『탁류』의 토포스

Abstract

This paper has examined the out-door view of a city as a specific place and as an endoscopic map, which is a motivating power that operates the out-door view. Thus, topos is proved to be a motive as an literary discourse that drives the plots of the novel. It is meaningful because topos enables us to unconsciously analyze the factors that restrain our lives with various viewpoints examining the experience structures built by the basic culture based on the special places. Takryu contains a kind of door-view spatial text which swirls Gunsan streets and has an inner spatial text acting as a 'hidden dimension', which has a close relationship with the door-view spatial text. This inner dimension is not a physical spatiality, but a kind of spatial implication, which abstract concepts have, though not spatial in themselves. In other words, the spatial implication is spatial qualities that the most universal things like social, religious, political, and moral models of the world necessarily have in order for human beings to give meaning to their surroundings. In Takryu spaces like ports, roads, railroads, schools, governmental offices, police offices, banks, brothels, provincial hospitals, and crematoriums are described in detail through the daily lives of Jeongjusa's family and his neighbors. In addition, the names of stores and the location of buildings in the novel proved almost the same, so the work has been evaluated as a report of the contemporary life of Gunsan citizens during the Japanese colonial era. Especially, as seen in the statement, "Midujang is the heart of Gunsan", the harmful consequences of colonial exploitation policy could be understood as a typical form of fetishistically materialistic capitalist phenomena. Thus, lives of marginal men like Jeongjusa and Chobong slowly and routinely fall behind in the maze of the planned city, Gunsan, which was built according to the city reorganization plan around Midujang, the center of colonial exploitation. On the other hand, there are hidden spatial signs, as abstract concepts, behind the visible places. First, seen from the aspect of the colonial political structure, Gunsan Port is a dynamic force which enables the narrative of this novel to continue as the symbol of a hub-city through which Japanese exploit rice produced in the fertile and wide Gimje Plain. In the aspect of educational structure, it was impossible for Joseon people to be born again as modern subjects through the colonial Japanese educational system, the purpose of which was to train modern rules to yield, at best, lower class officials. In this situation, the collapsing process of these characters cannot be explained simply with their individual ability. Rather, their collapse was forced by the political and educational environment of the colonial era. Thus, topos in Takryu enables us to understand not only the theme of the novel, but also the historical, philosophical, and cultural prospects of the region in order to produce different meanings according to the contexts of each space. Therefore, the characters of the novel Takryu in the colonial social structure were like the sedimentary material of Gunsan, which was swept away, but didn't know how to overcome the situation, and for whom the situation, or the influence of the space, becomes 'fate'.