「The Man of the West」 for Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Focused on a phrase from Ch. 36 “Christ’s Lifetime” - Lim, Hoon-Sik 「The Man of the West」, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s final literary work, is a chronicle of Jesus’ life examined by Akutagawa himself. In Chapter 36, “Christ’s Lifetime”, of this book, there is a contradictory phrase called ascend from the Heaven to the earth. In this thesis, I want to investigate this phrase in order to reveal the correlation between Akutagawa and Jesus in this novel. In the book, Jesus abandoned his own life, and ascended into the Heaven according to an order of the Holy Spirit, which can be said as a travel way from the earth to the Heaven. However, Jesus experiences a transformation afterwards. In other words, in the past, He abandoned the earth, and had proceeded only to the Heaven due to His priority to the Heaven over the earth. In contrast, the conceptual transformation, in which He began to miss the life in the earth, happened afterwards. However, it was merely a transformation of concept only; Jesus’ steps were heading to Heaven. Therefore, we can say that Jesus’ reality was failed to be transformed. I compared Jesus’ such traces with Akutagawa’s lifetime. Most of early and middle periods of Akutagawa’s literary works contain historic novels, including 「Rashomon」, essentially his first work. It is especially well-known that the 「Hell Screen」 nicely presents his artistic view, “art for art’s sake”. His such artistic attitude was a process only to achieve his idealistic goal, the creation of an art, by caring less about his own life. However, Akutagawa’s firm belief on art began to falter from 1919, and he reflected on himself about his writing only historic novels until that time. Hence, he wrote 「Autumn」 in 1920 as a modern novel but his transformation from writing historic novel to modern one was not successful. It can be noted that Akutagawa’s such traces are similar to Jesus’ in 「The Man of the West」. As we know from the examination so far, Akutagawa’s concept toward the Jesus was expressed in such a contradictory phrase. In other words, such phrase is a “summed” expression of combining before and after of conceptual transformation in “Christ’s Lifetime”. Ultimately, Akutagawa identified his lifetime with Jesus’ in the 36th chapter, “Christ’s Lifetime”.
동북아시아문화학회 [The Association of North-east Asian Cultures]
설립연도
2000
분야
복합학>학제간연구
소개
동북아시아 문화의 다양성과 정체성을 연구 토론하고, 지역내 문화 교류의 다양한 모습을 연구하고 문화변동의 큰 틀을 집적함으로써 우리 민족 문화 및 상대 민족의 문화적 터전을 이해하여 문화공동체적 특성을 계발하고 상호 관련성의 강화를 유도하는 학술활동을 통해 동북아시아의 문화발전에 이바지함.