김현 비평에서 ‘이론적 실천’의 의미와 비평의 역할 - ‘시의 사회학’은 어떻게 가능한가?(1)

Abstract

The unprecedented proliferation of Korean literary criticism in the 1970s and its legitimization of its own existence were possible thanks to criticism’s unique role of mediating the relation between literature and reality, that is, between the autonomy and heteronomy of literature. The distinction between “practical theory” and “theoretical practice,” which Kim Hyun proposed in his The Methods of Criticism, was important at this stage. For the latter method, which was what the critics of Moonji, including Kim Hyun, had chosen, to take effect, first, the critics should amply demonstrate the effect of literary works individually, rather than accepting an a priori justification of the uselessness of literature. Second, critics should be more empirical in examining how the volition to reconstruct reality can interact between writers, critics, and readers. Third, there needs to be a differentiated discussion with the unique characteristics by genres, of novel and poetry, into consideration. This essay, based on the aforementioned questions, looks into how “theoretical practice” or “sociology of poetry” is practiced in Kim Hyun’s criticism written in the 1970s. Kim Hyun’s studies on poetry can be classified in two; when focusing on the sociology of the work, his study took a genre-centered sociological approach by examining the historical and cultural conditions which led to the generation of the poetry as a genre, whereas when focusing on the sociology of the writer, Kim took a psychological approach and verified the complex the poet had as an individual or delved into the cultural history surrounding the poet. Such research puts more emphasis on the external objectives that gave rise to poetry as a genre or to a certain poem, but does not provide a clear answer to how works of poetry can be involved in its external reality. Even if literature can reflect the will to reconstruct reality, as Kim Hyun anticipated in The Methods of Criticism, how it can be demonstrated remains vague. For sure, it is the social existence of poetry that Kim Hyun is repeatedly emphasizing while considering poetry as a genre in the 1970s. That is, the mere existence of poetry, against the commercialization of literature, can act as a brake against the industrial age, which solely imposes the notions of productivity and exchange value, with the absolute autonomy of literature as a precondition. In the end, the methodology to Kim Hyun’s “theoretical practice,” becomes a mere theory which repeatedly emphasizes the autonomy of literature, without providing a detailed demonstration of how the will to reconstruct reality can be implemented from literature to the outer world. Nevertheless, for Kim Hyun himself, the methodology to “theoretical practice” was not merely a theoretical approach, since the politics of literature was realized in his own process of reading (/criticism) as an individual reader. In other words, Kim’s own works serve as a proof of a process in which literature calls attention to the ignorance of reality and literature becomes an aspiration. Thus, the success of Kim Hyun’s “theoretical practice” strategies, which substituted the relation between the writer-work-and reality with that between the writer-work-critic(/reader), has not been amply proven.