≪詩人之死≫,≪人啊,人!≫에 透映된 作家의 “實在와 不在”에 관한 小考

The Presence and Absence of the Author Seen through ≪The Death of Poet≫ and ≪Humans, Ah Humans!≫

What is literature in one's life and what role the literature has in it? The answers naturally vary. “Every literary work is the author's autobiography,” Yu Dafu once asserted. Even if not every literary work is the autobiography as Yu Dafu said, it is true that all literature contains a certain degree of autobiographical elements. Especially the past experiences are important material for an author's writing and it is inevitable that the author's image is reflected there. Dai Houying (戴厚英)'s novels, ≪≪The Death of a Poet 詩人之死≫ and ≪≪Humans, Ah, Humans 人啊,人!≫ are autobiographical novels based on her experiences during the tumultuous time of the Cultural Revolution. She agonizingly asks where the right value that a human should pursue lies by reflecting on the intellectuals' attitude of the time that did not see any alternative but choosing between the left and the right. Dai Houying describes in her ≪≪The Death of a Poet≫ the imprisoned lives of intellectuals like poets, painters, singers, actors, and teachers who had been suddenly taken as the useless ghosts. The author seriously and painfully asks where a human stands when everyone should monitor and accuse each other to survive, how one can preserve one's dignity, and what has been lost. It makes us to reflect on what was the last thing that the poet who loved the party and the people cannot give up even by choosing death. ≪≪Humans, Ah, Humans!≫, with the memory of the Cultural Revolution as a theme, depicts the process that the author and the people around her was healing the long seething wounds by looking into their minds. Though the apparent heroine of the novel, Son Yue, seems to depict Dai Houying, all people around her actually show some elements of her to a certain degree. This is the characteristic of the two novels and why this paper attempts to understand Dai Houying's autobiographical novels by comparing these two novels. The author portrays various attitudes and thoughts of herself in the two novels to make it seem like an attempt for a kind of self-healing process.