이어령의 시쓰기와 말년의 양식

Abstract

After fifty years of his literary career, Lee O-young (1934-2022) remained two posthumous notes since he published his first collection of poems. With reference to Theodor Adorno and Edward Said’s discussions of lateness, this paper considers the meanings of versification, which Lee O-young opted as his late style. Like so many great artists who resisted the social order and times by their catastrophic styles which created a stir in the mature stages of their respective lifelong works, Lee O-young also opted to resist and newly challenge his existing veteran writing. Going beyond his existing intellectual, analytic, logical and diagnostic writing, Lee O-young prays and confesses, just as one does the sacrament of confession, revealing and unfolding his injuries, invoking his senses and memories. His poems weave freely through prose, essays, children’s verse (fairy tales), prayer, records, and scribbles. By his making a poetic strategy with allegory, aphorism, sensory metaphor, and visible formality, his poems are characterized as the style of prayer of the christian faith, the style of memory toward the vitalities of maternity and childish mind, the style of reflection on death, and the style of scribbles in his own handwriting. “Lee O-young as a poet” is a new self of the later part of his life. His versification is not only the expression of his will to decisively style the splits and irreconcilable elements between life and death that he faced late in life, but also an existential exile, as well as a last resistive and challengeable journey of a great artist who is surrounded by death. In its birthplace for reacting against his existing writing, his versification reveals not only “negativity” in its contradictory and alienated relations, but also “resistivity” in its opposition to the temporal stream. This versification therefore answers to the late style in the respective mature stages of great artists.