梅溪 李漢雨의 ‘낯선 공간’으로서 瀛洲

Abstract

This study started from the idea that Mae-gye(梅溪) Han-woo Lee (李漢雨,1823~1881) could recreate Jeju(濟州) as a space of humanities named Youngju(瀛洲)because he approached by recognizing Jeju as ‘a strange space’. In addition, this study intended to find a clue that can allow us to solve various problems that Jeju is facing today in the process of reviewing this first step. Mae-gye could recognize Jeju, which is a familiar space to him, as a strange space because he saw Jeju, his hometown, through the eyes of strangers who were banished to or newly appointed to Jeju back then. One of the main motivations was the ‘vagueness’ of the process his family came into Jeju. This vagueness had some impacts on the self-perception of Mae-gye on his identity, and thus he could accept the eyes of strangers without the sense of rejection. But, while Mae-gye went back to his original hometown which was located a thousand ri(里) away in space and to 190 years ago in time as he crossed the sea eight times, he experienced the Différance(defer) of this time and space because the place was a familiar space to strangers where they should go back, but was a strange space to him. In this process, Jeju, his hometown, was reconstructed as a place to go back to,not a place he left. Mae-gye came back to his hometown and visited ‘the nature(自然)’, which is the space of Confucianist Self Cultivation. But, in case of Mae-gye, it is special in that this place is where he can settle the experiences of existent anxiety and Scheitern(wreck). In this viewpoint, the nature of Jeju, which is his hometown, was recreated as a space that is different from the past. Therefore, Jeju appearing in his poems is described as a space of humanities in which pairs of concepts such as time and space, movement and stoppage and separation and combination are contrasted in a layered way. Today we intend to approach Jeju only in the aspect of natural landscape. Thus the pros and cons of various national projects always make the nature a topic. However,today Jeju has a greater value to us as the space in which we can discuss ‘the trans-boundary humanities’. In this sense, the approach of Mae-gye to Youngju as ‘a strange space’ can be assessed as an attempt ‘to accept the centrality of the other while seeing the centrality of oneself’.