김소월의 시에 나타난 근대 풍경과 시선의 문제 - 식민지적 근대와 시선의 계보학(1)

Abstract

This paper examined, through the poetry of Kim Sowol, the landscape of colonial modernity that appeared during the formational period of Korean modern poetry and the process by which the gaze of the "seeing subject" that witnesses that landscape is formed. It was first noted that this gaze on the modern landscape was fundamentally the gaze of the traveler, and that the railroad gave birth to this traveler's gaze. The first work to feature the railroad in the process of formation of modern Korean poetry is Choe Namseon's Song of the Seoul-Busan Railroad (「경부텰도노래」,1908). In this work, the poetic narrator looks upon the landscape changed by the railroad with an enlightened gaze. The landscape as seen through the railroad offered a visual experience of the homogeneous space of modernity, and this experience led to the imagining of a modern nation-state. Yet just as Choe Namseon's enlightened gaze could not shed its abstractness, the landscape in his poetry failed to achieve physicality and concreteness. The reason for this is the same reason that, in the Symbolist poetry of the early 1920s, the urban landscape was perceived as merely an atmosphere of vague nihilism and decadence, and failed to achieve a sensory representation. In this regard, Kim Sowol's 1920 Streets of Seoul is noteworthy. In this work, the poetic narrator looks upon the landscape of the modern colonial city of Seoul through the gaze of the outsider (traveler). Yet the urban landscape can never be an object of fascination for him. Thoroughly alienated from the city's nighttime landscape, he wanders the night streets with a divided gaze. Such a wandering subject is unable to find a fixed position from which he can look upon the object with perspective, and his gaze is distracted. As a result, he comes face to face with the breakdown of the very borders of the self, unable to adjust to the modern spectacle that fills the streets. In this work, the gaze of the poetic narrator captures the colonial others, but the poetic narrator fails to achieve an ideological gaze that can form a bond of solidarity with them, ultimately falling into a mood of individual melancholy and sadness. On the other hand, in the works included in his first anthology, Azalea Flowers (1925;『진달래꽃』), Kim Sowol hid himself in a world of nature and tradition that colonial modernity has confined to a realm of invisibility (darkness). He confronted the abyss that lies between tradition and modernity and sang of the despair and longing for the "beloved" (tradition, hometown) faced with a situation from which there is no return. However, from the mid-1920s on, Kim Sowol discovered the other of colonial modernity and achieved a poetic vision that internalized into the subject the otherness of that other. The poetic narrator of a series of peasant poems and unpublished posthumous works is no longer the "wandering subject," but has transformed into a subject with a modern gaze trained on the world of colonial modernism from a fixed position. In particular, by joining with his imaginary community of "Chosun(조선)" and "Chosunin(조선인, the Korean people)," and by looking at the world from the position of a collective subject, he was able to achieve an ideological gaze that could criticize colonial modernity.