한국 소설 속에 나타난 인민재판의 양상 - 황순원ㆍ장용학ㆍ조정래의 소설을 중심으로 -

초록

This paper is not a delicate or in-depth analysis of literary works. Rather, as the title suggests, it examines the way three novelists describe kangaroo court trials, or ‘People’s Court’, in their work. Afterwards, by looking at differences among the three writers’ perception, the paper proceeds on considering the actual effects of kangaroo courts and the writers’ understanding of violence. The discussed Korean fiction works depicting kangaroo courts are: The Descendants of Cain (novel by Hwang Sun-won, 1954), The Poems of John the Baptist (short story by Chang Yong-hak, 1955) and Taebaek Mountain Range (saga novel by Jo Jung-rae, 1986). Hwang Sun-won, having grown tired of the North Korean regime and defected to the South, shows in The Descendants of Cain that the kangaroo court trials carried out in the North were used as a way to confiscate the land from its owners. Through a realistic depiction of the trial in North Korea, the author shows that the invisible violence is just as horrible as the visible one.Chang Yong-hak’s inspiration for The Poems of John the Baptist were memoirs from Geoje POW camp. After witnessing the kangaroo court where communist prisoners kill anticommunist prisoners before cutting their bodies and sinking them in feces, the protagonist Nuhye chooses to commit suicide out of agony. Chang's decision to lead Nuhye to suicide is based on the thought that killing one's own people through a kangaroo court and dismembering their bodies cannot be tolerated, whatever the ideology behind the act. The analogy between the communist prisoners and Salome, who led to the cutting off of the throat of John the Baptist, is an allusion to the author's conscience about violence being wrong. Jo Jung-rae takes an advocative stance towards kangaroo courts in Taebaek Mountain Range, in that those were violent reactions against violence. After the establishment of US military administration in South Korea, Nam-ro Dang (South Korea Labor Party) was outlawed and went underground. This led to partisan struggles, for which Jo attributes the responsibility to the Syngman Rhee government and United States. The author goes on to explain that the kangaroo courts, that were essentially self-rescue measures against the oppression towards Nam-ro Dang, were ‘defensive violence’ or ‘relatively violence’. Here is studied how such differences between the understanding of the violence, named ‘People’s Court’, are reflected in the novels’ themes.

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