문학사로서의 시, 영향 소멸에 대한 불안을 전유하는 시 쓰기 ― 전영경 시집 『선사시대』 읽기

Abstract

The poet Jeon Young-Kyung firstly emerged in the 1950s as a winner of the both Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo Literary Prize and stretched his literary skills to the field of academia, journal&newspaper, media, publishing, and painting, however from the same time, his works were under-evaluated by only a moral standard for frequently using profanities and vulgarism in poems, so has not been noticed until now days. However, Jeon’s first poetry collection Prehistory is a treasure trove of intertextuality and Korean modern literature. In particular, although the titles of the poems borrow titles of East Asian, European, and Aemrican writers’ texts or biblical passages, the contents appropriate the dictions of more than 20 Korean writers. This proves obviously that they are problematic texts that resonate with the realities of Korean society of the Cold War period escpecially regarding the appropriated targets are who defected or were kidnapped to North Korea, deceased writers before 1950, and writers still living in South Korea. First of all, in the title poem of the collection “Prehistory”, the poetic form of placing the ending “고”, which refers to both ‘pre’ or ‘passsed away’ and has same pronounciation with Chinese character ‘故/古’ with same meaning, in a single line and immediately changing the line, the poet covertly addresses the defected or kidnapped writers to North and alludes to that realityies in other poems, including poem “Cultural History of Korea”. By infiltrating into his poems and appropreating poetic dictions and their thoughts of literary figures―Kim Ki-rim, Oh Jang-hwan, Jeong Ji-yong, Baek Seok, Lim Hwa, Lee Yong-ak, Lee Tae-joon, Yoon Gon-gang, Seol Jeong-sik, and others―whose names were unable to be spoken out due to anti-communism ideology and censorship until the ‘Haegeum Jochi:해금 조치’, the declaration for free access to artistic works in 1988, Jeon reflects on reality that literary history is being constructed without specific facts being written down as the word of prehistory itself denotes. Above all, by appropriating that prehistorical languages, Jeon’s works are understood to have performed 'composing poetry as de/re-constructing the history of Korean modern literature' that also reconstructs the reality aganist the representation system of that time. In addition, Prehistory appropriates the dictions of not only defected/kidnapped literati, but also writers who already passed away before 1950s and those who living in South Korea such as Kim Sowol, Han Yong-woon, Yoon Dong-joo, Lee Sang, No Cheon-myung, Park Yong-cheol, Kim Kwang-gyun, Kim Young-rang, Lee Yuk-sa, Seo Jeong-joo, Park Doo-jin, Park Mok-wol, and others, and Jeon tragicizes this process again. In particular, the key beauty of these approaches can be glimpsed in his long poems, especially in one of representative works "the New Hamlet,” which is based on the universal human problems of grief and death, the impossibility of becoming a full subject of the world, and agency, reappropriates the protagonist archetype and absolute self-image of the existing Western tragedy as an ontological question of communities by calling the being's'-in-the-world, who are precarious after wars, as the protagonist's' of the tragedy. In doing so, it draws attention to individuals and their vulnerable otherness, who are victimized by the dichotomous confrontation of good/evil, this side/the other side, and the subjects/objects of revenge within the structure of the Cold War and imperial ideology. The gaze lies on the aesthetic politics of subjectivizing “we/us/ours,” the dramatic speakers, to pursue a glimmer of hope in the midst of a hopeless reality by allowing each of them to speak and recognize their own realities. Jeon's poetic project is not merely a sublimation of the “anxiety of influence,” but is the result of a deeper understanding of reality and history that appropriates the “anxiety of influences being disappearing forced by the limited and violent representation system,” or the tremendous anxiety of the disappearance of literary influence (掃滅/燒滅). It is a mature attitude that shows individuality while preempting the 'relational' poetic subject that would not be possible without them, rather than the desire to overcome the history of those who walked before them. Moreover, the fact that the form was expressed as composing poetry embracing history is understood as a victory of poetry over the anxiety of influence. The achievement of Prehistory is an important basis for understanding the worldview of Jeon's second collection Mrs. Kim San-wol and the literary logic of the poet's performativity of vulgarism and vernaculars, and resonates with the call for a (re)constructing of the literary history for Jeon Young-kyung in that it has a great influence on the innovation of poetic diction in South Korea by postwar writers, including Kim Soo-young etc.