1990년대 장편 후일담의 부상과 죽음—사랑의 배치들

Abstract

This article re-examines the narrative structures of memory shared by a series of novels that have been highlighted as a literary form of ‘looking back at the past’ in a time of historical and cultural transition and change after democratization, with the keywords of death and love. In the history of literature, a series of retrospective novels, often referred to as ‘Reminiscences Literature’, have been highlighted in the early and mid-1990s as narratives of experience and signs of historical and cultural disruption and loss in the transition to the 1990s. This article focuses on the narrative mechanisms and modes of existence of Reminiscences Literature in the 1990s, and examines how certain codes of retrospective narrative (death, love) that represented the early 1990s were later utilized and transformed into popular feature-length narrative forms. Specifically, I assume Gong Ji-young’s Mackerel(1994), which was a hot topic at the time, as the axis of comparison, but rather than reexamining the individual status of Mackerel, I focus on interconnecting Kim Hyung-kyung’s feature-length novel The Birds Crying by Their Own Names(1993) and Kim In-sook’s serialized novel The Promise of the Third Night(1996.4.1~1997.4.30.), which were published around the same time. Published from 1993 to 1996, each of the three novels deploys different deaths of characters embodying the 1980s (suicide, death from disease, death under suspicious circumstances, self-immolation) as important triggers for the novel’s action, overlaying them with narratives of conflicting and failing love. By noting that both novels, which have not been discussed or noted in the literature compared to Mackerel, garnered large readerships as public contest for feature-length novel winners and a special series of major newspapers at the time, I aim to examine how the narrative structure of reminiscences functioned as a cultural code that both revealed and reshaped the popular sensibilities of a particular era, and in doing so, capture the narrative patterns that frame feature-length reminiscences and how they have changed since the mid-1990s.