중립불가능의 시대와 회색의 좌표―이병주의 "관부연락선", "지리산"에 나타난 지식의 표상을 중심으로―

Abstract

This study aims to establish Lee’s awareness of the problem in The Gwan-Bu Ferry Ship and The Mountain Jiri. The main characters of the two novels are portrayed as those who try to maintain neutrality in the face of intense ideological confrontation. This attitude has been a target of criticism, referred to as ‘gray thinking’. However, Lee’s neutrality should be seen as a product of his will to maintain his faith, even while enduring criticism from both sides, and a problem of colonialism that has still not been overcome after liberation. What’s noteworthy is that Lee Byung-joo spends considerable weight on portraying the main character’s intellectual bias and self-consciousness as an intellectual in the process of shaping neutrality. Yoo Tae-rim and Park Tae-young are figures who experienced an intellectual hiatus through the end of the colonial era, when the public education system collapsed. Even school institutions at the end of the Japanese colonial era were reduced to a channel for mobilizing student soldier, and reading, which was the only way to satisfy their intellectual yearnings, was often considered rebellious action regardless of the content of the book. To intervene in the distribution of knowledge in these times is soon was forced to as a political context. Furthermore, the novel, The Gwan-Bu Ferry Ship and The Mountain Jiri can be seen as a kind of relationship. Yoo Tae-rim and Park Tae-young share common ground in that they were the so-called student soldier generation, but their subsequent moves show a significant contrast. Yoo Tae-rim become a teacher after liberation and meddles students who are differentiated according to the ideologic side logic and tries to maintain a balanced view. However, with the assassination of Yeo Un-hyung, he is now engaged in a campaign against the single government in earnest, and he is missing along with the Korean War. The second half of The Mountain Jiri begins at the point where the epic of The Gwan-Bu Ferry Ship has stopped, after which Park Tae-young takes the path of being a partizan alone, criticizing liberalism, nihilism and communism. The fundamental desire he found at the end of his last intellectual quest was to have a status as an agent who was not subjugated to anything. Although their story boils down to the failure of neutrality, Lee wanted to show that failure in novel was not a failure as a novel.