한강의 『소년이 온다』와 홀로코스트 문학- 고통과 치욕의 증언과 원한의 윤리를 중심으로

Abstract

Against the daily growing tendency of perversion and defamation of the Gwangju Democratic Uprising in our society, the novel Human Acts by Han Kang, which plays the role of testimony evoking the true remembrance of Gwangju, focuses more on the physical, mental suffering, as well as the humiliation, that the people there experienced at that time, and the resentment that drives their action, than on the relatively well-known, abstracted historical facts. In the point that this novel testifies to the experience of people who are exposed to extreme violence, as well as the damage of the things that should not have been damaged, it recalls the Holocaust literature left by the survivors of the mass extermination of Jews such as Promo Levi and Jean Améry. In this paper we intend to read the novel Human Acts with the Holocaust literature by Levi and Améry. First, the questions posed in this novel, namely a lacuna in testimony and the impossibility of bearing witness, are examined in the context of the argument of Agamben and Levi. Then, aspects of the physical, mental suffering and humiliation that the characters go through are discussed with Améry’s essay. Finally, the ethical character of the resentment, defined in Améry's essay as “the emotional source of every genuine morality”, is explored and based on it, the emotion of the resentment is analyzed, tormenting the characters of the novel as well as reawakening the will to live or sustaining the unhappy life.