홍계영의 가사 <희설(喜雪)>의 도교적 상상력과 문학적 특질

Abstract

This thesis seeks to examine the literary characteristics of Huiseol a Gasa of Hong Gye-Yeong (pen name: Gwansujae, 1687~1705), focusing on his Taoist imagination. This approach has been taken because his insights into the world and the subjective emotions that he tried to express through Huiseol commune with Taoist symbols and contribute to its aesthetic completion. Hong’s tragic and romantic insights into life and death are projected onto this Gasa that he wrote at age 18 when he was suffering from a long-lasting and worsening disease and foreboding about his death. Especially the imagery of snow as a poetic material forms a bridge between a fairyland in heaven and the real world, which clearly reveals his awareness about this mundane world and aspiration for a transcendental world. Snow, emphasized by a white-color image, functions as a psychological mediator of the narrator and allows him or her to overcome the pain of reality. Therefore, snow in this work can be interpreted as stylistic device that signifies his foreboding about his own death. In particular, the white-color image of snow is emphasized throughout the work, which seems to be a literary device to consciously dispel the white horror of disease and death. His work shows the contrast between the outside world of white color and the inner world of darkness, which suggests that he is painfully struggling with the limits of life, disease and death. The rhetoric of blessing in Huiseol, or Taoist symbols and reign of peace, should be interpreted to mean an outer cover woven by the self-consciousness of the author to resist the private pain of disease.