노동시의 일인칭 : 1980년대 노동시 다시 읽기

Abstract

This article aims to revitalize the texts of labor poetry in the 1980s by proposing to analyze the ‘first-person’ perspective demonstrated in the labor poetry of the era. In the 1980s, there emerged a great number of poems written by those who proclaimed to be a worker himself or herself. Having clung too much on to the fact that the writers were workers, however, the existing critiques read the characteristics of these labor poems as having resulted from the writers’ social status; that is, labor poetry fortified the belief that there was no distance between those who represented and those which were represented and the subject would be represented transparently. Still, ‘transparent representation’ is an illusion. And it is necessary to break away from the interpretation in which the ‘first-person’ perspective in labor poetry is reduced to the writer and to examine the point-of-view of the first-person as the properties of a voice that guides us to that representation. First, this article refers to the concept of ‘temps operatif’ by G. Agamben to contemplate the ‘parallax’ of the representation inevitable in the writing in first person. Second, considering that self-representation is nothing but a perpetual movement, it attempts to explain the impetus of writing in labor poetry with allegorical impulses, based on which the first person in poetry cannot be reduced to a specific self, but a subject that performs allegorical motions. Only when labor poetry is re-examined under such a horizon can the first person in labor poetry be placed on the ‘poetic subject’. Not only can the first person in labor poetry not be the writer herself, but it cannot be withdrawn to a ‘lyrical self’ as the owner of emotions who rules over and grants meaning to the objects being represented. Rather, the first person should be read as an assumed center, an empty place, that is, a ‘poetic subject’, formed as a result of the text. On the premise that the subject is in discord not only with the object but with herself, a new thought toward totality via labor poetry becomes possible when labor poetry is seen as a ceaseless motion that never completes.