임화 시에 나타난 근대 풍경과 이념적 시선의 변모과정 - 식민지적 근대와 시선의 계보학(3)

Abstract

In order to perform a fundamental examination of the modernity of Korean poetry, it is necessary to take note of the characteristics and methods of linguistic representation of the gaze that beholds the modern landscape. This paper, as part of an attempt to follow the genealogy of colonial modernity and this gaze, inquired into the issues of this gaze and the aspects of change in the modern landscape represented in the poetry of Im Hwa. The landscapes of Seoul in the mid-to-late 1920s had the most fundamental influence on Im Hwa's later understanding of the world and its implementation. Yet, the city landscape in Im Hwa's early avant garde poetry failed to achieve historicity and concreteness. His poetic subject views the landscape of the disturbed city of colonial modernism with perspective, but it fails to capture the details of this landscape with a subtle sensibility and gaze, focusing on the allegorical meaning of the city landscape. Instead, Im Hwa wandered the streets, searching for self-identity and attempting to gain "eyes"(a gaze) that can properly understand the world. In this process, Im Hwa gained the gaze of authority that intersects the colonial city and the gaze that stands in opposition to this gaze of authority, discovering the class-based others who are exposed to the arrangement of visibility of colonial authority. On the other hand, the poetic subject in the "short narrative poems"(단편서사시) Im Hwa began to publish in 1929 comes face to face with the landscape of the streets of Seoul. Now the streets are represented as a space where the struggle between colonial authority and the working class has been made ordinary, a space where the working class seeks solidarity, and at the same time a space of growth where the poetic subject is reborn as an avant garde class subject. In particular, it is noteworthy that Im Hwa narrates the streets of Seoul as an historical, realistic space that holds an optimistic outlook on the future. Whenever he was confronted with a political turning point, Im Hwa returned to the Jongno intersection, reminisced about the past, looked out on the present, and looked into the future. This is because the landscape of the streets of Seoul provided Im Hwa with an original image that decided his political thought, his understanding of the world, and his literary imagination. After the dissolution of KAPF, Im Hwa introduced a new poetic space known as the Korea Strait(현해탄). Yet the ocean landscape in the poems that followed the tradition of his Korea Strait, as well as the landscape of Japan and Busan, are Im Hwa's memories of the landscape that he saw when he went to Japan as a foreign student in order to grow as an avant garde class subject. The reason why Im Hwa had to write poetry about the Korea Strait of his memories is because he believed that the dreams and ideals cherished by the youth who crossed the Korea Strait would allow him to recover the "reflexive gaze" that looked back upon his self in the present. Through this reflexive gaze, Im Hwa looked back on the positive opportunity contained in the ideology of modernity and sought to reconstruct an ideological subject that would face the progressively worsening political condition. For this reason, Im Hwa represented the Korea Strait not merely as a homogeneous and empty space, but as a space filled with enlightened ideology capable of creating a new history. In this process of historicizing and temporalizing landscape, Im Hwa looked back on the fate of Korea and the Korean people and succumbed to self-destructive tendencies as a colonized subject, but he showed himself to be a modernist who accepting the landscape transformed by colonial modernization as a representation of progress.