『질마재 신화』에 나타난 공동체의 상상력 - 민간신앙을 경유하여 -

Abstract

『The Myth of Jilmajae』 written by Seo Jeong-ju was based on the existence and life in and toward a community. By recovering and reconstituting his real experiences in ‘Jilmaje’ where he had lived in his childhood, Seo Jeong-ju tried to open and share the secret of the continuance of ‘an old community’ at the present time (modern times). The commonly performing work in a series of poems of Jilmajae is to explore the operating principles of an old community. People, things, and places in Jilmajae create a ‘sky’-village-space ‘community, and incarnate the common sense of commonly holding the existence of community-the worlds as the physical body’. The common sense as the first precondition of community life is revealed realistically by the competence of a female shaman who is divided and shared by Jilmajae people. In the Korean modernization course led by the Japanese Imperialism and military dictatorship, a female shaman, a guardian of a traditional community had fallen into collapse, and the ethical and aesthetic roles (e.g., putting the clothes for the dead in funeral, boundary transcendence, healing, raising vitality) that a female shaman played for a community have been divided and shared by people in the community. Those indicate the direction of recovering a community in today's society. ‘Myth’, the logically jumping term of a ‘story’ about Jilmajae by Seo Jeong-ju, is a rhetoric that embraces the rapidly widening gap between Jilmajae and the modern world and the negative senses of the gap (e.g., anxiety, fear). From the 21st standpoint, 『The Myth of Jilmajae』 by Seo Jeong-ju is a past asset. However, if it is read as the record of ‘the past future’ which never comes again, the factor worsening the difference in time is not the poem of Seo Jeong-ju, but today's society and people who are losing the life (memory) of a community'.