박경리 소설에 나타난 음식의 문학적 재현과 의미 -『시장과 전장』을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the ways that war experiences and aspects of daily life were embodied through food motifs in Park Kyung-ni's early novels including Pyoryudo, Pasi, and The Market and the Battlefield. Food has materialistic nature of being directly connected to human survival and performs a narrative function involved in the meanings of a novel as part of literary reproduction. The investigator decided to approach Park's early novels through the cultural code of "food" because it was a valid material to figure out the meanings of human beings in competition between the extreme situations of war and daily life. General discussions about her early works have converged into making her private experiences a narrative and depicting the inner worlds of female characters. The points where her works started to distinguish themselves from these characteristics were Pyoryudo, Pasi, and The Market and the Battlefield. That is, these texts show her shift from making a narrative out of her personal experiences with a difficult life of supporting her family as a war widow and the sentiment of distrust across the society to ensuring some distance to figure out the meanings of war in an objective manner and recognizing them within the social, historical, and ideological magnetic field. In addition, these works contain the traces of life ideas that were the basis of her literary imagination till The Land that was the condensation of her literary world. Of these three works, The Market and the Battlefield depicts the food culture in colorful ways. Consisting of total 40 chapters, this work presents food in almost every chapter to develop an event and depict the inner psychology of a character. Most of the foods at about 100 points in the novel are staple or emergency foods including rice, sweet potato, and rice cake. They work to show changes to the consciousness of its main characters, Nam Ji-yeong and Ha Gi-hun, and their psychological circumstances. The food culture via Ji-yeong shows the low nature of human beings and also life ideas and aspects of human dignity to overcome it. The food culture related to Gi-hun shows a post-ideological attitude. Compared with The Market and the Battlefield, Pyoryudo and Pasi have a relatively lower frequency of food culture depicted in them. Set in the post-war time or home front distant from the war field, these two works describe daily life that would continue on even in the middle of shocks from the war. Park used food to talk about respect for life, caring for others, and sex morality experienced by women in Pyoryudo, which is about the life of a war widow called Kang Hyeon-hoi, and Pasi, which tells the stories of love and parting between Jo Myeong-hwa and Park Eung-ju in Busan. Food is the representative culture of power for social and historical reorganization, and Park used food ultimately to depict her life ideas representing her literary ideas in concrete manners.