김훈 소설에 나타난 몸담론 -「화장」을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper analyzes body discourse which is represented in Kim Hoon's short story, 「Hwajang」(「화장」). 「Hwajang」 is a work which requires readers to consider the four inevitable phases of life : birth, old age, sickness, and death. Man is born, gets old, gets sick and dies. A young woman, Choo Eunjoo(추은주), me (the narrator), suffering from prostatitis, and my wife (the narrator's wife), who passed away from a brain tumor; each character stands respectively for youth, old age, and death. All of us spend our youthful days like ‘Choo Eunjoo’(추은주), but as time goes by, get old like 'me', and in the end, die of incurable diseases like my 'wife'. Through lots of names of body parts and various expressions involving the body, 「Hwajang」 makes a panorama and foregrounds the problem with the four phases of life. The work deals with problems with the body from start to finish. This work covers a variety of topics like the inevitable phases of a life, a body's independence and a body being acted by others, ethical taboos, medicalization of death, capitalized bodies, commercialized genders, genders and points of view, etc. The short story, 「Hwajang」(「화장」) includes abstruse philosophical considerations on a human being's birth, old age, sickness, and death for a short discourse time, four days, by arranging binary oppositions closely such as body and mind, youth and being old, life and death, makeup and cremation, male and female, self and others, one's eyes and objects that are stared. I think Kim Hoon wants to tell through his work that body, youth, and life surpass mind, old age, and death in postmodern eras.