전후 시의 언술 특성 : 애도의 언어와 우울증의 언어 - 박인환·고은의 초기시를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper attempts to propose a new reading of postwar Korean poetry in terms of the 'discourse of mourning,' focussing on the poems of Bak In-hwan and the early poems of Ko Un. The 1950s, the postwar period, were a time of 'enormous slaughter and loss' at the levels of history, nation, and family. Confronted with such an experience of loss, young poets responded to the horrors and mental impact of war using a language of mourning and a language of depression. Mourning is a rhetorical response of sorrow on the loss of a loved one. And mourning is a structured psychological state experienced as a repeated pattern. Mourning displaces the lost other, so that a transfer of the libido onto another results, or having a rhetorical effect seen as an 'esthetic sublimation to an eternal imaginary world.' But if the transfer of the libido fails, the death of the loved one is not acknowledged, leading in the direction of necrophilia (see Bak In-hwan's 'Night`s Un-Burial) or the libido that had been invested in the lost one concentrates on another, heading toward such forms of depression as self-destruction, self-abolition, a death wish. Mourning and depression cannot be clearly distinguished and mourning is mixed with depression, depression is mixed with mourning, so that it is not easy to distinguish two specific forms of discourse. Gweon Taek-yeong writes, "If depression originates in narcissism and death instinct, mourning is a life-instinct and is obliged to repeat itself. Therefore the mourning subject is the subject of desire. Freud's mourning is Lacan's desire and depression is an urge," clarifying the viewpoints of Freud and Lacan. We studied the language of mourning and depression in postwar poetry with reference to the poems of the major postwar poet Bak In-hwan and the early poems of Ko Un. Bak's poetic language manifests the what Derrida calls the 'fundamental discourse act of exclamation, the vocative,' the characteristic rhetorical discourse of mourning, uttering repeatedly the insistent conversational voice of the poetic speaker demanding a listening ear. As De Man said, mourning uses personation a great deal, and there is plentiful use of personification and vocatives in Bak In-hwan's "If Something Remains Alive," "Night's Un-Burial" etc. Especially in the latter poem, the loss of the beloved is denied, while manifesting necrophilia by identification with the deceased other and narcissistic desire as well as depressive forms of language such as contradictions and paradoxes. Refusing to turn death into a symbol is likewise found in the poet's most famed work, "Wooden Horse and Lady." Between affirmation / denial of the loss of the beloved, rupture of memory / return of memory, a sorrowful rhythm is repeated, the poetic subject fluctuates endlessly between death-wish and life-wish, narcissism and lust. In Bak's texts, we find a strong interplay of the languages of mourning and depression. In the texts by Ko Un, the destructive effects of war are confronted while a desire for self-destruction is more strongly present; rather than tending toward modernism, they are sublimated into a desire for mourning in traditional lyric poetry. In his early poems, a depressive monotony of tone, a dullness of tone appear but certain poems arouse by their symbolist poetic qualities an inclination toward extinction, a praise of nihility. Here the lost one is replaced by 'sister,' and the poet's sense of original sin is expressed by his claim to have communicated a fatal disease to this (fictional) sister. In later poems the 'dead sister' is replaced by 'nature' while the departed person is sublimated into the limitlessness of an everlasting esthetic appreciation of the order of the imagination. The sister is enshrined in the esthetic world of the imagination, and in place of death, known as beauty, the place of the girl I killed, opens a world of the beauty of meaninglessness in the form of mourning. The dynamics of a sublimation creating an idealization within death are the result of symbolist techniques in Ko Un's poems, while mourning and sublimation are the outcome. We have examined the contrasting forms of discourse of mourning and depression found in the poems of the major postwar poet Bak In-hwan and the early poems of Ko Un.