Earticle

초록

한국어

This study re-reads Yu Hua's novel City of Fiction(Wencheng, 文城, 2021) through the antagonistic (拮抗) structure formed between its main and supplementary narratives, which, mediated by the shared space of “Wencheng,” continually interrogate the meaning of each other. In the main narrative, the criterion governing Lin Xiangfu's conduct is ren(仁, benevolence), embodied as the practice of the five virtues—gong(恭), kuan(寬), xin(信), min(敏), and hui(惠)—within a moral vacuum left by the collapse of social order. In the supplementary narrative, the criterion governing Xiaomei's conduct is survival; irreducible to any single motive, her choices, shaped by the constraints of the era and the imbalances of human relations, harbor an irreducible contradiction. “Wencheng” stands as the symbolic junction of this antagonism: a name without referent, whose very absence and fictionality paradoxically drive Lin Xiangfu's concrete ethical practice. The antagonism is consummated within the reader. Suspended between the ignorance of the main narrative and the truth of the supplementary narrative, Xiaomei's sincerity can be confirmed neither as falsehood nor as truth, and the supplementary narrative thereby renders the ren of the main narrative undecidable. Lin Xiangfu realizes ren without ever knowing the truth, yet for the reader that ren is no longer self-evident. As the perspectives of the two narratives collide within the reader, the final judgment on the work's meaning remains the reader's to make.

저자

• 이가영

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  동북아 문화연구 [Journal of North-east Asian Cultures]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3692

• 수록기간

  2001~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 910 DDC 950