나카지마 아쓰시의 남양문학에서 나타나는 신체와 문학

Abstract

Atsushi Nakajima's South Seas genre of literature has been interpreted as a critique of imperialist male intellectuals or, more often than not, as an attempt to understand the colonized. However, in order to clarify this, it is necessary to look at it through the experience of the space of the South Sea and the concept of the “body” that is constructed through the collision of multiple forces. If we look at Atsushi Nakajima's South Seas genre from this perspective, we can see that the imperialist male intellectual's perspective is still present in Nakajima, but the bodies he depicts do not only reflect the primitiveness or purity of existing discourses. First of all, Nakajima Atsushi's modernity is that he sees the body as a ‘social thing’. Under the notion that the body is constructed through the collision of various social forces, purity and primordiality at the individual level become relative. From this perspective, Atsushi Nakajima connects the physical to “habit” and suggests the possibility of a new body. The body constituted by habits becomes socially constructed through the medium or concept of ‘habit-writing on the body’. Nakajima also presupposes that literature and culture are constructed by the same logic. This notion of being constructed is the negation of absolutes, and as such, it leads to the limits and possibilities of literature (culture) and fiction as a social “habit” that connects to the otherness of the unknowable (as opposed to a singularity of purity or primordiality) and reconstructs the unknowable. This is perhaps the point at which Nakajima Atsushi's literature takes on a kind of modernity that distinguishes it from other South Seas genre of literature at that time.