북한서정시의 서사지향성 연구

Abstract

The argument that the life of lyrics should constitute the grains of thoughts well describes the importance of literature in North Korea. By the argument, they propose that a poet should serve the communist party and the nation for the great accomplishment and thus keep his or her life as a poet. This can partially explain why the ‘lyric’ voices are inevitably monologic no matter how diverse the sources are including the worker, farmer, fisherman, and miner in the communist society. Settled down in North Korea ten years after Korea regained its independence from the Japanese ruling, epics, lyric-epics, satirical poems and odes have been the major players in the North Korean poetic literature. There are some common features among them in their formation processes including the repetition of the same themes. The poets had to abandon their individual consciousness and private spaces in order to contribute to the birth of the Republic of North Korea and of the world where the excessive admiration and prospects for Kim Il-seong dominated. ‘Ego liberation’ that once characterized the modern days was substituted with ‘politicization of ego’ or ‘people-ization of ego’ that led to the communist version of utopia. The poetic world restricted the ego and the gap between the world and the ego grew wider and wider, which kind of an extreme world observed the egos of poets being buried under the reality of communist literature, or the North Korean literature. One’s imagination can be easily set aside by destroying the modern lyricism. When lyricism tried to connect with political imaginations and totalize the overall lives of the North Korean population superficially, the narrative nature was deeply immersed in poetry. Thus the lyrics of North Korea went through the stage where the characteristics of lyric poetry expanded into those of epic poetry.