This dissertation reasons it is of necessity to identify how the novels embodied and counteracted the anxiety in the peculiar 1950s during which the situational anxiety was promoted. This identification process will be of effect to be a milestone to e...
This dissertation reasons it is of necessity to identify how the novels embodied and counteracted the anxiety in the peculiar 1950s during which the situational anxiety was promoted. This identification process will be of effect to be a milestone to evaluate the literary history as well as to measure the literary sensibilities of the writers in 1950s. For this purpose, this thesis studies the modernistic features which were described in the Modernist novels of Jang Yong-Hak and Son Chang-Seop through investigating the anxiety and their narrative countermeasures to subside it.
The reason why this thesis focuses on anxiety is that it can be such nutrition of novels that it is immediately intertwined with the development of novels; in addition, depending on the times the cause and effect of anxiety can be differentiated, and accordingly the measures for coping with anxiety are variegated.
The period of 1950s when Jang Yong-Hak and Son Chang-Seop were actively engaged in writing was the time when everything was destroyed not only in the materialistic dimension but in the symbolical one, and meanwhile when encumbered with the obligation of creation and construction under the modernization planning.
The temporal issues for Building a modernistic nation and Making modernistic Koreans naturally supplied the basis to form the literary discourse on modernization. In the meantime, anxiety was promoted as the empirical aftermath of internal oppression and violence that were germinated during the modernization process. 1950s was the period the modernistic feature of violence was intensely revealed in the devastating Korean war that was consequently followed by the postwar modernization projects. This led the national members who lived through 1950s to be harshly afflicted with layered anxiety.
The postwar Korea in the 1950s embroiled in the marginal area of Modernity was stricken by the violent modernistic power. Jang Yong-Hak describes the life of dramatis personae who were forced with the unconditioned obedience as the law which would be the representation of modernistic world turned out to be the agnostic entity without goodness, and who underwent anxiety caused by the violent feature of law which was enacted on the basis of phantasm, an ideological mechanism. He also by focusing on language demonstrated the violent aspect of anxiety that was the prevailing modernistic discourse in 1950s.
He also discussed the situational aspects of violence and anxiety which uniquely featured 1950s Korea. During that period Korea was rapidly embroiled into the marginal frontier of Capitalism led by the USA, and within that historic hybridity characterizing the marginal sphere the personae of his novels were caught up in the dissociative anxiety.
Son Chang-Seop proved the fact that the vertically oppressive family structure was reinforced in the 1950s postwar society where the community thitherto was lost as a result of advocating familism, and the fact that Korea changed into a systematized community which imposed obligation and duties exclusively. His novels play variations on the characters who were living in isolation and under anxiety within a strange home, not a sweet home, which resulted from the familial disintegration without any collective social identity.
Western Capitalism began to be fully transplanted into the 1950s Korean society, and as Deleuze and Guattari insisted the capitalistic system frames individual desires by oedipalization. He depicted that the individuals in capitalistic society had no choice but to live in anxiety with his or her own unique vitality lost whether being assimilated in the system as the subject or dissimilated as the other.
The development of his novels are based on his autobiographical experience and deals with the anxiety within the figurative situation that people in 1950s Korea underwent on the absence of its biological father while the stepfather was occupying the patriarchic status and people were forced to accept him as the true father, leading to the elimination of their identifiable role model.
The next step in this thesis is to investigate the narrative countermeasures to subside the anxiety emerging in the 1950s Modernist fictions. Jang Yong-Hak was describing the narratives subverting the modern laws’ principle itself of obedience to orders. He especially showed the life of a village foreman who ventured into committing incest, or adopted a strategy to topple and disassemble the hierarchical order by allegorically restoring the non-identical other.
In addition, he revived the private memory by mnemonically fighting against the modernistic power which compels the collective memory through public discourse, and disclosed the fact that the world composed of linguistic order is the very estranged world of fear by narrating grotesque phantasm. He also described the struggling strategy by deconstructing the subverted modernistic time, and demonstrated the cannibalistic space-oriented narration through the main character’s marginal life.
Son Chang-Seop depicted a horizontally structured family which recuperated by love from the vertically reinforced structured family. He also set up as a focal narrator a schizophrenic character in the capitalistic system of oedipal structure to deliver the ironic narration.
He portrayed a character who resisted choosing and identifying with the stepfather in postwar 1950s society, and was thereby obsessed with a maternal woman. The life of a figure who was bound in the imaginary sphere rather reveals the writer’s narrative strategy to strongly divulge the negative recognition on the symbolic world.
In the 1950s Modernist fiction, the meaning of anxiety enabled to develop a reflective reasoning on the modernity in which the modernization was yet uncompleted, and to develop narrations through keeping distance at non-identification status beyond the modernistic identification principle. This made the Modernist novels such as Jang Yong-Hak and Son Chang-Seop’s become the representative ones that introduced the trend of the times and expand the literary scope. In addition, their novels succeeded the tradition of 1930s Modernist literature and effected far-reaching implications on the full blooming of 1960s Modernist literature.
Key words: Jang Yong-Hak, Son Chang-Seop, Modernism, novels, fiction, anxiety, modernity, violence, marginality, dissociation, non-identification, the other