崔仁勳의 『화두』에 대한 比較文學的 硏究

Abstract

After the publication of Hwadoo, Choi In-hoon hinted at a connection between the book and Marcel Proust's Finding Lost Time in interview. In the book the person ‘I’ also notes that he read seventh volume of the novel himself, thus strengthening the persuasion of comparative reading. Choi In-hoon borrowed the theme of ‘Memory and writing’ and reinterprets it in a new context. First, Choi In-hoon sets up narrating ‘I’ who starts writing again through the restoration of maternal memory at the novel, like in Finding Lost Time. In the final scene of the novel, ‘I’ resumes writing in order to leave this memory as immortal, and goes back again to the very beginning of the novel and starts to write the beginning part. This recursive form, which shows the process of writing this novel, is also borrowed from Proust. If the ‘lost time’ in the Finding Lost Time means the world in memory, the ‘retrieved time’ means the writing of the memory. It can be confirmed that the motif is being variated in the Hwadoo by Choi. For the second time, Choi wrote about original experience of ‘I’ on reading and writing. Just as Marcel of Finding Lost Time is returning to writing again through a recall of his reading with his mother, and just as he discovered his impressionistic writing method through his first writing experience, ‘I’ can restart writing through a recollection of being praised by teacher during the high school days. By this experience, the genre of ‘novel’ could discovered by ‘me’. In addition, ‘I’ is now trying to answer to the question of the Korean teacher had thrown to the students including himself in Korean language class. Finally, Choi In-hoon is looking for a way after the end of the Cold War by referring to Finding Lost Time in Hwadoo. The portrayal of the two roads in Finding Lost Time shows young Marcel's perception of the world, each of which is a differentiation between the noble world and the bourgeois world, the world of logos and the world of sense, and so on. If Proust's novel shows the way of the union between these two path, the two ways in Hwadoo means the two ideologies of the Cold War era and the new way of combining them means the way to be self as the intellectual of Korea. It is a way of writing that constantly observes the subject of “the way of becoming oneself” left by Cho Myung-hee.