사라진 신체들의 카르토그라피 - <빨갱이 바이러스>에 나타난 박완서 문학의 공간 정치

Abstract

This article re-reads Park Wan Seo’s later work The Ppalgaengi Virus in the dimension of spatial politics starting from the body scale, and analyzes the overlapping aspects of the narrative and spatial principles of the novel and its meaning in the context of Park’s novel. Uncle ‘ppalgaengi’, who is an ‘the other’ in the novel, symbolizes the victims in the history of division and the Cold War, but it is important that it permanently exists in a state of ‘disappearing’ rather than a definitive death. The three women and the main character ‘I’ in the novel live a structured life with a ‘disappearing body’ in common, and the pressure of ‘speaking’ surrounding secrets and revelations approaches ‘me’ with physical pain. The uncle’s body, which is not separated from ‘me’, oscillates between burial and uplift, showing a generative force that does not disappear. The theme and structure of this novel make the narrative style of Park Wan Seo more important through the cartography approach. In her literary career spanning forty years, this body scale is a circular space that has been repeated in Park Wan Seo’s novels, and it is related to the aspect of existence of the social body of Korea that Park has been looking for. She takes issue with the subjectivization of Koreans based on the deletion of existence or otherization, and summons those who have disappeared to the ‘here-and-now’. The Ppalgaengi Virus is a novel that exposes the theme through images of silence and omission, disappearance and burial in a way to tell once again the reality that cannot make the structure of division and the Cold War past. This article was intended to read the meaning of spatial politics in Park Wan Seo’s novel in more detail.