존 스타인벡 작품에 나타난 성의지(性意志) 연구

Abstract

This paper is to discuss John Steinbeck's Sexual-Will based on his biographies and his works, To a God Unknown, four stories in The Long Valley – “The Snake,” “The Chrysanthemum,” “The White Quail,” and “The Harness” and The Wayward Bus. A pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer is known to have opposed the optimistic ideas emphasized by the German idealists of the 19th century such as Fichte, Shelling, and Hegel. His approach was different from the tradition of the metaphysics of reason which had been more prevalent since Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason because he suggested that will-to-live should be substituted for reason, corresponding to Kant’s thing-in-itself or Plato’s form. Especially Sexual-Will, to his eyes, reveals the innermost essence of everything in nature as one of the most strengthened instincts, whose causal nature is not etiologically explicable, creating not a little hostility among intellectualists. Also, Steinbeck’s pantheistic view and inhumanism, a unique ecological idea, made by the poet Robert Jefferson, who lived in the same region are the backgrounds of To a God Unknown, which, I insist, made the critics at that time confused and gave them a subjective impression. All these facts share Arthur Schopenhauer’s irrationalism that was about one hundred years prior to them, which is greatly interesting and also help to understand the works of great men in America, such as Steinbeck, Campbell, and Ricketts. Given this, this study aims to introduce Carol and Campbell's love affair based on the texts of The Philosophers of Monterey and explore Jeffers' inhumanism in light of prior studies. Next, I will interpret the irrationalism of sexuality from the angle of Jeffers’ ecology as a natural phenomenon centralized on the text of To a God Unknown. I draw a distinction between reason and Sexual-Will by referring to Schopenhauer’s philosophical theory and illuminate what aspects Sexual-Will shows to reason by observing four short stories—“The Snake,” “The Chrysanthemums,” “The White Quail,” and “The Harness.” Through this analysis, in “The Snake” and “The Chrysanthemums” have the situations where Sexual-Will bursts forth in the space controlled by reason in the name of cold practicality and science. Also, “The White Quail” and “The Harness” show the appearance that Sexual-Will repressed by the power of reason gives the characters suffering and agony. And also I aim to illuminate its truth by observing the characters’ Sexual-Will in John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, which has been criticized as based on misogyny. As a research method, we introduce the controversial texts of this novel and then discuss the problems that have been pointed out so far. They are about the biographical evidence that the writer had a stormy marriage life with his wife of the time and the opinion that the work is centralized on the sexual selection theory. Considering that Steinbeck treats the ten characters’ Sexual-Will and their representation, the sexual desire, almost equally in this book, we interpret them in the light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s will-to-live and Friedrich Nietzsche’s will for power, who are voluntarism philosophers. Through this analysis, The Wayward Bus is proved to describe human nature without any adjustments against the capitalistic ills with which the American society was pervaded right after World War Ⅱ rather than being merely caused by the writer’s misogyny. Schopenhauer’s theory of Sexual-Will is found to account for irrational human acts behind reason and emphasize a sort of asceticism by acknowledging and looking to its destructive power. And the essential of Sexual-Will is the desire of the human Will-to-live. And he explains that the individual consciousness as the sexual impulse in general, and without mentioning a particular partner of the other sex, is called the will-to-live. But what appears in consciousness as the sexual desire, directed to a specific individual, is in itself the will-to-live as a precisely determined person. Therefore, it can be said that the will of Sexual-Will comes from the desire and sexual desire is like the life force. Humans are living present lives only with what they have. In this dissertation, I suggested the difference of Sexual-Will and sexual desire. And it can be seen that sexual desire is simply physiological instinct opposed to metaphysics of birth-and-death law, while that Sexual-Will is the motive power for humans to live by idealizing sexual desire. However, human reason lets humans be dominated by season which considers Sexual-Will immoral, and that causes people to be occupied with agony. But it can be said that since humans have love and affection, Sexual-Will is ahead of reason.