한국 소설과 분단의 아비투스-토지개혁의 경험과 민족 관념의 균열

Abstract

This article aims to study the habitus of division expressed in Korean fiction by focusing on structuralization of division, rather than on the habitus’ macroscopic view on Korean literature. To do so, the article keys in on the fact that North Korea’s land reform in March 1946 was one of the decisive events that led to political and economic division, which would break down nationalist idealism. It also aims to study a few examples from Korean fiction in regards to the reform’s aftermath. These examples showed when the two Koreas’ political and economic love-hate relations emerged as the division became structuralized after the land reform. The land reform was implemented as a socioeconomic measure, and authors with different ideological and class base had different reactions. Lee Gi-young and Lee Tae-jun regarded north korean land reform as triggering the modernization of socialism. Chae Man-sik, meanwhile, believed reforming farmland would be a way of eliminating remnants of Japanese culture following Korea’s liberation and used the North Korean land reform as a useful frame of reference. Writing from the landlord’s perspective, Hwang Soon-won turned the essence of the land reform into the reality where ideological violence and division, and primal possessiveness of the people are rampant. Hwang’s novel, <Descendants of Cain>, was the rare feature novel in the 1950s whose narrative was based on experience. This text also dismissed the land reform’s radicalism and primal violence, rather than the great cause of the movement, as opened possibility of interpreting them as the habitus of anti-communism.