ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper examines the significance of the grotesque physicality and the text’s fluoridation overflowing in Edogawa Ranpo novels published before and after 1930. In particular, I focused on the novel “Caterpillar” (1929), which can not be considered separately from the modern war. The recent controversy over the movie “Caterpillar” (2010), based on the novel “Caterpillar” as well as the title change at the time of publication, a ban on war, makes us question the reason why this novel is still a problematic text. It is a question of whether the “Caterpillar” are anti-war novels. This paper focuses on the overturned gender aspect and seeks to confirm the possibility of a “Caterpillar” as a subversive text beyond anti-war novel. The common feature of Ranpo’s novels in this period is that the grotesque physique of abnormal deformity and damage of the body such as malformation and disordered body is prominent. However, in the novels such as “Human Chair”, “Dwarf”, and “Blind Beast”, the cruelty and bizarre excessiveness reveal fear or cruelty itself, and there is a limit that can not recall the essential reason for its background. In comparison, “Caterpillar” are different in appearance. This is because “Caterpillar”, the strange and shocking tragedy of the soldier husband and his wife, who lost his arms in the war, trails the cause and background of fear beyond the horror or cruelty itself. A husband whose paralyzed senses are all but the visual and tactile senses, who have lost his limbs, can not live without the devoted care of his wife. The marital relationship is dramatically overturned because of the damaged body. On the other side of the praise for the faithfulness to the her husband, the wife consumes her husband's body as sex toys and exercises sadistic violence. Women actively lead the sex bargaining as the subject and have the right to decide the body. This is obviously a subversive gender relationship that reverses the contemporary gender ideology. Furthermore, it should be noted that the object of mistreatment is a husband who is a soldier who is symbolizing both nationalism and patriarchy. As a result, despite the writer’s own denial, the novel becomes a subversive text beyond simple the anti-war novels. The boundaries between men and women, between husbands and wives, between nations and peoples are broken, relations are dramatically upset and mixed. The novel that confirms the sadism and violence of human beings through the abnormal body embodies the possibility of subversion at the point out of the author’s intention. In the end, humanity evoked by her husband’s tragic suicide has made the “Caterpillar” a truly uncomfortable and subversive text that can not be consumed only by popular novels. In this way, the “Caterpillar” reveal the discord between war and everyday life, the falsity of ideology through the strange and subverted relationship of the couple. This novel is still at the center of the controversy, paradoxically, because the subversiveness of texts summons the history of war and constantly evokes the true reality.

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