1930년대의 좌파 정치와 급진적 감상주의: 오웰, 서머필드, 쾨슬러의 소설들

Abstract

The 1930s was a period of violent economic and political upheaval, and the writers on the Left tried to represent the confused struggle of people, especially those with leftist or anti-systemic sensibility, to cope with it. Sentimentalism, or autotelic emotional production, was often part of the struggle as well as of its representation. In Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the protagonist reveals a will-to-fall, an impulse to ‘sink’ into the underclass, which, rather than signifying a pursuit of gentlemanly self-sufficiency, reflects an ethical self-distantiation of the middle-class writer, especially in his Burmese years. As such, it entails a sentimental conception of the Other, that is, the underclass. In Sommerfield’s May Day, a work of ‘communist romanticism’ as he calls it later, sentimentalism is salient in the elevated voice and the bird’s-eye view of the narrator. Both apparatuses serve to integrate the many episodes with different focal points into a general story about solidarity and collective power. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon features an Old Bolshevik whose lifelong belief in the ‘logic of history’, acutely anti-sentimentalist on appearance, is in fact a covert and ‘dry’ form of sentimentalism. The ‘impersonality cult’ implied in the belief is supportive of Stalin’s ‘personality cult’. Together, these novels illuminate the pervasiveness and multiformity of sentimentalism in the 1930s and beyond.