마종기 초기 시의 "이주민" 의식에 대한 연구 ― 1960년대 시를 중심으로

Abstract

Ma Jong-Gi's poems, which have been famous among Korean sholars and readers from 1960, have been analyzed by the poet's identity as a doctor who always experiences death, a diaspora, and a christian. However, research on his early poems is overlooked, and most studies ever have been based on the biographical fact that he had immigrated to the U.S. Regarding of these context above, this study examines the consciousness of "immigrants" in his early poems, especially based on the expression ; "we have been endless immigrants", which was repeatedly revealed at <Stand as Flowers Too> written in 1960, much earlier than the moment that he had immigrated in 1966. There is no doubt that poetic images and his thoughts about "death" are important in reading his poems. However, this death was not only experienced by facing the death of a patient as a doctor, but also lies in a structural causal relationship with the massacre absurdity that experienced during the Korean War, in which South and North Korea began to clash in 1950s, and with facing the dead bodies that time. The attitude as spectator that the poetic subject shows before death is a way to respond to affect of anxiety triggered when the impression imprinted from the death experienced in childhood appears as symptoms. It stems from the conflict between empathy to make a place for the others without judging the "death" by himself, and the inevitable reality that has no choice but to judge death as a social self of a doctor. The poetic subject goes as far as transforming himself through an island image and an image that dissects and decomposes himself into a corpse. Thus, the before representation system of life and death is neutralized, and coexistence with the others is sought in the void revealed there. This void mediates 'epoche', where the judgment on death is being stopped, 'death drive' which connote that even the manager of death is eventually going to death, and 'uncertainty' that a fixed meaning cannot be secured. Ma Jong-Gi constantly confronts the affect of anxiety that exists around these, and sublimates the anxiety into a "immigrant" consciousness. In other words, the "immigrant" consciousness of early Ma Jong-Gi' poems is read as a literary practice not to encroach on the others by judging the death transcendentally but to secure the others' own places incessantly.