최서해 초기 소설에 형상된 ‘공포’와 ‘파국의 상상력’

Abstract

Im Hwa’s formularization of New Tendency as a transitional school from an autogenetical resistant literature to proletariat literature, as well as his positioning Choe Seo-hae as the representative writer of New Tendency, is still influential as a generally accepted idea. Considering that the “transitionality of New Tendency” was proposed on the basis of Leninist view of history that premises teleological, linear development, Im Hwa’s formularization and it’s validity should be reconsidered. This paper examines the ways in which Choe Seo-hae relates cruelty with terror that is best represented in his <Poverty and Massacre>, which is the revised version of <Tohyeol>. In this revision, Choe spends his labor spectacularizing cruel situation as well as associating it with a specific terror, which best characterizes his early novels. Scholars who have followed Im Hwa’s formularization read this terror as related to a subversive impulse and characterize it as a tendency toward proletariat literature. Choe’s description of terror casts, however, not a prospect for a new order, but the extreme despair. In this sense, the disastrousness in Choe’s novels should be reassessed as related to the maximized pessimism rather than to optimism about historical development.