‘경계성(liminality)’의 표지와 시의 인식론적 지평: 1950년대 김춘수와 김종삼의 시를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper is to figure out the meaning of the boundary marks in the poetry of the 1950s Modernists, Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam, focusing on the various spatial images representing the epistemological thought. Their thought about liminality is appeared in the images of a man walking over the barren surface, refusing to be a settler. In the way of passing through somewhere, the poetic subject is walking willfully with his eyes fixed on the distant horizon. But the unattainable horizon always make him deficient. In their poetry, this image of deficient subject coincides with the image of objects that disappears from the sight of subject with vibrating between the visible and the invisible. The subject only gaze at the object, but does not know its depth and its sadness, which shows that the object is another individual having its own world and cannot be reproduced in the subject’s thought and language. So, in the poetry of Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam, the spatial images of a boundary or margin, such as “the end of the branch,” “the top of the stairs,” or “the half-open door,” are very symbolic, because they are representing the poets’ thought of liminality and desire to infinity, where clear perception of the subject and reproducible representation of the language have disappeared. These spatial images of border symbolize the interface between reality and infinity, visibility and non-visibility, revealing the subject and poetic language that desires the world beyond the limit. In this context, the fleeting moments symbolizing eternity in Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam’s poems represent a mysterious “state of ecstasy”, but it is only a illusion beyond the horizon, shown to the subject instantly. Through their works, Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam tried to explore the existence of each subject independent of ideologies. Their poetic aims are ultimately to build the poetic spaces that are separate from reality and ideology, extending the poems’ horizons to the infinity. It is not just a disagreement with the world or an escape from the world but a critical negativity against the materialized world based on the ideology of “purpose-rationality”. Above all, the poetic language and images of Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam are important touchstones in the genealogy of modernism in the sense of representing the poets’ epistemological thought. It is well known that 1960s modernism poetry is focused on the individual and his inner problems with a high degree of consciousness about poetic language. This subsequent tendency searching on modern self as anti-uniformity and self-indulgent language was prepared by Kim Chun-soo and Kim Jong-sam in a pioneering way.