『바람이 분다, 가라』가 구현하는 서사적 탐색의 실재계적 욕망 고찰 = A Study on the Real-Oriented Desire of Narrative Exploration in The Wind Blows, Go

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines the Real-oriented desire of narrative exploration as embodied in Han Kang’s The Wind Blows, Go. Narrative may confine itself to representing the desire of a symbolic, self-identical subject that seeks to explore the world while exhaustively signifying it in a totalizing manner. However, such an attempt to rigidly appropriate the Other into one’s own symbolic order constitutes a form of neurotic violence. Alternatively, narrative may suspend this tendency and undertake an open exploration toward the world and the Other by exposing fissures within its own symbolic order. The so-called postmodern mode of narrative exploration—one that represents a world that resists totalization through endlessly dispersed and floating signifiers—serves as a familiar example. By indefinitely deferring totalization, such narratives reveal only intermittent ruptures within the symbolic order. Rather than distinctly embodying the desire directed toward the Real—which is, in principle, resistant to total explanation—they instead elevate this desire into a dynamic affect through the suspension of symbolic violence.
This paper, however, explores the desire for narrative exploration oriented toward the Real, as distinctly realized in The Wind Blows, Go. This desire emerges at the point where the narrative exposes a signifier that exceeds its own symbolic order—one that, in principle, cannot be explained—and thus appears as a remainder of the Real. In doing so, the author can be seen as seeking a path through which narrative exploration might fully embrace the suffering of the Other, by vividly rendering both the Other’s fundamental pain and the violence of the subject that engenders it. This paper interprets The Wind Blows, Go as a narrative that accomplishes a consummate form of exploration, insofar as it reflects upon and suspends even the symbolic violence inherent in its own narrative structure. In other words, from the perspective of Freudian and Lacanian depth psychology, this paper examines how the novel’s narrative meticulously represents the intimate and totalizing nature of violence, wherein the subject may dominate the Other at the level of the Imaginary or even rationalize such domination through symbolic appropriation. Finally, it demonstrates that this mode of narrative exploration is ultimately grounded in a Real-oriented desire that seeks to move beyond even the symbolic order structuring the narrative itself.