거부와 기피 사이, 비(非)군인의 장소 – 1970년대 송영 소설을 중심으로

Abstract

South Korea was a strongly militarized country with a national conscription system that grew out of its experiences in wars such as the Korean and Vietnam wars. Draft evasion and desertion were considered unpatriotic and unmanly, crimes that should be tried and punished. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, many people chose desertion and evasion, and they often lived in “fugitive territory” to avoid military authorities. In Korean society, except for religious conscientious objection, conscientious objection and desertion have been discussed under the discourse of military service, and the space between conscientious objection and refusal has never been properly discussed. This paper examines this in-between space and aspects of the ‘right to flee’ through Song Young’s novels of the 1970s, and historicizes it through the concept of (not) becoming a soldier. The novelist volunteered for the Marine Corps right after graduating from college in 1963, but immediately deserted and spent the next 24 to 30 years on the run until his arrest in 1969. His fiction allows us to examine the noise surrounding soldiering and the positioning of the ‘non-soldier’ as a disruptor. The military prison, a recurring theme in Song's fiction, is a space between the military and society, between the military and the prison, a space governed by the laws of the military, and it is here that Song focuses his attention on the disaffected. Moreover, they do not say why they deserted, but rather that it was their choice, creating a space between military service and denial. Through the good soldiers who were imprisoned for causing trouble in the Vietnam War, Song Young re-diagnoses the meaning of war and violence, explaining that being a soldier includes not being a soldier. Through this, the figure of the conscientious objector, a constitutive outsider of Korean hegemonic masculinity, was literary examined and the space between conscientious objection and evasion was identified.