현실 인식의 계기들― 「가을의 오로라들」
Reflective Occasions Realizing Reality: “The Auroras of Autumn”
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Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn” has been generally understood as one of his representative poems describing the process of “decreation,” in which pre-imagined notions of the world have to be abandoned or decreated in front of new experiences or the “otherness” of the world. However, what has been silenced, or misunderstood, I think, is about the ultimate significance or the result of such a decreation in Stevens’ poetry. Many critics assume that the decreative process leads to reveal “the nothing that is” underneath all the imaginative creation, which they claim to be the nihilistic abyss or the philosophical zero point existing separately from our actual world. These deconstructive or philosophical perspectives, in spite of their consistently insightful interpretations, might, I’m afraid to say, contribute to giving some false notion that there exists only a very monotonous mechanical movement between meaningfulness and nothingness, usually represented as the seasonal cycle at the center of Stevens’ poetry. However, one of Stevens’ essays written in his later years clearly indicates that the ultimate reality after all the decreation is the fact that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything (NA 175), which means the world is composed of what the human imagination has found out from the “totally other” world. Reading in terms of this essay, it is clear that “The Auroras of Autumn” is not about the cosmic process of decreation revealing the nothing as the ultimate reality, but about some of the dramatic occasions in which we vividly realize how our reality is “humanly” composed out of its endless possibilities. The keen observations of the ever-changing lights of the aurora borealis in late autumn described at the beginning of this poem enable us to illuminate the multi-layered flux of our reality: we realize that retrospectively, we inherited it from our former generation as an established, historical, cultural reality; and that prospectively, we have to renew and recreate it in face of new experiences and changes, here and now being “the always innocent beginning.”
Abstract
Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn” has been generally understood as one of his representative poems describing the process of “decreation,” in which pre-imagined notions of the world have to be abandoned or decreated in front of new experiences or the “otherness” of the world. However, what has been silenced, or misunderstood, I think, is about the ultimate significance or the result of such a decreation in Stevens’ poetry. Many critics assume that the decreative process leads to reveal “the nothing that is” underneath all the imaginative creation, which they claim to be the nihilistic abyss or the philosophical zero point existing separately from our actual world. These deconstructive or philosophical perspectives, in spite of their consistently insightful interpretations, might, I’m afraid to say, contribute to giving some false notion that there exists only a very monotonous mechanical movement between meaningfulness and nothingness, usually represented as the seasonal cycle at the center of Stevens’ poetry. However, one of Stevens’ essays written in his later years clearly indicates that the ultimate reality after all the decreation is the fact that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything (NA 175), which means the world is composed of what the human imagination has found out from the “totally other” world. Reading in terms of this essay, it is clear that “The Auroras of Autumn” is not about the cosmic process of decreation revealing the nothing as the ultimate reality, but about some of the dramatic occasions in which we vividly realize how our reality is “humanly” composed out of its endless possibilities. The keen observations of the ever-changing lights of the aurora borealis in late autumn described at the beginning of this poem enable us to illuminate the multi-layered flux of our reality: we realize that retrospectively, we inherited it from our former generation as an established, historical, cultural reality; and that prospectively, we have to renew and recreate it in face of new experiences and changes, here and now being “the always innocent beginning.”
참고문헌 (22)
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