육체적 사랑의 서사와 지배적 허구의 폭로 ―연애 담론으로 본 최인호의 『별들의 고향』―

Abstract

The idea of romantic love was the dominant ideology which stayed in the basis of the Korean family system in the 1970s. This article examined the narrative characteristics of Hometown of Stars as a work that explored the ordeal of sexual love on the basis of the dominant fiction of romantic love. Hometown of Stars depicted the downfall of a woman, who failed to enter the dominant family system. In this process, the work closely traced the psychological game of physical love played on the ground of unequal gender placement in the family structure. The sad story of Kyung-a, who became a victim of sexual love amidst an unequal hierarchy of gender roles, had publicly revealed the 'dominant hypocrisy of romantic love'. The revelation and exposure of the hypocrisy that the dominant love ideology hided was multiplied by another protagonist Moono's confession of intimacy, which was another central axis of the novel. The feelings of isolation and resistance to a hypocritical society that Moono confessed made a point of contact with Kyung-a's narrative in that it exposed the pretentiousness of the dominant ideology. Thus, the story of the two protagonists progressed to an ethical reversal in which they discovered the childlikeness in the love of a prostitute while confirming the purity and innocence of the marginalized. However, the narrative strategy of generalizing private experiences through the collective gaze of men called 'we' and of dissolving individual differences in the 'assumed universality' of sexual love, the work returned to the identity of the phallus and had no choice but to maintain the subordinate equilibrium.