4·19문학과 혁명의 아카이브들

Abstract

How to name the series of pro-democracy movements that took place between February 28 and April 26, 1960, in all walks of life, remains a matter of debate more than 60 years later, but in 1960, the most widely used and influential term was “revolution.” The aura of poetic purity that surrounded “4·19” was extraordinary. This was also manifested in an explosive movement to witness and document the revolutionary moment. Students who participated in the uprising and journalists who covered the scene began compiling memoirs and narratives as soon as the events were over, and in the two-and-a-half months from May 19, 1960, the day of the May 19 Memorial Day, to the end of July 1960, five poetry anthologies, three memoirs, and four photo collections by different editors were published in Seoul alone. This paper re-examines the ‘special issues’ of leading magazines in June/July 1960, and the contemporaneous outpouring of literary and memoir collections, from the perspective of the ‘first archival work’ on the 4·19. The special issues of Sasanggye and YeoWon were photojournalistic in nature, sharing the pathos of the revolution through collages of photographic images and texts, while the many collections of letters and memoirs pushed for a common narrative and historicization of the 19th, helping to build a narrative for a community of memory. More importantly, however, the outpouring of writing and images between April and July 1960, and the archival fervor with which they were collected, compiled, published, and shared, attest to the fact that there was an uprising here. The effect of the first archive on 4·19 is to document the scene of the uprising, to make us think about how we should remember 4·19, and thus to reorient our thinking about the uprising and revolution of 1960, which is why we need to expand the concept and scope of 4·19 literature and the way we interpret it.