황지우 시에 재현된 육체의 기억과 리좀적 글쓰기 -5·18을 중심으로

Abstract

The central focus of the current inquiry shall be drawn from memories of the 5·18 Movement within Hwang Jiwoo’s poetic body of work, specifically as they express themselves in the Rhizome writing style. The Rhizome writing style refers to the writing style arising from Deleuze. Hwang Jiwoo’s development of a creative language provides him with a poetic imagination which he experienced from the 5·18 Movement. Rhizome writing styles, which seek to dismantle the notion of fixed meaning and replace it with more pluralistic approaches to meaning, is realized by means of a sense of lost reason and collapsed identity. In his poetry, the body is a common reference to identity and self, often portrayed as inhabiting empty zones, making multiple appearances in multiple contexts, but portrayed in a slightly different light each time. In Hwang Jiwoo’s poems of 1980s, closer, temporally, to the events surrounding the 5·18 Movement, the self / ego is consistently portrayed as a terrible figure, such as a corpse. The events surrounding the Gwangju Uprising, at the core of the 5·18 Movement, is reenacted in this corpse, a battlefield where the savage face of military dictatorship fights with its own body. In so doing, the body of the poem is rendered as a semantic vacuum, where the powerful language of reason becomes meaningless, and the corpse must use the functions of poetic language, visualizing the fictional reality of the order underlying military dictatorships, nations, and capital. The corpse, by rejecting and twisting the conventional language of “normal life”, develops a language by which to express the poetic and the political. The poet enters a dark passage in which life and death coexist within the same body, and this allows him to confront the past in the silence of the dead witnesses to the Gwangju Uprising. This language of the dead, may take the form of silence, or the form of a more direct voice, resisting the politics of oblivion that would otherwise quickly erase the fact of their death. At this time, the body of the poem is aroused as a historical body testifying to Gwangju. In the 1990s, the body within HwangJiwoo’s poetry reveals itself in the image of a being incapable of pain. Here self-reflection and self-examination are capacities given to inhuman concepts, such as authority and ideology. In the absence of political ideology, the material body is spoken as disillusion for ideology and a descent into a language of lunacy that merely fills the space. This results in an inelastic body, one which has no passion for new worlds, and is a senseless object in the hopeless chaos of a disordered and confused world. Sense is broken, and must express itself through the language of those who have been shocked to the point of madness and collapse, but this broken sense still tries to express itself by means of the dominant language. The body, drawn in these terms, expresses the poet’s consciousness through the eyes of those who are eager to pass through the dominant forces of nations and capital that control its world. The material corpse is not only a reminder of civil war, but an aching scar of an event that remains part of our modern history. The despair the body feels in its search for language provides us with the opportunity for introspection regarding both our contemporary lives – in which we often forget the reality behind our sense of history – and our approach to poetry, where the greatest profit we achieve is one that is not easily measured in terms of capital.