박상륭의 『죽음의 한 연구』의 재조명

Abstract

Park Sang-ryung's A Study of Death is one of the most difficult novels in Korean literature. Its difficulty comes not only from the style of the author but also from its highly metaphysical content. This is the reason why most of the studies published on this novel have focused on its content. And the many references of the text - anthropological, mythological, theological, buddhist, psychological, alchemical, and so forth - made these studies all the more difficult and abstract. In this paper, we intend to focus mainly on this novel as a novel, that is as a literary text. Therefore, instead of focusing on its philosophical and erudite content, we will limit ourselves to the study of its form as a piece of literature. First, we will see the basic structure of the novel and its various elements. It appears that these elements challenge the traditional frame of a novel. For instance, none of the characters bear a name, the place where the whole novel takes place, Yuri, is a no-where place, referring to the mythical place of birth of the Book of Changes, and the time of the story is never defined. Then we will consider other non-fictional elements that strike the reader when he reads A Study of Death, that is the constant use of notes and quotations throughout the novel. And because these notes and quotations introduce a distance from the text, they compromise the mimesis at work in a classical text of fiction. This last point leads us to consider why Park Sang-ryung entitled his novel a "Study." All these observations of the strictly formal and literary aspect of A Study of Death reveal a structure that meets all the criteria of a postmodern fiction. And in the light of this postmodernity of Park Sang-ryung's novel, a door is open to reassessing the literary and philosophical values at stake in this ambitious novel.