옌롄커, 『인민을 위해 복무하라 』에 나타난 이데올로기적 숭고함의 소멸에 관하여

Abstract

Serving the People (2005) is a novel by Chinese author Yan Lianke (閻連科), depicting the love and separation between the young wife of a division commander and a cook in the military during the Cultural Revolution. Serving the People is famous for its blatant sexual description in the work, its shocking scene of destroying Mao Zedong’s statue, and its anecdote of receiving sheet metal from the Chinese government shortly after its announcement. I analyzed this novel using Slavoj Zizek’s perspective on ideology and Marcuse’s perspective on excessive oppression. Zizek proposed a “cross-section of social illusions” as a way of resisting ideology. Here, “illusion” refers to an ideological illusion, and in the novel, all things representing socialism, such as Mao Zedong monuments and quotes, are included. The characters destroy various representations of the Chinese Revolution at the peak of the novel, and the scene in which the statue of Mao Zedong falls on the floor, shatters, and stomps, turning into lime powder, proves that the ideological object they worshiped was nothing. Marcuse found the possibility of a civilization without repression in the world of artistic imagination and play. He also liked to use the expression “sublimation(昇華) of sexual desire,” which refers to Libido becoming an eros. Sex seems to have given eros vitality to the relationship between the two characters in the novel, but the relationship between the two changes from sexual pleasure to love. The two characters in the novel taste erosic sublimation in a society of excessive oppression and crave restoration of the subject, but they are defeated in resistance to ideology. Even though Liu Lian says that he loves Wu Dawang, he cannot abandon his power as the wife of the division commander. Wu Dawang also could not take risks by betraying his promise to give his wife and children in his hometown a family register in the city. In the epilogue of the novel, the reader can see two people living well in real life 15 years later. After a short period of resistance, the two surrender to the patriarchal society.