김수영과 프랑스 문학의 관련양상

Abstract

Kim, Soo-Young has been influenced deeply by Occidental Modern Literature. He sought for the essential stage of the Modernity. He didn’t think that Occidental Modern Literature was this stage itself; he believed that it offered to him the exemplary attitude, arriving to it. This attitude can be called ‘literature of self-betrayal’ which Kim Soo-Young took for the imperative of the Modernity. He was taught this attitude by French poets and novelists, i.e. Rimbaud, Camus, Michel Butor, etc. But Kim, Soo-Young had ambivalence about French Literature. Despite the fact that he undoubtedly drew his literary guide from French poets and novelists, he exposed a subtle repugnance against the actual works of French literature. He thought that the Frenchmen were those who could appreciate the beauty. But he judged that the point was not the appreciation or the contemplation of the beauty, but the enforcement of it. He felt that, according to this judgment, French Literature had some distance from the authentic literature. One example is the poetry of Jules Supervielle. Kim Soo-Young was attracted by the theatricality of Supervielle’s poems. However he realized also that the attractiveness of Supervielle was more due to the self-contemplation of this theatricality than the theatricality itself and that, without this contemplation, the poetry would be fallen into the cheap popularity. If it is necessary that the theatrical poetry is accompanied by the self-contemplation, this poetry can’t be in accord with the literature that Kim Soo-Young considered as authentic, because he thought that the authentic literature was not that of contemplation but the literature of enforcement. Therefore Kim Soo-Young quitted Supervielle since around 1961 and decided to return to the ‘Common-sense’ and ‘Normality’, what he had considered as Anglo-saxon. But he did not know how. The solution came when he read and translated “the wisdom of Giacometti” of Carlton Lake at 1966. In this article, he found that Giacometti grappled with same problems and the sculptor discovered his way. It was the hybrid of the common-sense and the strange in manner of the common-sensory expression evoking the invisible extraordinariness. Inspired by the sculptor, Kim Soo-Young applied his method with some detailed changes to his versification that he named ‘Giacomettian transformation’ and he associated allusively with Mallarmé not with Anglo-saxon poetry. The result was, as he asserted, his poem “The Snow.” But after this discovery, it does not seem that the theatricality was given u Two years before his death, from 1966 to 1968, is characterized as time of coexistence of two attitudes, i.e. that of theatricality and that of Giacomettian transformation. His prose “Spit, The Poetry!” and his poem “Variation on Love” are very theatrical, while his last poem “The Grass” have come across into the reader’s mind the Giacomettian transformation.