오태석 희곡 <자전거>의 증상과 환상

Abstract

Oh Tae-Seok's play, <Bicycle>, was created based upon the writer's own memory on the Korean War, which experienced in his youth. The play is famous for its dramatic expression of the tragedy of fratricide via adopting the motive of parricide. A lot of advanced research have been conducted in order to analyze the original meaning of this play, and the discussions have taken two directions, each with its own perspective. The first perspective of the two aims to analyze the peculiar format of the play in which the events progress. The existing perspective has revealed the counterpoint method, which contrasts the irrelevant events of the present and of the history, revealing the internal relevance of the two, as well as the analytic method that mainly exposes the true nature of a hidden event by repeated recollection. Add to this, this study tried to analyze the dramatic truth which is mingled with reality, history and illusion by identifying that the truth of trauma which is finally recollected by the plot, conducting with fore times of flashback and replay, was illusion. The second perspective aims to analyze the hero's suppressed inner feelings that are expressed throughout the complicated events. The existing discussion mainly investigates the guilty conscience followed on from related murder via psychoanalytic criticism, or analyzes the subconsciousness of suppressed characters through application of oblivion and distortion. This article in addition intends to reveal the cause of the hero, official Yoon's trauma, and the process in which the trauma deforms in levels of subconsciousness, as well as the expression of it in the layers of consciousness. Freud's condensation and displacement concept, Lacan's metaphor and metonymy concept, and symptom and fantasy concepts were utilized for this purpose. Therefore, the bicycle that is carried in the dark roads is the compressed metaphor which is the Japan's occupation period, the Korean War and the tragic history which continues to the ‘present’ of the play, as well as a symptom that inflicts spillage over absence of reality. And the image of fire, depicted from the lighter onto the arson event, is a metonymic signifier in which the deficiency of greed is slipped, and is a fantasy given birth by the greed that was conquested to advance into the impossible possession. And this study figured out that the play is the process which is moving forward to the step of mourning from the mood of melancholy by recollecting the traumatic memories repressed in the unconscious condition as the narrative.