17세기 소설에 나타난 회상과 조감(鳥瞰)의 시선－<운영전>・<최척전>・<강로전>을 중심으로－

Abstract

This paper explores how the wars and the narrativization of their memories correlate to the changes in 17th-century novels. Writings that remember and record war usually take the form of retrospection. In order to retrospect war in the past, we have to need two egos: the past self and the present self. The retrospection is the literary device in a narrative, in which a past event is narrated at a point later than its chronological order in a story. I think that the great change in 17th-century novels is closely related to the birth of a sense of the position in which the whole story can be viewed outside the narrative. In this paper, I named such a position ‘the perspective of bird's eye view’. The perspective of bird's-eye view is an elevated view of an object from above, with a perspective as if the observer were a bird. I have referred to time reversal causality and the experience of simultaneity as a change in the history of 17th-century novels that relates to the perspective of bird's eye view. Time reversal causality is a causal relationship created in an ex post and retrospective way of discovering the cause of the present state in the past. Time reversal causality is very similar to the process of creating a narrative to secure one's legitimacy when remembering and recording the war. It is the process of retroactively creating causality between events for the final purpose of the narrative. Simultaneity arises from experiencing the homogeneous and empty time flowing between two events in different places. Two events which happened simultaneously and even in separate places can link the people involved in those events by this precise simultaneity, and those people share a consciousness of a shared temporal dimension in which they co-exist. The perspective of bird's eye view is found in both narratives that remember the war and 17th-century novels, and this sense of the position in which the whole story can be viewed outside the narrative was the important cause of changes in the 17th-century novels.