ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The article interprets the story of a man growing up as a homosexual in Yukio Mishima's novel Confession of Mask(1949) as the conflictual effect of the bipolar forces of narcissism and self-disgust. Since Freud, the typical explanation of homosexuality has been limited to the problem of narcissistic neurosis. The drives of narcissism for self-preservation always operates with destructive drives, and even in the aspect of homosexual narcissism the libidinal forces of the opposed pole operate. The competitive relationship of these forces allows us to look at homosexuality as a variable identification instead of an inner and fixed identity. Shortly speak, it is the becoming-the homosexual. Confessions of Mask is a work that shows ‘this becoming’ in the realization of the bipolar drives. Mishima constructs a similar composition to Sigmund Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality in his work: the absence of a father and the existence of two mothers (his biological mother and adoptive mother). In this novel, however, the relationship of the two mothers (his grandmother and mother) is different from that of da Vinci. The two mothers are not amicable to the protagonist 'I'. This becomes the driving forces that stimulates his self-disgust within the homosexual tendency of the young protagonist. The image of death presented by Mishima functions as a symbol of the self-disgusting and destructive forces driven by narcissistic drives, and is obsessively repeated to the protagonist. The most clearly presented image of death is Saint Sebastian, Guido Reni’s painting work produced around 1616. St. Sebastian is his ideal self and the mirror image that the protagonist ‘I’ identifies. The work expresses the vivid body of a robust man with arrows in his armpit and side. Here, his life is simultaneous with his death. And it is not Sebastian's harmonious body that the protagonist loves. His fragmented body, that is, St. Sebastian’s wounded armpit and side itself absobs him. And theses part objects, which is a trace of self-disgust in the work, is implied as an aesthetic-political force that will create a fissure in oppressive social norms.

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