계엄과 한국문학― 한강의 질문, “과거가 현재를 도울 수 있는가,죽은 자가 산자를 구할 수 있는가”에 대해

Abstract

Civil war is an armed conflict in which a government and non-state forces within the same country contest internal sovereignty, understood as the exercise of political authority and territorial control. Martial law, by contrast, is an apparatus of hostility that either responds to civil-war-like conditions or actively manufactures them. Korean literature has developed, on the one hand, by critically verbalizing lived experiences of civil war and, on the other, by confronting the military and police under martial law in pursuit of the restoration of democratic conventions. While Korean modern history is often understood as a history of literature forged under a state of exception—marked by civil war, emergency decrees, and martial law—modern Korean literature unfolded within an anocratic condition between democracy and dictatorship, thereby taking democratization and distributive justice as central tasks. Taking as two key momenta (i) the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement for the writer Han Kang on October 10, 2024, and (ii) the declaration of emergency martial law on December 3, 2024, this article examines the relationship between martial law and Korean literature from a parallax perspective. It focuses in particular on (a) how Han Kang’s distinctive second-person narration renders events present, and (b) the post–12ㆍ3 role of her work as a device of Lifting Martial Law(解嚴), that is, an undoing or unmaking of martial law. By narrativizing the proclamations of martial law and the episodes of mass slaughter associated with April 3 (4ㆍ3) and May 18 (5ㆍ18), Han Kang’s literature has foregrounded—on the level of world literature—the problematic nexus between Korean literature and civil war. Because martial law aims primarily at the direct removal of whatever is framed as the source of crisis, it produces categories of internal and external enemies as “those who may be killed,” and it performs the violent function of eliminating them. A long-standing literary problematic in Korean literature—one that has reached a horizon of global resonance in Han Kang—is precisely the history of the collective production of “killable beings” and the question of literature that stands against it. The hermeneutic range of Human Acts (『소년이 온다』) extends across Korea’s singular contemporary times—May 18, 1980; January 20, 2009; April 16, 2014; and December 3, 2025—the literary responses that accompany them, and the proliferating “other Gwangjus” that haunt the globe. Methodologically, this study offers a discourse-oriented interpretation that mediates among contemporary criticism on Human Acts, post-announcement Nobel discourse, and the re-discursivization that followed the 12ㆍ3 emergency martial law crisis. It also briefly considers how recent movements—such as hostility toward Han Kang and apologias for martial law—have been articulated with a global civil war under neoliberalism.