이상의 「종생기」에 나타난 사랑, 죽음, 예술

Abstract

This essay aims at overcoming the two main interpretations of Yi Sang’s ecriture. One is the biographical interpretation which reduces Yi Sang’s literature into the documents of his despair and fear and the other is the semiological interpretation which makes his texts a hollow art isolated from life or an abstract play of signs. However, inscription of proper name(‘Yi Sang’) in his texts is not any reference to the author's presumed identity but a kind of strategy for disrupting ‘I’s unified identity and dissolving epistemological representationalism and literary realism. Yi Sang’s texts play variations on the theme of nonidentical identity by motives of the mirror, the mask, the double and broken bodies, all of which also disturb the layers of narration. The criticism of representationalism leads to the cognitive way of ‘sign-decoding’ and the layer of narrative of Yi Sang’s texts can, thus, be summarized in some struggles for decoding the violent signs(Oedipus family, modernity and fascism, love, death) which are emitted from the obscure world. Especially, Writing on Death is a peak of Yi Sang's literature because it envelops love and death in art. His viewpoint of art, condensed into the allusion of ‘Soneynhaeng(少年行)’, implicates a paradox that one can't reach art not by wasting his/her life and, in turn, the essence of life which he/she can glimpse only in art, is already dissipated in life itself. Moreover, Yi Sang has made persistent efforts to affirm both life and death by striking ‘pose for suicide’ and accomplishes ‘amor fati’ through art(Writing on Death) which overcomes Death and comes repeatedly across life, the world, and the Real.