첨단과 전통의 역설 -김수영 전통론의 현대적 재구성

Abstract

It is difficult to think about Kim Soo-Young’s literature without considering the context of ‘novelty’ or ‘avant-garde’. But, what makes his literature genuinely ‘cutting edge’ comes from self-reflection about it. This refers to the ‘gloom’ and ‘grief’ which appears in the poems of Kim Soo-Young. What is interesting is that this ‘condolence’ is not unrelated to the reality of the peripheral capitalism. The more a poet in the peripheral capitalism tries ‘a cutting edge song’, the bigger gap he experiences between the reality where he is in and his song. The condolence is also an expression of the recognition and self-awakening about this ‘gap’. It is also an acknowledgement about the ‘retardation’ of our poetic reality itself. Kim Soo-Young, by acknowledging the ‘retardation’, seeks the ‘paradox’ to lead to becoming ‘cutting edge’. It is in this context where Kim Soo-Young’s so-called remarks on ‘tradition’ become problematic. The ‘tradition’ here is irrelevant to chauvinism or populism. This relates to the pursuit of density in modern poetry by the poet who belongs to the peripheral capitalism. By detaching socio-cultural context from ‘traditional language’ and seeking for its true nature, he works on transforming it into the most cutting edge ‘vacuum language’. Through this ‘disturbance’ and ‘arrangement’, Kim Soo-Young dreams of the possibility to be able to change the reality through poetry (literature). This is the moment when the history of Korean literature arrives at the new recognition of the political power of the poetry. This is the very implication in the history of literature that Kim Soo-Young’s recognition of modern poetry has.