부재의 존재론, 역설의 시학 －김춘수의 후기 시집을 중심으로

Abstract

Kim ChunSoo’s poetry, though harshly self-conscious, often seems to be subordinate to his poetics. This can account for the critical opinion that, even when Kim’s outstanding position taken in the history of Korean poetry is well accepted, his poetry itself is often read as a redundant commentary for his poetry, or a surplus explanation on his argument. When Korean poetry is classified into the poetry of “word on meaning”and that of“ playing-on-word”based on Kim’s own terms,the poet definitely set himself up for latter. Therefore the criticism on Kim’s poetry divides into opposing standpoints, inevitably leading the essential question of what poetry is. Through his poetry, Kim ChunSoo constantly questioned himself that whether it is possible for poetry to be written in existing language: His early poems aroused the question of the meaning slipping through the gap between the signified and the signifier, and then continued its poetic pursuit to Nonsense Poetry trying to extend the gap and eliminating the meaning or conception. In his later poems, the poet acknowledged the cause of Nonsense Poetry’s failure and concluded his pursuit in shifting to the Poetry of Meaning. The poet deeply engaged in the pursuit of the existence: In early poems he maintains the relative ontology by signifying the existence through language (=Naming)and after that, he eliminates the meaning from language, breaking off from the signifiers. The remains are the signified, sound and rhythm full of the reverberation of the existence:in other word, a pure world of the signified. This is the essence of Nonsense Poetry breaking off the chain of meaning and reaching for the world of absolute pureness. The poetic subject in Kim ChunSoo’s poetry is disintegrated in this very context: Though the subject between enunciation and the enunciated is vaguely distinct in early poems, it is radically disintegrated in the stage of Nonsense poetry. Nevertheless, with the poet’s admitting that it is still a task to intervene the freedom and the ‘unrestrainable’quality the language holds in itself. He pursuits the language of paradox: The language firmly asserts its existence by the absence of it, seeking for the overflowing sense of existence from the ‘sign’, ‘trace’, ‘vestige’, ‘relics’of the flickering moment of existence. The poet consequently seeks for the sense of existence of absence, and in other words it is a language for the absent rather than the ones actually exists, the invisible than the visible, and which is not presented hither but still not thoroughly absent. He expresses his poetic cognition of Poetry of Meaning in the metapoetry. His poetic journey, limit of Nonsense Poetry, the dilatation of his poetry, the final meaning of life and poetry, reasons for poetry are revealed through the metapoetry and ultimately he develops the poetics of Usefulness of Uselessness(無用之用) and his thesis on art.