한·일 근현대문학에 나타난 생활사적 의미에서 「전당포(典當舖)」가 미친 영향

Abstract

For instance, Kenzo is deemed to see the pawnbroker’s shop as a space in which human’s insatiable desire for wealth (富) becomes laid bare plainly as what we humans lack continue to deceive, and to be deceived, by ourselves. K, the protagonist in Bincheo (Poor Wife), albeit an intelligentsia educated in China and Japan just as Kenzo is, is described in it as an obscure, lesser known writer whom no one but his wife recognize. What poverty means to Uno Koji indispensably relates to the pawnbroker’s shop. The pawnbroker’s shop appeared in Heotganan (Inside the Hut) tends to dually imply to its protagonist Yamaji as a consequence of the reversal and metamorphosis in its function: it first starts as a private space which provides him with a channel through which he is able to borrow money he needs as he had to have all his belongings foreclosed for his personal reasons, and it later ends up remaining a public space in which if the money he borrowed from the pawnbroker’s shop and those generated with time according to the interest rates it determined cannot be repaid as scheduled, what he previously left to the pawnbroker’s shop as security for a loan might not return to him as their original owner, or their original ownership would be transferred to some else’s. The author, Yeom Sang-seop, describes in Sookbakgi (Chronicle of Lodging) the everyday physical and mental sufferings of Koreans living in Japan during the period of the Japanese colonization through its protagonist, Beon Chang-gil. The lives of Koreans in Japan during the colonial time have nothing to do with, and are not benefited from, their social positions as the colonial subjects in it, no matter how high and successful theirs might be. The pawnbroker’s shop as a space exerted its influences on the then lives of the populace during the colonial period and in the middle of the rise of the modernism/modernist movement, started initially from the West, that led to affecting the then Korean society on a massive scale via Japan; it therefore represents the then lives of the populace after having undergone the relative ups and downs of this turbulent period. Accordingly, as the lifestyles of people today rely heavily on currency, it is commonly detected that their thoughts and behaviors tend to be determined by the currency economy to which they are subjected, the ethics of the relationships among humans broken, and the human relationships formed and maintained depending on whether or not to own currency.