근대전환기, 고전서사 전통의 이월과 갱신 - 채만식의 『심청전』 개작을 중심으로

Abstract

What role our classical narratives played still remained to be elucidated through the pe-riod of upheaval called modern transition. In other words, what did modern novels receive from classical narratives and what did they newly avoid and renew? To examine these questions is the ultimate purpose of this article. Understanding premodern narrative liter-ature should be a precondition in order to illuminate this properly. However the knowl-edge about this is quite negative and also unstable because the conventional notion that premodern narrative literature is outdated and stereotyped is predominant. However, those evaluations can be the result of assessing premodern Korean narrative literature by the standard of Western modern novels. The characteristics of Korean classi-cal narratives such as ‘recitation’ and ‘attentive listening’ unlike Western modern novels were almost not considered. But judging from several testimonies and materials, literary achievement of classical narratives had immense influence on many modern writers after the liberation of Korea as well as colonial period. The representative writer is Chae Man-Sik. He was able to create his masterpiece like Takryu and Taepyeong Cheonhachun by actively using narrative methods of Pansori nov-els since 1935. As a matter of fact, in case of The Tale of Shim Cheong, the story was revised four times under the title Shim Bongsa. The point of revision was to eliminate fantastic elements, fortify reality, and to change happy ending to tragic narrative. Despite these te-nacious efforts it is difficult to say that these novels successfully transitioned to modern novels. It is because though the writer had a great understanding in Pansori, his novel was not able to resonate with the narrative spirit of Pansori novels which The Tale of Shim Cheong had achieved. The novel was in some aspect a mere revision of the tradition of classical novels by the absolute standard of narrative rules of Western modern novels.