The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea 0674073266, 9780674073265

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The Real Modern

Harvard East Asian Monographs 357

The Real Modern Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea

Christopher P. Hanscom

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2013

© 2013 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanscom, Christopher P., 1972– The real modern : literary modernism and the crisis of representation in colonial Korea / Christopher P. Hanscom. pages cm. — (Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 357) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the critical and literary production of Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun, whose works confront the ‘crisis of representation’ from loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-0-674-07326-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Korean literature— 20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Korea. 3. Nationalism and literature—Korea. 4. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. PL957.5.M63H36 2013 895.7'09112—dc23 2012050266 Index by the author and Hannah Lim Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

vii 1

Paradox of Empire: The Crisis of Representation in 1930s Seoul Literary Circles

24

Pak T’aewŏn’s “Representation, Depiction, Technique” and the Colonial Double Bind

38

Modernism and Hysteria in One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo

59

“Thoughts from a Sickbed” and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse

78

The Irony of Language in Kim Yujŏng’s Short Fiction

95

Embodiments of Speech: Yi T’aejun’s Lectures on Composition

121

Lyrical Narrative and the Uncohering of Modernity

138

vi

Contents Conclusion: Colonial Modernism and Comparative Literary Studies

166

Notes

177

Bibliography

213

Index

229

Acknowledg ments

This book would not have been possible without the constant encouragement and support I received from teachers, colleagues, mentors, friends, and family. I am first of all grateful to my teachers, mentors, and colleagues at UCLA, particularly Robert Buswell, Jack Chen, John Duncan, Torquil Duthie, George Dutton, Namhee Lee, Peter H. Lee, Seiji Lippit, Aamir Mufti, David Schaberg, Shu-mei Shih, and Tim Tangherlini, for their unqualified support and guidance at every stage. Colleagues at Dartmouth College provided a welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment during a crucial stage in the writing, and my thanks go to Diana Abouali, Aimee Bahng, Rebecca Biron, Jim Dorsey, Steve Ericson, Gerd Gemünden, Allen Hockley, Ed Miller, Reiko Ohnuma, Jonathan Smolin, Michelle Warren, Dennis Washburn, and Lindsay Whaley for their warmth and generosity. My time as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Korea Institute was greatly enriched through conversation and collaborative work with Christopher Bondy, Ed Drott, Carter Eckert, Seth Jacobowitz, Sun Joo Kim, David McCann, Aaron Moore, and Rebecca Suter. Many others have provided support and encouragement along the way. Nancy Abelmann carefully read portions of the manuscript and suggested the title for the book. David Kang encouraged and mentored me at every stage of the writing. Jin-kyung Lee generously read portions of the manuscript and shared her extraordinarily helpful and constructive critique. Yu Chongho gave careful and frequent advice during my Fulbright year in Seoul. Kwon Boduerae graciously helped to clarify my thinking in the early stages, particularly on the Yi T’aejun chapters, and Michael Bourdaghs gave invaluable feedback at the inception of the project.

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Acknowledgments

A broader intellectual community has provided tremendous support, inspiration, and guidance, and in many cases has helped me navigate that terrain where friendship and profession overlap. It would be impossible to name everyone who has contributed to this project over the years in ways large and small, but special thanks to Ann Choi, Ellie Choi, Kyeong-Hee Choi, Henry Em, Todd Henry, Ted Hughes, Kelly Jeong, Jennifer Jung-Kim, Charles Kim, Chiyoung Kim, Hyung-Wook Kim, Jina Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Sonja Kim, Susie Kim, Su Yun Kim, Kim Uchang, Max Kuo, Aimee Kwon, Jeong-il Lee, Lee Kyung Hoon, Seung-Ah Lee, Paul Nam, Oh Sunmin, Franz Prichard, Youngju Ryu, Jiwon Shin, Hijoo Son, Minsuh Son, Yeunjee Song, Serk-bae Suh, and Yingzi Xu. I have had the privilege of presenting material from several chapters in various forums, and gained much from thoughtful questions and comments from the discussants and other participants. My thanks to the Korea and Reischauer Institutes at Harvard University; to the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University; to the USC Korean Studies Institute; to John Treat and the Korea Colloquium at Yale University; and to the third North American Korean Literature Workshop, hosted at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The dissertation research and writing that led to this book were made possible with the support of the UCLA Graduate Division, the department of Asian Languages and Cultures, the Center for Korean Studies, the Asia-Pacific Institute, the center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia, the Korea Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Time and access to materials provided by a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellowship were also instrumental in the reframing and completion of this volume. Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as “Kim Yujŏng’s ‘Thoughts from a Sickbed’ and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse” in The Journal of Korean Studies 14.1 (Fall 2009): 35–60. Excerpts from chapter 3 will appear in my forthcoming article, “Modernism, Hysteria and the Colonial Double Bind: Pak T’aewŏn’s One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo,” in positions: asia critique 21.3 (Summer 2013) and are reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. Passages in chapter 1 and the conclusion were previously published in “Degrees of Difference: Re-thinking the Transnational Turn in Korean Literary Studies,” in PMLA 126.3 (May 2011): 651–657, and are reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association. Grateful acknowledgment is made to these journals for permission to reprint material from these publications. I am very grateful to my editors, Will Hammell—for his willingness to take on a project focused unreservedly on literature—and Deborah

Acknowledgments

ix

Del Gais, for her patient guidance and care in seeing the project through to publication. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their detailed, constructive, and extremely helpful remarks. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unfailing encouragement. My parents, Gary and Phyllis Hanscom, and my sister Kate have been supportive beyond measure. My gratitude and love to the late Charles Rim, my father-in-law and constant ally who shared his deep knowledge and insight without reserve and who made great contributions to this book with his advice, his careful readings, and his tendency to challenge my thinking at crucial moments, and to my mother-in-law Esther Rim and sister-in-law Elisa Rim. Last but not least, this book is for Alice, Stella, and Eugenie, who are the greatest part of the beauty and joy in my life, and for my wife, Carol, the closest reader, who has been with me from the very beginning of this journey.

The Real Modern

Harvard East Asian Monographs 357

Introduction The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. Th is, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 5

Modernist Practice and the Scene of Writing in Colonial Korea In 1933, pioneering modernist author Pak T’aewŏn (1909–86) published a short story titled “Fatigue—Record of Half a Day.” The story, which can be read as a precursor to the author’s better-known 1934 novella One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo, narrates the thoughts and actions of an author as he seeks relief from his writer’s block in a walk about Seoul. “Fatigue” contains many aspects familiar to readers of modernist fiction. The story is related in the first person by a narrator compromised by physical and psychological weaknesses—infirmities that are emphasized in the narrative—as well as by an admittedly duplicitous character; the protagonist-narrator wanders aimlessly about the urban space of the colonial capital of Kyŏngsŏng, frequently immobilized by his own indecision and lack of destination or purpose; formally, we have the use of stream-of-consciousness technique, stylistic devices such as the insertion of formulas and advertisements directly into the text, and a circular structure, beginning and ending with the protagonist sitting at the same desk in the same café; in terms of its narrative themes, the story deals primarily and self-reflexively with the act of writing, cunningly presenting itself as an I-novel-type narrative (sasosŏl, J. shishōsetsu) while at the same time playing with the very conventions that identify it as a firstperson “confessional” piece of writing. Deeper themes that characterize Pak’s work also appear, including the reluctance of the narrator to fi x or reveal his identity, the frequent appearance of thwarted desire, and a

2

Introduction

pervasive sense of the difficulty or impossibility of communication. The protagonist remains alone and silent throughout. Though Pak went north in 1950 as the Korean War began and had a long, arguably successful career in North Korea—his fiction was banned in the South through the late 1980s—he is generally considered a modernist author, particularly with regard to his experimental use of language and his close attention to the technique or style of his writing. His work is seen as representing a new strain of literature that emerged out of the trying early years of the 1930s following the crackdown on leftist authors by Japanese colonial authorities, part of the rise of what was perceived as socially “disengaged” literature that paralleled the decline of socially “engaged” realist literature—psychological fiction, confessional pieces, travelogues, writings on leisure, and in particular fiction that appeared to privilege style over content or aesthetics over politics. One of the goals of this book is to trouble this standard literaryhistorical narrative and a historicity within which the rise and fall of literary forms neatly corresponds with events in the real world and literary works are judged on the degree to which their content mirrors the real. A starting point is the appearance of a very carefully delineated window at the center of “Fatigue,” a window that condenses several major themes, techniques, and issues at play in colonial modernist criticism and fiction. The story opens with the following description: The window—1.8 m × 46.965 cm—that window pierced the wall and faced east. When I grew weary of the fiction I was writing at the desk against the wall just beneath the window, I would readily lift my . . . eyes up to that window, which was just a bit higher than my head. Through that window could be seen the white, two-story Western-style house that stood across the street, and the lit advertisement that hung between that house’s second-story window and the window [I was looking out through]. Written upon the advertisement, these letters: MEDICAL EQUIPMENT: PROSTHETIC ARMS AND LEGS But what I saw through that window was not always limited to that inartistic, bleak advertisement alone. What I saw today were the two deep-black eyes of a child peeping furtively in through that window at the interior [of the café]. . . . Perhaps he had heard the gramophone music wafting out through the gap in the window as he passed by on the street. . . . When I saw those two eyes so full of curiosity, [the eyes of] that child standing on tiptoes and clinging to the window ledge, I retrieved from my memory a boy in a Stevenson children’s verse who climbs a cherry tree, longing for a faraway, unknown country. What then did our child see through the window? . . . I turned my head, which had been facing out the window, and looked for myself at all that the child peering through the window could see.

Introduction

3

A few details immediately catch the reader’s attention: the very precise measurement of the window, the insertion of the advertisement for medical equipment directly into the text, and perhaps the sense of stifling self-observation that permeates the writing from the very opening of the story. This opening also provides a framing device for the rest of the story—as is characteristic of Pak’s fiction, the narrative is frequently directed by the familiar modernist turn inward, recording traces of external reality on the consciousness of the protagonist. The narratorprotagonist enacts this strategy by literally turning his head toward the interior of the café, looking at himself and his environment from the perspective of the child peeping in through the window. The “I” becomes the object of the child’s and then the narrative’s gaze. Our narrator’s perspective, already limited to the narrow point of view afforded by the café window, is now compounded by or imbricated with the gaze of another. That inward gaze through the window gives us access to another aspect of “Fatigue,” a view onto the scene of writing in 1930s colonial Korea. Told in Pak’s familiar circular fashion, the story takes as its self-reflexive subject writing itself, showing us the protagonist—an author—sitting alone in a café, smoking, listening to the gramophone (his favorite song is Enrico Caruso’s performance of “Elegy”), and unable to make any progress on his manuscript. The conclusion of “Fatigue” is the protagonist’s return to the café after making a circuit of the city and his return to writing, presumably the very “record of half a day” that we have before us in the form of this short story. In a sense, then, the action of the narrative consists entirely in the production of the text itself and the experience of reading is made “almost directly analogous to the experience of writing.” We are also afforded a look at the literary circles of the times when Pak’s narrator reproduces a dialogue overheard at the café between some younger members of the literary establishment. Characteristically, the narrator isn’t wearing his glasses—the familiar unreliable narrator of modernist fiction—so cannot see who is talking, but can hear clearly the discussion of well-known authors such as Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950) and leftist writer Yi Kiyŏng (1895–1984), a recent story by Yŏm Sangsŏp (1897–1963), and the laments raised about stagnation in Korean literary circles. In this way, the window literally frames the story, turning the narrative in upon itself; is the object of precise, empirical description; and reveals both the act and scene of writing, writing in specific terms (the production of this particular narrative) and writing more generally (the literary scene of 1930s colonial Kyŏngsŏng). The idea of a window onto

4

Introduction

the world of the protagonist or into the mind of the narrator is further complicated by the reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–94) poem titled “Foreign Lands,” with the implied relationship being that between the act and scene of writing in colonial Korea and the gaze of the West. The first stanza reads: Up into the cherry tree Who should climb but little me? I held the trunk with both my hands And looked abroad on foreign lands.

The young narrator first looks next door, then beyond to the river, down “dusty roads,” then wishes to find a higher tree Farther and farther I should see, To where the grown-up river slips Into the sea among the ships, To where the roads on either hand Lead onward into fairy land.

References to the foreign or exotic are common in Stevenson. Several other poems in the same collection refer to foreigners: “Travel” presents sentiments similar to “Foreign Lands,” a narrator who wishes for adventure abroad in “Eastern cities” or on “parrot islands”; while “Foreign Children” strikes a decidedly Anglocentric note, asking “Little Turk or Japanee, / O! don’t you wish that you were me?” and speculating that “You must often, as you trod, / Have wearied not to be abroad.” “Fatigue” opens with a literal frame, the window, in through which a boy similar to Stevenson’s character looks seeking a foreign land. Pak’s child, however, fi nds only an older man looking out, an author who himself desires to travel, to escape. A sort of scopic circularity is established from the beginning: the narrator’s gaze meets the boy’s, both in a sense “longing for a foreign country” but finding only a mirrored gaze through the glass. Stevenson’s sentiments appear echoed here, as Pak’s characters “trod” about the city “wearied not to be abroad.” One possible reading is, then, that under the doubled gaze of the boy, the narrator himself becomes the “foreign child,” and Pak’s work, particularly in its almost ethnographic technique of modernologie, becomes a recounting of the thwarted desire of the colonized. The story ends with the narrator back in the café, this time closing the curtains against the view and the garish light of the advertisement for prosthetics. “The proprietor put on Enrico Caruso’s ‘Elegy’ for me, and

Introduction

5

[the music] ever so gently trembled in the air, so still was the atmosphere. I smoked three cigarettes, thinking, when will I ever finish this piece of writing? It was past 11. There was now less than an hour before this day too came to a close. Forcing a yawn, I went over again and again the path I’d walked up until now.” The window, the dimensions of which open the story, serves not only as a literal frame within the narrative—framing both the subject (the narrator, the frame through which he gazes, a gaze that produces the narrative) and the object (the street, the boy, colonial Seoul)—but also as a productive framing device for the entire story, appearing at both the very beginning of the narrative and its end, with the curtain drawn. The reader has taken the place of the boy here, looking in on the narrator not through the now-curtained window but through the window of the page itself, a reading encouraged by the apparent overlap of narrator, protagonist, and author, a device that we will see further exploited in the case of Kubo. Thus “Fatigue” may stand as a typical example of modernist fiction, with its self-referentiality and the theme of writing, the wandering and unreliable narrator, the sense of the modern (with the gramophone, the café, and the building-lined streets and crowded sidewalks of the colonial capital), the innovative insertion of found objects into the text, the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, and the playful overlap of authorial and narrative voice. Yet at the same time, within the carefully crafted structure of “Fatigue” we cannot miss the proliferation of things— from the gramophone, patrons, and lemon tea inside the café to the descriptions of buildings, streets, pedestrians, tram passengers, and the cityscape in general that the protagonist encounters on his walk about the capital. The details of the story—seen from the very first line with the precise delineation of the dimensions of the window—establish an arguably realistic mode of depiction, what Peter Brooks calls “realist vision.” For Brooks, what is different with the modernists is “most of all the selectivity of consciousness applied to the phenomenal world, and the establishment of a perspective resolutely within consciousness as it deals with the objects of the world.” Critic Kang Unsŏk agrees: “At the center of [‘Fatigue’] is a reproduction not of the objective world of external reality, but . . . the transformation of the self’s inner consciousness in relation to [that self’s] experience of the everyday world.” This impulse toward a realism that is “resolutely within consciousness” and at the same time indicative of the real world is at the heart of Pak’s 1934 essay “Representation, Depiction, Technique” where, as we will see in chapter 2, examples stressing the inadequacy of language to its object are balanced by attempts to overcome that inadequacy through

6

Introduction

recourse to making language an embodiment of the real. Arguing that the bodily appearance of the text or the voiced sounds that it produces upon reading can yield effects and convey meaning alongside the content itself, Pak advocates a technique that renders language “thing-like” in order to reproduce an effect of reality. These techniques reveal an anxiety regarding the potential of language to slip into different meanings, and turn to the embodiment of speech to fix language into a specific (intended) meaning. Thus the very focus on style or form that both decides standard definitions of modernism and Pak T’aewŏn’s place in literary history as an apolitical antirealist, a practitioner of “pure” literature, is understood anew as the basis for an almost hyperrealist aesthetic practice adequate to the experience of the modern and within the strictures of colonial censorship. Even this brief reading of a short passage from Pak’s fiction, then, calls into question both standard literary-historical narratives of colonial Korean fiction and the methods of interpretation utilized to apprehend modernist texts and to specify their position in a hierarchy of genres that has arguably structured the reception and evaluation of modern Korean fiction into the present day. In the pages that follow, we will see in late colonial literary circles both a critique of empiricist or realistic language and a series of attempts to come to terms with this fall of language from unproblematic referentiality, a series of attempts that opened up a field of thought and action for modernist authors in mid-1930s Korea and which are usually collected under the heading of “modernism” in literary history. All three authors treated in this book addressed in their critical works the question of how one might write meaningful literature when the word cannot coincide with its object—with the real—and I focus on these in the following chapters, in par ticu lar reading Pak T’aewŏn’s aforementioned “Representation, Depiction, Technique,” Kim Yujŏng’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” (1937) in chapter 4, and Yi T’aejun’s Lectures on Composition (1939) in chapter 6. In each we find a skepticism regarding the capacity of language to correspond with its referent in the world alongside prescriptions for overcoming this fundamental lack. In reading each author’s fictional works alongside their critical writings I argue that 1930s modernism, far from immersing itself in the pursuit of a purely nonreferential linguistic pleasure, strove for the presentation of—for lack of a better phrase—a realer real in attempting to overcome this crisis of representation. It is in the fall from referentiality that the interrelated terms modernity, colonialism, and modernism meet, and here that a productive rereading of colonialperiod fiction becomes possible. What is exposed in the process is that

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7

the choice given colonized authors in mainstream literary criticism—the choice between the political and the aesthetic—is both a false choice produced out of the colonial situation, and a choice that indicates the limitations of a Eurocentric approach to non-Western literatures. The method that results is one that fi nds the “antagonisms of the real” returning as problems of form and reads modernism as a self-conscious interpretive practice that strives for an expression of the real while consistently drawing attention to the limits of such expression. This study thus deals in large part with the relationship between language and its real in a specifically modern and colonial context.

The Group of Nine, Modernism, and Colonial Discourse in Korean Literary History This study of literary modernism in colonial Korea began with a question: How is it that during one of the most trying decades in modern Korean history—the period of so-called imperialization under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s—we find an unprecedented variety of literary and literary-critical production? Critic Kim Minjŏng writes that “it is not an exaggeration to say that most of the works which can be counted among those displaying the highest standard of literary quality during the colonial period were produced during the 1930s,” a period in which colonial censorship steadily gained in intensity and Japanese authorities began to discourage the use of the Korean language. This key question, of how to explain the flourishing and diversification of cultural production under the difficult conditions of the 1930s, is something that critics and historians of colonial Korea continue to struggle with, and I approach this question by focusing on three of the most interesting and important prose writers of the time—Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun. I look in particular at their critical writings on language, which to my knowledge have not been seriously dealt with in literary-historical studies of the authors or the period. The 1930s were a tumultuous time globally: the stock market crash, the rise of Italian fascism and the Nazi Party in Germany, the failure of democracy in Spain, and the collapse of the so-called Taishō democracy in Japan. The 1930s were also the decade during which Japan, which had followed a policy of “cultural rule” (munhwa chŏngch’i, J. bunka seiji) or assimilation during the 1920s, entered into war on the continent and consequently shifted toward a policy of imperialization in the colonies. The strategic positioning of Korea within Japan’s expansionary efforts on the continent following the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 required a

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Introduction

tightened control over the political and cultural life of the colony (a tightening paralleled in Japan) and the extraction of not only agricultural and industrial products and labor in the war effort but also the active support and participation in the imperial project by Korean subjects. The intensification of efforts to assimilate imperial subjects took place in a variety of areas: religious reform; the “national language movement” (J. kokugo undō), speaking the “national” language being a prerequisite for “being a true Japanese”; the “name-changing campaign” (J. sōshi kaimei), the replacement of Korean with Japanese names; and the active recruitment of military volunteers. Imperialization involved not only institutional change but also—as Leo Ching has argued—the interiorization of the project of assimilation, making colonization a problem of the self rather than a problem exclusively for the state. While participation in the political realm seemed increasingly impossible in Korea, cultural production continued, showing an increase in the number of writers, a noticeably expanded literary practice and theorization, and a technical refi nement and specialization of aesthetic theory. How can literary history explain the irony inherent in this situation? Another way of asking this question is: What is the relationship between history—the facts of colonization, of modernization, and so on—and literary works produced under its influence? Or, more abstractly: What is the relationship between literary language and reality? These questions not only stand behind this inquiry into modernist literary practice in Korea but were among the key questions that authors and critics alike were asking in the 1930s. The 1930s are also a difficult decade to apprehend in literary-historical terms, a period during which we witness the decline of the leftist or proletarian literature movement and the rise of something called “modernism.” Modernism is itself a contested, overwrought term in literary history, both in the Korean context and more generally. It is a notoriously difficult term to define, often reduced to a primarily European phenomenon with an exclusive canon populated by a few major authors or, conversely, expanded to include such a variety of artistic innovations that the term loses coherent meaning. Yet though the term may seem “intolerably vague, it has come to serve a crucial function in criticism and literary history, as well as in theoretical debates about literature.” The contentious relationship between modernism and realism in par ticu lar has arguably defi ned modern Korean literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. From a nativist perspective, Korean modernism is a comprador genre, its authors at best imitators of Western styles and modes and at worst collaborators with Japa nese coloni-

Introduction

9

zation; from a Eurocentric perspective, Korean modernism falls under “non-Western” or “alternative” modernism, defi ned by both its similarity and perceived inferiority to Western works. The literary history of the colonial period is typically framed in dichotomous terms: realism/modernism, verisimilitude/style or content/ form, collective/individual, politics/dilettantism, engaged/elite. The modernist collective of prose authors, poets, and critics that I focus on, the Kuinhoe or Group of Nine, occupies the stylistic, apolitical, or “art for art’s sake” pole in debates around colonial period literature, in contrast to the Korea Artista Proleta Federacio (KAPF), the collective of proletarian or leftist artists known as realists and disbanded in 1935 by colonial authorities. Characterized in Korean literary history as a coterie of prominent modernists with influence in Seoul literary circles from the early to mid-1930s, the group’s membership changed over time (though the total number of participants at any given time was kept to nine). Founded in August 1933 around the time of the first mass arrest of KAPF members, the group’s self-stated objective was “to form a group of literary men with the goal of extensive reading and writing and critique of each other’s works from a position of forthright investigation.” Due in part to these goals, which appear to limit the group’s activities to an autonomous realm of artistic production, in part to the historical context within which the group was formed and eventually dismantled, and in part to the literary activities of its constituent members, the Kuinhoe is typically referred to as a modernist group, interested in “pure literature” (sunsu munhak). Chŏng Chiyong (1903–?), for instance, is considered one of the first modernist poets of Korea; prominent modernist poet Yi Sang edited the group’s only publication, a journal titled Si wa sosŏl (Poetry and Fiction [March 1936]); and the group’s leading critic, Kim Kirim (1908–?), is known for his avant-garde poetry and for his poetry critique, influenced by Anglophone critics such as T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards as well as by theories of psychoanalysis. Yet membership or participation in the Group of Nine was hardly uniform, at least in terms of literary mode. Why, for instance, was Paek Sŏk (1912–95)—a poet interested in Korean tradition and folkways who could be characterized as lyrical in his use of poetic imagery and dialect—included in Poetry and Fiction? Why was Kim Yujŏng, an author known for his earthy, realistic portrayals of country folk, included as a member of the group from 1935 until its dissolution in 1936? The question becomes more complex when we consider that the writers, poets, and critics who made up the group are treated very differently as individuals in literary history than they are treated as a collective. There

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Introduction

are few works that treat the Group of Nine itself with any depth—in the apparent absence of a common cause or ideology behind group members’ activities, analyses that focus on the function and literary-historical effect of the group “generally concur that [the Group of Nine] is a ‘modernist group’ or ‘anti-KAPF.’” This leads to a tendency to view modernism as simply a discourse oppositional to realism. Yet despite the absence of critical authority and a loss of literary-intellectual Zeitgeist, this period produced an unprecedented variety of explorations in the fields of humanism, intellectualism, ethics, and class critique, and Kim Minjŏng consequently recommends viewing the group as a collective where various literary trends intersect rather than as a group bound by some common essence, an approach that investigates the specificity and relationality or resemblance of these various modes. With this in mind, I have treated three members of the Group of Nine who have each received significant critical attention as prose authors: Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun. Pak T’aewŏn is typically characterized as an experimental modernist, interested in the play of language and the possibilities of style, and presenting the reader with anemic protagonists wandering the streets of the city and lost in self-contemplation. In contrast, Kim Yujŏng (1908–37) wrote fiction that is frequently placed in genres understood as socially engaged and realistic, such as farm village fiction (nongch’on munhak) or literature of local color (hyangt’o munhak), often taking the uneducated country bumpkin as the object of its scathingly ironic humor. Finally, Yi T’aejun (1904–?) is understood as a “poetic” writer interested in the lyrical presentation of socially marginal characters, a neoclassicist epicure in retreat from a harsh colonial-modern present who finds solace in the artifacts and aesthetics of a past era. Despite the real differences in the literary-historical treatment of these writers, I propose that their works evidence—both in their specificity and in relation to one another—a focus on language as a flawed medium of communication and that their fiction, criticism, and literary theory thematize the impossibility of full communication in representational language. The act of communication, Briankle G. Chang writes, must take place “on the principle of equivalence, translation, and circulation, . . . an intersubjective affair [which] implies that before the message in question is sent, and certainly before that message can be properly received, the act of communication must communicate its communicability as the very foundation of message transfer. Logically speaking, then, there is always a message before the message, a prior sending before the sending itself, which . . . proposes itself as capable of being understood.”

Introduction

11

As we will see, the (in)capacity of language itself to convey this “communicability” is presented in both the form and content of these three authors’ works, a “crisis of representation” seen in Pak’s work as emerging between language and metacontext, in Kim’s fiction between alazon and ironist, and in Yi’s theory of language between the spontaneity of speech and the composition of the written word. For each author, language is understood as containing a constitutive lack, a nonidentity between object and representation; and each author proposes one or more strategies for bringing language closer to its own impossibility, closer to the actual re-presentation of the object-as-such in writing. Given the propensity of literary history to assume that literary works are formed by their historical context and that change in literature takes place developmentally, these claims immediately bring two problems to mind: the historical context that resulted in such a crisis, a divergence between language and meaning that arguably had a part in structuring the literary production of these important writers; and the question of a definition of modernism that might encompass these disparate literary practices by taking as its basis a concern with this perceived crisis of representation. Although realism has received ample attention and the period in which modernism flourished in Korea—the early to mid1930s—has been the object of intense debate around the concept of “colonial modernity” under Japanese empire, Korean literary modernism and its practitioners have not been treated as extensively or with such frequency. I hope to draw attention to literary modernism in the colonial context by engaging with the ongoing and important reevaluation of cultural production in colonial Korea and at the same time by redefining and situating modernism outside a strictly national framework by considering it as an interpretive strategy rather than a fixed and definable genre. In this sense, a central problem of the study rests with the relationship between aesthetic production—in this case, literary texts—and historical context. While research on the colonial period in Korea has flourished in the past decade, both historical and literary-historical studies have tended toward a communicative model of narration, where the (literary-)historical narrative is “a simulacrum of the structure and processes of real events,” an account that is considered true in terms of this correspondence “insofar as this representation resembles the events that it represents.” What is striking is that in the field of South Korean literary history and in accounts of non-Western modernisms, the literary text is frequently held to the same historico-realist standard, valued to the degree that the fictional narrative corresponds with purportedly real events. We might call this a communicative model of literary interpretation.

12

Introduction

One point at which the (historical) real may coincide with the role and status of language outside of this communicative model—a point at which we may be able to think again about the role of narrative form or literary style in connection with that real—is captured in the phrase “colonial discourse.” This is an elusive term, appearing with some frequency in studies of the Korean colonial period but with varying degrees of specificity or definition. Often “colonial discourse” refers to the developmentalist or assimilationist policy objectives (and their representation in state documents, journalistic accounts, and so on) adopted by the colonial government toward the colonized, or in literary or other texts complicit with the imperial project in the representation of colonized. The phrase appears in competition with “national discourse”; is sometimes attributed to the colonized, a derivative discourse in mimicry of colonizing power; is sometimes used broadly, encompassing the media culture of colonizer and colonized alike; and in most cases suggests a relationship, either cooperative or antagonistic, between the terms national, modern, and colonial. Colonial discourse is no more easily defined a concept than discourse itself. Benveniste holds that “discourse must be understood in its widest sense: every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way.” MacCabe writes against this oversimple conceptualization and cites Michel Pêcheux’s suggestion that we abandon a simplistic “communication” model of discourse. Rather than the idea of an autonomous sender transmitting a message to a receiver, he writes, we must accept that language functions as both communication and noncommunication, leave the communicative model behind, and “consider discursive formations, specific areas of communicability that set in place both sender and receiver and which determine the appropriateness of messages.” This is the point at which language itself becomes an issue for modernist authors of the 1930s. I will argue that the experimental techniques and stylistic innovations that are typically cited in support of a definition of Korean modernism are in fact a response to the need to both exceed and fi x narrative meaning in a context where an external authority determines the appropriate sense of linguistic utterances, a context in which the repeatability of the relation between sign and referent is destabilized. This necessarily takes us one step beyond modernism as that which simply resists or interrupts dominant or “traditional” discursive modes in a particular society. In the colonial situation, the “communicative and pragmatic function of language” is not only associated with the apparently coherent symbolic order of the rationalized commodifi-

Introduction

13

cation of bourgeois-democratic society. Language itself is colonized, and the social institutions where realism is “most fully at home”— politics, official administrations, schools, newspapers, the judicial system, and so on—are made unavailable to the writer. The resistance to the “false availability of meaning” offered by a communicative model of language is thus intensified under a form of imperialization that put forward Enlightenment ideals as its justification for colonization while denying the colonized access to the rights promised under those same ideals. The notion of discourse that I adopt throughout is consequently one that evokes a certain anxiety regarding representation itself and what it is “when it is manifested materially, as a written or spoken object.” Below, I address this peculiar and productive anxiety surrounding discourse in a specific time and place—Korea during the mid- to late colonial period—and particularly in relation to the emergence of literary modernism in the works of Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun. Though these authors occupy very different positions in standard literary histories, I find that what binds them together is first a loss of faith in the referential relation between language and the world, and second an imperative to rework literary language into a form that will prove adequate to representation and hence will be able to produce, if not truth, then at least meaning. I regard this loss of faith in language as a “crisis of representation” prevalent in Seoul literary circles in the 1930s and trace each author’s literary practice as it develops in both critical and fictional works as a response to this “crisis” and an attempt to render language meaningful. Language in the colonial situation is especially fraught. Foucault points out that wherever there is discourse, its production is “controlled, selected, organised and redistributed” via both rules of exclusion (those rules which control and limit what one is permitted to say, where and how one is permitted to say it, and who is authorized to speak) and internal rules “where discourse exercises its own control; rules concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution.”  Under colonization these rules and their enforcement become overt—censorship, the policing of public speech, “national language” movements, the assumption of authority to speak for the colonized in all areas—and act out the regulation of discourse in the open. It is at this level—that of the excluding prohibition—where discussions of colonial discourse often and rightly find their subject of analysis. Th is book, however, is primarily concerned with internal rules of discourse—the classification of literary texts or literary languages into hierarchies and the ways in which these classifications are dependent on an explicit or implicit relationship drawn between literary language, the

14

Introduction

author, and the world. Whether as a means to avoid censorship or punishment at the hands of colonial authorities, as a result of developments internal to 1930s Seoul and East Asian literary circles, or in response to the social, economic, and cultural changes wrought by the advance of modernity in the early twentieth century, the authors treated in this study were intensely interested in the question of the relationship between linguistic and literary form and the content or meaning interpretable from a particular literary work. Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun all wrote critical pieces on literary form, asking questions that remain relevant through the present day: Is writing simply an extension of speech? Can language refer in a definable or repeatable way? Can language be manipulated or shaped in a way that allows it to present the real? Can the satisfaction of meaning be attained through the literary work? Can the text guide or fi x interpretation? These are not new questions—in fact, they are among the oldest of questions—but they were being asked anew in the context of colonial Korea, and this book traces these authors’ questioning, explores the theories that they strove toward in key critical writings, and finally rereads their fictional works as putting into practice these theories of language and referentiality. Working through discourse that structures or creates its object from the “outside in” but also crucially through discourse as a set of evolving rules internal to literary language—those that work from the inside out to determine the reception and significance of that language within historically specific discursive conditions of possibility—this book argues that literary modernism in Korea is neither an escapist aesthetic practice severed from the sociopolitical context of its production nor a derivative and partial alternative to a purportedly originary or whole European modernism. Instead, I advance the thesis that Korean modernism is both a clear reaction to and engagement with the colonial context and that it also takes part in a more generalized crisis of representation, a modern loss of faith in the capacity of language to represent reality as such. The two are closely related. As Elleke Boehmer writes, “it was the very confrontation of an expansive, turn-of-the-century colonialism with myriad different social, cultural, and political ‘worlds’ across the globe that undercut the possibility and plausibility of its unifying languages of power.” An interest in modernism is thus an interest in “the modes through which that undercutting and decentering were recognized and registered in colonial modernist writing.” This study thus treats the specificity of the Korean case and at the same time raises questions about cultural production in relation to its political context, particularly regarding colonialism and the strictures that it places on language.

Introduction

15

Although all three authors treated below were members of the Group of Nine, it is far from obvious that their fiction can be broadly characterized as modernist; on the surface, it is challenging to find similarities of form or content across their major works. Thus it is not solely the familiar elements of modernism (self-reflexivity, the drawing of attention to the process of creation, the weakening of narrative structure, the presence of ambiguity or uncertainty often presented through a limited or fallible point of view, the “inward turn” or psychologizing of the individual subject and experience, and so on) that we find in their work that unites it under the category of modernism. What a close reading of their writings on literary practice and theory does reveal is a common focus on language as a flawed medium of communication, and I find that their fiction thematizes this flaw even as it attempts to work around a loss of conviction in the capacity of language to say what it means.

**** The representation of the “real” thus references both the demands placed on literary works from the colonial period by cultural historians and literary critics and at the same time the set of strategies or techniques that these modernist authors theorized and then enacted in their creative efforts. It is the former stance (that cultural products must reflect—at the level of content—a historical real that provides a basis for all subsequent interpretations of the work) that came under critique in 1930s intellectual circles, and in this sense the “crisis of representation” described in chapter 1 can be understood as a response to the “death of historicism”—a “growing awareness of the flux and multiplicity of history, and a growing consciousness of the subjectivity of its apprehension”—that more broadly characterizes modernism globally in the early twentieth century. Pak T’aewŏn’s insistence on the polysemic nature of language, Kim Yujŏng’s vigorous critique of empiricism, and Yi T’aejun’s subjectivization of literary language as “written speech” all participate in this distrust of a positivist basis for both perceiving and representing the “real” of a predetermining actuality, and their emphases on style play out in what I will argue is a sort of hyperrealism, a “more real than real” in their literary works. The introduction works in tandem with chapter 1 to provide the literaryhistorical context for rethinking modernism in colonial Korea, giving an overview of the contentious place of modernism in Korean literary history and raising the question of a “crisis of representation” in relation to Seoul literary circles of the 1930s. This crisis is understood as taking

16

Introduction

place in relation to colonization, to the broader constructivist worldview of modernism, to the advent of modernity, and to debates local to the East Asian literary community of the period. The “crisis” is also positioned in relation to recent scholarly interest in the late colonial period, and the significance of the analysis is examined both in terms of a revision of literary history and in terms of a reconsideration of the relationship between cultural production and historical context. By reading 1930s Korean modernist literary practice as a response to linguistic, subjective, and social crises, I attempt to delink the concept from both Eurocentric and nativist perspectives while maintaining a connection between literary form and historical context. It is only when one considers modernism as a coherent category within a fi xed developmental chronology that these mutually reinforcing approaches become valid: one via a temporal logic that understands non-Western modernism as a latecomer and hence derivative; and one via a spatial logic that presents Korean modernism as unique to a particular place and hence as something separate and entirely local. By thinking about modernism in 1930s Seoul as taking place both within a specific colonial context and as a response to the long-standing question of how language might connect with the world of things, I attempt to make a problem of standard approaches to modernism more generally both within and outside the Korean context and to encourage the reader to adopt a critical distance on received concepts and categories. Modernism is often considered a “crisis concept,” what Matei Calinescu calls “a threefold dialectical opposition to tradition, to the modernity of bourgeois civilization (with its ideals of rationality, utility, progress), and, finally, to itself, insofar as it increasingly perceives itself as a new tradition or form of authority.” At the same time, the question of the relationship between experience and representation extends from antiquity to the present—from the Book of Songs’ organization of experience, emotion, and expression and Aristotle’s dictum that meaning or “pleasure” is produced in the comparison of a representation with that which is represented to Nietzsche’s definition of truth as a linguistic phenomenon or Freud’s idea of the analysand’s language as a symptom indirectly expressing a hidden meaning. In both senses, a “crisis of representation” among 1930s Korean intellectuals—an intense realization of the uncrossable gap between signifier and signified, word and object—cannot be regarded as based on its expression of something new (despite its appearance of newness in that particular historical context). Instead, I read this crisis both in its historical specificity—as a reaction to the strictures of colonization and the

Introduction

17

onset of modernity—and as taking part in a “modernist mentality” that appears in different times and places but which finds its commonality in the realization of a gap between language and the world. It is by examining modernism not as a preestablished genre determined by its historical moment but as an interpretive category—utilized both in the 1930s as a way of making sense of the literary scene and in the present to shape our view of literary history—that we can reread Korean modernism and reposition these authors both within and outside Korean literary history. The broader task of this study is thus twofold: first, to rethink Korean literary history in relation to a redefinition of modernism outside the Eurocentric/nativist binary; and second, to establish a basis for comparing modernist practices across time and space. My aim is to retain an attentiveness to the literary text and its historical context while also reaching beyond a model of “European diffusionism” that understands non-Western cultural products as either radically different from or as derivative of the West. I attempt to reread Korean modernism within Korean literary history while reframing our understanding of colonialperiod literature within the comparative problem of language and reference and rethinking a methodology that presents reader and critic with a false choice between politics and aesthetics in its reliance on a communicative and isomorphic model of language in relation to the real. Following the introduction and opening chapter, chapters 2 through 7 progress by author, tracing the development of the “crisis of representation” in both literary-critical and prose works. Pak, Kim, and Yi all wrote critical works that advanced theories of literary language in relation to its social context, and I apply these to the authors’ fiction. Upon close examination, these authors often defy conventional ideas of modernist literary practice—yet I argue that they fi nd common ground in their critique of language, their questioning of the relationship between word and thing, and their attempts to overcome this perceived loss of referentiality through the careful crafting of the literary work. It is this increasing attention to the fallibility of language in both its objective (scientific) and subjective (psychological) modes that begins to blur boundaries between genres and complicates our reception of colonialperiod literature, and the book follows the development of Korean modernism as a response to this crisis throughout. By reading modernism in relation to sociohistorical and linguistic crisis, I begin to posit the relationship between the literature of the 1930s and the colonial context. It is crucial to take into account colonial modernity’s fraught relationship with language, not only in terms of overt censorship, government language policies, and so on, but also in terms of

18

Introduction

discourse more broadly conceived. Toward this end I develop ideas of the colonial subject and object and trace how each author’s theory of language may be read as a critical response to colonial discourse, challenging authoritative attempts to present objective truth in a transparently communicative medium. Throughout I treat literary discourse not as a postpolitical support structure for preexisting power relations but rather as constructive and symptomatic of power relations. To this end, I explicitly chose three modes of analysis that make a problem of discourse, allowing us to question this difficult term more deeply in the colonial situation. In psychoanalysis, the discourse of the patient’s narrative is untrustworthy and requires interpretation but is at the same time firmly linked symptomatically with the patient’s “real.” The “double bind” of chapters 2 and 3 is a special instance of this, and is arguably highly applicable in the colonial situation. With the ironic mode of reading of chapters 4 and 5, language always expresses at least two layers of meaning and, like the language of the analysand, requires careful interpretation—discourse relates to the real but in a multifaceted way that calls into question the veracity of all statements. Finally in chapters 6 and 7, narrative lyricism responds in a parallel way to an (imperial) situation that demands a univocal response by drawing attention to the constructedness of language itself, undermining a confident sense of time, space, and referentiality that discursively supports the assimilating rhetoric of colonization. In the conclusion, I return to the question of representation by asking how the 1930s modernist approach to representational crisis and its inherent critique of instrumentalist language might apply to literary-historical practice in the present, pointing to a broadly comparative method that attends to the politics of form. Chapters 2 through 7 are arranged in a dual architecture. I first look at critical works by the writer in question, considering that author’s stance on the question of referentiality in relation to representational crisis and the field of 1930s Korean literature more broadly and criticizing or expanding received literary-historical classifications. Paired with this in a dialogical and mutually reinforcing relationship, a second chapter devoted to the same author closely rereads that author’s fiction under guidance from the theory of language and the compositional methods advocated by each. Chapter 2 thus presents a close reading of Pak T’aewŏn’s “A Follow-Up to Writing: Representation, Depiction, Technique” (1934), arguing that this serialized essay provides not only evidence of Pak’s interest in modernist experimentation with language or of foreign influences on his literary technique (Pak cites examples from Kate Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Jules Renard, among others) but

Introduction

19

extends this common understanding by pointing out that the experimentation undertaken is not in pursuit of a purely nonreferential linguistic pleasure (an “art for art’s sake”)—the charge often leveled against colonial-period modernists—but instead strives for the attainment of a “more real” real in attempting to overcome the gap between signifier and referent. Pak argues that the bodily appearance of the text and the sounds that it produces upon reading can convey meaning alongside the content itself, and the author consequently attempts to render language “thinglike” in order to reproduce an effect of reality. I repoliticize this modernist response to representational crisis—the attempt to fi x meaning, to predetermine how the reader will apprehend the word on the page—by linking it with the anxieties engendered under colonial domination, turning to Gregory Bateson’s theory of the “double bind” and proposing a relation between colonial modernity, linguistic crisis, and literary response in a psychological mode where Pak’s theory of language finds a close cognate. Chapter 3 moves on to address the related conjunction of disease, desire, and language in Pak’s modernist fiction of the later colonial period through a close reading of his representative novella One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo (1934). First, the concept of hysteria is applied to describe the thematic use of symptoms in this canonical work, to theorize the modernist text itself as symptom, and fi nally to propose the hystericizing force of the text on the reader or critic. The chapter understands hysteria beyond individual etiology as the product of a certain social discourse, a relational condition linking desire with language in which the hysterical subject attains false satisfaction with the conversion of actual or repressed desire into the symptom and always distrusts the signifier as a medium of truth—satisfaction is always deferred for the hysteric, including the pleasure of meaning or referentiality. Second, I link Pak’s work with its historical context by locating “hysteria” as one possible outcome of the paradoxical demands of discriminatory colonial discourse, characterized in chapter 2 via Bateson’s concept of the double bind, and read the novella (at both levels of style and content) in relation to the hystericizing injunctions of forced assimilation. By taking the protagonist Kubo not as a neurasthenic (the text’s own diagnosis) but as a hysteric, by insisting on addressing the problematic relationship between signifier and referent in 1930s fiction and literary criticism, and by linking hysteria with the contradictory commands of a differentiating assimilation (“Be like us! But not too much like us!”), this chapter moves toward understanding modernist fiction—and the crisis of representation in Seoul literary circles more generally—as deeply

20

Introduction

engaged with the difficult questions of subjectivity and language under colonial rule. As with the hysteric, who in his or her perpetual dissatisfaction continually asks “What do you really want when you demand that of me?” Pak’s style is arguably an unceasing attempt to bring clarity to expression—to fi x the meaning of the text at the level of how it is to be taken, what it is to mean to the reader. Here again we find an instructive confusion between realist and modernist practices that undermines received literary-historical categories. Whereas Pak’s work implicitly raises significant questions of received genre classifications and prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between modernism and the colonial context, in chapter 4 Kim Yujŏng’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” presents a more explicit critique of instrumentalist conceptions of language and openly addresses the limitations of literary-historical classification. In this little-known essay, written in epistolary form and published in the month of the author’s death in 1937, Kim grapples with what I call empiricist discourse in the areas of science, love, and aesthetics, presenting a critique of subjectivism and objectivism in all three registers. Kim takes issue in particular with a naive belief in the capacity of language to fully capture its referent, which he finds assumed in both naturalist and “new psychological” modes of fiction writing and which understands language as a transparently communicative medium. He argues instead that it is the purpose of modern literature to confront such modes of discourse with the impossibility of complete representation and to move beyond them in a continual grasping toward human knowledge and understanding. I frame Kim’s engagement with empiricist discourse in the context of the more general crisis of representation prevalent in Seoul literary circles of the 1930s and suggest that his dual critique of realism and psychologism and his simultaneous advocacy of an ethical or humanist literary practice point toward idealism as a powerful category by which our understanding of colonialperiod literary history might be enhanced. Chapter 5 turns to Kim Yujŏng’s fiction, frequently understood as quintessentially realistic in its capture of the destitution of rural life in 1930s Korea. Working through Kim’s own thoughts on the gap between language and meaning, I instead read Kim as a modernist writer who confronts this impasse through the use of irony, formally presenting in his fiction a dual structure of reality that mirrors the discrepancy between reality and appearance linked with the colonial experience and modernity more generally. Rereading Kim’s canonical works such as “Spring—Spring” (1935), “The Scorching Heat” (1937), and “Spring and a Low Life” (1936) via the rhetorical trope and philosophical stance of

Introduction

21

irony yields a repositioning of this important writer in Korean literary history and compels a reconsideration of the relationship between cultural production and colonization as essentially ironic. Having read Pak T’aewŏn’s work as enumerating a creative practice attempting to overcome the limits of referentiality and Kim Yujŏng’s critique of objectivity and subjectivity as a theoretical basis for a modern crisis of representation, chapter 6 turns to Yi T’aejun’s theorization of practice in his 1939 Lectures on Composition. This series of lectures, collected at the end of the 1930s just prior to colonial language policies that would all but eliminate the Korean language as a mode of public discourse, is often dismissed as a primer designed for students of writing. Yet what I find in this seldom-treated text is a sophisticated elaboration of what Yi calls “compositional practice.” I first discuss the transition that Yi posits from an oral (traditional) society—where writing was subordinate to its rhetorical delivery—to a literate society, in which writing becomes the primary medium, albeit based on an underlying speech. I then read the Lectures as a systematic study of how signification might take place after the spoken word becomes the basis of writing with the rise of national languages in the modern period. I find that Yi’s recommendation to “write speech” is not coterminous with the “unification of speech and writing” (ŏnmun ilch’i, J. genbun itchi) project that characterized national language standardization in East Asia, but is rather a call to the embodiment of “inner speech” through the exploitation of the indicative layer of language, the visual and oral aspects of the sign. Here Yi extends Pak’s insights on the “thing-like” nature of the written word by centering the task of literary composition in the production of what José Gil calls a “voice-producing body,” with characteristics of both speech and writing—language that carries meaning above and beyond the purely expressive. I read this as the most complex of the modernists’ attempts to overcome in theory the constitutive gap between the “said” and the “meant” characteristic of the 1930s crisis of representation. Perhaps the best-known and certainly the most influential editor and author in 1930s Korea, Yi T’aejun is typically considered an “antimodern” dilettante or neoclassicist who turned from the exigencies of colonial life toward contemplative reflection on past eras. As evidenced in chapter 6, however, the status of language had come radically into question for Yi by the late 1930s, and in chapter 7 I build on the concept of “written speech” developed in the Lectures in order to read several of Yi’s canonical short stories as “lyrical prose,” examples of a stylistic interpenetration of speech and writing. Yi’s technique engages the complex knot

22

Introduction

between consciousness, speech, and writing in a way that undermines the assumptions of realist prose and calls into question the knowing subject who apprehends and describes reality for the reader, what Philip Weinstein calls the “uncohering” of the Enlightenment subject. Neither a retreat from contemporary reality nor an example of straightforward realist prose, I read Yi’s fiction as modernist in its resistance to a notion of language as transparently adequate to its object and to the idea of the knowing subject that underwrites the phonocentric discourse of national language. The analysis thus traces the theorization of a crisis of representation, the critical response to this crisis, modernists’ recommendations toward a practice or method that might overcome the communicative gap, and the enactment of these “compositional” methods in fictional texts by Pak, Kim, and Yi. In the conclusion I restate the two-part central argument of the book: that if the reader accepts this analysis and characterization of 1930s modernist fiction, then a reevaluation of received genre categories and a revision of the literary history of the colonial period in Korea is necessary to postulate a relation between cultural production and the context of that production; and that the Korean modernists’ loss of faith in the referential capacity of language and the active critique of instrumentalist understandings of literary language links them more broadly with a “metaphysics of modernism” that challenged not only representational verisimilitude but also the scientific model and historicism in its inward focus on the nature of its own medium. These are significant insights in par ticu lar for histories of nonWestern literatures. As Andre Schmid has pointed out, how history is written is crucial in relation to regional studies of imperial East Asia, particularly the challenging of histories geographically bounded by the idea of the nation-state, those “English-language histories [that] have tended to emphasize a form of nation-centered history at the expense of those forces transcendent to the nation, especially when those forces have derived from Asia.” Reconceptualizing modernism in the nonWestern context as an interpretive mode outside the Eurocentric/nativist binary raises questions of comparison and literary-historical priorities and methods that relegate non-Western modernist practice to the margins. In pointing out this “geographical blind spot,” I attempt to extend the grounds for comparison established in the course of the analysis into a rethinking of the place of the non-West in Area Studies and in postcolonial and comparative literary studies more broadly. Modernist authors in Korea not only took part in the production of fiction at a very high level but were also remarkable and original critics.

Introduction

23

In examining the interplay between these modernist authors’ fictional works and their critical writings, I demonstrate that the categories that literary history has conventionally assigned to these writers are undermined in a careful coreading of their fiction and literary-theoretical work. Understanding the interpretation of literary texts as overdetermined by systems of classification and viewing the modern period as accompanied by a fundamental shift in human understandings of referentiality and language—a change in the perceived relation between language and the world—are not necessarily new ideas. But by thinking about the status of the “real” in language—a concept that has been a central but in some ways undertheorized aspect of Korean literary history—I hope to gain a new or at least interesting perspective on the 1930s, and perhaps on literary-historical practice more generally. These authors, among others, tried to move beyond a simple relation of correspondence between word and thing, signifier and referent. Interacting with colonial modernity at the level of discourse, insisting on the materiality of language, resisting historicist or realist modes of interpretation, and exceeding realism as a literary practice defined by a perceived fidelity in its relationship to the real, these authors link the idea of the “real” with the “modern” through their theorization and composition of literary language during the colonial period. Insisting polemically on the real presence of these modernist texts in the context of a comparative global literature—the particularity of their relationship to the colonial situation but also their validity as modernist texts that bear formal analysis—our histories of their works should do justice to this complex and meaningful understanding of representation.

Chapter 1 Paradox of Empire: The Crisis of Representation in 1930s Seoul Literary Circles

In the introduction to her book The Age of the World Target, Rey Chow writes about how ideas of the relationship between language and the world changed over the course of the twentieth century. First with modernity, as Foucault theorized it, we have the fall of language from an equivalence between word and thing and a concomitant loss of certain knowledge of the world—the alienation of language from the world of things. Here literature can be seen as that which escapes the world through resemblance and analogy, or estrangement and difference. Poststructuralist theory inherited this view, that language’s work is selfreferential, a reflexivity “welded together,” Chow writes, with language. This was referred to as the linguistic turn, what Gabrielle Spiegel sums up as “the notion that language is the constitutive agent of human consciousness and the social production of meaning, and that our apprehension of the world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens of language’s precoded perceptions.” In compensation for this loss of immediate referentiality and certainty, we have the emergence of scientific or exegetic writing, for which, as Barthes wrote, “language is merely an instrument, which it chooses to make as transparent, as neutral as possible, subjugated to scientific matters . . . which are said to exist outside it and to precede it: on one side and first of all, the contents of the scientific message, which are everything; and on the other and afterwards, the verbal form entrusted with expressing those contents, which is nothing.” Empiricist or scientific discourse in this sense understands language as an unmediated conveyor of truth and knowledge, an instrumentalist means of transparent

Crisis of Representation

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communication, knowledge production, and objectification—of the natural world, or of other areas of the world. Taking Area Studies as an example of such an objectifying discourse, Chow maintains that this kind of language works to “hypostasize . . . targeted culture areas . . . and make them more legible, more accessible, more available for ‘our’ use.” Modernism in colonial Korea can be understood as both a creative response to referential crisis and as symptomatic of a loss of faith in larger narratives that relied on communicative models of language and the relationship between language and the world that these presuppose. I understand modernist literary practice not solely as a response to transcendental crisis—philosophically, “modern man’s homelessness in the world,” or aesthetically, the “loss of authoritative standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful”—but as a response to what Allan Megill calls the collapse of historicism and of the “faith in progress that was the widely diff used, vulgarized form of historicism.” Dorothy Ross also locates the place of modernism within this “broader crisis of Western culture and society” for which evolutionary theory and the critique of knowledge “were destroying the belief that science yielded unequivocal knowledge of nature” and “were robbing historical thought . . . of its power to generate certain knowledge and values. At the same time, industrialization, imperialism, and world war magnified doubts that a beneficent order existed in nature or history.” Modernist practice, as Michael Bell points out, was thus “both critically and creatively . . . centrally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding.” Whether in the realm of natural science, history, or linguistics, Bell points to a general dislodging of objective modes of knowledge and an undermining of scientifically inflected traditional “realism” and the onset of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” for which Marxian “false consciousness,” Freudian repression, and a Nietzschean critique of Christianity relocate interpretation as the privileged category through which to struggle toward truth or meaning.

Colonial-Period Critics and the Crisis of Representation The crises of self-, social, and historical representation that are understood as a precondition for a critical modernist practice meet in the idea of a “fall” from referentiality in the works of three major colonial-period critics. In the literary theories of Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Im Hwa, and Kim Kirim—all writing in the mid to late 1930s—this “fall” is related to the writer’s inability to say or express what he or she means, and the term “crisis” (wigi) is used to describe the social and discursive contexts faced

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by writers in colonial Korea. “Crisis” referred not only to the modern more generally but also indirectly to particular historical circumstances— the suppression of socialist proletarian literature and a colonial censorship that hobbled attempts to describe the present reality of life under Japanese colonization. This situation presented the 1930s author with a seemingly insurmountable gap between the real predicaments of colonial society and their representations in fictional or poetic form. The sense that emerged was of a generalized loss of truth (of the literary work, of the self, of the relation between author and society), particularly in relation to language’s capacity to represent the subjective or objective world. Literary critic Im Hwa characterized the period immediately following the mid-1930s’ dismantling of KAPF and the proletarian literature movement in Korea as a period of crisis, in which the gap between ideal (isang) and real (hyŏnsil) had grown exceedingly large. Due to the threat of violence and censorship at the hands of colonial authorities, writers during this period were unable to close this gap, to link ideology with the representation of actual social conditions in the literary work. Im notes the development, at this “zero point” (yŏngtchŏm) in literary history, of a disjunction between “what one intends to say” (mal haryanŭn kŏt) and “what one intends to depict” (kŭriryanŭn kŏt), a split emerging parallel to the gap between “ideal” and “real.” This gap rendered the writer incapable of producing an organic unity or harmony between character and environment, personality and circumstance, or self and context in his or her fiction. Authors were consequently forced to choose between “introspective” (naesŏng sosŏl) or “psychological” (simni sosŏl), and “descriptive” (set’ae myosa sosŏl) styles of fiction writing, styles that emphasized either the interiority of the character or the social context of the work without the unification of these elements into what Im judged a coherent work of art. This split between introspective and primarily descriptive works reflects a split internal to the writer, a split between what the author intends to say, and what the author actually portrays in the work. Either what the author intends to represent does not correspond with the world depicted in the work, or in attempting to bring to life the fictional world, the author’s thought cannot be brought into accord with the narrative. As Im puts it, “preserving the writer’s thought kills the work’s realness or verisimilitude [sasilsŏng ‫]࢟ܖܚ‬, yet in giving life to the work’s realness, the author’s thought is unavoidably lost—this is the dilemma we are sunk in.” Im takes Pak T’aewŏn as one example of an “extroverted” or “depictive” writer, whose inability to reconcile textual representation with (ideological, intentional) meaning renders his fiction entirely descriptive and

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the authorial self “powerless and impotent.” As opposed to Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s evaluation of Pak’s Scenes by a Stream as an objective extension of realism, Im famously views the work as a failure and as indicative of realism’s inability to exist independently of the writer’s thought or ideology. “In One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo, a self-becomingcorpse reminisces introspectively on his daily life amid a disordered reality; in Scenes by a Stream we see the minutely detailed depiction of various cross-sections of the disordered reality that has made of that self a walking corpse.” The value of such depiction (myosa), writes Im, is that it can convey to the reader a flawed reality without the author ever making an appearance. The weakness of this approach, however, is its inability to focus on particular aspects of reality, to make the distinction between what is important and what is not. This is what separates set’ae sosŏl from genuine realism in Im’s view, and links the “fiction of manners” with an “era of powerlessness.” What is clear from Im’s seminal argument on set’ae sosŏl is that the crisis of representation that we will see developing in the modernists’ fiction and criticism in the early to mid-1930s has in a few years come to be considered a broader literary-historical crisis as well, openly linked with the decline of “ideological” or socially engaged writing. The split between what is said and what is meant has extended itself both into the writer, forcing the choice between an exclusively introspective or exclusively extroverted approach, and outward, linked with the demise of leftist literature characteristic of the historical period of 1930s colonial Korea. Im Hwa was not alone in characterizing the 1930s as a period of crisis. In his well-known 1939 article “The Historical Position of Modernism,” critic and poet Kim Kirim asked what future course Korean literature (and poetry in particular) could take to extract itself from the confusion of the mid-1930s. Throughout this essay Kim conceives of literary history as dialectical, an ongoing process of affirmation (kŭngjŏng), negation (pujŏng), and synthesis (chonghap). Old values are discarded when new values are required or demanded by a new generation or era—thus romanticism and symbolism ground to a halt in the mid-1920s as tendency poetry rose to dominance in the late 1920s, with modernism progressing from 1930 to the mid-1930s until it reached a point where it fell out of touch with the needs of contemporary society and advancement could no longer be made. “I shudder whenever I hear the words ‘everlasting modernism,’ ” Kim wrote, calling instead for a careful examination of modernism’s role in literary history, the historical or social demands that it met as a genre, and the new position it struck vis-à-vis civilization (munmyŏng) as a way of envisioning a future for literature in the Korean context.

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In literary-historical terms, Kim sees modernism as reacting both to the sentimentalism of romantic or fin de siècle poetry and against the preponderance of content and ideology in tendency or leftist poetry and fiction. Modernism was instead based on a self-consciousness regarding poetic language or the linguistic technique behind poetry, and on a certain amount of acceptance or submission to the dictates of modern civilization. Sentimental portrayals of nature and the presentation of the subjective feelings of the poet no longer had the capacity to arouse emotion in people living in the present day, Kim wrote. Previous forms of expression were inadequate to the terms of an emerging historical period, and modernism emerged out of modernity and “seized on impressions flung out from civilization as fresh sensations.” Modernists are the “children of modern civilization,” born and raised in the city, taking up urban themes and subject matter that replace a poetry focused on the beauty of nature. Not only in terms of content but also at the formal level, modernism replaced the language of previous literary works with a vocabulary and compositional style that corresponded to the clamor of trains, airplanes, factories, and crowds. Modernism thus confronted traditional literature with the fact of its irrelevance to the contemporary social world in terms of both content and form. By the mid-1930s, however, modernism had reached a crisis, turning its own critical tools on itself and its demand for the new and losing its clear vision of contemporary reality. Looking over the entire community of Korean poets, Kim saw a new course, a synthesis of modernism and “sociality” (sahoesŏng), developing out of this crisis. Yet this course could not but be abandoned, he wrote, given the historical circumstances. Modernity could not here be overcome, but the task of creating a new direction for literature out of the historicity and sociality of the present could not, Kim concludes, arise from simply forgetting modernism and instead must develop dialectically out of modernism itself. More specifically, it is the self-conscious reflection of representational language on itself, a focus on ways of speaking and writing appropriate to contemporary society, that is modernism’s legacy. Modernism lost its historical mandate when it lost its “newness” to the passage of time, and consequently its capacity to reflect the contradictions of present society. For Kim, the crisis of representation—engendered by the development of modern civilization and reflected in the content and form of modernism— defined modernist literary practice and at the same time provided a starting point for dialectical escape from that same crisis in mid to late 1930s colonial Korea. While the above selections from Im Hwa and Kim Kirim are retrospective essays written toward the end of the 1930s, Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s well-

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known piece on satire and the crisis of the 1930s was written at the midpoint of the decade. An influential colonial-period critic, Ch’oe serialized “On Satirical Literature—Toward Breaking the Deadlock of Crisis in Current Literary Circles” in July 1935, weighing in on what he saw as a lack of response from literary circles to social and literary crisis. For Ch’oe the mission of modern literature was to recognize and faithfully represent the figure of the divided, fragmented self immersed in a contemporary reality shaped by the intertwined logics of capital and colonialism. The origins of satire were thus to be found in a pessimism based on the impossibility of employing standard literary tactics to change or even depict the objective conditions of such a reality. With “nationalist” literature (kungmin chuŭi munhak) and “socialist” literature (sahoe chuŭi munhak) locked in opposition and with no new literary trends arising outside this rigid dichotomy, Ch’oe sought an alternative critical approach, a different method of classifying literature that could suggest an escape from this impasse and allow a theorization of possibilities for the advancement of Korean literature. Avoiding a crude “reflection” theory of mechanical causality, Ch’oe carefully distinguishes between social crisis and literary crisis, pointing out that society doesn’t necessarily have an immediate, direct impact on the literary world. For a true literary crisis to emerge, he argues, there must be a complete breakdown in the belief system that had formerly knit society together. “It is when belieflessness becomes the everyday attitude of a people whose emotional life has collapsed that literary crisis first presents itself.” The modern (hyŏndae) is for Ch’oe just this sort of transitional period, where tradition has been discarded but a belief system befitting the new era has yet to emerge. This situation, having proven crippling for Korean writers, lies at the root of the current literary crisis: “Writers can write creatively without presuming a readership, but writers cannot write creatively without deeply held beliefs. A writer can write even if the whole world scorns and ridicules his art, as long as he himself believes in his art. (And in the end, this belief often ends up taking form as a universal truth.)” Without this sort of belief, the author is left to float amid fragmentary impressions and diffuse imprints of social life without the means to synthesize them into genuine art. “Even if the author has ample creative intent or purpose [ŭisa], he finds himself in a contradictory situation in which he cannot create with any integrity—this is the true meaning of literary crisis.” Ch’oe here links social crisis—the decline of a traditional belief system—with subjective crisis, the fragmentation or split of the writer’s self and the resulting incapacity to creatively grasp the whole of social life

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in an organically unified artwork. Ch’oe’s perception of the mid-1930s appears to coincide with Im Hwa’s in that both see a subjective split at the root of literary crisis and relate this to the writer’s inability to say or express what he or she means. Ch’oe also places priority on the author’s attitude or bearing toward the external world, and the reflection of this attitude in his or her aesthetic technique. Rather than commit the “logical suicide” of limiting his classification system to ideological terms and narrowing the potential focus of literary criticism to the deadlock between nationalist and socialist literatures, Ch’oe shifts the register of his critique to the subjective, the relationship between the self and the world. The external world for Ch’oe is the world of a modernity “in which one cannot accommodate tradition yet one cannot essentially reject it.” Given the transitional nature of the modern world, the individual can strike one of three potential positions or attitudes: acceptance of tradition and the present reality that has emerged from it; rejection of the present, replacing modern reality with constructive fantasies of yetunrealized social forms; or, finally, what Ch’oe calls a critical attitude, standing at the midpoint of acceptance and rejection, turning a critical eye on tradition while remaining firmly focused on the present and denouncing the defects and shortcomings of the contemporary. The function of the critical attitude is “passivistic destruction” (sogŭkchŏk p’agoe)—the simultaneous effort to destroy tradition, to undermine a past-oriented worldview, and to focus on the negative aspects of present reality. Shifting back into a literary-historical register, we can see that the negativity of the critical attitude attempts to avoid the binary trap of “nationalist” (affirmative, positive) and “socialist” (ideological, futureoriented) literature, choosing to resist both rather than to choose sides. In terms of literary practice this leads Ch’oe to advocate satirical literature, which alone can assume this wholly destructive task. Originating prior to the modern period, “low-grade satire” has long been used to attack the individual, while “political satire” criticizes political authority or power in a particular era and “high-end satire” takes humankind as a whole as the object of its scorn. There is, however, an aesthetic form of satire that according to Ch’oe is unique to the modern period: self-satire, the dissection, analysis, and critique of the author by the author. Ch’oe cites Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley as sources of the concept of self-satire, particularly Lewis’s theory of the modern human as split into self (chaa) and not-self (pi chaa). For Ch’oe, the not-self emerges as a result of the decline of a Romantic conception of individual character (and society) as eternally perfectible and a growing awareness of humankind’s inborn imperfection. Far from the

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nineteenth-century worship of the hero and the genius, representatives of the virtuous human spirit to which all could aspire, “the arrival of the imperfect man signals the world of tomorrow.” The one characteristic common to all moderns is consequently despair, yielding either melancholy—the intellectually weaker choice—or satire, a mastering of the self through self-critique and ridicule. “More than anything, selfsatire is a product of the modern [hyŏndae]. It is an aesthetic form unique to the modern period, which could not have arisen in a previous age. . . . Self-satire is an operation, an effect of self-consciousness, and selfconsciousness emerged from the splitting of the self, a division that took decisive form for the first time with the coming of the modern.” The modern disjunction of self and not-self, of a human animal who acts in each moment blind to chance and contingency and an introspective observer who sees in this actor “a slave, a pierrot of human life, an idiot”— here, writes Ch’oe, appears the opportunity for the birth of self-satire. The subjective split characteristic of the modern period allows this actionreaction to be contained within a single human entity. “In one moment the modern human is acting, moving blindly; in the next, the not-self observes this, criticizes it, ridicules it. Life’s greatest tragedy, yet the inescapable fate of the modern human.” It is the counteraction between the two poles, self and not-self, that “gives rise to the spark of laughter.”

Truth, Language, and the Paradox of Empire Each of these critics uses the term “crisis” (wigi) to describe the social and discursive context faced by writers in mid-1930s colonial Korea. In particular, a split is theorized in the modern subject, a division between self and not-self, exterior and interior, what is meant or thought and what is said or represented. Each critic refers not only to the modern (hyŏndae) as a source of this split, but also indirectly to particular “social circumstances”—to the suppression of socialist proletarian literature and to the colonial censorship that restricted any attempt to describe the present reality of life under Japanese colonization. For these critics, colonial modernity was closely related to what Im Hwa referred to as the gap between ideal and real, what Kim Kirim saw as the disjunction between Korean literature and its historical context, and what Ch’oe Chaesŏ warned was a present without belief in which only a critical self-satire and the resulting laughter could overcome the subjective and literaryhistorical deadlock of the modern. At the literary-historical level, this “deadlock” was connected to both the dismantling of KAPF and the gap between “nationalist” and “socialist”

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literatures that remained following the suppression of the organized proletarian literary movement. KAPF “advocated as its goal the establishment of a proletarian class culture,” but struggled to establish itself as a political force during the roughly ten years of its existence. Mass arrests of KAPF members in 1931 and again in 1935 significantly compromised the group’s ability to function as a political movement in Korea, and following the second “roundup” colonial authorities declared the group officially dissolved in May 1935. Despite factional schisms within the group and multiple shifts in ideological and aesthetic position, KAPF proved influential throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, and its demise left an opening—or as Im Hwa put it, a “decline in ideology”—in the literary field for authors who had not been overtly involved with the proletarian literary movement. In this regard the dismantling of the movement proved a decisive event in the history of colonial-period literature, and at the same time presented a sort of absent ideal with its demise, a foil against which modernism— judged apolitical in comparison—is often presented in Korean literary history. The conflict of emphasis between form and content or politics and aesthetics is not unique to the Korean colonial period, but as the three critics cited above point out, these moments of struggle within the mid-1930s’ literary circles resulted in a deadlock or crisis the overcoming of which was seen as necessary in order to imagine the continuation of a modern literature under colonial rule. Th is literary-historical context presented the 1930s author with a seemingly insurmountable gap between the real predicaments of colonial society and their ideal representations in fictional or poetic form, and a narrowed scope of literary practice under the militarization of Japanese imperial rule and the increasing enthusiasm with which statements of ideological conversion (sasang chŏnhyang) were elicited from former leftist activists. This disjunction was further theorized as closely related to the problem of modern subjectivity, the split between the individual and society, or self and not-self. Both Im Hwa and Ch’oe Chaesŏ saw the division and crisis endemic to the Korean literary community as both resulting from and originating in a parallel crisis internal to the modern individual. As we saw above, Ch’oe specifically associates the “splitting of the self” with modernity, and links this subjective crisis with literary practice, naming satire as the mode appropriate to the critical task of modern literature. This fundamental division of the modern subject, between the blind animal drive of the acting self and the “observing other” who scrutinizes this everyday self from within, the “not-self” also underlies Im Hwa’s critical

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evaluation of psychological and depictive fictional techniques. Psychological literature provides examples of the double gaze turned inward, while fiction depicting social conditions (set’ae sosŏl) gives the reader a supposedly objective portrayal of that which is external to the subject. Given the circumstances of the mid-1930s following the disbanding of KAPF that Im implies, this split precludes an organic unity of ideology and objective observation that could result in a new critical literature within and against the contradictory realities of colonial modernity. It is the impotence engendered by this split between self and not-self, interior and exterior, subjectivity and objectivity, that Ch’oe attempted to overcome through the concept of self-satire. For the modern human, any action is concomitant with self-critical reflection, and the literary result is a generic split that precludes a total grasp of reality or truth. Subjective and literary crises of subjectivity are linked to a social crisis stemming from the transitional nature of the modern period, and it is in language itself that symptoms of these linked crises appear. The rapid disintegration of a belief system or cosmology and the absence of a network of coherent social values or institutions to take its place leave the writer adrift, unable to produce a work of art representing the social or ethnic-national whole. Having discussed the literary-historical and individual ramifications of this disjunction, Ch’oe links the fragmentation of society and the individual with the nature of language itself. The point is made in his critique of works that reject present social reality, expending their narrative energy on the abstract construction of a future society. These literary works, which propagandize a future ideal or doctrine, appear unrealistic to the aesthetic imagination of the reader. Yet how is it possible, Ch’oe asks, that a particular use of narrative language can fail to attain the status of “genuine” (chinjŏnghan) literature? The answer lies in the inherently slippery nature of language itself, the words (ŏnŏ) and symbols (ssimbol) out of which literature is materialized. When required, the meaning-content [ŭimi naeyong] of a word can be changed, shifted. . . . Yet in the case of the symbol, [its meaning] cannot be changed all at once at the writer’s discretion. This is because the symbol, as a literary medium, requires a lengthy period of time [in which to develop its meaning], as it naturally originates from traditional social life or ethnicnational experiences and is interwoven with people’s emotional-imaginative lives. Thus this sort of conventional symbol—even when the tradition itself has been swept away—continues to faithfully direct the spiritual life of the people for some time. Herein lies the main reason why new literature [sinmunhak], which dismisses outdated tradition in a single stroke, can on occasion seem unfamiliar or distant to us.

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In a period of transition such as the modern period, the literary symbol becomes a mark of the persistence of the past, retaining a paleonymic burden of meaning accrued over time even when applied in an unfamiliar way or in unfamiliar circumstances, when the social context in which the symbol appears has lost the capacity to assign a position to the sign that would allow its familiar content or meaning to emerge. This is the weak point of socialist literature for Ch’oe—its inability to grasp the contradictions of the present as anything but the antithesis of an imagined future, and its consequent inattentiveness to how the production of meaning in narrative language in fact stems precisely from the crises of the present, revealed at the level of the word or symbol. The particular contradictions of the present cannot be ignored, for they enable literary meaning itself at a fundamental level. It is thus in the nature of the symbol or sign that the three registers of crisis reflected in Ch’oe’s article meet—a sociopolitical crisis (the loss of belief accompanying the modern), a literary-historical crisis (the stagnation or deadlock of contemporary Korean fiction under colonial domination), and a subjective crisis (the split self). When there is a fundamental gap between “what one intends to say” and “what one intends to depict,” the writer’s best option is to recognize the fallibility of language itself and to thematize that gap in the ser vice of a critical perspective on both tradition and the crises of the present. Thus concepts of both truth and language were under crisis in multiple fields of social reality in the mid-1930s, when colonial discourse turned to purportedly empirical sciences (such as biology, ethnology, linguistics, hygiene, anthropology, and so on) to describe and in a real sense possess other areas, making others and their areas “legible” and transforming them into known quantities and spaces “available for use” by empire. The linguistic crisis under discussion in 1930s literary circles not only parallels the criticism of realist methodologies in contemporary literary-historical practices but also compels a reading of 1930s literary texts in relation to colonial discourse as manifested in an empirical or “realist” mode of description. Standard literary histories often give the colonized author two choices: to mount a critique of colonial actuality through realistic or naturalist depiction of an exploitative, industrial colonization (in the city or countryside); or to speak the “slavish language” of the master, mimicking a foreign modernist or stylistically “pure” literature that avoids all mention of sociopolitical crisis. This division mirrors the division in literary history between “engaged” and “pure” literature, between realism and modernism as modes of literary practice and as literary genres. The author

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must either present the reality of the colonized in the natural and transparent language of the ethnic-nation, the “mother tongue” (understood as an act of anticolonial resistance in and of itself); or the author abandons a position from which he or she can enunciate as a colonized subject and adopts the language of empire, a “slavish language” (noye ŭi ŏnŏ). This false choice is the product of imperialization itself. The late colonial period was a time that critic and philosopher Yi Chingyŏng characterizes by referencing what he calls “imperialism’s paradox.” The paradox as Yi conceptualizes it is that empire, in the attempt to exceed the boundaries of individual nation-states and “bring forth a de-nationalized [t’algungminjŏk] and trans- [or supra-] nationalistic [ch’ogungminjŏk] field of thought and action,” itself gives rise to antagonisms between nation-states and produces, within colonialism, the ethnic-nation (minjok). Yi writes: “Precisely what we call ‘imperialism’—that which calls for the erasure of ethno-national boundaries—is the [very] casting of the colonized people as a single ethno-nation.” This paradox extends into the identities of both colonizer and colonized. “With regard to [members of] the ruled ethno-nation, [empire] must demand that they become identical [tongilhwa] as subjects of empire; at the same time, in order to maintain their own ruling position, [the colonizers] must maintain a difference [of and from the colonized].” A play on the title of Spivak’s well-known critique of postcolonial studies, Yi’s question—“can the colonized not speak?”—contains both the demand that, as an imperial subject, one speak beyond the position of the colonized, and the simultaneous denial of a universal position of enunciation to the same colonized subject. Yi’s answer to his title question is that in the end the colonized can speak, but they cannot speak, because “the position from which they can speak is not heard, hidden behind their spoken utterance [ŏnp’yo ᖪᔰ]—the place where they stand cannot be seen, concealed behind their words [ŏnsa ᖪᝀ].” Compelled under late colonial imperialization to speak from a position of universality in support of the transnational project of empire, any universalized enunciation obscures their actual position as colonized. By identifying with empire, the hierarchical relationship of colony to metropole engendered in the attempted solidarity of a “New East Asian Order” is hidden from view; paradoxically, the very position from which the colonized might speak is eradicated in the speech act itself. Th is is the point on which colonial-period modernism is tacitly regarded in many literary histories as apolitical, antinational, or proJapanese: in its failure to enunciate the particular and in the adoption of a universal position regarding language. Yet what we will see is that in

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their approach to language, these modernists did not privilege the universal as a locus of linguistic truth but instead called into question the veracity of all language. Consequently, what is required in a return to the transnational moment of late Japa nese empire is attention to the universal problem of language and reference, both as a product of and as a response to colonization and the dictates of empire. Even as the ethnic-national identity of the colonized was stipulated along an alignment of language, culture, and race, the colonized were also required to participate in a transnational space of thought and action and as such to adopt not a “national language” proper but an imperial language, a lingua franca theoretically delinked from ethnic belonging. It was in part this paradoxical situation, with its contradictory demands on the colonial subject, that arguably produced a crisis in Korean literary circles that was properly understood as a “crisis of representation,” a critical awareness of language’s inadequacy. The crisis described by Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Im Hwa, Kim Kirim, and others, and its reflection in the literary theories of Kim Yujŏng, Yi T’aejun, and Pak T’aewŏn, emerged from a situation in which one’s site of enunciation was split off from the enunciation itself—an alienation from language that made evident the gap between what was said and what was meant. We might apply this revisionist reframing to the literary-historical methodology of an equally transnational and globalizing present by bringing to bear the insights of the 1930s on current practices of literary interpretation and returning to a question that Rey Chow raised, the question of how language is handled when non-Western cultures are involved. Chow notes that so-called third-world literature is often treated not as that which escapes the world but that which is a victim of the world—a literary language that is helpless before and determined by the world of things, a realistic language produced out of the real, appearing within the real, presenting the real (of them) to us. Here empiricist methodology fi xes the literary text within a particular reality, usually a national reality or, for instance, the determining reality of something called colonial modernity. One reason to read these theories of language from the 1930s carefully and to take seriously their critique of realist or empiricist language is to enthusiastically empathize with the impulse to escape the world, to have one’s words determined not by the world of things but to instead determine that world through one’s language, a language that nonetheless remains estranged from it, always apart from the reality the defi nition of which it attempts to grasp. In the most general sense, if we can call the understanding of the relationship between language and the world

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shared by historicism, empiricism, scientism, and so on an isomorphic relation—one for which “correlations between verbal signs and mental signs and between mental signs and things serve as preconditions for verbal or mental truth”— then the emphasis in modernist literary practice on the fallibility of language cannot be regarded as mere aestheticism but must be understood as a critique of the isomorphic relation and the modes of discourse and understanding that this mode sustained and sustains. Attempting to do justice to the revolutionary potential of these works, I focus in the following chapters on how these authors and critics viewed language itself as the material of their art, drawing my analytical framework from the texts themselves rather than from a predetermined literary-historical classificatory system. At the same time I do not neglect the historical specificity of their context, the network of social and political power that acted as a sort of force field on cultural production during this period. An over-rigid classificatory system (“all modernists were apolitical dilettantes”) or a methodology that fi xes the meaning of other areas or peoples has the potential to hide or constrain the power of these texts to change the way we look at literature, literary history, and our own use of language in describing that history. By understanding these modernist writings as symptoms of the intense anxiety regarding language and discourse under the Japanese empire in 1930s colonial Korea, we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of “colonial modernity” and its discursive context and at the same time to mitigate the effects of a particularly imperial way of knowing on our understanding of literature and literary history in the present. Here a critique of an isomorphic, communicative model of language presents at once an implicit critique or “negative reflection” of historicism (or a signal of its collapse) together with its diffusionist logic of modernity—what Chakrabarty describes as historicism’s “recommendation to the colonized to wait”—and at the same time a lesson on purportedly objective approaches to the non-West. It was toward the contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse that these modernists turned in their critique of empiricism and their retheorization of the limitations and potentials of language in its relationship with the real.

Chapter 2 Pak T’aewŏn’s “Representation, Depiction, Technique” and the Colonial Double Bind

Widely considered one of the preeminent modernist authors in early twentieth-century Korea, Pak T’aewŏn exemplifies the constellation of theories and practices of language that surround the contentious genre of modernist literature. His experimental approach to language, his focus on technique, his concern with representing subjective interiority, the international influences that he claimed for his fiction writing, and his concern with everyday life all support his position as a modernist. At the same time, critics from the 1930s to the present have considered Pak’s fiction apolitical, disconnected from the broader historical concerns of its moment. This chapter traces this depoliticization of modernism in the Korean context, then moves on to explore how formal aspects of literary practice might have served as the grounds upon which colonial modernity could be engaged. The marked tendency in Pak’s critical writing to strive for an increased, almost hyperrealistic accuracy of expression in literary language at once calls into question his status as modernist, indicates his anxiety regarding the potential slippage of language into unintended meanings in the process of interpretation, and compels us to reconsider the relationship of aesthetic production to political or historical context in the colonial situation. Developing a parallel between interiorization in modernist literature and the shift toward subjectification in colonial discourse, I turn to the category of the “double bind” to expand the potential of modernist literary practice to vitally engage with its context at the level of form, particularly in its concern with the polysemy of language.

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As opposed to previous readings of Pak’s work that have predetermined his modernist aesthetic as a sign of political and historical disengagement, I understand both the form and content of his fictional and critical texts as logically produced not only out of an urban, modernizing context but out of the conflicting demands of colonialism as well. What we find when we review Pak’s place in Korean literary history in conjunction with a close reading of his own critical works on literary language is that the stylistic innovations proposed in his writings on literature and practiced in his fiction enact modifications on the relationship between language and the real that force a reconsideration of the parameters of discourse itself. In that this relationship—between language and the real—has structured critical responses to Pak’s work both during the colonial period and into the present, the role and status of modernism in Korean literary history must thus be reevaluated.

Depoliticizing Modernism Pak T’aewŏn is generally considered, along with Yi Sang (1910–37), as one of Korea’s leading modernist authors of the 1930s. Particularly with regard to his experimental use of language and his close attention to the technique or style of his writing, his work is seen as representing one of the new strains of literature that emerged out of the realism of the early 1920s. Korean literature of the period is frequently characterized by locating two trends developing in the early 1930s: socialist realism, practiced by the Korean Proletariat Artist Federation (Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, or KAPF) and represented by Pak Yŏnghŭi, Kim Kijin, Yi Kiyŏng, Im Hwa, and others; and modernism, practiced by the aestheticists, proponents of a “pure literature” or an “art for art’s sake” (yesul chisang chuŭi), represented by Pak T’aewŏn, Yi Sang, Ch’oe Myŏngik (1903–46), and others. Although oversimplified, this schema points to what is seen as the major division in the literary world of 1930s Korea, that between leftist socialist-realist writers and their overtly politicized works, and proponents of pure literature, the formalists, whose works emphasized aesthetic quality over didactic political message. Pak published a number of poems and critical essays before breaking into the literary scene in 1930 with the publication of “Beard” (Suyŏm). Paek Ch’ŏl (1908–85), a more senior member of Seoul literary circles (mundan) at that time, points out that Pak, along with Yi T’aejun, was not well known prior to 1933 because of the “hegemony of proletarian literature” and the fact that Pak’s texts were understood as being without political content. In this view, with the Japanese invasion of the continent

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in 1931 and the roundup of KAPF members as part of efforts to clamp down on radical political activities both in the metropole and in the colonies, those who had been ignored in the mundan rose to prominence. “The change in the literary circles at this time,” Paek wrote, “involved a shift away from the subordination of the text to a description of external reality and toward more emphasis on form, technique, the structure of the literary work itself.” He notes that this shift and the perceived split between realism and modernism—which arguably structured not only Korean literary history across the twentieth century but stands as the division constitutive of modern literature globally—marks the beginning of modern literary history in Korea. Criticism was consequently brought to bear on Pak’s work by leftist critic Im Hwa in his 1938 essay “On the Fiction of Manners.” Im particularly criticized Pak’s 1936 novel Scenes by a Stream, perhaps his best-known work, which traces the day-to-day happenings of a cast of characters living in one Seoul neighborhood through a series of loosely connected vignettes and which, “from its publication onward . . . was appraised as a good example of set’ ae sosŏl.” This so-called literature of manners indicated to leftist critics the decline of an ideology—its lack of structure and a vague organizational principle and composition were its faults—much as nineteenth-century Western “realism” could not but have declined into a “serious” fiction dealing objectively with social issues (pongyŏk sosŏl). Attempting to locate an interpretive or subjective position within what appeared to be a purely descriptive form was nearly impossible, according to leftist author and critic Kim Namch’ŏn: “Scenes by a Stream is fundamentally limited to a ‘panoramic’ description of people of low taste on the streets and their customs and manners. . . . Searching for some sort of theoretical ‘moral’ in the midst of this is a futile endeavor.” Pak seemed interested in neither the flow of the story nor including an authorial presence in his work of this period, wrote Ch’oe Chaesŏ: “If we are conscious of the author in this work at all, it is only a consciousness of his absence. That is, in the same way that when one watches a movie there is no consciousness of the existence of the camera, when we read this work we are not conscious of an author. The position of the author is not inside this work, but outside it.” Ch’oe compares Pak’s work with Yi Sang’s 1936 short story “Wings,” arguing that “each author has attempted as much as possible to relinquish subjectivity in confronting the object, resulting in Pak’s viewing the object in an objective manner and Yi’s viewing the subject in an objective manner.” This leads Ch’oe to his oftcited camera analogy:

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[Pak] does not willfully manipulate the characters in accordance with some made-up story; rather, he moves or rotates his camera according to the way the characters move. Of course, this “camera” is a literary camera—it is the eye of the author. Pak was always careful not to have a speck of the dust of subjectivity settle on the lens of that eye. The result, unusual in our literary world, appeared before us as a vivid and multifaceted representation of the city.

What is lacking in this urban scene “hermetically sealed” off from the rest of the world is a sense of the “power of the larger society, which presses upon and directs the narrow world that appears within the overall composition of his work.” It is this objectively descriptive, panoramic quality of Pak’s fiction that is often cited as evidence for the aesthetic, formalist concerns proper to a modernist author, while a reading of the text as socially engaged is put aside. Reading of Pak’s work was effectively banned until the late 1980s in South Korea due to his status as a wŏlbuk author, one who chose to migrate to the North during the period of growing hostility and division between communist forces and those backed by the United States in the South. In fact, known critical works on his writing in South Korea are surprisingly few between 1950 and 1989 for an author who arguably stood near the center of the literary world of the 1930s. Critical works that have been published since have often focused on Pak’s “antitraditional” and “experimental” technique, a continuation of the evaluative categories and critical predispositions already present in late-1930s writings on his work. Certainly an interest in technique or craftsmanship of expression is evident even in his early works. From conciseness and economy of language in “May’s Gentle Wind” (Owŏl ŭi hunp’ung, 1933) to sentences that run up to two pages in length and the use of symbols, equations, newspaper clippings, and advertisements in stories such as “Street” (Kŏri, 1936), “An Account” (Chŏnmal, 1935), and “Fatigue” (P’iro, 1933), Pak’s writing runs the gambit of stylistic experimentation. Th is formal experimentation— inclusion of extratextual elements, long sentence structures with rhythmical pauses, an excrescence or superfluity of expression above and beyond that necessary for purely logical or communicative language, and the lack of narrative center (multiple or divided shifting points of view, the lack of a main story or plot)—further encourages the characterization of Pak as a “stylistic” or “modernist” author. Pak’s work is generally perceived as emphasizing technique over language, composition, and plot. “In terms of Pak T’aewŏn’s fiction,” one critic writes, “it’s not literary technique, but a literature of technique.” The crucial point to be taken from such evaluations of Pak’s work is that, from the 1930s forward, it is almost unilaterally considered apolitical.

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This evaluation stems both from early left ist criticism of his work as panoramic, void of political or moral content, and from descriptions of his work as modernist that bound it within stylistic constraints, resulting in a foreshortened perspective on the content as entirely subjective. “Though he depicted the life surrounding him,” writes Kim Ujong, “because all of this conveys his unique sensibility, what emerges in the end is no different than his own self-portrait.” How can we reconcile these dual claims, that Pak’s work represents the subjective bent of a modernist fiction focused on interiority and at the same time a wholly objective perspective on the urban reality of the colonial period? Ch’oe Chaesŏ admits the intrusion of subjectivity into his model of the objective “camera” by pointing out that a writer must function as both camera and director. “As a camera, the writer can almost entirely transcend individualistic deviations; while working as a director the author cannot separate himself from the customs of subjectivity, nor is there any need for him to do so. The scenes a camera captures and the system by which a camera moves are determined by individuality, and the dignity and value of art lie in the fact that this determination is based on individuality.” For Ch’oe, it is thus in the technical aspects of fiction writing that the subjectivity of the author can and must creep into an otherwise potentially objective process. In his review of the first published collection of Pak’s short stories, critic An Hoenam agrees, locating the value of Pak’s work in the subjective position taken in relation to the description of reality. According to An, it is precisely in his technique that Pak is on par with the best contemporary authors worldwide—particularly in terms of his “position” (ipchang) and the “angle” (kakto) he takes on his subject matter, most often that of the modern city dweller. Pak’s works are “brainy” rather than sentimental, privileging “sensibility” (kamgak) over emotions (chŏng), often presenting the intricate mental state of the protagonists, and are consequently complex pieces. It is not hyperbole, An claims, to suggest that not one of Pak’s works has failed in terms of its “technicalism” (kigyo chuŭi) and he locates a critical, active potential in this technique itself. By taking seriously the potential of Pak’s technique and complicating conventional understandings of the term “modernism” when applied to his literary practice, I argue below that we can rework the restrictive genre categories stemming from colonial-period criticism and raise the question of the relationship between modernist literary practice and the colonial context outside of the modernist/realist dichotomy. Stretching the analytical categories used to approach colonial-period literature

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as well as the accepted range of outcomes or results to be expected from such analyses, we can map modernist literary practice as an index not only of subjectivity but of the double bind of colonial modernity.

The Language of Modernism Modernism is often described in one of two modes: as a break with the past, and as a form of aesthetic expression adequate to the present, to “modernity.” A large number of descriptions of Pak’s work below fall into the latter category, and as we will see Pak himself struggled to theorize and enact a literary language within the discursive constraints of the colonial modern. These two modes are frequently conflated, however, in understanding the subjective mode of modernist literary practice as a movement beyond or repudiation of the objectivity of realism: here, the modernist aesthetic is understood as at once an expression of the modern and a rejection of a past representational model. It is often the inner processes of subjective consciousness that are found to dictate the movement of the modernist narrative rather than a coherent copying of nature or a correct description of a shared reality. In the attempt to move beyond an oversimplification of experience, the modernist work utilizes juxtaposition and irony more than earlier forms, achieving aesthetic unity not through chronological narrative structure but rather through “the entire pattern of internal references.” “The defense of modernism,” Peter Faulkner argues, “has always included the assertion that its successful works embody a principle of coherence or order which is more subtle, complex, and ultimately satisfying, because more adequate to contemporary reality, than established methods.” Relativism, subjectivity, skepticism, and an awareness of complexity are all seen as key concepts for modernist art, which rejected “realism” as inadequate to describe the modern situation and turned instead to alternate forms of expression. The modernist author “submits, much more than was done in earlier realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena; and even though he winnows and stylizes the material of the real world—as of course he cannot help doing—he does not proceed rationalistically, nor with a view to bringing a continuity of exterior events to a planned conclusion.” The protagonist of the modernist work is thus read as increasingly introspective, turning inward away from his or her socioeconomic context, mirroring in a sense the author’s increasing concern with form or innovation with a withdrawal from a textual organization of the social aspects of communal or national life that were taken as the material

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for realist fiction. The author utilizes certain techniques or tools in the effort to depict the complex consciousness of the central character: self-reflexivity, simultaneity, juxtaposition or montage, ambiguity, and an undermining of the integrated individual subject, among others. In the standard view, modernity itself demands this aesthetic response— the rejection of previous modes of expression and the adoption of new forms more adequate to the fragmentation and pace of modern life under tandem conditions of alienating urbanization and the commodification of the global market. Modernism is consequently understood as contingent upon and at the same time resistant to the modernity from which it emerges, as with Calinescu’s oppositional “crisis” concept. Linguistic experimentation, elliptical language, the disjunctive juxtaposition of images, and the lack of discernible sociopolitical content are thus frequently taken as universal aspects of a global but hierarchical modernist aesthetic practice that rejects older forms in its response to modern society. Pak T’aewŏn’s texts exhibit many of these same properties, and he was to some extent engaged with global literary trends, having read Joyce and Gide and well-known Japanese authors of the period such as Yokomitsu Riichi and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Familiar with authors such as Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, and Jules Renard, Pak was also a translator, producing Korean versions of various of Tolstoy’s short stories (1930), Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” (1931), and Hemingway’s “The Killers” (1931). In “Pak T’aewŏn’s Fiction and Experimental Language,” Kim Sangt’ae locates the innovative quality of Pak’s work—its break with past literary modes—in his use of language, specifically in sentence structure, excrescence or “open language,” formal experimentation (the inclusion of advertisements, equations, and the like), and the lack of a narrative center that results in multiple points of view or various omnisciences. The space of the narration, Kim points out, is “migratory”—independent scenes are linked organically together by the style or technique of the text itself. Kim thus defines Pak’s work as “modernist” on the grounds that it experiments with language in a way that supersedes previous modes of narration. Here Pak’s work is seen as “part of the historical process by which the arts have disassociated themselves from . . . dead conventions,” an aesthetic break paralleling the breakdown “prevailing assumptions, artistic, ethical, and social.” It is Pak’s unique literary style that indicates this division from the past, marking a break with realist language in the author’s focus on technique, the diminishment of chronological narrative structure, an emphasis on the random or contingent nature of reality and its reflection in the form of the text, and the use of experimental

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language to “overcome the boundaries of the discursive symbolic system of language.” At the same time that Pak’s work is seen as marking a break with past modes of literary practice, his fiction is also read as expressing the specific historical moment of the “modern” in both its form and content, particularly in his adoption of a visual mode of representation. His writing is frequently related to cinematic technologies and techniques developing in the 1930s, and he is seen as taking part in the “lively interchange” among the modern arts, including film, journalism, and literature, in the 1920s and 1930s. Three major critics from the 1930s, mentioned above as theorists of crisis, saw Pak’s work as reflecting advances in cinematic technique: Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s understanding of the author as both “camera” and director, Im Hwa’s “mosaic” method of composition, and Kim Namch’ŏn’s evaluation of the author’s “panoramic” descriptive method can all be seen as relating Pak’s work to the high-speed reality effect of moving film. This adaptation of cinematic technique is generally understood as one of the factors weakening the role of the narrator in Pak’s work. Rather than a subjective presentation of characters and events, we have a roving “lens” that focuses on characters who become the subjects of the narrative. Instead of a work structured along “rational” or “logical” (continuous) relationships between events and characters, we see fragmented individual shots that “transform into reciprocally supplementing elements.” Critic Son Hwasuk finds evidence here for Pak’s reliance on Soviet montage technique, against the continuity editing of Hollywood fi lms of the period. A common modernist technique, montage was able to reflect intertwined levels of time and space—a medium suited to depicting the rapidly changing reality of modern times. Pak’s use of newspaper classifieds, store advertisements, Gothic type, sentences of extreme length, pauses to show the flow of consciousness, and a tone of everyday conversation were all, according to Son, intended to produce a visual effect on the reader. This visual effect is also produced by the use of “follow” or “tracking shots,” tracing the shift ing gaze of the narrator wherever he looks. The combination of follow shots with periods of recollection via “overlap” or “double exposure” keeps the narrative in continuous movement, “effectively expressing the flow of consciousness characteristic of modern fiction.” Pak’s work adopts techniques from cinema here that both mark it as separate from past literary conventions and at the same time enhance literature in a way that makes it more capable of expressing the scope and pace of modern life. Tellingly, however, Son downplays the well-known

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potential of montage to expose in its very form the constructed nature of the social totality and instead assigns montage the function of creating an “internal rhythm” in the work. The cinematic techniques employed function to create a cyclical, repetitive time and space characteristic of “monotonous” everyday life and consequently explain the almost total lack of “social issues” or “period-specific events” in Pak’s fiction. This second mode of defining modernist literary practice is as susceptible to historiographical choice as the first method, which relies on the notion of a “break” for its specificity. Here the use of montage is not understood as indicating a defamiliarizing resistance to standard narrative modes. Instead, montage functions immanently to show that at the center of repetitive everyday life not “penetrated by historical time” lies the acquisition of happiness in small day-to-day events for those to whom “historical progress and the like are meaningless, nothing but nonsense.” Such analyses focus on the aesthetic at the expense of the political or historical, at best noting its absence or suggested impossibility. Both modes of identifying modernism’s relationship with its context— locating a “break” and the emergence of a new style or reading the text as an expression adequate to the social formation of a particular moment, here located in the mode of visuality associated with film—yield a reading of Pak’s work that is strangely disconnected from both the global context of modernist literary practice (in the case of the former) and from the specificity of a colonial modernity (in the case of the latter). How are we to understand the complex relationship between formal innovation and the sociopolitical context of 1930s Korea? How can we posit a relationship between the “inward turn” of modernist fiction, its break with representational coherence and emphasis on formal innovation, and the context of colonization? If key characteristics of modernism are seen in the development of individual consciousness amid the “everyday,” a consciousness not necessarily bound by collective concepts or values (which especially distinguishes such literature from its “tendential” predecessors and contemporaries); if modernism is fascinated by the alienated self in the urban scene; then these preoccupations must be contextualized in the Korean case not only within some universalized modern space but within the space of the colony itself and under the presence of imperialization and its imperative focus on the ontology of the personal. The acquisition of an East Asian empire, which allowed certain parallels to be drawn between Japan and powerful Western states, here yields a sort of double bind for any consideration of modernist literature produced in Japan’s colonies. Seiji Lippit, noting that the definition of the term “modernism” covers a wide range of literary and artistic practices,

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gives a general definition that includes two elements: Modernism involves a breakdown in representation and at the same time functions as a critique of modernity, a modernity identified with the West. This raises a question for a reading of non-Western modernisms: “What happens when a critique of modernity—a ‘revolt against the traditions of the Western world’—is situated in a non-European context, in which the concept of the modern has been tied to the image of the West?” Extending this question in the context of the colony involves a further complexity: What happens when a critique of modernity is situated not only in a non-European context, but also a context dominated by an East Asian colonizer, which has associated itself with, yet is by its own definition not, the West? If, as Lippit argues, the fact of empire and colonization began to seep back into Japanese modernist literature toward the end of the 1920s, with cracks appearing in the edifice of Taishō cosmopolitanism and the appearance of full participation in the universal realm of world culture—a shared identity in a universalized realm of modernity—then how, if at all, did this fact work its way into the form or content of Korean modernism? Below we find that the subjectivization of language in Pak’s fictional works of the 1930s represents not only a “break” and a response to the modern but also allows the text to address and reflect the contradictions of colonial modernity at the level of form. The definition of modernism as simply an “inward turn” toward deep subjectivity is a definition politically invested in a particular narrative of the modern period that at the same time denies politicality to texts which, especially in the colonial situation, presented in their form and sometimes their content a direction decidedly hostile to the market and to modernity in general. Consequently, I discuss Pak’s own distrust of language and his use of style within a colonial “crisis of representation” as an attempt to fi x, rather than promote, indeterminate meaning—as an anxious response to conflicting demands on language. Pak’s writings on technique blur the boundaries between what are regularly understood as defi nable genres of realism and modernism; compel a rethinking of the literary-historical significance of modernism in the Korean context; and demand a redefinition of modernism beyond a limited set of aesthetic criteria attached to a particular historical time and place.

“Representation, Depiction, Technique” How did the modernists understand anew the relationship between language and the real under the contradictory imperatives of colonial discourse? How was the scope of what was sayable within this discursive

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context restricted or expanded? Pak T’aewŏn himself describes in some detail his thoughts on style and technique in “A Follow-Up to Writing: Representation, Depiction, Technique,” published in December 1934, less than four months after serialization of One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo came to an end. Among the many points that he makes in this long essay, I would like to draw out three that illustrate the problem of language’s indeterminacy for Pak and the methods by which he approached the untrustworthy signifier and at the same time undermined the pervasive notion of the writer as in control of language, confident in his or her ability to produce an intended meaning for the reader. Pak opens the essay with the admission that language is multiple. Not only do words have various meanings in and of themselves, but meaning also shifts depending on where the word appears in a text, how it is punctuated, how it is pronounced—in short, style or form determines meaning as much as content itself. The comma (an innovation in Korean grammar at the time) can fi x the meaning of “Ŏdi kani?” in the written text, where “Ŏdi kani?” means “Where are you going?” and “Ŏdi, kani?” means “Are you going somewhere?”; the doubling of consonants can not only specify accent or tone, but can lend affective value to a word or phrase; noting differences in pronunciation and representing them accurately on the page can also make clear the gendered difference of speech. “In language,” Pak wrote, “it is not enough simply to convey a fi xed meaning through the content. Together with [the content], one should without exception also convey, via sound [ŭmhyang], a nuanced implication [magyŏnhan amsi] to the reader.” As the content—language (ŏnŏ)—appeals to the intellect, the aural or visual form of the text— composition (munjang)—simultaneously appeals to the senses. “Only when these conditions are met can language and composition for the first time be said to have a literary style [munch’e], that is, ‘style’ [sŭt’ail].” One of Pak’s numerous examples here is the pronunciation of “ice cream,” with two standard pronunciations in Korean, “aissŭgguri” and “aisŭk’ŭrim.” Though both refer to the same referent (a frozen dairy product), “aisŭk’ŭrim” invokes the image of elegant men and women sitting in a café or teahouse, while “aissŭgguri” suggests children crowding around the ice cream seller on the street. A specific mood or atmosphere is created through these different textual representations of the same words, which have different meanings when they are differently transliterated. Not only sound but also appearance can alter the sense of a word: “wit” and “humor” are Pak’s examples here, with pairs “uit’ŭ” (a transliteration of the English “wit”) and “kiji” (the Sino-Korean term meaning “wit”), “yumŏ” (transliteration of “humor”) and “haehak” (the Sino-Korean

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term for “humor”) producing a different feeling or conveying a different meaning to the reader not only because they are pronounced differently but also because of the “effect that the shape and form of each of these characters has on our sense of sight [sigak].” These differences in the appearance and sound of particular words are what is referred to here as “style.” Second, Pak argues that the structure of the work can produce effects and convey meaning alongside the content itself. He begins with the direction of the text—when a man sitting on top of a pole talks with a man on the ground, the text should flow in the direction of each man’s speech, top to bottom and bottom to top, in order to more accurately convey the perspective of each speaker. Pak moves on to analyze an entry from Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles (1899), noting with marvel the French author’s technique of representing ants by placing a series of the numeral three side by side on the page. “Naive and straightforward” in expression, this method reveals the capacity of the form of the text to convey meaning above and beyond its content, which is after all only the numeral 3. Beyond the structure of the character or the phrase, the plot itself can be structured in a way that produces an effect beyond content. Among other works, Pak analyzes Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho (1884). Working from a translation by Takebayashi Musōan (1880–1962), Pak finds that the movement of the entire novel from beginning to end is encapsulated in a brief opening passage in which the protagonist carries the woman who will become his lifelong mistress up a long set of stairs, growing more and more exhausted until the initial enthusiasm that compelled him to sweep her off her feet is entirely expended. “It was no longer a woman he was carry ing, but something heavy, ghastly, which suffocated him, and which he was momentarily tempted to drop, to throw down angrily at the risk of crushing her brutally.”  The essence and action of the novel—the young man’s initial ardor for his mistress declining over time with his familial and social ruin—are compressed into this “exquisite” passage. Here once again, the structure of the work conveys a meaning far beyond its limited contents, functioning not only as the opening passage of the novel but also a summation of its entirety. Third, toward the end of his essay Pak details the technique of “double exposure” (yijung noch’ul) mentioned above. Despite the brief history of moving pictures, he notes, the artist has much to learn from cinema, particularly with regard to its technique. Pak points out that he is not alone in his interest in techniques of “overlap”—having recently read Joyce’s Ulysses—and goes on to provide two lengthy quotations from One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo as examples. In the first

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passage, Kubo has gone out to eat dinner with his friend, the owner of a teahouse in Seoul. He has been thinking of a woman he met in Tokyo, of how he became acquainted with her after finding by chance her misplaced notebook with a postcard addressed to her in it. He learns her name and address from the postcard, and goes in search of her. Coming out of the tea room with his friend and heading toward Taech’angok, Kubo suddenly thought of the postcard in the notebook. Of course at first he had hesitated. But knowing her address, he couldn’t let the opportunity slip away. Above all he was young, and this was of some interest to him. Reveling in a delusion becoming of a novelist, Kubo went out in search of the woman. . . . After the mistress of the house had come out and gone in again, the owner of the notebook, who showed up at the entrance, was clearly . . . a beautiful woman coming from the direction in which they were walking. She looked at them, smiled, and passed. A hostess in the café next to his friend’s tea house.

A second instance of overlap follows as Kubo, while eating soup at the restaurant with his friend, continues to think of his day with this woman in Tokyo, during which they had taken a taxi to Musashino. Upon getting out of the car at Musashino, Kubo stood stock still. It was not that he was waiting for the woman to appear behind him, but rather that in front of him stood a foreign lady, who smiled. Kubo’s English teacher looked back and forth between Kubo and the woman, smiled anew a smile full of meaning, said “I wish you a happy day” and went on her way. There may have been an element of disdain toward the younger man and woman in the smile of this spinster in her thirties. Like a boy, he felt countless beads of sweat on his forehead and along the bridge of his nose. So Kubo had to take a kerchief out from his pocket and wipe his face. It was so hot after eating a bowl of sŏllŏngt’ang on a summer evening.

Memory merges with the present in each of these passages, past reality blurring into the present in a single image: a café hostess and, in the second passage, beads of sweat on Kubo’s face. The “connection between present and past, the cross-section of reality and fantasy,” Pak wrote, can only be effectively expressed using this technique of double exposure. The woman and beads of sweat, or kerchief, present images around which past and present rotate—their “meaning” in the narrative present (where they are simply an acquaintance walking down the street and the result of eating hot soup, respectively) is expanded to encompass a past instance and a past meaning. At the same time that the meaning of narrative events is expanded, it is also fi xed—this embodiment gives a physical presence to the protagonist’s memories, actualizing ephemeral memory for the reader in concrete, bodily images.

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There are two critical points to note here. First, it is clear that Pak considers technique as a means to expand the scope and depth of linguistic meaning. Far from presenting style as pure technique divorced from the real, the careful crafting of the shape, sound, order, and structure of language can be utilized to represent a complex reality in which—to draw on Simmel’s well-known formulation—“the most banal externalities are, in the last analysis, bound up with the fi nal decisions concerning the meaning and the style of life.” The second point to note is that the flexibility of language develops internationally and multilingually, between Europe and Korea and between Tokyo and Seoul. Many of the examples that Pak uses to express the multiplicity or heteroglossia of language derive from the transliteration of English words into Korean, or from readings of European works of fiction, often in Japa nese translation. The complexity of Pak’s present is not simply urban, but is cosmopolitan and multilingual, overcoming the boundaries of a single symbolic system. Furthermore, the “cross-section of reality and fantasy” captured by the technique of double exposure is a cross-section of the space between Seoul and Tokyo, between the colonial capital and the imperial center. It is only through the “wit and intelligence” of the author, the “keenness” of the author’s mind, that technique can be wielded in a way that fi xes meaning, even temporarily, in this context. What stands out further among the techniques that Pak advocates in his essay is the attempt to render language “thing-like.” Examples are numerous: the vertical/inverted text that clarifies for the reader the position of the two speakers (one above, one below); large, bold letters used to emphasize overloud speech in a suddenly quiet setting (a concert hall); Renard’s sequential use of the numeral 3 to represent a line of ants; the metatextual organization of Daudet’s novel, which reveals the structure of the entire plot in the first few pages; the use of punctuation and other techniques to clarify the cadence, rhythm, emphasis—the spoken quality—of the written text; the importance of names (both titles and proper names); and finally the double overlap technique, which fi xes a past and present meaning in a single, fragmentary image. These techniques stem from an anxiety regarding the potential of language to slip into different meanings and turn to the embodiment of speech to fi x onto language a specific meaning. The gap out of which this anxiety emerges corresponds to the gap between what Bateson and Watzlawick refer to as “analogic” and “digital” language. Digital communication can refer to written language as we ordinarily think of it—a signifier standing in for a signified with no necessary relationship between the two. The numeral 5 is not, for instance, larger than the numeral 3; there

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is “nothing particularly five-like” or three-like about the numerals. In  analogic communication, however, “real magnitudes are used and they correspond to real magnitudes in the subject of discourse.” Analogic communication has something thing-like about it—nonverbal forms of communication such as “posture, gesture, facial expression, voice inflection, the sequence, rhythm and cadence of the words themselves . . . as well as the communicational clues unfailingly present in any context in which an interaction takes place.” In lending extralinguistic clues to his texts, Pak is in a sense attempting to add “analogic” communication to his writing, a metatextual commentary that lets the reader know how the language is to be taken. This is not an explicative clarification of content, of meaning, but rather takes place between the lines, so to speak, at the level of punctuation, typeface, structure—in short, at the level of style.

The Double Bind and Colonial Discourse The question of the relationship between aesthetics and the political— between text and context—is a long-standing and difficult one. In tackling the discursive context in which Pak was compelled to carefully take advantage of the content of form, my goal is not to give a definitive account of the structural relation between the two but rather to construct a provisional connection between social and aesthetic forms that might shed light on the modernists’ struggles with the referential function of language in the specific context of Japanese empire. What aspects of this context limited and constrained (but also perhaps pushed against the perceived boundaries of) literary expression? How, in the very critique of these limits carried out by the Korean modernists in their critical and fictional writings, can we come to a better understanding of the colonial modern? How did the “paradox of empire” and the generalized sense of a loss of truth that accompanied it manifest itself in literary language, in the internal rules “where discourse exercises its own control”? How can the innovative formal aspects of modernist literary practice be read in relation to or as a response to the contradictory basis of colonial society at the level of language? To begin, the modernist movement from outside to inside, from social to individual—from external causation to a psychic mechanism—can be seen as paralleling a shift in the sociopolitical relationship between the Japanese empire and its colonies from the 1920s to the 1930s, from policies of assimilation (tonghwa, J. dōka) to imperialization (hwangminhwa, J. kōminka). Japan’s relations with its colonies from the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 through defeat in 1945 can be de-

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scribed in terms of the project of imperialization, “a cultural-political campaign that aimed to transform its colonized people into imperial subjects . . . a political and cultural intensification required to transform colonized peoples into loyal imperial subjects in preparation for the war.” Leo Ching notes that understanding “imperialization” as an extension of earlier policies of assimilation—a sort of “final stage” of the processes of colonization—obscures “the strife of the colonized subjectivity under kōminka, where ‘identity struggle’ emerged as a fundamental problem and a predominant concern.” Imperialization inaugurated the problem of “becoming Japanese” as “exclusively a problematic of the colonized, viewed as an incomplete ‘imperial subject.’ ” A primary contradiction of assimilation—the disparity between cultural absorption and political rights, seen in par ticu lar during the period of “cultural policy” or “cultural rule” of the 1920s in Korea—is obscured in this shift from colonial project to colonial objectification. “Cultural representation under kōminka therefore displaced the concrete problematic of the social and replaced it with the ontology of the personal. . . . In the discourse of dōka, the problem of making the colonized into Japanese was perceived and conceived as predominantly a project of the colonial government. Under kōminka, however . . . becoming Japanese became the sole responsibility of the colonized.” Ching’s concern with identity is shaped in part by a parallel argument that similarities and differences between colonizer and colonized are not causal historical factors but are in fact discourses produced by the historical conditions of Japa nese colonialism itself. “Compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories” do not in fact exist outside the “temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it.” The well-known ideology of “Pan-Asianism” functioned rhetorically to distinguish Japanese empire from forms of Western domination, “proclaiming the unity of Asian interests against the ‘decadent’ imperial powers of the West.” At the same time, policies of assimilation were based on assumptions of Japanese superiority, “an assertion of ‘difference’ or ‘superiority’ by the colonizing nation/people with regard to the colonized subjects,” producing in effect a “policy of discriminatory assimilation.” This contradictory stance of “Asian brotherhood” and Japanese superiority produced radically different yet simultaneous perceptions of Koreans on the part of Japanese officials, as Peter Duus points out. “There is nothing especially different about [Koreans],” wrote Diet member Arakawa Gorō in 1906. “If you . . . did not look carefully, you might mistake them for Japanese. . . . You might think the Japanese and the Koreans are

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the same type of human being.” Yet Arakawa goes on to write, “If you look closely [at the Koreans], they appear to be a bit vacant, their mouths open and their eyes dull, somehow lacking . . . one could even say that they are closer to beasts than to human beings.” The alternation between what might be called narcissism and paranoia in this passage points to the ambivalence of colonial authority that Homi Bhabha locates in colonial mimicry, “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Colonial discourse is split, allowing two attitudes toward reality: “one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates ‘reality’ as mimicry”—on the one hand, the “reality” of cultural and morphological similarities between Japanese and Koreans, and on the other, the “difference that is almost nothing but not quite,” the ill-defi ned slackness, vacancy, or lack in Arakawa’s description. The closer that the colonized approach the perceived location of the colonizer as civilized, modern, and so on, the more threatening this mimicry becomes—the overcoming of cultural and historical difference requires renewed efforts to fix the colonized as Other, as minimally yet overwhelmingly different. Soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite.

The “site of interdiction,” the imperative delivered to the colonized in a scenario of assimilation, is thus a contradictory one. “Be like us!” the colonizer demands—“But not too much like us.” The appearance of a self-contradicting statement here is not surprising. It is here . . . where the paradox of Japan’s racial essentialism and its imperialist aggression lies: since Japa neseness, with its constituting uniqueness and superiority, is inaccessible to other Asians, its imperialism and colonial endeavor will ultimately threaten that very ontological existence. Put differently, if Japan’s enjoyment is only possible through the differing enjoyment of the “Others,” would not the annihilation of that difference eradicate Japan’s own enjoyment?

Sonia Ryang locates the anxiety produced by a situation of simultaneous desire for sameness and difference in her survey of Japanese travelers’ perceptions of Korea from the 1910s to the 1930s. Travel literature during

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this period reinforced official discourse, which held that “it was merely a matter of ‘teaching [Koreans] properly’ in order to rescue them from backwardness”—in other words, an extension of the imperative to “make them like us.” Yet there was the constantly present danger of teaching the colonized too well or too much. Ryang cites a retired professor of the Japanese Military Academy on his travel to Korea: “ ‘Senjin [derogatory for Koreans] are not bad at all. . . . If we teach them very well, we can make them as good as Japanese,’ but ‘we have to be careful with one thing: if we educate them too well, they may dream up bad things such as calling for insurrections [against Japanese].’ ” Anxiety did not stem only from the possibility of political uprisings—“some took the Korean ‘mimicking ability’ as a threat to Japanese identity.” One frequent visitor to Korea, for instance, “warned against implementing a facile and unhierarchical assimilation policy which in his eyes would give Koreans too much equality with Japanese, thereby making them just the same as Japanese, and in turn rendering colonial rule meaningless.” I understand this paradoxical command—Be like us, but not too much!—as an example of a double bind, a communicative reversal contained within a single imperative or a series of injunctions that presents a contradictory relationship between levels of content and metacontent. Based on Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types, which stipulates a different level of abstraction between a class and its members, the doublebind theory takes the repeated breach of this difference as a starting point for understanding the communicative origins of pathological states. Gregory Bateson and others detail the conditions necessary for such a double bind to develop: the involvement of two or more persons, one of whom is referred to as the “victim” or, later, the “recipient”; the double bind as a recurring experience for the recipient; a primary, negative injunction made by an outside authority, either “If you do not do so, I will punish you” or “If you do not do so-and-so, I will punish you”; a secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, conflicting with one element of the first message, also backed up by the threat of punishment; and a third injunction against leaving the field. The secondary injunction is often delivered nonverbally (posture, gesture, facial expression, and so on) and frequently takes place at a “metacommunicative” level, a communication about the original message itself that informs the recipient how the message is to be understood. Among the simplest examples is the sign reading “Ignore This Sign” or, the primary example for Bateson, a young man recovering from a mental breakdown who is visited in the hospital by his mother—she shrinks from his initial embrace, but when he takes his arm away, asks,

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“Don’t you love me anymore?” The dilemma presented to the patient becomes “If I am to keep my tie to mother I must not show her that I love her, but if I do not show her that I love her, then I will lose her.” This is the basic model for the double bind: the mother, anxious about expressions of love from the child, withdraws, but denies these unacceptable feelings of hostility by responding to the child’s subsequent withdrawal from her with loving or affectionate behavior, which draws the child in and begins the cycle anew. “The important point,” writes Bateson, “is that her loving behavior is then a comment on (since it is compensatory for) her hostile behavior and consequently it is of a different order of message than the hostile behavior—it is a message about a sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existence of those messages which it is about, i.e., the hostile withdrawal.” The recipient in this position must not accurately interpret the communication, must not distinguish between the two levels (simulated feelings, real feelings) if he is to maintain the relationship with the figure of authority. He must in other words “deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support the mother in her deception,” since strict obedience to either level of the injunction will bring punishment. Finally, the child in this scenario is prohibited from talking about the situation at a metacommunicative level (pointing out the contradictory position itself) by the mother, who would understand his attempts at clarification as an accusation. Bateson’s idea was that rather than a chemical imbalance in the brain or a single, early-childhood trauma, the repetition of this type of situation could lead to schizophrenia. Unable to guess what is meant by incoming statements and unable to discern whether outgoing statements are literal or figural, a breakdown in the recipient’s metacommunicative system would ultimately occur. Eventually “the injunctions come from within the subject himself but are treated as if they originated from some outside authority that cannot be directly flouted, but can very well be fooled.” This model is useful in the colonial context for several reasons. First, as an interactive, intersubjective, communicative model, it allows for the emergence of pathological symptoms from a specific social environment— from a relationship between two rather than the essence of one. Second, it attends to the status of language in this relationship, both the initial paradoxical demand and the pathological language that results from repeated exposure to contradictory injunctions—an incapacity to attribute meaning to statements combined with an acute attention to the need to understand that meaning. The subject is confronted repeatedly with statements that also contain contradictory meaning at the metacommu-

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nicative level (the mother demands to be loved, but shrinks from the embrace) and in attempting to come to terms with this impossibility loses himself or herself in the gap between utterance and enunciation. As we will see in chapter 3, it is out of this gap between demand and desire that Lacan locates the emergence of the hysterical subject and her perpetual questioning: “at the level of utterance you’re saying this, but what do you want to tell me with it, through it?” The hysteric desires something, yet if that something comes to him, he must reject it—a temporary rejection, for he cannot permanently renounce the thing that he loves. This results, as Sluzki points out, in an indefinitely repeating “yes, but no” response, keeping the purported object of desire in abeyance. The double-bind situation responsible for this in communicative theory can be expressed in the following injunction: “Take initiative, but remember that it is forbidden to take initiative!” Repetition of a circumstance in which activity is punished and passivity is rewarded and the paradoxical messages emerging from this context lead, in short, to hysteria. Widely considered apolitical and focused on technique, I find that Pak’s literary practice, in its intense focus on the relationship between art and its referent, establishes the ground on which the double bind constitutive of the colonial situation could be engaged and its apparently “communicative and pragmatic” discourse undermined. In the context of colonial modernity, technique or style was not a means of intentionally obfuscating meaning or avoiding reference to political topics, obscuring the reality of colonial Seoul with a “screen of fantasy.” In that this was a context in which it was crucial to discriminate meaning—the identification of language—yet a context that limited the use of “digital” communication via censorship, the colonial modern read as a double bind “implies a whole style of relation with the world . . . in which certain stimuli are systematically denied, certain meanings are systematically repressed, lack of recognition is reinforced and rewarded, and clarification is punished—in this, we concur in believing, might rest the pathogenesis of schizophrenia.” In chapter 3 I trace the pathogenesis not of schizophrenia but of a hysterical modernism in Pak’s fictional works, which arguably face the double bind of colonialism more directly in their paradoxical, ambiguous response than conventionally realistic texts that appear to accept the mimetic and subject-centered logic adopted from Western standards of literary worth. By incorporating indeterminate meaning at the formal level as well as at the level of content, we will see that Pak’s “hysterical” texts work to produce interpretive desire in the reader through the split

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between utterance and enunciation described in Pak’s ideas on literary language and enacted in his fiction. The gap between what is said (utterance) and what is meant (enunciation) is the gap between demand and desire from which the hysteric emerges, insisting in response to the double bind, “You demand something of me, but what do you really want? What are you aiming at through this demand?” It is this demand that results not only in the response of the text—Pak’s modernist technique—but a response within the text, seen in the use of disease as a framework through which to read the circulation and repetition of desire in the colonial capital and in the appearance of symptoms on the body and in the language of subjects situated both within and by colonial discourse.

Chapter 3 Modernism and Hysteria in One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo

This chapter addresses the status of modernist Korean fiction of the late colonial period through a reading of Pak T’aewŏn’s seminal novella One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo. As we have seen, Pak’s work most often falls on the apolitical side of the division that structured the literary world of 1920s and 1930s Korea, that between leftist socialist-realist writers and their overtly politicized works of “engagement,” and the formalists, proponents of pure literature (sunsu munhak), whose works emphasized aesthetics over didactic message. By addressing anew one of the central modernist texts of 1930s Korea, I hope to work around this categorical opposition and its attendant dichotomies (objective/subjective, materialist/metaphysical, social/individual, and so on) that have structured much of modern literary history. I focus on three themes prevalent in Pak’s fiction of the period: desire, disease, and the problem of referentiality. I propose that the psychoanalytic concept of hysteria allows for a cohesion of these three themes, and that by reading the chronically ill narrator as a hysteric (rather than a neurasthenic, the character’s own diagnosis) we can understand the modernist text as produced not only out of an urban, modernizing context but out of the conflicting demands of colonialism as well, a thoughtful response to the dilemmas of subjectivity and objectivity in language faced by authors in colonial Korea. Kubo’s oft-discussed search for satisfaction as he wanders the streets of the colonial capital has been read as a sociological phenomenon, the result of the establishment of the colonial city or capitalist modernity in Korea, and as an individual phenomenon, a private search for happiness

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in the historical space of that modern city. These readings fit well with the dominant understanding of Pak’s work as concerned solely with representing interiority and as consumed with problems of style. Yet as we will see below, given Kubo’s frequent characterization of linguistic inaccuracy as symptom and connections drawn more generally between disease and representation, a literary-historical method that takes a historico-realist approach to the text would fall short of asking how the text itself questions the capacity of language (including its own) to adequately represent the world. Using the psychoanalytic figure of the hysteric, I propose that Kubo’s desire leads us toward and not away from the problems of linguistic reference and that the concept of hysteria productively links disease, desire, and language in a way that suggests a method for rereading modernist literary texts, particularly in relation to the paradoxical imperatives of colonial discourse in the 1930s. Tracing hysteria in Kubo allows us to exceed the search for a final meaning—the prevailing approach to the novella among literary critics past and present—and instead to posit or rethink a series of relationships: between hysteria and modernism as a literary practice; between the text and its interpretation; and finally, between the colonial context and the enigma of Pak T’aewŏn’s fictional work. First, modernism and the psychoanalytic definition of hysteria share both an “unreliable narrator” and consequently a marked attentiveness to the medium of expression. Each initially incites in the reader or analyst a desire for meaning that “assumes that true significance remains concealed until it is revealed by an interpretive act.” The notion of the symptom embodies this idea and provokes, by its nature, interpretation, where “the correlative assumption is that whatever is hidden must be true, that the subject’s truth resides in what he or she conceals.” We will see that Kubo blocks, rather than elicits, successful interpretation, presenting us with something like Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifier,” that which contains meaning but remains irreducibly opaque to both the sender and receiver of the message. This continual deferral of satisfaction in a sense hystericizes the reader by extending an offer of meaning that remains unfulfi lled, an “enunciation that denounces itself.” The interpretive act and the assignment of literary-historical meaning to Kubo is both provoked and denied by the novella, rendering our “translation” of the text always at the same time a failure. Reading hysteria as emerging in response to the “Chè vuoi?” of the other opens up the colonial relation itself to productive scrutiny. Here the contradictory injunction of the colonial double bind—which demands subjective truth from the colonized on the basis of a successful (if impossible) response—is

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understood as residing at the core of the linguistic indeterminacy that motivates Pak’s stylistic innovation. The difficulty of the modernist text is thus read less as a barrier to communication (as with censorship) than as an alternate register of communication indicative of the historical context within which Kubo was written and consumed. This in turn allows a rethinking of the relationship between “nonrealist” texts and the colonial context in literary history. Hysteria as a Freudian concept straddles the psychic/somatic divide, allowing us to categorize the physical symptoms that Kubo obsessively presents throughout the novella as psychic in origin. Yet the novella perpetually defers interpretation and ultimately frustrates the hermeneutic desire to master the text and locate fi xed meaning. If the language of the analysand is that which is to be interpreted or rendered meaningful by the analyst, Kubo undermines that authority and desire for mastery by both presenting and, I argue, performing an indeterminacy of language (an inability to know the other’s desire) and an inability to know oneself (to structure one’s own desire) that hystericizes the reader, pointing to that which is potentially hidden behind language while never allowing understanding to take place. In three registers—literary modernism, its interpretation, and colonial discourse—hysteria allows us to call the status of the subject into question as always emerging in response to the desire of another. This chapter then carries out a reading of Kubo on three levels: at the level of the text’s own thematics; as a thesis on the relation of the subject to (self-) knowledge; and as a response emerging from the colonial double bind and the attendant crisis of representation that characterized critical discourse in 1930s Seoul literary circles. I reach beyond a Freudian understanding of hysteria, particularly in relation to the hermeneutic role of the analyst in decoding the symptomatic language of the analysand, and at the same time toward a historically specific location of the hystericizing modernist text within a contradictory and anxious colonial discourse. Kubo presents bodily and linguistic symptoms within a psychoanalytic framework yet frustrates interpretation, drawing the reader into a hysterical relation with the irreducible text.

Hysteria and Modernism The development of the concept of hysteria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries parallels in certain ways the development of the concept of modernism. It is notoriously difficult, for instance, to arrive at a precise definition of hysteria, yet at the same time hysteria served as the

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foundation for Freud’s development of a theory of psychoanalysis. Modernism is likewise “intolerably vague,” but nonetheless serves as one of the defining categories of modern and contemporary literature. The concept of hysteria is provocative in that it links desire and language, imagination and illness—all themes that emerge with frequency in Pak’s fiction and in the critical response to his writings; the concept of modernism links past and present, text and context, retaining the power to connect with “aesthetic, ideological, and historical issues which have still not been closed.” It is in the clash between social demands and subjective desires that hysteria emerges—in the process of repressing the individual need, the “most secret and repressed wish,” the hysterical symptom emerges as a “bodily form of expression” of the stifled affect connected with the “intolerable idea.” The satisfaction of the hysteric’s desire is thus in a sense false, emerging encoded in an indirect representation, the symptom. Further, the hysteric “can sustain her desire only as an unsatisfied desire”—the closer the subject moves to the object-cause of his desire, the further it moves from him. Modernism as a literary form also arguably emerges between social demand and the expression of subjective desire. As an aesthetic category the term represses marginal instances of modernist literary practice and at the same time eludes definition, producing a “dissonance of meanings” out of “irrational and covert processes of repression, return, and transference in modernist studies,” processes that “reflect unresolved complexes within modernity itself.” This raises two key points for our analysis of Pak’s fiction and critical writings. First, within this paradigm desire is seen as mediated, always based on the desire of another. A variety of critics have attempted to come to terms with the path of desire in Pak’s work—the narrators are constantly seeking, searching for happiness, pleasure—yet I argue that it is by asking “whence” Pak’s characters desire (rather than what they desire) that we can begin to understand how Kubo’s satisfaction is always false, incomplete, and results in the cyclical structure that is characteristic of Pak’s fiction in this period. Second, by bringing the concept of hysteria into proximity with Pak’s ideas on literary language, we are compelled to take note of his mistrust of the signifier, his lack of confidence in the ability of language to convey truth. The register of meaning is for Pak “ambiguous, polyvalent, betraying something one wanted to remain hidden, hiding something one intended to express”—we will find this sentiment echoed in the author’s use of literary style, in his fictional staging of the symptomatic reading, and as well in Kubo’s perpetual enactment of the hysteric’s question: “That is what you are saying, but what do you really want?”

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Beyond this, however, I suggest that in the case of Kubo the historical context that produces both this indeterminacy of meaning and the hysteric’s interrogative response is not simply modernity but more specifically an assimilatory colonial discourse that addressed its paradoxical injunction to the colonized under Japanese policies of imperialization, a simultaneous demand for sameness with and difference from the colonizer. In this sense, hysteria appears less from an individual etiology than as the product of a certain social discourse, a relation structured in and by language that at the same time undermines the assumed capacity of language to refer. Below I examine the ailment with which Kubo diagnoses himself, “neurasthenia” (singyŏng soeyak), one of the dominant metaphorical modes of imagining the subject’s relationship to modernity during the early twentieth century, and then move beyond neurasthenia proper and into a relationship between disease and subjectivity, symptom and language, that emerges in its most extended form in Kubo. Specifically, I explore the emergence of Kubo as a figure of hysteria in relation to the paradoxical injunction of colonialism. The double bind of the colonial intellectual yields hysteria as “the effect and testimony of a failed interpellation; what is the hysterical question”—Why am I what you are telling me I am?—“if not an articulation of the incapacity of the subject to fulfill the symbolic identification, to assume fully and without restraint the symbolic mandate?” It is in Kubo that Bateson’s idea of particular modes of communication as both cause and symptom and Lacan’s characterization of the hysteric as exemplary of the functioning of desire in subject formation meet, and where language is shown to be inherently untrustworthy—always an indirect expression, and itself inciting an endless series of interpretive attempts.

From Conservation to Conversion: Kubo the Neurasthenic One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo details the wanderings of Kubo, a self-described author and observer of the urban scene in Seoul. The narrative opens from the perspective of Kubo’s mother at their home near Ch’ŏnggye Stream as she frets about her unmarried and unemployed twenty-six-year-old son’s future. Kubo leaves the house without responding to her poignant question, “Are you going somewhere?” and in the third section of the novella the point of view shifts to Kubo. In these first three segments alone we can identify the close attention to language that the author has paid in this work and stylistic innovations typically understood as modernist: an entire conversation that takes place in two lines using short, choppy sentences to convey summary meaning;

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a proliferation of thoughts or recollections disproportionate to the “action” of the present (the first physical movement in the story is described on the sixth page of the text as Kubo steps out of the house and moves to the street corner); and the inclusion of a chartlike medical prescription in the third segment. The entire day is spent within the center of the city, where Kubo “spins in place” like a caged animal. Kubo travels on foot and by tram roughly in a circle around downtown Kyŏngsŏng between midday and 2  a.m., cane in one hand and notebook in the other, starting near the western end of the main street, Chongno, moving toward East Gate, down though the predominantly Japanese neighborhoods south of Ch’ŏnggye Stream and back west toward South Gate, on to crowded Kyŏngsŏng Station, and finally back up through the South Gate and to the restaurants and cafés of Chongno. The scope, action, and stream-ofconsciousness narration of the story is comparable to that of Joyce’s Ulysses, with which Pak was familiar and which makes an appearance in the narrative. Inhabitants of the colonial city are presented in the streets and squares, stations, cafés, and restaurants of the metropolis in “a mosaic of jagged fragments” transforming, as in Joyce’s Portrait, “the material of everyday life” into art. It is in the third of the thirty-one sections of Kubo that we first encounter the concept of disease. Immediately after leaving his house in the morning, Kubo stands on a street corner, without destination and immobilized by indecision. Wondering in which direction he should walk, he suddenly experiences a severe headache—brought on, he believes, by neurasthenia. Absorbed in consideration of his condition, he dodges aside—not having heard the loud ringing of a bell in his reverie, he narrowly avoids being struck by a fast-moving bicycle. This in turn leads Kubo to suspect that his ears are failing, and we learn that this is not the first time such suspicions have plagued him. (Doctors have told him that his ears are simply exceedingly dirty, but he is convinced that at the very least he has an inflammation of the middle ear.) He remembers having looked through a dictionary of medical terms and lists for the reader all the diseases related to ears that he found there. In the near future, he suspects, he might even need a hearing aid. This long explication of Kubo’s middle ear problems is quickly supplemented by a description of problems with vision and the memory of his visit to the Governor-General’s Hospital; the sudden onset of another severe headache and fatigue, followed in the next section by dizziness and more thoughts of “ner vous exhaustion”; a theory that all his ailments originated with the unhealthy secret practice of reading popular

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works of fiction (beginning with The Tale of Ch’unhyang when he was nine years old) that were prohibited in his home, followed by another list of ailments including fatigue and ennui, along with the failed methods of treatment that he had tried in the past (including psychotherapy); a strong interest in (among other conditions) thyroid gland disorders, nephritis, and chronic gastric dilation; enumeration of illnesses that he might one day contract; and so on. The scorching midday summer sun on his bare head made him dizzy. He couldn’t stand there like that any longer. Neurasthenia. But of course, it is not only his nerves that are weakened. With this head, this body, how much could I do—. As luck would have it a man in the prime of his life was just passing by; Kubo feels daunted by his energetic body and resilient step. . . . Constipation. . . . Fatigue. Ennui. Headache. Heavy-headedness. Fainting.

In this and other passages from the novella, we find the narrator Kubo compiling his symptoms with apparent relish, coming to a diagnosis— neurasthenia—and in the process touching on the defining aspects of the illness, a ner vous exhaustion or enervation characterized by a bewildering array of potential symptoms. A precursor of the neuroses and hysteria in Freud’s thinking and a disease linked closely with urban life and social advancement, refined intellects and sexual excess, neurasthenia had become almost a household word by the late nineteenth century, a “heteroglossic, polysemic, overdetermined” disease, the “amorphous possibility” of which became a “nearly universal trope for the individual’s relation to cultural modernization.” It is this syndrome that provides an initial context for understanding the use of metaphors of disease in Pak’s fiction. Neurasthenia, according to American physician George Beard, encompassed a wide variety of symptoms, was “liable to attack all functions and organs,” and often occurred in sequence with other disorders. In American Nervousness (1881) he defined ner vousness as a lack of nerve force rather than a simple excess of emotion or an organic disease—an impoverishment of excitation. As Tom Lutz points out, this was an economic theory of bodily energy—“When the supply of nerve force was too heavily taxed by the demands upon it . . . ner vous bankruptcy, or ner vousness, was the result.” The primary cause of this strain upon the human nervous system was, according to Beard, modern civilization itself. There are two key points to note immediately. The first is that neurasthenia was taken by Beard both as a result of the processes of modernization and as a sign of those “civilizing” processes—a progressive, “developmental” disease. The price of assuming the mantle of modern

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civilization was depletion of human nerve force and an accompanying ner vousness. Second, it is important to emphasize that the origin of ner vousness lay in material and social forces—the telegraph, noise (“the rumbling of omnibuses, the jangling of car-bells . . . the tramping and shuffling of vast multitudes in our crowded streets”), the “molecular disturbances” of rail travel, the rapid development and acceptance of new ideas (the exchange of science for religion), the new potential of social mobility, and the sheer amount of business conducted in the modern city—and their effects on the “central machine” of the human body. Colonial Korea was no exception. Scenes of urban modernity—the bustling streets, the experience of mass transportation, the sound of phonographs in cafés and tea houses, the conspicuous consumption of the department store—make up the world through which Kubo so hesitantly moves, and journalistic writing on neurasthenia in the late 1920s and early 1930s reflects popu lar perceptions of the connection between modernity and the enervation of the city dweller. Neurasthenia was an ailment brought on by the pace and “complex circumstances” of modern living that rendered “the essence of the national people all the more neurasthenic” —an accumulation of fatigue in a context of mental and physical stress. Analysis of neurasthenia had taken a significant turn, however, by the mid-1930s. Rather than external causes, the most important condition for the onset of neurasthenia became “emotional keenness” (kamgak yemin)—it is the blockage of one aspect of the patient’s emotional life (kamjŏng saenghwal) brought about by repeated shock or trauma, longrepressed emotions, or the repression of normal sexuality that produces the symptoms manifested at the onset of the illness. Thus for psychoanalyst An Chongil, writing in the year of Kubo’s publication, the origin of neurasthenia does not lie simply with fatigue but rather in distressing experiences or emotions of a sexual nature. It is especially the repression of the affect accompanying these thoughts or emotions—the “constant worry, the self-reproach and repression”—that results in both mental and somatic effects. The complex of neurasthenic symptoms has its origins here, in the suppression of sexual desires (sŏngyok pokch’ak) and the consequent “transposition or displacement of affect,” as has been “maintained by psychoanalysts, especially Freud.” Here we see a significant move from an urban-industrial to a psychic etiology—from physical, external sources to internal, affective sources with the emergence of symptoms from a mechanism of repression and, ultimately, conversion that reminds one not so much of Beard’s neurasthenia as Freud’s foundational definition of hysteria.

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Desire and the Interpretation of Symptoms in Kubo Kubo’s self-diagnosis as a neurasthenic works within an economy of conservation, linking the diseased body with the enervating processes of modernity. The novella, however, teaches us to either distrust or to read beyond the statements (or diagnoses) of the narrator. Kubo adopts the interpretation of symptoms itself as a frequent theme in the narrative, and at the same time establishes the narrator as a site of symptoms to be interpreted—an unreliable narrator whose statements, as in the psychoanalytic process, must be framed or symbolized. Kubo teaches us to read for symptoms early in the novella. Riding a streetcar, “a smile played about [Kubo’s] lips. A young woman sat in front of him. That woman had placed her umbrella between her knees, which he has learned from some magazine indicates that she is not a virgin.”  Here we see the attribution of hidden and particularly sexual meaning to a gesture or behavior—the conversion of a hidden cause into an involuntary and outward sign. Kubo applies the same symptomatic reading to himself later in the day as he walks along the street toward a teahouse: “Suddenly a telegram delivery bicycle passed by. . . . Kubo suddenly felt an urge, wanted to have the sensation of holding a telegram in his hand, the seal of which had not been broken. . . . Hmph, Kubo sneered. That thought too was a manifestation of, a certain form of, sexual desire.”  Kubo again interprets a thought or feeling as indicative of something entirely different from its content: the craving for a telegram becomes the expression of a deeper, repressed sexual desire. These passages instruct the reader even as they undermine Kubo’s authority as a narrator. His expression of both thought and experience is opened up to a symptomatic reading, a questioning of the capacity of language to express the truth of subjectivity or its index, desire. This is markedly different from a reading of Kubo as a neurasthenic. The discourse of neurasthenia provides a conservative, economic understanding of the psychology and biology of individual bodies at the intersection of the psychic and physical forces of modernity at the same time that it figures the health and cohesiveness of the political or social body. Here, however, we have moved from a necessary conservation to an involuntary conversion of psychic forces into physical symptoms— the placement of the umbrella, the longing for an “unopened telegram,” and the like. Language—whether indicative, the language of gesture; or expressive, the inner or outer expression of thought or feeling—never quite accounts for the truth in Kubo. In its linkage of disease, desire, and language, Kubo’s presentation of symptoms may be interpreted not

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as neurasthenic but rather as hysterical, a sign of continually unsatisfied desire. Numerous critics have attempted to come to terms with Kubo’s desire, the search for “happiness” and satisfaction that appears to drive the narrative. The novella begins with a section titled “Mother,” and Kubo ends his day at 2 a.m. by returning home with a renewed sense of filial devotion, so it is not surprising that some critics take family, domesticity, or simply the mother as the center around which Kubo’s search revolves. Conversely, the absence of a father may be taken as the motive cause behind Kubo’s wandering as he seeks happiness outside of the home. For others, it is the space of the colonial city itself that produces both a search for happiness and a desire to escape (t’alch’ul ŭi yongmang)—a goal the impossibility of which is rationalized in a return to domestic life and the family. In this reading Kubo represents both the alienated individual and the colonized intellectual, his solitude symbolized by the walking stick and notebook that he has constantly in hand, a powerless monad who resolves his own loneliness in an acceptance of bourgeois, familial normativity. Contradictions in the city space itself can also be understood as motivating Kubo’s dissatisfaction. The urban landscape of Seoul in the 1930s, a colonial capital in the Japanese empire, was newly modernized and yet divided into northern Korean and southern Japanese zones aligned with both ethnicity and relative wealth. In particular, the Japanese quarter of the new city, with its bright lights, cafés, and bustling streets, brought the spectacle of modernity into the midst of an impoverished colonial reality. The posturing of Korean intellectuals amid these changes in the urban environment—critic Kim Kirim’s “dandyism”; Pak T’aewŏn’s cane, silk hat, and evening jacket; “countrified debauchee” Kim Yujŏng’s black coat with the calico collar; Yi Sang’s unkempt hair and white shoes—was befitting young artists desiring the elusive modern. Literary historians also take Kubo as an exemplar of the alienated lumpen intelligentsia, the flaneur on the streets of Kyŏngsŏng, strolling the perverted or distorted space of the colonial city and recording his impressions. Others detail the commercialization of the colonial capital, a new focus on consumption and the production of desire for products in advertising, with its steady repetition of motifs such as health (kŏngang), happiness (haengbok), family life (kajŏng saenghwal), and hygiene (wisaeng). Critics have focused repeatedly on the protagonist’s seemingly endless search for happiness, for personal satisfaction—have searched themselves, in fact, for critical satisfaction in determining the mode and object of Kubo’s desire. What I propose here is not to fi x a specific object as

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that which Kubo desires (intercourse with a woman, membership in a nuclear family, participation in the bourgeois everyday, wealth, literary fame, etc.) but rather to observe how Kubo’s desire is perpetual, never finding precisely what it wants. Kubo is constantly both dissatisfied with and in doubt regarding his position socially and interpersonally; he continually questions his own capacity as a narrator; language never quite accounts for the truth, paralleling Pak’s own distrust of the slippage of meaning between utterance and enunciation; and when Kubo does attain some sense of even potential satisfaction, the object of his desire turns out to be false or lacking in some way. As noted above, this sense of lack is characteristic of the hysteric, of hysteria not necessarily in the form of an individual pathology that we may diagnose through observation and analysis of the patient—Kubo is, after all, a fictional character—but rather hysteria as a social discourse, a way of interacting with others that emerges as the result of a configuration of social context with impasses of individual desire. Hysteria is relational, taking the form of a question—“That’s what you’re saying, but what is it that you actually want of me?”—a desire that equates itself with “the desire of the Other.” In my analysis of Kubo I thus focus on three aspects of the text that may be characterized as hysterical: the indeterminacy or distrust of language and a consequent incapacity to know what others want (of one); the lack of self-knowledge and an accompanying absence of singular desire; and finally the ingenious transference by the text of the hysterical mode onto the reader.

One Day in the Life of the Hysteric, Mr. Kubo As we saw in “Representation, Depiction, Technique,” Pak posits a basic condition of linguistic indeterminacy and a concomitant incapacity of written language to convey an unproblematic or singular meaning to the reader. As well, throughout this sustained literary critical work Pak strives to overcome the inadequacy of language to its object by introducing an indicative layer of composition that can produce effects and convey meaning or “implication” from within the written text, a concern that he shares with Group of Nine founder Yi T’aejun. Yet despite Pak’s efforts to fi x linguistic meaning by including communicational clues in the text, the novella’s syntax often takes indeterminacy as its standard, frequently using words such as hok (perhaps) to begin sentences and sentence-ending constructions such as -dŭssip’ŏtta (it seems) and -chido morŭnda (don’t know if maybe, perhaps). The latter construction is used three times in the opening section of the novella

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alone: “My son, having gone out as far as the door, perhaps might not have heard what I had said”; “Or, I don’t know if maybe his response hadn’t reached my ear”; and “If only the noise of the gate hadn’t been so loud, perhaps she could have heard the sound of her son’s ‘yes.’ ” The -dŭssip’ŏtda construction appears in the third installment, with: “However, it seemed that fortunately Kubo had a middle-ear infection.” The -chido morŭnda construction appears here as well: “Sometime in the notso-distant future he would perhaps have to supplement his hearing with a Dunkel Acousticon or hearing aid”; and again in the fift h installment, with “Perhaps he had never loved solitude. Perhaps he had had a boundless fear of it.” We cannot miss the fact that this indeterminate language, the “don’t know if maybe” that appears frequently throughout the opening sections of the novella, initially arises attached to passages questioning the possibility of communication, mainly spoken communication. Kubo’s mother cannot hear his response to her question, “Are you going somewhere?”; Kubo has a hearing disorder, perhaps a chronic middle-ear catarrh in his left ear, and anticipates needing a hearing aid. The indeterminate (written) language marks the text where uncertainty of (spoken) communication, the ability to make oneself heard, or the ability to hear others, appears at the level of the content. In the fourth episode, the narrator’s sight fails him (retinal scotomata and short-sightedness), and by the fift h section, this doubt has extended to the narrator’s interiority, his emotional life. Not only the ability to communicate with others, but the ability to know one’s own desires is here called into question at the pivotal point of Pak’s ambiguous grammatical constructions, where the content of the work mirrors the linguistic constructions that give it form. The untrustworthy narrator is a familiar feature of modernist texts, and Kubo is no exception. His hearing, his vision, his weak constitution, all call into question his ability to reproduce his experiences to himself and others. Although he can enumerate his “subjective symptoms” in great detail, Kubo doesn’t seem to understand their origins; he is the author who strolls the streets of Seoul with a trademark cane and notebook but cannot produce a work of fiction. This inability to “know” is translated into spatial terms in the action of the novella—Kubo’s movements about the city are erratic, unplanned, without reason. Immediately after leaving his mother at home, he walks along Ch’ŏnggye Stream toward the Kwanggyo intersection “as if he has something to do,” wondering where he should go and realizing that “he could go anywhere. There is no place for him to go.” He stands immobilized, then suddenly decides to begin walking again. He heads toward the Chongno intersec-

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tion, having nothing to do there but turning in that direction more or less by chance—“there was no other reason than his right foot having accidentally [konggyoropke] turned left when he put it down.” A strange gap is thus opened up between the narrator and the character Kubo, in his lack of knowledge about himself and in the lack of control he appears to exert even over his own movements, actions, and speech. This lack of self-knowledge suggests that Kubo has no desire of his own. His will or volition, even down to the direction in which his feet are pointing when he begins walking, seems entirely lacking. This reading appears to be authorized by the text itself, as Kubo questions his lack: “Kubo lit a cigarette and wondered: What is my greatest desire? . . . what is it that I, in truth, want?” Here Kubo cites a tanka—“Thought about the things I really wanted / and yet it all boiled down to none”—and agrees that “though it seemed that there should be such a thing [one’s greatest desire], there was not.” This is borne out to some extent throughout the novella. Kubo struggles with the desires for a conventional married life and bourgeois leisure in the Hwasin Department Store, where he sees a family waiting for the elevator; without destination, he follows others onto a train, afraid of being left behind; the memory of another’s desire for an eighteen-karat gold watch causes him to consider wealth as a source of happiness; a poster on a café wall inspires the desire for travel; a quotation by one of Confucius’s disciples makes him wish for the company of friends; and so on—examples are extremely numerous in the text. At every point, even when Kubo is nauseated by an example of sexual excess and at his own (lustful) reaction to it, his desire is incited by another’s, by the gaze of another. The same mechanism applies to what is in some sense the central event of the novella, a love affair with a woman in Tokyo that Kubo recalls at several points in the narrative and which gains its significance or seriousness only after a competitor enters the scene. A student abroad, Kubo develops a relationship with this woman only to back down when he learns that she is engaged. “Perhaps he had thought to obtain some worthless pride, in having the strength to be able to restrain his deep emotion, his true desire. . . . Even if he had truly loved that woman, he would never have been able to make her happy—is it not the sense of incompletion that makes all people unhappy?” At the same time, it is this very incompletion that incites the recollection and yields a form of pleasure in the retelling. This passage strongly recalls the condition of the hysteric. “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” Freud wrote—something that is

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remembered can also produce the hysterical symptom, “the precipitate of a reminiscence,” long after the event itself has come to an end. Kubo recalls here a scene in which he has removed himself from competition for the object of desire. After she reveals that she is engaged, he forfeits his position as her lover to the other man. Here as elsewhere in the novella, Kubo is the subject of mediated desire, a “hysterical subject [who] seems not to occupy its own position as a desiring subject, but rather is exclusively the object of the desire of the Other.” When Kubo does happen to arouse the desire of another, as in Tokyo, he makes sure that it remains an unsatisfied desire; or, confronted with the other’s desire, Kubo responds with a (hysterical) fantasy. Furthermore, the language of these reminiscences takes on a particular stylistic density. It is here that Pak utilizes his well-known cinematic “double exposure” (yijung noch’ul) technique—overlapping elements of one scene with the next—as well as more abruptly juxtaposing sentences dealing with the past context and the present throughout. In addition, the language of ambiguity appears, the -chi morŭnda construction lending indeterminacy in the above passage both to Kubo’s motivations and to the meaning of the passage itself. The author acknowledges this ambiguity by adding to it—the structure of this passage has Kubo the character (an author) becoming an (imaginary) author and character in a popular novel depicting the Tokyo love affair. “Popular fiction must have a quick tempo,” Pak writes. “Since the previous day when he had obtained the [young woman’s] ethics notebook, Kubo had already become the author of a piece of popu lar fiction, and without a doubt the protagonist as well.” This technique, a sort of metalepsis, arises precisely at the moment when desire is repressed, when the desire of the other is fended off. Kubo is tripled in this passage (Pak’s protagonist, author of popular fiction, character in that fiction), emphasizing that the signifier can never account for the truth, instead only multiplying desire at different diegetic levels. Kubo reveals this impossibility of satisfaction elsewhere in the text in the form of a riddle, the “problem of the five apples.” When in possession of five apples, he muses, in what order should they be eaten? He proposes three methods to a poet friend who has joined him at a teahouse: begin with the tastiest, which gives the satisfaction of thinking that one is at all times eating the most delicious of those remaining; begin with the least tasty, which brings one to a delicious climax; or choose from among them at random. Each method ends for Kubo in dissatisfaction: he is either left pathetically holding the least tasty apple in the end; or he is compelled to eat the least tasty apple of the bunch each time he picks from among them. Again, it is only by denying satisfaction that desire is kept

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in play—“things are never ‘good enough’; the [hysterical] patient cannot leave things as they are. Whatever result she might achieve, she is immediately pricked by doubts, and a feeling of dissatisfaction rears its head, so that again and again she is driven on to achieve a state from which every lack would be banished.” This is the very definition of desire in Kubo, its object-cause never attainable, moving further away the closer one gets. For Kubo, satisfaction is always a false satisfaction. It is worth noting that the “five apples” episode also takes place in proximity to a passage where, as above, multiple levels of narrative and metatextual commentary are overlaid one atop another. Pak, in a warning to the reader, slyly remarks that Kubo’s poet friend, though an avid reader of Kubo’s writing, is untrustworthy in that after reading only one of his works he acted as though he “knew everything about Kubo.” Today his friend complains that the writer represented in one of Kubo’s recently published works is “preposterously old, much older than Kubo’s present age. If that was all there was to it, it would be fine, but in addition his friend had concluded that the writer was only feigning old age, was not really old at all.” Upon consideration, Kubo is pleased that his friend has taken the ruse of age as a disguise or pretense. “Yet [at the same time] if he had deliberately attempted to portray himself as young, his friend might say that he was adopting an unreasonably young affectation.” The question is raised here of the gap between the author and the character—between Kubo and his characters as well as between Pak and the protagonist Kubo. The absurd “idler’s” question of the five apples follows immediately after this passage, confusing Kubo’s friend, who has been holding forth on André Gide and who expresses some doubt about what sort of connection the five apples might have with literature. Mention of Gide adds another layer of reference to the passage, in that the French author is known for his use of mise en abyme, the novel-within-a-novel technique used to heighten the sense of reflexive self-consciousness in the text, a technique of infi nite regress. Reference to Gide takes the reader back to the passage immediately before the riddle, where Kubo and his friend debate the “disguise” of the author-within-the-novel (Kubo the author-protagonist of Pak’s text, Kubo the author-character within Kubo’s text, and so on). “The mechanism of poetry [Dichtung: creative writing] is the same as that of hysterical phantasies,” Freud wrote. By way of the fantasy, the author “protect[s] himself from the consequences of his experience.” Yet even as Kubo distances himself from his experiences in Tokyo by portraying them as a “popu lar novel” that he both “writes” and acts in,

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Pak chastises those who believe that they know something about him simply from reading his fictional works. The pretense of the fictional work made apparent in the artifice itself (here the use of metalepsis or mise en abyme to draw attention to the work as a conscious creation) is not unusual in modernist fiction. Yet as readers we are taken in (as Kubo’s poet friend is)—we distrust language as inherently deceptive, yet find satisfaction in attempting to know the characters, in trying to understand their motives and desires. It is Kubo’s task to point out that the reader is a failed translator, subject to the gap between literary production and literary investigation, a point I return to below. As with moments of linguistic indeterminacy linked with Kubo’s unreliable sensory apparatus, the symptomatic reading prevalent in the text is also often related to language and writing. Particularly with the examples of the umbrella and telegram above, not only is a psychic economy of repression and conversion at work, but following the analysis Kubo immediately loses himself in memory or fantasy, the retelling of experience. In the case of the telegram, this fantasy significantly involves writing: “Now he buys thousands of postcards. . . . Presently, he saw himself writing letters to friends with great enthusiasm. One card, two cards, Kubo scrawled his friends’ names and addresses onto postcards, those that he remembered, unaware of the half-smoked cigarette burning in the ashtray.” Juxtaposed with this passage, in which Kubo analyzes his own thought processes, is a note on writing. “A satisfied smile turning up the corners of his mouth, he thought that this was not at all a lowbrow conclusion for a piece of short fiction—. Of course, Kubo has as yet not given thought to its content.” Kubo’s sexual impulse does not simply transform itself into a more innocuous desire for a telegram; the entire episode is first retold, transformed into a “flight of fancy,” and is then framed as a potential ending to a piece of fiction, as Kubo “protects” himself from his experience of desiring, concretizing his fantasy by throwing up a narrative screen as he had done with the “popular novel” of his Tokyo love affair. One final example adds to our picture of Kubo the hysteric. Pak’s distrust of language as a communicative medium is transformed into Kubo’s distrust of the speech of others, their willingness or ability to make clear what they mean in what they are saying. Pak, as we have seen, was aware of the slippage of meaning possible in any use of written language; the character Kubo is acutely aware of this same slippage between utterance and enunciation in the language of the people who populate his environment. He and a friend are drinking with a number of hostesses at a café toward the end of the novella, when

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suddenly, Kubo felt a strong urge to observe mental diseases in all people. In fact, there was a large number of mental patients in here. Symptoms of flights of fancy, paraphasia, megalomania, compulsive use of obscene language, nymphomania, “inconsistency and incoherence,” jealous delusions, male lewdness, morbid, eccentric conduct, mythomania, pathological immorality, dissipation, and so on. Kubo suddenly realized that he himself, feeling an interest in such things . . . was already a sort of patient, and laughed merrily.

“What, is everyone in the world crazy then?” asks the hostess sitting next to Kubo. By way of answer he asks her age, which she appears to lie about, claiming to be much younger than she looks. He then describes symptoms of paralogia, reading a dialogue between a physician and a patient from his ever-present notebook. “How many noses do you have? asks the doctor. Two, but I’m not sure how many. How many ears? One. What’s three plus two? Seven. How old are you? Twenty-one. (In reality thirtyeight.)” In this witty response to the hostess’s lie, Kubo indicates that she too suffers from a condition—characteristic of schizophrenia—that manifests itself as an inability to produce appropriate responses when questioned. In combination with his perpetual search for happiness, a desire always mediated by another, Kubo’s constant questioning of those he encounters in colonial Seoul—his distrust of the truth of their presentation to him—yields a portrait not of a neurasthenic intellectual but rather a hysterical artist. The “riddle of desire” is hardly solved for us here, as we are continually confronted with ambiguity at the formal level (grammatical construction, use of mise en abyme, metalepsis) and the gap that develops between the protagonist and the narrator and the perpetual failure of communication to reach its mark—the never-resolved gap between what is said and what is meant. Pak makes use of a familiar psychoanalytic mechanism, repeatedly locating the origin of a somatic or behavioral symptom in unconscious or psychic causes and rendering the narrator unknowable to himself and to others. Kubo embodies the split between utterance and enunciation, condemned to circle the streets of central Seoul in an impossible search for words that mean what they say.

Interpretive Desire If we accept phonocentrism as the division between spoken language as immediate expression and written language as mediated expression, then as Naoki Sakai points out we must “locate difficulties and failures of communication on the side of mediation,” assuming that speech consists of an “intimacy devoid of such interruptions.” In “Representation,

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Depiction, Technique,” Pak appears at times to assume just this formulation—that speech is a privileged site of truth, and that only by intertwining aspects of spoken language with written language can linguistic representation become adequate to its object. Yet with Kubo spoken language is opaque: a gap between not only what is written or expressed but also what is said appears, and from within that gap pathological effects emerge. Often using first-person and stream-of-consciousness narration, Pak presents even the “inner” speech of his protagonist as unreliable, unknowable to the character himself; in addition, public or “outer” speech is analyzed in the novel as symptomatic, as unreliable and indicative not of expressed meaning but of some underlying or hidden cause. Why does Kubo’s response to colonial reality have to take on the form of the hysteric’s fantasy? It is here that we can assign fresh literaryhistorical meaning to Pak’s fiction as related to the sociopolitical context of the 1930s, a relevant and timely response at levels of both form and content to the double bind of colonial existence under Japanese imperial rule. In the context of the colonial double bind, where the civilized, modern “outside” is to be desired and sought after but to which the colonized may never be fully assimilated—where the colonized intellectual is faced with the paradoxical injunction to “Take initiative, but remember that it is forbidden to take initiative!” or “Be like us, but not too much like us!”— language as a communicative system breaks down. Within this crisis of representation, Pak both represents and presents the breach of referentiality to the reader, continually linking themes of disease and incommunicability with linguistic innovations that attempt to address but also point out the indefiniteness of language as an expressive medium. The argument here is not that Pak’s text is populated with traumatic events that are then repressed by the protagonist/analysand only to emerge as symptoms that the reader/analyst can then easily interpret and understand. Rather than resisting the claim of the text to its own indeterminateness and attempting to fi x its final meaning, I would instead point out that the rhetorical, thematic, and structural aspects of the work also function together to incite in the reader or critic the desire to interpret, to locate the true object of Kubo’s desire and the meaning of his perpetual seeking. What we have in Kubo is a starting point for understanding the colonial modernist text—and modernism itself, never separable from the global context of imperialism—as both hysterical symptom and hystericizing force in its intertwining of language, disease, and desire. The appearance of somatic and psychical symptoms in the text, the thematics of desire, and the cyclical structure of Pak’s fiction of this period enact the gap between utterance and enunciation and compel

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the reader to question his or her own demand that the text yield meaning and the desire for referentiality. Kubo can no more answer the question of his own desire than the critic can provide a final answer to the question of the text. Instead we have a series of desires and rejections, a perpetual denial of satisfaction and an enjoyment of precisely that dissatisfaction, the never-satisfied desire arising between self and other, experience and representation. The modernist author’s response to modernity is thus structured like the hysterical fantasy, and the modernist text produces or provokes the question of desire in the reader, “disrupt[ing] forms of mastery with which we’ve made sense of our own and of others’ desires.” Kubo both stages and enacts the problem of desire and incites us to rehearse its paradoxes again and again.

Chapter 4 “Thoughts from a Sickbed” and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse

If Pak T’aewŏn raises the question of referentiality and the capacity of language to transparently represent through the figure of the hysteric who interrogates the veracity of every utterance, in this chapter we turn to an author who deepens this question into an overt critique of the idea of language as an unmediated conveyor of truth and knowledge. In his “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” a wide-ranging essay written in epistolary form and published in the month of his death in 1937, canonical author Kim Yujŏng grapples with what I call empiricist discourse in the areas of science, love, and aesthetics and presents a critique of subjectivism and objectivism in all three registers. Kim takes issue with a naive belief in the capacity of language to fully capture its referent, a tendency he finds basic to both naturalist and “new psychological” fiction. He argues instead for a mode of writing that confronts such assumptions with the impossibility of complete representation, a continual grasping toward always unattainable ideals of human knowledge and understanding. I frame Kim’s engagement with empiricist discourse in the context of the more general crisis of representation that crossed ideological boundaries in the Seoul literary circles of the 1930s and suggest that Kim’s critique—and subsequent advocacy of ethical literary practice—points toward irony and idealism as categories through which the relationship between discourse and reality in colonial-period literary history might be productively thought. At the same time, this chapter examines Kim’s only sustained piece of literary-critical writing with an eye toward revising the genre conventions that structure our perceptions of colonialperiod Korean literature and redefining modernist literary practice. If

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we find Pak, the model modernist, writing as a hyperrealist in the preceding chapters, then with Kim—the essential realist—we have an even more startling example of both the critique of the communicative model of representation and the idea that this critique produces a form of literature that cannot be coded in familiar categories. If modernism is “centrally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding,” then Kim’s literary criticism and fiction, in their exploration of the crucial juncture between language and knowing, push us further toward a reframing of colonial-period literature and beyond a methodology reliant on communicative models of literary history. As previously discussed, modernism in colonial-period Korea is often understood as rising to prominence only following the mid-1930s suppression by Japanese colonial authorities of the influential leftist literary movement. KAPF is conceived in this view as an inherently political, anticolonial movement grounded in a realist literary practice, whereas the modernist movement is seen as guided by an art-for-art’s-sake mentality, and limited to the autonomous or apolitical realm of artistic production. Against the disavowal of modernist fiction based on its supposed “apoliticism,” I suggest the need to confront in more detail 1930s modernist texts’ relation to local and global constellations of political, social, and literary-historical forces. In par ticu lar, I attempt to understand the possibility of modernist fiction as arising not simply out of negativity—the sudden absence of a left ist-realist literary influence, the incapacity of authors to address the reality of the colonial situation, or an enforced apoliticism born of censorship and suppression—but out of the active critique of a particular understanding of the relationship between language and reality. I do not propose here a single definition or set of limiting characteristics that would characterize aesthetic or literary modernism, either generally or in terms of a particularly non-Western modernism. Rather than establishing categories that both artificially homogenize a heterogeneous set of aesthetic practices and predetermine our understanding of literary texts, I consider modernist practice more generally in terms of a breakdown in representation and as critical of modernity. As we will see below, this becomes particularly important when dealing with the diversity of both literature and literary criticism in the mid to late colonial period, marked, as critic Yŏm Muung notes, by several trends including an increased number of writers, a noticeably expanded influence of Western literary practices and theories, and a technical refinement and specialization of aesthetic theory.

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A variety of literary movements and theories (often difficult to distinguish) developed in 1930s Korea, including but not limited to humanism, intellectualism, aestheticism, classicism, realism, surrealism, culturalism, Dadaism, historical fiction, and East Asian literature, among others. According to Yŏm, following the collapse of the literary effort in the 1920s to unify politics, scholarship, and personality, what remained was an emphasis on style, where ideology succumbed to technical skill—by some definitions, a modernist literary practice. The structure of Korean literature in the 1930s is thus seen as a symptom, a condition resulting from the simultaneous increase in outside influences and the turn inward, away from engagement with the realities of colonial modernity. Although South Korean literary history has tended to understand the 1930s in dichotomous terms as a period in which literary and critical production lost the nationalist, liberatory bent of the 1920s and succumbed to the force of colonial dictates—particularly with the suppression and eventual dismantling of KAPF—a closer look yields a diversity of thought and practice on either side of the dividing line of political engagement. Further, beyond the marked heterogeneity of the literary field of the 1930s, it was during this period that the transparency of language itself, the unproblematic correlation of signifier and referent that arguably comprised the basis of both realist and formalist aesthetic practices, came into question. This was a crucial moment in early twentiethcentury Korean literary history, when the concepts and terms that would help to structure the production and reception of literature into the present day were under formation or revision. Th is larger critique of referentiality and retheorizing of literary language in 1930s Seoul literary circles—what I am calling a crisis of representation—gives us the context to examine a prominent instance of this critique with Kim Yujŏng’s only sustained piece of literary criticism, “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” written in epistolary form two months before his death in 1937. Kim’s letter provides a unique opportunity to question received genre classifications. Widely known as a realist author who wrote primarily on the struggles of everyday life in poor, rural farming villages in an idiomatic or colloquial, humorous, and sometimes ribald language, Kim was also a member of the Group of Nine, the Seoul-based coterie of artists, critics, poets, and fiction writers central to the mid-1930s literary world and typically characterized in Korean literary history as modernist. What can explain the presence of Kim Yujŏng—known for his earthy, realistic portrayals of country folk—on the group’s membership roster from 1935 until its dissolution in 1936? I address this apparent collision of literary-historical categories by turning again to Kim’s own thoughts

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on writing. His pointed critique in “Thoughts from a Sickbed” of the particularly modern notion of the instrumentality of language at work in both “new psychological” literature (sin simnijuŭi ŭi munhak) and realist fiction opens a window onto the broader questioning of referentiality characteristic of the period, and allows us to reconsider Kim Yujŏng’s fiction and its place in Korean literary history. Following a brief discussion of Kim’s life and place in the South Korean literary canon, I analyze his critique of empiricist language in what he calls the “age of science.” Linked in this perception of crisis are the constraints on political expression in the late colonial period, the perceived transition to modernity, and the advent of the “split self” familiar from descriptions of modern subjectivity. Language itself becomes unstable or unreliable in all three registers: under colonial censorship, in a period of transition between a socially coherent tradition and the ideological fragmentation of the modern, and in the self-reflexivity of the modern individual who comes to stand as both the subject and object of representation. I suggest not only that the undermining of the assumption that reality, objects, or the world could be presented without difficulty in words destabilized the field of literary expression and opened the way for modernist experimentation, but also that the same critique can be wielded usefully in the present to exceed received literaryhistorical categories and to revise methodologies that elide the gap between representation and social reality.

Kim Yujŏng in Literary History Kim Yujŏng passed away on the morning of March 29, 1937, his life and literary career cut short at the age of twenty-nine. He made his debut in Kyŏngsŏng literary circles in 1935 with the award-winning “A Sudden Shower,” and published twenty-eight stories before his death two years later. It is generally held that Kim was born into a well-to-do, landowning family in Sille Village in Kangwŏn Province, near what is today the city of Ch’unch’ŏn on November 28, 1908. The family had some difficulty with colonial authorities following annexation in 1910, and when much of their land was seized, Kim’s father purchased a house in Seoul and maintained it until it was forfeited in the 1913 land survey. The entire family moved to Seoul in 1914; Kim’s mother died shortly after in 1915, when he was seven years old, and his father passed away in 1917. While his older brother squandered the family’s remaining fortune, Kim attended a variety of schools. In 1930 at the age of twenty-two he entered Yŏnhŭi College, but was expelled less than three months later

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due to a violation of school regulations. He moved back to Kangwŏn Province the same year, enrolled in college, and opened a night school in Sille Village, which kept him occupied until 1933, when he moved back to Seoul and lived with his older sister. It was shortly after this move that he contracted tuberculosis. In 1934 he began to focus on his literary work, and when he published “A Sudden Shower” in 1935, it won first prize in the Chosŏn Daily News annual spring literary contest. He published several other well-known stories in the same year, including “Gathering Gold in the Bean Field,” “Scoundrels,” “Spring—Spring,” and “Bonanza,” and joined the Group of Nine. He published no fewer than twelve short stories and six essays during 1936, his work appearing in the major literary and popular journals almost monthly. Literary critics and historians often treat Kim Yujŏng’s fiction as representative of a nonleftist realism that takes as its subject matter the daily lives of the rural poor. Yu Insuk finds that among nine major literary histories of the modern period, seven share a common perspective on Kim Yujŏng’s fiction, namely that “what emerges in his work is the problem of poverty, objectively depicted, expressed stylistically in a unique fictional language and treated humorously.” Key terms from many studies of his oeuvre appear here: objective depiction, unique language, humor, and the problem of poverty. “More than any other author,” Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyŏn write, “[Kim] vividly depicts the image of the destitute farming village under colonial rule.” Although also focusing on the direct representation of rural poverty, Yi Chaesŏn points out the humor characteristic of Kim Yujŏng’s fiction. “Kim Yujŏng’s literary world is essentially caricaturistic and humorous [kolgye]. In this sense, his way of understanding or his attitude toward the world is that of an intellectual, a cool-headed, realistic sensibility, a sensibility brimming over with a caricaturistic humor [haehak] more than a tragic seriousness.” Locating key features of Kim’s work in the presence of simple but honest characters, outrageous endings, unexpected actions and behaviors, a humor that refracts the image of reality, an ironic antiaesthetic, and the use of vulgar, colloquial language, Yi writes that “via this unique concave mirror of caricaturistic humor, Kim Yujŏng presents the dark, dreary reality of the farming village along with the mode of living of peasants who have no choice but to go on leading their lives there. Accordingly his literature displays its true worth chiefly by augmenting a painful compassion regarding these peasants’ daily lives with laughter.” Chŏng Hansuk also argues for the reality of rural poverty as the central issue addressed in Kim Yujŏng’s work, “a destitute condition of living

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[that] is the essential, common feature emerging in Kim Yujŏng’s fiction.” The defeated attitude of the adolescent protagonist of “The Camellias,” for instance, “precisely signifies one’s powerlessness in the face of reality.” For Chŏng, the “irrational” behavior of Kim’s characters— selling one’s wife into prostitution, digging up one’s ripening harvest to look for a vein of gold beneath, stealing from one’s own harvest to elude taxation—stems not from the will to advance socially but from the survival instinct, a basic drive to escape from poverty and hunger. Cho Tongil agrees that Kim Yujŏng narrates the problem of poverty and emphasizes that whereas others during the same period used satire in their portrayals of colonial reality, such as KAPF author Yi Kiyŏng, Kim Yujŏng’s combination of humor (haehak) and satire (p’ungja) accomplished the difficult task of raising an implicit argument against social injustice while at the same time arousing laughter in the reader. This rich tradition of scholarship on Kim Yujŏng’s literary work has tended to focus on biographical elements as the foundation for textual analysis. Kim, presumably born in a rural village and raised among landlords and tenant farmers alike, has been taken as a representative of the rural peasant, an informant sprung from a farming village and transported into the colonial capital of Seoul for the last few years of his life, where he poured stories from the margins of colonized existence into the publications of the already established literary world. Both psychological and traditionalist approaches to his literature emerge from this basis. A closer look at Kim’s biography, however, reveals some of the artifice of this characterization. Born into a relatively wealthy family, then losing both parents early, Kim apparently moved to Seoul around the age of eleven and spent nearly all of the next decade in various schools in the city, living with his brother and then his sister. He did not move back to Ch’unch’ŏn until late 1930, when he was twenty-two years old, and he spent only three years there, between 1930 and 1933, before moving back to the capital, where he remained until just before his death. As Kim Yunsik points out, given his years in the city, it seems somewhat incongruous that Kim Yujŏng is almost exclusively described as a farming village author, a writer native to Kangwŏn Province steeped in the dialect of the peasantry. We can see a discrepancy within the dominant construction of Kim’s literary-historical persona, not only in terms of the available biographical information, but also in terms of the fictional settings of the stories that he produced during the relatively short period in which he concentrated on creative writing. Kim Chonggŏn, in his analysis of the use of space by Group of Nine authors, points out that among the twenty-eight stories that Kim Yujŏng actually published, fourteen are set in the city

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and ten are set in secluded mountain villages. Only four actually take place in farming villages. Whether tenant farmers, isolated peasants, or urban poor, Kim Yujŏng focused his critique on the wretched lives of colonized Koreans, a perspective that according to Kim Chonggŏn reveals the author’s historical consciousness of social reality in the 1930s. Kim Yujŏng, he argues, is able to establish a second narrative level, a universal space containing a reality not directly depicted in the particular space of the story but rather alluded to as a causal force. Although the ludicrous or absurd events depicted in the space of the story evoke laughter in the reader, the social reality behind the actions of the characters (poverty, exploitation, naïveté, and so on) transform the comic moment and “our laughter becomes a laughter of compassion and affection, rather than derision.” This revisionist account does move beyond other critiques in that Kim Yujŏng is removed from an exclusively rural setting and as such from a position in literary history determined almost entirely by birth. However, what is maintained in shifting from the relationship between writer and place (the organic link between Kim Yujŏng and the countryside, and thus the ethnic nation) to the relationship between text and reader is the notion of a connection between reader and narrative reality that largely neglects any consideration of the mediating role of language. That is, although it is now a broader colonial reality that is encompassed by the author’s historical consciousness, Kim Yujŏng is here presented as one who is able to transfer his experiences directly to the reader in his works. Pointing to a depiction of laborers working under the blazing sun in “The Bachelor and the Frog,” Kim Chonggŏn writes that “this is not the perspective of an outsider, a bystander, looking out over the scenery, seeing these people working in the distance—rather, the description compels the reader to feel the sensations of the workers, the heat of the sun, the running drops of sweat. His depiction yields the result of making us directly conscious of these things.” This interpretation of the text establishes a mystical apparatus of feeling, of sensation and emotion, that joins the reader to the text and hence to the reality the author himself experienced. What is important for my argument here is that the medium of language is seemingly dismissed—in proposing a direct link between the reader and the time and space of the narrative, the gap inherent to any use of language (the gap between signifier and referent) is elided, and Kim Yujŏng’s fictional narratives are understood as reflections of reality and relegated to the status of everyday realism. Through an understanding of Kim’s fiction at the level of its language rather than as an example of direct and unmediated communication, the

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limitations of a biographical approach are subverted. For instance, writing on the short story “Toad,” Kim Yunsik argues for a more linguistic appropriation of Kim Yujŏng’s work understood on the basis of literary style (munch’e). “More than a piece of fiction conveying a story (introduction, development, turn, and conclusion), this is an instance where the writer is fascinated by his own language (voice). Transmission of content is not primary—language as it stands takes precedence.” If, as Kim Yunsik notes, a skeptical modernism was the primary aesthetic response to capitalist-colonial aspects of modernity, then we can begin to read Kim Yujŏng’s work as deeply related to the 1930s not only as a reflection of the situation, but also as an aesthetic manifestation of crisis. Or as Son Chongŏp puts it: “It seems as though it is possible to easily and simply approach his fiction, but in fact its inner form [naechŏk hyŏngsik] maintains an unseen dimension of experimentation [sirhŏmsŏng].” This “inner form,” Son argues, is a holistic structure or framework that is difficult to grasp through a superficial application of “reflection theory” or biographical approaches to Kim’s work and can be described as the result of a decidedly ironic modern awareness that the use of language is “at once an endeavor to insert oneself into the world, and at the same time confirmation of the impossibility of ever doing so.” Son’s evaluation suggests a connection between Kim’s writing and what I have been calling the crisis of representation that characterized 1930s intellectual circles in Seoul, a literary-historical crisis rooted in subjective crisis (the split subject of modernity), historical crisis (the loss of classical consensus with the advent of modernity), and the sociopolitical crisis of colonization. By suggesting that Kim’s response to modernity was theoretically and creatively focused on the ironic gap between what is said and what is meant—the impossibility of complete communication—I argue that his fiction confronted the crisis of the modern period as a crisis of representation. Taking this impasse as a heuristic precondition of my analysis of Kim’s work and focusing my attention on the status assigned to language in both his critical and fictional writings avoids a deterministic perspective on Kim’s literary work that would rest on unsustainable assumptions of causality between context and text. That is, as opposed to seeing Kim’s fictional work as an attempt to “grasp reality as it is,” I understand the adoption of irony as a dominant technique in Kim’s fiction as a rejection of the idea that language might fully represent either the (colonial) present or the (utopian or socialist) future, a technique that instead embraces the gap between “what one intends to say” and “what one intends to depict,” recognizing the fallibility of language itself and thematizing that gap in coordination with a

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critique of the crises of the colonial modern. Kim’s critical evaluation of language’s capacity to represent both subjective and objective worlds cuts across the dominant literary-historical symptom of these linked crises—the polarization of literary genres into “psychological”/modernist and realist—and takes place within the general sense of a loss of truth and the radical limitations on expression that characterized intellectual life in the mid to late 1930s in colonial Korea.

The Critique of Empiricist Discourse Kim Yujŏng addresses this crisis of representation and positions himself against both formalist and realist fiction in “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” a letter written in early 1937 and ostensibly intended for his lover, Pak Pongja. In this carefully crafted and fascinating letter, Kim goes far beyond what one would expect to find in a jilted lover’s correspondence, treating many of the major categories that informed the literary debates of his day—expression and communication, form and content, artist and society, subject and object, and the place of literature in modernity. His critique of both subjectivity and objectivity in literary language is surprising for a number of reasons, not least because many literary historians place Kim’s fiction in genres typically designated as socially engaged and realistic, such as farm village literature (nongch’on munhak) or literature of local color (hyangt’o munhak). Kim’s short stories are typically seen as standing in the tradition of objective realism, “accurately represent[ing] the concrete reality of the farming village through the everyday language [ilsangŏ] of the peasant,” an accuracy that is gained not through a deliberate craft ing of language but through long observation and direct contact—it is only in the everyday colloquial language that the essence (siljilsŏng) of the ethnic-nation (minjok) can be objectively displayed. This sort of argument can be seen as typical of a literary history that raises Kim Yujŏng’s work up as representative of the life of the ethnicnational whole. As we have seen, it is frequently Kim’s biography—his “long observation” of the countryside and his consequently natural and authentic mastery of the rural colloquial—that endows his fiction with this role. The medium of language is seemingly dismissed—the gap inherent between signifier and referent is elided and the literary work is understood as an exact reproduction or reflection of reality and is relegated to the status of everyday realism. The revised introduction to Kim’s Collected Works, for instance, holds, “it is often as if Kim had made a sound and video recording at the actual site where his story is taking place, capturing precisely the emotion of the scene. . . . In the sound and video, we have presented in front

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of us [this reality] unedited, unmodified by human hands.” It is as if Kim’s fiction can directly reveal to us the mind of the people or minjok, and it is through this seemingly unmediated expression that Kim’s work as a whole is typically assigned its literary-historical value. On the other hand, a perspective that views Kim Yujŏng’s fiction as engaged with the problems of representational language and the thematization of these dilemmas would allow us to move beyond the received premises that have limited analyses of Kim’s fiction to the question of its “folkish beauty.” A focus on Kim’s attention to style and language would align his work with other authors and critics of the period and help to explain, for instance, why Yi Sang, a leading modernist, placed Kim Yujŏng among the “great artists” (k’ŭn yesulga) of the 1930s alongside Kim Kirim, Chŏng Chiyong, and Pak T’aewŏn, and would ultimately allow a reading of Kim Yujŏng’s work as deeply related to the situation of the 1930s, not only as a reflection but also as a manifestation of social crisis at a formal level. The letter is carefully organized around a series of pairs: the twentiethcentury division of science and technology; the differences between love and sex; and in literary-critical terms, the modern disjunction of art and technique. Kim maintains that each of these terms (technology, sex, and technique) arrogantly asserts full knowledge of subject, object, or both. In a previous letter Pak Pongja had written that she knew the reason behind Kim Yujŏng’s professions of love (that is, his sexual desire) and demanded instead a “love for love’s sake.” To this Kim responds that when questioned a scientist will insist on his or her subjective freedom to practice “science for science’s sake” even in the midst of catastrophic or facetious technological developments such as germ warfare or cosmetic surgery. Modern authors as well confidently claim to present the truth of either the object (via naturalism or realism) or the subject (through “new psychological fiction”) without linking that representation with the ethical concerns of a broader humanity—an “art for art’s sake” (yesul ŭl wihan yesul). The false confidence gained from knowledge or expertise in matters of sex, technology, or technique leads in each case to a perceived or demanded purity of love, science, or art, which in turn validates the universality or objectivity of sexual, technological, or technical practices. Kim describes this process as dangerously isolated from the social, and tries to recover love, science, and art as vehicles of truth and ethicality. Against empiricist modes of knowing and acting, love, science, and art are for Kim practices that reflect the impossibility of full (intersubjective or objective) knowledge but perpetually attempt to overcome this impossibility. Love, he maintains, is a fundamental ethic that compels

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him to attempt again and again the attainment of mutual understanding and union with another human being, to attempt to overcome the impenetrable boundary between self and other. Science is that which attempts to abstract knowledge from experience, knowledge that comes as close as possible to truth (chilli). And art is that which must take as its task the transmission of knowledge from the realm of logic into the realm of the sensible. To put it in other terms, discourses of sex, technology, and technique engage in what Naoki Sakai calls homolingual address, which “assumes the normalcy of reciprocal and transparent communication in a homogeneous medium” and are not in need of translation or interpretation; whereas discourses of love, science, and art adopt a “heterolingual address,” which “does not abide by the normalcy of reciprocal and transparent communication, but instead assumes that every utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium.” Kim undermines a self-assured knowledge by confronting the confident expertise of technique and technology with this problematic bracketing of referentiality, and begins by questioning the relationship between representation and communication: “Some ask whether the goal of art is transmission [of a message] or expression [itself]. . . . ‘Representation’ takes delivery [of the message] as its premise and only then gains life. Put differently, representation is the process in which a ruse [strategy, artifice] is established that anticipates delivery as its result [or the expected outcome of which is communication].” Here the address is placed anterior to communication, and the essay insists on the gap between the two and the uncertainty of achieving the latter. Expression is a prerequisite for communication, but is not itself communication. As opposed to homolingual address, Sakai points out, with heterolingual address one must “address yourself to the addressee . . . without assuming that the addressee would necessarily and automatically comprehend what you were about to say: you would, of course, wish the addressee to comprehend what you say—for, without this wish, the act of addressing would not constitute itself—but you would not take it for granted.”  To again draw a figure from Sakai’s text, one must aim before one can strike a target, but in the act of aiming there is no presumption of success—in fact, “[it] is because the message can always not arrive that addressing is possible” in the first place. This is why Kim is so disparaging of both naturalist realism and psychological fiction or “I-novels” (sasosŏl), and he refers to Zola and Joyce as being equally boring in this regard—each operates as though the object (in the case of naturalism) or subject (in the case of “new psychological fiction”) can be fully re-

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presented in language. Opposing this, Kim writes, “Art is not a duplication of nature; nor is duplication of nature that easy a thing. Even an objectively depictive camera [sasiljŏgin sajingi] will fail to perfectly capture [reality]—how much more profound a joke is the idea that we can reproduce humanity in written characters.” Here we can see a confrontation with the central premise of what I am calling empiricist discourse: the idea that language transparently conveys, that expression or representation is equivalent with communication, that a word is somehow either equivalent, or entirely subordinate to, the thing or object that it purports to represent—in short, raising what Barthes in his essay “From Science to Literature” called “the problem of the linguistic status of science,” an instrumentalist treatment of “transparent” language that eliminates consideration of formal aspects of expression. In Kim Yujŏng’s broad critique of instrumentalist discourse and its confidence in a language that can flawlessly capture and convey reality, seen not only in terms of literature but also in scientific and intersubjective realms as well, he adopts the particular task that Barthes assigns to literature: to “represent actively to the scientific institution just what it rejects, i.e., the sovereignty of language” in its constitutive heterogeneity. Even further, Kim understands that it is not only privileging form over content but the very establishment of the split between the two that distinguishes the empiricist or “scientific” mode, locating the point at which the purported objectivity of a scientific or realist perspective and the subjectivity of a formalist perspective coincide in their assumptions about the relationship between signifier and referent. If scientific methodology rests on empiricism, the derivation of knowledge from observation or sense experience, then scientific discourse operates in what we can unexpectedly refer to as a romantic mode that “refuses to distinguish between experience and the representation of this experience,” in which “the subjectivity of experience is preserved when it is translated into language.”  What de Man here fi nds true of romanticism—the simultaneous exaltation of subjectivity and refusal to consider the mediating role of language in representations of consciousness, experience, or the object world—Kim Yujŏng also finds true of scientific discourse, and he significantly includes both objectivist and subjectivist literary practices under this category. Hence Kim is able to bring together what are apparently polar opposites—the “said” and the “meant” in Im Hwa, or Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s split subject-as-subject (subject of enunciation) and subject-as-object (subject of utterance)—at the point where they meet, where paradoxically—as Lukács wrote in “Narrate or Describe?”—“extreme subjectivism approximates the inert reification

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of pseudo- objectivism.” Both realism and formalism adopt an empiricist mode of literary production, observing and describing the minutiae of the external or mental world.

Toward an Ethical Literary Practice The 1930s were a time when there was ample reason to lose faith in the referential powers of language. Throughout the colonial period, imperial ideologues’ reliance on “scientific,” historical, and objective language to justify Japanese rule undermined referential relations in obvious ways— and with the intensification of censorship and the repression of free speech following Japan’s escalating military involvement on the mainland, a “dual” speech became increasingly necessary for colonial subjects. Regarding the Korean language in particular, the 1930s represented a difficult period between the more open “cultural policy” of the 1920s and the imperialization of the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Japanese language use was encouraged or enforced in the colony through assimilationist policies including the “national language movement” and the “name-changing campaign.” The 1930s are furthermore presented as a time of ongoing transition from a traditional to a modern mode of life, a shift in civilization behind which language lagged with its burden of past meanings and during which authors were faced with the challenge of bringing language into conjunction with a rapidly changing reality. Finally, the modern, ironic subject is posited, a split consciousness inhabiting the contemporary city space, both the subject and object of its own inner narrative. Kim Yujŏng’s insight that expression is always antecedent to communication suggests that expression is always in need of translation, that intersubjective language can always fail to communicate, that language is always strange and is consequently never a transparent medium regardless of one’s membership in a par ticu lar cultural community or ethnic-national whole. Further, it is the recognition of this capacity to fail and subsequently what Kim calls a perpetual “longing for intimacy” or meaning that allows a particular discourse (here of love, science, or art) to function ethically or “humanistically.” Paralleling the split subject, Kim Yujŏng references both science and love as examples of “split” discourses, having been rationalized into modes of instrumentalist knowledge concerned with technology and sex respectively and having, in the process, lost their connection with humankind more generally. His arguments against science for science’s sake and love for love’s sake carry over into the aesthetic realm, where an art-for-art’s-sake focus on the technical aspects of writing drains litera-

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ture of what he calls its soul. Practitioners of both hypersubjectivity and hyperobjectivity become objects of critique in their assumption of the transparency of language and their faith in language to accurately represent both inner and outer worlds to another. His critique of the “photographic” objectivity adopted in Zola’s naturalism or Joyce’s streamof-consciousness narratives makes differentiations of genre or subject matter irrelevant at the level of language, where pseudo-objectivism and extreme subjectivism become indistinguishable. Here Kim’s argument mirrors that of the influential critic Georg Lukács, who made a similar connection between these two seemingly disparate literary forms. In “Art and Objective Truth,” Lukács linked what he called “mechanical materialism,” an “insistence upon the concept of the reflection of objective reality” in literature, with “idealism,” an isolation from material reality where “direct experience becomes . . . subjectivized, . . . firmly conceived as an independent and autonomous function of the individual (as impression, emotional response, etc., abstractly divorced from the objective reality which generates it).” Increasingly, he wrote, “theories become permeated with an eclectism of a false objectivism and a false subjectivism.” Purportedly objective depiction goes hand in hand, for Lukács, with a “spurious subjectivity,” a selforiented, isolated individual who presents the reader with “a succession of fetishized objects”—whether of the mental or the external world. “The method of observation and description developed as part of an attempt to make literature scientific. . . . [Yet] these modes of composition easily slip into their polar opposite—complete subjectivism.” For Kim Yujŏng, as for other authors and critics, this generalized loss of faith in language also took on an ethical resonance, representative of a gap between responsible and irresponsible practices. Science for science’s sake, in its pursuit of pure knowledge and its justification on the grounds of individual interests, ignores the ethical dimension of knowing, whereas art for art’s sake ignores the relationship between its expression and the greater human good. In an effort to provide a concept that might link art and humanity, Kim thus posits a “great love” (widaehan sarang) in the concluding paragraphs of the letter. Though this idea is as yet a vague one, he writes, “an art which fails to embrace this great love cannot enter onto the right path,” just as the addressee of his letter, without comprehending “perfect love” (wanjŏnhan sarang) will fall short of becoming a “complete person” (wanjŏnhan saram). Kim does not, finally, present a concrete recommendation or strategy for bringing art into alignment with an (equally undefined) ethical imperative; the troubled relationship between art and “engagement”

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remains unresolved in the letter. The general shape of his argument, however, is notable in and of itself. In his critique of both aesthetic formalism and realist representation as forms of naive objectivism, and in his alignment of these (and other) discourses for which language is “merely an instrument” with irresponsible or unethical practices, Kim appears to turn toward the ideal as the proper end of art. Just as it is the purpose of the human being to become “complete” or “perfected” through knowledge, it is the purpose of art to bring this knowledge of perfectibility into the realm, as he writes, of the sensible—and in the process to enable the intersubjective experience of intimacy (miljŏp). In this way art merges with life and becomes part of the movement toward human completion or fulfillment: “My writing of literary works has the same motive as other life activities, daily living, such as taking a stroll or eating rice—it’s the same type of action. To put it differently, what is called literature is part of my existence, the process of my being alive.” I would like to conclude with two areas for consideration that we might extrapolate from Kim’s letter: the status of idealism in literary histories of the colonial period, and the figure of irony as a means toward a rereading of Kim’s fictional texts. First, Kim’s dual critique of formalism and realism as well as his turn to idealist categories to point toward the future-oriented function of literature compels us to consider colonialperiod literature outside the dichotomy of realism and modernism. As Toril Moi points out, “morally uplifting” idealism can productively oppose both “world-weary” naturalism and modernism. Aesthetic idealism, with its focus on the beautiful, the true, and the good, “holds out to us all an optimistic, utopian vision of human perfection.” It is when this trinity breaks down that naturalism (truth without beauty) or aestheticism (beauty without truth) appear. If the “development of the modern faith in the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’ begins when aesthetics is severed from ethics,” then we see Kim criticize this autonomy not only in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of scientific discourse and, finally, in the attempt to reattach “goodness” to the production of human knowledge. Kim’s opposition to the instrumentality of language for literary practitioners may at fi rst appear contrary to his demand that ethics be reinserted into aesthetics, for he objects to a belief in language’s capacity to perfectly reference the world. Yet this is also an expression of idealism: the gap between the ideal and its phenomenal representation fuels the striving toward completion and inspires belief in ultimate perfectibility. For Kim, this humanistic goal stands behind his writing and links art with everyday communication: “If you consider my motive for writing letters to you,” he writes to Pak

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Pongja, “there’s no difference between that and my motive for writing [literary] works.” Literature is to be autonomous neither from the social nor from lived experience; it is rather the belief in the capacity of language to perfectly capture these, the “naive faith in the power of language to represent reality,” to which Kim objects. Second, irony may be understood as a figure that allows the aesthetic embodiment of the theories of language and literature put forward in “Thoughts from a Sickbed.” As we saw above, literary-historical discussions of Kim’s work often center on situating the author biographically and assigning a certain authenticity to his fiction as realistic and representative, presenting “things as they really were.” In reading Kim’s work as representative of the Korean ethnic nation under colonial rule, however, literary critics and historians inadvertently mirror the assignment of authenticity to the literature of the colonized; the demand for “proof of identity” that continually justifies the difference between the colonizer and colonized and thus the colonial project itself. In this sense, these discussions place their faith in the power of language to re-present, a belief that Kim roundly critiques. The letter instead presents a schematic argument toward a literary practice that both acknowledges and at the same time attempts to overcome the insurmountable and parallel gaps between subject and subject or language and referent, linking the crisis of representation in language with the dilemmas of intersubjective communication and knowing. Taking this critique into consideration will thus require a reexamination of Kim’s fictional texts with an eye toward how they address or thematize the status of language. In chapter 5 I undertake a reading of Kim’s short stories through the narrative strategy of irony as just such a potentially productive approach. Moving between his critical work and literary texts, I aim to show that the theorized impossibility of representation in language was not a formalist preoccupation for Kim Yujŏng but arose from a constellation of political, social, and literary-historical forces that had prompted Kim and other critics and writers of the period to deeply consider the limitations of language. Exceeding the question of genre, when we address this impossibility or crisis in the writings of critics and authors of the 1930s, we are compelled to think through complex issues of writing and speech, truth and language, consciousness and expression, and not least the relationship between the material, sociocultural context and its mediation in literary production. Beyond the predetermining power of classification, which organizes the reception of literary works, considering theories and critiques of language may shed light on the efforts of Kim Yujŏng and others to conceptualize and practice modes of representation adequate to the experience of 1930s colonial Korea.

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Irony, as “a mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words” and which further has as its function the thematization of this difference between sign and meaning, may thus provide a starting point for examining Kim’s colonial-period fiction. As a discourse for which essence can never coincide with phenomenon, irony provides an ideal form for thematizing the impossibility of complete, direct communication through language, and critiquing the empiricist demand for such transparency. Closely related to the recommendations of Kim’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” irony allows for the “expression of what lies beyond the reach of direct communication” by “making the ineffable articulate”—an expression of perpetual hope in the capacity of language to exceed limitations of human knowing and communication. Further, as Efi Hatzimanolis has argued in a different context, irony can function as a sophisticated critique of ethnic stereotypes, a way for the ethnic writer to play with the slippage between speaking for oneself and speaking as oneself. When institutional desire—in this case, the assimilatory policies of the colonial period—demands that one speak as oneself but restricts one’s ability to speak for oneself (a combination of the identification of the colonized other as somehow different or specifiable and the simultaneous restriction of political rights), irony can take the stereotypes created and (mis)recognized in this process to their limit, exposing the false inclusivity of official culture extended to the ethnic other. Kim Yujŏng utilizes stereotypes of the country bumpkin, the displaced peasant, the tenant farmer, the aging bachelor, and the prostitute in stories such as “Spring—Spring” (Pom—Pom, 1935), “The Scorching Heat” (Ttaengppyŏt, 1937), “The Bachelor and the Frog,” (Ch’onggak kwa maengkkongi, 1933), “Scoundrels” (Manmubang, 1935), and “Gathering Gold in the Bean Field” (Kŭm ttanŭn k’ongbat, 1935). In so doing, the author implicitly raises the question of, rather than stabilizes, categories of national belonging and ethnic identity, presenting the dual structure of the ironic narrative and mirroring the discrepancy between reality and appearance that characterized the colonial experience and a fragmented modernity in general. It is here that the crisis of linguistic representation may be brought into conjunction with the problem of representing another, an alignment the question of which can be raised in relation to colonial society. Where the noncoincidence of the “said” and the “meant” parallels not only the split subject of modernity but the gap between the “authentic” colonized and the rhetoric of imperial belonging, we may begin to read literary works as aesthetic responses to the contradiction that exists where language and social reality meet.

Chapter 5 The Irony of Language in Kim Yujŏng’s Short Fiction

In this chapter, I trace a movement from stable, specific irony to an unstable or universal irony across Kim Yujŏng’s short fiction, a shift that renders the meaning or value that the reader is to assign the ironic text increasingly less evident. I find that the narratives apply the double structure of irony to language itself, compelling a shift from an interpretive mode that confidently assigns meaning to an approach that takes the instability of reference itself as the subject of the ironist’s ruse. This strategy produces two revisionist readings of Kim’s work. First, I argue that Kim adopts a modernist literary mode in his short fiction through the ironic double language he frequently employs, a duplicity arising in part as a critique of the essential irony of modern existence (the coexistence of earlier economic and social forms with colonial and modern modes) but also as a response to the split self of the modern subject that enables the “self-satirical” or cynical literature appropriate to a historical moment in which “said” and “meant” may not coincide. Second, in locating a more radical form of irony in his fiction, we can see that Kim’s irony is mobilized not only in response to the material and subjective conditions of the colonial modern but also as a means to thematize the fallibility of language itself, to draw attention to the formal aspects of the text. Most of Kim’s work was published during a very brief period just before his death, so more than identifying a chronological development across his fiction, my analysis questions the methods used over time to assign meaning both to individual texts and to Kim’s work as a whole. In par ticu lar, approaches that rely on biographical information or a

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common historical or linguistic (ethnic-national) community of interpretation are understood as exemplifying what I have been calling the communicative model of literary interpretation, whereas a closer reading of his fiction allows us to fi nd in it a response to the crisis of representation, the complex combination of crises in subjective, historical, linguistic, and literary registers that characterized literary and intellectual circles in 1930s colonial Korea. Although the prior approach is able to locate Kim’s work in relation to its colonial modern context at the level of content, the latter reads his fiction as a response to its context at the level of form. I move from the former to the latter approach as the chapter progresses. That a consideration of humor is crucial to understanding Kim Yujŏng’s literary texts is widely accepted. Almost every critic who has written on Kim agrees that humor (haehak) or comicality (kolgye) stands in combination with the use of an idiomatic, vernacular language as a central feature of his fiction. His stories furthermore give “the impression that the world that appears in the narration exists alongside a different world—not the world taken at face value, formed on the surface of the writing, but another world that exceeds this.” This is the effect of irony, which classically presents a literal meaning, “the world taken at face value,” and a connoted meaning, a meaning that the ironist pretends to ignore while allowing it to bear the weight of his intention. Whereas Pak T’aewŏn adopted a psychoanalytic mode, rendering the interface between language and reality doubtful at the level of the relating subject, in Kim’s work this doubt arises at the level of form. Here it is not a subjective split, manifested in the hysteric who questions all utterances, but rather a narrative split characteristic of irony that calls meaning into question. Irony can be seen as a modern form par excellence in which the self-critical “divided” subject of modernity (the self-conscious narrator) enacts the undecidability of representational language, drawing attention to the literary work as a construct by consistently pointing out the multiple meanings of any utterance in its enactment of the gap between what is said and what is meant. I find that what emerges from this gap when clear meaning cannot be assigned to the ironic text is a ner vous or “negative” laughter and suggest that Kim’s irony does not always conform to the classical trope that simply means the opposite of what it says, but presents a more complex case, a general or sustained irony that undermines a straightforward tropical derivation of meaning from the text and allows a reading of his fiction as modernist in both its derivation from and critique of the conditions of modernity.

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From Satire to Irony, from Irony to Humor Under the discursive strictures of colonization and the transforming pressures of modernity in 1930s Korea, language came unmoored from its stable referent and referentiality was called into question across the ideological spectrum. At this “zero point” in literary history, critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ advocated for satirical literature which could thematize the gap between “said” and “meant” and take a critical position on literaryhistorical crisis, rejecting the assumption of transparent symbolic language in a critique of both the dead past and the moribund present and moving beyond the two modes also criticized in Kim’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed”: psychological fiction and set’ae sosŏl, the objective depiction of the social. Satire admittedly differs from irony in its morality, suggesting a “firm allegiance to a set of convictions” against which “the satirist weighs the failings and follies of human beings” whereas the ironist’s attitude “is always ambivalent, because he does not see the world in the stark colouring typical of the satirist’s vision; instead he tends to admit the good and the bad in every alternative.” Yet irony does enact the split self of Ch’oe’s self-satirical approach in its division of the narrative into two levels: on the one hand we have the alazon, the character who is “confidently unaware,” Lewis’s “self”; on the other hand we have the knowing subject (the narrator, a wise character, the reader himself or herself), the observing “not-self” who understands what the alazon does not. Formally ironic texts are split into two levels: “At the lower level is the situation either as it appears to the victim of irony . . . or as it is deceptively presented by the ironist. . . . At the upper level is the situation as it appears to the observer or ironist.” When irony is present, there is always an opposition between these two levels—a contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility—where “what the victim thinks may be contradicted by what the observer knows.” This “victim” of irony remains in a sense innocent, “confidently unaware of the very possibility of there being an upper level or point of view that invalidates his own, or an ironist pretends not to be aware of it.” This corresponds to what Muecke calls specific, situational irony, for which “a ‘condition of affairs’ or ‘outcome of events’ . . . is seen and felt to be ironic.” In that the reader shares with the ironist a knowing perspective, specific irony is also “stable irony,” marked by authorial intent in the presentation of covert meanings “intended to be reconstructed with meanings different from those on the surface,” meanings that are stable or fi xed and finite in application. The reconstructed meanings are “local,

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limited,” not to do with the “nature of things in general” or qualities of the universe but rather about something specific, “attributable to par ticu lar men at a par ticu lar time,” drawn from a knowing community “whose values are more or less established, whose members, as a body, are ‘assured of certain certainties.’ ” With stable irony, reading thus becomes a process “of finding and communing with kindred spirits . . . [as] every irony intends to build a  community of believers even as it excludes,” a community of those who can see the essential truth, the group of those who grasp the irony of it. For Booth, both communicative (direct statement by the narrator, obvious errors or conflicts within the work itself) and metacommunicative (stylistic) aspects of the fictional work can clue the reader in to the presence of irony; in addition, “we are alerted whenever we notice an unmistakable conflict between the beliefs expressed and the beliefs we hold and suspect the author of holding.” In that “we never make all of our shared assumptions explicit,” this appeal to shared assumptions resembles all forms of verbal communication, and the action of irony leads us to consider interpretive activity itself as a bringing to light of “the hidden complexities that are mastered whenever men succeed in understanding each other in any mode, even the most flat and literal.” Here Booth seems to invoke the undecidability or untrustworthiness of language as the basis of the ironic operation— that language cannot convey an entire meaning, cannot grasp the thing itself, is always a re-presentation—while at the same time insisting that language originating in authorial intention can be “mastered” through interpretation, especially through fi xing meaning using clues present in the context of an interaction, either at a metadiscursive level (the “community of meaning”) or via a context internal to the text itself that lets us know how language is to be taken. The humor of Kim’s fiction is often understood as deriving from a carefully crafted ignorance of the contradiction between external appearances, the “surface of the writing,” and a larger reality understood by a community of knowledgeable interpreters. As noted above, ironic humor is one of two main categories through which Kim’s fiction is often approached in South Korean literary history. In his fiction we are presented with rural poverty as seen in a “concave mirror” of caricature, while Kim’s literary style (munch’e) provokes a “negative laughter” in the reader; further, Kim’s combination of humor (haehak) and satire (p’ungja) is seen as accomplishing the difficult task of moving beyond a moralizing leftist-realist mode and arousing genuine laughter in the reader, a “roundabout tactic” (uhoe chŏnsul) in dealing with reality (hyŏnsil).

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Typical approaches to Kim’s work tend to assume a context-based community of understanding and adopt reading strategies designed to work through Kim’s covert meanings. As we saw in chapter 4, Kim’s humorous technique has often been linked with his biography, in the sense of his link with the countryside and the rural peasant but also by placing him in a long lineage of traditional oral literature. The “community of believers,” those who may understand the intended meaning of the literary work despite the concavity of its presention, is thus both a historical and a linguistic community. This is a mode of interpretation that Candace Lang calls “ironic criticism,” which understands the text as expressive, intended to communicate a par ticu lar idea or message, and rendered in language considered “a supplement whose sole function is to represent a preexistent idea or concept”—in other words, what I have been calling a communicative model of literary interpretation. Even if a writer uses indirect language, the ironic approach assumes that the text is “potentially interpretable, and generally contains indications as to how it is to be read. . . . Even when language is used to frustrate understanding—writing is still perceived of as an act of representation, albeit in this case a misrepresentation.” The role of the critic is thus “the discovery or revelation of meaning (i.e., authorial intent). The ironic critic assumes that language is by nature subservient to conceptualization, and considers any text in which this hierarchy is reversed or put into question to be at best frivolous, at worst aberrant or perverse.” Lang takes Booth as one example of the ironic critic, seeking to reconstruct ironic meaning through the “rebuilding” of the structure of the text on firmer ground. For Booth, “the comprehension of irony entails the elimination of a contradiction within the original utterance and/or between that utterance and its context, by transporting the true meaning of the expression elsewhere—that is, by treating it as a trope.” The function of literary criticism here is “the replacement of an illogical or unacceptable utterance with an acceptable, logical one . . . to phrase in logical, coherent language an original intention that unifies all parts of the text by subordinating them to a central core of meaning.” Whereas ironic interpretation understands meaning to be concealed beneath the “phenomenal veil” of language and coterminous with authorial intention—the “truth” of the author’s self or character “conceived of as an autonomous cogito”—Lang defi nes a text as humorous “to the extent that it implicitly or explicitly casts doubt upon the supposed priority of the signified and, consequently, the priority of the cogito itself.” The humorous text is one in which language and writing are thematized, and problems of language are linked to problems of self-identity. Ironic

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critics seek to peer beyond the split assumed by their interpretive method between phenomenon/essence, word/thought, expression/meaning, other/self, real/ideal, appearance/reality—in short, to master the “non-coincidence of essence and phenomenon [that] is characteristic of all forms of irony.” Thus, as Furst points out, the commonly accepted definition of irony rests on certain fundamental assumptions: a “conscious intentionality on the part of the ironist; the existence of stable meanings; and the efficacy of words as a medium of communication between writer and reader.” For Lang, a “humorous” approach to the literary work questions these assumptions, asking: “What happens when ‘meaning’, ‘intention’, and ‘language’ are themselves exposed to scrutiny as to their signification? Or when they become the objects of irony?” These were the questions that 1930s authors and critics were asking, and below I play out the ramifications of Kim’s “humorous” critique of confident knowledge at both subjective and objective levels, finding in his use of irony a modernist literary practice and style that registers both “the limits of perception and the waning of a confident epistemology.”

Stable Irony in Kim’s Short Fiction The form of irony most often located in Kim’s fiction is stable or situational irony, and examples are extremely numerous. “The Bachelor and the Frog,” for instance, details a naive tenant farmer’s awkward attempt to propose marriage to a prostitute. Throughout the tale there are two levels of reality: one in which the protagonist Tŏngmani believes that it is possible to propose marriage to the prostitute; and one that understands the true nature of her visit to his village, focused on monetary (not marital) goals. These two levels remain in perpetual contradiction throughout, and Tŏngmani remains “confidently unaware of the very possibility of there being an upper level or point of view that invalidates his own.” In addition, no apparent ironist is present—rather, it is the situation that has enabled the moment of irony, Tŏngmani being so poor that his family has left him. The dual nature of this irony carries into the title of the story itself, where “Maengkkongi” stands both as both the name of the small frog heard toward the end of the tale and a euphemism for “idiot” or “moron.” Another example of the doubled narrative structure of irony comes in “Gathering Gold in the Bean Field,” a story that draws a caricature of those who dream of “getting rich quick.” The two levels of irony correspond to those who believe in such a “groundless fantasy” and those who profit from the naïveté of the believers. Again, no ironist is present:

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the situation that results in the formation of dual levels of awareness is the simple reality that when one cannot survive doing farm work, it makes sense to put one’s faith in the fantasy of sudden windfall. The protagonist’s folly—destroying his ripening fields in repeated attempts to find a vein of gold beneath—results only in the promise of starvation and the accumulation of further debt during the coming winter. The reader is aware of this disastrous outcome from the very beginning of the story, and in fact Kim Yujŏng often structures his stories not to attain maximum dramatic effect by keeping the reader in the dark regarding the existence of an “upper” level of reality and unveiling the presence of these two levels only at the end of the story, but rather in a way that focuses the reader’s attention on the recounting itself. Kim here relies not on the promise of suspense or an element of surprise—the reader’s sudden knowledge that he or she has been unaware of the actual state of affairs—but on a continual, oppositional interaction between the two levels of reality to maintain the momentum of the story, repeatedly confirming the reader’s knowledge of the “higher” level of reality. With Kim Yujŏng’s well-known “Spring—Spring,” we again see the “groundless fantasy” appear early on; the opening lines of this short work neatly contain the entire dynamic of the story. “Father-in-law! Isn’t now, uh—” When I ask him why he won’t let us get married, as we’re old enough, his reply is always: “You little—! What’s this about marriage?—you’ve got to grow up to do something like that.” This “growing up” that he speaks of isn’t in reference to me, but to the height of my wife-to-be, Chŏmsun. I came here and started working three years and seven months ago, and nothing has changed—I still haven’t gotten a penny. He said she’s not grown up enough, but I sure as hell don’t know when she’ll have gotten tall enough. . . . “Chŏmsun has to grow some more, she’s still a child,” he says, but I can’t see why—I’m just dumbfounded.

The protagonist is “confidently unaware” in relation to two interwoven strands of the narrative. First, despite the exclamation that opens the story, the tenant manager Pongp’il—whose daughter the protagonist hopes to marry—is not yet his “father-in-law” (changin nim) and to all appearances never will be. As the narrative progresses we realize that Pongp’il’s resistance to marriage is a habitual one, a strategy calculated to retain the free labor of a potential son-in-law for as long as possible before discarding him and attracting another suitor with the promise of a daughter’s hand in marriage. We learn from the protagonist’s friend Mungt’ae, for example, that the eldest daughter of the tenant manager,

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recently married, had been promised to a string of “prospective” sons-inlaw over the previous ten years, each suitor laboring for no pay in his “father-in-law’s” fields and eventually discarded—thus he was “known in the village as one who was rich in sons-in-law.” The protagonist is in fact the third “son-in-law” that Pongp’il has promised to marry Chŏmsun to. In this sense, the protagonist’s insistence upon referring to his employer—or more accurately, his master—as “father-in-law” reveals a fantasy parallel to “getting rich quick” or coming into a “sudden windfall.” This appears to be a clear-cut case of stable, situational irony. There are two levels of narrative reality, one at which the protagonist operates (as if he will one day win Chŏmsun’s hand in marriage) and one from which Mungt’ae, the village, and presumably the reader observe the action, knowing that the tenant manager has no intention of ever letting his daughter marry the naive laborer. Yet it is not only the protagonist’s ignorance vis-à-vis his sly master’s plan that entraps him as the victim of irony, between a reality where “father-in-law” means what it says and a reality where it means something else entirely. There is a second play on language that carries throughout the story and allows the protagonist to maintain a hope for future marriage to Chŏmsun, even after he learns from Mungt’ae that he is the third in a series of exploited suitors. This is the perpetual ambiguity surrounding the concept of “growing up.” The central slippage is addressed in the opening lines above. When the tenant manager insists that one has to be “grown up” (charaya) to get married, it appears that he is referring to a level of maturity or age required before marriage would be considered a socially sanctioned act. Yet both are clearly old enough to marry: the protagonist is at least twenty-five years old, and Chŏmsun herself is fifteen. Thus the idea of “growth” is displaced into the register of size, with charada suggesting both maturation and increase or gain, and Chŏmsun’s height becomes the issue around which the possibility of marriage revolves. The continual play between these two registers lends this story its humor. On the one hand, height is measurable, a rational or scientific category that serves as proof (or potential refutation) of the correctness of Pongp’il’s argument. On the other hand, the suggestion that height is a measure of one’s preparedness for matrimony strikes the reader as ridiculous. In addition, Chŏmsun is quite short despite her age, and there doesn’t appear to be any hope of her growing any taller. “He says that he’ll let us marry when his daughter grows up, but how can you know when a person is tall enough without standing there and watching them all the time? And anyway, I thought I knew that ‘grow up’ meant a person growing well to a certain height, but who knows whether there might

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be someone whose body just widens out from a fi xed height?” The protagonist’s gullibility leads him to accept Pongp’il’s rationality—he thinks about trying to measure Chŏmsun with a ruler; he wonders, “if dogs and pigs grow so well, why don’t some people?”; he decides that she isn’t growing because she carries the water pitcher daily on her head (so he undertakes this task for her); and he even prays for a growth spurt. The protagonist decides to take the issue to the local prefect, a “man of the world” with a waxed moustache who initially agrees that the two should be allowed to marry—after all, Chŏmsun is already a hair taller than her own mother, who as everyone can see was perfectly fit to marry and have children. After a hushed exchange with Pongp’il (from whom he rents two rice fields), however, the prefect returns with a different verdict. “What you’ve said is correct—because you’ve reached a certain age, you’re not wrong to speak of the urgency of having a son. However . . . in the statutes we find the term ‘legal age’ [sŏngnyŏn] meaning that one has to be twenty-one years of age before marrying.” Here we get the third rendition of the concept of “growing up” in the form of a legal definition— not only emotional maturity or height, then, but also the requirement of arriving at a “lawful age” (Chŏmsun being only fifteen) might stand in the way of their union. The prefect concludes that the protagonist should be thankful that Pongp’il has once again promised to allow the two to marry in the autumn despite Chŏmsun’s youth before the law. This comment leads us to a final stage of analysis, where the interplay between various definitions of maturity comes into contact with both the protagonist’s groundless fantasy and the structure of the story itself. Pongp’il uses the promise of an autumn marriage to goad his “son-inlaw” to hard work during the spring planting and the fall harvest, then vacillates until the following spring, when the cycle begins again. This repetition of sowing and harvesting parallels the sort of cyclical “growth” that Chŏmsun is subjected to in the discourse between the two males: she matures, she could be taller, there might be the possibility of marriage, before she is once again “cut down” to size and made inaccessible to the protagonist. This hope, associated with a coming harvest and sustained in the slippage between concepts of maturity, physical size, and legal age, appears to be what has sustained the protagonist over the past few years. The gap between what is said and what is meant is here associated with a difference between linear (biographical, measurable, legal time) and cyclical (natural, agricultural) time, between a measurable growth that takes place over calendar time and a cyclical pattern of life and death suggested by the repetition of the word “spring” in the title. This ambiguity

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and the protagonist’s laughable confusion bring to light the ludicrous distinction between ideal and real, between the opposing levels of reality that render the narrative an ironic one. By the end of the story, this confusion has extended to the protagonist’s attempts to understand Chŏmsun herself. She is at first a mystery— her father is careful to maintain a physical distance between the two youngsters (invoking naeoe, the social law keeping men at a proper distance from women in public), which prevents the protagonist from properly “measuring” Chŏmsun. Later in the story, when Chŏmsun brings him food in the fields, she unexpectedly breaks with convention and speaks to him, complaining that he just works day and night, and suggesting that he confront her father about acquiescing to their marriage. After she leaves, he thinks: “When it’s spring, water rises into the trees and plants, and buds shoot out. It seems that Chŏmsun has suddenly grown up in the space of a few days—maybe it can be so with humans too?” Here again in this central passage the two “times” are conflated: emotional maturity, presumably a linear development, is combined with (cyclical) images of spring. This is the discrepancy that ultimately brings the story to an unhappy end. Chŏmsun has confronted the protagonist in the fields once again, berating him for not convincing her father to allow them to marry, and suggesting that he go so far as to “yank on his beard” if he has to. It is this encounter, a further “growth” on Chŏmsun’s part, that instigates a physical battle between Pongp’il and his “son-in-law.” After a scene of prolonged, clownish grappling, the protagonist eventually gives in; but instead of remaining angry, Pongp’il gives him a pack of cigarettes and tells him to hurry up and get back to work in the bean field, repeating his promise that he will let them marry in the autumn. Overwhelmed by this display of restraint, the protagonist shoulders his A-frame. In the same moment, however, he breaks out of the cycle: “Just then, without thinking, I could only consider my father-in-law an enemy and laid hold of him with all my might.” Her father’s cries bring Chŏmsun out into the yard, where she proceeds to attack her purported future husband, grabbing him by the ear and cursing at him. The final lines of the story read: I . . . could only stare blankly up at Chŏmsun’s face, this Chŏmsun whose interior I could not know. “You little—! You’d go so far as to make the word ‘grandfather’ leave your father-in-law’s lips?”

Here we have a final inversion, a reversal of social standing—Chŏmsun is angered that her father has been forced to shout “grandfather” (akin to

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“crying uncle”), an exclamation made under duress of the protagonist’s superior status, his control, albeit temporary, over the situation and over Pongp’il. Given the attention paid to family nomenclature throughout the story, this at the very least strikes the reader as amusing, a sudden reversion to the physical world where the protagonist is in fact larger and stronger than his aged master. It is this play on language that again produces confusion, a failure of communication that leaves the protagonist as “dumbfounded” as he was at the story’s beginning. Just as the key words in the opening paragraph were “father-in-law” and “grow up”— one signaling the groundless fantasy and one a flexible meaning by which the fantasy was sustained—here we find the ultimately “unknowable interior” of Chŏmsun (sok alsu ŏmnŭn Chŏmsun), an intention that cannot be known by another. The protagonist has watched her “inner” (sok) maturation, but finds that in the end he has grossly misjudged her and is once again thrown into hapless confusion. In sum, with “Spring—Spring” we see the thematization of a failed communication, where a linguistic ambiguity provides the motive force behind the division of narrative reality into “upper” and “lower” levels. This shifting significance, linked to distinct modes of temporality, ultimately results in the story’s pessimistic ending, which echoes the unknowable other with which Kim’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” opens. Language, unable to facilitate intersubjective understanding and often used to foil just such certainty, fails at both objective and subjective levels, positioning an imperceptible truth somewhere between height/age and maturity, outside and inside. The narrative thus points to a reality structured by language, within which the protagonist exists subject to the vicissitudes of changing meanings, incomprehensible relationships between interior (essence) and exterior (phenomenon). Although we can locate opposing layers of reality in this story and witness the functioning of an apparently clear-cut case of stable, situational irony, “Spring— Spring” also suggests that the reader’s “superior” position may rest on the same shaky linguistic grounds as the protagonist’s understanding of his own situation. Although it is the gap between these layers of reality that provides for much of the humor in “Spring—Spring,” the pessimistic ending of the tale calls into question the same capacity to “attain the other”—complete communication or understanding—that Kim’s critical writing casts doubt upon. Kim Yujŏng’s treatment of this “linguistic reality” does not stop with stable irony, but grows increasingly complex until the two narrative levels merge into one, a situation in which a confidently “ironic” analysis becomes unreliable. This intensification of the ironic effect beyond a simple

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structuring of the narrative and into a questioning of the capacities of representational language emerges in the short piece “The Scorching Heat,” for instance, a story that does not clearly signal the ironist’s position on the “upper level” of truth. The narrative gives no clue as to that larger, causal “reality,” and the reader is left to his or her own devices to locate the meaning that underlies the action and dialogue of the text. The story is of a rural couple that traverses the city to visit the university hospital, displaced characters common in Kim’s work—awkward flaneurs who, without full access to the city, become both observers and observed, “themselves the objects of intense or hostile scrutiny.” The wife, her abdomen “hideously bloated,” has carried an unborn dead fetus in her womb three months beyond the due date, and at one level the couple’s ignorance is at the base of the absurd situation that reveals the gap between levels of understanding characteristic of ironic narrative. As with “Spring—Spring,” the misunderstanding stems from miscommunication: at the hospital, the protagonist, Tŏksun, “had not understood every single word the nurse had said” and was “at a loss for words” in the face of his wife’s protest against surgery, with the nurse “flabbergasted” at the hostile reaction of Tŏksun’s wife to the suggestion of further medical treatment. Communication is further limited in the colonial context by the fact that the gynecologist is Japanese, and relies on the nurse to interpret for him. The characters consistently misinterpret or misunderstand the meaning of what another is saying, less to comic effect than revealing “the perception of cross-purposes, of absurdity, or tragic suffering, the enigma of events that happen to us.” The “groundless fantasy” in this work does not have solely to do with the wife’s health. The couple has also heard that the university hospital will pay a salary to patients who exhibit symptoms strange enough to merit further study. Yet this is a fantasy that neither fully believe, and their confusion and doubt allow the story to take on both comic and tragic elements, leaving the reader between empathy and derisive laughter. Further, the “knowing” characters in the story—the educated doctor, his staff, and the hospital itself—are described in negative, aggressive, or threatening language. The nurses make “what seemed like an attack” on Tŏksun’s wife in the examination room; “the stinging medical odor that hung heavy in the air was somehow chilling against the background of heat, but what really made one’s heart shrivel with fear was the sight of the shiny instruments and equipment that stood at the far side of the room.” The text first presents the reader with a hope that is not easily dismissed, then stages the events that eventually expose this hope as unfounded in the contrast between the dusty street’s “scorching heat” and

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the “chilling” and “icy” hospital interior. While the story draws its comic-tragic energy from the familiar ironic opposition between “lower” and “upper” levels, the true meaning that the reader is to assign is not self-evident. With the proliferation of miscommunications, confidence in ironic misrepresentation-as-representation breaks down, while this breakdown itself becomes both the action and theme of the story.

“The Talk of Words”: Toward a Formal Critique of Representation Irony in each of the above examples stems from an awareness of discrepancy between reality and appearance. Each narrative depends on the text saying one thing and meaning another—presenting in convincing language the hope of marriage to an indifferent prostitute, the quest for gold in a bean field, one’s belief that one might profit from illness, or the seasonal hope of marriage in “Spring—Spring”—while clueing the reader into the “upper” level of reality on which these hopes and beliefs appear unfounded. In each case, some meaning other than that presented by the words themselves is produced, and the gap between these two results in the reader’s uncomfortable, “negative” laughter. This process is far from a simple one—how do we know the ironic author’s intent, that the true meaning of the tale is different from what the characters appear to think or say? Or, more precisely: “How do we talk about the peculiar relationship between authors and readers of those passages which are unquestionably ironic?” There are, after all, many literary devices that say one thing and intend another. Further complicating the matter, potentially “every literary context is ironic because it provides a weighting or qualification on every word in it, thus requiring the reader to infer meanings which are in a sense not in the words themselves: all literary meanings in this view become a form of covert irony.”  Kim arguably encourages this overlap between ironic and intended meaning in his literary practice, employing an ambivalent wording or a syntax of doubleness (ijung ŭi pujŏng ŏpŏp) and leading the reader to believe neither the narrator nor the protagonist, equivalent perspectives that reflect the text’s “double vision,” an equivalence itself the product of presenting tragic subject matter through comic representation. That is, Kim introduces doubt into “ironic critique” or the communicative model of literary interpretation, questioning the textual and contextual basis necessary for the confident derivation of meaning from the literary work. Here the impossibility of knowing the other, of full communication via language between subjects, is linked to what Kim Sangt’ae calls Kim’s

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“double” language, the use of “individual words” (words Kim Yujŏng has created), misleading words (faux amis, where meaning seems apparent but is not), “transparent words” (words with slightly different spelling that appear to refer to the same signified), and onomatopoeia—words that resist transposition into standard language, that resist the standardization of language itself. Th is “double” language is often uncritically referred to as “vernacular” or “dialect,” yet Kim Sangt’ae urges us to take the author’s style more seriously—Kim Yujŏng’s work is not simply unskilled, strange, or “natural” but “flawless,” carefully crafted, signaling “the excellence of his linguistic sensibility.” For practitioners of ironic criticism, which treats meaning as opposed to expression and reality as opposed to appearance, “irony becomes serious only when it is negated, when signifier once again coincides with signified.” The task of the reader of the ironic work is to reattach the signifier to the intended signified. Stated differently, this task is to assign value to irony, to make something valuable of it despite its reluctance to reveal a deeper significance, always insisting on saying something otherwise. The value that is typically assigned to Kim’s work—as an ethnographic portrayal of colonial-period reality, a “lyricism of folkways” that provides the present-day reader with a window onto the past—depends precisely on prioritizing the author (biographical evidence) or the context of his work (socioeconomic reality). Here literary history itself provides a dialectical countermoment, assigning intention and meaning in order to make irony “work” toward a particular telos, reproducing the subjective choice and purportedly objective practice that Kim Yujŏng critiques roundly in “Thoughts from a Sickbed.” An account of Kim Yujŏng’s irony that takes into consideration the crisis of representation that Kim himself described as the basis of his creative work must move beyond this type of “ironic” approach and into the difficult realm of the “humorous.” If we take seriously the modernist author’s critique of representation, then in addition to rereading these texts as modernist—as the duplicitous or ironic expression of the conditions or experience of modernity in 1930s colonial Korea—we must also understand the fiction as discursively engaged with its sociopolitical context at the level of form. Rejecting a method that takes the writer as an autonomous literary-historical subject guaranteeing the meaning of the text for the reader—a rejection authorized both by the narrative form of Kim’s works and by his own critique of the knowing authorial subject in “Thoughts from a Sickbed”—is not equivalent to rejecting the capacity of the literary text to engage critically with its context. With Kim’s irony, we find that the

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objective conditions of a modernizing colonial society provide the precondition or “situation” of the work, that which enables the splitting of the narrative into multiple levels; and at the same time, his irony allows taking not only these objective conditions but the modern subject and language itself as objects of mockery. The idea of a self-conscious literary language that takes a metadiscursive perspective on itself, or makes a central theme of its own language, is characteristic of (though not limited to) modernist literary practice, and raises the prospect of a sort of “linguistic turn” in 1930s colonial Korea. Rather than language “talking” about or presenting reality, language “talks” about itself—and in the process, somehow comes to an understanding of the nature of that reality. In what Quine calls a “semantic ascent,” we see a marked shift where statements about X are paraphrased into statements about the term “X”—which in turn may or may not tell you something about X itself. Another way of saying this is that truth can only be had of language, and not of the reality that it purports to describe through any sort of empirical investigation or observation. If we accept the idea in Kim’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” that one does not have direct access to objects in reality except via language, and that authors and critics shifted their discourse from a “talk of objects” to “talk of words” in this period—a particular self-consciousness about the use of language, its capacity or incapacity to communicate, and a turn to the materiality of language to create new meaning—then it makes sense to address the formal aspects of his work as a metadiscourse, particularly where in their recursiveness they trouble meaning. Revealed in the constitutive gap between what is said (utterance) and what is meant (enunciation), this split appears under the “double bind” of colonial modernity that engenders “a whole style of relation with the world and in which certain stimuli are systematically denied, certain meanings are systematically repressed, lack of recognition is reinforced and rewarded, and clarification is punished.” As we saw with Pak T’aewŏn, this situation demands an inquiry into the fundamental problem of the relationship of language to the reality that it purports to describe, a problem of communication that becomes especially acute with the rise of the modern period and an attendant “self-critical awareness of . . . linguistic embeddedness” characteristic of modern subjectivity and the ironic mode. In a situation in which “normal discourse” and “straightforward speech” have become impossible, Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s suggestion of the skeptical introspection of self-satire in response to the gap between ideal and real, self and not-self, takes on the characteristic of ironic discourse. That is, as a discourse for which essence (thought) can never coincide

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with phenomenon (word), irony provides an ideal form for thematizing the impossibility of complete, direct communication through language, and the simultaneous demand for such transparency. Here the split subject and doubled discourse of the modern meet, with the capacity to laugh at oneself stemming from the situation of the self in language: “Language . . . divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-defi nition.” The self-in-the-world is mystified, Ch’oe’s buffoon “existing in a state of inauthenticity,” while the linguistic self— transferred “out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language”—is superior in its knowledge of the very difference that makes possible its comic observation. Thus irony for de Man works against the nineteenth-century commonplace that the literary symbol embodies “an expression of unity between the representative and the semantic function of language,” an assumption that Ch’oe criticized Korean writers for continuing to rely on. Whereas the symbol postulates identity, a necessary and continuous relationship between sign and meaning, irony suggests an arbitrary and discontinuous relationship between the two, a “demystification of an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide. It is especially against the latter that irony is directed.” As we have seen, the gap between literary representation and social reality is often obscured in the process of literary history, with critics reading symbolic value into Kim Yujŏng’s work, understood to represent and correspond to the history, language, and experience of an ethnic-national whole. Yet it is this unproblematic understanding of narrative language that Ch’oe located in 1935 at the base of the deadlock of Korean literature, a communicative model that stood as the object of Kim’s literary-historical critique both in his critical writing and in his ironic prose. In the relationship between the world and language, “new psychologism” and “objective depiction” both prioritize the signified—in one case, the autonomous subject (interiority), and in the other, external physical reality. As with Lang’s “ironic critic,” both treat language as a vehicle through which truth or essence is to be reached for—the nature of the subject (author), the reality of a par ticu lar social structure, and the like. Kim Yujŏng, writing in the mid-1930s, faced an interlinked set of crises—of the subject, of literary history, and of colonial modernity itself—that compel us to seek in his texts an alternative writing, a means

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of tricking meaning out from between the hypersubject and hyperobject that he openly rejected. The technique of indirect communication that irony offered to Kim allowed him to critique two then-dominant literary techniques (individualistic, bourgeois I-novels and socialist or ideologically engaged naturalism), striking a position between Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s “accepting” and “rejecting” attitudes in the “critical attitude” of selfsatire, a vehicle through which literature could be used not only to critique (objective) social reality but which thematized subjectivity and representation as well. This is not to say that Kim’s fiction completely fails to address sociohistorical reality as such, but rather that it utilizes the figure of irony in order to reveal that when the very conditions of (economic, social) existence affirm on a daily basis the gap between essence and phenomenon, irony becomes the mode of communication most suited to reality. The essence of Kim Yujŏng’s fiction would not then be the “reality of poverty” of the colonial-period proletariat or the impoverished intellectual, but that what is said is not equivalent to what is meant, and further that this is the fundamental nature of the experience of the colonial modern— the world upside-down. The real provides an inadequate corrective to the intentional misstatement of irony. The ironic misstatement undermines local stability and confident interpretability with the application of irony to the “nature of things in general,” shift ing our focus from the par ticu lar to the universal. Here is an irony in which value cannot be assigned to a preexisting or intended meaning because the very concept of value on which “ironic” literaryhistorical approaches depend is undermined. The task of the reader cannot be to reattach an essential, intended signified with the signifier, to make something valuable of the text by revealing its deeper significance. The significance lies on the surface of the text, which takes life as a “fundamentally and inescapably ironic state of affairs” of which ironist and reader alike are victims—an irony directed, writes Kierkegaard, against “the whole given actuality of a certain time and situation.” Th is “general irony” lies in contradictions engendered when “the meaning of meaning, and the value of value” are themselves considered to be in question. Th is is the point at which an awkward, “negative” laughter is evoked, drawn out of the reader at the moment when local irony becomes universal, the irony of existence itself. Understanding Kim’s irony as a formal response to the contradictions of colonial modernity allows us to take into account his own sophisticated views on narrative language and relating his fiction to a par ticu lar historical period outside a reflection theory of meaning.

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Sustained Irony in “Spring and a Lowlife” In order to locate the meaning of an ironic statement or text in its historical context—the interpretive move of the “ironic” critic—it is necessary to reconstruct the meaning of the statement on a “higher ground,” to assign an original meaning to the words that appear on the page. What makes Kim Yujŏng’s irony difficult to pin down is that its indirect content, typically understood as “provided by the corrective judgment that naturally arises” in an ironic exchange, is not always clear. It is obvious that the situation is ironic, that there is something in need of correction when a tenant farmer is so overwhelmed by taxation and debt that he has to steal from his own harvest in order to avoid starvation, or when a rural woodcutter tries to train his own wife to become a professional entertainer or prostitute (tŭlpyŏngi), singing and serving alcohol to local men. Though ironic, it is not clear where we are to place the blame—it is as if irony does not function as a trope in the limited sense of the word, which presumes a subject able to reconstruct meaning, but “disguises its entire meaning,” treating both subject and object as ironic. It is as if there is no “higher ground” on which to rebuild the structure of meaning and replace “the speaker’s utterance with one that squares with the context.” Kim himself has made the same point in his critical writing—the hubristic assumption that meaning preexists expression undergirds the hypersubjective and hyperobjective literary practices that he dismisses, and he instead sees representative language as not objective or subjective but as continually attempting to overcome the constitutive gap between thought and word. Methodologically, this moves us from a stable irony where biographical determinism (locating meaning in the authorial subject) or a reflection theory of literary causality (locating meaning in the historical object) might suffice when interpreting his fiction, and toward a general or “cosmic” irony, which rests on an understanding of representational language itself as always separate from its object. Here not only the unwitting victim but also the reader and the ironist alike are fi xed within an unstable linguistic system, consigned to continually attempt to overcome the gap between self and other. Although it is generally held that the meaning of the word “irony” was restricted to its rhetorical function until the eighteenth century, the term since the romantic period has become more complex, with an ironic sensibility often seen as a marker of modernity itself. With unstable irony, we see the author refusing to declare any stable proposition or truth from which correction or judgment could be made. Here “the only sure affirmation is that negation that begins all ironic play: ‘this affirmation must

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be rejected,’ leaving the possibility, and in infinite ironies the clear implication, that since the universe (or at least the universe of discourse) is inherently absurd, all statements are subject to ironic undermining. No statement can really ‘mean what it says.’ ” This “general irony” sees life itself as a “fundamentally and inescapably ironic state of affairs” in which we are all victims, similar to Kierkegaard’s “eminent irony” directed against “the totality of existence which it considers sub specie ironiae.” In order to take irony as a fully interpretable sign concealing a true meaning, what is required is “the elimination of the figural aspect of the text, or relationship among terms in praesentia, [which] is requisite to the construction of the in absentia term of the trope.” A general or modernist irony that called attention to the figural nature of all language would resist this eradication of the “present” text for an authoritative “absent” meaning, insisting instead on the transience of any context that might provide full meaning and—as in Kim’s critical writing—point to the lack of both subjective and objective certitude in discourse. Between stable and unstable irony and requiring no positive identification of a single meaning behind its ironic duality, Kim’s fiction moves toward a sustained or irreducible irony, a form that “has long been considered immoral and even criminal because it constitutes a nonteleological . . . use of language, both deceitful and wasteful”—Kierkegaard’s “unredeemable currency.” “Spring and a Lowlife” presents an example of how an ironic approach to a transitional modernity may strike such a self-critical position. As with many of Kim’s titles, this one suggests ambiguity, multiple levels of meaning. The wife of “Wife” is married to the protagonist, but the story suggests that their relationship is other than that which might be expected of a typical couple. Both an “idiot” (maenkkongi) and a “small frog” make appearances in “The Bachelor and the Frog”; in “Scoundrels,” the protagonist does in fact steal from the harvest (making him a “scoundrel”), but the crop is that which he sowed with his own hands; “Smoke” appears in the protagonist’s dream, as a figure of the dreamed-of gold that disappears upon waking and as an actual stimulus that wakes the dreamer. All of these titles find an accurate meaning present in the text itself, but are all ambiguous terms that function differently at different points in the narrative. As Furst points out, meaning is not reversed but “unsettled” by this sort of irony. “Spring and the Lowlife” is no exception. Ttaraji has a variety of meanings—a dwarf, a “miserable existence”—but here I understand its literal meaning as “one point,” the lowest possible point in a card game. Sam-p’al ttaraji is originally a gambling term meaning roughly “the cards you’ve drawn from the deck appear to be the best possible hand,

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but if you look closely, one of them is missing something, a small symbol, that renders the combination null.” The term contains the cynical disappointment of one who has nearly succeeded but has been defeated by a fate so cruel that it seems almost personalized. The ttaraji of this story finds himself a “one,” the lowest rung in urban Kyŏngsŏng society, yet he does not shrink from this fate but rather embraces it, using his position to achieve small victories against advocates of “modern living” that he finds himself in conflict with. “Now the body, after shrinking so during the tedious winter, begins to thaw—here and there it grows itchy. One’s back crawls as if with insects.” The story opens on a city street as the ttaraji, wearing a coat so tattered that it is almost unrecognizable as such, leans against a telegraph pole and moves his body up and down, “in motion like a machine,” his loose coat flapping about him “like a butterfly dance” as he scratches his back. The spectacle brings passersby to a halt, eyes widened, but when they realize what he is doing they laugh and move on. The narrative point of view in this opening section is characteristic of the story as a whole: stream of consciousness mixed with third-person narration. Other stylistic features usually understood as more characteristic of a modernist practice also appear: no paragraph breaks, very few proper nouns, extremely short sentences often consisting of fragmented sensory perceptions, and an urban setting. The protagonist, apparently a youngster (he has just recently tried cigarettes for the first time), wanders through an open-air market, the text noting visual and auditory impressions as he strolls along the street. He passes stalls where proprietors call out their prices, a money-throwing game, a group of men quarreling around a chess (changgi) board, young couples out for a walk in the evening, an elderly gentleman in a horsehair hat and a filthy Korean-style overcoat with hands clasped behind his back, mothers leading children by the hand, a violinist playing in a nook between buildings, and so on. This depiction of the urban setting reminds one of the “camera” or “panoramic” of Pak T’aewŏn’s fiction, particularly Scenes by a Stream. The protagonist might be called an ironic flaneur, a young, emaciated homeless man with “scabrous” skin and wearing a hodgepodge of clothes torn and stained beyond recognition— this is hardly the dandy of contemporary critical imagination. As we will see, his everyday life is a product of the distance between himself and urban modernity, a distance that nonetheless allows him to hurl invectives at its representatives. The ttaraji heads for the main street in Chongno, the center of Korean business in colonial Kyŏngsŏng, where he encounters a man in a Western

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suit staggering out onto the street, eating an apple and apparently drunk. “ ‘A penny, sir?’ Whether he heard or not, he just continued to totter down the street.” What the ttaraji is actually after is the apple, and he commences to beg the “suit” to hand him the remains of the apple when he is finished eating “with tongue-bending sounds” (hyŏ kkoburajin sori). When only two or three bites remain, the “suit” throws the core to the ground, which the ttaraji immediately picks up, wipes off, and eats. The ttaraji approaches almost every other character that makes an appearance in the narrative by asking them for money, but they do not appear to hear him, or his request results in an absurd, unexpected circumstance. This gap between self and other, made concrete in the figure of the exchange of money, keeps the ttaraji in motion throughout the story, and a series of misinterpretations yield a narrative of dramatic irony. After a brief encounter with a police officer, the protagonist latches onto a passing woman, her hair done up and wearing silk skirts and pointed-toe shoes with several books under her arm. He again asks for money, but when she doesn’t appear to hear him, he grabs the hem of her skirt. He had taken her for a prostitute, but when she kindly offers to give him something if he’ll follow her home, he reevaluates and posits that she’s a Christian. He falls into step behind her, assuming a dignified air, into an alley past the Umigwan theater and up to the gate of a newly built home, with a tile roof and electric lights. What emerges from the house is not, however, the leftover bread or scraps of food that he has imagined, but the woman’s husband, who proceeds to administer a beating, incensed that a beggar has followed his wife off the main road. The ttaraji takes this occasion to shout curses at the man, calling him a half-wit (ch’aelp’uni) and an opium addict (aep’enjaengi). “Go ahead, hit me, do what you want. Even in the worst case, you won’t kill me. Whenever his fists hit me, I shouted words at him which were unbearable, curses which really enraged him.” When the husband realizes that a crowd has gathered and is listening to the stream of invectives that the ttaraji is directing against him, he leaves off and returns to his house. The ttaraji “went over to the wall and sat down and cried, but in fact, this sly dog, though he’s been subjected to such insult, feels a great sense of superiority, having recovered his self-respect.” Subsequent encounters in the text follow a similar pattern: begging, an unexpected response, what appears to be public humiliation, followed by a sort of delight on the part of the ttaraji. The story ends with the ttaraji being dragged off by the ear, held firmly in the grasp of a “New Woman” (sin yŏsŏng) who lost her patience while trying to ignore his pleas for

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money—he had not only tugged at the hem of her skirt but butted her with his shoulder, used his elbows to slow her down, and eventually started chewing on her skirt, finally attempting to knock her down by running into her (but instead bouncing off and falling down himself). When she begins to shout at him and grabs his ear in a painful pincer grip, “more than fear, he felt a sort of friendship.” Having no choice, he follows her as she stomps along, one oversized shoe dragging behind him, when “suddenly a memory came to mind, a scene that had left a deep impression on him when he had risked peeking furtively through a window in the alley next to the Umigwan theater.” The background narration had explained hoarsely that the hero had, at risk of life and limb, bravely pursued the villain. “And ttangttang ttaari ttangttang ttaari tting tting ttii, that stylish accompaniment, the spring breeze blowing gently, when it blew down the main street, then the spectacle of this youngster risking his life, getting rid of these shoes, he became greatly elated. Ah, aiya, it hurts. Catch up, get rid of these shoes, now, this young man, ttang ttang ttaari ttang ttang ttaari tting tting ttii tting tting ttii.” The story ends abruptly with this passage full of overlap and onomatopoeia. In this moment of metalepsis, signs of modernity—the film, the Western suit, the coiff ure and silk skirts, the New Woman—take on a sheen of artifice, even as they are described in language faithful both visually and aurally to their appearance. In contrast with stories such as “The Bachelor and the Frog,” where the gap between what is said and what is meant by the text seems clear and provides the basis for stable, interpretable irony, in “Spring and a Lowlife” it is as if these two levels have merged into one. A general irony is sustained throughout this short work from the title to the final passage; at every point in the story, the meaning of things is unstable—the ttaraji laughs, cries, bites, follows women home, and so on, not only eliciting what are for him incomprehensible responses from otherwise rational, “modern” folk, but in addition surely remaining a mystery to those around him. Here we find a protagonist who embodies the impossibility of intersubjective knowing, for whom the gap between the utterance or action of the other and its meaning is never closed. Only in the heroic fantasy of the final passage, a fantasy drawn from the model of the film narrative, does the ttaraji find symbolic meaning, reversing narrative reality (is he being dragged, or is he chasing her?) and taking the soft spring breeze as a musical accompaniment to his pursuit of the “villain.” This “unsettled” narrative disrupts not only the relationship between the protagonist and other characters, but that between the protagonist (narrator) and the reader as well. As the mask of irony slips over the text as a whole, the distance be-

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tween mask and narrator is “significantly foreshortened to the point where the mask takes possession of the persona”—the ttaraji, doubly embedded in discourse, becomes the heroic figure of the film as the film soundtrack becomes an accompaniment to the narrative present.

Irony and Modernism In response to the split between “what is said” and “what is meant,” in part a product of modern alienation of the individual and in part required in a period of censorship when socially engaged fiction had been almost entirely suppressed, self-satire and modernism might be understood as parallel or even synonymous in their common responses to modernity. For Ch’oe Chaesŏ, self-satire in particular was both a product of the modern (hyŏndae) and the only adequate response to modernity. The splitting of the self, which Ch’oe characterizes as quintessentially modern, also provided occasion for the appearance of modern or existential irony, which addresses the very split between utterance and enunciation. As the self-satirical “critical attitude” utilizes this duality of self to approach the duality of the modern—the double bind of colonial modernity—irony can be understood as re-presenting this duplicity in fictional form, meaning both other than what it says and at the same time, maintaining its surface meanings in praesentia. Kim’s struggle with language in fact places him at the center of mid1930s debates regarding the purpose of literature. Im Hwa, we recall, described Korean authors as forced to choose between “introspective” or “psychological” fiction and a “descriptive” style, unable to unify the two into an organic whole given the status of the colonized and censored author following the dismantling of KAPF in 1935. Ch’oe Chaesŏ looked to satire in his essay as a means of overcoming the “deadlock” between nationalist and socialist fiction, categories that roughly correspond with Im’s bourgeois-psychological/naturalist dichotomy. As with these critics, under investigation in Kim’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” is the gap between meaning and representation, between the need to convey a par ticu lar content to the reader and the words it is necessary to use to do so. The author admits that the gap exists—“expression itself is not communication”—yet what is the “strategy” that can overcome this gap? Kim is not a romantic: the resolution to this paradox does not lie in the organic merging of the artist’s consciousness with nature, with the object itself, and a consequent involuntary expression of its essence. As seen in the previous chapter, Kim overtly mocked the assumptions behind such a narrative mode. Yet he criticizes the mimetic mode of repre-

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sentation as well, as falsely claiming identity between reality and language itself, which is then endowed with a reproductive capacity, able to duplicate reality so long as the method of depiction is fine or detailed enough. A close examination of Kim Yujŏng’s work gives us the occasion to question not only the reduction of his technique to simple “folkish” realism but also the dichotomy between realism and modernism itself. By suggesting that Kim’s response to modernity was an ironic one and as such thematically focused on the gap between what is said and what is meant—the impossibility of complete communication—I maintain that his fiction confronted the crisis of the modern period as a crisis of representation. Taking this crisis as the basis of our analysis of Kim’s work—an “objective precondition” of the ironic form of his text—allows us to “cut across the false problems of causality or ‘determinism’ ” and “directs our attention to the more sensible procedure of exploring those semantic and structural givens which are logically prior to this text and without which its emergence is inconceivable.” For Kim, irony (both stable and unstable) proved the artifice best suited not only to the indirect communication necessary under 1930s censorship but also to put into practice the dual critique of both “new psychologism” (correspondence between subject and language) and “realism” (correspondence between object and language) by which writers attempted the merging of fiction and reality. Kim Yujŏng’s fiction does not simply attempt to bridge the gap between “what is said” and “what is meant” by invoking some common context (national, ethnic, historical, linguistic) through which the reader or critic can arrive at some true meaning of the text—the classic operation of irony. Instead, his critique of colonial modernity thematizes this very gap, using what we could call a figural irony, a sustained irony that does not “square” with its context but instead refuses to alter its “strict sense.” The characters that appear in Kim’s fiction are either perpetually separated from “reality” by the objects that they imagine or fantasize about—the “groundless fantasy” of “windfall” or “getting rich quick” (fantasies that nevertheless structure the narrative, an ironic “crosssection of fantasy and reality”)—or have accepted the ironic nature of modern existence, as in “Spring and a Lowlife,” where we have the subject of radical or modern irony with the absurd figure of the ttaraji. I understand Kim’s fiction as modernist in this regard, a response to modernity that draws its conditions of possibility from the specific crises of its historical period while mounting a critical formal response to those conditions, a form for which “some older common-sense notion of ‘reality’ has become problematic, and with it, a traditional faith in the transparency of language and an unselfconscious practice of mimetic

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representation, along with the very categories of experience and events themselves.” Irony is after all a literary form endemic to the modern, not only in its acceptance of the impossibility of direct communication but also in its simultaneous reliance on the concept of the individual. It is in the modern period that, with the divided self and the loss of a coherent system of belief, “the attempt at complete communication is shipwrecked and transforms itself into indirect, ironic communication”—given the impossibility of direct communication, literary language “transforms itself into indirect communication, into saying it otherwise. . . . The imagination therefore finds its necessary correspondence in irony, in ironic construction.” In addition, irony is taken as a mark of modernity in part because the idea of a unified and autonomous self is a “prerequisite to irony,” both the individual subject and the split that characterizes its position in a fragmented and contradictory historical, social, linguistic, and literary context. With the advent of the divided self, language in crisis came to be seen as fundamentally polysemic, the gap between signifier and signified never closed, words or symbols never pinning down a single meaning. The discovery of this ambiguity in language was “a potent factor impelling towards more radical and enveloping constructs of irony that mirror the essential paradoxicality of existence. The intuition of the instability of meaning paves the way for the metamorphosis of irony.” Challenges to the bases of objective knowledge thus gave rise to questions regarding the certainties of language itself, and the “ascendancy of subjectivity” in both areas thus seriously prejudices the operations of traditional irony, which rests on the acceptance of a common understanding of words and ideas. . . . When signification and meaning in themselves become matters of doubt, then it is no longer practical to say the contrary to what is meant in the supposition that meaning and countermeaning will immediately be understood. If words are used with uncertain meanings . . . even rhetorical irony cannot function as the simple, stable device it is generally taken to be.

I have argued that Kim Yujŏng’s fiction, written during the crises prevalent under colonial modernity in the mid-1930s, can be read less as characterized by traditional or classical rhetorical modernity than as representative of an ambiguous “modern” irony, where the unreliability of language as a mediator of meaning is thematized and made central to the work. Kim himself made an issue of this in “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” pointing to the impossibility of objective communication or a full transmission of the truth of the subject in literary works—a “strategy” or ruse would be required to trick meaning out of the fictional text. Charac-

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terized by a self-conscious narrator and a foreshortening of the “distance between the mask and the persona of the narrator” (or, the distance between his or her fantasy and the real position that he or she occupies in the narrative reality), fiction becomes metafiction when “the contract between narrator and reader loses its reliability as the basis for communication,” with meaning not reversed but unsettled. With no stable ground on which to interpret the meaning of the text, “the resultant irony is wholly different in nature to that engendered by a mutually trusting narrator and reader whose shared intelligence is contrasted with the ignorance of the protagonists.” Understood as modernist fiction, Kim’s works question the illusion of meaning produced through the use of literary language, pointing to dualities or ambiguities (through both the use of homonyms, “transparent” words, and other “double” language, and a doubled ironic structure) and reminding the reader of the text’s status as fiction. When word can no longer be assumed to necessarily coincide with meaning (or is required not to), a fictional work that appears realistic, a veritable sound and video recording of reality, results in a heightened awareness of the artifice of the text. Rather than a black-and-white true or false, which affirms the certainty of a particular “community of meaning,” Kim’s fiction, “alert to the plurality of all meaning and the relativity of every position,” examines the contradictions of modern existence in both rural and urban settings, subjecting “appearance and reality alike” to scrutiny—a scrutiny that yields not firm resolution but instead a peculiarly negative laughter. As Ch’oe Chaesŏ suggests in his essay on satire, the social world does not have a direct or unmediated impact on the literary work. Rather, the literary work consists of an aesthetic response to a contradiction that already exists on the level of social reality. In its ironic response to colonial reality at the levels of both form and content, Kim Yujŏng’s fiction represents a critical form of modernism that can be read as a response to the double bind of colonial modernity and the subsequent intensification of the disjunction between signifier and signified. With “complete communication” not only interdicted by colonial authorities but also precluded by the split subjectivity of the modern and thus understood as impossible at the level of literary language, irony might accomplish “what lies beyond the reach of direct communication,” encompassing but also critically thematizing divisions of self and language endemic to modernity itself.

Chapter 6 Embodiments of Speech: Yi T’aejun’s Lectures on Composition The tablet shouts, it cries aloud. Look, look what I have seen in written letters (en graphais)—a song speaking aloud! —Euripides, Hippolytus

The idea that language can transparently convey reality, that expression is equivalent with communication, had come under thorough questioning by the mid-1930s among Korean intellectuals and writers. This critique of realism as relying on an instrumentalist idea of language and as a mode of reading that unquestioningly privileges content (what is said) over form (how the content is presented)—where communication of content determines the expressive form of language—decouples the “natural” link between signifier and referent assumed in realist discourse. We saw this critique developed in Pak T’aewŏn’s fiction and criticism of the mid-1930s, where we found the appearance of techniques that acknowledge and at the same time attempt to overcome the gap between reality, speech or consciousness, and the sign system used to present that reality. In response to the anxiety surrounding the potential for language to slip into different meanings, Pak turned to the embodiment of speech to fix language into the production of a specific sense through the use of stylistic or analogic strategies—the size and direction of the text, punctuation, and other more familiar modernist innovations such as juxtaposition, montage, and the insertion of found objects into the text— rendering language “thing-like” in order to reproduce an effect of reality. The critique was further developed with Kim Yujŏng’s love letter in 1937, particularly the related assertions that the real cannot be adequately represented in language, and that representation or expression is always anterior to communication and never guarantees the successful inception of a message. Kim Yujŏng saw language as inherently imperfect, never a means to proclaim a fully objective meaning or truth, and turned

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to irony as a way of “saying other than what was meant,” a ruse by which to trick meaning out of language at the level of narrative structure and avoid the closely related traps of hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity, modes that corresponded to the dominant genres of his day. Even as the capacity of language to represent objects was understood as fundamentally undermined, these writers attempted to once again rehabilitate meaning through indicators of style and formal artifice. These theories and practices of literary representation engaged the question of language as inadequate to representation, and proposed techniques by which that inadequacy could be at least partially overcome. In this chapter, and in the following chapter, I continue a close examination of how literary language was conceptualized as a medium for producing meaning and to think about how sociopolitical discourse might have shaped the possibilities inherent in the project of cultural production during the 1930s by turning to the work of Yi T’aejun. Yi, one of the most influential authors and editors of the later colonial period, is typically understood either as a neoclassicist, a dilettante who closed his eyes to the realities of colonial modernity and turned instead to the artifacts and aesthetics of a past era, or as a “collaborator” who supported the Japanese imperial effort. There is much evidence to be taken from Yi’s biography and his literary works that supports this image of Yi as an aesthete in retreat from the exigencies of both modernity and the colonial situation. Here I read against the grain of this dominant understanding, maintaining that the communicative model of literary interpretation that locates Yi’s politics and aesthetics at the level of literary content oversimplifies our perspective on this major literary figure. In this chapter I continue to reframe colonial literature within the larger problem of referentiality, reviewing Yi’s theory of language—the detailed conceptualization of the function and form of literary language that we fi nd in his Lectures on Composition—and rethinking the methodological presuppositions that structure typical interpretations of the relationship between his literary works and the sociohistorical context of colonial modernity. I make two overarching observations on the Lectures: first, that the practice of composition captured in Yi’s dictum “write speech” is not equivalent to the project of unifying speech and writing (ŏnmun ilch’i, J. genbun itchi), the standardization of national languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries closely related to state building in East Asia; and second, that Yi’s theory of language is expressly modern, that his theorization of literary representation may be read as a constructive response to the exigencies and subjective experience of modernity

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even as it acknowledges the fundamental limits of linguistic representation that accompany them.

Yi T’aejun and the Lectures on Composition If Kim Yujŏng theorized the inadequacy of both hyperobjective and hypersubjective modes of literary representation and Pak T’aewŏn took this inadequacy as a basis for his practice of writing, then with Yi T’aejun’s Lectures on Composition we have the fullest expression of a theorization of literary practice. Serialized from the inaugural issue of Literature in 1939, the nine lectures were compiled into a single text and published the following year. Still in print today, Yi’s Lectures cover an enormous range of literary techniques, from traditional to modern modes and across genres and styles. I approach the Lectures as a complex statement of literary theory, an attempt at addressing the question of the connection between expressive script and intended signification or sense. If what is commonly referred to as “realism” is that which pretends the full textual presence of reality or objects in words, then how does a textual literary practice response to this fundamental insufficiency? Both his critical writings and, as we will see in chapter 7, his literary technique work against dominant characterizations of Yi as a dilettante disengaged from the struggles of modern colonial life and taking refuge in the artifacts and aesthetics of the past. Arguably the best-known and most influential author and editor in 1930s Seoul and a founding member of the modernist coterie the Group of Nine, Yi T’aejun provides a final example of an author who, despite working in a predominantly visual, typographic, or chirographic medium, looks to aurality and visuality—both indicative aspects of orality—in order to transform texts into what José Gil calls a “voice-producing body,” intertwining indicative and expressive layers of language to achieve a more thing-like representation of the experience of the world. As we will see, the careful composition of the text both exceeds an idea of national literature as the “unification of speech and writing” and draws attention to the medium of writing itself, which turns out to be something besides the simple representation of spoken language in visible form. Yi T’aejun was born in 1904 and spent his early years in Manchuria near the border with Russia before returning to Korea in 1910 after his father’s death. The son of a political exile, Yi was orphaned in 1912 after his mother also passed away, and he returned to his hometown in Kangwŏn Province to be raised by relatives. After traveling abroad to Japan in 1924, he entered Sophia University in Tokyo in 1926 but dropped

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out the following year and returned to Seoul, where he began work at the publishing company Kaebyŏk. In 1931 when the newspaper he had been working at discontinued publication, he became head of the arts and culture department at the Chosŏn Central Daily (Chosŏn chungang ilbo). In August 1933 he became an inaugural member of the Group of Nine, and in 1934 his first collection of short stories, Moonlit Night (Talppam), was published. By the mid-1930s Yi was the arbiter of style among Seoul literary circles, holding a powerful position in the publishing industry and maintaining an active presence in the community of authors, poets, and critics residing in the capital. His second collection of short stories, Crows (Kamagwi), was published in 1937, and by the age of thirty-five in 1939 he was the editor of the influential journal Literature (Munjang). In the mid-1930s, Yi’s apparent turn to a neoclassical style and adoption of a “pose” of “dilettantism” in his writing is also understood as paralleling his “conversion” to a pro-Japanese stance by the late 1930s. Beyond the vacuum left in literary circles after the suppression of the leftist literary movement and the eventual demise of KAPF in the mid-1930s, this later context—with Japan’s entrance into war on the continent in 1937 opening a period of increasing militarization and exploitation—must be taken into consideration when approaching Yi’s work of the period. In terms of representational crisis, it was during this time that the name-change policy and restrictions on Korean language came into effect or were more fully enforced; by 1941, effects in the literary world included the cessation of publication of Yi’s journal Literature (which had already adopted Japanese as its primary language) and the renaming of the influential journal Liberal Arts Review (Inmun p’yŏngnon) to National Literature (Kungmin munhak, J. Kokumin bungaku), with a marked increase in the number of Japanese-language articles and a pro-imperial stance. Following liberation in 1945, Yi participated actively in the left ist literary movement, publishing an account of intellectual hypocrisy in “Before and After Liberation” (Haebang chŏnhu, published in Literature in August 1946) before traveling to the north in late 1946. In literary-historical treatments we find Yi presented as an author who intentionally divorces his works from this increasingly harsh reality, apparently unconcerned with or unaware of any defined historical context or ideological concern. As we will see in more detail in chapter 7, he is portrayed as a “transcendental solipsist” who portrays characters in the course of self-becoming even as they close their eyes to actual circumstances, or a writer of “pure literature” who produces fiction lacking in both historical sense and an ideological basis, “a literature void of the social” where emotion, rather than thought, motivates the produc-

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tion and action of the story. “We don’t find any agitation of serious thought in his works,” wrote Yi’s contemporary and Group of Nine member Kim Hwant’ae, “but their intensive expressive efforts succeed in giving form to his contemplative sentiments, observations of customs and manners, and razor-sharp sensibilities.” This emphasis on sentiment and style over politics and content is seen as symptomatic of a “closed society” where one must cope with the double burden of exploitative colonial policies and “feudalistic” customs. Yi’s “dilettantism” is thus understood as a result of the social pressure placed on colonial-period intellectuals—he could not openly state his politics. What developed was a “literatus temperament” that compelled him to shun the everyday life of the colonial modern and live the retired, contemplative life of a scholar-gentleman. Thus Yi’s characters “meet a changing society with cynicism—humor coexisting with irony—and personal relations with pathos. They do not believe in an advancing history. . . . Unable to respond adequately to a changing reality, Yi’s characters are those who cling to the memory of the past alone.” At the same time this past-oriented and defeatist consciousness in Yi’s fiction may be read as “deeply related to the everyday conditions of a contradictory ‘modernity’ and colonial reality.” Critic Kwŏn Yŏngmin sees Yi’s reluctance to attack the problems of colonial society directly through didactic or polemical prose not as a weakness but as an alternate method of approaching the period. “Although he could see moral collapse and the chaos of customs in the social reality of the colonial period,” Kwŏn writes, “[Yi] stressed the natural human characteristic of naïveté, and in doing so emphasized the problems of colonial modernity from within the deep structure of his narrative discourse.” The connection of this critical and introspective modern consciousness is, Kwŏn argues, implicitly understood as linked with the “intense discord” of colonial reality. Yet more than overtly problematizing the conditions of reality that fetter the characters’ lives, Yi aims at a deep nostalgia for a whole, intact life of spiritual abundance in the face of the degradations of the modern through the “human lexicon” (ingan sajŏn) of characters used to index the social reality of colonial modernity. Thus several aspects of Yi’s fiction emerge as predominant in these late twentieth-century literary histories. The flight from reality, the “poverty of thought,” emotion as a motivating force behind narrative action, the self-reflective intellectual, and characters marginalized from society— “people buried in strata of the oxidized past, unable to act against time in the changing present”—are seen as fitting themes for an author characterized as a dilettante, a scholar-gentleman, a neoclassicist ill suited to the

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realities of modern civilization. At the same time that Yi is considered in retreat from colonial reality, however, his writing is privileged as a site of expressive virtuosity, locating beauty within a “vile” present through an expressive and “veracious” technique under which form and content merge. “Without form, the content would be unthinkable,” writes Yi’s contemporary Kim Hwant’ae. “Content is form, form is content.” Yi’s fiction is understood here not only as presenting marginal characters, the pattern of whose actions produces a particular affect in the reader, but as doing so in a form of language that actually takes on the characteristics of the objects it purports to represent, heightening the affective response of the reader. The presence or thing-ness of the language, in combination with the content of the story, yields this “veracious” writing. In the Lectures, literary practice is held to attain veracity in two ways: by capturing the spontaneity of speech, and by reproducing the world in the materiality of the signifier. The tendency in Yi’s literary theory to merge form and content is closely linked to the term “composition” (munjang), which the author distinguishes from language (ŏnŏ), speech (mal), writing (kŭl), and letters (muntcha) across the first two lectures, titled “The New Significance of Compositional Method” and “Reproblematizing Language and Composition.” As we will see, the practice of composition exceeds the phonocentrism of the nationalist “unification of writing and speech,” emerging as a complex understanding of the interpenetration of speech and representation, consciousness and language, and at the same time attempts to overcome what Yi sees as a constitutive limitation of representation by appealing to the materiality and aurality of the written word. Yi opens the first of the nine lectures with the following: “ ‘Composition’ is the recording of language, the representation of language in [written] characters. Writing [kŭl] without language [ŏnŏ], that is, speech [mal], is not possible. So long as the [written] characters are not transformed into pictures or paintings [hoehwa] and so long as one is able to pronounce the [written] characters, then composition is inescapably the recording of language[-as-speech].” Yi seems to assert the predominance of speech here, even equating it with language itself. “In the end, there isn’t a single thing that is written down that exceeds or doesn’t exceed speech”—upon hearing spoken language, anyone who knows the written language should be able to put what they have heard down in writing [kŭl]. “Just as one would speak as one saw or thought something, writing [kŭl] is precisely when you write something down in letters as you see or think it.”

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At the outset of the Lectures, then, writing seems simply the recording of speech in visible form. At the same time, Yi T’aejun is careful to distinguish speech, mal, from what he calls “speech-as-such” (mal taero), clarifying his position in the final section of the Lectures, titled “The Problem of Ŏnmun ilch’i Composition.” “Composition” is “the recording of speech [mal] in letters [muntcha]”. . . . This is different, however, from ŏnmun ilch’i composition. Composition cannot be “the recording of speech as such in letters.” The idea that “speech as such in letters” could in general terms be considered composition, but “speech as such in letters” cannot be “composition” in the sense of literature or, even more so, in the sense of art and literature, is something that has been established with the modern.

Yi’s focus on the modernity of language is an important one, as he carefully distinguishes modern from pre-modern forms, particularly Western “rhetoric” or East Asian susa (̤ᝀ), techniques of refi ning speech as speech. Because oral literature was predominant during the Chosŏn period, rhetoric was the method of choice until mechanical printing became widespread, and pre-modern composition was concerned primarily with the refinement or embellishment of a (spoken or written) text for the purposes of recitation—the dominance of eloquence over content. In the case of Chosŏn, rhetoric was not properly theorized, Yi writes, leading to an aesthetic of imitation, a near-total citation of classical Chinese texts passing for literature and a conventional composition without creativity or uniqueness. Rhetoric has its place in literary history, but Yi argues that it was the conventionalization of rhetorical methods in particular that eventually undermined the musicality and rhyme of the original compositions. When imitation or convention becomes dominant, then there is no question of finding the writer’s own sentiment or sensibility (kamgak) in the writing—it did not matter if the speech (mal) evoked in the writing made sense or had any experiential meaning for the author. “If one simply set down the writing, that was enough.” Yi proposes several elements of a modern compositional method that would oppose the rhetorical and conventional methods of the past. First, he writes, one must “write speech.” Not writing writing, but writing speech—this brings a clearer understanding [insik]. Not writing [kŭl], but speech [mal]. What we intend to express is our mind, our thoughts, our emotions. Speech is closer than writing to our minds, thoughts, and emotions. The old-style perspective on composition had its basis in the sentence “Writing, namely, speech.” We must design an expression . . . which has its basis in the statement “Speech, namely, mind.”

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The compositional method of the past concentrated its efforts on how to refine or embellish writing. Thus there were many cases where the emotion that lived in the [written] letters was put to death. From this point on, compositional method—though it put writing to death—must fi rst focus its efforts on bringing emotion and speech to life.

Here literary representation “is not writing but speech”—the modern author must “write speech.” Yi distinguishes this new mode of representation from a pre-modern aesthetics that stressed only the skillful imitation of past texts written to be read aloud and which hence focused formulaically on rhetorical flourish. He characterizes pre-modern composition as “writing, namely, speech” (kŭl kot mal) but then shifts the terms to achieve a definition of modern writing, “speech, that is, mind” (mal kot maŭm). This formulation is quite remarkable. Its parallelism allows us to approach the problem diachronically, with language as an entity evolving over time from a pre-modern to a modern form. He posits a transition from an oral society—where writing was subordinate to its rhetorical delivery—to a literate society, in which writing is the primary medium but is still based on an underlying speech. Focusing on the second half of the formulation, Yi T’aejun can then treat language in a synchronic mode, and the Lectures are in fact a systematic study of how signification takes place. Finally, we can address the curious imperative to “write speech” by asking what, precisely, Yi means by speech—what is a writing that incorporates elements of speech while at the same time exceeding the immediately spoken? At first, speech seems to be the form of expression closest to the individual’s mind or consciousness, the most spontaneous form of expression. If modern literature must take as its task the expression of mind, thought, and emotion, Yi reasoned, the closest expression of these aspects of consciousness is in fact speech. Yet as we have seen, Yi distinguishes “speech as such”—the actual overhearable manifestation of ideal speech—from a speech that corresponds more to an “inner speech” or thought. The simple recording of sound in letters is better described as “transcription,” Yi writes. Although linguistic beauty (ŏnŏmi) belongs to speech, “compositional beauty” (munjangmi) is demanded for writing (kŭl). “The ‘unification of speech and writing’ is the spirit of utility. It is the life of the everyday. It is not performance [yŏngi ෎ঊ]. It is something banal, something superficial, something notional.” In short, the selection of bits of speech from everyday conversations and their recording in writing is the “nonexistence” of composition. Speech in this sense is not real, actualized, overheard communication that is simply recorded

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with pen and paper, but is more an internal speech, an internal response to external stimuli that, when it emerges into communicative expression, must be carefully crafted in writing as a performance rather than as a spontaneous enunciation. This argument can be recast in terms of the debates over the standardization of written language in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “unification of spoken and written language” is generally taken to be a phenomenon concurrent with a broader modernization in Japan and Korea beginning in the 1880s and continuing through the early decades of the twentieth century; by 1900, it had arguably become a dominant literary style in Japan in an attempt to close the gap between fiction and everyday speech. This “unification of spoken and written language” was seen as essential for several reasons: national literatures were supposed to be closely tied to the national people and the national life, a fact that became apparent with the translation of European works into Japanese and Korean; linguistic unification was necessary to systematize and standardize language toward the realization of the nation (“backward” countries were perceived as being without such a language), and toward the establishment of a nationwide educational system and publishing industry; in order to overcome previous ways of speaking and writing that were seen as feudal and hierarchical (in an egalitarian society, there was the need for a more neutral form of address, as well as the need for authors to address a neutral “you,” the audience, with the rise of mass culture); and because language was no longer seen as a source of values, but rather as a transmitter of values, a transparent medium that simply conveyed meaning. “In the world of letters, such writing was viewed as the essential handmaiden of Western realism, necessary for incisive and nuanced psychological portrayal.” Ŏnmun ilch’i was also closely linked to the rise of realistic or modern literature in Japan and Korea, functioning as a standardized colloquial language appropriate to both the new context of mass culture and the open and direct expression of the author’s “interior” life, the subject of the “I-novel,” which had become one of the dominant forms of literary expression by the 1920s and 1930s. A standardized language was also seen as facilitating the creation or imagination of a state subject, a member of a linguistically homogeneous population, and was understood as essential for not only for state building at the institutional level but also on a symbolic level after it became apparent that hegemonic Western states boasted national languages with apparently little or no divergence between spoken and written forms.

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The first thing to note about modern composition, Yi writes in a section titled “The Modern of Composition” (Munjang ŭi hyŏndae), is that it is closely linked with ŏnmun ilch’i and associated with the elimination of classical Chinese (hanmun), part of the “language purification” movement. This style of vernacular writing, Yi notes, became most popular following the publication of Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless (Mujŏng, 1917) and reached its “perfection” in Yi Kwangsu’s Earth (Hŭk, 1932–33). This “unification of spoken and written language” is, however, more of a basis for composition than composition or style itself—rather than providing a coherent aesthetics upon which an individual style of composition could be based, it is the “field upon which the flowers [of style] will bloom.” According to Yi, it was to escape the banality of this mode of composition that Yi Sang turned to “sensationalism,” Chŏng Chiyong turned to classical styles (including naeganch’e, the epistolary style used by women in pre-modern Korea), Pak T’aewŏn varied his manner of speaking, and Yi Hyosŏk and Kim Kirim took up modernism. Thus “an individual Korean [mode of] composition, the flower garden [hwawŏn] of artistic composition, is still something appertaining to tomorrow.” Karatani Kōjin argues that genbun itchi presented a new ideology of writing, in which the abolition of kanji was central and phonocentrism— writing as derivative of speech—was crucial in the effort to subordinate meaning to sound. Repression of figurative language (logographs) comes together for Karatani with the supposition of the capacity of a so-called transparent language to constitute “interiority,” with meaning established by an “inner voice” that was captured or recorded in written language. Yet as we should not subsume Yi’s emphasis on phonographic writing to the logic of ŏnmun ilch’i, we should also not understand Yi’s focus on the materiality of the signifier as being due to the aphonetic natural “spontaneity” of the Chinese character. He instead emphasizes the constructedness of the relationship between visual appearance and phonetic value, and works to exploit that combination to literary effect. In the Lectures, the fundamental differences between speech and writing require writing to exceed speech in various ways—what is required for composition is not only the faithful rendering of the spoken word, but an attention to the materiality of language as well. While speech is received aurally and is fleeting in time, limited to a par ticu lar space, and acquired in humans naturally, writing is visual, remains over time, is spatially distributed, and is learned intentionally, through practice. The visual sign—writing—is associated for Yi with meaning, thought, and prose, whereas orality is associated with music, emotion or mood, and verse. “Letters are not just signs seen with the eyes; they also

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have sounds, which can be read with the mouth. Using these [signs] to produce sounds, as if they were musical instruments, one can express not only meaning and thought but can express, musically, mood and feeling.” There is precedent for this nonidentification of meaning and sound in the history of the Korean language: when using logographs, the pronunciation or reading of the graphs is not necessarily identified with the meaning. Yi points this out in a short essay titled “Book”: “As for ‘book,’ I prefer ‘book’ (δ) to ‘book’ (ᷭ). More so than ‘book’ (ᷭ), ‘book’ (δ) is more beautiful, is more booklike.” Yi is distinguishing between the word “book” rendered in hangŭl, and the same word (also sharing the same pronunciation) written as a logograph, and claiming that the graph provides a more “booklike” representation of a book (the object in the world) in its combination of sound with pictorial quality. This prompts critic Kim Yunsik to conclude that Yi is interested only in the literal form of writing. Yi “exceeds the functional category of ‘book,’ simply jumping to the level of materialization. . . . He has no interest in the possible meanings that speech [mal] might indicate—rather, he is entirely fascinated by the form of the writing [kŭltcha moyang]. . . . The world of meaning, the world of reality, has but secondary significance.” The Lectures thus echo the communicational dilemma that Pak T’aewŏn faced, the gap between analogic and digital language: in writing, one does not have facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, and so on to clarify the context of the utterance. For Yi, writing requires design (sŏlgye), choice (sŏnt’aek), orga nized form (chojik), and development (baltchŏn)—it requires study and the acquisition of skill. Written language requires the construction of a whole, a “living body” (saengmyŏngch’e) within which fragmentary expressions can be fi xed in context, a structure within which to acquire meaning. In short, writing (kŭl), to succeed in communicating meaning, requires style. Composition is thus this process of exceeding (yet retaining the essence of) speech, of passing speech through a process in which it becomes part of a living whole, “writing.” Yi paints this process as a scientific one: to the extent that modern humans exist in a world where even psychology and behavior have become matters of technique or technology, a scientific method is needed in the approach to representation itself.

A “Living Body” of Text: Composition as Modern Expression In addition to its break from the orality of pre-modern literary forms— “writing, that is, speech”—modern compositional method must, for Yi,

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exceed speech-as-such as well as rhetorical imitation in two other ways. First, with the advent of the modern we see the rise of the individual and the demand for self-expression, language specific to the individual. Second, the expression of the experiences of the modern requires a new vocabulary and syntax. “Compositional method must take as its standard the individual,” Yi writes: “Speech [mal] is social. It is not an individual thing. It is fundamentally unsuitable for the expression of things individual [to be undertaken via] a vocabulary in the possession of society. There are thus scholars who have reached the pessimistic conclusion that the communication to others of things individual, of an individual consciousness via language [ŏnŏ], is impossible.”

Yet the modern period, Yi writes, urgently demands the establishment of the individual subject and the exchange of individual thoughts and emotions. One of the goals of modern compositional method is thus the discovery of a process via which the representation of individual thoughts and emotions would be possible. The realization that the modern era is unique in its demand for the individual and the communication of individual sentiments or ideas— “speech, that is, mind”—leads to Yi’s second assertion of composition’s modernity: “Th is compositional method must be undertaken for the sake of a new composition. . . . This is not to ignore the classical or traditional, but because ‘today’ is newer than ‘yesterday,’ and ‘tomorrow’ will again be newer than ‘today’; because life [saenghwal] does not pass from ‘today’ to ‘yesterday,’ but from ‘today’ to ‘tomorrow,’ even if it’s not something that one is consciously aware of, one cannot but collide with the ‘new’ in both spiritual and material terms.” Even one who lives the most banal life, Yi writes, has the need to represent or express the new, if only because he or she must live with new things. Furthermore, an already established language, syntax, and vocabulary adequate to express past experiences cannot be sufficient to express the experience of the modern. A new terminology, a new style is demanded to represent the new. In the second lecture, for instance, Yi takes “loan words” as an example. Words such as “coffee” or “permanent” borrowed from other languages should no longer be treated as bits of a foreign language— these words arise from new forms of life, from the demands of everyday living when one drinks coffee or visits the hair salon. Taken out of context, the resistance to a phonocentric literary language based on everyday speech that we see in the Lectures might well be

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taken as evidence of Yi’s classicism, his rejection of the modern and embrace of the past. Yi’s use of logographs in his prose and his tendency to privilege graphs as being more thing-like and hence more successful at representing a given object seemingly provide grounds on which to situate Yi T’aejun on the “outside” of Korean modernity, divorcing his fictional practice from history—the history of real life, or of the nation. Yi’s attempts at the materialization of language could be understood as a thematic and formal return to a sort of prelapsarian referentiality, an identity between word and thing, or between language and the world. In such analyses, Yi’s attention to language, exemplified in his Lectures, would serve to isolate him from colonial modernity—both the content of his works (characters ill suited to modernity, topics unrelated to “real” life) and their form (personal, essayistic, esoteric, stylized) might be taken as evidence of a radical separation from or externality to historical time. Yi’s Lectures contradict this arguably dominant literary-historical impression both in direct statements on the modernity of composition and in the practical theorization of literary language. Certainly the “writing of speech” in the Lectures is not the “unification of speech and writing” authorized by the project of national language standardization. Composition is not an attempt to reproduce the immediacy of speech-as-such in writing, but is rather centered on the modernist task of composing written language into a “voice-producing body,” with characteristics of both speech and writing. As we have seen above, speech here is not real, actualized, overheard communication that is simply recorded with pen and paper, but is more an internal speech, an internal response to external stimuli which, when it emerges into communicative expression, must be carefully crafted in writing as a performance rather than as a spontaneous enunciation. Composition thus brings inner speech to life in language in the production of what Yi calls a “living body” (saengmyŏngch’e གྷӷᨛ) of text. The means to this living textual organism lie at least partly in the exploitation of the visual and aural aspects of the sign, the indicative layer of language. Signs, he writes, can of course be read aloud—but they also have a visual appearance, and both should be carefully considered in the course of composition. The author resorts quite literally to presenting text as something bodily, as obtaining aspects of an object in the world, and as something carry ing characteristics above and beyond purely expressive meaning. José Gil, drawing on Husserl’s terminology, assigns all discourse “indicative” and “expressive” layers: “Let us say that all discourse presupposes an ‘indicative’ layer (made of bodily indices) and an ‘expressive’ layer (language). When an orator speaks in public her discourse is also

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deployed on a level parallel to that of the words, a level that everyone understands. It is made up of gestures, physiognomical quirks, rhythms of silence, vocal intensities, and so on.” Oratorical technique, for Gil, consists primarily in “arranging for the indicative layer to progressively take over from the expressive one.” This level of discourse does not address itself to “reason”—rather, the indicative stratum is directed outward, “the rhythm, the timbre, and force of the voice” appear “as the very meaning of what is being said, as the expression.” Gil sees this as a sort of translation: “The indicative stratum becomes the expression of the expression . . . the interior of words is on display”—or in Yi’s terms, the representation of an internal “speech, that is, mind” through an intertwining of material sign and composed orality. We have seen the inclusion of the indicative—taken in Husserl as “facial expressions, gestures, the whole of the body and the mundane register, in a word, the whole of the visible and spatial as such”—in Pak T’aewŏn’s theory and practice of literary representation, in his call for an innovative extension of language into the aural and visual. In the Lectures, Yi T’aejun as well calls for an emphasis on the indicative stratum of language in order to express the inner speech of the modern individual.

Composition as a Response to Crisis Yi T’aejun’s theory of compositional language in the Lectures exceeds the “unification of spoken and written language” both in the sense of its skepticism toward the recording of “social” or “overheard” speech in literature and in its treatment of the materiality of the signifier. Further, both the rejection of ŏnmun ilch’i and the skepticism toward empirical observation (listening) at the basis of literary technique stem not from Yi’s purported turn to the past or denial of the present in purely aesthetic concerns, but instead grow from his concern with language itself, with how to make language communicative under the specific demands of the modern. At the same time, language remains in crisis throughout the Lectures, failing for Yi at the point of the inexpressible, that which is “beyond expression.” Common to all language is this central lack, what Yi calls the “dark aspect” of language—the inability to represent the human consciousness in its fullness. One outcome of this constitutive deficit in language is the impossibility of perfect translation. “In each language, there are aspects for which representation is possible, and aspects for which representation is impossible, and the impossibility of representation in each language is not identical [puril ⅀ɞ], not uniform; thus we

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become aware of the fact that perfect translation is eternally impossible.” Although it is easy to reach the conclusion that the target language is inferior to the language of the original text, each language contains its own puril, its own nonidenticalness, the gap between the possibility and impossibility of expression. Furthermore, these gaps are not regularly distributed across languages, leading to a sort of nonalignment of impossibilities (points of nonidentity) in a multilingual setting such as translation. Though “speech, that is, mind” and the imperative to “write speech” appear to correspond to an isomorphic relation between world— thought—word (where “utterances receive their meaning from mental concepts” and the “truth of mental concepts consists in their correspondence with reality”), here doubt is introduced at the level of representational language itself. Speech—the “spontaneous utterance”—is understood as closest to thought, emotion, or perception. Due to its proximity to these stimuli (“speech, that is, mind”), speech (mal) must be maintained as the form of expression closest to truth. At the same time, speech in and of itself is insufficient to express that truth in writing (kŭl), the mode of communication central to Yi’s idea of a modern compositional method. Thus composition becomes a process of bringing speech to life, and in the process exceeding speech in the production of a “living body,” the text or writing formed out of the medium of language. Although (personal, individual) speech is understood as primary to modern modes of expression, composition is also the process by which power is wrested from speech and given over to writing with the decline of traditional rhetoric, the rise of print culture, and the demand for individual expression. Yi emphasizes the differences between speech and writing: the former aural, limited to a specific space and time, and the latter visual, coherent over time, and distributed in space (in both the form and circulation of the text). In Yi’s theory, they are intertwined—composition undoubtedly falls within the realm of writing, while at the same time the spontaneity and authenticity of speech is crucial to the compositional method that he is proposing. Here the inclusion of oral or indicative strategies in the modern literary work are a means to enhance the reception of the written text, an “interlock” between orality and literacy where “the acoustic flow of language contrived . . . to hold the attention of the ear has been reshuffled into visual patterns created by the thoughtful attention of the eye.” As with Pak T’aewŏn, composition may be seen as a response to overlapping crises—subjective, social, and literary—exemplified in the “forced marriage” of spoken and written language in ŏnmun ilch’i, the unification

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not only of speech and writing but also of that now naturalized language with ethnic-national identity. In the context of imperialization, when the author was faced with the dual imperatives to write in the natural and transparent language of the ethnic-nation and at the same time to adopt the “slavish” language of empire, Yi T’aejun’s modernism came to be tacitly regarded as apolitical, antinational, or pro-Japanese in its failure to enunciate the particular, in the adoption of a universal position regarding language—an evaluation that has carried down to the present day. Yet my larger argument is that in their approach to language, these modernists did not privilege the universal as a locus of linguistic truth, but instead called into question the veracity of all language. Even as the ethnic-national identity of the colonized was constructed and enforced along an alignment of language, culture, and race, the colonized were also required to participate in a transnational linguistic space and as such to adopt not a “national language” proper but an imperial language, theoretically delinked from ethnic belonging. When the specific difference between communities, the difference at the heart of questions of national language and belonging, was theoretically eradicated in theories of a New East Asian Order (Tonga sin chilsŏ), an East Asian Cooperative Union (Tonga hyŏptong ch’e), or the East Asian Alliance Union (Tonga yŏnmaeng ch’e) in the 1930s, the veracity of spoken and written language entered a period of crisis. Korean authors and intellectuals in the 1930s were compelled to respond to the contradictory situation of, on the one hand, having ethnic and linguistic difference demanded of them—in terms of both nationalist resistance and maintaining the difference necessary for the continued legitimization of colonial rule—while at the same time participating in the supposedly transnational space of empire and modernity. This is a situation in which site of enunciation is split off from the enunciation itself—an alienation from language that makes evident the gap between what is said and what is meant. I understand the theorization of literary practice we find in Yi’s Lectures as, in part, a formal response to this paradox. Speech may arise from the need to express an intention or from the immediacy of perception, yet for Yi an individual’s intent is always unavailable to another; speech (mal) does not have the capacity to realize that intent. As such, speech is not “holy,” he writes: it is not infallible. “There are any number of situations in which meaning is present, and the desire to put forth [that meaning] is present—but speech is not there.” If spoken language is not the guarantor of identity, writing also always contains the potential impossibility or nonunity of language; it is the obligation of the writer to try and solve or break through the inexpressible, the “crisis of

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representation,” in a mode of writing anxiously produced from within the impossibility of communication. Far from denying the complex and contradictory realities of colonial modernity, Yi’s response to sociopolitical and literary crisis was posed at the level of discourse itself. In the following chapter I extend these insights into a rereading of Yi’s literary works, challenging the perception of the author as neoclassicist dilettante and interpreting his writing as modernist in its remarkable attention to linguistic and narrative form and, thematically, in its resistance to the modern itself. Yi’s thoughts on language reflect what was seen by 1930s Korean modernists as the constitutive complexity of literary language as a communicative medium, and these theories of literary practice compel us to rethink both the relation between literary meaning and literary-historical significance and the interpretive mode by which we approach and classify these texts.

Chapter 7 Lyrical Narrative and the Uncohering of Modernity

With Yi T’aejun’s Lectures we saw a movement away from national language toward a universal conception of literary composition and the production of meaning in writing, and at the same time the placement of language in the specific context of modernity as a mode of individual expression in a situation demanding new modes of representation. The Lectures thus challenge conventional understandings of Yi as a neoclassicist dilettante or aesthete, and Yi himself—in calling attention to the constructedness of literary language—implicitly criticizes the communicative model of interpretation that underlies such evaluations of the connection (or lack thereof) between his fictional work and its historical context. Reading the Lectures as a response to the colonial modern at the level of discourse allows us to pursue a more complex interpretation of Yi’s fiction. If Yi engaged with the crisis of representation in his theory of language, how then did this response manifest itself in his literary practice? What tactics did Yi use to both express the contradictions of the colonial modern at a formal level and at the same time indicate the loss of a sure referential correspondence between word and thing? If the status of language had come radically into question by the mid-1930s, its capacity to represent fundamentally undermined, how did Yi attempt to rehabilitate meaning through indicators of style and formal artifice in his work—in short, through what he called composition? In this chapter I argue that Yi T’aejun put his compositional theory into practice by adopting a critical antimodern stance in his work at the level of content while at the level of form developing a mode of lyrical narration that undermines the confident sense of time, space, and

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referentiality undergirding discourses of modernization and colonization. Here my attention shifts to the larger framework of narrative. In one sense this seems unlikely, as Yi is often understood as a lyrical author or even, metaphorically, a poet—one focused on the minutiae of word choice, a concern with language that can be seen as a symptom of “lyric presuppositions.” Yet one of the key assertions here is that by addressing Yi’s theory of composition at the level of narrative and narrative structure we can locate a critical stance in his prose that exceeds analysis carried out solely at the intersection of content and history, whether biographical or national. I suggest that within a prevalent colonialist discourse that stressed the desirability of progress and homogeneity (while at the same time calling for the maintenance of hierarchical distinctions between colonizer and colonized), Yi’s adoption of a lyrical narrative mode may be read as undermining the progressive time and space of developmental narratives that characterized both modernization and wartime public discourse. In the Lectures Yi, like Kim Yujŏng, proposes that the essence of an object is unreachable through language, countering realism’s “spatial premise that representational language somehow makes reliable contact with the real world (signaled by that language) of objects, others”; and at the same time shares Pak T’aewŏn’s desire for a “thing-like” symbolic language that presents to the eye the form of the object in combination with aural representation, a “living body” of text. For Yi, as with Pak and Kim, there is a realm of unrepresentability, an object or aspect of an object that cannot be represented in language; and his strategy for approaching this realm is what he calls composition, a category that explicitly excludes any idea of the direct presentation of everyday speech in the fictional text or the idea that the “everyday” itself is somehow more meaningful or real. Following from this stance toward language and knowledge, a particular kind of literary practice emerges, one that in Philip Weinstein’s terms “unknows” the purported familiarity of (colonial modern) space and time and that “disrupts the subject’s compact for negotiating objects in space and time, [where] the subject loses its own coherent identity.” The concept of lyrical prose seems at first glance a paradoxical one. Lyricism is widely regarded as the spontaneous poetic expression of emotion, often with the goal of affecting a similar emotion in the reader or listener. With origins in musical expression, the spontaneous and intensely subjective mode of expression of the lyric poem seems incompatible with the spatial and temporal progression of narrative. Where realist fiction establishes figure and ground and privileges the “figure” (or subject) as it moves across the fictional landscape, the lyrical presents “an

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emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time” that “sees complex details in juxtaposition and experiences them as a whole.” This form—which in many ways encapsulates what are understood as familiar aspects of Yi’s fictional work, his recommendations toward a compositional method in the Lectures, and dominant literary-historical impressions of him as a “poet” or “lyricist”—provides a counter to what Weinstein calls the narrative of “coming to know,” a sense of space and time that, when deployed in realist fiction, draws a “rational correspondence between the individual and the world” and allows for the illusion of coherent subjectivity “moving steadily toward epiphanies of selfunderstanding.” Realism proposes that “the representational field of space and time and others that its protagonist moves through corresponds to the objective world itself,” the protagonist “a free-standing subject moving within a lawful and indifferent frame.” We will see that Yi’s fiction, at levels of both content and form, moves counter to this realist paradigm and the accompanying premise of a progressive history underlying assumptions of full subjectivity and objective knowledge of the world. In this chapter I examine critical reception of a number of Yi’s shorter works, including “Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow” (Sŏlchung pangnanki), “Old Man Yŏngwŏl” (Yŏngwŏl yŏnggam), “The Realtor’s Office” (Poktŏkpang), and “Crows” (Kamagwi). These stories have been interpreted in various ways—as examples of Yi’s sŏnbi (literati) attitude, his neoclassicism, his antimodern bias, his fondness for depictions of the countryside, and his attention to socially marginal or unimportant characters. I will offer a reinterpretation of Yi’s fiction, reading his work through the Lectures’ understanding of literary language, treating his fiction first in the context of its antimodernity and second as an example of what Ralph Freedman calls the “lyrical novel,” an intermixture of lyrical and narrative forms that works to undermine the status of narrative itself. By addressing two major assumptions about the author—that his work adopts a classical mode that renders an uncrossable gap between narrative and historical contexts, and that his work focuses on the materiality of language over the communication of content—we will gain a perspective on this major figure that allows us to view Yi as a modernist author in his engagement with the crisis of representation that characterized the modernist literary response to a contradictory colonial discourse in the repressive political and linguistic environment of late 1930s imperialization. Rather than the escapist creations of an elitist author in retreat from the harsh present and denying the real of colonial moder-

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nity with “eyes closed,” Yi’s complex theorization and practice of literary language can be seen as undermining the rational foundations of a communicative and isomorphic understanding of language and interpretation fundamental to realist narrative itself, and in doing so engaging with colonial modernity at the level of discourse.

The Language of Antimodernity: Dominant Impressions of Yi’s Work Yi T’aejun is consistently referred to by his contemporaries and in Korean literary history as a “poet” whose fiction provokes strong affect in the reader. His fiction is also seen as “antiprogressive” or “antimodern,” in retreat from its historical moment and taking solace in the artifacts and aesthetics of past eras. This typically yields two approaches to his fiction: one focused on aestheticism, particularly his regard for language disengaged from real or everyday life; and one focused on the absence of the historical in his fiction. Below, I briefly review the language-centered approach, coded in terms of plenitude or excess, then discuss a provocative response to the charges of lack or disconnection usually brought against Yi’s “ahistorical” prose by focusing on the modernity of antimodernity. I show that at the root of both approaches is the idea of literary truth gained in the reflection of the real (whether biographical, historical, or “everyday”) and lay the groundwork for a formal analysis of Yi’s prose that seeks a combination of the terms in the historicity of his attention to language—that is, in his discursive response to the crisis of representation. In the following section these two questions—of representational language and of the relationship between literary practice and history—are shown to meet at the point where “lyrical prose” comes into question as a particular stance toward knowledge and language that resists both the idea of transparent communication and the concomitant narratives of progress and enlightenment. Yi is often classified as an author of pure literature, “an art that calls ‘beauty’ into being through the expressive device of language.” As in previous critiques of pure literature, Yi’s prose is understood as having two consequent “blind spots”: it is ahistorical, and it lacks an ideological basis. “This is a literature absent of history, a literature void of the social,” critic Kim Ujong writes—a literature where emotion, rather than thought, motivates the production and action of the story. Further, all the characters that appear in Yi’s works, Kim argues, have one thing in common: they are failures at life, those who have fallen behind the historical development of modernization and as such reflect the author’s

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skepticism toward the modern. Th is absence of historical grounding yields fiction that “in order to remain faithful to the purity of literature . . . wholly disregards social utility . . . as the essence of literature, and in doing so produces a literature isolated from society, a literature separated from history.” Two dominant tendencies arise in response to this isolation of Yi’s work from the colonial modern context of its production: one that reads for Yi’s attention to literary language, and one that reads for history, or its absence, in the content of the fiction. On the first point, we have seen in the Lectures that Yi paid great attention to the craft of language under colonial domination. “The greatest menace I felt prior to liberation was to culture, more than literature; and more than culture, to language,” Yi recalled in 1946. Critic Kim Yunsik, in his oft-cited study “On Yi T’aejun,” concurs: “Yi clung to the Korean language as being more important than anything else.” This is taken as both a source of commonality with Yi’s modernist contemporaries in the Group of Nine who sought “the highest attainment of ‘writing,’ ” and at the same time as the basis of the perceived divorce of language from the practicality of the present, the “worship” of language and its capacity to create an art that is understood as an object of beauty with no relation whatsoever with life itself. Here Yi is seen as exceeding functional or communicative language and as interested only in the form, the “materialization,” of words. “He has no interest in the possible meanings that speech [mal] might indicate—rather, he is entirely fascinated by the form of the writing [kŭltcha moyang]. . . . The world of meaning, the world of reality, has but secondary significance.” A contemporary of Yi’s, poet and essayist Yi Sang, scorned this “materialism of writing,” likening Yi’s attentiveness to words to the archaeologist’s excitement over bits of ceramic excavated from ancient tombs, fragments of what had been simple objects of use that has been assigned aesthetic or historical value only from the retrospective present. As Kim points out, this unsettles the Saussurian distinction between langue and parole, bringing the written word—originally intended to simply represent the verbal—into the principal representational role. Thus Yi is an author whose writing is equivalent to “the effort to surpass everyday meaning.” Kim’s example of writing that “departs entirely from and stands in a position completely unrelated to life” is a short piece that Yi contributed to the Group of Nine’s Poetry and Fiction (March 1936). Titled “Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow,” this is an “essayistic” work of fiction that details a gathering of “classicists” (ŭigo chuŭija) at the house of Yi Pyŏnggi (1891–1968), a scholar of Korean language and litera-

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ture and noted connoisseur of orchids, who has obtained several samples that are blooming even in the depths of winter. In this piece of prose we can locate several elements that might compel the reader to consider this an escapist, esoteric, or classicist work. First, the narrator assumes the role of a specialist, naming specific types of orchids by name, discussing their characteristics, their locations of origin, and so on. The narrator also exhibits the enthusiasm of an avid amateur: of his orchid at home, he writes, “I’m watching it day and night, waiting for the tip to appear”; he “yearns for the fragrance that radiates” from the flower; he also pays frequent visits to a greenhouse, where he can stroll among the orchids there, though without enough money to actually purchase them. In midwinter, the narrator receives a letter from poet Chŏng Chiyong, which says in part: “Karam [Yi Pyŏnggi] told me that his orchid has flowered, and asked us to come over to his place on the 22nd. Stop everything, and just come. It seems like it’s going to be a year-end social gathering. . . . Won’t it be a pleasure?” The narrator’s enthusiasm for the orchid and his botanical knowledge are shared by a small community of others in Seoul, including Chŏng, another prominent member of the Group of Nine, and Yi Pyŏnggi, well known for his collection of old books and manuscripts. The narrator continues: “Indeed this was a pleasant letter, a correspondence letting me know that I should come because a flower is blooming in the middle of a deep cold, where the temperature has reached twenty degrees below zero. That day, I was the fi rst to arrive at [Yi Pyŏnggi’s] home. Even before the sliding door was opened for me, I drew in a breath and found the air impregnated with fragrance.” The company comes to the room where the orchid is blooming: “We undid the collars of our coats and approached closer, to see the green of the leaves; then we withdrew, to look at its shadow extending horizontally across the wall, in many strokes, like a traditional ink painting.” The group sits to eat in the same room, where, due to the heavy fragrance of the flower, “when we drank wine, it was as if we were drinking orchid wine; when we ate meat, it was as if we were eating orchid meat. . . . With the clear scent, the pure conversation, and sound of clear laughing voices [ഴ᧗ഴᗹഴᄞዐ], we forgot the mundane [chinjap] and spent half the night enjoying ourselves. All I regret is that we could not follow the literati of old—on such a good night as tonight, we returned to our homes without writing any poems despite our feelings.” Notable here is the atmosphere of appreciation, signaled by the behavior of the guests—appreciating not only the scent and appearance of the orchid, but also its shadow seen as an ink painting and the penetration of

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the orchid’s fragrance into the real-life activity of eating. The wine becomes orchid wine; the meat becomes orchid meat. The piece ends on a note of regret, that despite the mood of the evening, no poetry was composed. This sentiment is expressed concisely in a four-graph phrase: yugam musi (ଔं็ᗒ). The regret here is double: first, that the “literati of old” are not fully emulated in the present; and second, that a seemingly natural outcome of strong emotion—poetry—is absent from the gathering. Instead, the reader is left with this prose work, which, while it narrates the events of the evening as they occurred, does so by framing the piece as an essay on orchids interspersed with signs of the narrator’s enthusiasm, expressions of his feelings upon encountering an orchid blooming in midwinter. At the level of the story’s content, it is easy to see how Kim Yunsik reaches his conclusion that Yi’s fiction has “departed from life”—there is nothing of the mundane everyday here. Furthermore, the text itself supports Kim’s claims of Yi’s “materialism” vis-à-vis the capacity of language to produce meaning for the reader. First, there is the frequent use of hantcha throughout the prose: “orchid” is never “᠕Ḓ” (nanch’o) but is always “⃸” (nan), from the opening line to the close of the piece. Second, there is an effort to establish a concept of “clarity” throughout the piece, from the intense focus on the singularity of the orchid and its “clean” scent to the “clear” sounds of laughter and conversation among the guests. The above-quoted line from the final paragraph makes the dichotomy evident: “With the clear scent, the pure conversation, and sound of clear laughing voices, we forgot the mundane [chinjap].” The term that Yi uses for “mundane” here, chinjap (؇ᤙ), suggests the dust and disorder of events in the human world; this is clearly contrasted with the ch’ŏng (ഴ) of the guests’ conversation, which is then in turn linked with the ch’ŏng (ഴ) of the orchid’s fragrance. Finally, the proper result of this “clarity” of conversation and sensation—experience and its appreciation—is, according to Yi’s narrator, poetry. In that this combination of the essayistic and a poetic concentration of language might be read as a resistance to a phonocentric written language based on everyday speech and hence as residing external to the presentday real—that is, residing outside of Korean modernity—the materialization of language in Yi’s fiction might be taken as evidence of his isolation from colonial modernity, radically separated from historical time. Yet what we have found in the hysterical texts of Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng’s ironic mode, and in the critical writings of all three authors, is that modernist literary practice in colonial Korea consistently acknowledges the fallibility of the written word—its incapacity to fully reference the “real”

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world—at the same time that it intensifies its formal efforts to overcome that referential insufficiency. Furthermore, we have found modernist fiction to resist certain aspects of the modern precisely in its resistance to an objective or empiricist mode of communication. We should ask the same of Yi T’aejun’s fiction, reading against received literary-historical classifications of his work: Is it possible to read the insistence on an aggressively “nonmodern” use of literary language as something other than the abandonment of participation in the present moment? It should be clear from the attention given the constructed nature of literary language in the Lectures that Yi’s fiction may not be read as an accidental, biographically informed transcription of the author’s retreat from the social. A more complex approach would read Yi’s proclivity for antiques, his focus on the personal, or the negative representation of modernity in his fictional texts as a critical and engaged response to the contradictions of the historical period in which Yi wrote: that is, as taking part in the familiar resistance of aesthetic modernism to the modern itself. Yi’s fiction, in keeping with his literary theory, would then be read not as exhibiting an actual relationship of isolation between text and world, but rather in antagonistic relation with the par ticu lar time and space of 1930s colonial Korea through the figure of isolation. In contrast to an approach that focuses on the materialism of Yi’s classicist language, critic Hwang Chongyŏn reads for the historical specificity of Yi’s prose narratives. He first points to the multiple modernities that rose with the globalization of capitalism in the early twentieth century, bound together by a common temporal disruption between past and present and a critical stance toward what emerged, namely a continually revolutionized social reality—Marx’s “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” or Baudelaire’s ephemeral, fugitive and contingent modern. Modernism comes into being as both an expression of and resistance to the conditions of modern existence, particularly the impossibility of historical continuity. As one who “sought out the possibility of an authentic art within the confrontation with and experience of the chaos and disorder” of capitalism’s rise to world dominance, Yi T’aejun may then—in a reversal of conventional literary-historical wisdom—be read as a modernist. Hwang locates Yi’s modernist practice in two tendencies: in the critique of the idea of Western civilization as the progressive vanguard of humankind (the identification of modernization with Westernization), and in the critical representation of the modern itself. Although enlightenment thinkers, cultural gradualists, and Marxists alike may have perceived modernization as progressive and unavoidable, the continual “newness”

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of the present was not always necessarily greeted with optimism. “ ‘To the West goes the conquest of the present,’ ” Yi wrote. “ ‘However much we scorn them, we must follow stealthily along behind them—this is the lamentation of the East.’ ” Yi mirrors the gap between “clarity” and the mundane that we saw in “Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow” by figuring the difference between East and West through a series of dichotomies that place the West at a disadvantage, primarily “refinement” (a ᤌ) and the “mundane” (sok ̚). Against the vulgarization of human life within the processes of advancing capitalism, Yi establishes a refinement in decline, a situation in which “noble moral and cultural values”—seen in the naïveté of the lower classes, the artistry of kisaeng, the cultivation of the literati—is extinguished. For Hwang, Yi’s fondness for antiques is exemplary of this resistance to modernity, with literary documents, drawings and paintings from the Chosŏn period, ceramics, and structures or ruins remaining within the fabric of the expanding cityscape appearing with frequency in his fiction and essays. “Among the various characteristics of Yi’s personal narratives, nothing gives such clear evidence of his anti-era inclinations as this intense attachment to relics from the past.” Rather than signifying a worship of the past, however, Yi engages in a personal or private aesthetic experience of historical artifacts in the present, a “privacy” that may have been related to the social circumstances of the time—militarism, the ban on all anti-Japanese activities, the pressure for intellectuals to “convert” (chŏnhyang, J. tenkō), and the dominance of the “I-novel”—but also signals a desire for a refuge at the very center of a daily acceleration of social and cultural change. While we can reread Yi’s “classicist” prose as an implicit critique of the inferiority of the modern present, the author also expresses the fleeting nature of modernity itself in his short fiction. In “Old Man Yŏngwŏl,” for instance, the title character—a former official who had been jailed as an anticolonial activist for participating in the March 1, 1919, independence uprising—is depicted in his new search for wealth as a mining speculator. A figure for the universality of the modern, the old man puts all of his faith in the power of gold: “What else besides gold has an unchanging value, regardless of time or place?” Hwang notes that in the process of this “vulgarization” of a figure who had been respected both locally, as a political leader, and nationally, as a participant in anti-Japanese resistance, the old man’s body is physically broken down. His face disfigured in a mining accident, and finally succumbing to septicemia, the old man becomes a “sacrificial offering.” Here we find Yi’s fiction adhering to “an obstinately antimodern stance” in its prescription against Old Man Yŏngwŏl’s fate.

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In “The Realtor’s Office,” we see a rich portrayal of the rise of sok and the decline of a mentioned above—the “tragedy of Chosŏn” or the “lament of the East” in the inability to safeguard what is already a past culture from modernization, change, and subsequent ruin. As with many of Yi’s stories, this drama is populated by failures, aging characters out of place in the modern context. The story is set in 1930s Seoul and is centered on a realtor’s office and three old men who gather there. An Ch’osi is a businessman down on his luck (past failures include a sundries shop and a furniture store) who frequently sleeps at the realtor’s office; Sŏ Ch’amwi is the real estate broker who, although business is slow presently, had made and invested enough money to remain financially comfortable; and Pak Hŭiwan is another old man who also frequents the office—unchanging “statues” fi xed in a past age when they had a sense of belonging. For the three gentlemen, that era has been extinguished, a continuity severed. The unfamiliarity of the present is displayed in a number of ways throughout the story: not only through their powerlessness and diminished circumstances, but through frequent reminiscences, through a discomfort with modern customs and settings, through a disjunction with the younger generation, and through a cynical hope sustained even in these dark circumstances. There is a clear contrast, for instance, between the real estate office where they congregate—Sŏ the broker, wearing a horsehair hat and looking out the old-style sliding door onto the street—and the modern structures and high-rise buildings under construction all around. [An Ch’osi] was bored, so he went out wandering, for a bit of exercise. Construction of high-rise buildings was taking place on every street; every neighborhood had its modern houses—like in pictures. His mind wandered for just a bit and a car, sleek as a catfish suddenly jumping from the water, gave a honk. . . . Turning around to look—the driver glared fiercely at him, and behind the driver, a heavyset, middle-aged gentleman with a gold watch band flashing [at his wrist] sat grinning.

The image of an aged An shuffling along the street and gazing at the modern houses and high-rises—still appearing to him as if “in pictures”—and being nearly run over by an automobile makes An’s discomfort in a rapidly changing urban environment unmistakable. The central plot line of the story—An’s attempt to get back into business by investing money borrowed from his daughter in land where, according to Pak Hŭiwan, a new harbor city is rumored to be constructed— also reveals both An’s failure to “catch up” with his contemporaries and the sense of unmoored fate that characterizes the modern period in Yi’s

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fiction. Pak has heard from a secret contact that the government will begin constructing a new harbor city along the coast in Hwanghae Province, along the lines of the port already constructed at Najin. “What with the formation of Manchukuo,” An thinks, “as relations with China grow deeper, as a matter of course they’ll need a big harbor on the coast of Hwanghae Province, like Najin—this we can surmise, just from common sense. One could trust in An’s common sense.”  Here we find the temptation to participate in the modern world, to enter into the complex political and economic context of modernity and empire. An, however, loses his entire investment within the year, and soon after Sŏ finds his corpse next to an empty bottle of medication on the floor of the realtor’s office. “If An Ch’osi had been headed for ruin alone,” Ch’oe Chaesŏ writes, “it does not seem that he would have committed suicide. If not for the . . . allure of life, An would have tread the course of his life for a little longer, no matter how narrow, how dark that course had become.” From the beginning of the story, An did not envy Sŏ’s success, because “he believed that at some point some possibility would arise, something that would put him in possession of his own house, allow him to eat his own food, allow him to confront the world with strength and honor.” It is the defeat of this hope that leads to the drastic end of An’s life, and makes the ending of the story—a funeral at which An’s corpse is dressed in clothes finer than any he had worn in recent years—all the more ironic. For Yi Chaesŏn this sad tale indicates that members of a fading generation, still maintaining a value system derived from a bygone and now unfamiliar age, exist only “as fossils or antiques from a past era, unable to be brought into accord with the present, the new era.” Hwang, however, reads this story as a figuration of the difference between East and West, a dramatization of the categorical difference between a and sok. Held up against the idea of traditional cultivation, the modernization associated with the West is equivalent to the vulgarization of human life. The giving over of the body to an uncontrollable fate—in the form of mining or market speculation—and the evaporation of social norms give us a penetrating insight into modernity itself, where “all that is solid melts into air” and social relations are structured in economic terms. “In this state,” despairs An Ch’osi, “what do I care of modern houses being built? Of what relation is it to me if cars and airplanes spread like ants or flies? The money has slipped out of my hands, and immediately, the tie was severed.” Rather than a retreat from the contemporary, then, what we find expressed in Yi’s short fiction is the a constitutive, defining element of the

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modern itself—a powerful discontinuity between past and present coupled with a commoditization of human relations. As Hwang argues, the valorization of the past requires an opposition to the present moment, and Yi’s fiction and essays signal an antagonistic relationship with their historical context. Opposed to a reading of Yi’s work that locates its essential truth in its formal attention to language, here the content of the works reveal its position in the vortex of a determining capitalist modernity. What these two dominant approaches to Yi’s work share is a straightforward assumption of the artwork’s connection with the real: whether biographical or historical, literary truth is to be had in the reflection of the real in the fictional work. Yet if colonial-period modernism is to be defined as a mode that takes into consideration both the inherent limitations of representational language in a context of crisis and attempts at the same time to overcome these limitations through the addition of extralinguistic layers of communication that augment the written (that is, style), then we must combine the terms of these analyses and seek the historicity of Yi’s attention to language. Much as we found in Pak T’aewŏn’s “hysterical” texts a formal response to the double bind of colonial modernity, and in Kim Yujŏng’s irony a similar response to an empiricist take on language that demands authenticity from the colonized author, here I read for a particular formal aspect of Yi’s fiction—its lyricism—and propose that the concept of “lyrical prose” allows us to avoid a reflection theory of interpretation, which would locate truth either in Yi’s alienation from, or in an overt critique of, colonial modernity. Instead, I move toward an understanding of Yi’s modernist practice as a critical response to the discursive constraints of the colonial modern at the level of form.

Spontaneous Composition: Lyric in the Lectures Lyric is commonly understood in the modern period as an individual and spontaneous utterance provoked by the emotion resulting from something seen, heard, or recalled by the poet. The product is often taken to be an “utterance overheard,”  expressing “his own thoughts and sentiments to himself or to no one,”  a self-centered affective expression that often leads to language that contemplates or “circle[s] around a defined theme instead of having our attention thrown forward to see what comes next.” Whereas with narrative the reader “demands progress and action,”  the lyric suspends time, “turns away from sequential experience and superimposes a different kind of experience on it. The superimposing provides an intense concentration of emotion and

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imagery, usually on some concrete image. . . . In this kind of meditative intensity the mind is identified with what it contemplates.” Key to modern defi nitions of lyric is the combination of what Northrop Frye calls melos and opsis, the musical and pictorial elements of the poem. Whereas traditional definitions of lyric focus on the musical attributes of the spoken or sung poem, with written poetry visual pattern is linked with the lyric, an emphasis on the pictorial that recalls Yi’s concept of the “materiality” of language and his preference for logographs as signifiers closer in form to their referents and more able to convey the thing-like qualities of what they stand in for. The lyrical mode thus not only collapses aural and visual but also maintains a tension between speech and writing: the poet’s “spontaneous” expression of emotion is also necessarily rendered in language, carefully patterned for the reader. Lyric is paradoxically seen as both an instantaneous response to perception and as the organization of this perception in language: “not a reproduction of what is seen” but “a highly complex action . . . in which what is outer and what is inner—things, perceptions, conceptions, actualities, emotions, and ideas—are gathered into and made manifest by emotive and intelligible forms.” This not only comes close to Yi’s definition of literary composition but encompasses questions of the self and language that have structured my approach to the crisis of representation in 1930s Korea, unexpectedly making of the lyric what de Man calls “the best means of access to a discussion of literary modernity in general.” As Yi wrote in the Lectures, what is demanded of the modern writer is the carefully crafted expression of the individual experience of new modes of being; at the same time, language cannot but fail to fully represent either subject or object, a weakness that must be overcome through formal artifice and innovation. The lyric is one such form where by definition the indicative and expressive comingle and offer “an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time” where the reader sees “complex details in juxtaposition and experiences them as a whole.” At the same time, the progression from affected poet to expression and finally to the production of affect in the reader or listener yields what Earl Miner calls a “literature of radical presence,” an impression of the full presentation of subjectivity in the lyrical text. Finally, the lyrical mode fulfills a third condition of Yi’s compositional method, its devotion to words: “Talk of ‘representation,’ ‘referent,’ or ‘fiction’ presumes a mimetic legacy based on drama,” Miner writes. “Talk of ‘language’ . . . presumes an affective-expressive legacy based on lyric.” In that the lyric can be taken as a socially disengaged literary form, a “vehicle for personal feelings and subjective experiences” and an appar-

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ently apolitical “communication of inward states,” this linkage between Yi’s work and poetic form may in part be what opens his fiction up to charges of dilettantism. These charges bolster the division between realist and modernist literary practices, enforcing received genre categories as the basis for both critical and historical veracity. Yet, Adorno writes, “the meaning of a poem is not merely the expression of individual experiences and stirrings of emotion. Rather, these become artistic only when, precisely because of their defined aesthetic form, they participate in the generality of things.” By “recognizing that society and politics shape the very project of a poet’s work and the inner dynamic of poetic language itself, its processes of figuration, its status as a linguistic act, its forms and techniques, its effects within the reading process,” the critic may read for the internal counterlogic of the text, the contradictions contained within the text itself that reveal an engagement of art with society. Literature in this sense is “a practice that acts upon language. The text enters into a complex but determinate relation with the actual social world because language is the very ground of social interaction.” What we find in Yi T’aejun is that the careful differentiation between speech, language, and writing in his compositional method (and the hybrid genre that results) undermines the illusion of full subjectivity found in standard definitions of lyric as “utterance overheard.” As we saw in the previous chapter, in the Lectures, speech, the “spontaneous utterance” is understood as closest to thought, emotion, or perception and as provoked by mental or emotional stimuli. Due to its proximity to these stimuli (“speech, that is, mind”), speech (mal) must be maintained as the form of expression closest to truth; at the same time, speech in and of itself is insufficient to express that truth in writing (kŭl), the mode of communication dominant in the modern period and central to Yi’s idea of a compositional method. Thus composition becomes a process of bringing speech to life, and in the process exceeding speech in the production of a “living organism,” the text or writing formed out of the medium of language. Although speech is understood as primary to modern modes of expression, composition is also the process by which power is wrested from speech and given over to writing with the decline of traditional rhetoric, the rise of print culture, and the demand for individual expression. Yi emphasizes the differences between speech and writing: the former aural, limited to a specific space and time, and the latter visual, coherent over time and distributed across space (in both the form and circulation of the text). While composition is a practice of writing, Yi emphasizes at the same time the spontaneity and authenticity of speech and its importance to the compositional method that he is proposing.

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The section of the Lectures dealing with “lyrical writing” (sŏjŏngmun) opens with a definition of lyric as principally a form of writing (kŭl) that results as “one writes down those emotions [that arise when] when one is emotionally moved by some phenomenon of nature or human affairs.” For Yi, lyrical writing is not merely a “spontaneous utterance”—it is the emotional reaction to phenomena that are spontaneous or inevitable, and a necessary second step is the crafting of this emotion into narrative depiction. Thus it is no surprise that the six examples of lyricism that Yi reproduces in the text are prose narratives. The first, for instance, is a long passage from Hong Myŏnghŭi’s “Thinking of Someone Deceased,” an example of what Yi calls the first technique necessary for expressing emotion in writing: the careful ordering of the experience of emotion into a sequence with a beginning and an end. The second selection is from Yi Wŏnjo’s sketch “Snowy Evening,” in which the poetic voice “walk[s] the evening road alone, like an apparition . . . the streetlamps all appearing blurred, like the pupils of eyes suff used with tears.” Here Yi finds the presentation of an enjoyable pathos of solitude, a delectable beauty (kammi) rendered in lyrical prose. These passages center on the individual, in each case functioning as both the subject and object of enunciation, and strive toward a vocabulary of the new with the description of urban streets or the inclusion of foreign loan words. Yi is also careful, however, to note that each is meticulously ordered through narrative devices such as the inclusion of time phrases (“for a while,” “and then”), the self-conscious framing of each piece as a personal narrative, the recounting of successive events, and the location of the action in familiar space. Each describes a moment of intense emotion, an instant in which the narrator was moved to “speak” to the reader, and that moment of spontaneous utterance is given narrative context. What emerges from Yi T’aejun’s understanding of lyrical composition in the Lectures is ultimately the reconciliation of opposing poles: the spontaneous and the carefully crafted; the temporally fleeting and that which is durable; the spatial context and analogic communicative potential of the spoken word with the distribution of narrative over space and time; the individuality of expression with the sociality of language; and the linguistic patterns of older forms of expression—already existing language—with the newness of the experience of the modern. Hence his description of lyrical writing is an interpenetration of speech and writing, a “composition of speech” that can be achieved via different methods but which tends to focus on the expression of individual emotions and, in its highest form, on the production of these emotions in the

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reader as well. In this sense the lyric is for Yi a “vehicle for personal feelings and subjective experiences” and at the same time the organization of perceptions in writing (kŭl). Despite frequent references to Yi as a “lyric poet” and to his fiction as “an art that calls ‘beauty’ into being,” then, it is important to emphasize that for Yi lyric—while referring to poetic effects—is deployed in the form of prose. His focus is on the production of poetic effects within narrative, a hybrid form difficult to characterize within standard dichotomies (modernism/realism, self/other, pure/engaged, language/history) that have shaped prior perceptions of Yi’s work and modern Korean literature more generally. Narrative is understood as based on causation and progressive time—that “lawfulness of time and space” within which “a subject learns to map the outer world accurately and, thereby, to achieve inner orientation.” Against this, lyrical writing poses the spontaneous, the world “reduced to a lyrical point of view, the equivalent of the poet’s ‘I’: the lyrical self.” Although the first-person narrator becomes a passive awareness that absorbs and transforms all objects and experiences, “enacting [the world] through a progression of images,” this hypersubjectification arguably moves the lyrical narrative away from traditional lyric and toward modernist fiction’s attention to the interior world, a literary practice in which the narrator “substitut[es] perception for action and, for external reality, a formal portrait of himself. Concentration on the inner life of a passive hero and the consequent creation of a detached ‘poetic’ form distinguish lyrical from non-lyrical narrative.” In lyrical narrative, elements of lyric—the spontaneous “utterance overheard,” sensation or emotion as stimulus reproduced and transmitted— are made to exceed speech through the mediation of a compositional literary practice. More than a transcription of speech, lyrical prose turns away from the language used to describe ordinary experience with its “devotion to words” at the same time as it frames its heightened presentation of subjective experience within a carefully constructed narrative framework. Within this framework figure becomes ground, resisting the privileging of figure undertaken in narrative generally understood, as the “lyrical self” absorbs instants of feeling or perception and, “ordering all parts retroactively into a total image,” produces the written text. A hybrid and modern “lyrical prose” would thus undermine not only the focus on the subject of traditional lyric but also the demand that spontaneous language reveal the truth of the subject, in both literary discourse under the modern project of the “unification of speech and writing” (as with the I-novel, for instance) and also in colonial discourse, where language had become a marker of ethnic-national identification.

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At the same time, Yi’s focus on composition and the introduction of lyrical elements into the world of prose undermines narrative modes of development, progress, and enlightenment, unsettling stories of selfbecoming within coherent and modernizing space.

“Crows” as Lyrical Narrative “Crows,” first published in Morning Light in 1936 and republished as the title work of a collection of Yi’s short stories in 1937, tells the story of a struggling author who, no longer able to pay rent at his boardinghouse, has taken up residence at a friend’s country house. The villa and its near environs—deserted for the winter months, a solitary refuge for the main character—provide the setting for the entire story and offer the protagonist an isolated escape from the mundane world. Surrounded by fields of grass, a pavilion, pond, and garden, the villa is separated from the other houses in the area by a stream, “across which tile-roofed and thatchroofed houses stood layered upon the hill.” Within the villa itself, the protagonist’s sense of solitude deepens. Not only is he the only resident (aside from the groundskeeper), but he spends the night writing in the small circle of light put off by a kerosene lamp, a light that evokes memories of his old family house. Each evening he would pour kerosene into the lamp, polish the glass cover, and listen to the calling of the crows while waiting for dark. When the mysterious whisperings of the night began to emerge from every nook and corner of the room, he would soft ly fall to his knees and would reverently raise the lamp . . . and would light the flame. When he saw that the fluttering flame had steadied, he would retreat to the spot on the floor nearest the fireplace, where he would recline, or sit—whatever he liked—alone, reading, thinking, and writing as the night deepened.

The country house is not only an isolated site, but is a setting that evokes a specific sense of antiquity and a marked, almost sacred spatiotemporal separation from present reality. The classical trappings of the protagonist’s quarters provide a literal frame through which he looks out over the natural setting: Affi xed to the closet door is a painting of the “four gentlemen” [sagunja] with the seal of a painter—perhaps famous, perhaps not—and to the door casing, a still life. . . . Outside as well, above his door, a tablet had been hung with “Ch’usŏng Pavilion” written in Ch’usa’s [calligraphic] style; and dangling in an antiquated fashion from the eaves on either side were rusted blue-green wind-bells with fish clappers. . . . [In the distance] the Water Pavilion stood serenely at the base of the mountain, and below this there was a lotus pond, with dried lotus leaves and autumn-tinted maple leaves sunk to the bottom.

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Through this frame of traditional representational styles, the protagonist can see the rock garden on the hillside and the path winding through the grass field, the sky to the east, and an old fir tree, “the crown of which was like deer antlers, its uppermost branches spotted, covered with bird droppings. Gazing tranquilly across this secluded scene, it was as if he dwelled in remote antiquity.” The evocation of antiquity here, the natural setting and carefully crafted environment dotted with reminders of classical scenes and long-dead masters, is often understood by critics as a manifestation of Yi’s neoclassicism, a “projection of the author’s sentimentalism [kamsang chuŭi] in lyrical emotion” and a “closing of one’s eyes” to actual circumstances—to a reality external to the scene—that allows the fiction to approximate lyrical poetry. The timelessness of the wintry, secluded environment and the protagonist’s isolation gradually yield the impression that the protagonist is authoring the experiential world in which he resides. In Freedman’s terms, these first passages present the narrative as a vehicle for subjective experience at the same time that the subject—the lyrical “I”—organizes those experiences into a seemingly noncontradictory whole. The protagonist, for example, longs to shun the body—the requirement of sleep is merely a habit handed down from earlier times, and even hunger, he thinks, must be a “worthless custom” handed down across generations. Over the course of the story, not only the requirements of the body but also the visible world itself are “relegate[d] . . . to the second place accorded it by the sharper demands of imagination and desire.” The confluence of consciousness and perception eventually results in a baffling interpenetration of the imaginary and the real, as when the narrator tells us that “I heard a rustling in my head—I cautiously rested my hand on my forehead; it was a sound coming from within the wall closet.” Or when the snowy quietude of the country setting is darkened by “the shadow of a woman” cast across the landscape that the protagonist can see from his room, he finds himself in love and exclaims: “I suddenly realized that ‘I will love her!’—I ran up against my own passion.” In the first instance, that which is exterior to his mind becomes indistinguishable from that which is inside; and in the latter case, that which is internal to the self appears as something realized in the exterior world, something that he “collides” with. Here we find staged a literal interpenetration of subject and object—the world becomes the “poetic world,” an exteriority structured by the author-protagonist. The carefully ordered world of the “lyrical I” is challenged by the arrival of a consumptive woman, who presents the protagonist with a daily reminder of the contingency of the mortal body. At the same time, the relationship that develops between the two characters provides an

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occasion for the story to meditate upon the creative capacity of language. “Crows” establishes writing as a theme by extending the interpenetration of imagination and reality into the realm of language. First, the woman is an avid reader of the protagonist’s “idiosyncratic” fiction—in a sense, she knows him before she meets him, a relationship based on the written word. Second, the woman is described as if she is “in writing,” a literal materialization of the written word. When he first sees her, “his curiosity was aroused as if he had encountered a fine new bound volume. As he watched her she passed close beneath the terrace, his eyes fell upon her forehead, clean as a new envelope, and traced the corners of her eyes, as if they had been written in English.” Although critics point to this passage to make a case for Yi’s identity as a member of the literati and a connoisseur of books, the self-conscious “writing” of the character suggests more directly a representation of the act of creative writing itself, the “tracing” of the woman in language and her materialization as an image in and through the text. Third, the protagonist’s perception of the woman is mediated by literary texts. The setting, a deserted villa deep in the countryside and the ever-present sight and sound of crows hunched on the branches of the decaying fir tree, already suggests a gothic (rather than neoclassical) atmosphere, an impression that is furthered through the introduction of the theme of death in the protagonist’s conversations with the dying woman. As the protagonist develops a one-sided romance with the woman and imagines saving her from her almost certain plight, he invokes Poe’s “The Raven”: “Th inking of Poe’s sorrowful poem ‘The Raven,’ he called out ‘Lenore? Lenore?’ in a mournful voice as Poe called out to the departed spirit of his love. . . . An urge arose in him to hold her soft ly to him with a passion greater than Poe’s. Poe scrutinizing ancient books in his solitary study, a violent gale flinging open the door, a crow calling unseen from a dark wood.” Here the protagonist not only draws attention to parallels between Poe’s work and the present text—the solitary author, the presence of crows, and the (impending) death of a (perceived) lover—but reenacts the scene of “The Raven” himself with a passion that “exceeds” that of the poet. The poem not only implicitly structures Yi’s text but also mediates the protagonist’s affective experience of his reality. Finally, the interpenetration of creative language and the world reaches its apex with the efforts that the protagonist undertakes to rescue the woman from her growing malaise through the manipulation of metaphors, especially those associated with two dominant images. First, the title image of the crow occupies the narrative from beginning to end,

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at first a sign of the pastoral setting but increasingly as a familiar figure for death. Kkak kkak—the cries always came from the same spot, seemingly the rotten branches of the fir tree just outside. “Those crows there, they’re my friends,” he said, making an effort to conceal the sinister sound with his laughter. “Sir! Your friends? I like everything in this town, but—those crows I hate. It’s as if they’re again and again making me realize that I mustn’t forget death.”

The protagonist’s response is an attempt to defuse the figural association of crows with death. “That’s a pointless notion,” he tells her. “There are white birds, there are black birds; there are birds with clear calls and birds with rough cries. According to one’s tastes, it would seem possible to love even crows.” Here we find an attempt to reduce the metaphorical (supernatural) meaning that the crows hold by way of categorization, by placing crows within their genus—a comparative, rational, biological leveling. Th is logic is carried to its extreme near the close of the story. The woman, who has remained unconvinced that the crows are not harbingers of death, is reminded of them again at twilight. Their thick cries were not yet coming from the crown of the fir tree, but they could hear the black birds pecking at the rotting wood—ttak ttak—with their cruel beaks. “The crows have come?” “You hate them that much?” “I hate them. They’re frightening—it’s as if they have various sorts of hideous things fi lling their stomachs. Once I dreamed that I saw the things in a crow’s stomach—some sort of amulet, a knife, a deep blue flame.”

The protagonist determines that he will kill a crow, dissect it, and show the woman that “a crow’s innards are no different than those of any other bird.” This, he believes, will eradicate her irrational fear. As soon as she leaves, he constructs a bow and some arrows, lures a crow down with some seeds, and shoots it in the wing. After a gruesome and protracted chase, during which he repeatedly pins the now-flightless crow down only to have it escape again (and is forced to fend off the other crows by threatening them with rocks), he kills the bird. “When the woman appeared again, he would conduct an autopsy of the crow’s corpse like a prominent surgeon, demonstrating that what was in a crow’s stomach was no different than the innards of any winged creature—simple intestines—and that there was in any case not any sort of amulet, knife,

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or blue flame within.” Here the appeal is made to rationality or science against the power of figural language, and a counternarrative is proposed that might diminish the woman’s fear of death. The power of metaphorical language is defused as it is brought into proximity with rational narrative. A second recurring image, that of the flower garden, works in a related but opposite direction. Here the metaphor has lost its spontaneous and affective power, a power that the protagonist seeks to restore. The woman has noted the beauty of the garden at the villa, and has frequently strolled through it in the past; the idyll of the garden remains in her mind as she discusses her impending death. “At first I thought that even death would be an exceedingly beautiful thing. Just as I could run into a flower garden whenever life became troublesome, it was a joyous thing to know that I could always plunge into beautiful death. But now that I’ve run up against [death itself], I grow frightened again and again—in my dreams as well.” In the early stages of her disease the young woman had been pleased about her illness if only because her friends visited and brought flowers—a happiness that has faded in light of the growing, visceral sense of her own mortality. At another point, the protagonist imagines the young woman as a flower in a hothouse, a delicate blossom. The image of the flower garden functions in a similar fashion—in resisting the everyday, the bodily, and the mortal, the protagonist desires to restore the image of the flower garden to its metaphorical prime, its artistic, spiritual, eternal value. He was exceedingly melancholy—what remained of the young woman after her first visit to his room was her body heat together with her germs. What sort of words could he use to console the woman? Could she in reality not be saved from her disease? How could he make that woman once again see death as a flower garden? 

Here the protagonist seeks to return the recurring image of the flower garden to its previous metaphorical status, to transport the “mimetic situation . . . to a world of analogic language which exists in parallel to a world of experience, as its definition.” Death must once again become a flower garden for the young woman; the two terms must return to a status of identification, the “ ‘sudden glory’ of fused metaphor.” In this continual shifting between literal and metaphorical and the “fusion of metaphor and referent,” it is possible to define the lyric as this “unity of various things,” the expression of an encompassing moment of consciousness. The lyrical narrative then becomes the organization of these images into a meaning-producing whole, a “living organism”—a

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means “to intensify feeling and theme” by “ordering all parts retroactively into a total image,” as Freedman puts it. Yet even as figural language enters materially into the narrative and imagination interpenetrates and structures the lived experience of the protagonist, we can also perceive a struggle between spontaneity of expression and the need to compose that expression into literary form: with the gothic isolation of the “lyrical I”; in the use of language as a descriptive referent for the human (the woman is a bound volume, her forehead is an envelope, the shape of her eyes traced by written characters); with the mediation of experience through the literary text; and through the self-conscious manipulation of metaphorical language by the protagonist in his attempts to produce an affect of comfort or happiness in the consumptive woman. Language and the space-time of the “real” interpenetrate so fully that the final sustained note of the story, the sound of the crow, itself takes the shape of a single letter: “Th is night too, the crows cawed . . .‘kkak kkak’ . . . from time to time calling out as if trying to enunciate GA followed by an endless R.” Here the spontaneous utterance, the sound of the crow, is given visual form in the text (in the letters GAR) in combination with onomatopoetic Korean—the merging of visual and aural qualities that Yi describes as a key part of literary composition in the Lectures. At the same time even this brief animal utterance—the meaning of which varies throughout the story—is broken down and recomposed into a relationship between separate terms, the pronunciation of “GA followed by an endless R.” What is remarkable about Yi’s story is that he thematizes the confl ict between lyrical and narrative modes by making language itself a motivating presence in the action of the story. Further, the metanarrative on fiction writing that runs through the text—for instance, when the author-protagonist denies ever having written a story with a consumptive character—gives rise to moments of irony, a “discrepancy between the self and its experiences on the one hand, and, on the other, their combination in the work of art.” The protagonist-hero experiences the same split that characterizes Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s modern subject, the gap between radical metaphor and rational autopsy, between self-asactor (drawn into the scene) and self-as-observer (detached from the scene)—“the relationship of the double to its symbolic form.” The failure of the narrative to carry out a merging of these two modes— the affective and the rational, the imaginative and empirical accuracy, the spontaneous utterance and carefully ordered composition—allows us to read the story as a sort of parable on the dangers of writing without composition.

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The failure of the protagonist to console the young woman, to bring about a metaphorical identification that would comfort her and at the same time eliminate her fear by rationalizing it, points to a fundamental failure at the level of language. In the end, all that the protagonist can offer the dying woman are words. The reality of death, the bodily and the contingent, triumphs over the powers of art. “Short of actually becoming ill with the same disease as the person who is sick, you cannot have compassion for them,” the young woman tells the writer. “But can one become sick and suffer to the same extent, and die at the same hour, just as one pleases?” The young woman points out what Yi dictates in the Lectures: that speech stems from experience, and that art arises from the composition of this primary language. Yet rather than understanding this as a sign of Yi’s defeatism, I read this as a comment on the status of representational language in 1930s colonial Korea—as an experiment in and recommendation of the compositional method.

The Uncohering of Narrative and the Critique of Historicism What we see in “Crows” is a particular impossibility of communication in language that stems less from the gap between signifier and signified (as it does in Kim Yujŏng’s fiction and criticism) and more from the slippage between “analogic” and “digital” modes of communication that we saw in Pak T’aewŏn—the gap between the actually experienced (rendered in contextualized speech) and the literary text (rendered in writing, separated from its purportedly original context). In “Crows” this impossibility occurs at the intersection of the “lyrical I”—the subjective rendering of the world, the predominance of experience—and the metatextuality of the prose, its self-conscious staging of the compositional method. On the one hand, “Crows” might be considered a successful example of a “living body” of text, retaining the spontaneity of the “utterance overheard” within a carefully crafted narrative framework and literary style; on the other hand, the story draws attention to the failure of language to foster communication, compassion, or comfort, pointing to the limits inherent in both the spoken and written word. This moves us beyond the two modes in which Yi’s fiction has previously been received, as focused exclusively on language (to the exclusion of the political or historical) or as engaged in a “politics of time” where a preoccupation with the past is understood as symptomatic of the author’s pervasive antimodern stance. In lyrical prose, these two tendencies are combined, the diachronic overlapping with the synchronic in a way that calls critical attention both to the idea of transparent communi-

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cation in language and to narratives of progress and enlightenment that assume such communicability in literary works. “Writing [kŭl] does three things,” Yi explains in the Lectures. “It lets one hear, it lets one know, and it lets one see. Letting one hear is the task of verse. Letting one know and letting one see are the tasks of prose. . . . Letting one see is a much more concrete means of communication than letting one know.” Depiction (myosa), he continues, was originally a term used for visual arts, indicating the appearance of an object as such, as in a painting or drawing—it is the “representation, through composition, of an existing situation. . . . That which stops at logic or reason, as history or scholarship does, is not depiction but a descriptive account [kisul]. Depiction is instead that expression which shows an actual scene or actual situation to the reader, letting them enter into the circumstances themselves, letting them taste the mood themselves.” To attain proper depiction, “the subject must always be passed through [a process of] dispassionate observation; there must be a systematic sequence of space and time” and at the same time, “differently than a camera would, depiction must gather what is essential and specific to an object.” Much as the logograph through its visual force creates a “sense” for the reader in addition to its purely phonetic value, lyrical prose seeks to reconstruct an affective environment through the modulation of images and the spontaneity of subjective utterance within a narrative structure that relies on a rational mode of representation (coherent space and chronology). At the same time, Yi calls attention to the difficulties of merging the lyrical and the narrative in both his literary theory and his fiction, citing the “unrepresentable” that resides at the heart of all language and, in works like “Crows,” dramatizing the struggle between literal and figural meaning. The ideal fusing of self and world—“to eliminate the disjunction of self and world in the very genre that seems most to require their separation”—fails at multiple levels in Yi’s fiction, from “failed” characters displaced in time and space from the moment of modernity to the self-conscious introduction of language-as-theme in works that are ostensibly lyrical in content and form. How are we to understand this dual movement, toward the lyrical or poetic in fiction and the simultaneous metacommentary on the fallibility of literary language? I suggest that the seemingly contradictory form of lyrical prose stood against the form that dominated not only literary circles but historiography and colonial discourse as well: the realist narrative, the seemingly faithful reproduction of time and space. Yi’s fiction—filled with marginal, anachronistic characters, their courses indeterminately plotted and depicted in a language that turns away from

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everyday expression—functions in this sense as a counternarrative both to simple realism as conceptualized by leftist authors and critics and to the narrative of “enlightenment” and progress that underwrote both capitalist and colonial discourses. Realist narratives are most often stories of “coming to know,” writes Weinstein. “Coming to know enacts an Enlightenment premise of rational correspondence between the individual and the world. Thanks to the lawfulness of time and space, a subject learns to map the outer world accurately and, thereby, to achieve inner orientation as well. Personal identity gets confirmed by way of this arduously achieved knowledge of exterior entities.” The theory of language that supports this mode of writing is one of transparent communication: “Word and thing are brought to coincide in the sense that the former is a completely adequate and transparent representation of the latter.” It is this idea of language as fully adequate to its object, and the resulting concept of fiction as an instructive presentation of the subject’s movement through familiar reality—a “reflexive doubling back of the subject upon itself, confirmed in its self-knowing by its capacity to know the object”—that Yi resists in the Lectures and in his literary practice. It is in this regard that we can characterize Yi T’aejun as a modernist, as one resistant to the market, resistant to everyday life under capitalistcolonial reality, and resistant to a notion of language as transparent, adequate to its object and a tool of the subject (res cogitans) on a path toward knowledge. “An artist’s composition is not a utensil of everyday life,” Yi writes. “It is an instrument of creation. Composition is always ambitious . . . seeking out the kernel of the object that language cannot reach. How can we remain self-satisfied with [composition as] an appendage of language, a tool of [everyday] life!” Modernist texts, having “determined that inherited cultural models of maturation—of coming to know other and self—misrepresented the drama of the modern subject,” dramatize the “uncohering” of the subject in their unraveling of familiar time, space, and language, “ruptur[ing] the syntax of realism’s knowing subject in space/time,” fusing past and present in the subject. We have seen that this knowing, progressive subject is undercut in Yi’s fiction—filled as it is with the marginal, the uncomprehending, the suicidal, the invalid—as is the forward-moving narrative that undergirds such a subject’s passage into a knowable future. In a sense, Yi’s narratives are backward moving, from present to past, or circular, from present to past and back to the present. Th is suggests that a treatment of Yi’s sup-

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posed classicism, his integration of past objects into his texts, should be taken seriously not only biographically or thematically but also at the level of formal function. Whether or not these objects and Yi’s interest in the past function as an escape from reality or as a nostalgia for a coherent social whole prior to the disruption of capitalism, they render problematic a narrative coherence of subjectivity “grounded in purposeful movement through time and space.” In resisting this progressive narrative, along with the subject of knowing and the idea of fully representational language that support such a discourse, Yi resists the very historicist narrative that relegates the nonWest to Chakrabarty’s “not yet”—for which the history of modernity is already known, “something which has already happened elsewhere”— and the implied imperative that the non-West “catch up.” “To the West goes the conquest of the present,” Yi wrote. “However much we scorn them, we must follow stealthily along behind them—this is the lamentation of the East.” Although Yi’s failed characters repeatedly act out this disjunction between lived experience and modern present, what we see in his critical and fictional works is a careful engagement with the narrative mode that describes this “present” as at once rational and unattainable, depicting “with compassion and humor the loneliness of those people who fall behind,” yet “consciously linking this theme to a greater extent with society and human existence.” In stories such as “Crows,” Yi cannot but bring his observations on human existence in the modern context to a close at an ironic impasse—“his interest in society is introduced only as cynicism,” Ch’oe Chaesŏ writes, and his attention to the colonial modern consequently leaves contradiction or conflict intact, without false solution. Although a cynical resistance to narratives of modern progress runs through Yi T’aejun’s fiction, we have also found in the Lectures a striving toward a subject-centered modern practice of compositional communication. “Westerners,” Old Man Yŏngwŏl tells us, “need to return to nature. For us, it’s the opposite. We must repeatedly go outward, into civilization [munmyŏng], urban areas—where history is being made.” Thus although Weinstein’s argument—for a modernism understood as revealing the props in time and space that support a particular notion of the progressive subject as coming to know—might prove convincing at the level of narrative, in terms of a theory of language, we see Yi T’aejun moving in a seemingly opposite direction: toward the rationalization of experience, its expression in communicative language (writing) reached through a process of composition (munjang), the patterning of language. Th is

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appears to be less a process of unknowing than a formation of knowing, a coming to knowledge about experience or perception through the organization of that phenomenon into a language of exchange. In a sense, language thus moves from (social) speech through (individual) composition and then back into society, via its communicability. These opposing impulses in Yi’s criticism and fiction are understood as contradictory only when a contradiction fundamental to modernity— the dual understanding of the modern both as having an origin and at the same time as springing, essentially, from an ongoing process—is not taken into account. That is, the modern is both an origin, a state of being, and an ongoing process of becoming. In that Yi’s characters are perpetually relegated to a belated “becoming modern,” and as far as Yi’s compositional method is in many ways a self-conscious attempt to produce a discourse sufficient to the expression of the modern, this process mirrors the double bind of colonial discourse—“Be like us! But not too much like us.” The colonized were to participate in empire, to enter into modernity through entrance into a discursive reality—such as that of the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere—and at the same time were labeled as those who required an (endless) process of becoming, who were unfailingly different precisely because they did not share in the origin of modernity with the colonizers. If we are to name Yi T’aejun a modernist against prevalent understandings of him as a neoclassicist, aristocrat, dilettante, escapist, collaborator, turncoat, or writer who went north (wŏlbuk chakka)—each with their own strategy of either disqualifying Yi from participating as a writer in his present moment, from the history of modern Korean literature altogether, or from modernism “proper”—then we will have to resist the narrowing of our perspective to either a language-centered or history-centered focus. A reading of Yi’s fiction as “lyrical prose,” with all its attendant contradictions, moves toward an understanding of his particular modernism as stemming from the acknowledgment of representational language as fundamentally lacking at the same time as his fiction is read as a critique of modernity—particularly the idea of modernity as tied only to the West, as an origin—through his depiction of failed, marginal characters. Yi’s narratives counter a “knowing” journey through time and space at the same time that his writing presupposes a process of the rationalization of experience and perception, an attempt to objectify the fully subjective. This interpenetration of self and world, or form and content, leads us to the concept of lyrical prose less as a clearly defi ned set of classificatory criteria than as a form that “epitomizes a writer’s special attitudes toward knowledge.” In the effort to

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reconcile narrative form—a “succession in time and sequences of cause and effect”—with the imagistic intensification through which lyric produces its meaning, Yi is compelled to address questions of language and conscious perception that give his literature a special relevance to the 1930s, a period in which the adequacy of language to reality was prohibited.

Conclusion: Colonial Modernism and Comparative Literary Studies

We have seen how a consideration of modernist literary practice outside the West and under a situation of colonization can make a productive problem of the term “modernism.” Working in psychoanalytic, antiempiricist, and compositional modes, Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun drew attention to both the constitutive nonidentity of word and referent and the necessity of interpretation when approaching the world and the literary text alike. I have traced their anxious formal responses to the crisis of representation as a form of engagement at a discursive level, a critique of the isomorphic model that undergirded empirical, scientific, historical, and other discourses sustaining modern and colonial power. The divisive literary-historical genre categories of realism and modernism have also been shown not only to be inadequate to the task of reading colonial-period literature but also to have roots in an imperial logic that demands the “real” from the colonized (or the nonWest). When all language comes under question, as it did in the theoretical and literary practices of these authors, then the natural and transparent language of the “mother tongue,” demanded as a form of identification, authenticity, or difference, itself becomes impossible as a standard of literary creation or interpretation. I have tried to intervene at both local and global levels: first revising genre categories in Korean literary history to allow for a reconsideration of these three authors as modernists deeply engaged in the colonial context; and, second, rethinking the modernist/realist debates that have structured twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary history around a dichotomous and politically invested understanding of the relationship

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between literary works, genre categories, and reality or the world. More broadly and through a reading of these non-Western modernist literary works, I have tried to propose a definition of modernism that allows for a more inclusive and comparative understanding of what modernist literary practice is and does. The result of nativist and Eurocentric approaches to Korean modernism is a “communicative model of literary history” that demands transparent meaning from the non-Western literary text. In that Korean modernists struggled with just this idea—that language can assume an isomorphic relation with the real—and remained openly skeptical regarding the capacity of literary language to correspond with its referent, it makes sense to reexamine how our interpretation of these texts, as individual works and also as examples of particular literary-historical categories, is predetermined by those categories and to break out of this historico-realist mode of reading in the subversive spirit of the modernists themselves. To put it differently, if we understand modernism in colonial Korea as a response to the double bind of colonization in discursive terms and the “communicative model” as coterminous with an imperial mode of apprehending and knowing the colonized other, then it is our task to reread these texts and their place in history in accordance with the resistant and critical stance struck by Pak, Kim, Yi, and others, and to continue to work toward the decolonization of knowledge in the present day. I touched on the relationship between this imperial-empirical mode of knowing and expressing and what might loosely be called an Area Studies approach to literary texts in the opening chapter. In conclusion— but as a way of keeping the question of non-Western modernism open—I would like to present three interrelated statements that I hope will help us consider how the rethinking of a non-Western modernist literary practice can be linked to the global situation of the early twentieth century, and how this might expand the scope and methodology of modernist and postcolonial literary studies in the present. Korean modernism is modernism. As Susan Stanford Friedman has eloquently pointed out, definitions of modernism too often contain an “unacknowledged spatial politics that suppresses the global dimensions of modernism through time,” disqualifying non-Western or postcolonial modernisms as derivative while modernism remains “the invention of the West imitated by the Rest.” Understanding modernism as the “expressive dimension of any given modernity” and modernity as a relational concept characterized by a sharp rupture with the past and a subsequently intense and often violent period of intercultural contact, Friedman advocates a polycentric notion of modernity and consequently

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of modernisms that arise in different sites and at different times, “simultaneously distinctive and yet produced through indigenizations of traveling modernities that take place within frequently extreme differences of power.” Against an ideology of “European diff usionism” that reinforces a center/periphery binary and—whether from the perspective of the Eurocentric or the nationalist or nativist critic who celebrates the perceived gap between Western and non-Western literatures—sees non-Western cultural products as derivative of a European original, I have throughout treated Korean modernism as modernism, operating not “after” or “under the influence of” a powerful Anglo-European center but within a colonial context of violent “intercultural contact” that characterizes modernity globally and as an example of “the range of styles among creative forms that share family resemblances based on an engagement with the historical conditions of modernity in a particular location.” It is clear that Korean modernist literature from the colonial period shares many if not all of the “recognizably modernist modes of representation” that Friedman lists: cosmopolitanism, a “polyvocal pastiche of languages and allusions,” a sense of rupture, self-reflexivity, jumbled chronology, simultaneity, ambiguity, a crisis of normative certainties, the narration of psychodynamic processes of consciousness, the appearance of the symptom in the return of the repressed, and the sense that the “effects of empire are inseparable from issues of individual subjectivity and agency,” among others. As should be clear from the preceding analysis, I wholly sympathize with her effort to decentralize European and American modernisms as the original from which purportedly imitative non-Western modernisms are derived, and also advocate adopting a strategy for reading modernist works that locates “heterogeneous and multiple sites around the globe” as sources of modernist literary practice, a “locational” approach that is sensitive to the historical specificity and internal power dynamics of a particular manifestation of modernism. I have found that the polyvocality and formal innovation of Korean modernism arose in response to a particular hegemonic relation in the context of Japanese empire, and more specifically to the representational crisis that emerged from the contradictory demands placed on the language of the colonized in this discursive environment. When what is said cannot correspond with what is meant—when the position of (particular) utterance is obscured in an instance of (universal) enunciation, and vice versa—then the practitioner of language must adopt textual strategies of meaning production that exceed communicative models and take as their theme precisely the crisis that both compels and under-

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mines the literary efforts of the colonized author. In this sense, my study of Korean modernism is perhaps less about linking these authors and their works with a definitive set of characteristics that signal modernist literary practice globally (although those commonalities clearly exist) and more about linking these modes to the specific discursive context of 1930s Korea. In that such characteristics can just as easily be utilized to discredit modernist literary practice as to confirm it, the question becomes one of the politics of literary interpretation, particularly the separation of aesthetics and politics. Korean modernism is political. Beyond the entirely defensible idea prevalent in recent work in postcolonial studies that one of the most crucial issues facing literary studies today is the complicity between Europe’s colonial past “and its consequent imbrication, materially and epistemologically, with the ‘third world,’ ” this study has attempted to open up a space for comparative work between colonial situations both within and outside the sphere of direct European influence. As such, I understand the colonial relation as a foundational aspect of modernity and read the Korean modernists as active subjects against this backdrop of a globalizable power imbalance. “If modernity and colonialism are simultaneous,” as Sonita Sarker writes, “colonial subjects are already to be counted among the architects of modernity.” In this sense Pak T’aewŏn’s hysterical and hystericizing narratives, Kim Yujŏng’s critique of empiricism and sense of universal irony, and Yi T’aejun’s painstaking compositional practice and lyrical prose may be read as modes of literary theory and practice born both of the modern moment and in response to the specific contradictions of the colonial context. In terms of Korean literary history, modernism has often been maligned as an apolitical or antinational(ist) practice, a comprador literary form that derives from external models and ignores the “real” of the colonial crisis. The colonial power differential not only links Korean modernism to a global historical horizon but also compels us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetic practice and the political in our interpretation of literary works, particularly in a non-Western context. If postcolonial critics have treated modernism with “suspicion” as a site of “Eurocentric danger, a threat to the assumed authenticity of the cultural and literary traditions of postcolonial polities,” modernism has been treated with an equal level of suspicion within the local context of Korean literary history. It is at this point of convergence that both the limits of a postcolonial literary studies “haunted by the spectre of cultural authenticity” and the collusion between nationalist literary history and a Eurocentric Western

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literary institution may be called into question. Non-Western modernism, as Shu-mei Shih has pointed out in her study of Chinese modernism, “challenges the constructed history of modernism as primarily a Euro-American event”; at the same time, it retains the critical capacity to oppose its ostensibly comprador status on the grounds of its connection with the colonial modern. In both senses and thus at both times (under colonial rule, and in the present day), Korean modernism may be considered “political,” a productive site for postcolonial analysis so long as postcolonial studies is understood not as “after” colonialism but as the moment when, as Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out, “the workings of colonialism and Euro-imperialism are now available for reflection in ways they were not before.” Reclaiming Korean modernism as an interpretive strategy particular to the colonial period places these authors and their works at the cutting edge of literary modernism and combats the division of aesthetics from politics that, as I have tried to show, stems from a particularly colonialist epistemology that understands language as coterminous with both reality and ethnic-national identity. Korean modernist texts bear formal analysis. Against the idea that language may correspond with its referent in a transparent and unproblematic way, an idea repeatedly critiqued in the Korean modernists’ critical and fictional texts, this study has emphasized the seemingly obvious assertion that close textual analysis requires an attention to form—that there is a content to the form. Questions of form and genre, John Hawley writes, “have often fallen outside analysis typically defined as postcolonial unless they reinforce the uses to which some critics think such writing should be put.” Hawley cites Timothy Brennan’s finding that there is “a lack of interest in the explicitly modernist or experimental writing of those who are considered not to be political enough—those who do not fit the injunction that the third-world writer embody politics in a readily consumable form.” It is rather in the formal aspects of these texts where axes of genre and political engagement meet, a powerful qualifying nexus in the categorization of literary texts. This is not to argue for a return to the idea of an objective aesthetic value to be found immanent to the literary work of art; nor is it to uncritically espouse a “new formalism” or “surface reading” that jettisons the capacity of critical work to read symptomatically, to locate meaning in what the work of art does not say. Against both a move away from symptomatic reading and a historicism that “flatly refuses the meaningfulness of form . . . except as mystification,” I would put forward the crisis of historicism that characterized intellectual circles in colonial Korea and insist that this crisis, in its connection with ques-

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tions of representation and veracity, has much to teach us about the potential of form to address and express meaning related to social antagonism. That is to say, the crucial question of the relation between art and society is operative in these modernist works themselves not at the level of content—intentional statement—but in their formal structure. In keeping with the quotation from Adorno that begins this volume, I have understood modernist fiction in Korea as an art form that “revolts in advance against positivist subordination of meaning” through a perpetual thematization of the fallibility of representational language, but at the same time a literary practice that insists on that reality—as a mediating force in the realm of discourse—by the very distance that it keeps from it. These texts do not “express” political commitment; “rather, by ‘regroup[ing]’ the elements of empirical reality according to its own laws, the artwork instantiates and effectuates commitment, commitment not to an agenda but to the project of radically reorganizing perception, propaedeutic to social change.” In both critical and creative writings, all three of the authors dealt with in the preceding study took as overt topic and underlying theme the troubled relationship between language and reality, and I have maintained that this consistent treatment of the fallibility of words as tools of transparent communication comes in response to a crisis of representation that characterized 1930s literary and intellectual circles in Seoul and marks these authors, despite their distance from one another in literary history, as modernist. We saw the pathogenesis of modernism in Pak T’aewŏn’s anxious attempts at analogic communication through the representation of disease in the colonial capital, a hysterical and hystericizing response to the double bind of colonial discourse. The critique of the communicative model of literary language in Kim Yujŏng’s 1937 love letter followed, with its dismissal of the hubris of a technical mastery of language and rejection of emergent hypersubjective and hyperobjective modes and genres; and we saw Kim’s resistance to meaning and insistence on the gap between “said” and “meant” in the practice of ironic representation. Finally, Yi T’aejun most thoroughly separated literary language from the idea of full or transparent communication in his Lectures and in his recommendation to “write speech” beyond the boundaries of the “unification of speech and writing” that characterized imperial and nationalist understandings of language; and we saw in his hybrid practice of lyrical prose a subjective authoring of reality, the merging the indicative and expressive into a “living body” of text. These modes of expression situated in historical context point not only to the advent of a fragmented and contingent modernity, but also to

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colonial constraints on language. In the modernist practice of Pak, Kim, and Yi we find not only the influences of the modern but a resistance to it; and, at a formal level, a response to and rejection of colonial modes of discourse as well. In that this literary form emerged during a period of repression, as Celia Marshik points out in the case of British modernism, we can not only trace how many of its aesthetic innovations stem from the pressures of censorship but can also see how these features (including self-reflexivity, fragmentation, indirection, and the use of irony and satire) combine into a “subtle instruction” that “encourage[s] readers . . . to question the repressive culture that surrounded modernist writers, and . . . expresses an ethical and political dimension that modernism is often thought to lack.” With the hysteric, the ironist, and the lyrical narrator, the principle of equivalence on which communication is based—the “message before the message” that announces its intelligibility— disappears in a powerful statement of language’s lack, and interpretation is demanded in the action of style rather than at the overt level of statement or content. In the literary theory and practice of these modernists, the false choice between a “colonized language,” the “slavish,” comprador speech of the collaborator, and the “mother tongue”—a transparent, communicative expression of communal and political belonging and identity—is undone. In methodological terms, the center/periphery model inherited from these categories breaks down when we consider modernism as a polycentric, global phenomenon and when our focus is distributed spatially across metropole and colony outside the bias of “diff usionist” time. The equally false choice between a Eurocentric approach and postcolonial “authenticity” in the case of the former deprives the non-Western text of its critical potential by making it derivative of Anglo-European knowledge, and in the case of the latter coincides with a nativism that insists on valuing the local precisely in its separation from the global. My tactic has been to posit a framing and comparative theory—a crisis of representation characteristic of 1930s Seoul literary circles, an anxiety around the representational capacity of language and its link with subjective, cultural, or historical truth—in order to maintain that modernism can be productively defined as a reaction to this crisis, a creative response to the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world that accompanied colonial modernity. The method that stems from this theory is one that reads the “modernism” of texts from the early to mid-1930s not as a foregone conclusion but as a set of techniques that emerged in the reaction to this crisis and at the same time as an interpretive category that structures our perceptions of colonial-

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period literary history. That is, against the “communicative and pragmatic function of language,” we see interpretation emerge as the privileged category through which a variable and uncertain truth might emerge, and understand crises of self, society, and history as coinciding in a critical modernist literary practice. The intended effect of these polemical statements is thus not to close the book on modernist studies in Korea but to open the Korean case to comparative work in broader literary or modernist studies, and in the process to modify—as the modernists themselves attempted—the very field of aesthetic and political possibility. The fact of non-Western literary works in relation to a global horizon of the modern, the politics of the modernist text under colonial rule, and the question of the relation between literary form and political context all provide footholds for continuing work toward both expanding the definition of modernism and calling attention to the act of comparison in literary studies. If “comparative thinking” is essential to the development of “natural” hierarchies between what is being compared, and if comparison takes place not only from an “empirical or objective basis” but also out of “the interest or principle of reason that motivates each particular activity of comparison,” a principle that presupposes “geographical or cultural areas that are a priori distinct and to be compared,” the activity of comparison itself must become an object of analysis, treated “not as a methodological problem, but as a historical object.” I have tried to maintain an attentiveness to this problem by considering modernism as an interpretive category (rather than as a definable constellation of par ticu lar stylistic traits, or as a movement confined to a par ticu lar geographical location) through which either the “crisis of normative certainties” that characterized 1930s colonial Seoul intellectual life or the critical mode through which non-Western modernisms are approached in the present might be illuminated. In this sense, non-Western modernism is one possible starting point for thinking through literary comparability outside both national literatures and the temporal restrictions of “European diff usionism”: it is at once a genre and an interpretive category where accusations of exceeding the strictly national (comprador) meet disciplinary restrictions against the penetration of the sphere of Western literature by the explicitly nonWestern (derivative). Dichotomous sets of terms used to frame colonialperiod fiction in South Korean literary histories—realism/modernism, verisimilitude/style, collective/individualist, engaged/elite—attain a strange complicity with Westocentric evaluations of non-Western literatures when placed in the comparative hierarchy of “world literature.” The

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critical power of the colonial-period modernists’ resistance to empirical or realist conceptions of language compels a rethinking of a methodology that applies historico-realist standards to the literary text—that values the (non-Western) text to the degree that it corresponds with purportedly real events and reflects its (real) ethnic-national context and content. This bias, which rests on a communicative model of discourse and reproduces the objectifying and identitarian epistemology of both colonial and nationalist/nativist positions, suggests a link between 1930s East Asia and the present via a situation in which a rhetoric of comparative internationalism actually works to solidify ethnic-national boundaries. From one perspective, what this study has attempted is to find a new way of talking about the literature that was produced out of the critique of this empiricalimperial model in 1930s Korea, a literature that cannot be coded into familiar categories and which expresses, at the level of form, the basic discursive contradictions of colonial society. Alternate ways of thinking about literature from the period are necessary partly because of the difficulty of classifying hybrid forms, a difficulty that involves rejecting standard literary-historical schemas of classification. Typical dichotomous understandings of literary production (realist/modernist, objective/subjective, political/apolitical) stem from colonial modes of discourse and yield what Ann Stoler in the context of French colonial history refers to as “colonial aphasia”: an “occlusion of knowledge” that is itself a way of knowing, an occlusion that produces a “difficult[y] generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things”—the thing is at once there but is unspeakable or misrecognized. Korean modernists addressed precisely this juncture between language and knowing, the (in)ability to say what one meant, and they did so in the specific context of a colonial discourse characterized by a scientific or communicative understanding of the identifying power of language, a universal mode of enunciation that, as Yi Chingyŏng pointed out, occluded the voice and situation of the colonized in any attempt at enunciation as a condition of its universality. It should not surprise us that the literary forms that developed in response to this crisis situation—the paradox of empire, the demand for a simultaneous sameness (identity, unimpeded referentiality) and difference (otherness, indeterminacy)— were complex; nor that the texts’ difficulty—their “invitation to misunderstanding” that compels our rereading and judgment—pushes us toward developing a vocabulary or method that moves beyond the aphasic categories that emerged out of the discursive constraints of the colonial situation, categories that continue to structure literary-historical

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understanding not only of modern Korean literature but of non-Western literature more generally. By rereading colonial-period modernism outside of national categories and reframing modernist literary practice within the universal problem of language and reference, I hope to have opened up a field within which methodologies applied to non-Western literatures might be rethought. The fall from referentiality that modernist authors took as the beginning and basis of their work undermines not only the progressive and empiricist discourses of the modern and the colonial, but also Eurocentric and postcolonial/nativist emphases on the necessary and authentic—yet derivative and imitative—“real” of the periphery. Supported by a communicative and isomorphic model of language, the choice between aesthetics and politics is false choice, the product of imperialism itself, and a choice that mirrors the limitations of a Eurocentric approach to non-Western literatures.

Notes

Introduction 1. Pak T’aewŏn’s “P’iro—ŏnŭ panil ŭi kirok” (Fatigue—Record of Half a Day) was originally published in Yŏmyŏng (Daybreak) 1, no. 8 (July 1933). I cite here from the version published in Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo), 121–31. 2. I use the name for the colonial capital, Kyŏngsŏng (J. Keijō), interchangeably with “Seoul” throughout. 3. Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo), 121. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. All Korean-language texts are published in Seoul unless otherwise noted. 4. Poirier, “The Difficulties of Modernism,” 138. 5. Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, 24–25. Stevenson’s works were widely translated during the 1920s and 1930s in Korea and Japan. See Kim Pyŏngch’ŏl, Hanguk kŭndae pŏnyŏk munhaksa yŏngu (A Study of the History of Literary Translation in Modern Korea); also see Meiji Taishō Shōwa honyaku bungaku mokuroku (Index of Translated Literature during the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa Periods). 6. Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, 60–61. 7. See Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa ron (History of Modern Korean Literary Criticism), 245–276. 8. Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo), 131. 9. Brooks, Realist Vision, 211. 10. Kang Unsŏk, Hanguk modŏnijŭm sosŏl yŏngu (Research on Korean Modernist Fiction), 62. As we will see in chapter 1, in the context of colonization this is not simply a return to the “poetic language fallacy,” a mode of distinguishing the literary from ordinary communicative language (the common charge of those who designate colonial-period modernism as “pure” literature). Under colonial rule, “communicative

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language” is not a neutral term; where rational language is associated with the colonial state’s capacity to define and manage the colonized population, “normative language,” rather than being a “natural” cultural attribute, becomes explicitly associated with a violently assimilatory mode of colonial rule. See Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, especially 3–37; see also Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 197–206. 11. Gregory Golley similarly finds a “shift outward”—a drive toward referential accuracy and a “nonmimetic” form of realism—at the heart of Japa nese modernist practices. My argument differs in two important and related ways. First, in terms of periodization, Golley resituates Japa nese “high modernism” as taking place between 1910 and the mid-1930s. With 1910 being precisely the year in which Korea was formally colonized by Japan, Golley’s periodization marks a moment in East Asia during which a scientific objectivity was increasingly associated with imperial modes of knowing and dominating the colonized, and my analysis reflects a deep suspicion of this way of knowing both during the colonial period and in the present day. This leads to the second key difference: while for Golley the modernists rejected the conventions of literary realism while accepting realism as an ontological or epistemological category, the literary criticism that I read below takes a much more ambiguous stance toward the possibility of empirical knowing, and hence a more fraught stance toward the potential of modernist literary technique to enact an “expanded realism.” See Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See. 12. Kim Minjŏng, “Kuinhoe rŭl tullŏssan myŏt kaji munje chegi” (Introducing a Number of Questions Surrounding the Group of Nine), 26. 13. This is at least partly due to the fact that both Pak and Yi’s fiction was banned in South Korea until the late 1980s because of their status as wŏlbuk chakka, authors who appear to have chosen to go north during the period preceding or during the Korean War. Another reason, discussed below, is the firm literary-historical division between modernism and realism and the political and historical values consequently attached to these terms. 14. Chou, “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea,” 50. 15. According to the colonial archive, over 75 percent of Korean households had adopted Japa nese family names by August 1940 (ibid., 60). 16. See also Henry, “Assimilation’s Racializing Sensibilities”; and Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: The Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–45, Asia-Pacific Modern (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming). 17. Yŏm, Minjung sidae ŭi munhak (Literature of the Era of the People), 67–68. 18. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 1. 19. See Shih, The Lure of the Modern. 20. Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, Esperanto title of the Chosŏn Proletarian Artists Alliance (Chosŏn p’ŭrollet’aria yesulga tongmaeng), founded 1925, the organization around which left ist literature and criticism was centered. The group was dismantled by the colonial government in 1935 after a series of arrests of its leadership and members. See Park, “Writing the Real.” 21. See Kŭndae munhak kwa Kuinhoe (Modern Literature and the Group of Nine); see also Yi Chungjae, Kuinhoe sosŏl ŭi munhaksajŏk yŏngu (A LiteraryHistorical Study on the Fiction of the Group of Nine); and Kim Minjŏng, “Kuinhoe

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ŭi chonrip yangsang kwa mijŏk ideollogi ŭi sanggwansŏng yŏngu” (On the Interrelationship between Aesthetic Ideology and the Existential Modality of the Group of Nine). For a retrospective account of the group see Cho Yongman, Kuinhoe mandŭl muryŏp (Around the Time When the Group of Nine Was Formed). 22. The original nine members were Yi T’aejun (1904–?), Yi Hyosŏk (1907–42), Cho Yongman (1909–?), Chŏng Chiyong (1903–?), Kim Kirim (1908–?), Yi Muyŏng (1908– 60), Yi Chongmyŏng, Yu Ch’ijin (1905–?), and Kim Yuyŏng (1907–40). Yi Hyosŏk, Yi Chongmyŏng, and Kim Yuyŏng were replaced in 1934 by Pak T’aewŏn (1909–86), Yi Sang (1910–37), and Pak P’aryang (1905–?), and in 1935 Cho Yongman and Yu Ch’ijin were replaced by Kim Yujŏng (1908–37) and Kim Hwant’ae (1909–44). 23. The establishment of the Kuinhoe was noted in the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) on September 1, 1933, and in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily) on August 30, 1933. See Hyŏn Sunyŏng, “Hoegodam ŭl t’onghan Kuinhoe ch’angnip kwajŏng yŏngu” (A Study on the Process of the Foundation of the Group of Nine through Reminiscences), Pip’yŏng munhak (Literature and Criticism) 30 (December 2008): 389–426. The group also held public lectures: see Kim Inyong, “Kuinhoe wŏlp’yŏng pangch’ŏnggi” (A Record of Attending the Group of Nine’s Monthly Review), Chosŏn munhak (Chosŏn Literature) 1, no. 3 (August 1933): 84–88; and “Kuinhoe ŭi munye kangjwa” (The Group of Nine’s Course of Lectures in the Literary Arts), Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily), February 17, 1935. In addition to regular members of the group including Pak T’aewŏn, Yi T’aejun, and Chŏng Chiyong, other well-known authors such as Yi Kwangsu and Kim Tongin were also listed as speakers in the series. 24. Critic Kim Yunsik attributes Paek’s presence in the volume to editor Yi Sang’s architectural “sense of symmetry.” Kim argues that Paek was included in order to produce a balance or symmetry with the modernist poets (Kim Kirim, Chŏng Chiyong, Yi Sang) included in the publication. Kim similarly argues that Kim Yujŏng was included as a counterbalance to modernist Pak T’aewŏn. See Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa ron (History of Modern Korean Literary Criticism), 245–50. 25. Kim Minjŏng, “Kuinhoe rŭl tullŏssan myŏt kaji munje chegi” (Introducing a Number of Questions Surrounding the Group of Nine), 11–12. 26. Ibid., 28. 27. For the purposes of this study I have selected the major prose authors from the group’s later period, but the analysis could also be extended to deal with the poetry of Chŏng Chiyong, Yi Sang, or Kim Kirim. 28. Chang, Deconstructing Communication, xii. 29. Perkins, Is Literary History Possible?, 4. “The assumption that the various genres, periods, schools, traditions, movements, communicative systems, discourses, and epistemes are not baseless and arbitrary groupings, that such classifications can have objective and valid grounds in the literature of the past, is still the fundamental assumption of the discipline, and the premise that empowers it” (ibid., 4). 30. White, The Content of the Form, 27. 31. In this sense of the term, Said’s Orientalism arguably inaugurated colonial discourse studies, linking “knowledge about and power over colonised lands” (Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 44) and opening critical studies of empire to “structures of thinking” manifest not only in historical documents but also in

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“literary and artistic production, in political and scientific writings” that allow insight into “how power works through language, literature, culture, and the institutions which regulate our daily lives” (ibid., 47). While this study follows Said in focusing on connections between discourse and colonial power and takes advantage of the expanded archive that Said’s work authorizes, I move beyond the oft-critiqued tendency to define colonial discourse as that produced solely or primarily by the colonizer. 32. See for example Shin and Robinson, “Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Korea.” 33. MacCabe, “On Discourse,” 188–89. 34. Ibid., 208. 35. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 222. 36. Ibid., 186. 37. This is not to diminish the importance of the specific material aspects of colonization, nor to privilege the broader imperial rhetoric of domination as somehow definitive of reality under Japa nese empire. My focus on cultural or linguistic modes of colonization and aesthetic responses to these conditions stems rather from what I see as the need to make more complex the relationship between colonial rule and its discursive context. 38. Ibid., 201. 39. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 215–16. 40. Ibid., 216, 220. 41. Thus as Robert Tierney points out we have colonial discourse as false speech, an “imperial ventriloquism, the attribution of views by the colonizer to the colonized in order to create the false impression of dialogue,” and discourse as legitimizing rhetoric—both characterized by duality or “duplicity.” See Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 28–32. See also Kyeong-Hee Choi’s important study Beneath the Vermilion Ink: The Making of Modern Korean Literature under Japanese Colonial Censorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). 42. See for example Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity, especially 7–8. 43. Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 180. 44. Megill, Prophets of Extremity, 113. As Megill points out, the interpretive categories of modernism in response to this crisis “turn out to be central to such intellectual trends or movements as psychoanalysis, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism” (ibid., 112). On the relationship between historical rupture and forms of modern subjectivity in relation to Japa nese fiction, see Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction. 45. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 10. 46. The question of interpretation had become a crucial one in East Asia under Japanese empire. See for instance James Dorsey’s study of Kobayashi Hideo, in particular how Kobayashi’s distrust of interpretation and search for a literary experience “beyond articulation” brings to light the question of “how renunciations of the interpretive act themselves constitute literary and ideological interventions.” Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics, 9. 47. The concept of “European diff usionism” is from Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, quoted in Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 429.

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48. In claiming that the modernists struck a position against a communicative model of discourse and consequently focused on tracing the determination of the limits of language within their literary works, I neither take an approach that is constructivist—privileging language as the ultimate determinant of reality—nor treat the colonial political context as the sole referent of fiction from the period. Rather, I aim to mediate these two positions, allowing for both the power of an external authority to fi x the meaning of linguistic utterances and the power of literary works to exceed or undermine the “pragmatic” function of language and in the process emphasize the very ambivalence that characterizes the supposedly univocal interdiction of colonial power. 49. Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 188. 50. Weinstein, Unknowing. 51. Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” 15. 52. Schmid, “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem,’ ” 951–52. 53. Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 428. Chapter One 1. Spiegel, Practicing History, 2. A question of terminology arises here, as Andrew Hewitt points out: If modernism can be characterized as the reduction of reality to text, then (following Peter Bürger) the avant-garde must be distinguished as that which problematizes the “relationship of reality and representation” and insists upon “the reality of the text, rather than upon the textuality of the real.” See Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 14; and Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. While my understanding of modernist literary practice falls closer to Hewitt’s definition of the avant-garde, I will continue to use the term “modernism” here as appropriate to both the local context and to facilitate comparability in present-day debates around the subject. 2. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 4. 3. Chow, The Age of the World Target, 15. 4. Megill, Prophets of Extremity, xii–xiii. 5. Ross, “Introduction: Modernism Reconsidered,” 1. 6. Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” 11. 7. Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily News), April 2, 1938. This installment, the second of five published April 1–6, was titled “ ‘Malharyanŭn kŏt’ kwa ‘kŭriryanŭn kŏt’ ŭi punyŏl” (The Split between ‘What One Intends to Say’ and ‘What One Intends to Depict’). Im Hwa (1908–53) was an influential leftist critic and poet associated with KAPF in the late 1920s and 1930s. 8. Ibid. 9. See Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa” (The Expansion and Deepening of Realism). 10. Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), April 3, 1938. 11. Kim Kirim, “Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” (The Historical Position of Modernism), originally published in Inmun p’yŏngnon (Liberal Arts Review) 1, no. 1 (October 1939): 80–85. I refer here to the version reproduced in Kim Kirim chŏnjip (Collected Works of Kim Kirim), 53–58. Kim Kirim (1908–?) was a well-known

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Notes to Pages 27–31

literary critic and avant-garde poet. A member of the Group of Nine, Kim was educated in Japan during the 1920s with a major in English literature and was influenced by Anglophone critics such as T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, as well as by theories of psychoanalysis. 12. Ibid., 53. 13. Ibid., 54. 14. Ibid., 55. 15. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 208. 16. Kim Kirim, “Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” (The Historical Position of Modernism), 56. 17. Modernism, as Jameson similarly points out, can be understood as a literary form “for which some older common-sense notion of ‘reality’ has become problematical, and with it, a traditional faith in the transparency of language and an unselfconscious practice of mimetic representation, along with the very categories of experience and events themselves.” Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 38. 18. Kim Kirim, “Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” (The Historical Position of Modernism), 58. 19. Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–64) was a leading and prolific literary critic throughout the 1930s. A graduate of Keijō Imperial University in 1933, he was appointed as lecturer there and published articles in the mid-1930s on American and European literature, along with translations of authors such as James Joyce, introducing Korean readers to the works and ideas of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, and I. A. Richards, among others. Ch’oe worked with Group of Nine member Kim Hwant’ae and others toward constructing a literary-critical method that could confront the social crises that proletarian fiction and criticism had, they claimed, been unable to negotiate. 20. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), originally serialized in Chosŏn ilbo during July 1935. I refer here to the version reproduced in Ch’oe Chaesŏ p’yŏngnonjip (Ch’oe Chaesŏ: Essays in Criticism), 185–96. 21. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk minjok munhak non yŏngu (A Study on the Theory of Korean Ethnic-National Literature), 337. 22. For more on the diversity of literary and literary-historical modes under what Ch’oe calls “nationalist literature” during this period, including “Korea-ism” (Chosŏn chuŭii), the sijo revival (sijo puhŭng) movement, class literature (kyegŭp munhak), and the “eclecticist” (chŏlch’ung chuŭi) school, among others, see Kim Yŏngmin, Hanguk munhak pip’yŏng nonjaengsa (History of Literary-Historical Debates in Korea), 225–282. 23. The term is Althusser’s. See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital; see also Jameson’s treatment of Althusser’s antihistoricism in The Political Unconscious, especially 17–102. 24. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 187. 25. Ibid., 188. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 190. 28. Lewis, “The Physics of the Non-Self.” 29. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 194. 30. Ibid., 193.

Notes to Pages 31–35

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31. Ibid., 194. 32. Ibid., 195. 33. Ibid. 34. See Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 305–36; see also Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk kyegŭp munhak undongsa (A History of the Korean Class Literature Movement). 35. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), 310. 36. Ibid., 328. 37. Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), April 1, 1938. 38. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), 336. 39. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 195. 40. Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron” (On the Fiction of Manners), April 6, 1938. Im closes this article by arguing not for the outright rejection of psychological and depictive techniques, but for a critique of each as a historically situated and limited genre toward their eventual dialectical synthesis into a genuinely descriptive narrative form that could “grasp reality as it is.” 41. For an extended consideration of “introversion” and “extroversion” among Korean writers, specifically Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang, see Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa” (The Expansion and Deepening of Realism). 42. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 195. 43. Throughout the article, Ch’oe strives to supplant classifications of literary genre based on ideological orientation—such as “socialist” and “nationalist” literature—with evaluations based on the author’s stance toward social reality and the writer’s narrative technique. 44. Here Ch’oe clarifies his use of the English term “symbol” by inserting the characters for sangjing (ᙗ४). 45. Ibid., 191. 46. Yi Chingyŏng, “Singminji inmin ŭn mal hal su ŏpnŭnga?” (Can the Colonized Not Speak?), 24. 47. Ibid., 3. 48. Ibid. 49. Yi’s article begins by proposing that we assume a naive stance and imagine that a transnational solidarity beyond the framework of the nation-state might in fact have been possible under Japa nese empire and its New East Asian Order. 50. Ibid., 12. 51. This reflects the contradiction of colonialist assimilation, which referred to colonial Koreans as “Japa nese nationals” without extending access to the concomitant rights and privileges of the colonizer. “Despite apparent equality of nationality, a clear dividing line between ‘Japa nese proper’ (naichijin) and ‘colonial subjects’ could be maintained because of the existence of the family registration (kosek) system, which separated individuals into groups defined by place of origin.” These groups outside the “interior,” writes Morris-Suzuki, “served almost as ‘subnationalities’ within the larger community of ‘Japa nese imperial subjects.’ ” Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan, 189.

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Notes to Pages 36–40

52. What comes immediately to mind is Fredric Jameson’s oft-maligned essay on “third-world literature,” in which non-Western literature is tied tightly to political reality and language is that which allegorizes the world; and Aijaz Ahmad’s response that “there is no such thing as a ‘Third World Literature’ which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge.’ ” See Ahmad, In Theory, 96– 97; also Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” 65–88. 53. The objectification of other spaces or times is, in part, what Frederick Cooper is writing about when he tells us that “treating colonialism abstractly, generically, as something to be juxtaposed with an equally flat vision of European ‘modernity,’ ” in fact “obscure[s] the details of colonial history and the experience of people in colonies.” The space of empire was rather a “terrain where concepts were not only imposed” but were also “engaged and contested.” Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 3–4. 54. Hallett, Language and Truth, 6. 55. Said, “Globalizing Literary Study,” 67–68. Said is drawing on Adorno here, who also posits a dialectic between the “isolation of the aesthetic” and its capacity to negatively reflect the “antinomies of the social situation.” The “development of artistic processes,” he writes, “usually classed under the heading of style, corresponds to social development. . . . The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 5. 56. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. Chapter Two 1. Cho Tongil et al., Hanguk munhak kangŭi (Lectures on Korean Literature), 378. 2. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Kuinhoe wa Kubo ŭi modŏnit’i” (The Modernity of Kubo and the Group of Nine), 92. Paek, writing this reminiscent article in postwar South Korea, uses the term “proletarian literature” in a somewhat derogatory sense, suggesting more or less political propaganda. 3. The rise of this new literary tendency in Korea was marked by the emergence of the Group of Nine in August 1933, and we find Pak T’aewŏn joining its ranks in 1934. According to Cho Yongman, an original member of the group, Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang became a familiar pair walking up and down the central thoroughfares of the city during this period: Pak with his tortoiseshell glasses and strange, bowlshaped haircut, tall in a double-breasted overcoat; and a bearded Yi Sang, his face pallid under disheveled hair. See Cho Yongman, “Yi Sang kwa Pak T’aewŏn” (Yi Sang and Pak T’aewŏn), 7. 4. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Kuinhoe wa Kubo ŭi modŏnit’i” (The Modernity of Kubo and the Group of Nine), 93. 5. Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng (Scenes by a Stream) was originally serialized in Chogwang (Morning Light) 2, nos. 8–10 (August–October 1936). 6. Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), vol. 5, 450. 7. Ibid., 246.

Notes to Pages 40–45

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8. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Set’ae p’ungsok myosa kit’a” (Descriptions of Social Manners, Etc.), 116–17, quoted in Son Hwasuk, “Yŏnghwajŏk kibŏp ŭi suyong kwa chakka ŭisik” (Authorial Consciousness and the Appropriation of Cinematic Technique), 214–15. 9. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa” (The Expansion and Deepening of Realism), November 3, 1936. 10. Ibid., October 31, 1936. 11. Ibid., November 3, 1936. 12. Ibid., November 5, 1936. 13. Pak is thought to have gone north in June 1950. 14. Chŏng Hyŏnsuk, “Pak T’aewŏn yŏngu ŭi hyŏnhwang kwa kwaje” (The Present State and Themes of Research on Pak T’aewŏn), 17. 15. See Kim Sangt’ae, “Pak T’aewŏn sosŏl kwa sirhŏm ŭi ŏnŏ” (Pak T’aewŏn’s Fiction and Experimental Language), in Hanguk hyŏndae munhak ron (On Modern Korean Literature). 16. Chŏng Hyŏnsuk, “Pak T’aewŏn yŏngu ŭi hyŏnhwang kwa kwaje” (The Present State and Themes of Research on Pak T’aewŏn), 17. 17. Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 280–81. 18. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Rialijŭm ŭi hwaktae wa simhwa” (The Expansion and Deepening of Realism), November 3, 1936. 19. An Hoenam, “Pak T’aewŏn chŏ Kubossi ŭi iril” (Pak T’aewŏn’s Kubo’s Day). Pak’s collection of short stories was published under the title Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo) by Munjangsa on December 7, 1938. 20. An Hoenam, “Chakka Pak T’aewŏn ron” (The Author Pak T’aewŏn), 146. 21. Faulkner, Modernism, 16. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Auerbach, Mimesis, 538. 24. Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, 33–35. 25. Considered a modernist, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) was one of the founders of the New Sensationalist School (Shinkankaku-ha) in the early 1920s. His novel Shanhai (Shanghai, 1928–31) is famous in part for its use of stream-of-consciousness narration. Celebrated short story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) was also known in part for his technical skill as a modernist. 26. Translated by Pak as “Tosaltcha,” Hemingway’s “The Killers” was originally published in March 1927. 27. Kim Sangt’ae, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak ron (On Modern Korean Literature), 368. 28. Ibid., 369. 29. Faulkner, Modernism, 1. 30. Ibid., 6. 31. Kim Sangt’ae, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak ron (On Modern Korean Literature), 371–73. 32. Son Hwasuk, “Yŏnghwajŏk kibŏp ŭi suyong kwa chakka ŭisik” (Authorial Consciousness and the Appropriation of Cinematic Technique), 208. See also Theodore Hughes’s discussion of the literary text as integrated into the visual culture of

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Notes to Pages 45–49

modernity in Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, especially his theorization of the “verbal-visual” and the relationship between word and image in literary texts in both colonial and postcolonial Korea. 33. Son Hwasuk, “Yŏnghwajŏk kibŏp ŭi suyong kwa chakka ŭisik” (Authorial Consciousness and the Appropriation of Cinematic Technique), 215. 34. Ibid., 218. 35. Ibid., 214. 36. Ibid., 219. Son’s example is Pudovkin. Lunn refers to Eisenstein’s Marxist constructivism as an example, where montage is seen as an “internal combustion engine”—the director focuses the camera on “selected physical details” and uses “carefully composed symbolic cross-references” to achieve his effect. Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, 54. It is in showing how a montage is created that “the process of ‘artificially’ reconstructing the social whole will be bared.” Ibid., 87. 37. Son Hwasuk, “Yŏnghwajŏk kibŏp ŭi suyong kwa chakka ŭisik” (Authorial Consciousness and the Appropriation of Cinematic Technique), 224. “As compared to a social life that responds positively and sensitively to political and epochal changes,” Son writes, “everyday life has a monotonous and cyclical structure. This is precisely the origin of the fact that we can find no trace of the social issues of that time, or reflection of period-specific events.” 38. Ibid., 223–24. 39. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 456–57. 40. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 6. 41. As Tierney notes, here “one needs to supplement Bhabha’s idea of colonial mimicry with the subsidiary notion of imperial mimicry—the mimicry by one imperial power of another.” Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 16. 42. “Ch’angjak yŏrok: p’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (A Follow-Up to Writing: Representation, Depiction, Technique) was serialized in the Chosŏn chungang ilbo (Chosŏn Central Daily), appearing on December 17–20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 1934. 43. This use of the comma appears on the first page of One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo, when the protagonist’s mother asks him, “Are you going somewhere?” Pak wrote that he regarded his “passion for punctuation” as equal to his interest in composition and style as a whole. Pak, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 17, 1934. 44. Ibid., December 18, 1934. 45. Ibid., December 20, 1934. 46. Ibid. It is no coincidence that Pak frequently takes examples from “loan words” common in Korea at the time, locating a slippage of meaning at the point of relationship between two different language systems. Pak is clearly aware here of what Lydia Liu points out, that languages “travel” and are “reinvented” in local, historically specific contexts. See Lydia Liu, “Translingual Practice”; and Liu, Translingual Practice. 47. The 1934 text of Pak’s article is formatted vertically, as was common practice in newspaper publication at the time. 48. Pak, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 22, 1934. 49. Daudet, Sapho, 13.

Notes to Pages 49–55

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50. Pak presumably read Itō Sei’s 1932 translation of Ulysses into Japa nese. 51. Taech’angok is the name of a well-known restaurant on Chongno in the 1930s. 52. Pak T’aewŏn, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 31, 1934. See also Pak, Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo), 55–56. Emphases in the original. 53. Pak T’aewŏn, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 31, 1934. 54. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 328. 55. Pak T’aewŏn, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 23, 1934. 56. Ibid., December 30, 1934. 57. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 373. 58. Ibid., 373. 59. Watzlawick et al., Pragmatics of Human Communication, 62. 60. Ching, Becoming “Japanese,” 92. 61. Ibid., 91. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 95–96. 64. Ibid., 97. “What I want to underscore is the kōminka entailed for the colonized, as dōka did not, the ‘interiorization’ of an objective colonial antagonism into a subjective struggle over, not between, colonial identities. The historical significance of kōminka was that for the first time in Taiwanese colonial history, the struggle over identity emerges as the dominant discourse for the colonized.” Ibid., 96. 65. Ibid., 11. 66. Gann, “Western and Japa nese Colonialism,” 517. 67. Ching, Becoming “Japanese,” 106. 68. Yee Yong-suk, “ ‘Dōka’ to wa nanika” (What Is Doka?), 157, quoted in Ching, Becoming “Japanese,” 105. 69. Arakawa Gorō, Saikin Chōsen jijō (Recent State of Affairs in Korea), 86–87, quoted in Duus, The Abacus and the Sword, 398. 70. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. Emphasis in the original. 71. Ibid., 90. 72. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 73. Ching, “Yellow Skin, White Masks,” 82. 74. Ryang, “Japa nese Travellers’ Accounts of Korea,” 144. 75. Tomoda Yoshitake, Shina, Manshū, Chōsen ryokō (Travels in China, Manchuria, and Korea), 445, 421, quoted in Ryang, “Japa nese Travellers’ Accounts of Korea,” 146. 76. Ryang, “Japa nese Travellers’ Accounts of Korea,” 148. 77. Tokutomi Sohō, Ryōkyōkyoryūshi (Sojourn Diaries of the Two Capitals), 264– 65, quoted in Ryang, “Japa nese Travellers’ Accounts of Korea,” 149. 78. Although much of the the initial work—primarily by an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Stanford in the early 1950s—and subsequent research in this area has focused on schizophrenia, others have sought links between double-bind situations and a wider range of disorders. See Sluzki and Verón, “The Double Bind as a Universal Pathogenic Situation,” 228–40.

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Notes to Pages 55–63

79. Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” 253–54. 80. Ibid., 259. 81. Ibid., 257. 82. Ibid. 83. Sluzki and Verón, “The Double Bind as a Universal Pathogenic Situation,” 229. 84. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 111. 85. See Sluzki and Verón, “The Double Bind as a Universal Pathogenic Situation.” 86. Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa ron (History of Modern Korean Literary Criticism), 256. 87. Sluzki et al., “Transactional Disqualification,” 226. 88. See Fujii, Complicit Fictions. Chapter Three 1. Dean, “Art as Symptom,” 26–27. 2. See Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-hermeneutics,” 7–12. 3. Lacan, Écrits, 288. 4. Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-hermeneutics,” 11. For Laplanche the unintelligible message from the other seduces one into relationality (Dean, “Art as Symptom,” 35); see also Fletcher, “Introduction.” 5. See Laseque, “Des hystéries périphériques,” 655, quoted in Showalter, Hystories, 14. “The definition of hysteria has never been given and never will be. The symptoms are not constant enough, nor sufficiently similar in form or equal in duration and intensity that one type, even descriptive, could comprise them all.” 6. Eysteinsson and Liska, “Introduction,” 1. 7. Abse, The Diagnosis of Hysteria, 9. 8. Freud, “Dora,” 12. 9. Freud, “The Defence Neuro-Psychoses (1894),” 63. 10. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 12. According to Lacan, this is a universal feature of desire, exemplified in the hysteric. See Rabaté, Jacques Lacan, 23. 11. See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, especially 3–70; see also Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. 12. Friedman, “Definitional Excursions,” 498. 13. Dora, in Freud’s famous example, desired Frau K. because she identified with Herr K. and took his desire to be her own. 14. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 67. 15. These two points stem from the four theses of the hysteric as described by Alenka Zupančič. The hysteric is one who insists that: “an injustice is being done to the subject”; “the Master is incompetent”; “the signifier always fails to account for the truth”; and “satisfaction is always a false satisfaction.” Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” 164. See also Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII. 16. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 113.

Notes to Pages 63–68

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17. Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo) was fi rst published serially in Chosŏn chungang ilbo (Chosŏn Central Daily) from August 1 to September 19, 1934. I cite throughout from the version reprinted in Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril (One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo), 17–76. 18. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 21. 19. Ch’ae Hosŏk, Hanguk kŭndae munhak kwa kyemong ŭi sŏsa (Korean Literature and the Narration of Enlightenment), 448. 20. Ulysses takes place between 8 a.m. and roughly 2:45 a.m. on June 16–17, 1904; Kubo’s day occurs between approximately the same hours (the final section is titled “2 a.m.”) during a summer month; both protagonists wander the colonial city primarily on foot. 21. Wells, “James Joyce,” 331. 22. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 23. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Ibid., 36. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. Ibid., 40. 27. Ibid., 37. 28. Lutz, American Ner vousness, 20. 29. Beard, A Practical Treatise on Ner vous Exhaustion, 12. 30. See also Freud, “The Justification for Detaching from Neurasthenia a Par ticular Syndrome,” 104–6. 31. Lutz, American Ner vousness, 3. 32. Beard, American Ner vousness, vi. Beard likens the human ner vous system to “Edison’s electric light,” where the addition of more lamps requires a consequent increase in power. Ibid., 98–99. 33. Ibid., 128–30. 34. Ibid., 106. 35. On the perception of neurasthenia (J. shinkei suijaku) in Japan as both a progressive ailment and as a threat to national development, see Frühstuck, Colonizing Sex; on a similar logic of conservation in the case of sexual neurasthenia (C. xing shenjing shuairuo) in Republican China, see Shapiro, “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea”; see also Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China, especially 163–64. 36. “Singyŏng soeyagŭn pomch’ŏle simhada” (Neurasthenia Takes Hold in Spring). 37. An Chongil, “Singyŏng soeyagŭn ŏttŏn pyŏnginga” (Neurasthenia—What Sort of Disease Is It?), Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily News), February 26, 1934. An cites Beard in this installment. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., March 4, 1934. 40. Ibid., February 26, 1934. 41. This is especially apparent in An’s recommendation of psychotherapy as the most important method toward a cure for sexual neurasthenia. Ibid., March 2, 1934. 42. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 30. 43. Ibid., 63. 44. See, for example, Son Hwasuk, “Yŏnghwajŏk kibŏp ŭi suyong kwa chakka ŭisik” (Authorial Consciousness and the Appropriation of Cinematic Technique), 207–25.

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Notes to Pages 68–72

45. Ch’ae Hosŏk, Hanguk kŭndae munhak kwa kyemong ŭi sŏsa (Korean Literature and the Narration of Enlightenment), 448. 46. Ibid., 446. 47. Ch’oe Hyesil, “Kyŏngsŏng ŭi tosihwaga” (The Urbanization of Kyŏngsŏng), 179–80. 48. This, as both Ch’ae Hosŏk and Ch’oe Hyesil point out, is related to Pak’s technique of “modernologie” (kohyŏnhak, J. kōgengaku), which originated with Japa nese architect and ethnographer Kon Wajirō, who transformed an older term for the “study of antiquity” (kogohak, J. kōgogaku) into the neologism kohyŏnhak, the “study of the modern,” to signify the systematic and scientific description of modern life and society. See Silverberg, “Constructing the Japa nese Ethnography of Modernity,” 30–54. 49. Kang Simho et al., “Ilche singminji ch’iha Kyŏngsŏngbumin ŭi tosijŏk kamsusŏng hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng yŏngu” (The Process of the Formation of Urban Sensibility in Colonial Kyŏngsŏng), 129. 50. “The Freudian topography of the ego shows us how a hysteric . . . uses his or her ego in order to raise the question, that is, precisely in order not to raise it,” Lacan writes. “The structure of a neurosis is essentially a question.” Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, 174. 51. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 38. This is “the formula that originated in the experience of the hysteric . . . —man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” See also Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 54. 52. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 17. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. Ibid., 26. 55. Kang Unsŏk, Hanguk modŏnijŭm sosŏl yŏngu (Research on Korean Modernist Fiction), 67. 56. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 23–24. 57. Ibid., 34. 58. The poet is Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912). 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 24–25. 61. Ibid., 25. 62. Ibid., 32. 63. Ibid., 33. 64. Ibid., 34. 65. Ibid., 59. 66. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 7. 67. Freud, “Anxiety,” 396. 68. Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 253. 69. “In the case of the hysteric, inasmuch as desire is sustained in fantasy only by the lack of satisfaction the hysteric brings desire by slipping away as its object.” Lacan, Écrits, 308. 70. See Pak T’aewŏn, “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” (Representation, Depiction, Technique), December 31, 1934. 71. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 55.

Notes to Pages 72–80

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72. The name “Kubo” can be represented in a variety of combinations of logographs. The character’s name (ʸ཈) is similar to, but not the same as, Pak T’aewŏn’s pen name (ɮ཈), although Pak also used his character’s name. Pak’s original pen name was Mongbo (‫ق‬཈), which he began using in 1929. 73. Ibid., 48. 74. Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 254. 75. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 47. 76. Ibid., 48. 77. Ibid. The “idler” (yumin) is defined by critic Kim Yunsik as one who sees that no choice is perfect and is therefore immobilized, suggesting the perpetual dissatisfaction of the hysteric. See Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa ron (History of Modern Korean Literary Criticism), 277–89. 78. Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, May 31, 1897, in The Standard Edition, vol. 1, 256. 79. Pak T’aewŏn, Kubo, 63. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 70. 82. Ibid., 71. 83. To take just one instance, directly preceding the scene with the prostitutes, Kubo insults a passing woman by grinning at something he is remembering—a miscommunication that Kubo finds immensely amusing. 84. Sakai, “Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ ” 20. 85. See Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 41–66. 86. Dean, “Art as Symptom,” 36. Chapter Four 1. Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” 11. 2. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 6. 3. Yŏm Muung, Minjung sidae ŭi munhak (Literature of the Era of the People), 61. 4. This is where critic Kim Yunsik locates the advent of modernism in Korea, at the juncture of the importing of European modernism into the colonial context and the assumption of a narrative vision narrow enough to avoid dealing with the broader sociopolitical context of colonization. See Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean literature), 292. 5. Born into a rural, landowning family in 1908, Kim Yujŏng’s literary career did not begin in earnest until 1935, only two years before his untimely death. In this brief time he published twenty-eight stories, one long translation, and a number of essays and letters. During 1936, his work appeared in a major literary or popular journal or newspaper almost once a month. His rural origins, his association with an agricultural lifestyle, his provincial dialect, and his displacement to the city are all key biographical details at the base of much postwar South Korean literary-critical work on Kim. See Kim Yŏnggi, “Kim Yujŏng ŭi kamun” (Kim Yujŏng’s Family), 13–22; and Chŏn Sinjae, ed., Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts). 6. On this point see Kim Yunsik, Hanguk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa ron (History of Modern Korean Literary Criticism), 245–50.

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Notes to Pages 81–84

7. While I refer to the perceived erosion of referentiality and the aesthetic and literary-critical responses to this failure of meaning in late colonial-period Korea as a “crisis of representation” and throughout primarily emphasize the linguistic representation of experience or cognition, I follow Kim Yujŏng here in concluding with a move toward an ethical consideration of representation in the sense of “standing in for” or “speaking for.” 8. Summary taken primarily from Kim Yŏnggi, “Kim Yujŏng ŭi kamun” (Kim Yujŏng’s Family) and Chŏn Sinjae, ed., Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts). 9. “Sonakpi” (A Sudden Shower) was serialized in six installments between January 29 and February 4, 1935, in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily News). 10. Kim Yunsik points out that it is not entirely clear whether Kim Yujŏng was born in Sille Village or in Seoul. See Kim Yunsik, “Tŭlpyŏngi sasang” (Prostitute Thought), 281. 11. Yu Insuk, “Kim Yujŏng munhak yŏngusa” (History of Research on Kim Yujŏng’s Literature), 24. Kim Ujong provides a rare dissenting opinion, arguing that Kim Yujŏng lacks historical consciousness due to what the critic calls the “blind spot of lyricism”—“The author always wears glasses colored by good will when dealing with reality,” and consequently shapes his stories “without a precise objective apprehension of reality.” These “glasses” render Kim Yujŏng shortsighted and unable to view his “native place” objectively and with a long historical perspective. See Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 267–72. 12. Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyŏn, Hanguk munhaksa (History of Korean Literature), 323. 13. Yi Chaesŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 370. 14. Ibid., 371. 15. Chŏng Hansuk, Hyŏndae Hanguk munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), 165. 16. Ibid., 165. “Tongbaek kkot” (The Camellias) was originally published in the May 1936 issue of the journal Chogwang (Morning Light), 273–80. 17. Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), 476–77. 18. Kim Yunsik, “Tŭlpyŏngi sasang” (Prostitute Thought), 281. 19. Ibid., 281. 20. Kim Chonggŏn, Kuinhoe sosŏl ŭi konggan sŏlchŏng kwa chakka ŭisik (Authorial Consciousness and the Establishment of Space in the Fiction of the Group of Nine), 31. 21. Ibid., 36. 22. Ibid., 39. 23. “Ch’onggak kwa maengkkongi” (The Bachelor and the Frog), Kim’s second published work, originally appeared in September 1933, in the journal Sinyŏsŏng (New Woman): 127–33. 24. Kim Chonggŏn, Kuinhoe sosŏl ŭi konggan sŏlchŏng kwa chakka ŭisik (Authorial Consciousness and the Establishment of Space in the Fiction of the Group of Nine), 36.

Notes to Pages 85–89

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25. “Tukkŏbi” (Toad) was published in the Group of Nine’s journal Si wa sosŏl (Poetry and Fiction) in March 1936. 26. Kim Yunsik, “Tŭlpyŏngi sasang” (Prostitute Thought), 279. 27. Ibid., 274–75. 28. Son Chongŏp, Kŭkchang kwa sup (The Theater and the Forest), 201. 29. Ibid., 215. 30. Ibid., 205. 31. “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed) was published in Chogwang (Morning Light) (March 1937): 185–93, as part of a collection of pieces by various authors under the heading “Love Letters.” Here I quote from the text as it appears in Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 464– 72. The letter was most likely written around January 10, 1937, to Pak Pongja (1909–88), who had rejected his “passionate advances” (Kim had gone so far as to publish a proposal of sorts in a popular women’s journal) the previous year. Pak later married Kim’s acquaintance and member of the Kuinhoe, critic Kim Hwant’ae (1909–44). 32. Sin Tonguk, “Sunggomi wa kolgyemi ŭi yangsang” (Aspects of Humorous and Sublime Aesthetics), 742. 33. Chŏn Sinjae, “Pojŏngp’an sŏmun” (Revised Introduction), 4. Quoted in Son Chongŏp, Kŭkchang kwa sup (The Theater and the Forest), 214. 34. Son Chongŏp, Kŭkchang kwa sup (The Theater and the Forest), 208. 35. “P’yŏnji rŭl ponaesinŭn iyu ka nabyŏn e issŭriyo.” The insinuation is that behind Kim’s profession of love is his sexual desire for her. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 465. 36. Kim does not limit “art for art’s sake” to the modernism of the “new psychological” camp, applying it more broadly to authors who confidently present the truth of the thing itself in language. 37. Alain Badiou identifies a similar process or configuration as hostile to truth in the present: “The name ‘culture’ comes to obliterate that of ‘art.’ The word ‘technology’ obliterates the word ‘science.’ The word ‘management’ obliterates the word ‘politics.’ The word ‘sexuality’ obliterates love.” See Badiou, Saint Paul, 12. 38. Kim opens the letter with this statement of unknowability: “It is extremely difficult to know another. I don’t know who you are, you don’t know who I am— perhaps this is the way it should be.” Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 464. 39. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 8. 40. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 468–69. 41. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 9. 42. Ibid., 194n3. Sakai is citing Derrida’s well-known analysis of Poe’s The Purloined Letter. 43. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 469. 44. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 10. 45. Ibid., 4. 46. Ibid., 10. Barthes levels a similar critique at the discourse of history and its assumed capacity to objectively present the “facts”; the “real” is “never anything but an unformulated signified, sheltered behind the apparent omnipotence of the referent.” Ibid., 139.

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Notes to Pages 89–96

47. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 188. 48. Lukács, Writer and Critic, 144. 49. See Ching, Becoming “Japanese.” 50. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 465. 51. The attempt to attain a total expression would be equivalent to presenting the object/subject itself, which would mean, in a sense, the death of that subject/object and its complete subjection to the (re)presentation. It is such attempts at total expression—in realist-naturalist fiction and psychological fiction, via a fineness of detail, a depth of perspective—that Kim criticizes in his essay. 52. Lukács, Writer and Critic, 31–32. 53. Ibid., 134. 54. Ibid., 140. “What we today call formalism is the expression of this establishment of a peripheral point as the centre of objectivity, a subjectivist principle as the basis for objectivity.” Ibid., 107. 55. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 471–72. 56. Ibid., 465. 57. Ibid., 472. 58. “Realism—the representation of reality in writing and art—is neither modernism’s opposite nor its historically necessary predecessor. If any one entity occupies that position, it is idealism.” See Moi, Henrik Ibsen, 67. For a discussion of the early modern formation of Korean literary realism, see Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism,” 165–92. 59. Moi, Henrik Ibsen, 72–73. 60. Ibid., 87–89. 61. Ibid., 90. 62. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 466. 63. Moi, Henrik Ibsen, 20. 64. See Perkins, Is Literary History Possible?, 131–32. 65. Definition taken from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), quoted in Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 8. 66. Lang, Irony/Humor, 51. 67. Ibid., 25. 68. Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, 111. 69. While Hatzimanolis writes on such demands for authenticity and otherness in the context of multicultural Australia, the question of the institutional desire for subjects who speak “as themselves” may also be raised in the colonial setting. Among other possible meanings and uses, “ethnicity” might then be understood as a status assigned to the perceived or enforced difference between the colonized and colonizer. 70. Hatzimanolis, “Multiple Ethnicity Disorder.” See also Hatzimanolis, “Ethnic Double Agents.” Chapter Five 1. Kim Sangt’ae, “Kim Yujŏng kwa haehak ŭi mihak” (Kim Yujŏng and the Aesthetic of Humor), 324–25.

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2. It is in this sense that Friedrich Schlegel defined irony as “eine permanente Parekbase,” where “parabasis is understood as what is called in English criticism the ‘self-conscious narrator,’ the author’s intrusion that disrupts the fictional illusion.” de Man, Blindness and Insight, 218–19. 3. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 8–9. One could argue that Ch’oe’s notion of satire is closer to irony in its amorality, under Lewis’s influence: see Lewis, Men without Art, especially “The Greatest Satire Is Non-moral,” 85–93. 4. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 19. 5. Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid. Irony thus “regards assumption as presumption and therefore innocence as guilt. Simple ignorance is safe from irony, but ignorance compounded with the least degree of confidence counts as intellectual hubris and is a punishable offence.” Ibid., 30. 7. Ibid., 42. Kim Sangt’ae claims that the irony in Kim Yujŏng’s case is situational in that it is “related to the political and economic situation of that time.” Kim Sangt’ae, “Kim Yujŏng kwa haehak ŭi mihak” (Kim Yujŏng and the Aesthetic of Humor), 327. 8. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 4. 9. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 120. According to Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony, this “amicable community” is formed in the reading and interpretation of the ironic text. Encountering incongruity, the reader “is required to reject the literal meaning of the text” (10); considers alternative interpretations; decides whether or not the “implied author” sees similar contradictions in the text; and chooses a new, reconstructed meaning “necessarily . . . in harmony with the unspoken beliefs that the reader has decided to attribute” to the author (12), ultimately rejecting the entire (now absurd) “structure of meaning” that supports the literal reading and stepping onto the “firmer ground” of the “higher” ironic meaning (36–37). 10. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 28–29. 11. Ibid., 73. Emphasis in original. 12. Ibid., 33. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Chŏng Hansuk, Hyŏndae Hanguk munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), 167. 15. Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), vol. 5, 476–77. Cho dubs Kim’s fiction “satirical-humorous” (p’ungja haehak sosŏl) in this passage. 16. Lang, Irony/Humor, 5. 17. Ibid., 43. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Ibid., 8–9. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 1–2. 23. Ibid., 21. This is precisely what occurs in the literary field of 1930s Kyŏngsŏng: what we see in Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Im Hwa’s critical pieces, and in Kim Yujŏng’s “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” above, is that the “efficacy of words” or the possibility of direct communication in language is constantly in question, and that this question is at the root of Kim Yujŏng’s creative writing.

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Notes to Pages 100–107

24. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 20. 25. Here I refer to the edition published in Kim Yujŏng, Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 29–37. 26. This term, t’ŏmuni ŏmnŭn kongsang, is Kim Sangt’ae’s. 27. “Kŭm ttanŭn k’ongbat” (Gathering Gold in the Bean Field) was originally published in Kaebyŏk (Creation) 2 (March 1935): 23, 51–64. Here I quote from the version published in Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 64–76. 28. Chŏng Hansuk, Hyŏndae Hanguk munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), 166. Critic Kim Ch’ŏl argues that money is the single source of emotional reaction among the characters in Kim’s work, the medium by which relations—of love, hatred, compassion, kindness, jealousy, distrust, betrayal, envy, and so on— are established between humans; the source of human desire and the single means to the realization of that desire. See Kim Ch’ŏl, “Kkum—hwanggŭm—hyŏnsil” (Dream— Gold—Reality), 256. 29. Kim Sangt’ae, “Kim Yujŏng kwa haehak ŭi mihak” (Kim Yujŏng and the Aesthetic of Humor), 330. 30. “Pom—Pom” (Spring—Spring) was originally published in Chogwang (Morning Light) (December 1935): 323–33. Here I refer to the version published in Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 156–68. 31. Ibid., 156. 32. Ibid., 164. 33. Ibid., 157. 34. Ibid., 162. 35. Ibid., 162–63. 36. Ibid., 157. 37. Ibid., 161. 38. Ibid., 165. 39. Ibid., 167. Some later reprintings of “Spring—Spring” reverse the fi nal two paragraphs, making the fight scenes contiguous and concluding with the reconciliation between Pongp’il and the protagonist. The original text in Chogwang (Morning Light), however, maintains a more indeterminate ending. 40. Kim Yujŏng, “Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak” (Thoughts from a Sickbed), 464. 41. “Ttaengppyŏt” (The Scorching Heat) was originally published in Yŏsŏng (Woman) (February 1937): 92–95. The text is reproduced in Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 324–31; here I quote from “The Scorching Heat,” in Camellias, 25–42. 42. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 16. 43. Kim Yujŏng, “The Scorching Heat,” 37–38. 44. A. E. Dyson, quoted in Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 5. 45. Kim Sangt’ae, “Kim Yujŏng kwa haehak ŭi mihak” (Kim Yujŏng and the Aesthetic of Humor), 323. 46. Kim Yujŏng, “The Scorching Heat,” 33. 47. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 3. 48. Ibid., 7. My emphasis. Northrop Frye writes that “the literary structure is ironic because ‘what it says’ is always different in kind or degree from ‘what it

Notes to Pages 107–112

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means.’ In discursive writing what is said tends to approximate, ideally to become identified with, what is meant.” Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 81. 49. Kim Sangt’ae, “Kim Yujŏng kwa haehak ŭi mihak” (Kim Yujŏng and the Aesthetic of Humor), 324. 50. Ibid., 327–29. 51. Lang, Irony/Humor, 42. 52. Quine, Word and Object, 271–72. 53. On the linguistic turn in philosophy, see Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 35; Bergmann, Meaning and Existence; Bergmann, Logic and Reality; Rorty, The Linguistic Turn. 54. Sluzki et al., “Transactional Disqualification: Research on the Double Bind,” 226. The authors are here discussing schizophrenia, a description I borrow in order to emphasize a similar set of conditions at the root of the production of modernist texts. 55. Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, 112. “In general, and independent of any specification according to historical time, the most crucial issues of irony reside in the area of self-conscious saying and writing and concern the problems of linguistic articulation, communication, and understanding in regard to truth. The ironic manner of expression can be described as attempting to transcend the restrictions of normal discourse and straightforward speech by making the ineffable articulate, at least indirectly, through a great number of verbal strategies, and accomplishing what lies beyond the reach of direct communication.” Ibid., 111. 56. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 195–96. 57. Lang, Irony/Humor, 25. 58. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 213. 59. Ibid., 213. 60. Ibid., 189. 61. Lang, Irony/Humor, 50. 62. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 222. 63. This is counter to a Platonic economic conception of language, where “meaning, or truth, is equated with gold (an absolute standard of value), whereas language functions as a kind of paper currency or other medium of exchange, false or insincere language naturally being regarded as bogus or counterfeit money.” Lang, Irony/ Humor, 2. For Kierkegaard, irony is thus an “unredeemable currency,” a symbolic money that cannot be turned in for “gold.” “ ‘That there is in the ironist . . . an Urgrund, a hard currency, is indisputable; yet the coin he mints does not itself bear the real value but is a nothingness like paper money; and yet all the ironist’s transactions with the world are carried on with this kind of currency’ ” Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1989), 88. Quoted in Lang, Irony/Humor, 31. 64. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 120. 65. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1966), 271. Quoted in Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 120. 66. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 121. 67. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, 11–12. 68. The first example is taken from “Manmubang” (Scoundrels), originally serialized in thirteen installments in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily News), July 17–30,

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Notes to Pages 112–119

1935; the second is taken from “Anhae” (Wife), published in Sahae kongnon (World Opinion) (December 1935): 167–75. 69. Extending Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s terms, what we again see with Kim is a self-satirical irony, a critique not only of the objective social world but also of the self, presented with a linguistic self-consciousness that calls attention to the fictional or ambiguous nature of language (the text) itself—an arguably modernist technique. 70. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, 112. 71. Knox, The Word IRONY and Its Context, 30. 72. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 241. My emphasis. 73. Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 120. 74. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1966), 271. Quoted in Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 120. 75. Lang, Irony/Humor, 43. 76. Ibid., 41. 77. “Pom kwa ttaraji” (Spring and a Lowlife) was originally published in Sinin munhak (Newcomers’ Literature) (Ch’ŏngjosa, January 1936), 265–69. I quote here from the version reproduced in Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 185–90. 78. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 230. 79. Kim Yujŏng, Wŏnbon Kim Yujŏng chŏnjip (Kim Yujŏng’s Collected Works: Original Texts), 185. 80. In the passages of stream-of-consciousness or first-person narration, the protagonist often refers to himself as kkakjjaengi, a craft y fellow. 81. Ibid., 186. 82. Ibid., 188. 83. Ibid. 84. Possibly the voice of a movie host, narrating the silent fi lm. 85. Ibid., 190. The ttaraji’s shoes are secondhand and too large, and are impeding him as he tries to keep up with the woman. 86. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 230. 87. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “P’ungja munhak non” (On Satirical Literature), 194. 88. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 93–94. 89. Ibid., 38. 90. Muecke points out that “general” irony has existed only during the last two hundred years, emerging from a modern “awareness of life as being fundamentally and inescapably at odds with itself or with the world at large.” Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 123. Muecke, Furst, and other theorists of irony sometimes use “modern” to refer to the twentieth century, but often understand the term to encompass the entire romantic period as well, with roots in the late eighteenth century. 91. Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, 66–67. The author is paraphrasing Friedrich Schlegel. 92. Lang, Irony/Humor, 14. 93. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 42. For Furst, this “instability of meaning” rose over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Eu rope, a transformation of Western civilization from the Renaissance into the modern period.

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94. Ibid., 39–40. Furst is paraphrasing Locke here, from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). 95. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 230–31. 96. Ibid., 239. 97. Ibid., 228. 98. The relationship between literary production and social reality that Ch’oe suggests in his essay can be understood as similar to that in Fredric Jameson’s critique of immanent literary histories, where he claims that the examination of the semantic and structural preconditions of an aesthetic form does not necessarily suggest that art reflects historical events or political situations. “From any point of view . . . —whether that of the formal possibilities themselves, or of their content— every great formal innovation is determinate, and reflects a situation that cannot immediately be assimilated to those which may precede or follow it.” As such, the work of art must be read as “an unstable and provisory solution to an aesthetic dilemma which is itself the manifestation of a social and historical contradiction.” Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 93–94. Chapter Six 1. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition) (Seoul: Munjangsa, 1940). Throughout I refer to the version edited and annotated by Chang Yŏngu (Kip’ŭnsaem, 1997), which is based on an enlarged and revised edition of the Lectures published in 1948. 2. Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 188. 3. This phrasing is from Ong’s discussion of Saussure: See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 17. 4. Yi T’aejun’s pen name was Sanghŏ (ࢁወ). Kwŏn Yŏngmin lists Yi’s date of death as 1970, but other sources decline to provide a definite date, given the lack of clarity surrounding his life and death in North Korea. See Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 470. Biographical details taken primarily from Pak Hŏnho, Yi T’aejun kwa Hanguk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi sŏnggyŏk (Yi T’aejun and the Character of Korean Modern Fiction); and Min Ch’unghwan, Yi T’aejun yŏngu (Research on Yi T’aejun). Much of the biographical detail in these texts seems to have been gleaned from Yi T’aejun’s own autobiographical and fictional writings. 5. Min Ch’unghwan, drawing on Yi’s semiautobiographical work Sasang ŭi wŏlya (A Moonlit Night of Thought, 1946), speculates that Yi’s father—described as suddenly fleeing the country via Nagasaki then into Manchuria—was a member of a group of enlightenment intellectuals whose plans at reforming Chosŏn set them at odds with the Japa nese authorities. Min, Yi T’aejun yŏngu (Research on Yi T’aejun), 26. 6. Yi had begun publishing in earnest in 1929, and by 1932 was producing what are now well-known works, including “Sŏgŭlp’ŭn iyagi” (Sad Story, Sin Tonga [New East Asia], September 1932), “Kkot namu nŭn simŏ nok’o” (Plant a Flowering Tree, Sin Tonga [New East Asia], March 1933), and “Talppam” (Moonlit Night, Chungang, November 1933).

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Notes to Page 124

7. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, among others, links this turn to classicism with the plight of colonized intellectuals and artists under an increasingly harsh Japa nese rule. Without recourse to political action and under colonial censorship, Yi “depicted the interiority of an intellectual author who had experienced colonial modernity and its intense discord” in short fiction such as “Tokki iyagi” (Rabbit Story, Munjang [Literature], February 1941). See Kwŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 476–77. Yu Chongho also finds parallels between the author’s situation and the progression of his fiction over time: “Kohyang” (Hometown, serialized in the Tonga ilbo [East Asia Daily News], April 21–29, 1931) protagonist Kim Yunjŏn finds scenes of lethargy, a social movement in prison, and the collapse of ineffective colonial intellectuals (reflecting Yi’s perceptions of Seoul after returning from Japan); “Changma” (Rainy Spell, Chogwang [Morning Light], October 1936) presents an established author chafing under the restraints of a cloying and enforced domestic existence; and “T’okki iyagi” (Rabbit Story) reflects the period after Korean-language newspapers had stopped publishing—the protagonist must abandon the rabbits that he has been raising, leaving them without food or water. See Yu Chongho, “Ingan sajŏnŭl ponŭn chaemi” (The Pleasure of Reading the Human Dictionary), 51–57. 8. Evidence supporting claims of conversion are often taken from passages supporting the imperial effort in Yi’s journal Munjang (Literature), for example, this from November 1940: “The world is taking up arms. The empire’s situation demands of our nation a universal conscription. The Association of Literary Men is generally mobilized, visiting the Training School to observe the thousand zealous youth of the peninsula, as they train night and day aspiring to become soldiers of empire; I realize that this duty of the literary man [to encourage these soldiers in training] is of great importance.” Quoted in Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 244. 9. See Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, particularly chapter 5. 10. See Suh, Treacherous Translation; and Suh, “The Location of ‘Korean’ Culture.” Henry Em also neatly summarizes the contradictions that characterize this period: “It is . . . well known that in the last decade of the colonial period, colonial authorities pursued a policy of forced assimilation under the banner of Naisen Ittai (Interior [Japan] and Korea as one body): eliminating the use of Korean in school instruction (1934), requiring attendance at Shinto ceremonies (1935) and forcing Koreans to adopt Japa nese surnames (1939). The slogan of Naisen Ittai, however, reveals the ambivalence of Japan’s racial policy throughout the colonial period: the ambivalence marked by Japan as the Interior (Nai), excluding Korea (sen) as the ‘outside,’ while at the same time this outside (Korea) must become one with the Interior which is always already there.” Em, “Between Colonialism and Nationalism.” See also Ch’oe Yuri, Ilche malgi singminji chibae chŏngch’aek yŏngu (Policies of Colonial Rule in the Last Years of Japa nese Imperialism), especially chapter 2. 11. While this chapter is limited to Yi T’aejun’s fiction from the 1930s in the context of colonial modernity, the status of Yi’s multiple “conversions” (chŏnhyang, J. tenkō) and the disjunction between the literary-historical portrait of the author as either a modernist stylist or an apolitical dilettante (interested only in pure litera-

Notes to Pages 124–126

201

ture or collecting antiques) and his active participation as a leftist in the postliberation political scene and eventual choice to travel north in 1946 calls for careful future investigation. 12. Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), vol. 5, 485–86. 13. Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 248. 14. Quoted in ibid., 250. 15. Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyŏn, Hanguk munhaksa (History of Korean Literature), 323. 16. Ibid., 325. 17. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 470–71. See also Poole, “Yi T’aejun, sajŏk yŏngyŏk ŭrosŏ ŭi Tongyang” (Yi T’aejun’s Private Orient). 18. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 471. My emphasis. “P’aegangnaeng” (Chill on the River, 1938), for instance, addresses both colonial oppression (the cancellation of Korean-language classes) and the bankruptcy of the human being under the spell of materialism and profit; in “T’okki iyagi” (Rabbit Story) we fi nd a figure for the plight of the colonial intellectual, jobless following the closure of his (Korean-language) newspaper and making ends meet by raising and slaughtering rabbits in his backyard; “Changma” (Rainy Spell, 1936) portrays the “self-consciousness of the [colonial-period] author, a powerless intellectual . . . confined to everyday reality.” Ibid., 474–76. 19. Ibid., 476–77. 20. Ibid., 472. 21. The term “human lexicon” is taken from Yi’s epigraph to the Group of Nine’s Poetry and Fiction: “I have come to feel that fiction is a lexicon of humanity.” See Yu Chongho, “Ingan sajŏnŭl ponŭn chaemi” (The Pleasure of Reading the Human Dictionary), 57. 22. Yi Chaesŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 367–68. 23. “ᳺ ࡐࠬᱪᳺ ᳺ ‫܀ת‬ᳩ གྷᖝᾒᮬ ᱪᳩ ᜛ᳺᢟ. . . . ‫܀ת‬Ћࡐࠬ ࡐࠬЋ‫܀ת‬.” Kim Hwant’ae, “Sanghŏ ŭi chakp’um kwa kŭ yesulgwan” (Yi T’aejun’s Works and Aesthetic Perspective) was originally published in Kaebyŏk 2, no. 1 (December 1934): 11–15. I quote here from the version reproduced in Yi Kiin, Yi T’aejun, 275–79. 24. A more accurate translation of munjang (઄ᄈ) here might be “refined writing” or “patterned writing”; the earliest instances of the term seem to suggest refined embellishment. James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, 7–9. However, I chose “composition” because while Yi T’aejun uses a number of terms for “writing” in his other critical works, munjang seems to refer to a par ticu lar method or process of producing literature; in fact, it is a term often used by Yi in the phrase munjang chakpŏp (“a compositional method toward refined writing”), which makes that sense even more explicit. Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition) is organized around the idea of combining parts into an aesthetic whole, the production of an organic “body” out of disparate parts through a process of refinement. In addition to wanting to distinguish munjang from “writing” (which might mistakenly be understood as the simple putting down of letters on the page), it is this emphasis on

202

Notes to Pages 126–129

process and technique that I hoped to evoke by translating munjang as “composition” throughout. 25. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 11. 26. Ibid., 12. My emphasis. 27. Ibid., 346. My emphasis. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Ibid., 18. Yi cites the phi losopher and literary historian Hu Shi (1891–1962), quoting from Hu’s seminal 1917 text “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” originally published as “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (઄۟੨ᎇ᎞ᘺ) in Xin qingnian 2, no. 5 (January 1917). Hu, an influential member of the Chinese intellectual community at the time of the May Fourth movement (1919) and a proponent of the adoption of the vernacular in Chinese literature, called for “an end to imitation, allusiveness, floweriness, and pedantry in literature and promoted a new lively language closer to the spoken language.” Hu, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” 116. Yi focuses on Hu’s recommendation of eight methods for escaping from the compositional methods of the past: writing should have substance; do not imitate the ancients; emphasize the technique of writing; do not moan without illness; eliminate hackneyed and formal language; do not use allusions; do not use parallelism; do not avoid vulgar diction. Ibid., 123–24. Interestingly, in two versions of Yi’s text the final item reads, “Do not use colloquialisms or simplified logographs.” See Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 20. See also Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition) (2005), 26. 30. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 22. 31. “᧹ᳩ ᶊណ᦮ ᾘ᱑ ᾒ ᜛ᳺᢟ.” Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 20. 32. Ibid., 22–23. 33. Ibid., 22. 34. Ibid., 22–23. 35. In this sense, what we see in the Lectures is a mixture of historical linguistics and semiology. 36. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 22. 37. “Actual communication always involves an abandonment of this privileged sphere [of transcendental consciousness or ‘solitary mental life’]. It involves the going-out into a world, into a realm of empirical fact. For this reason [Husserl] maintains that expression is necessarily ‘interwoven’ with indication in every case of effective communication. . . . Communication, then, would be a re-presentation of what primordially occurs in this inner sphere. What is ‘meant’ in communication is merely ‘indicated’ by means of sensible signs, by the actually spoken or written signs.” Allison, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxv. 38. As Vygotsky argued in 1934, “Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech—it is a function of itself.” Vygotsky, “Thought and Word,” quoted in Burke et al., The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, 122. 39. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 347. 40. Fujii, Complicit Fictions, 109. 41. See especially Twine, Language and the Modern State. Twine analyzes the emergence of genbun itchi in empirical or utilitarian terms, linking it with modern-

Notes to Pages 129–131

203

ization at social and state levels, and contextualizing it within a feudal-to-modern/ industrial transition narrative. The development or rationalization of a modern colloquial style in this context, she argues, was necessary to co-opt the masses for this transition to modernity and capitalism, more specifically toward the attainment of modern nationhood. Diverse classical linguistic conventions, seen as obstacles to modernization (given their difficulty and elite nature), had to be replaced by a uniform style of writing that could offer the new citizenry access to the public life of the nation. 42. See King, “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea.” 43. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 343–44. 44. Ibid., 345. 45. Ibid., 345–46. 46. See Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, especially chapter 2, “The Discovery of Interiority.” Karatani’s well-known argument is that the genbun itchi movement in a sense produced interiority, making possible a self not in existence prior to the advent of modernity but since naturalized. That is, it was not an a priori (national) self that required the ser vices of a standardized colloquial and thus called one into being, but the form of genbun itchi itself that called into being a (national) self, signifying a previously absent interiority. 47. In an article on Mori Ōgai, Thomas Lamarre points out that in the early phase of language reform, “Chinese characters were seen as anathema to the establishment of a rationally phonetic script for the Japa nese language.” Thus Karatani, who “depicts the main trajectory of modern Japa nese literature in terms of the production of interiority and transparency,” can situate Mori—on the basis of his resistance to the elimination of logographs—on the “outside of Japa nese modernity.” Lamarre, “Bacterial Cultures and Linguistic Colonies,” 624–625. Mori held that “Chinese characters must not be transparently representational. They must appear as objects. . . . [Mori] wants characters to stand without phonetic readings because he has come to revere the ‘nature’ or ‘reality’ or ‘spontaneity’ (shizen) of the Chinese characters that appear in the old chronicles, records, and annals.” Ibid., 627. 48. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 13. 49. Ibid., 97. 50. Ibid., 73. Yi’s example here is ch’ŏngch’ŏn (ᗳ‫)م‬, a pairing of logographs with the meaning p’urŭn hanŭl (blue sky). Yi is arguing that the Korean language, represented in hangŭl, functions on a one-to-one relation between sound and meaning, while the use of Chinese graphs adds a layer of separation from the pronunciation of the characters and the explicated meaning of the characters as spoken in the Korean language. 51. “δ᧶᳨ ᷭ᪲ᢟ δ᳦᦮ ᰤ᜻ ᯡᢟ
ᷭ᪲ᢟ δᳺ ᢻ ᰸᧥ᢪ᜻ ᢻ δᢪᢟ.” Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 346. The passage is taken from Yi’s collection of essays titled Musŏrok, included in Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 15, 90. Yi makes the same point, using the same example, in a section of Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition) devoted to the adequacy of language to its object; see Yi, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 264: “ᷭᳺ᥵᜻ᢈ ’ᷭ’᪲ᢟ ’δ’ ᴈᛯ ᢻ ᷭ ᛾ᢟ. ᷭ (δ) ᴈᢈ ᯗᛰᴩ᳦᦮ ᾼᭋᳺ ᵂΉᯗṷ ᵢᢈ ᤩᩊᳺᢟ.” (The logograph for “book” is more

204

Notes to Pages 131–135

like that which is called a book than the Korean rendering of the word. The reason for this is that the logograph gives a sense of visual accord [with the object].) For an outstanding translation of Musŏrok, see Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, trans. Janet Poole, Weatherhead Books on Asia (NY: Columbia University Press, 2009). 52. Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 347. Kim’s description of Yi T’aejun’s approach to language as “materialist” calls to mind Yokomitsu Riichi’s (1898–1947) “literary materialism” (bungakuteki yuibutsuron) of the same period— like Yi, “For Yokomitsu, this signified an emphasis on the material properties of the written word itself, which he referred to as a physical object. His theory of formalism was essentially a rejection of the language of genbun itchi—the ‘colloquial’ idiom that served as the basis for the formation of modern literature in Japan.” Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, 28–29. 53. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 16. 54. Ibid., 14. 55. Ibid., 17. Yi cautions against an overly technical approach to representational language, however, citing Kim Chŏnghŭi’s (1786–1856) seeming paradox, “‫ܚ‬ᒝଔഗ ⅀ҽ็ഗʩ⅀ҽ”—in depicting an orchid, one must both have a method, and at the same time, have no method. 56. Ibid., 23. 57. Ibid., 24. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 31–32. 60. Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 188. Here Yi works to bring the sign closer to both signified (object in the world) and signifier (the ideal inner presentation or voicing of that object; individual consciousness). 61. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 16. 62. Ibid., 189. My thanks to Michael Bourdaghs for introducing me to Gil’s work. 63. Ibid. 64. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 35. See also Husserl, Logical Investigations. “Speaking and hearing, intimation of mental states through speaking and reception thereof of hearing, are mutually correlated. If one surveys these interconnections, one sees at once that all expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve the hearer as signs of the ‘thoughts’ of the speaker.” Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 189. Husserl includes here “outward bodily things.” Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 39. 65. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 33. 66. Ibid. 67. I take this to be an implied defense of the Korean language as not inferior to other languages, from which texts were regularly being translated from the enlightenment period on. In Yi’s schema, the source language has already worked out (or around) its impossibilities of expression in the production of the “complete” work, while the target language must work through these points of nonidentity in the process of translation, the construction of its own finished product. On the incommensurability of languages, see Liu, Translingual Practice. For a critique of “homolinguality” (the assumption of transparent communication within a particular language) and the

Notes to Pages 135–143

205

consequent “regime of translation,” where translation is understood as a symmetrical exchange between two languages, see Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity. 68. Hallett, Language and Truth, 14. 69. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 13. 70. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 32–33. 71. Ibid., 34. Chapter Seven 1. Miner, Comparative Poetics, 26. 2. Weinstein, Unknowing, 45. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 6. 5. Weinstein, Unknowing, 2. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 249. 9. Ibid., 248. 10. Ibid., 250. 11. Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 353. Kim quotes from Paek Ch’ŏl, Chungsŏng (February 1946): 45. Kim is here linking Yi’s sense of a “crisis of language” with Japa nese colonial policies in the 1930s and early 1940s to eradicate the Korean language from public and private life; in 1941 the journal Munjang (Literature) was discontinued, along with nongovernmental newspapers such as the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily News) and Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn Daily News). 12. Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 354. 13. Ibid., 353. 14. Ibid., 354–55. 15. Ibid., 347. 16. Ibid., 349. Kim Yunsik is reading from Yi Sang’s essay “Choch’un chŏmmyo” (Early Spring Sketch રૃᬅਉ), particularly a section titled “Koldong pyŏk” (The Curio Habit); see Yi Sang, Yi Sang munhak chŏnjip (Yi Sang’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 3, 47. 17. See Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 24–25. 18. Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 349. Th is is also clear from the Lectures, where Yi T’aejun likens composition to performance rather than the banal “transcription” of the written national vernacular. See Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 347. 19. Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron” (On Yi T’aejun), 352. 20. “Sŏlchung pangnanki” (Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow) was originally published in the March 1936 edition of the Group of Nine’s sole publication, Si wa sosŏl (Poetry and Fiction). Here, I quote from the version reproduced in Kŭndae munhak kwa Kuinhoe (Modern Literature and the Group of Nine), 403–4. 21. Hwang Chongyŏn finds the term “essayistic tendency” used by Yi Wŏnjo in 1937 to describe Yi T’aejun’s style. See Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 432.

206

Notes to Pages 143–147

22. Yi T’aejun, “Sŏlchung pangnanki” (Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow), 403. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 403–4. 25. Ibid., 404. The word ch’ŏngdam is a technical term designating philosophical conversation and originating in circa third-century China. 26. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 426–27. Hwang cites familiar passages from Marx and Engels’s “Manifesto of the Communist Party” and Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvre Complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 695. Translation taken from Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 476; see also Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 13. 27. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 428. 28. Ibid., 442. Hwang is quoting from Yi T’aejun, “Tongbang chŏngch’wi” (Charm of the East), Musŏrok (Hansŏng tosa, 1941), 88–90. 29. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 435–36. 30. Ibid., 432–33. See Anderer, “Tokyo and the Borders of Modern Japa nese Fiction.” See also Poole, “Yi T’aejun, sajŏk yŏngyŏk ŭrosŏ ŭi Tongyang” (Yi T’aejun’s Private Orient). 31. “Yŏngwŏl yŏnggam” (Old Man Yŏngwŏl) was originally published in Munjang (Literature) (February–March, 1939), was included in the Japanese-language collection of Yi’s short stories titled Poktŏkpang (The Realtor’s Office) in August 1941, and was also anthologized in the December 1943 collection Toldari. I quote from the version republished in Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 117–32. 32. Yi T’aejung, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 124. 33. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 446. 34. Ibid., 449. 35. “Poktŏkpang” (The Realtor’s Office) was originally published in Chogwang (Morning Light) (March 1937), and was included in the August 1937 collection of Yi’s stories titled Kamagwi (Crows), another collection of Yi’s short stories titled Yi T’aejun tanp’yŏn sŏn (A Selection of Yi T’aejun’s Short Fiction) published in December 1939, the 1941 Japanese-language collection of Yi’s stories, and a May 1947 collection titled Poktŏkpang (The Realtor’s Office). I quote from the version reproduced in Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 83–98. 36. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 442. 37. Yi Chaesŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 367. 38. The two examples in the story are Pak Hŭiwan’s nephew and An’s daughter, An Kyŏnghwa. Pak’s nephew, an employee in the court system, studies an elementary reader in the “national language” (Soksu kugŏ tokbon ᝵̤֦ᗨᙀଥ) with aspirations of learning Japa nese and becoming a scribe. He walks about intoning from the book, edited by the Chosŏn governor-general’s office. While the character of the nephew can be treated as symptomatic of the younger generation’s lack of concern

Notes to Pages 147–152

207

with resisting colonial rule, An Kyŏnghwa receives a more in-depth treatment. Having traveled abroad to Osaka and Tokyo, An’s daughter returned to Seoul as a wellknown dancer. When the three old men attend one of her performances, however, Sŏ and Pak find the exposed flesh too much to let pass without disapproving comment. “ ‘As far as dancing is concerned, the more civilized the country, the more [clothes] you take off,’ ” An argues. An Kyŏnghwa’s reluctance to report her father’s suicide to the police (for fear that it would damage her reputation), her unwillingness to spend her father’s life insurance payment on his funeral, and her Western attire at the funeral are all received badly by the elderly characters, and can be read as indications of the sort of disjunctions Yi emphasizes in his fiction. 39. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 90–91. The term for “modern house” here is munhwa chut’aek. 40. Ibid., 92–93. 41. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tanp’yŏn chakkarosŏŭi Yi T’aejun” (Yi T’aejun as a Writer of Short Fiction), 272. Ch’oe’s essay was originally collected in a 1938 volume titled Munhak kwa chisŏng (Literature and Intellect). 42. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 84. 43. Yi Chaesŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 367. 44. Hwang Chongyŏn, “Pangŭndae ŭi chŏngsin” (The Spirit of Antimodernity), 447. 45. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 91. 46. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 249. Frye is paraphrasing John Stuart Mill’s famous definition. 47. Johnson, The Idea of the Lyric, 1. 48. Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” 35. 49. Brewster, Lyric, 81. 50. Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” 33. 51. See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 273–75. 52. Johnson, The Idea of the Lyric, 14. 53. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 169. 54. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 6. 55. Miner, Comparative Poetics, 134. 56. O’Conner, introduction to “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 211. 57. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 213. 58. Ibid. 59. Brenkman, “The Concrete Utopia of Poetry,” 185. 60. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 136. Yi’s initial definition of the lyric (sŏjŏng ঑ࣟ or ੮ࣟ) shares similarities with the earliest treatments of the form in East Asia through the twentieth century. Morohashi Tetsuiji’s Dai Kan-Wa jiten (Sino-Japanese Dictionary) (Tokyo: Taishūkan Shoten, 1984–86) defines “lyric” as “the utterance of thought [or emotion]” (omohi o noberu), citing from the Hou han shu (ࡨෑଋ) an early example, and “lyric poem” as “a poem which takes emotion as its theme and narrates or enunciates it”; the Han yu da ci dian (Unabridged Dictionary of the Chinese Language) (Shanghai: Shanghai ci shu

208

Notes to Pages 152–154

chu ban she, 1987) cites the earliest occurrence of sŏjŏng from the Songs of Ch’u (௼ ᝀ), giving an example from the opening lines of the first of the “Nine Declarations” (ʉᄈ) titled “ࣦᗮ” (Hsi sung, Grieving I Make My Plaint): “ࣦᗮˉፖࣼΨ, ࿆शˉ ঑”—“Grieving I make my plaint, to give my sorrows rein, / To vent my wrath and tell my pent-up thoughts.” Translation from Hawkes, Ch’u Tz’ŭ, 60. The Han yu da ci dian also cites Guo Moruo (ៅഄᎭ) from the early twentieth century: “㇩᥆঑ࣟ ʀ˲኱, ஑ଥɦે㇩. ঑ࣟཇ㔡౻࿋㇯ୂ㈅̑ેᔰᾝࣾ㇚.” (If a poem is not the expression of emotion, then it is fundamentally not a poem. As for “expression of emotion,” using progressive vocabulary, it is the expression of consciousness.) My thanks to Theodore Huters for this translation of the Guo Moruo passage. 61. Lyrical writing is for Yi the most emotional among prose forms. Consequently lyrical prose can, “at the slightest slip, fall into cheap sentimentality” and must thus be carefully produced via a principled refinement of both form and content. Without such refinement (Yi uses both p’unggyŏk [ᦠஒ] and p’umgyŏk [ԏஒ] in this passage) the weeping of the lyric “is a false weeping.” Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 142. 62. “Chugŭn saramŭl saenggak hamyŏ” (Thinking of Someone Deceased). Writer Hong Myŏnghŭi (1888–1968) participated in the nationalist independence group Singanhoe and was later affi liated with KAPF. 63. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 139. 64. “Nun onŭn pam” (Snowy Evening). Yi Wŏnjo (1909–55) was a critic who sided with the “tendency literature” camp in the 1930s, advocating a realistic literature over an “art for art’s sake” approach. Yi became chairman of the successor to KAPF, the Munhakka tongmaeng (Korean Writers’ Alliance), and relocated to the north in the postliberation period. 65. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 139. 66. Weinstein, Unknowing, 2. 67. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 8. 68. Ibid., 9. 69. Ibid., 18. 70. Ibid., 6. 71. “Kamagwi” (Crows) was originally published in Chogwang (Morning Light) (January 1936), and was included in the August 1937 publication of Yi’s collected short stories titled Kamagwi; the story was also translated and published in the August 1941 Japanese-language collection of Yi’s stories, Poktŏkpang (The Realtor’s Office), and was again anthologized in the Korean-language Poktŏkpang (The Realtor’s Office) in May 1947. I quote from the version published in Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 205–18. For a translation of the story see Yi T’aejun, “Crows,” in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 23–34. 72. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 210. 73. Ibid., 208. 74. Referring to the four plants or trees that appear in classical painting: plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo. 75. This painting is described with the phrase kimyŏng chŏlchi, which literally means tablewear and a spray of blossoms or branches painted together.

Notes to Pages 154–160

209

76. Ch’usa is the penname of Kim Chŏnghŭi (1786–1856), a famous Chosŏn-period scholar and calligrapher. 77. Ibid., 206. 78. Ibid. My emphasis. 79. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, Hanguk hyŏndae munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Literature), vol. 1, 474. 80. Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), vol. 5, 485. 81. Cameron, Lyric Time, 10. 82. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 213. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 209. 85. See Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyŏn, Hanguk munhaksa (History of Korean Literature), 324. 86. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 213–14. 87. Ibid., 212. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 216. 90. Ibid., 217. 91. Ibid., 210. 92. Ibid., 212. 93. Ibid., 214. The protagonist sees the woman as sublime—with no worldly desires—precisely because of her illness and proximity to death, while at the same time refusing the visceral, bodily picture of herself that she presents to him (referencing cups of blood coughed up, hearses and biers, and so on), maintaining a figural picture of her. Ibid., 216. 94. Ibid., 212–13. My emphasis. 95. Weisbuch, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, 19. Cited in Cameron, Lyric Time, 15. 96. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 281. 97. Cameron, Lyric Time, 18. 98. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 6. 99. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 218. 100. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 26–27. 101. Ibid., 32. 102. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Works), vol. 1, 215. Yi Chaesŏn finds the affinity with death in Yi T’aejun’s fiction to be linked with the temporal bind of one whose past is irretrievable and who can yet find no place in the present. Such characters live “the life of a relic”—here, the life of one whose immanent death is certain, and who is isolated from contemporary society by virtue of this fact. In this sense, an attempt to attain compassion structures “Crows,” a striving toward a sympathetic joining of subject and object—what Yi Chaesŏn calls a projection of lyrical compassion—which the young woman here denies as a possibility. Yi Chaesŏn, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 368. Colonial-period critic Kim Hwant’ae also understands the author’s project as one of compassionate understanding: “If an author intends to show us [a] genuine human life, that author must fi rst understand human life better than anyone else. . . .

210

Notes to Pages 160–165

Without love you cannot understand the object [taesang].” Kim Hwant’ae, “Sanghŏ ŭi chakp’um kwa kŭ yesulgwan” (Yi T’aejun’s Works and His Artistic Sense), 275– 76. Here, Kim also finds that the emotional bond that is being denied to the protagonist also functions as the bond between (creating) subject and (depicted) object, which renders understanding successful and can thus lead to successful communication in literary language. 103. Kim Ujong, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏlsa (History of Modern Korean Fiction), 247. Cho Tongil also refers to Yi and his characters as being of a “defeatist type.” Cho Tongil, Hanguk munhak t’ongsa (A General History of Korean Literature), vol. 5, 485. 104. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 252. 105. Ibid., 253. 106. Ibid., 75. 107. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 16. 108. Weinstein, Unknowing, 2. 109. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, 36. Quoted in Weinstein, Unknowing, 28. 110. Weinstein, Unknowing, 29. Emphasis in the original. 111. The “insistence on free-standing subjectivity is precisely what modernist fiction subverts,” Weinstein writes. “It does so in order to reveal the human subject as situational, space/time dependent, capable of coming to know only if the props that enable knowing are already in place.” In the modernist work, “the narrative props that underwrite the subject/object/space drama of coming to know are refused.” Ibid., 2. 112. Yi T’aejun, Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Composition), 347. My emphasis. 113. Weinstein, Unknowing, 1. 114. Ibid., 147. Weinstein is discussing Faulkner in this passage. 115. Ibid., 96. 116. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 39. 117. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tanp’yŏn chakkarosŏŭi Yi T’aejun” (Yi T’aejun as a Writer of Short Fiction), 271. 118. Ibid., 273. 119. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip (Yi T’aejun’s Collected Literary Works), vol. 2, 120. 120. This idea stems from Paul de Man’s summary of a particular literaryhistorical understanding of lyrical poetry as moving away from representation throughout the modern period, a movement that constitutes a historical process “as well as being the very movement of modernity.” The “reconciliation of modernity with history in a common genetic process is highly satisfying, because it allows one to be both origin and offspring at the same time. . . . Such a reconciliation of memory with action is the dream of all historians.” de Man, “Lyric and Modernity,” 172–73. 121. This is more complex in the case of the Japa nese empire, itself a “latecomer” to modernity and colonizer status; at the same time, Japan legitimated its imperial expansion through an anti-Western discourse that sought to establish a par ticu lar (non-Western) modernity. See Ching, “Yellow Skin, White Masks”; Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernity, particularly in his analysis of Yokomitsu Riichi; Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?; and Karatani, “Overcoming Modernity.” 122. Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, viii.

Notes to Pages 167–173

211

Conclusion 1. Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 439. 2. Ibid., 438. 3. Ibid., 435. On modernity as a relational concept see also Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern, 1–2. 4. Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 432. Th is is not unrelated to the concept of “geomodernism” advanced by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, “a locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity” that “breaks open” the term “modernism” as it is usually understood and renders it comparable not within “strict national or temporal frameworks or even explicit aesthetic programs” but within “a global horizon that affects both content and form.” Doyle and Winkiel, “Introduction,” 3–4. 5. Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis,” 35. 6. Ibid., 38–39. 7. George, Relocating Agency, ix. 8. Sarker, “Afterword,” 561. 9. Gikandi, “Preface: Modernism in the World,” 421. 10. Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, 37. 11. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 4. 12. Pratt, “In the Neocolony,” 460. 13. Or as de Man put it, “we must remember that what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature and that what we call literary interpretation . . . is in fact literary history. If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts.” de Man, Blindness and Insight, 165. 14. Hawley, “The Colonizing Impulse of Postcolonial Theory,” 780. 15. Ibid. See Brennan, At Home in the World, 207. 16. See Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics. 17. See “Surface Reading,” a special issue of Representations 108 (Fall 2009), edited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. 18. Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” 565. 19. Adorno, “Commitment,” 302. 20. Ibid., 314. 21. Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” 567; see Adorno, “Commitment,” 314. 22. Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, 4. Marshik’s study focuses on the presence and use of irony and satire in modernist works, a form of “reverse pedagogy” that yields an ethical or moral meaning through the conflicting presence of two value systems. Ibid., 7. 23. Chang, Deconstructing Communication, xii. 24. As Tierney writes, “postcolonial theories are generally based on a limited empirical perspective, cover a narrow geographical range, and tend to generalize excessively. As a consequence, their theoretical formulations tend to neglect the historical and linguistic features of colonial empires outside the Anglo-American framework.” Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 13. My emphasis. 25. Loomba, “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique,” 501. 26. Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison,” 3–4.

212

Notes to Pages 173–174

27. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 862. 28. Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis,” 39. In this important piece Friedman advocates a “paratactic comparativism” that brings literary texts from different cultural locations into “conjuncture” or juxtaposition in a way that sheds light on modernisms’ “geography of intercultural encounters in contact zones” through the construction of horizontal (rather than vertical, hierarchical) relations and outside of national categories of belonging. 29. Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 153. 30. Ibid., 125, 145. 31. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” 15.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 1, 37n55, 151, 171 Aesthetics, 10–11, 20, 25, 30–33, 92–94, 146, 172; and modernism, 6, 14, 39, 41, 43–44, 62, 79–80, 85; and the political, 7, 17, 37–39, 52, 169–70, 173, 175; and pure literature, 59; and satire, 120; and Yi T’aejun, 122–23, 127–28, 130, 134, 138, 141–46, 151 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 44, 44n25 An Chongil, 66 An Hoenam, 42 Arakawa Gorō, 53–54 Aristotle, 16 Barthes, Roland, 24, 89 Bateson, Gregory, 19, 51, 55–56, 63 Beard, George, 65–66 Bell, Michael, 25 Bhabha, Homi, 54 Boehmer, Elleke, 14 Booth, Wayne, 98–99 Brooks, Peter, 5 Bunka seiji. See Cultural rule Calinescu, Matei, 16, 44 Censorship, 6, 7, 14, 17, 26, 31, 57, 79, 81, 90, 117–18, 124n7, 172. See also Colonialism; Language

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 37, 163 Chang, Briankle G., 10 Ching, Leo, 8, 53 Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 28n19; and the camera, 39–41, 42, 45; and crisis, literary, 29–30, 31, 33–34, 36, 100n23, 110; and “fall” from referentiality, 25–26, 27; and the modern individual, 32–33; and Pak T’aewŏn, 27, 40; and passivistic destruction, 30–31; and satire, 30, 97, 109, 111, 117, 120; on self and not-self split, 30–31, 32–33, 34, 89, 97, 109, 110, 117, 159; and Yi T’aejun, 148. See also Modernity, colonial —Works: “On Satirical Literature— Toward Breaking the Deadlock of Crisis in Current Literary Circles” (P’ungja munhak non), 29 Ch’oe Myŏngik, 39 Chŏng Chiyong, 9, 87, 130, 143 Chŏng Hansuk, 82–83 Cho Tongil, 83 Chow, Rey, 24–25, 36 Cho Yongman, 40n3. See also Group of Nine Colonialism, 6, 29; and assimilation, 8, 18, 35n51, 52–53, 90, 94, 124; and collaborator, 8, 122, 164, 172;

230

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Colonialism (continued) and imperialism, 12, 32, 35–37, 76, 94, 175; and literary history, 9; and national language, 14, 36, 59, 147n38 Communicative model of literary interpretation, 11, 12, 13, 18n48, 37, 79, 95–96, 98, 107–8, 109, 122, 138, 167, 174–75 Crisis, 25–26, 31. See also Ch’oe Chaesŏ; Im Hwa Crisis of representation, 6, 13, 14, 25–26, 55–57, 80, 81n7, 95, 166–67; and colonization, 16–17; and death of historicism, 15; and historical specificity, 16, 171–72; and imperial language, 36; and Kim Yujŏng, 28, 78, 85, 86, 93–94, 108–9, 117, 120; and modernist mentality, 16; and Pak T’aewŏn, 47, 61, 76, 171; in Seoul literary circles, 19, 36, 61, 78, 100n23, 122; theorization of, 21; and Yi T’aejun, 136–37, 138, 140–41, 150, 164 Cultural rule, 7–8, 53, 90 Daudet, Alphonse, 18, 44, 49, 51 de Man, Paul, 89, 110, 150, 164n120, 170n13 Dilettantism. See Yi T’aejun Discourse, colonial, 12, 13, 18, 139, 140–41; and empirical sciences, 34; as false speech, 13n41; internal rules of, 13; and ironic discourse, 109–10; literary discourse, 18; notion of, 13; and the real, 12 Double bind, 57, 117, 120; and hysteria, 58, 63, 76–77; and psychoanalysis, 18; and modernist literature, 38 Duus, Peter, 53 Eliot, T. S., 9, 27n11, 30 Empiricist discourse, critique of. See under Kim Yujŏng Ethnic-nation, 33, 35–36, 86–87, 90, 96, 110, 136, 153, 170, 174

Farm village literature. See under Kim Yujŏng Faulkner, Peter, 43 Fiction of manners, 27, 33, 40, 97 Foucault, Michel, 13, 24 Freedman, Ralph, 140, 155, 159. See also Lyrical novel Freud, Sigmund, 16, 25, 61–62, 65–66, 73. See also Hysteria Friedman, Susan Stanford, 167–68, 173n28 Furst, Lilian R., 100, 103 Genbun itchi. See Spoken and written language, unification of Gide, André, 44, 73 Gil, José, 21, 123, 133–34 Golley, Gregory, 6n11 Group of Nine, 9–10, 40n3, 83–84, 123, 124, 142; literary history of, 9–10; members, 9–10, 9n22, 9n23, 80, 82, 143; and Poetry and Fiction (Si wa sosŏl), 9, 125n21, 142n20 Hatzimanolis, Efi, 94 Hong Myŏnghŭi, 152 Humor, 96, 98, 99, 102, 104–7, 111, 125. See also Irony; Kim Yujŏng Huxley, Aldous, 30 Hwang Chongyŏn, 145–46, 148–49 Hyangt’o munhak. See Literature of local color Hyperrealism, 6, 15, 38, 78–79 Hysteria, 19, 57, 78; and desire, 62, 67, 68, 71–72, 72n69, 74–75, 76–77; as Freudian concept, 61, 65–66, 69n50, 71–72; gap between utterance and enunciation, 58; and lack, 69; and literary modernism, 60, 61; as product of social discourse, 63; and reminiscences, 71–72, 74; satisfaction, impossibility of, 72–73; schizophrenia, 74–75; as social discourse, 69. See under Pak T’aewŏn: hysteria; neurasthenia

Index Im Hwa, 32, 39, 89; crisis, literary, 26, 31, 36, 100n23, 117; “fall” from referentiality, 25–27; and the modern individual, 32–33; and “mosaic” method of composition, 45; and Pak T’aewŏn, 26–27, 40. See also Fiction of manners —Works: “On the Fiction of Manners” (Set’ae sosŏl ron), 40 Imperialism. See under Colonialism Imperialization, 13, 35–36, 46, 52–53, 63, 90, 136, 140–41 Inmun p’yŏngnon. See Liberal Arts Review and National Literature Irony, 82, 95, 96n2, 97, 99–100, 107, 108, 109n55, 109–10, 111n63, 119; and the real, 111, 121–22; stable irony, 85–86, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97–98; unstable irony, 95, 111, 112; Yi T’aejun, in the work of, 125. See also under Kim Yujŏng: stable irony; unstable irony Joyce, James, 44, 49, 64, 88, 91 Kang Unsŏk, 5 Karatani, Kōjin, 130, 130n46, 130n47 Keijō. See Seoul Kierkegaard, Søren, 111, 113 Kim Chonggŏn, 83–84 Kim Hwant’ae, 29n19, 125, 126; on Yi T’aejun, 125 Kim Hyŏn, 82 Kim Kijin, 39 Kim Kirim, 9, 27–29, 31, 68, 87, 130; and crisis, literary, 28, 31, 36; and “fall” from referentiality, 25–26, 27 —Works: “The Historical Position of Modernism” (Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i), 27–28 Kim Minjŏng, 7, 10 Kim Namch’ŏn, 40; “panoramic” descriptive method, 45 Kim Sangt’ae, 44, 107–8 Kim Ujong, 42, 82n11, 141 Kim Yujŏng, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 68, 80n5, 81–82, 110–11, 138, 149; and art, 87–88,

231

91–92; characterization of, 10, 82–84, 86–87, 93, 99; and crisis of representation, 11, 13, 15, 17, 36, 85, 92–93, 94; and “double” language, 107, 108; empiricist discourse, critique of, 20, 78, 87, 89, 92; and expression, 88, 90; and farm village literature, 10, 86; and humor, 80–81, 82–83, 96, 98–99, 102–3, 108; and idealism, 78, 91–92; on language, ambiguity of, 102, 103–4, 105; on language, loss of faith in, 91–92, 93, 95, 121–22; and love, 87–88, 90, 91; and money, 101n28; and New Women, 115–16; and Pak Pongja, 86n31, 86–87, 92–93, 121; reconsideration of, 81, 93; and rural portrayals, 80, 82–84, 94, 98–99, 101–5, 106, 112; and satire, 98, 112n69; and science, 81, 87–88, 89, 90, 91; settings of, 84; and stable irony, 97n6, 100, 102, 103–4; subjectivity/objectivity, critique of, 86, 87, 90n51, 90–91; and ttaraji, 113–16, 118; and unstable irony, 105–7, 108–9, 111, 112–13, 116–17, 119–20 —Works: “The Bachelor and the Frog” (Ch’onggak kwa maengkkongi), 84, 100, 113; “Bonanza” (Nodaji) 82; “Gathering Gold in the Bean Field” (Kŭm ttanŭn k’ongbat), 82, 100–101; “The Scorching Heat” (Ttaengppyŏt), 20, 106; “Scoundrels” (Manmubang), 82, 113; “Spring and a Lowlife” (Pom kwa ttaraji), 20, 113; “Spring—Spring” (Pom—Pom), 20, 82, 101n30, 101–5, 107; “A Sudden Shower” (Sonakpi), 81, 82; “Thoughts from a Sickbed” (Pyŏngsang ŭi saenggak), 20, 78, 94, 96, 97, 108–9, 117, 119; “Toad” (Tukkŏbi), 85 Kim Yunsik, 82, 83, 85, 131, 142, 142n11 Kokugo undō. See National language movement Kokumin bungaku. See National Literature Kōminka. See Imperialization

232

Index

Korea Artista Proleta Federacio. See Korean Proletariat Artist Federation Korean Proletariat Artist Federation (Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, KAPF), 9, 9n20, 10, 31–32, 33, 39; characteristics of, 79; dismantling of, 26, 31, 40, 80, 117, 124. See also Left ist literature movement Kuinhoe. See Group of Nine Kungmin munhak. See National Literature Kwŏn Yŏngmin, 124n7, 125 Kyŏngsŏng. See Seoul Lacan, Jacques, 57, 63 Lang, Candace, 99–100, 110, 111n63 Language, 5–6, 119, 171; and assimilation, 8, 35n51; colonization of, 13, 35–36, 172; and communicability, 5n10, 10–11, 33–34, 95, 105–6, 120, 139, 144–45, 161–62; and context, 7, 95, 120, 122; false choice of imperialization, 35; gap between analogic and digital language, 51–52, 131; gap between utterance and enunciation, 109, 118; polysemy of, 38; and the real, 8, 23, 36, 81, 110, 121–22, 166; and referentiality, 6, 80, 90, 96, 109; and self, 110, 119; and writing, 123, 125 Laplanche, Jean, 60 Left ist literature movement, 2, 8, 32, 98, 124; hegemony of, 39; ideological conversion, statement of, 32; suppression of, 26, 31–32, 79, 124. See also Korean Proletariat Artist Federation Lewis, Wyndham, 30, 97 Liberal Arts Review, 124 Linguistic turn, 24, 109, 109n53 Lippit, Seiji, 46–47 Literary crisis. See Crisis Literature of local color, 10, 86. See also Kim Yujŏng Lukács, Georg, 89–90, 91 Lutz, Tom, 65

Lyric, 149–51, 158 Lyrical narrative, 139–40, 152, 152n60, 153, 158–59, 161, 164n120 Lyrical novel, 140. See also Ralph Freedman MacCabe, Colin, 12 Manchukuo. See Manchuria Manchuria, 7, 123, 148 Materialism, 59, 91, 144, 150 Megill, Allan, 15n44, 25 Miner, Earl, 150 Minjok. See Ethnic-nation Mise en abyme, 73–74, 75 Modernism, 6–7, 11, 145, 168n4; and antimodernism, 141; characteristics of, 15, 15n44, 17, 33, 37, 43–44, 46, 47, 79; and Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 29–30, 117–18; colonial context of, 16, 90, 146; crisis of, 28, 33, 90; critique of modernity, 79, 96; critique of relationship between language and reality, 79, 108; definition of, 24n1, 28n17; as an interpretive category, 17; and Kim Kirim, 28, 130; Kim Yujŏng as representative author of, 80–81, 96, 100, 118–19, 120; Korean, 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 32, 35, 80n4, 167–70; metaphysics of, 22; and montage, 46; nonWestern, 37, 46–47, 163–64, 166–69, 172–73; Pak T’aewŏn as representative author of, 2, 5, 38, 39, 41–44, 121; and realism, 8–9, 15, 34, 92, 118; rise of, 8–9; split subject of, 32, 33, 81, 90, 95; and traditional literature, 28; Yi T’aejun as representative author of, 22, 122, 140, 145–46, 162, 164–65 Modernity, 6, 24, 28, 43–44, 47, 79, 120; and One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo—A Record of My Daily Life, 66, 67–69, 77; subject of modernity, 63, 85, 94, 96 Modernity, capitalist, 59–60, 85, 145–49 Modernity, colonial, 17–18, 23, 31, 33, 36–37, 47, 57, 80, 85, 124n7, 125, 138, 141; and irony, 108, 110, 111

Index Modernologie, technique of, 4, 18n48 Moi, Toril, 92 Muecke, D. C., 97, 119n90 Munhwa chŏngch’i. See Cultural rule Name-changing campaign, 8, 90, 124 Narrative, I-novel-type, 1, 3, 88, 129, 146, 153 National language movement, 8, 90, 124 National literature, 122, 129 National Literature, 124 Neurasthenia, 63, 65–66; interpretation of symptoms, 67–68; perception of in Japan, 66n35. See also under Pak T’aewŏn: neurasthenia Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16 Nongch’on munhak. See under Kim Yujŏng: farm village literature Ŏnmun ilch’i. See Spoken and written language, unification of Paek Ch’ŏl, 39 Paek Sŏk, 9 Pak Pongja. See under Kim Yujŏng Pak T’aewŏn, 6, 7, 11, 15, 40n3, 68, 72n72, 87, 96, 130, 139, 149; and the camera, 114; characterization of, 10, 39; and Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 27; and crisis of representation, 11, 13, 15, 17, 36; double exposure, technique of, 49–51, 72; and framing, 2–3, 4, 5; and hyperrealism, 15; and hysteria, 19–20, 58, 59–61, 62–63, 65, 69–75; and language, 5–6, 38, 47, 48–49, 51, 69, 121, 131; language, indeterminacy of, 69–70, 72–73, 75–76; and neurasthenia, 19, 63–66, 67–68; reevaluation of, 39; themes of, 1–2, 5, 59; and unreliable narrator, 3, 60, 70; as wŏlbuk author, 41 —Works: “An Account” (Chŏnmal), 41; “Beard” (Suyŏm), 39; “Fatigue— Record of Half a Day” (P’iro—ŏnŭ panil ŭi kirok), 1, 2–3, 5, 41; “A Follow-Up to Writing: Representa-

233

tion, Depiction, Technique” (Ch’angjak yŏrok: pyonhyŏn, myosa, kigyo) 5, 18, 48; “May’s Gentle Wind” (Owŏl ŭi hunp’ung), 41; One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo (Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi iril), 1, 19, 27, 48, 49, 59, 63–65, 67–77, 78; Scenes by a Stream (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng), 27, 114; “Street” (Kŏri), 41 Pak Yŏnghŭi, 39 Poetry and Fiction, 9. See also Group of Nine Proletarian literature movement. See Left ist literature movement Pure literature, 6, 9, 39, 59, 124–25, 141 Real, the, 144–45, 166; antagonisms of, 7; and appearance, 107; and embodiment, 5–6; and ideal, 104, 109; and irony, 111; and the modern, 23, 149; real/representation distinction, 32, 110; representation of, 15, 101; space-time of, 159; structured by language, 105 Realism, 89–90, 92n58, 123, 173; Kim Yujŏng as representative author of, 80, 84, 86–87, 118; Kim Yujŏng’s critique of, 88–89, 92; limitations of, 43, 121, 140, 161–62, 166; realist literature, 2, 6n11 Renard, Jules, 18, 44, 49, 51 Richards, I. A., 9, 27n11 Romanticism, 27–28, 89, 117–18 Ross, Dorothy, 25 Ryang, Sonia, 54–55 Said, Edward, 12n31, 37n55 Sakai, Naoki, 75, 88–89 Sasang chŏnhyang. See under Left ist literature movement: ideological conversion, statement of Sasosŏl. See Narrative, I-novel-type Satire. See under Ch’oe Chaesŏ; Kim Yujŏng Schmid, Andre, 22

234

Index

Seoul, 1, 14, 50, 51, 57, 114; landscape of, 63–64, 68, 70–71 Set’ae sosŏl. See Fiction of manners Shih, Shu-mei, 8–9, 170 Shishōsetsu. See Narrative, I-novel-type Singyŏng soeyak. See Neurasthenia Sino-Japanese War, second, 52 Sin yŏsŏng. See under Kim Yujŏng: New Women Si wa sosŏl. See Poetry and Fiction Sluzki, Carlos, 57 Socialist realism, 39 Sogŭkchŏk p’agoe. See under Ch’oe Chaesŏ: passivistic destruction Sŏjŏng. See Lyric Son Chongŏp, 85 Son Hwasuk, 45 Sōshi kaimei. See Name-changing campaign Spiegel, Gabrielle, 24 Spivak, Gayatri, 35 Split subject. See under Modernism Spoken and written language, unification of, 21, 122, 127, 129, 129n41, 130, 130n46, 131n52, 134, 135–36, 153 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 4 Stoler, Ann, 174 Subjectivity, 32–33, 40, 42–43, 140; and Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 29–30, 31–32, 42; crisis of, 33; and Kim Yujŏng, 86, 89, 91, 109; and the modern individual, 32; and Pak T’aewŏn, 59, 63, 67; and Yi T’aejun, 150–51, 163 Sunsu munhak. See Pure literature Tierney, Robert, 13n41 Tokyo, 50, 51, 73, 74 Ttaraji. See under Kim Yujŏng Weinstein, Philip, 22, 139–40, 162–63 Wigi. See Crisis Yi Chaesŏn, 82, 148, 160n102 Yi Chingyŏng, 35, 174 Yi Hyosŏk, 130

Yijung noch’ul. See under Pak T’aewŏn: double exposure, technique of Yi Kiyŏng, 3, 39, 83 Yi Kwangsu, 3, 9n23, 130 Yi Pyŏnggi, 142–43 Yi Sang, 9, 39, 40n3, 68, 87, 130, 142 Yi T’aejun, 6, 7, 15, 123n4, 123n5, 123–24; and antimodernism, 141, 146–49; characterization of, 10, 21, 122–26, 145–46, 151, 164; and compositional practice, 21, 131, 138–39; and context, 124n7, 124–25, 146; and crisis of representation, 11, 13, 15, 17, 21, 36, 138, 141, 150; and dilettantism, 122, 124, 124n11, 125–26, 137, 138, 150–51, 164; and hyperrealism, 15; and language, 69, 126–29, 135n67, 139, 149, 151–53, 155–58, 163–65; literary practice, theorization of, 123, 126, 145; Literature (Munjang), 124; and the lyric, 140, 150, 152n60, 152n61; and lyrical narrative, 10, 139, 152n60, 152–54; and materialism, 125n18, 131n52, 142, 144–45, 150; and nostalgia, 125; reconsideration of, 122, 138, 140–41, 160–61; and rhetoric, 127; and speech, 128–29, 130; on spoken and written language, unification of, 130–31; themes of, 125; and writing, modern, 126n24, 128, 130–31, 144 —Works: Crows (Kamagwi), 124, 147n35, 154–60; “Hometown” (Kohyang), 124n7; Lectures on Composition (Munjang kangkwa), 6, 122–23, 123n1, 126, 127, 131, 138; Moonlit Night (Talppam), 124, 124n6; “A Moonlit Night of Thought” (Sasang ŭi wŏlya), 123n5; “Old Man Yŏngwŏl” (Yŏngwŏl yŏnggam), 146–47, 163; “Plant a Flowering Tree” (Kkot namu nŭn simŏ nok’o), 124n6; “Rabbit Story” (Tokki iyagi), 124n7, 125n18; “Rainy Spell” (Changma), 124n7, 125n18; “The Realtor’s Office” (Poktŏkpang), 146n31, 147–48, 147n35,

Index Yi T’aejun (continued) 154n71; “Record of a Visit to an Orchid Blooming in Snow” (Sŏlchung pangnanki), 142–44, 142n20, 146; “Sad Story” (Sŏgŭlp’ŭn iyagi), 124n6 Yi Wŏnjo, 152

Yokomitsu Riichi, 44, 44n25, 131n52 Yŏm Muung, 79–80 Yŏm Sangsŏp, 3 Yu Chongho, 124n7 Yu Insuk, 82 Zola, Émile, 88, 91

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Harvard East Asian Monographs (*out-of-print)

*1. *2. 3. *4. *5. *6. 7. *8. *9. 10. 11. 12. 13. *14. 15. *16. *17. *18. *19. *20. *21. *22.

Liang Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China Harold C. Hinton, The Grain Tribute System of China, 1845±1911 Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Kaiping Mines, 1877±1912 Chao Kuo-chün, Agrarian Policies of Mainland China: A Documentary Study, 1949±1956 Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China, 1936±1945 Edwin George Beal, Jr., The Origin of Likin, 1835±1864 Chao Kuo-chün, Economic Planning and Organization in Mainland China: A Documentary Study, 1949±1957 John K. Fairbank, Ching Documents: An Introductory Syllabus Helen Yin and Yi-chang Yin, Economic Statistics of Mainland China, 1949±1957 Wolfgang Franke, The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination System Albert Feuerwerker and S. Cheng, Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese History C. John Stanley, Late Ching Finance: Hu Kuang-yung as an Innovator S. M. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions Ssu-yü Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion Chun-Jo Liu, Controversies in Modern Chinese Intellectual History: An Analytic Bibliography of Periodical Articles, Mainly of the May Fourth and Post-May Fourth Era Edward J. M. Rhoads, The Chinese Red Army, 1927±1963: An Annotated Bibliography Andrew J. Nathan, A History of the China International Famine Relief Commission Frank H. H. King (ed.) and Prescott Clarke, A Research Guide to China-Coast Newspapers, 1822±1911 Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps, 1949±1964 Toshio G. Tsukahira, )HXGDO&RQWUROLQ7RNXJDZD-DSDQ7KH6DQNLQ.ŇWDL6\VWHP Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars George Moseley, A Sino-Soviet Cultural Frontier: The Ili Kazakh Autonomous Chou

Harvard East Asian Monographs 23. Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910±1931 *24. Adrian Arthur Bennett, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth-Century China *25. Donald J. Friedman, The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938±1941 *26. Edward LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ching China: A Selective Survey of Jardine, Matheson and Company’s Operations, 1842±1895 27. Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 1957±1967 *28. Kungtu C. Sun, assisted by Ralph W. Huenemann, The Economic Development of Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century *29. Shahid Javed Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes, 1965 30. John Carter Vincent, The Extraterritorial System in China: Final Phase 31. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914±1918 *32. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810±1860 *33. James Pusey, Wu Han: Attacking the Present Through the Past *34. Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860±1896 35. Tuvia Blumenthal, Saving in Postwar Japan 36. Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis 37. Stephen C. Lockwood, Augustine Heard and Company, 1858±1862 38. Robert R. Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by His Son 39. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations 40. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925±1927, trans. Steven L. Levine 41. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Regime 42. Ezra Vogel, Margie Sargent, Vivienne B. Shue, Thomas Jay Mathews, and Deborah S. Davis, The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces 43. Sidney A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895±1905 *44. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.: A Symposium *45. Ching Young Choe, 7KH5XOHRIWKH7DHZʼnQJXQ1864±1873: Restoration in Yi Korea 46. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy, 1958±1970 47. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, 1854±1864 48. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief Administrator and Advocate of National Reform 49. Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide 50. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations, 1860±1864 51. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847±1880 52. Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 53. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949±1963

Harvard East Asian Monographs *54. Han-sheng Chuan and Richard Kraus, Mid-Ching Rice Markets and Trade: An Essay in Price History 55. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution 56. Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864±1949 *57. Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900±1949 *58. Edward W. Wagner, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea *59. Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945±1972 60. 1RULNR.DPDFKL-RKQ.)DLUEDQNDQG&Kş]Ň,FKLNRJapanese Studies of Modern China Since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for 1953±1969 61. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918±1942 62. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese Enterprises 63. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the Public Record Office of London *64. Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yü and His Geography of 1848 *65. William A. Brown and Urgrunge Onon, translators and annotators, History of the Mongolian People’s Republic 66. Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals *67. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero *68. William J. Tyler, tr., The Psychological World oI1DWVXPH6ŇVHNLby Doi Takeo 69. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth Century *70. Charlton M. Lewis, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution: The Transformation of Ideas and Institutions in Hunan Province, 1891±1907 71. Preston Torbert, The Ching Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its Organization and Principal Functions, 1662±1796 72. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China 73. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China 74. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China 75. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880±1920 *76. Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-Siamese Trade, 1652±1853 77. Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty 78. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949±1974: An Annotated Bibliography *79. Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins and Modern Enterprise in Late Ching China 80. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from Shandong by Jing Su and Luo Lun *81. Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic *82. George A. Hayden, Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama: Three Judge Pao Plays

Harvard East Asian Monographs *83. Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, 1910±1940 84. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878±1954 85. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan 86. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation 87. Anne O. Krueger, The Developmental Role of the Foreign Sector and Aid *88. Edwin S. Mills and Byung-Nak Song, Urbanization and Urban Problems 89. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development *90. Noel F. McGinn, Donald R. Snodgrass, Yung Bong Kim, Shin-Bok Kim, and Quee-Young Kim, Education and Development in Korea *91. Leroy P. Jones and II SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in Economic Development: The Korean Case 92. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea 93. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John E. Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea 94. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927±1937 95. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model 96. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and Communication 97. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842± 1937 98. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China *99. Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu 100. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin 101. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi 102. Thomas A. Stanley, ņVXJL6DNDH$QDUFKLVWLQ7DLVKŇ-DSDQ7KH&UHDWLYLW\RIWKH(JR 103. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in Restoration Kiangsu, 1867±1870 104. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911±1915 105. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region 106. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945±1978 107. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances During the Korean Modernization Process 108. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K, 1870±1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry 109. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876±1937 *110. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China

Harvard East Asian Monographs 111. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World 112. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898 *113. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666±1687 114. Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The &DVHRI1DLWŇ.RQDQ1866±1934) *115. Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978±1981 116. C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu 117. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853±1955 *118. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the “Ta Hsueh”: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon 119. Christine Guth Kanda, 6KLQ]Ň+DFKLPDQ,PDJHU\DQG,WV'HYHORSPHQW *120. Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court 121. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature, 1918±1937 *122. Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and Management at Nissan and Toyota 123. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times 124. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin 125. Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard T. Smith, Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854±1863 126. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern -DSDQ7KH´1HZ7KHVHVµ of 1825 127. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai EijiUŇ (1891±1944) 128. Ellen Widmer, 7KH0DUJLQVRI8WRSLD´6KXL-hu hou-chuan” and the Literature of Ming Loyalism 129. R. Kent Guy, 7KH(PSHURU·V)RXU7UHDVXULHV6FKRODUVDQGWKH6WDWHLQWKH/DWH Chien-lung Era 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 *133. Paul A. Cohen, %HWZHHQ7UDGLWLRQDQG0RGHUQLW\:DQJ7·DRDQG5HIRUPLQ/DWH Ching China 134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule *135. Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931±1937 *136. Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890± 1920 137. Susan Downing Videen, 7DOHVRI+HLFKş

Harvard East Asian Monographs 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 142. William D. Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar Experience *143. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, Local Government in China Under the Ching 144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM 145. Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry 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 *153. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927± 1937 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 156. George J. Tanabe, Jr.0\ŇHWKH'UHDPNHHSHU)DQWDV\DQG.QRZOHGJHLQ.DPDNXUD Buddhism 157. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500±1300 158. Yu-ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and ChineseAmerican Relations 159. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea *160. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898±1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan 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: ShisKŇVHWVXDV/Lterary 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. *190. 191. 192. 193. 194.

Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in TwelfthCentury Japan Charles ShirŇ,QRX\H7KH6LPLOLWXGHRI%ORVVRPV$&ULWLFDO%LRJUDSK\RI,]XPL.\ŇND (1873±1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, 1918±1931: A Comparative Perspective Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914±1919 John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902±1978) Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the GŇQŇ Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late &KRVʼnQ.RUHD John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: AsakuVD6HQVŇMLDQG(GR Society Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895±1937 Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier: Southwest China, 1250±1850 Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868±1945 William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds., State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 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 198. Curtis J. Milhaupt, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Michael K. Young, eds. and comps., Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics 199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937±1952 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. 0LOHQD'ROHæHORYi-9HOLQJHURYiDQG2OGőLFK.UiOZLWK*UDKDP6DQders, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project 208. Robert N. Huey, 7KH0DNLQJRI¶6KLQNRNLQVKş’ 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. .HYLQ2·5RXUNHThe 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 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 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 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 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: 7DNDQR&KŇHL7DNDKDVKL.HLVDNXDQG 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 8QLWHG1DWLRQVLQ-DSDQ·V)RUHLJQDQG6HFXULW\3ROLF\PDNLQJ1945– 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, “8VHOHVVWRWKH6WDWHµ´6RFLDO3UREOHPVµDQG6RFLDO(QJLQHHULQJLQ 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. Lin Man-houng, 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in WKH)LFWLRQRI+LJXFKL,FKL\Ň 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 279. Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the KiE\ŇVKL of Edo Japan 280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods 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 285. Peter Nickerson, Taoism, Bureaucracy, and Popular Religion in Early Medieval China 286. &KDUR%'·(WFKHYHUU\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: ,NNŇ,NNL 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, 7UDGLWLRQ7UHDWLHVDQG7UDGH4LQJ,PSHULDOLVPDQG&KRVʼnQ.RUHD 1850–1910 296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism 297. Barbara Ambros, EmplaFLQJD3LOJULPDJH7KHņ\DPD&XOWDQG5HJLRQDO5HOLJLRQLQ Early Modern Japan 298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States

Harvard East Asian Monographs 299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II 300. Linda Isako Angst, In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered Nationalism in Postwar Okinawa 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, 7KH3RZHURIWKH%XGGKDV7KH3ROLWLFVRI%XGGKLVP'XULQJWKH.RU\ʼn Dynasty (918–1392) 304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature 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 .ŇEŇ 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 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 0DQ·\ŇVKş Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737 331. 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, SailRU'LSORPDW1RPXUD.LFKLVDEXUŇDQGWKH-DSDQHVH-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, 7KH3HRSOH·V3RVW2IILFH7KH+LVWRU\DQG3ROLWLFVRIWKH-DSDQHVH 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 SakuzŇand 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

Harvard East Asian Monographs 352. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction 353. Suzanne G. O’Brien, Customizing Daily Life: Representing and Reforming Customs in Nineteenth-Century Japan 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