Localization between Insiders/Outsiders of the Local and the Aspects of Literary Representation - Focusing on Novel Busan and Writing Busan -
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This paper begins with a question about differences in footing points between outsiders’ and insiders’ gaze. It compares how the structure and the desire, which are embedded in the mode of local imagination, are embodied by analyzing two novels ― Novel Busan and Writing Busan ― as the texts for this study. Novel Busan imagines Busan from the gaze of an outsider.
The gazing subject recognizes that his/her gaze is ultimately directed toward his/her desire to consume an unknown and lost object, rather than the object itself, by perceiving its fallacy and his/her desire that operates by depending on it, as he/she witnesses the paradox of melancholy in Seoul in which the position of the gazing subject is fixed. Although Busan is described as the object of gaze, as the space structure still operates, the signified including identity is omitted, so it only remains as the space that is replaceable and abstracted, the signifier without the signified, in other words, a kind of trace.
On the other hand, Writing Busan formalizes the insiders’ gaze. The short stories introduced in Writing Busan attribute trace to the past by misunderstanding it as an aura, while they prescribe the present as the time of loss/damage, as if we can claim for the possession of the object, by misunderstanding a lack as a loss. The stories, therefore, can argue that the present and the future should possess the past sublime value that they already once possessed by recovering and restoring it. Writing Busan’s misunderstanding, which means to regard things that it cannot possess as its possession, has the form isolated and solidified through the paradox of deceptive spectacle, so it has an effect on the process in which the place identity of the present Busan is organized. The outsider’s gaze which repeatedly otherizes Busan for the melancholy of Seoul is homologous with the insider’s gaze intending to prescribe the place identity by misunderstanding the trace as an aura. It is, however, possible to find the attempts to refuse to copy the outsider’s gaze in Writing Busan.
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