고석규의 죽음의 세계와 여백의 사상

Abstract

This study attempts to consider the world of horror, anxiety and death shown in Ko Suk-gyu’s poems. He defected to South Korea due to personal ideology when he was young and he entered the war as a soldier. Consciousness of horror, anxiety and death he experienced through the war was due to the horror that he might soon be killed on the battlefield, facing death of soldiers. Human violence and loss of humanity which he experienced on the battlefield was deeply stamped on his mind so that it distressed him. He was hurled into the irrational reality where the living and the dead coexist. This irrationality causes intense anxiety so that this anxiety was expressed in ambivalent ways of laugh and weeping. These patterns were expressed in the various forms of self-defence, catharsis, madness, etc. Go Suk-gyu realized in anxiety the fact that he was a being towards death and he felt the futility about death, that is to say human finitude and a sence of self-alienation. Also he faced a lot of the dead bodies and horror, wandering in the city streets in ruins. And he recognized that his mind was ready dead and that his body was fully ruined, acknowledging that his body was fragmented state, that is deformed body. And he deeply thinks what is life and what is death. Through this thinking, he listened voice of conscience in the form of silence in his inner side. That is not fleeing from death but fighting against death. That is anticipation to death. And he went out into the world of criticism across the route to poem. That is to have new understanding about the world of horror and death which he could not overcome in his poetic worlds. His new understanding was not that death is nothing where anything is nonexistent but that death is empty space where silence exists, that is to say empty space filled by absence. Man can acquire the possibility of existence to fill the empty space because empty space exists. His writing on the basis of concept of this empty space was a possibility that he could transcend horror and irrationality, and then transcend even death.