‘감정’과 ‘노동’이라는 의미소(意味素)－『신생활』에 실린 신일용의 글을 중심으로－

Abstract

Shin Il-yong was a doctor before becoming a reporter for ‘New Life’. As a physician, he met poor patients, vagrants, women, lepers, and children without help, and treated them for infectious diseases, malnutrition and sexually transmitted diseases. His writing began after he turned to a journalist, but his clinical experience was at the center of his writing. This article examines Shin Il-yong’s writings published in ‘New Life’ and reveals that ‘emotion’ and ‘labor’, the two keywords were a language for closely observing the old world and a meaning that made it possible to imagine a new society. Here, ‘emotion’ can be precisely called ‘people’s emotions’, and Shin Il-yong actively expressed that these emotions are based on ‘instinct’ and ‘impulse’. In Shin Il-yong’s creative poem ‘Bambi(Rain at Night)’, the narrator expresses of the agony that he is piled up in an ‘old shell’, but at the same time he is hesitant to wear ‘new clothes’. This is because he knew that ‘new clothes’ would one day become ‘old shells’. Shin Il-yong believed that the only way to preserve the ‘new quality’ of ‘new clothes’ was that it should include the qualities of ‘life’. The place where that ‘life’ was preserved was ‘instinct’ and ‘impulse’. “creative rebellious will” from “the greatest suffering”, For Shin Il-yong, the artist was nothing more than a person who created and amplified the relationship of complex desires based on ‘life’. The reason why Shin Il-yong continued to think about the dialectical relationship between ‘old shells’ and ‘new clothes’ was because he desired a new understanding of the world. A new perception of the world we belong to starts with looking at the world from a different perspective. It was the language of Marxism that provided such a perspective. In particular, by looking at the world with the keyword ‘labor’, I was able to think about the irrationality of the world. A Study on the Problems of Wife - Liberalism and the Thoughts of Wise wife(Hyeonmyeongcheo) is an article that Shin Il-yong continuously serialized from ‘New Life’. This is an article that grasps the housekeeping activities of a housekeeper from the point of view of a labor contract. What is particularly noteworthy here is that it seeks to view the role of women as ‘labor’ in the family. By approaching women’s housekeeping activities with the concept of a wage problem, Shin Il-yong reinforces the world’s ‘irrationality’. In this article, he argued that it is not only ‘uncivilized’ but also ‘irrational’ that exchange value cannot be established because women’s housework does not have an “market”. However, this article does not stop at pointing out irrationality, but suggests ideal human relationships and lifestyles based on rationality. The world in which the state completely entrusts childcare and housework that he suggests is similar to the world of the future presented by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward. This is an attempt to search for idealism based on scientific rationality and pragmatism that was actively conducted in the early 1920s. This idealism was conceived while the social evolution theory of the previous period was criticized as the bankruptcy of the modern spirit, and the spiritualistic philosophy was searched for the direction based on scientific evolution and pragmatism. The reason why he paid attention to the world of Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’ in which National Socialism was realized is because of his interest in creating a ‘material foundation’ that all people in society, including women and the weak, can enjoy equally. Bellamy’s novels have the characteristic of a utopia centered on materials and institutions. The idea that society can be rational only if there is equality supported as an institution. This point came to be important to him.