정지용 중·후기시에 나타난 풍경과 시선, 재현의 문제 － 식민지적 근대와 시선의 계보학(4)

Abstract

This paper examined the problems of Landscape, Gaze, and its linguistic representation, through Jeong Jiyong’s later poems, especially the religious poetry, the travel poetry created during the last stage of Japanese imperialism. In the religious poetry, Jeong Jiyong adopted the transcendent gaze of the God. The God in his poetry is represented as the image of heavenly body such as sun, moon, Venus, or as the image of flame of the Lamp. These imagery always has the image of Eye. The poetic subject negating his own eyes draws the God’s Eye into his soul. Jeong Jiyong’s self-reflection deepened the internality of Korean modern poetry by adopting the God’s eye instead of the modern gaze which gives privilege on human eyes. In the travel poetry, Jeong Jiyong represented the total image of Mountains only by way of representing small natural objects and combining its imagery. Especially, he identified his haggard soul with the natural objects which he had met by chance on his way of climbing mountains. On the other hand, he adopted the gaze of butterfly’s compound 【Abstracts】 148 제47집(2009. 8. 30) eyes to criticize the violence of modern subject’s gaze. Through the butterfly’s compound eyes, Jeong Jiyong could showed the transcendent imagination crossing the border between life and death, the border between existing and non-existing. In addition, Jeong Jiyong protected the purity of his soul and the dignity of modern poetry by declaring the symbolic death of himself. The fantasy of death which Jeong Jiyong saw through the butterfly was the representation of poet’s destiny in the colonial modern society. And, it was the self declaration of giving up writing in order not to cooperate with Japanese Imperialism, too.