Yi Moon-gu’s novel series Kwanchon Essays is controversial text on diverse aspects of genre, style, and a view of the world etc. The reason why there has been much controversy over the work is that the text itself has very complex features. The text cannot be analysed merely as the modern novel genre, and even cannot be readily explained by the traditional pansori usage. To elucidate the complexity of Kwanchon Essays, in this paper I newly analysed the work's style while noticing the language modes of comprehensiveness, and considered thematic aspect while giving the explanation about the ecological nature of complexity. And lastly, I put both aspects together and integrate those issues in that novel.
In Kwanchon Essays the language of grandfather who had been a traditional ‘yijoin(a person of the Joseon Dynasty)’ shows the model of the confucian scholar's discourse. His language displays overtly its time-honoring tastes on the basis of languages of confucian scriptures. And in other fields of the text’s setting, native languages used by the people of lower classes unfold in a vigorous way.
The coexistence of ancient and native language sometimes causes a harmony or a dissonance, but makes a contribution to the dynamic construction and the rhythm of the text. The main character, the narrator’s language on the vertical level, has been impressed by his grandfather’s language, and on the horizontal level, communicate with the lower class’s people. So it can comprehend both aspect of languages and give complex vitality to the novel’s discourse of the work. By using varied languages of comprehensiveness which includes the comprehension of formal/informal and premodern/ modern languages etc., the author can establish the rhetoric of complexity.
In the thematic aspect, this paper took notice of the sense of conflation and ecological ethics. I’ve constructed the ecology of complexity through the conflation of nature and human, living and nonliving things, and the life of Yangban(higher class) and lower class, and lastly, pathos of the loss of hometown and basic longing for home. Especially, through the ecology of complexity caught from the point of view of a man on the border, which conflate and premodern and modern, the lifestyle of the rural community and city, we can look at the reality of the ecology with the nature of difference and composition in the right light.
To sum up, Yi Moon-gu's Kwanchon Essays is the novel which, through the language of comprehensiveness, variously express the complex sense of conflation and themes. Through the rhetoric of complexity, the ecology of complexity can be represented, and inversely, the rhetoric of complexity can be newly invented through the ecology of complexity.