이형기의 시에 나타난 허무의 판타지 — <돌의 환타지아> 분석을 중심으로 —

Abstract

Hyung-Gi Lee was a poet dreaming of nihility during his 50-year career of poem writing. Lee pursued nothingness through his poetic works, poetics and criticism, and existing studies on the poet and his works have emphasized nihility. In other words, it can be said nihilism is Lee's poetic motive throughout all his texts. The Fantasia of the Stone is a sensational piece fully expressing Lee's nihilistic aesthetics, for which Hyung-Gi Lee was much eager to look in his entire life. In this poem, we can see his dynamic imagination, methodology of the contradiction and the destruction, and struggles against nothingness. This poem plays the stone's liberal imagination in the terms of the fantasy. The stone transforms itself into the aleph, an imaginary bead, and shows the world of it. The aleph symbolizes the smallest which embraces the greatest. Hyung-Gi Lee symbolically represents nihility by consciously imitating the aleph of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer. In this poem of the Fantasia of the Stone, the stone in prison keeps striving for the freedom. In this poem, nothingness with mingled hope and despair is well bodied from the symbol of the Ouroboros: the poet already introduced the image of the Ouroboros, derived from Buddhistic metempsychosis, in his work of the Poetics of Ouroboros. The aspect of nihility in the Fantasia of the Stone can be explained by simulation, the post-modern concept of the object. The stone in this work is not natural material as the object but creates new time and space. That is, the stone makes itself a secure prison, shows the situation of simulation and comes back to the prison; that is an irony. Seeing the stone's fantasy as the situation of simulation allows us to analyze the nihilistic world with a new and fresh view. Hyung-Gi Lee elegantly expresses nihilism and the eschatological intention of civilization critique. The fantasy of the stone in this piece actually lies in the non-existent maze. With the symbol of the aleph, the eternity of the Ouroboros and the technique of simulation, the stone's fantasy enables us to think about the human being's existence and nihility. In short, the Fantasia of the Stone uniquely expresses Hyung-Gi Lee's nihilism, regarded to obtain the reality even today.