공동체의 기억을 보존하는 방법 - 이문구의 『관촌수필』

Abstract

This article focuses on Gwanchon Essays to explore the relationship between Lee Mun-ku’s personal history and his writing and to consider the ethics of his memory. During the Korean War, Lee’s father, who was the head of the Boryoung Branch of Workers’ Party of South Korea, and older brothers were brutally massacred, destroying his prestigious family and forcing him to leave his hometown almost as an orphan. Beginning with a return visit to his hometown after 13 years and reflecting on the past, Gwanchon Essays attempts to remember the things that were lost when his hometown was destroyed: the “relational world” symbolized by his grandfather; the “sense of caring” formed by words and emotions of the people of his hometown, such as Ongjeom, Daebok, Sin Sukgong, and Yoo Cheonman; and the “political space” symbolized by the underground activities of his father and older brothers. But most actively of all, he seeks to revive a sense of caring, and rather than painfully recalling and confronting the events of massacre and retribution, resentment and hostility, stigma and hatred that turned his homeland into a “cursed land,” he seeks to reconstruct that world by remembering the people who surrounded him. The world he tries to reconstruct in Gwanchon Essays is a world of care and nurturing, a world that can only be called the world of the ‘young master’. The memories of the ‘young master’ being cared for are basically subjective, but Gwanchon Essays does not hide its subjectivist limitations, but balances them by surrounding them with the ‘words’ of people. Rather than constructing a narrative of subjectivity along the lines of a normative ‘plot’, the text seeks to reconstruct a communal world through ‘episodic composition’. This episodic composition corresponds to the direction of the text’s memory, which seeks to create an environment in which to live and breathe, rather than to recover his identity through his father’s life and death.