예쁘고 흉악하다 -식민지 시대 말기 소설 속 한글의 몇 가지 양상에 대해-

Abstract

In Choi Jung-hee’s Japanese short story “A Soldier of Illusion (Hwan-ui Byeongsa)” (1941), Hangul is not a language symbol but a sensual object that matches well with the Korean heroine Young-sun. It is downgraded to “shape,” becoming a gendered representation of the colony and at the same time leaping to the metaphysical grounds of the “Great East.” In “Blood Letter (Hyeolseo),” Lee Kwang-su performs a translation as a rebellion to overthrow the gender hierarchy between empire and colony. However, at the end of the colonial period, Lee Kwang-su expects the disappearance of the text written in Hangul, and imagines the language of “Japan and Korea are one” that sublates the confrontation between Korea and Japan with the idea of “the letters of Kamis’ era (Sindae Munja).” Park Tae-won’s “Aekyung” evokes not only the various social positions of colonial Koreans but also the heterogeneity and cracks of colonial Korea by presenting Japanese language in Hangul. In other words, the frivolous episodes of this novel are not different from this transliteration. And this transliterated Japanese is a slang of the colonial city’s alley rather than “Kokugo (national language).” The important issue of Chae Man-sik’s “Frozen Fish(Nangdongeo)” is the antinomy and contradiction contained in the name of hero’s daughter. It embodies the broken subjectivity of colonial Koreans. This novel also symbolizes the anxious and complex situation of colonial Koreans who can not be fully assimilated into the empire’s ideology of war by the letters of “뚫”and “끊.” This is the profound meaning of “ugly” Hangul.