「布衣交集」의 眞情과 虛僞

Abstract

Poui-gyojip is a Korean classical Chinese medium-length novel written in the late 19th century. The narrator of Poui-gyojip illuminated the male and female protagonists with two contradictory views, the view for amusement(the author’s view that saw Cho-ok as an object of play) and the view of sincerity(the author’s another view that try to understand the inside of Cho-ok sincerely). The beginning of the work was dominated by the view for amusement, but since the middle of the work, the center of gravity shifted towards the view of sincerity. At the end of the work, the view of sincerity was completely dominant, and especially in the finishing scene, only the view of sincerity that saw the male and female protagonists sympathetically remained. However, in view of the tragic destiny of Cho-ok, the author of Poui-gyojip did not fully express the tragic embedded in the work. The reason for this was that the author, who did not understand the consciousness of Cho-ok, chose the way of the comic from the starting point of the work and then illuminated Cho-ok with two contradictory views. The peculiarity of Poui-gyojip lay in Cho-ok's idea that defined ‘affair’ as ‘pure friendship’. However, the ‘ethics of love’ proposed by Cho-ok was hardly recognized as justified for the following two reasons. First, the author of Poui-gyojip could not set up appropriate character relationships for searching issues seriously. The relationship between Yi-saeng and Cho-ok family was a major obstacle to judge Cho-ok's desire as sincerity, not false consciousness. Secondly, there is a big logical flaw in Cho-ok's idea. Cho-ok pursued spiritual sympathy between best friends, and furthermore publicly insisted that the physical relationship was legitimate. But a friendship and physical love are separate issues. In order to avoid logical contradictions, Cho-ok must justify the love of married men and women in the dimension of affirmation of desire by abandoning the name of pure friendship, but she did not choose this way.