정지용 초기 시의 일본 근대문화 수용과 문화의식

Abstract

This thesis examines the perspective through which the culture of Japan was assimilated by the colonial subject focusing on Jeong Ji-yong’s poems “Cafe France”, “Reptiles” and “The Covering Carriage” and discusses the significance of that culture based on the cultural consciousness that was formed by that assimilation. The first poem, “Cafe France” is filled with exotic images and through the objects captured in the focus of the gaze of the poetic self, that colonized self-consciousness is revealed. By establishing an emotional identification between “exotic” images such as palm trees, parrots, and puppies, and dispossed objects, the poet expresses both a powerful sense of alienation and a mocking self-abnegation. Here we can see that an unemotional attitude toward the acceptance of the modern culture of the empire has been interjected. In the second poem, “Reptiles” the train, the cultural symbol of colonial subjectivity, is figuratively depicted as a monstrous and repulsive reptile. This can be seen as a psychological exclusion mechanism of the colonized that rejects the culture of the other. Not only is he belittling the Japanese with the term “Jap” but the poet also adds an unsavory touch by describing their legs as “hairy” alluding to animal-like characteristics. These aspects of the poem make it possible to read it as a reversal of the colonial narrative of the empire and as resistance narrative as well. The third poem “The Covering Carriage” set in a modern Japanese city, is undercut with the sense of insecurity and fear necessarily felt by an outsider and colonial subject in a city of the empire. The poetic self, while negotiating the night streets of the city, is diminished by the sense of insecurity and fear that it experiences simultaneously from both the time and space that it is located in. The only why out of this is to leave the city and the means of that departure is found by dreaming of escape in the “Covering Carriage.” The early poems of Jeong Ji-yong showed characteristics of a negative and critical reception of Japanese modern culture. This was due to the following: modern Japanese culture placed the poetic self in a state of unbalance characterized by defamiliarization and difference, made this self the object of disgust or rejection through an exclusionist psychology, or coerced it by injecting feeling of insecurity and fear.