고은의 「그 석굴 소년」에 나타난 신화적 상상력

Abstract

<Ten Thousands Lives> written by ko-un has been received attention and studied constantly, in that it shows results of extending the new horizon of Character Description in Korean Poetry Literature. In particular, in  “A Stone Cave Boy”, which marks the end of the vast scale, the movements of time and space are more dynamic than other poems and the mythical image presents distinctly. It seems like the person who told stories of the other poems interestingly was the boy through  “A Stone Cave Boy” in the last. The boy ‘Soorae’ exists as a mysterious hero and the very man who has told everybody’s story. He deepens himself the mythical image by encompassing cosmic past and future. The boy who lives environmentally friendly and without ‘time’, grows learning the rhythm of nature in the space of the cave. “A Stone Cave Boy” denote ‘eternal present’ through the boy who can freely move between past and future, and past-present-future rotation system is naturally designed. The boy enters the world not of ‘absolute time’ but of ‘time-free’ and is given memories of a few million years ago and hunches of a few million years later. It tells the boy’s eternity by making the conventional view for time pointless. Through his ability, he develops as a hero delivering the structure of interdependent relationship between human and nature. The space that the world of time-free turns up is ‘the stone cave’. This place is primal space the boy was born and means a return to the original form, and can convey tremendous power only to the boy. This place features the space congregated by nature and mankind more than just space. Water, one of the basic materials of space, has been recognized by the same meaning with ‘mother’, and image of ‘sea’ in Ko-un’s works is connected to ‘life’ and ‘purification.’ Therefore, the boy is purified and gains the life force by returning to the primal place. Furthermore, it exists as a connecting link to present, not the opposing existence, and disclose the interaction between human and nature by arranging the movements of life and nature in a row. Entry into the stone cave is the space which the boy exists himself as well as his destiny. He finally finds the authentic self and eternal life by making roles of communication between space and empty.                 What the boy’s world of time-free or space-free is willing to reveal is the fact that the world bases on a mythical imagination of circulation and eternal recurrence. As the last part of   “A Stone Cave Boy”, the life or death is meaningless in the world of the cave. The boy obtains sense of freedom by erasing the boundary between life and death. The fact that the story of ‘eternal boy, Soo-rae’ in the world of time-free and space-free in the last masterpiece <Ten Thousands Lives> is the writer’s meaning that there are countless stories in the past and the future.