The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 0674417178, 9780674417175

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The Proletarian Wave

Harvard East Asian Monographs 374

The Proletarian Wave Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945

Sunyoung Park

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2015

© 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japa nese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the Association for Asian Studies First Book Subvention Program. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Park, Sunyoung, 1971The proletarian wave : literature and left ist culture in colonial Korea, 1910–1945 / Sunyoung Park. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-41717-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Korean literature—1919– 1945—History and criticism. 2. Korean literature—1894–1919—History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature—Korea—History—20th century. 4. Socialism—Korea— History—20th century. 5. Radicalism—Korea—History—20th century. 6. Right and left (Political science)—History—20th century. 7. Ideology and literature—History— 20th century. 8. Korea—Politics and government—1910–1945. 9. Korea— Colonial influence. I. Title. PL958.6.P37 2014 895.7'0935851903—dc23 2014011103 Index by Anne Holmes Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

Contents

List of Plates and Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1 Part I: Backgrounds

1

The Left in Colonial Korea: A Contextual Account

21

Part II: Landscapes 2

The Proletarian Wave: An Anatomy of the Literary Left

43

3

Leftist Literature and Cultural Modernity: A Critical Overview

89

Part III: Portraits 4 5

Translating the Proletariat: Debates and Literary Experience of the KAPF

125

Confessing the Colonial Self: Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Literary Ethnographies of the Proletarian Nation

160

Contents

vi

6 7

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae’s Portraits of Proletarian Women

197

Everyday Life as Critique: Kim Namch’ŏn’s Literary Experiments

232

Conclusion

268

Bibliography

277

Index

311

Plates and Figures

Plates The color plates are included in an insert following p. 122.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Pip’an (Criticism, January 1933), cover Kongje (Mutual aid, September 1920), cover Kaebyŏk (Creation, July 1921), cover Ŭmak kwa si (Music and poetry, August 1930), cover Ŏrini (Children, January 1932), cover Hyesŏng (Comet, March 1931), cover Hyesŏng (Comet, March 1932), cover Kŭnu (Friends of the rose of Sharon, May 1929), cover Yŏmyŏng (Dawning light, July 1925), cover Sin yŏsŏng (New woman, October 1932), cover Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3

A group of Korean peasant rebels, 1907, from Frederick Arthur McKenzie, The Tragedy of Korea (1908) Protest march organized by the Wŏnsan Labor Association, from Tonga ilbo, May 10, 1928 News report on the arrest of members of the Korean Communist Party in 1925, from Tonga ilbo, September 13, 1927

25 30

34

viii

Plates and Figures

2.1

An anarchist-inspired cartoon, from Sin saenghwal, May 1922 One of the KAPF journals, Yesul undong, November 1927 (reprinted cover) News report on the trial of KAPF members, from Chosŏn chungang ilbo, October 27, 1935 “March Scene,” a cartoon about the Great Depression, from Pip’an, March 1932 Ko Hŭidong, Ch’ŏngch’un, December 1914, cover Ahn Sŏkchu, illustration from Pyŏlgŏn’gon, August 1927 Kim Kyut’aek, Che ilsŏn, June 1932, cover Na Un’gyu, still photograph from Arirang, 1926 Yi Sangch’un, woodblock print for Yi Pungmyŏng’s The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory, from Chosŏn ilbo, May 29, 1932 Ahn Sŏkchu, illustration for Yi Kiyŏng’s Hometown, from Chosǒn ilbo, June 8, 1934 La Ruino, July 1920, cover Photograph of Yŏm Sangsŏp and the daughter of an acquaintance taken during his school days in Japan Ahn Sŏkchu, illustration for Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Three Generations, from Chosǒn ilbo, September 3, 1927 Illustration for Chong Ch’ilsŏng’s essay, “The World through a Woman’s Eyes,” from Pip’an, January 1931 Ch’oe Yŏngsu, illustration for Kang Kyŏngae’s Salt, from Sin kajŏng, August 1934 Yi Madong, illustration for Kang Kyŏngae’s The Human Predicament, from Chosŏn ilbo, November 23, 1934 An image of angst during the second Sino-Japanese War, Pip’an, November 1938, cover The wartime magazine Ch’unch’u, February 1941, cover

2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2

4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2

52 64 71 80 97 106 111 132

142 150 165 184 191 206 219 224 254 264

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the knowledgeable, generous, and unwavering support of my dissertation advisers at Columbia University. Paul Anderer taught me modern Japanese literature and expertly guided me through the labyrinth of the graduate program. Charles Armstrong has been a wise adviser who from the very beginning could spot the potential of a book on Korean realism. The late Jahyun Kim Haboush was and will always be for me the model of a passionate and dedicated scholar. Theodore Hughes has been for many years a most committed and caring mentor and also a cherished colleague whose scholarship has taught me much. Both through his work and his words, Bruce Robbins has been the rare inspirational intellectual. Over the years, I have also been fortunate to encounter many great teachers of literature, culture, and life. They include professors Cho Namhyŏn, Cho Tongil, Kim Yoon-sik, and Kwon Youngmin at Seoul National University; Barbara Bono at SUNY Buffalo; Harry Harootunian at New York University; and Edward Said, Karatani Kojin, and Martin Puchner at Columbia University. In diverse ways, their passion and knowledge have had a formative impact on this book. My colleagues at the University of Southern California have provided an ideal environment and a constant stream of stimulation during the writing of the book. I would like to thank, in particular, Brian Bernards, David Bialock, Bettine Birge, Dominc Cheung, Youngmin Choe, George Hayden, Namkil Kim, Sonya Lee, Audrey Li, Akira Lippit, Anne McKnight, Lori Meeks, Stanley Rosen, and Satoko Shimazaki for their generous support, mentorship, and friendship. I owe special

x

Acknowledgments

thanks to Kyung Moon Hwang, who has been the greatest mentor and could not have been more generous in giving careful and constructive feedback. David James also read and annotated an early draft in its entirety, and his comments have helped me invaluably on my way to the final draft. David Kang organized a refereed manuscript workshop at a critical stage of my writing and has been throughout a supportive colleague. As a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, I benefited from the cordial collegiality of many scholars; I would particularly like to thank Robert Hegel, Mijeong Mimi Kim, Linchei Letty Chen, Rebecca Copeland, and Lori Watt. Finally, graduate students have contributed ideas, big and small, many of which have made their way into the manuscript. Special recognition and gratitude are owed to Kyeonghee Eo, Nathaniel Henneghan, Wooseok Kang, Kathryn Page Lippsmeyer, Youngsun Park, Yunji Park, Nicole Schildkraut, and Benjamin Uchiyama. Some of the most decisive contributions to the book have come from scholars within the broader community of East Asian studies. JinKyung Lee has taught me so much not just through her caring and attentive feedback but also through her example as a genuine intellectual of ideas. Jae-yong Kim and Alan Tansman made time to read the whole manuscript and offered immensely helpful insights and suggestions. Much knowledge and the comfort of a community have been provided by more individuals than I can name here. I particularly want to thank Ruth Barraclough, Sookja Cho, Kyong-Hee Choi, Hye Seung Chung, Kimberly Chung, Michael Denning, Henry Em, Christopher Hanscom, Kelly Jeong, Charles Kim, Kyunghyun Kim, Sangjun Kim, Suzy Kim, Ross King, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Namhee Lee, Sang-kyung Lee, David McCann, Eun Kyung Min, Hwasook Nam, Se-Mi Oh, Samuel Perry, Michael Robinson, Youngju Ryu, Michael Shin, Serk-bae Suh, Yoon Sun Yang, and Dafna Zur. Their contributions to this book have been numerous and could not always be acknowledged in the footnotes. A special mention is due to Cheon Jung-hwan, Han Kihyŏng, Son Youkyong, Yi Hyeryŏng, and the other members of the socialist culture reading group at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. They have been an indispensable source of enthusiasm and inspiration since our first encounter in 2011, and they embody the kind of scholarly group on which I hope to rely for future learning and collaboration. The many librarians who have aided my research at various American institutions also deserve to be mentioned here. They include

Acknowledgments

xi

Hyokyong Yi and Hee-sook Shin at Columbia University; Yunah Sung at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; and Tony Chang at Washington University in St. Louis. At the University of Southern California (USC), I rely daily on the expeditious and resourceful help of the two outstanding guardians of the Korean Heritage Library, Joy Kim and Sun-Yoon Lee. I am also indebted to a number of hardworking and accommodating librarians in Korea. Many members of the staffs of the National Library of Korea, the National Assembly Library, Koryo University Library, Yonsei University Library, and the libraries at Seoul National University have made my research on often rare colonial-period magazines, journals, and books possible. In addition, I thank O Yŏngsik of the Modern Korean Bibliographical Society for facilitating access to the Adan and Ch’unch’ŏn private archives, from which come many of the color illustrations included in this volume. The research and writing of this book have at various stages been sponsored by multiple foundations. The Daesan Foundation provided grants for completion of my dissertation at Columbia University. The Korean Literature Translation Institute supplied partial funding for my translation and publication of On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asia Series, 2010), an anthology that is in many ways a companion volume to this book. The Northeast Asia Studies Council of the Association of Asian Studies funded my research travel and conference orga nization, and the Association of Asian Studies awarded a first-book subvention for publication of this text. The USC Dornsife College, the Sejong Society of the USC Korean Studies Institute, and the USC East Asian Studies Center all have provided me with much needed and gratefully acknowledged research and conference grants over the years. I have presented materials from this book to audiences at Arizona State University, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard University, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Washington, and Washington University in St. Louis. I am grateful to the organizers, discussants, and those in attendance for their insights and comments. All materials in Part I, Part II, and two chapters of Part III are previously unpublished. Chapter 6 has appeared as “Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyŏngae’s Portraits of Proletarian Women,” in

xii

Acknowledgments

Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 4 (2013): 947–85, and Chapter 7 was published under the title “Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea: Kim Namch’ŏn’s Literary Experiments,” in the Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 3 (2009): 861–93. I am grateful to these journals for permission to reprint these materials. More thanks go to editors at the Harvard University Asia Center and the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University. At Harvard, two anonymous reviewers provided useful feedback and suggestions. Robert Graham has been the most reliable and attentive editor that any author could hope for. Deborah Del Gais has provided me with caring and knowledgeable guidance, and Jeff Cosloy has my gratitude for his work on the book cover. I am also thankful to Barbara Folsom, Kim Giambattisto, Katie Van Heest, and Patricia Waldygo for their careful and patient copyediting of the manuscript. Lastly, I owe special thanks to Dan Hitchcock Vaughan for his meticulous and masterful restoration of colonial illustrations. Behind every book is a personal life, and mine is thankfully full of wonderful people. My family in Korea has always been my solid anchor. I thank my late dad, Park Jungsup, and my mom, Kim Yeonjo, for supporting me emotionally and materially for so many years, all the while enduring my lengthy absences and lifetime vagaries. And I thank each of my sisters—Hyesun, Youngsin, Jiseon, Jisook, and Youngha—for their love and support and for endowing me today with a delightful community of sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews. I would also like to acknowledge my family in Italy—my late father-in-law Mario, my motherin-law Angela, and my sister-in-law Silvia and her family—for enriching my life beyond description before, during, and after the writing of the book. Finally, I owe a tremendous debt to my husband and lifetime companion, who for the past few years has lived with “the book” as much as I have. Thank you, Massimo, for more than I can thank you for.

Abbreviations

HHMP

INSC

KAPF KCP KKC

KNC

KPCC

KPM

Han’guk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa (An anthology of modern Korean literary criticism). Edited by Kwon Youngmin. 6 vols. Tandae ch’ulp’ansa, 1981. Ilche kangjŏmgi han’guk nodong sosŏl chŏnjip (The anthology of labor literature from colonial Korea). Edited by An Sŭnghyŏn. 3 vols. Pogosa, 1995. Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (The Korean federation of proletarian artists, in Esperanto) Korean Communist Party Kang Kyŏngae chŏnjip (Collected works of Kang Kyŏngae). Edited by Lee Sang-Kyung. Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2002 [1999]. Kim Namch’ŏn chŏnjip (Collected essays of Kim Namch’ŏn). Edited by Chŏng Houng and Son Chŏngsu. 2 vols. Pagijŏng, 2000. K’ap’u pip’yŏng charyo ch’ongsŏ (Collected critical essays of the KAPF). Edited by Im Kyuch’an and Han Kihyŏng. 8 vols. T’aehaksa, 1990. Kim P’albong munhak chŏnjip (Collected works of Kim Kijin). Edited by Hong Chŏngsŏn. 5 vols. Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 1988.

xiv

PYC

YKS YSC

Abbreviations

Pak Yŏnghŭi chŏnjip (Collected works of Pak Yŏnghŭi). Edited by Yi Tonghŭi and No Sangnae. 5 vols. Kyŏngsan: Yŏngnam taehakkyo ch’ulp’ansa, 1997. Yi Kiyŏng sŏnjip (Selected works of Yi Kiyŏng). 13 vols. P’ulbit, 1989. Yŏm Sangsŏp chŏnjip (Collected works of Yŏm Sangsŏp). Edited by Kwon Youngmin, Kim Uch’ang, Yu Chongho, and Yi Chaesŏn. 12 vols. Minŭmsa, 1987.

introduction The hegemonic sense of tradition is always the most active: a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order. . . . It is significant that much of the most accessible and influential work of the counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations. But this in turn has little effect unless the lines to the present, in the actual process of selective tradition, are clearly and actively traced. Otherwise any recovery can be simply residual or marginal. It is at the vital point of connection, where a version of the past is used to ratify the present and to indicate directions for the future, that a selective tradition is at once powerful and vulnerable. —Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

As the term is used in this book, “the proletarian wave” refers to a broad alliance of writers, intellectuals, publishers, editors, and readers that arose within Korean culture in the mid-1910s and declined in the early 1940s with the approach of the Great Pacific War. Commonly inspired by the rise of leftist movements on the international scene, these cultural agents came together in formal and informal associations, student groups, literary journals, writing contests, reading circles, and public lectures with the intention of filtering the cultural and social experience of colonial Korea through the ideological prism of various radical theories. The doctrines of anarchism and Marxism were powerful influences, but equally widespread were broader ideas about social democracy, the political emancipation of the masses, and the experience of the Russian Revolution. Ideological orthodoxy, in any case, was more the exception than the rule, as few classics of socialism had been yet translated into Korean. One could perhaps say that the zeitgeist had brought socialism to Korea at this time in history. The socialist message then resonated loudly among many who were trying to grasp the complex political, social, and cultural realities of a newly colonized nation. This proletarian wave was never organized or institutionalized as a single movement. Throughout the colonial era (1910–45), the cultural left

2

Introduction

consisted of a sparse and often fractious constellation of groups that differed widely in membership and ideological orientation. The radical core of this small cultural universe was occupied, beginning in 1925, by the Marxist organization of the Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF), a high-profile collective whose advocacy of politicized arts would ultimately be stopped by the Japanese authorities in 1935. The KAPF was at once a propeller for the entire leftist movement and a catalyst for debate among its different constituencies, some of which espoused competing or barely compatible brands of socialist ideology. Ever since the mid-1910s, for example, anarchism in the style of Peter Kropotkin had been a major inspiration for Korean exiles and students in China and Japan, and throughout the colonial period the doctrine offered an important ideological alternative and counterpoint to Marxism. Likewise, in a shifting dynamic of competition and cooperation, an influential group of leftist nationalist intellectuals initially attacked the KAPF for its pronounced emphasis on class over nation, but these same intellectuals later allied with the Marxists in the umbrella organization of the Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society; 1927–31). There were also groups that, owing to their social or geographical location, carried out their activities outside of the mainstream of colonial culture. In this respect, socialist women writers were virtually on their own due to the ingrained gender segregation of Korean society, and a substantial number of cultural activists among Korean emigrants in Japan tended to self-organize rather than refer to the KAPF or to other Korean organizations. The influence of the proletarian wave was felt powerfully across Korea during the colonial period. As one commentator wrote, Marxism started spreading “like an influenza” after the rousing anti-Japanese insurrections of March 1, 1919, and by 1925 there was barely a young writer whose work did not exhibit some influence of radical ideologies.1 Although exact membership is hard to assess, at its peak the KAPF alone reportedly counted over 150 active affiliates at ten branch offices, including one in Tokyo.2 A survey of the archives yields over sixty left-leaning 1. Yŏm Sangsŏp compared the mid-1920s popularity of literary socialism to “an influenza” in “Kyegŭp munhak ŭl nonhaya,” 61. See also Paek Ch’ŏl’s account of the shaping influence of socialism on a generation of young writers in Chŭngbo sin munhak sajosa, 277. 2. Kim Kijin, “Chosŏn e issŏsŏ p’utollert’aria yesul undong,” 58. Kim wrote this document under duress in 1931 while he was in police detention at Sŏdaemun Prison, which may have induced him to offer a conservative estimate of member-

Introduction

3

Korean-language periodicals published in Korea, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century.3 The most prominent partisan magazines were Kaebyŏk (Creation; 1920–26), Chosŏn chi kwang (Light of Korea; 1922–30), and Pip’an (Criticism; 1931–40), but also friendly to the socialist cause were prestigious mainstream periodicals such as Chosŏn ilbo (Korean daily), Hyŏndae p’yŏngnon (Contemporary criticism), and Sin yŏsŏng (New women). Some writers and novels enjoyed broad popularity. Humorist Ch’ae Mansik, for example, whose biting satires chastised the habits of the rising urban bourgeoisie, was a mainstay in 1930s popular magazines. Similarly, Yi Kiyŏng, whose masterpiece Hometown (Kohyang) was greatly acclaimed during its original 1934 serialization in Chosŏn ilbo, had his novel reprinted six times in book form, all the while being heralded as the greatest Korean writer of peasant literature.4 The leftists’ contributions ran the gamut of literary genres, ranging from poems, novels, essays, and plays to cultural criticism as well as to translations of radical literature from Japan, Europe, Russia, and the United States.5 The intense adventure of the proletarian wave did not end well. Initially emboldened by revolutionary and internationalist ideas, young Korean intellectuals soon found themselves under the strict watch of Japanese colonial authorities. All socialist activity was sent underground with the forcible dissolution of the KAPF in 1935, and by 1941, in the shadow of fascism and with the Great Pacific War under way, all forms of resistance became impracticable in the colonized peninsula. If this activist wave struggled during the colonial era, however, its memory resonated long afterward. Indeed, the historical experience of the proletarian wave went on to become a high mark of political activism and a model of cultural politics for generations to come. The much celebrated democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s took explicit inspiration from the leftist radicalism of the colonial period, and still ship. Since the KAPF was a cultural orga nization, the number would have also included fi lmmakers, theater directors, artists, and musicians. 3. See Kim Kŭnsu, Han’guk chapchisa, for a comprehensive list of colonial Korean periodicals. Though the majority of these journals were not exclusively focused on literature, many of them regularly published fiction and literary criticism. 4. Cheon Jung-hwan, Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ikki, 310. 5. For a detailed account of literary translations in colonial Korea, see Kim Pyŏngchŏl, Han’guk kŭndae pŏnyŏk munhaksa and Han’guk kŭndae sŏyang munhak iipsa.

4

Introduction

today the most prominent writers of that era are widely read and taught as part of the canonized tradition of Korean realism.6 On the strength of this posthumous vindication, the colonial leftist movement provides a fitting illustration of Stuart Hall’s dictum that cultural forces that are defeated at any one time do not simply disappear, as they become grist for the mill of new history in later eras.7 Today the proletarian wave occupies a special place in the collective memory of both South and North Koreans, and its legacy lives on as a common origin in the present and a possible unifying factor in the future.

This book studies the origins, development, and influence of leftist literature in Korea during the colonial era. The aim throughout is at once documentary, rebalancing, and rehabilitative. In the spirit of documentation, the book traces the historical, ideological, and aesthetic contours of a movement that has greatly influenced artistic tastes and cultural politics alike during and after the colonial period. In terms of rebalancing, the book uses class as a lens through which to view colonial Korean culture, after strong emphasis since the 1970s has been placed on the category of “the nation” as both a descriptive and a normative measure of the Korean experience of colonial modernity. Finally, in its rehabilitative approach, the book contributes to the aesthetic and ideological reevaluation of a once thriving literary movement. The decades of the Cold War, which in Korea continues to this day, have severely damaged the reputation and perceived viability of any form of leftist culture on the peninsula. Inspired by Raymond Williams’s counterhegemonic stance— his “recovery of discarded areas” in the face of hostile tradition—this book aims at repairing the consequences of much negative ideological accretion, and in the process it tries to bring back to life some of the authors, works, and ideas that have been central to Korean culture at a defining time in its modern history. Although colonial leftist culture has been extensively discussed by scholars in Korea, there is currently a dearth of publications that treat of it in the English-speaking world. The most useful contributions are single chapters within four volumes—by Michael Robinson, Brian Myers, 6. See Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism.” 7. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” 423.

Introduction

5

Gi-Wook Shin, and Tatiana Gabroussenko—whose main topics are either Korean nationalism (Robinson and Shin) or North Korean culture (Myers and Gabroussenko).8 Aside from this, colonial leftist writers are the objects of mention in reference works such as Peter Lee’s History of Korean Literature, whereas a less recent source are the two volumes of Robert Scalapino and Chung-sik Lee’s Communism in Korea, in which colonial leftist culture is briefly discussed, again, as a predecessor of North Korean culture.9 The scarce interest in colonial leftist culture stems, at least in part, from its perceived failure to perform the critical function that is in general associated with a socialist cultural force. Indeed, emerging from the above scholarship is a rather unflattering critical picture of this literary tradition. According to Michael Robinson, “no coherent political line emerged among leftist writers,” some of whom exhibited “[little] evidence of appreciation for the nature of capitalism.” In Robinson’s view, the predominantly nationalist orientation of Korean leftist intellectuals, along with their predilection for the peasantry over the industrial working class, accounts for the minor and unorthodox manifestation of socialist culture in the colonial nation.10 Likewise, Brian Myers and Tatiana Gabroussenko have pointed to the pervasive unorthodoxy of leftist literature as a possible explanation for its supposed ineffectiveness. Although the Korean left ists thought of themselves as socialists, these critics assess, their works reveal a nationalist bent and, even more pronouncedly, a traditionalist and antimodern vision that is deeply incompatible with the core tenets of Marx-Leninism. Thus, in commenting on the KAPF’s early New Tendency literature, Myers writes that “[o]ne is hard put to find any significant reflection of Marxist ideology in [this literature]. . . . Most of what was written in these years was marked by the same 8. See Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front; Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya; Robinson, Cultural Nationalism; and Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism. Also important are the articles collected in a special issue of Positions (Fall 2006) on proletarian arts in East Asia, which together opened a new avenue of research by focusing on the hitherto ignored gender and diasporic subjectivities in colonial left ist literature. See Barraclough, “Tales of Seduction”; Kida, “Japanese-Korean Exchange”; and Perry, “Korean as Proletarian.” 9. Peter Lee, ed., History of Korean Literature; Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1. 10. See Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 118–19 and 164.

6

Introduction

ethnocentric pastoralism and anti-industrialism as contemporary Korean ‘bourgeois’ naturalism.”11 In challenging this hostile critical scenario, the present book shows that, contrary to current assessment, a genuinely socialist influence was pervasive and fertile within the ideological landscape of the colonial period: leftist literature and culture played a prominent role in modern Korean debates, and they did so by propounding values that were fully integral to the international socialist culture of the early twentieth century. The key to appreciating this fact, this book suggests, is a recognition of the historically variable manifestations of socialist ideology in nonWestern, and especially colonial, contexts. Both in its translation and in its local application, socialism in Korea played quite a different role from its counterparts in the West and the Soviet Union. The investigation of this variance, aided by a transnational and postcolonial perspective, enables us to better understand an intellectual tradition that has played an important role in Korean culture and society both during and after the colonial period. Korea entered the modern era as a colony, and this condition had a profound impact on the ways in which socialist inspirations were imported and applied in the peninsula. Why did socialism become so 11. Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya, 17. These judgments, pointing to a perceived ideological dissonance at the heart of left ist literature, closely recall a view that was popu lar in South Korea during the 1950s and 1960s according to which socialism and communism never quite fit the complex ideological and cultural environment of Korea during the colonial period. Endorsing the image of socialist doctrines as extraneous to Korean culture, critics such as Cho Yŏnhyŏn declared that the “foreign-influenced” proletarian literature of the colonial period had been both “a mistake for the nation” and “an error for the literary arts.” See Cho Yŏnhyŏn, Hyŏndae munhak kaegwan, 184. Whereas earlier critics denounced the dangers of socialist ideology per se, however, more recent commentators have been keener to suggest that the left ists failed to endorse socialism. In Myers and Gabroussenko’s case, the argument has been integral to a broader strategy of cultural delegitimation of North Korea, whereby the hermit kingdom is shown to be a failed state, not just because of its international crimes and human rights violations, but also because of its inability to endorse socialist doctrine in a principled and competent manner. The origin of this flaw, these writers argue, lies in the intellectuals’ supposed endorsement of a “patrimonial” system of power that valued cronyism and personal affi liation over literary and intellectual achievement. See Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya, 1–2, and Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 167–74. For a previous deployment of the same strategy, applied in that case to Mao’s China, see James Myers, “The Political Dynamics of the Cult of Mao Tse-Tung.”

Introduction

7

salient in Korea at this moment in history? What impact did the colonial condition have on the leftist literary practice? And how, specifically, did leftist writers apply socialist doctrines in the complex ideological and cultural environment of a newly colonized nation? As Parts I and II of this book show, although varieties of activism ranged widely across the leftist movement, at least two features generally characterized socialist cultural practice in modern Korea. First, leftist intellectuals often gave a nationalist spin to newly imported socialist ideas. They thus rendered the Marxist category of the proletariat through the nationalism-inspired concept of minjung (the people), and they projected the vision of Korea as an independent “proletarian nation” that ought to define its own role in both foreign and domestic politics. Second, Korean leftists often responded to the socioeconomic conditions of colonial Korea by focusing on the rural question rather than on the more typically communist struggle of the industrial proletariat. They thereby continued a local tradition that, going back to the Tonghak peasant uprisings of the 1880s, had identified the peasants as both the bearers of oppression and the agents of social change in the mostly rural Korean peninsula. Beginning in the 1950s, under the changed Cold War conditions of South Korea, the socialist cultural tradition of the colonial period was either forgotten or, more frequently, it was remembered as a dangerously mistaken political option. The detractors of the movement were not alone in projecting on it an image of danger, as even friendly commentators— particularly among the South Korean activists of the 1970s and 1980s— often glossed on this literature’s socialist content in favor of a politically more acceptable nationalist emphasis. Leftist culture has thus become an uncomfortable ideological heritage in South Korean as well as Western debates since the end of the colonial period. The vitality of this tradition within the cultural dynamics of the colonial era has yet to have been fully acknowledged, with the result that socialist values and politics remain as impracticable in Korea today as they were during the ideologically charged decades of the Cold War.

In a 1994 essay titled “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” Edward Said offered insights into the ways in which an established critical paradigm, or “theory,” can find innovative and productive applications when deployed in contexts other than its original one. When theory “travels” across cultures, Said remarked, its movement necessarily opens it up to “the

8

Introduction

possibility of actively different locales, sites, and situations.” New settings, reflecting contingencies of time, culture, and geography, typically alter a theory in substantial ways, and they may result in novel cultural formations that cannot properly be seen as the mere copies of an original. “To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not adequate,” wrote Said, because what is established between the original theorist and his or her followers is rather “an intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word.”12 Said’s pluralism of affiliation, with its emphasis on the openness of theory, should be kept in mind when looking at the global migration of socialist thought during the twentieth century. Leftist cultures within colonial and Third World settings differed considerably from their more famous counterparts in the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The differences involved, however, do not immediately indicate a “failure” of socialist culture in those contexts. A Eurocentric attitude emphasizing orthodoxy and stylistic resemblance has too often regarded Western and Soviet Marxism as the paradigms for socialist cultures around the world, and it has thereby relegated socialist experiences in the periphery to the status of replicas of an original model, if not outright deviations from one. The above considerations bear directly upon this book’s reevaluation of leftist literature in colonial Korea. For example, in his 1988 study of cultural nationalism in colonial Korea, Michael Robinson offers a convincing representation of leftist intellectuals as major actors in the movement of national resistance. In virtue of that representation, however, he also doubts the genuine character of the left ists’ socialist commitment: “The majority of left ists had little connection with the Korean Communist movement in exile. They were, in fact, not orthodox Communists at all. They did not submit to party discipline, and, as the Comintern had already pointed out, ‘nationalism,’ that is, the liberation and independence of Korea, was their primary motivation.”13 In assuming that there would be a tension between nationalist and socialist commitments, Robinson implicitly vouches for a Marxist view of the nation as a quintessentially 12. Said, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” 452. 13. See Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 114. Robinson has since omitted this view from his recent history textbook, Korea’s Twentieth Century Odyssey. He may thus hold a different position today, although the more recent text does not explicitly disavow his previous view.

Introduction

9

bourgeois institution.14 In modern colonial settings, however, nationhood has often been a prime aspiration of progressive and revolutionary forces, and an anticolonial nationalist stance has been integral to many brands of socialism defended by indigenous resistance movements. In the case of Korea, Japanese settlers were in control of most of the industrial capital in the colony, which made it imperative for Korean socialists to give their practice a strong anti-imperialist and nationalist edge. Their move was in keeping with international debates of the early 1920s, as Lenin and the Comintern had urged the communists in colonized societies to take active part in national liberation movements.15 It was a trend that would later become established worldwide, as nationalist intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Ho Chi Minh relied heavily on Marxism in formulating their anticolonial stances in the 1950s and 1960s.16 A study of leftist culture in a colonial society naturally stands at an intersection between Marxist theory and postcolonial studies. “The originality of the colonial context,” Fanon famously observed in colonial Algeria, “is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never came to mask the human realities.” According to him, because the colonial socioeconomic order rests primarily upon a racial hierarchy, “the economic substructure is also a superstructure” in colonies. A Marxist analysis should accordingly “always be slightly stretched” when we think of colonial society and analyze its cultural products.17 This Fanonian insight forces a reconsideration of the distance between the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and leftist literature and culture in Korea and in other colonized nations. That distance is measured by way of “colonial differences” that need to be studied with a culturally and historically attuned analytical approach. 14. Marx himself characterized nationalism as one of the ideological tools of the bourgeoisie. See Marx, German Ideology, 79–81. 15. Hallas, The Comintern, 49–50. 16. The assumption of a bourgeois monopoly over nationalist discourse is predicated on the prevalent experience of early capitalist development in the West, in which nations and the middle class had often fully developed by the time socialism appeared. By contrast, in the decolonizing world, the idea of the nation was often reclaimed by the working class and the oppressed masses, with the result that the hegemony over national culture was in many cases contested between the middle class—Fanon’s reviled national bourgeoisie—and the lower social strata for whom socialists spoke. 17. All quotations are from Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40.

10

Introduction

Two dimensions of colonial difference command special significance in the case of Korea. On the one hand, there is the distance between the West (and the Soviet Union) and Korean left ist culture. On the other hand, a further marker of difference lies between the imperial cultural hegemony of Japan and colonial Korean subjectivity. The appropriation of Gramsci’s Marxian concept of cultural hegemony in exploring the shifting and intertwined relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is perhaps one of the most powerful and influential theoretical innovations that postcolonial studies has brought to the study of colonialism and imperialism.18 Similarly, Homi Bhabha’s theorization of a “third space” between colonizer and colonized offers a way to overcome simultaneously the nationalist insistence on native self-construction and the (neo)imperialist suggestion that the colonized can speak only through the language of the colonizer.19 Instead of essentializing the Koreans’ stance against hegemonic culture, this book situates the analysis of that stance within its discursively constructed nature and historicity. In Korea as elsewhere, a counterhegemonic cultural practice was never static but constantly changed in response to the evolving historical forces in the Japanese empire—and the world beyond it—and their consequent reverberations within hegemonic imperial culture itself. Accounting for the Marxist edge of my analysis, a focus on leftist culture also demands that the postcolonial emphasis on colonialism as a psychological and cultural project of domination be complemented with a healthy dose of critical attention to its economic and material dimensions. This balancing act means more than just embedding our reading of a text in both its material and cultural contexts. A Marxist analysis of colonialism brings to the fore the issue of class alongside and in conjunction with that of race. This critical move challenges, among other things, the postcolonial tendency to reify the West and the East, or the empire and the colony, into political entities without internal fragmentations and divergences.20 The intellectual and personal affiliations between Japanese and Korean leftist writers, for instance, complicate our understanding of the modes of interrelatedness between the colonizer and the colonized be18. For Gramsci’s Marxist discussion of hegemony as a ruling ideology, see his Selections from Prison Notebooks, 275–76. 19. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36–39. 20. For the critique of the postcolonial reification of the West, see Cooper, “Postcolonial Studies and the Study of History” and Lazarus, “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory.”

Introduction

11

yond the mainstream postcolonial paradigm. In this sense, a Marxist consideration of class goes hand in hand with a more nuanced understanding of nationalism as a flexible discourse that in colonial Korea engaged elements of imperial culture at least as much as it antagonized them. It is not unusual for studies of a leftist culture to engage in the rebuttal of several supposed negative misconceptions about their subject matter. The present study is no exception. In addition to having been seen as “not left ist enough,” colonial Korean left ist literature has been from time to time criticized for being too dogmatic and too undogmatic, too naive and too intellectual, too derivative and too idiosyncratic, and too conservative and too experimental. Though none of these arguments is specifically engaged in this study, one should not lose sight of a deeper, underlying reality: from inside an expanding capitalist cultural hegemony, the objection to socialist arts and literature is often systemic and ideological. Worldviews partake of the hegemonic, they are internalized, and they define limits of intelligibility just as they evolve in exchange with a myriad cultural formations. This book, then, strives to put literary history in the ser vice of counterhegemony. If argument cannot hope by itself to dissipate the shadows of the ideological, perhaps the plain act of representing a neglected literary tradition can serve the cause of its rehabilitation to history. This is especially so for leftist literature, which during the Cold War suffered an intensely politicized rejection. Today we may rescue this literature by simply reading it, immediately and without preconceptions, thereby bypassing the ideological accretions of later decades as well as the ennui and complacency of the present.

Efforts to record the history of colonial leftist literature began as early as 1935 with Im Hwa’s publication of “Introduction to Modern Korean Literature” (Chosŏn sinmunhaksaron sŏsŏl), which was written in part as a defense of the KAPF after the group was forcibly dissolved by the Japanese authorities.21 After the division of the two Koreas, however, the topic 21. Im Hwa, “Chosŏn sinmunhaksaron sŏsŏl.” Im’s late-colonial writings on modern Korean literary history are widely considered as foundational works for Korean literary historiography. Aside from Im’s work, Paek Ch’ŏl’s Chosŏn sin munhak sajosa (History of modern Korean literary trends, 1948), the first attempt at a comprehensive exposition of colonial literary history, initially devoted over two hundred pages to the socialist movement and its cultural products. By the time of the publication of the book’s revised edition under the shortened title

12

Introduction

of socialist culture became taboo in both academic and public discourse, and a strict ban was imposed on the circulation and republication of the works of colonial leftist writers. The ban was lifted only after the democratization of South Korea in 1987, at which point early socialist culture came to attract intense academic interest and was rediscovered by researchers and activists within the broad minjung cultural movement.22 Aiming to uphold the values and interests of the common Korean people, or the minjung, these intellectuals stood for a nationalist rapprochement with the North and reclaimed a shared inter-Korean cultural heritage against the constraints of the Cold War order. Their collective efforts culminated in 1993 with the publication of Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa (History of modern Korean literature), a revisionary literary history of the colonial era that placed leftist literature at its center while embedding it in a nationalist interpretive framework.23 Rediscovery in the context of democratization introduced many colonial socialist writers to an unofficial but influential South Korean literary canon. Following upon that, between the late 1990s and the present day, new studies have attempted to integrate the critical reception of socialist literature within broader reflections on modernity and postnationalist colonial history. Some researchers have refined and expanded the established canon to include the hitherto marginalized figures of leftist women writers, anarchist thinkers, and the diasporic writers of Japan’s of Sin munhak sajosa (1953) in the midst of the Korean War, however, the author had drastically reduced his treatment of left ist literature to a mere twenty pages. For the publication and revision history of Paek’s book, see Chŏn Yongho, “Paek Ch’ŏl munhaksa ŭi p’anbon.” 22. One important exception to the predemocratization silence was the literary criticism of Kim Yoon-sik. Already during the 1970s, this literary historian published pioneering studies on colonial leftist critical essays. See Kim Yoon-sik, Han’guk kŭndae munye pip’yŏngsa. 23. Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa. The 1980s minjung cultural discourse had its early roots in the minjok (national) literary discourse of the 1970s. The notion of progressive, people-oriented national literature had already been formulated as an antithesis of conservative official national literature by Paik Nak-chung in his seminal 1974 essay “Minjok munhak kaenyŏm ŭi chŏngnip ŭl wihae.” The essay was translated into English in 1993 with the title “The Idea of a  Korean National Literature Then and Now.” For a discussion of the continuities between the 1970s ideal of progressive national literature and the more clearly classbased minjung literature, see the essays collected in Song Minyŏp, ed., Minjung munhangnon.

Introduction

13

Korean immigrant communities.24 Others have contributed to tempering the occasional nationalist zeal of minjung criticism, as they have highlighted the many cross-cultural affiliations between Korean and Japanese leftists as well as the more uncertain, ideologically ambiguous character of late-colonial socialist writings in Korea.25 Still another trend has been to ground the study of early socialist literature more firmly within the frameworks of modern cultural studies and social history. In an example of this approach, a group of scholars centered at Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University have produced a body of scholarship that attends to the impacts of socialist culture on the everyday life of colonial Koreans, focusing in particular on the role of ideology in the creation of social spaces such as reading groups, night schools, mutual aid societies, and the like.26 In alignment and conversation with these new lines of Korean criticism, this book too seeks to approach its subject matter in terms that are cultural rather than ideological, sizing up the territory of colonial leftist literature according more to influence and affinity than to doctrinal orthodoxy. The very coinage of the term “proletarian wave” is meant both to invite flexibility and to acknowledge the many different modes and forms that socialist culture assumed in the time-space of colonial Korea. Whereas socialist literature was previously identified with the production of KAPF writers, that Marxist organization is here embedded in an ideologically composite network of influences that also included anarchist, nationalist, feminist, and liberal inspirations. Similarly, welcoming the lessons of comparative and transnational studies, an effort has been made here to highlight the many personal and intellectual ties between Korean intellectuals and their counterparts in Japan, China, 24. For recent studies on leftist women writers, see Kim Inhwan et al., Kang Kyŏngae sidae wa munhak; Ku Moryong, ed., Paek Sinae; and Lee Sang-Kyung, Im Sundŭk. For anarchist literature, see Kim T’aekho, Han’guk kŭndae anak’ijŭm munhak and Yi Horyong, Han’guk ŭi anak’ijŭm. And for Korean leftist writers in Japan, see Kim Jae-Yong and Kwak Hyŏnggŭn, Kim Saryang and Kim Haktong, Chang Hyŏkchu. 25. See, for instance, Cho Chin’gi, Hanil p’ŭro munhangnon; Munhak kwa sasang yŏn’guhoe, Im Hwa munhak ŭi chaeinsik; and No Sangnae, Han’guk munin ŭi chŏnhyang. 26. See the collected essays in Sanghŏ hakhoe, Kŭndae chisik ŭrosŏŭi sahoejuŭi and Sungkyunkwan taehakyo tongasia haksurwŏn, Kŭndae chisik ŭrosŏŭi sahoejuŭi wa kŭ munhwa, special issue, Taedong munhwa yŏn’gu 64 (2008). Also see Son Yugyŏng, P’uro munhak ŭi kamsŏng kujo, and Ch’oe Pyŏnggu, “1920 nyŏndae p’uro munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng.”

14

Introduction

Russia, and other countries. Aside from its intrinsic historical interest, research on these international lines of cultural transmission serves to rebalance the nationalist narratives that are still prominent today in East Asian cultural discourses. Doctrinal correctness and ideological compliance are questionable evaluative standards for colonial leftist literature, which should rather be judged based on its cultural impact, its effectiveness in raising consciousness, and the counterhegemonic function that it performed within its own specific colonial context. For this reason, Part I of the book, “Backgrounds,” examines the social, political, and economic context within which left ist literature arose and developed in colonial Korea, focusing on the incipient industrial development, the formation of the first labor organizations, and the early efforts to establish a communist party in the peninsula. Central to this examination are two institutional factors—the strength of the labor movement and the instability of the Korean Communist Party—that in different ways distinguished the experiences of colonial left ist writers from those of their counterparts in Japan, China, the West, and the established communist regime of the Soviet Union. Taken together, these factors contribute to an explanation of the unorthodox character of the left in Korea, and they also set the stage for our later appreciation of its literature’s countercultural function under the specific conditions of colonial Korean society. Part II, “Landscapes,” provides broad overviews of the history, institutions, ideology, and aesthetics of the colonial Korean leftist literary movement. The label of a “proletarian wave,” which is the book’s original coinage, aims to gather the multiple and often discordant aspects of colonial leftist culture within a recognizable framework, stressing at once the ideological cohesiveness of the movement and the importance of its rise at this moment in history. Chapter 2 thus traces the historical and institutional contours of the proletarian wave from its origins in the early anarchist groups of the 1910s through its decline on the eve of the Pacific War in the early 1940s. Drawing primarily from contemporary periodicals, writers’ memoirs, and the original and reprinted editions of their works, this outline presents the leftist movement as a composite cultural formation, a wide river whose shifting streams were formed by the inflows of ideology, ethnicity, gender, and class. In spite of the KAPF’s attempts to helm the movement, the chapter shows, outlying groups and intellectuals maintained their distinctive voices throughout, often

Introduction

15

engaging in spirited debates concerning the direction and aims of leftist culture in Korea. Shifting to a thematic focus, Chapter 3 discusses the profound aesthetic and ideological impacts of the proletarian wave on the cultural scene of colonial Korea. A widely held narrative of Korean literary modernity credits almost exclusively liberal reformist intellectuals for having introduced to Korea the modernizing ideas of artistic autonomy, individualism, enlightenment, and more. However, literary modernity in Korea was just as much the achievement of left ist writers and intellectuals. The leftists shared with the reformists the ideals of national liberation as well as social engagement, but for the rest they rejected individualism in favor of communitarian values; they criticized the elitist tendencies of both traditional and bourgeois culture; and they propagated an uncompromisingly materialist approach to the explanation of realities such as unequal development, colonialism, and war. Leftist culture was thus the proponent of an “alternative modernity” within Korea’s colonial situation, and it took a stance that was both progressive and countercultural in its interaction with other cultural forces of the period. This representation rebalances the critical image of leftist culture as merely a more radical branch of the national resistance movement, and it contradicts any characterization of the leftists as antimodern advocates of nativist values and traditionalist utopia. Taken together, Chapters 2 and 3 build a broad case for the reevaluation of colonial leftist literature. This literature is shown there to have been more pervasive than previously assumed and to have made a fertile and integral contribution to the transformation of Korea into a modern culture and society. Moving then from general landscape to detail, Part III, “Portraits,” offers an intertwining set of case studies that are meant to display the variety and complexity of the leftist literary experience in colonial Korea. Touching upon the KAPF literary group as well as three major left ist writers—Yom Sangsŏp, Kang Kyŏngae, and Kim Namch’ŏn—these stand-alone monographic explorations advance the book’s case for the pervasiveness and fertility of the socialist influence on colonial Korea. In so doing, the chapters adopt a fresh perspective over some of the defining questions of Marxist literary criticism—such as the quest for a realist aesthetics, the clash between proletarian writers and leftist nationalists, the relation between socialism and feminism, and the rise of pan-Asianism as an imperialist war ideology. Overall, while

16

Introduction

keeping their focus on the intellectual experiences of individual writers, these chapters also try to embed their subject matter in a broader social and historical context, opening up to more general discussions of, among others, the 1920s era of radical activism, the economic prosperity of the 1930s, and the concurrent militarization of Korean society throughout that decade. Since this book largely deals with literary, cultural, and historical issues, little space has been devoted to the conceptual problems of political theory. Before commencing the primary discussion, however, it may be helpful to clarify some of the ideological labels that are central to the analysis. As it is understood throughout, “socialist” characterizes any political theory that joins a critique of modern capitalist society to an egalitarian and communitarian vision. In this definition, socialist views are distinguished from liberal ones by their oppositional stance on capitalism, and they differ from fascist views in projecting a vision that is communitarian rather than statist. At a slight but significant remove from “socialist,” the adjective “leftist” is understood here as synonymous with “socialism-inspired.” A writer is leftist, in this sense, when his or her writings exhibit some substantial influence of socialism, regardless of whether socialism is also the doctrine to which those writings are ultimately committed. A writer such as Yŏm Sangsŏp, therefore, whose primary ideological affi liation was nationalist, qualifies as leftist in virtue of the formative influence that socialism had on his writings. Finally, turning from the general to the specific, “anarchist” and “Marxist” characterize two different versions of a socialist position, which are identified by their respective descendance from the ideas of Bakunin-Kropotkin on the one hand and Marx-Engels on the other. These two traditions exerted by far the most prominent influence on Korean leftist culture, although the ideas of other socialist thinkers did on occasion appear in the thoughts of individual writers. Rereading the past is often a way of reflecting on the present and, perhaps, the future. More than two decades have passed since “the end of history,” the triumphant 1992 claim of international capitalism that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds.27 Indeed, early in the new millennium the funeral toll for Marxism and socialism was still ringing loud. Today, however, the atmosphere is far more congenial for a class-based critique of global society, with the United States, Europe, 27. See Fukuyama, The End of History.

Introduction

17

and other developed countries undergoing arguably the worst economic and financial crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many of the problems that we are grappling with today are similar to those that were faced by colonial leftist writers, such as widespread unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, the pauperization of women, and the racial discrimination against transnational labor migrants. Colonial Koreans lived in an era when many people still believed in the possibility of fundamental social reform. If we recognize our life experiences and aspirations in theirs, we may just be able to feel that way again, and may be inspired by values such as equality and social justice even as we plunge farther into a new century of modern capitalist history.

Part I Backgrounds

One

The Left in Colonial Korea A Contextual Account

If modern Korea can be defined by the coming of [Western and Japanese] powers,” Bruce Cumings has written, “so it is also defined by the participation in politics of ordinary peasants.”1 The extraordinary transformations that took place in Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while amenable to a variety of narratives, have often been recounted with a focus on the disruptive arrival of foreign powers on Korean shores. As Cumings’s words imply, however, an equally fruitful perspective on modern Korean history would emphasize the tremendous domestic upheavals of this era. The rise in political influence of the lower strata, which happened through a wave of insurrections and protests, provides one of the central narratives of Korean modernization as well as the context in which the formation of leftist culture in the peninsula can be observed most directly. The penetration of socialist ideas into Korea has been traditionally explained via the experience of colonization in 1910, the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the popular nationalist uprisings of March 1, 1919. After nearly ten years of harsh colonial rule, historians have pointed out, Korean nationalist intellectuals in the 1920s recognized the futility of the West’s declared support for the independence of colonized nations. They accordingly radicalized their approach and turned for inspiration to the triumphant Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the neighboring Soviet Union, whose collectivist and anti-imperialist values were consonant with the spirit of the popular uprisings on Korean soil. The national question, in 1. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 115.

22

Backgrounds

this narrative, was prominent on the leftist agenda from the very start, and socialism in Korea functioned essentially as an alternative to liberalism for intellectuals who were disappointed with the double standards of Western nations.2 There is much to be said for this version of early socialist history in Korea. The nationalist commitment of leftist intellectuals was a constant and distinctive characteristic of the Korean socialist movement, and the March First Movement of 1919–20 did mark a watershed in the intensity of leftist activism in the newly colonized nation. In a more ample historical perspective, however, an account of early socialist culture ought also to acknowledge its origins in the labor struggles and political activism of the early years of the twentieth century. If Korean intellectuals came en masse to socialism in the early 1920s, a local labor movement supported by peasants and urban workers had been developing already since the 1900s. Th is vast and loosely coordinated social force, reflective of the changing socioeconomic conditions of the peninsula, laid the ground for the development of an influential leftist cultural movement in colonial Korea. Contemporary critics at times lament the raw and unrefined character of leftist literature from the colonial era. They have been less attuned, however, to the socially integrated nature of a cultural movement that had antielitism and inclusiveness as some of its core values. Leftist culture was in this regard a coherent outgrowth of underlying social movements in colonial Korea, and its variegated social composition ensured its relevance in ethical and political debates both during and after the colonial period.

Peasant Unrest in Late Chosŏn Korea The rise of a socialist movement in Korea in the early twentieth century was the combined effect of both domestic preconditions and international developments. Domestically, late Chosŏn society had witnessed increasing discontent among the lower social strata, whose conditions had worsened even as the peninsula was beginning to experience some form of industrial development. On the international stage, the revolutionary events in Russia and social upheaval in Europe had made socialism at once popular and feared throughout the world. In Korea, socialism made a particular impression on those activists and intellectuals, who were looking for ways of dealing with the domestic situation. 2. See, for instance, Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, 69.

The Left in Colonial Korea

23

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the political stability of the Chosŏn dynasty became threatened by the pressures of Western and Asian empires. As foreign diplomacies and armies acquired increasing influence on the peninsula, Korean peasants began to feel squeezed between these new powers and the traditional masters of the yangban aristocracy.3 Discontent among Koreans of nonaristocratic descent ensued, and it soon came to be expressed in novel ideological formations. Catholicism, until then a minor influence, began to spread on the strength of its egalitarian and communitarian message. In addition, the Tonghak (Eastern Learning), an indigenous religious response that was both inspired by and opposed to the “Western Learning” of Catholicism, preached its own message of universal humanism, especially among the lower strata. In 1894, the followers of the Tonghak led armed peasant uprisings and demanded, among other things, the punishment of corrupt officials, the expulsion of Japanese merchants, and the abolition of the hereditary status system. The uprisings were violently quashed, and its participants suffered heavy casualties. Yet not all was in vain, as some of their requests would later be incorporated into social reforms.4 The late-century suppression of the peasant revolts marked an important shift in the balance of power on the Korean peninsula. Facing the mounting threat of the peasant army, the ruling elites of the dynasty turned to the Chinese court for military help. The Chinese complied swift ly, and the status quo was restored without apparent damage to the dynasty. Chosŏn’s call for aid, however, gave Japan an excuse to send its own armed forces to the peninsula. Korea soon found itself turned into a battleground for the first Sino-Japanese War, which ended with Japan’s victory in 1895 and its increased influence over Korea. This series of events would later become emblematic of the historically inevitable decline of the Chosŏn dynasty. For one thing, Chosŏn’s request for help exposed the deepening degree of dependency of the Korean dynasty on foreign forces, effectively emboldening the Japanese military’s ambitions. In addition, the episode exposed the affi nity of Korean royalty with their Chinese counterpart as well as their alienation from the rising Korean masses. At 3. The word yangban literally means “officials of both scholarly and military ranks,” but since Chosŏn’s aristocratic status was largely hereditary in practice, if not in principle, not all yangbans were officials. 4. For a recent study of the Tonghak religion and movement, see Kallander, Salvation through Dissent.

24

Backgrounds

a time when modern ideas of the nation were becoming increasingly influential among intellectuals and the press, the dynasty’s use of foreign forces against Korean peasants struck public opinion as anachronistic at best and treasonous at worst. In the years following the Tonghak uprisings, disgruntled peasants began to fill the rank-and-file positions of the so-called righteous armies (ŭibyŏng), which were irregular militias that could be led by a Confucian scholar, an ex-military officer, or a peasant leader (fig. 1.1). These militias in many ways continued the Tonghak movement by demanding Korea’s independence from foreign powers, punishment of corrupted officials, and a more equal distribution of wealth.5 Aside from participating in the righteous armies, peasants also staged spontaneous protests against government policies and the exploitative practices of landlords. Between the 1900s and the 1910s, newspapers reported single incidents that could involve hundreds of peasants, stoking a flame of protest that finally erupted into mass uprisings during the 1919 March First Movement.6 Peasant unrest formed an important backdrop to the rise of the Korean leftist movement. Newspapers and magazines during the 1900s regularly included reports on peasants’ hardship and their protests. Later on, Kaebyŏk became an effective link between peasant activists and the rising socialist literary movement.7 The predicament of peasants and their acts of resistance likely inspired many Korean intellectuals to espouse the ideology of socialism, and these intellectuals later provided 5. See Hong Yŏnggi, Hanmal hugi ŭibyŏng. 6. To give a few examples, Hwangsŏng sinmun published news reports “Nongmin t’agwang” (Peasants destroy a mine; October 20, 1905) about a peasant attack on a mine supervisor’s house and “Nongmin sowŏn” (Peasants’ petition; November 23, 1907) about a peasants’ orga nized protest against taxation. This newspaper also often reported Russian peasant uprisings. In addition, Taehan maeil sinbo published “Nongmin p’yenong” (Crisis in a peasant village; June 3, 1909) about a crisis in a rural village caused by the police oppression of local participants in a righteous army and also “Ungjin nongmin soyo” (Peasant disturbances in Ungjin; July 5, 1910) about peasants’ protest against the land survey conducted by colonial authorities. Clark Sorenson has argued that nongmin, the term for peasantry, did not become established in Korean public discourse as an important social category prior to the colonial period, despite its ancient origin. In a slight correction, it should be noted that the term was already widely used in the vernacular press during the 1900s, although it acquired nationalist overtones only in the early 1920s. See Sorenson, “National Identity and the Creation of the Category ‘Peasant,’ ” 297. 7. For Kaebyŏk’s role in the 1920s Korean literary world, see Ch’oe Suil, Kaebyŏk yŏn’gu.

The Left in Colonial Korea

25

Figure 1.1 A group of Korean peasant rebels, 1907. From Frederick Arthur McKenzie, The Tragedy of Korea (1908).

organizational discipline and a theoretical grounding to the peasant movement during the colonial era and beyond. Already at this early stage, when little presence of an industrial capital could be detected in Korea, the so-called peasant question became a prominent concern for leftist activists, and it would remain such for subsequent waves of anarchist and Marxist intellectuals.8

Colonial Industrialization and Labor Struggle Korea was still a preindustrial society when it came under Japanese rule in 1910. Economic development in the late Chosŏn period had led to some growth of the manufacturing sector, but the change fell short of a fundamental transformation of the country’s agricultural economy. Exemplifying this early development was the founding of Chikchoguk (the official textile department; 1885–1991), where Chinese technicians taught Korean workers to operate imported European machines. Although the experiment generated some interest at first, it was ultimately doomed by the traditional Confucian disdain for commerce and manual labor and by the lack of trained personnel in Korea.9 8. The important role played by Kaebyŏk in the peasant movement is significant on account of this magazine’s affi liation with the religion of Ch’ŏndogyo, which in its turn traced its roots back to the Tonghak uprisings. 9. See Eckert, Offspring of Empire, 1–6 and 27–28.

26

Backgrounds

Pursued primarily under the colonial rule, Korea’s experience of industrialization bore historical characteristics that set it apart from those of both Western countries and imperial Japan. Almost all of the industrial capital in Korea, up to 90 percent, belonged to the Japanese.10 The general course of Korea’s industrialization was thus determined by Japan’s changing strategies for its political and economic expansion in East Asia. During the 1910s, when Japan regarded Korea mainly as a rice basket and a market for its own manufacturing products, the colonial government focused its economic policy on increasing rice production. This emphasis on the export-oriented commercialization of agriculture was accompanied by the legislation of the Company Law (1910–20), which effectively hindered local industrial development by requiring all new businesses to apply for a license. Things changed substantially, however, when Japan experienced the rapid economic growth of the 1915–18 period. With its increased surplus capital needing an outlet, Japan abolished the Company Law, allowing a freer inflow of capital into Korea. This spurred a process of industrialization of the colony, which in the 1920s saw its factories double with concentration on light industries such as textiles, food, rubber, and pottery.11 Upon its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan turned Korea into a logistic and strategic base for its continental expansion. The focus progressively shifted to heavy industry, such as the production of machinery, steel, chemicals, and ships, and the speed of this development sharply accelerated after the beginning of Japan’s war with China in 1937. Th is wartime industrialization led to a form of “overdevelopment,” in which infrastructural expansion far outpaced the needs of the local population.12 By the end of the Pacific War, Korea was a significantly industrialized society, at least in its urban centers, and employment in the industrial sectors accounted for more than 30 percent of the workforce.13 10. The preponderance of foreign capital did not necessarily mean that the Koreans were alienated from the benefits of industrialization, because economic development provided a sizable number of Koreans—in par ticu lar entrepreneurs and skilled workers—with unprecedented opportunities for upward social mobility. At the same time, it was the external interest of the imperial metropolis rather than domestic needs that drove Korea’s industrialization process. 11. See Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 44. The number of factories by the end of the decade reached 4,500, although most of these were run in a cottage style and employed less than thirty workers. 12. Cumings, “The Legacy of Japa nese Colonialism,” 489. 13. Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 15–18.

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As it went through this gradual process of industrialization, Korean society experienced a progressive unraveling of its traditional economic structure. Land ownership became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a dwindling number of landlords, leading to the proletarianization of rural labor. The colonial regime’s export-oriented agricultural policy, which favored large-scale commercial farming, benefited the upper-class landlords all the while penalizing the ranks of smallholders, semi-tenants, and landless peasants. By 1930, absentee landlords had increased to 31 percent of landowners, and the number of foremen working on their behalf doubled during the latter half of the 1920s.14 Those who were pushed out of landownership or tenancy found themselves in an increasingly competitive market for rural wage labor. Many of them chose to migrate to cities or abroad, especially to Japan and Manchuria, in search for better opportunities. In the cities, however, migrant workers had to find jobs outside the industrial sector, crowding the day-labor market and hiring themselves out as rickshaw pullers, porters, and construction workers.15 Historians have poignantly characterized this mass of urban workers as “a huge, frequently unemployed, job-seeking, floating population,” and they have coined the expression of “virtual paupers” to convey their dire conditions of precariousness and uncertainty.16 Combined with the emphasis on light industry, the outsize proportion of underemployed day laborers among the male population explains the relatively high percentage of women and child workers in colonial Korean factories. Women accounted for about 20 percent of the factory workforce in the early 1920s, and their numbers rose to more than 30 percent in the 1930s and 1940s.17 Women’s participation in the industrial workforce provoked public controversy in traditionally gender-segregated Korean society, and factory owners countered 14. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 46. 15. Ibid., 45. Industrial workers accounted for up to 50 percent of the urban workforce in the early 1930s. The proportion decreased to about 30 percent during war time, due to the explosive increase in miners and construction workers. 16. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble, 9–12. In this study, Kawashima argues for broadening our conceptualization of “the proletariat” in order to apply the term to Korean workers in Japan, most of whom were obliged to sell their labor in daylabor markets, barred by racial discrimination, if not an official policy, from positions that were more rewarding and promised better job security. It should also be noted that the workers in colonial Korea had little legal protection and no welfare safety net, because Japan’s labor law was enforced only in the imperial mainland. 17. Janice Kim, To Live to Work, 27.

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Backgrounds

them by adopting paternalistic policies, such as accommodating the workers in gender-specific housing on factory compounds and enforcing strict codes of conduct.18 In reality, however, women workers were typically subjected to harsher conditions than men were. At the mercy of male factory managers, women workers were routinely victims of sexual violence and harassment. They rarely earned as much as men, and their average daily working hours regularly exceeded those of men.19 Collective labor struggle by urban workers began before colonization and became a conspicuous social phenomenon by the late 1910s. Labor strikes in these early years mostly occurred at harbors, at construction sites, and in mining areas, and they featured demands for wage increases as well as improved working conditions. A spike in labor activism occurred in 1918, with workers staging fift y strikes, a manifold increase from previous years. Postwar inflation, which provoked the nationwide popu lar uprisings known in Japan as the Rice Riots, was likely responsible for the sudden increase in labor disputes. The tides of labor strikes rose even higher in following years, as they gained further momentum from the general social unrest of the March First Movement.20 The first labor organization of Korea, the Korean Workers Mutual Aid Association (Chosŏn nodong kongjehoe), was founded in Seoul in 1920. The leaders of this organization were inspired by the contemporary Japanese labor movement, which they had observed and to which they had contributed as students in Japan. Over the four years of its existence, the organization expanded within the most developed industrial sectors, eventually reaching a membership of nearly eighteen thousand. The labor movement drew its participants especially from the constituencies of press workers, dock workers, and transport laborers. It also paid attention to the peasantry, who after all still accounted for the majority of the working class. Partly due to the nature of its members’ occupations, many of whom were “free” laborers without annual or multiyear contracts, the movement tended to give more emphasis to reformist agen18. For competing discourses on factory women workers, see Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 152–60. 19. See Janice Kim, To Live to Work, 89–92. 20. For statistical information and other details about this early period’s labor strikes, see Kang Man’gil, Kŭndae nodongja kyegŭp ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 224–43.

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das, such as mutual aid and workers’ education, rather than to the revolutionary cause of class struggle.21 The Korean labor movement grew more intense and radical between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s. As industrialization advanced in Korea, the formerly region-based labor organizations were replaced by industry-centered ones, with factory workers playing an increasingly prominent role in labor disputes. Aside from the further collectivization of workers, two factors had a decisive influence on radicalizing the period’s labor movement: the economic collapse in the wake of the 1929 financial crisis and the leftists’ turning away from a united front of antiimperialist resistance and toward a more focused concentration on organizing a popular revolution. The economic crisis created momentum for hard-pressed workers’ voluntary participation in labor protests, while the change in leftist strategy, which was encouraged by the Communist International (Comintern) itself, translated into intellectuals’ more active infiltration into work sites. This period’s labor strikes tended to be well-organized, large-scale, and politicized. Representative was the 1929 Wŏnsan general strike, in which more than two thousand workers of various industries—from transportation, to clothes manufacturing, to the press—participated in a massive protest against unjust hiring practices (fig. 1.2). The early 1930s saw the rise of the so-called Red Union Movement among both peasants and factory laborers, especially in the northeastern region where heavy industry was concentrated and the communist movement was particularly active.22 The high tide of labor activism, however, subsided beginning in the mid-1930s under Japan’s intensifying militarism. Labor disputes occurred into the 1940s at a sharply decreased rate. Although the number of industrial workers tripled through the late colonial years, strikes in the three major cities—Seoul, Pyongyang, and Pusan—declined from about forty incidents in the early 1930s to less than five in 1940.23 Peasant protests also continued but tended to take the form of individual tenancy lawsuits rather than a collective union movement. 21. See Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 92–98. For the changing occupational breakdown of the Korean population, see Grajdanzev, Modern Korea. 22. For the Red Peasant Union Movement, see Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 75–113. 23. Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 313.

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Figure 1.2 Protest march orga nized by the Wŏnsan Labor Association, from Tonga ilbo, May 10, 1928. Courtesy of Tonga ilbo.

It was not merely through repression that Japan managed to stem the tide of labor unrest. Equally important was the colonial government’s adoption of a softer rhetoric and friendlier policies directed toward the Korean peasantry, which were meant to co-opt the population for Japan’s military campaign.24 Still, economic difficulties at the end of the war put extreme pressure on both peasants and industrial workers. Discontent and desperation were often expressed through more passive forms of resistance, such as work slowdowns and desertion.25 Despite the presence of radical moments in the labor struggles of colonial Korea, recent studies of the peasant and labor movements have shown that their participants were, overall, no revolutionary and classconscious proletariat. The previous representation of Korean labor struggle as a politicized and collectivist display of proletarian unity actually belies the individual and voluntaristic character of many of these 24. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 114–32. 25. See ibid., 134–43, and Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 398–414.

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manifestations. As Janice Kim has argued, consciousness-raising campaigns, both nationalist and socialist, did not have permanent effects. The vast majority of labor demonstrations among women arose spontaneously and independently.26 Gi-Wook Shin has similarly shown that tenancy disputes during the colonial era were typically reformist and practical rather than revolutionary or ideological.27 Although intellectuals provided the urban and rural workers with ideological stimuli at times of economic crisis, workers were normally more tied to their families and local communities than to the abstract collectivity of the proletariat. As we shall observe in the next section, the repressive circumstances of colonial Korea prevented the formation of a strong communist party in the peninsula. Th is fact explains why, even in its heyday, the labor movement was only marginally influenced by politics and socialist ideology. In addition, as we shall see later on still, the weak communist party could exercise little influence over leftist writers and intellectuals. The leftist movement in Korea, we may say, lacked a strong political core but was solid at both its social and cultural edges. Some of the salient characteristics of leftist literature, including its marked ideological tones and its unorthodoxy, can be explained by the left’s political weakness, which put writers in charge of politics and at the same time left them free to use their best judgment in applying socialist doctrine to the specific conditions of colonial Korea.

The Korean Communist Movement and the Cultural Left An official Korean Communist Party was founded in Seoul in 1925 and was recognized by the Comintern in that same year. Leading up to this important moment, however, was a string of events that took place in Russia, Japan, and China. The very first Korean communist parties were organized in Russia as early as in the late 1910s. Russia hosted two tiers of Korean immigrants, which together numbered tens of thousands: those who had emigrated for economic reasons around the midnineteenth century and the more recent arrivals who chose political exile after Japan’s annexation of Korea. The latter group gave itself representation through the Korean Socialist Party (Hanin sahoedang), 26. Janice Kim, To Live to Work, 114. 27. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 74.

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Backgrounds

which was founded in 1918 in Khabarovsk and later moved its base to Shanghai. The former group was instead represented by the Irkutsk Communist Party, which was founded in September 1919 and whose Russified Korean leaders were ideologically more orthodox and more concerned with questions of Russian domestic politics. Regardless of its supposed internationalist commitments, the Korean communist movement in Russia was strongly motivated by a nationalist agenda. The double cause—nationalist and socialist—saddled the movement with issues of priority and provoked internal disputes from the very beginning.28 The two communist parties were indeed divided over their visions for Korea’s revolution, with the Shanghai faction supporting a revolution in two stages—a proletarian upheaval following national liberation—and the Irkutsk faction advocating an immediate proletarian revolution. The two factions vied for the hegemony of the emerging socialist movement within the Korean peninsula, where a few radical dissident groups had sprung up in the wake of the March First Movement.29 Not all leftists, however, came from the north. As Scalapino and Lee have noted, “more Korean Marxists were being made in Japan than in Russia.”30 A sizable contingent of young Koreans, most of them students, were introduced to socialism and communism through their participation in the alternative political scenes of Japan. Marx’s brand of socialism gained popularity in Japan in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as an alternative to anarchism, as many leftists found the Marxist focus on a collectivist revolution to be an improvement over the anarchist strategy of single terrorist acts. Communists in Japan were banned from organizing a party, however, and they thus opted for the creation of cultural organizations, called “thought societies” (sasang tanch’e), which provided a legal front for political activism. One such organization was the Northern Star Society (Puksŏnghoe), which was founded in 1923 by exanarchist converts of the Black Wave Society (Hŭktohoe; 1921).31 The group 28. Here my perspective differs from that of Scalapino and Lee, who regarded the Korean communist movement as a “homogenized” one that identified the two causes of nationalism and communism, despite Lenin’s objection to such homogenization. Although such a tendency was prominently present in the movement, the claim, if taken at the face value, suppresses the existing disagreements within the colonial left. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 1: 61. 29. For a comparative analysis of two factions, see Im Kyŏngsŏk, Ch’ogi sahoejuŭi undong, 185–224. 30. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 1: 57. 31. Daesook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement, 46.

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expanded its activities to Korea and in the process changed its name into the Northern Wind Society (Pukp’unghoe; 1924).32 Amid the fervor of the March First uprisings, Korean returnees from Japan led the fast growth of the domestic communist movement along with those from China and Russia. When the Korean Communist Party (KCP) was finally launched in Seoul, it took the form of a coalition of the Shanghai, Irkutsk, and Tokyo factions. The core members of the first KCP came from the Tuesday Society (Hwayohoe; 1924), a thought society named in commemoration of the weekday of Marx’s birth.33 The KCP’s inaugural agenda set as its goals “the complete independence of Korea,” “the enforcement of the eight-hour working day,” “political, economic, and social equality for women,” and “support of Chinese and Russian revolutions.”34 As a coalition of groups, the party could rely on a substantial network of preexisting youth, peasant, and labor organizations. By the same token, however, party leaders were also constrained by the necessity of mediating among the various factions. The task was far from easy, and the life of the party was characterized by weak unity and frequent disputes among members. Existing between 1925 and 1928, the KCP was subject to the exceptionally effective control of the colonial police force. Equally impressive, however, was the Korean socialists’ persistence in keeping the party alive. The KCP was destroyed and rebuilt three times over, with its top command changing hands six times between different factions. Each time, the police made a mass arrest of all of the suspects, thereby wiping out the majority of members throughout the ranks (fig. 1.3). Of four distinct incarnations of the KCP, the third one lasted the longest and commanded the broadest organizational network through its alliance with left ist nationalists in the united front of the Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society; 1927–31). The KCP was effectively dissolved after the fourth police crackdown, not because the Koreans were no longer willing to rebuild the party, but because the Comintern instructed Korean socialists to focus first on expanding their support base among the working-class masses before founding yet another official KCP. Recent studies have

32. For a more detailed account of the Northern Wind Society, see Im Kyŏngsŏk, Ch’ogi sahoejujŭi undong, 338–41. 33. Yi Chunsik, Chosŏn kongsandang sŏngnip kwa hwaltong, 75. The Tuesday Society was founded by returned members of the Irkutsk Communist Party, including major leaders such as Cho Pongam, Kim Chaebong, and Pak Hŏnyŏng. 34. Ibid., 83–84.

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Figure 1.3 News report on the arrest of members of the Korean Communist Party in 1925. The news was reported belatedly in Tonga ilbo, September 13, 1927. Courtesy of Tonga ilbo.

revealed that multiple underground organizations, including the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group led by Pak Hŏnyŏng, were still aiming to rebuild the KCP as late as 1942.35 As the circumstances of its end attest, the KCP maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Comintern during its brief existence. In its role as the headquarters of the international communist movement, the 35. For a history of the KCP, see Daesook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement. For more updated accounts that include Soviet archival materials, see Yi Chunsik, Chosŏn kongsandang sŏngnip kwa hwaltong, and Ch’oe Kyujin, Chosŏn kongsandang chaegŏn undong.

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Comintern paid close attention to developments in Korea, providing its activists with aid in the form of money, personnel, weapons, and easy access to Soviet institutions such as the Moscow-based Communist University for Oriental Workers. Such a friendly policy was motivated in part by the strategic interests of the new Soviet regime, whose alliance with colonies was a deliberate step in the confrontation with Western and Eastern empires.36 Despite the mutual interest and alliance, however, the Comintern withdrew its approval after the Korean party’s repeated dismantlement by the Japanese police. The Comintern also compelled the dissolution of overseas Korean communist organizations under Stalin’s new policy of “Socialism in One Country,” which served the national interest of the Soviet Union by recognizing only one communist party in each nation. In the new, regressively nation-centered political climate, Korean communists abroad were obliged to refer to the communist party of their resident nation, be it China, Japan, or Russia. Although Koreans generally regarded the Comintern as the “mother of all communist parties,” the Comintern’s decision against their autonomy became a cause of resentment for many.37 The hardship faced by the KCP and the political left had important consequences for the socialist movement in Korea. Without a strong and legally recognized central organization, leftist activism thrived in the underground and never quite achieved the open recognition that socialist mass movements typically garnered in the West. Both the labor movement and the intellectual avant-garde were thus deprived of an important institutional and political resource. As would also become apparent in later decades, on the other hand, the harsh treatment to which the colonial authorities subjected the socialists ultimately contributed to enhancing their status in the consideration of the Korean public. Repression thus functioned as a double-edged sword for the Japanese occupiers, for it conferred an enduring moral status upon the left just as it deprived it of immediate political efficacy. The absence of a stable communist party was also consequential for the cultural left. There was certainly an overlap in personnel between the 36. The Soviet Union also had a special interest in supporting the anti-Japanese Korean resistance, as Japan had won its 1905 war against Russia and was a major participant in the counterrevolutionary White Army. 37. See Daesook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement, 102–8 and 177–86; and Ch’oe Kyujin, Chosŏn kongsnagdang chaegŏn undong, 16–20.

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communist party and the socialist cultural organization of the KAPF.38 Still, with the communist party in a perpetually embattled state, colonial leftist writers could rely on neither the sponsorship nor the surveillance of an established political authority. The absence of sponsorship meant, for instance, the unavailability of a reliable publication space in party organs. Th is was an especially sore problem for KAPF writers, whose affiliation with an openly political group was a liability at a time of rampant censorship.39 After the authorities shut down Kaebyŏk in 1926, the only remaining partisan periodical was Chosŏn chi kwang (Light of Korea; 1922–31), which began as a nationalist magazine but later assumed a socialist tone. The dire conditions of funding and censorship forced writers to seek alternative publication outlets, at times risking being chastised by the KAPF leadership for publishing in “enemy” periodicals.40 This situation improved somewhat only in the early 1930s, when a series of new leftist magazines—including Pip’an (Criticism; 1931–40), Irŏt’a (Status quo; 1931–36), and Sin kyedan (New steps; 1932– 33)—were introduced amid an expansion of readership and a new flourishing of the publication industry (pl. 1).41 38. Those affi liated with both organizations included Cho Chunggon, Kim Pokchin, Kim Tuyong, Ko Kyŏnghŭm, Yi Pungman, and Yi Ujŏk. Kim Pokchin, the first sculptor of Korea, was the elder brother of Kim Kijin, the founding member and theoretical architect of the KAPF. See the writers’ biographies in Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa, 359–400, and Kang Man’gil and Sŏng Taegyŏng, eds., Han’guk sahoejuŭi undong inmyŏng sajŏn. 39. Japan had laid the foundation of its censorship policy with the introduction of two laws—the Newspaper Law (Sinmunji pŏp; 1907) and the Publication Law (Ch’ulp’an pŏp; 1909)—when Korea was still only a protectorate. Although these regulations were modeled after their counterparts on the mainland, the Korean versions were stricter in requiring that all materials intended for publication be submitted in advance to the censorship agency within the Police Department. As Han Mansu has suggested, the presence of censorship means that what is given in a colonial text is often merely “what the writer could write”—it is not to be confused with what a writer would have written if given freedom of expression. For studies of colonial censorship policies, see Robinson, “Colonial Publication Policy”; Tongguk taehakkyo munhwa haksurwŏn han’guk munhak yŏn’guso, ed., Singminji sigi kŏmyŏl, and Kŏmyŏl yŏn’guhoe, ed., Singminji kŏmyŏl. Han’s quote is from Han Mansu, “Singminji sigi munhak kŏmyŏl,” 106. 40. See Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Ch’och’anggi ŭi mundan ch’ŭngmyŏnsa,” 391. 41. Other new left ist magazines of the time included Adŭng (Us; 1931–32), Che ilsŏn (First front; 1932–33), Hyesŏng (Comet; 1931–32), and Taejung (Masses; 1933). The publisher of Kaebyŏk reintroduced Pyŏlgŏn’gon, Hyesŏng, and Che ilsŏn upon

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For writers, the positive side of having a weak communist party was greater freedom from doctrinal constraints. The KAPF leadership was generally anxious to conform to the policy lines of the Comintern and, around 1930, even established an internal screening system to control the quality of its literary output.42 Nevertheless, if any of its members made an unorthodox interpretation of the Comintern’s policies, whose translations were often ambiguous and open-ended, the only disciplinary measure that could be applied was the comrades’ censure or, at most, expulsion from the organization. Although possibly psychologically traumatizing, these measures were lax compared with the grave consequences of unorthodoxy in the established communist regimes of the period. The colonial government’s repression of the political left had the ultimate effect of boosting the size and the importance of the cultural left in Korea. Activities or ideas that would not be tolerated in the factory and the square would often be acceptable to authorities if contained within the conveniently fictional boundaries of literature. Accordingly, instead of outlawed political parties, it was often thought that societies, reading circles, and other cultural organizations served as the centers of leftist activities, ranging from doctrinal education to the plotting of street demonstrations. It was the leftist reading circles, for instance, that played a central role in orga nizing protests such as the 1929 Kwangju Student Movement and the 1931 anti-imperialist campaign at Kyŏngsŏng Imperial University.43 The preponderant role of culture within the Korean socialist movement explains nicely the prestige that literature carried in Korea both during and after the colonial period. In a society where freedom of speech was seriously curtailed, creative writing was charged with the additional mission of serving as a site of political discourse. Both leftist writers and their readers were mindful of the political relevance of their literary practice. Leftist literature majorly contributed to popularizing socialist ideas and building a socialist “structure of feeling” in Korea, and its writers accomplished this task while coping with the stringency of colonial censorship. the demise of Kaebyŏk, but these lighter-weight alternatives were unable to regain the clout of their predecessor. 42. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Ch’och’anggi ŭi mundan ch’ŭngmyŏnsa,” 380. 43. See Cheon Jung-hwan, “1920 nyŏndae toksŏhoe,’ ” 58–59, and Yun Kŭmsŏn, “1920–1930 nyŏndae toksŏ undong,” 159–60.

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Colonial Differences in the Korean Leftist Movement The peasant revolts of the late nineteenth century created fertile terrain for the subsequent growth of the first workers’ organizations in Korea, and the industrial expansion of the colonial era made possible the penetration of this labor culture into urban centers—especially Seoul—where it gained more visibility. This movement’s ties with the political left were mostly tenuous, as the KCP could not overcome repression by the colonial authorities to exercise leadership within a structured and organized socialist movement. Nevertheless, leftist culture in a broad sense thrived during the colonial era, partly because it responded to a deeply felt need for social renewal and partly because socialism met with the favor of some of the most talented young writers and intellectuals of the time. The left in Korea was accordingly a peculiarly hollow historical bloc, deprived of a strong political core but flourishing overall in both its social and its cultural manifestations.44 The experiences of the labor movement provided direct inspiration for some of the writers of New Tendency literature in the early 1920s, and throughout the colonial period left ist intellectuals maintained a privileged relationship with field and factory, sometimes even rising from their ranks. As a phenomenon integral to colonial modernization, the Korean left ist movement reflected the historical specificities of that important process. The movement thus assumed strong anti-imperialist and nationalist commitments, at one point becoming the bearer of a radicalized and uncompromising form of national resistance. In its more characterizing social and political activities, however, the leftist movement also stood firmly at the side of the Korean working classes. Factory laborers composed just a minor part of the leftists’ constituency, as Korea then counted on a huge number of peasants joined by the ranks of precariously employed urban laborers. The variegated composition of the colonial workforce both diversified the leftist labor movement and posed an added challenge to the left ists’ cross-cultural translation of Western socialist doctrines. Another distinctly colonial characteristic of the Korean left was the weakness of its political manifestation. As we have seen, the KCP never 44. For Gramsci’s analytical concept of a “historical bloc,” understood as an integral layering of economic, social, political, and cultural relations, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, in par ticu lar 366 and 377.

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quite gained full control over the broader socialist forces on the peninsula. Instead of political parties, it was thought that societies and literary groups served as the centers of the Korean left ist movement. Literature, in particular, proved to be the most fertile form of leftist culture because of its efficiency in delivering articulate social criticism and also because other mediums, such as film and theater, required bigger capital investments and were subjected to harsher censorship.45 Compared with their Western, Russian, and Japanese counterparts, leftist intellectuals in colonial Korea had to cope with notable disadvantages. They could expect little help from the network of a stable party organization, and they were constantly exposed to the risk of arrest and, more perniciously, censorship.46 From a slightly different perspective, however, the disadvantages of the Korean left in colonial times could also be seen as having had positive consequences. In the absence of an established and controlling party authority, Korean leftist intellectuals were relatively free of political surveillance, and they were quite autonomous when it came to embedding Marxist and socialist ideas in their own creative practices. The pressure of colonial censorship, moreover, made an ironic contribution toward developing leftist literary practices, as writers were obliged to exercise their artistic craftsmanship in devising various ways to circumvent the censors’ constraints. Finally, the forced cultural focus of the Korean socialist movement encouraged the development of a substantial corpus of leftist literature. This body of written work, in its turn, would prove effective in establishing a leftist legacy in the postcolonial era. The aura of an embattled yet resistant cultural tradition is today still distinctive of colonial leftist culture, and it lends moral authority to contemporary progressive politics on the peninsula. 45. For proletarian theater and cinema movements in colonial Korea, see An Kwanghŭi, Han’guk p’urollet’aria yŏn’gŭk undong, and Hyangjin Lee, Contemporary Korean Cinema, 28–29. 46. Under their divide-and-rule policy, the colonial authorities consistently wielded their control over the cultural sphere to restrict publication opportunities for radical writers. Aside from the practice of censorship, the authorities also co-opted tamer publishers by granting them financial incentives as well as easier access to technology and facilities. See Han Mansu, “Singminji sigi munhak kŏmyŏl kwa inswae chabon” and “Singminji sigi kŭndae kisul (ch’ŏlto, t’ongsin) kwa inswaemul kŏmyŏl.”

Part II Landscapes

Two

The Proletarian Wave An Anatomy of the Literary Left

In the late 1930s, writing retrospectively about the fortunes of Korean socialist literature during the previous decade, Pak Yŏnghŭi singled out the time around 1930 as a particularly difficult period for him and the other members of the Marxist cultural organization of the KAPF. “Having lost our balance between ideology and literature, we felt like we had failed,” Pak wrote in somber evaluation and recollection. “We still hunkered down, trying to shape our position through heated theoretical debates. The more vigorous the debates got, however, the more our creative practice seemed to be getting weary and stagnant.”1 As chairman and cofounder of the KAPF, Pak had tried until then to steer the organization in a properly communist direction, only to encounter dissent from fellow intellectuals and frustration in the delicate balancing of art and politics. Given the adverse conditions in which it had been operating, Pak reflected, the KAPF had made a valiant effort to introduce Marxist literature and arts to colonial Korea. It had also met with enormous difficulties, however, and by Pak’s own suggestion, the Korean left had failed to create a Marxist culture on the peninsula that would be comparable to those in the West or the Soviet Union. Seemingly confirming Pak Yŏnghŭi’s assessment, critics today tend to agree on the fact that colonial Korean intellectuals were generally unable to embed Marxist principles in their theory and literary practice. Commenting on a 1924 article that appeared in Kaebyŏk, for example, Michael Robinson has pointed out that a “jumble of categories” was used 1. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Ch’och’anggi ŭi mundan ch’ŭngmyŏnsa,” 358.

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by its author, and he has noted “the difficulty Koreans encountered when applying orthodox Marxist categories of analysis to the Korean situation.”2 Likewise Tatiana Gabroussenko, whose analysis centers mostly on a Korean–Soviet comparison, has criticized the works of Yi Kiyŏng on the grounds of their supposedly unorthodox character: “[Yi Kiyŏng’s] writings never presented a proletariat-centered approach to the world and society, ideas of class struggle, or the concept of Communist revolution—all of which were necessary features of Communist orthodoxy.”3 These and other commentators generally accept that socialism-inspired literature contributed substantially to colonial culture, and they typically assess it as having had important nationalist significance. By the same token, however, these scholars also express skepticism about the specifically socialist valence of Korean leftist literature. In their view, leftist writers had serious difficulties in mastering the fundamental tenets of Marxist-Leninist theory, and as a consequence they produced writings that were marked by unorthodoxy and, in some cases, ideological naïveté.4 A balanced evaluation of these views should mix agreement with a dose of contextualization. There is no question, when we look at the literary and theoretical production of colonial intellectuals, that little of it qualifies as orthodoxly Marxist. Indeed, even the broader theories of communism did not find much representation in the actual output of Korean writers. What is missing in the above assessments, however, is a keener embedding of the question of orthodoxy within the challenges, the aspirations, and ultimately the significance of leftist literature in colonial Korea. Two points in particular deserve mention. First, when we reflect on Marxism and communism as new inspirations in colonial Korea, what is really at issue is the encounter between an international political movement of European origins and an East Asian society that had until then been little exposed to the changes and influences that constituted Western modernization. In this process of theoretical migration, socialist doctrines had to be adapted and reformulated in ways that would naturally diverge from any Western or Soviet idea of Marxist or communist “orthodoxy.” Second, the insistence on Marxism and communism as 2. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 123. 3. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 77. 4. See, for example, Gabroussenko, ibid.; Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya; and Robinson, Cultural Nationalism.

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normative touchstones for the colonial left reflects a point of view that was certainly endorsed by Pak Yŏnghŭi as the chairman of the KAPF. As the cultural wing of the newly formed Korean Communist Party, the KAPF inscribed an allegiance to Marxist principles in its very statutes. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all left-leaning Korean intellectuals of the time would have taken Marxism or communism as their inspiration. A more accurate picture of colonial reality is that of an open ideological environment in which the locals applied various socialist doctrines—anarchism and Marxism in particular— at an intersection with other major ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, feminism, and pan-Asianism. These preliminary observations are meant to complicate an overly simple image of the colonial leftist movement: the image of a movement that overall “failed” to bring socialism into Korean culture. There is, then, a further issue that is worthy of mention. Even granting that socialist doctrines came to Korea from abroad, and granting that local intellectuals displayed a desire to “learn” them, there is a limit to the interest of the question “But did they really understand socialism?” Other promising questions, few of which have been asked, provide more insight into the ideological transactions of Korean intellectuals at a time of rapid change on the peninsula: How did the story of leftist culture actually play out in Korea during the colonial period? What new ideological formations were the products of the encounter of Korean culture with the international radical movements of the early twentieth century? And, regardless of whether they “understood” it, what did Koreans actually do with socialism? What function did socialism play, in whatever form it was received, in the complex ideological environment of colonial Korea? In beginning to consider these questions, the pages that follow trace a historical outline of the events, the people, the associations, the journals, the publishers, and in general the institutional settings that constituted the cultural left in colonial Korea. The immediate emphasis here is on the anatomy and internal composition of the leftist movement, leaving for Chapter 3 an analysis that places the cultural left, taken as a whole, within the broader landscape of modern Korean culture. I thus start, here, by accounting for the introduction of primarily anarchist ideas to Korea during the period of 1910 to 1925. I then proceed to chronicle the institutional history of the KAPF between 1925 and 1935, focusing first on the Marxist beginnings of the organization and then on its maturation into a controversial catalyst of the diversification of the proletarian

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literary movement. This outline ends with an overview of the many groups of intellectuals who were unaffiliated sympathizers of the KAPF during its existence and beyond. As we shall see in closing, modern leftist culture thrived on the many synergies as well as tensions among a variety of ideological influences, prominent among which were Marxism, anarchism, liberalism, nationalism, and feminism. The previous focus on the KAPF’s centrality has so far obscured the true extent of this literary tradition, and it has prevented the rediscovery of left ist literature as a poignantly hybrid cultural formation that managed to translate an international socialist inspiration for its application to the local reality of colonial Korea.

The Anarchist Beginnings of the Socialist Literary Movement Having been mired for two decades in social upheavals and a deepening political crisis, Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century was a highly volatile society that seemed ripe for radical change. In the late nineteenth century, the rising bourgeois elites and some parts of the aristocracy had pursued modernization by embracing the new political ideals of constitutional monarchy and republicanism, which they had tried to promote both by legal means and through a failed coup d’état. Among peasants and the lower classes, however, the experience of the Tonghak uprisings had left a legacy of revolutionary egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism. It was in this heated social atmosphere that the ideas of thinkers such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx, and Proudhon found fertile terrain for growth. As we saw in the last chapter, early socialist intellectuals found their social referents in the realities of peasant unrest and urban struggle. Among the newly available Western doctrines, anarchism in particular clearly resonated with the aspirations of these mobilized masses, and many intellectuals were drawn to it in their attempt to conceptualize the rapidly changing Korean situation. Reflecting a global trend, anarchist theory remained influential in East Asia until at least the early 1920s, when Marxism began to spread throughout the region as the triumphant ideology of the Russian Revolution.5 “Anarchy,” in this context, referred to a variable cluster of ideas, prominent among which were the refusal to acknowledge a 5. Van der Walt and Hirsch, eds., Anarchism and Syndicalism.

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central governing authority and an aspiration for self-determination and freedom of association within one’s community. This sort of antiauthoritarian and antistatist stance had been especially suited to a region where a rigid social order, sanctioned by Confucian conservatism, preserved traditional hierarchies until the beginning of industrialization and modernization. A widely read writer among both Japanese and Korean intellectuals was Peter Kropotkin, the visionary of anarcho-communism. Especially popular were his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), which countered the then rampant political Darwinism with a view of cooperation as a core social and political principle, and The Conquest of Bread (1906), which offered Kropotkin’s blueprint for an ideal community based on self-government and the sharing of power.6 The diffusion of this particular brand of anarchism, which advocated the abolition of private property and was born in Kropotkin’s exchanges with Marx in Paris, meant that there would be some affinity, later on, between these early influences and the Marxist-Leninist line that many intellectuals endorsed during the 1920s.7 Both China and Japan hosted sizable groups of Korean students, intellectuals, and immigrant workers during the 1910s. It was in these tightknit communities that many Koreans had their first encounters with the ideas of Kropotkin and, in smaller measure, Mikhail Bakunin. In China, Korean expatriates were concentrated in Shanghai, which was then a hotbed of radical movements as well as a seaport where people could mingle and travel with relative freedom. In 1912, Shin Kyusik, an activist and former military officer of the late Korean Empire (1897–1910), organized the Mutual Aid Society (Tongjesa) along with a number of prominent affiliates. There are no detailed records left today of the activities of this secret society, but we know that its leaders, who went on to organize the Korean Socialist Party (Chosŏn sahoedang) in 1918, espoused anarchism primarily as an ideological underpinning for their anti-imperialist resistance movement.8 By contrast, in Japan, where Korean nationalist 6. Yi Horyong, Han’guk ŭi anak’ijŭm, 92–93, and Dongyoun Hwang, “Korean Anarchism before 1945,” 102–3. Also, part of Kropotkin’s “An Appeal to the Young” was translated into Korean. See Kim Myŏngjin, “Ch’ŏngnyŏn ege koham.” 7. For the history of Korean anarchist movements in East Asia, see Ku Sŭnghoe et al., Han’guk anak’ijŭm 100 nyŏn, and also Hwang, “Korean Anarchism before 1945.” 8. The Tongjesa quickly became the largest Korean nationalist group outside of the peninsula, with a substantial network of more than three hundred members in

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activities were suppressed, many Korean students gravitated instead toward the labor movement and the socialist militancy of their Japanese peers. Particularly influential labor activists were Chŏng T’aesin and Na Kyŏngsŏk, two students who orga nized Korean labor in Osaka and were close to Japa nese anarchists such as Ōsugi Sakae. They later became founding members of the Korean Workers’ Mutual Aid Association in Korea. Among the writers in Japan, the notable figures were Hwang Sŏgu, a poet and critic who founded the journals Kŭndae sajo (Modern thought; 1916) and Samgwang (Three lights; 1920–21), and a young Yŏm Sangsŏp, who promoted the anarchist cause by contributing articles to Samgwang and to the Korean students’ magazine Hakchigwang (Light of learning; 1914–30).9 The 1920 founding of the Korean Workers Mutual Aid Association (Chosŏn nodong kongjehoe; 1920–22) marked a watershed moment in Korean social history. As the first nationwide labor organization on Korean territory, the Kongjehoe was soon flourishing and came at one point to preside over fift y branch offices and about eighteen thousand members. Its ideological basis was elaborated on the pages of Kongje (Mutual aid; 1920–21), a journal that published labor-related articles as well as socialist writings in translation (pl. 2). Advocating the Kropotkian principle of mutual cooperation and prosperity, the Kongjehoe focused on coordinating local labor groups within fast-expanding industrial sectors such as textile, construction, transportation, papermaking, and printing. Many labor strikes in Korea took place under the aegis of the Kongjehoe in these sectors, which often prompted colonial authorities to react by curbing the association’s activities. Just as important, the Kongjehoe ran an educational campaign aimed at vindicating the dignity and worth of China, Japan, Russia, and the United States (Hawaii and San Francisco, in par ticu lar). Writers Hong Myŏnghŭi, Mun Ilp’yŏng, and Sin Ch’aeho were among the most active members. For more on the formation and activities of the orga nization, see Kim Hŭigon, “Tongjesa wa Sanghae chiyŏk tongnip undong.” See also a well-known account of the life story of a Korean anarchist revolutionary in China in Wales and Kim San, Song of Ariran. 9. Using the pseudonym “KS saeng,” Na Kyŏngsŏk published the article “Chŏgŭp ŭi saengjonyok,” in which he advocated general strikes as an effective recourse in peasant struggles. For Chŏng’s and Na’s labor organization activities, see Yi Horyong, Han’guk ŭi anak’ijŭm, 114. For Hwang Sŏgu’s career as a poet and publisher, see Chŏng Ut’aek, Hwang Sŏgu. Yŏm Sangsŏp projected a liberal agenda tinged with anarchism in his article “Ijung haebang.” See Chapter 5 for further details.

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manual labor. In a society still bound by the Confucian dismissal of the “lower” professions, this message was revolutionary and liberating for the throngs of shoemakers, barbers, cooks, and day laborers who were increasingly crowding modern cities such as Seoul, Pyongyang, and Pusan.10 In addition to organizing urban labor, the Kongjehoe was also invested in peasant unions and in arranging for and mediating tenancy disputes between peasants and property owners.11 A large share of the association’s work involved advocating for peasants’ rights, continuing a tradition that had its roots in the Tonghak uprisings of a few decades earlier. As early as its founding year, Kongje carried an article by Sin Paegu titled “The Case for Peasant Unions” (Sojagin chohamnon; 1920), which noted that urban wage workers, despite their hardship, were living more civilized and comfortable lives than did their rural counterparts. Ascribing the peasants’ misery to exploitative property owners, their intermediaries, and the colonial authorities, the article urged rural workers to unite for mutual aid at a time when “aristocratism and capitalism” were about to be upturned in a socialist upheaval.12 The author’s choice of words deserves notice, as he targeted both the late Chosŏn tenancy system (hinted at by “aristocratism”) and the new capitalist development that had been introduced by the colonial government. Only later would Marxists single out the bourgeoisie and its capital as their social antithesis. At this early stage of labor struggle, activists like Sin would more often assume a generalized anti-authoritarian stance, all the while calling for peasants to form unions. According to a contemporary survey run by the Japanese government, peasant unions in Korea increased from zero to 107 between 1920 and 1923, roughly coinciding with the time of the Kongjehoe’s existence.13 10. Kim Kyŏngil provides an account of the activities of the Kongjehoe in Nodong undong, 92–98. 11. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 65–66. 12. Sin Paegu, “Sojagin chohamnon.” According to Gi-Wook Shin, at this time most Korean peasants were working at a subsistence level, meaning that they could not be described as living in misery. Sin Paegu may have turned to hyperbole for enhanced effect, or he may have taken for granted the entrenched urban view of rural life as wretched, no matter what. See Shin, ibid., 54–74. 13. The Kongjehoe was dissolved in 1922, following disputes among its leaders. The next large-scale labor and peasant orga nization of Marxist persuasion, the General Alliance of Korean Laborers and Peasants, was not founded until 1924. For statistics about peasant unions, see the survey charts in Kim Yongdal, Nongmin undong, 26.

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Many members of the Kongjehoe were also affi liated with smaller thought societies that were explicitly wedded to the anarchist cause. Students and intellectuals returning from exile were often at the helm of these organizations, and it was not uncommon for a society to exist in Korea and also in Japan or China. Pak Yŏl, for example, led the organization of the Black Labor Society (Hŭngnohoe; 1921) in Seoul and the Black Wave Society (Hŭktohoe; 1921–23) in Tokyo, whereas Sin Ch’aeho founded the Black Youth Alliance (Hŭkseak chŏngnyŏn tongmaeng; 1921–24?) in both Seoul and Beijing.14 In keeping with a prominent function of anarchism throughout the East Asian region, these organizations often linked their labor activism with an anti-imperialist and nationalist agenda. They proposed to promote national independence, at least in theory, through bombings, assassinations, and other acts of political violence. In practice, however, these societies played a mostly organizational and cultural role, providing a network for politically engaged students and intellectuals. It is unclear whether these societies deliberately avoided political violence, or whether the extremely efficient Japanese police were simply able to repress these groups’ activities.15 14. For Pak Yŏl and Sin Ch’aeho’s organizational activities, see Yi Horyong, Han’guk ŭi anak’ijŭm, 101–2, 126–27, and 151. Sin Ch’aeho would later become one of the most celebrated intellectual figures of colonial Korea. In these early years, Sin played a major role in shaping Korean anarchist literature in China by serving as the editor for periodicals such as Shin taehan (New Korea; 1919–20), Chŏngŭi kongbo (The justice newspaper; 1924–25), and later T’arhwan (The conquest; 1928– 30). He was also a prolific scholar and writer, pioneering Korean nationalist historiography and authoring literary works such as The Battle of Dragons (Yong kwa yong ŭi taegyŏkchŏn; 1928?), an allegorical fantasy novel about socialist revolution on a global scale. Sin is believed to have first encountered anarchism through his reading of foreign books, in par ticu lar, Liang Qichao’s Yinbingshi wenji (Collected works from the ice drinker’s studio; 1903) and Kōtoku Shūsui’s Chōkōzetsu (Long speech; 1905), two texts that provided, respectively, a detailed account of the terrorist activities of the Russian Nihilist Party and a theoretical justification of anarchism and its terrorist strategies. See ibid., 44–85, and Kōtoku, Chōkōzetsu. 15. In the exception that proves the rule, Pak Yŏl and his wife Fumiko Kaneko would later become notorious for plotting a terrorist attack against the Japanese imperial family. The attested alliance of nationalist and anarchist agendas in Korea defies the common view of the two ideologies as antithetical to each other. Reflecting on this phenomenon, some scholars have suggested that anarchism might have lent itself to anti-imperialist nationalism due to its emphasis on decentralization and local autonomy. (See Crump, “Anarchism and Nationalism in East Asia,” 50). Moreover, taking a slightly different perspective, Arif Dirlik has offered useful insights

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Literature was an important part of the Korean anarchist movement of the early 1920s. Sin saenghwal (New life; 1922–23), the first socialist magazine to be published in Korea, carried a number of works that at once denounced the economic oppression of Koreans under Japan and represented the struggle of individuals against the institutions of colonial rule (fig. 2.1). Hyŏn Chin’gŏn’s “Human” (In; 1922), for instance, featured two homeless urban laborers blaming their financial ruin on Japan’s Oriental Development Company (Tongyang ch’ŏksik chusik hoesa), which was a state venture that extracted profit from the colonial enterprise. The woman accuses the company of bankrupting her entrepreneur father, whereas the man claims to have been underpaid as a company employee.16 Similarly, Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Myoji (Grave; 1922–23), an incomplete serialization that would later become On the Eve of the Uprising, drew the portrait of a young Korean intellectual who is harassed by the colonial police and witnesses the pauperization of his fellow countrymen at the hands of Japanese merchants and businessmen.17 Both stories featured the plight of ordinary Koreans instead of the factory workers that are more typical of Marxist literature. By contrast, Yi Sŏngt’ae’s “The Iron Factory” (Soegongjang; 1922) narrated the story of a factory strike only to highlight the difficulties inherent in unionization and collective struggle. Its first-person narrator is an enlightened striker who laments the way in which his coworkers are duped by the rhetoric of owner-appointed “labor representatives.” In declaring his “despair at the masses,” the protagonist resolves to “believe in myself only” and to continue his fight with a small number of likeminded colleagues. “We will always be in the minority,” he writes at a climatic moment. In its emphasis on individual rebellion over collective into the analogous case of mid-century revolutionary China. Instead of positing nationalism as a conservative antithesis of anarchism, Dirlik points to the radical quality of nationalism in early-twentieth-century East Asia, where the ideal of a republic “provoked a revolutionary reconceptualization of political legitimacy and a reconstitution of political space internally to create nations” (Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, 50–51). As the ideal of a nation was itself a revolutionary idea, Dirlik suggests, for some intellectuals it could plausibly serve as a path to other radical ideologies such as anarchism and Marxism. See also Van der Walt and Hirsch, “Rethinking Anarchism and Syndicalism,” in Anarchism and Syndicalism, lx. 16. Hyŏn Chin’gŏn, “In,” 124. The story was published under the writer’s pseudonym, Hyŏn Chwagŏn. 17. Yŏm Sangsŏp, Myoji.

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Figure 2.1 An anarchist-inspired cartoon, from Sin saenghwal (New life, May 1922). The indifference of the military and economic authorities to the suffering of the masses is symbolized by the two giant figures cheerfully joining in a toast. Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

action, the story offered an anarchist alternative to a more typical Marxist revolution by the organized proletariat.18 While Kropotkian anarchism upheld the ideal of mutual aid, that theme was not necessarily apparent in the works of anarchism-inspired 18. Yi Sŏngt’ae, “Soegongjang,” 82. The story was signed by “R S T,” the writer’s initials, as his family name can also be spelled as “Ri.” Aside from these stories, other notable fiction in Sin saenghwal included Yi Iksang’s “Will to Life,” published under the pen name “Sŏnghae,” which deployed multiperspectival storytelling to represent both an intellectual’s inner thoughts and those of his rickshaw puller. Also part of the magazine was “Sacrifice” (Hŭisaeng) by Chŏkchin (again a pen name), which told the tragic story of a young woman who is forced into prostitution by her parents in order to support the family. On contracting a venereal disease that leaves her destitute, the woman is pushed to the brink of suicide. Originally written in 1912, “Sacrifice” targeted traditional customs more than colonial political life, yet it shared with the other stories its grotesque depiction of poverty and a resentment of established authority, in this case represented by the family.

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writers of fiction. Of the aforementioned three stories, only “Human” is suggestive of the theme, as the homeless laborers care for each other and form a sort of family. The anarchist imprint on socialist literature, however, is to be found in a mainly negative stance of protest that was subsumed under an ideal of egalitarian antiauthoritarianism. Stories such as “Human,” “Grave,” and “The Iron Factory” projected a view of society broadly divided between the haves (yusanja) and the have-nots (musanja), and they advocated the subversion of the status quo by approvingly representing individuals’ fury against social injustices. In “Human,” for instance, a character muses that “if one tramples an insect, it will react before letting itself be crushed, and if one attacks a small bee, it will sting at least once before dying.”19 Likewise, in “The Iron Factory,” the protagonist declares himself ready to “charge against the factory organization and institution like an angry beast.”20 These stories were unacknowledged predecessors of later so-called New Tendency literature (Sin’gyŏnghyangp’a munhak), whose trademark features were a dramatic representation of poverty and an open endorsement of the individual’s rebellion against political disenfranchisement and the abuse of authority. Although New Tendency literature is generally known today as the first stage of the KAPF’s literary movement, the majority of its works actually had a distinctly anarchist flavor, which was especially evident in the frequent condemnation of social hierarchy, both traditional and modern, as well as in the rejection of the authority of states and other political institutions. Along with early works of anarchist fiction, the early 1920s also saw the emergence of literary criticism and aesthetic debate of a socialist orientation. Arguably the first piece of such criticism was Na Kyŏngsŏk’s essay “Shoes and Poetry” (Yanghwa wa siga; 1920).21 The essay criticized the writers of modern literature in Korea for their elitist aestheticism, arguing that as shoemakers create shoes for poets, so poets should produce work that is comprehensible to shoemakers and to the working-class masses, not just for the elites. In embryonic form, Na’s essay engaged with themes that would soon become important to Korean writers and literary critics of all ideological persuasions. Indeed, this early critical divide between modern literature and socialist criticism prefigured a later confrontation between modernism and realism, and that confrontation in 19. Hyŏn Chin’gŏn, “In,” 126. 20. Yi Sŏngt’ae, “Soegongjang,” 82. 21. See Na Kyŏngsŏk, “Yanghwa wa siga.”

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its turn had a defining influence on literary production and criticism in Korea during the twentieth century.22 In the areas of literature and culture, the intellectual experience of early socialist anarchism in colonial Korea was deep and far-reaching. At a most general level, the doctrine appealed to Korean intellectuals because of its power to evoke a comprehensive new vision for society and politics in Korea. The manifesto of the Kongjehoe, for example, deployed Kropotkin’s antiauthoritarian ideas in calling for the upset of the social, economic, and even geopolitical status quo: “The weak nations must be liberated from the strong ones, the lowly people from the nobility, and the poor from the rich.”23 Such a sweeping statement reflected not only a desire for revolutionary change but also a broad understanding of anarchism as a doctrine born of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the inaugural platform of the Kongjehoe included among its goals “the freedom and equality of humanity,” “the abolition of racial discrimination,” and “the cultivation of people’s (taejung) culture.”24 These all were ideals that in the West would have been part of a generic liberal agenda. In the context of Korea’s “compressed modernity,” however, Kropotkin was read alongside other Western thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche, and his works could be interpreted along with them as primers for an ambitious program of modernization and antitraditionalist social reform. If these early socialist documents conveyed both the ideals of the Enlightenment and a revolutionary spirit, conspicuously absent from them was a more detailed class analysis in the style of Marxism. In fact, the Marxist leaders of the KAPF would later criticize the anarchists for their “unscientific” and “idealistic” approach, mounting a campaign against the supposed unorthodoxy of their fellow intellectuals. Arguably, however, their objections were little more than a rote reiteration of the then popu lar Marxist polemic against previous socialist doctrines—a sales pitch that, having been started by Marx himself, was then perpetuated by his followers. As the first socialist group to emerge in a predominantly peasant, barely industrialized society, anarchist 22. For a summary of the realism–modernism debate in Korea, see Kim Yoonsik and Chŏng Houng, Han’guk munhak ŭi riŏllijŭm kwa modŏnijŭm. 23. Ko Sunhŭm, “Manifesto” for the Chosŏn nodong kongjehoe. Quoted in Yi Horyong, 96. Ko composed this document from memory in 1967 for Korean historians of the colonial anarchist movement. 24. Quoted in Kim Kyŏngil, Nodong undong, 93.

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intellectuals in Korea were concerned less with economic exploitation than they were with the social and political framework that enabled a larger spectrum of abuses and injustices. They accordingly targeted the traditional hierarchical order in all of its contemporary manifestations, forgoing economic and class analysis in favor of an ethically grounded stance in support of the oppressed and the powerless. Such a broad focus on injustice in Korean society accounts for the tremendous success that anarchist doctrines enjoyed in the 1920s among reform-minded intellectuals in Korea. As we shall see in the next section, many intellectuals converted to Marxism in the mid-1920s once that doctrine became a new and powerful ideology among the left. It also bears remembering, however, that a sizable contingent of anarchist intellectuals remained opposed to Marxism. This anarchist tradition within the left has been either neglected or downplayed in previous studies, where narratives have tended to emphasize the centrality of the KAPF at the expense of its equally important periphery. The KAPF was indeed the most formidable manifestation of organized leftist culture in colonial Korea. Even so, the Marxist stance of the KAPF did not go uncontested during the colonial era, and it would be a distortion to ascribe a normative status to it today. Anarchist literature in Korea was a precursor of Marxist orthodoxy, not a deviation from it, and its practitioners advanced a vision that injected both culture and politics with antiauthoritarian and egalitarian ideals that are still central to today’s progressive leftist culture in Korea.

The Birth of the KAPF and the Marxist Turn of Socialist Literature On August 17, 1925, eleven men gathered at T’aesŏgwan, a restaurant in downtown Seoul, for a reception dinner in honor of the Japanese proletarian writer Nakanishi Inosuke. Nakanishi was visiting Korea at the invitation of six different socialist organizations—the Tuesday Society (Hwayohoe), the Northern Wind Society (Pukp’unghoe), the Korean Labor Party (Chosŏn nodongdang), the Proletarian Alliance (Musanja tongmaeng), the Spark Society (Yŏmgunsa), and the PASKYULA. Of these, the last two were cultural organizations whose prime objective was the development of socialist literature in Korea. They acted as broad and inclusive literary fraternities, and their members at the dinner came from a variety of backgrounds. Kim Kijin was a landowner’s son and a former

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French literature major at Rikkyo University in Japan; Pak Yŏnghŭi was a former romantic poet and the son of a Christian minister; Song Yŏng was a schoolteacher who once worked at a Japa nese factory; and Yi Chŏkhyo was a press worker and labor activist with only an elementary school education. On that night, the members of the two literary groups decided to merge into one socialist cultural organization, and so was born the Chosŏn p’uroret’aria yesul tongmaeng, which was later to be known to history by its Esperanto name, “Korea Artista Proleta Federatio,” or, simply, the KAPF.25 As we saw in the last section, recognizable forms of socialist literature had been present in Korean culture at least since the early 1910s, when political exiles and students in China and Japan created societies with an anarchist orientation. The 1925 constitution of the KAPF, therefore, did not mark the beginning of socialist culture in Korea, but rather the time when Marxism rapidly became the mainstream within the Korean cultural left. We can easily notice the change by perusing the period’s magazines and their language. Prior to the advent of the KAPF, the lower classes were typically identified through the rather unspecific term musanja (the unpropertied), which denoted a generic economic condition rather than the functional contribution of a social class to the system of capitalist production. With the emergence of the KAPF, however, the Marxist term p’uroret’aria (proletariat) became standard in Korean literary discourse, and with its use the classic analysis of class as a function of a group’s role within a system of production also gained ground. On the international stage, the Marxist cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s had its historical origins in the launching in Russia of the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations, commonly known as Proletkult, on the eve of the 1917 revolution. Led by an avant-gardist group called Vpered, or “Forward,” the Proletkult was famously ill-fated in Russia, where it soon ran counter to Stalin’s predilection for a didactic collectivism that would promote social integration.26 By the time of its 1923 dissolution, however, the Proletkult’s original inspiration had 25. Nakanishi Inosuke, who grew up in Korea, enjoyed popularity among socialists on the peninsula for his literary portrayals of Korean workers in Japan. According to Pak Yŏnghŭi’s recollection, however, that night the assembled writers protested against Nakanishi’s use of the term t’oin (aborigine) in reference to Korean workers, criticizing it as a case of imperialist condescension. See Pak, “Ch’och’anggi ŭi mundan ch’ŭngmyŏnsa,” 331. 26. For a history of the Proletkult, see Mally, Culture of the Future.

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traveled far, creating waves of a movement that would sweep across many countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia during the 1920s and 1930s. In many countries, this international movement became synergic with various preexisting local causes, of which the most powerful were labor activism, antiwar movements, anticolonial resistance, and women’s movements. In the specific case of Korea, Marxism gained additional momentum for its propagation from Lenin’s renewed attention to the East in the early 1920s and his subsequent support for communist movements in the region. In these years the Comintern provided Korean communists with financial help, institutional support, and political guidance. In addition, the Koreans experienced a spectacular outburst of popular subversive energy during the 1919 March First Movement. In the aftermath of that movement, Marxism as a near-scientific method and prophecy of revolution appealed anew to those who hoped to harness the power of the Korean masses for a future insurrection. As a result, a number of Korean communist societies were founded inside and outside of Korea during the few years prior to the eventual founding, in 1925, of the Korean Communist Party.27 The history of the KAPF has been documented extensively in a number of previous studies.28 As we saw above, the association was formed in 1925 through the merging of the Spark Society and the PASKYULA.29 27. See Im Kyŏngsŏk, Ch’ogi sahoejuŭi undong, 225–92. 28. For the most comprehensive account of the organizational history of the KAPF, see Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa. For a history of its critical debates, see Kim Yŏngmin, Han’guk kŭndae munhak pip’yŏngsa, and Cho Chin’gi, Hanil p’ŭro munhangnon. 29. The two societies differed significantly in their membership. The Spark Society gathered mostly seasoned labor activists such as Yi Chŏkhyo and Yi Ho and was led by Song Yŏng, who himself had the experience of working at a factory in Japan. Founded in 1922 with the aim of “fighting for the liberation of the unpropertied class through a cultural movement,” the group saw its attempt at publishing the magazine Yŏmgun (Spark) frustrated when the censors confiscated its first two issues. By contrast, the PASKYULA included mostly students and intellectuals, having been the result of a previous merger between the romantic literary coterie of the Paekcho (White tide; 1922–23) and the first modern theater group named T’owŏrhoe (Earth and moon society). Among the members of the PASKYULA were artists such as Kim Pokchin, the first modern sculptor in Korea, and Ahn Sŏkchu, a pioneer of newspaper illustration. The group, which was named after the initials of its eight founding members, began as more of a cultural fraternity with

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Pak Yŏnghŭi and Kim Kijin were the central figures of the association, and they practically acted as co-chairs during the first few years. The generally agreed upon purpose of the KAPF was that of fostering the development of proletarian arts and letters in Korea, with a particular focus on guiding and coordinating new writers under the informal aegis of the Korean Communist Party. In order to pursue that function, the KAPF would successfully capitalize on the unparalleled status of Kaebyŏk as the most respected and influential literary journal of its time. As the chief editor of its literary section, Pak Yŏnghŭi regularly ran literary contests to discover and recruit new talents and also organized special forums on proletarian literature. For many leftist writers, Kaebyŏk was as much a publishing outlet as it was a hub for community building (pl. 3). If the KAPF’s ideological profile was decidedly proletarian, a large part of its constituency came from the middle and upper classes. The typical KAPF member was a young male intellectual, aged between the late teens and the early thirties, and educated at one of Korea’s elite urban high schools. He may also have attended a university in Japan or, less commonly, in China or Russia. The formative political experience of these educated KAPF members was not only the March First Movement but also the student activism of the 1920s, which created the conditions for the circulation of socialist ideas in students’ magazines, book clubs, and extracurricular reading circles both in Korea and in Japan. Some prestigious institutions, such as Paejae High School and Posŏng High School in Seoul, were especially famous as the cradles of radical intellectuals.30 Kim Kijin a rather vague ideological identity. Kim Pokchin later recalled the coterie as “a gathering of Whitmanians, Tolstoyans, and admirers of Lunacharsky” who upheld the rather abstract ideal of an “art for life” that would fight against the status quo. See Kim Pokchin, “P’ask’ura.” On the PASKYULA’s orga nization and activities, see Kim Kijin, “Na ŭi hoegorok,” 190–95. Finally, for the Spark Society, see Song Yŏng, “Chosŏn p’urollet’aria undong sosa.” 30. Paejae was built in 1885 by the American Methodist missionary Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, whereas Posŏng was founded in 1905 by Yi Yongik, a court official of the Chosŏn dynasty, and was later managed by the Ch’ŏndogyo, the indigenous religious institution that had originated in the Tonghak movement. Both schools existed prior to Japan’s colonization of Korea and survived the colonial government’s mass closing of preexisting schools. Unlike public high schools that focused on vocational education, these and other schools of their kind continued to serve as elite higher-education institutions in colonial Korea. For a study of colonial Korean institutions of higher education, see Han Yongjin, Kŭndae han’guk kodŭng kyoyuk.

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and Pak Yŏnghŭi both graduated from Paejae, whereas Im Hwa, Kim Yuyŏng, and Yi Iksang went to Posŏng. Also students at Paejae were, among others, Ch’oe Sŭngil, Pak Seyŏng, and Song Yŏng. Joining these elite members of the KAPF was a smaller number of activists of humbler origins and more varied backgrounds. Mostly the sons of peasants and laborers, some of these working-class activists received nothing beyond an elementary school education, although more commonly they could count on vocational degrees from professional schools in Korea or Japan. They were employed as office clerks, press workers, newspaper deliverymen, low-level industrial technicians, and factory workers, and some of them joined the KAPF during or after their experiences as activists in the fast-developing labor organizations. Indeed, these rather unusual members of a proletarian arts federation enjoyed prestige within the KAPF precisely because of their intimate knowledge of the working world. Among the better-known writers to arise from this group were Ch’oe Sŏhae, Kim Ch’angsul, Kim Yŏngp’al, Yi Chŏkhyo, and Yi Pungmyŏng. Ch’oe Sŏhae in particular became the face of early proletarian literature, known as the literature of poverty, with his autobiographical writings about his experience of living in Manchuria as a destitute day laborer.31 In addition, constituting this group were many nonwriter members of the KAPF—especially those belonging to theater groups and those partaking in organizational activities. The anonymity of these rank-and-file members suggests the lack of economic and social privilege accorded them. Nonetheless, they formed an important basis of the organization, and there is evidence that their number swelled as the decade of the 1920s advanced.32 The third and smallest of the KAPF’s constituencies was a group of Korean activists and intellectuals in Japan, including the leaders 31. For the contemporary reception of Ch’oe, see Kwak Kŭn, Ch’oe Sŏhae chakp’um charyojip. 32. The biographies of the best-known KAPF members are available in Kwon Youngmin’s Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa. The identities of only about half of the KAPF’s 150 members are known today. In a study of the socioeconomic backgrounds of socialist activists in colonial Korea, Chŏn Sangsuk has reviewed the police profiles of hundreds of members of the Korean Communist Party movements. She observes that working-class participants accounted for less than 27 percent of interrogated activists on record in the mid-1920s, but that this ratio increased to 43 percent in the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. See Chŏn, Ilche sigi han’guk sahoejuŭi chisigin, 204.

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and organizers of Korean labor in industrial centers such as Osaka and Tokyo. These overseas members, prominent among whom where Ko Kyŏnghŭm, Kim Samgyu, Kim Tuyong, Kim Yongje, and Yi Pungman, provided a theoretical leadership to the KAPF by virtue of their location in the imperial mainland, where both socialist culture and a mass cultural industry were more developed. They also generally enjoyed greater freedom of expression than their comrades in the colony did. This third group made its affi liation with the KAPF official in 1927. And it played a crucial role in serving as liaison between the KAPF and Japanese leftist organizations such as the NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio; 1928–31) and the KOPF (Federacio de Proletaj Kultur Organizoj Japanaj; 1931–34). All three of these groups—young intellectuals, workers, and Korean expatriates in Japan—united their forces to make the KAPF the longestlasting and most influential socialist cultural organization in colonial Korea. The mixing of social classes in its membership was in itself a nearly unprecedented event, as traditional Korea was notably lacking in venues in which peasants, secondary status groups, and the aristocracy could interact on an equal basis. Making all this possible, besides the egalitarian ideals of socialist intellectuals, was the success of the colonial government’s introduction of public schooling, which provided many Koreans with at least a basic elementary education. Ironically for a movement that would lead a radical campaign against the colonial regime, the very existence of the KAPF was in part predicated on the modernizing achievements of its enemy. The irony, of course, includes the fact that the colonial government may have miscalculated its move of providing its Korean subjects with the canny weapons of literacy and a modern education.33 Although the KAPF was officially a Marxist organization, at the beginning it encompassed a membership with heterogeneous ideological backgrounds. Indeed, as we saw in the last section, the KAPF’s early New Tendency literature prominently featured anarchist elements, such as a morally based advocacy of the weak vis-à-vis the powerful and, relatedly, the celebration of an individual’s spontaneous acts of rebellion. The discrepancy between Marxist theory and an ideologically mixed practice was the cause of some concern among KAPF’s leaders, who, 33. On the history of colonial education in Korea, see Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan.”

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perhaps fearing an excess of eclecticism and unorthodoxy, began to cast a negative light on writers who were perceived to be noncompliant. Criticism was especially harsh toward the anarchists, who then came to be labeled as naïve and lacking a positive vision. Im Hwa, for instance, polemically characterized anarchist writers as “sentimental rebels against oppression and violence” who were “un-socialist,” “unscientific,” and “obsessively individualist.”34 These skirmishes were in effect early moves in the Marxist turn of the socialist movement. Earlier Kim Kijin had laid a foundation for this process by introducing the antiwar socialist writings of Henri Barbusse, the French communist leader of the Clarté movement who had also been a source of inspiration for Japanese leftists.35 Likewise, in his programmatic writings, Pak Yŏnghŭi urged writers to infuse their literary works with a clearer sense of history’s teleological direction, which would be aimed at inciting a mass revolt in keeping with the ultimate goal of a proletarian revolution.36 In September 1927, the KAPF provided itself with a new platform that turned it into an explicitly Marxist cultural organization. The new document openly asserted the “historical inevitability of Marxism” and stipulated the KAPF’s objectives to be those of “promoting the repudiation of all feudal or capitalist ideas,” “enabling the struggle against tyrannical powers,” and “carrying out activities meant to raise the consciousness [of the proletariat].”37 In a way, in strictly codifying the political orientation of the KAPF, the leadership was choosing to subordinate the artistic cause to the political efficacy of the group. After 1927, the charge of dogmatism became routine among critics of the KAPF. Conversely, members of the organization then started to play up the agitprop value of their art. As the KAPF openly committed to a Marxist orientation, however, the rift between its core constituency and its anarchist wing became irreparable. In March 1927, right as the Marxist reform was being debated, 34. Im Hwa, “Punhwa wa chŏn’gae.” 35. For Kim Kijin’s remembrance of his early development into a proletarian literary critic, see “Na ŭi hoegorok,” 188–89. For his essays on Barbusse, see “Barbusse tae Roman Roland kan ŭi chaengnon,” “K’ŭllarŭt’e undong ŭi segyehwa,” and “Ttodasi K’ŭllarŭt’e e taehaesŏ.” 36. See Pak Yŏnghŭi, “T’ujaenggi e innŭn munye pip’yŏngga ŭi t’aedo.” 37. “Ponbu, chibu, kak kisulpu pogo,” 52. The platform was also published in “Chosŏn p’uro yemaeng tongmaeng, panghyang chŏnhwan ŭl kyŏrŭi” in Chosŏn ilbo on September 4, 1927. But the newspaper report omitted any mention of Marxism.

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Kim Hwasan argued for the preferability of anarchism to Marxism based on its greater recognition of aesthetic autonomy. Kim explained that although he “fully endorse[d] Marx’s historical materialist critique of society,”38 he could not agree to the instrumentalization of literature as a mere means to the end of class revolution: “We should not expect the literary arts to fulfill a historically predetermined duty at each stage of xx [revolution]; rather, we should allow for a literature that changes its form according to the historical development.”39 In response, Cho Chunggon, Im Hwa, and Yun Kijŏng attacked Kim for his “bourgeois individualism” and “aestheticism.”40 As Kim wrote again in justifying his position, “it would be fine if a communist strategist used an artwork for his agitprop purpose, but for him to impose a mandate of agitprop arts is despotic”; “An artist is not a robotic, mechanical being that should carry out a particular periodical duty.”41 To the core members of the KAPF, however, Kim’s argument sounded too liberal. A central tenet of the newly proposed reform was that the KAPF’s production should be seen as a direct cultural contribution to the Communist Party movement. The heated debate ended, quite predictably, with the expulsion of all anarchists from the KAPF in December 1927. The KAPF’s insistence on ideological orthodoxy was understandable within its own historical context, where Marxism had been heralded 38. Kim Hwasan, “Kyegŭp yesullon ŭi sinjŏn’gae,” 395. 39. Kim Hwasan, “Noedongsŏng munyeron ŭi kŭkpok,” 434. The “xx” marks in the quoted passage are known as pokcha in Korean and fuseji in Japanese. They originally indicated words expurgated by censors. Colonial writers, however, also used them themselves in an attempt to prevent heavier expurgation of their words. This self-censoring technique was especially popular in the composition of critical essays, which naturally contained ideological pronouncements and terminology that would not have passed the authorities’ screening. The effacement of a few words was likely the writers’ own doing, while more extensive expurgation, with the X marks running a few sentences or even over a page, should probably be ascribed to censors. (See Han Mansu, “Singmin sidae munhak kŏmyŏl ro nat’anan pokcha ŭi yuhyŏng” and “Singmin sidae munhak kŏmyŏl e ŭihan pokcha ŭi pogwŏn.”) For Japanese writers’ appropriation of fuseji, see Kasza, The State and the Mass Media, 37–38, and Mitchell, Thought Control, 163–64. 40. See Cho Chunggon, “Pi Maksŭjuŭi munyeron ŭi paegyŏk”; Im Hwa, “Ch’akkakchŏk munye iron”; Yun Kijŏng, “Sangho pip’an kwa iron hwangnip.” See also another anarchist respondent, Kang Hŏbong, “ ‘Pi Maksŭjuŭi munyeron ŭi paegyŏk’ ŭl paegyŏkham.” 41. Kim Hwasan, “Kyegŭp yesullon ŭi sinjŏn’gae,” 396 and “Noedongsŏng munyeron ŭi kŭkpok,” 434.

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internationally as an alternative and an improvement on previous forms of socialism. In the long run, however, it is arguable that the internal rift between Marxists and anarchists compromised both the reputation and the subsequent critical memory of the left ist movement in Korea. Socialist intellectuals projected an image of factionalism and conflict that inevitably undermined the left’s claim to a unified political vision. Moreover, the harsh tones and fi xation with Marxism arguably made one of the strengths of the leftist movement appear a liability. Some commentators today take it for granted that colonial intellectuals tried but failed to effectively espouse Marxist philosophy.42 Left ist debates in colonial Korea, however, can also be seen as the result of the writers’ efforts to formulate the right socialist vision for the newly colonized nation. The KAPF’s sanguine assertiveness, while justifiable at a time of strong political passions, may have obscured the intrinsic openness of the socialist question at this point in history, and it probably encouraged a depressing image of the Korean left as, in essence, a foot-dragging epigone of the Marxist-Leninist line of the neighboring Soviet Union. Once the Marxist turn had been decisively taken, Kim Kijin and Pak Yŏnghŭi sought to consolidate the KAPF’s new course by expanding the group’s network as well as its organizational capacity. They joined forces with the Tokyo members of the Third Front (Che 3 chŏnsŏnp’a), whose name, also the title of their journal, referred to the cultural front after the political and economic ones. The group’s members included Yi Pungman, Cho Chunggon, Hong Hyomin, and Kim Tuyong. The Korean socialists in Japan held an advantage over those in Korea both in theoretical sophistication and in institutional facility, thanks to the more advanced cultural industry of Japan, and they also enjoyed the greater freedom of speech that was granted in imperial metropoles. By recruiting these new members, moreover, the KAPF was also able to resume the publication of its discontinued journal under the new title of Yesul undong (The arts movement; 1927) (fig. 2.2). Another way in which the KAPF extended its reach was by enlisting under the Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society; 1927–31), a newly formed nationalist umbrella organization that enjoyed tremendous success during its short existence. The Sin’ganhoe had been launched in February 42. See Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 70–77 and Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya, 20–27.

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Figure 2.2 A reprinted cover of Yesul undong (Art movement, November 1927), one of the KAPF journals. In the original, the flag enveloping the world was red. Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

1922 at the initiative of leftist nationalists such as Hong Myŏnghŭi and An Chaehong in order to block the cultural nationalists’ attempt to promote the Government General’s proposal for Korea’s partial autonomy. The Sin’ganhoe quickly grew into the largest Korean organization of the colonial period, at one point comprising about thirty thousand

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members affiliated with nearly 150 branch offices.43 By partaking in the broader nationalist movement, the KAPF came to rely on a vast nationwide network, to which it was able to contribute its own offices in more than ten cities, including important industrial centers such as Pyongyang, Kaesŏng, Suwŏn, Wŏnsan, and Hamhŭng. Within three years of the KAPF’s 1925 foundation, a small fraternity of eclectic leftist intellectuals had transformed itself into a nationally ramified Marxist cultural organization. The birth of the KAPF decisively reoriented the socialist literary movement in a Marxist direction. Just as important, however, the rise of the KAPF had a shaping impact on literature and culture in Korea as a whole. The organization’s paradigmatic linking of art and ideological commitment typically drew the more activist leftist intellectuals close to the KAPF, whereas it tended to alienate those writers who, like Kim Hwasan, were more concerned about issues of artistic autonomy. Aside from this specifically artistic trajectory, which will be addressed in some detail in Chapter 4, one of the KAPF’s most distinctive marks on colonial culture rests with its performance of a bold and provocative ideological function. As we shall see in the next section, the KAPF’s double aesthetic and ideological mission determined the peculiar nature of its literary production and lent the organization a unique place on the Korean cultural scene up until and after its eventual demise in 1935.

The Maturation of the KAPF and the Artistic Resurgence of the Korean Left Between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the KAPF’s artistic production came to be characterized by a tendency toward stilted dogmatism and schematic plots. Along with the quest for political orthodoxy, the recent and rapid organizational expansion was likely accountable for this sort of artistic crisis. The more the cultural society stretched itself by admitting members with little qualification or investment in literature, the more the urgency of political concerns ended up detracting from the quality of the aesthetic enterprise. The recent radicalization of the KAPF, moreover, provided the colonial authority with a reason for tightening censorship and intensifying the police supervision of the writers in the orga nization. As a result, the overall literary quality as well as productivity of the KAPF suffered a 43. See Yi Kyunyŏng, Sin’ganhoe yŏn’gu, 248 and 260.

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decline, occasioning a sense of fatigue and disorientation among its membership. Both the artistic crisis and the mounting pressure of censorship became major subjects of KAPF debates and were addressed directly in a round of discussions over strategies for popularizing proletarian literature. Reflecting the point of view of a concerned senior member, Kim Kijin put forth a set of moderate views. Along with making their stories more accessible to the uneducated reader, Kim suggested, the proletarian writers should also cautiously avoid any direct confrontation with the colonial authorities: “[O]ur literature should have its blades blunted a bit in the current extremely inconvenient political situation.” 44 Kim’s proposal for moderation, however, was opposed by younger radical returnees from Tokyo such as An Mak, Im Hwa, and Kim Tuyong. Criticizing Kim’s position as defeatist, the new members argued for the further integration of the proletarian literary movement into the political struggle for class revolution. Only through the latter, they believed, would the KAPF be able to overcome the institutional impediments to propagating proletarian literature among a workingclass readership: “The ‘inconvenient political situation’ that Comrade Kim mentioned,” Im wrote, “would not be resolved through the innovation of form. The problem can be resolved only through our actual fighting based on the principle of xx [class struggle].” 45 In the wake of this debate, Kim Kijin and other more moderate members lost much of their influence, leaving the younger radicals at the helm of the organization. In retrospect, this may have been yet another juncture at which the KAPF chose purity over expediency, confirming a vocation for ideological orthodoxy that would lead to its demise within the turn of a few years. Amid these terse debates and an ongoing power struggle, the early 1930s were also a time when the KAPF underwent some dramatic organizational changes. The 1927 Chinese Civil War between the nationalists and the communists had led the Comintern to change its policy for the united front, urging communists across the world to sever their alliance with nationalists and to focus instead on expanding their base among 44. Kim Kijin, “Pyŏnjŭngjŏk sasilchuŭi,” 62. The article was originally serialized in Tonga ilbo between February 25 and March 7, 1929. 45. Im Hwa, “T’angnyu e hanghaya,” 92. Also see An Mak, “P’uro yesul ŭi hyŏngsik munje” and Kim Tuyong, “Chŏngch’ijŏk sigak esŏ pon yesul nonjaeng.”

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laborers and peasants.46 The KAPF effectively complied in 1931 when, along with other socialist groups, it withdrew from the Sin’ganhoe and became partly responsible for the collapse of that organization. Thus ended an important collaboration between socialist and nationalist intellectuals in colonial Korea. As we shall see in the next section, the end of the Sin’ganhoe exposed an important fracture within the leftist movement between intellectuals who adopted a conventional Marxist internationalism and those who regarded national liberation as a more pressing priority. In a novel and uniquely colonial inflection of international socialist culture, many intellectuals in Korea then came to identify with a “leftist nationalist” position whereby they endorsed Marxist economic analysis while still insisting on national unity and independence as preconditions for the development of Korea and its people.47 The KAPF’s rethinking of alliances, amid the overall radicalization of the Korean communist movement, led to changes that in the end affected the organization’s own integrity. Its Tokyo branch defected in 1931 when its core members, citing the ineffectiveness of the Seoul headquarters, formed the separate group of The Unpropertied (Musanja).48 Also in 1931, the branch office in Kaesŏng, whose members had for two years published the KAPF’s new journal Kun’gi (Banner; 1930–31), decided to leave the organization. These incidents seriously undermined the already weakening command of the Seoul group over its nationwide network and probably gave the KAPF’s leadership a further sense of the crisis of the organization, as well as the urgent need for its renewal.49 It is tempting to understand the KAPF’s crisis and its artistic slump as effects of its subordination of the artistic enterprise to a political goal. In truth, however, the creative impasse of the KAPF may be more 46. The Comintern’s 1928 resolution, known as the December Theses, was made available in English, Russian, Japa nese, and Korean. See Dae-Sook Suh, Documents of Korean Communism, 243–56. 47. The Korean case arguably anticipated developments, later in the century, in the anti- and postcolonial movements in northern Africa as well as South America. Intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara were influenced by Marxism in developing their tricontinental nationalisms, calling for nations in Africa, Asia, and South America to reclaim their independence from Western capitalist powers. For an exposition of Fanon and Guevara’s positions, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism, 17–21 and 122–29. 48. See Kim Tuyong, “Chŏngch’ijŏk sigak esŏ pon yesul nonjaeng,” 6. 49. For an account of the internal conflicts of the KAPF, see Pak, “Ch’och’anggi ŭi mundan ch’ŭngmyŏnsa,” 358–70.

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plausibly explained as an incident in a process of growth, as right then writers were struggling with the need to translate the European-born tenets of Marxism for their application to the local social reality of colonial Korea. As will become more clearly apparent in Chapter 4, KAPF writers soon rebounded from their slump, and the 1930s saw the publication of some of the most mature works of Korean proletarian literature. Writers began to experiment with new genres such as reportage and expanded their artistic purview to include the previously unexplored thematic fields of peasant literature and experimental form. The literary experience of Yi Kiyŏng stands out as emblematic of the literary resurgence of the left during these years. In his celebrated novel Hometown (Kohyang), fi rst serialized in the newspaper Chosŏn ilbo in 1934, Yi drew a lively collective portrait of peasants in a rural village undergoing the process of colonial modernization. The novel is well known today for setting a new paradigm for the literary rendering of the Korean proletariat, which up to then had been portrayed in KAPF literature chiefly as stereotyped factory workers. What is less known about Yi’s literary quest, however, is that Hometown came only after years of struggle with the tension between Marxist theory and the reality of the predominantly nonindustrial Korean proletariat. Yi finally made his artistic breakthrough by combining the inspiration of the socialist romanfleuve with a reportage mode of writing, whereby a broad narrative form was joined with a close account of the everyday life of peasants.50 Renewal thus came to the KAPF during the 1930s, and it took the form of an artistic resurgence that was also enabled by the group’s expansion into the new media of music, theater, and film. In 1930, KAPF members founded the magazine Ŭmak kwa si (Music and poetry), which aimed to promote the creation of a new “proletarian” music as a more accessible form of activist culture for the working class (pl. 4).51 The KAPF 50. A more detailed account of Yi Kiyŏng’s literary and aesthetic trajectory is provided in Chapter 4, where his experience is seen as representative of the artistic evolution of the KAPF as a whole. Another important KAPF writer was Yi Pungmyŏng, who, unlike most of his comrades in the organization, moved into literature after a pivotal experience as a factory worker. Yi composed intimate, psychologically realistic portraits of workers trapped in the brutal routine of the factory shift in stories such as Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory (Chilso piryo kongjang; 1932) and “The Ammonia Tank” (Ammonia t’aengk’ŭ; 1932), and he is regarded today as the most distinguished writer of labor reportage literature in colonial Korea. 51. The first and only remaining issue of the magazine carried twenty poems and songs about the life of peasants, factory workers, and other laborers. Accompanying

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was also behind the first professional proletarian theater company to arise in Korea—the Red Ant Theater Group (Pulkaemi) founded in Seoul in 1927—which was followed in 1929 by its own Tokyo branch.52 Both theater projects could not overcome censorship to reach the stage, but the failure did not deter KAPF playwrights. In April 1930, the KAPF revamped its organization to install new divisions on theater, cinema, and the arts. The theater division further expanded into the Korean Proletarian Theater Alliance (Chosŏn p’ŭrollet’aria kŭkchang tongmaeng) in 1931, and a number of local theater companies came into being under its aegis. Finally, the KAPF seized upon the potential of new film media by founding two cinema companies, the Seoul Kino and the Ch’ŏngbok Kino. Together, the two companies produced five feature films, the most popular of which were Dark Street (Hon’ga; 1929) and The Underground Village (Chihach’on; 1931).53 The KAPF’s expansion into new media gave a significant boost to the leftist cultural movement. Whereas literature had traditionally been the cultural property of the educated elites, theatrical representations became popular among the masses in both cities and provinces, and the medium’s appropriation by the leftists made their message more easily accessible to their intended audience.54 The KAPF’s new theater, film, and art productions were potentially very effective for agitprop purposes. This also meant, however, that such these creative works were also a few critical essays, among which Sin Kosong’s “Music and the Masses” (Ŭmak kwa taejung) stands out. Criticizing the contemporary popularity of Western music concerts among the urban bourgeoisie, Sin envisioned a new mass music that would combine popular melodies of folksongs with agitprop poems. 52. Before Pulkaemi, nonprofessional writers and artists had been performing amateur theater since at least 1923 in progressive labor, peasant, and youth organizations. A trigger and inspiration for these groups was the To’wŏrhoe, the first Western-influenced theater group that, as we saw, was one of the original constituents of the KAPF. For a detailed account of the amateur proletarian theater movement, see An Kwanghŭi, Han’guk p’urollet’aria yŏn’gŭk undong, 30–72. For the KAPF’s theater movement in Korea and Japan, see ibid., 73–166. 53. None of the KAPF fi lms survived the destruction of the Korean film archive during World War II. See Hyangjin Lee’s reconstructive account of the KAPF’s “tendency fi lms,” in Contemporary Korean Cinema, 28–29; and Kim Mihyŏn, ed., Han’guk yŏnghwasa, 59–62. 54. The cross-media expansion also meant the consideration of diverse audiences. Around 1930, KAPF members such as Pak Seyŏng, Song Yŏng, Yi Kiyŏng, Yi Tonggyu, Yi Chuho, and Im Hwa also took active part in the production of children’s literature. Pang Chŏnghwan’s Ŏrini (Children; 1923–34), the first magazine of its kind, carried a number of leftist writings, and the KAPF later launched its own socialist children’s magazine, Pyŏllara (Star land; 1930–34) (pl. 5). See Zur, “The Construction of the Child.”

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works quickly became subject to especially tight police control. When the arts division organized an exhibition with over 130 paintings, for example, more than half were confiscated, and the planned second exhibition was prohibited.55 Eventually, the KAPF’s new visibility also gave the police a motivation to increase their surveillance of it. The authorities dealt a blow to the organization by arresting some of its key members in 1931 for their suspected involvement in the rebuilding of the Korean Communist Party. In 1934, the police moved to block the KAPF’s theatrical staging of Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front in Seoul and in local cities. More than one hundred people were arrested throughout Korea, including almost all of the more famous KAPF writers (fig. 2. 3). With most of its members still behind bars, the organization was officially dissolved in May 1935.56 Not surprisingly, it was the 1930s resurgence and popularization of the KAPF that, however indirectly, brought about its demise. The more boldly the organization sought out ideological clarity and purity, the more it exposed itself to the reaction of the authorities at a time of Japan’s increasing militarization. Upon their arrest, KAPF members were subjected to the process of forced conversion (chŏnhyang), in which the colonial authorities coerced them to recant their ideological beliefs and retire from social activism. The traumatic experience of conversion itself became frequent subject matter in the literary testimony of many former KAPF writers. In a way, at a time when any form of explicit activism was forbidden, the more persistent proletarian writers subtly continued the KAPF’s mission by writing affectingly about the demise of the organization. It was only with the 1941 ban on Koreanlanguage publications, along with the military rule extended throughout the Japanese empire, that leftist literary activism came to a definitive end in Korea.57 55. Ch’oe Yŏl, Han’guk kŭndae misul, 264. For a further account of the KAPF’s arts movement, see 257–64 and 209–17. 56. For a detailed account of the KAPF’s disintegration process, see Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa, 292–348. 57. Some of the most accomplished works of conversion literature were written by Kim Namch’ŏn, who in Barley (Maek; 1941) offered an intimate portrait of intellectuals faced with the ideological strictures of Korea during war time. Kim, whose aesthetic and ideological trajectory during the colonial period is recounted in Chapter 7, was perhaps the KAPF writer who most effectively embraced formal experimentalism as a way to innovate and revitalize socialist literature after the dissolution of the Marxist orga nization.

Figure 2.3 News report on the trial of KAPF members, from Chosŏn chungang ilbo, October 27, 1935. The full-page article also includes an illustrated summary account of the KAPF’s ten-year history. Courtesy of the National Institute of Korean History.

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Between 1925 and 1935, coinciding with a decade of extreme dynamism in Korean society, the KAPF spearheaded the leftist cultural movement by supporting political art and coordinating the efforts of writers who endorsed the communist cause. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of this organization on Korean culture. As an ambitious experiment of providing cultural production with political guidance, the KAPF brought ideology right to the core of aesthetic debates; it galvanized the development of literary criticism in modern Korea; and it promoted cultural democratization through its expansion into the media of film and theater. Just as important, the KAPF and its critics brought much clarity and new terminology to both artistic and political debates on the peninsula. In the years following the KAPF’s constitution, intellectuals inside and outside the organization were forced to clarify for themselves their ideological position and its rationale. The advent of the KAPF and its Marxist commitment was, in a way, a catalyst for the ideological advancement—and polarization—of the broader leftist movement. The KAPF’s importance, however, by no means implies the existence of a unified leftist cultural front in colonial Korea. A widespread misconception surrounding the cultural left in Korea is that the KAPF was its sole and homogeneous expression during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, as we have seen and will further observe, even at its peak the KAPF was only one part of the complex leftist literary scene in Korea. Persisting alongside it were smaller groups and individuals who, despite their dissent with the mainstream Marxist line, still saw themselves as leftist and, in some cases, as “fellow travelers” of the KAPF’s journey.

Fellow Travelers and the Diversification of Leftist Literature “Fellow travelers” is a contested term. Its Russian original, poputchiki, was first used by Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1924) to refer to writers—such as Boris Pilnyak, Nicolai Tikhonov, and Sergei Yessenin—who had no party affi liation but were supportive of the revolution.58 The term was then translated more than once into Korean

58. Trotsky, “The Literary ‘Fellow-Travelers’ of the Revolution,” in Literature and Revolution, 61–104.

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during the colonial period.59 Yŏm Sangsŏp, a self-professed fellow traveler, first introduced it as “the sympathizers” (simp’ŏssaijŏ) in 1926, after hearing it in one of Pilnyak’s lectures in Tokyo. In Yŏm’s usage, the term referred to the nationalists who supported the socialists’ fight against Japanese imperialism and the collaborative Korean bourgeoisie, and who should thus be regarded as worthy allies by the socialists.60 In the early 1930s, the term was retranslated into tongbanja (companions) or subanja (followers) by KAPF critics, who found it useful as a way of asserting the KAPF’s hegemony over the leftist camp at the time of the decline of the organization.61 Given this use by the KAPF, however, the label was not always welcomed by all the addressees, and some, like Ch’ae Mansik, would vocally reject the implication of the KAPF’s control over the entire cultural left.62 The substantial presence of fellow travelers in colonial Korea attests to both the attraction and the repulsion that several groups of intellectuals felt vis-à-vis the cultural-political apparatus of the KAPF. Many intellectuals welcomed the foundation of the organization as a concrete sign of the evolving success of the proletarian cultural movement. A number of those individuals, however, also refrained from ever officially joining the KAPF. Initially there were misgivings about whether the arts should be institutionalized in an explicitly political organization. As time wore on, moreover, new concerns arose in regard to the KAPF’s dogmatic exclusionism and to the frequent factional and ideological conflicts among its members. The perhaps most important group of fellow travelers in colonial Korea was that of the so-called leftist nationalists. As is often the case in a colonial situation, in Korea too nationalism and socialism represented closely synergic ideological stances, and many intellectuals avowed allegiance to both. As socialists grew radical in the mid-1920s, however, a sizable group of leftist nationalist intellectuals found it difficult to reconcile the class-divisive message of Marxism with the necessity of maintaining a unified national front. Opting for a status as fellow travelers, 59. For a detailed account of the Korean translation history of this Russian term, see Cho Namhyŏn, “Tongbanja chakka ŭi sŏnggyŏk.” 60. Yŏm, “P’ŭroret’aria munhak e taehan P ssi ŭi ŏn.” 61. See, for instance, Pak Yŏnghŭi, “K’ap’u chakka wa kŭ subanja” and Kim Kijin, “Chosŏn munhak ŭi hyŏnjae ŭi sujun.” The latter provides a comprehensive list of fellow travelers on p. 372. 62. Ch’ae Mansik, “Hyŏnin kun ŭi mong ŭl kyeham.”

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writers such as Hong Myŏnghŭi and Yŏm Sangsŏp became central figures within the expansive nationalist coalition of the Sin’ganhoe, which as we saw entertained a short and ill-fated alliance with the KAPF. The 1931 divorce between the two organizations marked the high point of tension between nationalists and socialists. The nationalists regarded the Marxist emphasis on a communist revolution as counterproductive in the oppressive political environment of a colonized nation. The socialists, for their part, insisted that Koreans would be able to regain their independence only through the overthrow of capitalism as the underpinning of Japanese imperialism.63 Aside from providing a contrast within the socialist camp, the leftist nationalist position was in itself an important contribution to Korean debates about national independence. A moderate nationalist vision had been propounded early in the 1920s by Yi Kwangsu and his supporters. As the celebrated author of Korea’s fi rst modern novel, The Heartless (Mujŏng; 1917), Yi viewed the cultural education of the people as key for transforming Korea after the models of the West and Japan. He accordingly saw independence as a long-term goal for the peninsula and for the time being recommended increased exposure to Western values and acquiescence to the developmental plans of the colonial authorities.64 Yi’s cultural nationalist vision was forcefully criticized by leftist nationalist intellectuals, who instead espoused a more uncompromisingly anticolonialist position. These intellectuals recognized how colonialism had impoverished working-class Koreans, whose forced economic subservience to the indigenous aristocracy had now been compounded by new taxes owed to the colonial authorities. They thus took a stance that called for the political and economic emancipation of the Korean people, first from Japan, and in time from the inequalities that characterized both the traditional and the modern capitalist organization of labor.65 63. For the organ i zational history of the Sin’ganhoe, see Yi Kyunyŏng, Sin’ganhoe yŏn’gu. 64. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 64–73. 65. In laying emphasis on the material conditions of Koreans under colonization, left ist nationalists in effect rejected the myth of Japan’s benign stewardship of Korea’s development and modernization. They replaced that idea with the image of Korea as a “proletarian nation” that, like other Asian colonies, was prey to the exploitative capitalist ambitions of Japan and the Western world. The left ist nationalist position was new in the political debates of the 1920s and the 1930s. Its anticolonial stance allowed left ist nationalism to become a powerful inspiration, later in

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This socialism-inflected version of nationalism became a powerful alternative on the left to both early anarchist trends and the later Marxism of the KAPF. Yŏm Sangsŏp was among the leftist nationalist intellectuals who most actively engaged in debate with the writers of the KAPF. In a series of essays and fictional works, Yŏm made a passionate case for the urgency of national liberation as a prerequisite for an eventual class revolution—whereas virtually all KAPF members would have prioritized a proletarian revolution. Regardless of their differing priorities, however, the Sin’ganhoe and the KAPF were united in opposing the aforementioned cultural nationalist position. Having inherited the revolutionary spirit of the March First Movement, both the KAPF and the leftist nationalists consistently antagonized the colonial authority. They differed starkly in their priorities, however, and their debates were at times marked by strong polemical tones. As had been the case with both the anarchists and the Marxists, the leftist nationalist movement too was characterized by a flourishing literary production. Some writers and works came to be seen later as emblematic of the leftist nationalist ideological vein. Hong Myŏnghŭi, for example, is renowned today for his ten-volume epic saga titled The Tale of Im Kkŏkchŏng (Im Kkŏkchŏng; 1928–40). Mixing a celebration of traditional Korean culture with a socialist take on the period’s history, the novel tells the story of the titular seventeenth-century hero, a bandit whose exploits evoked the spirit of popular resistance against both the feudal hierarchy and foreign military aggressions.66 Yŏm Sangsŏp, on the other hand, became one of the most significant writers of colonial Korea, capable as he was of combining nationalist and socialist influences with a marked sensitivity and literary refinement. Yŏm’s now classic works of fiction include the novella On the Eve of the Uprising (Mansejŏn; 1924) and the historic novel Three Generations (Samdae; 1931).67 Another important group of fellow travelers of the KAPF were anarchist writers and intellectuals. Indeed, despite the KAPF critics’ the century, for the minjung movement’s opposition to Korea’s semicolonial condition under U.S. influence. 66. In this historical novel, Hong boldly inserted episodes about Korea’s resistance to Japan’s military invasion in 1592. The novel was serialized in Chosŏn ilbo between the writer’s multiple prison terms. See Kang Yŏngju, Pyŏkch’o Hong Myŏngŭi, 625. 67. See Chapter 5 for a monographic account of Yŏm’s intellectual and literary trajectory during the colonial era.

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one-time dismissal of it, anarchist literature survived as a cultural undercurrent in Korea for the whole of the colonial period. One of the early and well-known writers in this vein was Na Tohyang, who had been a member of the romantic Paekcho literary coterie before venturing on his own intellectual path. Na wrote some of the most popu lar works in the style of New Tendency literature, such as “A Servant’s Son” (Haengnang chasik; 1923), “Samnyong the Mute” (Pŏngŏri Samnyongi; 1925), and “Chi Hyŏnggŭn” (Chi Hyŏnggŭn; 1926). All of these stories exposed the everyday hardship of rural servants and urban day laborers, and they often closed with indignant outbursts of anger on the part of their downtrodden protagonists.68 Unlike KAPF writers, who tended to subordinate private romantic sentiments to the ideological demands of a political cause, Na approached the feeling of love as the prime expression of one’s desire for life and would turn an illstarred, unconventional love affair into an occasion for rebellion against the established social order. Seen in this light, his works straddled the romantic trends of early-1920s modern literature and mid-1920s New Tendency literature.69 Although Na never joined the KAPF, other writers inspired by anarchism were first members of the organization and later went on to form their own politically committed literary groups. As we saw earlier, a rift opened within the KAPF when Kim Hwasan questioned the Marxist turn of the organization. Kim was expelled along with Kwŏn Kuhyŏn, and together the two joined writers like Hŏ Munil, Yi Hyang, and Yi Honggŭn to found the Alliance of Freedom Arts (Chayu yesul yŏnmaeng: 1928–?).70 These writers left a body of work that was distinctive for its close attention to rural society and the conditions of the Korean peasantry. Hŏ Munil, for example, depicted human tragedy in declining rural villages in stories such as “Beggar” (Kŏrin; 1932) and “A Peasant’s Daughter” (Sojagin ŭi ttal; 1933), both of which were published in Nongmin (Peasant; 68. See Na Tohyang, “Chi Hyŏnggŭ,” “Haengnang chasik,” and“Pŏngŏri Samnyongi.” 69. Hyŏn Chin’gŏn was another Paekcho member who did not join the KAPF but exhibited a socialist influence in his works, such as the aforementioned “Human”; “A Lucky Day” (Unsu choŭn nal; 1924), a story of a rickshaw puller’s daily struggle and his tragic loss of his wife; and “Fire” (Pul; 1925), a tale of an abused child bride setting her in-laws’ house on fire. 70. For studies of anarchist literature in colonial Korea, see Kim T’aekho, Han’guk kŭndae anak’ijŭm munhak, and Cho Namhyŏn, “Han’guk kŭndae munhak ŭi anak’ijŭm.”

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1930–33).71 The theme was also present in the works of Kwŏn Kuhyŏn, a writer, painter, and cultural critic who debuted with a landmark anthology of anarchist poetry titled A Gift from the Black Chamber (Hŭkpang ŭi sŏnmul; 1927). In his own poetry and prose, Kwŏn expanded on the rural focus to depict the ills of urban poverty such as prostitution and homelessness, which he featured prominently in works such as “The Scum” (P’yemul; 1927), “Bankruptcy” (P’asan; 1929), and “Sketches from a Slave Market” (Inyuk sijang chŏmgyŏng; 1933).72 New groups and literary trends started to appear in Korea as the 1920s gave way to the early 1930s. During this period, changes of both a political and an economic nature came to reshape the conditions of Koreans as the colonized subjects of imperial Japan. On the political side, the increasingly militaristic rule of the colonial authority led to diminishing freedoms and, for Koreans, fewer opportunities to participate in social activism without suffering dire consequences. As we saw in the last section, mass arrests of KAPF members started in 1931 and intensified until the organization was finally disbanded in 1935. On the economic side, on the other hand, the early 1930s was an era of unprecedented expansion and prosperity, as Japan accelerated the industrialization of Korea in order to turn it into a base for the military conquest of China’s easternmost provinces. This meant that, over just a few years, Seoul began to display more and more the traits of a modern metropolis, with rapidly changing cityscapes, the opening of new department stores, and the rise of a relatively well-off and educated middle class to replace the dwindling land-owning nobility. This combination of less political freedom and more economic prosperity had important effects on the life of Korean intellectuals. The young leftist writers who had emerged during the activist decade of the 1920s were now discouraged from joining overtly political organizations, but they found opportunities for remunerative employment through a number of newly published popular magazines that catered to the tastes of the rising middle class. Progressive magazines such as Pyŏlgŏn’gon (Another world; 1926–31), Pip’an (Criticism; 1931–40), Hyesŏng (Comet; 1931–32), Che ilsŏn (First front; 1932–33), and Taejung kongnon (Public forum; 1930), as well as others such as Samch’ŏlli (Th ree thousand li; 1929–41) and Chogwang (Morning light; 1935–40), all offered ample publication 71. Hŏ Munil, “Kŏrin” and “Sojagin ŭi ttal.” Also see Kim T’aekho, “Hŏ Munil, nongminjuŭi wa anak’ijŭm.” 72. Kwŏn Kuhyŏn, “P’yemul,” “P’asan,” and “Inyuk sijang chŏmgyŏng.”

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opportunities for literary aspirants (pls. 6 and 7). The up-and-coming writers for these magazines effectively composed a new pool of fellow travelers for the KAPF, from which the organization would occasionally recruit new members. Many of the writers, however, chose to remain unaffiliated, either from fear of the authorities or because of their disagreement with the KAPF’s leadership. Two young writers who came to prominence in the early 1930s were Yi Hyosŏk and Yu Chino.73 Both graduates of the prestigious Kyŏngsŏng Imperial University, Yi and Yu attracted the attention of KAPF critics who were then orchestrating the artistic resurgence of proletarian literature. Yi wrote about the human misery of the homeless in Seoul by metaphorically representing them as goblins haunting the streets of the colonial capital in “City and Specter” (Tosi wa yuryŏng; 1928); about sex workers’ daily ordeals in a red-light district and their organization of a strike in “Breaking the Red Lantern” (Kkaett’ŭryŏjinŭn hongdŭng; 1930); and about a comradely relationship between Russian ship laborers and Korean clandestine emigrants in “Along the Russian Coast” (Noryŏng kŭnhae; 1930).74 Yu portrayed an unemployed intellectual’s proletarian self-awakening in “Job-seeker in May” (Owŏl ŭi kujikcha; 1929) and a struggle between a union worker and a factory’s informant in “Night Wanderers” (Pamjung e kŏninŭnja; 1931).75 If the social repercussions of the global depression in Korea and the human cost of the uneven recovery afterwards thematically preoccupied the new leftist literature (fig. 2.4), it was also distinctive for linguistic craftsmanship and artistic refinement, which reflected both the elite writers’ superior education and their interest in the experimental literature promoted by Japanese modernists such as Yokomitsu Riichi and his Shinkankakuha (New Sensationalists) literary group.76 73. See Chang Ryangsu’s study of the two writers in Han’guk ŭi tongbanja sosŏl. 74. See Yi Hyosŏk, “Tosi wa yuryŏng,” “Kkaet’ŭryŏjinŭn hongdŭng,” and “Noryŏng kŭnhae.” See also Kimberly Chung’s discussion of “City and Specter,” a rare proletarian story with supernatural elements, in “Colonial Horrors.” Her reading situates the story in the context of the popularity of agwi (starving ghost) as a symbol of the proletariat in Korean literary and visual culture during the 1920s and 1930s. 75. Yu Chino, “Pamjung e kŏninŭnja” and “Owŏl ŭi kujikcha.” 76. Yu’s early works, such as “Sammyŏn’gyŏng” (Three-faced mirror; 1928) and “Nekt’ai ŭi ch’imjŏn” (Drowning neckties; 1928), exhibit the influence of the New Sensationalists in their use of fresh metaphors and narrative fragmentation.

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Among the “New Left” writers of the 1930s, a special mention is owed to satirist Ch’ae Mansik, who in his uniquely sardonic writing style presented some of the most biting parodies of new urban middleclass Koreans, the beneficiaries of colonial modernization and supporters of cultural assimilation to Japanese customs. In novels such as Muddy Currents (T’angnyu; 1938) and Peace under Heaven (T’aep’yŏng ch’ŏnha; 1938), Ch’ae excelled especially in the political use of humor, at once managing to achieve a socially critical effect and avoid a direct clash with the colonial authority’s censors. Ch’ae’s alternately humorous and disturbing narratives also resonated with the contemporary popular taste for the erotic, the grotesque, and the nonsensical, and they exemplified a productive intersection between political progressivism and mass culture in the fertile atmosphere of 1930s Korea.77 Another new and distinctive brand of leftist intellectuals were socialist women writers, who also emerged in the early 1930s as the institution of women’s literature (yŏryu munhak) was established in contemporary popu lar magazines. Writers such as Paek Sinae, Pak Hwasŏng, Kang Kyŏngae, and Song Kyewŏl had taken part in 1920s social activism either as students or as members of the Kŭnuhoe, a sister organization of the Sin’ganhoe. Colonial women intellectuals, however, had little opportunity for a professional literary career until the early 1930s, and they could not join an all-male organization such as the KAPF due to the customary segregation of genders. Late in the colonial period, women’s literature came to be institutionalized in contemporary popular magazines— both in niche magazines such as Sin yŏsŏng (New women; 1923–34) and Sin kajŏng (New household; 1933–36) and in mainstream ones such as Sin tonga (New East Asia; 1931–36) and Samch’ŏlli (Three thousand li; 1929– 41)—and began to cater to a readership of newly educated middle-class women. Later, Yu also recognized the experimental writings of Yokomitsu and Kawabata Yasunari as the main source of his artistic inspiration in his newspaper-serialized memoir, “P’yŏnp’yŏn yahwa.” Yi’s works were permeated with modernist sensibilities, such as heightened visual and olfactory sensory images and the use of mystery—a tendency that only grew stronger later on, making Yi one of the most noteworthy modernist writers in colonial Korea. Aside from these two, many others wrote under the influence of proletarian literature during at least one stage of their careers. See, for instance, Cho Yongman chakp’umjip, Kye Yongmuk chŏnjip, Hyŏn Kyŏngjun, and Yi Muyŏng munhak chŏnjip. 77. Ch’ae Mansik, T’angnyu and T’aep’yŏng ch’ŏnha.

Figure 2.4 This cartoon from Pip’an (Criticism, March 1932), titled “March Scene,” represents the social consequences of the Great Depression. Students march in protest (top left) along with workers (bottom left). Unemployed people are scattered around, while a rich man rests on a pile of accounting books emblazoned with “in the red” despite the heft y bag of money lying nearby. Courtesy of the Seoul National University Library.

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The first openly socialist women’s organization of Korea was the Korean Women’s League (Chosŏn yŏsŏng tonguhoe; 1924–27).78 Its inaugural declaration promoted a liberal feminist agenda of women’s education and their emancipation from the traditional Confucian ethics and family institution, but it also marked a clear rhetorical shift toward a more materialist approach to the woman question: “Women are enslaved to the family, wages, and sexuality. Although women have made their contributions to society by devoting their energy to many works necessary for living, tyrannical men have rewarded them only by denying them an education and destroying their motherhood. Moreover, Korean women are oppressed under the yoke of Confucian morals. Let us unite in solidarity in our common indignation over such inhumane treatment of women.”79 The Korean Women’s League was followed by the launching of diverse socialist women’s organizations. Prominent among them were the Seoul Women’s Youth Alliance (Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng; 1925–26), an avant-garde organization whose goal was “to educate and instruct young working-class women”; the Seoul Women’s Youth Association (Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe; 1925–26), which campaigned more broadly for social reforms for “women’s independence, gender equality, and the protection of motherhood”; and the Alliance for Women’s Liberation (Yŏsŏng haebang tongmaeng; 1925–26), which aimed to expand the women’s movement beyond the limited circles of the New Women elite.80 Following the example of the coalition of Sin’ganhoe between male socialists and progressive nationalists, these various women’s groups also created the umbrella organization of the Kŭnuhoe (Friends of the rose of Sharon; 1927–31), whose name was inspired by a flower symbolic of the Korean nation. Although the Kŭnuhoe included many Christian liberal women intellectuals, its leadership was characterized by a left ist orientation that was clear in the first issue of its journal, Kŭnu (pl. 8). The group’s inaugural platform combined classic liberal 78. Pak Yongok provides detailed, extensively researched information on the socialist women’s organizations and activities in Han’guk yŏsŏng hangil undongsa. Regarding the Korean Women’s League, see 258–73. 79. The declaration was originally published in Tonga ilbo, May 22, 1929. Both the text and the platform of the orga nization are quoted in ibid., 263. The English translations are mine. 80. See Kim Kyŏngil, “1920–30 nyŏndae han’guk ŭi sin yŏsŏng kwa sahoejuŭi,” 170–75.

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feminist goals such as “abolition of all social and legal discriminations against women,” “eradication of feudal customs and superstitions,” and “a ban on early marriage and the freedom in marital choice” with classsensitive ones such as “advocacy of rural women’s economic interests,” “abolition of wage discrimination and the provision of paid maternity leave,” and “prohibition of dangerous labor and night labor for women and youth workers.” 81 Coming after the liberal New Women writers, whose primary thematic concern had been women’s education and sexual liberation, socialist women writers forged a new feminist position infused with the socialist theory of women’s emancipation. Among the most representative works of this group are Kang Kyŏngae’s The Human Predicament (In’gan munje; 1934) and Salt (Sogom; 1934). Both offered detailed portraits of proletarian women, in particular factory workers and domestic helpers, with a focus on their everyday experiences of material hardship, labor exploitation, and sexual abuse.82 As we shall examine further in Chapter 6, these works illustrate both the accomplishments of socialist feminism in representing working-class women’s specific interests and the internal tension of integrating the class-based outlook of socialism with the gender-oriented feminist position. Whereas New Left and women writers had no history of affi liation with the KAPF, another fringe socialist group of the 1930s was the direct offshoot of the activist experience of that orga nization. Th is was comprised of the seceded KAPF members in Japan, where writers such as Kim Tuyong, Kim Yongje, and Yi Pungman remained active through their new societies, named The Unpropertied (Musanja) and the Comrade Society (Tongjisa). After 1931, these writers joined the Japanese organization of the KOPF in compliance with Stalin’s new policy of “Socialism in One Country,” or the unification of socialists in each country under one umbrella organization controlled by the Soviet Union. Following the incorporation, however, the writers continued to represent the interests of Korean residents in Japan by publishing, among others, the Koreanlanguage organ Uri tongmu (Our comrades; 1932–33).83 Also, a new 81. Reprinted in ibid., 183. 82. See Chapter 6 for a monographic account of Kang Kyŏngae’s literary experience. 83. For closer studies of this magazine, see Osamu, Chōsen kindai bungaku to Nihon, 23–44, and Kida, “Japanese–Korean Exchange.”

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generation of unaffiliated Korean-Japanese writers, including Chang Hyŏkchu and Kim Saryang, expressed their diasporic identities by using the ideological and aesthetic registers of proletarian literature. Works such as Chang’s “Hell of the Starving” (Gakidō; 1932) and Kim’s “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni; 1939), written in refined literary Japanese, attracted the attention of Japanese as well as Korean critics for their exposure of racial discrimination and its human consequences. These writers are regarded today as the early pioneers of Korean minority literature in Japan.84 Beyond their leftist inclination, the writers we have included in this section may have little in common. The category of a “fellow traveler” itself is highly contested, having historically shifted in denotation as well as connotation. In using that label, however, we are calling attention to the presence of a sizable group of writers who were inspired by socialism yet did not join the KAPF. These writers made significant contributions to leftist literary production. Acknowledging them today allows us to map the terrain of the Korean leftist literary movement more accurately. That remapping in turn affords us a better insight into the historical and ideological significance of the movement as a whole.

Rediscovering the Proletarian Wave Today Studies of modern Korean literature have often identified the KAPF as the sole expression of the leftist literary movement in colonial Korea. In a well-known reference work on Korean literature, for example, Kwon Youngmin purports to chronicle the history of “class literature” (kyegŭp munhak) by discussing the writers of the KAPF exclusively.85 Likewise Tatiana Gabroussenko, in accounting for the local roots of North Korean literature, singles out KAPF writers alone as representative of the 84. For the history of the Korean proletarian writers’ movement in Japan, see Nin, Nihon ni okeru Chōsenjin no bungaku, 153–76. Also see Perry, “Korean as Proletarian,” and Nayoung Kwon’s study of Kim Saryang, “Empire and Minor Writer,” in chapter 2 of “Translated Encounter and Empire,” 31–102. In addition to the Japanese exiles, Cho Myŏnghŭi, a prominent KAPF poet and writer, was exiled to the Soviet Union in 1928, where he devoted himself to cultivating Korean-language literature among Korean immigrants there. Cho was executed in 1942 under false charges of spying for Japan. He was rehabilitated in 1956 after Stalin’s death. See U Chŏnggwŏn, Cho Myŏnghŭi wa Sŏnbong. 85. Kwon Youngmin, “Class Movements and Ideology,” in A History of Korean Literature, ed. Peter Lee, 397–99.

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literary left in colonial Korea.86 The assumption of many scholars is that, in its substance, the history of leftist literature in colonial Korea coincides with the history of the KAPF as the period’s leading Marxist literary society. The assumption is so entrenched that, in Korean literary criticism, “KAPF literature” and “proletarian literature” are normally regarded as synonyms.87 The KAPF’s reputation as the most important leftist cultural society in colonial Korea is well deserved. Between its foundation in 1925 and its demise in 1935, the organization acted as the effective core of Korean socialist culture, reaching out to writers through branch offices, literary journals, and an extensive administrative apparatus. As we could observe in this chapter, however, leftist culture in Korea far exceeded the confines of this major Marxist organization. Marxism was a relative novelty when it was introduced by the KAPF in the mid-1920s. Rather, until that time anarchism had been the preeminent ideological influence among Korean leftists, as writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Ōsugi Sakae had gained popularity for their insurrectionist and antiauthoritarian ideas. Moreover, several groups of writers of various persuasions refrained from joining the KAPF even later, after Marxism had become a powerful ideology among Korean leftists. Members of these groups typically assumed the position of “fellow travelers” of the KAPF, and some of them formed alliances that were sometimes in synergy and sometimes in competition with the foremost Marxist organization.88 86. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front. Despite her inclusion of Cho Kich’ŏn, a Russian Korean poet, and Yi T’aejun, an aesthete who went to the North, in her study, Gabroussenko’s discussion of the literary left in colonial Korea focuses on the KAPF. 87. See also Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa; Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya; and Pak Myŏngyong, Han’guk p’urollet’aria munhak. 88. The myth of the KAPF’s hegemony over the colonial Korean cultural left had its origins partly in mere historical contingencies: the orga nization possessed considerable clout during and after the colonial era, and early accounts of colonial left ist literature were written mostly by former KAPF members, such as Im Hwa and Paek Ch’ŏl. In addition to this, however, the excessive emphasis on Marxism and the KAPF may have been a reflection, inside Korea, of the global cultural politics of the Cold War period. Within the dichotomous politico-ideological order of that era, the complex history of world socialism was often reduced to a simple story line of Marxism-Leninism, and the trends and movements that did not fit that line were often forgotten or criticized. For a KAPF member’s early account of the colonial left ist cultural movement, see Im Hwa’s “Chosŏn sinmunhaksaron sŏsŏl” and Paek Ch’ŏl, Chosŏn sinmunhak sajosa (1948).

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This complex and often shifting proletarian wave offered a number of different answers to what could be termed “the socialist question”: the question of how the international socialist culture of the early twentieth century was to be translated, adapted, and appropriated from within the local conditions of colonial Korea. When seen from the perspective of their ideological translation, socialist doctrines in Korea look very much like the “traveling theories” that were introduced by Edward Said early in the 1990s.89 In fi nding new applications across time and geopolitical boundaries, Said explained, an original body of theory travels and becomes something else—a novel inspiration, a link in a new tradition, and another “original” ready to depart toward new shores. The narrow, conservative notion of “orthodoxy” is inadequate to the task of accounting for this kind of movement. In giving an answer to the socialist question, Korean intellectuals often strayed from an orthodox Marxist line into less common theoretical directions. It was in this way that anarchism found new life in colonial Korea, taking on the traits of an egalitarian parsing of Enlightenment ideals within the deeply hierarchical society of the peninsula. Similarly, modern nationalism, which in the West would have been incompatible with socialist ideas, traveled to Korea only to merge with a socialist stance, leading to a vision of Korea as a “proletarian nation” whose independence would be secured only through a popular revolutionary upheaval. In these and other cases, the socialist question was answered in ways that must appear unsocialist by strict criteria. Regardless, these divergences from a Marxist-Leninist line did not detract from the effectiveness of socialist culture in Korea. Quite to the contrary, the “unorthodoxy” of these novel cultural formations often accounted for socialism’s successful deployment and singular adaptivity within the complex ideological environment of colonial Korea. The historical experience of anarchism exemplifies quite effectively the odd mixture of orthodoxy and deviation that overall characterized socialist culture in Korea. Critics in the past have often lamented the colonial anarchists’ supposed lack of a lucid anticapitalist analysis of the Korean situation.90 In an important way, however, this judgment misses the specific function that anarchism had in the ideological economy of colonial Korea. Unlike later Marxist literature, which in the 1930s would 89. Said, “Traveling Theory” and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered.” 90. See, for example, Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa, 316, and Kim Yoon-sik and Chŏng Houng, Han’guk sosŏlsa, 133.

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contest uneven development within an expanding capitalist society, anarchist culture in early modern Korea was more concerned with exposing the social and legal inequalities that had survived the decline of the late Chosŏn political order. In their generic distinction between the propertied and the unpropertied (yusanja and musanja), the anarchist writers were in effect indicting the hierarchical system of privileges that, well into the twentieth century, still divided Koreans along lines of birth and inheritance. It would be disingenuous to complain that this antitraditionalist function does not quite belong in the roles typically performed by the left. More constructively, it seems that leftist culture in colonial Korea faced both an anticapitalist and an antitraditionalist task. In a vocabulary that would have been dear to Marx, Korean leftist intellectuals were engaged with critiquing both a capitalist and a feudal order. They did so, crucially, at a time when modernity was coming to Korea in a compressed format and at an accelerated pace. In an analogous interplay of orthodoxy and variation, some Korean intellectuals put socialism at the ser vice of the nation in the novel ideological formation of leftist nationalism. As we saw earlier, Marxist critics within the KAPF disapproved of the subordination of the cause of class struggle to that of national independence. When considered against the background of Korea’s colonial condition, however, the leftist nationalist experience is revealed to be much more than a confused juxtaposition of incompatible ideological stances. We should remember that Marx’s own denunciation of all nationalisms was in effect a response to the bourgeoisie’s identification with the nation after the French Revolution. Nationalism could be seen by Marx as a tool of conservative ideology precisely because throughout Europe the idea of the nation had been claimed as its own by the rising bourgeoisie. In the colonial settings of earlytwentieth-century Korea, however, nationhood could be only an aspiration, and the national ideal could be claimed with equal legitimacy by both the bourgeoisie and the working classes—which explains how, in Korea, leftist nationalism arose and entered into direct confrontation with cultural nationalism. A similar dynamic was described by Frantz Fanon, decades later, in the political landscape of recently decolonized Algeria.91 In Fanon’s analysis, too, the newly available leadership of the nation was contested between the comprador bourgeoisie and the up91. See Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, 148–205.

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to-then disempowered masses. And in Algeria, too, as had been the case in Korea, a configuration of Marxist and nationalist ideas proved to be a powerful ideological platform for intellectuals who pursued national liberation through a primarily socialist and populist approach. The KAPF historically took a hard line against fringe movements within the Korean left. Its members tended to ascribe a normative status to Marxist doctrine, and they consequently projected a dismissive shadow of unorthodoxy on those areas of the left—inside and outside the organization—where intellectuals did not quite align with a MarxistLeninist style of politics. Within the complex ideological economy of colonial Korea, however, doctrinal divergence and “unorthodox” variation were the tangible signs of a timely and inescapable cultural debate. Anarchism and leftist nationalism were only two among several alternative paths for a genuinely socialist cultural practice in colonial Korea. Equally interesting variations on socialist culture were on display in the New Left wave of the early 1930s, in the socialist feminist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and in the groups of ethnic Korean leftist writers in Japan during that same period. KAPF leaders often wrote with impatience about these unaligned fringe movements, worried as they were that Korea might miss the teleological train to history’s communist future. Within such a fast-changing environment, Korean left ist writers translated socialist ideas by adapting them to their local situation. There is little point today in wondering whether these intellectuals really “understood” socialism. The truth is that socialism per se would have been inconsequential in Korea without this process of appropriation on the part of local intellectuals. In now evaluating the historical significance of colonial leftist culture, we must avoid falling into a parochial localism, celebrating these intellectuals simply based on the prestigious roles they have since acquired in Korean national history. However, we must also be warned against the absurd expectation that, in a perfect world, events, institutions, and ideas in a colonial culture will somehow fall in line with abstract orthodoxies that have their origins in the Soviet Union or the Western world. In a 1974 article titled “Toward a Concept of National Literature,” Paik Nak-chung gave effective expression to a postcolonial intellectual’s desire for emancipation from cultural norms that emanate from the imperial center: “We must . . . set aside both those contemporary evaluations that judged the extent to which a work fit the Chinese norm and the method rampant today . . . that evaluates a work according to the degree

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to which it corresponds with the concept and aesthetic sense of Western literature.” 92 As Paik saw clearly at this early stage, five years before the appearance of Said’s Orientalism, our standards of evaluation of cultural and literary products need not correspond with “the concept and aesthetic sense of Western literature.” Today’s researchers will not find much “orthodox Marxism” in the archives of colonial Korean leftist culture. What they will find instead is the orthodoxly human striving of intellectuals who once tried to trace an ideal path for Korea under the influence of socialism. Furthermore, they will find that the efforts of these intellectuals had some concrete, tangible cultural effects in the complex and changing ideological environment of colonial Korea. It is to the study of some of these effects that we shall now turn. 92. Paik Nak-chung, “The Idea of a Korean National Literature,” 562.

Three

Leftist Literature and Cultural Modernity A Critical Overview

Modernity brought dramatic socioeconomic change to Korea in the form of the rise of a bourgeois class, the expansion of urban centers, and a process of industrialization that was well under way by the mid-1920s. Within the cultural sphere, moreover, modernity set Koreans on a path toward a radical reconceptualization of the nature of literature and the arts. The rise of “national literature,” the spread of Korean as a literary language, and the appearance of the first modern novels were only some of the aesthetic and ideological novelties in a dynamic era of creative possibilities. Increased literacy and the development of a thriving market for books turned mass publishing into a sustainable business within the budding capitalist economy of Seoul and other urban centers. Everywhere, new ideas and a changing society made the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century into a time of unprecedented transformation for people in the Korean peninsula. Modernity, however, also brought political mayhem. These were the decades when Korea lost its independence amid the clash of its surrounding empires, a time of rapid change that outstripped the country’s capacity for response and adaptation. The 1876 opening of Korea to international trade, the peasant revolts of the 1890s, and the 1910 annexation of Korea to Japan all in different ways hastened the end of Chosŏn and an ancient way of life. The ever contradictory quality of the modern age—at once alluring and threatening, promising great progress but replete with terrifying events—came to be reflected in Korean consciousness through an ambivalent attitude toward change and modernization. Feared and at the same time celebrated, modernity performed double duty as manifest

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telos and reviled destiny in Korean discourses. The very industrialization that had brought wealth and urban expansion to Korea was also often regarded as responsible for the country’s loss of identity and the corruption of its traditional Confucian values. Coming to Korea at the heart of the modern era, socialist culture in many ways epitomized the duality of the country’s feelings toward modernity. Leftist intellectuals were modern themselves and integrally belonged in the large movement for reform of the early twentieth century. They shared with other intellectuals of the time a concern for national liberation as well as a dislike for traditionalism and Confucian culture, and they endorsed the quintessentially modern project of advancing Korea’s standing through education and exposure to Western values. Alongside this support of modernizing values, however, writers and activists on the left also mounted a direct attack on the newly established bourgeois culture of their time. They used vehement rhetoric in battling artistic aestheticism and the elitism of fellow reformist intellectuals, many of whom had previously been their teachers and mentors. And they often decried the evils of modernization and industrialization, committed as they were to the idea that capitalism did not offer a socially sustainable model of development for Korea. Socialist culture was not antimodern, as some commentators have suggested.1 Rather, the socialists and their sympathizers were proponents of a different path into modernity, an alternative model of development that had at its core the received lessons of international Marxist and anarchist thought. At once modern and countercultural, leftist intellectuals resisted colonial development and the status quo while being progressive in their own ideologically grounded way. Their experience attests both to the powerful appeal of socialism in early modern Korea and to the resilience of Korean culture amid the upheavals and crises that befell the country at a momentous time in its history.

Modern Culture in Colonial Korea The pressure of imperial powers, domestic unrest, and the flawed leadership of the Korean ruling class brought about the decline of the Chosŏn dynasty around the turn of the twentieth century. As we partly saw in Chapter 1, the forced opening of Korea’s markets to foreign powers had 1. See Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya, and Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front.

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generated discontent in the country’s provinces, and it eventually fueled the Tonghak peasant uprisings of 1894. It was the elites’ response to these uprisings, however, that ultimately determined the dynasty’s fall and a shift of power on the peninsula. Fearing the violence of peasant rebels, the rulers of Chosŏn called in the Chinese army to suppress the popular movement. The situation was promptly exploited by Japan, which also sent its own army to Korea and, for the following two years, struggled with China for control of the peninsula. In the wake of Japan’s victory, Korea found itself subjugated to a foreign power. As a momentous political and military event, the loss of independence became an emblem of Korea’s modern decline, and modernity itself started to be negatively associated by Koreans with the end of a centuries-old tradition of self-rule. Equally important, moreover, the end of Chosŏn entailed a major cultural change and led to the gradual marginalization of Confucian culture along with its elite proponents. In response to the failed leadership of traditional rulers, several voices then arose among progressive intellectuals and a middle class of both mercantile and administrative extraction. The consensus view blamed Confucian officials for placing familial and factional interests before those of the entire community of Koreans. It similarly became common within public discourse to regard yangban aristocracy as a backward force and an obstacle to Korea’s modernization.2 We may devise the label of “cultural reform movement” to embrace the many voices that in this period contested traditional culture while upholding progressive ideals. As we do so, however, we should not forget that these intellectuals, professionals, entrepreneurs, and politicians never quite united to form a single and cohesive institution or movement. More than an organic movement, this was a generation of Koreans to whom the task of modernizing the country was clear and inescapable. Its expression consisted in a myriad of organizations with diverse agendas. The Independence Club (Tongnip hyŏphoe), for example, was an early nationalist association that published the first newspaper in vernacular Korean between 1896 and 1899 (Tongnip sinmun; The independent). The 2. In effect endorsing a central theme of imperial propaganda, the Korean reformists were in agreement with the Japa nese in portraying the yangban as lazy and corrupted. Unlike the Japa nese, however, the Koreans showed more concern about how to reform the traditional elites to become the leaders of Korea’s modernization. For the critique of the yangban in the reformist press, see Schmid, “Images of the yangban,” in Korea between Empires, 121–28.

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“self-strengthening” (chagang) movement of the 1900s also pursued a nationalist ideal, but it focused on school education and economic development as prime vehicles for the modernization of the country. Both movements established a precedent for the New Literature (sinmunhak) movement of the early colonial period, but the new trend again shifted emphasis to liberal education and the cultivation of a Western-influenced class of modern intellectuals. These and other related cultural associations espoused reformism, nationalism, and progressive values as the foundations upon which to rebuild public discourse in rejection of the old ways of Confucian society. It was in this context of progressive nation building that modernity as a cultural phenomenon gained a foothold in Korea. Indeed, the development of a national consciousness was the major task of modern intellectuals. Although the people of Chosŏn shared a sense of heritage and affinity, this ethnic consciousness was initially not strong enough to overcome the traditionally entrenched class divisions. Accordingly, the new reformist intellectuals had first to create and propagate the very idea of the nation as an imagined community of equal citizens before being able to mobilize popular support for it. Their action had to be cultural before it could aim at any social or political goal. As the sun was setting over Chosŏn, looking toward tomorrow required mining new ideas that could support a new political culture on the Korean peninsula. The reformist response to Chosŏn’s fin-de-siècle crisis in many ways amounted to a comprehensive reimagining of the Korean polity under the influence of Western values. In its turn, this reimagining determined the specific behaviors and cultural politics that were adopted by new intellectuals. Among the most prominent novelties of the time was the enfranchisement of vernacular Korean as an acceptable language for academic and literary purposes. After Tongnip sinmun first embraced Korean as its print language, Cheguk sinmun (The imperial news; 1898– 1910) and Taehan maeil sinbo (The Korean daily news; 1904–10) also published vernacular Korean editions of their newspapers. An epochal linguistic project driven by democratic ideals, the vernacularization of literature and the news was accomplished gradually and with great effort. The editors and contributors of the early newspapers often struggled to render loft y ideals and the high-minded rhetoric of the Enlightenment in a language that had hitherto been regarded as lowly and vulgar. Moreover, the newsprint debut of Korean created a newly complex condition of multilingualism on the peninsula. The influential

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Taehan maeil sinbo, for instance, was published in three different languages, complementing its Korean edition with one in English and another one in the mixed script of Chinese and Korean. In spite of these difficulties, the newspapers’ adoption of Korean opened a path for the publication of other Korean-language periodicals, including student literary magazines, and by the early 1920s Korean had irreversibly become Korea’s official print language.3 It is common to think of vernacular language as offering little elegance and a limited lexicon. The new literary language, however, was far from being a simple transcription of the vernacular on the streets. The aesthetic behind the new mode of writing was the descriptive narrative style of Western realism, models of which had been brought to Korea via Japan. Many contemporary Korean writers found the formal embodiment of their individualist literary ideal in Japanese I-novel confessional narratives, which focused on recording in detail the private thoughts and emotions of an intellectual protagonist, often the writer’s autobiographical self. The linguistic replacement of Chinese with Korean was thus effected via a deeper replacement in cultural influences. Japanese and Western culture acquired new prestige in this era, and it became customary for young intellectuals from wealthy families to complete their education with sojourns in Japan, China, and sometimes even Europe or America. The epochal replacement of classical Chinese with everyday Korean as the main literary language had important practical implications, as it allowed writers to reach a broader public and to rely on a bigger market. In cultural and ideological terms, moreover, the switch was symbolic in at least two respects. First, it reflected the reformists’ belief in the inadequacy of the now “foreign” Chinese letters to express the cultural identity of the Korean nation. Implicitly rejecting the tradition of sadae, or subservience to the great China, the reformists produced a statement of cultural autonomy, and thereby cast a shadow of treason on those literati who wanted to preserve Korea’s Sinicized literary tradition. Second, the switch to vernacular literature represented the taking of a stance against the elitism of Confucian culture. Treasuring their monopoly over classical Chinese, Confucian literati had discouraged commoners’ access to classical education and had been critical of the 3. For the Korean-language edition of Taehan maeil sinbo and its relevance to the development of modern Korean literature, see Kim Yŏngmin, Han’guk ŭi kŭndae sinmun kwa kŭndae sosŏl, vol. 1.

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Korean alphabet ever since its introduction in 1446. In dignifying the vernacular with literary value, reformist intellectuals rejected the classist assumptions of Confucian culture by opening up the literary space to the appreciation as well as participation of the people. Another central component of reformist cultural politics was the rediscovery of popu lar fiction as an artistic form and a vehicle for the education of the broader public. Popular prose fiction had existed in Korea at least since the seventeenth century, but it had generally been treated with condescension within Confucian culture. In a subversion of established literary hierarchy, the new intellectuals started to regard the poetry and philosophical writings of the Chosŏn era as obsolete.4 They replaced them with new literary forms such as the novel and the short story, which prospered in part thanks to their flexible applicability to a range of narrative tasks. Both the vernacularization of culture and the reevaluation of popular fiction were performed by Korean intellectuals under the influence of contemporary Chinese and Japanese models. A very popular writer was Liang Qichao, whose reformist writings inspired a wave of semifictional biographical works that created new paradigms of Korean public virtue.5 Korean intellectuals also drew inspiration from the Japa nese political novels, the so-called seiji shōsetsu, which were typically written as allegorical tales representing their author’s political views.6 In particular Yi 4. See Kwŏn Podŭrae, Ha’nguk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn, 96–101. 5. Liang was the most widely published foreign writer in Korea during the decade of the 1900s. For a comprehensive list of his works published there, both in the original and in translation, see U Rimgŏl, Han’guk kaehwagi munhak kwa Yang Kyech’o, 30–32. Sin Ch’aeho, who translated, together with Pak Ŭnsik, Liang’s Biographies of Three Italian National Heroes (It’aeri kŏn’guk samgŏl chŏn; 1907), subsequently serialized a fictional biography of a Korean national hero, Life of Yi Sunshin, the Greatest Admiral (Sugun cheil wiin Yi Sunshin chŏn; 1908) in Taehan maeil sinbo. Initially written in the mixed script of Korean and Chinese, the novel was later republished in the same newspaper in the Korean-language version under the vernacular title of Syugun ŭi teil kŏrukhan inmul Yi Sunshin chŏn. See Tanjae Sin Ch’aeho chŏnjip 4: 155–200 and 203–81 for the two versions of Life of Yi Sunshin and ibid., 362–455 for Sin’s translation of Liang’s work. 6. For the Korean translation and adaptation of Japa nese political novels during the 1900s, see Karen Thornber’s careful analysis in Empire of Texts in Motion, 158– 71. Thornber notes that Korean writers often added a new emphasis on the strength and potential of the Korean nation and its people in the process of reproducing Japa nese narratives in the Korean context.

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Injik, a Japan-educated journalist, pioneered the new literary form of sin sosŏl (the New Novel), which distinguished itself for mixing modern ideas and diction with the familiar narrative style of vernacular Korean fiction. Yi’s first novel, Tears of Blood (Hyŏl ŭi nu; 1905), which he serialized in the newspaper Mansebo (1906–7), projected a reformist political vision through the life story of an orphaned girl of yangban origins who grows up to be a modern woman after her education in Japan and the United States.7 The New Novel proved to be a productive genre, and works by writers such as Yi Injik, Ch’oe Ch’ansik, and Yi Haejo came to enjoy wide popularity in the early twentieth century. Like biographical writing, this kind of novel allowed for engrossing and didactical storytelling that was imbued with the new culture of citizenship and national allegiance. The strong commercial appeal of these novels only added to their viability as both a cultural product in an expanding market and an ideological vehicle for the ideas of a new generation of intellectuals.8 Vernacularization and popular culture were both central novelties of literary modernity in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. To them must be added the perhaps most consequential aesthetic contribution of the cultural reform movement: the reconceptualization of literature as an autonomous discipline distinct from the writing of science, history, the law, and other vocational subjects. Although a Korean term for “modern literature,” munhak, had existed earlier, its distinction from mun, used for general scholarship and learning, was first advanced during the 1910s by a group of student intellectuals based in Japan. In essays by An Hwak, Ch’oe Tusŏn, Paek Taejin, and Yi Kwangsu, the writing of munhak was then celebrated as an artistic endeavor of autonomous value, the worthy occupation of an individual free from traditional ties and biases.9 In “What Is Literature?” (Munhak iran hao?; 1916), Yi Kwangsu un7. Yi Injik, Hyŏl ŭi nu. This volume includes the editor’s article on the work’s significance in Korean literary history. 8. The majority of the works in this genre were published between 1912 and 1914. Beginning in 1915, a mixture of colonial censorship, intensifiying surveillance, and commercialism increasingly compromised the quality of New Novel production. For a sociolog ical history of the New Novel in the 1910s, see Han Kihyŏng, “1910 nyŏndae sinsosŏl e mich’in ch’ulp’an yut’ong hwan’gyŏng ŭi yŏnghyang.” For the censorship practice during the 1910s and its impact on Korean publications, see Yi Chungyŏn, Ch’aek ŭi unmyŏng, 426–33. 9. An Hwak, “Chosŏn ŭi munhak,” Ch’oe Tusŏn, “Munhak ŭiŭi e kwanhaya,” and Yi Kwangsu [Pogyŏng], “Munhak ŭi kach’i.” (Pogyŏng was Yi Kwangsu’s given

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derscored the creative function of literature by contrasting it with general science and its task of conveying knowledge. According to Yi, the representation and fulfillment of emotions was the specific tasks of literature. Emotion, Yi noted, had just been a slave to knowledge in the past, but now it had “gained equal standing to seek its fulfillment in literature, music, and arts” (49–50).10 Yi’s emphasis on emotion was heavily indebted to the neoromantic concept of art as a means of catharsis and self-expression. That vision of art was instrumental in endowing literature with its own disciplinary autonomy. It was precisely the notion that literature had its own subject matter—the interiority and emotional life of a writer—that justified its treatment as an independent discipline in schools and public discourse alike. Further underlying the idea of literature as the art of emotion were Western conceptions of individualism, which represented a distinctive novelty in the new cultural wave of Korea (fig. 3.1). Even as the citizen of a Korean nation, the individual person remained the subject of rights and the bearer of interiority, in contrast with the traditional Confucian insistence on maintaining the harmony of the community as the supreme political value. In the composite ideological economy of the new movement for reform, the twin ideals of emotional self-expression and individualism were not necessarily antithetical to the creation of a national literature and the national subject. Quite to the contrary, it would seem, an individual had to be freed from the traditional allegiance to family, faction, and status identity before he or she could be interpellated into the role of a subject of the modern nation-state. As Jin-Kyung Lee has observed, the aesthetic subject, “epitomizing the notions of voluntarism, interiority, and the autonomy of the Western-style individual, became the prototype of the colonial-modern [and national] subject.”11 The discursive emancipation name in his youth.) For Paik’s essay “Munhak e taehan sinyŏn’gu” (A new study of literature), which was published in Sinmun’gye, March 1916, see Kim Poksun’s account in 1910 nyŏndae han’guk munhak kwa kŭndaesŏng, 199. Of these four early proponents of modern Korean literature, An was the most senior and had greater reservations about reforming Korean literature after Western examples, although he openly supported the importance of cultivating a new literature as an autonomous artistic discipline. See Serk-Bae Suh’s analysis of An’s essay in Treacherous Translation, 28–31. 10. Yi Kwangsu, “Munhak iran hao.” 11. See Jin-Kyung Lee, “Autonomous Aesthetics and the Autonomous Subject,” x.

Figure 3.1 The cultural nationalist magazine Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth, December 1914). Published by Ch’oe Namsŏn, it included Yi Kwangsu among its contributors. In this cover illustration by Ko Hŭidong, a young man wearing an ancient Greek toga tames and leads a tiger symbolizing the Korean nation. Courtesy of the Modern Korean Bibliographical Society.

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of the individual could thus be regarded as a prerequisite for nation building, and the ideological construction of the reform movement was principally centered on the nationalist ideal. Modernity in Korea coincided with this fundamental and revolutionary reconfiguration of the country as a modern nation-state.

The Literary Left and the Cultural Movement When socialist writers first came to prominence in Korea, roughly in the middle of the 1910s, the by then established reformist movement was one of their clearest polemical targets. Leftist intellectuals were waging a vehement cultural battle against the alleged bourgeois tendencies of writers such as Yi Kwangsu and Ch’oe Namsŏn, whom they regarded as prime examples of both capitalist and imperial co-optation. Critics and historians of the colonial period have subsequently represented the reformist movement and the socialist reaction to it in rather antithetical terms.12 As often happens, however, a contraposition can also hide nuances and important continuities. In the case of Korean socialist culture, indeed, an argument could be made for its inclusion in the very reform movement that the socialists purportedly opposed. Young leftist intellectuals had after all been educated in the modernizing atmosphere of the reform movement in such a way that their opposition to traditional Confucian culture was substantially consonant with that of the reformists. Like the liberal influences of their predecessors, the leftists’ socialist inspirations were profoundly Western, and they travelled to Korea over the same geocultural routes of China and Japan. The two groups even exhibited a modicum of overlap in their membership, as some of the prominent figures of leftist culture had initially been aligned with the reformist movement.13

12. Michael Robinson, for example, has offered a division of the Korean nationalist movement into first a “moderate” and then a “radical” phase, approximately coinciding with the divide between an earlier bourgeois movement and the later revolutionary approach. See Robinson, Cultural Nationalism. 13. Sin Ch’aeho, for instance, started out as the reformist pioneer of a new history of the Korean nation that would have at its center the common people (minjung) rather than the royal family. Other leftist writers, such as Yŏm Sangsŏp and Pak Yŏnghŭi, actively contributed to the reformist New Literature movement by publishing literary translations and creative works and organizing literary societies

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An abiding concern about Korea’s independence was a strong motif of continuity between reformist intellectuals and their leftist successors. For both groups aiming at liberation was a response to the experience of discrimination and subjugation as colonial subjects. Socialist intellectuals, however, brought renewed energy and urgency to the national question. As we saw in Chapter 2, by the early 1920s the cultural movement had settled into a mainly compliant and accommodationist relationship with the colonial government. Leftist nationalism arose, in part, as a rejection of gradualist and legalistic tactics. Socialist activists infused the nationalist movement with revolutionary fervor, even as they arguably fractured the main movement in the process. As Michael Robinson has suggested, Japan was able to exploit to its advantage the rift in the ranks of Korean nationalists, and it deployed strategies of selective oppression that may in the end have weakened the prospects of Korean activists.14 Even while rejecting their predecessors’ specific brand of nationalism, new leftist writers and activists nonetheless endorsed some of the cultural tactics of the reformist movement. Prominent among these was the insistence on mass enlightenment and public acculturation as means toward the development of social consciousness among Koreans. Both reformist and socialist intellectuals regarded Korean society as fertile ground for advancement guided by the teaching of intellectuals and other educated people. Emblematic of this continuity was the unabating popularity of the traditional pedagogical plot, which featured an intellectual figure going into a working-class community to serve as mentor for its members’ education and indoctrination. Yi Kiyŏng’s Hometown (Kohyang), for instance, shared that sort of plot with Yi Kwangsu’s Earth (Hŭk), a major reformist novel on the theme of agrarian development. An interesting twist on the classic pedagogical plot in the work of leftist writers was the occasional appearance of two protagonists. In Yi Kiyŏng’s novel, for example, Hŭijun, an educated young man of upright morals, is shown in close interaction with Indong, who despite a lack of schooling demonstrates courage and an ability to learn from his comrades. The elitist assumptions built into this sort of portrayal were naturally in tension with the national-popular ambitions of most left ist writers. As was the case elsewhere, in Korea too socialist culture met with the and publications such as Samgwang (Three lights), P’yehŏ (Ruins), and Paekcho (White tides). 14. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 157–66.

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difficulties that are inherent in the project of emancipating the masses through the intervention of an intellectual avant-garde. The new leftist intellectuals were in a way as modern as their reformist predecessors, upholding for Korea the cultural and ideological opportunities of modernization in an age of deep political crisis. Regardless of their differences, both leftists and reformists supported industrialization, which they both regarded as essential to strengthening Korea and to developing the political agency of Koreans. It would thus be a mistake to read leftist culture as in any way a nostalgic, regressive historical force.15 In spite of their often strident critique of the colonial modernization process, socialist intellectuals are most plausibly seen as radical modernists who pushed their country further into the development of its own modernity. Leftist culture stood for an alternative modernity for Korea, and it did so by translating into Korean debates some of the central ideological dialectics of twentieth-century international politics. It is by looking closely at this complex process of translation and adaptation that we can appreciate the impact that socialism had on the modern culture of colonial Korea.

Creating a People’s Culture When left ist intellectuals appeared to oppose previous tradition most strongly, they were often responding to the heavily hierarchical organization of Korean society at this time in history. Korea at the end of the Chosŏn era was organized according to a complex layering of social roles, and correlated with these roles were the occupations that were from time to time accessible to an individual. All ruling and high administrative positions were held by royalty and the yangban elite, whose ranks were strictly determined by birth. Below this aristocratic stratum were socalled secondary status groups, whose members were eligible for lowerranking bureaucratic posts as public clerks and military officials; and slightly below this category were the chungin, literally “the middle people,” who were technical specialists such as interpreters, legal experts, accountants, and medical personnel.16 The rest of society, which included the majority of the population, did not normally have access to education beyond the primary level. It included peasants, artisans, and 15. See Brian Myers, Han Sorya and Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front. 16. See Kyung Moon Hwang’s formulation and account of secondary status groups as belonging to a distinctive social category in Beyond Birth, 17–41.

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merchants, all of whom could become wealthy but commanded little social consideration. Below this socio-occupational layer, at the bottom of Chosŏn’s complex hierarchy, were the special groups of slaves, who were mostly employed as servants, and the outcasts, people whose occupations—as butchers, shamans, or kisaengs (female entertainers)— were traditionally despised for religious or ethical reasons. In this stratified social system, Chosŏn Koreans were born into de facto hereditary occupations and enjoyed few opportunities for upward social mobility. The state examination for public officials (kwagŏ chedo) ranked candidates based on their aristocratic ancestry and required them to demonstrate a deep knowledge of classical Chinese language and literature. Confucian doctrine served in many ways to reinforce, rather than mitigate, the hereditary status system in Korea. Learning and the practice of literature were prerogatives of the aristocracy, who jealously guarded its monopoly over them, and classical Chinese commanded a prestige that was lacking in the humbler Korean alphabet introduced by King Sejong in 1446.17 Even when literature in the vernacular developed, from about the seventeenth century on, the majority of its writers came from the ranks of poor or “fallen” yangban, while its most numerous patrons were moneyed upper-tier commoners and yangban women whose inferior-gendered status banned them from access to a formal literary education.18 Reflective of the interests of its producers and consumers, this vernacular literature gave only marginal representation to those below their social ranks. Responding to the reigning inequality, left ist intellectuals saw in modernization the potential for redistribution and social democratization. In the inaugural preface for the journal Sin saenghwal (New life), for instance, Kim Myŏngsik characterized the new publication’s mission in terms that uncompromisingly signaled a break with past tradition: “New Life is a friend of the people (taejung). It rejects the old ways, defying the greed of capital, the absurdity of traditions, and the violence of authorities. In other words, New Life is for a new life and for the people, because it proceeds from the will of the people.”19 Used almost as a mantra for

17. Throughout the Chosŏn era, Korean remained a second-tier language, earning condescending nicknames such as amk’ŭl (women’s letters) or ahaetkŭl (children’s letters). 18. See Cho Kwangguk, “Han’guk kojŏn sosŏl ŭi chakcha,” and Yi Chuyŏng, “Han’guk kojŏn sosŏl ŭi tokcha.” 19. Kim Myŏngsik, “Ch’anggansa,” 9.

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an until then vaguely defined social subject, the term “the people” began to serve as a marker and a reference point for the leftist movement’s cultural and political agenda. In this way, the construction of a “people’s culture” became a shared enterprise for young intellectuals influenced by Marxism and anarchism. Left ist intellectuals were also responsible for a fundamental rearrangement of cultural and political alliances within the volatile atmosphere of early-twentieth-century Korea. By relying for the first time on a socialist perspective, Kim Myŏngsik and other young writers were able to reconfigure the topography of the Korean intellectual world, pairing the cultural reformists with their former foes, the Confucian literati, and regarding them both as the “bourgeois” literati whose cultural products represented the interests of a minority of Koreans. The move was extraordinary in part because of the prestige commanded at that time by reformist intellectuals. The leftists pressed their class-conscious case with lucidity and a certain provocative intent. “The flow of culture from feudal aristocratic to capitalist was all on the same plane,” wrote Kim Myŏngsik, suggesting that these had now become both minority cultures. “The new age belongs to labor culture or mass culture. The new culture will be derived from the spirit of the people.”20 Similarly, Kim Kijin, whom we saw turning into an architect of the KAPF movement, perceived the bourgeois culture of Korea to be “more complex than that of other countries,” because it combined “the well-organized, orderly educational institutions of today’s ruling class with the traditional and pervasive influence of yesterday’s yangbans.”21 The sense of a second intellectual revolution characterized the writings of the new politicized cultural wave. A mere twenty years after the advent of modern reformism, socialist intellectuals again shook up the cultural scene with a radical new vision for Korean society. The leftists’ class-based charge against the cultural reform movement was not unfounded. The genre of the New Novel, for instance, catered to the same readership as traditional vernacular fiction and mostly featured as its main characters middle- to upper-class women, petty bureaucrats, wealthy merchants, and modern intellectuals. Elitism even 20. Kim Myŏngsik, “Kumunhwa wa sinmunhwa” (Old culture and new culture), Sin saenghwal 2 (March 1922): 6. Quoted in Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 119. 21. P’albong sanin, “Chibae kegŭp kyohwa, p’ijibae kegŭp kyohwa,” 14. The essay was published under Kim’s pen name.

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intensified in later New Literature works, as foreign-educated intellectuals often modeled their works on the example of the Japanese I-novel and focused on creating portraits of the members of their own kind. Insofar as the cultural elites envisioned the new Korean nation as a community of civilized modern gentlemen and ladies, hoping to accomplish this vision through education of the common people, their movement inevitably ran the risk of propagating a complacent self-representation. As Robinson has noted, left ist intellectuals found it easy to denounce the reformists for holding “a truncated vision of the nation” as a community of their own, a vision that enabled them to retain their status as leaders of Korean society while the colonial regime took care of their material needs.22 Pursuing their project of cultural popularization, leftist intellectuals searched for ways of making literature more relevant to the concerns and experiences of ordinary peasants and workers. They did so, in part, by figuratively narrowing the gap between writers and their proletarian readership. In an effort to recruit literary talents from the ranks of the workers themselves, the editors of leftist magazines would often solicit original contributions from their readership, stressing that submissions should display a writer’s familiarity with the life conditions of workingclass Koreans. Indeed, Pak Yŏnghŭi enlisted several new KAPF members by running cash-prize literary contests in Kaebyŏk during the 1920s, and in the 1930s leftist magazines regularly featured works of testimonial labor reportage contributed by laborers and peasants.23 This program of literary scouting went some way toward creating the Korean equivalent of Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals,” understood as the educated members of a social class who represent and promote class interest in conformity with the direction of history.24 The small but significant number of writers of working-class origins attests to the relative accomplishment of the left’s effort to popularize modern Korean culture. In addition to supporting working-class writers, leftist intellectuals pursued a communitarian orientation by organizing unofficial study and reading groups in schools, youth centers, night schools, and labor unions. Although socialists were neither the only nor the first ones to take such 22. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism, 163. 23. For a more detailed account of the 1930s reportage movement, see Chapter 4 and also Sunyoung Park, “A Forgotten Aesthetic.” 24. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, 3.

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initiatives, their intervention gave much momentum to the proliferation of such institutions. Cultural historians have argued that the spreading of reading groups between the 1920s and mid-1930s amounted to a veritable “nationwide reading movement,”25 and Cheon Jung-hwan in particular has interpreted the phenomenon as “demonstrating that a wide variety of people were undertaking a large-scale struggle for their intellectual emancipation.”26 In a reading group, books or periodicals would typically be acquired via a library loan, a donation, or a collective subscription, to be read in rotation or recited aloud by an intellectual figure—a student, teacher, or anyone who was literate—to his or her illiterate audience. Socialist writings were regularly read in many of these groups, whose association with antigovernment activities soon resulted in their being branded as illegitimate, and even criminal, by mainstream media.27 The left ists’ reconfiguration of cultural subjectivity, the essence of their drive for a “people’s culture,” had to some extent an immediate impact on the cultural discourses of modern Korea. A striking attestation to this fact lies in the lexical transformation of discourse about “the people” over the period of a few years. Several distinct designations became current by 1930, each of them having slightly different connotations. The most common terms were minjung (the common people), musanja (the unpropertied), nodongja (the laborers), taejung (the masses), and p’uroret’aria (the proletarians). Mostly coined in Japan, many of these words were newly introduced in modern times and gained currency under socialist influence. Aside from signaling the shift in themes that were debated publicly, this terminological variety shows again how “the people” as the collective subject became an important concern within modern Korean intellectual and literary discourse. Another immediate impact of leftist intervention was the first-time appearance of working-class protagonists in Korean fiction. Stories that featured urban and rural laborers—from rickshaw pullers to construction workers, from factory laborers to peasant servants—emerged en

25. See Yun Kŭmsŏn, “1920–1930 nyŏndae toksŏ undong,” 87. For a case study of a local communist movement that involved the active orga nization of reading groups among students and urban laborers such as newspaper deliverymen and factory workers, see Yun Sŏnja, “1933 nyŏn chŏnbuk chogong chaegŏn.” 26. Cheon Jung-hwan, “1920 nyŏndae toksŏhoe,’ ” 67. 27. Ibid., 48.

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masse in modern Korean literature only after the propagation of socialism. This new focus on working-class subjects enlarged the aesthetic vocabulary of Korean literature to include unprecedented social and physical settings, including urban slums, factories, and declining rural villages. More important still, however, was the implied perspectival shift in the public perception of Korean society and reality evident in these works. Kim Kijin was the first critic who recommended, as an evaluative criterion for proletarian literature, “the writer’s class consciousness and his attitude toward the subject matter.”28 Echoing the theme of perspectival shift, Pak Yŏnghŭi, too, encouraged authors to “represent the life of the proletariat from their own perspective and with all its pains,” avoiding the common bourgeois pitfall of “aestheticizing [proletarian life] from a distance” (fig. 3.2).29 The leftists’ shift of perspective was ultimately their chief instrument for solving the problem of representation for working-class Koreans. If class awakening requires self-consciousness, a necessary condition of such consciousness is the opportunity to see one’s life reflected in cultural representations and public discourse. The novel textual prominence of humbler folk was an important feature of Korean literature during the 1920s, and it provided a striking contrast with their scant and even pejorative representation only a few years earlier. Illustrative of this development was the changing literary representation of rickshaw pullers, who were fi xtures in Seoul’s urban landscape and iconic presences in 1910s and 1920s Korean literature. In Kim Tongin’s “The Sorrow of the Weak” (Yakhan cha ŭi sŭlp’ŭm; 1919), for example, the figure of the rickshaw puller appeared as barely distinguishable from his rickshaw, the means of transportation of the urban elites and seemingly the essence of the man’s existence. Kim’s heroine, Elizabeth, is riding in the rickshaw on a rainy evening. As she is listening in the dark, Elizabeth hears “the rickshaw being hit by the rain . . . , the heavy panting of the rickshaw puller, and her own heart’s beating anxiously.” She fears she will be sexually assaulted by the man, whose persona appears to her as animalistic and “brute.”30 Elizabeth’s fear had its textual justification, as she had previously been sexually harassed by her employer, but the scene was also reflective of the then common conflation of working-class masculinity with criminality. 28. Kim Kijin, “P’it’usŏngi toen p’uro hon,” 44. 29. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Sinhŭng munye ŭi naeyong,” 133. 30. Kim Tongin, “Yakhanja ŭi sŭlp’ŭm,” 2.

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Figure 3.2 Published in Pyŏlgŏn’gon (A different world, August 1927), this illustration by Ahn Sŏkchu depicts a modern girl and boy lounging at a café while blacksmiths labor in the summer heat outside. The woman complains, “What a racket! It hurts my ears.” In response, the man says, “Crazy people . . . have they no better way to work out?” Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

By contrast, in Hyŏn Chin’gŏn’s “A Lucky Day” (Unsu chohŭn nal; 1924), a similar scene is recounted from the rickshaw puller’s perspective. The narrative focus is placed from the start on the physical and psychological experience of the man at work: “The sweat on his body had run cold, and a chill welled up from his soaking clothes that he could feel in his famished stomach. This gave him a heightened awareness of both the satisfaction and the anguish of earning one wŏn fifty.”31 The story then goes on to characterize the man’s life outside of his occupation, describing the interior of his humble house and revealing the wretched state of his family—a dying wife and a starved child. By highlighting the laborer’s physical pain and poverty, the narrative invites the reader to draw a causal connection between his personal tragedy—the final loss of his 31. Hyŏn Chin’gŏn, “A Lucky Day,” 5. For the original Korean publication, see “Unsu chohŭn nal.”

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wife—and the material hardship in the then declining rickshaw business. In effect, between Kim’s 1919 and Hyŏn’s 1924 stories, a radical shift in representation has taken place. The later story recasts the rickshaw puller from the exotic and mildly threatening other of bourgeois life to an epitome of the life conditions of Koreans who were left behind by colonial modernization. In the broader implications of this change, modern development itself was reconceptualized from agent of progress for all to a process that could engender uneven and class-divisive social change. In giving literary representation to the perspectives of working-class Koreans, leftist intellectuals made an important contribution to the construction of a more egalitarian society. They initiated, in Gramsci’s terminology, the cultural battle for the hegemony of Korean public discourse. The immediate effect of socialist literature may have been merely cultural, as the leftist movement could do little to counter repression by the colonial government along with a domestic tradition of social privilege. In the end, however, the anti-elitist message of colonial leftist literature established a precedent and a canon that resonated loudly in later decades. A degree of popular legitimation became an essential ingredient for the regimes of either North or South Korea from the 1950s onward. When democracy finally came to the South in the late 1980s, the time’s cultural activists reclaimed the heritage of colonial left ist literature and asserted the hegemony of realist literary practice as well as criticism. The discourse of equality and popu lar entitlement had then run its historical course from the pages of colonial literature to the cultural activism of a newly democratized nation. Today it is still a central reference within progressive politics in South Korea, and it still inspires a great number of writers and directors who espouse realism as both their aesthetic and their ideological vocation.

From Aestheticism to Engagement with the Social The theorization of literature as an art expressive of emotions and individuality had a dual significance in early colonial Korea. Its first, immediate value lay in separating literature as an independent discipline from  the general traditional category of writing and scholarship. As time went by, however, the individualist discourse of emotions also engendered a new, modern understanding of the artistic enterprise itself as autonomous and free from the constraints of politics and social life. This aestheticist view of art, whose roots went back to romanticist

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discourse in the West, enabled many artists in Korea to counter the prevalent communitarian and pragmatic orientation of Confucian culture. Early in the twentieth century, it became common among Korean writers to profess an endorsement of artistic autonomy in the search for beauty in its purest form, untainted by the banality of everyday life. One prominent advocate of Korean neo-aestheticism was Kim Ŏk, a translator of French symbolist poetry and himself a poet. In his essay “Artistic Life” (Yesulchŏk saenghwal; 1915), Kim opened by effectively dismissing the aestheticist slogan of l’art pour l’art. The debate between art for art’s sake and art for life’s sake was a false one, Kim wrote, because art and life should ultimately flow into each other: “[O]ne’s art must become one’s life, and conversely, one’s life should become one’s art.” Kim maintained that each individual’s purpose should be to “make one’s life artistic,” because “art has its significance in approving life as a whole, improving its imperfect reality, inspiring its creativity, and aiding its development toward perfection, finally uniting all its fragments into a perfect whole.”32 Through the evident Nietzschean inspiration of Kim’s position, one can discern a sense of liberation and empowerment of the artistic enterprise as such.33 Modern intellectuals of Kim’s generation were perhaps the fi rst Koreans of nonaristocratic origins who could fully consider themselves cultural operators. The autonomous space of art became for them an extension of individual freedom, giving them the ability to gain emancipation from the binding ties of traditional Korean society. Though not devoid of a social purpose, the aestheticism of early reformist intellectuals prescribed public commitment and amelioration via a characteristically indirect route. Many writers of New Novels, for instance, believed that art had a transformative social effect in virtue of its power over single individuals. Kim Ŏk gave effective expression to this belief when he posited that an individual’s aesthetic epiphany would naturally transpire within collectivity: “Let the core of the individual’s life be artistic. Then social life will also become artistic.”34 Similarly, Yi Kwangsu elaborated on the social significance of contemporary aes32. Kim Ŏk, “Yesulchŏk saenghwal,” 61. 33. Kim Ŏk’s words resonate particularly with Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum that “In art man enjoys himself as perfection” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols). The German phi losopher was wildly popu lar among contemporary East Asian intellectuals, and Kim Ŏk was one of the first Korean writers who introduced his ideas. See Kim Chŏnghyŏn, “Nich’e sasang ŭi han’gukchŏk suyong.” 34. Kim Ŏk, “Yesulchŏk saenghwal,” 62.

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theticism in his essay “Art and Life” (Yesul kwa insaeng; 1922), in which he offered a spirited defense of the aestheticist ethos in the face of its contestation by leftist writers. Yi reiterated the aestheticist point in its most abstract and general form: “What is the ultimate ideal of human life? It is to aestheticize the entirety of life.” Upon expanding and specifying his understanding of “life,” moreover, he revealed a purview that encompassed both the individual and the social sphere, including “thoughts, actions, basic needs such as clothes, food, and shelters, communities, villages, and cities.”35 Through the aesthetic sublimation of all dimensions of life, Yi believed, Korea’s modernist renaissance would figuratively transform “the desert of Korea” into a “flower garden of art.”36 Providing the Korean people with an understanding of culture and artistic beauty would thus be as conducive to improving their life as any “political, economic, or social” reform.37 In the preponderant worldview of modernist aestheticism, art was highly valuable for its power to transform society, yet such transformation would be achieved only by dissolving the social into the aesthetic. At their arrival on the Korean cultural scene, leftist critics made the aestheticist trend of contemporary literature one of their major polemical targets. As participants themselves in the broad movement for modernization, they were sympathetic to the cause of aesthetic autonomy insofar as it helped the institutional establishment of modern literature. However, they rejected what they perceived to be their predecessors’ trivialization of literature as an art of romantic indulgence in individual emotion. Pak Yŏnghŭi, for instance, alerted his readers to “a strange phenomenon” taking place in the Korean literary world in which many writers “aestheticize abstract emotions and take flight into a realm of spiritual desires, neglecting the real world.” Such “escapist” literature, Pak remarked, “has no relevance to our life and our times.”38 In a similar vein, Kim Kijin denounced the beauty of romantic, “bourgeois” literature as merely “ornamental” and politically conformist.39 Kim urged fellow socialist writers to wield their pens instead to create “a literature that would be useful for building our future,” even if they risked losing some 35. Kyŏngsŏ hagin, “Yesul kwa insaeng,” 21. Yi Kwangsu used his pen name in this publication. 36. Ibid., 17. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Komin munhak ŭi p’iryŏnsŏng,” 64. 39. Kim Kijin, “Kamkak ŭi pyŏnhyŏk,” 37.

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aesthetic beauty in the process.40 For socialist intellectuals such as Kim and Pak, the goal of transforming society could be attained only with the support of a socially engaged literary ideal. The indirect aestheticist route to social amelioration struck these intellectuals as utopian at best and insincere at worst. In poignantly phrasing their rejection of an aestheticist literary ideal, left ist critics often appealed to the spatial metaphor of writers’ leaving their snug studies to actually engage with the masses in the streets. “Instead of remaining within the ivory tower of lifeless phantoms,” Pak Yŏnghŭi recommended, “art can become more valuable in places for living, such as streets, markets, and factories.” 41 Kim Kijin similarly exhorted intellectuals to establish their presence in mundane sites of the commoners so as to cultivate a proletarian culture outside bourgeois institutions: “Everywhere we look, we find opportunities for learning and growth. . . . They are in the streets, in the dwellings of rural servants, in open fields, on the grass, in factories, at the stops of rickshaw drivers, at taverns, everywhere. There is no lack of places for our advancement.” 42 This figurative shift from an intellectual’s closed study to the openness of public space implied a repudiation of the aestheticist vision, which inevitably gave priority to a writer’s interiority within the artistic process. The connection between individual cultivation and the enhancement of the whole community was no longer taken for granted in the new cultural climate (fig. 3.3). Beyond the censorious tones of their critique, left ist intellectuals strove to offer a positive artistic vision through their theorization of a literature that would effectively live up to the social burden of intellectuals. Many of their discussions centered on the proper formulation of a “realist” literary aesthetic. Korean realism, as the literary tradition to be started by these aesthetic reflections, went on to become the most distinctive and long-lasting heritage of socialist culture on the Korean peninsula. Many writers today still either endorse or contend with the realist label, and the neat opposition between realism and modernism still serves as a cardinal if controversial starting point for many aesthetic debates.

40. Kim Kijin, “Kŭmil ŭi munhak, myŏngil ŭi munhak,” 54. 41. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Sinhŭng munye ŭi naeyong,” 133. 42. Kim Kijin, “Chibae kegŭp kyohwa, p’ijibae kegŭp kyohwa,” 22.

Figure 3.3 One of Kim Kyut’aek’s cover illustrations for Che ilsŏn (First front, June 1932), a successor to Kaebyŏk. The journal’s inaugural preface proclaimed its intention to be “on the first front along with the masses.” Courtesy of the Modern Korean Bibliographical Society.

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One of the earliest and most influential theorizations of a realist aesthetics was again provided by Kim Kijin in his 1929 essay titled “Dialectical Realism.” Surveying the literary and cultural trends of his time, Kim drew a line that divided “subjective” and “idealist” literature from the kind that is “objective” and “realist.” If romantic poetry belonged to idealism, Kim believed, the I-novelist confessionals of early-twentiethcentury Japan were firmly in the realist camp. Kim also noted, however, that many once progressive Korean writers of I-novel literature had “drifted to individualism, increasingly turning away from the total and concrete understanding of reality and focusing their observations exclusively on the fleeting and fragmented phenomena of everyday life.” 43 In rejecting this form of “bourgeois realism,” Kim emphatically predicted that an alternative, proletarian form of realism would become the literature of the future. A proletarian writer, he specified, should not only write “in an objective, realist, and concrete style” but also represent life experiences, “not in stagnation but in dynamic movements and not in parts but in totality.” This sort of writer, he continued, would “maintain an avant-garde proletarian perspective” that would enable us “to objectively perceive the progression of history.” 44 Through these scant and at times elliptical recommendations, Kim Kijin was in effect attempting to formulate the content of a realist aesthetic for its use under colonial Korean conditions. His project was quite directly inspired by the period’s international socialist culture.45 Georg Lukács in particular had theorized realism as the canonical aesthetics of the socialist avant-gardes in the early 1920s. In Lukács’s famous views, modernist art at once expressed and solidified capitalism’s grip on society through its fragmented and distorting representation of reality.46 As an aesthetic antidote to this distortion, Lukács proposed, socialist art should represent reality in its “totality,” exposing artistic fragmentation 43. Kim Kijin, “Pyŏnjŭngjŏk sasilchuŭi,” 65–66. 44. Ibid., 72. 45. Kim’s immediate source of inspiration was Kurahara Korehito, whose article “The Path to Proletarian Realism” (Puroretaria riarizumu e no michi; 1928) was itself inspired by the advent of dialectical materialism on the Soviet cultural scene at the 1928 Congress of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP; 1928– 32). See Cho Chin’gi’s comparative analysis of Japanese and Korean theories of proletarian realism in Hanil p’uro munhangnon, 240–53. For the history of the RAPP, see Brown, The Proletarian Episode. 46. For Lukács’s critique of modernist arts, see “Realism in the Balance.”

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as an ideological tactic that prevented the proletarians from awakening to a class consciousness of their own. The result would be an activist art that revealed the present and future orientations of revolutionary historical development. In effect, this would be an art that reappropriated the modes of representation of the mid-nineteenth century in order to cope with the ideological challenges of twentieth-century life. While Kim Kijin and the KAPF endorsed the Lukácsian project of a realist literature, their understanding and execution of realist aesthetics differed substantially from those of the neighboring Soviet Union. The doctrine of socialist realism never took root in colonial Korea despite the Koreans’ admiration for Russian writers and leftist intellectuals. This was partly due to a chronological contingency, as Soviet socialist realism became an officially adopted doctrine in Russia only in 1932, at a time when Korean leftist culture was winding down owing to censorship and repression. A more decisive reason, however, were the differences in the very roles played by socialist culture in the two countries. Whereas Soviet writers could afford to maintain strong tones of revolutionary idealism, their Korean counterparts often had to fight a defensive battle in a politically constrained environment and so tended to uphold the unity of the proletariat in conjunction with the furthering of the nationalist cause. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Korean cultural left lacked the support of a strong communist party, and leftist writers and intellectuals practiced socialism far more as a political inspiration than as a defi nite doctrinal and ideological direction. A realist artistic vision entailed a fundamental redefinition of a writer’s role from that of a romantic genius to that of a cultural and social activist. In “The World of One’s Own Creation” (Chagi ŭi ch’angjohan segye; 1920), Kim Tongin had previously proposed an influential vision of artistic creation as responding exclusively to the logic of art and poetry. Instead of representing life in its imperfect manifestations, Kim argued, a writer should take example from the puppeteer, the creator of a fictional world, and develop characters and plots that compensate for the imperfect world of reality.47 In leftist literary practice, this poetic image of the writer as an autonomous subject gave way to that of the writer as a more mundane and socially engaged figure. Engagement could take many forms, ranging from relatively detached observation and reporting to the infiltration of factories for the purpose of organizing labor. If the former 47. Kim Tongin, “Chagi ŭi ch’angjohan segye.”

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position was represented by Yŏm Sangsŏp, the latter had its life models in KAPF writers such as Kim Namch’ŏn and Yi Pungmyŏng. In this more radical manifestation, the leftist ideal of an engaged writer was akin to Walter Benjamin’s and Sergei Tretiakov’s conceptualization of “the operating writer”—as opposed to “the informing writer”—whose mission was “not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively,” in order to directly promote social change.48 Realism also brought about innovation in the modes of literary production, boosting the development of literary forms such as reportage and the wall novel. With its mixture of investigative reporting and journalistic sensationalism, reportage offered writers an opportunity to depict social reality from an angle that would be both objective and congenial to the morality and emotions of common folk. Beginning in the late 1920s, periodicals such as Pyŏlgŏn’gon and Chosŏn ilbo frequently reported on life conditions among the socially disadvantaged, focusing in particular on crime-related locales such as a beggars’ den, a penitentiary, a brothel, or an urban slum.49 While clearly exploiting their bourgeois readers’ fascination with these places, many writers of reportage explicitly countered misperception and prejudice about their subject matter and in this way contributed to raising awareness about urban destitution and social injustice.50 A closely related subgenre that gained popularity in Korea was factory reportage. As emblems of modernity, factories were an object of curiosity to a public that was for the most part kept in the dark about their inner workings. Writer Yi Pungmyŏng, in particular, specialized in reportage-like stories that exposed working environments in all their hardness while maintaining a veneer of fictionality.51 The part journalistic and part literary genre of reportage, which required writers to be 48. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 223. For more on Tretiakov’s activities, including his relation to Benjamin, see Fore, “Soviet Factography.” 49. Songjak, “Taet’amsagi kkakchŏngi ro pyŏnsin chamip” (A beggars’ den); Ssang S., “Chŏnyurhal tae angmagul” (A brothel); Yun Sŏngsang. “Yŏgamok pangmun’gi” (Women’s prison); and “B kija ŭi sugi” (Urban slums). For more examples of colonial reportage and their analysis, see Sunyoung Park, “A Forgotten Aesthetic.” 50. The parallel phenomenon in 1930s China is treated by Laughlin in Chinese Reportage, 13. 51. For a more detailed discussion of Yi’s literary career, see Chapter 4 and Sunyoung Park, “A Forgotten Aesthetic,” 56–59.

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both observers and participants in their subject matter, raised interest within the literary left as an ideal way to bridge the distance between theory and practice. The wall novel, a form of short prose fiction, was even more radical in its attempt to mix literary practice with action and social influence. Like reportage, the form originated in German leftist culture and was introduced to Korea via Japan.52 In his introduction to the genre in “On the Wall Novel” (Pyŏksosŏl e taehayŏ; 1932), Yi Sŏch’an simply defined it as “a brief story to be posted on the wall” at the gathering places of laborers. More expansively, the wall novel was an experiment in agitprop whereby a narrative would be condensed into a few pages that could be easily read during a work break. It was a genre, wrote Yi, “whose value lies in its immediacy and whose worth is contingent upon its influence on its laborer-readers.” 53 For the very reason of its radicalism, production of the wall novel in Korea was rather limited. Yi himself noted that it was supposed to be written at a workplace among workers and by workers themselves, and for that reason Korean writers had so far been able to produce only a few specimens of the genre. In its reorientation from aestheticism to social engagement, modern Korean literature underwent a change parallel to what Chinese critic Cheng Fangwu aptly described as a move “from a literary revolution to a revolutionary literature.” 54 The shift had a far-reaching significance in redefining the role of the writer as a public intellectual. Its many manifestations included the appearance of new activist literary forms, the popularization of literature as a commodity available to the masses, and a substantial transformation of the modes of literary production and consumption. Aestheticism never quite died in the rapidly diversifying cultural environment of colonial Korea. The high-modernist literature of the new reform movement, however, ceased to function normatively 52. See Samuel Perry’s comparative study of the Japa nese and the Korean wall novels in “Aesthetics for Justice,” 26–126 and Recasting Red Culture, 70–123. 53. Yi Sŏch’an, “Pyŏksosŏl e taehayŏ,” 112–13. See also Yi Kapki’s discussion of the wall novel in “Munye sip’yŏng.” The essay is signed with the KAPF critic’s pseudonym, Hyŏnin. 54. Cheng Fangwu, “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature.” As an initially romantic critic who later turned to socialism, Cheng in his intellectual trajectory poignantly exemplified the ideological shifts that were then taking place in China, Korea, and Japan.

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as the unique model for a progressive and truly modern culture. The influence of socialism endowed Korean intellectuals with the available vision of an “alternative modernity,” and that vision in turn allowed common Koreans to begin to move past the entrenched elitism of traditional mores. Korea as a community had started then on a path of slow but steady democratization, an endorsement of democratic values that was cultural and social long before it would become an established political reality at the end of the 1980s.

Toward a Materialist Aesthetic A materialist view of culture and society, which gave primacy to the economic sphere in the explanation of superstructural phenomena, was introduced for the first time to Korea by socialists in a radical departure from previous philosophical outlooks. Neo-Confucianism, as the most widely accepted belief system of Chosŏn Korea, had been fundamentally an idealist philosophy. In the Neo-Confucian worldview, all heavenly and earthly things were believed to have derived from the permanent and transcendental principle of li (reason), which took the material form of ki (energy) to manifest itself in the world. Li was considered to be the source of all goodness, whereas ki, which included one’s desires and emotions, encompassed evil and the transiency of all that is material and earthbound.55 Accordingly, the ideal of Confucian education was to cultivate one’s mind—and by extension, those of the people—so as to bring mental life into accord with the universal principle of li and thereby accomplish harmony and order in the material world. In spite of their rejection of various aspects of traditional Confucian culture, reformist intellectuals inherited from that culture an idealist approach to thinking about morality, society, and politics. An example of this modern form of idealism was Yi Kwangsu’s proposal to build a strong Korea by reforming “the ethnic character” of its citizens. In a controversial essay titled “A Proposal for National Reconstruction” (Minjok kaejoron; 1922), Yi ascribed what he called “[T]he decline of the Korean nation (minjok)” to the moral dissolution of its people, and he consequently recommended that “the reform of the moral, spiritual character of [Korean] people should be the fundamental priority in national 55. For an account of the Neo-Confucian worldview in Chosŏn Korea, see Chung Chaesik, A Korean Confucian Encounter with the Modern World, 85–130.

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reconstruction.” In making his argument, Yi appealed to the authority of famed French psychologist Gustav Le Bon, quoting his The Psychology of Peoples (1894) as saying that “all elements of a nation’s civilization, such as language, institution, ideology, religion, aesthetics, and literature, are the expressions of national psychology.”56 With its premise of racial geneticism, Le Bon’s theory served to legitimate the contemporary Western discourse on racism and imperialism, but it was evoked in Yi’s essay to emphasize the importance of moral education in strengthening the Korean nation.57 Departing from an idealist approach to the explanation of social and cultural phenomena, many Korean intellectuals found in socialism an inspiring emphasis on material conditions as key for the comprehension of colonial reality as well as history in general. One of the early upholders of a materialist approach was Sin Ch’aeho, who tellingly united in his critique new reformist intellectuals and the writers of classical Chinese poetry. Both groups of scholars, he believed, had been led by idealism to misjudge the nature of what is real or important: “Both are the same in their escape from reality. Isn’t reality, for example, the new iron bridge over the Han River? What about rice speculation in Inch’ŏn? The economic depression? The deserted state of Korean commerce and industry? Isn’t reality the mass emigration of peasants to Chientao?” 58 In another now famous confrontation, Pak Yŏnghŭi contested Yi Kwangsu’s claim about the Koreans’ inferior moral character by pointing out that the alleged “laziness” of Koreans had its material cause in the sheer lack of jobs due to suppressed industrial development in Korea and ethnically discriminatory employment policies.59 In these and other cases, entrenched narratives of Korean history and society were disrupted through a form of economic analysis that was distinctly novel for its time. Marx’s historical materialism was, beginning in the mid-1920s, an important cultural reference for Korean intellectuals. The first publication to relate Marx’s theory in Korea was Chŏng T’aesin’s “A Glimpse into Marx and His Materialism” (Makssŭ wa yumulsagwan ŭi ilp’ye; 1920). Here too, the article, written by one of the first-generation communist 56. Yi Kwangsu, “Minjok Kaejoron,” 30–31 and 34. 57. For the introduction and appropriation of Le Bon’s theory in Japan and Korea, see Hatano, Ilbon yuhaksaeng chakka yŏn’gu, 150–70. 58. Sin Ch’aeho, “Munyegye ch’ŏngnyŏn ege,” 281. 59. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Munhak sang ŭro pon Yi Kwangsu,” 81.

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leaders, deployed Marx’s views in order to provide a straightforward response to previous appeals to spiritual or moral explanations: “The progress of human society and the evolution of its institutions do not result from the change of ideals but from the development of material conditions within society. . . . Our moral criteria in promoting virtue and reproving evil, and even our religious beliefs, are also all derivative of and contingent on changes in material conditions. . . . Social transformation is [therefore] not contingent on spiritual progress but on changes in the mode of production and exchange.”60 Following this publication, historical materialism became one of the most frequently discussed philosophical issues in Korean periodicals.61 Korean intellectuals could also gain access to a systematic exposition of Marx’s views through translated books such as Sakai Toshihiko’s A General Summary of Socialist Theories (Shakai shugi gakusetsu taiyō; 1925). And by the late 1920s, Marx’s own writings became available in Japanese translation. Many Japanese anthologies of socialist theoretical writings—by Marx and Engels as well as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Lenin—enjoyed wide popularity among learned Korean readers.62 In addition to its epistemological relevance, historical materialism also had an impact on aesthetics and literary practice in colonial Korea. Many leftist literary works represented human life and society from the perspective of money, labor, and economic reality. Narratives would often introduce their characters by noting their class identities or through a description of their professions and living conditions. Characters of different classes would be seen interacting primarily through the mediation of various forms of money, such as wages, rent, debt, bribery, or allowances. Sex was typically represented in the commodified form of 60. Chŏng T’aesin [Uyŏngsaeng], “Makssŭ wa yumulsagwan,” 99–100. Uyŏngsaeng was one of Chŏng T’aesin’s pen names. Chŏng’s essay was based on Sakai Toshihiko’s “Introduction to Historical Materialism” (Yuibutsu shikan gaiyou; 1919). See Pak Chongrin’s close analysis of Chŏng’s essay in “1920 nyŏndae ch’o Chŏng T’aesin ŭi Marŭk’ŭsŭ chuŭi,’ ” 144. 61. See Kim Minhwan’s statistical study in “Ilche kangchŏmgi sahoejuŭi chapchi ŭi sahoejuŭi nonsŏl.” 62. See Cheon Jung-hwan, Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ilkki, 212–14. Some of Marx’s own writings were translated into Korean, including A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The German Ideology, and the “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” For a history of Korean translations of Marx’s writings, see Hong Yŏngdu, “Marŭk’usŭ chuŭi ch’ŏrhak sasang wŏnjŏn pŏnyŏksa.”

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prostitution or unequal exchange. These textual features had a strong presence in works as diverse as Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Three Generations, Yi Kiyŏng’s Hometown, Kang Kyŏngae’s The Human Predicament, and Ch’ae Mansik’s Muddy Currents. The overarching message was that, in the everyday life of ordinary Koreans, monetary calculation had to take precedence over emotional bonds and family ties. Attention to the economic aspect of life also frequently extended to a thematic interest in work and labor. Leftist narratives often gave detailed representations of the process of labor—whether agricultural, industrial, or domestic— as a way of depicting the mode of production that sustained the present social order. Another aesthetic feature to be linked with materialism was the writers’ renewed attention to places in their physicality, which sharply contrasted with the I-novelists’ preoccupation with emotional interiority and their corresponding general indifference to external surroundings.63 The shift from inward to outward narrative orientation clearly characterized Yŏm Sangsŏp’s transition from naturalism to realism in On the Eve of the Uprising (see Chapter 5). The narrative focus on places was also generic in reportage literature. In a rhetorical move symbolic of their materialist turn, many writers named their stories after their economically relevant narrative settings, explaining the origin of titles such as Kang Kyŏngae’s “Underground Village,” Yi Kiyŏng’s “Paper Factory Village,” and Yi Pungmyŏng’s “The Foundation Construction Site” (Kich’o kongsajang; 1932) and The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory. Marx’s materialist tenet “[I]t is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” found additional aesthetic expression in the narrative emphasis on bodily experiences.64 Bodies that are hungry, emaciated, diseased, battered, burned, and severed were featured prominently in leftist literary works. Just as the explicit, seemingly philistine, focus on money could offend the bourgeois aesthetic sensibility, so the “indiscreet” presentation of a sick or injured body had the subversive effect of offending the normative imperial and national ideal of a healthy, beautiful body. A damaged body in leftist literary works was not emblematic of a laborer’s mental disability or benightedness but rather symbolized the material conditions of him and his social class. By putting on display 63. See Gilbert, “Spatial and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishō Writings.” 64. Marx and Engels, “Preface,” 31.

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the abject bodies of laborers, leftist narratives dramatically portrayed the human cost of the capitalist exploitation and abuse resulting from the accelerated modernization of Korean society.65 The introduction of historical materialism provoked something very similar to an epistemological revolution in colonial Korea. After much emphasis had previously been placed on differences in moral character and civilization among nations, the colonial process itself came to be reconceptualized as at heart an economic phenomenon. Moreover, historical materialism variously influenced aesthetic conceptions and literary practices. In the course of theorizing a realist aesthetics, for example, Kim Kijin pointed to a materialist approach as a central feature of socialist literature and art, and he enjoined the authors of fiction to “describe a human character not in abstraction but through a close analysis of his material and social life.” “A man,” wrote Kim, “is a sum of his material and social relations.”66 A materialist anthropology was ultimately the essence of the socialist rethinking of history and society with humanity placed at their center. It was a radical departure from the earlier notion of a modern individual as an autonomous repository of thoughts and emotions.

Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea Reacting to the failed leadership of the aristocracy in Korea’s fin de siècle crisis, modern Korean intellectuals pursued the strengthening of their nation through a comprehensive rethinking of its ideological architecture. The ideals of citizenship, individualism, and the common status of all Koreans became the centerpieces of a reformist program that invested the arts, literature, and more generally culture as repositories of new values and future perspectives. As this chapter has shown, early in the twentieth century socialism became one of the dominant ideological forces to exercise an influence over the reform movement. Socialist intellectuals shared with previous reformists both a concern for Korea’s liberation and the ambition of modernizing the country in the face of Confucian tradition. They also disagreed with cultural reformists, however, in their views on society, history, and aesthetics. Denouncing the centuries’ old 65. For other studies of the representation of the body in colonial leftist literature, see Kyeong-Hee Choi, “Impaired Body as Colonial Trope,” and Jin-Kyung Lee, “Performative Ethnicities.” 66. Kim Kijin, “Pyŏnjŭngjŏk sasilchuŭi,” 65–66.

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alienation of the masses from literary culture, they advocated the cause of a “people’s literature” while recruiting new talents from the lower ranks of society. Resisting the modern tendency toward aestheticization and literary autonomy, the leftists propounded realism and social engagement as aesthetic guidelines for literary production. And finally, in response to the pervasive idealism of contemporary Korean culture, socialist thinkers adopted a materialist epistemological outlook that enabled them to understand phenomena like imperialism and colonization in terms that were economic rather than cultural or psychological. Leftist intellectuals were, in a way, both modern and antimodern in the complex ideological dynamics playing out in Korea. They were an integral part of a broad movement for reform and innovation, but they also directed some of their sharpest critiques against other modernizers and against Japan’s efforts at industrializing Korea. This double function of socialist culture in Korea was not a sign of ambivalence. Rather, socialist culture is best understood as the proponent of an alternative form of modernity in the cultural debates of colonial Korea. Although they witnessed and endorsed the compressed modernization of their country, socialist intellectuals were also opposed to a reformist movement that they perceived as elitist and prone to idealist and aestheticist cultural values. They searched for a different direction for Korea’s modernization and found that direction in the empowerment of the people, or the minjung, as the legitimate subject of Korea’s historical evolution. While it projected an alternative modernity upon Korea’s future, colonial leftist culture also engaged during its own time in a beneficial relationship with the institution of literature. Indeed, a mutually sustaining rapport linked socialist activism and literary production during the colonial era. At a time when no open political dissidence was allowed, socialist intellectuals found in literature a relatively free cultural space, and they were often able to use the cover of fiction to encode controversial messages without suffering heavy consequences. Conversely, literature as a modern practice found in left ist culture a means of legitimation and public vindication. Some of the masterpieces of colonial literature were composed by socialist writers, and still today writers in both Koreas enjoy a prestige that descends in part from literature’s political function during the colonial era. What was once a close relationship between literature and leftist culture has today become an element of distinction for both, endowing literature with political relevance while dignifying leftist politics with cultural depth.

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There are no doubt risks in associating literature with politics, and commentators have often criticized socialist culture for subjecting art to a political program. However, Walter Benjamin’s insights into 1930s Germany may help us better appreciate the significance of “politicized art” in the context of colonial Korea. Commenting on the co-optation of popu lar culture by Hitler’s regime, Benjamin observed that the fascist government “saw its salvation in giving the masses not their right [to the redistribution of property], but instead a chance to express themselves.” 67 Divorced from politics and the needs of the people, Benjamin noted, the commodified art of the National Socialists served to aestheticize politics while promoting the regime’s ends. “Communism responded by politicizing art,” wrote Benjamin, as that was the only way of pushing back on the Nazist appropriation of it. From this perspective, the politicization of art by the Korean left assumes positive significance as a pointed ideological countermove. Faced with Japan’s own aestheticization of the political, which in Korea took the form of a flight into the pan-Asianist dream, socialist intellectuals recognized that only writers and artists still had a modicum of freedom in an increasingly repressive colonial world.68 Art could not afford the luxury of autonomy within the periphery of a fascist empire. It became, for many Koreans, the only remaining space for resistance, and thus became the sphere wherein they expressed their aspirations for a modernity other than the one offered by both the empire and the accommodating bourgeoisie. 67. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 241. 68. For the aestheticization of politics in war time Japan, see Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism.

Part III Portraits

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Translating the Proletariat Debates and Literary Experience of the KAPF

When Marxism traveled to Korean shores as the triumphant ideology of the Russian Revolution in the late 1910s, it arrived at a society that was considerably different from both postrevolutionary Russia and its native land of Germany. The Koreans were yet to have experienced industrial transformation, and the social structure of the late Chosŏn dynasty remained largely intact. Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910 did not bring an immediate boost for industrialization. Rather, the colonial regime focused on increasing rice production by striking agreements with the local land-based aristocracy. As we saw in Chapter 3, new intellectuals with modern education had already emerged prior to the colonization to lead nationalist reform movements. Even so, their initiatives suffered a setback through colonization and a decade of military rule by Japan. It was on this social and cultural scene that the proletarian writers of the KAPF arrived in the mid-1920s. Its acronym standing for “Korea Artista Proleta Federatio,” the KAPF (1925–35) received harsh ideological evaluations in the two Koreas during the Cold War period. In South Korea, KAPF writers were for decades remembered as a group of well-meaning intellectuals who had gone awry by espousing communist ideology. In North Korea, on the other hand, the historical memory of the KAPF was nearly erased in the 1960s, when the cult of Kim Ilsung’s personality pushed the past literary tradition to the margins of national history. The KAPF was later reinstated to the North Korean literary canon after Kim’s death in 1994, whereas in the South, some redemption for it came during the

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1980s with its rescue within the interpretive paradigm of the minjung democratization movement.1 Perhaps the harshest critique of KAPF literature, however, has come more recently from scholars who have read it as an unsuccessful attempt at adapting Soviet-style socialist literature to the local conditions of colonial Korea. In an influential book that appeared in 1994, Brian Myers suggested that the literary productions of Han Sŏrya, Yi Kiyŏng, and other self-professed proletarian writers were marked by a rather extraordinary discrepancy between their socialist intentions and their actual content: “One is hard put to find any significant reflection of Marxist ideology in the literature of this early, so-called Sin’gyŏnghyang or New Tendency phase of the proletarian culture movement. Most of what was written in these years was marked by the same ethnocentric pastoralism and antiindustrialism as contemporary Korean ‘bourgeois’ naturalism.”2 If nominally the KAPF aimed to endorse and propagate an orthodox form of Marxism in Korean literature and arts, Myers suggests, a combination of  factors—including incompetence and ideological precommitment— determined its failure to do so. What we find instead in KAPF literature, according to Myers, is a mixture of anticolonial, antimodernist emotions that are sustained by a nostalgic exaltation of the purity of peasant life. Echoing Myers’s views, Tatiana Gabroussenko has recently suggested that, prior to the advent of North Korea’s Communist regime, “Korea had no established Communist intellectual tradition.” Epitomizing the KAPF’s failure to live up to its Marxist theoretical commitments, according to this critic, is the figure of Yi Kiyŏng who, “despite his self-description as a proletarian writer, largely remained a ‘peasant writer,’ predisposed to traditionalist sentiment and a gross idealization of premodern rural life.”3 1. For South Korean literary scholarship during Cold War decades, see Cho Yŏnhyŏn, Chosŏn hyŏndae munhaksa, and Kim Ujong, Han’guk hyŏndae sosŏlsa. For the changing North Korean historical accounts of the KAPF, see Pak Chongwŏn et al., Chosŏn munhaksa 19 segi mal–1925 and Ryu Man, Chosŏn munhaksa 8: 1926– 45. Kim Jae-Yong notes that it was from 1963 that North Korean literary historians began to erase the memory of the KAPF from their official narrative in favor of “the anti-Japanese revolutionary literature.” See Kim Jae-Yong, Pukhan munhak ŭi ihae, 157. For the postdemocratization South Korean scholarship, see, for instance, Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa, and Kim Yoon-sik and Chŏng Houng, Han’guk sosŏlsa. 2. Brian Myers, Han Sŏrya, 17. 3. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 167.

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In seeking a more charitable reading of the KAPF’s cultural experience, the present chapter situates the KAPF’s unorthodox literary production in the specific historical and social context from which it arose. How did these writers individually or collectively interpret and apply Marxist theory in their creative practice? What variables influenced and conditioned their changing interpretations? In pursuing these sorts of questions, I believe, we should emphasize the role of the KAPF writers as cultural translators, specifically focusing on the ways in which they endeavored to parse the international socialist concept of “the proletariat” within their changing social and cultural conditions. Proletarian literature is by definition one that reflects the point of view of the proletariat. The actual referent of “proletariat,” however, historically presented great variability, and understanding it posed a challenge to Korean critics and writers alike.

New Tendency Literature and the Proletarian Grotesque Written in a preindustrial colony, the initial literary output of KAPF writers, known as New Tendency literature, appears at first glance to consist of simple tales of paupers rather than an ideologically conscious proletarian literature. This early socialist literature, however, owed its major inspiration to anarchism more than to Marxism. Its historical significance lay in giving literary expression to the epistemological revolution that was taking place in Korea with the propagation of socialist ideas. The writers of New Tendency literature reclaimed the paupers from unfortunate social losers into subversive victims of an unjust social system. In reinterpreting poverty in colonial Korea by viewing them through the lens of class, KAPF writers effectively turned an indistinct mass of servants, rural laborers, and factory workers into a compact and more readily recognizable proletariat. The official name for the early socialist literature came from Pak Yŏnghŭi’s 1925 essay, “New Tendency Literature and Its Status in the Literary World” (Sin’gyŏnghyangp’a munhak kwa kŭ mundanjŏk chiwi). In the essay, Pak discussed a group of recently published literary works that commonly featured, as he wrote, “a protagonist who achieves selfenlightenment through his life experiences and protests the status quo in aspiration for a new social order.” The writers of this new vein of literature, Pak noted, all identified with a broadly understood socialist cause: “[They] are all venting their discontent with the established

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social order and are demanding the abolition of the existing social injustice and violence, demonstrating in the process their ardor to emancipate proletarian Korea.” The essay served as the KAPF’s de facto manifesto, emphatically announcing the arrival of a literary force that would give precedence to “outcry over form, reality over description, power over beauty, and protest over compromise.” 4 Behind Pak’s manifesto were so-called hunger-and-murder stories that depicted the impoverishment and desperation of working-class Koreans and their spontaneous acts of rebellion. With titles such as “The Poor,” “Fight,” “Fury,” “Madness,” and “Starvation and Murder,” these stories gave representation to the everyday struggle of office clerks, factory laborers, day laborers, unemployed intellectuals, young students, peasants, prostitutes, and so on. Several of these characters either plot or enact some sort of revolt, often in the form of an act of arson or murder, against supposed oppressors who may include exploitative relatives, wealthy Korean landlords, Japanese factory owners, or the colonial authorities.5 The socialist theme of class struggle frequently overlapped with an anti-imperialist theme of ethnic conflict. Pak Kilsu’s “Dirt Diggers” (Ttang p’amŏngnŭn saramdŭl; 1925), for example, treated the plight of Korean peasants as Japanese settlers took their land; similarly, Ch’oe Sŏhae’s “Escape” (T’alch’ulgi; 1925) recounted the down-spiraling fate of a Korean emigrant in Manchuria, where Koreans could not own land because of their status as an ethnic minority. A theme of socialist internationalism, however, was also present in these stories. Song Yŏng’s “Blast Furnace” (Yonggwangno; 1925), for instance, told the story of a romance between a male Korean factory worker and a female Japanese colleague. Illustrative of many generic characteristics of New Tendency literature is Yi Kiyŏng’s early tale titled “The Poor” (Kananhan saramdŭl; 1925). Written as a diary-like confessional narrative, the story focuses on the autobiographical character of Sŏngho, a student returnee from Japan who has spent many years wandering around the country. He is currently 4. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Sin’gyŏnghyangp’a munhak kwa kŭ mundanjŏk chiwi,” 121–22. 5. In the given order, Kim Kijin, “Pulgŭn chwi” (unemployed intellectual and day laborers); Yi Iksang, “Kwangnan” (office clerk); Song Yŏng, “Nŭrŏganŭn muri” (factory laborer); Yi Kiyŏng, “Kananhan Saramdŭl” (unemployed intellectual); Ch’oe Haksong, “Kia wa saryuk” (peasant); Ch’oe Sŭngil, “Tu chŏlmŭn saram” (prostitute); Chu Yosŏp, “Sarin” (prostitute); Pak Kilsu, “Ttang p’amŏngnŭn saramdŭl” (peasant’s son). Haksong is Ch’oe Sŏae’s pen name.

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living in the provinces, where the scarcity of opportunities makes it hard for him to sustain himself and his wife. Penniless and hungry, and in desperate need of a job, Sŏngho sends a telegram to one of his friends in Seoul, asking for help. He then visits another friend’s house, where he meets an ex-police officer who has been laid off because of his participation in an antiracist strike. Back home, Sŏngho finds his wife in tears. She tells him that she has been to his well-off cousin’s house to beg for a sack of rice only to be scornfully dismissed. Upon hearing this news, Sŏngho bursts into anger, and the narrator intervenes to parse his frustration into the language of class struggle: “There is something that sharply divides the cousin from [Sŏngho]. It is without doubt class-consciousness. Now is the peak of the capitalist age, in which the haves and have-nots are polarized like the north and the south. Even brothers, or parents and children, are divided into the propertied and the unpropertied. Since class interest precedes family ethics, they kill each other and become archenemies. . . . What remains is only a lifeand-death class struggle.” 6 Soon after this, Sŏngho receives a telegram containing his friend’s negative reply to his request for a job. At this point, finally driven beyond his limits, Sŏngho falls prey to a frightful vision of murderous rampage. He has a dream of nightmarish horror, in which the women in his family go insane and run berserk at a nagging usurer, stabbing the man to death with knives and sickles. In their furious madness, the women also kill their own infant children by dashing them to the ground. Sprawling in the yard are “the pathetic corpses of the youngest children resembling hairless newborn birds. One child had her neck broken and the other had his belly burst. In front of the gate lay the mustached usurer in a bucket full of blood. His corpse looked terrifying with its scowling eyes and clenched teeth.”7 Awakening from his nightmare, Sŏngho breaks into wild running, with a burning desire to take revenge upon the evil world. Distinctive of stories like “The Poor” is their use of the rhetorical strategy of “the proletarian grotesque,” the deliberately shocking, gross description of working-class poverty. The phrase was coined by Michael Denning in reference to 1930s American leftist writers’ appropriation of the antirealist, avant-gardist aesthetic of the grotesque to depict such discomforting realities as postdepression destitution, racist violence, and the 6. Yi Kiyŏng, “Kananhan saramdŭl,” 80. 7. Ibid., 84.

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rise of fascism.8 During the 1920s, a similar rhetorical device had been popular in both Korea and Japan. Aside from “The Poor,” grotesque imageries abound in many other works of early Korean proletarian literature: the “dirty, ugly, and poor” shacks, eyesores amid urban splendor, in Yi’s “Madness” (Silchin; 1927); a beggar’s burned face resembling “the rotten face of a corpse” in Ch’oe Sŭngil’s “A Beggar with a Burnt Face” (Kŏrin tendungi; 1926); the dismembered and disemboweled corpse of a starved revolutionary in Kim Kijin’s “Red Rat” (Pulgŭn chwi; 1924).9 This phenomenon is particularly notable in the writers who studied in Japan, where the emergence of proletarian literature coincided with that of experimental modernist arts best represented by the avant-garde medley of the Shinkankakuha (New Sensationalists). In her study of interwar Japanese popular culture, Miriam Silverberg observes the frequent association of the grotesque in contemporary cultural codes with social inequalities and the consequent living practices of the “down-and-out” people, including beggars and vagabonds.10 As a rhetorical strategy, the proletarian grotesque served to shock readers out of their ordinary complacency, confronting them with the tragic human costs of capitalist development joined with the persistence of strict social hierarchy. Quite a few literary critics have dismissed New Tendency literature for a perceived lack of theoretical sophistication. These literary works, it is said, generally exhibit only a rudimentary understanding of Marxist theory, revealing little reflection on the dialectical mechanism of modern capitalist society beyond the generic opposition between the propertied (yusanja) and the unpropertied (musanja). In addition, the protagonists of these stories would typically commit an individual act of revenge, critics have noted, forgoing the more usual socialist practice of joining other workers in protest. For these reasons, even sympathetic critics have often regarded New Tendency literature as a naïve “literature of poverty” that “naturally” emanated from the aggravating material conditions of common Koreans with little ideological inspiration.11 8. Denning, The Cultural Front, 122–23. 9. Yi Kiyŏng, “Silchin”; Ch’oe Sŭngil, “Kŏrin tendungi”; and Kim Kijin, “Pulgŭn chwi.” 10. Silverberg, Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense, 29–30. 11. In addition to the aforementioned studies of Brian Myers and Gabroussenko, see also Kim Yoon-sik and Kim Hyŏn, Han’guk munhaksa, 160– 63, and Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa, 315–32. In a rare booklength study focused on New Tendency literature, Pak Sangjun also critiqued the

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There is some value to the previous assessment, as stories like “The Poor” do seem to bear only a spurious Marxist influence. Yi Kiyŏng’s narrative is particularly interesting in this respect. As my summary shows, the author planted the Marxist terminology of class consciousness and class struggle right at the core of the story, as Sŏngho indignantly reacts to his cousin’s refusal to help him. At the same time, however, the socialist rhetoric remained abstract and rather alien to the concreteness of the rest of the confessional narrative. Besides, Sŏngho seems to deplore the notion of class struggle, which he sees as the force that has destroyed “family ethics,” whereas a more orthodox Marxist protagonist would be likely to embrace the cause of class struggle and proletarian revolution with enthusiasm. Taking a slightly different point of view, however, we should not immediately interpret Yi’s shaky grasp of Marxist theory as a sign of “naïveté” and “ideological immaturity.”12 While only gesturing toward Marxist theory at this stage, Yi and other New Tendency writers were not quite offering unreconstructed ideological statements. To the contrary, both the generalized notion of rich–poor antagonism and the violent ending in individual rebellion were legacies of the anarchist understanding of socialism that remained hegemonic in Korea until the early 1920s (see Chapter 2). In contrast to Marxist theory, anarchism’s looser doctrine served well the theoretical needs of New Tendency writers, as they could deploy the vaguer concept of “the dispossessed” to assert not only the interests of industrial laborers but also those of urban day laborers, peasants, women, pauperized intellectuals, and colonial Koreans in general. Also, the anarchist advocacy of individual terrorist action had a natural popular appeal for Koreans in its cathartic simplicity, as it resonated with the widespread feelings of vengeance after Japan’s violent suppression of the 1919 uprisings (fig. 4.1). As we shall observe in the next section, anarchist literature grew unpopular in the mid-1920s, following the Marxist turn of the KAPF and its members. Even nowadays, the Marxist critique of New Tendency literature is widely shared among South Korean literary historians. In the present-day context, however, refocusing on anarchism can help us conventional reading of the New Tendency period as a mere transitional stage prior to the advent of “real” proletarian literature, in his Han’guk kŭndae munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng, 151–53. 12. Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa, 292.

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Figure 4.1 A rare surviving still from Na Un’gyu’s legendary fi lm Arirang (1926). In its representation of violent rebellion, the film resonates with Yi Kiyŏng’s “The Poor” and other stories of early left ist New Tendency literature. Courtesy of the Korean Film Archive.

appreciate the discursive effects of New Tendency literature on the Korean culture of its time. The antagonism and tension that pervade a story like “The Poor” are symptomatic of an important epistemological revolution in the public conception of poverty in early twentiethcentury Korea. As is suggested by historical sources as well as many a proverb (“Heaven ordains the rich”), poverty had been regarded as the poor individual’s own responsibility in traditional Korea, in line with the frequent Confucian association of national poverty with the moral flaws of the ruling monarch. In the newly hegemonic discourse of Western liberalism, too, poverty was often viewed as an individual’s liability that could be overcome through his assiduous self-application. By contrast, in New Tendency literature poverty assumed a novel significance as an inevitable consequence of an iniquitous social system, a consequence that would only worsen with the perpetuation of the status quo. Only after poverty was thus reconceived as a socially reproduced phenomenon with a complex underlying mechanism could the condition of the poor become a reason for rebellion and a subject matter worthy of

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writers’ aesthetic representation. In this respect, again the frequent use of grotesque imagery acted as an amplifier of these writers’ social message. In their perhaps unsophisticated depiction of desperate rebellion, New Tendency stories were still capable of powerfully and effectively signaling this epistemological shift. As the first wave of the KAPF’s literary production, New Tendency literature gave immediate recognition to the newly formed proletarian literary group. Writers such as Yi Kiyŏng, Ch’oe Sŏhae, and Song Yŏng expanded the thematic sphere of modern Korean literature beyond the previous focus on the privileged elites, addressing the lives of workingclass Koreans. As KAPF writers strove to produce a literature that could inspire and motivate a mass movement, however, they started to move away from the doctrinal simplicity of anarchism toward a more systematic, Marxist revolutionary outlook. In the next section, we will examine the ways in which KAPF critics tried to align the group’s literary output more closely to Marxist doctrine in the following years, and we will look at what impact this move had on the writers’ creative practice.

From Parable Storytelling to Labor Reportage In January 1927, Pak Yŏnghŭi released new critical guidelines that called for a rather explicit Marxist indoctrination of KAPF literature. In the essay “A Literary Critic’s Attitude in the Age of Class Struggle,” Pak sought to establish new criteria for proletarian literary works and began by questioning the definition of proletarian literature: “That [proletarian literature] is about the laborers (nodongja), the proletariat (p’uroret’aria), is a matter of course. Yet the subject matter alone does not make a literary work proletarian. If so, there are already many stories on the proletariat, and they would all belong to proletarian literature. True proletarian literature must represent class xx [struggle], which is dynamically unfolding in the life of the proletariat and is driven by its class consciousness with a vision of its xx [historical orientation].”13 Notable in this passage is Pak’s replacement of the unpropertied (musanja) with the laborers (nodongja) as the interpretation of proletariat. Like “laborer,” the Korean term nodongja generally refers to modern industrial workers and urban day laborers in exclusion of peasants and other people of traditionally lower classes. Pak also distinguished 13. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “T’ujaenggi e innŭn munye pip’yŏngga,” 188.

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the “true proletarian literature” of the future from its less desirable precedents. If previous proletarian stories had focused on depicting the misery and indignation of poor Koreans, future socialist literature would more properly represent class consciousness within a full-fledged Marxist historical vision. As many KAPF members had a limited knowledge of Marxist theory at this time, Pak also gave more practical instructions that would facilitate the writers’ compliance with his new guidelines. In particular, he recommended replacing the “catastrophic and individualist” endings of New Tendency literature with more “optimistic and collectivist” ones.14 Pak’s urging KAPF writers to go beyond the “voluntaristic” literature of the New Tendency coincided with the mainstreaming of a MarxistLeninist line in the Korean socialist movement. In formulating his critical guidelines, Pak drew from Aono Suekichi’s “Natural Growth and Objective Consciousness” (Shizen seichō to mokuteki ishiki; 1926), in which the Japanese critic argued that, although a proletarian literature of “natural growth” might be satisfied with a mere depiction of laborers’ life experiences, a true proletarian literature should show “objective consciousness”—that is, an awareness of the social and historical significance of the depicted class struggle.15 Soon after making these theoretical statements, Pak and the KAPF took the concrete step of expelling a few of the orga nization’s anarchist members. In this process of separation, many former anarchists shifted their allegiance to Marxism, mainly due to the perceived efficacy of mass organization over individual action as a way of pursuing a social revolution. By the end of 1927, the KAPF had reorganized itself from a broadly socialist literary fraternity to a strictly Marxist-Leninist cultural league with an extensive network of branch offices throughout Korea as well as in Tokyo. Pak’s critical guidelines had a formative impact on the literary output of the KAPF in the following years, as writers sought to produce 14. Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Singyŏnghyangp’a munhak kwa musanja,” 205. 15. Aono, “Shizen seichō to mokuteki ishiki,” 78. Aono was a prominent critic and a translator of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and in his essay he was directly applying Lenin’s theory for political action to literary creation. In Japan, Aono’s theory also resonated with Fukumoto Katsuo’s argument for the establishment of Marxist orthodoxy within the Japa nese socialist movement. The argument was introduced to Korea by a group of younger activist returnees known as the Third Front (Che 3 chŏnsŏnp’a), whom Pak enlisted into the KAPF in the middle of 1927. For a closer comparative study of the literary theories of Aono and Pak, see Cho Chin’gi, Hanil p’ŭro munhangnon, 44–51.

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literature that would effectively apply an orthodox Marxist outlook to the local realities of colonial Korea. An earliest and representative example of this period’s KAPF literature is Yi Kiyŏng’s “Extra” (Hooe; 1927). The story begins with a group of steel workers spiritedly talking over that day’s event at the factory. As it transpires, the workers are all members of an unofficial labor union. On that day, they stopped Wŏnsik, a nonunion member suspected of spying for the supervisor, from bullying a timid worker named Sŏngdŭk. When they gather for a union meeting that evening, Sŏngdŭk unexpectedly joins them to say thanks to his colleagues. The workers warmly welcome him into the union and together go on to discuss plans for a night school, their concerns for recently laid-off members, and their support for an upcoming strike at a neighboring power plant. On the next day, the workers who fought Wŏnsik are summoned by the supervisor, who promptly lays them off on account of their use of violence. The workers openly protest, and Sŏngdŭk takes courage to speak out for their sake. His speech impresses and stirs his coworkers, who start chasing after Wŏnsik and cause a commotion in the process. The story ends with the extraordinary edition of the evening newspaper (“Extra”), which reports the protest along with the simultaneous strike at a power plant. Although “Extra” remains as one of Yi’s most impassioned depictions of labor struggle, the story is emblematic of the abstraction and stiltedness that affected much of KAPF literature during the late 1920s. Its opening scene, for instance, introduces the union members without giving their names, distinguishing them only by minimally described physical features such as height, age, or appearance. Much of the narrative consists of dialogues scattered with Marxist terms such as “exploitation” (ch’akch’wi), “class consciousness” (kyegŭp ŭisik), “strike” (p’aŏp), and “battle” (t’ujaeng), some of which are accentuated with dots in its original publication. A worker even mentions “dialectical materialism” (yumul pyŏnjŭngbŏp), which he exemplifies by the bourgeoisie’s paradoxical relationship with capital accumulation: the accumulation, he notes, “fattens the bourgeois” but will ultimately lead to “their digging their own grave” by causing the proletarian revolution.16 The narrative repeatedly references “class consciousness,” with the workers comparing their self-awakening during a strike to a religious epiphany. As the plot builds toward the final protest, the opening walk of the laborers transforms into a symbolic march of the proletariat toward their predetermined historical triumph. 16. Yi Kiyŏng, “Hooe,” 193.

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Stories such as “Extra” are perhaps best approached as parables of class struggle. They are didactic and somewhat oversimple attempts by their writers to master the esoteric-sounding principles of Marxism. Their narratives delivered doctrinal lessons and rarely gave plausible representations of the reality of labor activism. Relevant here is Katerina Clark’s proposal to read the Soviet novels produced under the aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism as “parable[s] of the working-out of Marx-Leninism in history.”17 Like their Soviet counterparts, late1920s KAPF writers wanted their stories to function as a public forum through which readers would be educated about the Marxist doctrine. A distinctive trait throughout this period’s KAPF literature was abstraction from and stylization of reality. The opening scene of “Extra,” for instance, blurs the characters’ individuality in order to emphasize their collective class identity. The story also leaves its setting vague, as we only learn that the laborers live in a certain factory district and work at “a steel factory.” Lacking individuality and specificity, stories such as “Extra” are notable for constructing a narrative space of the proletarian sublime in which the life world of laborers is distilled into the ideals of Marxist theory. As Jin-Kyung Lee has observed, the Marxist rhetoric in such stories “makes absent the materiality of [the workers’] bodies and their living through their insertion into the abstract world of labor, production, and revolution.”18 Parable and abstract storytelling were more prominent in KAPF literature in the late 1920s than in any other period. Kim Yŏngp’al’s “A Certain Spectacle” (Ŏttŏn kwanggyŏng; 1927), for instance, is another story of a labor strike that shares in the idealism of “Extra”; Cho Myŏnghŭi’s celebrated The Naktong River (Naktonggang; 1927) opens with a biblicalstyle narration that recounts a history of Korea from its beginning to the present age of social activism; and Yi Kiyŏng’s satire “In Search of Light” (Kwangmyŏng ŭl ch’ajasŏ; 1930) treaded into the territory of fables with its depiction of his “proletarian” mice triumphing over the bourgeois owner of the house that they inhabit.19 17. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 9. 18. Jin-Kyung Lee, “Performative Ethnicities,”115. 19. Cho Myŏnghŭi, The Naktong River; Kim Yŏngp’al, “A Certain Spectacle”; and Yi Kiyŏng, “In Search of Light.” Yi’s story was a radicalized sequel to his earlier satirical story, “Chwi iyagi.”

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Korea’s case, however, differed from that of the Soviet Union, where the socialist realist literature became a repository of state myths after the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. In colonial Korea, the socialist parable was a transitional genre, as dissatisfied writers soon sought to resolve the blatant discrepancy between their theoretical knowledge and local social reality. Their efforts led to the most enduring literary debate of the colonial period: the realism controversy, which involved virtually all the prominent leftist writers inside and outside the KAPF. Kim Kijin began the debate by addressing the problem of a lack of verisimilitude in contemporary proletarian literature in his 1928 essay “Dialectical Realism.”20 The target of Kim’s criticism was what he provocatively called the “intellectual masturbation” of KAPF writers, by which he meant their absorbed insistence on a dogmatic translation of Marxist theory into fiction. A proletarian writer, Kim argued, “must rather be a realist”: “[It is] an unscientific attitude to ignore existing discrepancies and to make white into red to one’s liking. The bourgeois must be described as they are. The proletariat must be pictured as beaten if they indeed are beaten. . . . We should avoid making such a blunder as to portray a peasant who is illiterate and yet gives a lecture on Marxist economics.”21 In Kim’s essays published around the time, the issue of creating plausible proletarian characters was tied to his broader argument for making KAPF literature easier to read in order to facilitate its propagation among its original target readership of working-class Koreans. Kim’s proposal initially encountered strong resistance from the younger radical leaders of the KAPF, who regarded it as conservative and reactionary.22 In the following years, however, Kim’s point of view gradu20. The title of Kim’s essay was directly inspired by the theorization of dialectical materialist realism, a new literary policy adopted by the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers; 1928–32) a year before. Although Kim’s argument conformed to the RAPP’s general orientation in his emphasis on enhancing verisimilitude and psychological portraiture, however, the main focus of the essay was not the new Soviet aesthetic protocol, but rather the internal debate on verisimilitude among Korean leftist writers. 21. Kim Kijin, “Pyŏnjŭngjŏk sasilchuŭi,” 62 and 67. 22. While Kim drew from Japa nese left ist critics such as Kurahara Korehito and Hayashi Fusao in formulating his argument for the popularization of proletarian literature, his immediate motivation also came from the increasing political strains on the KAPF since the 1928 enactment of the more stringent, revised version of the Peace Preservation Law. The newly intensified police crackdown on socialists had left the orga nization nearly paralyzed by 1929, making it difficult for

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ally made its impact felt, heightening the general appreciation of experiential reality and verisimilitude among proletarian writers, both in creative writing and in critical reception. Yi Kiyŏng was one of the fi rst writers to heed Kim’s critical advice.23 His story “Papermakers” (Chongi ttŭnŭn saramdŭl; 1930) markedly differed from earlier proletarian parables in its concrete settings, believable characters, and the use of the vernacular rather than a more stilted doctrinal language. The story is set in a mountain valley village whose inhabitants have been paper handicraftsmen for generations. Into this village moves a modern papermaking factory, bringing along such novelties as electricity, telephones, bicycles, and motors that replace donkeys. The villagers, who are at first excited over the new wonders of modernity and their possible benefits, become disappointed when the factory starts offering only a minimum wage. The workers organize a strike under the guidance of a mentor, a mysterious learned laborer nicknamed saennim (gentleman). This mentor, however, disappears early in the strike, presumably having been kidnapped and incarcerated at the owner’s behest. The remaining workers waver and divide as the factory owner enjoins them to resume their work and even imprisons some of them, Their strike ultimately fails, yet the narrative hints at an optimistic future as it comments that the workers are waiting for the mentor’s return, with “the seeds he had sown in their minds growing by day and night.”24 Gabroussenko has unfavorably contrasted “Papermakers” with Maxim Gorky’s Mother, suggesting that Yi’s literary practice lacked originality and “bordered on plagiarism” when compared with the Russian giant’s work.25 Yet the relationship between the two would seem to be KAPF members to openly communicate with each other and sharply decreasing their literary productivity. Yet all the more because of the increased threats and sacrifices, the more radical members of the KAPF would disdain any gesture toward moderation as an unacceptable defeatist compromise. See my account of the KAPF’s younger, more radical members’ response to Kim in Chapter 2. 23. Another writer was Han Sŏrya, who wrote “A Transitional Time” (Kwadogi; 1929). The story depicts the homecoming of a Korean emigrant returnee from Manchuria, who feels alienated in his industrializing hometown and eventually transforms into a factory laborer himself. The story departed from the earlier dogmatic proletarian literature in that Han used Marx’s historical materialist worldview not to devise a schematic tale of class struggle but rather to question the legitimacy of the colonial development. See Han Sŏrya, “Kwadogi.” 24. See Yi Kiyŏng, “Chongi ttŭnŭn saramŭl,” 189. 25. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 75.

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better perceived as a case of dynamic intertextuality in which Yi creatively adapted Gorky’s classic novel.26 The plot of “Papermakers,” we may say, was conceived in the prologue of Mother: both works begin with a description of a factory as a living hell of laborers, with its regimental sirens and exploitative work schedules; and Mother’s prologue, like Yi’s story, also depicts the pattern of workers’ everyday lives, including their family worries, their dissolute drinking habits, and their occasional encounter with a stranger who brings “a faint shadow of hope.”27 Rather than lessening the originality of “Papermakers,” however, these similarities render all the more impressive Yi’s success in depicting the local reality of colonial Korea. Yi accomplished this through a series of realistic aesthetic decisions, such as providing an elaborate and detailed description of the papermaking process as well as having his traditional handicraftsmen-turned-factory workers speak in the vernacular dialect of the Kyŏngsang province. The mysterious mentor himself uses ordinary language: instead of giving a formal speech on capitalist exploitation, he explains the necessity of class consciousness by saying that unawakened workers are treated like “talking things” (mal hanŭn mulgŏn) by their employers. For these merits, “Papermakers” was heralded as exemplary of a new, more experiential proletarian literature and was included as Yi’s representative work in The Anthology of Seven KAPF Writers (1932) under the revised title of “Paper Factory Village” (Cheji kongjangch’on; 1932).28 Although “Papermakers” heralded better times, the question of verisimilitude remained a persistent concern among KAPF writers throughout the 1920s. The labor movement was at a high tide in late-1920s Korea, yet the majority of the writers had little or no real firsthand experience of modern factory labor. Nor could they easily gain access to colonial factories, where no labor law was enforced and the rampant abuse of workers went along with restrictions on the open circulation of information.29 So 26. See Thornber’s discussion of dynamic versus passive intertextuality in Empire of Texts, 218–19. Gorky was Yi’s favorite Russian writer not just for his towering reputation in the Soviet Union but also because Yi felt a personal affinity to Gorky who, like him, had lived many years as a vagabond. See Yi Kiyŏng, “Yisang kwa noryŏk” (1957), 70. 27. Gorky, Mother, 9. 28. The anthology K’ap’u chakka 7 injip did not survive censorship, but Yi’s revised story was published in North Korea. See its reprint, “Cheji kongjangch’on.” 29. Eckert, Offspring of Empire, 191.

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the period’s stories about the Korean industrial proletariat were mostly written based on the writers’ limited secondhand knowledge. It was partly in reaction to these problems that the genre of labor reportage emerged as a new artistic avenue for proletarian writers in the early 1930s. As an investigative experiential report on underrepresented social settings, reportage had been first popularized in Korea during the 1920s by the magazine Pyŏlgŏn’gon. The journalists of this magazine would typically venture into seedy neighborhoods, pay incognito visits to slums, brothels, and opium dens, and then publish their eyewitness investigative reports of the proceedings. These reports made entertaining reading for their sensationalistic quality, but they also served the critical purpose of exploring the underbelly of urban modernity in Seoul. KAPF writers, as well as unaffi liated leftists, took a keen interest in this genre because it promised to deliver a new activist aesthetic that could easily bridge theoretical premises and literary practice. Moreover, the rise of labor reportage was also spurred by the Comintern’s 1928 resolution on the Korean question. That resolution urged Korean socialists to focus on building a stronger alliance with laborers and peasants instead of cooperating with nationalist elites.30 In response, KAPF writers redoubled their efforts to get closer to the working-class masses by infiltrating sites such as factories, night schools, and the meetings of underground reading societies.31 What may be called “the reportage movement” was pursued in two directions at large. On the one hand, leftist magazines such as Hyesŏng (Comet; 1931–32), Che ilsŏn (First front; 1932–33), Sin kyedan (New steps; 1932–33), Sidae kongnon (Contemporary public forum; 1931), and Puin kongnon (Women’s public forum; 1932) actively solicited contributions from workers themselves. In adopting this strategy, left ist journalists were following the example of the worker-correspondent movement in other countries such as Germany, Russia, China, and Japan.32 On the other hand, critics encouraged proletarian writers to produce works based on their field experience, incorporating raw materials such as factory newsletters and strike reports in their novels.33 This was, 30. See Dae-sook Suh, Documents of Korean Communism, 243–56. 31. For a more detailed account, see Sunyoung Park, “A Forgotten Aesthetic.” 32. Regarding the reportage movements of other countries, see the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers, “To All Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers, To All Workers’ Correspondents”; Fore, “Soviet Factography”; Laughlin, Chinese Reportage; and Ruporutāju shū. 33. See, for instance, Kwŏn Hwan, “Chosŏn yesul undong.”

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in effect, a keen literary appropriation of a popular surrealist experimental technique. Both the testimonial representations of labor experiences and the inclusion of external documents reflected the innate visual orientation of the new genre of reportage. Observing the KAPF’s inclination toward an aesthetic of immediacy, as well as its investment in the production of visual cultural artifacts such as comics and films, Theodore Hughes has argued that its proletarian literature “relies on the verbal invocation of the visual.”34 The reportage movement yielded results. During the four years between 1930 and 1933, Korean magazines published a number of testimonial reportages written in the varied forms of diary, letter, and confession. Fictional works with reportage elements became typical in the period’s literature by KAPF writers. For example, Kim Namch’ŏn wrote “Factory Fraternity” (Konguhoe; 1932) and “The Literary Club” (Munye kurakpu; 1934) based on his experience of participating in a labor strike at the Pyongyang Rubber Factory; Kim Kijin published The Sound of Waves (Haejoŭm; 1930), a realistic novel about a fishermen’s strike; Han Sŏrya produced a vivid portrayal of peasants working as day laborers at an irrigation construction site in “Sand Guard” (Sabang kongsa; 1932); and Pak Hwasŏng, an unaffiliated socialist woman writer, attracted attention with her detailed account of a strike by sewage construction workers in “Sewer Construction” (Hasudo kongsa; 1932).35 In addition, the reportage movement brought new literary talents to the KAPF. Yi Pungmyŏng, a former employee of the Hamhŭng Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory, then the biggest factory in East Asia, went on to become the most productive and accomplished writer of the genre, penning works such as The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory (Chilso piryo kongjang; 1932) (fig. 4.2), “The Ammonia Tank” (Ammonia t’aengk’ŭ; 1932), “A Factory Girl” (Yŏgong; 1933), and “A Sketch from a Dark Night” (Ŏdum esŏ chuŭn sk’ech’i; 1933). For their combination of daring representation of class consciousness with the intimate details of modern factory life, these works are today acknowledged as some of the most effective of Korean proletarian literature.36 34. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, 26. 35. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Konguhoe” and “Munye kurakpu”; Han Sŏrya, “Sabang kongsa”; Pak Hwasŏng, “Hasudo kongsa”; and Kim Kijin, Haejoŭm. 36. Yi Pungmyŏng, “Ammonia t’aengk’ŭ,” Chilso piryo kongjang, “Ŏdum esŏ chuŭn sk’ech’i,” and “Yŏgong.” Yi’s initial newspaper serialization of The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory in Chosŏn ilbo was interrupted by colonial authorities. In 1935 he published a revised and complete version in Japa nese under the new title of “The

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Figure 4.2 Yi Sangch’un’s woodblock print for Yi Pungmyŏng’s novella The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory, from Chosŏn ilbo (May 29, 1932). Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

Between 1927 and the early 1930s, KAPF literature slowly progressed from abstract, parable-like storytelling to more fleshed-out stories as well as vivid documentary pieces of labor reportage. We may read this progression as a symptom of the writers’ struggle to convert the international concept of “proletariat” into a viable subject matter of their fictions. As the KAPF leadership encouraged writers to depict the proletariat as the idealized subject of class struggle, writers such as Yi Kiyŏng at first found it difficult to reconcile the doctrinal constraints with the imperative of verisimilitude. Soon, however, these writers began to cultivate the genre of labor reportage, through which they tried to record in the vernacular voices of Korean workers the concrete details of their labor experiences. Because labor reportage literature mostly focused on portraying factory or other urban workers, the writers risked neglecting peasants, who were the absolute majority of the Korean working class. Accordingly, beginning in the early 1930s, the critics of the KAPF actively engaged in the discussion of peasant literature (nongmin munhak) alongside the promoFirst Battle” (Shojin) in Bungaku hyōron (Literary criticism). For its Korean translation, see Chilso piryo kongjang (1995).

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tion of labor reportage literature. We move on in the next section to examine the KAPF’s literary development in that direction.

Peasant Literature and the Collective Novel Insofar as modern literature was a product of Western-educated intellectuals, it was not only elitist but also had an urban orientation. This tendency was true of both cultural reformists and left ist writers, both of which groups held a teleological historical perspective in which peasants figured as the dark and backward “others” of the modern elites as well as the industrial proletarian avant-gardes. Even when Yi Kwangsu and Kim Tongin turned nativist in the mid-1920s in the cause of national literature (minjok munhak), they mostly wrote historical novels about monarchs and the urban aristocracy. Thus it was not until the early 1930s that “peasant literature” came to be established as a subcategory of modern Korean literature in the contexts of the Red Peasant Union Movement as well as the government-sponsored rural revitalization movement.37 The debate surrounding peasant literature started in the early 1920s in agrarian nationalist circles. Agrarian nationalism, or agrarianism, drew its inspiration partly from the traditional thoughts of Confucianism and Daoism and partly from anarchism. Its ideal was the construction and protection of self-sufficient utopian rural communities from the eroding power of modern capitalism.38 In 1923 Yi Sŏnghwan, the wouldbe founder of the magazine Chosŏn nongmin (Korean peasants; 1925–30), called for the creation of peasant literature: “Since Korea is a country of the poor, its literary arts should also be those of the poor, in particular peasants.”39 Despite its advocacy of peasant themes, however, the literature of agrarianism was often idealized and pastoralist, written as it was by urban intellectuals who relied on a presumptive knowledge of rural life. One early literary illustration of these traits would be “Baptism of Earth” (Hŭk ŭi serye; 1925) by Yi Iksang, an anarchist and one-time member of the KAPF. The autobiographical confessional story tells of an intellectual couple’s return to the countryside after the husband’s decision 37. For the Red Peasant Union Movement, see Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 75–113. For the rural revitalization movement, see Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism.” 38. See Gi-Wook Shin, “Agrarianism.” 39. Yi Sŏnghwan, “Pinmin egero kara.”

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to pursue “the honest life of a farmer” instead of a terrorist path.40 In depicting the couple’s difficult adjustment to rural life, Yi’s narrative maintains its focus steadily on the perspective of city-dwellers. The story thus stops short of representing the living conditions and experiences of the peasants, to the point where critics today tend to classify it and its kin as rural or pastoral literature (nongch’on munhak or chŏnwŏn munhak) rather than “peasant literature.” The most celebrated agrarian nationalist novel was Yi Kwangsu’s Earth (Hŭk; 1932).41 The work of Korea’s then best-selling writer, the novel was serialized in Tonga ilbo, the newspaper that promoted the V-narod movement and encouraged students to go to rural areas in order to educate Korean peasants. Hŭk, meaning “earth,” may be the most elitist novel bearing that name that was ever written. All of its main characters are highly educated, holding graduate degrees from American and Japanese universities and enjoying prestige in professions such as law and science. The narrative revolves around the protagonist Hŏ Sung’s efforts for rural reforms, and it adds a theme of personal romance through the love triangle between Hŏ, his wealthy wife and modern woman Yun Chŏngsŏn, and his one-time lover Yu Sun, who personifies the Confucian ideal of chaste womanhood. The action takes place between Seoul and the pastorally named fictional village of Sallyŏul (Rapid Creek). In spite of its varied settings, however, the novel persistent ly represents the viewpoint of urban intellectuals, relegating a few peasant extras to margins. As Gi-Wook Shin has observed, for cultural reformist intellectuals such as Yi, “peasants were not historical agents of social change, but simply ‘objects’ to be taught and enlightened if rural poverty was going to be eradicated.”42 The novel was highly regarded in its time for its lucid description and advocacy of rural reform. Thematically and aesthetically, however, the work only confirmed the deeply alien, uneasy place occupied by the peasantry in modern Korean culture. Aside from agrarian nationalist literature, the 1920s also saw the emergence of narratives that more closely focused on the economic and social conditions of rural Korea. Na Tohyang was the author of “Water Mill” (Mulle panga; 1924) and “Samnyong the Mute” (Pŏngŏri Samnyong; 1925), both of which featured an illicit sexual romance of 40. Yi Iksang, “Hŭk ŭi serye.” 41. Yi Kwangsu, Hŭk. 42. Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest, 87.

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rural working-class characters as an expression of the socialist theme of individual liberation from oppressive social norms; Ch’oe Sŏhae depicted the material hardship of Korean emigrant peasants in Manchuria in “Red Flame” (Hongyŏm; 1927); and Yi Kiyŏng portrayed Korean peasants’ alienation from the process of colonial modernization in “A Village of Commoners” (Minch’on; 1926) and “Wŏnbo” (Wŏnbo; 1928).43 These stories by leftist writers all displayed a socialist inspiration that was also apparent in the illustrations accompanying them (pl. 9). The theoretical issue of peasant literature, however, remained sidelined from the critical attention of the KAPF throughout the 1920s, owing primarily to the group’s preoccupation with the industrial proletariat. The KAPF finally came to face the question of peasant literature in the early 1930s. In 1928, the Comintern released a resolution on the Korean question, commonly known as “the December Theses” among Korean socialists, that openly declared the organization’s endorsement of an agrarian revolution in Korea and East Asia: “The revolution in Korea must be an agrarian revolution. . . . [T]he overthrow of imperialism and the revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem are to be seen as the main objectives of the revolution in Korea in the fi rst phase of its development.”44 Underlying the resolution was the changing class structure of Korean rural society, which had become increasingly bipolarized since Japan’s implementation of the rice production increase policy (1920–34). The policy’s export-oriented industrialization of Korean agriculture led to the concentration of agricultural capital in the hands of a small number of large-scale landlords and, correspondingly, it brought about a decline in the numbers of owner cultivators and semipeasants. Based on its analysis of the situation, the Comintern judged that the Korean peasants had “no prospects of an improvement of their position without a revolution.” 45 Its resolution provided a direct inspiration for the Red Peasant Union Movement in the following years, and its analysis of the agrarian question remained influential throughout the East Asian region at least until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.46 43. Na Tohyang, “Pŏngŏri Samnyong” and “Mulle panga”; Ch’oe Sŏhae, “Hongyŏm”; Yi Kiyŏng, “Minch’on” and “Wŏnbo.” 44. See Dae-sook Suh, Documents of Korean Communism, 247. 45. Ibid. 46. The emphasis on peasants was later renewed in the cultural field at the second conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) at Kharkov in 1930. The conference passed a resolution that advised Japa nese

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Acknowledging the Comintern’s resolution, KAPF critics soon engaged in debate about the question of the status of peasant literature visà-vis proletarian literature. At the center was, once again, the question of the translation of “proletariat” in the Korean context. Peasant literature had been until then regarded mostly as a marginal corner of proletarian culture. Indeed, Marx himself had at times regarded the peasantry—European owner-cultivators in particular—as a reactionary force that stood in the way of revolutionary historical progress.47 Against such views, An Hamgwang argued for the necessity of nurturing an agitprop literature that would appeal to over 80 percent of the Korean working-class population. As a vocal advocate of peasant literature, An urged that the KAPF should aim to provide peasants with an education in “the hegemony of the proletariat,” at the same time helping them acquire “an understanding of reality within its objective historical context.” 48 In a rejoinder, Paek Ch’ŏl criticized what he perceived to be An’s continuing subordination of peasant literature to the cultural hegemony of the urban proletariat. He argued, instead, that the Koreans should endorse Kurahara Korehito’s recent theorization of peasant literature as “a revolutionary literature in its own right,” which should retain a temporary autonomy to suit the particular class traits of the peasantry but which was also destined “ultimately [to] converge with proletarian literature.” 49 The recognition of the autonomy of peasant literature would have substantial implications for its creative practice. First of all, the peasants would no longer need to be presented as the passive followers of the industrial proletariat, and writers were urged to study “the everyday life of peasants” in search of their subject matters. An Hamgwang suggested, as possible relevant themes, a critique of the negative impacts of “the rice production increase policy, the rural enlightenment movement, and the proletarian writers to more actively engage in the production of peasant literature; the NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio) followed up by installing a new study group on the issue. The move had an impact on KAPF too. For instance, Kwŏn Hwan, in his 1931 newspaper report on the conference, commented that Korean proletarian writers might as well heed the resolution and amend their hitherto neglect of peasants. See Kwŏn Hwan, “Harik’op’ŭ taehoe sŏnggwa.” 47. See, for instance, Marx, “After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, 543. 48. An Hamgwang, “Nongmin munhak e taehan il koch’al,” 302. 49. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Nongmin munhak munje,” 325.

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revival of Confucianism” on peasant households. Moreover, equally stressed in these debates was the need to involve peasants in the creation process through “the recruitment of peasant correspondents” and “writers’ interactions with their potential readers at sites such as reading circles, night schools, and youth organizations.” 50 These guidelines likely encouraged Yi Kiyŏng to renew his efforts to depict peasant life in a socialist vein. The result was Hometown (Kohyang; 1933–34), the novel today considered Yi’s biggest literary achievement. A survey of Yi’s stories about peasants from the mid-1920s through the early 1930s reveals a developmental trajectory strikingly parallel to that of the KAPF. Over this period of time, he progressively shifted his focus from mainly representing the economic hardship of peasant families to more aggressively depicting peasants’ collective actions. “A Commoners’ Village” (1925), for example, describes the hardship of peasants but refrains from suggesting any act of rebellion on their part. In the story, the sale of a peasant’s daughter to a landlord as his concubine elicits only sorrow and suppressed anger in her relatives, who seem keenly aware of their powerlessness and their lowly place within the feudal order. In “A Young Daughter-in-Law” (Minmyŏnŭri; 1927), however, Yi introduced a more rebellious heroine who suffers harsh persecution at the hands of her in-laws but ultimately succeeds in running away to become a factory worker. Finally, “Flood” (1930) tells the story of the birth of a peasant union in a village where the peasants organize around a student returnee from Japan for communal rebuilding efforts after a flood and then again for a tenancy dispute. The early1930s reportage movement and the debates on peasant literature seem to have helped Yi move away from generic to lifelike characters in his portrayal of peasants. In 1928, for example, Yi’s story “Wŏnbo” featured a wretched, benighted peasant who received help from a factory laborer. By 1933, however, Wŏnbo’s peasant figure was replaced by that of Tolsoe in “Rat Fire” (Sŏhwa), a lively self-willed peasant hero with a love interest and a gambling habit.51 A full-length novel allegedly written over a forty-day period, Hometown is widely regarded today as the classic work of colonial Korean 50. For the quotes, see ibid., 327–30, and An Hamgwang, “Nongmin munhak munje cheron,” 347. 51. In addition to the earlier citations for other stories, see Yi Kiyŏng, “A Young Daughter-in-Law” and “Rat Fire.”

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peasant literature.52 The novel was first serialized in the newspaper Chosŏn ilbo between November 15, 1933, and September 21, 1934. In one of its most important plot lines, the novel tells the semiautobiographical story of Hŭijun, a student returnee from Japan who is determined to commit himself to the rural reform movement. At first, Hŭijun joins the agrarian nationalist youth organization in the village to run a night school, yet he is soon disillusioned with the group’s middle-class members’ lukewarm attitude. He then directly engages with peasants themselves to revive a ture, a traditional mutual aid organization that combines communal labor with a village festival. Once established, the ture serves the function of a labor union, unifying the peasants and creating a site of public forum in the village. When a flood ruins the year’s harvest, Hŭijun leads the peasants’ tenancy dispute against An Sŭnghak, the greedy, villainous agent of their absentee landlord. As the dispute is prolonged, Hŭijun and the peasants receive financial help from the workers of the neighboring textile factory: the daughters of peasant villagers plus An’s own daughter Kapsuk, a student-turned-labor activist. In the end, An accedes to the peasants’ demands, but only because he fears that Hŭijun and other peasant leaders will spread the news of his daughter’s “ignoble” behavior—that is, her becoming a factory-working girl and establishing a romantic relationship with Kyŏngho, a man of humble origins. Aside from Kapsuk’s romance, the sentimental side of the narrative is enriched by Hŭijun’s unhappy marriage and his own love interest in Kapsuk. Hŭijun and Kapsuk confess to each other their mutual attraction but pledge to set aside their feelings to remain comrades. Adding to its standard plot of an intellectual’s return to the countryside, Hometown also features several other story lines whose protagonists are colorfully depicted peasants who speak in the vernacular dialect of the Ch’ungch’ŏng province. The novel’s opening introduces a peasant family, whose patriarch Wŏnch’il is compared to the legendary general Guan Yu for his handsomeness and moral integrity.53 Wŏnch’il’s eldest son Indong and daughter Insun are also described as energetic, am52. Yi Kiyŏng recalled the writing pro cess of Hometown in closest detail in “A Writer’s School Is His Life Experiences” (Chakka ŭi hakkyo nŭn saenghwal ida; 1962). This essay was published in Munhak sinmun in North Korea, and part of it has been reprinted in Cho Namhyŏn, Yi Kiyŏng, 88–92. 53. Yi Kiyŏng, Kohyang, 39. General Guan Yu is one of the three heroes of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, one of the most popu lar classic Chinese novels that was widely known to contemporary Koreans, including peasants.

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bitious, and spirited individuals, in a depiction that loosely resembles that of contemporary proletarian heroes in KAPF novels. Indong finds in Hŭijun a natural mentor, yet over the course of the novel their relationship will sour because of the intellectual’s patronizing attitude. Around this peasant family are also a crowd of rural working-class Koreans with varying backgrounds—the descendants of fallen yangban, daily wage workers, the owner of a local inn, a village idiot, and others—whose respective family histories and individual idiosyncrasies the narrative relates in detail. Wŏnt’ŏ, the name of the village, means “the original site,” which resonates closely with the title of the novel. So although Hŭijun’s story remains central throughout, the allocation of the narrative space indicates that Hometown is the novel of a community rather than a single hero (fig. 4.3). When he was drafting Hometown, Yi Kiyŏng is said to have stayed at a temple near his native village in Ch’ŏnan, frequenting the village to observe and interview the real-life models of his characters. Such a close documentary approach accounts for the novel’s vivid portrayal of everyday life among the peasants, for Yi paid close attention to nuances of language as well as the intricacies of traditional social relations that were gradually undergoing transformation in the process of colonial modernization. Although Hometown drew its materials from local reality, the novel also found aesthetic inspiration in the international radicalism of 1920s and 1930s socialist culture. A strong influence on Yi in this period were Sholokhov’s roman-fleuves Quiet Flows the Don (1928–40) and Virgin Land under the Plow (1932), which Yi had read in Japanese translation shortly before.54 Like Sholokhov’s agrarian novels, Hometown too attempts to capture rural life on a broad literary canvas from a multitude of social and personal perspectives, making the community of Wŏnt’ŏ the real protagonist of its narrative. Barbara Foley has characterized such communityoriented literary works as “the collective novel,” which she has insightfully defined to be one of the salient aesthetic inventions of modern international leftist literature. Citing examples like John Dos Passos’s USA, Foley 54. Yi mentioned both works in “Ch’angjak pangbŏp munje e kwanhayŏ,” 200. Min Pyŏnghwi, a contemporary critic, also remarked on the similarity between the two Russian novels and Hometown in “Minch’on ŭi kohyangnon,” 360. Also see Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 88, for her citation of a relevant North Korean record.

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Figure 4.3 Ahn Sŏkchu’s illustration for Yi Kiyŏng’s Hometown (Kohyang), from Chosŏn ilbo (June 8, 1934). Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

ascribes to the collective novel generic attributes such as the privileging of interconnected group subjectivities over individual heroes, as well as the addition of original materials and “documentary links to the world of readers.”55 Hometown shares this documentary impulse in its inclusion of historical materials such as a landlord’s calculation chart and several factory workers’ folksongs.56 Like the contemporary genre of labor reportage, Yi’s Hometown was among the finest fruits of KAPF writers’ efforts to appropriate international literary conventions for their own critical interests. The writing of Hometown was, first and foremost, a political act. The novel was originally commissioned to Yi Kiyŏng by the leftist 55. Foley, Radical Representations, 401. 56. Yi’s novel stops short of meeting the third criterion mentioned by Foley: the “frequent use of experimental devices that break up the narrative and rupture the illusion of seamless transparency” (401). The realistic, mimetic narrative of Hometown, however, does not disqualify it as a collective novel. It more likely suggests that, if globally considered, Foley’s third criterion may be peripheral to the historical conventions of the collective novel.

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nationalist editors of Chosŏn ilbo, whose line was critical of both the V-narod movement and the government-led rural revitalization movement. Both those movements had sought to reinforce traditional Confucian ethical values, focusing on spiritual and cultural reform of rural society instead of addressing the structural problems of its economic deterioration. In promoting such reforms, both agrarian nationalists and colonial officials had appealed to elite village institutions, such as the hyanggyo, a local Confucian school, and the hyangyak, a community system that aimed to regulate the villagers’ labor force and their moral behaviors. In this regard, Yi’s use of the traditional motif of the ture, or mutual aid societies, assumes a critical significance. The ture were grassroots organizations that typically arose spontaneously among the peasant owners of small lots of land. Dating back to the late Chosŏn period, the ture were an expressly economical institution whereby the peasants would regulate the exchange of their labor during busy seasons.57 By replacing the hyangyak with the ture, Yi was in effect countering the dominant elitist and culturist approach to the peasant question, recasting it instead in populist terms and giving emphasis to the material causes of the decline of peasant society.58 Hometown is widely regarded as a classic example of proletarian literature, with many pointing to it as the undisputed acme of socialist peasant literature. What is not often remarked upon, however, is the way in which Yi’s early anarchist literary practice was transformed, in Hometown, by a rather orthodox application of Marxist theory to the economic and social conditions of rural colonial Korea. In a section titled “A Good Harvest” (P’ungnyŏn), for instance, a dialogue between two peasants centers on how the traditional landlord system has evolved into a capitalist mode of production with the introduction of new industrial machinery. The peasants marvel at the new rules in big farms, where tenants were no longer allowed to thrash and bag rice on their own but were required to bring their crops to an appointed ground to have 57. For the history of the ture from the Chosŏn period through the colonial era, see Chu Kanghyŏn, Han’guk ŭi ture, 1:19–98. The ture also played an important cultural role, as peasants developed their own popu lar music and dance through their cooperation within the mutual aid orga nization. 58. In countering cultural nationalist discourse, Hometown also took a more progressive position on women’s sexual freedom, depicting strong, independent-minded peasant women characters such as Indong’s lover, Panggae, in favorable contrast with traditional submissive ones like his wife Ŭmjŏn.

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them thrashed, weighed, and bagged by machines. While the new system is advertised as “serving everyone fair,” the peasants reflect, these modern technologies in fact worked only “for the landlords who want to exact as much rice as possible” with mechanical precision.59 Also added to the peasants’ burden was the mandatory use of chemical fertilizer sold by the landlord, “whose price keeps going up, while the rice price continues to fall.” 60 In this rationalization of agriculture, peasants had to pay the extra interest on “the capital incorporated into the earth,” in Marx’s words.61 The Marxist tenor is also evident in the narrative emphasis on the collective agency of the peasants. When An refuses to make any concession in response to the peasants’ request for a reduced rent in the wake of a flood disaster, the villagers finally take collective action by organizing and sending their delegates to the absentee landlord in Seoul, their travel expenses paid from the communal treasury of the ture. When this attempt proves in vain, they go on strike. Both their group action and Yi’s insight into the changing rural economy were literary imaginings made possible through the ideological inspiration of Marx’s critique of capitalism and his vision of the collective agency of the proletariat. Departing from the general critical consensus, Gabroussenko has recently suggested that Hometown does not quite qualify as a proletarian novel. Developing a reading mode first proposed by Myers in 1994, she finds “an obvious contradiction between the leftist rhetoric that occasionally appears in the novel and the actual traditionalist, antimodernist essence of Hometown.” Among the evidence for her claim, the critic includes Yi’s rediscovery of the ture, which she deems to be a sign of his nostalgia for an idyllic past that is at odds with the progressive orientation of a truly Marxist view. In the end, she regards Hometown as textual evidence of the fact that “the left ist tendencies in Yi Kiyŏng’s writings began to wane [in the early 1930s].” 62 There may be some merit to Gabroussenko’s argument: Yi’s peasant novel is indeed replete with nativist imagery and folk scenes, and the writer makes frequent use of narrative turns that were typical of a premodern poetic sensibility. When it comes to understanding the 59. Yi Kiyŏng, Kohyang, 376. 60. Ibid., 369. 61. Marx, Capital, 3:756–57. 62. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 90 and 92.

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significance of these elements, however, three considerations deserve our attention. First of all, had Yi meant to convey an antimodern, traditionalist message, he certainly would not have centered Hometown around the story of an intellectual’s efforts to improve life in the countryside. Common to agrarianism and to the KAPF, that plot was the standard narrative of modernization, whereby progress in the countryside would be sparked by the infusion of Enlightenment ideas through the effort of a well-meaning intellectual. Second, the nativist feelings of Hometown may be also ascribed to Yi’s desire to popularize proletarian literature, maintaining a register, a tone, and a sensibility that would likely appeal to the uneducated or barely educated peasant audience. As we saw in the last section, this question of popularization had played a large role in the KAPF debates of the late 1920s. Third, as we saw earlier, the significance of Yi’s harking back to the ture should be read in the context of a socialist response to agrarian nationalist culturism and spiritualism. Far from representing a return to the idealized past, Yi’s choice was meant to refocus the literary representation of the countryside on the economic substance of peasant exploitation. In this sense, the imagined ture in Hometown were the natural equivalent, in colonial Korea, of the socialist institution of collective farming in the neighboring Soviet Union. Though the ideological imprint of Yi’s novel is clearly Marxist, however, Gabroussenko is also right to point out that Hometown does not quite fit the criteria of contemporary socialist realist novels in the Soviet Union.63 A more typical socialist plot would present a hierarchical pairing of an intellectual communist mentor with a proletarian mentee, whose growth into a self-aware “positive hero” epitomizes revolutionary historical progress.64 In Hometown, instead, Hŭijun’s relation to his supposed mentee, Indong, is notably unsuccessful. Hŭijun patronizingly arranges Indong’s marriage to the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper. That union soon collapses, and Indong regrets not having followed his heart to marry Panggae, his wilder, more independent lover. When Hŭijun criticizes the lad for his lack of affection for his wife, Indong erupts in anger

63. Ibid., 88–91. 64. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 46–67. As Gabroussenko has critiqued, Clark’s structuralist analysis has an overgeneralizing tendency. Yet, on this par ticu lar point of the hierarchical mentor–mentee relationship, had exceptions existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union, they would indeed have been exceptions. See Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 7–8.

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and frustration, making his intellectual mentor recoil in fear of his furious peasant mentee.65 Through this and similar episodes, Yi’s narrative undercuts the authority of the intellectual mentor figure, presenting Hŭijun as the rare embattled, self-doubting socialist character. In another departure from socialist realist conventions, the tenancy dispute between the peasants and the landlord’s agent is resolved rather meekly, as the workers win concessions through blackmail rather than a triumph of reason and ennobling comradeship. In this, as in the previous case, it seems plausible to ascribe the cautious and subdued features of Yi’s plot to the increasingly constrained political climate under Japanese domination, which for Yi and other writers meant living under constant threat of censorship and imprisonment. Not long before Hometown was written, in 1931, the colonial police had arrested Yi Kiyŏng as well as some of the leading members of the KAPF, including Kim Kijin and Pak Yŏnghŭi. Everybody was released after about two months, but this round of arrests marked the beginning of the decline of oppositional social activism in Korea. In his remembrance, Yi also recalled having the parts on the factory strike in Hometown expurgated by censorship.66 In fact, issues of imprisonment and censorship render moot the very authorship of Hometown’s ending. Upon its rushed drafting, the novel was being revised piecemeal for its newspaper publication between 1933 and 1934. A month before the serialization was completed, however, Yi was again arrested and imprisoned.67 We do not know for sure whether Kim Kijin revised the final month’s worth of installments, as he claimed. Regardless, whoever edited them could have only blunted the critical edge of Yi’s draft.68 Hometown was ironically acclaimed by KAPF critics as a model example of socialist realism.69 As the novel overall bears only a distant resemblance to the Soviet classics, this evaluation may sound ill-judged. Also strange is Yi Kiyŏng’s crediting Valery Kirpotin, head of the literary section of the Soviet Central Committee and a prominent proponent 65. Yi Kiyŏng, Kohyang, 500. 66. Yi Kiyŏng, “Chakka ŭi hakkyo nŭn saenghwal ida.” Quoted in Cho Namhyŏn, Yi Kiyŏng, 92. 67. Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa, 424. 68. Kim Kijin makes the claim in “Mundan kyoryugi,” 529. 69. Min Pyŏnghwi, for example, compares it to Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and Virgin Soil Upturned (1935) in his essay, “Minch’on ŭi Kohyang non,” 360.

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of socialist realism, for “liberating” him from the past paralysis of his creative instincts by slogans such as “objective consciousness” and “dialectical materialist realism.”70 Yet if we put ourselves in Yi’s and his comrades’ shoes across our time difference, their response may not seem so misguided. When socialist realism was first adopted as the new aesthetic doctrine of the Soviet Union in 1932, the official promulgation defined it rather vaguely as an aesthetic that would offer “a historically concrete presentation of reality in its revolutionary development” and also guaranteed, at least in theory, that under the new policy the writers would have “an extraordinary opportunity to manifest any artistic initiative and a choice of various forms, styles, and genres.”71 In spite of these liberating phrases, the actual historical impact of socialist realism on Soviet culture was a consolidation of government control over artistic activities. In Korea, however, the introduction of socialist realism coincided with the dissolution of the KAPF, and in this situation writers such as Yi interpreted the new aesthetic guideline literally and used it to criticize past dogmatic literary practice. Thus, through a historical irony of translation, the Soviet introduction of socialist realism had different literary consequences in colonial Korea. From today’s vantage point, Hometown stands as a monument to the decade-long achievement of the Korean proletarian literary movement. As was the case with the theme of poverty in New Tendency literature, modern Korean writers needed to rediscover the peasants, not as the residue of bygone days, but as parts of the problematic uneven present, before they could direct their creative attention to them. Whereas the agrarian nationalists exalted the peasants as the essence of Korean national identity, socialist writers such as Yi Kiyŏng tried their best to represent peasant life in accordance with their historical materialist worldview. This literary rediscovery of the peasants, not as a mere pastoral background but as active subjects of history with their own desires and will, was made possible because the writers were observing them anew through the concept of “the proletariat” in its broader application. The novel was a monument, not a milestone, because its publication was in effect completed after the demise of the KAPF. The association officially dissolved in 1935 with most of its members still behind bars. In the closing scene of Hometown, Hŭijun gazes at the receding figures of his now grown-up mentees, 70. Yi Kiyŏng, “Sahoejŏk kyŏnghŏm kwa suwan,” 143. 71. Quoted in Robin, Socialist Realism, 55.

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Indong and Kapsuk, against the sunrise. Th is symbolic image of a proletarian–peasant alliance was a male intellectual’s fantasy, given Kapsuk’s true identity as a modern girl, and also a mirage about to vanish by the time the last installment of Hometown went into print.

Reassessing KAPF Literature I have examined the aesthetic and ideological trajectory of KAPF literature between 1925 and 1935. Throughout, the focus has been on the changing ways in which the socialist concept of “proletariat” was translated in the Korean context, with a par ticu lar regard for the aesthetic consequences of these translations. At its introduction in the early 1920s, that concept was understood in an anarchist way, loosely and broadly applying to “the dispossessed” and “the unpropertied” (musanja). That translation engendered New Tendency literature, which confronted readers with a grotesquely rendered representation of poverty as a social ill that could not be ascribed to the poors’ lack of responsibility. KAPF theorists then moved on, in the late 1920s, by proposing the more orthodox idea of the proletariat as the class of “urban industrial laborers” who are the ideal subjects of revolutionary history. Lacking a clear referent for that category, writers at first struggled and tended to produce rather abstract parables of the socialist vision of revolutionary historical progress. They soon moved on to cultivating labor reportage, however, which allowed them to more successfully reconcile the doctrinal requirements of Marxism with the mandate of verisimilitude. Finally, in the early 1930s, the narrow focus on urban laborers was broadened to include the rural proletariat, with the creation of peasant literature and the emergence of Yi Kiyŏng as the most prominent writer of the genre. The collective narrative of Yi’s proletarian–peasant novel Hometown was effective in countering the elitist discourses of rural reforms promoted by both the colonial authorities and the agrarian nationalists. Yi’s self-willed, living peasant characters in Hometown represented a departure from the contemporary canon of Soviet socialist realism, and they marked a peak of KAPF writers’ decade-long struggle to indigenize the Western and international concept of the proletariat to the specific historical conditions of rural colonial Korea. As an oppositional cultural movement at the margin of the Japanese empire, the Korean proletarian literary movement was disrupted in 1935 with the forced disbanding of the KAPF. The writers’ restricted

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freedom of expression, association, and movement posed a great obstacle, especially when they tried to reach out to a broader audience in the early 1930s. Illustrative of this is the short-lived experience of the worker-correspondent movement, as well as the frequent police interruptions of cultural events such as film screenings and theatrical plays. For all the suppressions, however, the KAPF was far from having lost momentum at the time of its forced dissolution. Rather, its movement was terminated at the height of its cultural productivity and amid its continued transformation. Much has been written about the KAPF in the field of Korean literary criticism. Some assessments are decidedly positive, portraying the organization as a prime contributor to Korean literary modernization and, at the same time, a force for social change through cultural intervention.72 There are also criticisms, however, that have proven to be very resilient in Korea as well as abroad. One of these is that the KAPF’s contribution to literary aesthetics was minimal and even noxious, its literature having been for the most part sterile, formulaic, and an overall example of the dogmatic subjugation of artistic values to a political line.73 As is apparent from our overview of the KAPF’s history, however, New Tendency literature, labor reportage, and the collective peasant novel were all valuable additions to the modern Korean literary canon. In different ways, these literary innovations injected social and political themes into the typically elitist practice of “high” literature. The reportage movement, in particular, prefigured the development of a tradition of modern investigative literature that was unprecedented and that today has developed into a quintessentially democratic literary form thriving in South Korea. The charge of sterility is also very much dependent on assumptions that privilege creative over critical writing in the assessment of literary production. In the case of the KAPF, we have seen that debate was always as important as creative practice, as its members frequently engaged in theoretical discussions over a range of key issues—such as the aesthetics of realism, the social function of literature, and the different tasks of national, proletarian, and peasant literature. Through its eloquent symbolic presence, the KAPF acted as a point of reference for writers within 72. See, for instance, Kim Yoon-sik and Chŏng Houng, Han’guk sosŏlsa, and Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa. 73. See, for instance, Youngmin Kwon, “Early Twentieth-Century Fiction by Men,” in Peter H. Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature, 399.

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the modern Korean literary scene. Precisely those features that some critics have found to be dogmatic, such as the endorsement of a strictly Marxist theory of the arts and their function, were also the factors that often lent sharpness to the critical positions espoused by KAPF members. Ever since critic Cho Yŏnhyŏn characterized KAPF literature as “foreign-influenced” and a “mistake for the nation,” a recurrent and persistent criticism of it has been that, essentially, this literature is derivative from and imitative of the Soviet model.74 In retrospect, the literature of the KAPF is certainly to be grasped as an integral manifestation of the international proletarian cultural activism of the 1920s and 1930s. This fact, however, should not be misunderstood as its being a mere epigone of Soviet literature.75 While KAPF writers were responsive to the changing policies of the Comintern, they did not adopt these policies without first subjecting them to intense internal debates. From An Hamgwang’s emphasis on the importance of peasant literature, Yi Kiyŏng’s struggle to create a proletarian peasant novel, to the sustained debates over realism, KAPF writers were keenly conscious of the discrepancy between the “universal” theories of international socialism and the particularities of local life experiences. They constantly strove to mediate the two. Moreover, athough KAPF writers were influenced by Soviet models, they also maintained close cross-cultural ties with Japanese proletarian writers through personal relationships as well as the border-crossing circulation of ideas and writings. These interrelations have been underexplored in previous studies and constitute an important avenue for future research.76 In our continued study of interpersonal and intertextual exchanges between Korean proletarian literature and those of Japan and Russia, our 74. Cho Yŏnhyŏn, Hyŏndae munhak kaegwan, 184. 75. Rossen Djagalov has insightfully noted the relative independence of peripheral socialist cultures from the Soviet model. As he observes, if “the Soviet State was . . . the condition of possibility for the People’s Republic,” that is, the international community of socialist writers, “it could never quite control the Republic.” See Djgalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters,” p. 2 of the abstract. See also Juraga and Booker, eds., Rereading Global Socialist Cultures and Socialist Cultures East and West for a similarly pluralist, locally nuanced approach to global socialist cultures. 76. For exemplary studies in this comparative direction, see Bowen-Struyk, ed., “Proletarian Arts in East Asia: Quest for National, Gender and Class Justice,” special issue, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, no. 2 (2006).

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analytical approach should take into full consideration the transcultural dynamism and complexity of such practices instead of regarding the colonial differences as symptoms of unorthodoxy and deviation. It is misleading to characterize the thematic concerns of the colonial proletarian writers as “antimodernist lamentations over the ‘lost paradise’ of the traditional way of life, embarrassment over the backwardness of their native land, disappointment about the supposed moral degradation of Korean society, grief about the powerlessness of Korean intellectuals, and the like.”77 Lacking a clear argumentative focus, these characterizations only serve to perpetuate the inflammatory, dismissive rhetoric that all too often plagues discussions of the KAPF within the anticommunist paradigm. Emotions such as despair and nostalgia certainly had their place in KAPF literature. As this chapter has shown, they were often enmeshed with other emotions, such as an intense passion for social justice, an aspiration for modernization along a socialist path, and a hope for a better future. 77. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 167.

Five

Confessing the Colonial Self Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Literary Ethnographies of the Proletarian Nation

Alongside the proletarian writers of the KAPF who formed the radical stream of the colonial literary left were “fellow travelers,” that is, unaffi liated sympathizers of the socialist cause, whose presence turned the proletarian wave into a critical mainstream in colonial Korea. Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, some of these writers formed a prominent force as outspoken advocates of the leftist nationalist movement led by the Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society), the largest coalition of nationalists and socialists in colonial Korea. This chapter examines one such writer, Yŏm Sangsŏp. Best known for his unsentimental and unflinching documentation of urbanites in colonial Seoul, Yŏm has often been compared to Honoré de Balzac, the Parisian master of literary realism. Like Balzac, Yŏm was no card-carrying member of a political organization, but he was one of the most vocal supporters of the Sin’ganhoe. By closely examining his works, I aim here to reconsider the issue of colonial nationalism and its cultural practice as well as to illustrate the broad and ramified influence of socialism on modern Korean literature and thought. Th is chapter presents a renewed critical portrait of Yŏm, who has been widely regarded as a bourgeois nationalist and political conservative with only a superficial interest in socialism since the 1987 publication of Kim Yoon-sik’s influential study on the writer.1 This representation of the writer has not gone undisputed in Korea. In more recent studies, for instance, Yi Poyŏng countered it by contending that Yŏm was genuinely sympathetic to the socialist—primarily Marxist—movement, 1. Kim Yoon-sik, Yŏm Sangsŏp yŏn’gu.

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which he embraced as an ideology of national resistance.2 Han Kihyŏng also suggested that the writer’s ideological underpinnings were indeed anarchist and that this fact compels us to contest the conventional binary division of 1920s Korean literature into the proletarian literary camp of the KAPF and its cultural nationalist opponents.3 In this chapter, I take these critical insights further to propose an alternative account of Yŏm’s relationship to socialism. I argue that socialism was neither external nor merely instrumental but rather integral to the writer’s national subjectivity and that its influence was formative in his materialist literary aesthetic of realism. To reexamine the actual impact of socialism on Yŏm’s intellectual and literary development, I pursue the following set of interrelated questions in my discussion. How did Yŏm interpret and apply socialist ideology or ideologies? More specifically, which socialist tenets did he espouse, or repudiate, and why? And what impact did his eclectic engagement with socialism have on his literary works? I explore these inquiries by analyzing the writer’s literary trajectory through the long 1920s, the activist decade between the 1919 uprisings and the 1931 disintegration of the Sin’ganhoe. Through my analysis, I submit that Yŏm endorsed the class-based socialist critique of modern capitalism but regarded the national liberation of Korea as a prerequisite for a social revolution. He consequently developed a leftist nationalist position that was an alternative to that of cultural nationalism, which viewed the colonial modernization process as a way to gradually strengthen Korea. Yŏm’s materialist aesthetic of realism embodied his leftist national subjectivity. In his pursuit of the literary ideal, he progressively shifted the focus of his writing from a confession of the colonial self—the discovery of the colonial “us”—to an ethnographic portrayal of the colonial nation, which he envisioned first and foremost as an affective community of colonial Koreans who, as the “proletariat” of the global imperialist world, shared the material condition of imperial oppression and their common emancipatory agenda. Beyond providing a fresh perspective on one of the most important writers in colonial Korea, my study of Yŏm has two broad implications. First, it will remind us of the often downplayed variety of 2. Yi Poyŏng, Nanse ŭi munhak and Yŏm Sangsŏp munhangnon. 3. Han Kihyŏng, “Ch’ogi Yŏm Sangsŏp ŭi anak’ijŭm suyong.” This book shares his insights but does not situate Yŏm Sangsŏp in-between the right and the left, as Han suggests, but rather within the broad socialist cultural movement of colonial Korea.

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colonial nationalist subjectivities. Remembering colonial nationalism in its historical plurality is particularly important in the case of Korea, where the cultural nationalists were co-opted by the colonial regime from the late 1920s on, leaving the leftist nationalists and the socialists alone to carry the burden of anticolonial resistance. Second, this study also showcases the breadth and complexity of leftist thought in colonial Korea. The colonial left was a composite group, whose varied participants often competed with, and contradicted, one another and also followed diverging paths after the 1945 liberation. When Korea was divided, some leftists chose to join the communist regime of the North, some others dreamed of building a social democratic regime in the South, and still others felt trapped on either side of the two regimes, neither of which they found desirable. Many anarchists and leftist nationalists, including Yŏm, belonged to the latter two categories. If we are to gauge the extent of the impact of socialist thinking on modern Korean culture, we need to pay attention to the internal variety of the colonial left, which has often been suppressed and forgotten due to the dichotomous thinking that characterized the cultural politics of the Cold War. This chapter is organized into four parts. I begin by examining Yŏm’s intellectual development as a left ist nationalist throughout the 1920s, tracing it from his early exposure to anarchism in Japan to his emergence as the most articulate proponent of the Sin’ganhoe movement at the peak of the decade’s social activism. Against this backdrop I turn, in later sections, to a close reading of his representative literary works from the colonial period. I first analyze his transition from the I-novelistic confessional of The Green Frog in the Specimen Room (P’yobonsil ŭi ch’ŏnggaeguri; 1921) to the more intersubjective travelogue of On the Eve of the Uprising (Mansejŏn; 1924) and the socialist influence in this process. Following this analysis, I examine the display of Yŏm’s mature leftist nationalist subjectivity in his later realist novels, in particular Three Generations (Samdae; 1931), which I approach as an ethnographic novel depicting the proletarian nation of colonial Korea. The conclusion reflects on Yŏm’s renewed significance in our reconsideration of both nationalism and socialism in colonial Korea.

Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Formation as a Leftist Nationalist When Im Hwa, the former chairman of the KAPF, turned to writing a history of modern Korean literature in 1935, he asserted, “Yŏm Sangsŏp was, in fact, the greatest writer in Korean literary history until we

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discovered Yi Kiyŏng.” 4 Im’s comment reveals the significant degree of respect that Yŏm commanded among the members of the KAPF, with whom the writer once had vitriolic exchanges over their differences concerning the notion of proletarian literature as well as the political priority of social movements in colonial Korea. Underlying Im’s conciliatory respect is the two writers’ unadvertised ideological affinity, which has often been eclipsed by their rivalry and contention. Yŏm, in effect, belonged to the fi rst generation of modern Korean writers who took a serious interest in socialism. During his school days in Japan between 1912 and 1918, he became invested in the cause of the labor movement, which was gathering momentum during the post–World War I economic recession and amid triumphant news of the Russian Revolution. When Yŏm organized a protest of Korean students and laborers in Osaka on March 19, 1919, in response to the earlier uprisings in Korea, he composed a declaration of independence for the occasion and signed it “Yŏm Sangsŏp, Representative of Korean Laborers in Osaka.” 5 For this activity, he was imprisoned for four months. After his release from prison, the recent college dropout from Keiō University received a generous offer of financial aid for his continued college education from Yoshino Sakuzō, a professor of political science at Tokyo Imperial University and a leader of the Taishō democratization movement. The young rebel rejected it, however; instead, he headed for Yokohama, a center of foreign trade and cosmopolitanism, to become a labor activist while earning his living as a typesetter in a printing office.6 Unsurprisingly, socialist inspirations infused and characterized Yŏm’s early writings. One prominent example was “The Current Orientation of the Labor Movement and Its True Significance” (1920), a 4. Im Hwa, “Chosŏn sinmunhaksaron sŏsŏl,” 409. 5. Quoted in Yŏm, “Tongnip sŏnŏnsŏ,” 44. Like many of the contemporary Korean elites, Yŏm spent his formative years in Japan. He was born in Seoul in 1897 to a family of chungin, Chosŏn dynasty’s secondary status group of hereditary technocrats, who were positioned between the yangban aristocracy and commoners. He received a modern education from a Korean elementary school and was sent to Japan in 1912, at the tender age of fi fteen, to continue his higher education. He attended the Kyoto Prefectural Second High School and Keiō University in Tokyo, which he apparently had to quit due to fi nancial difficulties. For Yŏm’s biographical details, see ibid. and the writer’s own memoirs and essays in Yŏm Sangsŏp chŏnjip, vol. 12. 6. Yŏm, “Hoengbo mundan hoesanggi,” 227. “Hoengbo” is Yŏm’s pen name.

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newspaper article that he contributed to Tonga ilbo after being chosen as its Japan correspondent. This article illustrates Yŏm’s familiarity with various socialist and democratic ideas of the time, ranging from Abraham Lincoln’s principle of democratic government (“of the people, by the people, and for the people”) through Karl Marx’s “scientific” labor theory of value (“the exchange value of commodity [is] equal to the abstract amount of labor-time invested in it”) to Peter Kropotkin’s ideal of anarchist communism (“individuality will be respected and each will be governed by one’s own will” and “all men will work and help each other to advance mutual well-being”).7 Also cited in the article were John Fitzpatrick, the representative of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in the United States, and John Thomas, the general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen in Great Britain. Both of them professed, according to Yŏm, that the labor movement did not simply pursue short-term gains, such as an increase in wages, but also sought the utopian goal of “emancipating mankind.” Yŏm envisioned that the fledgling labor movement in Korea would have its greatest significance, first and foremost, in challenging the country’s traditional class hierarchy.8 A further glimpse into Yŏm’s ideological identity can be gained from “Double Liberation” (Ijung haebang), which he contributed to Samgwang (Three lights; 1919–20), a music and arts magazine published by Korean students in Tokyo.9 Yŏm is today better known as the founding member of P’yehŏ (Ruins; 1920–21), a coterie magazine characterized by its antitraditional nihilist tenor and its cultural cosmopolitanism (fig. 5.1). But Samgwang excels it in terms of the quality and substance of the included articles, possibly due to the comparatively lax censorship in the imperial mainland. In Yŏm’s essay, which reads like a 7. Yŏm, “Nodong undong ŭi kyŏnghyang.” 8. Ibid., April 26, 1920. 9. The magazine carried music features, such as Hong Yŏnghu’s “An Account of Musical Notes” (Ŭmaksang ŭm ŭi haesŏl), but also included other kinds of writing, such as Yu Chiyong’s original play Ideal Marriage (Isangjŏk kyŏrhon, which advocated marriage by individual choice; a Korean translation of Dostoevsky’s “Poor Folk” (Pinmin); an anonymous writer’s “Short Biographies of Marx and Engels” (Maksŭ wa Engelsŭ ŭi sojŏn); and also Yŏm’s first incomplete fictional work “An Imported Cat” (Pangnaemyo). A parody of Natsume Sōseki’s famous satire I Am a Cat, Yŏm’s story has as its narrator a cat that dares to claim its grandfather was the real author of Sōseki’s work. For Yŏm’s works, see “Ijung haebang” and “Pangnaemyo.”

Figure 5.1 Cover of the inaugural issue of P’yehŏ (Ruins, July 1920), which also displays its name in Esperanto as La Ruino. Courtesy of the Modern Korean Bibliographical Society.

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de facto manifesto of anarchism, he starts out by questioning what kind of social reform should be pursued in the post–World War I world. He professes that he would object to any reform that did not promise liberation, because it would only wreak more havoc on humanity: “I simply cannot think of reform without liberation. . . . A reform that fails to achieve liberation will only lead the people (minjung) to despair. Such an unfortunate history of repeated miseries has continued so far. The mere thought of another false reform just chills my blood.” True reform, in Yŏm’s vision, would take humanity beyond its tragic history of merely “replacing one authority with another” into a genuinely free world. The following excerpt delineates the substance of this ultimate reform: We must deliver the New Men of the New Age from the fetters of corrupted old morals, the youths from their hard-headed parents and elders, housewives from their husbands, individuals from their households surrounded by the walls of traditional customs, workers from their hard lives and their chains of labor exploitation, and the people from the bonds of tyranny. Only by completely liberating them from all the authorities into democracy will we be able to reform humanity, establish an ideal society, and guarantee mankind its infinite progress and happiness.10

Distinctive of Yŏm’s all-encompassing project of emancipation is his combining the liberal agenda of individual liberation with those of feminism and socialism. Notably absent is the exclusive primacy of the proletariat or the labor struggle. Also, in place of a proletarian revolution, Yŏm calls for “democracy” and freedom from “all authorities.” The manifesto ends with a call for a double liberation that is “both internal and external, both spiritual and physical, and both political and economic.” In the contemporary discursive context, this idea of a double liberation could serve as an anarchist critique of both the culturism of gradual reformists and the economic determinism of Marxists.11 Given this earlier intellectual trajectory, it was only natural for Yŏm to maintain a critical distance from both the cultural nationalists and the Marxist organization of the KAPF amid their looming antagonism. Despite his affi liation with Chosŏn mundan, the cultural nationalist magazine, Yŏm was one of its marginal members who did not fully agree with its mainstream literary orientation and sought to stake out his own position between the two camps. Unlike Yi Kwangsu, for example, Yŏm 10. Yŏm, “Ijung haebang,” 5. 11. Ibid. The quotations are from 3 and 5.

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approved of the idea of proletarian literature itself, which he regarded as a “natural” by-product of the development of capitalist society. At the same time, he believed that when the future cultural education of Korean laborers bore fruit, it was the workers themselves who should produce a proletarian literature, instead of it being prematurely created by self-proclaimed proletarian writers of bourgeois origin.12 In professing this belief, Yŏm was in agreement with Ōsugi Sakae, a leader of the Japanese anarchist movement, whose writings and translations of Kropotkin’s works were influential among contemporary Korean socialists.13 Aside from his anarchist disagreement with the KAPF on the notion of proletarian literature, Yŏm was also offended by the daring and dogmatic attitude of its younger members, who indiscriminately denounced all “bourgeois” writers outside their organization, including Yŏm, as “decadent.” In return, Yŏm harshly criticized the crude schematism of KAPF writers’ works as well as what he conceived to be their reductive approach to literature as mere propaganda. “The proletariat,” he exhorted, “do not just wield knives, nor is their consciousness made up of rebellious spirits only. The proletariat have their own passions, tears, laughter, and hopes— all those ‘romantic’ sentiments flow in their hearts. . . . Also, a proletarian literature, as long as it is a literature, must acquire artistic qualities.”14 Above all, however, Yŏm seems to have been most concerned about the divisive impact of the KAPF’s classist emphasis on national resistance efforts. Suggestive of this point was his short story “The Rotary Press” (Yunjŏn’gi; 1925). The story is a close record of the last hour of a threeday-long labor strike in a newspaper company, presented from the perspective of A, the editor. The narrative opens with A ner vously waiting in his office for the return of his messenger, who should bring a loan that 12. Yŏm, “Chakka rosŏnŭn muŭimihan mal,” 60. 13. See Ōsugi, “Rōdō undō to rōdō bungaku.” It was originally published in Shinchō, October 1921. Because Yŏm has been mainly read as a nationalist, critics have overlooked the intellectual relationship between him and Ōsugi. Yŏm also never recognized the influence of the Japanese anarchist in his memoir essays, possibly because admitting to any association with Ōsugi, who was murdered in 1923 by the imperial police, would not have been wise, either during or after colonial times. Yet all textual evidence indicates that Ōsugi was one of the most important sources of Yŏm’s intellectual inspiration in his early years. Yŏm’s articles in Tonga ilbo and Kaebyŏk, for example, are inspired by some of Ōsugi’s writings, such as “Rōdō undō no seishin,” “Rōdō undō to kojinshugi,” and “Rōdō undō to sandikarisumu.” 14. Yŏm, “Kegŭp munhak ŭl nonhaya,” 65.

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is sufficient to pay the workers’ back wages. Grounded as a hostage to hostile workers, he fears what commotion “the drunken bunch of pressworkers” might make should the money fail to arrive. The narrative also presents the workers’ perspective through the voice of Tŏksam, the foreman, who is leading the strike: “Wait for another thirty minutes? Huh! Look outside, no heat in our rooms, empty stomachs . . . ,” he protests, “I wait till ten-thirty, then go home in a blizzard, empty-handed and feeling like shit. My family should all come here and die together, or something. . . . God!”15 At the same time, the narrative also undercuts class antagonism by emphasizing in A’s voice that both sides have “the same duties, the same responsibilities” for carry ing on the social mission of keeping one of the few licensed Korean newspapers in print: “True, no matter how important a newspaper is, people have to eat, but is it just my vanity to think they couldn’t be allowed to kill the newspaper on account of hunger? Is it my personal ambition, utter lack of selfishness, or some ser vice spirit?”16 The situation turns increasingly tense as the workers threaten to become violent, but at the last moment, the much-awaited money finally arrives to quickly dissolve the tension. On seeing the workers happily resuming the printing of the next day’s newspaper under Tŏksam’s leadership, A grasps the foreman’s “cudgel-like” proletarian hand in tearful reconciliation. “The Rotary Press” can be read, at first glance, as an antiproletarian tale written by a bourgeois nationalist subject. Yŏm’s characterization of the workers is none too flattering, as they are depicted as ignorant, selfish, and irresponsible. Read this way, the story seems to belie the hypocrisy of the writer, who penned a newspaper article supportive of the labor union movement a few years earlier and who would soon claim to be a sympathizer of the socialist cause. Yet from an alternative perspective, the story reads not necessarily as Yŏm’s negative commentary on labor strikes in general but rather as his argumentative rejoinder to the radical writers of the KAPF. In fact, given the lack of a mass readership in mid-1920s Korea, it is highly likely that the latter was indeed the story’s 15. Yŏm, “Yunjŏn’gi,” 17. In translating the text, I referenced Yŏm, “The Rotary Press.” As this translation was based on the writer’s postliberation revision, however, I have taken the liberty of modifying the translation to make it more faithful to the original colonial manuscript. 16. Ibid., 14. After 1945 national liberation, the writer revised the vague ending of A’s monologue by adding the following: “[O]nce the Governor-General’s Office revoked the paper’s publication right, they would never reinstate it. This was a frightening prospect” (“The Rotary Press,” 36).

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purpose. Once we thus reconceive its target audience, the story no longer appears to be a bourgeois writer’s pedagogical tale of national unity for his proletarian audience.17 Rather, it seems to argue against radical socialists that an exclusive focus on class warfare is a nearsighted solution for the social contradictions of colonial Korea. Yŏm continued to advance such an argument in his later writings, but his tone gradually changed from argumentative to conciliatory. In 1926 he declared himself to be a “sympathizer” of the socialist movement in the essay “Boris Pilnyak’s Comments on Proletarian Literature” (P’ŭroretaria munhak e taehan P ssi ŭi ŏn; 1926). A “sympathizer” was Yŏm’s translation of the Russian word poputchik (fellow traveler), which Trotsky first used to refer to the writers who supported the revolution despite their lack of party affiliation. In Yŏm’s appropriation, the term referred to a conscientious bourgeois intellectual who shared the historical vision of socialists but was more invested in the immediate goal of national liberation rather than the remote possibility of a proletarian revolution.18 Yŏm articulated a rationale for his sympathizer’s position in the 1927 essay “An Ideological Inquiry into Nationalist and Socialist Movements” (Minjok, sahoe undong ŭi yusimjŏk koch’al). In the essay, he posits that a nation has two kinds of tradition (chŏnt’ong), spiritual and material: the spiritual consists of the “ethnic and cultural aspects,” such as language and customs; and the material is made up of the “political and economic aspects,” such as its class hierarchy and social institutions. Although not timeless, the former has an enduring quality, because it has developed over a long period in accord with the natural environment of Korea, while the latter is historically variable. Nationalism emphasizes the spiritual aspects of the national tradition; socialism, its material aspects. Despite their different priorities, the two sides are compatible because their goals—the nationalist goal of recovering the spiritual tradition and the socialist goal of replacing the material institution with a better one— overlap each other in their aim to deliver the Korean people from their present colonial bondage. The essay concludes as follows: In the present situation we have no choice but to counter the exploitation of one nation [minjok] by another through our own development of 17. For the pedagogical function of nationalist discourse, see Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in The Location of Culture, 199–244. 18. See Yŏm, “P’ŭroretaria munhak e taehan P ssi ŭi ŏn.” Also see Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 61–104.

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national capitalism. This may seem like a historical reversal, even perversion [pyŏnt’ae]. For the proletariat to help the development of the bourgeoisie seems to be self-defeating and even self-destructive. But herein lies the dilemma of the oppressed people. Should this be the only path to ensure the survival of our own people, we cannot but make a temporary concession—even if it means our going against the natural course of history. Yes, this is the point! To become the worthy ally of socialists, nationalists must grant that they are only temporarily supporting the capitalist economic system. They actually do not have any choice since the economic problem of Korea cannot be resolved under capitalism and requires a socialist economic system for its solution. Given their meager capacity, the Korean bourgeois are themselves unable to solve the economic problem, regardless of the resolution of their political problem [i.e., colonialism]. On their side, socialists must acknowledge the existing fact of racial exploitation and condone the nationalists’ economic efforts with the understanding that the Korean bourgeois will not and cannot follow the path of imperial capitalists.19

The previous passage argues that, even though the long-term historical future of Korea lies in a socialist direction, socialists should support, or at least condone, the national bourgeoisie as a short-term strategy to ensure the economic survival of Korea. In return, the bourgeois should be mindful of their own limitations and voluntarily assist in the socialist struggle against imperial capitalists with the prospect of ultimately constructing a new socialist state in Korea. It is easy to dismiss Yŏm’s rationale as a bourgeois intellectual’s thinly disguised promotion of self-interest. Yet Yŏm was far from being alone in upholding the view, which was shared by many of his contemporaries who are variably known in Korean history as “leftist nationalists,” “uncompromising nationalists,” or “middle-of-the-roaders” (chungdop’a). The leading figures of this group include An Chaehong, editor in chief of Chosŏn ilbo; Hong Myŏnghŭi, president of Sidae ilbo and a novelist; Kim Chunyŏn, chairman of the Third Korean Communist Party (alias the M.L. Party); Paek Namun, an economic historian who wrote the first Marxist history of Korea, Chosŏn sahoe kyŏngjesa (The economic history of Korean society; 1933); and Yi Sunt’ak, a pioneering Marxist economist.20 19. Yŏm, “Minjok, Sahoe undong ŭi yusimjŏk koch’al,” 106. 20. For an inclusive Korean account of leftist nationalists, see Yi Kyunyŏng, Sin’ganhoe yŏn’gu and Hanminjok tongnip undongsa, 8: 249–63. Also see the following sources on individual intellectuals: Kang Yŏngju, Pyŏkch’o Hong Myŏnghŭi; Hŏ Tosan, Kŏn’guk ŭi wŏnjun Nangsan Kim Chunyŏn; Pang Kie-Chung, “Paek

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Despite their individual differences, these intellectuals shared in common a national subjectivity tinged with socialism. They believed in the Marxist critique of modern capitalism and the need to pursue a better, alternative social system. But they also thought that, because the social ills of colonial Korea were the combined result of class and colonial contradictions, the solution would lie in pursuing two stages of revolution, the first stage being national liberation and the second a social, if not proletarian, revolution to create a nation-state akin to social democracy. Accordingly, they sought class cooperation, instead of class struggle, through the formation of a united nationalist front that would include labor and peasant movements. In fact, their position was close to that of the Comintern itself before it abandoned the policy of a united front in the wake of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s betrayal and massacre of communists in 1927. The left ist nationalists emerged as a leading independent political force in the late 1920s with the organization of the Sin’ganhoe, the biggest nationalist coalition in colonial Korean history. Th is society was launched in February 1927 to prevent cultural nationalists such as Yi Kwangsu, Ch’oe Namsŏn, and Kim Sŏngsu from establishing an organization that would promote, with the backing of the colonial government, the cause of partial autonomy for Korea. In the unlikelihood of Korea’s gaining full independence, the cultural nationalists might have considered it the best possible option to support the Japanese proposal of making Korea an autonomous region within the empire, but their willingness to make this concession was widely regarded as anathema by other nationalists. Targeting the group, the inaugural platform of the Sin’ganhoe confi rmed its “defiance of any opportunism” as well as its “commitment to national unity.” 21 In practice, the Sin’ganhoe leadership adopted a pragmatic, inclusive policy line. The society had as its de facto organs Chosŏn ilbo and the monthly Hyŏndae p’yŏngnon (Contemporary review; 1927–28). The latter’s inaugural preface professed: “We are willing to embrace an ideology, whether it be Leninism or Washingtonism, as long as it corresponds with the demands of the people.”22 Whereas “Leninism” Namun and Marxist Scholarship”; Lee Ji-won, “An Chaehong’s Thought”; and Hong Sung-Chan, “Yi Sunt’ak and Social Democratic Thought.” 21. Yi Kyunyŏng, Sin’ganhoe yŏn’gu, 97. 22. “Preface,” Hyŏndae p’yŏngnon 1 (January 1927): 1.

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referred to socialism, the gradual reformist stance of cultural nationalists is mentioned here by the term “Washingtonism”—that is, Booker T. Washington’s idea that black Americans should win their civil rights by gradually proving themselves to be self-reliant and reliable citizens. This preface exemplifies the Sin’ganhoe leadership’s pragmatic and conciliatory attitude, in which they preferred to remain ideologically flexible while cooperating with any social group to pursue the political and economic interests of colonial Koreans. The substantial presence of leftist nationalists attests to both the powerful appeal of socialism to Korean nationalists and its conflict with the national liberation movement. Socialism attracted many Korean nationalists because of its powerful explanation of colonial social phenomena, such as the rapacity of the imperial capital and the increasing proletarianization of the colonial masses. Although Marx’s critique of capitalism rang true to many ears, however, his political solution of a proletarian revolution stopped short of convincing as many people, if only because the vision seemed too remote to be a real possibility in industrially underdeveloped colonies such as 1920s Korea. More critically, the Westoriented theory of Marxism gave little consideration to racism, which made it an ultimately insufficient ideology for anticolonial resistance movements. As Fanon observed three decades later, racial discrimination was inseparable from class conflict in a colonial context, and for this reason, “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.”23 The seemingly self-serving theory of the two-stage revolution can actually be seen as a result of the leftist nationalists’ efforts to reconcile their cause of national resistance with the theoretical mandate of Marxism, both of which helped form their political identity. Illustrative of the plurality of colonial nationalist subjectivities, as  well as the complexity of left ist thought in colonial Korea, left ist 23. In Fanon’s words, “The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40.

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nationalism found its unique aesthetic embodiment in the cultural practices of its advocates, such as Yŏm. In the following sections, we shall examine how Yŏm’s left ist national subjectivity shaped, and was also constructed by, his creative literary practice. We will first observe his transition from the I-novelist confessional to the more intersubjective narrative form of travelogue in the mid-1920s. As we will see, the shift foreshadowed his later development into becoming a literary ethnographer of the Korean nation, which he envisioned through a socialist critique of colonial modernity.

Confessing the Colonial Self, Discovering the Colonial Nation In the early stage of his literary career, Yŏm was a prominent advocate and practitioner of the I-novelist confessional. Autobiographical confessional writing was in vogue during the early 1920s, when it was widely regarded as the most “authentic,” truest form of literature in both Japan and Korea. All well-known modern Korean writers produced confessionals. Yŏm also prided himself on his mastery of the hegemonic literary convention, writing stories such as The Green Frog in the Specimen Room, “Dark Night” (Amya; 1922), and “New Year’s Eve” (Cheya; 1923). He also defended the literary convention against criticisms about its solipsistic tendency, arguing that the individual truth of the confessional has its primary significance in expressing “the disillusionment of an awakened self upon his denial of authorities and his iconoclasm of idols.”24 This outspoken proponent of the confessional, however, soon found it necessary to remake the narrative form. The remainder of this section will examine, through a close reading of Yŏm’s two stories, The Green Frog and On the Eve of the Uprising, how and why he departed from the form. My analysis will suggest that although these stories have few of the recognizable generic conventions of proletarian literature, such as a workingclass protagonist or the theme of class struggle, socialism had a shaping 24. “Dark Night” (Amya; 1922) was a diary-like record of an intellectual conflicted between his aspirations for art and romance and his obligations to the family, and “New Year’s Eve” (Cheya; 1923) was an epistolary confession of a new woman whose desire to study abroad led to an illicit romance, an unwanted pregnancy, a failed marriage, and finally her suicide. See Kim Soonsik’s analysis of these early stories in Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse, 36–48. For Yŏm’s defense of confessional writing, see “Kaesŏng kwa yesul,” 35.

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influence on this formal transition by inspiring Yŏm with a vision of a proletarian colonial nation. Before we turn to textual analysis, it would be useful to examine the main characteristics of the confessional narrative form, or the I-novel, as it prevailed among Japanese, Korean, and also Chinese writers in the early twentieth century. The literary form was first developed by a group of Japanese writers known as “naturalists”—among them Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Tōson, and Tokuda Shūsei—in the late 1900s. These Japanese writers were first inspired by French naturalists, in particular Emile Zola, whose “scientific” social outlook and elaborate descriptive writing style they admired. In Japan, however, the term “naturalism” also came to connote the philosophical ideas of other Western thinkers, especially Nietzsche’s iconoclasm and Rousseau’s idealization of the “natural man,” free from conventional inhibitions.25 Both concepts held far more appeal for Meiji Japanese intellectuals than did Zola’s genetic determinism and contributed to the individualist orientation of Japanese naturalists. As an established literary convention, the naturalist confessional typically recorded in minute detail the confl ict-ridden interiority of a modern intellectual. The cause of his conflict, revealed in the climax of the narrative, was oftentimes illicit sexual desire or an affair, which served as a radical symbolic expression of one’s individuality.26 This form was further popularized by writers such as Shiga Naoya and Arishima Takeo in the Taishō era (1912–26), when it came to be known as the I-novel because the protagonist was often identified with the writer himself within the cliquish culture of Japanese literary society.27 In retrospect, we may say that the confessional narrative form of the I-novel stemmed from modern Japanese writers’ efforts to apply what they believed to be the most advanced Western writing style to one of their most urgent concerns, the creation and assertion of the 25. For the formation of Japa nese naturalist literature, see Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, 73–148, and Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 33–47. 26. See Karatani, “Confession as a System.” In this essay, Karatani overturns the myth of the I-novel as the literary record of the true self by drawing from Foucault’s analysis of the secrecy of sex not as a natural instinct but as an effect of the convention entailed by Christian penance. According to Karatani’s reasoning, it is not that the writer is compelled to make a confession of already existing secrets but that the institutional existence of confessional narrative induces him to create a secret to disclose. 27. Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 3–8.

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modern individual self. Both aesthetic aspiration and thematic concern were widely shared among the first generation of modern Korean writers, who had either studied in Japan or found their most accessible model of modern literature in the works of Japanese naturalists.28 Yŏm’s first completed story, The Green Frog, was also written as an I-novelistic confessional and exhibits many of its generic attributes. Its anonymous first-person narrator “I,” a student returnee from Japan, suffers from nameless anxiety. His symptoms include chronic physical fatigue, constant ner vous hypertension, weeks-long insomnia, and nightmares. One of his recurring nightmares features the dissection of a green frog in a lab. To relieve his anxiety, “I” takes trips with his friends, but everywhere he goes, he runs into figures of madness, ghostly emanations of his anxiety. As is often the case with the Japanese I-novel, the narrative pays little attention to the physicality of the places where “I” travels, focusing only on describing the protagonist’s fluctuating mental and emotional state. The titular trope of dissection was a popular symbol of psychological realism in contemporary East Asian literary discourse.29 Lacking concrete descriptions of the external world, the entire story can be read like a prolonged nightmare of “I.” This colonial I-novel, however, has a curious formal irregularity. Its narrative diverges in the middle to a seemingly independent episode about the life of Kim Ch’angŏk, one of the lunatics “I” comes across. The mad philosopher is a mysterious figure in that he induces an unexplained euphoric response from “I.” At his friends’ urging, “I” visits Kim’s selfmade makeshift abode, a “grand” three-storied shack atop a hill. During their visit, Kim rambles on about international politics and domestic social issues, such as universal pacifism, the Wilsonian doctrine of self-reliance, and the hypocrisy of Christians. Others find the madman to be a laughingstock, but “I” feels profoundly moved by him, for a reason that is not immediately apparent in the text. On his way back, “I” even writes to a friend about his intense empathy for Kim, whom he eulogizes 28. For a recent, broader study on confessional narratives from modern Korea, see U Chŏnggwŏn, Han’guk kŭndae kobaek sosŏl ŭi hyŏngsŏng. U has also collected confessional stories in Han’guk kŭndae kobaek sosŏl chakp’um sŏnjip. 29. For the general abstract quality of spatial description in the Japa nese I-novels, see Gilbert, “Spatial and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishō Writings.” See also Lydia Liu’s observation of the use of dissection as a popu lar trope of psychological realism among the modern Chinese writers who were influenced by Japanese naturalism in Translingual Practice, 128.

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as “the citizen of freedom” and “a victor who accomplished our wishes by himself.”30 This euphoric moment, despite its apparent lack of rationale, marks the affective climax of the narrative. At this point, the narrative suddenly breaks, shift ing in time and voice, to recount Kim’s life story from an omniscient third-person narrator’s perspective. We learn that Kim was a child prodigy in his hometown of Namp’o, a seaport city near Pyongyang. He was sent to Seoul for his higher education but had to leave school due to his father’s sudden death, which was soon followed by that of his mother. Kim became an elementary-school teacher in Namp’o, but his domestic tragedy, including his loveless arranged marriage, drove him to drink. Meanwhile, “the Old and New Testaments on his desk were replaced by the political economy textbooks of a university in Tokyo.” Fortunately, his unloved wife soon passed away. He remarried a pretty young woman and began a new life. Just when Kim was finally tasting a bit of happiness, however, he “was forced to suffer behind bars owing to an unexpected incident.”31 When he came out of prison, his wife had already run away, leaving their infant daughter behind. Abandoned, with no job and no wife, the broken man found solace in the blissful oblivion of madness. In his state of delusion, he set out to build his dream house, a three-story, Western-style mansion, using only six wooden pillars, two panels, straw mats, pebbles, and mud. He named the completed makeshift building with a grand river 30. Yŏm, “P’yobonsil ŭi ch’ŏnggaeguri,” 30. Yŏm’s mysterious, saintly madman has its hidden subtext in Ōsugi Sakae’s 1914 essay “Madman of Justice.” Ōsugi wrote the essay in response to Sakai Toshihiko’s skepticism about individual activism through direct action after the 1911 Treason Incident. Against Sakai, who cautioned by quoting George Bernard Shaw’s quip “Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long,” Ōsugi argued that in climbing the summits, which is “an act of a madman of justice” and “a noble art of action,” one gains a moment of self-liberation, without which one would remain among the ignorant masses and would not be able to “become a creative subject of history.” Hence, no matter how many times one might tumble down, one must climb again, and also “urge and even force others to do the same.” In Ōsugi’s debate with Sakai, this figure of a madman, inspired by Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Bergson’s philosophy of life, was a defense of anarchist syndicalism and/or terrorism against Sakai’s doubt of their efficiency. Appropriated in Yŏm’s story, however, Ōsugi’s theory of a madman of justice acquires another significance, that of justifying the March First Movement, despite the sacrifices. See Ōsugi, “Seigi no kyōjin”; for Sakai’s comment on Shaw, see 65, and for the rest of quotations, 73. 31. Yŏm, “P’yobonsil ŭi ch’ŏnggaeguri,” 32 and 33.

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view “The East–West Friendship Institute.” After depicting Kim’s life story, the narrative shifts back to the confessional mode to find “I” again slipping into depression on learning the news of Kim’s disappearance from Namp’o after burning down his building. What shall we make of this framed story and the formal irregularity caused by it? What symbolic significance does Kim Ch’angŏk hold, whose life story is told at length and occupies the center of the narrative? The mad philosopher, it seems to me, should be seen as a personification of the missing secret in Yŏm’s confessional story. The Green Frog is peculiar as a confessional in that it makes no disclosure of a secret that would be the cause of Yŏm’s autobiographical narrator’s anxiety. In its stead, the narrative gives us Kim’s life story, which parallels that of the writer himself, for Yŏm also had to drop out of college, was imprisoned due to his participation in the 1919 uprisings, and was a schoolteacher at the time of writing this story. In fact, the narrative deliberately calls the reader’s attention to Kim’s relevance: Kim alone is endowed with his full name, while the other characters remain nameless or are all identified only by an English initial; Kim is also said to resemble the dissector in the opening nightmare, and he is the only character to whom the protagonist responds emotionally. In adopting this narrative strategy of indirect confession, Yŏm might have been appealing to the interpretive convention of the I-novel, in which a close circle of readers was expected to identify the protagonist with the writer. At the same time, given the nationwide impact of the March First Movement, Yŏm could also rely on more general readers to pick up affinities that resonated with their own life experiences. In this sense, The Green Frog was less of a me-moir than an “us-moir.”32 We may say that Yŏm’s I-novelistic confessional without the conventional revelation of a private secret is a case of Karen Thornber’s “dynamic intertextuality,” in which the writer consciously or subconsciously modified his literary predecessors, thus affirming the authority of the Japanese I-novel as a hegemonic literary form and at the same time transforming its legacy.33 The formal complexity of Yŏm’s first I-novel can be partly considered an effect of colonial censorship. Despite its original philosophical un32. I thank Anne McKnight for introducing this coinage by Edwidge Danticat that was quoted in Carolina Gonzalez’s blog post, “Not a ME-moir, but an USmoir.” http://soundtaste.typepad.com/sound _taste/2007/11/brother-im-dyin.html. 33. Thornber, Empire of Texts, 218–19.

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derpinnings in liberal individualism, the confessional narrative form could be and had been used to express collectivist themes. For instance, Korean proletarian writers initially made much use of it, and Chinese writers such as Yu Dafu reinvented the I-novel to express their nationalist subjectivity.34 Yet when a theme was of an illegal nature, as the March First Movement was in colonial Korea, the I-novel was an inconvenient form for the writer to employ, because it provided little camouflage. Accordingly, it seems that Yŏm had to make a formal detour from the conventional I-novel to write his oblique memoir on the taboo subject matter. In On the Eve, Yŏm followed his formal experiment in The Green Frog with his subsequent modification of the confessional into a travelogue. The latter reused the confessional-cum-travelogue form of The Green Frog but is more of a travelogue in its proper sense, with its narrator, Inhwa, more attentively observing his surroundings and having greater interactions with the people he meets during his journey. On the Eve has a spatially circular narrative structure, beginning with Inhwa leaving Tokyo to visit his sick wife in Seoul and ending with him returning to Tokyo after her death. Between the two cities, Inhwa travels through various places, such as Kobe—where he visits his ex-girlfriend—and the harbor cities of Simonoseki and Pusan. Although the purpose of the travel is to visit his dying wife, this aim never surfaces in Inhwa’s consciousness during his journey. Apart from its apparent purpose, the travel assumes an autonomous significance as a time-space for his transformation from a cosmopolitan liberal intellectual into a colonial nationalist.35 In this process, the narrative projects Inhwa’s changing interiority on a panoramic mosaic of snapshots of the social scenes and the people of colonial Korea rather than on a single, inarticulate figure. Such a formal transition forecasts the writer’s later literary development toward ethnographic fiction. The protagonist of On the Eve appears at first to be a self-absorbed bourgeois liberal intellectual with little national consciousness. The narrative follows him to his usual hangouts in Tokyo, such as the boardinghouse, the college, a barbershop, a gift store, and a café. Now and then he falls into musing on abstract, philosophical ideas, such as universal human nature and the behavioral habits and mores of different social classes, but his thoughts never dwell on his ethnic identity. Nor does Inhwa betray 34. See Keaveney, The Subversive Self. 35. Pak Sangjun makes the observation in 1920 nyŏndae munhak kwa Yŏm Sangsŏp, 166–71.

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any ethnic consciousness in his interactions with the Japanese. He even flirts with the Japanese café waitress Shizuko, his love interest. During his farewell visit to her, she criticizes him for delaying his departure upon learning its cause. As self-justification, Inhwa launches into tall talk of Nietzschean iconoclasm: “Dying is one thing, drinking is another. And yet, drinking while ‘my wife’ is dying?—so-called morality raises its head. But it’s not my conscience speaking. It’s only a devil called ‘ideal,’ who pulls me by a leash around my neck. Man is a slave to false ideals. True living lies in liberating oneself from false moral ideals.”36 This confident cosmopolitan liberal, however, transmutes into an indignant colonial nationalist through his experiencing of the embodied colonial self during his journey to Seoul. If he could remain indifferent to his ethnicity amid the liberal atmosphere of the imperial metropolis, he is rudely awakened to the prevalence of rampant racism in the border zones, such as a harbor or a railroad station, where the police stop him for random interrogation for no other reason than his appearance as an educated Korean and where Japanese civilians look at him as if he were a troublemaker. Their suspicious gazes turn his body into a marker of his ethnic identity, stripping Inhwa of his individuality and imposing, in its place, his collective identity as a disgraced member of the colonized race. Inhwa’s nationalist conversion echoes Frantz Fanon’s theory of the nationalist growth of a colonial intellectual. According to Fanon, a Europe-educated colonial intellectual initially dwells in the “imitative” stage of unqualified assimilation, in which he remains a cosmopolitan, one of the “race of angels,” with no consciousness of his racial, ethnic, or national identity. When he is first subjected to racial discrimination, however, he enters the second, “disturbed” stage, where he painfully recognizes his other self, the overdetermined colonial subject.37 Significantly, Inhwa’s nationalist awakening coincides with his emotional identification with Korean peasants and his subsequent renunciation of the complacent bourgeois self. A decisive moment in his conversion comes when he overhears a conversation among three Japa nese aboard the ferry to Korea. In this scene, which takes place in a public bath, Inhwa’s individuality is literally obliterated as the steam makes him invisible to the Japanese passengers. Unaware of his presence, the Japanese freely converse about the human trafficking of colonial laborers, “Korean 36. Yŏm, “On the Eve of the Uprising,” 14. 37. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 217–18.

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yobos” and “Taiwanese beasts” (yŏbo, which literally means “look here,” is a colloquial term of address that was used by the Japanese to refer to Korean workers during the colonial period). Their careless discussion of gullible, impoverished Korean peasants, who easily fall prey to Japanese human traffickers, rouses Inhwa’s sense of moral indignation, which in turn awakens his feeling of racial enmity. Simultaneously, he is struck with a pang of guilt: Since I had been only a bookish student, I could not help but be amazed at such a story. Needless to say, all my ideas on life, humanity, and society were no more than empty theories in a classroom. I could prattle on about life, nature, poetry, and the novel, having done a little bit of study or skimmed a few novels, thanks to my father or ancestors, but all my critiques were in the end nothing but the grumblings of a satiated belly; they had no relevance. They were completely out of touch with the facts hidden behind the curtain. At that moment in the bathing area, I was helplessly seized by grave doubt about what I had been doing and what I would do in the future.38

Inhwa’s nationalist self-awakening is thus achieved simultaneously with his self-criticism of “bourgeois idealism” and his realization of the material reality of colonial Korea. Mediating this realization was his sympathy for the Korean peasant masses. In his continuing reflection, Inhwa questions the enslaved lot of the peasants: “With ten drops of sweat and a hundred drops of blood, they grow a grain of rice. But to whose mouth does it go? What do they receive in return? More than anything else, starvation is their wage.” Considering that the colonial government endorsed, rather than reformed, the exploitative traditional landlord system of Korea for its own interests, we witness here one of the first novelistic critiques of colonial modernity from a class-based perspective.39 During the rest of his trip home, Inhwa assumes the role of a nationalist critical observer of Korean society, wherein he finds his compatriots under political and economic oppression. The travel narrative part of On the Eve is also distinct from the rest in its use of space. Instead of a few enclosed areas of his daily life, Inhwa now appears in a variety of communal settings, such as streets, train stations, train cars, and docks. They serve as the locations in which he actually engages in interaction with a host of strangers—rather than with immediate relations and lovers—instead of remaining absorbed in his own philosophical reflections. As the narrative focuses on registering his reactions to the 38. Yŏm, “On the Eve of the Uprising,” 35. 39. Ibid., 35–36.

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people’s appearances and actions as well as his conversations with them, Inhwa is decentered to serve as a critical observer. Among the colonial figures he encounters are an uneducated hat seller who is convinced that a man with a modern appearance but with no command of spoken Japanese will only “be harassed, beaten, and sent to prison once a month”;40 a half-Korean, half-Japanese girl who hates her own Korean mother; a clerk who will speak only Japanese; train passengers who are frightened at the mere sight of an armed Japanese policeman; and a group of abused prisoners, including a poor mother and a child. Together, their images provide eloquent, cumulative testimony to the troubled lot of Koreans in the process of colonial modernization. Consequently emerging from Yŏm’s narrative is a vision of colonial Korea as a proletarian nation that is caught in the process of progressive pauperization due to imperial capitalist accumulation and exploitation. In a most suggestive textual instance, when Inhwa lands at Pusan harbor, he walks to the main road, fi lled with nostalgic longing for Korean food, only to find that Japanese settlements have crowded Koreans out of the city center. There, he now sees new theaters and motion-picture houses decorated with colorful posters and flags. While Koreans are marveling at the wonders of modernity, Inhwa reflects, their houses “change hands and end up in the possession of the Chosŏn Industrial Bank, to be occupied by a new owner. In such a manner, one after another, a hundred more houses are lost, and a few hundred more households disappear entirely,” with their former occupants driven to migrate to Manchuria.41 In this vision, the new amenities of modernity—electricity, Western-style houses, streetcars, newspaper subscription ser vice, and so on—are no longer perceived as welcome signs of the progress of civilization, as they were, for instance, in Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless (Mujŏng; 1917).42 As Inhwa asks, “To whom do the two-story houses belong, and for whom does the hygiene matter?” Colonial modernization is equated here with being invaded by exploitative imperial capital, epitomized in the narrative by the Chosŏn Industrial Bank, an institution that played a pivotal role in colonial development. In such a negative perception of colonial modernity, not only the imperial claim of mission civilsatrice but also an optimistic vision of gradual reformism would sound hollow and even hypocritical. 40. Ibid., 77. 41. Ibid., 54–55. 42. Yi Kwangsu, Mujŏng.

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Compared with the poignancy of the main part of its narrative, the ending of On the Eve seems rather anticlimactic. Yŏm offers no satisfactory resolution but only hints at a vague optimism for the future. Inhwa does not rush out to join a public demonstration, as we might have expected from the title or as Fanon envisioned a newly awakened colonial nationalist doing in the final, “combative” stage of his political development. Instead, Inhwa simply gets on the return train to Tokyo after sending a farewell letter to Shizuko. In the letter he bewails the status quo: “How can I dream of ‘Flowering Seoul,’ buried as I am in this grave swarming with ghosts—all so many lifeless Koreans.” But the letter ends only with an abstract exultation of individual creativity: “Not just Europe but the whole world is now brimming over with hope for a new and better life. If one individual epitomizes the whole, then this glorious rebirth must start and end with each individual.” 43 However, censorship did play a role in making the ending timid. When Yŏm first serialized the novella under the title Grave (Myoji) in Sin saenghwal in 1922, its third installment was confiscated with the subsequent banning of the magazine itself. In 1924, Yŏm managed to reserialize the novella in Sidae ilbo under the current title.44 When Yŏm republished On the Eve after liberation, he did indeed revise the ending to have a more pointed finale. The postliberation version altered the previously quoted part of the letter as follows: “It seems that people finally want to put aside their vain swords and guns and think of the rebirth of mankind. But when will the teachers of this land lay down their mock swords?”45 Here, Inhwa is criticizing Japan’s militarist rule of Korea during the 1910s, implying that what needs to change is the system, not just individuals. Although we should be wary of treating a postliberation revision as a possible pre-censorship version, in this particular case the revision seems to accord better with the writer’s ideological orientation at the time of its colonial publication. 43. Yŏm, “On the Eve of the Uprising,” 110–11. 44. When Yŏm resumed its serialization, he made no conspicuous change other than the title. But when he republished the novella after liberation, in 1948, he made three major revisions: he polished his earlier writing by modernizing some expressions, most noticeably replacing Japanese terms with Korean ones; he significantly curtailed those sections of the novella involving the narrator’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend Ŭlla; and he reinforced the nationalistic tone of the work. See Yi Chaesŏn’s close study of the two versions in “Ilche ŭi kŏmyŏl kwa Mansejŏn.” 45. See Yŏm, Samdae oe, 671.

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Whereas The Green Frog began with a colonial intellectual’s confession of his private self and ended with his revelation of the colonial us, On the Eve departed from the same point to result in the discovery of the colonial nation. In the process, Yŏm moved away from the private confessional toward the more intersubjective narrative form of a travelogue. Inhwa’s record of his homecoming trip was not the case of a colonial subject “writing back” to the empire, reversing the epistemological violence of imperial Western or Japa nese travelers on Korea and the Koreans. Rather, it was a foreign-educated colonial intellectual’s travel of reconciliation with his “grave-like” native land and its people, including his own colonial self (fig. 5.2). “Travel might always be fundamentally about the discovery of self in the apprehension of the other,” Bill Ashcroft notes, “but in reconciliation travel the function of discovery—the dialectic of intersubjective discovery—is the discovery that requires self-revelation in the attempt to gain healing.” 46 Ashcroft is referring here to interracial reconciliation travel between the former imperial subject and the ex-colonial subject, but his insight also applies to Inhwa’s intra-ethnic, inter-class reconciliation travel, through which he comes to confront and renounce his cosmopolitanized, bourgeois self. A travelogue, however, as Ashcroft also observes, has its formal limitations, in that its essentially subjective narrative cannot bear witness to collective subjectivity. Perhaps for this reason, Yŏm subsequently moved further toward a third-person narrative form. Socialism continued to play a crucial role in Yŏm’s subsequent maturation into an ethnographic novelist. If the writer’s socialist inspiration was overridden by his liberal and nationalist agenda in The Green Frog, it was rather prominently displayed in On the Eve, whose social outlook on colonial Korea was informed by Marx’s—and also Kropotkin’s—critique of modern capitalism. Although in this novella Yŏm projected the vision of the proletarian nation from Inhwa’s individual subjective perspective, he would render it in a more objective fashion in his later novels by portraying on a broad literary canvas a crowd of characters from various walks of society who are bound together, despite all their differences, by their membership in the proletarian colonial nation.

46. Ashcroft, “Afterword: Travel and Power,” 238.

Figure 5.2 Yŏm Sangsŏp and the daughter of an acquaintance during his school days in Japan. Photograph used with the permission of Yŏm’s family.

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Writing Literary Ethnographies of the Proletarian Nation In his later days, Yŏm reflected, “I have never wavered from realism, and it has been long since I left naturalism behind.”47 Yŏm moved away from the naturalist I-novelistic confessional after the publication of On the Eve of the Uprising in 1924, but it was not until 1927 that he professed his new literary ideal to be “realism.” Realism, as he conceived it, was not simply a plain writing style, which the naturalist confessional also had. Rather, it connoted a national aesthetic equipped with a materialist outlook. In his essay “Literature and Life” (Munhak kwa saenghwal; 1927), for instance, Yŏm defined the mission of a realist novelist “to represent people’s lives today,” especially “the historical and social consciousness—or, more specifically, the national consciousness—that informs the life of his contemporaries.” To represent national consciousness, he maintained, the writer should depict “life, society, and the world in their unfolding movements” by examining their material bases, because “life dances on reality, and it is reality that controls its dance.” 48 In this essay, he decisively moved away from his earlier advocacy of the individualist aesthetic of the naturalist confessional toward a national aesthetic and also emphasized the importance of grounding one’s representation of life in material reality. With its nationalist overtone aside, Yŏm’s literary ideal may be best compared to Lukács’s notion of critical realism, in which a writer would critically portray reality in its dynamic totality without explicitly prescribing a solution for depicted social ills.49 We can appreciate the critical relevance of Yŏm’s realism by comparing it with other contemporary literary trends. On the one hand, it was distinct from proletarian realism for its emphasis on “national” consciousness, as well as for Yŏm’s conception of the writer’s role as a critical observer of reality rather than an avant-garde instigator of revolution. On the other hand, Yŏm’s realism also differed from the nativist aesthetic of cultural nationalists for its materialist outlook and its insistence on the contemporaneity of subject matter. Though cultural nationalists such as Ch’oe Namsŏn and Yi Kwangsu were pioneers of modern literary forms during the New Literature movement, in the mid-1920s they changed 47. Yŏm, “Na wa chayŏnjuŭi,” 220. 48. Yŏm, “Munye wa saenghwal,” 107–8. 49. For Lukács’s discussion of critical realism in contrast with socialist realism, see The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 93–135.

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their aesthetic orientation to more conservative nativism in response to the socialist critique of their elitist culturism. By the late 1920s, Ch’oe was promoting the revival of sijo, traditional Korean vernacular poetry, and in a corresponding move, Yi Kwangsu was writing historical novels about the dynastic past, such as Prince Maŭi (Maŭi t’aeja; 1927) and The Sad History of King Tanjong (Tanjong aesa; 1929).50 By upholding his principle of critical realism in this situation, Yŏm distinguished himself as a rare writer resolutely committed to recording the living present of Korean society at a time when cultural nationalists were turning nostalgic for an invented, essentialized cultural past, while KAPF writers were taking flight into a revolutionary future. In practicing his alternative national aesthetic, Yŏm produced novels that can be characterized as “ethnographic fiction.” By invoking this term, we are not implying that Yŏm had any unusual degree of familiarity with the discipline of anthropology. Rather, the term applies in a broad and generalized sense suggested by Janet Talman in reference to literary works that “convey significant information about the culture or cultures from which the novel originates.”51 During the Sin’ganhoe movement period Yŏm published a number of full-length novels, most of which he serialized in newspapers: Love and Crime (Sarang kwa choe; 1927–28); Two Hearts (Isim; 1928– 29); Fury (Kwangbun; 1929–30); Three Generations (Samdae; 1931); and Fig (Muhwagwa; 1931–32). All of these novels present rich composite narratives with an assortment of lively characters. They come from all walks of life and all corners of Seoul—traditional and nouveaux riches; conservative, moderate, and radical intellectuals; new and old women; factory laborers and servants; detectives and criminals; and missionaries and prostitutes. Some of these are foreigners—particularly Japanese 50. The two novels had the common theme of the dethronement of a righteous royal heir, a theme that could resonate with colonial Korean readers. In these novels, Yi turned to the ancient and medieval dynastic past of Korea for his literary themes and also adopted more archaic language in his writing. Maŭi t’aeja, which literally means “Crown Prince in Hemp Clothing,” is an alias for the last crown prince of the ancient Silla dynasty. Legend has it that the prince chose to live out his life in a mountain hermitage after Silla surrendered to Koryŏ in 918. Tanjong, a grandson of King Sejong, became king when he was only twelve. He was dethroned after only three years by his ambitious uncle Prince Suyang (King Sejo) and was executed in his place of exile. 51. See Talman, “The Ethnographic Novel,” 12.

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and American. Yŏm’s narratives interweave their respective environments, lifestyles, and mores into multistranded plot lines to achieve rich literary tapestries. Journalistic immanence characterizes these works, which have as their background events the period’s landmark incidents, such as the 1928 dissolution of the Korean Communist Party in Three Generations, the 1929 industrial exhibition in Fury, and the 1931 Manchurian Incident in Fig. By painting his journalistic sensibility on a broad literary canvas, Yŏm produced vivid literary documentations of contemporary Korean life experiences as they were unfolding in the colonial capital. It is in this sense that his novels can be regarded as literary ethnographies of colonial Korea. Writing literary ethnographies of a nation, however, means more than just documenting its social relations and cultural customs. The literary act also has the discursive function of evoking an imagined national community, conveying to readers a certain coherent vision of the nation. We may ask, then, which vision of colonial Korea was evoked by Yŏm’s leftist national narratives. I will pursue this inquiry by discussing one of his novels, Three Generations, which earned the writer his greatest critical and commercial success.52 Serialized in Chosŏn ilbo between January 1 and September 19, 1931, Three Generations tells the story of a family crisis in an upper-middleclass household in contemporary Seoul. The Cho family has three patriarchs: Master Cho, a Confucian landlord; his son, Sanghun, a U.S.educated Christian philanthropist; and the grandson, Tŏkki, a student at a Japanese college. Their household is beset by internal conflicts: Master Cho and Sanghun argue over their religious and generational differences; Master Cho’s concubine, Madame Suwŏn, vies with the younger patriarchs over the right to inheritance; and Sanghun and his wife are estranged due to his extramarital affairs. As an heir apparent and a dutiful offspring, Tŏkki is caught in the midst of the family turmoil and longs to escape from everyone by returning to college in Tokyo. In its representation of the crisis and decay of the family, Yŏm’s novel resonates with Shimazaki Tōson’s The Family (Ie; 1911). In this colonial novel of the family, however, the domestic saga is also criss-crossed with other tales of a colorful group of youths surrounding Tŏkki, thereby expanding the boundary of the narrative to a broader 52. See Sŏ Kwangun, Han’guk sinmun sosŏlsa, 187.

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society.53 It is mainly through his childhood friend Pyŏnghwa, now a communist, that Tŏkki comes to associate with characters from different social walks of life. For instance, he meets, P’ilsun, a factory working girl and Pyŏnghwa’s protégé, for whom he develops romantic feelings despite the fact that he is a married man. Joining this group is Kyŏngae, Tŏkki’s former schoolmate-turned-stepmother, who was seduced and abandoned by Sanghun and is now working as a café waitress. A fashionable modern girl who is also a single mother, she arouses Pyŏnghwa’s romantic interest. Tŏkki acts as a benefactor to everyone, providing them with financial assistance for their needs, and in the process he becomes unwittingly involved in Pyŏnghwa’s underground activity as a financial sponsor of his clandestine comrades. While the first half of the novel focuses on introducing these characters and relating their personal interactions, its second half takes on an aura of mystery and detective fiction, in which the domestic and the social become more deeply intertwined. The turning point of the narrative comes with the sudden death of Master Cho. As soon as Tŏkki returns to Japan, he is summoned back by his dying grandfather, who is growing weaker daily after an accidental fall in the yard. After the funeral, Tŏkki finds himself in charge of his quarrelsome household and forced to cope with other family members’ jealousy and greed, as well as the suspicion that his grandfather might have been fatally poisoned. Soon the police are on the case, while they are also tracking down a secret emissary from Russia who delivered a lump sum to Pyŏnghwa and other socialist activists for their terrorist operation. One by one, virtually all of the characters end up in police custody for their respective involvement in domestic and political crimes. Three Generations can be read as a family saga, but if we take a cue from the writer’s own commentary, we may also read it as a self-conscious national allegory—in par ticu lar, an allegory depicting the national status quo during the Sin’ganhoe movement period.54 Each of the Cho 53. Thornber observes that this close bonding between the family and society distinguishes modern Korean and Chinese family novels from their Japa nese counterparts. See Thornber, Empire of Texts, 315. 54. By reading Three Generations as a national allegory, I am not endorsing Frederic Jameson’s much criticized argument that all third-world texts are “necessarily” allegorical and that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (545–46). Taken without the overgeneralization, however, his claim can offer

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patriarchs, Yŏm wrote in his memoir, stands for the leading social group of his respective generation, and their individual fortunes epitomize the collective fate of their own group.55 Master Cho, the traditional yangban of the bygone dynasty, decays into death through his feudal sin of concubinage; Sanghun represents compromised reformists with his Christian affi liation, Western tastes, and moral hypocrisy; and Tŏkki is “the sympathizer,” or fellow traveler, who thinks that “he could not remain simply as an indifferent onlooker of the socialist movement, but given his temperament and the family situation, he could not fight on the frontline. Thus he thought that he could best serve by becoming an attorney and assisting [the movement] as a nurse would [a soldier].”56 In this allegorical reading, love triangles involving these men symbolically indicate the power transition in national leadership. Notably, Kyŏngae, a scion of a martyred leader of the 1919 uprisings, leaves Sanghun, the compromised reformist, for Pyŏnghwa, the communist revolutionary; and P’ilsun, the daughter of an ex-labor union activist, favors the more pragmatic Tŏkki over the diehard radical Pyŏnghwa. In Yŏm’s leftist national allegory, the bourgeois sympathizer leads the alliance of socialists and the working class to protect the nation that was betrayed by cultural nationalists. If we probe still deeper, however, we fi nd underneath Yŏm’s selfconscious national allegory another more troubling and seemingly pessimistic vision of Korea as a proletarian nation. Socialist inspirations—in particular, class consciousness and a materialist view of human relationships—structure Yŏm’s national narrative. The characters of Three Generations are divided by their economic disparity and monetary interests. Money mediates all human relationships in the novel, whether they be between strangers, between a couple, or even between parents and children. Class consciousness, prevalent throughout the narrative, is regularly highlighted rather than blurred as the narrative contrasts the differences between the haves and the have-nots in their housing, clothes, and meals. For instance, Sanghun’s mansion is filled with luxurious pieces of furniture, such as “shiny mirrored wardrobes,” “a cabinet a useful comparative insight into the difference between Western literature and colonial, semicolonial, or postcolonial literature outside the West. See Jameson, “Third-World Literature.” 55. Yŏm, “Hoengbo mundan hoesanggi,” 237. 56. Yŏm, Samdae oe, 98–99.

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full of satin bedding,” and “a decorated ottoman with embroidered pillows and cushions,” while P’ilsun’s family’s cavelike dwelling is described as having barely furnished rooms, “a nearly collapsing gate,” and “a fence of black, rotten straw mats,” the shabbiness of which Tŏkki “has never seen before.”57 The narrative also routinely underscores class conflict, either through the omniscient third-person narrator’s direct comments or in the voice of working-class and socialist characters. Finally, occupying the center of the novel is the bourgeois–proletarian romance between Tŏkki, the millionaire heir, and P’ilsun, the factory worker. Although amply recognizing the monetary conflict and division among the characters, Yŏm’s narrative ultimately subsumes it under their common identity as subjects of the proletarian colonial nation. More specifically, to create a sense of unity among the characters, the narrative brings them all together at a colonial police station. To this end, it interweaves three separate criminal subplots: Madame Suwŏn’s scheme to poison Master Cho; Sanghun’s ruse to embezzle his son’s inheritance; and the socialists’ conspiracy in organizing a terrorist operation. The narrative progressively builds suspense as it alternates among these story lines, until almost everyone ends up in the police station at the same time, for his or her own respective reasons. In addition to the prime suspects and their accomplices, Tŏkki is arrested for providing an allowance to revolutionaries, and P’ilsun for running an errand for P’ihyŏk, Kyŏngae’s long-lost cousin and a secret emissary from an overseas Korean communist party, if not the Comintern itself. They are interrogated by the overweening Japanese police chief Kanemura, whose authority dwarfs all Korean characters, flattening their social differences in the world outside. Accentuating their collective ordeal are rare scenes of torture that punctuate the interrogation sequences. The narrative offers surprisingly graphic depictions of the abused bodies of torture victims: the bloodcaked face of Chang Hun, a communist who commits suicide under severe torture; the red, swollen hands of Kyŏngae’s mother, the widow of an independence movement leader; and the emaciated, frail body of P’ilsun’s father, an ex-labor unionist, who dies soon after his release. These scenes of torture, where both the guilty and the innocent are abused by Japanese policemen, serve as poignant reminders of Japan’s imperial violence against the Koreans (fig. 5.3). The insertion of torture scenes was a rather remarkable feat that Yŏm skillfully managed to achieve under the watchful eyes of censors. 57. Yŏm, Samdae oe, 339 and 38.

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Figure 5.3 Ahn Sŏkchu’s illustration for Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Three Generations, from Chosŏn ilbo (September 3, 1927). Reflective of Yŏm’s adoption of detective fiction’s narrative conventions, Ahn’s drawings for the novel have a noir feeling to them, often featuring shadowed faces, figures in dark silhouette, and secluded places. Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

Although torture was a major theme in Japanese proletarian literature, it was scarcely treated in Korean proletarian literature, except in a few works published by Korean socialists in Japan.58 In fact, Yŏm’s narrative strategically places the provocative scenes among others that are more favorable to the police: for instance, the description of the police chief’s 58. For a discussion of the symbolic significance of torture in Japa nese proletarian literature as the concrete manifestation of state repression, see Bowen-Struyk, “The Epistemology of Torture.” Although torture was an important theme of Japa nese proletarian literature, the theme is hardly found at all in Korean proletarian publications, most likely due to colonial censorship. Aside from Three Generations, the only stories of torture that I found were both in the Musanja, the Korean socialist journal published in Tokyo. Both Ch’oe Sŏngsu’s “Spring” (Pom) and Sŏ Sangho’s “Blood” (P’i) are mainly focused on recording the horror and pains of torture and are much more graphic than Yŏm’s novel. While “Spring” depicts the death of a Korean socialist in Japan, “Blood,” a story of a union worker’s death, seems to be set in Korea, given no particular mention of a foreign setting or racial consciousness. The severe extent of the expurgation, however, makes any defi nite confirmation impossible.

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brutal treatment of Chang Hun in his last dying moment is immediately followed by a scene in which the same police chief triumphantly boasts to Tŏkki about police efficiency in solving the crimes of his grandfather’s death and the theft of his inheritance. In such a sequence, the domestic story line helps to distract the censor from the politically sensitive one. Disturbing and provocative, the literary visualization of the tortured bodies effectively buttresses the narrative vision of colonial Korea as a politically disenfranchised and materially declining “proletarian” nation. Yŏm’s pessimistic vision of colonial Korea was reflective of contemporary social reality, but only partially. The Korean national bourgeoisie, who had provided leadership to the 1920s social movements, were indeed experiencing a crisis, because they were affected by the economic fallout from the 1929 global depression and also lost their political clout with the disintegration of the Sin’ganhoe. Yet the early 1930s also saw the emergence of a new middle class whose economic bases were not traditional landownership but urban professions and industrial entrepreneurship. These beneficiaries of colonial modernization, however, tended to be less politically invested and also more culturally assimilated. In Yŏm’s performative narrative of proletarian Korea, the new “comprador” bourgeoisie and the economic prosperity enjoyed by them were discounted. In Fig, a sequel to Three Generations, Yŏm finally turned to a laborer, rather than the emerging middle class, as the subject of his national history. The replacement, however, did not necessarily signify a change in Yŏm’s political priorities. In the novel, Wŏnyŏng, Tŏkki’s reincarnate, appears as a now bankrupt newspaper publisher and is replaced by Wansik, a gentrified male factory laborer, as a future leader of the nation. In a telling scene, a despondent Wŏnyŏng tells Wansik: “Both you and I grew up in the same society, the same age, and the same class, but you will go forward. I am only thirty, but I am already passé.” In response, Wansik ponders, “They did not belong to the same economic class, but [Wŏnyŏng] seemed to mean that they were both from the same ancestry.” Again, the narrative trumps class differences by appealing to the men’s common ethnic identity to advocate class cooperation over class antagonism. Yŏm’s proletarian hero subsequently envisions “a fresh new path” for himself, which would differ from that of Wŏnyŏng but would not alienate his fallen bourgeois compatriot.59 59. Yŏm, Muhwagwa, 844 and 819.

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If Yŏm subsumed class consciousness under national consciousness, the suppressed presence of class sensitivity still made a meaningful difference in his vision of the nation. He was not able to articulate a concrete future path for Korea in his colonial novels, but implied in them, I would suggest, was a vision akin to the welfare state of social democracy— rather than proletarian dictatorship or unrestrained capitalism—that advocated both individual liberty and greater economic equality. Yŏm’s modest socialist outlook informed his postliberation revision of Three Generations. Following the completion of its serial publication, the novel was prohibited during the colonial years, then was finally published in book form in 1948. In the revision, Yŏm changed the colonial manuscript, mainly to empower his protagonist and make the ending more optimistic. The original newspaper serial had ended with many of the characters still behind bars because Tŏkki was unable to rescue them. By contrast, in the postliberation revision, Tŏkki appeared more capable and saved all of his relatives and friends except for the socialists. Also, the final scene of P’ilsun’s crying over their collective misery was replaced by Tŏkki pledging to himself that he would look after P’ilsun in the future. In his final monologue, he ponders, “Someone who was poor, whose lot in life was hard labor, shouldn’t she at least receive an appropriate compensation for her pains?” 60 Having returned in the postliberation space, Yŏm’s “agent of national history”— his protagonist, Tŏkki—pictured a new Korean nation-state that would look after its proletariat for no reason other than their relative material deprivation. In fact, Yŏm’s idealized figure of the sympathizer, a conscientious and charitable bourgeois gentleman who is a leader of the nation, is likely to have been informed by Japanese Marxist economist Kawakami Hajime’s proposal for a solution to poverty that is more social democratic than orthodox Marxist. Instead of calling for a class revolution, Kawakami promoted, along with the nationalization of industry and the redistribution of wealth, bourgeois charity as a countermeasure for the ills of capitalist society.61 Despite its unorthodoxy, his view enjoyed popu lar support among Japa nese left ists, and it was his best seller The Tale of Poverty (Bimbo monogatari; 1917) that Wansik was reading in Fig.62 60. Yŏm, Samdae, 472. 61. See Bernstein, Japanese Marxist, 89–91. 62. Yŏm, Muhwagwa, 682.

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In spite of the obvious tension and ultimate incompatibility between the ethnocentric ideology of nationalism and the class-oriented doctrine of socialism, Yŏm’s integration of the latter with the former did not entirely cancel out his socialist inspiration. Rather, the integration inflected his national subjectivity with a socialist accent. The writer, however, was to fi nd little room for his moderate left ist vision in liberated Korea, where two separate nation-states, the communist North and the anticommunist South, were inaugurated under the looming shadow of the global Cold War.

Reconsidering Colonial Nationalism and Its Cultural Practice So far, we have examined Yŏm Sangsŏp’s intellectual and literary trajectory during the long activist decade of the 1920s. Yŏm was initially drawn to socialism for its scientific critique of modern capitalism and its emancipatory promise at a time when anarchism was its hegemonic strand. From this early exposure to socialism, he acquired antiauthoritarian individualism, his interest in labor issues, and a materialist worldview that was fundamentally Marxist. At the same time, Yŏm was critical of the KAPF’s dogmatism, and he also found the exclusive Marxist focus on class struggle—and the corresponding downplaying of racial discrimination—objectionable in the context of colonial Korea. His consequent ambivalence toward the socialist movement formed his critical subjectivity as a leftist nationalist, which he shared with many of his contemporaries. Expressive—and constitutive—of his subjectivity was a materialist aesthetic of realism, which he pursued by transitioning from the I-novelist confessional to ethnographic fiction about the proletarian nation. Yŏm’s literary trajectory during the colonial era was in many ways a result of his prolonged struggle to confess his colonial self. In his confessional stories, he tried to reveal his colonial interiority by expressing it directly through his autobiographical first-person narrator; and when that was impossible due to censorship, by indirectly projecting it on characters who were selected for the purpose and are more an emanation of his narrator’s psychology than they are lifelike figures. Over the years, however, Yŏm progressively moved from telling to showing in his narrative strategy. In his later ethnographic fiction, he represented his imagined national community through a lively mass of mundane characters. The Koreans in his novels were divided by their class and ideological

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differences but were united in their common status as colonial subjects. Together, they projected a vision of colonial Korea as an affective community whose members shared the condition of imperial oppression and a common emancipatory agenda. Having begun his fictional writing with an urge to confess his colonial interiority, Yŏm found another way to express it by writing ethnographic novels on colonial Korea as a proletarian nation. This portrait of Yŏm as a leftist nationalist writer illustrates the plurality of colonial nationalism and its cultural expressions, thereby compelling us to reconsider and diversify the current mainstream postcolonialist paradigms when we think about these issues. I have in mind the two dominant paradigms proposed by Homi Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry is useful in explaining the construction of colonial nationalism as a type of modern political ideology and discourse that was formulated after its Western counterpart yet had the ironic effect of critiquing it. When universally applied, however, the theory can be blinding, because it leads us to preclude any consideration of colonial national subjectivities that drew part of their formative and integral inspiration from Marxism. Similarly, Partha Chatterjee’s model of cultural nationalism, the construction of a national identity in the private sphere in compensation for a loss of control over the public, politico-economic domain, is effective in accounting for, say, the frequent fusion of anti-imperialism and religious fundamentalism.63 But to approximate historical actualities, the model needs to be complemented by an acknowledgment of other forms of nationalism, especially the kind that Frantz Fanon advocated in his essay “On National Culture”—the nationalism that “take[s] its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom.” 64 While such acknowledgment would be relevant for our understanding of nationalism in colonial India during the twentieth century too, it is particularly crucial in the case of Korea, where cultural nationalists, unlike their Indian counterparts, failed to provide leadership in the struggle for national liberation. As we have seen in this chapter, after the co-optation of cultural nationalists in the 1920s, it was the leftist nationalists who led the organization of anticolonial oppositional forces in colonial Korea. Reflective of their ideological divergence, leftist nationalists cultivated a form of national culture that was distinct from that of cultural nationalists. While 63. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 1–35. 64. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 233.

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cultural nationalists engaged in inventing, preserving, and celebrating nativist culture, leftist nationalists focused on examining and documenting the material status quo of the nation through both fictional and nonfictional writings. As critics in the fields of history and sociology have previously argued, nationalism in colonial Korea was not a monadic ideology but rather a complex field of competing ideologies.65 Just as important, the present study also reminds us of the wideranging and ramified effects of socialism on modern Korean intellectual and literary trends, as portrayed in the intellectual and cultural trajectory of Yŏm’s work. In his recent critique of nationalist historiography, Yun Haedong has called for the necessity of acknowledging the broad swath of “a grey zone” between anticolonial resistance and pro-Japanese collaboration.66 Likewise, it is essential to observe the presence of a broad middle spectrum between the radical poles of the right and the left. Without taking a more nuanced view, we will not be able to appreciate the actual extent of the socialist influence on modern Korean culture. Within the conventional, oversimplifying binary view of 1920s Korean literature, Yŏm has long been regarded as a representative nationalist writer and a staunch critic of socialist writers of the KAPF. Yet socialism was integral to Yŏm’s critical subjectivity as a left ist nationalist despite the disagreements he had with KAPF writers. Accordingly, his materialist aesthetic ideal of realism should be counted, without any reservation, as a unique and vital part of the Korean proletarian wave. 65. See, for instance, Robinson, Cultural Nationalism and Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism. 66. Yun Haedong, “Singminji insik ŭi hoesaek chidae.”

Six

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea Kang Kyŏngae’s Portraits of Proletarian Women

In June 1932 a train was returning to Korea from Manchuria, where Japan had founded its new colony Manchukuo only three months before. On the train was a Korean woman passenger intently looking out the window. As the train rumbled southward, the woman’s thoughts raced back to the land she had just left, Chientao in southeastern Manchuria, home to a large Korean ethnic enclave. She remembered the people she had met there, particularly the “old and young women refugees” who had lost their families in recent Japanese military operations against Korean guerrilla armies.1 Th is passenger was Kang Kyŏngae, one of the most accomplished and prolific women writers of colonial Korea. In the following years, Kang would go on to record her Manchurian experiences in vivid and often stirring portraits of women—mostly poor and proletarian—exposed to the hardships of life in a developing colonized society. Today, these stories are counted as some of the most representative works of Korean women’s literature. Although Kang is unique in respect to her emigrant experience, she also shares many characteristics with other women writers of her time. In the early 1930s, Korea saw the emergence of a group of women writers, most of whom had a left ist inclination, whose work represented the experiences of working-class women in the social reality of colonial Korea. These so-called sahoejuui yŏsŏng (socialist women), among whom we 1. Born as a peasant’s daughter in Songhwa in the Hwanghae province, Kang received her education in Pyongyang and Seoul and moved to Chientao after her marriage. She writes of her trip to Korea as a refugee in “Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏnsŏ.”

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include Kang, Pak Hwasŏng, and Paek Sinae, developed a feminist approach markedly different from that of the early-1920s writers of the New Women movement.2 Whereas previous New Women writers such as Na Hyesŏk, Kim Iryŏp, and Kim Myŏngsun had given priority to cultural education and spiritual enlightenment as prerequisites for the universal liberation of women, the later socialist women writers were more attentive to class differences among women, addressing the material and economic dimensions of women’s oppression and advocating class struggle and revolution as a way of achieving women’s emancipation. Reflective of their ideological differences, these writers mainly produced exposés of working-class women’s living conditions, while the New Women writers had tended to favor I-novelistic, confessional narratives of a woman’s awakening to her individual autonomy. Until recent years the 1930s socialist women’s literature had remained a rather obscure chapter of Korean literary history. Two factors have significantly contributed to this neglect. First of all, the literary criticism of the Cold War period was not congenial to leftist writers in general, male or female. Also, further impeding their reception, women writers in Korea have been severely marginalized by the mostly male and conservative interpretive community of local critics. It was only with the advent of feminist criticism in the early 1990s that women writers began to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. As the study of socialist women writers picked up, an initial consensus developed that, however committed these writers were to issues of women’s equality and social justice, their works should not be taken as representative of a truly feminist stance. In their turn to a socialist worldview, these writers were believed to have replaced their previous concern 2. Educated at Japan Women’s University, Pak Hwasŏng (1904–88) had a thriving literary career between 1932 and 1938, after which she stopped writing until national liberation. After 1945, she became one of the most active women writers in South Korea and served as the first chairwoman of the Yŏryu munhakhoe (Women Writers’ Association). A small museum dedicated to her opened in her hometown of Mokp’o in 1995. For a book-length study of the writer, see Pyŏn, Pak Hwasŏng. Paek Sinae (1908–39) was a schoolteacher but was dismissed from her position because of her involvement with the socialist women’s orga nization Korean Women’s League (Chosŏn yŏsŏng tonguhoe). Paek traveled to Russia in 1927, and on her way back was arrested and tortured by the Japa nese police. Between 1930 and 1932 she studied the arts at Nippon University. In Korean literary history she has been best known for “Kkŏraei” (1933), a story about Korean emigrants in Russia whose title refers to the Russian pronunciation of “Koryŏin”—that is, Koreans. For recent studies on the writer, see Ku Moryong, ed., Paek Sinae.

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for women’s rights with an orthodox socialist focus on class struggle. In her pioneering 1985 study of the early modern history of feminism in the Th ird World, for instance, Kumari Jayawardena observed that Kang Kyŏngae and Pak Hwasŏng “wrote novels and short stories dealing especially with women’s problems, but the standpoint implicit in their writings was not by any means feminist.”3 Similarly, in his 1991 study of the women’s movement in colonial Korea, Kenneth Wells suggested that feminism had a brave start in Korea with the appearance of New Women in the early 1920s but faded within a few years as its cause was subordinated to those of socialism and nationalism.4 For both these authors, the socialist inclination of Korean women intellectuals was in effect a digression from, or a regressive development of, their earlier feminist focus. Even if they continued to write about issues relevant to women, both critics would judge, they did so while communicating a message that was socialist, not feminist.5 Although this view persists, it has not gone uncontested by critics who are more charitable in recognizing the feminist stance of colonial socialist women’s movements. Lee Sang-Kyung, for instance, has compellingly argued for a reevaluation of these writers within the canons of both women’s and feminist literature. Furthermore, in her analysis of the literary representations of factory workers in colonial Korea, Ruth Barraclough has noted the feminist dimensions of Kang Kyŏngae’s novel The Human Predicament (In’gan munje; 1934), which she reads as a reappropriation of the socialist trope of the seduction of a factory girl to the effect of affirming women’s own independence and critical agency. Finally, in his recent study on the colonial history of the Korean women’s movement, Theodore Jun Yu has observed the critical significance of socialist women’s social and cultural activism in promoting the cause of women laborers.6 3. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 223. 4. Wells, “The Price of Legitimacy.” Wells more generally ascribes the decline of feminism in colonial Korea to lack of support from other women, the uncooperative chauvinism of Korean male intellectuals, and the subordination of the feminist cause to those of socialism and nationalism among Korean activists. 5. A less firm consensus has also been reached in the debate among Korean critics. See Sŏ Yŏngin’s discussion of the bipolarized critical views on Kang Kyŏngae in her essay “Kang Kyŏngae munhak ŭi yŏsŏngsŏng,” 97–98. 6. See Lee Sang-Kyung, Han’guk kŭndae yŏsŏng munhaksaron; Barraclough, “Tales of Seduction”; and Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 138–39 and 654.

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Building upon these recent studies, this chapter seeks to contribute to a fresh feminist reading of the historical significance of the 1930s socialist women’s literature. It seems to me that, once read in the context of contemporary Korean culture, many works by socialist women writers can be seen to perform a genuinely feminist function. That function is easily missed, however, when a text is interpreted by itself, typically in abstraction from its own defining and shaping discursive milieu. Resisting such abstraction, I propose a closely contextualized analysis of two of Kang Kyŏngae’s most mature and representative fictional works: The Human Predicament (In’gan munje; 1934) and the novella Salt (Sogom; 1934). Taken as paradigmatic of the broader production of 1930s socialist women writers, these works yield precious insights into the feminist significance of the 1930s socialist women’s movement in the context of contemporary Korean society. The rest of the chapter is comprised of four main sections. The first provides a brief historical overview of the development of the Korean socialist women’s movement between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s. Th is development, seen here as a bridge between the early-1920s New Women’s literature and the 1930s socialist women’s literature, accounts for some important continuities as well as ruptures between the two groups of women writers. I then move on, in the following section, to a close reading of Kang’s novella Salt. Read against the contemporary patriarchal glorification of women’s domestic virtues, this tale of a failed proletarian motherhood provides a clearly feminist counterpoint to the idealized image of a self-sacrificial mother-savior. Extending my analysis, I turn next to Kang’s The Human Predicament, the writer’s most complete tableaux of colonial Korean society, to probe further into the ambivalent relationship between socialism and feminism. Revealing a tension between the class-oriented ideology of socialism and Kang’s gendered critical subjectivity, this novel illustrates how socialist women writers embedded a feminist message in an otherwise socialist overall plot scheme. The closing provides a more general assessment of the socialist stream of the colonial Korean women’s movement. As I suggest there, the movement had a feminist significance that cannot simply be captured through the conventional notion of feminism as a stance for the universal rights of women. It is only by endorsing a more analytical feminist perspective that takes into account women’s experiences of class, racial, and regional affi liation that we may hope to understand better the actual entity and importance of a feminist practice both historically and in today’s context.

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The Development of the Socialist Women’s Movement The Korean women’s movement had its start around 1917 with the publication of women’s magazines, in par ticu lar Yŏjagye (Women’s world; 1917–20) and Sin yŏja (New women; 1920), which gave a voice to a new generation of modern-educated women.7 Although Korean women had previously participated in other kinds of social activism, little emphasis had been given to their gendered interests prior to this historical moment. Likewise, public debates over “the woman question”—that is, the question of women’s new status and role in a modernizing society—had continued since the onset of national reform efforts in the 1880s, but the earlier discussions had been largely limited to producing ideal “mothers of the nation.”8 In contrast, the New Women leaders of early feminism, most prominently Na Hyesŏk and Kim Iryŏp, advocated women’s individual autonomy without necessarily associating their cause with that of national interest. Drawing their inspiration from contemporary Japanese feminists, in particular the writers of the Seitō (Bluestocking) group such as Hiratsuka Raichō and Yosano Akiko, and also from Western intellectuals like Henrik Ibsen and Ellen Key, the first generation of Korean feminists supported not only women’s rights to education but also their financial independence and sexual freedom. Their radical voices, combined with their controversial, unconventional lifestyle, constituted the first glimpse of a modern feminist movement on the Korean peninsula. Although the 1920s emergence of a Korean feminist movement is by now an extensively documented phenomenon, less known is the fact that, already at this early stage, a socialist influence was clearly detectable in contemporary public discourse on women. As early as 1920, for example, O Ch’ŏnsŏk was appealing to the concept of class in describing the inequalities between genders in Korean society: “In the past and the present, human society—especially ours—has been divided 7. Published by and for Korean women students in Tokyo, Yŏjagye was the fi rst Korean women’s magazine. When Kim Iryŏp launched Sin yŏja in Seoul three years later, she emphasized that the editorial board of the new magazine consisted of all women, unlike that of Yŏjagye. See Yu Chinwŏl, Kim Iryŏp ŭi Sin yŏja yŏn’gu, 35. 8. See Jiweon Shin, “Social Construction of Idealized Images of Women,” 164–65.

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into oppositional classes (kyegŭp). The first division runs between yangbans and commoners (or capitalists and laborers), and the second runs between the male and the female class.”9 By addressing the issue of gender inequality in the same context as that of social and economic disparities, the writer was drawing a significant parallel between the socially inferior status of women and that of the proletarian and peasant classes. This parallel was also common in other writings published in magazines such as Kaebyŏk and Sin saenghwal. In an essay titled “A Reflection on the Woman Question” (Puin munje ŭi ilgoch’al), for instance, Sin Iryong criticized both the traditional and the modern “bourgeois family institution” for exploiting women’s labor through endless domestic routines. This exploitation, Sin remarked, was even harsher than that practiced upon laborers and servants: “It is commonly said that, of all laborers, male and female servants have the most difficulty in developing a critical consciousness of their misery. And yet, a wife’s lot is not only the same as theirs but is even worse, since unlike a contract laborer, a wife is perpetually bound to her master through the socalled institution of marriage.”10 If early advocates of feminism such as O and Sin adopted the concepts of class and exploitation, their writings still propounded a recognizably liberal feminist agenda, with a focus on women’s education, economic independence, and sexual autonomy. Indeed, a more explicitly socialist voice in early Korean feminist discourse would arise only a few years later with the arrival of radical women educated overseas. The radicalization of socialist feminist discourse in the mid-1920s was partly due to the replacement of anarchism, which tended to be more liberal and individualist, by Marxism in the mainstream of socialist thought in East Asia.11 Many would-be leaders of the Korean socialist women’s movement received their college education in Japan. Women had been active participants in the country’s socialist movement since the 1900s. By the mid-1920s August Bebel’s classic Woman under Socialism had become available in complete Japanese translation, and women writers such as Miyamoto Yuriko, Sata Ineko, and Hirabayashi Taiko were publishing their fictional works on the lives and struggles of workingclass women. Korean women activists such as Hŏ Chŏngsuk, Pak 9. O Ch’ŏnsŏk, “Sin yŏja rŭl wihayŏ,” 113. 10. See Sin Iryong, “Puin munje ŭi ilgoch’al,” 18. 11. See Duus and Scheiner, “Socialism, Liberalism, and Marxism,” 193, and Ku Sŭngmhoe, Han’guk anak’ijŭm 100 nyŏn, 203.

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Hwasŏng, and Yi Hyŏn’gyŏng spent their formative years in this radical intellectual climate, sometimes personally associating with Japanese socialist women.12 In 1925, Yi and other students in Tokyo created the March Society (Samwŏrhoe), a Korean women’s organization that was prominently supported by Yamakawa Kikue, a founder of Japan’s first socialist women’s organization, the Red Wave Society (Sekirankai; 1921–25).13 Other Korean women were first exposed to socialist ideas while studying in China and the Soviet Union. Chu Sejuk, for instance, associated with socialists while studying piano in Shanghai and eventually married Pak Hŏnyŏng, the future leader of the South Korean Labor Party.14 Ko Myŏngja, who would later become a founder of the Korean Communist Party, was educated in Russia at the Communist University of 12. See Mackie, Creating Socialist Women, 157. Among the Korean activists, Hŏ Chŏngsuk (1908–91) studied in both Japan and America. She earned the nickname of the “Kollontai of Korea” after the famous Soviet diplomat and feminist activist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), partly for her rare competence in socialist theories and partly for her practice of free love. One of the most renowned socialist intellectuals, Hŏ served two prison terms during the colonial period. She went into exile in China in 1936 and continued her political activities through 1945. Afterward, she joined the North Korean government and remained active on its political scene for the duration of her life. Yi Hyŏn’gyŏng (1902–?) studied at the Sungmyŏng Women’s High School in Seoul and later at the Tokyo Women’s University. After she became a socialist activist, she met An Kwangch’ŏn, a medical doctor-turned-socialist, whom she married. She was a founding member of the Kŭnuhoe, but in 1928, the couple went into exile in China, where they remained active in a revolutionary movement. For additional biographical details on socialist women activists, see Kang and Sŏng, eds., Han’guk sahoejuŭi undong inmyŏng sajŏn. 13. The first issue of Samwŏrhoe’s organ carried the translation of Yamakawa Kikue’s biographies of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the founders of the German Communist Party, both of whom were murdered in 1919; see “Tongyŏng Samwŏrhoe, p’amp’ŭllet’ŭ parhaeng. For a historical account of the group, see also Pak Yongok, Han’guk yŏsŏng hangil undongsa, 270. For the Sekirankai and Yamakawa Kikue’s account of the group, see Mikiso Hane, trans. and ed., Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, 125–74. 14. Chu Sejuk (1901–53) returned to Korea with her husband in 1921, where the two devoted themselves to the Korean Communist movement. Chu suffered three imprisonments before she fled to the Soviet Union in 1929. Between 1929 and 1931 she studied at the Communist University of Oriental Workers (CUOW) in Moscow. Following Pak’s arrest and imprisonment in 1933, she chose exile to Moscow. In 1938 Chu was banished to Alma-Ata along with other Korean emigrants during Stalin’s purge of the Koreans, who were suspected of being Japanese spies.

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Oriental Workers in Moscow.15 Partly thanks to these women’s activities, socialism became something akin to a mainstream intellectual trend among young Korean women by the early 1930s. So when Red Love, a novel by the Soviet revolutionary and diplomat Alexandra Kollontai, emerged as a best seller among high school students in Seoul, a journalist could comment that it seemed a natural course of development for the readers of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to move on to Red Love.16 The socialist feminist movement counted among its most active participants elite women such as Chu Sejuk and Hŏ Chŏngsuk. Also members, however, were women from lower social strata such as Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng, a former kisaeng who turned activist, and Chŏng Chongmyŏng, a widow who had founded in 1922 the Mutual Aid Association of Women Students (Yŏhaksaeng sangjohoe), a self-help group that provided financial and emotional support to poor female students.17 It is likely that these women of humbler origins found the socialist feminist discourse congenial because of its attention to the economic difficulties of working-class women. As Japan’s agricultural policy of promoting large-scale farming drove an increasing number of small-scale farmers and peasants into bankruptcy, the women of impoverished rural households flowed into cities in search of employment. As career options for them were extremely limited, a good number of these women turned to prostitution, doubling the number of prostitutes from about three thousand to nearly six thousand between 1925 and 1931.18 Those who found jobs as domestic helping hands or factory workers suffered from low wages and harsh treatment. 15. Ko Myŏngja (1904–?), a high school graduate, was trained as a midwife. She joined the Korean Women’s League in 1925. At the end of the year she was admitted to the CUOW in Moscow. On her return to Korea in 1929, she participated in the preparatory committee for the Korean Communist Party. She was arrested in 1930 and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. After liberation in 1945, she went to the North. 16. Cheon Jung-hwan, Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ikki, 349. 17. Chŏng Chongmyŏng (1895–?) was a nurse and midwife by profession. After her founding of the Yŏhaksaeng sangjohoe, she became active in social movements and was frequently imprisoned. She went to North Korea after the division of two Koreas, and her fate there is as of today unknown. Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng (1895–1958) was a high-class kisaeng and studied at a Japanese school for geishas. After her colonial career as a public speaker and activist, at the 1948 division of two Koreas she joined the North. She is believed to have been purged in 1958. 18. Yi Yŏsŏng, “Chosŏn ŭi yegi.” For a secondary source on prostitution in Korea, see Song Youn-ok, “Japa nese Colonial Rule and State-Managed Prostitution.”

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The existence of class differences among women was pointed out by Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng in the inaugural issue of Kŭnu: “In today’s modernizing world, not all women live the same life. While the daughters of the bourgeoisie . . . are born into a good life, proletarian women draw no benefit from modernity, rather suffering from an increasing misery that turns from bad to worse with all the developments.”19 In Chŏng’s observation women were no longer a single group as they were divided by their class identities. With this recognition, Chŏng was implicitly criticizing the earlier liberal feminist view of modernization as an inherently liberating historical process. Instead, it seemed, modernization was at best only a partially liberating process, with wealthy women benefiting from the cheap labor of domestic helpers as well as industrial workers. If the women’s movement was to seek emancipation for all women, the implication was, an activist could not avoid engaging in a struggle against the current orientation of social development (fig. 6.1). In addition to its relative blindness to class differences, the liberal feminist position of the early-1920s New Women was also hampered by some political liabilities unique to the colonial situation of Korea. The pressure from male nationalists and socialists and the indifference of the female masses may have contributed to weakening the position. More relevant still, however, was the impracticability of a women’s suffrage movement in colonial Korea. Whereas liberal feminists in the West, China, or Japan could claim to empower all women through their demand for legal reforms, most notably the political enfranchisement of women, their Korean counterparts had to stop at promoting women’s education and cultural cultivation. This limitation left the pioneering leaders of the local liberal feminist movement vulnerable to the charge of cultural elitism not only from their male critics but also from socialist women. The socialist critique of liberal feminism often found expression in the negative portrayal of stereotyped New Women characters. In her novella Slope (Pit’al; 1934), for instance, Pak Hwasŏng contrasted Suok, a selfish and materialistic girl and caricature of a New Woman, with Chuhŭi, a compassionate and dedicated night-school teacher whom the writer characterized as a “true modern woman” (hyŏndae yŏsŏng).20 Similarly, Kang Kyŏngae featured in her story “The Woman” (Kŭ yŏja; 1932) the figure of Maria, a superficial writer who contemptuously refers to 19. Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng, “Ŭisikchŏk kaksŏng ŭrobut’ŏ,” 35. 20. Pak Hwasŏng, Pit’al, 101.

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Figure 6.1 Illustration for Chong Ch’ilsŏng’s essay, “The World through a Woman’s Eyes” (Yŏsŏng ŭi nun ŭro pon segye), from Pip’an (Criticism, January 1931). Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University.

emigrant Korean peasants in Manchuria as “negroes.”21 During her lecture tour in the region, Maria’s arrogance and lack of compassion provokes her peasant audience to violent rage: “The crowd [of peasants] seemed to see next to Maria the ghosts of their wives, sisters, and beloved daughters, who had starved to death a few days before without a bowl of warm gruel to eat. Didn’t their sisters and wives work sweat and blood, until the illness struck them, to dress and feed this woman, to let her study, and to keep her skin pale and white, while they themselves went without food, clothes, or learning? As the peasants thought of this, Maria, as well as the minister and the elder behind her, looked like a vampire. No, they were vampires.”22 In both these stories, the New Woman either dies—Suok falls from a cliff while secretly watching a meeting between her fiancé, a socialist activist, and Chuhŭi—or nearly dies—Maria is badly beaten up by the angry mob of peasants. The symbolic, seemingly antifeminist murder of the New Women characters, however, does not necessarily signal socialist women’s turn away from the cause of women’s liberation. As Kang’s own critique of her pre-socialist life suggests, for example, the literary murder may sensibly be read as a ritualistic killing of one’s past self, an act aimed at establishing an alternative, more socially concerned, subjective position for women activists.23 It should also be noted that Suok and Maria do not so much 21. Kang Kyŏngae, “Kŭ yŏja,” 437. 22. Ibid., 440. 23. For Kang’s critique of her past literary practice, see her essay “Kando rŭl tŭngjimyŏnsŏ.” I quote part of it here: “What do students learn, and how do the socalled intelligentsia live? Before criticizing others, what have I learned until now?

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embody the independent spirit of the New Woman as, rather, the frivolous qualities of a consumerist moga, as so-called modern girls came to be known, in Japanese abbreviation, both in Japan and in Korea. In Japan, the word moga generally connoted an independent urban professional woman who wore Western fashions and spent money lavishly on herself.24 In Korea, on the other hand, where women began to move into urban occupations in greater numbers only in the mid-1930s, the figure of a moga became described in comparatively more derogatory terms, as it came to be identified only with women who were vain and wanton in their spending. Although it lacked of referents in real life, the term “moga” in the late-1920s and early-1930s Korean context tended to be an alias for such a deplorably consumerist New Woman, and it was arguably this parodied version of their feminist predecessors that socialist women writers were condemning in their efforts to re-create their own feminist subjectivity.25 We can gain further insight into the literary murder of New Women characters if we contrast the fate of Suok and Maria with that of comparable female characters in the work of contemporary male novelists. In Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Two Hearts (Isim; 1927), for instance, a school girl named Ch’un’gyŏng elopes with her socialist boyfriend into a marriage for love.26 During his imprisonment, however, financial necessity forces Ch’un’gyŏng to have affairs with a Japanese and an American man, with the consequence that, upon his release, her husband sells her to a brothel, where she commits suicide. Ch’un’gyŏng’s punishment and death belie Yŏm’s endorsement of a sexual morality specific to women, to which we should add his patriarchal understanding of interethnic liaisons as a betrayal of the nation. In another instance, Ch’ae Mansik’s After Leaving the Doll’s House (Inhyŏng ŭi chip ŭl nawasŏ; 1933) portrays a modern housewife, How have I fed and clothed myself? Have I not lived on their [laborers’ and peasants’] sweat and blood?” (722). 24. Sato documents the emergence of the moga and her consumerist appropriation in Japanese popular culture in The New Japanese Woman, 45–77. For a comparative account of Japanese and Korean implications of the New Woman and the moga, see Kim Kyŏngil, Yŏsŏng ŭi kŭndae, 22–30. “The Modern Girl” first appeared in print in Korea in 1927 (ibid., 28), following her emergence in Japan in 1923 (Sato, 57). 25. For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between the moga and urban women laborers in Japan and Korea, see respectively Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as Militant,” in Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense, 51–72, and Sŏ Chiyŏng, “Singminji Chosŏn ŭi modŏn kŏl.” 26. Yŏm, Isim.

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Nora, who declares her individual freedom from her patronizing lawyer husband.27 Nora’s naïveté and lack of professional skills lead her to a series of lowly, menial jobs, until she becomes a bar girl and one day is raped by a customer. Nora eventually throws herself into the river, but she barely survives and begins a new life as a factory laborer. Her suicide attempt reflects Ch’ae’s view that a woman’s freedom is all but futile talk without an economic basis, and in his ending the New Woman is reborn as a subject of class struggle. By imposing self-destruction on their sexually autonomous women characters, both Yŏm and Ch’ae reaffirm the traditional Confucian gender ethics according to which virtuous womanhood is defined by sexual chastity. By contrast, the death of a New Woman character in socialist women’s writings has little to do with her nonconformity to sexual morals. Rather, Suok and Maria are punished because they have neglected to consider the interests of other women, from whose services and labor they have profited. The narrowly sexual concerns of male writers are thus typically replaced in women’s literature by a relational and communitarian morality that makes a woman responsible for fostering the well-being of other women. Thus, there are some genuinely feminist motivations behind the fictional killings of New Women characters in the work of socialist women writers. At the same time, however, these killings also suggest, in a somewhat graphic manner, that the balancing of a feminist and a socialist outlook could present unusual challenges for writers in the position of Pak and Kang. After all, Maria is a woman who nearly dies at the hands of an angry proletarian mob, now understood to be made up of both men and women. When reading the work of socialist feminists the question arises: To what extent was the newly acquired socialist approach really compatible with a genuinely feminist stance? Some critics have suggested that in its transformation from a liberal to a socialist movement, the Korean women’s movement may have lost touch with its more vital feminist spirit, in effect becoming absorbed into the broader socialist and nationalist landscapes of the time. In his assessment of the development of the movement, for example, Wells has proposed that the earlier strong feminist position became “progressively relative in the course of the nationalist and socialist debates until it became a pale, ineffectual

27. Ch’ae Mansik, Inhyŏng ŭi chip.

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image of its former self.”28 In his view, the socialist women writers may have kept writing about women, and about the problems that women faced in their everyday lives, but in the process they may have lost their clear feminist edge. In the specific case of the Korean feminist movement, it seems, a reorientation toward socialism may have implied the sacrifice of an unhampered commitment to the cause of women’s liberation. I will provide a further critical assessment of this suggestion in the next two sections, where to that effect I will analyze two of Kang Kyŏngae’s most representative fictional pieces. My inclination leans toward a qualified disagreement: granting its difficult cohabitation with socialist themes, it seems to me, a feminist commitment is evident in the discursive functions of a number of literary works produced by Kang and other writers. So far, however, I have merely outlined a plausible rationale for the development of socialist feminist thought in colonial Korea. Without being able to fight for women’s legal enfranchisement in colonial Korea, the early-1920s liberal feminists were ill equipped to provide any convincing solution for the oppressive status quo. Since the colonial authority would not have tolerated their challenging its legal system, these women could only focus on what seemed possible to achieve through the reform of traditional Korean customs, such as women’s right to education and sexual autonomy. In this process, the liberal feminists left unaddressed the new problems brought by modernization, in particular the labor and sexual exploitation of working-class women. Accordingly, although the liberal feminist agenda did have much social relevance, it was woefully insufficient to meet its stated goal of the liberation of all women. For those discontented, socialism, with its class-based critique of capitalist modernity and its empowering vision of a revolution, offered an alternative path to women’s liberation.

A Socialist Feminist Reimagining of Domesticity The Kŭnuhoe dissolved in 1931 with few tangible achievements despite its impressive organizational capacity. At its peak, the society had counted on over sixty branch offices inside and outside of the Korean peninsula.29 Aside from being plagued by the ideological antagonism among its 28. Wells, “The Price of Legitimacy,” 218. 29. Pak Yongok, Han’guk yŏsŏng hangil undongsa, 373.

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members, the orga nization had suffered, like its male counterpart Sin’ganhoe, from its own impossible operating principle of fighting against the colonial authority without violating its laws. Once the Kŭnuhoe movement became more aggressive, the police intensified its supervision of the members’ activities, preventing meetings, confiscating printed materials, and arresting some of the leaders of the movement. Prominent figures such as Hŏ Chŏngsuk and Chŏng Chongmyŏng were imprisoned under suspicion of their involvement in reestablishing the Korean Communist Party and could not resume their political activities in Korea for the rest of the colonial period.30 Socialist women’s activism itself, however, survived the political defeat, as some Kŭnuhoe members found a new venue for their critical voices in writing literature. All three major socialist women writers—Pak Hwasŏng, Paek Sinae, and Kang Kyŏngae—had once been affiliated with the Kŭnuhoe, and they began to more actively participate in literary production in the early 1930s. The shift to literature among socialist women intellectuals followed changes in the publication industry. During the latter half of the 1920s, political activism consumed much of the limited financial resources of Korean cultural elites, causing the virtual disappearance of a publication space exclusively reserved for literature. As publication opportunities grew scarce, the doors to a literary career became altogether closed to women. That situation changed in the early 1930s with the introduction of new popular magazines that relied on the increasing number of educated middle-class women for their main readership.31 In addition to niche magazines such as Sin yŏsŏng (New women; 1923–34) and Sin kajŏng (New household; 1933–36), popular mainstream publications such as Sin 30. To this crisis the Kŭnuhoe responded by inaugurating a new, more moderate leadership, which avoided engaging in aggressive protests for legal reforms and instead limited its activities to relatively innocuous ones such as educating rural women. This reorientation, however, further alienated socialist women, whose enthusiasm for the orga nization had already been waning in the wake of the Comintern’s new hardline position against any compromise with moderates. See Kim Kyŏngil, “1920–30 nyŏndae han’guk ŭi sin yŏsŏng kwa sahoejuŭi,” 185–86. For the dated account of police intervention into the Kŭnuhoe’s activities and the detailed documentation of the activities of each branch office, see Pak Yongok, Han’guk yŏsŏng hangil undongsa, 410–13 and 416–61 respectively. 31. In a contemporary estimation, Chu Yosŏp projected that the number of women with an elementary school education increased sevenfold between 1920 and 1931—from 14,367 to 104,857—and those with a high school education eightfold— from 705 to 5,788. See Chu Yosŏp, “Chosŏn yŏja kyoyuksa.”

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tonga (New East Asia; 1931–36) and Samch’ŏlli (Three thousand li; 1929– 41) sought women writers to attract women readers. Together, these magazines created a demand for women’s interest features that offered career opportunities to women literary aspirants.32 Coinciding with the mounting political oppression, the expansion of the publishing market determined the paradoxical conditions in which the socialist women writers found themselves pursuing their literary careers. The 1930s was a time of shrinking political freedom paired with expanded economic opportunities, a period in which oppression and an increasing prosperity were often the two sides of the same coin. Left with no outlet of their own, socialist women writers were thus forced to encapsulate their message in the context of a peculiarly commercialized and gendered publication space. The new magazines were largely under the control of male editors, critics, and publishers, with the effect of adding a sort of patriarchal censorship to the already intense political censorship exercised by the Japanese colonial authority. Among the writers who capitalized on these new opportunities was Kang Kyŏngae. Kang’s literary career spanned the decade of the 1930s and was interrupted by illness around 1940, at which point she had published over twenty fictional works as well as a number of essays in periodicals in Korea, Japan, and Manchuria.33 Many of her works document the plight of Korean emigrants, guerrilla soldiers, and their families in Manchuria. Perhaps for this reason, Kang is today well known in North Korea, whose founder, Kim Ilsung, used to be one of the Manchuria-based Korean guerrilla leaders. In South Korea, Kang had largely remained unknown until the government’s lifting of the ban on colonial leftist writ32. The commercial drive led to the institutional establishment of yŏryu munhak, which can be translated as either “ladies’ literature” or “women’s literature,” as a subcategory of Korean literature. For a study on women’s literature as an institution, see Sim Chin’gyŏng, “Mundan ŭi yŏryu.” See also Joan Ericson’s analysis of the institutionalization of women’s literature in 1920s Japan, “The Origins of the Concept of ‘Women’s Literature.’ ” Ericson notes that the field of “women’s literature” was established in Japan in the wake of the diversification of magazines for different readerships. 33. Though Kang published most of her works in Korean periodicals, her short story “The Changsan Point” (Changsangot) was serialized in Ōsaka shimbun in Japan (1936), and two of her poems, “A Spring in This Land” (I ttang ŭi pom; 1935) and “A Random Thought” (Tansang; 1936) appeared in Pukhyang (Northern hometown), a Korean-language literary magazine published in Manchuria. For a chronicle of the writer’s life and the full bibliography of her works, see KKC, 877–79.

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ers in the late 1980s. Then, her writings were first rediscovered within the paradigm of national resistance literature.34 The nationalist reading helped reinstate Kang to the Korean literary canon, but it also tended to eclipse the complexity of her work, which may be more accurately placed at the intersection of feminism and socialism in a colonial society such as that of 1930s Korea. Kang’s novella Salt was serialized in six installments in the magazine Sin kajŏng in 1934. The titles of its six episodes in themselves are revealing of the content: “A Farm House,” “Wandering,” “Birth,” “A Nursemaid,” “A Mother’s Heart,” and “Smuggling.”35 The plot traces a Korean peasant woman’s agonizing journey from the time of her husband’s violent death and her subsequent departure from home to the moment when she achieves a proletarian self-awakening through enduring a series of ever more aggravating ordeals. As a tale of tragic proletarian motherhood, the story is quite representative of a whole subgenre of 1930s proletarian women’s literature, but it distinguishes itself for its Manchurian location as well as the gritty and embodied writing style of its author. Salt opens with its heroine, a peasant housewife, ner vously scraping an earthen wall of her house with her nails. She remains nameless throughout, always simply identified in relation to her children as “the mother of Pongsik” or “the mother of Pongyŏm.” The woman is anxiously waiting for the return of her husband, who went out to work for their Chinese landlord, P’angdung, amid the ongoing fighting between the Japanese army, the Chinese nationalists, and the Chinese and Korean communist guerrillas. Lamenting her family’s precarious life, the mother also resents her inability to treat her husband to tasty meals because of the lack of salt. As the most basic condiment, salt served as a poignant symbol of the material deprivation of the Manchurian peasant population under the Japa nese occupation. It was Japan’s policy of exporting a large amount of local salt to the imperial mainland that caused its price to soar beyond the reach of local peasants and made it the object of smuggling.36 The woman’s fears are soon realized, as her husband returns mortally wounded by Chinese communists who wanted to punish P’angdung for 34. For an example of the nationalist interpretation, see Kim Jae-Yong et al., Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa, 496–502. 35. See Kang Kyŏngae, Sogom. Sogom is an archaic word for sogŭm. 36. For Japan’s increasing import of salt for its chemical industry in the 1930s, see Stewart, “Japan’s Salt Production Program.”

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collaborating with the Manchukuo authority. On the day of the funeral her eldest son, Pongsik, sets out to avenge his father, leaving the mother and his younger sister, Pongyŏm, to fend for themselves in the wild frontier region. A further series of ordeals follow. Mother and daughter are taken in by P’angdung, who exploits their labor and soon rapes the mother. While the woman is still pregnant with P’angdung’s child, he casts them out, using as an excuse the police execution of Pongsik, who had supposedly joined a communist guerrilla troop. The homeless mother then gives birth in a neighbor’s barn, and she subsequently becomes a nursemaid for a newborn baby called Myŏngsu. To obtain the job, however, the mother has to lie about the presence of her own young children, whom she secretly keeps in a rented room nearby and visits only sporadically. When Pongyŏm and the infant die of a contagious disease, the mother loses her job, becoming homeless again. She misses Myŏngsu but is banned from going back to her employer’s house. Consumed by her aimless love, the now childless mother breaks down, crying and cursing, “Love is a dirty thing.”37 The last episode gives us a faint glimpse of the mother’s awakening to an autonomous identity in a moment of self-enlightenment that is mediated by her class consciousness. She joins a group of Koreans who are smuggling salt from Korea into Manchuria. On their perilous trip, they are stopped by Korean communist guerrillas, who let them go unharmed after giving them a brief lecture on the notion of class struggle. Once back at her shelter, however, the mother is soon caught by the Manchurian police, who confiscate her salt and arrest her. Her final speech is censored out, but the few remaining visible words suggest that the woman is indignant and that she now finds the guerrilla leaders’ lecture newly convincing. She lashes out against the status quo and, as the novella ends, is finally being reborn as a conscious proletarian subject.38 It is plausible to read Salt, in its plot as in its themes, as a classic socialist fable of discovery of the proletarian self. Throughout the story, the heroine’s identity as a laborer is consistently emphasized and remarked upon, with poignant accounts of her exploitation as a farmer, a nurse, and 37. Kang Kyŏngae, Sogŭm, 326. 38. See Kang Kyŏngae, Sogom (October 1934), 207. The recent restoration of the censored part by South Korean scholars confirms this inference. See Han Mansu, “Kang Kyŏngae Sogŭm ŭi ‘putchil pokcha’ pogwŏn.”

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a smuggler. Adding to the novella’s socialist theme, moreover, is the nationalist significance of its setting in Manchuria, a hotbed of Korean resistance as well as a destination for a large number of peasant emigrants who had been demoted in the process of Japan’s modernization of Korea. Against Japan’s propaganda of Manchukuo as a model state of racial harmony, Kang’s story represents it as a warring territory, a place where Korean peasants were leading precarious existences under the threat of foreign armies. Although Japan’s occupation of the region gave new legal and economic benefits to Korean settlers, who had not been entitled to landownership under Chinese rule, the preceding years of hardship had left many of them destitute. The new era also brought them new perils, because the Japanese antiguerrilla task force and members of the Chinese resistance regarded them as potential enemies.39 Hence, to many working-class Koreans, Manchuria seemed still a place where one’s ethnic identity largely overlapped with one’s class identity. As the background of Salt, the location allowed the socialist theme to converge easily with an anticolonial nationalist one.40 An exclusively socialist-cum-nationalist reading, however, would neglect the fact that the protagonist of Kang’s story is not just any proletarian, but a woman and, more specifically, a mother. It is from this perspective, I would suggest, that the story can be evaluated for either the presence or the absence of a feminist valence. And, in testimony to the fascinating complexity of Kang’s novella, an analysis of this kind is likely to reveal reasons on both sides of the debate. The first thing to be noted about Salt’s nameless protagonist is the fact that she is deliberately constructed as a generic character, an ignorant, conventional mother who has lost herself in her caring for her 39. After Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, local Korean emigrants were subjected to new hardships as they were preyed upon by both the Japa nese antiguerrilla task forces and the Chinese resistant forces who suspected Koreans of collaborating with the Japa nese. See Hyun Ok Pak, Two Dreams in One Bed. 40. Kang’s depiction of Manchukuo as a chaotic state resonates with that of Manchurian Chinese women writers such as Dan Di and Mei Nang. In his study of Chinese women’s literature under the Japanese occupation, Norman Smith identifies four relevant tropes—“darkness, pessimism, disorder, and destitution”—that were employed by Chinese women writers to critique and resist the hegemonic order of contemporary society (see Smith, Resisting Manchukuo, 6). Much of Smith’s insight can easily be applied to Kang’s writings, to the extent that a closer comparative study would be worthy of future research.

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family and who retains little trace of an individual autonomy. When her daughter Pongyŏm asks for a pair of running shoes, for instance, the mother replies that if she had the money she would rather spend it on the education of Pongsik the son, provoking Pongyŏm to pity her as a woman “who knows nothing” and continues the traditional patriarchal bias of favoring the son over the daughter.41 Throughout the story, the narrative defines the mother as just that—a woman who cannot exist but for her conventional devotion to her family. The scene of the woman’s nightly visit to her sick children, for instance, dramatically illustrates her virtual identification with motherhood: “Pongyŏm’s mother could not sleep at all after having seen Pongyŏm in her sickbed. So at night, she sneaked out of Myŏngsu’s house in her underwear. . . . Darkness was impenetrable, and gushing winds mercilessly struck her naked shoulders with heavy raindrops. Blinding lightning and deafening thunders seemed to tear apart the sky. But the mother was afraid of nothing. She only worried about her daughters.” 42 As the mother furtively journeys to visit her sick children near the emotional climax of the novella, intense rhetorical words such as “impenetrable,” “merciless,” “blinding,” and “deafening” all serve to accentuate the woman’s heroic devotion to her children, which is only augmented by the image of the naked mother walking through a violent night storm. Whereas the classic heroine of feminist fiction is an autonomous individual, a person defined by her agency, Kang’s protagonist is instead a passive and desperate subject, a woman stripped of all identity except that of mother. Given this rendering of its heroine as a self-sacrificing mother, Salt does not seem to qualify as feminist fiction, which we would generally understand as involving an explicit representation of a woman’s gendered consciousness. Contrasting with this assessment, however, is a more closely contextualized analysis of the discursive function of Kang’s novella. I will now briefly shift the focus to consider the broader cultural milieu in which Kang’s story was written. It is against this necessary background that we can better appreciate the reasons why Kang’s novella should be read as a genuinely feminist intervention within an increasingly conservative and patriarchal cultural atmosphere. A failed proletarian motherhood was a frequent theme of 1930s socialist women’s literature. Aside from Salt, Kang’s short story “The 41. Kang Kyŏngae, Sogŭm, 498. 42. Ibid., 523.

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Underground Village” (Chihach’on; 1936), Paek Sinae’s “Penury” (Chŏkpin; 1934), and Pak Hwasŏng’s “Before and After the Flood” (Hongsu chŏnhu; 1934) and “Spring Night” (Ch’unso; 1936) all told the story of poor mothers who are forced by circumstances to helplessly watch their family’s ruin, especially the death or withering away of their children.43 One predictable reason for the recurrence of this theme would have been the efficacy of a mother as a literary trope in attracting the readers’ sympathy for their proletarian protagonists. Another important reason, however, was that the topic of motherhood was among the favorite themes of male editors and publishers of contemporary women’s magazines. When Sin kajŏng commissioned women writers to write an omnibus novella in 1933, for instance, the editors chose “A Young Mother” as the title and topic of the novel.44 And other contemporary magazines filled their pages with numerous features about new techniques of homemaking and child rearing, stories of successful mothers, and photos of happy families with the mother at the center. This celebration of motherhood and housewifery, the expression of a veritable cult of domesticity, was a new phenomenon in 1930s Korean society. As the 1933 inaugural preface to Sin kajŏng suggests, for example, the trend seemed to have been conceived as a co-opting response to the feminist advances of the 1920s: “One may misunderstand the status and social value of a housewife and talk of her as a subordinate to her husband, but this cannot be further from the truth . . . . If an individual home is new, bright, orderly, and rich, it brings happiness not only to an individual or a family but also to Korean society and the Korean people. Therefore, how could we think light of a housewife’s role?” 45 Words such 43. See Kang Kyŏngae, “Chihach’on”; Pak Hwasŏng, “Hongsu chŏnhu”; and Paek Sinae, “Chŏkpin.” 44. A Young Mother (Chŏlmŭn ŏmŏni) tells the story of a young widow and mother who has lost her husband to a socialist movement. Its overall leftist inclination reflects the ideological affiliation of the five participating women writers—Pak Hwasŏng, Song Kyewŏl, Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, Kang Kyŏngae, and Kim Chahye in the order of serialization. The story line centers on the conflict and betrayal among socialist activists and the mother’s unwitting involvement in it. The mother rejects a bank manager’s marriage proposal and falls in love with another socialist activist, who, however, is soon dragged away by the police due to his friend’s betrayal. Again left alone, the mother moves to the countryside and becomes a teacher for poor village children. The novel was serialized in Sin kajŏng from January through May 1933. 45. Song Chinu, “Ch’anggansa,” 3. Song was the president of Tonga ilbo, which represented the cultural nationalist voice. Sin kajŏng was a sister magazine of the newspaper.

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as these were meant to contribute to the replacement of the unmarried, independent New Woman by a fecund and self-sacrificial mother as the public ideal of womanhood. The discursive transition was in part a conservative nationalist response to the decade’s accelerating modernization process as well as Japan’s intensifying assimilation policy. Facing the faster erosion of the traditional social order and the increasing compromise of a Korean cultural identity, Korean intellectuals abandoned earlier feminist postures and instead promoted the idealized figure of a strong mother who would be aware of her social and national duties.46 The nationalist glorification of motherhood, however, was ironically prone to convergence with the interests of the Japa nese colonial authority. As Japan’s imperial expansion and consequent excessive draft put further constraints on the availability of male labor in the country, the government progressively shifted the focus of its familystate ideology from fatherhood to motherhood during the 1930s.47 Japan accordingly made widespread use of the image of a nurturing, educating mother in its state propaganda in the imperial mainland as well as in Manchukuo and colonial Korea.48 The following 1936 comments by Yi Kwangsu exemplify the collusion between the Japanese and the Korean cult of motherhood and also its political gravity: If women sublimate their youthful passion into a motherly love, proceed from chaste romance to sacred motherhood, and go one step further to love all the children in the world with the deep, boundless love of their own children, then a new spring will come to this world. If Korean women follow such a path, Korea will win the peace, joy, and prosperity of new life.49

46. Jiweon Shin, “Social Construction of Idealized Images of Women,” 170–71. 47. See Miyake, “Doubling Expectations.” Also, in her classic study “Imperialism and Motherhood,” Anna Davin associates the social production of modern discourses on motherhood with the rise of militarism in the age of global imperialism. More specifically, she attributes the proliferation of discourses on childcare in early twentieth-century Britain to the increasing rivalry between Western empires and the subsequent need for a bigger male population for wars and the management of colonies. 48. For Japan’s use of the mother as a political trope in its propaganda in Manchuko, see Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 174–75, and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 369. 49. Yi Kwangsu, “Mosŏng,” 204.

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The peace and happiness of mankind cannot come from the Geneva Convention, or various kinds of knotty laws, but only from motherly love.50

In a seeming outburst of naïveté, here Yi advances sublime, boundless motherly love as a solution for both national and international problems. Following his logic, Korean women were capable of saving their own families, society, and even the world by devoting themselves to selfless motherhood. And conversely, women who neglected their domestic duties to pursue a career outside the home could be held accountable for all the miseries of their compatriots as well as humankind. By worshipping motherhood as a cure-all virtue that could even surpass the effectiveness of international treaties and laws, Yi was attempting to transfer the responsibility for the alleviation of the material hardships experienced by the colonized from the colonial regime—as well as impotent Korean male elites—to colonial women. Viewed against this contemporary background, Salt acquires a sharp polemical edge in that it defies the hegemonic positive representation of motherhood and domesticity. Whereas the patriarchal cult of motherhood elevated a motherly love into a source of salvific power, Salt disputes it by underscoring a mother’s inability to ensure her family’s happiness. In fact, the story seems to belie the very idea of a mother as an allproviding being, as its narrative stresses her own physical as well as economic needs. Physical sensations, from the piercing labor pains of childbirth to the “hammering and searing” headache she has during a river crossing, persistently underscore the mother’s inability to provide all that is expected of her. When Kang’s heroine, left alone with her hopelessly persistent feeling of motherly love, finally mutters, “Love is a dirty thing” (Chŏng iran ch’isahan kŏsida), her frustration powerfully resonates against the imperial and national exaltation of omnipotent motherhood.51 Thus, while Salt does not directly contest the patriarchal cult of motherhood by confronting it with a classic feminist assertion of a woman’s autonomy apart from her reproductive function, the story still challenges it by denouncing its illusionary nature (fig. 6.2). Read in this way, tales of proletarian mothers such as Salt, “Penury,” and “Before and After the Flood” may acquire an important feminist significance in their given discursive context. And, just as important, they can be seen to bear such significance in full harmony with 50. Yi Kwangsu, “Mosŏng ŭrosŏŭi yŏja,” 206. 51. Kang Kyŏngae, Sogŭm, 526.

Figure 6.2 Ch’oe Yŏngsu’s illustration for Kang Kyŏngae’s Salt in Sin kajŏng (New family, August 1934). Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

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their socialist outlook. The contemporary cult of domesticity and motherhood had its basis in the fledgling colonial middle class: only middle-class women, who could count on the cheap labor of the working class, could devote themselves to homemaking and child rearing without worrying about working to survive. By taking a proletarian perspective, writers such as Kang, Paek, and Pak could launch an effective critique of the imperial and national cult of motherhood, exposing the propagandistic intents underlying it. In so doing, they could remind their readers—typically Korean schoolgirls and young mothers—of the fact that the future recovery of Korea and Japan from the present crisis did not depend on women’s self-sacrifice but on the struggle to change the politico-economic system that perpetuated the virtual slavery of innocent women like the unfortunate mothers in their stories. An important side effect of socialist women’s critique of domesticity was the reclaiming of the household as a site of women’s everyday experience. If liberal feminist heroines such as Ibsen’s Nora had rejected domesticity and all its implications, Kang and other Korean writers appeared, rather, to reimagine the sphere of the household by representing it in its rawness and physicality as a place of hard labor for bare survival. Rosemary Marangoly George has proposed the useful analogy of a “responsible recycling” to characterize the reappropriation of domesticity in transnational feminist literature.52 If leaving the sphere of the domestic is not feasible—or even desired—a valid feminist option is to reclaim its representation from the distorting patriarchal rhetoric of a woman’s sacrifice and salvific love. In the writings of Korean socialist women, the disenchanted description of the everyday performs a sort of liberating reimagination that in the act of criticizing the exploitation of women also lays the groundwork for a more authentic representation of women’s experience. Implicit in Kang’s destructive exposure of a failing motherhood, then, we can also see the positive message of a recasting of domesticity in truer and more responsible terms. We will move on, in the next section, to an analysis of some of the feminist themes that are present in Kang’s most renowned novel, The Human Predicament. Before doing that, however, it will be useful here to again contrast the ways in which the figure of a proletarian working mother was represented by male and female socialist writers in colonial Korea. Male socialist writers rarely wrote a story with a proletarian mother as its protagonist, but Ch’ae Mansik’s short story “Poverty: Part 52. Marangoly, “Recycling,” 3.

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I, Chapter II” (Pin che il chang che i kwa; 1936) provides a suggestive insight into the possible contrast. The story features as its protagonist a woman who, like Kang’s nameless mother, is forced by poverty to nurse someone else’s baby instead of her own.53 In Ch’ae’s narrative, however, this mother figure is projected as that of a vain and selfish woman who would spend her income on buying a parasol rather than food for her starving family. Though she is depicted as a victim of the capitalist social order, the woman is also a persecutor of her crestfallen unemployed husband and her infant son. From the male writer’s patriarchal perspective, a financially independent woman was thus regarded with suspicion, as though her earning money could constitute a threat to male authority over her. By contrast, in Salt and elsewhere, socialist women writers had no difficulty integrating the theme of women’s work into the broader topic of proletarian exploitation and alienation—the nameless mother’s work is, after all, part of what makes her condition unsustainable. As a more developed comparison might reveal, male writers may have suffered from a partial socialist vision that was caused by their gender prejudice. Women writers such as Kang, on the other hand, were better positioned to represent the experience of proletarian women, and they did so, in part, through powerful depictions of failed proletarian motherhood such as the one we found in Salt.

Critiquing Socialist Patriarchy If Salt does not resemble a classic liberal feminist narrative, the story still does preserve a genuinely feminist valence, which is recognizable once we look at its function within its contemporary discursive context. A similar approach, I believe, can be fruitfully applied to other texts by socialist women writers. Here, I focus my attention on the work that is perhaps preeminent among them: Kang Kyŏngae’s The Human Predicament. As Kang’s only full-length novel, ambitious both in length and in thematic range, this work is today regarded in Korea as one of the most accomplished products of colonial-period literature. As Ruth Barraclough has noted, Kang’s novel successfully redeployed the socialist image of a sexually abused factory girl to the effect of vindicating women’s gendered experience and agency.54 My own reading focuses on examining 53. Ch’ae Mansik, “Pin che il chang che i kwa.” 54. See Barraclough, “Tales of Seduction,” 364.

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more closely the tension between the class-based ideology of socialism and Kang’s gendered critical subjectivity. The Human Predicament was first serialized in Tonga ilbo from August through November 1934. The first half of the story, set in a rural village, traces the protagonist’s transformation from an innocent peasant girl into an exploited and abused laborer for her family’s landlord. Sŏnbi first appears in an idyllic scene in the village forest, where she is gathering wild berries and is being teased by Ch’ŏtchae, a village lad who has a crush on her. By simply referring to them as “a lass” (kyejibae) and “a woodcutter” (namukkun), the narrative reinforces an ambience of primitive bliss. Sŏnbi’s happy maidenhood, however, comes to an abrupt end when her father dies of an accidental wound he received from the landlord, Tŏkho. Upon the further loss of her mother to illness, Sŏnbi comes to depend on Tŏkho and moves into his household as a kitchen maid. There she attracts the attention of Sinch’ŏl, a law student at Keijō Imperial University and love interest of Okchŏm, Tŏkho’s moga daughter, who is characterized by her consumerism and possessive romantic passion. Sinch’ŏl, who despite his bourgeois background is sympathetic to the cause of labor activism, develops a shallow attachment to Sŏnbi, whom he praises for her pristine beauty and servile submissiveness. Sinch’ŏl’s love for Sŏnbi, unreturned by her, contrasts unfavorably with Ch’ŏtchae’s sincere and more egalitarian affection. After his introduction to socialist doctrine, Ch’ŏtchae thinks of Sŏnbi as a companion who is “no longer obedient and pretty but brave and strong instead.”55 Sŏnbi’s fortunes take a turn for the worse when she is raped by Tŏkho, who seduces her with a vain promise of school education. Sexually harassed by Tŏkho at night and berated by his wife during the day, Sŏnbi experiences unwanted pregnancy and abortion before finally deciding to escape to a city. In the meantime Ch’ŏtchae has also run into trouble while taking part in a spontaneous tenancy dispute, thus becoming an unwitting violator of “the so-called law.” No longer able to find employment in his native village, he too runs away to the city where, however, he has to live away from Sŏnbi. What started as a simple love story between Sŏnbi and Ch’ŏtchae is thus turned into the “proletarian bildungsroman” of both youths, a story of their maturing into class subjects within the expanding industrial landscape of 1930s Korea.56 55. Kang Kyŏngae, In’gan munje, 373. 56. Foley defines the “proletarian bildungsroman” as a paradoxical adaptation of the bourgeois bildungsroman. The former “tells the story of an individual

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On arriving in the city Sŏnbi meets up with Kannani, a childhood friend who has become a worker and, secretly, a labor agitator at a large spinning factory. Sŏnbi is soon employed in Kannani’s factory, which is immediately revealed to be more similar to a prison of dehumanizing control. In the shiny new steel-and-glass building, hundreds of young female workers toil for over twelve hours a day to the rhythm of regulatory sirens. Their working schedule is so taxing that Sŏnbi compares the reels of threads at her spinning machine to “gigantic worms gnawing away at her life.” 57 However, the factory is also a place of political awakening for Sŏnbi, who comes to understand the cause of the socialist movement when she reads the leaflets illegally distributed by Kannani. Indeed, after Kannani escapes from the factory because of rising suspicions, Sŏnbi takes charge of orga nizing the union movement (fig. 6.3). In the meantime, her childhood friend Ch’ŏtchae has also become an industrial worker and, upon joining the socialist movement, has come under the mentorship of Sinch’ŏl, who recognizes Ch’ŏtchae’s promise as a future revolutionary. Sinch’ŏl cannot help being intimidated by the mounting oppression of the movement, but Ch’ŏtchae becomes more and more determined to overcome his condition as an exploited proletarian. After their participation in an unsuccessful strike, Sinch’ŏl is arrested and imprisoned, and Ch’ŏtchae is forced to go into hiding along with a fellow activist. In the end of the novel Sŏnbi and Ch’ŏtchae are reunited in a dramatic emotional climax. Due to her constant exposure to cotton filaments at the factory, Sŏnbi has fallen ill with tuberculosis and is lying on her deathbed. When Kannani seeks help for her dying comrade and friend, Ch’ŏtchae rushes to her aid, only to find Sŏnbi, his long-lost love, already dead. Deeply shaken, Ch’ŏtchae is left trembling with indignation. And it is on the image of him blinded with anger that the story closes with the narrator’s seeming appeal for a proletarian revolution: “While he was staring at Sŏnbi’s corpse, the corpse gradually transformed into a dark mass. The mass grew bigger and bigger to block his sight. Rather, it blocked the passage of humanity. . . . This dark mass, isn’t this mass the fundamental human predicament? Humanity has fought to resolve this predicament for thousands of years. But it has not been resolved learning to correlate his/her particularity with the destiny of his/her class” instead of tracing the process of one’s growth into an autonomous individual. See Foley, Radical Representations, 359. 57. Kang Kyŏngae, In’gan munje, 507.

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Figure 6.3 Yi Madong’s illustration for Kang Kyŏngae’s The Human Predicament, from Chosŏn ilbo (November 23, 1934). Women laborers are having a meal at a factory refectory. The symmetry of their figures and the workers in the background effectively render the modern factory environment’s mood of anonymity and alienation. Courtesy of the Korean Heritage Library, University of Southern California.

yet! Then who could solve this problem in the future?”58 As Sŏnbi’s body figuratively turns into an indistinct, formless dark mass, the heroine’s death becomes the occasion for a call for all proletarians—men and women alike—to rise to the struggle against capitalist exploitation. Like Salt, The Human Predicament, too, can be read as both a proletarian bildungsroman and a melodramatic tale of a rural girl’s tragic

58. Kang Kyŏngae, In’gan munje, Tonga ilbo, Dec. 22, 1934. In its postliberation reprint in book form in North Korea, the last sentence was revised to read: “This problem will be resolved only if numerous people like Ch’ŏtchae, who have walked and are still walking a hard path, unite in solidarity.” Though the editor seems to have made only a slight revision, in which he changed Kang’s interrogative statement into a declarative one for clarification, this revision also reinforced the patriarchal bias of the socialist vision of a proletarian revolution by identifying the revolutionary actor as Ch’ŏtchae instead of, for instance, Ch’ŏtchae and Kannan, which Kang might have done had she been alive and been able to make her own revision. For the revised ending, see KKC, 413.

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life. In its general outline, the novel recounts the story of Sŏnbi’s political growth largely in accord with a once widespread socialist realist scheme, which typically involved a male worker’s entry into the modern industrial labor force, his awakening to class consciousness, and his eventual liberation through a proletarian revolution. In Kang’s colonial novel, however, the triumphant finale is absent, replaced by Sŏnbi’s pitiful death and her male socialist comrade’s call for a revolution. The tragic ending brings the plot of the novel closer to those of contemporary popular melodramas with the central theme of a virtuous heroine caught in the vicissitudes of a cruel destiny. In a departure from both socialist and melodramatic conventions, however, Kang’s novel also features the ambiguous character of Sinch’ŏl, the figure of a socialist intellectual idly vacillating between fatuous romance and a shaky political commitment. Just before hearing of Sŏnbi’s illness, Ch’ŏtchae learns that Sinch’ŏl has betrayed the movement: he has publicly renounced socialism in prison, has accepted a government position in Manchukuo, and is now engaged to a rich heiress—possibly Okchŏm. Ostensibly unrelated to the main story line of the novel, Sinch’ŏl’s story seems to command an autonomous significance in the narrative economy of The Human Predicament. Overall, Sinch’ŏl is a negative character even though he had originally devoted himself to the cause of labor activism despite his middle-class background. And precisely because his character is not assigned a central role in the novel’s proletarian scheme, Sinch’ŏl comes out as more ambiguous, and in a way more interesting, than any other character in the book. There are two intertwined threads in Kang’s portrayal of Sinch’ŏl. On the one hand, he is depicted as a fickle political agent, an unworthy companion of revolutionary workers, who in the end betrays the movement. Th rough this trait, Kang was plausibly denouncing a worrisome trend among contemporary socialist intellectuals, many of whom had chosen to renounce their ideological beliefs under pressure from the police and the colonial government. On the other hand, Sinch’ŏl is also represented as a frivolous and chauvinist lover, a man whose conception of gender roles conforms to the dominant patriarchal values. Sinch’ŏl’s ideal woman is both beautiful and servile, as he originally thought Sŏnbi would be. It is in the intertwining of these two threads, it seems, that Kang achieves a remarkable echoing effect: Sinch’ŏl’s chauvinism early in the novel foreshadows his political infidelity later on; and conversely, his political unreliability stands as confirmation of his sentimental immaturity. It is

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as though, in linking a man’s political and romantic virtues, Kang’s narrative were establishing one as an indispensable condition for the other: only a good lover can make a good revolutionary; and vice versa, only a true revolutionary can be a true lover. We can again appreciate the discursive relevance of Kang’s method if we contrast it with the then predominant tendency among socialist writers to sharply separate a male character’s private sentiments from his political allegiance. In entwining the two themes of romance and ideology, Kang was in effect challenging the conventional treatment of romantic and revolutionary commitments as incompatible with each other. In her study of the so-called love plus revolution genre (aiqing jia geming) in Chinese leftist literature, Amy Dooling notes how the late-1920s emergence of the genre, whose theme was the conflict between one’s private romantic sentiments and public revolutionary aspirations, marked a transitional point from the earlier romantic socialist literature to the later more dogmatic one.59 Such a transition was also discernible in Korean proletarian literature of the same period. Previously, the expression of romantic sentiments had been regarded as the core attribute of the autonomous modern individual subject, and socialist writers would uncontroversially conjoin the practice of free love with the pursuit of socialist revolution in their fiction. By the late 1920s, however, the ideologically more strict members of the KAPF came to consider love as a rather unwelcome obstacle to one’s wholehearted devotion to a revolutionary cause. Now, emotional love came to be looked upon as a petit bourgeois vice, and its literary celebration was considered antagonistic to the more genuinely materialist worldview of socialism. In 1929, for instance, KAPF member Han Sŏrya was quick to criticize Song Yŏng’s “Our Love” (Uridŭl ŭi sarang; 1929), a love story of two factory laborers: “Love does not determine one’s consciousness—this materialist tenet alone warrants our dismissal of Song’s work.” 60 Even when love still had a place in later socialist fictions, typically as a sign of self-awakening among peasants and laborers, the protagonists would invariably choose the “noble” devotion to a revolution over the “selfish” gratification of one’s love interest. As Dooling observes, the natural consequence of love plus revolution narratives was to separate the domestic, private, and “apolitical” 59. Dooling, “Love and/or Revolution?” in Women’s Literary Feminism, 103–36. 60. Han Sŏrya, “Sinch’un ch’angjakp’yŏng,” 108. Han seems to be misleadingly paraphrasing Marx’s famous passage from The German Ideology: “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.”

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sphere from the social, public, and political one.61 The message to be drawn was transparently the irrelevance of the private sphere, to which most women were relegated, vis-à-vis the apparently more political realm of public life. It was arguably to counter such depoliticization of gender issues, as we may call this phenomenon, that Kang indissolubly linked political and sentimental infidelity in the character of Sinch’ŏl. Nor was Kang alone in relying on this narrative strategy to assert her gendered subjectivity. Pak Hwasŏng and Paek Sinae, for example, also produced oblique literary critiques of socialist patriarchy by featuring male characters whose ideological weakness is reflected in their chauvinist attitudes toward women. In Pak’s Northern Light (Pukkŭk ŭi yŏmyŏng; 1935) an ex-socialist activist tries to beat his wife into compliance as she criticizes him for his ideological conversion; and again, in Paek’s “A Mad Woman’s Memoir” (Kwangin sugi: 1938) an ex-activist husband betrays his devoted wife in order to have an affair with a young woman. In both works the men’s political betrayal is criticized through the exposure of their chauvinism toward and disrespect for their wives.62 In creating such characters, the women writers were insistently relocating the question of gender at the heart of the political debate. They were, in a way, repoliticizing gender issues after such issues had been stripped of political value in the supposedly progressive practice of proletarian literature. Sinch’ŏl’s character is interesting also from a more closely biographical perspective, namely as a reflection of the patriarchal attitudes Kang and other socialist writers had to confront in their daily dealings with male intellectuals. Women activists such as Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng would criticize male elites for their indifference to women’s issues by blaming the “old and new men”—that is, conservative and liberal nationalists as well as socialists—for “talking big about how important the women’s movement is as part of the entire movement, while all they actually do is to criticize women and watch them from a distance.” 63 As we can see in The Human Predicament, Kang, too, did not refrain from openly denouncing the patriarchal values of her socialist comrades, which she embedded in the worldview of Sinch’ŏl’s weak-willed character. In this way she provided a rather transversal critique of patriarchal attitudes, with little regard for the political orientation of those who held them. Where Salt seemed to be responding primarily to imperial and 61. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism, 116. 62. Pak Hwasŏng, Pukkuk ŭi yŏmŏng and Paek Sinae, “Kwangin sugi.” 63. Ch’ŏng Ch’ilsŏng, “Ŭisikchŏk kaksŏng ŭrobut’ŏ,” 37.

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nationalist patriarchy, The Human Predicament more openly addressed male chauvinism in the form that was more commonly found among Kang’s male socialist comrades.

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea Socialism appealed to many Korean women intellectuals primarily as an answer to the class-divisive effects of Japan’s modernization of their colonized country. Although colonial modernization opened up new opportunities for middle-class women, expanding the possibilities for education and encouraging their social participation, that same process also facilitated the exploitation of Korean women laborers in the interests of the patriarchal state and industrial corporations. The collusion between state and capital had consequences for all Korean women, limiting their opportunities in multiple ways. But it was especially workingclass women who had to bear the brunt of imperial exploitation. The socialist development of the Korean women’s movement was, in a way, inevitable. As Tani Barlow has observed in her study of the Chinese feminist movement, early-twentieth-century liberal feminism was not quite an otherwise neutral doctrine in support of women’s rights and aspirations.64 Originating in nineteenth-century Europe, the ideal of the New Woman had from the start a middle-class orientation firmly rooted in the bourgeois values of the French Revolution. The movement’s consequent insensitivity to the particular afflictions of working-class women revealed the limits of traditional feminism as a liberational ideology and gave rise to “red feminism” in many countries.65 This was especially so in colonial Korea, where liberal feminists were also institutionally unable to fight for women’s suffrage and other legal rights. The socialist path thus became the only vital option for feminists who wanted to pursue a more aggressive political solution for Korean women’s problems. For all their unorthodoxies, compromises, and contradictions, the socialist women writers of 1930s Korea produced works that held a genuinely feminist position in the discursive economy of their time. They did 64. See Tani Barlow’s discussion of the relationship between imperialism, nationalism, and feminism in The Question of Women, 64–67. As Barlow shows, part of the impetus behind liberal feminism came from the imperial and national interest in securing healthier and better-educated offspring, a form of eugenics that gave a suspiciously instrumental role to the cause of women’s liberation. 65. For the history of socialist feminism in Europe, see Gruber and Graves, eds., Women and Socialism.

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so despite a publishing field that was heavily controlled by male editors, despite the mounting censorship and propaganda exercised by the Japanese colonial government, and despite the ideological constraints that were engendered by their adherence to the socialist doctrines. Works such as Salt and The Human Predicament may thus be read as subtle and yet fully intended responses to the established patriarchal trends of their time, whether they were the glorification of motherhood and housewifery as ideal womanhood or the depoliticization of gender issues through their detachment from the public sphere. Both works provide good examples of so-called palimpsestic writing, in which a woman writer creates a layered narrative by inscribing her critical perspective below the surface of a male-oriented narrative convention.66 By deploying these narrative strategies, Kang and other women simultaneously conformed to and subverted the patriarchal conventions of their literary environment. They embedded the stance of feminism into that of socialism, and in so doing they stretched the boundaries of the political terrain of both ideologies at once.67 The Korean women’s movement declined with the dissolution of the Kŭnuhoe in 1931. Women’s political activism was yet another casualty of the 1930s ascension of Japanese militarism, which manifested itself internally through the police repression of most forms of social activism during that decade. If the political movement was discontinued, however, feminism as a cultural and literary practice persisted throughout the colonial period. Socialist women writers continued to write well into the late 1930s, and the ranks of Kang, Pak, and Paek were joined by new talents such as Song Kyewŏl, who promoted the cause of socialist feminism through her fictional writings and editorship of the magazine Sin yŏsŏng (pl. 10), and Im Sundŭk, who emerged in 1937 to become the youngest and most articulate critic and writer among the group.68 With the exception 66. Gubart and Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic, 73. 67. As Paula Rabinowtiz has argued, socialist women’s fiction, which drew from both the conventions of proletarian realism and those of the traditional domestic narrative, should be viewed “both as a variation of proletarian literature and as a coherent genre of its own.” See Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 66. 68. Song Kyewŏl (1911–33) became acquainted with socialism while attending the Kyŏngsŏng Women’s Commercial High School. She was one of the student leaders who orga nized the women students’ protest in Seoul (1930) under the guidance of Hŏ Chŏngsuk. Song was expelled from the school as a result and was briefly imprisoned. After her release on probation, she first found a job as a saleswoman in a department store but was soon employed as an editor for the magazine Sin

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of Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, who renounced socialism after her 1934 imprisonment, none of the socialist women writers actively contributed to Japan’s militarist propaganda. Alongside the socialist stream, a new generation of liberal feminist writers such as Im Ogin and Yi Sŏnhŭi appeared in the late 1930s to advance their literary advocacy for more egalitarian gender relationships. And even women’s “patriotic” literature during World War II, as has been argued by Choi Kyeong-Hee, was not completely devoid of feminist concerns.69 The socialist women writers of colonial Korea gave a literary voice to the poorer among colonial women through their vivid portraits of destitute mothers, abused factory girls, and peasant girls forced into prostitution. In so doing, they may have helped their readers reimagine the place of working-class women in Korean society as well as the broader modern world. It is unclear to what extent socialist women’s literature was in effect an influence on floor-level political activism. The literacy rate among Korean women in the 1930s hovered at barely over 10 percent, and that rate was certainly much lower among women factory workers. At the same time, it would be hasty to rule out any influence, as the women and men who were the main readers of proletarian fictions were often also occupying influential positions as leaders of educational organizations such as night schools and reading circles. The interaction between the cultural and the political wings of the women’s movement in colonial Korea is as of today a virtually unstudied phenomenon, and it would make an interesting subject for a future investigation.70 Today the very concept of feminism is often under dispute, exposed as it is to the critique of women who feel that their interests are not well yŏsŏng. (See Pak Chŏngae, “Ŏnŭ sin yŏsŏng ŭi kyŏnghŏm.”) Im Sundŭk (1915–57) shared Song’s experience of participating in the 1930 protest as a student leader of the Ewha Women’s High School. She was also expelled, but was able to continue her education at the Tongdŏk Women’s High School. She published only a few stories and essays during the colonial era but had a prolific career after the 1945 liberation and later in North Korea. See Yi Sanggyŏng, Im Sundŭk. 69. For a feminist reading of Korean women’s war time literature, see Choi Kyeong-Hee, “Another Layer of Pro-Japanese Literature,” and Yi Sŏnok, “Yŏsŏng haebang ŭi kidae wa chŏnjaeng.” 70. A survey of colonial magazines reveals no working-class reader’s response to socialist women’s fictional works, regardless of the reader’s gender. Yet leftist magazines did publish writings of women workers that displayed a socialist inspiration. For a small sample of these, see Ch’oe Oksun’s “Yŏltu sigan nodong” and Yu Hŭisun’s “Yŏjikkong ŭi hasoyŏn.”

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represented under the traditional feminist umbrella. The need is widely felt to reconfigure feminism as a movement in which gender equality figures centrally but is also attuned to other just as important struggles for women’s liberation, such as the fight against discrimination based on race, class, or religion. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have written, there is “an imperative need to address the concerns of women around the world in the historicized particularity of their relationship to multiple patriarchies as well as to international economic hegemonies.”71 This rings true to us today, and arguably, the same would have been true for Korean women activists in colonial times. By focusing on the plight of working-class women from their class-sensitive perspectives, the socialist women writers could both correct and complement the views of the liberal feminist movement. And by making feminism more pluralistic, they contributed effectively to the critique of the patriarchal assumptions that were embedded in the nationalist and imperialist discourses of colonial Korea. 71. Grewal and Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies, 17.

Seven

Everyday Life as Critique Kim Namch’ŏn’s Literary Experiments

During his high school days in Pyongyang in the mid-1920s, Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–53?) founded with his classmates a literary circle called The Castle on the Moon (Wŏryŏk). The reading list of this group was fi lled with the works of renowned Japa nese writers, among whom Kim particularly admired Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. A decade later Kim would recall, “While I was deeply absorbed in Akutagawa, he committed suicide. I had never in such earnest worshipped a writer before or since.”1 Yet, despite his admiration for modernist experimentalists such as Akutagawa and Yokomitsu, Kim eventually chose a different path for his own literary career. In 1929, while attending Hōsei University in Tokyo, he joined the local division of the KAPF. In his own words, he chose to be “a foot soldier in politics rather than a master in arts.”2 Kim went on to become one of the most accomplished leftist writers in Korea, distinguishing himself for his critical acumen and a rare aesthetic inventiveness. He reached the peak of his literary success in the years between 1938 and 1941. When the prestigious journal Inmun p’yŏngnon (Humane 1. Shortly later Kim wrote “A Market Day” (Changnal; 1939), a short story modeled on Akutagawa’s famed Rashōmon and dedicated to the Japanese writer. Kim belonged to a generation of Koreans who received their education in colonial public schools, and his high school readings demonstrate the extent to which these youths were immersed in Japa nese culture. Beyond Akutagawa, other Japa nese writers included in Kim’s reading list were Mushanōkōji Saneatsu, the three Arishima brothers, Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Shiga Naoya. See Kim Namch’ŏn, “Chajak annae,”383. 2. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Mongsang ŭi sun’gyŏlsŏng,” 57.

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criticism) held a literary criticism contest in 1941, it invited its readers to write about three prominent contemporary novelists: Yu Chino, Yi Hyosŏk, and Kim Namch’ŏn.3 Kim is believed to have been executed in North Korea around 1953, when factionalism within the regime led to the purge of many intellectuals within that country.4 His name has since been erased from the literary history of the North. Meanwhile in the South, Kim’s works were banned on account of the writer’s defection to the North in 1947. When the ban was lifted in 1988, these works became the object of intense critical interest within academic circles. Reading him then was a generation of scholars committed to minjung activism. Amid the social struggles for the democratization of South Korea, these scholars rescued Kim Namch’ŏn’s literature to the prominence it had enjoyed during the colonial period. After having been forgotten for nearly four decades, today Kim Namch’ŏn is acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of modern Korean literature. Kim and his KAPF comrades lived through a time of profound transformations in the history of colonial Korea and the Japanese empire. At the organization’s birth in the mid-1920s, Korea was still a predominantly agricultural country. By the time the KAPF was forcibly dissolved in 1935, however, the colony had undergone a rapid process of industrialization and had become an integral part of the imperial developmental project. Its rising economic importance coincided with Japan’s move to eradicate oppositional forces as well as expedite the cultural assimilation of the peninsula—a policy that culminated around 1940 with the imposition of the Japanese language, religion, and names on all Koreans. Amid the expanding wealth and shrinking freedom in the colony, Kim and the other leftists found it increasingly difficult to circumvent the oppressive forces of censorship and imprisonment. These intellectuals became subject to an enormous pressure to recant their socialist convictions, and by the time the so-called Greater East Asian War started in 1941, most of them were either silent or had become compliant, to varying extents, with the ideological directives of the imperial government. Writing during these tumultuous years, Kim left a complex body of work that defies any easy overarching interpretation. Upon his 3. See the advertisement in Inmun P’yŏngnon, July 1941, 300–301. For a detailed chronology of the writer’s life and work, see KNC, 1: 883–85. 4. See KNC, 1: 599.

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rediscovery in 1988, critics such as Chang Sasŏn, Yi Sanggap, and Yi Tŏkhwa immediately identified Kim as a major proponent of literary realism during the late colonial period. In their interpretations, Kim was regarded as a socialist writer who joined a nationalist cause with a materialist critique of colonial society.5 In more recent years, however, other critics have come to contest such a reading of Kim. In par ticu lar, they have pointed to a discrepancy between the writer’s theoretical reflections and his actual literary practice. In his theoretical work, Kim consistently advocated realism as his own guiding aesthetic principle. An admirer of Balzac and an intellectual kinsman of Lukács, he actively theorized literature as a conduit for the organic critique of society, history, and, more generally, “reality.” In his fictional writings, however, Kim also displayed a seemingly antithetical interest in the fragmentary and the contingent, which he conveyed by using experimentalist techniques such as montage, multiple points of view, and stream of consciousness. Here, in the separate locus of his writerly practice, Kim would often delight in detail as he depicted a signboard, a café, a busy street, and in general the fleeting scenes of urban modernity. In effect, the consensus today seems to be that Kim did not give practical application to his aesthetic ideal of realism. Rather, in the readings of critics such as Ch’ae Hosŏk and Kim Chul, the writer has become emblematic of a colonial intellectual who was deeply split in his aesthetic as well as his ideological allegiances.6 Ch’ae has suggested that Kim may at one point have renounced his socialist commitment. And Kim Chul has gone even further, seeing in the writer, not only an acquiescent acceptance of the status quo, but also a willing inclination toward the governmentsponsored ideology of pan-Asianism. In resisting the previous consensus, I offer in this chapter an alternative perspective on Kim Namch’ŏn’s late-colonial literary trajectory. Instead of assuming that he advocated one thing and practiced another, I take more seriously his claim to have “never written a work that did not accord with my critical argument.”7 If Kim indeed did remain faithful to his aesthetic ideal of realism, then the challenge facing us now is to interpret him carefully. What did he mean by realism, and how did he practice 5. See Chang Sasŏn, Han’guk riŏllijŭm munhangnon; Yi Tŏkhwa, Kim Namch’ŏn; and Yi Sanggap, Kim Namch’ŏn. 6. Ch’ae Hosŏk, “Kim Namch’ŏn munhak yŏn’gu,” and Kim Chul, “ ‘Kŭndae ŭi ch’ogŭk,’ Nangbi, and Benech’ia.” 7. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Yangdoryu ŭi toryang,” 511.

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his aesthetic ideal within the changing conditions of colonial Korea? My discussion focuses, in particular, on Kim’s early theorization of everyday life—the sphere of ordinary and experiential daily occurrences—as a literary space fully apt for a materialist critique of society and history. It is through this move, I suggest, that Kim reformulated his aesthetic into a novel but still recognizable form of realism. As my analysis shows, Kim remained faithful to this aesthetic principle throughout his career, but he applied it in his fictions with varying degrees of consistency. In the end, in his creative practice Kim could not always maintain a critical distance from the everyday spectacles of urban modernity. Yet his focus on the everyday also allowed him to resist both the excesses of dogmatic socialism and the utopian visions of the pan-Asianist ideology. The four main sections of this chapter follow a roughly chronological order. I first attend to how the Korean leftists were affected by Japan’s policy of forced conversion (tenkō) during the early 1930s. The arrest and subsequent trial of many intellectuals forms an important historical background to Kim’s own reformulation of a realist aesthetic in the late 1930s. I then focus on this crucial stage of Kim’s literary development, observing how, reacting to the pressures of the political environment, Kim theorized everyday life as the proper space for a Marxist critique of society and history. The following two sections look at how Kim put his theoretical ideal into practice in two of his most representative works, The Green Star Pharmacy (Noksŏngdang; 1938) and Barley (Maek; 1941). And finally, the conclusion addresses the broader significance of this analysis for our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of colonial Korea. Kim’s literary experience is indicative of the resilience of leftist culture within the increasingly oppressive political conditions of late colonial Korea. Even after their inevitable political defeat, the most resourceful leftist intellectuals were still able to preserve their distinctive countercultural voices amid the cacophonous din of censorship, imprisonment, propaganda, and a fast approaching world war.

Japan’s Thought Control and Its Effects on Leftist Writers I begin my discussion by considering the impact of chŏnhyang, forced ideological conversion, on Korean left ist writers. Th is political event was a watershed in the development of literary leftism in Korea, and it led Kim Namch’ŏn to fundamentally reconsider his previous political and aesthetic assumptions. As we shall see, through this process Kim

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came to abandon his dogmatic socialist views in favor of a more critical approach, one in which the application of Marxist tenets would be adapted to the contingent historical situation of colonial Korea. Japan had its thought-control policy, known as the Peace Preservation Law, in place by 1925; but it was not until 1927, when the conservatives gained upper hand in the government, that the police began to enforce the law actively to dissolve oppositional forces.8 The primary targets of this law were the members and sympathizers of the Japanese Communist Party. In a particularly infamous incident in 1933, Kobayashi Takiji, a socialist writer and a party member, died under torture during police interrogation. In the majority of cases, however, the Japanese government employed a less violent strategy of co-optation of the intellectuals, and toward that goal in 1931 it adopted the policy of forced conversion.9 Under this policy, the police were allowed to use both persuasive and coercive means to pressure those arrested into recanting their ideologies and pledging future support for the government’s cause. Japan widely implemented this policy not only in the imperial mainland but also in its colonies of Taiwan and Korea. In Korea, frequent objects of Japan’s thought control were the socialist writers of the KAPF. The police first arrested the leading members of the organization in 1931 on the charge of conspiring to reconstruct the Korean Communist Party.10 All were released except Kim Namch’ŏn, who was indicted for his role as an agitator in the total strike of Pyongyang rubber factory laborers. Kim was sentenced to two years of imprisonment and was released on sick bail in 1933. He was spared from a second wave of arrests in 1934, when the police again rounded up most of the known KAPF members with the aim of disbanding the organization. This time, the writers were seized while preparing for the regional tour of their theatrical production of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), an antiwar novel adapted by the Japanese communist playwright Murayama Tomoyoshi.11 At the trial in 1935, none of those indicted received a sentence heavier than three years’ imprisonment, and all were released on probation. According to the trial records, the court delivered relatively light sentences because the writers had 8. Mitchell, Thought Control, 69–96. 9. Ibid., 127. 10. Kwon Youngmin, Han’guk kyegŭp munhak undongsa, 419–20. 11. Ibid., 295.

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“pledged to convert.”12 Most likely, Kim Namch’ŏn also had made such a pledge at some time between 1933 and 1934. It is difficult to gauge the exact extent and content of the Korean writers’ “conversions.” In the imperial mainland, Japan’s policy proved quite effective in eradicating internal oppositions. Many Japanese leftists converted from socialism to nationalism after the 1933 release of a joint statement by Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, in which the two leaders of the Japanese Communist Party denounced the “foreign” ideology of socialism and avowed their support for the Japanese imperial enterprise.13 In Korea, however, the same policy had a less clear impact. It was only around 1937, at the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war, that Korean leftists began to give outspoken support for Japan’s military ambitions.14 Prior to that time, writers had generally responded to the pressure of the colonial authorities in less committed ways, typically by promising to withdraw from politics. In the first case of a publicized conversion in 1934, former KAPF chairman Pak Yŏnghŭi denounced the past politicized literature of proletarian writers. Pak called for the writers’ return to literature, in particular to “realism,” by which he meant a faithful depiction of reality without an ideological bias.15 He coined the apt phrase, “Gained was an ideology and lost were arts,” which became instantly famous and widely discussed among Korean writers. Indeed, Pak’s turn from politicized literature to literature without politics seems to have set the basic pattern for other writers’ conversions. In recalling KAPF writers’ collective recantation at the 1935 trial, for instance, Paek Ch’ŏl wrote, “At the court, most of us stated our determination to return to the truth of literature. This was the moment when the KAPF decided to abandon its politics-first policy and return to literature. It was also the most natural thing to do, given our status as defenders.”16 12. Ibid., 324. 13. Sano and Nabeyama, “Kyōdōhikoku dōshi ni tsugeru bun.” On the conversion of Japa nese left ist intellectuals, see Mitchell, Thought Control, 109–11; Doak, Dreams of Difference, 107–30; and No Sangnae, Chŏnhyang iran muŏssin’ga. The last is an anthology of selected essays on Japa nese conversion literature by prominent Japa nese critics such as Honda Shūgo, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Sagiura Minpei. 14. Chŏn Sangsuk, Ilche sigi han’guk sahoejuŭi chisigin, and Kim Jae-Yong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang. 15. See Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Ch’oegŭn munyeron ŭi sinjŏn’gae.” 16. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Piae ŭi sŏngsa,” 473–74.

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Yet if the writers generally stated their intention to “return to literature,” it was less clear what their new aesthetic and ideological orientations would be. In fact, many of them were at a loss. They returned to the writer’s desk from the battlefield of politics only to find literature as they had known it no longer possible to create. What new direction to take became the focus of intense debates in the following years. The highly respected Yi Kiyŏng, for example, fell back into writing in the style of earlier proletarian stories, plainly describing the life of the poor, but such stories no longer had the subversive power that they had possessed in the mid-1920s. Meanwhile Pak Yŏnghŭi’s proposal of a revised form of nonideological, “objective” realism was met with strong opposition from the more idealistic members of the KAPF. Against Pak, Im Hwa especially upheld an ideal of “realism with a romantic spirit,” a literature infused with an optimistic socialist vision of history: “No true realism is possible without a sincere romantic spirit—a spirit that guides humanity to a broad future from a historical perspective.”17 Read in the contemporary context, Im was in effect proposing a version of socialist realism. But his proposal, too, was not a viable option in the political situation of the late 1930s. For one thing, stories with an explicit socialist outlook could not survive intensified censorship.18 And besides, a Soviet-style, heroic representation of class struggle crowned by the triumph of the proletariat would have commanded little credibility after the general demise of the leftist movements in Korea. Kim entered the theoretical debate at this juncture, responding to Im Hwa in an essay entitled “On Changing the Method for Creation” (1934). In his essay Kim argued that only a more radical and autonomous rethinking of their assumptions would enable KAPF writers to regenerate their literary practice. As he wrote in a veiled criticism of Im, “we [KAPF writers] should no longer repeat our old, unscrupulous practice of directly adopting solutions from foreign comrades instead of devising one on our own.”19 More precisely, Kim’s target was the dogmatic deference of KAPF writers to the aesthetic guidelines adopted by their Soviet counterparts. In a series of essays written thereafter, Kim urged his fellow writers to critically reinterpret the meaning of “socialist” in socialist realism in order to create a literature that would be relevant to 17. Im Hwa, Munhak ŭi nolli, 23–24. 18. Kim recalls having five of his stories censored between 1935 and 1936. See “Chajak annae,” 384. 19. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Ch’angjak pangbŏp e issŏsŏ,” 63.

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their own political situation: “We want to first understand the difference between the social task of Korean literature and that of the literature of another country. Of course, we cannot think of one region apart from its place in world history. Nevertheless, it is just a fact that while a joy of construction prevails in one country, such a joy and optimism is lost in dark clouds in another place.”20 Obviously referring to the Soviet Union and colonial Korea, Kim here stressed the difference between the historical contingencies of the two countries. The local particularities of Korea, Kim argued, could hardly fit within a grand historical narrative of universal revolutionary progress. The most urgent task for Korean leftists would accordingly be that of developing their own literary model first and then deploying that model in representing the lived reality of colonial Korea in all its specificities. Kim thus criticized his fellow writers’ uncritical adherence to a foreign-originated socialism. It is important to note, however, that he did not renounce the socialist ideal per se. All along he recognized the necessity of analyzing the local problems of colonial Korea from an essentially Marxist internationalist perspective. Herein lay the novelty of Kim’s position in KAPF debates, and at the same time its difficulty. In an increasingly oppressive political environment, the revolutionary optimism of traditional proletarian stories sounded jarringly empty. Yet the need remained for a literature that would expose social inequalities in an age of imperialism. To provide a viable direction for this literature became a major concern for Kim Namch’ŏn, and to that task he would devote his energies in the following years.21

Theorizing a Marxist Aesthetic of Everyday Life Against the background of the debates within the KAPF, Kim Namch’ŏn set out to develop a new aesthetic program for a socialist literature better suited to Korea and its situation. This was a challenging task, and 20. Ibid., 243. 21. Even after the disintegration of the KAPF in 1935, Kim Namch’ŏn remained in dialogue with the former members of the orga nization. His critical suggestions were often debated among other left ist writers and his influence seen in their works. After the 1939 publication of Kim’s Great Currents (Taeha), for example, Yi Kiyŏng and Han Sŏrya, respectively, wrote Spring (Pom; 1941) and Pagoda (T’ap; 1941). Inspired by Taeha, both novels focused on depicting the decline of the feudal social order rather than the contemporary conditions of Korea under Japa nese rule.

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initially he focused more on exposing the old vices. In 1937, for example, he introduced his vision for what he called a “literature of indictment” (kobal munhak): An unsparing spirit of criticism toward all, a passion to investigate and expose the very roots of a variety of different lifestyles—these will save our proletarian literature from its present stagnancy and regression and will establish it as the historical successor to bourgeois literature. By pursuing our aesthetic practice in this direction, we will fulfi ll the social mission of literature. Without doubt it is but a development of our proper realist spirit, only a localized manifestation of it. In practice, one should indict schematism and doctrinal attitude. Heroism and bureaucratism. Ugliness, beauty, poverty, and wealth—all of them. Intellectuals, socialists, nationalists, bourgeoisie, officials, landlords, tenants, their lifestyles, all of their conflicts, morals, and worldviews. One must question and indict all of them without reservation.22

Emerging from this invective is a program distinctive in its all-consuming passion for criticism—a program perhaps more akin to the negative aesthetic of an avant-garde than to any normative socialist literature. Indeed, given the predominantly polemical thrust of the vision, it may seem that the writer, then barely twenty-six years old, did not at this point have a positive proposal on which to base his literary practice. Yet Kim also insisted that his program was “a development of our proper realist spirit, only a localized manifestation of it.” In emphasizing the continuity between his vision and past literary practices, Kim meant to offer a constructive critique of those practices. Since the late 1920s KAPF writers had typically constructed their stories around the theme of class struggle, often telling black-and-white tales of conflict between laborers (or peasants) and agricultural or industrial capitalists. Kim himself had previously used such an approach to literature, producing rousing depictions of the industrial proletariat as the agent that would eventually bring about the fulfillment of Marx’s historical prophecy.23 With his literature of indictment, Kim in effect proposed to abandon schematism and teleology in favor of a more eclectic, less doctrinal approach to literary production. While still working within the framework of a Marxist aesthetic, he aimed to expand the reach of a socialist literature from the confined realm of class struggle to the broader area of what he called “a variety of different lifestyles.” 22. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Kobal ŭi chŏngsin,” 231. 23. See Kim Namch’ŏn, “Kongjang sinmun” and “Konguhoe.”

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We can read Kim’s proposal as both a denial of Marx’s teleological determinism and an affirmation of his historical materialism. Instinctively distrustful of any narrative of necessary development, at the same time Kim thought that the reality of all social and historical phenomena was to be found in their material basis: “Literature of indictment as my current ideal is nothing but a literary esprit that aims to faithfully reflect the dark actualities of our time without any distortion. . . . [It] is our realism, based on the epistemology of mimesis and aligned to modern materialism (hyŏndae yumullon).”24 Departing further from the more traditional forms of Marxism, however, Kim did not regard this material basis to be restricted to the sphere of economic phenomena. While acknowledging economic relations as among the prime determinants of social phenomena, Kim also insisted that a realist writer should look beyond them to depict life in its multiple dimensions. In so relaxing the strict economic focus of previous KAPF literature, Kim was searching for an antidote to the schematism that had plagued the movement in the past. In effect, by liberalizing his commitment to “modern materialism,” he laid the basis for a literary practice that would “return to literature” while still performing its function of providing a materialist critique of society. Once he had taken his materialism beyond the confines of the economic, Kim came to the conclusion that life itself, in all its economic, social, cultural, and political aspects, constituted the proper object of interest for a realist writer. At the core of his proposal Kim placed the understanding that a writer is first and foremost an observer of the everyday, a chronicler of events that happen ordinarily and banally. The task of the realist, he suggested, was to select and illuminate those events, placing them in a light that revealed their deeper and more essential structures.25 A broadly materialist critique would thereby be induced through a writerly practice, but that practice ought to remain grounded in the observation of everyday life. For Kim, a critique was inherent in the representation of daily occurrences, yet it should not schematically structure that representation. His vision thus adapted a social critique to the everyday at the same time that it theorized the everyday as a proper space for that critique. In sum, we could say that Kim “quotidianized” Marxist theory and politicized the everyday, bringing the two together in a literary practice aimed at social criticism. 24. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Ch’angjak pangbŏp ŭi sin’gungmyŏn,” 239. 25. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Set’ae wa p’ungsok,” 420–21.

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Kim further articulated his vision for a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life by relying on the theories of Tosaka Jun (1900–45), a leftist Japanese philosopher who was among the few never to recant his socialism.26 Before Kim, Tosaka had moved to free a Marxist approach from the constraints of a narrow focus on economic phenomena. He had come to reflect on the autonomous significance of culture as a shaping force of society through his analysis of the contemporary ultranationalist assertion of pure Japanese cultural identity dubbed “Japanism.” In writings such as Shishō to shite no bungaku (Literature as thought; 1936) and Shishō to fūzoku (Thought and custom; 1936), Tosaka had argued that one should study an ideology not only in its institutional aspects but also in its everyday form, that of common morals (tōdoku). As the ethical codes of a society, he thought, morals have a double relevance to its economic basis: while derived from the production relations of society, morals are by no means mere reflections of those relations, as they can exert a considerable influence on social changes by determining an individual’s consciousness and behaviors. In accord with his conceptualization of morals as the quotidian form of ideology, Tosaka sought to create a new social science whose primary object of analysis would be the culture of everyday life, which he called “customs” (fūzoku).27 He advocated for a science that, like literature, would take interest in the mundane aspects of life, and he believed that literature should represent life through its scientific understanding. In a series of essays written in 1938, Kim Namch’ŏn borrowed Tosaka’s notions of “customs” and “morals” to theorize his own aesthetic ideal.28 For Kim as for Tosaka, the customs of a society encompassed “not just the economic, political or cultural aspects of life, but the entire so26. Tosaka was a professor at Kim’s alma mater, Hōsei University, but the two never met because Tosaka joined the faculty only in 1931, a month after Kim was expelled from the school. Tosaka was later stripped of his professorship for his Marxist views in 1934 and by 1937 was also prohibited from publishing his writings. For more biographical information on Tosaka Jun, see Yamada, Tosaka Jun to sono jidai. 27. Tosaka, Shisō to shite no bungaku and Shishō to fūzoku. Tosaka seems to have derived the terms “customs” and “morality” from the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit (translatable as “morality of customs,” or “social ethics”). In Hegel’s philosophy of mind, Sittlichkeit refers to social institutions, in par ticu lar the family, the civil society, and the state. 28. See Kim Namch’ŏn, “Todŏk ŭi munhakchŏk p’aak,” “Ilsinsang chilli wa moral,” and “Moral ŭi hwangnip.”

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cial phenomena that include all the layers of the material structure of society.”29 According to Kim, the thematic expansion of Korean leftist literature would depart from a proper acknowledgment of the significance of customs, so understood, within Korean society. At the same time, he added another semantic layer to Tosaka’s concept by separating p’ungsok (Korean for fūzoku) from set’ae, another Korean word that can be translated as “trends.” In Kim’s usage, set’ae meant culture as it was sensuously experienced by individuals, whereas p’ungsok came to connote culture as it was rationally understood in its structural relations. By contrasting the two, Kim was seeking to distinguish his aesthetic ideal from that of contemporary modernist writers. He suggested that a realist writer should go beyond the modernist depiction of set’ae to represent p’ungsok. By looking at everyday reality through the lens of morals, Kim argued, a writer would be able to capture its structural and material elements without stopping at its more contingent and transitory aspects.30 In attending to the pervasive presence of ideology in everyday life, Kim shared a kindred spirit not only with Tosaka Jun but also with contemporary Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács (1885–1971) and Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).31 Indeed, Kim would later develop a keen fondness for Lukács’s theory of historical realism, and Kim’s distinction between the sensuous and rational modes of representing reality resonates with the Hungarian critic’s opposition of modernism to realism as a sensuous aesthetic of fragmentation versus a rational aesthetic of totality.32 The affinities between the two critics, however, should not blind us 29. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Ilsinsang chilli wa moral,” 359. 30. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Set’ae wa p’ungsok,” 420–21. 31. Harry Harootunian has pointed to the three Marxist thinkers’ common interest in everyday life as a space for analysis in History’s Disquiet and Overcome by Modernity. Approaching this intellectual development within the context of modernity, Harootunian outlines the emergence of everyday life as a new analytical paradigm in the writings of major modern thinkers throughout the world. Here, I wish to take Harootunian’s insight in a different direction in order to observe the global reconfiguration of Marxism as a critical philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. 32. See Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. The Japa nese translation of Lukács’s The Historical Novel was published in 1938. For a study on Lukács’s influence on contemporary Korean writers, see Kim Yoon-sik, Han’guk kŭndae munhak sasangsa, 243–56. Inspired by Lukács’s historical realism, Kim Namch’ŏn developed the idea of the family chronology novel (kajok yŏndaegi sosŏl) in “Changp’yŏn sosŏl e taehan na ŭi isang.” Based on this ideal, he wrote Great Currents and its incomplete 1945 sequel Artery (Tongmaek).

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to one important difference. As an oppositional European intellectual, Lukács never really questioned the validity of Marx’s teleological vision of history. Rather, he was most apprehensive that capitalist alienation— man’s estrangement from his environment, labor, and self—might hamper the inevitable progression of history toward its revolutionary fulfi llment.33 Because he believed that modernist art prevented people from overcoming their alienation, Lukács adamantly opposed it, instead championing the more structural, “totalistic” vision of realism. In contrast, Kim Namch’ŏn seriously doubted that a Marxist historical vision could be applied to colonial Korea. Since his motivating concern was the rejuvenation of literary leftism, Kim stressed that a Korean writer should actively educe a sense of the direction of history through close observation of the everyday instead of more passively describing it as a determined outcome of dialectical necessity. Accordingly, while Kim agreed in principle with Lukács about the necessity of representing the totality of everyday reality, in practice he was more inclined to give priority to “everyday” over “totality” in the actual execution of his literary projects. Everyday life (ilsang saenghwal) became a topic of interest in Korean public discourse only in the 1930s. Its emergence coincided with the growth of the urban middle class—industrialists and professionals mostly uninterested in large social issues—and with an intensifying police repression that inevitably weakened the appeal of the grand narratives of liberation or revolution. In the depoliticized commercial culture that ensued, the urban elites started to enjoy a new lifestyle dependent on modern commodities, and the mass media turned that lifestyle into a public ideal by celebrating it in newspapers, magazines, and fi lms. The discursive emergence of everyday life, then, marked the moment when modernity became a mass phenomenon and a popular ideal. It was then that the spectacles of modernity ceased to be regarded as curiosities and instead became normative displays of what Korea should become. In the thriving urban culture of 1930s Korea, the everyday became synonymous with prosperity and the modernizing values of Japan and the West. In the cultural history of the twentieth century it has been common for the process of modernization to trigger an artistic reaction, which in the West found its expression especially in the individualist aesthetic of modernism. In Korea too, modernist writers such as Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang resisted the more commercialized forms of everyday life, 33. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 83–222.

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reconfiguring the everyday as a space of private, authentic experiences consciously removed from the commotions of modernity.34 In comparison, we have seen that Kim Namch’ŏn’s reaction took a rather more aggressive form. In his literary aesthetic, the everyday was appropriated as a concrete historical space that was fully apt for a materialist critique of colonial modernity. Accordingly, though Kim shared with the modernists an interest in everyday life as a literary space, he did not necessarily share their approach to that space. As a leftist intellectual in an increasingly oppressive environment, he was intensely exposed to the experiences of alienation and political disenfranchisement; but Kim reacted to these pressures not only by withdrawing from the world but also by trying to critique and demystify it in a more engaged fashion. We will move on, in the next two sections, to analyze Kim’s literary practice in light of these reflections. As we will observe, Kim was not always consistent in pursuing his newly developed literary program. Yet it will be apparent that he intended to hold on to that program as a guiding principle of his literary practice. Whether or not Kim succeeded in his intent, he pursued his writing under the ideal of literature as a social critique induced from the close observation of everyday life.

Searching for History in Everyday Life We have seen so far how Kim Namch’ŏn came to reconceive his ideal of realism as that of an aesthetic of everyday life filtered through a Marxist materialist prism. In the wake of his forced recantation in the mid-1930s, Kim proposed that the proper creative method for a writer would be to supply insights into the material relations of society through the careful exploration of its everyday details. With these theoretical reflections mostly completed by 1938, Kim went on in subsequent years to create some of the most experimental fictions in colonial Korea. In works such as After Hitting My Wife (Chŏ rŭl ttaerigo; 1937), The Green Star Pharmacy (Noksŏngdang; 1939), and the trilogy of Waste (Nangbi; 1940–41), Management (Kyŏngyŏng; 1940), and Barley (Maek; 1941), Kim put into practice his avowed aesthetic of realism by using techniques that were actually more reminiscent of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. One may wonder at this apparent incongruence. It seems safe to assume that Kim, now subject to the scrutiny of colonial censors, would choose a form of 34. Poole, “Colonial Interiors.”

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writing less transparent than the plain writing style traditionally practiced by the realists. Yet beyond this explanation, we shall also see that Kim Namch’ŏn may have been less deliberate in his choice of themes and styles. The discrepancy between his theoretical reflections and his actual literary practice may be read, as we shall read it here, as the symptom of a deeper conflict in the writer’s views of rapidly changing Korean society. We shall focus our analysis on The Green Star Pharmacy, which in addition to being one of Kim’s most experimental fictions is one that has received less critical attention. The story was published in 1939 in a literary magazine called Munjang (Writing). It is divided into three unnumbered sections, and each section is narrated by what seems to be a different voice.35 The first section begins with a self-referential introduction: If I say “Kim Namch’ŏn,” at least those who read this story would recognize the name and say, “Um, you mean the guy who is writing this story?” But if I give the name Pak Sŏngun, few would take such notice. Even if I present its Chinese characters, sŏng to reach and un the cloud, only those who used to go drinking with Pak, and of them, only those with a good recollection, may remember, “Ah, him! Isn’t he one of the writers who used to hang out with Kim Namch’ŏn several years, or maybe a decade, ago?” But there is no guarantee that anyone would indeed remember, given how forgetful people are nowadays. (Amnesia is such a great thing. If the memory of what happened ten years ago kept coming back every night to make one anxious and regretful, how could anyone stay sane? So everybody easily forgets.)36

In this passage the first-person narrator, Kim Namch’ŏn, introduces Pak Sŏngun, the main character of the story, through a rather long, seemingly digressive reflection on his past literary fame and present anonymity. Following this, the reader learns that Pak disappeared from the public eye shortly after his literary debut because he was imprisoned for “a certain incident.”37 After Pak’s recent death the manuscript of a diary-like short story written by him was found, and the narrator (Kim) declares that he will relate the “edited” version of said manuscript. Contemporary readers

35. Two versions of The Green Star Pharmacy exist. The original colonial story was published in 1939. When Kim republished it in his postliberation short story collection in The March First Movement (Samil undong), he shortened it by omitting the self-referential opening, most likely because of the changed audience and times. It was this shortened version that was rediscovered in postdemocratization South Korea. See “Noksŏngdang” (1939) and its revised reprints (1947 and 1988). 36. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Noksŏngdang” (1939), 113. 37. Ibid., 114.

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who were acquainted with the writer’s life—namely, most of the insiders of the small Korean literary world—would have easily noticed the close parallel between Pak’s life and that of Kim Namch’ŏn: like Pak, Kim too had served a prison term for his socialist activism, and he too had come back from Seoul to Pyongyang to make a living with his pregnant wife, a licensed pharmacist.38 Many learned readers, including leftist writers, might also have recognized in the name of Pak Sŏngun the writer’s allusion to the revolutionary hero of Cho Myŏnghŭi’s novella Naktonggang (The Naktong river; 1927).39 Widely regarded as a classic of 1920s proletarian literature, the novella told the story of Pak Sŏngun, a nationalist-turned-socialist, who devoted his life to a range of social movements until he finally succumbed to an illness that struck him in prison. It was no coincidence that Kim, a voracious reader whose writings abound in intertextual references, would allude to Pak’s legendary name, insisting on spelling out its Chinese characters (meaning “catching the cloud”) and spending the entire opening paragraph musing upon Pak’s supposedly faded fame. The forgotten name of Pak Sŏngun betokens the changed cultural climate of late colonial Korea. By 1939 the activist decade of the 1920s had become a distant memory, as Japan’s policy of selective oppression had been successful in undermining the continuity of the leftist movement. Although The Green Star Pharmacy has autobiographical elements, Kim’s experimental narrative prevents the reader from approaching the story as an I-novel, in which the reader is expected to identify the firstor third-person protagonist with the writer himself. Kim’s narrative deliberately disrupts such identification by creating an effect of infinite regression through the writer’s multiple reflections of the self— the first-person narrator Kim Namch’ŏn, the late Pak Sŏngun, and the character Pak Sŏngun in Pak’s I-novel—whose authenticity they mutually undermine. As the narrative moves on to its middle section, it becomes unclear just who is giving the long, colorful descriptions of modern cultural scenes of Pyongyang as a booming commercial city. An unidentified first-person narrator guides the reader through downtown Pyongyang, describing the main streets lined with shops as well as the shabbier back alleys. The chatty, long-winded narration, in a 38. For the writer’s marital life with his first wife, see his published letters, “Ŏrin tu ttal ege” and “Kŭ tui ŭi ŏrin tu ttal.” 39. Readers would have also noticed the astute assonance of Kim’s title— Noksŏngdang—with that of Cho’s story—Nakktonggang.

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movement similar to a camera close-up, gradually approaches the building that houses Pak’s wife’s pharmacy: In the middle of Sŏmundong avenue—in a place that is not such a good location for business but then may not be so bad after all—stands an old and small one-storied house with a tiled roof. On the signboard is written “Green Star Pharmacy,” and under it are also some Western alphabets that are neither English nor German. At a closer look, one discovers that it reads “Verda Stelo” in Esperanto. Maybe the owner knows Esperanto, or maybe he became acquainted with it during the time he spent in a quiet solitary place and chose the name. He takes pride in the fact that it is a “pharmacy” and not a “drugstore.” 40

The “green star” in the name of the pharmacy refers to the flag of the international Esperanto movement, which was popular among Korean intellectuals during the 1920s. The character of Pak Sŏngun had learned the language while he was in prison, “a quiet and solitary place,” and Kim too may have had some knowledge of it. The presence of the pharmacy— not a drugstore—attests to the prosperity of late colonial Pyongyang, which was then undergoing rapid industrialization. We are now at the doorstep of the Green Star Pharmacy, but instead of entering it, the narrator continues to observe the scenes of modern commercial culture. He takes more than a fleeting look at a bicycle repair shop, a signboard store, and a tailor of Western suits, stopping each time to give entertaining descriptions of the place and its occupants. His interest is then caught by a redundantly named hardware store, “The Cheap Cheapo Store,” and he relates the extravagant sales techniques of its clerks:41 The name is not the only thing that makes the store remarkable. From time to time you will have all the clerks marching out, loudly banging on cymbals and gongs, small and big. They stage quite a head-spinning show. With such refined salesmanship, one can only imagine what kind of customers they will get. The neighbors are quite inconvenienced by the show, but they seem to tolerate it. It is, after all, only four or five times a day, for five to ten minutes at a time. But then they also have a megaphone, attached to a creaky phonograph that howls loudly from morning till evening. If only it played good songs. . . . 40. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Noksŏngdang” (1939), 116–17. 41. Kim explains that “cheap” (ssada) is a Seoul expression whereas “cheapo” (nukta) is Pyongyang dialect. The owner of the store wittily chose the name to attract both northerners and southerners.

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The brisk and ironic tone of the narration makes these descriptions especially amusing. Soon after, the depiction of street scenes ends with the narrator hurrying to finish his stroll—as though he had lost himself so far: “If I am to introduce every one of the gentlemanly merchants in this neighborhood, I will never finish. So I shall now turn to the Green Star Pharmacy.” 42 On the whole, this middle section is too lengthy and digressive to be taken as merely providing visual background to the story. Rather, Kim’s chatty stroll from shop to shop seems to possess an autonomous significance in the narrative. Its anonymous first-person narrator may either be Pak referring to himself in the third person or Kim indulging in a description before relating Pak’s story. Whichever it is, however, this narrator’s cheerful, lighthearted voice is at odds with the more subdued and reflective tones of the other sections of the story. This tonal discord, as we shall see shortly, is indicative of an important thematic ambivalence in The Green Star Pharmacy. The third and last section of the story offers an extract from Pak Sŏngun’s diary-like record, with its action taking place almost entirely inside the pharmacy. Sŏngun is hosting a visitor, a young activist about twenty years old, who has come to ask him to give a lecture to the dwellers of a local slum on the social mission of the arts. The youth impassionedly argues that such a lecture would enlighten the poor, and that giving it is the social responsibility of a writer. Sŏngun listens quietly, feeling awkward and incapable of giving any response. He understands the young man’s activist zeal, but he cannot readily offer either encouragement or criticism because he is no longer sure of himself. After all, he thinks to himself, he was only recently released from prison. He quit his literary career to return to Pyongyang six months earlier, where he opened the pharmacy with his pregnant wife. He is now trying to settle into his new life as a salesman but now and then feels a pang of guilt for having left the movement. However, Sŏngun cannot confess these personal thoughts to the visitor, and only a timely phone call from a past comrade saves him from his predicament. The comrade, a socialist theater activist, asks for free medicine for his gonorrhea. Sŏngun sends the youth away with the promise that he will show up for the lecture that afternoon. He then busies himself with packing the medicine for his friend. When his wife discovers it, Sŏngun gets a good scolding for looking after such a useless 42. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Noksŏngdang” (1939), 118 and 120.

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friend who, according to her, likes to say “labor is sacred” and uses “petit bourgeois” as the biggest insult but is “an impossibly lazy, dependent, and beggarly lumpen.” 43 The confrontation with his wife leaves Sŏngun feeling overwhelmed: “Suddenly, he remembered his experience of a diving competition in his childhood. How he shut his eyes tight and held his breath as he did not want to lose. That frustrating sense of suffocation suddenly crossed his mind.” Ignoring his wife’s objections, Sŏngun takes the medicine and leaves for the lecture. As he walks out to the street, a Japanese policeman greets him with “How is your business?” and Sŏngun replies in Japanese, “Okage sama de” (All is well—thanks to you).44 Taken as a whole, The Green Star Pharmacy is the portrait of an alienated ex-activist who feels uncomfortable with his new life but is also estranged from his past self. Behind Pak Sŏngun’s alienation we can recognize Kim’s status as a convicted “thought offender,” whose physical and intellectual freedom were constrained under the Thought Offenders’ Protection and Supervision Law of 1936. This law placed all supposed offenders under the supervision of the police and an individual civil sponsor, in order not only to “prevent offenders from repeating their crimes” but also to “guide them back to the correct national path” by “supporting” them in their mental and economic struggles.45 The actual guidelines for enforcing the law, however, required the sponsor to restrict the offender’s freedom of domicile as well as association.46 In the story, Kim’s situation as a thought offender under supervision is hinted at by Sŏngun’s encounter with the Japanese policeman, who is probably in charge of checking on him regularly. Even before the encounter, however, Sŏngun feels a physical sense of suffocation. As the conversation with his young visitor attests, Sŏngun’s old activist fire is all but extinguished. Giving a lecture to the poor does not seem to him so urgent anymore, and a comrade of old battles is now saddled with illness and poverty. As his wife unsympathetically reminds him, keeping such friendships is inconvenient now that he is running a business. All of this, however, is but a part of the layered content of The Green Star Pharmacy. Incongruous with this main theme of gloomy activist 43. Ibid., 133. 44. Ibid., 135 and 136. 45. Minjok munje yŏn’guso, ed., Ilcheha chŏnsi ch’ejegi chŏngch’aek charyo 66: 463. 46. Ibid., 485.

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frustration is the middle section of the story, in which we fi nd Kim Namch’ŏn practicing a literature of customs through the close observation of everyday street scenes. The playful, almost jocular narration of this section hardly becomes a Marxist writer critical of capitalist modernization, let alone a depressed ex-activist. Rather, the unidentified narrator’s voice here closely resembles that of a modern flâneur, a stroller leisurely exploring the fast-changing urban space. In fact, the incongruity is stylistic as well as thematic. The self-referential narrator, the montage of a variety of scenes, and the use of verbal and situational irony—all foreign to Kim’s previous works—are reminiscent of the writing style of a contemporary modernist writer, Pak T’aewŏn, whose experimentalism Kim admired. Pak was the first Korean writer to adopt the idea of modernologio (kohyŏnhak), the near-ethnographic recording of urban scenes, in fictions such as A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (Sosŏlga Kubo ssi ŭi iril; 1934) and Streamside Sketches (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’ungyŏng; 1936–37). The first novella is particularly known for Pak’s parody of himself as an urban stroller, in effect presenting the first Korean flâneur character.47 Kim’s use of modernologio in the middle section of The Green Star Pharmacy suggests a profound ambivalence in the novel. On the one hand, the story is written by and about a Marxist critic of modernity— Kim Namch’ŏn. But on the other hand, at the heart of the novel we also find a narrator—Kim Namch’ŏn?—who is enchanted by modernity and its lively cityscapes. This unlikely convergence of a committed socialist and a flâneur may be interpreted as the mark of a deeply split subjectivity in its author. In fact, Kim seemed to foster an ambivalent attitude toward the new urban modernity of late colonial Korea. He certainly was a convicted thought criminal, a man unable to shut his eyes to the repressive aspects of the colonial power. Yet he was also a man of culture, a young writer who was charmed by the prosperity and innovations generated by that same power. This is Kim Namch’ŏn the modern flâneur, who at times found himself longing, albeit not without a sense of irony, 47. Pak himself took the idea of modernologio from Kon Wajirō, a Japa nese architect and cultural critic, who coined the Esperanto term for his studies of contemporary life during the rebuilding of Tokyo after the 1923 great earthquake (see Kim Yoon-sik, Han’guk hyŏndae hyŏnsilchuŭi pip’yŏng). Fascinated by the new urban landscapes in the reborn city, Kon aimed to compile detailed records of the changing scenes of modern life. However, since he recorded par ticu lar facts without synthesizing them through critical analysis, his method was criticized by Tosaka Jun as phenomenal and unsystematic. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 122–23.

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for “a snobbish life in which one spends a day listening to Tchaikovsky and watching the daffodils grow, while sipping a well-brewed, bittersweet mocha coffee.” 48 In The Green Star Pharmacy, it seems, Kim gave craft y, powerfully symbolic expression to his simultaneous attraction to and criticism of colonial modernity. He created a fragmented and cacophonous narrative that linked only loosely the scenes of urban everyday life with an ex-activist’s continued struggle with the traumatic aftermath of forced recantation.49 Kim himself was aware of his own conflicted subjectivity. He openly discussed it, expressing his will to overcome it, in a 1938 essay entitled “The Intellectual’s Schizophrenia and Indomitable Spirit.” In this essay Kim identified two major themes in his writing—“the split subjectivity of a petit bourgeois intellectual” and “an unsullied, indomitable spirit that actively strives for self-improvement despite all the banality, insult, humiliation, and oppression.” 50 As a matter of fact, Kim was not alone in his struggle to cope with this sort of inconsistency. The “schizophrenia” in his essay was arguably symptomatic of a more general epistemological crisis among Korean intellectuals at this stage in the colonial experience. By the late 1930s, Korea under Japan was experiencing a rapid and unprecedented economic development paired with an equally unprecedented political oppression. During the 1920s, when Japan had used Korea mainly as a rice basket and secondary market, the imperial exploitation had been relatively barefaced; hence even the supporters of imperial developmentalism could complain that progress was too slow. Beginning in the early 1930s, however, the process of industrialization started to bring ubiquitous signs of prosperity to the urban centers of Korea. Modernity, once limited to the talk of the elites, had become a lived reality in the streets. Many intellectuals belonged to the urban middle class and stood to benefit materially from these improved economic conditions. As a result these intellectuals found themselves ideologically stranded, confused, and in the end unable to choose between a critique of 48. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Hwalbingdang,” 132–33. 49. A similar narrative fragmentation is also apparent in the epic novel Great Currents. Although the novel ostensibly focuses on early modern Korean society in its historical development, much of its narrative is devoted to the details of modern cultural scenes such as a wedding ceremony, a variety shop, and a school sports event. As happened in The Green Star Pharmacy, these scenes have only tenuous relevance to the plot, causing the narrative to be fragmented. 50. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Chisigin ŭi chagi punyŏl,” 246–47.

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society and a more alluring acquiescence to it. We can say that, in a way, during this time Korean intellectuals were suffering from an opaque historical vision.51 Today we know that the prosperity of late colonial Korea was a byproduct of Japan’s all-consuming war, hence it could not last long. Yet at least until 1942 Japan continued to triumph, and many Koreans could not foresee the evolving direction the war would take until 1944 at the earliest. To account for this blockage of a historical vision, we may draw a useful insight from Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the inward turn of many European modernists in the early twentieth century. Jameson has argued that this development was a consequence of the “epistemological containment” of European intellectuals, who at one point could no longer perceive the global flow of capital in their daily lives.52 A containment of a similar sort arguably struck Korean intellectuals in the late colonial period as Korea became more integrated within Japan’s capitalist system. Critical intellectuals such as Kim Namch’ŏn tried to overcome their epistemological crisis through critical analysis of everyday life. Yet in scenes of daily living they could not readily perceive the main historical force that shaped contemporary Korean social conditions—namely, the war that was unfolding on overseas battlefronts (fig. 7.1). By the early 1940s most Korean intellectuals had abandoned the two main political visions that had shaped their worldviews since the late nineteenth century. On the one hand, Western liberalism, which had hitherto been looked upon as the pinnacle of universal human progress, seemed to be decaying in the self-destructive conflagration of two world wars. In addition to Japan’s anti-Western propaganda, the writings of apocalyptic thinkers such as Spengler contributed to this bleak view of 51. Adding to the confusion of Korean intellectuals, the force that brought them economic prosperity also threatened their ethnic cultural identity. For under a colonial system, becoming modern often requires from the colonized a compromise of their native cultural identity, as the modern sphere of society is defined by the colonizers’ cultural values. This was especially true in late-1930s Korea, as the colonial authority launched the so-called hwangguk sinminhwa (kōminka in Japanese) movement in 1937, in which Koreans were forced to adopt the Japa nese language, religion, and names. This situation intensified the paradox of imperialism, which demanded the assimilation of the colonized without granting them an equal status. For an in-depth analysis of the 1930s increasing pressure for assimilation and a subsequent crisis of representation among Korean writers, see Hanscom, The Real Modern. 52. Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism.”

Figure 7.1 An image of angst during the second Sino-Japanese War from the cover of Pip’an (Criticism, November 1938). Courtesy of the Adan Library Collection.

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the West.53 On the other hand, the Marxist promise of evolution toward a communist utopia no longer sounded credible, as a proletarian upheaval now seemed to be only a remote possibility in the tightening political conditions of the peninsula. In the ensuing ideological vacuum, and with the war mostly bringing success, many intellectuals became vulnerable to the tempting “third way” that, in concurrence with the spread of fascism in Europe, became available in the powerful ideology of pan-Asianism. We shall see in the next section how Kim Namch’ŏn responded to the spread of pan-Asianism among Korean intellectuals. Ironically, if Kim’s focus on everyday life had previously left him exposed to the lures of modernity, that same focus may have helped him recognize in pan-Asianism an abstract ideology that lacked grounding in the lived historical conditions of the Asian people.

Everyday Life as a Critical Space in the Greater East Asian War Korea’s involvement in Japan’s war effort entered a new phase on the eve of the Pacific War. As its army was bogged down in China and the prospect of military confrontation with Western powers loomed, Japan sought to maximize the mobilization of natural and human resources in its colonies. To this end the imperial authority used both coercive measures and the ideological propaganda of pan-Asianism. Japan’s discourse of pan-Asianism dates back to the Meiji era, but it received a new articulation around 1940 as a rationale of the so-called Greater East Asian War by the conservative phi losophers of the Kyoto school, most notably Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). At its theoretical core pan-Asianism had two interrelated political agendas: on the one hand, on the basis of their racial and cultural affinity it promoted the solidarity of Asian nations against Western imperial aggressors; on the other hand, it asserted Japan’s leadership in such an alliance, even to the extent of justifying its imperial conquest of other Asian nations. Whereas pan-Asianism in earlier periods had advocated an alternative, more desirable modernization in which the spiritual values of the East would complement the material advancement of the West, pan-Asianism in the wartime propaganda envisioned a “postmodern” telos purged of the evils of Western modernity. In the contemporary Japanese discourse of 53. Kim Yerim, “1930 nyŏndae huban mollak/chaesaeng ŭi sŏsa.”

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“overcoming the modern” (kindai no chōkoku), the very idea of modernity came to refer to a West-originated cultural totality that encompassed Western imperialism, capitalism, science, democracy, liberalism, and individualism.54 Under Japan’s leadership the Asian nations were to replace Western modernity in toto with a new Asian cultural totality, which they would re-create by reviving native traditions. Accordingly, Japan’s wartime propaganda projected the utopian vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a harmonious world wherein Asian countries would preserve and celebrate their ethnic and cultural uniqueness under the benevolent aegis of Japan. Many contemporary Korean intellectuals found the pluralistic tenor of pan-Asianism attractive.55 Lured by the vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and drawn to it by the attendant material gains, many intellectuals willingly extended their support for the war. At the same time, as the clouds of war thickened over Japan and its empire, pressure became stronger on any public figure in Korea to openly pledge allegiance to the official ideology of the empire. This was especially true for leftists. Those who had been forced to recant their socialism during the 1930s had generally been left free to find their own refuges in Christianity, cultural nationalism, pure literature, or a reformulated Marxism. In contrast, recantation in the early 1940s implied a writer’s open reorientation from socialism to pan-Asianism.56 As more and more intellectuals converted to pan-Asianism, some remained unpersuaded by the vision of the Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere. This may have been the case with Kim Namch’ŏn, who even as the war was raging kept writing and publishing fictions such as Barley (Maek; 1941), Lamp (Tŭngbul; 1942), and So Says the Cloud (Kurŭm i malhagi rŭl; 1942). Kim has been read elsewhere as one of the writers who did convert from socialism to pan-Asianism during these years. Kim Chul especially has interpreted the writer’s split subjectivity as a 54. Takeuchi, What Is Modernity? 111–18, and Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 34–47. 55. Kim Jae-Yong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang, and Yi Kyŏnghun, “Kŭndae ŭi ch’ogŭk’non.” 56. More than two hundred and fi ft y Korean writers, including many ex-KAPF members, were orga nized into the Association of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munin hyŏphoe) in 1939. This orga nization held its opening ceremony in the Seoul city hall on October 29 of that year. In 1943 the group was further integrated into the Patriotic Association of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munin pogukhoe).

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symptom of his inclination toward fascism, noting the substantial presence of pan-Asianist discourses in Kim’s late colonial writings.57 However, a reading of this kind underestimates the considerable pressure that censorship exercised over Kim’s continuing literary activity. As the official philosophy of the empire, pan-Asianism would naturally have to appear in a positive light in every publication approved by the censor. Yet in the works of some writers, and I believe in Kim’s, strategies were deployed that would allow a more critical and balanced evaluation of the doctrines of pan-Asianism. I will make my case through a close reading of Barley, one of Kim’s best-known but perhaps most easily misunderstood works. Barley is the last of a trilogy whose other parts were entitled Waste and Management.58 Its central character is Mugyŏng, a woman in her early twenties who works as an accountant in an apartment management office. A threestoried modern building is both her workplace and her home. She has recently moved into one of the apartments, having left her parental home upon her widowed mother’s remarriage. However, Mugyŏng would not be living alone but for the betrayal of her fiancé, Sihyŏng. She looked after him for two years while he was waiting in prison for trial as a thought offender, and it was through her efforts that he was finally released on bail. Sihyŏng has apparently changed during his stay in prison. In his own words, he has converted “from economics to philosophy, and from a unitary view of history to a pluralist one.” 59 Both adjustments connote his reorientation from Marxism to pan-Asianism in the contemporary cultural context. Now that Sihyŏng has undergone an ideological conversion, he has also reconciled with his wealthy father, who had been opposed to his marrying Mugyŏng, a woman of modest education and fortune. Abandoning his devoted fiancée, Sihyŏng has followed his father to Pyongyang. Puzzled at Sihyŏng’s sudden betrayal, Mugyŏng takes to reading the philosophy books he has left behind. In this situation she meets a new tenant, Kwanhyŏng, a former lecturer of English literature at Kyŏngsŏng Imperial University, who is now leading an idle life as a boutique 57. Kim Chul, “ ‘Kŭndae ŭi ch’oŭk,’ Nangbi, and Benech’ia.” 58. The three works, which were not published as sequels, also appeared in different magazines. Waste was serialized in Inmun p’yŏngnon, Management in Munjang, and Barley in Ch’unch’u. 59. Kim Namch’ŏn, Maek (2006), 288.

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owner’s kept lover. At Mugyŏng’s request Kwanhyŏng discusses with her the philosophical premises of pan-Asianism and submits his own critique of its lack of material basis. At the end of their conversation Kwanhyŏng remarks that, if he were an ear of barley, he would rather remain buried in the earth than be milled into bread. Mugyŏng replies that she prefers to bloom on her own. On Sihyŏng’s trial day Mugyŏng goes to court, where she discovers that he has been betrothed to the wealthy daughter of the governor of Pyongyang. Soon after, Kwanhyŏng will be gone too; he has abandoned his mistress and left the apartment. The ending of the novella fi nds Mugyŏng back to the same condition she was in at the beginning—alone and lonely in her bed, despite her renewed determination to live “for herself and herself alone.” 60 At the powerful core of Barley’s narrative is the experience of betrayal told from a woman’s perspective. In choosing this theme, Kim was adopting a literary strategy first developed by Kang Kyŏngae and Paek Sinae, two socialist women writers in the post-recantation period. As we have seen in the previous chapter, both Kang’s The Human Predicament and Paek’s “A Mad Woman’s Memoir” portray a woman’s tragic fall into insanity and death after a converted socialist intellectual has abandoned her. As a gendered literary strategy, the narrative of betrayal allowed these writers to establish a meaningful link between the personal infidelity of male socialist intellectuals and their political conversion. As used in Barley, however, the theme of betrayal acquires an added layer of subtlety and complexity. Mugyŏng is ultimately abandoned by two men, of whom one has converted to pan-Asianism and the other criticizes it. So beyond their opposite ideological positions, and regardless of the degree of their success in supporting them, both men are in different measures contributing to Mugyŏng’s misery. In constructing Barley around Mugyŏng’s emotional pain, Kim enigmatically hints at a malaise that seems to go deeper than the rational confrontation between his two male characters. This ulterior malaise, whose nature is not made clear in the story, suffuses the characters of Sihyŏng and Kwanhyŏng with an ambiguous light within the narrative economy of Barley. Given these complexities, it seems misleading to read Barley as a document of its author’s conversion. To be sure, the story contains much that can be read as an elegiac advocacy of pan-Asianism, and it also gives us 60. Ibid., 291.

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a sharp sense of the failure of socialist activism in late-colonial Korea. At the same time, it seems clear that the novella is not meant to be read as an I-novelist confessional of Kim Namch’ŏn’s own conversion. Especially through the character of Sihyŏng, Kim seems, rather, to be offering a partially empathetic analysis of the rationale of conversion among Korean leftists. When Sihyŏng testifies to his conversion in court, he openly endorses the pluralistic historical vision of pan-Asianism, renouncing his Marxism and mentioning in his final statement two renowned Japanese philosophers, Watsuji Tetsurō and Tanabe Hajime. Once away from the court, however, in his farewell letter to Mugyŏng, he makes the following confession, which focuses not so much on his ideological reorientation as on his desire for total rebirth: Now I am focusing on thinking of my future, of how I can be spiritually reborn as a stronger, better self. I have learned earlier the spirit of criticism. But repetitive criticism can become self-torment. I don’t want to be addicted to self-torment. Besides, I don’t agree with current intellectuals’ erroneous belief that all will go well as long as they thoroughly criticize society. Those who only criticize create nothing. Therefore, I cannot but cherish this new sprout growing in my heart, even if it results in egotism or my compliance to the circumstances. Neither can I help it if I have to abuse and sacrifice all that belonged to my past to build my future in this new political situation.61

Sihyŏng’s confession offers a glimpse into the interiority of a leftist intellectual who has grown tired of his thankless role as a critic without a positive historical outlook. It is easy to sympathize with Sihyŏng’s lamentation that “[t]hose who only criticize create nothing,” especially at a time when a Marxist critique seemed less and less likely to produce any concrete effects in the short or long run. Accordingly, Sihyŏng declares himself willing to renounce his political past in exchange for an optimistic vision of the future, a total remaking of his life. We may say, in accord with Kim Chul, that leftists such as Sihyŏng “took a leap from the transcendental subject of ‘class’ to yet another transcendental subject, ‘Asian.’ ” 62 Yet not all leftists would take that leap. Kim Namch’ŏn makes this point through Kwanhyŏng’s voice: “Even great philosophers like Nishida are taking pains to create a pure Japa nese ideology by using Western 61. Ibid., 293–94. 62. Kim Chul, “ ‘Kŭndae ŭi ch’ogŭk,’ Nangbi, and Benech’ia,” 393.

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methods. In Korea too, there are people who talk about a pure Korean philosophy. I can sympathize with them, but all is in the name with no real substance.” 63 The wartime discourse of pan-Asianism rested on the polarity of a materialist and corrupted West versus a spiritual and virtuous East. As Kwanhyŏng suggests, however, the very idea of the East, or the Orient, was a Western theorization that could be grasped only through Western paradigms: It will be difficult to establish Oriental studies as a purely autonomous academic field. . . . [M]ost of us do our studies by using the theories imported from Europe. Almost everybody with [a] college education has learned European theories and can’t study the Orient without them. If we were to do so, we would need to rely on theories of our own invention. Maybe because I majored in English literature, I don’t think I can know anything without appealing to European methods in either social science, natural science, philosophy, or psychology.64

As Kwanhyŏng implies, the untainted Orient posited by pan-Asianism existed only in theory. In actuality, by the 1930s a Western influence had become structural in Japanese and Korean society, which had been turning irrevocably modern since the late nineteenth century. And a native tradition could not be retrieved without bearing the imprint of a modern cultural discourse that had its basis in West-originated paradigms. Kwanhyŏng further criticizes pan-Asianism for its endorsement of a monadic vision of Asia’s future in disregard of the existing racial and cultural confl icts among Asian countries. When Mugyŏng asks him about this particular historical vision of pan-Asianism, Kwanhyŏng answers by pointing to the gap that exists between the ideal of a unified Asia and the actual differences between Asians: “You mean the historical view that Asia has its own version of world history? That is to say, India has its own history, so does China, and also Japan, . . . and thus we should think of Asia in its own terms? Well, it’s an idea well worth considering for an Asian. But we must remember one thing—that Asia lacks an ideological unity similar to that of the West or Europe.” 65 If Western imperialism typically erased the histories of the colonies, casting them in an imaginary past of the empire, pan-Asianism was on the surface more pluralistic, as it acknowledged that each culture had had its own autonomous course of development. As Kwanhyŏng suggests, however, in the 63. Kim Namch’ŏn, Maek (2006), 327. 64. Ibid., 329. 65. Ibid.

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end pan-Asianism might dissolve the material present of Japan’s colonies into an equally imaginary vision of an Asia with a “common” historical destiny. His comments echo Kim’s own voice in an essay published shortly before Barley. Commenting on Kōyama Iwao’s pluralistic view of world history, Kim suggested that in projecting the vision of a unified Asia, pan-Asianism might be disregarding the existent divergences among Asian countries.66 Although Kwanhyŏng is also critical of the West, he refrains from condemning Western modernity completely. Instead, he thinks that the problem lies not in Western modernity per se but in a “superficial” understanding of it.67 The narrative does not clarify what he implies by a deeper understanding of Western modernity. We can conjecture, however, that he is referring to what Tosaka called “the scientific spirit,” that is, the kind of materialist rationalism originating in the ideas of Marx. Indeed, in the essay “The Question of Human Nature and the Future of the Novel,” published one month after Barley in March 1941, Kim Namch’ŏn reiterated Tosaka’s Marxist materialist thesis that “we must grasp human nature in its concreteness and regard it as a construct of social customs.”68 Owing to his continued commitment to a Marxist worldview, it seems that Kim was disposed against becoming an upholder of pan-Asianism. In distinguishing Marxism from the hegemonic imperialist ideologies of the West, he was also implicitly refusing to endorse the monadic view of the West that was characteristic of pan-Asianism. If one could still retain a Marxist worldview, however, one had little room to exercise it in war time Korea, whose public sphere had by then fallen under the total control of Japan’s military regime. Hence, 66. See Kim Namch’ŏn, “Sosŏl ŭi changnae.” Kōyama (1905–93) was a disciple of Nishida and a member of the Kyoto School of Philosophy. Kim was commenting on his 1940 essay “Sekaishi no rinen” (The idea of world history). 67. Kim Namch’ŏn, Maek (2006), 332. 68. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Sosŏl ŭi changnae,” 715. Written under wartime censorship, the essay takes its theme from one of the sanctioned topics: the rebirth of mankind into a new wholesome population of Japan’s new world. Still, Kim manages to assert his critical views underhandedly through subtle twists of accepted ideas and oblique allusions such as his complimentary reference to Maxim Gorky as “the author of The Lower Depths and The Life of Klim Samgin.” Kim must have taken an interest in The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–36), an unfinished epic covering Russian history from 1880 to 1917, as a model example of the Lukácsian historical novel. The Lower Depths was translated in 1934 by the leftist writer Ham Taehun under the title Pam Chumak (A flophouse) and was frequently staged by Korean students during the 1930s. See Kim Pyŏngch’ŏl, Han’guk kŭndae pŏnyŏk munhaksa, 920.

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Kwanhyŏng wishes to remain “buried in the earth,” that is, lead a private life outside of the public sphere. This is where Kim Namch’ŏn introduces the metaphor of “barley,” which he deploys to remarkable double-meaning effect. Kwanhyŏng quotes the artist Vincent Van Gogh as saying: “Men are like ears of barley. What does it matter if they are not sown in the earth to germinate there? Aren’t they milled into bread in the end? Indeed, we should pity those that are not milled.” 69 Read in the context of the story, this quotation forms a background to Kwanhyŏng’s and Mugyŏng’s unwillingness to respond to Japan’s clarion call and their wish to preserve their personal autonomy against the increasing totalitarian pressure. However, in the political context of 1940s Korea, Van Gogh’s words could also be interpreted as a justification for the totalitarian demand of human sacrifice. The inaugural issue of the magazine Ch’unch’u, in which Barley was published, was filled with government-sponsored articles such as “The Glory of the Korean Youth,” which called for Korean volunteers to join the imperial army.70 Indeed, the title of Kim’s story itself would have reminded a contemporary reader of another barley—the barley of Barley and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai; 1938), Hino Ashihei’s best-selling propagandistic war fiction. Th is novel made a sensation in Japan, and its translation was also apparently widely read among Korean men of letters.71 In Hino’s usage, barley was an allegory of the alien Chinese landscape seen from Japanese soldiers’ perspective.72 But as the novel focused so much on the hardship and sacrifice of Japanese soldiers, Van Gogh’s barley would easily have added another layer to Hino’s barley as an allegory of a human life. 69. Kim Namch’ŏn, Maek (2006), 330. The quotation refers to the following passage of Van Gogh’s letter: “Do you know what I think of pretty often—what I already said to you some time ago—that even if I did not succeed, all the same I thought that what I have worked at will be carried on. Not directly, but one isn’t alone in believing in things that are true. And what does it matter personally then! I feel so strongly that it is the same with people as it is with wheat, if you are not sown in the earth to germinate there, what does it matter, in the end you are milled to become bread” (Van Gogh, “To Theo Van Gogh”). Kim Namch’ŏn made slight modifications to Van Gogh’s writing and also endowed it with a different meaning by moving it out of its original context. 70. “Ch’ŏngnyŏn Chosŏn ŭi yŏngye.” 71. For the novel’s reputation in Japan, see Rosenfield, Unhappy Soldier, and for its fame in Korea, Paek Ch’ŏl, “Chŏngjang munhak ilgo,” and Kim Jae-Yong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang, 102–3. 72. Hino, Barley and Soldiers.

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It is important to note that Barley is narrated from Mugyŏng’s perspective, and that she also occupies some of the most poignant moments in the story. Kim Namch’ŏn had never before adopted a woman’s perspective in his fictions. Moreover, Kwanhyŏng, the character who criticizes pan-Asianism, ostensibly has his masculinity compromised: at their first encounter Mugyŏng finds him lying in bed wearing what appears to be “a bright woman’s gown.”73 We may find a clue to the significance of this feminization of Kim’s characters in Rita Felski’s observation of a parallel phenomenon in the works of the European avant-gardes. In The Gender of Modernity Felski notes that the imaginary identification with the feminine was common among avant-gardist writers, who generally felt alienated from the dominant social norms of masculinity. In the works of these writers, Felski writes, “the feminized male became a provocative emblem of the contemporary crisis of values.”74 Seen in this light, the feminization of Kim’s positive characters again assumes a double meaning: on the one hand, it signifies the writer’s own feeling of undermined masculinity as a physically and politically constrained colonial intellectual; on the other, it can be interpreted as emblematic of Kim’s defiance of the belligerent masculinity Japan demanded of its imperial subjects, who were expected to sacrifice their lives readily for the “sacred” war (fig. 7.2). A notable feature of Barley is the way in which its author made some characters (Kwanhyŏng and Mugyŏng especially) into mouthpieces for his own views on politics and history. This is a phenomenon that finds its explanation in the specific conditions of colonial Korea. Censorship and the threat of imprisonment rendered the open representation of dissident views all but impossible, which forced intellectuals to exercise their subjectivity under the camouflaging disguise of fiction. It also seems likely that Kim, along with many of his contemporaries, would have been influenced by the confessional spirit of I-novel literature. The result was that literature was rarely entirely fictional in the cultural formations of the colonial period. Kim Namch’ŏn’s Barley was a vehicle of cultural representation for the views and aspirations of its author as much as it was a story. As Leo Ching has suggested, in Taiwan the war time discourse of pan-Asianism replaced the traditional institutional discrimination against the colonized with a more inclusive “ontology of the personal.”75 73. Kim Namch’ŏn, Maek (2006), 306. 74. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 92. 75. Ching, Becoming “Japanese,” 126.

Figure 7.2 The issue of Ch’unch’u (Spring and Autumn) in which Kim Namch’ŏn’s Barley was published in February 1941. Courtesy of the Adan Library Collection.

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The colonized were now expected to transcend their local identities, joining instead in an equal community of “Asians.” Ching’s observation is applicable to Korea too, but only to a lesser degree, as Japan was forced to resort to more coercive measures in Korea because of a widespread lack of compliance.76 For Korean writers who were not willing to support Japan’s military campaigns, a solipsistic withdrawal seemed to be the only available recourse. Kim Namch’ŏn was no exception. He stopped writing fiction in 1943, and in his few last publications we find him retiring deeper into private space.77 In the memorable last scene of Lamp, we find his partly autobiographical character Chang reading a bedtime story to his son.78 After the boy falls asleep, Chang sits in silence, surrounded by darkness except for a small pool of light from a desk lamp. He feels a sense of comfort in the island of light, his refuge from the great currents of history swirling around him, threatening to swallow the last bit of his autonomy. Adorno could not have found a better example for his argument of an artist’s solipsism as a social, rather than asocial, consequence.79

In the Interstice of the Historical and the Quotidian Taken as a whole, Kim Namch’ŏn’s literary experience attests to the remarkable resilience of literary left ism in late colonial Korea. Having grown into an influential nationwide movement during the 1920s, 76. Chou, “The Kōminka Movement.” 77. Kim published his last colonial fiction “One Morning” (Aru asa) in Japa nese in Kungmin munhak, January 1943. The story is a private episode about his experience of anxiously awaiting the birth of his fi ft h child. The par ticu lar issue is missing from the reprinted version of the colonial magazine, but it can be found in Korean translation in Kim Jae-Yong et al., Singminjuŭi wa pihyŏmnyŏk, 235–42. 78. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Tŭngbul.” Lamp is an epistolary novella that consists of a series of letters Chang Yusŏng writes to various relatives and acquaintances. As a convicted thought criminal, Chang is under close supervision and is doing his stint at an office that trades in military goods. He still thinks of literature and maintains that depicting the concrete experiential reality of one’s life, if not that of a broader section of society, is an option closer to realism than writing “a love story between a Korean man and a Japa nese café waitress” (116). However, he also regrets having sacrificed his family for his literary activity and wishes to be “just a common husband and father” (123). 79. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music.

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Korean leftism was able to survive the demise of the KAPF in 1935. In addition to ex-KAPF members, unaffiliated intellectuals such as Ch’ae Mansik and Kang Kyŏngae continued throughout the 1930s to draw their creative inspirations from Marxism when representing the social ills of Korea at a time of rapid industrialization. In reformulating his realism as a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life, Kim drew the interest of other leftist writers who, like him, had been looking for a way of depicting the material living conditions of colonial Korea. Strikingly novel and yet firmly rooted in its local literary tradition, Kim’s case calls for the expansion of our purview in studying the leftist literature of colonial Korea. It is only by broadening our focus beyond the more traditional forms of proletarian literature that we can grasp the complexity and richness of colonial literary leftism. There is no point in trying to decide whether, in the end, Kim Namch’ŏn was a realist or a modernist. In fact, from a certain perspective his literary experience destabilizes the very distinction between realism and modernism in colonial Korean literature. Kim was a Marxist, but the critical Marxism he espoused was opposed to any teleological historical vision; he upheld realism as his aesthetic principle, but he was also enthusiastic about the avant-garde and its formal experimentation; and finally, like a realist Kim was invested in examining the structural causes of historical events, but like a modernist he also nourished a critical interest in the alienation of individual lives. In an attempt to resolve these tensions, it is helpful to approach Marxism, and its attendant aesthetic of realism, as an ideology with its own internal openness and ambivalence. Understood positivistically as a science of historical development, Marxism engenders an overarching view of history that is tinged with strong teleological and totalistic elements; yet in a more humanistic approach, Marxism can also provide a critique of capitalism and its cultural consequences that shuns any commitment to historical determinism. As the findings of this chapter suggest, by 1938 Kim had turned from the former to the latter view of Marxism, and in this shift he came to occupy a middle position between the traditional camps of realism and modernism. The aesthetic linchpin of this position was the close observation of everyday reality. By devoting his writerly attention to the customs of daily life in colonial Korea, Kim sought to produce a materialist critique of its society during a time of increasing political oppression. Kim’s literary practice also challenges the popular association of the aesthetic of everyday life with a modernist approach to literature in

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current critical discourse.80 Seemingly all inclusive, “everyday life” as a critical idiom connotes a definite set of qualities—such as the mundane, the sensory, and the fragmented—that establish it as a positive antithesis to “history,” which is instead linked to the extraordinary, the rational, and the totalistic. Implicitly, this association reaffirms the achievement of modernism as the worthy, truthful aesthetic of modern life as opposed to the historical—and thus less true-to-life—aesthetic of realism. Viewed from this perspective, the opposition of realism and modernism tends to privilege the life experience of middle-class urbanites, in par ticu lar those in European metropolises, as the normative experience of modernity. Seen through the selective narratives of European modernism, modern life is often characterized as Janus-faced, at once boring and enchanting. Yet missing in this picture is the third face of modernity— the concrete and threatening one—that is more visible to those living on its undersides. In the life experiences of these individuals, the historical and the everyday are not quite distinct from each other. They certainly were not for Kim Namch’ŏn, who, much as a historian would, regarded everyday life in colonial Korea as an actual historical space. 80. See, for instance, Highmore, Everyday Life and Tang, Chinese Modern.

conclusion

The leftist literary movement exerted a previously underrecognized influence on colonial Korean culture and society. Contrary to previous assessments, the movement’s reach extended well beyond the Marxist group of the KAPF, including within its ranks an anarchist tradition dating back to the 1910s, a contingent of leftist nationalists, a group of socialist women writers, and many other unaffiliated intellectuals. Moreover, in their ideological as well as aesthetic impact, the leftist writers were both participants in and opponents of the modernizing forces of the hegemonic reform movement. These intellectuals were thoroughly modern in their socialism-inspired critique of traditional aristocratic culture. They were also oppositional, however, in their antielitist and populist rejection of the bourgeois values of reformist intellectuals. As a new force devoted to social emancipation and democratization, leftist literature played both a participative and a countercultural role within the complex ideological environment of colonial Korea, and it proposed a vision for an alternative modernity whose core values were in line with those of the international socialist culture of the period. The historical experience of leftist culture during the colonial period effectively ended with the Japanese imperial authority’s militarization of Korean society in the early 1940s, which included the imposition of a general ban on Korean-language publications. By then, the left had long been politically defeated, and even while the movement was still active, it had lacked the unity and force that would have been required for its countercultural message to find effective application under its difficult historical conditions. Several factors contributed to the politically minor

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impact of the left in colonial Korea—from the factionalism within the movement and the efficiency of imperial repression to the weakness of the constantly reshuffling Communist Party. In spite of its towering cultural and discursive significance, it would seem, the left ist movement failed to transform into political action the wealth of radical ideas that came from Marxism, anarchism, leftist nationalism, and other similarly progressive doctrines. We must bear in mind this historical judgment as we now move on to examine the postliberation legacy of colonial leftist literature. That legacy today does not depend particularly on the achievements of leftist politics during the colonial period. It depends, rather, on the strength of proletarian literary works produced during the colonial era and on the ways in which those works were inherited and reappropriated by subsequent generations of activist intellectuals in South Korea. If colonial leftist culture had to exist under challenging conditions during the Japanese occupation, its immediate afterlife in liberated Korea was no less difficult. After the end of Japanese rule in 1945, Koreans found themselves embroiled in the looming threat of the Cold War, and anticommunist dogma emerged as a newly reigning ideology in the South under the U.S. military occupation. In November 1948, two months after the establishment of the South Korean state, the government banned the publication and circulation of the works of all leftist writers, and it added especially harsh sanctions against the so-called wŏlbuk chakka, or those writers who had voluntarily moved to the North upon national division.1 From then on, colonial leftist literature came to be regarded by conservative ideologues as an unfortunate and deviant past of national culture. Cho Yŏnhyŏn, a leading critic of the conservative camp, judged the “foreign-influenced” proletarian literary movement of the colonial period to be “a mistake for the nation” and “an error for literary arts.”2 For his part, Kim Ujong, a more sympathetic critic, acknowledged the anticolonial nationalist motivation of the movement, but he also felt obliged to note its ultimate complicity with “Stalin’s policy to expand the communist rule to the world.”3 It is important to remember that these condemnatory evaluations were presented to the public during the virtual absence of the writers involved and when most of the relevant literary 1. Yi Pongbŏm, “Pan’gongjuŭi wa kŏmyŏl,” 83. 2. Cho Yŏnhyŏn, Hyŏndae munhak kaegwan, 184. 3. Kim Ujong, Han’guk hyŏndae sosŏlsa, 205.

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works were unavailable. The charge of “foreignness” was a particularly specious one, because in the early twentieth century, socialism had been no more foreign to Korea than, say, individualism, feminism, or evolutionism. A literature inspired by socialism was foreign-influenced only as much as any modern literary tradition, including the trend of pure literature (sunsu munhak) that was favored by many critics of the left in postwar decades.4 Because of the hardship that befell the left in South Korea in the postliberation era, it is generally assumed that colonial leftist literature instead found its proper legacy in the communist society and politics of North Korea. This was the case, perhaps, in the early years after national division. A descendant of the KAPF, the Alliance of Proletarian Arts (P’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng) was founded in Pyongyang in January 1946, a mere five months after liberation.5 The organization was soon affiliated with Kim Ilsung’s Northern Labor Party (Puk Chosŏn nodongdang), which in its turn had the backing of the Soviet Union, and its prestige was further consolidated through the endorsement and participation of big names such as Im Hwa, Kim Namch’ŏn, and Yi Kiyŏng.6 4. The postliberation ideal of pure literature ostensibly denoted a literature of aesthetic autonomy, but in practice it also connoted a literature vetted for political innocuousness. The concept had first gained critical currency in early-1920s Japan as an antithesis to both dogmatic proletarian literature and commercialized popular literature. It performed a similar function when introduced into Korea in the early 1930s and was thus comparable to modernism in the West during the age of the avant-gardes. When redeployed in postliberation South Korea, however, pure literature assumed a distinctly conformist political character, as is suggested by the name of its 1960s opposite, littérature engagée (ch’amyŏ munhak). For a detailed account of debates on pure literature in the years around national division, see Kim Chaesŏk, “Haebang chikhu Kim Tongni sunsu munhangnon.” Also see Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the parallel conservative use of the concept of modernism in Cold War America in A Singular Modernity, 139–210. 5. Kwon Youngmin, Haebang chikhu ŭi minjok munhak undong, 80. 6. Before joining the North in 1948, Im Hwa and Kim Namch’ŏn had led the formation in Seoul of the Center for the Construction of Korean Literature (Chosŏn munhak kŏnsŏl ponbu) on August 17, 1945. The new association, symbolically, took over the former headquarters of the Patriotic Association of Writers (Chosŏn munin pogukhoe), a group that had been organized by the colonial authority in 1943 with the purpose of mobilizing Korean writers for wartime propaganda. The inclusive centrist line of the association, however, provoked the more hard-line members of the KAPF, such as Yi Kiyŏng and Han Sŏrya, into founding a rival organization, the Korean Alliance of Proletarian Arts (Chosŏn p’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng), on

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As the initially revolutionary regime of North Korea degenerated into a de facto dynasty, however, only the more superficial features of socialism were retained. The country’s historiography increasingly morphed into a hagiographic exercise centered on the figure of Kim Ilsung, and by 1966 a new periodization was introduced that stipulated Kim’s AntiImperialist Alliance (T’ado chegukchuŭi tongmaeng; 1926) to have been the first and only communist organization in colonial Korea.7 The once mighty colonial proletarian wave came then to be represented as a mere tide pool, and the North Korean literary officialdom soon became the province of writers who were willing to conform to the new regime. In the end, then, as had been the case in the South, in the North too the historical memory of colonial leftist literature faded with the advent of a Cold War political order. In the South the left became a reviled public enemy, and in the North it took on the role of an uncomfortable heritage within an increasingly authoritarian nationalist regime.8 By the late 1960s, it would seem, the historical verdict on colonial leftist literature had all but been written. Th is was an embattled tradition that, choked by the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, appeared to have little to offer future generations of Korean intellectuals and activists. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that leftist culture should have experienced a dramatic resurgence in public consideration starting in the early 1970s. Then, colonial leftist literature, theater, and arts began September 17. The two groups eventually merged into the Alliance of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng) in December of that year. See ibid., 9–26. 7. Kim Hamyŏng et al., Chosŏn munhaksa, 7. All the writers now affi liated with the South—including KAPF founders Kim Kijin and Pak Yŏnghŭi—were deleted from North Korean literary history. Kim Kijin, who during the war had survived a summary execution by North Korean soldiers, remained active in the South as an opponent of the dictatorial government until his forced retirement in the 1960s. He died in Seoul in 1989. Also purged from North Korea’s literary history were Im Hwa and Kim Namch’ŏn. In spite of their support for the North Korean regime, these writers eventually lost favor during the process of consolidation of Kim Ilsung’s political hegemony. 8. Some KAPF writers were selectively reinstated to the North’s official literary history during the 1980s. At that time, the regime changed its cultural policy from glorifying Kim Ilsung and his Manchurian guerrilla troops to celebrating “hidden heroes” among ordinary citizens. Underlying this reorientation was the need to prepare for the transfer of power from Kim Ilsung to Kim Jungil, whose legitimacy did not rest on his past exploits in anticolonial resistance but rather on the support and goodwill of the military and middle-class citizens. See Kim Jae-Yong, Pukhan munhak, 260–63.

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to function as an inspiration for the activists and the critics of the rising minjung democratization movement, in a process of reappropriation that would have profound effects on the ideological landscape of South Korea for decades to come. The origin of the minjung movement is a large topic that cannot properly be covered in this volume.9 For our purposes here, however, it is important to note that literature was once again the cultural discipline within which ideas for the movement germinated and grew. In 1971, in the course of redefining the tasks of literature for a new era of cultural activism, Im Hŏnyŏng claimed that the roots of the new movement lay not only in the eighteenth-century pragmatist writings of Sirhak (practical learning), but also, and more prominently, in the “realist” literature of the resistance movement during the colonial period.10 It is a testament to the power of colonial leftist literature that, still today, the literary enterprise enjoys prestige and political relevance in South Korea. The participants in the minjung democratization movement reappropriated early-century leftist literary culture in a variety of ways. Rescuing a colonial tradition of social engagement, they gave literary representation to working-class life in the settings of Korea’s industrial development of the 1970s and the 1980s. In so doing they gave new life to ideologically charged genres such as labor reportage, prisoners’ memoirs, the political novel, and social poetry.11 In addition, as had been the case during the colonial era, activist critics grouped around progressive quarterlies such as Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏng (Creativity and criticism) and Silch’ŏn munhak (Letters in action), and they supported these publications by actively recruiting new talent from among laborers. For many of these activists, who were often branded ppalgaengi (red commies) by the government and the conservative media, rediscovering the colonial left ist tradition had the significance of both redressing the severed history of a divided country and affirming their own identity as part of the minjung, the “common people” and disenfranchised masses who were now standing up for their right to participate in the political process. The cultural rescue of the colonial left was not without its problems. Typical of a minjung reading of leftist literature, for example, were nationalist overtones that often distorted its more specifically socialist 9. For a comprehensive historical account of the minjung movement, see Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung. 10. See Im Hŏnyŏng, “Han’guk munhak ŭi kwaje.” 11. See Choi Hyun-moo, “Contemporary Korean Literature.”

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content. When viewed as part of the legacy of the colonial leftist tradition, however, that tradition’s reactivation during the 1970s stands out as a historical turning point. The 1970s and 1980s were indeed the juncture at which leftist culture finally had its own moment of history. The colonial left became then the highly symbolic and cherished heritage of a new generation of progressive intellectuals, effectively inscribing itself into the DNA of contemporary South Korean political consciousness. Writers such as Kang Kyŏngae, Kim Namch’ŏn, Yi Kiyŏng, and Yŏm Sangsŏp, whose works were once relegated to obscurity, have since been widely republished and have become the objects of intense academic interest. Fredric Jameson once remarked, commenting on the vicissitudes of socialist movements in Russia and Europe, that “history progresses by failure rather than by success”: “It would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures—that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history—than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense.”12 Jameson’s observation applies well to the Korean leftist experience, as the limitations suffered by the colonial movement became lessons learned for the minjung activists of later decades. In a similar spirit, Stuart Hall has insightfully characterized the way in which a social movement’s impact may be delayed by historical circumstances: “Social forces which lose out in any particular historical period do not thereby disappear from the terrain of struggle; nor is struggle in such circumstances suspended.”13 Here too, Hall’s words are suggestive of the fate of the proletarian wave in Korea during the twentieth century. The movement’s radicalism may indeed have been responsible both for its decline in the 1940s and for its successive resurgence in the 1970s and the 1980s. As a progressive historical force, leftist counterculture had to succumb to the pressures of Japanese fascism and the Cold War order. It was precisely its past history of oppression and resistance, however, that burnished the movement’s reputation in the eyes of the new activists of the late twentieth century.

Having so far traced the history and legacy of colonial leftist literature, we must now inquire about the significance of our rediscovery of that 12. Jameson, Postmodernism, 209. 13. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” 423.

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tradition. What does the proletarian wave teach us? What are the lessons that, arising from our excursion into literary history, can be brought to bear in considering broader issues of contemporary relevance? The existence of the proletarian wave reminds us, among other things, that class was one of the central categories through which Koreans filtered their experience of the colonial period. Indeed, a renewed emphasis on the leftist cultural tradition is relevant to changes that are currently under way in Korean society. Today South Korea enjoys unprecedented prosperity, with strong economic growth, a surplus trade balance, and the increasing popularity of its cultural products. In the shadow of wealth, however, lie persistent social problems such as a widening class gap, a high rate of unemployment, discrimination toward migrant workers, pauperization of the lower classes and, significantly, one of the world’s highest suicide rates. All of these issues can be more effectively addressed within a class-based rather than a nationalist framework. Reclaimed in a socialist key, colonial culture can become more conversant with contemporary South Korean activism, and its critical energy can continue to be inspirational and pertinent to emergent progressive cultural forces. Remembering the proletarian wave also has consequences today for our renewed understanding of the 1970s and 1980s minjung democratization movement. It is frequently remarked, in historical as well as critical literature, that a nationalist accent has characterized minjung culture ever since its inception among activists and students of the early 1970s. Less attention has been paid, however, to that movement’s equally strong commitment to issues of class, labor, social justice, and equal citizenship. Taking their inspiration partly from the colonial tradition, minjung scholars and activists have consistently labored to raise the collective awareness of a people—the minjung—whose participation in politics and governance had been persistently frustrated by historical forces outside their control. From this perspective, rediscovering the leftist heritage of the minjung movement helps us now to balance the historical record, allowing a reevaluation of the movement that is not entirely held hostage to its nationalist excesses. Socialist and nationalist themes have always coexisted in minjung ideology, but emphasis has often been placed on the latter. Pointing out this fact is important for our renewed understanding of a political movement that has influenced the direction of progressive politics in South Korea for the last forty years. Shifting the focus to international politics, a stronger recognition by South Koreans of their leftist cultural heritage might have beneficial effects on inter-Korean relations. If the official communism of North

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Korea is represented as entirely imported from China or the Soviet Union, it becomes possible for conservative forces in the South to paint North Korea as a “foreign” country. Appeals to the constitutive nationalism of the South Korean public will suffice to keep the North at a distance. If, however, it is understood that the colonial period already had a thriving and indigenous leftist cultural tradition, then North Korea cannot quite be sidelined as a product of foreign influence. Activists and scholars during the 1980s were the first to undertake this sort of ideological rescue of a North Korean heritage in one of their major efforts to engage with the reclusive country.14 The acknowledg ment of a shared twentieth-century left ist cultural tradition remains allimportant for contemporary debates, especially when considering the increasing fractiousness and polarization that are engendered by the ongoing North Korean crises.15 To close on a more theoretical note, the substantial presence of proletarian literature in colonial Korea invites a reconsideration of the interpretive paradigms that have long dominated the study of colonial cultures both in East Asia and around the world. In thinking about the process of identity formation, conventional nationalist historiographies have tended to rely on a strict and oversimplified dichotomy of colonizer versus colonized. They have been countered, in postcolonial scholarship, with an insistence on the importance of what Homi Bhabha has called “the Third Space.” Bhabha’s Third Space is a figurative interstice between the empire and the colony, in which the colonized form their own identities by appropriating, translating, and rehistoricizing the culture of the colonizer.16 The Third Space is indeed, according to this critic, the only site apt for the formation of one’s cultural identity.17 This model has been highly useful in allowing us to recognize the essential hybridity of all identity formation, but it has also confirmed the constraining and 14. See, for instance, Kim Jae-Yong, Pukhan munhak ŭi ihae. The myth of a “revolution from the outside,” which was popular during the Cold War era, has been effectively countered by historians such as Bruce Cumings, Charles Armstrong, and Suzy Kim, whose researches have emphasized the important role played by local agencies and circumstances in the founding of North Korea. See Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, and Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution. 15. For a recent comprehensive study of contemporary North Korean culture, see Suk-Young Kim, Illusive Utopia. 16. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 35–36. 17. Rutherford, “The Third Space.” See in par ticu lar page 211.

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exclusionary character of a binary supposition of two sorts of subjects— one imperial and the other colonial. In order to integrate the proletarian wave into the colonial modernity of Korea, I propose that we need to expand our vision to include yet another kind of space, a cross-cultural rather than intercultural one, in which counterhegemonic classes and groups in both the empires and their colonies can come together to ally with one another via either organizational ties or ideological affinity. Without such an expansion of the theoretical framework, our reconstructed universe of colonial Korea and the Japanese empire will fall short of what Michael Robinson and Gi-Wook Shin have termed its “original ecosystem,” understood here as the complex ideological environment in which social forces in Korea negotiated their various identities, all the while interacting with an imperial Japanese culture that is itself internally ramified.18 The proletarian wave can be seen, in the last analysis, as a reminder of the cultural and ideological dynamics of Korea during the twentieth century. Socialism was a major ideological influence on Korean intellectuals early in the century, only to become a casualty of Cold War culture in the time immediately following the 1945 national liberation. In North Korea, the repressed nationalism of the colonial period and the experience of the Korean War then fueled a xenophobic, ethnocentric version of socialist realism that was officially promoted under Kim Ilsung’s regime. Similarly, in South Korea, nationalist sentiments morphed after liberation into a dominant conservative ideology that supported a military dictatorship until 1987. Boosted by an insistent anticommunist propaganda, a potent ideological configuration came into being as a reflection and ratification of state capitalism, developmentalism, and a strict alignment within the Cold War order. From this perspective, today’s reassessment of colonial leftist culture acquires an important counterhegemonic function. As Raymond Williams has argued, the task of a counterhegemony often involves “the recovery of discarded areas,” as traditions that were once prominent become forgotten or distorted through the ideological accretions of later eras.19 Once colonial leftist culture is recognized as having been a powerful historical force, its important critical voices can finally rise from the oblivion of several decades of nationalist and anticommunist discourse on the Korean peninsula. 18. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea, 5. 19. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 116.

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Index

Figures are indicated by italicized page numbers (e.g., 106); italicized references to the color plates are preceded by the abbreviation pl. (e.g., pl. 8). Adorno, Theodor, 265 aestheticism: and fascism, 122; left ist criticism of, 109–16; and materialism, 117; vs. realism, 110–13; vs. social engagement, 107–16, 121 After Hitting My Wife (Chŏ rŭl ttaerigo; Kim Namch’ŏn), 245 After Leaving the Doll’s House (Inhyŏng ŭi chip ŭl nawasŏ; Ch’ae Mansik), 207–8 agrarianism: and Hometown, 99, 148, 149, 153, 156; and nationalism, 143–44, 151, 153, 155; and revolution, 145 agriculture: commercialization of, 25–27, 145, 152, 204, 233; in left ist literature, 119, 143–53, 240 Ahn Sŏkchu, 57n29, 106, 150, 191, pl. 8 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 232 Algeria, 86–87 Alliance for Women’s Liberation (Yŏsŏng haebang tongmaeng), 81 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 70, 236 Alliance of Freedom Arts (Chayu yesul yŏnmaeng), 76

Alliance of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng), 271n6 Alliance of Proletarian Arts (P’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng), 270 “Along the Russian Coast” (Noryŏng kŭnhae; Yi Hyosŏk), 78 “Ammonia Tank, The” (Ammonia t’aengk’ŭ; Yi Pungmyŏng), 68n50, 141 An Chaehong, 64, 170 An Hamgwang, 146, 158 An Hwak, 95 An Kwangch’ŏn, 203n12 An Kwanghŭi, 39n45, 69n52 An Mak, 66 anarchism, 46–55, 52, 85–86; and agrarianism, 143; defined, 16; and division of Korea, 162; and individualism, 51–52, 53; and KAPF, 53, 55, 60–62, 75–76, 134; and labor, 48, 50, 156, pl. 2; and left ism, 1, 12, 14, 45, 46, 102, 268, 269; and literature, 13, 50n14, 51–55, 77, 151, 269; vs. Marxism, 2, 32, 46, 47, 54–55, 60–63, 84, 87, 166–67; and modernity, 46, 86, 90; and nationalism, 47, 48, 50, 50nn14–15; and New Tendency literature, 53, 60,

312

Index

anarchism (continued) 76, 127, 131–32, 133; and New Women movement, 198, 201, 209; and overseas Koreans, 56; and peasants, 25, 46, 54, 76; and poetry, 77; and terrorism, 32, 50nn14–15, 131; vs. traditionalism, 47, 52n18, 54, 55, 86; and Yi Kiyŏng, 128–31; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 48, 161–62, 164, 166–67, 194 Anthology of Seven KAPF Writers, The (K’ap’u chakka 7 injip), 139 Anti-Imperialist Alliance (T’ado chegukchuŭi tongmaeng), 271 antiwar movements, 57; and literature, 61, 70, 212–14, 220, 236, 257–65 Aono Suekichi, 134 Appenzeller, Henry Gerhard, 58n30 Arirang (fi lm; Na Un’gyu), 132 Arishima Takeo, 174 Armstrong, Charles, 275n14 art: autonomy in, 65, 108, 109, 121, 122; censorship of, 65–66, 69–70; and KAPF, 61, 62, 67–69, pl. 1, pl. 4; and politics, 2, 43, 72, 73, 122, 157 “Art and Life” (Yesul kwa insaeng; Yi Kwangsu), 109 “Artistic Life” (Yesulchŏk saenghwal; Kim Ŏk), 108 Ashcroft, Bill, 183 Association of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munin hyŏphoe), 256n56 Bakunin, Mikhail, 16, 46, 47, 118 Balzac, Honoré de, 160, 234 “Bankruptcy” (P’asan; Kwŏn Kuhyŏn), 77 “Baptism of Earth” (Hŭk ŭi serye; Yi Iksang), 143–44 Barbusse, Henri, 61 Barley (Maek; Kim Namch’ŏn), 70n57, 235, 245, 256, 257–65, 264 Barley and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai; Hino Ashihei), 262 Barlow, Tani, 228 Barraclough, Ruth, 199, 221

Battle of Dragons, The (Yong kwa yong ŭi taegyŏkchŏn; Sin Ch’aeho), 50n14 Bebel, August, 202 “Before and After the Flood” (Hongsu chŏnhu; Pak Hwasŏng), 216, 218 “Beggar” (Kŏrin; Hŏ Munil), 76 “Beggar with a Burnt Face” (Kŏrin tendungi; Ch’oe Sŭngil), 130 Benjamin, Walter, 114, 122 Bergson, Henri, 176n30 Bhabha, Homi, 10, 195, 275 Black Labor Society (Hŭngnohoe), 50 Black Wave Society (Hŭktohoe), 32, 50 Black Youth Alliance (Hŭkseak ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng), 50 “Blast Furnace” (Yonggwanno; Song Yŏng), 128 “Blood” (P’i; Sŏ Sangho), 191n58 “Boris Pilnyak’s Comment on Proletarian Literature” (P’ŭroretaria munhak e taehan P ssi ŭi ŏn; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 169 bourgeoisie: in Algeria, 86–87; and the body, 119; criticism of, 90, 98; and cultural reform, 102; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 252; vs. leftist culture, 122, 268; and modernity, 89, 244, 252–53, 267; national, 9, 170, 180, 192; and New Women, 202, 205, 228; vs. proletariat, 105; and realism, 112; and romanticism, 226; satire of, 79; and social democracy, 193; urban, 244, 252–53, 267; and women, 79, 81, 202, 205, 228; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 167, 170, 189, 192 “Breaking the Red Lantern” (Kkaett’ŭryŏjinŭn hongdŭng; Yi Hyosŏk), 78 Brecht, Bertolt, 273 capitalism, 5, 16, 112; and agrarianism, 143; and anarchism, 49; and colonialism, 181; critiques of, 16–17, 90, 98, 172, 266; and Hometown, 151–52; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 244, 251, 253, 266; and left ist nationalism, 74, 171; and modernity, 120, 209, 253; and

Index capitalism (continued) pan-Asianism, 181, 253, 256; and proletarian grotesque, 129–30; state, 26, 276; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 161, 170, 183, 193, 194 Catholicism, 23 censorship: and forced conversion, 238; and Hometown, 154; and Kang Kyŏngae, 213; and KAPF, 65–66, 70, 238n18, 250; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 235, 245, 257, 261n68, 263; and left ist literature, 36, 37, 39, 233; and New Novel, 95n8; and satire, 79; self, 62n39; and socialist realism, 113; and theater, 69; and thought control, 235–39; and women writers, 211, 229; and Yi Kiyŏng, 154; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 164, 177–78, 182, 190–92, 194 Center for the Construction of Korean Literature (Chosŏn munhak kŏnsŏl ponbu), 270n6 “Certain Spectacle, A” (Ŏttŏn kwanggyŏng; Kim Yŏngp’al), 136 Ch’ae Hosŏk, 234 Ch’ae Mansik, 3, 73, 79, 119, 207–8, 220–21, 266 Chang Hyŏkchu, 83 Chang Sasŏn, 234 Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏng (Creativity and criticism; journal), 272 “Changsan Point, The” (Changsangot; Kang Kyŏngae), 211n33 Chatterjee, Partha, 195 Chayu yesul yŏnmaeng. See Alliance of Freedom Arts Cheguk sinmun (The imperial news), 92 Che ilsŏn (First front; magazine), 77, 111, 140 Cheng Fangwu, 115 Cheon Jung-hwan, 104 “Chi Hyŏnggŭn” (Chi Hyŏnggŭn; Na Tohyang), 76 China: Civil War in, 66; communist parties in, 35, 171; feminism in, 228; I-novel in, 174, 178; and Korea, 23–24, 25, 87, 93; and Korean Communist

313

Party, 31, 33; Koreans in, 3, 13, 47, 48n8, 50, 50n14, 93, 203; leftist literature in, 14, 98; in Manchuria, 212, 214; Nationalist Party in, 171, 212, 214n39; and North Korea, 275; and pan-Asianism, 260; peasant uprisings in, 91; reportage in, 140; and vernacularization, 94; wars with Japan of, 23, 26, 237, 254, 255 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 171 Chinese language, 93, 101 Ching, Leo, 263, 265 Cho Chunggon, 36n38, 62, 63 Cho Myŏnghŭi, 83n84, 136, 247 Cho Namhyŏn, 73n59, 76n70, 148n52 Cho Pongam, 33n33 Cho Yongman, 79n77 Cho Yŏnhyŏn, 6n11, 158, 269 Ch’oe Ch’ansik, 95 Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, 216n44, 230 Ch’oe Namsŏn, 97, 98, 171, 185–86 Ch’oe Sŏhae, 59, 128, 133, 145 Ch’oe Sŏngsu, 191n58 Ch’oe Sŭngil, 59, 128n5, 130 Ch’oe Tusŏn, 95 Ch’oe Yŏngsu, 219 Chogwang (Morning light; magazine), 77 Choi Kyeong-Hee, 120n65, 230 Chŏn Sangsuk, 59n32 Ch’ŏndogyo (religion), 25n8, 58n30 Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng, 204, 205, 206, 227 Chŏng Chongmyŏng, 204, 210 Chŏng T’aesin, 48, 117–18 Ch’ŏngbok Kino, 69 Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth; magazine), 97 Chŏngŭi kongbo (The justice newspaper), 50n14 Chŏnhyang. See forced conversion Chosŏn chi kwang (Light of Korea; journal), 3, 36 Chosŏn chungang ilbo (newspaper), 71 Chosŏn dynasty: class structure in, 86, 100–101, 125; Confucianism in, 116; economic development in, 22, 25; fall of, 89, 90–91; peasant rebellions in, 22–25

314

Index

Chosŏn ilbo (Korean daily; newspaper), 3, 61n37, 68, 75n66, 114, 142, 170, 171; Hometown in, 148, 150, 151; The Human Predicament in, 224; The Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory in, 141n36, 142; The Three Generations in, 187 Chosŏn mundan (magazine), 166 Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng. See Alliance of Korean Writers Chosŏn munhak kŏnsŏl ponbu (Center for the Construction of Korean Literature), 270n6 Chosŏn munin hyŏphoe. See Association of Korean Writers Chosŏn munin pogukhoe. See Patriotic Association of Korean Writers Chosŏn nodongdang. See Korean Labor Party Chosŏn nodong kongjehoe. See Korean Workers Mutual Aid Association Chosŏn nongmin (Korean peasants; magazine), 143 Chosŏn p’ŭrollet’aria kŭkchang tongmaeng. See Korean Proletarian Theater Alliance Chosŏn puroret’aria yesul tongmaeng. See KAPF Chosŏn p’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng. See Korean Alliance of Proletarian Arts Chosŏn sahoedang. See Korean Socialist Party Chosŏn sahoe kyŏngjesa (Economic history of Korean society; Paek Namun), 170 Chosŏn sin munhak sajosa (History of modern Korean literary trends; Paek Ch’ŏl), 11n21 Chosŏn yŏsŏng tonguhoe. See Korean Women’s League Christianity, 23, 81, 174n26, 175, 189, 256 Chu Sejuk, 203, 203n14, 204 Chu Yosŏp, 128n5, 210n31 Ch’unch’u (Spring and Autumn; magazine), 262, 264

chungin (middle class), 100, 163n5. See also bourgeoisie “City and Specter, The” (Tosi wa yuryŏng; Yi Hyosŏk), 78 Clark, Katerina, 136 Clarté movement, 61 class: and anarchism, 54, 55; and the body, 119–20; in Chosŏn society, 86, 100–101, 125; and colonialism, 10; and feminism, 82, 199, 200, 204, 209, 228, 231; and Kang Kyŏngae, 213, 222, 225; and KAPF, 60, 240; and labor movement, 29; and labor reportage, 142; and left ism, 4, 5, 14, 102, 274; and left ist nationalism, 73, 86, 171; in literature, 83, 101–6, 118–19, 127–29, 131, 133, 134, 136, 198; in Manchuria, 214; and Marxism, 11, 56; in materialist literature, 118–19; and minjung movement, 274; and modernity, 107; and nationalism, 9n16, 11, 92, 180; and New Novel, 102–3; and New Tendency literature, 127, 128, 129, 131; and New Women movement, 201–2, 205, 208; and pan-Asianism, 259; and proletarian grotesque, 130; and proletarian literature, 133, 134, 136; and racism, 172; and realism, 113, 139, 141; and women’s literature, 198; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 164, 167–69, 189–90, 192–94. See also bourgeoisie; peasants; proletariat; yangban aristocracy Cold War: and KAPF, 84n88, 125, 159; left ist literature in, 4, 7, 11, 162, 269, 273; and North Korea, 194, 271, 275n14; and South Korea, 194, 276; and women’s literature, 198 colonialism, Japa nese, 3, 23, 89, 91; and anarchism, 51; and anticolonial movements, 9, 74, 162, 195, 196; and assimilation, 233, 253n51; and capitalism, 181; and communism, 9, 33–34; and culture, 10, 91n2, 99, 125, 233, 253n51, 275–76; and economic

Index colonialism, Japa nese (continued) development, 26, 38, 77, 90, 121, 125, 233; and forced conversion, 235–39; and industrialization, 121, 125, 233; and Japanese language, 233; and KAPF, 3, 60, 65–66, 126; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 233, 234, 247; and labor movement, 25–31; and leftist culture, 3, 6–7, 90, 121, 268–69, 273; and leftist nationalism, 9, 67, 74, 171; in Manchuria, 26, 212; and pan-Asianism, 122, 260–61, 263, 265; policies of, 145, 146; and Proletkult, 56–57; and race, 9, 10, 172, 179–80, 253n51; and socialism, 1, 6–9, 21, 117; in Taiwan, 236; and torture, 190–92; and women, 205, 209–11, 217, 218, 228, 229, 263; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 161–62, 170, 183, 190, 192, 194–95 Comintern, 8, 9, 57, 171, 190; and KAPF, 66–67, 158; and Korean Communist Party, 31–35, 37; and labor, 29, 140; and peasant literature, 145–46; and women’s movement, 210n30 commercialism, 95n8, 211, 244; in agriculture, 25–27, 145, 152, 204, 233 “Commoners’ Village, A” (Minch’on; Yi Kiyŏng), 147 communism: in China, 35, 171; and colonialism, 9, 33–34; and cultural left, 31–37; and fascism, 122; as foreign import, 6n11, 274–75; in Japan, 31, 32, 35, 236, 237; and KAPF, 36, 37, 43, 57, 58, 62, 66–67, 70, 125, 126, 158, 159; and Korean left ist culture, 43–46. See also Comintern; Korean Communist Party; North Korea Communist University for Oriental Workers (Moscow), 35, 203–4 Company Law (hoesaryŏng), 26 Comrade Society (Tongjisa), 82 Confucianism, 25, 108, 116; and agrarianism, 143; and anarchism, 47, 49; and class, 101, 132; and cultural reform, 92, 98, 102; vs. individualism, 96; vs. left ist culture, 120–21; vs.

315

modernity, 90, 91; and peasants, 147, 151; vs. vernacular literature, 93–94; and women, 81, 208 Conquest of Bread, The (Peter Kropotkin), 47 constructivism, Russian, pl. 7 cultural reform movement, 91–103, 117, 125; and Confucianism, 92, 98, 102; elitism of, 102–3; vs. left ists, 102, 115–16; and peasants, 143, 144; and socialism, 98–100, 102–3, 120, 121 culture: and colonialism, 10, 99, 125, 233, 253n51, 275–276; vs. economics, 242; German, 122; and identity, 275–76; people’s, 100–107, 110; popu lar, 79, 95, 103, 122, 153. See also left ist culture; urban culture Cumings, Bruce, 21, 275n14 “Current Orientation of the Labor Movement and Its True Significance” (Nodong undong ŭi kyŏnghyang kwa nodong undong ŭi chinŭi; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 163–64 customs (fūzoku [Japa nese], p’ungsok [Korean]), 242–43, 251 Dan Di, 214n40 Daoism, 143 “Dark Night” (Amya; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 173 Dark Street (Hon’ga; fi lm; Kim Yuyŏng), 69 Darwinism, political, 47 Davin, Anna, 217n47 Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist, A (Sosŏlga Kubo ssi ŭi iril; Pak T’aewŏn), 251 December Theses (Comintern), 67n46, 145 democracy, 107, 163, 164, 256; social, 1, 162, 171, 193 democratization movement (South Korea), 3–4, 13, 75n65, 125, 233; and colonial left ist culture, 12, 116, 272–75

316

Index

Denning, Michael, 129–30 “Dialectical Realism” (Pyŏnjŭngjŏk sasilchuŭi; Kim Kijin), 112, 137–38 Dirlik, Arif, 50n15 “Dirt Diggers” (Ttang p’amŏngnŭn saramdŭl; Pak Kilsu), 128 Djagalov, Rossen, 158n75 Doll’s House, A (Henrik Ibsen), 204, 220 domesticity: cult of, 216–19, 220; vs. politics, 226–27, 229 Dooling, Amy, 226 Dos Passos, John, 149 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 164n9 “Double Liberation” (Ijung haebang; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 164 “Drowning Neckties” (Nekt’ai ŭi ch’imjŏn; Yu Chino), 78n76 Earth (Hŭk; Yi Kwangsu), 99, 144 economic development: in Chosŏn dynasty, 22, 25; and colonialism, 26, 38, 77, 90, 121, 125, 233; and cultural reform, 92; and international trade, 89, 90–91; in Japan, 26; in Korea, 16; and labor movement, 25–31; and left ist culture, 14, 274; and left ist nationalists, 74; and modernity, 89–90; and political oppression, 252. See also industrialization economic issues: international, 16–17, 80, 192; Korean, 27, 28, 29; and leftist culture, 121; in literature, 14, 118–19, 151, 152, 241, 242; and materialism, 116, 118–19, 120; rural, 151, 152, 153; and women, 204, 208, 211 education: of activists, 58–59, 60; and class, 100–101; classical Confucian, 93, 116; and cultural reform, 92; elite, 58n30; in fiction, 95, 180, 222; foreign, 58, 93, 95, 103; and left ist nationalists, 74; of masses, 99–100, 103–4; and modernity, 90; moral, 116–17; of peasants, 146; and popu lar fiction, 94; of women, 201, 202, 209, 210, 228. See also students

elitism: of cultural reform, 102–3; and education of masses, 99–100; and left ist culture, 116, 121; in literature, 15, 116, 143, 144 Engels, Friedrich, 16, 118 “Escape” (T’alch’ulgi; Ch’oe Sŏhae), 128 Esperanto, 56, 165, 248, 251n47, pl. 1 ethnicity. See racism ethnographic fiction, 161–62, 178, 183, 186, 194–95 Eu rope, 3, 14, 85, 86; economic crisis in, 16–17; Korean students in, 93; modernism in, 253, 267; socialism in, 8, 22, 273 everyday life (ilsang saenghwal), 239–45, 266; and history, 245–55, 267 experimentalism, 78n76, 78–79, 232, 234, 245–47, 251, 266 “Extra” (Hooe; Yi Kiyŏng), 135–36 “Factory Fraternity” (Konguhoe; Kim Namch’ŏn), 141 “Factory Girl, A” (Yŏgong; Yi Pungmyŏng), 141 Family, The (Ie; Shimazaki Tōson), 187 Fanon, Frantz, 9, 67n47, 86–87, 172, 179, 182, 195 fascism, 16, 122, 130, 255, 257, 273 fellow travelers (poputchiki), 72–83, 84, 160, 169, 189 Felski, Rita, 263 feminism: Chinese, 228; and class, 82, 199, 200, 204, 209, 228, 231; and domesticity, 220; Japa nese, 201; Korean, 45, 46, 81, 197–231, 270; and left ist culture, 45, 46, 81–82, 201–2; liberal, 205, 208, 231; liberal vs. socialist, 228–31; and literary criticism, 198–99; vs. nationalism, 199, 208–9, 231; and racism, 200, 231; and socialism, 13, 15, 87, 198–99, 200, 208, 209–21; transnational, 220; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 166. See also New Women movement; women Fig (Muhwagwa; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 186, 187, 192–94

Index fi lm, 132, 141, 157; and KAPF, 68–69, 72 Fitzpatrick, John, 164 “Flood” (Hongsu; Yi Kiyŏng), 147 Foley, Barbara, 149–50 forced conversion (tenkō, chŏnhyang) policy, 70, 235–39, 252, 256, 258–59 Foucault, Michel, 174n26 “Foundation Construction Site, The” (Kich’o kongsajang; Yi Pungmyŏng), 79, 119 French Revolution, 228 Fukumoto Katsuo, 134n15 Fury (Kwangbun; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 186, 187 Gabroussenko, Tatiana, 5, 44, 83–84, 126, 138–39, 152, 153 gender, 2, 5n8, 14, 79, 258–59, 263. See also women Gender of Modernity (Rita Felski), 263 General Alliance of Korean Laborers and Peasants, 49n13 General Summary of Socialist Theories (Shakai shugi gakusetsu; Sakai Toshihiko), 118 George, Rosemary Marangoly, 220 Germany, 115, 122, 125, 140 Gift from the Black Chamber (Hŭkpang ŭi sŏnmul), 77 “Glimpse into Marx and His Materialism, A” (Makssŭ wa yumulsagwan ŭi ilp’ye; Chŏng T’aesin), 117–18 Gorky, Maxim, 138–39, 261n68 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 38n44, 103, 107, 243 Grave (Myoji; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 51, 53, 182. See also On the Eve of the Uprising Great Currents (Taeha; Kim Namch’ŏn), 239n21, 243n32 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 256 Greater East Asian War (World War II), 1, 3, 14, 233, 253; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 235, 255–65

317

Green Frog in the Specimen Room (P’yobonsil ŭi ch’ŏnggaeguri; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 162, 173, 175–78, 183 Green Star Pharmacy (Noksŏngdang; Kim Namch’ŏn), 235, 245–55; versions of, 246n35 Grewal, Inderpal, 231 Guevara, Che, 67n47 Hakchigwang (Light of learning; magazine), 48 Hall, Stuart, 4, 273 Ham Taehun, 261n68 Han Kihyŏng, 161 Han Mansu, 36n39 Han Sŏrya, 119, 126, 138n23, 141, 226, 239n21, 270n6 Han’guk kŭndae minjok munhaksa (History of modern Korean literature; Kim Jae-Yong et al.), 12 Hanin sahoedang. See Korean Socialist Party Harootunian, Harry, 243n31 Hayashi Fusao, 137n22 Heartless, The (Mujŏng; Yi Kwangsu), 74, 181 Hegel, G. W. F., 242n27 “Hell of the Starving” (Gakidŏ; Chang Hyŏkchu), 83 Hino Ashihei, 262 Hirabayashi Taiko, 202 Hiratsuka Raichō, 201 History of Korean Literature (Peter Lee), 5 Hitler, Adolf, 122 Ho Chi Minh, 9 Hŏ Chŏngsuk, 202, 203n12, 204, 210, 229n68 Hŏ Munil, 76 Hometown (Kohyang; Yi Kiyŏng), 3, 68, 99, 119, 147–56, 150, 156 Hong Hyomin, 63 Hong Myŏnghŭi, 48n8, 64, 74, 75, 170 Hong Yŏnghu, 164n9 Hughes, Theodore, 141

318

Index

Hŭkseak ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng. See Black Youth Alliance Hŭktohoe. See Black Wave Society “Human” (Hyŏn Chin’gŏn), 51, 53, 76n69 Human Predicament, The (In’gan munje; Kang Kyŏngae), 82, 119, 221–28, 229, 258; feminism in, 199, 220, 224; revision of, 224n58; social context of, 200 hunger-and-murder stories, 128 Hŭngnohoe. See Black Labor Society Hwang Sŏgu, 48 hwangguk sinminhwa (kōminka) movement, 253n51 Hwayohae (Tuesday Society), 33, 55 Hyesŏng (Comet; magazine), 77, 140, pl. 6, pl. 7 Hyŏn Chin’gŏn, 51, 76n69, 106 Hyŏn Kyŏngjun, 79n77 Hyŏndae p’yŏngnon (Contemporary criticism; periodical), 3, 171 I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru; Natsume Sōseki), 164n9 Ibsen, Henrik, 201, 204, 220 “Ideological Inquiry into Nationalist and Socialist Movements, An” (Minjok, sahoe undong ŭi yusimjŏk koch’al; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 169 Im Hŏnyŏng, 272 Im Hwa, 11, 59, 61, 62, 270, 271n7; and children’s literature, 69n54; and KAPF, 66, 84n88, 238; on Yŏm Sangsŏp, 162–63 Im Ogin, 230 Im Sundŭk, 229 imperialism, 10, 47, 89, 117, 145; in Korea, 21, 23–24, 252; and leftist culture, 38, 121, 237, 262–63, 268; in Manchuria, 212; in New Tendency literature, 128; opposition to, 11, 37, 50, 98, 271; and patriarchy, 217–18, 220, 228. See also colonialism, Japanese “Imported Cat, An” (Pangnaemyo; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 164n9

Independence Club (Tongnip hyŏphoe), 91 India, 195, 260 individualism, 112, 120, 132, 226, 244, 270; and aestheticism, 108–9; and anarchism, 51–52, 53; bourgeois, 62; and I-novel, 174, 175; and KAPF, 60–61; and Kim Namchŏn, 252, 262; in labor movement, 30–31; in literature, 15, 51–52, 93, 96, 107, 134, 145, 198; and nationalism, 96, 98; and pan-Asianism, 256; and women, 198, 201, 202, 215; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 178, 185, 194 industrial exhibition (1929), 187 industrialization, 27, 89, 90, 100, 145, 272; and Japa nese colonialism, 121, 125, 233; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 248, 266; and political oppression, 252. See also economic development In’gan munje. See Human Predicament, The Inmun p’yŏngnon (Humane criticism; journal), 232–33 I-novel, 93, 103, 112, 119; in China, 174, 178; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 247, 259, 263; and New Tendency literature, 128; and New Women writers, 198; as travelogue, 178, 180–81, 183; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 162, 173–83, 185, 194, 195 “In Search of Light” (Kwangmyŏng ŭl ch’ajasŏ; Yi Kiyŏng), 136 “Intellectual’s Schizophrenia and Indomitable Spirit, The” (Chisigin ŭi chagi punyŏl kwa puryo pulkul ŭi chŏngsin; Kim Namch’ŏn), 252 International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), 145n46 “Into the Light” (Hikari no naka ni; Kim Saryang), 83 “Introduction to Modern Korean Literature” (Chosŏn sinmunhaksaron sŏsŏl; Im Hwa), 11 “Iron Factory” (Soegongjang; Yi Sŏngt’ae), 51–52, 53 Irŏt’a (Status quo; magazine), 36

Index Jameson, Frederic, 188n54, 253, 273 Japan: and anarchism, 47–48; and China, 23, 26, 237, 255; communism in, 31, 32, 35, 236, 237; economic development in, 26; and KAPF, 2, 59–60, 82–83, 158; and Korean Communist Party, 31, 32; and Korean literature, 3, 10, 83, 93, 98, 191; Koreans in, 3, 12–13, 14, 27, 47, 48n8, 50, 59–60, 63, 82–83, 87, 95, 211, 232; left ist culture in, 10, 13, 32, 39, 104, 115; literature in, 94, 130, 174, 175, 211n32; and March First Movement, 131; militarism of, 16, 29–30, 70, 77, 229; and modernity, 244; moga (modern girls) in, 207; racism in, 27n16, 83; Taisho democracy in, 163; thought societies in, 32–33; Treason Incident in, 176n30; women in, 201, 202–3, 211n32; workercorrespondent movement in, 140; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 162, 163. See also colonialism, Japa nese Japa nese Communist Party, 236, 237 Japa nese language, 118, 233, 253n51 Japanism (Nihon shugi), 242 Jayawardena, Kumari, 199 “Job-seeker in May” (Owŏl ŭi kujikcha; Yu Chino), 78 Kaebyŏk (Creation; magazine), 3, 24, 36, 43–44, 58, 103, 111, 202, pl. 3 Kaneko, Fumiko 50n15 Kang Kyŏngae, 15, 119, 197–231, 258, 266; activism of, 79, 210; feminism of, 82, 199, 209; and labor movement, 222–23, 225; in Manchuria, 211, 214; and New Women, 205–7, 208; in North vs. South Korea, 211–12; poems by, 211n33; rediscovery of, 273. See also Human Predicament, The; Salt KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federatio), 54, 102, 114, 125–59, 270n6; and anarchism, 53, 55, 60–62, 75–76, 134; artistic crisis of, 65–68; censorship,

319

65–66, 70; and class struggle, 60, 240; and Cold War, 84n88, 125, 159; and communism, 36, 37, 43, 45, 57, 58, 62, 66–67, 70, 125, 126, 158, 159; criticism of, 126, 156–59; dissolution of, 3, 11, 70–72, 156–57, 266; factionalism in, 63, 72, 73; fellow travelers of, 72–83, 84; and fi lm, 68–69, 72; and forced conversion, 236, 238; founding of, 55–65; and free love, 226; ideological orthodoxy of, 65–66, 87; and Japan, 2, 59–60, 82–83, 158; and Japa nese colonialism, 3, 60, 65–66, 126; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 232–33, 239, 240, 241; and left ist culture, 14–15, 45–46, pl. 4, pl. 5; and left ist nationalism, 86; and literature, 13, 55–65, 67–68, 69n54, 72, 83–84, 103, 133–43, 145–46, 149, 158; and Marxism, 5, 45, 55–65, 72, 87, 126, 127, 131, 133–34, 158, 268; maturation of, 65–72; police suppression of, 71, 77, 137n22, 154, 155; and realism, 113; resurgence of, 68–70; and Sin’ganhoe, 63–65, 67, 74; and theater, 59, 68–69, 72; and Yi Kiyŏng, 68, 135–36, 138, 142, 147, 156, 163; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167, 168–69, 186, 194 Kaplan, Caren, 231 Karatani Kojin, 174n26 Kawabata Yasunari, 79n76 Kawakami Hajime, 193 Key, Ellen, 201 Kikuchi Kan, 232n1 Kim Chaebong, 33n33 Kim Chahye, 216n44 Kim Ch’angsul, 59 Kim Chul, 234, 256–57, 259 Kim Chunyŏn, 170 Kim Hwasan, 62, 65, 76 Kim Ilsung, 125, 211, 270, 271 Kim Iryŏp, 198, 201 Kim Jae-Yong, 12, 126n1, 212n34, 275n14 Kim, Janice, 31 Kim Jungil, 271n8

320

Index

Kim Kijin, 55–56, 105, 271n7; on aestheticism, 109, 110; arrest of, 2n2, 154; and KAPF, 36n38, 58–59, 61, 63, 66, 102; and realism, 113, 120; works by, 112, 128n5, 130, 137–38, 141 Kim Kyŏngil, 26n11, 49n10, 207n24, 210n30 Kim Kyut’aek, 111 Kim Myŏngsik, 101 Kim Myŏngsun, 198 Kim Namch’ŏn, 15, 70n57, 114, 141, 232–67; on everyday life, 235, 239–45; forced conversion of, 235–39, 245, 256; and literature of indictment (kobal munhak), 240–41; and North Korea, 270, 271n7; rediscovery of, 273. See also Barley; Green Star Pharmacy Kim Ŏk, 108 Kim Pokchin, 36n38, 57n29 Kim Samgyu, 60 Kim Saryang, 83 Kim Sŏngsu, 171 Kim, Suzy, 275n14 Kim Tongin, 105, 107, 113, 143 Kim Tuyong, 36n38, 60, 63, 66, 82 Kim Ujong, 269 Kim Yongje, 60, 82 Kim Yŏngp’al, 59, 136 Kim Yoon-sik, 12n22, 160 Kim Yuyŏng, 59 Kirpotin, Valery, 154–55 “Kkŏraei” (Koreans; Paek Sinae), 198n2 Ko Hŭidong, 97 Ko Kyŏnghŭm, 36n38, 60 Ko Myŏngja, 203–4, 204n15 Kobayashi Takiji, 236 Kohyang. See Hometown Kollontai, Alexandra, 203n12, 204 Kon Wajirō, 251n47 Kongje (Mutual aid; journal), 48, 49, pl. 2 Kongjehoe. See Korean Workers Mutual Aid Association KOPF (Federacio de Proletaj Kurlturorganizoj Japanaj) , 60, 82

Korean Alliance of Proletarian Arts (Chosŏn p’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng), 270n6 Korean Communist Party (KCP), 14, 31–37, 34; in exile, 8; factions in, 32, 33; and forced conversion, 236; founding of, 33; and KAPF, 57, 58, 62, 70; and left ist culture, 35–36, 38–39; membership of, 59n32; weakness of, 31, 35–36, 37, 269; women in, 203, 204n15, 210; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 187 Korean Labor Party (Chosŏn nodongdang), 55 Korean language, 89; alphabet for, 94, 101; banning of, 233, 268; vernacular, 91–95, 139, 142, 148, 186 Korean Proletarian Theater Alliance (Chosŏn p’ŭrollet’aria kŭkchang tongmaeng), 69 Korean Socialist Party (Chosŏn sahoedang), 47 Korean Socialist Party (Hanin sahoedang), 31 Korean War (1950–53), 276 Korean Women’s League (Chosŏn yŏsŏng tonguhoe), 81, 198n2, 204n15 Korean Workers Mutual Aid Association (Kongjehoe; Chosŏn nodong kongjehoe), 28, 48, 49, 50, 54 Kōtoku Shūsui, 50n14 Kōyama Iwao, 261 Kropotkin, Peter, 2, 16, 46–48, 52, 54, 84, 118, pl. 2; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 164, 167, 183 Kume Masao, 232n1 Kŭndae sajo (Modern thought; journal), 48 Kun’gi (Banner; journal), 67 Kŭnu (Friends of the rose of Sharon; journal), 81, 205, pl. 8 Kŭnuhoe (Friends of the rose of Sharon; women’s orga nization), 79, 81, 203n12, 209–10, 229 Kurahara Korehito, 112n45, 137n22, 146 Kwangju Student Movement (1929), 37 Kwŏn Hwan, 146n46

Index Kwŏn Kuhyŏn, 76, 77 Kwon Youngmin, 57n28, 59n32, 70n56, 83 Kye Yongmuk, 79n77 Kyŏngsŏng anti-imperialist campaign (1931), 37 Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group, 34 Kyŏngsŏng Imperial University, 37, 78, 257 Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe. See Seoul Women’s Youth Association Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng. See Seoul Women’s Youth Alliance Kyoto school, 255, 261n66 labor movement: and anarchism, 48, 156; and class, 29, 142; and communist party, 33, 35; and feminism, 199; and forced conversion, 236; individualism in, 30–31; and Japa nese colonialism, 25–31; and Kang Kyŏngae, 222–23, 225; and KAPF, 59, 135; and left ist culture, 14, 22, 38, pl. 1, pl. 2, pl. 5, pl. 7; and literature, 14, 135, 136; and minjung movement, 274; and mutual aid associations, 28, 47–49, 50, 54, 204; and politics, 31, 55; and Proletkult, 56–57; protests by, 29, 30, 80; and realism, 139–40; and reportage, 140–43, 150, 156, 157; and thought societies, 50; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 163, 164, 166, 168, 194 Lamp (Tŭngbul; Kim Namch’ŏn), 256, 265 land ownership, 27, 49, 180 Laughlin, Charles, 114n58 Lazarus, Neil, 10n20 Le Bon, Gustav, 117 Lee, Hyangjin, 39n45, 69n53 Lee, Namhee, 272n9 Lee, Peter, 5, 32 Lee Chung-sik, 5 Lee Jin-Kyung, 96, 136

321

Lee Sang-Kyung, 199 leftism: vs. aestheticism, 109–16; colonial, 1–2, 4–5, 38–39, 268–76; and cultural reform movement, 98–100; defined, 16; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 235; and labor movement, 29, 31; legacy of, 268–76; literary, 43–88, 268–76; and March First Movement, 22, 32, 33, 57, 58, 75; and modernity, 12, 100; and peasants, 22, 24, 38, 49, 143, 147; and people’s culture, 100–107; resilience of, 265–66; varieties of, 7, 162 left ist culture, 31–37; vs. bourgeoisie, 122, 268; and colonialism, 3, 6–7, 90, 121, 268–69, 273; and communism, 43–46; vs. Confucianism, 120–21; and ethnicity, 14; and fascism, 273; in Germany, 115; international transmission of, 13–14; in Japan, 10, 13, 32, 39, 104, 115; and KAPF, 14–15, 45–46; and KCP, 35–36, 38–39; and literature, 120–22; and Marxism, 1, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 39, 43–46, 88, 125; and modern politics, 12, 273–76; and nationalism, 5, 7, 8–9, 38, 44, 45, 46, 274; in Russia, 39, 56; and socialism, 8–9, 38, 39, 44, 45, 274; and traditionalism, 5, 15, 86; and USSR, 10, 43, 44; and women, 12, 45, 46, 197–98 left ist writers: and forced conversion, 235–39; Japa nese, 10; and nationalism, 36, 272; in North Korea, 230n68, 269, 270, 271; organizations of, 145n46, 256n56, 270n6; rediscovery of, 271–73; women as, 82, 230n68, 268. See also particular individuals Lenin, V. I., 9, 32n28, 57, 118, 273 Leninism, 171 Liang Qichao, 50n14, 94 liberalism: and anarchism, 54; and cultural reform, 98; defined, 16; and feminism, 82, 205, 208, 228–31, 231; and left ist culture, 13, 45, 46; and literature, 15; and pan-Asianism, 256; and poverty, 132; vs. socialism, 16, 22; and world wars, 253

322

Index

Liebknecht, Karl, 203n13 Life of Klim Samgin (Gorky), 261n68 Lincoln, Abraham, 164 literacy, 60, 89, 104, 230 “Literary Club, The” (Munye kurakpu; Kim Namch’ŏn), 141 literary criticism: and feminism, 198–99; and KAPF, 72; and social criticism, 240–41, 245; socialist, 53–54 “Literary Critic’s Attitude in the Age of Class Struggle, A” (T’ujaenggi e innŭn munye pip’yŏngga ŭi t’aedo; Pak Yŏnghŭi), 133 literature: aestheticism vs. social engagement in, 107–16, 121; agrarian nationalist, 144; bourgeois, 109, 240; children’s, 69n54; Confucian, 120–21; experimental, 70n57, 78, 130, 141; of indictment (kobal munhak), 240–41; Japa nese, 94, 130, 174, 175, 211n32; Korean in Japan, 3, 10, 83, 93, 98, 191; modern Korean, 83–84, 95–96; national (minjok munhak), 89, 96, 143; peasant (nongmin munhak), 76, 142, 143–56, 158; people’s, 121; popu lar, 94, 103; of poverty, 59, 127–33; pure (sunsu munhak), 270; rural (nongch’on munhak), 144; vernacular, 91–95, 139, 142, 148, 186; Western, 88, 93, 96, 98; women’s (yŏryu munhak), 79, 197–231. See also I-novel; New Literature (sinmunhak) movement; New Tendency literature; novels literature, left ist, 43–88; and agriculture, 119, 240; and anarchism, 13, 50n14, 51–55, 77, 151, 269; and antiwar movements, 61, 70, 236; ban on, 11–12; censorship of, 36, 37, 39, 233; in China, 14, 98; class in, 83, 101–106, 118–19, 127–29, 131, 133, 134, 136, 198; and Cold War, 4, 7, 11, 162, 269, 273; economic issues in, 14, 118–19, 151, 152, 153, 241, 242; emotion in, 96, 107; and forced conversion, 237;

individualism in, 15, 51–52, 93, 96, 107, 134, 145, 198; and KAPF, 13, 55–65, 67–68, 69n54, 72, 83–84, 103, 133–43, 145–46, 149, 158; and labor movement, 14, 22, 135, 136; and left ist culture, 120–22; legacy of, 268–76; and Marxism, 13, 15, 62, 127, 130–31, 133, 135, 136, 266, 269; and the masses, 103; materialism in, 15, 118–20, 135, 155; and modernity, 15, 89–122; in North Korea, 107; and politics, 39, 121–22; as social criticism, 240–41, 245; and socialism, 13, 37, 55–65, 83–84, 120–22, 126, 128, 131, 145, 200; and weakness of left, 31; workingclass characters in, 104–6 literature, proletarian: bildungsroman, 222, 224; vs. bourgeois, 240; on class, 133, 134, 136; and cultural differences, 158–59; and culture, 275–76; gender issues in, 227–28, 230; grotesque, 127, 129–33, 156; Japa nese, 191; and KAPF, 67–68, 133–43, 149; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 239, 240, 247; and labor reportage, 140–43; legacy of, 269; vs. littérature engagée, 270n4; and minjung democratization, 272; as parable, 136, 156; vs. peasant literature, 146, 151; on poverty, 132–33; and realism, 137–40, 229n67, 266– 67; Soviet, 136; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 163, 167, 173–74, 178, 181, 183 “Literature and Life” (Munhak kwa saenghwal; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 185 Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 72 Literature as Thought (Shishō to shite no bungaku; Tosaka Jun), 242 Love and Crime (Sarang kwa choe; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 186 love plus revolution (aiqing jia geming) genre, 226 “Lucky Day, A” (Unsu chohŭn nal; Hyŏn Chin’gŏn), 106–7 Lukács, Georg, 112, 185, 234, 243, 244, 261n68 Luxemburg, Rosa, 203n13

Index “Madman of Justice” (Seigi no kyōjin; Ōsugi Sakae), 176n30 “Mad Woman’s Memoir” (Kwangin sugi; Paek Sinae), 227, 258 Maek. See Barley magazines, 3, pls.1–10; left ist, 36n41, 77; popu lar, 77, 79, 103; reportage in, 141; and women, 201, 210–11, 230n70. See also particular publications Management (Kyŏngyŏng; Kim Namch’ŏn), 245, 257 Manchuria (Manchukuo): Chinese in, 212, 214; Japa nese in, 26, 212; Kang Kyŏngae in, 211, 214; Korean migration to, 27, 128, 138n23, 181, 206, 211; and peasant literature, 145; refugees from, 197; women in, 212, 214, 217 Manchurian Incident (1931), 187 Mansebo (newspaper), 95 March First Movement (1919), 2, 21, 22, 24, 28, 75; and communist party, 32, 33; and KAPF, 57, 58; suppression of, 131; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 176n30, 177, 178 March First Movement (Samil undong; Kim Namch’ŏn), 246n35 March Society (Samwŏrhoe), 203, 203n13 “Market Day, A” (Changnal; Kim Namch’ŏn), 232n1 Marx, Karl, 9n14, 16, 54, 86, 146, 172, 226n60; and anarchism, 46, 47; in Japan, 32; on materialism, 117–18, 119; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 164, 183 Marxism: vs. anarchism, 2, 32, 46, 47, 54–55, 60–63, 84, 87; and capitalism, 49; and class, 11, 56; and colonialism, 9, 10, 255; defined, 16; and everyday life, 239–45; and forced conversions, 256; and Hometown, 151, 152; and KAPF, 2, 5, 45, 55–65, 72, 87, 126, 127, 131, 133–34, 158, 268; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 235, 239, 245, 251, 257, 259; and left ist culture, 1, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 39, 43–46, 88, 125; and left ist literature,

323

13, 15, 62, 127, 130–31, 133, 135, 136, 266, 269; and left ist nationalism, 73–74, 171; and modernity, 90, 261; and nationalism, 66–67, 86–87, 195; and New Tendency literature, 127, 130–31, 133; and New Women movement, 202; as orthodoxy, 55, 84–88; and pan-Asianism, 257; and peasants, 25, 68; and the people, 102; and proletarian literature, 135, 136; and realism, 137, 156, 266–67; in USSR, 21, 46, 125; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 160, 194 materialism: and aesthetics, 116–20; and the body, 119–20; dialectical, 112n45, 135, 137n20, 155; and everyday life, 266–67; historical, 117–18, 120, 241; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 234, 235, 241, 245; and leftist culture, 121; in literature, 15, 118–20, 135, 155; modern, 241, 261; rational, 261; and realism, 119, 120, 137n20, 155; and romanticism, 226; Western, 260; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 161, 185, 189–90, 194, 196 Mei Niang, 214n40 middle class. See bourgeoisie migration: to China, 3, 13, 47, 48n8, 50, 50n14, 93, 203; to Manchuria, 27, 128, 138n23, 181, 206, 211; to Russia, 31–32 minjok (national) literary discourse, 12n23 minjung (the people), 7, 121. See also democratization movement; people, the Miyamoto Yuriko, 202 modernism: and aestheticism, 109; European, 253, 267; and everyday life, 266–67; vs. KAPF, 126; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 245; and modernization, 244; and pure literature, 270n4; vs. realism, 53–54, 110, 243, 266–67 modernity: alternative, 15, 116, 121, 268; and anarchism, 46, 86, 90; and bourgeoisie, 89, 244, 252–53, 267; capitalist, 120, 209, 253; colonial, 4, 12, 173, 180–81, 192, 245, 252–53, 276;

324

Index

modernity (continued) cultural, 89–122, 276; and economic development, 89–90; and everyday life, 243n31, 244–45, 255; fear of, 89–90; and feminism, 209; and gender, 263; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 234, 235, 245, 248, 251, 252; and left ism, 12, 38, 100; and left ist literature, 15, 89–122; and New Women movement, 205; overcoming (kindai no chōkoku), 256; and pan-Asianism, 255–56, 260; and reportage, 114–15, 140; and spectacle, 235, 244; spread of, 252–53; urban, 234, 235, 244; Western, 90, 244, 261; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 173, 180–81, 192 modernization, 46, 79, 159; and the body, 120; in literature, 68, 107, 145, 149, 161; and modernism, 244; Western vs. Korean, 44; and women, 201, 209, 214, 217, 228. See also economic development; industrialization modernologio (kohyŏnhak), 251 moga (modern girls), 207, 222 morals (tōdoku), 242–43 Mother (Gorky), 138–39 motherhood: cult of, 216, 220, 229; male writers on, 220–21; proletarian, 212, 216, 218, 221 Mouron, Adolphe, pl. 6 Muddy Currents (T’angnyu; Ch’ae Mansik), 79, 119 Mun Ilp’yŏng, 48n8 Munjang (Writing; magazine), 246 Murayama Tomoyoshi, 236 Musanja ( journal), 191n58 musanja (the unpropertied), 56, 67, 82, 86, 104, 130–31, 133, 156 Musanja tongmaeng. See Proletarian Alliance Mushanōkōji Saneatsu, 232n1 music, 68–69, 69n51 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Kropotkin), 47

Mutual Aid Association of Women Students (Yŏhaksaeng sangjohoe), 204 Mutual aid associations, 28, 47–49, 50, 54, 204; rural, 148, 151–53 Mutual Aid Society (Tongjesa), 47 Myers, Brian, 4, 5, 126, 152 Myoji. See Grave; On the Eve of the Uprising Na Hyesŏk, 198, 201 Na Kyŏngsŏk, 48, 53 Na Tohyang, 76, 144–45, pl. 9 Na Un’gyu, 132 Nabeyama Sadachika, 237 Nakanishi Inosuke, 55 Naktong River (Naktonggang; Cho Myŏnghŭi), 136, 247 NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio), 60, 146n46 nationalism: agrarian, 143–44, 151, 153, 155; and anarchism, 47, 50n15; bourgeois, 9n16, 86, 160; and class, 9n16, 11, 92, 180; concept of, 4, 92; and cult of motherhood, 217; and cultural reform, 92, 99; in Europe vs. Korea, 85; vs. feminism, 199, 208–9, 231; and forced conversions, 237, 256; and individualism, 96, 98; vs. internationalism, 14, 32; and Kang Kyŏngae, 212, 214; and KAPF, 2, 66–67; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 234; and labor movement, 31; and left ist culture, 5, 7, 8–9, 15, 36, 38, 44, 45, 46, 272, 274; in literature, 13, 36, 185, 272; in Manchuria, 214; and Marxism, 66– 67, 86–87, 195; and minjung movement, 13, 274; and New Women movement, 205; in North Korea, 12, 276; and Sin’ganhoe, 64– 65; and socialism, 21–22, 32, 73, 74–75, 81, 113, 120, 239, 269–70, 274–75; in South Korea, 276; and thought societies, 50; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 16, 73, 75, 160, 167n13, 168–70, 178–80, 182, 183, 185, 194–96

Index nationalism, cultural, 8, 64, 97; in India, 195; vs. left ist nationalism, 74–75, 171, 195–96; and nativism, 185, 186, 196; and Sin’ganhoe, 171–72; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 161, 162, 166, 189 nationalism, left ist, 16, 86–87, 99, 268; and class, 73, 86, 171; vs. cultural nationalism, 74–75, 171, 195–96; and Japa nese colonialism, 9, 67, 74, 171; and left ist literature, 269; and Marxism, 73–74, 171; and Sin’ganhoe, 74, 75, 171–72; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 75, 161, 162–73, 189, 194, 195 Nationalist Party (KMT; China), 171, 212, 214n39 nativism, 143, 152, 153, 186, 196 Natsume Sōseki, 164n9 “Natural Growth and Objective Consciousness” (Shizen seichō to mokuteki ishiki; Aono Suekichi), 134 naturalism, 6, 126, 174, 175, 185; vs. realism, 119 Nazism, 122. See also fascism Neo-Confucianism, 116 neoromanticism, 96 New Korea Society. See Sin’ganhoe New Left, 87 New Life. See Sin saenghwal New Literature (sinmunhak) movement, 92, 98n13, 103, 185 New Novel (sinsosŏl), 94–95, 102–3, 108 Newspaper Law (Sinmunji pŏp), 36n39 Newspapers, 91, 95; vernacular Korean in, 92–93. See also particular newspapers New Tendency (sin’gyŏnghyang) literature, 5, 38, 60, 126, 127–33, 155–57; and anarchism, 53, 127, 131–32, 133; vs. proletarian literature, 134; and romanticism, 76 “New Tendency Literature and Its Status in the Literary World” (Sin’gyŏnghyangp’a munhak kwa kŭ mundanjŏk chiwi; Pak Yŏnghŭi), 127–28

325

New Women, 81–82; and bourgeoisie, 202, 205, 228; and cult of motherhood, 217; literary murder of, 205–7; magazines for, 3, 79, 201, 210, 229 New Women movement: and fictional stereotypes, 205–6; and Japa nese women, 201; vs. socialism, 198, 199, 201–2, 205–6; and women’s literature, 199, 200 “New Year’s Eve” (Cheya; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54, 108, 174, 176n30, 179 “Night Wanderers” (Pamjung e kŏninŭnja; Yu Chino), 78 Nihilist Party, Russian, 50n14 Nishida Kitarō, 255, 259 Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory (Chilso piryo kongjang; Yi Pungmyŏng), 68n50, 119, 142 nodongja (laborers), 133. See also proletariat Noksŏngdang. See Green Star Pharmacy Nongmin (Peasant; journal), 76 Northern Labor Party (Pukchosŏn nodongdang), 270 Northern Light (Pukkŭk ŭi yŏmyŏng; Pak Hwasŏng), 227 Northern Star Society (Puksŏnghoe), 32 Northern Wind Society (Pukp’unghoe), 33, 55 North Korea, 4, 5, 6n11; in Cold War, 194, 271, 275n14; and division, 162, 194; KAPF in, 125; and left ist culture, 107, 162; left ist writers in, 230n68, 233, 269, 270, 271; nationalism in, 12, 276; socialist women in, 203n12, 204nn15–17, 230n68; South Korean views of, 274–75 novels: collective, 149–50, 157; ethnographic, 19; family chronology (kajok yŏndaegi sosŏl), 243n32; Japa nese political (seiji shōsetsu), 94; vernacular, 101; wall, 114, 115. See also I-novel; New Novel

326

Index

O Ch’ŏnsŏk, 201–2 “On Changing the Method for Creation” (Changjak pangbŏp e issŏsŏ chŏnhwan ŭi munje; Kim Namch’ŏn), 238 “One Morning” (Aru asa; Kim Namch’ŏn), 265n77 “On National Culture” (Frantz Fanon), 195 On the Eve of the Uprising (Mansejŏn; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 75, 119, 162, 173, 178–83, 185; first version of, 51, 53, 182; revisions to, 182 “On the Wall Novel” (Pyŏksosŏl e taehayŏ; Yi Sŏch’an), 115 Orientalism (Edward Said), 88 Ŏrini (Children; magazine), pl. 5 Ōsugi Sakae, 48, 84, 167, 176n30 “Our Love” (Uridŭl ŭi sarang; Song Yŏng), 226 outcasts (ch’ŏnmin), 101 Paejae High School, 58–59 Paek Ch’ŏl, 11n21, 84n88, 146, 237 Paek Namun, 170 Paek Sinae, 79, 198, 210, 216, 220, 227, 229, 258 Paek Taejin, 95 Paekcho (White tide; periodical), 57n29, 76, 99n13 Paik Nak-chung, 12n23, 87–88 Pak Hŏnyŏng, 33n33, 34, 203 Pak Hwasŏng, 79, 141, 198–99, 202–3, 210, 229; and cult of motherhood, 216; and New Women, 205–6, 208; and socialist patriarchy, 227 Pak Kilsu, 128, 128n5 Pak Seyŏng, 59, 69n54, pl. 5 Pak T’aewŏn, 244, 251 Pak Ŭnsik, 94n5 Pak Yŏl, 50, 50n15 Pak Yŏnghŭi, 56, 59, 98n13, 103, 117, 271n7; on aestheticism, 109, 110; arrest of, 154; forced conversion of, 237, 238; and KAPF, 43, 45, 58, 61, 63; and Marxism, 133–34; on New

Tendency literature, 127–28; on proletariat, 105 pan-Asianism, 15, 45, 122, 234, 235, 255–65; and fascism, 255; origins of, 255; as war time ideology, 256, 263, 265 Pang Chŏnghwan, 69n54. See also Ŏrini “Paper Factory Village” (Cheji kongjangch’on; Yi Kiyŏng), 39, 119 “Papermakers” (Chongi ttŭnŭn saramdŭl; Yi Kiyŏng), 138–39 PASKYULA, 55, 57 patriarchy, socialist, 221, 227–28, 229 Patriotic Association of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munin pogukhoe), 256n56, 270n6 Peace Preservation Law, 137n22, 236 Peace under Heaven (T’aep’yŏng ch’ŏnha; Ch’ae Mansik), 79 peasants (nongmin): and anarchism, 46, 54; and colonial nationalism, 180; and Confucianism, 147, 151; and cultural reform movement, 143, 144; and feminism, 204; and Japa nese militarism, 29–30; and labor movement, 28; and left ism, 22, 24, 38, 49, 143, 147; literature of, 76, 142, 143–56, 158; vs. proletariat, 5, 7, 145, 146; rebellions by, 7, 21, 22–25, 25, 89, 91, 132. See also Tonghak peasant uprisings “Peasant’s Daughter, A” (Sojagin ŭi ttal; Hŏ Munil), 76 “Penury” (Chŏkpin; Paek Sinae), 216, 218 people, the: culture of, 100–107, 110; literature of, 121; terms for, 7, 104 Pilnyak, Boris, 72, 73 Pip’an (Criticism; journal), 3, 36, 77, 80, 206, 206, 254, pl. 1 poetry, 77, 108, 112, 117, 186, 272 Pom (Spring; Yi Kiyŏng), 239n21 “Poor, The” (Kananhan saramdŭl; Yi Kiyŏng), 128–29, 130, 131, 132 Posŏng High School, 58–59

Index “Poverty: Part I, Chapter II” (Pin che il chang che i kwa; Ch’ae Mansik), 220–21 Prince Maŭi (Maŭi t’aeja; Yi Kwangsu), 186 Proletarian Alliance (Musanja tongmaeng), 55 proletarian grotesque, 127, 129–33, 156 proletarian wave, 3, 13–15, 84–87; defined, 1; legacy of, 4, 15, 268–76. See also left ism; left ist culture proletariat (p’ŭroret’aria), 56, 156; in left ist literature, 104–7; vs. peasants, 5, 7, 145, 146. See also literature, proletarian; musanja Proletkult (Russian Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations), 56–57 “Proposal for National Reconstruction” (Minjok kaejoron; Yi Kwangsu), 116–17 prostitution, 204; in literature, 77–78, 118–19, 230 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 46 Psychology of Peoples (Le Bon), 117 Publication Law (Ch’ulp’an pŏp), 36n39 publishing industry, 39n46, 89, pl. 1; and women, 210–11, 229 Puin kongnon (Women’s public forum; magazine), 140 Pukchosŏn nodongdang. See Northern Labor Party Pukp’unghoe. See Northern Wind Society Puksŏnghoe. See Northern Star Society “Pul” (Fire; Hyŏn Chin’gŏn), 76n69 Pulkaemi. See Red Ant Theater Group P’ŭroret’aria yesul tongmaeng. See Alliance of Proletarian Arts P’yehŏ (Ruins; journal), 99n13, 164, 165 P’yobonsil ŭi ch’ŏnggaeguri. See Green Frog in the Specimen Room Pyŏlgŏn’gon (Another world; magazine), 77, 106, 114, 140

327

“Question of Human Nature and the Future of the Novel, The” (Sosŏl ŭi changnae wa in’gansŏng munje; Kim Namch’ŏn), 261 Quiet Flows the Don (Sholokhov), 149 Rabinowitz, Paula, 229n67 racism, 14, 17, 54, 117; and colonialism, 9, 10, 172, 179–80, 253n51; and feminism, 200, 231; in Japan, 27n16, 83; in Manchuria, 214; and panAsianism, 260; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 179, 194 RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), 137n20 Rashōmon (Akutagawa Ryōnosuke), 232n1 “Rat Fire” (Sŏhwa; Yi Kiyŏng), 147 reading circles, 37, 103–4, 147 realism, 4, 15, 107; vs. aestheticism, 110–13; and class, 113, 139, 141; critical, 185, 186; and customs, 243; dialectical materialist, 137n20, 155; and forced conversion, 237, 238; historical, 243, 267; and I-novel, 175; and Kang Kyŏngae, 198; and KAPF, 157, 158; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 234–35, 240–41, 243–46, 265n78; and left ist culture, 121; and Marxism, 137, 156, 266–67; and materialism, 119, 120, 137n20, 155; and minjung democratization, 272; vs. modernism, 53–54, 110, 243, 266–67; and proletarian literature, 137–40, 229n67, 266–67; and reportage, 114–15; Western, 93; and Yi Kiyŏng, 138–39; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 161, 185, 194, 196 realism, socialist, 9, 110, 112, 136, 225, 238; in North Korea, 276; Soviet, 112n45, 113, 137, 155, 156, pl. 7; Soviet vs. Korean, 153–55 Red Ant Theater Group (Pulkaemi), 69 “Red Flame” (Hongyŏm; Ch’oe Sŏhae), 145 Red Love (Kollontai), 204

328

Index

Red Peasant Union Movement, 143, 145 “Red Rat” (Pulgŭn chwi; Kim Kijin), 130 Red Union Movement, 29 Red Wave Society (Sekirankai), 203 “Reflection on the Woman Question, A” (Puin munje ŭi ilgoch’al: Sin Iryong), 202 religion, 25n8, 58n30, 195, 231, 233, 253n51. See also Catholicism; Christianity; Tonghak Remarque, Erich Maria, 70, 236 reportage, 68, 103, 119, 147, 272; factory, 114–15; labor, 140–43, 150, 156, 157 Rice Riots (Japan), 28 rickshaw pullers, 104, 105–7 righteous armies (ŭibyŏng), 24 Robinson, Michael, 4, 5, 8, 43–44, 98n12, 99, 103, 276 romanticism, 76, 96, 167; and aestheticism, 107–8; and forced conversion, 238; in poetry, 112; and socialism, 226–27 “Rotary Press, The” (Yunjŏn’gi; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 167–69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 54, 174 rural reform, 156; and mutual aid associations, 148, 151–53. See also peasants rural revitalization movement, 143, 151 Russia, 39, 50n14, 56–57, 125, 137n20, 273; and Korean leftists, 3, 14, 31–32, 33, 48n8, 158, 198n2; workercorrespondent movement in, 140. See also Soviet Union Russian Revolution (1917), 1, 21, 22, 32, 46, 125, 163 Russo-Japanese War (1905), 35n36 “Sacrifice” (Hŭisaeng; Chŏkchin), 52n18 Sad History of King Tangjong (Tanjong aesa; Yi Kwangsu), 186 Said, Edward, 7–8, 85, 88 Sakai Toshihiko, 118, 176n30 Salt (Sogom; Kang Kyŏngae), 82, 212–19, 219, 221, 224, 227, 229; social context of, 200, 215–18

Samch’ŏlli (Three thousand li; magazine), 77, 79, 211 Samdae. See Three Generations Samgwang (Three lights; journal), 48, 99n13, 164 “Samnyong the Mute” (Pŏngŏri Samnyongi; Na Tohyang), 76, 144–45, pl. 9 Samwŏrhoe. See March Society “Sand Guard” (Sabang kongsa; Han Sŏrya), 141 Sano Manabu, 237 Sata Ineko, 202 Scalapino, Robert, 5, 32 “Scum, The” (P’yemul; Kwŏn Kuhyŏn), 77 Seitō (Bluestocking) group, 201 Sejong, King, 101 Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), 203 self-strengthening (chagang) movement, 92 Seoul Kino, 69 Seoul Women’s Youth Alliance (Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng), 81 Seoul Women’s Youth Association (Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe), 81 “Servant’s Son, A” (Haengnang chasik; Na Tohyang), 76 “Sewer Construction” (Hasudo kongsa; Pak Hwasŏng), 141 sexuality, 174, 203n12; in male writing, 118–19, 144–45, 151n58, 207–8; and New Women movement, 82, 201, 202, 208, 209; in socialist women’s movement, 81–82, 221 Shaw, George Bernard, 176n30 Shiga Naoya, 174, 232n1 Shimazaki Tōson, 174, 187 Shin Gi-Wook, 5, 31, 49n12, 144, 276 Shin Kyusik, 47 Shinkankakuha (New Sensationalists), 78, 130 Shin taehan (New Korea; periodical), 50n14

Index “Shoes and Poetry” (Yanghwa wa siga; Na Kyŏngsŏk), 53 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 149, 154n69 Sidae ilbo, 170, 182 Sidae kongnon (Contemporary public forum; magazine), 140 sijo (vernacular poetry), 186 “Silchin” (Madness; Yi Kiyŏng), 130 Silch’ŏn munhak (Letters in action; journal), 272 Silverberg, Miriam, 130 Sin Ch’aeho, 48n8, 50, 94n5, 98n13, 117 Sin Iryong, 202 Sin Kosong, 69n51 Sin Paegu, 49 Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society), 2, 33, 79, 81, 188, 210; founding of, 171–72; and KAPF, 63–65, 67, 74; and left ist nationalism, 74, 75, 171–72; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 74, 160, 161, 162, 186 Sin kajŏng (New household; magazine), 79, 210, 212, 216, 219 Sin kyedan (New steps; journal), 36, 140 Sino-Japanese War, first (1894–95), 23 Sino-Japanese War, second (1937–45), 26, 237, 254. See also Greater East Asian War Sin saenghwal (New life; periodical), 51, 52, 101, 182, 202 Sin tonga (New East Asia; magazine), 79, 210–11 Sin yŏja (New women; magazine), 201 Sin yŏsŏng (New women; magazine), 3, 79, 210, 229, pl. 10 Sirhak (practical learning), 272 “Sketches from a Slave Market” (Inyuk sijang chŏmgyŏng; Kwŏn Kuhyŏn), 77 “Sketch from a Dark Night” (Ŏdum esŏ chuŭn sk’ech’i; Yi Pungmyŏng), 141 slaves (nobi), 101 Slope (Pit’al; Pak Hwasŏng), 205–6 Smith, Norman, 214n40 Sŏ Sangho, 191n58

329

social democracy, 1, 162, 171, 193 socialism: and anarchism, 16, 53, 85; and Cold War, 276; colonial, 1, 6–7; and cultural reform movement, 98–100, 102–3, 120, 121; defined, 16; elitism in, 99–100; in Europe, 8, 22, 273; failure of, 259; and feminism, 13, 15, 87, 198–99, 200, 208–21, 228–31; and forced conversion, 235–39, 242, 256; as foreign, 239, 269–70; and free love, 226; influence of, 196; international, 8, 85, 112, 127, 128, 158; and Japa nese colonialism, 1, 6–9, 21, 117; and Kang Kyŏngae, 212, 223; and Kim Namch’ŏn, 234, 235; and labor movement, 31, 105–7; and left ist culture, 8–9, 38, 39, 44, 45, 274; and left ist literature, 13, 37, 55–65, 83–84, 120–22, 126, 128, 131, 145, 200, 273; and left ist nationalism, 171, 172; legacy of, 4, 268–76; vs. liberalism, 22; and Marxism, 134; and modernity, 89–90, 116; vs. nationalism, 21–22, 32, 73, 74–75, 81, 113, 120, 239, 269–70, 274–75; vs. New Women movement, 198, 199, 201–2, 205–6; in North Korea, 271; and patriarchy, 225–28; and peasant unrest, 22–25; and reading groups, 104; and romanticism, 226–27; and Sin’ganhoe, 171–72; Soviet, 6, 8, 82, 87; and terrorism, 190; varieties of, 84–88; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 2n1, 73, 160–63, 166, 169–70, 173–74, 183, 189, 194, 196 Sogom. See Salt Song Chinu, 216n45 Song Kyewŏl, 79, 216n44, 229, pl. 10 Song Yŏng, 56, 57n29, 59, 69n54, 128, 133, 226, pl. 5 Song of Ariran, 48n8 Sorenson, Clark, 24n6 “Sorrow of the Weak” (Yakhan cha ŭi sŭlp’ŭm; Kim Tongin), 105, 107 So Says the Cloud (Kurŭm i malhagi rŭl; Kim Namch’ŏn), 256

330

Index

Sound of Waves (Haejoŭm; Kim Kijin), 141 South Korea: in Cold War, 194, 276; and colonial left ist culture, 12, 116, 269, 272–75; democracy in, 107, 162; democratization movement in, 3–4, 13, 75n65, 125, 233; and division, 162, 194; KAPF in, 125–26; left ist writers in, 211–12, 233, 270, 271, 273; and North Korea, 274–75 Soviet Union (USSR): and colonialism, 9; influence of, 238, 239; and KAPF, 63, 158; and Korean Communist Party, 35; Koreans in, 3, 14, 31–32, 83n84; and left ist culture, 10, 43, 44; Marxism in, 21, 46, 125; and North Korea, 270, 275; proletarian literature in, 136; rural economy of, 153; socialism in, 6, 8, 82, 87; socialist realism in, 112n45, 113, 137, 153–55, 156; socialist women in, 203, 203n14; and unification of socialists, 82. See also Russia Spark Society (Yŏmgunsa), 55, 57 Spengler, Oswald, 253 “Spring” (Pom; Ch’oe Sŏngsu), 191n58 “Spring Night” (Ch’unso; Pak Hwasŏng), 216 Stalin, Joseph, 35, 56, 82, 203n14, 269 Streamside Sketches (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’ungyŏng; Pak T’aewŏn), 251 students: abroad, 2, 28, 32, 47, 48, 56, 58, 95, 148, 163, 164, 201n7; activism of, 1, 37, 48, 50, 57n29, 58–59, 79, 80, 104, 148, 163, 204, 274; and KAPF, 58–59; in literature, 128, 144, 147, 148, 175, 180, 187, 222; women, 201–3, 204, 229n68 T’ado chegukchuŭi tongmaeng. See Anti-Imperialist Alliance Taehan maeil sinbo (The Korean daily news), 92, 93 Taejung Kongnon (Public forum; magazine), 77 Taishō democracy (Japan), 163

Taiwan, 236, 263 Tale of Im Kkŏkchŏng (Im Kkŏkchŏng; Hong Myŏnghŭi), 75 Tale of Poverty, The (Bimbo monogatari; Kawakami Hajime), 193 Talman, Janet, 186 Tanabe Hajime, 259 T’ap (Pagoda; Han Sŏrya), 239n21 T’arhwan (The conquest; periodical), 50n14 Tayama Katai, 174 Tears of Blood (Hyŏl ŭi nu; Yi Injik), 95 terrorism, 144, 176n30, 188, 190; and anarchism, 32, 50nn14–15, 131 theater, 57n29, 157, 236; and KAPF, 59, 68–69, 72 Third Front (Che 3 chŏnsŏnp’a), 63, 134n15 Th ird Korean Communist Party (M. L. Party), 170 Third Space, 275 Thomas, John, 164 Thornber, Karen, 177, 188n53 Thought and Custom (Shisō to fūzoku; Tosaka Jun), 242 Thought Offenders’ Protection and Supervision Law (1936), 250 thought societies (sasang tanch’e), 32–33, 50 “Three-Faced Mirror, The” (Sammyŏn’gyŏng; Yu Chino), 78n76 Three Generations (Samdae; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 75, 119, 162, 186, 187–92, 191; as national allegory, 188–89; revisions to, 193 Tikhonov, Nicolai, 72 Tokuda Shūsei, 174 Tonga ilbo (newspaper), 30, 34, 144, 164, 222 Tonghak (Eastern Learning), 23 Tonghak peasant uprisings, 7, 23–24, 25n8, 46, 49, 58n30, 91 Tongjesa. See Mutual Aid Society Tongjisa. See Comrade Society Tongmaek (Artery; Kim Namch’ŏn), 243n32

Index Tongnip sinmun (The independent; newspaper), 91, 92 Tosaka Jun, 242, 251n47, 261 “Toward a Concept of National Literature” (Minjok munhak kaenyŏm ŭi chŏngnip ŭl wihae; Paik Nak-chung), 87–88 T’owŏrhoe (Earth and moon society; theater group), 57n29, 69n52 traditionalism: vs. anarchism, 47, 52n18, 54, 55, 86; and class structure, 100–101; and Hometown, 152–53; and left ist culture, 5, 15, 86; and left ist nationalists, 74; vs. modernity, 90, 91; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 169 Tragedy of Korea (McKenzie), 25 “Transitional Time, A” (Kwadogi; Han Sŏrya), 138n23 traveling theories, 85 “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (Edward Said), 7–8 travelogues, 173, 178, 180–81, 183 Treason Incident (Japan; 1911), 176n30 Tretiakov, Sergei, 114 Trotsky, Leon, 72, 169 Tuesday Society (Hwayohae), 33, 55 ture (mutual aid orga nization), 148, 151, 152, 153 Two Hearts (Isim; Yŏm Sangsŏp), 186, 207 Ŭmak kwa si (Music and poetry; magazine), 68, pl. 4 Underground Village (Chihach’on; fi lm; Kang Ho), 69 “Underground Village” (Chihach’on; Kang Kyŏngae), 119, 216 United States (U.S.), 3, 187; economic crisis in, 16–17; in Korea, 269, 276; Koreans in, 48n8, 93, 95 “Unsu choŭn nal” (A lucky day; Hyŏn Chin’gŏn), 76n69 urban culture: bourgeois, 244, 252–53, 267; and modernity, 234, 235, 244; proletarian, 146 urbanization, 89, 90, 140

331

Uri tongmu (Our comrades; periodical), 82 USA (Dos Passos), 149 Van Gogh, Vincent, 262 “Village of Commoners, A” (Minch’on; Yi Kiyŏng), 145 Virgin Land under the Plow (Sholokhov), 149 V-narod movement, 144, 151 Vpered (Forward), 56 wall novel, 114, 115 Washington, Booker T., 171–72 Waste (Nangbi; Kim Namch’ŏn), 245, 257 “Water Mill” (Mulle panga; Na Tohyang), 144 Watsuji Tetsurō, 259 Wells, Kenneth, 199, 208–9 West, the: influence of, 92, 93, 96, 98, 108, 174, 244, 260; and modernity, 44, 90, 244, 261; and the Orient, 260; and pan-Asianism, 255–56, 259–60. See also Europe; United States “What Is Literature?” (Munhak iran hao?; Yi Kwangsu), 95–96 Williams, Raymond, 1, 4, 276 “Will to Life” (Saeng ŭl kuhanŭn mam; Yi Iksang), 52n18 “Woman, The” (Kŭ yŏja; Kang Kyŏngae), 205–6 Woman under Socialism (Bebel), 202 women: bourgeois, 79, 81, 202, 205, 228; and communist party, 33, 203, 204n15, 210; and Confucianism, 81, 208; economic issues of, 204, 208, 211; education of, 101, 201, 202, 209, 210, 228; enfranchisement of, 205, 209, 228; and individualism, 198, 201, 202, 215; Japa nese, 201, 202–3, 211n32; and Japa nese colonialism, 205, 209–11, 217, 218, 228, 229, 263; and left ist culture, 12, 45, 46, 197–98; as left ist writers, 79, 81, 82, 141, 230n68, 268; in literature, 151n58,

332

Index

women (c0ntinued) 258–65; literature of, 79, 197–231; magazines for, 79, 201, 210–11, 212, 216, 219, 230n70, pl. 8, pl. 10; in Manchuria, 212, 214, 217; and modernization, 201, 209, 214, 217, 228; movements of, 57, 200, 201–9, 229; in North Korea, 203n12, 204nn15–17, 230n68; proletarian, 27–28, 31, 197–231, 224; and publishing industry, 210–11; socialist (sahoejuui yŏsŏng), 2, 197–98, 200, 201–9; as students, 201–3, 204, 229n68; in USSR, 203, 203n14; yangban, 101, 202. See also feminism; motherhood; New Women Women Writers’ Association (Yŏryu munhakhoe), 198n2 “Wŏnbo” (Wŏnbo; Yi Kiyŏng), 145, 147 Wŏnsan general strike (1929), 29, 30 worker-correspondent movement, 140, 157 “World of One’s Own Creation” (Chagi ŭi ch’angjohan segye; Kim Tongin), 113 “World through a Woman’s Eyes, The” (Yŏsŏng ŭi nun ŭro pon segye; Chŏng Ch’ilsŏng), 206 World War II. See Greater East Asian War; Sino-Japanese War, second Yamakawa Kikue, 203, 203n13 Yang Ch’angjun, pl. 4 yangban aristocracy, 23, 91, 95, 100, 120, 125; and bourgeoisie, 102, 163n5; women of, 101, 202 Yessenin, Sergei, 72 Yesul undong (The arts movement; journal), 63, 64 Yi Chŏkhyo, 56, 57n29, 59 Yi Chuho, 69n54 Yi Haejo, 95 Yi Ho, 57n29 Yi Honggŭn, 76 Yi Hyang, 76 Yi Hyŏn’gyŏng, 203

Yi Hyosŏk, 78, 233 Yi Iksang, 52n18, 59, 128n5, 143–44 Yi Injik, 94–95 Yi Kiyŏng, 44, 142, 270n6; arrest of, 154; and children’s literature, 69n54; criticism of, 126; and forced conversion, 238; Hometown by, 3, 68, 99, 119, 147–56, 151n58; and New Tendency literature, 133; and North Korea, 270; other works by, 119, 128–32, 135–36, 138–39, 145, 147, 239n21; and peasants, 147–56; and realism, 138–39; rediscovery of, 273; and Yŏm Sangsŏp, 163, 166 Yi Kwangsu, 74, 95–99, 143, 144, 181; on aestheticism, 108–9; and cultural nationalism, 97, 171, 185–86; on morality, 116–17; on motherhood, 217–18 Yi Madong, 224 Yi Muyŏng, 79n76 Yi Poyŏng, 160 Yi Pungman, 36n38, 60, 63, 82 Yi Pungmyŏng, 59, 68n50, 114, 119, 141, 142 Yi Sang, 244 Yi Sangch’un, 142 Yi Sŏch’an, 115 Yi Sŏnghwan, 143 Yi Sŏngt’ae, 51 Yi Sŏnhŭi, 230 Yi Sunt’ak, 170 Yi Tonggyu, 69n54 Yi Ujŏk, 36n38 Yi Yongik, 58n30 Yŏhaksaeng sangjohoe. See Mutual Aid Association of Women Students Yŏjagye (Women’s world; magazine), 201 Yokomitsu Riichi, 78, 79n76, 232 Yŏm Sangsŏp, 15, 98n13, 114, 160–96, 184; and anarchism, 48, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 194; and bourgeoisie, 167, 170, 189, 192; and censorship, 164, 177–78, 182, 190–92, 194; on class, 164, 167–69, 189–90, 192–94; early life of, 163n5; and I-novel, 162, 173–83,

Index Yŏm Sangsŏp (continued) 185, 194, 195; and KAPF, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167, 168–69, 186, 194; literary ethnographies of, 178, 183, 185–94, 195; and nationalism, 16, 73, 75, 162–73, 178–80, 182, 183, 185, 194–96; rediscovery of, 273; and Sin’ganhoe, 74, 160, 161, 162, 186; and socialism, 2n1, 73, 160–63, 166, 169–70, 173–74, 183, 189, 194, 196; on women, 207, 208; and Yi Kiyŏng, 163. See also On the Eve of the Uprising; Three Generations Yŏmgun (Spark; magazine), 57n29 Yŏmgunsa. See Spark Society Yŏmyŏng (Dawning light; magazine), pl. 9 yŏryu munhak (women’s literature), 79, 197–231

333

Yŏryu munhakhoe (Women Writers’ Association), 198n2 Yosano Akiko, 201 Yoshino Sakuzō, 163 Yŏsŏng haebang tongmaeng. See Alliance for Women’s Liberation “Young Daughter-in-Law, A” (Minmyŏnŭri; Yi Kiyŏng), 147 Young Mother, A (Chŏlmŭn ŏmoni), 216n44 Yu Chino, 78, 233 Yu Chiyong, 164n9 Yu Dafu, 178 Yu, Theodore Jun, 199 Yun Haedong, 196 Yun Kijŏng, 62 Zola, Emile, 174

Harvard East Asian Monographs (titles in print)

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 111. 117. 119. 121. 123. 124. 126. 127. 129.

James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi Thomas A. Stanley, ņsugi Sakae, Anarchist in TaishŇ Japan: The Creativity of the Ego Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in Restoration Kiangsu, 1867–1870 James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915 Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945–1978 Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances during the Korean Modernization Process William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K., 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937 Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 Christine Guth Kanda, ShinzŇ: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The “New Theses” of 1825 Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai EijirŇ (1891–1944) R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Chien-lung Era

Harvard East Asian Monographs 130. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 131. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893– 1980) 132. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century 134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule 137. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichş 138. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan 139. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit 140. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 141. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan 144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM 146. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi 147. Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan 148. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 149. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic 150. Merle Goldman and Paul A. Cohen, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz 151. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War 152. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946 154. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital Controls, 1899–1980 155. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866 157. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300 159. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea 161. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 162. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan 163. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan 164. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: ShishŇsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon 165. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture 166. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the SeibuSaison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan 167. Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction 168. Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan 169. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution

Harvard East Asian Monographs 170. Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class 171. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in TwelfthCentury Japan 173. Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland 174. Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan 175. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy toward China, 1918–1931: A Comparative Perspective 176. Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese 177. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 178. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) 179. Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the GŇnŇ 180. Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction 181. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory 182. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late Chosʼnn Korea 183. John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China 184. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea 185. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa SensŇji and Edo Society 186. Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 187. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories 188. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan 189. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity 191. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization 192. Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868–1945 193. William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds., State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars 194. Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan 195. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 196. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 197. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction 199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937–1952

Harvard East Asian Monographs 200. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600 201. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan 202. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China 203. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China Diplomacy, 1954–1973 204. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott 205. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography 206. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song 207. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldőich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project 208. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshş’ 209. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal 210. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China 211. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 212. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China 213. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in Japan and America 214. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China 215. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo 216. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle, 1972–1989 217. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius 218. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan 219. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism in Asia, 1883–1945 220. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century 221. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History 222. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative 223. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 224. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation 225. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry 226. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912

Harvard East Asian Monographs 227. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s 228. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects 229. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China 230. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 231. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China 232. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art 233. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China during the Republican and PostMao Eras 234. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time 235. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan 236. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 237. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 238. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig 239. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture 240. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature 241. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850 242. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature 243. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea 244. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China 245. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism 246. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985 247. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan 248. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China 249. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond 250. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature 251. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History 252. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan 253. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography

Harvard East Asian Monographs 254. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China Relations: An International History 255. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano ChŇei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan 256. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi 257. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945– 1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status 258. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing 259. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937 260. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s 261. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry 262. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China 263. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian ji 啀栢楕 (Collection from among the Flowers) 264. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) 265. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China 266. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics 267. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China 268. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in NineteenthCentury China 269. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in NineteenthCentury Guangzhou 270. Man-houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 271. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China 272. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 273. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China 274. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction 275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi IchiyŇ 276. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese 277. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan 278. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods

Harvard East Asian Monographs 281. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Chosʼnn Korea, 1600–1894 282. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System 283. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China 284. Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics 286. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love after The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the Shining Prince 287. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680–1785 288. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: IkkŇ Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan 289. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127 –1279) 290. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction 291. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 292. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes 293. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200– 1700 294. Tomoko Shiroyama, China during the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929–1937 295. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosʼnn Korea, 1850–1910 296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism 297. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The ņyama Cult and Regional Religion in Early Modern Japan 298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States 299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II 301. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368– 1644) 302. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural Enterprises 303. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryʼn Dynasty (918–1392) 304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

Harvard East Asian Monographs 305. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese History, 907–1911 306. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427–1900) 307. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History 308. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity 309. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea 310. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan 311. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China 312. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China 313. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai 314. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000 315. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China 316. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue ◦が) in Medieval China 317. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan 318. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan 319. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe KŇbŇ 320. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing 321. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan 322. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity 323. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution 324. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness 325. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China 326. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1750–1868 327. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of Tao Qian (365–427) 328. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan 329. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return 330. H. Mack Horton, Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yŇshş Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737

Harvard East Asian Monographs 331. Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan 332. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan 333. Peter Mauch, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura KichisaburŇ and the Japanese-American War 334. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan 335. David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing 336. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China 337. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 338. Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 339. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937 340. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations 341. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry 342. Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China 343. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture 344. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 345. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 346. Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino SakuzŇ and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 347. Atsuko Hirai, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 348. Darryl E. Flaherty, Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan 349. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan 350. Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy 351. Michel Mohr, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality 352. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction 354. Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth, Income Inequality in Korea: An Analysis of Trends, Causes, and Answers 355. Jamie L. Newhard, Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales of Ise 356. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan 357. Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea 358. Michael Wert, Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 359. Garret P. S. Olberding, ed., Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court 360. Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide 361. David Spafford, A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan 362. Jongryn Mo and Barry Weingast, Korean Political and Economic Development: Crisis, Security, and Economic Rebalancing 363. Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio 364. Hiraku Shimoda, Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan 365. Trent E. Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan 366. Gina Cogan, The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan 367. Eric C. Han, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 368. Natasha Heller, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben 369. Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination 370. Simon James Bytheway, Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859–2011 371. Sukhee Lee, Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in TwelfthFourteenth China 372. Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court 373. Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 374. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 375. Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins, The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future 376. Heather Blair, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan 377. Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria 378. Martina Deuchler, Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea 379. Joseph R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 380. Cathy Yeh, The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre 381. Noell Wilson, Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan 382. Miri Nakamura, Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan 383. Nara Dillon, Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University Selected Titles (Complete list at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/weatherhead-studies.html) Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity, by Sean Hsiang-lin Lei. University of Chicago Press, 2014. When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, by Janet Poole. Columbia University Press, 2014. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, & Politics in Japan, 1870–1950, by Robert Stolz. Duke University Press, 2014. Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972, by Eric C. Han. Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan, by Louise Young. University of California Press, 2013. From Cultures of War to Cultures of Peace: War and Peace Museums in Japan, China, and South Korea, by Takashi Yoshida. MerwinAsia, 2013. Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945, by Yukiko Koshiro. Cornell University Press, 2013. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, by Ian J. Miller. University of California Press, 2013. Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan, by Noriko Aso. Duke University Press, 2013. Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945, by John P. DiMoia. Stanford University Press, 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, by Emily T. Yeh. Cornell University Press, 2013. Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992, by Charles K. Armstrong. Cornell University Press, 2013. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, by Kirsten Cather. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese, by Paula Harrell. MerwinAsia, 2012. Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture, by Michael Gibbs Hill. Oxford University Press, 2012. Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Ser vicemen in Postwar Japan, by Sarah Kovner. Stanford University Press, 2012. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Postwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel. University of California Press, 2012. Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World, by Aaron Herald Skabelund. Cornell University Press, 2011. Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011.

Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, by David Lurie. Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Russo-Japanese Relations, 1905–17: From enemies to allies, by Peter Berton. Routledge, 2011. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing, by Fabio Lanza. Columbia University Press, 2010. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary, by Kenneth J. Ruoff. Cornell University Press, 2010. Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, by Shao-hua Liu. Stanford University Press, 2010. Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys: Guilty Lessons, by Julian Dierkes. Routledge, 2010. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman. University of California Press, 2009. The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan. University of Hawai‘I Press, 2009. Leprosy in China: A History, by Angela Ki Che Leung. Columbia University Press, 2008. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States, by Christopher Hill. Duke University Press, 2008.