자아와 문화의 정체성 —세이머스 히니의 ꡔ어느 자연주의자의 죽음ꡕ

Abstract

The Identity of the Self and the Culture in Death of a Naturalist Jae-Joon Kim (Mokpo National University) The issue of identity of a personal self or a cultural community has been one of the major themes throughout Western literature. This one has traditionally been an especially important concern for the writers of Ireland which had been colonized by England for a long time. Seamus Heaney often confessed that he had felt from the early time that he had constantly been threatened with the dissolution of the self. Like many postcolonial writers, many of his poems and proses express a sense of dividedness on both sides of self and culture. Heaney describes himself placed between English influence and native Irish experience. Around the time his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published, Heaney defined his few poems as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself. But the self and the culture his poem revealed and restored do not show any continuous and unified inheritance or quality. His poems eventually imply that it is impossible that any culture continues to maintain the original quality, and that the self, even though preoccupied with the past, continually suffers from breaking off from its past and unstably stays confused among the memory of the past, and the experience of the present, and the perspective of the future. The connection between digging and writing is the most important aspect of Heaney’s poetic idea. But Heaney’s digging as writing a poem is poignantly paradoxical and contradictory because it is both an act that bonds the generations as well as an act that severs the living roots of the past. The act of setting darkness echoing, which is also another metaphor for writing, simultaneously involves a continuation of the past as well as a rupture within that continuation.