韓國文學과 그 <悲劇的인 것>

A STUDY OF ‘THE TRAGIC’ IN THE LITERARY TRADITION OF ANCIENT KOREA

This paper is to examine the possibility of finding what is known as the tragic , latent in the literary tradition from the early dawn of Korean history to the end of the Koryo dynasty In the Korean tradition, the tragic means that man, for all his lamentation over his mortality and his efforts to overcome such frailty, is destined to failure. And it means also that man in spite of his desperate aspiration to be rid of earthliness, is to be bound to it despairingly. Hence he feels the necessity of proving himself immortal by sacrificing his own mortal existence at the altar of the transcendent being. This kind of tragic feature shows its own possible archtype in such resurrection rites as King Tong Myong, the founder of the Koguryo Dynasty, used to perform. He succumbed to death, symbolized by his enterring into the cave on horseback, so that he might insure himself as well as his kingdom against mortality. His immortality was brought into the world by his reappearing on the rock in the water An old document says that he was supposed to go through the tunnel which runs from the cave on the land to the rock in the river. He proved that he himself was a tragic figure. For all of his endeavor to surmount the incompatible conflict between mortality and eternity, earthliness and godliness, to succomb to death is the only way to be free from death. Such representative works of Hyanga Sylla Dynasty as Chan Kiparang Ga (Praise be to Kiparang!), Jae Mangmae Ga (A Requiem for Soul of My Young Sister) and also such a master piece of Koryo Kasa(Koryo s verse) as Dong Dong might be called the lyrical transformations of the tragic as mentioned above. Chan Kiparang Ga, on the one hand, is an elegy in the sense that the verse is mourning for the human existence divided from the world of truth. On the other hand, it is a poem of paean to the man who is supposed to share the eternity with the moon in the river. For a woman reciting Dong Dong, the love has to keep going with the seasonal rotation of nature; her monthly love affairs should go on hand in band with the calendrical changes of the season; as the ice is thawing away on the surface of the river at the beginning of the new year, so her frozen heart might begin to bloom at the end of a period of intolerable loneliness. She grieves at her estrangement from nature. Her tragedy origi!lates in the gap between nature as eternity and her love affair with earthliness. She has faith in nature. For her the seasonal progress of nature is no less than the divine Providence. Now it is possible to conclude that the motivation, which caused the ancient poets to write two works, Chan Kiparang Ga and Dong Dong, is the indomitable nature of the human spirit attempting to bridge the river whose flow devides eternity from momentary life, godliness from earthliness. Such human spirit was destined to failure, but it desperately tried to achieve its proper objective none the less.