윤동주 시에 나타난 향암성(向暗性)의 상상력

Abstract

Dong Joo Yoon occupies a firm position in Korean literature as a representative poet of the late Japanese colonial period. As Dong Joo’s rhetoric nicknames such as ‘the star in the dark age sky’ or ‘the last star of the colony’ tell us, his poems written during the period of the aggravated oppression of Japanese imperialism have been interpreted as dealing with Korean ethnic group and resistance even though his work is lyrical and introspective by nature. Accordingly, the image of the light/dark in the poems are interpreted in a way that fits best for the mainstream interpretation. In other words, the unilinear interpretation that the dark in the poems is viewed as a metaphor for the colonial era and the light in the poems is viewed as the sign of hope for the independence of one’s country has been the mainstream interpretation. Attempting to interpret Dong Joo Yoon’s poems in the light of psychoanalysis, this article searches for the meaning of imagination of Scototropism in his poems. As a result, such attempt could unearth the phenomenon of mother fixation, the desire to return to the womb and other desires buried deep in the poet’s subconscious through a detailed image analysis. What I found is the poet wanted to live as a pure soul kept desire and passion in his inner world that he couldn’t even sense and control. From this perspective, his poems depict the cyclical journey: a soul expelled from the maternal space wonders the world experiencing discord and proceeds to the moment of gaining the imaginative sense of unity with the mother. Therefore, the stereotype of the manifestation that the dark image is negative and the light image is positive should be modified.