오가와의 『박사가 사랑한 수식』에 나타난 블레이크의 시적상징과 주제

Abstract

This is a comparative study between the novel of a Japanese writer Ogawa Yōko and the poetry of a British romantic poet William Blake. Intertextuality means the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Ogawa’s novel, The Professor and His Beloved Equation, has the interconnection with the symbolic meanings and themes of William Blake’s poetry—innocence, experience, imagination, intuition, eternity, and so on. Each of the characters of the novel respectively suffers the states of innocence and experience, changes for the truth in their lives, and finally advances to the higher state of Innocence. The writer Ogawa uses math, especially Euler’s Equation, as a concept that can be applied to life in order to get closer to the deeper invisible truths hidden in it. The crucial theme of the novel can be well represented in the poetic lines of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,”: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.” It is the crucial message of the novel that eternity and infinity can be experienced ‘here and now’ through the imagination and intuition.