추존되고 격하되는 혁명의 역사 : 60年式 전향소설 - 최정희, 『인간사』(1960-64)

Abstract

This study aims to interpret Choi Jeong-hee’s novel Ingan-sa (Human History, 1960-64) as a text designed both to elevate and to demote the “Tokyo Days”─the phase of the colonial era when ideologically engaged youth were active in Tokyo─in an effort to summon and bequeath that history to the April Revolution. First, this study focuses on the strategy of posthumously commemorating the revolutionary origins of the socialist movement during the colonial era, which undergirds the novel’s structural and thematic organization. Although the chronicle of the protagonist, who has defected from socialism, is imbued with a strong anti-communist discourse, the narrative simultaneously reveals the guilt of a figure whose career of ideological conversion implicates himself, in retrospect, in the countless deaths of the late colonial period and the Korean War. In seeking to escape the aftermath of his conversion, the protagonist─delegated to represent the converts─restores the “Tokyo Days” by invoking the dead as comrades, henceforth undertaking the task of linking the history of the socialist movement to the contemporaneous revolution of April 19. In post-liberation South Korea, the legitimacy to recall the experience of the socialist movement was predicated on a prior deviation from socialism, and Ingan-sa constructs this rupture through a narrative trajectory in which the ideology─framed as an “ideological fever” or “feverish socialism”─collapses, leading the protagonist to ideological conversion. This study critically examines the novel’s representation of ideological conversion, particularly the protagonist’s renunciation of the “ism” in favor of “love.” Finally, this study explicates the narrative logic by which the devalued motive for the protagonist’s conversion is revalued through its transformation into familialism, thereby reinscribing his legacy by recognizing his commitment to reproducing the April 19 Generation. After his conversion, the protagonist attempts to construct a family, raising children in the absence of a female character; within the narrative, in which these children are destined to become the agents of future revolution, he, holding the “Tokyo Days” as an archetype of familial memory, comes to bequeath the origin of revolution to the April 19 Generation. This study thus traces how the protagonist’s letter for conversion develops into a family history of revolutionary succession, homologous to how socialism is retrospectively exalted by the converts. Recalling the “Tokyo Days” in the scene of April 19 signifies the revalorization of the socialist movement of the colonial era as a foundational moment of South Korea’s first revolution. The converted subject who had once betrayed the “Tokyo Days” addresses his responsibility for the historical traumas of the late colonial period and the Korean War by memorializing the “Tokyo Days.” The male subject─whose immersion in the realm of sexuality leads to his derailment from commitment to the revolution─now assumes the familial duty of reproduction and care for the next generation, hence completing the transmission of the “Tokyo Days” into the future. Both the kernel events of the protagonist’s departure from, and eventual bequeathal of, the “Tokyo Days” are permeated by the novel’s treatment of ideological conversion─the central axis of its narrative, whereby ideology is displaced by sexuality. As this study has demonstrated, the history, elevated and demoted by the converted subject established as the (post)colonial subject in Ingan-sa, is constituted as the very history of conversion. It is not socialism per se, in the narrative, but the convert’s experiences of activism, defection, and family history─both the motive and the consequence of his conversion─that are ultimately inherited by the revolutionary present of 1960.