조명희 작품 연구

초록

Jo Myong-hee (penname; Posok) whose literary activities were vigorious during the 1920's when the Japanese colonial scheme was in full-scale shape, attempted to present a positive direction to the conquest of our people's agony through literature. His literary life can be divided into the two periods; the first one was from 1920 through 1924 when he was engaged mainly in writing dramas and poems. During this period, his self-consciousness seemed to have been formed. And the second period was from 1925 to the time when he took asylum in the Soviet Union in 1928. During this second period, he conducted a full-scale literary activities, engaged mainly in writing novels. The discussion on the KAPF faction writer Jo Myong-hee's literary world has been focused on his understanding of the reality and his literary efforts to surmount the colonial situation of the times embodied in his novels, which accommodated socialism and depicted a head-on confrontation with the colonial reality. In particular, considering the transitional position of his novels between the indigenous 'New Ism' faction and the purposive 'Proleteriat' school, his works are instrumental in understanding the developmental process of the proleteriat literature. Based on this background, this paper aims at reviewing the developmental transition of Jo Myong-hee's understanding of reality and the limitation of his literary world as well caused by the transition. The individualistic 'Humanism' or human liberation which was embodied in his earlier works, later developed into the 'Collective Value' of humanism such as people's liberation and class leveling. Because his novels accommodate the socialism after the long self-reflection on the corruption of human beings and society, they could combine the class ideology and the people's liberation. His novels show the gradual transition of his individualistic view of life formed through his poverty-stricken experiences to the collective view of society. In this transition, he simultaneously apprehended the dual relationship between the peoples and the classes through the recognition of the colonialism/imperialism equation and in the end presented a positive settlement of the people's liberation. In this self-consciousness development process, the individualistic experiences take the three stages; personal experiences of poverty, critical view of the irregular reality and the recognition of the dual exploitation structure of the Japanese imperialists/landowners. Through these three stages of experiences, the final stage of surmounting the reality is reached. Such stages of approaching the reality were also clearly shown in his view of women. In his earlier works, woman was the maternity itself in absolute terms, and the corruption of women was totally despised. In his later novels, however, he apprehended the corruption of women was caused by the dual oppression of the colonial situation and the men's rule, which, he suggested, women should surmound for themselves. Summing up the above analysis, Jo Myong-hee's novels surmounted the limitation of the' New Ism' faction which could not break from the obscurity and conceptuality of resistance, caught in a naive personal experiences or ideological emptiness. Furthermore, his novels were successful in presenting a direction to the people's liberation through the realistic approach to the situation of the times and ideology. However, despite his efforts to objectively describe the real. world through the various descriptive methods, we miss that in terms of the creativity of embodying the writer's view of the world in the novels, he could only suggest some possibility of apprehending the overall reality and building a concrete prospect thereupon in a long novel.