최승호 초기시의 알레고리 양상과 기능

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing the aspect and function of allegory in Choi Seung-ho’s early poems as a way of symbolizing social imagination. Choi Seung-ho is a poet who is aware of the absurd political history and the disease of depraved post-industrial society and so his poetic world lies in the middle of the contradiction of the history of the 1970s and 1980s. He was more engaged in existential agony about being and serious search for language rather than response in terms of being-in-itself to phenomena and the allegory used in this process was shown conscientized even in the process of speculation as well as at the technical level. Allegory is the way of pursuing fragmentary and realistic historicity by revealing the disagreement between reality and the ideal or between phenomena and the essence as they are while preserving the individual independence, thus it becomes an easy poetic strategy in verifying specific historic facts. Besides, it is possible to have abundant discussions on the abnormal aspect of modern society full of contradiction and paradox since it embraces the aesthetics of ugliness created by disagreeableness that is caused by the entangling of crude material, the unfamiliar method of narration and antinomic elements. The following are the types of allegory shown in Choi Seung-ho’s early poems: First, it is the method of approaching the truth by suggesting the problems of high-handedness of political authority and enervated life of the petit bourgeois with indirectly but clearly returned poetic devices. Second, it is the method of shockingly proposing the savagery of civilization and the tragedy of desire they experience in the turbulence of urbanization and industrialization through the tangling of antinomic elements they possess and forming a new semantic network, an opportunity of awakening. The historical and practical aspect of allegory is required to confirm that Choi Seung-ho’s poems with awareness of the issue of the time has a valid meaning and value even in the contemporary respect. Therefore, having it in mind that the ways of life and requirements of the time and the present are not largely changed, reading Choi Seung-ho’s poems with allegory is meaningful in becoming a page of the ‘history’ of literature and raising an ongoing issue ‘here right now.’