‘심연’의 시대, ‘벽’의 언어 : 1950년대 ‘비평/위기’의 존재론과 민족(어)문학의 자기구축 테크놀로지

Abstract

This paper examines the link between the project of determining the boundary of national-language literature and the debates about the role of criticism in South Korea during the 1950s. It also examines the discursive logic of this “crisis” which made criticism of this period possible. From liberation and through the 1950s, critic Paek Ch’ŏl, whose works continuously made references to “the crisis of literature,” pointed to the importance of the relationship between “critique” and “crisis” in the philosophical and historical formation of notions of enlightenment and progress. Consciousness about the crisis of culture privileged “the postwar” as a turning point in progressivist historical thought, and a particular critical rhetoric was deployed to this end. Following the formula “being conscious of the crisis=ability to make judgment,” critics emphasized the idea that critical consciousness is what shaped the communal ethos of Korean society and supported the value of literature, and this mindset was penetrated with an excessive self-consciousness about the role of criticism. To put it differently, we might say that this self-consciousness was an awareness about the 1950s as a “turning point” or a “transition period.” As we can see from Paek, a self-awarenss about a sense of crisis stemmed from the fact that while Korean literature was supposed to be going through a “transition period” theoretically-speaking, signs of this transformation were not yet visible. As an independent and organic (ethno)national literature, the so-called “Korean literature,” the imagined topography of which had formed within the historical context of post-colonial nationalism and the Cold War, was neither self-evident nor unified as a concept. We see this in the controversy surrounding the “infiltration” of foreign languages in the 1950s literary field, in the debates about translation and second-hand translation in which a world recalcitrant to unmediated understanding became visible, as well as in the problems of new technologized forms of visuality. These cases suggest that the (ethno)national language could not enjoy the privileged position of being able to securely establish Korean literature as an (ethno)national literature. In order to ensure the legitimacy and cultural unity of the new nation-state “Republic of Korea,” the boundaries of a linguistic community based on the formula “national- language sphere=monolingual society” had to be established. Furthermore, we can say that the discourse on the crisis of national (language) literature was part of an attempt to re-order how its very origins were to be understood.