김명인 시집 『동두천』에서의 기억의 현재화와 부정적 상징물의 기능

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of transition of “us” in Kim Myung-In’s first poetry collection, Dongducheon, from the perspective of liminality. It seeks to elucidate how the author, Kim Myung-In, personally confronts and overcomes his wounds and the contemporary issues of his time. Research on Dongducheon has been bifurcated into a psychoanalytic approach focused on his personal history and a historicist methodology centered around diagnosing societal issues in the 1970s. The “us” to which the poetic subject belongs encompasses orphanages, hometown friends, and a group of teachers. Among these, first, the violent environment of “us” stimulates the suppressed memories of the teacher group’s “us.” The purpose of transitions occurring in liminality is to confront those memories and reconcile with the others involved in a conflicted relationship within those memories. The poetic subject confesses the suppressed guilt from the past through the theatrical act of articulating negative symbols in the rituals. As a result of this transition, the pre-existing “us” of the teacher group is reintegrated into a newly formed “us,” which includes mixed-blood students. The societal position of this reintegrated “us” is a more fundamental stage of life than the violent “us” to which they originally belong. Since this group is virtual, the only reality is the imagination of liminality that enables such virtuality. This imagination is a movement of identification towards the lowest level of social status from their present social position. This identification movement is a social phenomenon of the 1970s that aimed for a class identity with the masses.