재난서사와 퇴행하는 공동체 - 박서련, 김유담, 최진영의 소설을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper is a plan to report about an analysis of disaster narratives before and after the pandemic that the ideological inertia of existing society produces disasters and is further the cause of insensitivity and incompetence toward disaster situations. The novels of Park Seo-ryun, Kim Yu-dam, and Choi Jin-young were analyzed as the main subjects in order to derive the degenerative aspects of a community where the illusion of normality and customary ideology operate. In Chapter 2, the foundation of the relationship between the fantasy of normality and disaster narratives is laid out through Jeong Yi-hyeon's short story “Sampung Department Store”. Jeong Yi-hyeon's novel performed the work of memory and mourning with a new relationship that superimposed the subject's life on the place where the other was erased, in order to restore the uniqueness of the individual victims who were discarded in collective memory. In Chapter 3, Park Seo-ryun's “Disease” and Kim Yu-dam's “Special Disaster Area”, which were planned after the pandemic, were analyzed. The two novels showed the moral panic of ‘barbarism disguised as humanity.’ The essence of this barbarism was the secret sexual solidarity and helplessness of men, and the aid and acquiescence of female enforcers who protected patriarchal customs. The conventional ideologies of the existing world maintained their order by sexualizing the most vulnerable beings, female children, or by subjecting them to hatred, discrimination, and stigma. The two novels each showed the image of a community that is silent and tolerates, and the regressive image of a community that is maintained only at the expense of someone's sacrifice. In Chapter 4, Choi Jin-young's full-length novel 『To the place where the sun sets』 was analyzed. This work clearly revealed the violent tragedy caused by social inertia and the illusion of mediocrity. The people who left for other countries were already faced with the disaster of survivalism even before the disaster. This suggests that this novel is a project to expose the helplessness of the conventional system and the logic of survival of the fittest behind the disaster narrative. Also, the new world of the male characters was a repetition of a world that had already experienced collapse once. They could not escape the public system of ‘family-society-state’. The queer romance of female characters and scenes of female solidarity open up the possibility of new relationships while exposing the powerlessness of existing laws on the other side. The works reviewed in this paper point out that the illusion of normality leads to the disappearance of humanity and the regression of the community through a common strategy of placing visible violence at the front of the narrative and concealed violence at the back.