On the Other Side of Mirror: Affect and Self-reflexivity in Colonial Modernist Texts in Korea

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영상예술학회
· 수록지 정보 : 영상예술연구 / 19호 / 39 ~ 68페이지
· 저자명 : 박현선

초록

The essay investigates the metonymic process of the formation of colonial subjectivity mediated through modern objects. Mirror, train, and screen, as recurring motifs in modern Korean literature and film, reveal the intertwined relationship between the interior place of the subject and the exterior landscape of politics. Through an analysis of the modernist writer, Yi Sang’s Mirror poems and the 1941 self-reflective film, Spring of Korean Peninsula, directed by Yi Byŏng-il, the essay pays attention to the material and metonymic aesthetic of the mirror-ness. Its aim is to rethink regarding colonial modernity beyond the binary framework of the colonizer and the colonized, thus to explore the affective origin of Korean modernism, concerning the relationship of the modern object, the colonial world, and the modernist subject.
Yi Sang, an archeological figure of the modernist subject in colonial Korea, reveals in his Mirror poems that the act of mirroring formulates not only the emergence of modern subjectivity but also the paradoxes of a colonial subject as an exile through the inversion of its position. The aesthetic and political significance of the mirror in Yi Sang’s work articulate show the seamless conceptualization of self-reflexivity, which is characteristic of the Western modernist discourse, can be revised through the opaque and unstable presentation of colonial self-reflexivity. In this vein, the mirror is not a mimetic device to reflect the being in the reality, but one of heterotopic spaces, which invite a positional inversion, affective excess, and traces of writing.
Spring of Korean Peninsula is not only one of the few modernist films that presents a film-within-a film structure but also a passionate filmic statement about Korean film industry in colonial era. Its mirroring mode of self-reflectivity does notremain at the mimetic dimension of reflection but indicates the affective ambivalence during the transitional period from vernacular modernism to colonial fascism. Also, paying attention to the dialectic between train and mirror in the film, the essay examines two sides of modern experience in relation to time and space. While the train-object functions as a passionate metaphor of progress and cosmopolitanism, the mirror-object presents the mode of halting and inversion and foregrounds the binding of the self with its surrounding environment, that is the 1940s colonial world. The way the film oscillates between two forms of colonial affect, passion and melancholy, asks us to read it as a polyhedral text and allows the comparative reading of the so-called ‘pro-Japanese’ film and Yi Sang’s modernist work.

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