김수영 문학에서 ‘시인’과 ‘시쓰기’의 의미 - 문학적 견유주의를 위한 시론

Abstract

To a poet Kim Soo-young, ‘poem’ was not merely ‘literary work’. As shown clearly in his prose, he invested more value than any of his contemporaries in ‘poem’, and in the same vein, emphasized importance of a ‘poet’ in relation to human civilization and politi-cal matters. To him, in addition to written words, any act of struggle to earn freedom of ‘language’, to overcome backwardness of ‘culture’, and to be liberated from ideological fet-ters equated to literature. Indeed he argued for all these in the name of ‘poem’ and ‘poet’. In Western aesthetics literature is largely understood in two branches. They include the view of art as a foyess (manufactured) and art as a “fraxis” (practical act), which begins in the philosophy of the reciprocity. For Kim Soo-young, literature was the latter. If we ex-amine the value of ‘poem’ and the mission of ‘poet’ as advocated by Kim Soo-young in his prose, we can see that he regarded a ‘poet’ not as someone who performs a certain func-tion, but as someone who practices poem, who lives poem. In this article, we analyze views on ‘poem’ and ‘poet’ within the context of an aesthetical genealogy on the ‘life as an artist’, and further, by exploring its connection to the concept of parrhesia that Michel Foucault advocated in his later years, we attempt to explain that to Kim Soo-young, ‘poem’ and ‘poet’, or ‘poem’ and ‘life’ were on a continuing line. When we understand lit-erature as art of parrhesia, it would be possible to clarify the meaning of a holistic ap-proach to poetry that Kim Soo-young advocated.