황순원 소설에 나타난 뿌리의 심연과 접목의 수사학

Abstract

Hwang Sun-won is an author who configures possibility of humanity within the historical turmoil of colonialization, the division, and the Korean War. He often uses a rhetoric related with the image of human being as a damaged tree; he traces out entangled roots of hurting relationships as well as he depicts apparent features of the flora. In his novels such as A Descendant of Cain, Human Grafting, Trees Stand on a Slope, he shows us that every individual is no more than a tree standing dangerously on a very steep slope regardless of whether one is an idealist or a realist in political terms. He draws our attention to human tragedy that is an inevitable outcome of the internalized war of all against all; what we have at hand is only conflict and betrayal. At this point, his rhetoric of grafting emerges as a kind of remedy for beings-in-crisis or the wounded. “A Sip of Water” illustrates his literary, aesthetic principle of hospitality for the other. Just a sip of water can quench the thirst of a damaged tree or human being that undergoes grafting as initiation. Writing fiction, for Hwang Sun-won, is a kind of growing a tree or grafting a damaged tree onto a new life.