영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 편견 없이
이스라엘 쟁윌의 《편견 없이》는 19세기 후반에 쓰인 에세이 모음집이다. 이 작품은 당대의 다양한 사회적, 문학적, 철학적 쟁점에 대한 저자의 견해를 담고 있으며, 삶과 그 복잡성에 대한 풍부하고 기발한 탐구를 집약하고 있다. 에세이 전반에 걸쳐 쟁윌은 사회 규범을 비판하는 논의에 참여하며, 특히 성별 역할, 예술, 그리고 존재의 도전이라는 주제에 집중한다.
《편견 없이》의 도입부는 화자가 경험하는 생생하고 초현실적인 환상을 소개한다. 화자는 불만과 열망을 소란스럽게 토해내는 거대한 여성 군중에 둘러싸인 자신을 발견한다. 이 장면은 양성 모두에게 부과되는 사회적 기대를 환상적으로 재현한 것이다. 화자는 처음에 그들의 비난에 맞서 자신을 변호하려 하며, 그들의 요구를 해결할 능력이 자신에게는 없다고 주장한다. 대화의 초점이 여성에서 남성으로 옮겨가면서, 화자는 사회적 불의에 수반되는 책임과 죄의식의 무게와 씨름하게 되고, 이는 인류가 공유하는 고투에 대한 더 깊은 성찰로 이어진다. 이 생생한 도입부는 근대성과 사회를 괴롭히는 무수한 문제들에 대한 일련의 비판적 성찰의 어조를 설정하며, 쟁윌이 환상과 날카로운 사회 논평을 어떻게 능숙하게 엮어내는지를 보여준다.
Classics Read in English _ Without Prejudice by Israel Zangwill
The title Without Prejudice is both a promise and a provocation. It is the kind of claim only a writer supremely confident in his own intellectual agility would dare to make — and Israel Zangwill, to his credit, very nearly delivers on it.
Published in the closing years of the nineteenth century, this collection of essays is not a systematic treatise on anything. It is, instead, the record of a mind in motion — restless, playful, digressive, and incapable of leaving any subject unexamined. Zangwill moves from gender politics to literary criticism to philosophical speculation with the ease of a man who considers all human experience to be a single, interconnected conversation and sees no reason to respect the boundaries between disciplines.
The opening essay announces the collection's intent with a stroke of surrealist bravado. The narrator finds himself plunged into a hallucinatory assembly — a vast, clamorous gathering of women, each voicing grievances that are at once absurd and devastatingly real. He tries to defend himself, protests his powerlessness, fumbles for excuses — and in doing so becomes every man who has ever claimed that the injustices women face are regrettable but somehow beyond his jurisdiction. When the scene pivots and the accusations shift to encompass the failures of men as well, the fantasy peels away to reveal something rawer: a meditation on complicity, on the shared guilt of a species that has organized itself around inequalities it cannot quite bring itself to dismantle.
This opening is vintage Zangwill — fantastical on the surface, surgical underneath. It establishes the method that will govern every essay that follows: begin with wit, proceed through paradox, arrive at an uncomfortable truth, and leave the reader unsure whether they have been entertained or indicted. The genius of Without Prejudice lies not in any single argument but in the cumulative effect of a voice that refuses to look at the world with the comfortable eyes of convention — a voice that insists, essay after essay, that seeing clearly is the minimum we owe each other, and that prejudice is not merely an opinion but a form of blindness we choose.
Among the contents
And it came to pass that my soul was vexed with the problems of life, so that I could not sleep. So I opened a book by a lady novelist, and fell to reading therein. And of a sudden I looked up, and lo! a great host of women filled the chamber, which had become as the Albert Hall for magnitude—women of all complexions, countries, times, ages, and sexes. Some were bewitching and beautiful, some wan and flat-breasted, some elegant and stately, some ugly and squat, some plain and whitewashed, and some painted and decorated; women in silk gowns, and women in divided skirts, and women in widows' weeds, and women in knickerbockers, and women in ulsters, and women in furs, and women in crinolines, and women in tights, and women in rags; but every woman of them all in tears. The great chamber was full of a mighty babel; shouts and ululations, groans and moans, weeping and wailing and gnashing of false and genuine teeth, and tearing of hair both artificial and natural; and therewith the flutter of a myriad fans, and the rustle of a million powder-puffs. And the air reeked with a thousand indescribable scents—patchouli and attar of roses and cherry blossom, and the heavy odours of hair-oil and dyes and cosmetics and patent medicines innumerable.
