국가의 기억과 경합하는 ‘유령’의 기억 -4·3사건의 포스트기억으로 본 김석범의 「만덕유령기담」-

Abstract

This paper examines the attempts to reconstruct the memory of the April 3 incident from the respective positions of state power and Korean-Japanese writers. By analyzing the antagonism between the two sides’ reconstruction of the event, I wanted to rethink the assessment that the 60s were a hiatus in the memory of the April 3 incident. The memory of the April 3 incident, which was created by the state, is examined in the context of the development project of Jeju Island by the military regime in the 60s and the cultural film Hallasan (1964), which was produced by the US military as cultural propaganda. The military regime reframed the April 3 Incident as a dehistoricized people’s narrative of suffering, ignoring the historicity of the event and the long-standing demands and aspirations of the individuals involved, and the resulting narrative excluded “non-nationals” for the purpose of national unity. On the other hand, Korean-Japanese writer Kim Seok-beom, who retrieved the memory of the April 3 incident from a relatively free memory space outside the nation-state, not only rehistoricized the repressed memory, but also linked the memory of the April 3 incident to his own existential crisis as a Korean-Japanese and as an organizational deviant, making the April 3 novel a postmemory that goes beyond the literary record of historical events. Therefore, this paper examines the April 3 incident memory space in the 60s and explores the ways in which literary efforts to respond to the crisis could lead to the creation of postmemory.