마종기 초기 시의 생태적 애도 -「證例」연작 읽기

Abstract

This paper aims to connect and expand the meaning of the “consciousness of immigrant” of Ma Jong-Gi's early poems in the 1960s, which I've analyzed before, to the ecological level by focusing on Ma's poem series 證例(1~6)―which refers to the case of diseases in English―written around the same period and by newly defining the key-thoughts of the poetic subject as ‘ecological mourning.’ What I argued in the previous paper was that the poetic subject sublimates the anxiety originating between the reality that has no choice but to pronounce others' death as a doctor and empathy to let others' death be without judging it to the consciousness of immigrants, proving that this sublimation is a literary practice not to encroach on the others by the pronounce of death but to secure the places for others on their own incessantly. Regarding the context above, when the consciousness of immigrants is a keyword of his early poems, the keyhole would be ecological thought revealed in his text. In the works of 證例 series, although the subject is a doctor who encounters the death of others during autopsy-decomposition, he does not view the death as an event of reality-testing that already has been concluded. The mourning begins from this time. The poetic subject presents ‘decomposition’ as an essential precondition for mourning and secures its phase at the ecological level by imagining ‘self-decomposition’ and ‘ego extinction’ that directs the practice toward oneself. The decomposed/being decomposed poetic subject exists inside the ecosystem together with dead others, and mourning is embodied as a practice of imagining coexistence in an ecological space. In this way, both the decomposed self and the other exist as co-agents in an 'ecosystem', and the hierarchy of self and other and the boundary between life and death are reconstructed in a poetic setting. This is how Ma imagines a new coexistence by performing an 'ecological mourning' in which he chooses to decompose himself and cohabit within the ecosystem with the others. In conclusion, I argue that the poetic subject of Ma's early works explored the outside of the representation system surrounding the dichotomous semanticization of life and death, and expanded the context of immigrants' thought to a level of eco-dimension by ‘ecological mourning’ involving the establishment of a relationship centered on the otherness.