이기영 소설의 서사공간과 장소성

Abstract

This paper attempts to reread the novel of Lee Ki-young in terms of narrative space and placeness. The narrative space and placeness of Lee Ki-young’s novel responds to the deepening expansion of spatial imagination rooted in the writer's own experience which is divided into farming area and town, a series of factory and mine as a specific place outside of the two spaces. In Lee Ki-young’s novel, Rural Village is the base of place experience and the center of spatial imagination. The home of poor tenant farmers appearing in Lee Ki-young's rural novel preserves the placeness inherited through tradition and has a closed space that accepts natural order as fate, but gradually opens to the outside beyond the boundaries of the place. The feature, Hometown(고향), is a crystal plate that converges and expands the typical spatial composition and placeness of rural narratives established in the early middle of Lee Ki-young’s novel, and symbolizes the special place love for rural space through a return of hometown motif. In the novel of Lee Ki-young, the process of expanding and deepening the writer's spatial imagination appears as a ‘city’. Seoul, which is depicted in cold and heartless images in works such as “The Wonbo”(원보), “The Money”(돈), and “The puerperd”(산모), is emerging as a place dominated by the placelessness of being rooted out from the true place of life experienced by poor farmers and workers. The narrative of mining villages and spaces called Manchuria, which emerged around the 1940s, inherently has the character of compromise writing, which had no choice but to meet the Japanese national policy. “Dongcheonhong”(동천홍) and Gwangsanchon(광산촌) show the process of seeking artist self-esteem through deepening spatial imagination based on their own experiences. The Son of the Earth(대지의 아들) and The Land of Maiden(처녀지) also reveal problems in that they are responding to the national policy imposed by Japan, but in terms of expanding spatial imagination and restoring place, it means one of the plans that writer Lee Ki-young has long dreamed of.