구보의 픽션, 박태원의 메타픽션 -「소설가 구보씨의 일일」 연구

Abstract

Park, Tae-won’s Soseolga Gubossiui Ilil (A Day of Novelist Gubo) is his representative work and often considered the genuine starting point of Korean literary modernism. Specifically, it is perhaps the first novel to display a methodological consideration of the writing process, revealing the consciousness of the novelist in the form of Gubo, the author’s mask or alter-ego. There has been a wide array of research on this novel and the author’s own description of his methodology in the term “Modernology(考現學),” an approach seeking to observe the contemporary reality and record it again into language. Park, Tae-won’s unique writing process is not only the key to defining his literature as a whole, but also a basis for the construction of a genealogy of modernist Korean literature. However if anything is yet left to be elucidated about his work it is the meta- character of his novels. There is a particular need to reread Soseolga Gubossiui Ilil from the perspective of metafiction, but the term metafiction here means something more than just the ‘novelist‘s novel,’ a novel in which the author’s act of writing appears. An essential exploration of the character of the novel as a genre, of the (im)possibility of representing the world through language, is central to the meaning of metafiction. Soseolga Gubossiui Ilil exposes a process of thinking the novel as a thoroughly artificial ‘text’ while continuously ‘re-perceiving’ its narration. This is because Park, Tae-won perceived the semiotic character of language, frequently explained as the relation of signifier and signified. Park, Tae-won, who tried to construct the novel within language even as he perceived its limits, can be described as the first metafictional author.