박완서 소설의 멜로드라마적 상상력에 나타난 정치성 고찰 -『살아 있는 날의 시작』론

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore Wan-seo Park’s novels in the historico-philosophical context. This type of research has not been made enough yet. For example, The Beginning of the Living Days(1980) has been studied mainly within the genealogy of ‘feminine novels’ written later such as A Standing Woman(1985) and Are You Still Dreaming?(1989), and it was primarily desirable. Considering that the period when the novel was serialized(October 2, 1979 ~ May 30, 1980) overlapped with so called ‘The Spring of Seoul’ when Jeong-hee Park’s long dictatorial regime fell and the country was boiling with longing for democratization, it is rather strange not to analyze the structure and theme of the novel in connection the heat of resistance in those days. At the introductory part of the novel, heroine Cheong-hee visits the ‘April 19th National Cemetery’ and mourns for the victims, and this scene is a symbolic moment suggesting implicitly the hidden political unconsciousness of the novel. After the scene, the novel depicts the courageous awakening and abscondence of a woman who has been groaning under the patriarchal value system, and succeeds in meeting accurately contemporary people’s desire to farewell patriarchal dictatorship and to construct a new society. What is important, however, is that such a historico-philosophical character of the novel is not obtained ‘although the novel is melodramatic’ but rather ‘because it is melodramatic.’ According to studies on the history of melodramas by Peter Brooks, Ben Singer, etc., melodrama is essentially a genre embracing both moral anxiety and new expectation felt by people in the time and space of desacralization opened together with the collapse of ancien régime. Melodramas gain their unique popularity by presenting conflicts occurring in such a time and space in a world where good and evil are clearly distinguished and resolving the conflicts dramatically. Referring to these historical studies, we can understand the melodramatic element of The Beginning of the Living Days not only as a ground for the popularity of Wan-seo Park’s novels but also as a subject to be studied seriously in connection to the fact that the novel was written in the time and space opened together with the collapse of the ancien régime (‘Yusin Regime’). What is more, consideration should be given to how dramas of (im)moral passion developing in popular grammar are closely related to the (im)possibility of political situations. The active deviation attempted by heroine Cheong-hee can be called an act to approach the intensity of a true life even in collusion with evil in G. Bataille’s sense, namely, ‘transgression’, and this is related to the possibility opened by the political situation in those days. Nevertheless, Wan-seo Park does not go in the direction of praising the possibility romantically. Such a transgressive act may bring forth the fatal results of the loss of family and the effacement of existence and, moreover, it is a stern reality in those days that it was hardly possible to get a result other than that. When this fact is confronted squarely at the end of the novel, Wan-seo Park’s realistic face will be disclosed clearly.