This thesis is to compare and study the representative Japanese modern writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa(芥川龍之介;1892~1927) and Korean avant-garde writer Sang Lee(李箱;1910~1937) on the theme of the 'consciousness of anxiety.'
Akutagawa's suicide is generally regarded as an occasion to disclose the consciousness of crisis among the intelligent rather than an individual one. It was triggered from Akutagawa's referring the 'obscure anxiety' about the reason of suicide in his testamentary writing. From this allusion the theme of 'anxiety' was constantly brought up to Akutagawa and the meaning involved within the term of 'anxiety' could be still an important element to understand his literature and his generation.
Meanwhile, the death of Sang Lee can be interpreted as a tragic death because there was the psychology of anxiety as a kind of the consciousness of the sufferings of the intellectual which was involved with an insecure societal conditions and unjust political situations under the Japanese domination. And the literature of Sang Lee is 'the results of anxiety from the beginning to the end' in which the crisis of self-consciousness was delicately entangled with the critical perception of the modern civilization itself. Therefore, it is still important to extract the psychological foundation of the 'anxiety' brewed from anguish and conflicts.
The origin of the 'anxiety' motif referred as something to both writers will be compared and investigated through their works, which also leads to the theme study to glance over the contemporary stream of 1920s-1930s between Japan and Korea. Furthermore, the corroborative evidence that Sang Lee was conscious of Akutagawa and came under his influence issues the necessity of a comparative literature study on both writers.
Therefore the approach of this study will be argued through psychological analysis to inspect the inner similarity between two writers providing that Sang Lee felt the domestically similar environment for Akutagawa. And above all to compare and examine both writers with the focus on the 'anxiety' motif, thematic comparison study can be useful as a method to search the meaning of motif, image, symbol, etc in literature.
With the focus on the theme 'anxiety', I inquire into the consciousness of anxiety expressed in both writer's works through the developmental phase, the narrative style and the exile desire in the main discourse. At first, the first part of the second chapter deals with homogeneity of the psychological complex, the consciousness of an adopted son the starting point. Sang Lee's growth process was very similar with the Akutagawa's in the domestic environment that he was brought up by an uncle instead of his real parents and held the whole responsibility alone of the head family and the adoptive when he was grown up. In other words, Akutagawa's trauma was the consciousness of an adoptive son and the problem with his mother and likewise Sang Lee was grown up with his mind mortgaged as 'a deathly child(童孩)' by a foster father. This growth background is deeply related with the 'anxiety' consciousness represented in their writings.
Secondly, their departure for the literature was investigated as 'an attitude of escaping from the reality' which commences from the deficiency inducing anxiety and frustration of spiritual aspiration. Akutagawa's writing mostly started from his personal history because he could not acquire self-identification during the period of forming self-perception, and 'anxiety' was released from his neglecting that matter. This inclination was so jointed with the foundation of Sang Lee's writing. Sang Lee was also grown up as an adopted son in the separation from the illiterate biological parents, as a self-supporting student, as a tuberculosis patient, as a feeble intellectual not to free himself from his country Chosun's reality of colonialization in 1920's, and then he headed for the literary field, an idealistic world as the means of fleeing from the severe reality.
Thirdly, the contemporary meaning was examined with the writer's consciousness of anxiety. Korea and Japan in 1920s-1930s was not irrelevant with an individual outlook of the world, defeat of humanism and decadent ideology. In Japan, many authors perceived and socially accepted their 'anxiety' as the contemporary crisis provoked from the death of Akutagawa. And Sang Lee's works in charge of the summit in the genealogy of anxiety literature would have something in common with the popularity of 'anxiety literature' before and after 1935 in company with the contemporary critical consciousness.
In the second part of the third chapter, an aspect of representation for the consciousness of anxiety was inquired into the source of the common elements of both writers who could not help conceiving such an anxiety consciousness. In the first place, an aspect of self-dissociation revealed in Sang Lee's works discloses the unstable mental state directly and it is expressed through the medium of 'mirror' effectively. It tells the theme of self-dissociation displayed within the phenomenon of 'I' and 'another I', and it shows an image of alienation through the structure for hero to confront others, which shares the theme with Akutagawa's work. 'Self-dissociation' image expressed in both writers leaded to the loss of the hero's feeling of presence and mechanism to create the anxiety consciousness and it became the results at the same time. Providing that anxiety is related with a fundamental factor generated from the forecast of the crisis, frustration, collapse, and etc, the phenomenon of self-dissociation can be seen as one of the chief aspects to represent an unstable self not to live with whole identity because of the existential uncertainty.
Also, there appear many times the haunted heroes by the anxiety consciousness with the power of destiny sensed in the literature of Sang Lee and Akutagawa. Their similarity is found at 'the anticipating anxiety symptom' the psychoanalyst Freud refers to and is relevant with their own destiny rather than simply anxiety consciousness and an assumption of death. Although we are not free from a proposition of mortality, the power of destiny was not irrelevant to the illness factors of tuberculosis and mental disease to both of them.
And 'the ambivalence' was looked into as an aspect of the expression of the consciousness of anxiety. 'The ambivalence' means the concurrent adherence to two opposite or conflicting views, feelings, etc about someone or something. This is not irrelevant with the unstable growth background as an adopted son which was already inspected as the starting point of the anxiety consciousness of two writers, and this ambivalence can be the outcome of the psychological phenomenon of anxiety. Therefore the mental state of 'anxiety' of Akutagawa can bring forth the logic of ambivalence referred in psychology and produce a binomial confrontation structure of a verbal promise as a figuration of literature. Also the logic of symmetrical point frequented in Sang Lee's literature could be understood with the same context.
In the third chapter, I argued a technique of 'the stream-of-consciousness' and the tendency of an autobiographical novel. The common characteristics off Sang Lee's and Akutagawa's novels are concentrated on the pursuit of the inner consciousness and depth psychology of the human being on the motif of 'the stream-of-the consciousness' in the literary technique. This narrative technique makes their novels 'poetic' and finally results in a tendency to weaken narrative while exhibiting that the subject perceives the opacity of the reality as the object of the narrative.
In the second part of the third chapter, I examined that the autobiographical narrative style in Akutagawa's and Sang Lee's novels is implicated in a critical moment of their lives. Sang Lee has already written a story based on his life in the early writings, and in that creation the situation to be aware of "tuberculosis is equal with death" pushes him into taking the pose continuously to his last work 「The Record of Ending Life(Jongsaenggi)」. And Akutagawa's autobiographical tendency in his writings involves the meaning of 'I will die as a mad man" along with the recollection of his 'mad' mother. Therefore their autobiographical inclination has something in common with disclosing the unstability of unconscious self involved in the awareness of "a crisis of life."
At the fourth chapter, both writers are similar with the desire of escaping from anxiety consciousness and one of them is 'thanatos'(desire for death). In contrast to the early ones, the desire for death appears in the later works of Akutagawa. For example, the unstable daily affair was portrayed in 「A Toothed Wheel(Haguruma)」. And the protagonist fears to live itself and the story suggests that the way to get out of the fear is the way to go for death. This tendency is discovered in Sang Lee's works. Although Sang Lee's 「The Record of Ending Life(Jongsaenggi)」 is literally the record of ending a life, the substance deals with everyday affairs. Like his existing novels, there appears the encounter of lovers and a worry of living instead of the fear of death. Finally, the protagonists in Akutagawa's works reveal the desire for death in order to release from the anxiety consciousness, which is repeated many times with suicide-oriented aspects of Sang Lee's works.
And the protagonists of the unstable self-consciousness reveal their narcistic disposition as a kind of means to take off their uneasy state. In a sense, as narcissism connotes self-alienation or self-lockout(autism), the characters in Akutagawa's works display an alienated self-image at 'hell of solitude' that is not understood from others. This inclination was not different with Sang Lee's literature. Most of Sang Lee's works are composed of mostly the alienated 'lame' persons at the society and they are cut off from others within their family and society. The characteristic of these persons is the ambivalence of the failed intellectual and narcistic intoxication. So, the irony of narcissism fundamentally involving both sides of self-compassion and self-intoxication flows through the bottom of their literature.
There is also the 'wings' motif similar with this escaping image. Though there is the reference that Sang Lee parodied the 'wings' image of Akutagawa at the existing studies, the 'wings' to Akutagawa is the symbol of his artistic soul flying upward. However, the escape desire from the uncertain reality is closely related with the self-consciousness of 'a stuffed genius' since Akutagawa has a wing but can't fly. In other words, there is a meaning of recollecting of the past by a symbol of an artistic soul in the Akutagawa's 'artificial wings,' while there exists the meaning of the return to the reality in Sang Lee's escaping or soaring from the actual with descending tendency. This difference takes place in Sang Lee's anticipation of a trip to Tokyo with new hope of life while creating his 「the Wings」. Meanwhile, 'the artificial wings' of Akutagawa exposes the remaining hopelessness of 'madness and suicide' before his committing suicide.
To both writers the theme of 'consciousness of anxiety' means the existential uncertainty of human beings, that is, the perception of self-dissolution, and thereafter provoked a great echo to a new age literature. Moreover, we can find out the significance in that they suggest a new style to represent the dismantlement of modern spirit beyond an individual agony.
As for a hereafter assignment, a mutual relation between the christian elements in Sang Lee's works and the christianity included in Akutagawa's should be examined. This approach can make it sense because the start of the tendency of anxiety of 20 century is raised from the death of God and also is deeply related with the existential uncertainty of modern man who can find any reliance nowhere.
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