서발턴은 쓸 수 있는가 : 1970~80년대 민중의 자기재현과 ‘민중문학’의 재평가를 위한 일고

Abstract

This article examines the relation between subaltern(≒the people, Minjung) and writing(≒literature) in order to reconsider the historical status of people’s literature. It explores the self-reproduction of people during the 1970’s~80’s. “People’s Literature” is beyond history, and the word “people’s literature” itself almost became obsolete. This historical oblivion owes to both the dearth of debate within mainstream literature and the self-liquidation of the people’s literature camp. After modern writing and literature was distributed and enjoyed, there existed not only the literature and the history of literature instituted by the literary world and literary media, literature education, literary history, and literary norms, but also the literature and the history of literature which was unwritten or unable to be written. Both sides overlap, and the latter is the “constitutive outside” of the “history of literature.” “People’s literature” was a signifiant that indicated the unwritten. It could potentially be called “the history of people’s literature.” For a literature to be accepted by the autonomous field, it needs to internalize the principles of modern bourgeois literature. However, the “80’s” threatened and toppled these firm institutions and principles with the influx of magazine books, pamphlets, and the spontaneous writings of laborers. The people’s movement and the spontaneous craze for literature formed the popular writing of the 70’s and 80’s, and literature supremacy judged it and ended it. Why did (modern) literature, under certain conditions, give rise to those rough and coarse slogans, reportages, and essays? How should “countercultural” literature such as Korean Artist Proletariat Federation material, propaganda poems from the period of liberation, and literature from the 80’s be evaluated? “Literature” contains within itself the possibility to produce slogans, typical and crude poems, etc. It involves “realism” but goes beyond it. The denial that “slogans” and “leaflets” are literature comes from a mainstream literature that permits only “well-made pottery” into the category of “literature” or “fine literature.” Is a literature (or literary world) which no longer produces slogans, reportage and essays desirable?