박인환 시의 불안, 죽음 의식과 이를 통한 시쓰기의 문제

Abstract

This study discusses Park In-hwan’s attitude toward death and anxiety as they appear in his poetry. I argue that the anxiety and consciousness of death that appears in Park’s poetry is not simply the passive emotional response of an intellectual facing a tragic era, but is instead an important mood(stimmung) that serves a more fundamental role in Park’s perception of history. Through this process, I interpret some of the main motifs of Park’s work (the black god, wind/storms, finality, and so on), hoping to provide a perspective from which to understand Park’s poetry with greater depth. The source of the anxiety and consciousness of death that permeates Park’s work is not limited simply to the Korean War. The anxiety of his poetry is instead closer to the ontological anxiety of “having-been-thrown” (geworfenheit) into the world. He expresses this ontological anxiety through the image of ‘wind’ (or storms), and he represents a perceived world of meaninglessness in the image of ‘the black god.’ The issue of ontological anxiety is also linked to his consciousness of death. Park consistently locates himself in the space between life and death, so that to him death is both something fast approaching and, at the same time, the thing that repeatedly makes him aware of life. The discerning feature of this consciousness of death is that the moment the poet perceives death is the moment that forces him to see his present objectively. Ultimately what Park achieves through this consciousness of death is a poetry of conscience. From within his anxiety, the speaker hears the call of conscience, and then makes a continued effort to recover his essential self (to become a poet). In this way, anxiety and perception of death become the motivation for the poet to continue writing poetry. In other words, it can be seen that in Park’s work, anxiety is not only the expression of a passive emotional response to war, but in fact functions as the fundamental element that sets his entire poetic process in motion. Park thereby approaches the question of the real meaning of existence, which extends beyond a specific era, in his literary work. In addition, he moves beyond the encroachments of anxiety as an emotion to reveal a unique attitude towards death and the problem of conscience.