서정주 초기시의 근대성 재론 -‘육체’와 ‘직정언어’의 문제를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper aimed to examine Seo Jeongju's early poems in terms of colonial context. Especially, I examined the problems of 'Body' and 'Chikjung-language'(직정언어), the poetic diction of directly expressing the emotion in his poetry at the end of the Japanese colonial period. In this study, I adopted the viewpoint of Im Hwa(임화), who in the Marxist perspective had demanded the unity of lyrical poem and the colonial reality. Seo Jeongju had to face the irrational reality of the colonial modernity in the political, cultural conditions in the 1930s. He didn't have any means to confront himself with the reality but his (naked) body, because the late 1930s is the period when the interpreting the world in terms of ideology or enjoying the sensuous world couldn't be accepted any more. Seo Jeongju expressed the pose of hypocrisy in his Decadence poetry. But, his hypocritical pause didn't stand on the morally sound base. Though he declared his intention to separate from the pre-modern, ethical order, and began to express aesthetical morality in his poem "Self-portrait(자화상)", he could not find the passage to return to the reality. On his poem, "Sudaedongsi(수대동시)" written in 1938, Seo Jeongju began to accept the ethical distortion. He selected the order of the ethic(Sittlich) order instead of aesthetic subject negating the colonial modern reality. This ethical distortion made him write pro-Japanese poetry where the poetic-self descended into the totalistic ethics, in other word the pseudo-Sittlichkeit. That was the finding the way he could reach the eternity as a poetic vision in the greater self represented by family, nation, and state. In this process, he selected the "dialect" instead of 'Chikjung-language'. In his poetry, the "dialect" and "Korean language" are the languages which had the destiny to be assimilated to or to be governed by the language of the Japanese Imperial. So, we can say that Seo Jeongju's distortion of language consciousness is connected with the ethical distortion, the sublating the subjective and aesthetic morality into the pseudo-Sittlichkeit.