문학 속에 나타난 ‘애도’와 ‘멜랑콜리’에 대한 고찰 - 애도와 멜랑콜리의 경계에서, 김승옥론

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and examine the issue of mourning and melancholy in human life focusing on Kim Seung-Ok’s novels. To perform this work, the researcher psychoanalytically approaches the root of trauma structuralized in human by holding onto the position, ‘The literature is unconsciousness of psychoanalysis’. It is natural for every human being to go through all sorts of traumas. The first trauma is the lost of ‘the Thing(la Chose, das Ding) as ’mother’ who gave the experience of perfect love. Because of this, human faces the issue of mourning and melancholy. Kim Seung-Ok’s novels fully reflect this psychoanalytical aspect. Especially, this is fully revealed in his novel 「To Understand My Sister」. The main character of this work emphasizes that human is born to long for something. What is the object of longing and why does human endlessly long for something? The reason is originated from the trauma caused by the ‘loss of the Thing’. The movement of desire which is a psychological phenomenon to take back ‘the Thing’ registered as ‘deficiency’ disappeared when the symbolic was accepted due to the introduction of language, is the truth of ‘longing’. In the works by Kim Seung-Ok, the ‘original trauma’ which is the loss of a beloved object as the first trauma is revealed and realized when it is triggered by the secondary ‘retroaction’ of experiencing the loss in a city or urban experiences. When a human faces this basic original trauma in life, there are three different paths of attitude to find the object of longing such as normal mourning, pathological mourning, and melancholy. Kim Seung-Ok’s novels show the lives of various people who take those three different paths as a method for relieving or overcoming their longing in their lives. In the results of examining which path Kim Seung-Ok chose as a method for getting out of the imaginary called ‘longing’, and how the normal mourning, pathological mourning, and melancholy have been novelized in his novels, the characters in his works are described as the look of pathological mourning or melancholic guilt, instead of taking the path of sublimed normal mourning by recognizing and admitting the ‘deficiency’ caused by the ‘loss’. The characters who take the path of sublimed mourning through the symbolization work which is ‘homeopathy’ emphasized by Lacan are the sister of 「Life Practice」, the sister of 「To Understand My Sister」, and Seo of 「History」. The rest characters take the path of melancholy by carrying out self-punishment such as childish, evil-pretending, and disillusioned pathological mourning or suicide. His literature had no other choices but to seek for another path because the human life he observed and understood was disillusion, and the characters in his novels were wandering in the depth of pathological mourning and melancholy. As the literature is a work of asking about the path of human salvation, Kim Seung-Ok who gave up on finding the path of human salvation in literature, walks around the boundary between mourning and melancholy, and then enters the new path of salvation in different dimension called ‘God’ or ‘faith’.