간도 체험과 강경애의 소설

Abstract

Kang Kyong-ae, who lived in Longjing [Korean: Yongjong], Jiandao [Korean: Kando] for a decade from the early 1930's to the early 1940's, used that experience in twelve of the twenty-one works that she published during her lifetime. The present study will classify her fiction based on the Jiandao experience into four groups and examine ㆍthem in terms of migr literature or literature created by ethnic Korean migrs in China. Works such as "A Vegetable Garden [Ch'aejon]" and "A Soccer Game [Ch'ukkujon]" express their author's class ideology in terms of praxis and "Existence and Nonexistence [Yumu],"though less explicit, likewise reveals Kang's will to social action. Such characteristics have served as an important reason to call Kang a writer with sympathies for KAPF literature. Indeed, "Salt" and "Mother and Son [Moja]"reveal class ideology through the difficult lives of their main characters. Works including "That Woman [Ku Yoja]," "Compassion [Tongjong]," "Contribution Fee200 Won [Wongoryo Ibaeg Won]," and "Agony [Ponnoe]" criticize activists'disillusion and thus prompt self-critique and introspection. On the other hand, "Mother and Son," "Drugs [Mayak]," "Darkness," and "The Nigger [Komdung'i]" betray a considerable sense of loss and despair on the author's part despite their raw exposure of dark reality. As an expression of Kang's resistant will, the thematic tendency of these works shows a downward movement, for it progresses from the manifestation of blatant class ideology to a critique of social reality, finally to a deep sense of loss and despair. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that her authorial consciousness consistently hinged on resistance and class ideology in both early and late works. At a glance, Kang's works, though, based on her Jiandao experience, may not seem to address the issue of migridentity in depth. That is a false observation, however, because the author clearly saw Jiando as a land of revolution and struggle. It is then possible to say that, for Kang, who adhered to class ideology, migridentity existed for the resistant fighter or anyone who would be one. In other words, she was able to secure and to maintain her identity by utterly negating reality and struggling against colonial mastersunlike the writer An Su-gil, who led an migrlife by partly resisting reality and partly compromising.