김동리 문학의 바이오 휴머니티

Abstract

Many critics have positioned Dong-Ree Kim in the tradition of Korean Shamanism, particularly exploring the conflict between two oppositional thoughts of Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism, the value of aesthetics, and even the realist vein of his literature. On the contrary, this paper explores Kim's short stories in light of the new paradigm of ecology promoting the subversion of the boundaries of human and nonhuman world. For this purpose, I will investigate three dominating tendencies, or patterns occurring in his fiction. First, Lee's stories feature the conflict between the two oppositional ideologies whether they are religions, or philosophy, and the ensuing defeat of his characters after their obsessional self-assertion. Second, I will examine the recurrent theme of incest throughout his stories, which simultaneously provokes a negative reaction and sympathy from the reader. Third, his stories also evoke the uncanny feeling due to the strange mixture of opposite desires such as the life impulse with the death drive,─ the desire of self-preservation and self-destruction,─ to borrow from Sigmund Freud. My investigation concludes with one significant point that most of characters end up in tragedy because of these three conflicts. Furthermore, exploring the reason for the tragic ending explained in the above, and attempting to find the ways we avoid this tragedy, I examine the complexity of Darwinian evolution in relation to Lee's fiction. For instance, his stories lend themselves to the question of how human life can coexist with nature. Why does mankind alone exploit nature? Animals are trapped into neither the fantasy of an object nor the excess of greed. In fact, Darwin's evolutionary theory itself has a conflict in proportion to the conflicts in human life portrayed in Kim's stories. In this context, I suggest the best way to reduce human sufferings and the tragedy of the Mother-Earth is that we need to accept the Other in order to live in accordance to the cycle of nature and yin-yang harmony. Hence, the formular of Kim's third humanism can be reinterpreted to the Biohumanism in the vein of the new paradigm of ecology.