The Image of Suicide as the Functions of Reality and Art

현실과 예술적 기능으로서의 자살 이미지

This paper focuses on the function of suicidal images in the history of art including literature. Death has been romanticized or repoliticized into an existential act of defiance and rebellion in literary works, so questions remain about the correlation between literary suicide and the essence of suicide. Although Jacques Ranciere insists that the order of art contrasts with the order of common people whose acts and gestures can express either their specific purposes nor the rationalities of their frustration, literary suicide reflects the outside life of readers. In fact, images of suicide produces the order of things about the real world. William Shakespeare's Hamlet handled two oppositional self-murder significantly. As Ron M. Brown pointed out, Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is voluntary, thus he avoids self-destruction and feels triumph of heroic fashion. Ophelia's self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and diminishes her from the tragic to the pathetic(16). In the $19^{th}$ century, the resurrection of Ophelia acted as the context for later periods where life itself is fictionalized from the differing periods of network of signifier and texts. Finally, in Ophelia's case, fiction became life(Brown 285). Her suicidal image was fixed in the Victorian Culture whose visual discourse was strikingly similar to that of the men. Likewise, the ambiguities of the suicide became intertwined with the social, cultural issues of a certain period, and the paradigm of suicide was conformed to the changing needs of successive generations. However, if literary art understands that a European culture grappled with the almost impossible task and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena, it will be able to focus on of the multi-layered suicide by recognizing the inherent instability of the verbal sign which cannot reveal the design and grammar of truth.