민재식 시에 나타난 성서적 모티프 연구 -속죄양 기제를 중심으로-

Abstract

Min Jae-shik's poetry “The Scapegoat” is a peculiar text which shows us how to recognize crisis by exposing the process of the Christian thetic desire permeating into the world. This study suggests that the most appropriate mechanism of revealing the nature of our civilization, in which the poet dwells as well, is a religious or sacrificial process of making scapegoat, and that the violent nature of this world is expressed as the symptom of abjection in the text. The poet exposes the tragic postwar situation of Korea by showing how the world functions as a gigantic mechanism of religious sacrifice. Min's work does not convey any single transcendental or thetic signified as the biblical meaning. On the contrary, his “The Scapegoat” reveals the illusory desire of the powerful who attempt to reorganize the absurdity of war experiences into a meaningful coherent world by the process of constructing a scapegoat myth. The absurdity of that desire of the world is externalized as an analogy of scapegoat, and the world also desires to maintain the status quo by blaming victims in turn. This is exactly why Min treats biblical motif of Jesus' life in his poem, which shows the identical symbolic mechanism of scapegoating. Thus, the image of God in Min's poetry is not a totally good God whose pure and simple goodness is metaphysically guaranteed in the Christian tradition, but a God with his dark power of horror or a self-identical God of the One who rules and controls the universe. This article is not concerned to analyze how Min utilizes biblical motif of a single unified meaning of ‘truth’ for the ethical improvement of humanity, but to study his ethics of mortality which traces the process of the Bible's functioning as a thetic religious power in social contexts and reveals the illusory nature of its thetic truth.