I Who Remember: Shotaro Yasuoka’s A View by the Sea and The Postwar Japanese I‐Novel

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 외국문학연구 / 52호 / 69 ~ 90페이지
· 저자명 : 박선주, 김경원

초록

This paper explores the inter-constitutive relationship between the regional identity of ‘Asia’ and the concept of ‘I’ through ‘memory’ discourse. Memory makes identity, as an essential link between an individual and a region/culture, but it also unmakes identity, putting the whole idea of region/regionalization itself in question. Post-war Japan is a good place to examine this problematic status of memory in (un)making identity because in this period the issue of memory plays a crucial role in the self-making of ‘Asia’ both on individual and collective levels. The genre of Japanese I-novel, as a product of the complicated negotiations with the West, is an example where the contradictions within the construction of the ‘I’—as an individual, a Japanese, or an Asian—are revealed most clearly. A View by the Sea (1959) by Shotaro Yasuoka, a post-war I-novel, deals with the (in)stability of personal and collective identity depending on the idea of a person who remembers (in)correctly. The incoherent, jumbled memory and the madness of the family members in this novel problematize the idea of ‘I’ as an authentic and unified entity. A View by the Sea also shows that the problematic (de-)construction of identity is deeply related to the memory of trauma in the historical context of post-war Japan. The coherent ‘I’ that the postwar narrative have tried to establish is seriously put into question and the presumably ‘authentic’ self and its ‘whole’ memory are constantly contradicted, displaced, and challenged.

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