ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In liberation-period Korean literature, old age has generally been read as either an anachronistic presence or a figure set in contrast to youth. In the social reality of the time, however, older people also emerged as agents who, drawing on memories of colonial experience, deliberated over the direction of the new nation while intervening in issues of bodily vulnerability and everyday conditions. Taking this reality into account, this article examines how post-liberation fiction represents the temporality and corporeality of old age. First, through short stories by Choe Jeong-hui, Im Ok-in, Han Mu-suk, and Heo Jun, the article shows that in the sphere of everyday life the “vulnerable body” of old age functions as a medium that fractures patriarchal hierarchies and the naturalization of reproductive labor, thereby catalyzing new family relations and an ethics of care. The fatigue of the aged and ailing body leads to an awareness of the self as an individual not wholly subsumed within the family collective and, in some cases, expands into an ethical sensibility attuned to the suffering of an antagonized other. Next, through Jeong Bi-seok’s “Gwi-hyang” (Homecoming) and Son So-hui’s “Yeok-ryu” (Backflow), the article considers how the corporeality of old age is figured within the ideological and political tasks of the liberation period. In Gwi-hyang, the elderly body is not so much a historical body bearing the traces of colonial violence as it is endowed with the meaning of something that should “naturally” disappear for generational replacement and nation-building. By contrast, Yeok-ryu bears witness to the incompleteness of reckoning and the failure of decolonization through the overdetermined body of an old man obsessed with private revenge. In this way, liberation-period fiction captures the reality of liberation by linking the vulnerable body to the meanings of care in the everyday realm, while in relation to political tasks it either effaces the elderly body or renders it in an excessive mode of representation. These works, each in different ways, reveal an “unfinished liberation” through the vulnerable body as their mediating figure. By attending to the place of old age that has been marginalized in studies of liberation-period fiction, this article re-illuminates the sidelined history of the time and seeks to reflect on an ethics of care and coexistence mediated by the vulnerability of old age.

키워드