올림픽의 무의식 : 1987년 6월 항쟁과 88년 서울 올림픽 사이

Abstract

The year 1988 is remembered in Korea not only for the deeply emotional events of the Seoul Olympic Games but also for the beginning of newly established democracy as the aftermath of the Great June Struggle in 1987. The June Struggle is now widely regarded as a political revolution which realized peacefully the desire of Korean people for a democratic government thanks to the participation of the middle class. Though there are criticisms that the middle class who had supported the democratization movement quickly became conservative as soon as the democracy seemed guaranteed institutionally, it is tempting to narrate the events between 87 and 88 as a great success story, as a process of seamless development in a very positive sense. Because the 1988 Seoul Olympics was actually so successful in many ways, it seemed to many to be the crowning moment of modern development of Korea which followed directly the peaceful democratization. This article calls this narrative of success that presupposes implicitly a homogeneous subject like 'Korean People' into question and try to reconstruct various perspectives of disparate subjects such as workers, the urban poor, and middle class citizens at that time on the basis of a careful analysis of some novels from the 1980s which thematize the democratization movement or the Seoul Olympics. They show that there were big scepticisms among democracy activists about the government-driven endeavors to prepare Seoul for the Olympic games as it was politically used as justification of the military dictatorship. Some texts make it also evident that many workers and poor people felt no change in their life even after the so-called democratization and found themselves on the side of the sacrified for the Olympics, while the whole society celebrated and enjoyed 'the world festival'. It is this rift that makes some middle-class characters in Park Wan-seo's short stories suffer from indefinite guilty conscience and anxieties, although they benefited much from the political and economical development of that period. These symptoms of nervousness are signs of the fractured social reality which underlies the time of democratization and the Seoul Olympic Games. It's the Unconscious of the Olympics which the narratives of Korean Success conceal and this article try to describe and to explain.