상생과 불협화음의 경계에 선 말년성(lateness) - 박완서의 「빨갱이 바이러스」를 중심으로

Abstract

Park Wan-seo's novels on old age are summed up into an inclusive worldview of symbiosis and coexistence, focusing on research on dementia in old age, which focused on early works, or works that gained public popularity in the 2000s. In the gap between timely and content studies, her later work "Ppalgaengi Virus" was classified as a study of war novels, and the late-life history of the novel was not properly evaluated. Therefore, this study aims to examine new aspects uniform to Park Wan-seo's novels on old age while referring to Edward Said's lateness. The process of searching for differences from existing novels by analyzing them in the same order as the novel reveals the political nature of the differences contained in the present. This means that there is the (im)possibility of resolution of the subject represented by each person. In Park Wan-seo's later work, the characters representing women, motherhood, and old age have broken conventional wisdom to go against readers' expectations with a realistic and self-centered attitude. In their confessions, issues of reconciliation, forgiveness and sensation exist as impossible conditions for possibility. Finally, the narrator who remembers the memory of the murder of the family due to war realizes the weight of the historical wound that has the same identity as the three characters and the social other but cannot be connected with anyone. As such, Park Wan-seo's “Ppalgaengi Virus” is outside the conclusion of a positive synthesis, consistent with the expectations that the reader has because of her lateness. Above all, this novel portrays the dissonance of life, representing the unreasonable and difficult events of everyday life and death. Accepting continuous change as a writer, like life in old age, is the reason Park Wan-seo's “Ppalgaengi Virus” should be accepted as a late style.