조세희 문학을 통해 본 1970년대 산업사회와 ‘희망’의 문제 : 개발독재 시대의 윤리와 부(2)

Abstract

The rapid industrialization of Korean society in the 1970-80s was led by government. This policy caused negative social change that the gap between the rich and poor was ever widening. Cho Se-hee who was a representative writer in 1970s had self-identity as 'the first generation of industrialization.' This paper examines his literary themes of the restoration of morality and the realization of distribution justice through his whole works, and the process of his literary creativity being exhausted because of his moral severity For the above discussion, this paper first looked at the realistic dilemma and the point of artistic chaos that existed behind powerful moralist requests. Firstly, The Dwarf, his representative novel, has the ambivalent attitude; on one hand, it asserts the morality in front of the crowd devoted to survival struggle or criticizes the inhumane agenda of the modern industrialization, but on the other, the helplessness and anxiety feelings are caught in the mood of novel. Secondly, this paper focused on the point that the elite who became social middle class were criticized severely in Cho's novels. Because their attitude smells hypocrisy. The author described the elite as the hypocritical group that consumed moral compassion as a proof for proving their moral virtue while concentrating on accumulation of secular interest. In this article, the criticism of the writer toward the middle class commented through the concept of 'the perversity of the heart' by borrowing Kant 's view of morality. In addition, the dichotomy of good and evil, which is criticized by Cho's literary limit, is not to be criticized as a result of limited recognition of reality in contemporary Korean society, but rather as a result of recognizing an impossibility of judgment on the difference between good and ill in real situation that can not be defined or condemned by dichotomy. Therefore, this dichotomy should be viewed as a moralistic narrative strategy that is required to settle an indispensable attitude. However, the sense of responsibility to create hope in the 'closed frame' of the industrial society leads to the end of the novel writing by Cho. In this article, his late works were subjected to the obsession for the restoration of morality, and it was closed another genre such as a reportage or theological narrative: the former is a writing without 'representation', the latter is a writing without 'realistic facts'. His late works are beyond the level of realistic representation. Cho's literary works has been showed a realistic struggle that had to be handled as a writer who had contemplated the future of the community in the self-consciousness of 'the first generation of industrialization.'