광주, 그리고 우리에 관하여 - 1980년대 후반 김영현, 임철우, 최윤의 5.18 관련 소설을 중심으로

Abstract

Kim Young-hyeon, Im Cheol-woo, and Choi Yoon, the generations born in the 1950s and just grown up in 1980, wrote novels about 5.18 before and after the June Uprising of 1987. The fact that these works still remain the most important ‘may novels’ in literary history suggests that the problem consciousness of this generation can be an important reference point for contemplating the 87regime as the ‘old present’. In this paper, noting that the 5.18 narrative of this generation was constructed in a way that rethinks the notion of ‘we’, tried to specify the meaning of these writer’s creation of ‘May Novel’ started with the 87regime and interpretive and ethical judgment about the ‘May Gwangju’. Kim Young-hyeon's “Fire cries”, which took the structural identity of national violence into question, interprets 5.18 as a victim’s narrative, even giving up the narrative probabilities. This interpretive judgment is problematic in that it stems from the guilt (ethical judgment) of the generation Kim Young-hyun called ‘our generation’. Im Cheol-woo’s Spring Day, created with the intention of restoring 5.18 as a ‘documentary form’, is a work in which the desire for representation and the desire for fiction are in conflict, unlike general interpretations. This is because unlike the first half, which strongly reveals ‘fictional desire’, centering on the chronology of the Han’s family, the mid-to-late half of Spring Day converges in a narrative style that is faithful to the ‘desire of factual representation’. This gap stems from Im Cheol-woo’s ethical judgment, who was unable to reconcile with the reality that 5.18 has been organized into history since the establishment of the 87regime. And this impossibility of reconciliation is presented in a more complex and impressive way in Choi Yun's “There A Petal Silently Falls”. In this regard, it should be noted that ‘we’ is set as the narrators of chapters 3, 6, and 10. In the work, ‘we’ is set to go on a trip to find the sister(girl) of a dead friend. Through this trip, ‘we’ realizes that we are a ‘community that cannot be revealed’. This is because the ‘our relationship’ that appears in the work is all urged to die or leave. Prologue's narrator approves us as a ‘community that cannot be revealed’ by not saying ‘we’ anymore at the end of the trip. The notion of ​​’we’ revealed in their novels differs little by little. However, it is common in that they are sensitive to the weight and responsibility of the word ‘we’. In that sense, the importance of this generation’s ‘May novel’ is that it has been recorded in the history of literature without forgetting the fact that many deaths still exist within our ‘relationship’, which had been unified by the cause of democratization after the 1987 regime.