이문구의 「해벽(海壁)」에 나타난 근대화 프로젝트와 탈식민주의

Abstract

Lee Moon-koo's medium-length novel 'The Sea Barrier' is a problem novel which is 'a criticism of the modernization' that results in a coercion for poor fishermen's sacrifice because the modernizing work for Sapogot Cape on the west coast in Choongchong-do Province was enforced by anti-fishermen power and 'ecological imagination' as well as 'a cirtical viewpoint' progress in which the regime of Park Chaung-hee reigning as a dominating power behind the modernization and the dominating sturcture of the United States ran counter to each other in a complex manner. The modernization of Sapogot Cape is promoted holding a mortgage on the fishermen's sacrifice and on women's sexual suppression and sacrifice. Supposing that the national modernizaing project coerced the fisher-men's sacrifice violently, the dominating power of the United States as a form of n대-colonialism is believed to work in the process of the women's sacrifice and sexual exploitation. The story develops with Cho Dung-man as its hereo, who gets ruined gradually in the offices of Shipowner and Head of Maritime Cooperative Association, but his passion for protecting Sapogot Cape is frustrated by the modernizing project promoted antionally. Though Cho Dung-man has a post-centralist mind critical of the military regime and the United States existing behind the power of modernization promotion, he can't but be helpless before such enormous power. The modernization criticizaed by the novelist in 'The Sea Barrier' is, in other words, a development of simultaneity in non-simultaneity and a development of non-equality. But 'The Sea Barrier' didn't describe more than the ecological destruction caused by the disappearance of sea-mud field. In other words, it didn't reach the stage of proving generally the logical emptiness of development that devastates human beings in the course of destroying the natural ecological system and the irrestorable natural environment to be caused by the modernizing project.