장용학의 『圓形의 傳說』에 나타난 냉전기의 주체 분열 양상

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the split aspects of human subject in Jang Yong-hak's Legend of the Circularity in connection with the Korean War and Cold War system. The Korean War became a factor in the operation of a strong anti-communist and anti-American ideology in the south and north Korea, respectively. Freedom and equality were politically recontextualized to maintain state power and integrate the people into homogeneous subject, and were segmented into dichotomous concepts supporting capitalism and communism. Legend of the Circularity, which critically captures the reality of the Korean Peninsula, identifies the Korean War as a product of the global Cold War, not a civil war, and it is a work that captures the split of the subject that the people of the time had to experience by revealing the illusion of the Cold War ideology that dominated the Korean Peninsula after the war. The process of the central character, ‘Lee Jang’ finding his father and exploring the meaning and history of his existence can be understood as a process of identifying the big other on the Korean Peninsula that defines and suppresses humans. ‘Lee Jang’ eventually refuses to be a subordinate subject to the collective identity of society and remains a stranger aiming outside the system. These narratives take the form of hysterical discourse in which the subject asks questions about the origins and basis of the existing order. It was intended to show the cracks in Korean society in the Cold War era by shaping the realm of those who could not be assimilated into the dominant discourse that homogenizes the people, that is, the surplus zone of the Cold War system. ‘Lee Jang’ moves in the direction of pursuing his original desire and conceives a world of “the fourth dimensions” that can be liberated from the words of the other that suppress humans. It is a world that abolishes the concept of “humane” defining humans as humans and aims for the original “human” that is not distorted by symbolic order such as dichotomy. The narrative of Legend of the Circularity, which awakens the fierce awareness of human freedom, contains an anarchistic spirit that resists all power and oppression. This paper concludes that Legend of the Circularity captures the backside of the ruling discourse and institution that has been forced under the pretext of rationality and sublimates the critical mind in the Cold War period demanding discussion and awakening of the autonomy of human subjects in literature.