Documents of Survival and Trauma: Memories of the Korean War in Korean Novels of the 1960s

Abstract

This article aims at rethinking how novels represented by battlefield scenes and published in the 1960s are important linking works between “novels of postwar” and “novels of division” in the history of modern Korean novels. The three novels, Long day’s Journey into Night by Kang Yong-jun, The Revolution at Bangat-gol by Oh Yu-Gueon, and Market and Battlefield by Park Kyung-ri, have been relatively neglected in the history of modern Korean novels although the literary acceptance of war experiences has been understood as an important research theme. Writers in the 1950s showed a sense of doubt, defiance, and despair in “novels of postwar,” which reflected the fact that they could not be relieved of their war experience oppression. In “novels of division” writers in the 1970-80s presented the present lives of the nation after the war and attempted to deal with the sharp contradiction of a divided nation. In concretizing war experiences, novels published in the 1960s used battlefields for fictional time-space in an attempt to gain distance from the trauma of war. Namely, it gained the distance to see the historical war as fictional material as well as began to understand what the war was and why it had happened, resulting in full-scale scenes of the battlefields being fictionalized in a long story form in the 1960s. Most Koreans experienced that they could make new historical situations during the April Revolution (4.19 Revolution) of 1960. Having escaped from the feeling of being victimized by the war, the novels seriously began with a reasonable understanding of the war in the 1960s. It should be considered that these novels concretized battlefields of the war are important linking works between “novels of postwar” and “novels of division” beyond the division era in the history of modern Korean novels.