주체, 언어, 재현의 경계에서: 스나이더의 공(空)의 시학

Subject, Language, and Representation: Snyder’s Poetics of Emptiness

My essay explores the possibility of poetics of emptiness in the poetry of Gary Snyder. His Buddhist concept, emptiness, demonstrates the lack of intrinsic nature in all phenomena and the absence of an independent, perduring self. He locates the extralinguistic reality, emptiness, within the contingent nexus of language itself instead of transcending or discarding it: the elision of a lyric “I” and transitive verbs, for example, is his grammatic attempt to represent the illusory nature of the self. He replaces the solitary speaker with sparely modified, concrete, but generic images to demonstrate human enactment into a harmonious interplay with other elements of life as a part of a vast web of interconnections. Through various uses of grammatical and structural ellipse, paratactical construction, and typographical and semantical space, his poetry forces the reader to experience the “thought-pause” and intuitively perceive things-as-they-are. Snyder enacts in his poetics an alternative to postmodern perspectives on subject, language, and representation, and revitalizes their skeptical look at any account of human agency and the possibility of language.