죽음․애도․환대의 시학－김종삼론－

Abstract

Poet Kim Jong-sam left total 238 poems working for 30 years or so. Up until now, researchers have come up with the proposition that Kim Jong-sam’s poems are characterized by “beauty without contents”. The expression came from his own poem, but indeed, the evaluation goes well with his experiment in various forms, abstractive images, or his pursuit of meaning from compression and implication. This study focuses on the poet’s lifelong interest, the explanation and appreciation of ‘a dying person’s loneliness’. Although he was seriously tormented by his family’s death and his own disease, he concentrated on ‘social death’ associated with ‘awful modernity’. The examples can be disease and war destroying ordinary lives, massacre, or cultural alienation. On account of that, he strived to explore and describe the hollowness of beings, dismantlement of a community, fragmentation of reality, or absence of the future. In order to console miserable beings for their personal or social death and also elevate the impulse of living for human existence, he kept inviting as poetic objects many poets, musicians, or painters of Korea and the world who had been sensitive about the change and death. Through this, he earnestly carried out faithful lamentation for the dead and the work of hospitality to ‘here, now’. ‘Lamentation’ here is something beyond the traditional meaning of it: to say good-bye to the dead and allow the living to keep leading a usual life. It was a ritual of love and life to make the meaning of the dead always present and fill the void of the world. The work of lamentation is completed not by regarding the dead as the living but by summoning them ‘here, now’ and practicing hospitality to provide a meaningful space / place needed for that activity. The lamentation and hospitality of Kim Jong-sam’s poems are represented by the vivid memories and reproduction of death in the Auschwitz massacre and the Korean War, the people and petit bourgeois’ death from disease, expression on the situation of laying the body in state, the death of poets and artists, and the recalling of works dealing with death. As his posthumous poetry, 「Arirang Gogae」 series are left. These poems allowed him to make ‘loneliness from death’ he had been depicting valuable as the world’s universal incidence and also succeed satisfactorily in localizing and generalizing ‘the beauty’ he had been pursuing as well.