農巖 金昌協의 「亡兒初朞祭文」 硏究

Abstract

This study is designed to examine the characteristics of the esthetic sense of the “Ceremonial Writing at the First Rites to Allay the Son” by Kim Chang-hyeop (whose pen name was Nongam) and figure out other esthetic characteristics than was highlighted in other studies. And in the process, the following has been studied. Existing studies tended to neglect to distinguish epitaphs from ceremonial writings in analysis because they both treated the issue of death. But these two genres do differ in the emotional effect they evoke depending on recipients. While the primary recipient is an unspecified third party in an epitaph, it is the dead as the addressee in a ceremonial writing. Especially when the dead person is the writer’s child, frequently the emotional tracks reveal themselves and, since the writer writes a lengthy and detailed piece, the length of the written fragment necessarily tends to get protracted. For this reason, Kim Chang-hyeop’s ceremonial writing is bound to show aspects quite different from those found in his other writings where emotions are restrained and language demonstrates extreme economy. “Ceremonial Writing at the First Rites to Allay the Son” was written when the son had been dead for a year, which successfully shows through its distinctive repetition how the frequently occurring sorrows after the impetuous grief control our daily life. To be specific, while the writing depicts the large width of change in the meaning of everyday life due to the presence or absence of the loved one despite the unvaried content of the repetitive quotidian, and the emotional variations thereby, it tenderly describes how a person sluggishly moves on with his daily life after the change in its meaning. This specific piece has the aspect that anyone who plods on through the difficult quotidian following experience of a separation can sympathize with, in that it describes the existential situation of coping with the quotidian life. And it is the look of our everyday life after we have experienced parting. It may be said that the emotional state of the writing is dominated by an element different than the beauty of concise rigor shown in epitaphs among others. The writing places repeated details throughout the piece, enabling the reader follow the everyday life shared with the dead son, while it shows through literary devices how it still continues and constitutes sadness. Therefore, the piece is a bit longer compared to the earlier ceremonial writings in which the writer unlocks an outpouring gush of impetuous grief. Nongam, the writer, gets to write a rarely long piece, detailing his sorrows in the “Ceremonial Writing at the First Rites to Allay the Son” done when his emotions are more under control with passage of time. This should be the product of his honest emotional tracks in the writer’s own words.