일하는 사람의 ‘아플’ 권리 : 1980년대 소설에 나타난 노동자의 질병과 섹슈얼리티

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, new characters, such as workers who have risen as the agents of historical change and student activists, were introduced into Korean novels. The purpose of this paper is to identify the frame of literary reproduction which served as the stage for these unfamiliar characters. For this, this study analyzes the system of literary imagination of the “human body at work at production sites and reproduction sites,” by focusing on three motifs－self-immolation, transformation and devotion. In Chapter 2, this paper discusses how emphasis is put on the worker’s ‘body,’ rather than their ‘mind’ in representative labor novels which highlight the animosity between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ Novels by Hwajin Jeong, Hyeonseok Bang and Jaeseong An, which include contrapuntal placement of scenes where healthy bodies of young male workers are broken and damaged in an instant by industrial accidents or due to governmental authority or the violence of the past, make us question why the main characters and even the author ‘needed’ the worker’s body to be drastically destroyed by industrial accidents or by self-immolation. Chapter 3 focuses on how Hyangsook Kim and Yeonghyeon Kim captured the worker’s body which is in pain, not due to a shocking accident, but as a result of an illness or its aftereffects. Female workers are usually victims to chronic diseases in these novels, and in all cases the deteriorating body is not valued as an example and nor does it become an object of care. What is important is that the characters who suffer from illness do not even have time to suffer quietly in solitude. Considering that the space for characters who gradually suffer has been very small compared to the victims of terrible violence, Yeonghyeon Kim’s novel, which adapted the transformation motif to portray the body of a character that does not receive care after experiencing extreme pain and suffering from its aftereffects, is quite distinctive in its imagination. In Chapter 4, this study focuses on how the body someone ‘wants’ in ‘your’ and ‘my’ everyday life, rather than the body someone ‘needs’ in a hostile relationship between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ was projected in the novels of the era. In the novels by Hyeongseok Bang, Heedam Hong and Hyangsook Kim, female characters are subject to exhausting care labor, both at home and at work. Hyangsook Kim, in particular, created a distinctive female character that is compassionate and devoted despite the extreme labor and displayed a new form of imagination on human vulnerability in her novels. By taking a critical viewpoint towards the imagery in novels on the worker’s illness and sexuality written in the 1980s, in accordance with the notion of the progress of caring, this paper aims to call attention to the pivotal issue of the present time－to reclaim the worker’s ‘right to be ill’ at home and at the workplace.