각색 영화의 번역가능성: 하루키와 포크너 사이의 <버닝>

초록

Lee Chang-dong’s film Burning (2018) is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1983 short story “Barn Burning,” yet it reconfigures the original narrative by relocating it to post–2008 financial-crisis Korea and foregrounding issues of class inequality and social marginalization. While the film draws on the structural elements and key motifs of Murakami’s story―such as the disappearance of the narrator’s girl friend and the enigmatic figure who claims to burn barns―it simultaneously introduces “anger” as a central affective force that was less explicit in the literary source. This thematic shift positions the film at the intersection of Murakami’s text and William Faulkner’s 1938 short story “Barn Burning,” whose narrative of a tenant farmer expressing his accumulated rage through arson resonates with the film’s climactic scene in which Jong-su kills Ben and sets his car ablaze. This intertextual configuration suggests that Burning constructs its narrative by weaving together two short stories situated in distinct sociocultural contexts, adopting the motif of burning as a thematic bridge. Accordingly, this paper compares the meanings embedded in the two literary texts as they are reinterpreted within the filmic adaptation. It examines how the sociocultural frameworks of the original works are transformed, displaced, or recontextualized in the transition from literary to cinematic media. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “translatability” and “afterlife” of the original text in “The Task of the Translator,” this paper approaches adaptation as a form of cultural translation, exploring the new layers of meaning produced through the shift from written to visual narrative. Ultimately, this paper argues that Burning demonstrates how adapted works not only inherit but regenerate the symbolic force of their sources across divergent temporal and cultural settings.

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