김광주의 『아방궁』과 「상해시절회상기」 연구 : 상해와 서울 공간 인식을 중심으로

Abstract

By examining literary representations of Shanghai and Seoul in Epang Palace (Abangkung), Kim Gwang-ju’s novel published in the 1970s, the present study seeks to explore in a more multifaceted manner continuity, discontinuity, or changes in his perceptions of Shanghai, which hitherto have been discussed only in terms of the writer’s early works. To Kim, Shanghai, where he had spent his youth, was not only a space signifying passion, romance, and revolution as his “second home” but also the starting point of his literary works. Consequently, in understanding his literary world, indispensable is an examination of the space called “Shanghai.” Kim published recollections of his time in Shanghai from a retrospective viewpoint in December 1965 and January 1966, over 20 years since his return to Korea, and published the novel Epang Palace in 1970. In this respect, existing interpretations that the problematics of his early works, set in Shanghai, was discontinued after the Liberation (1945) from Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) need to be reconsidered. Kim’s Recollections of Days in Shanghai (Sanghae Sijeol Hoesanggi) features comrades of diverse political ideologies and leanings. Judging from the fact that this work was a post factum reconstruction coinciding with the normalization of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan (1965), during which the question of settling the colonial past emerged as an issue, such recollections hold the significance of reinstating comrades, from the perspective of “here and now,” who were forgotten under anti-communism consolidated through the Cold War system and dictatorial regimes after the Liberation. This novel shows that he once again came to ponder on the space called “Shanghai” after undergoing the Liberation, April 19 Revolution (1960), and normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan. In the novel, Shanghai is depicted as a problematic space strictly divided into spaces respectively for Korean revolutionaries and spies but free movement between the two spheres is possible because the figures are all of the same ethnicity, outwardly indistinguishable. On the other hand, Seoul after the normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan, which is portrayed as similar to Shanghai from the 1930s onward, is exposed as degenerating into a semi-colony, as with Shanghai in the past, amidst the processes of earning foreign currencies and modernizing the homeland. In the novel, memories of independence movements in Shanghai, though summoned as grounds of legitimacy for national reconstruction and the April 19 Revolution, are shown to be faced with the destiny of inevitable disappearance and betrayal with the flow of history. The fact that the independence fighter’s daughter, who is linked to memories of colonial rule and independence movements in Shanghai, cannot but die in the end problematizes the question of inheritance surrounding the historical significance assigned to independence movements in Shanghai.