강소천 동화에 나타난 월남의식과 서사의 징환

Abstract

This article aims to reexamine Kang So-Cheon’s literature based on the consciousness of defection to South Korea shown in the void between dream and reality described in the children’s literature and juvenile novels of Kang So-Cheon who defected to South Korea alone in December, 1950. So far, Kang So-Cheon’s literature has been discussed in two ways in terms of educational children’s literature and anti-communistic children’s literature. However, when we read his works created after his defection to South Korea closely, we can understand how the traces of pain and frustration in Kang So-Cheon’s heart for the defection to South Korea are associated with his literature and build the world of his literature. This study takes as its chief text Kang So-Cheon’s works dealing with the matters of memory about the war, separation, hometown, or family such as <The Photo Studio Taking Pictures of Dream>, <The House Selling Dream>, <Flowery Shoes>, <A Person Making Flowery Shoes>, <Missing Echo>, and <The Village where Sunflowers Bloom> in order to identify his consciousness about defection to South Korea and also uses as its auxiliary text his other children’s literature, juvenile novels, or essays to develop the discussion. First, in Kang So-Cheon’s works, memory about his hometown and the return of his suppressed trauma become the chief motif to lead the narrative. His hometown in his dream is only suggested in distance just like a piece of landscape but cannot return as the place of concrete memory. It can be said that to Kang So-Cheon, the experience to defect to South Korea is the world of ‘absence’ where everything is deleted, and it is the aspect shown in the process of repeating constant longing for ‘presence’ and frustration. Second, in Kang So-Cheon’s juvenile novels, consciousness of violent reality and nomads’ consciousness of anxiety are overlapped, and this produces a distorted narrative structure due to the internal suppression and self-censorship. In his narrative, memory about the war is expressed not beyond the memory agreed in that time. The characters that cannot be included in the existing order due to the discord to the reality exert violence to others in the aspects of abnormality and defectiveness, and also, they enforce maternal love of deformity not realizing how violent the act is. As above, Kang So-Cheon’s literature works as a means of traces of suppressed memory and atonement about the defection to South Korea, and this can be seen from his work titled as [I am a Coward] published in 1961. He makes a character named ‘Sunam’ and insists about the external severe violence that “one should take either one of them”: adaptation or resistance. Like this, through literature, he defines the properties of ‘I’ and ‘others’ as the common signs of ‘a weaker to ideology’, and he draw a portrait of petty persons defecting to South Korea and struggling for the tightrope walking of ethics and survival.