疲竭之愛：李箱與翁鬧作品中的現代愛，及其不滿

Exhausted Love: Modern Love and Its Discontents in Yi Sang and Weng Nao’s Novels

本文聚焦討論台韓殖民日常政治中的矛盾性，此矛盾性體現於現代愛追求過程中永恆的挫敗與耗費，我將之稱為「疲竭之愛」。二十世紀初期東亞各地出現了大量的戀愛論述，將現代愛的各種概念創造、翻譯、轉化進入在地文化實踐中，並據此建構現代個人主體。殖民知識分子圍繞「愛」這一主題生產的諸多論述，更反映了現代文明與殖民現代性的複雜問題。美國人類學家伊麗莎白‧普維內利（2006）曾以「親密事件」命名殖民情境中的規範性力量；殖民者與被殖民者之間的關係，乃是透過愛的論述，重新調整這些場域、模糊地域和關係的界線。據此，本文將在論文前半分析台韓殖民文學中「愛」的制度化、及其中反思殖民現代性的傾向，後半特別聚焦討論翁鬧的〈天亮前的愛情故事〉與李箱的〈翅膀〉。這兩篇小說皆發表於日本皇民化政策實施與戰時總動員前夕，並被視為是現代主義的高峰期作品；且這兩篇小說的作者背景、歷史時空、獨白敘事、戀愛主題有著高度的同質性，可視為台韓被分隔為殖民地的情境下，仍可透過反思被殖民與反殖民的經驗進而互為參照的例子。再者，本文認為小說中共同展現的與「非典型」女性的親密關係、與被殖民者的都市經驗，在在揭示了現代主體的殖民矛盾性。小說主角們耗盡力氣追尋的理想之愛、錯認的親密關係，反映的是被殖民主體窮盡自身現代化的可能性，亦同時挑戰了現代性內部的矛盾、及其隱含的帝國主義內涵。

This paper seeks to examine the colonial ambivalence that embodied in the pursuing of modern love and represented as what I term the “exhausted love” in the colonial daily life of Taiwan and Korea. The discourses on love were explosively produced in the early 20th Century East Asia; conceptions of modern love were created, transformed, and translated into local cultural practices in an effort to modernize the individuals. The writings and columns encompassed free love, marriage, and sexual issues by local intellectuals demonstrate the specificity of interior modernization and addresses complex issues of colonial modernity. However, the modern love is represented as what Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) terms “the intimate event” as a powerful regulative ideal, functions in the colonial situation by tracing how the conceptions of love are produced in the intersection of individual freedom and social bondage. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on love which fetishized and commodified in/with the literary works and intersected with the (anti-) modern consumption culture. The two novellas that will be examined in this paper—“A Love Story Before Dawn” by Weng Nao and “The Wings” by Yi Sang —were written and published right before Japan’s acceleration of assimilation policy and total war mobilization starting in 1937, and are often regarded as the pinnacle of modernist colonial fiction. These two novellas are narrated through monologues, and best represent the ambivalence of modern individual subjects, who exhausted the possibility of love (the symbol of civilization), as well as the narrative (means of self-representation). As this paper argues, the love of exhaustion is a sign for the reflective thinking on colonial modernity. The colonized exhausted the form and material of being modern, and these experiences of the colonial subjects resulted in a challenge to modernity and its imperialist ideology.