nerveless before the undeniable great tradition and reality, eventually in the late May Forth Guo came to feel a sense of disillusion to an extreme extent. Going through this experience of fail, Guo’s aesthetic autonomy combined with Marxism, which awakened him to the fact that his aesthetic autonomy is ineffective in coping with China’s situational crises, then, Guo’s literary thinking came to shift from aesthetic resistance to realistic resistance by discovering the Proletariat as an expanded individual. But, unlike some critics’ claim, after conversion to Marxism, Guo had tried to pursue the literature, not simple propaganda, for politics of national identity by appealing to national emotion, which seems similar to the nationalism of contemporary China.