기억과 장소, 이야기의 공동체 - 황정은의『백(百)의 그림자』를 중심으로

초록

This article examines Hwang Jungeun’s One Hundred Shadows(2010), focusing on how place and memory in an urban space undergoing redevelopment function as conditions for the formation of community. While previous studies have interpreted the relationships depicted in the novel through the theories of community developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben, emphasizing the possibility of loose forms of solidarity not founded on shared identity or purpose, this article shifts attention to the spatial conditions under which such a community emerges. In particular, it examines the relationship among place, memory, storytelling, and community by considering Sewoon Arcade, the real-life model for the electronics market in the novel, not simply as a setting but as a place that mediates the characters’ memories and enables relationships to emerge. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space and Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism, this article analyzes how Sewoon Arcade, defined by urban planning and redevelopment as an object of intervention, is transformed into lived space through the everyday practices and memories of those who inhabit it. In One Hundred Shadows, the precariousness of place produced by redevelopment operates as a form of structural violence that destabilizes the very ground of the characters’ lives. As they share stories of their individual suffering and loss, they come to confront one another’s conditions of life and suffering. The relationships that emerge in this process do not constitute a bond based on shared identity or purpose but rather a Nancian inoperative community in which individuals remain alongside others at the limits of their existence without assimilating their different conditions of life and suffering into a shared experience. Sewoon Arcade thus functions not merely as the physical backdrop of community but as a spatial condition that makes its emergence possible. Furthermore, by preserving within narratives the experiences and memories of places that are disappearing or being transformed by redevelopment, the novel extends the boundaries of community to include its readers. Through the interaction between fictional and actual space, readers participate in a community of memory by sharing the burden of remembering places that have disappeared or are at risk of disappearing. One Hundred Shadows, therefore, does more than represent the realities of urban redevelopment: it can be read as a literary practice that sustains the memory of place through storytelling and, in doing so, brings erased lives and presences back into relation with others.

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