김수영을 표절한 임화, 임화를 애도한 김수영(1) ― 임화와 김수영의 시적 세계관과 그 상동성

Abstract

The history of Korean modern poetry has being constructed by the disconnect between tradition and modern caused by Korean War and the division of the peninsula, as well as by the refraction from North/South ideology and its censorship, which has resulted a non-linear process of reception by readers. Regarding this fact, I focus on two poets; Lim Hwa and Kim Soo-Young. The presence of Lim Hwa precedes that of Kim Soo-young in historical reality in the sense that Lim was born earlier and composed and published before, but Kim Soo-young is the one whose work has been read and analyzed more deeply in South Korea. That is because Lim Hwa moved to North before the disconnection, which caused his whole work be forbbiden until 1987 by the censorship with ideological issue, otherwise Kim stayed South and composed poems on what genuinely ‘free’ is. Although these two poets seem to be placed separately in the North and the South, Kim Soo-young’s chronology has an intense and compressed record of “totally obsessed with poet Lim Hwa,” and his poetry and prose are heavily influenced by Lim’s texts. Thus, the study proving their relationship on poetic world view and trying to connect them are requested by the need to overcome the disconnect fostered by dichotomous ideology of division. This work is initiated utilizing the concept ‘anticipatory plagiarism’ given that the trace of history of Korean modern poetry itself had being constructed anachronically, and this would be a re-constructing it with comtemplating the history. The first step is about similar view on ‘life-world’ and ‘reality’ of them. Kim Soo-Young sees life as a requirement of reality and asks for ‘bodiness’ from thoes in life-world, which is not the passive characteristics of everyday people who simply reproduce the rountinized system, but an essential that guarantees the project of being-in-the-world who sublimate the opportunities of surreality latent in the life into action. Lim-Hwa, defining reality as an abstraction condensed life as a phenomenon and history as its essence, also interpellered for the historical practice of those who stand onto “higher level of life” among “life” to sense the inherently existing potential to the surreal in the presented. As the ‘romance’-the keyword of Lim’s philosophy-was not the attribute of solipsistic utopia as the result of ignoring reality, but the revolutionary spirit of those who overcome reality within their lives, for Kim, his keyword ‘modernity’ is the romance of a re-genesis that embraces the fatigue and sorrow of life-world and reconstructs reality experiencing it as a springboard. Furthermore, both literati were desperate for a poetic subject who would embody the philosophy above in succession: a person who would project to be new being every each day. While applying it to composing, they both argued that the subjects should distance themselves from overusing abstract and conceptual poetic diction or from ideologizing dead languages-not being used anymore among people in real world-in the name of ethnic nationalism. They supposed to be life-world activists who are conscious of the over-determined constraint of ‘being colonized’ and ‘class contradiction’ and transcend the reality by of course using their mother tongue as a ethno language against the imperialistic language, but also by using the everyday language used in the life world at the time. Since the reality is a fluid potential and also a synthesis of the temporarily captured, the positionity of the subject must be constantly reconstructed. Therefore, becoming a life-world poetic subject is a necessarily variable process of reality at every moments rather than a static goal, and is a practice with the essence of movement and continuity too. This is why they can only be defined as subjects who are being reconstructed, not subjects who have been reconstructed. Later, Lim and Kim sought literary permanence by preserving its potential power through the linguistic forms of “The Bifoliate in a Seed” and “The Peach Pit and the Apricot Pit,” respectively. This form is a metaphor for their worldview and corresponds to their methodological image of carrying out a revolution in the world that includes the beings themselves.