박영근 시에 나타난 절망과 서정의 변증법

Abstract

Park YoungKeun as a labourer poet had fought intensively against economical extremities of Neo-liberalism and exploitation of capital from labourers until he died. However, he came to fall into ideological despair by losing his destination after the breakdown of Soviet Union. The Labourers, liberal intellectuals as well as labourer poets, dreaming about the world where labourers can live subjectively, resulted in losing their dynamics by the fact that all of the social classes were swept by the high waves of Neo-liberalism but to show extreme secularization. Park diagnoses that the cause of the failure exists in snobbism by which the position of labourers can be found in the upper parts of the social structure, and that love and value of labour cannot be attained in the political conflicts. He thinks that the true images of labourers exist in the pity that they fall like dust for their consolidation to become one, rather than in fighting for their realistic pie. Thus, he departs desolate cities and inhuman factories and tries to find the fountain of lyricism by returning to his hometown where his family are sweating in the farm. The poet can sing with his poems feeling the thirst for lyricism because he is feeling deep despair. Park’s despairs can be classified into ideological despair, economical one, and existential one. These despairs are not so much divided as mutually connected and affiliated into deeper one. The female labourers are fascinated to watch the images of manikins in the street and liable to be polluted willingly for their secular illusions. Now, the labour poems of 80s cannot maintain their ideological values further and are degenerated into hypocritical slogans. The poet tries to maintain moderated lyricism by gazing his past calmly when he feels his fear that he would cry out at his long and meaningless way of ideological strifes. The poet would like to accept his poor ordinary life positively, not painfully though he is suffering from realistic difficulties caused by economical poverty. When labourers cannot accept poverty as their own, they come to lose their identities and become in-existential beings. He thinks that the poor can enjoy their own lyricism and let the flowers of their esthetics bloom even in the environment of slums. And he dares to prove the lyrical esthetics of the poverty by entering into the despairs of the poverty and playing their hearts as musical instruments, not by telling the causes of it in the battlefield of ideological strifes. Lastly, the objects on which he would like to depend for overcoming his despairs are his poems. However, he comes to fall into existential despair when he faces the huge universe and nature. He realizes that even his poems are powerless and meaningless in front of tremendous nature like the wide plain of Mongol. He departs the way of wandering in his existential despair as mad Hamlet resists against corrupted world. His wandering can be that of finding the truth of existential life, as well it can be the existential situation of the poet who is expelled by the conspiracy of power and capital. He achieves his awakening that he can reach the level of ecological and lyrical esthetics with the principle of life and regeneration through his integration with existential elements of the universe and nature as well as through the rottenness of human-beings’ secularities.