식민지 말기(末期) 이기영 소설의 한 내면―「貯水池(저수지)」(1943)와 선행소설들과의 접합 지점을 중심으로―

Abstract

Lee Ki-young's novels and short stories, published during the colonial period, are interconnected by sharing settings and ideas in various ways. Reservoir, which was serialized in The Peninsula’s Light in 1943, is one of the representative examples, and the part woven from other previously published narrative texts accounts for a considerable amount. In particular, this narrative text shows the situation in which the theme consciousness of Lee Ki-young's narrative texts during the colonial period is reversed at the end of the colonial period, and at the same time, they pursue opposing messages while overlapping each other. Yong, the main character, of Soil and Life, which was unfinished due to the closure of the magazine, was expected to be a proletarian leader who resisted existing power, but was reborn as a model young man who actively cooperates with national government in Reservoir. Poverty is removed from the landscape that shows the fear of life experienced by peasants compulsory mobilizated for public work of the colonial government and their wives in the embankment construction scene in the Soil and Life or first birthday party of the Throes of Revolution. It is reborn as a space where lessons that must be learned for the public interest and beliefs about national government that promise abundance are disseminated. In the Son of the Earth the romantic tradition of reminding foreign Koreans who carried out the national policy of Manchurian development as an entity was bizarrely transformed in the Reservoir and unnaturally inserted into the entire context with the continued story added. The confrontational encounters of messages made in Reservoir negate the 'typicality' of characters and situations, and ask back the meaning of its fundamental passivity. On the other hand, the framed national tradition is marked with ruin as values and ethics that have been adhered to in previous narrative texts have been overthrown, and only innocent proletariats survive where the elite has disappeared and progress to a fanciful utopia. Perhaps this story of chaos crosses the middle of this orderly national public relations narrative (regardless of the author's intention) is close to the typicality that the text itself is realizing, that is, a more fundamental 'typical' outside the framework of Marxist literature.