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Essay and literary self-portrait － through Marguerite Duras’ La vie matérielle and Park Wan-suh’s A single fathom －

  • Journal of Humanities
  • 2018, (70), pp.89-120
  • DOI : 10.31310/HUM.070.04
  • Publisher : Institute for Humanities
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : July 19, 2018
  • Accepted : August 2, 2018
  • Published : August 31, 2018

Ka Ya LEE 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes how are the relationship between the theory of literary self-portrait - as posited by Michel Beaujour in Miroirs d’Encre - and the genre of essay, through Duras’ La Vie matérielle and Park’s A single fathom (Han Gil Saram Sok). Michel Beaujour wrote that since literary self-portrait portrays oneself of today as how one sees oneself through the mirror and that a mirror doesn’t aim to narrate, a literary self-portrait has a distinctive characteristic of non-narrative structure, unlike autobiography, biography or novel. A literary self-portrait reflects and analyzes a given theme, which allows it to embrace contemporary experiences and to gain universality as it gets interposed with digressions and annotations. This is similar to the nature of essays in that the latter is not retrospective, composed of very short stories - unlike autobiography - and that it describes not only one’s own life stories but also the stories of other people’s lives and socio-political events over the course of one’s life that are not necessarily relevant on a personal level. This article examines the characteristics of literary self-portrait as a mirrored writing found in the essays of both Duras and Park. It considers how thematic and spatial descriptions of literary self-portrait, which refuses chronological narrative, show in their writings. In the writings of Duras and Park, memories of personal spaces, mainly home and hometown, get often intertwined with various other themes of their stories. In particular, it is important to observe how personal and particular thoughts and memories of an individual transfer to the themes that appeal to the authors’ contemporaries on a more universal level. Finally, it will be discussed what aspects of oneself Duras and Park wanted to convey in their essays, by observing how the identity of the moment, reflected in the mirror, is portrayed. That identity of now is the condition of literary self-portrait set around its nature of subjective confession and nowness.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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