When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea 9780231538558

Citation preview

WHEN THE FUTURE DISAPPEARS Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

C6548.indb i

8/29/14 9:22 AM

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

columbia university press

01-pool16518_fm.indd ii

New York

8/29/14 9:29 AM

JA N E T P O O L E

WHEN THE FUTURE DISAPPEARS THE MODERNIST I M A G I N AT I ON I N L AT E C O L O N I A L

KOREA

01-pool16518_fm.indd iii

8/29/14 9:29 AM

columbia universit y press publishers since 1893 new york chichester , west sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press This publication is made possible with the grant support provided by the Korea Foundation and help from the Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto. Publication of this book has been supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poole, Janet, author. When the future disappears : the modernist imagination in late colonial Korea / Janet Poole. pages cm — (Studies of the Weatherhead Institute, Columbia University) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-16518-1 (cloth : acid-free-paper) — isbn 978-0-231-53855-8 (e-book) 1. Korean literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Korea.

3. Colonialism in literature.

4. Postcolonialism in

literature. 5. Language and languages in literature. I. Title. pl957.5.m63p66 2015 895.7'09112—dc23 2014009491

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 jacket image: yi sang, pak t’aewŏn, and kim sowoon during changmoonsa publishing er a b ook & jacket design: chang jae lee References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

C6548.indb iv

8/29/14 9:22 AM

People say that modernity is a transformative period in history. “Transformative period” means literally one huge crisis. It is a time when the common sense, morals, traditions, and customs that had directed our daily lives collapse as all the passions that create the new and the strange bear down upon us in confusion. Sŏ Insik, “Themes of Modernity,” 1939

Exhausted by reflection, my so-called conscience and reason have long since been paralyzed, and I float on a lake of time. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Patterns of the Heart,” 1939

C6548.indb v

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb vi

8/29/14 9:22 AM

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Disappearing Future of Colonial Fascism 1. The Unruly Detail of Late Colonialism 2. The Sociology of Colonial Nostalgia 3. A Private Orient

1

17 51

85

4. Peri-urban Dreams

115

5. Imperialization, or the Resolution of Crisis

149

6. Taking Possession of the Emperor’s Language 177 Epilogue: Afterlives

Notes

201

209

Selected Bibliography 249 Index

C6548.indb vii

269

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb viii

8/29/14 9:22 AM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A s I wa s w r i t i n g t h i s b o o k t h e r e w e r e m o m e n t s when I felt as if I had created my own disappearing future, so stubbornly did the book refuse to be finished. Now that I can finally experience something close to the sense of an ending, I thank everyone who made the writing of this book possible, and sometimes even pleasurable. Yi T’aejun liked to believe that writing blooms from the individual alone, and sitting at the keyboard day after day can feel like a lonely enterprise to be sure. But I appreciate now more than ever how utterly mistaken he was. Although this is not my dissertation, some of the research and questions I explore here stem from my work in graduate school. I thank my exemplary committee members for their help and support: Paul Anderer, Charles Armstrong, Harry Harootunian, Hwang Jongyon, and Tomi Suzuki. Harry Harootunian has been nothing short of an inspiration with his endless curiosity, enthusiasm, and encouragement. But, more than that, his work on interwar modernism in Japan offered me both a guide and a challenge to map the constellations of modernism in colonial Korea. Hwang Jongyon has always patiently answered all manner of questions, both large and small. I consider myself extremely lucky to have met him so many years ago. Carol Gluck taught one of the first seminars I attended at Columbia and made me realize for the first time that I could be a writer. She has continued to support me in the best ways possible ever since. During a long period in Seoul I received more help than I ever deserved. In particular I thank all the members of Kim Chul’s fascism seminar: Baek Moon

C6548.indb ix

8/29/14 9:22 AM

x acknowledgments

Im, Cha Seung-ki, Kim Chul, Kim Hyun-Joo, Kim Ye-Rim, Kwon Myoung A, Lee Kyoung-Hoon, Shin Hyung-ki, and all the other participants who introduced me to the study of colonial era literature. I have been a poor correspondent since I returned to North America, but I hope I can repay their help one day. Lee Jaeson took me in when I first went to Seoul, seeing me through a last minute bureaucratic wrangle that threatened to upset my work before it even began. Kim Jae-Yong sent me, unsolicited, some vital photocopies—I am very grateful! Meanwhile, Sam Perry kept me motivated through the first stages of research with early morning tennis on the courts at Sogang University, and Suh Jiyoung has always been available for questions and advice. My happiest memories of grad school are of summer writing retreats on the New Jersey seashore with Laura Neitzel. Through the highs and lows of graduate life I received phenomenal support from Joy Kim, Sarah Kovner, and Leila Wice. At New York University Keith Vincent pushed me further on my engagement with literary texts and was always the best partner for brainstorming syllabi and suggesting books to read. I thank my colleagues from New York University who helped me through my first years of teaching: Rebecca Karl, Tom Looser, Hyun Ok Park, Moss Roberts, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Zhang Xudong, and Dawn Lawson in the excellent library. In Toronto I have been blessed with a growing community of colleagues whose work inspires me. Andre Schmid has read many of these chapters at different stages, patiently telling me to send the manuscript away. Evie Gu was a particularly strict taskmaster one summer when I was feeling lazy. Linda Feng cajoled me over the finish line. Meng Yue always has a creative spark, while Tom Keirstead, Graham Sanders, and Vincent Shen have been ever supportive chairs. I am glad to work with Jotaro Arimori, Eric Cazdyn, Amanda Goodman, Ken Kawashima, Kyoungrok Ko, Johanna Liu, Hsiaowei Rupprecht, Atsuko Sakaki, Curie Virag, Yiching Wu, and Lisa Yoneyama. Ikuko Komuro-Lee has, always smiling, helped me to negotiate the world of difficult Japanese names, while Yurou Zhong has provided tea and chocolate. Hana Kim is a most supportive librarian. Paul Chin, Norma Escobar, and Natasja VanderBerg have made my work life easy, especially over the final weeks of writing. My enormous gratitude goes to Sungjo Kim, who stepped in at the end and, with the greatest of efficiency, took on the thorny task of obtaining copyright for the images reproduced here. Meanwhile, the many students at the University of Toronto have forced me to understand and articulate the difference between what is important and what does not really matter. Andrea Arai is always willing to chat late into the night, keeping my spirits nourished and endowing the elsewhere with a special warmth. Henry Em of-

C6548.indb x

8/29/14 9:22 AM

acknowledgments

xi

fered much support as I wrote the early chapters. A long time ago Kim Brandt read my dissertation and offered me some pointers at an early point in the process. I am most grateful to the reviewers for the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia University Press, especially to the anonymous reviewer, who suggested serious revisions. I have tried to follow your advice and only hope that you will consider your reviewing work to have been worthwhile. I have received much support from Columbia University Press for this work and my translation efforts. I thank Jennifer Crewe for her continued belief in the viability of works in the humanities and translations of Asian literatures. Jonathan Fiedler, Anita O’Brien, and Kathryn Schell have been a pleasure to work with. And I am awaiting with great expectation the always fabulous work from the design department. Because the cover arrives at the very end, I did not get to publicly thank Chang Jae Lee for his beautiful cover work on my translation of Yi T’aejun’s Eastern Sentiments, so I thank him here for designing a book that could match Yi’s high aesthetic standards. I have received much support too from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Dan Rivero, who was so comforting as things threatened to fall apart. I thank you for that. This kind of slow, archival research would not be possible without the generous support of funding agencies who appreciate that the richest rewards may appear only in the long run. I gratefully acknowledge the help I have received from the Korea Foundation (many times over), the Social Science Research Council in the form of an International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the International Communication Foundation, and the Northeast Asia Council at the Association of Asian Studies. Finally, I recall here the late Marshall Pihl, who first set me off on this journey twenty years ago, when he helped me to move from England to Hawai’i and the even more foreign world of graduate school. I hope this work will offer a small amount of vindication to his spirit. At home my brother, Chris, would shame me into action from time to time as his voice rose incredulously with the words, “Is that still the book you were working on ten years ago?” Fortunately he will have to ask different questions from now on. Rachel was always enthusiastic and understanding. And my mother has been a constant supporter through Skype. It is so great to know that I will not have to experience alone the joy and relief of finishing. I dedicate this book to those who were at my side as I wrote every word. To Dew and Grace: I’m sorry that I deleted everything you typed. You were only trying to help, and did so, immeasurably.

C6548.indb xi

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb xii

8/29/14 9:22 AM

WHEN THE FUTURE DISAPPEARS

C6548.indb xiii

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb xiv

8/29/14 9:22 AM

INTRODUCTION THE DISAPPEARING FUTURE OF COLONIAL FASCISM Inside the dimly lit building the long periods of time preserved in the pottery, the statues of Buddha, and the mammoth skeleton, all on display in chronological order, merely sent a cold and empty breeze over us. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Patterns of the Heart”

A q u e s t i o n o f t i m e l i e s at t h e h e a r t o f t h i s b o o k , which explores the ways in which the work of poets, philosophers, fiction writers, and essayists living on the Korean peninsula during the final decade of Japanese colonial occupation was fueled by the sense of a disappearing future and the struggle to imagine a transformed present. Haunted by the paradoxical disappearance of that which was yet to appear, their works turned to the past and the repetitive present of the everyday just as that past was being consigned to the museum by an imperial state at war. The cold breeze that passes over Ch’oe Myŏngik’s disenchanted protagonist on a visit to the Harbin Museum whispers that the separation of the past from the present and its rearrangement as chronological narrative, so central to the time consciousness of modernity, fail to communicate anything other than the estrangement of an icy death. That same chronological time equally fails to offer any futural promise in the short stories, essays, poems, and novels appearing from the second half of the 1930s, which, with their fragmented, episodic, and cyclical structures, replace the hope, dreams, and ambition of youth from earlier colonial stories with the compromise of middle age and old men struggling to cope in a strange, new world. The disappearing future suggests a profound loss of faith in the ideology of progress and modernization as the industrialization of the peninsula speeded up. The industrial societies of Europe shared such a loss of faith, but what also disappeared with the future in late colonial Korea was the idea, or hope, of postcolonialism itself. As colonial rule took on a more recognizably fascist form, the imperialization

C6548.indb 1

8/29/14 9:22 AM

2

introduc tion

policies of the Japanese empire threatened the imagination of a national future reaching into a distant horizon. Korea’s writers bore a special burden as the attempted elimination of Korean as a public language emerged as one major strategy on the part of the imperial state. It is to this moment that we can trace, perhaps surprisingly, a creative and varied exploration of the nature of time in modernity from those to whom the time of the modern appeared most often, but not only, as foreclosed. The imprint of that foreclosure was held within the very form of the writings they produced, and it left behind some of the most intriguing works of mid-twentieth-century global modernism. The loss of a future did not bring an end to stories of time, but it did raise the question: what happens to time when the future becomes unimaginable and unnarratable? If the future appears absent in late colonial fiction, it is all too overwhelmingly present in the writing of its history. The historian of late colonial Korea faces two major problems: she writes from the position of knowing that colonial rule came to a sudden end with Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War a mere three to four years after the final colonial era publications of many of the writers mentioned in the following pages, and she writes across, but still within, a sixty-year-plus history of the Cold War world in which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Republic of Korea set up competing states on the same peninsula and are still at war. The writers discussed here, then, have been subject to a triple censorship—by the colonial censor as they wrote, by postcolonial states for their collaborative actions, and by Cold War states for their postdivision choices of north or south. The crisis of representation they encountered is part of a longer twentieth-century history of Korean modernity in which capitalism, colonialism, and Cold War converge in a peculiarly intense fashion. That crisis has been only deepened by the historicist logic, through which history is so often told as a prelude to the present, which has exerted great influence on the ways in which late colonial writers and their works have been read. The extent of that influence has reached even to the fundamentals of whose works can or cannot be legally published. Those who willingly, or unwillingly, moved to the north of the country during the late 1940s—the socalled wŏlbuk chakka (crossing-to-the-north writers)—were subject to a publication ban until 1988 in South Korea.1 The effect of this ban on the writing of Korea’s colonial cultural history can be gauged if we consider that, of the writers discussed in this book, Yi T’aejun, Pak T’aewŏn, Ch’oe Myŏngik, Im Hwa, O Changhwan, and Kim Namch’ŏn all either moved to or stayed in the

C6548.indb 2

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

3

North. In other words, almost all the writers I discuss were persona non grata during the first four decades of the history of the Republic of Korea. Much work has been done to reintegrate these writers into the literary history of South Korea, especially during the past decade, but the effect of the long ban is still felt. In North Korean scholarship, many of these writers have fared little better as they fell out of favor during the purges of the late 1950s.2 And the effect of the ban on whose work has been translated into English is, if anything, even more striking.3 When it comes to the narration of late colonial history, there are perhaps four common narratives invoked to incorporate writers from the time into the differing national histories that have appeared since then. The first is a tale of total capitulation, which ironically mirrors the imperialist rhetoric of total mobilization. Here the choice to write in Japanese, for example, is read as unequivocal support for the imperial regime, and the figure of the former revolutionary is supposed to testify to the decisive collapse of the leftist movement in the wake of brutal suppression in the early 1930s.4 Strategy comprised a second narrative, invoked in the immediate wake of liberation and expounded most famously by the writer Kim Saryang, whom metropolitan critics had widely praised for his fictional depictions of Koreans in Japan.5 Somewhat sheepishly defending his own colonial career, on which he now claimed to have had second thoughts, Kim defended his choice to write in Japanese by arguing that there was nothing honorable in silence at the moment of crisis, unless one had continued to write in Korean in secret.6 That in fact constituted the third narrative, in which there was a period of lying in wait for colonial rule to end, exemplified by the repetition of the ways in which writers such as Hwang Sunwŏn continued to write in Korean but buried their work in anticipation of liberation.7 This option tends toward anachronism in its prior knowledge of the short-lasting nature of the total war era, a knowledge that contemporaries did not share. A fourth version of late colonial history has been most perfectly shaped in literature from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which depicts the anticolonial guerrilla warfare in Manchuria as a successful war of resistance. The problem of narrating past to present in a linear, causal fashion is resolved by imposing a narrative of constant struggle leading to victory over the colonial power.8 In this case the struggle justified the postliberation political settlement and still holds power in the Democratic People’s Republic today. Without claiming to have resolved irrevocably the problem of anachronism that historicism creates, this study is shaped by the decision to focus on how

C6548.indb 3

8/29/14 9:22 AM

4 introduc tion

writers conceived their own futures, including those who bought into the fascist project. I have found Tani Barlow’s advocacy of future anteriority as historical method helpful in considering how later knowledge of the imminent end of colonial rule and coming division shapes the historiography of late colonial Korea, which struggles to deal with a period when alternative futures for the nation were considered. As Barlow writes, “the conjecture that those who preceded us knew where in human time they were located when they acted historically is, I suggest, a potentially disabling inference.”9 Barlow’s stress on the tense of future anteriority in her work on Chinese feminism is helpful for thinking through the lateness of late colonialism, which, after all, appears only in retrospect. In histories that highlight the tense of future anteriority, the emphasis is not on what once was but on the what will have been, that is, on the imagination of the future in a moment, regardless of what actually came to pass. Such histories aim to return the quality of contingency to the writing of history and relieve the subjects of the past from the burden of representing the past merely because they were there, as if they “instantiated or embodied their own present” in a way that can be sufficiently excavated.10 Such a stance should effect major changes in the ways in which late colonial history is more usually narrated. In popular South Korean histories, the period of the late 1930s and early 1940s has been known as a “dark period” (amhŭkki), as if it were a black hole where conventional notions of time, and perhaps also responsibility, disappeared.11 The reluctance to discuss this period stemmed from the difficulty of writing into national history an era when an alternative future for the nation was imagined and practiced. It also arose from legal and ethical issues arising from a period that has led to kidnapping, executions, official tribunals, and public shaming.12 In 2002, sixty years after the end of colonial rule, scholars worked with groups from South Korea’s National Assembly to once more draw up an official list of collaborators in an attempt to produce a more accurate picture of writers’ and artists’ positions toward the colonial power.13 One of the working groups’ emphases, which is also a more recent academic trend, was to look at the content of Japanese-language works rather than passing judgment by virtue of the choice of language alone. Yet it is still difficult to consider the motivations and situation of late colonial writers, other than in relation to their apparent support, or lack thereof, for the idea of national culture, and difficult to consider their work without considering their motivations.14

C6548.indb 4

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

5

Nevertheless, the dark period also attests to the ways in which the history of fascism in the Japanese empire has been subjected to that same historicist logic that declared a Sonderweg, or special path, in Nazi Germany and described wartime Japan as having entered a “dark valley.” Such rhetorical figures attempt to rewrite the era as a time when the peoples of Germany and Japan are supposed to have stepped outside the history of modernity and behaved irrationally or reverted to their cultural “essence.” Thus the history of fascism was, until recently, written as a period of aberration or a blip when people momentarily lost their minds before somehow returning, or being returned, to the path of a true modernity, whose ideologies of progress, development, and democratization could thus be reaffirmed.15 In recent years historians have instead devoted much effort to rewriting the history of fascism as an integral part of modernity and to thus examining the relationship between modernism and fascism. By refusing to consign fascism to an atavistic past, they have forced a consideration of fascist legacies in the present; once the dark period is no longer allowed to remain in the dark, as it were, it can exert a different and powerful presence in relation to the present. This book is part of the broad effort to rewrite the history of the late colonial period into the global history of modernity and fascist cultures.16 This means to consider fascism in the colonies and not just in the metropolitan centers where it is more easily imagined. I write “easily” because this book takes fascist culture to refer not only to culture under fascism but also to a culture that actively espouses fascism. It therefore demands the recognition that Japanese fascism was coproduced in its colonies and not merely resisted or tolerated, although that certainly occurred as well. My tactic of reading a few texts closely stems from the belief that what has been excised from the historical record is precisely the strategies and forms through which the writers of occupied Korea attempted to critique their own lives and dream their own futures. Despite all the difficulties, writing did emerge, whether in Korean or Japanese, and form was given to the dilemmas and dreams of Korea’s nascent bourgeoisie. Their work opens up a history that has been rendered unseen by historicist ideologies of progress, development, and nation. In writing this book, I have been influenced by Peter Osborne’s rethinking of modernism as what he calls the “cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of negation,” which produces the search for the new.17 This negation does not take place in a historical vacuum but as an affirmation of the

C6548.indb 5

8/29/14 9:22 AM

6

introduc tion

global culture of time that is modernity, driven by the expansion of capitalist markets. As global as modernism is, however, it also bears the imprint of its location and situation. If negation is the fundamental dynamic of modernism, then the content and form of that modernism will differ according to the object of negation—what so often is termed tradition—and the conditions under which that negation takes place. It will also differ according to different models available for the mode of negation itself. Osborne’s work demands that we consider modernism as much more than a set of literary practices and forms identified predominantly with certain European literatures. And yet scholars persist in discussing modernism as a purely artistic phenomenon intrinsic to the development of modern European literature, rendering it hard to recognize Korean modernism as such.18 Caught up in its own ideology, modernism has been considered a mere formal innovation or an artistic movement, defined as a reaction against traditional representational practices, regardless of the fact that it is modernism’s privileging of the new that produces the concept of a traditional representational practice in the first place.19 Until recently, Korean modernist works have been recognized in terms of their proximity to European models and thus judged as later, inauthentic imports or incomplete attempts at mimicry. By emphasizing the status of modernism as temporal-cultural form, Osborne tries to retrieve it from its use in chronological periodizations of style, or as the name for a self-conscious artistic movement. Such common uses of the term, he argues, disregard modernism’s temporal dynamic as the “condition of possibility of a . . . distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience of history as temporal form” and thus fail to recognize its “pervasiveness and contradictory complexity.”20 What is at stake is not only the categorization, and valuation, of particular literary works but the very form for the narration of both history and the future. Elsewhere Osborne has argued that modernism is not only a consciousness of the historical time of modernity but also an ideology that represses its geopolitical origins in the “West” and subsequent universalization with colonial rule.21 It has been well argued by now that the politics of modernism were to locate all that is new and hence privileged in the mythical West. Globally this temporal scheme depended on positing a lack in the non-Western other. Historians of colonialism, such as Anne McClintock, have noted that colonialism thus places the colony in anterior time to the colonizer, a move that worked to legitimate imperialism as a means of gradually leading those backward regions forward in time toward European progress and reason.22

C6548.indb 6

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

7

Colonies could never be allowed to achieve simultaneity with Euro-America because that would bring to an end this spatial hierarchy of temporalities, along with the fragile identity of the “West” itself. Japanese colonialism availed itself of this same logic to justify its own violence but also stimulated a rich panoply of modernists against modernity: writers and philosophers whose work could, sometimes self-consciously, sometimes not so, provide the base for an alternative pan-Asian universalism that reinforced Japan’s temporal hierarchy within Asia at the same moment that it questioned the dominance of so-called Western thought and offered a center for Asian intellectuals’ identification.23 Such flourishing pan-Asianisms rendered particularly complex the romantic antiquarianism that prospered in Korea, as in Japan, for if the turn to the past was a specifically colonial ideology that accepted the colonizers’ terms, as the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon criticized, then it often offered a more viable way for the colonial subject to join imperial time.24 The modernism of late colonial Korea appears to struggle to envision a future, but that does not mean that it is any less future oriented than other modernisms. And like other modernisms, that future orientation took on differing political shades. One of those shades was fascism, which I understand here as the desire for a kind of “capitalism without capitalism,” as it were. Following Slavoj Žižek and others, here fascism refers to the dream of capitalism without its “excess,” that is, without class division, peasant and labor unrest, or the threat of communist revolution—in other words, so much of what capitalism gives rise to.25 Marilyn Ivy has recently summarized fascism as the erasure of “class divisions by appealing to the nation as an organic community that transcends these divisions while keeping in place existing property relations.”26 Anyone who reads the lectures of the literary critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ from the early 1940s, as I do in chapter 5, would harbor no doubts that fascism had arrived in Korea. According to Ch’oe, any fiction that ignored the happy situation of communal harmony in Korea to describe unhappy and impoverished peasants could no longer be considered realism.27 It is hard to imagine a property relation more central to modernity than that of colonialism. Fascism in late colonial Korea took the form of the rhetorical disavowal of the colonial relation; capitalism without capitalism also necessarily meant colonialism without colonialism. The wartime injunctions to “become Japanese” and to rethink Korea as a “region,” and not a colony, of the imperial nation performed that disavowal, which acted to keep in place existing property relations of class and empire.

C6548.indb 7

8/29/14 9:22 AM

8 introduc tion

To avail myself of fascism’s comparative conceptual power is to place colonial Korea in the history of global modernity rather than consign it to the small box of cultural exceptionalism in which the late colonial policies of the imperial state are narrated under the terms of mere cultural assimilationism, the term more usually used when discussing Korea’s colonial history. Late colonial Korea did indeed undergo policies of assimilation, but not so much assimilation to “being Japanese” as assimilation to the fantasy of fascism and its production of the fantasy of something called “Japanese culture,” a process that also had the effect of realigning and reinforcing ideas of something called “Korean culture.” This is why we can trace back to this period the “origins” of so many of the aesthetic and cultural notions of “Koreanness” that still thrive, from unself-conscious immediacy to the beauty of sorrow.28 Under fascism the idea of “culture” takes on a particular significance, a fact that is noteworthy for those of us who work on Korea’s colonial history, where the period from 1920 through either 1931 or 1937 is generally dubbed the era of “cultural rule,” as if somehow the military disappeared for a while. During those years a flourishing cultural sphere was allowed to emerge in the media and arts so long as it did not nurture aspirations for political autonomy. Under colonial rule “Korean” identity would ideally be cultural and not political, but under late colonial rule that cultural identity would simultaneously have to support the war cause. Paradoxically these policies endowed the realm of culture with added significance not only for imperialist forces but also for any kind of anticolonialism, as it offered a space for practices where notions of self, whether individual or communal, were elaborated and contested. Aesthetics and politics were not easily separated. Bruce Cumings has characterized Japan’s colonialism in Korea as “developmental,” by which he does not mean to praise the results of that rule but rather to describe the way in which it turned to infrastructure and industry in order to integrate the colony into the imperial market, producing a nascent industrial revolution in its wake.29 The experience of temporal dislocation that was modernity in colonial Korea was rendered most visible in the cities, whose population surged throughout the decade with the influx of impoverished peasants, new factory workers, and Japanese immigrants. By 1940 the population of Seoul had reached one million, of whom almost one-third were Japanese residents, and other cities also grew, especially those on the northsouth railroad line that continued up into Manchuria. Widening roads, rising buildings, and expanding tram and bus networks were transforming the

C6548.indb 8

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

9

urban environment irrevocably. Both slums and new housing developments were coalescing around urban peripheries, the first apartment buildings were going up, and Seoul’s downtown commercial core was lit up each night with neon lights. Korea’s cities staged the encounter between the height of fashion, the newest technologies, grinding poverty, and the unequal distribution of resources in a visible demonstration of the increasing coexistence and disparities of old and new, rich and poor. In histories of Korea the disjunctural time of the “late colonial” era (ilche mal), which refers to roughly the decade preceding the liberation from formal colonial rule that came with Japan’s defeat, is most often woven into a political history. After the second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the already harsh colonial surveillance regime, which had been stepping up its repression of anticolonial and communist movements since the Manchurian Incident of 1931, took a distinct turn to focus on making colonial subjects self-identify as imperial subjects, a policy referred to generally as imperialization (hwangminhwa/kōminka). The now infamous slogan naisen ittai (literally, the Japanese homeland and Korea as one body) appeared as imperial rhetoric and declared Korea to be not a colony—as it had been since formal colonization in 1910—but a region of Japan with the goal of solidifying support for the labor of war soon in progress on two fronts and demanding more bodies to staff factories and fight battles. With its proximity to the newly founded state of Manchukuo and the warfront in China, Korea had taken on a vital strategic importance, and its full exploitation, or what was termed total mobilization, demanded that colonial subjects not only cease to protest their status and treatment but actively identify with the cause of war, enough to be prepared to pick up a gun and die on the battlefield. They had to become believers. Today the era known as late colonial is remembered mostly by a few iconic events: the voluntary and forced drafting of millions of men and women to staff mines, factories, and on occasion sexual labor camps; the drafting of Korean men into the Imperial Army; the order announced in 1939 that Koreans should adopt Japanese-style names; the forced attendance at Shintō shrine services; the closing of the vernacular press in 1940; and the increasingly widespread adoption of the Japanese language both in public life and at home. As the war deepened, writers and artists were expected to produce works in line with the narrative of victory in war, through their work and the ubiquitous writers’ tours to encourage students to join the army and to celebrate their sacrifice as martyrdom, and increasingly to write in the Japanese language rather than the Korean of their custom. The enforcement of

C6548.indb 9

8/29/14 9:22 AM

10

introduc tion

Japanese language use, at least in the public realm and ideally extending into private life, was one of the most controversial policies aiming to encourage Koreans to identify with a Japanese future. The degree to which the Government General had come to view the Korean language as harboring the potential to foster alternative communities to that of Korea as a loyal region of the Japanese imperial state became dramatically visible in what became known as the Language Society Incident of 1942. Members of the Korean Language Society involved in producing the first Korean language dictionary were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured on suspicion of conspiring against the imperial state. Two of them died in prison.30 Perhaps it should not surprise that the project to preserve words as the material embodiment of a Korean social life and to explain them through other Korean words should be viewed as a gesture of self-referentiality and autonomy. During the years of the Pacific War, writers increasingly faced the prospect of publishing in Japanese or not at all, and, although their choices differed, the possibility of the Korean language passing into disuse became not quite so unimaginable after all. If Korea’s early modern reformers had presumed the existence of the nation with its own language, stretching into the distant future, by the height of the Pacific War their faith was beginning to shake. The particular resonance of the imperialization policies for the generation of writers discussed here was painful. They were for the most part born just before or after colonial rule had been imposed in 1910. They had no lived memory of precolonial society, and all their schooling had taken place within the colonial education system. The majority of them had, furthermore, pursued higher education in the Japanese metropole. But they were also the generation of writers whose careers had been forged on their return to Korea in a flourishing Korean language media of the 1930s, which benefited from increased literacy rates and the emergence of a market where, for some, money could be made. Newspaper sales had trebled over the course of the decade, and a range of magazines and journals appeared catering to increasingly specialized readerships.31 Whereas in the previous decade publishers had lost money, sometimes bringing financial ruin on themselves with their attempts to develop a vernacular literature and press often with explicitly nationalist beliefs, by the 1930s the press was beginning to support the upwardly mobile dreams of individual writers. Indeed the 1930s marked the decade when it became possible for a few to earn a living as a professional writer, making those writers some of the

C6548.indb 10

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

11

most paradigmatic examples of a self-made bourgeoisie in the colony.32 Yi T’aejun, featured in chapter 3, counted among these, and by serializing one long novel per year in a newspaper, as well as writing short stories and writing guides, at times editing the cultural pages for newspapers and teaching writing, he could string together enough money to support his growing family and reasonably elegant daily life. A favorite topic of writers such as Yi was the critique of the ongoing processes of commodification in Korean society, but this critique of capitalism voiced so often by writers at the time is not without its own contradictions, as many of them benefited greatly from these transformations. Yi Hyosŏk, for example, better known today for his peaceful description of rural market towns, hailed the commoditization of the writer himself, describing his joy at the inauguration of a manuscript fee system in the mid-1930s, whereby writers would be paid per page rather than rewarded in the “primitive” way with a meal and a drink; this, Yi wrote, was “modern and signifies development.”33 The writers and artists who appear in this book are bourgeois subjects: self-made, in thrall to the market while fantasizing freedom from it, tied through language to the notion of a national culture but betrayed by the imperial state on whose back they had hitherto thrived. They are caught between the state, global economy, and precolonial memory and live the contradictions between nation and capital in a peculiarly fraught fashion. With the shutdown of the vernacular press in 1940, the contradictions in their situation became painfully real, as they could no longer fantasize freedom from either the market or politics. Some lost jobs as newspaper editors, and all saw publication venues decrease. They had manipulated their education and knowledge toward the elaboration of Korean language arts, but now, with only a few journals continuing to publish short stories, for the most part to survive as a writer meant confronting one option, that of writing in the imperial language. In colonial histories there are few examples where colonial languages have been inducted into the modern only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. At the height of imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial languages around the world struggled to give birth to modern forms of literature, which were all too often dominated by the imperial languages.34 Against the authority of metropolitan institutions of education, media, and government, the colonial language struggled to represent the modern subject in writing. This had been possible in Korea against all odds, and yet as war drew in, and under the weight of forced suppression

C6548.indb 11

8/29/14 9:22 AM

12 introduc tion

as well as the beginning of an inevitable forgetting from younger generations schooled in Japanese, the Korean language faced the prospect of its own gradual disappearance. Of all the disappearances of the late colonial period, this one hit writers the hardest, striking at the heart of their political and social life practice. Reactions to this were as diverse as the determined use of new languages to hold onto revolutionary ideals or the wholesale advocacy of fascism as the path to a future free from the burden of colonial subjecthood. If they chose not to adopt the imperial language, they were challenged to use a language rapidly becoming minor to describe the complexities of a society in which the very medium of description was under threat of becoming obsolete. I have suggested these broad coordinates for a history unfamiliar to many, but the pages that follow explore the aesthetic constellations of the time through relatively few works. In an essay describing the literary forms most prominent in 1930s Korea, the writer and editor Yi T’aejun commented that “in environments such as Korea, where one encounters a variety of difficulties when trying to handle the general situation either spatially or temporally, it is no exaggeration to say that the most partial and fragmented form of the short story has to be the most appropriate literary form.”35 Yi drew a connection between the colonial situation and the forms that emerged from within that experience. I have followed that connection in my focus on the “minor” genres of philosophy, literary criticism, the short story, and the anecdotal essay. I do not read form as a straitjacket, or a set of rules to which writers strove to comply, but as contested, pushed to its limits, and refracting always dynamic emergence amid the entanglements of late colonial time.36 I am interested, for example, in the revival of the anecdotal essay with its fragmentary and repetitive form that seems to have spoken more adeptly to the nature of everyday experience; in the rise of historical philosophy and the capacity of the abstract nature of philosophical language to circumvent the colonial censorship regime; and in the serialization of tales of domestic mundanity in the midst of dramatic social transformation. I am interested equally in the discourses of fragmentation that arose from both socialists and fascists, who all blamed the conflicts of the time on capitalist crisis. For literary critics in favor of the fascist regime, the defeat of narrative fragmentation promised the clarity of a transformed future, just as proliferation of a narrative perceived to have fragmented prevented the imagination of revolution for those who still harbored

C6548.indb 12

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

13

the socialist dream. Meanwhile, for others fragmentation comprised the very mode for confronting contemporary experience. A brief consideration of an earlier modernism highlights the distinctive developments in modernism of the late 1930s. Consider how the stories of Ch’oe Myŏngik and his contemporaries stand in stark contrast with novels written just before or after Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910, where ambitious youths pledge their future to the nation and set off overseas to acquire the modern education they deemed the logical route to not only selftransformation but the renovation of Korean society on their projected return. As in other colonial literatures around the world, to early modern writers such as Yi Injik (1862–1916) and Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), the bildungsroman offered a model for a particular sense of selfhood that linked the individual to the nation and projected their entangled fate into the future as destiny. Faith in the powerful modernist ideology of progress guaranteed the development of protagonist, the national community, and the novel itself, which thus relied on a sense of future time as the destination toward which all three headed, even as they encountered difficulties along the way.37 A mere two decades later, this individual seems hard to find in the pages of magazines, newspapers, and books. In place of progress and destiny, decadence and nostalgia permeate the atmosphere of the short stories, poems, and essays, which dominate the literary scene with their fragmented, episodic, and cyclical structures. This changing relationship between individual and national futures left its indelible imprint on narrative form, posing a challenge to the stories that could be told and the manner of their telling. Deprived of an obvious future, writers began to explore their present as a complex composite of temporal experience where memory impinged on daily life, where the past lifted its head both to haunt and to remind but could also be fashioned to be of use in the present, and where the endless repetition of the everyday might raise it to the level of myth but might also provide the hope for transformation within that daily life. Fiction turned to the realm of the personal and domestic, to the past and tradition, but also, decidedly, to a present morphing toward an uncertain future. Philosophy and criticism followed in its wake as artists and thinkers sought to give shape to new senses of time. In the chapters that follow, I track the modernist imagination in the late colonial works of a number of writers, moving between the vernacular and imperial languages to consider what kind of space of possibility is opened up in each. This is by no means a survey of literature from the period and makes

C6548.indb 13

8/29/14 9:22 AM

14 introduc tion

no claim to comprehensive representation of different genres, artists, or aesthetic and political tendencies. Instead my interest lies in the parameters and possibilities of literary practice under the conditions of late colonialism and the ways in which they force us to reconsider colonial histories and literatures. To this end I begin with the sense of narrative fragmentation bewailed on all sides in the late 1930s and an author, Ch’oe Myŏngik, who forged his own aesthetic project from within it. Chapter 1 shows how in the wake of a disappearing future the “detail” rose as an object of both debate and literary practice and uses it as a lens through which to examine a historical mode of perception that takes on new meaning in the context of late colonial fascism. In Ch’oe’s work the urban everyday emerges historically as a site of dynamic dissonance, thus opening up a theme that runs throughout this book, that of the everyday as a site of both crisis and possibility. In many ways this everyday was an emergent temporality of late colonialism, theorized and rendered visible by fiction writers and philosophers alike. Chapter 2 examines the widespread interest in the past as a dominant temporality that took on a particularly charged valence in the context of colonial history. Interest in the necessarily precolonial past always held the potential to threaten the legitimacy of the contemporary regime, but it also ran the constant risk of being absorbed and tamed by a more widespread modernist nostalgia shared by, among others, the Japanese intelligentsia and a commercial media. The chapter explores the politics of late colonial nostalgia through the work of philosopher Sŏ Insik, better known for his introduction into Korean of Japan’s Kyoto School of philosophers. Sŏ’s criticism of the nostalgia phenomenon formed part of his own attempts to think a different, and universal, future through the abstract language of philosophy. As a committed member of the Communist Party who had served time in a colonial jail, Sŏ is often remembered today as a former revolutionary, yet his dogged pursuit of a futural politics amid the most severe censorship defies the notion that he had abandoned his political dreams entirely. A rereading of Sŏ’s philosophical essays as form thus becomes the occasion for a consideration of how to read the colonial archive and move beyond the criticism of Korea’s colonial intellectuals for their “overintimacy” with the art and thinking of Japan’s writers and artists. By the early 1940s the narrating of Korean culture into the past had reached such a point that in a roundtable discussion with some famous Japanese writers visiting Korea, the critic and poet Im Hwa had begged that Korean literature not be consigned to some “museum-like thing.”38 Chapter 3 explores Yi

C6548.indb 14

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

15

T’aejun’s attempts to reenchant that past, setting it free from beneath the cold and empty breeze. His works reveal the attractions of antiquarianism to an emergent bourgeois elite, and the ways in which the reenchantment of the past actually aimed for the reenchantment of the everyday present. Yi’s romantic antiquarianism allowed a renarration of the Orient at the peak of pan-Asian imperial discourses, helping to delineate what appeared to be an intensely private subject who is yet fully enmeshed in and constituted by the imperial economy, disdaining commerce while being a product of capitalism, and parodying the old while being essentially modern, in fact modernist. This highly contradictory emergent personal sphere found expression in the anecdotal essay form, which underwent a revival in the 1930s and which equally straddled the traditional and the modern, the public and the private. Chapter 4 attempts to account for the material environment that housed this private subject through a reading of fiction from the transforming periphery of Seoul. Stories set in this new peri-urban space, where old and new converge in a particularly intense form, reveal it to be a product of the encounter between capital and the colonial state, where state-led urban planning, global economic crisis, and precolonial memory combine to shape the lives of Korea’s growing bourgeois class. The form of narrative that emerged from this confluence of factors was relentlessly inward turning, focusing on the protagonist’s consciousness and the minutiae of his domestic life. The chapter focuses on a triptych of stories by the author Pak T’aewŏn to reveal the relationship between these seemingly apolitical, asocial stories and the wartime economy. Chapter 5 takes me into the heart of fascism, exploring how support for the colonial policies of imperialization constituted one response to the crisis of time that had affected all, from Ch’oe Myŏngik onward, who struggled to imagine a different future. The chapter follows the work of the critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ, who led the campaign for a literature of imperialization and promoted writing in Japanese and fighting on behalf of the war effort. For Ch’oe imperialization promised a happy future and the elimination of doubt and anxiety, even if the route to that future lay in sacrifice on the battlefield. Here I trace the logic through which Ch’oe came to narrate belief in the imperial project and his desire for the catharsis of tragedy through a close reading of his most controversial text, a collection of literary criticism published in 1943. The final chapter attempts to open cracks in the monolithic discourse of imperialization through discussion of a story written in Japanese for Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s wartime literary magazine by former communist leader Kim

C6548.indb 15

8/29/14 9:22 AM

16

introduc tion

Namch’ŏn. Kim’s moving meditation on the birth of a son casts the figure of the child as a focus point for a consideration of the future for both the nation and individuals. Far from supporting the imperial regime, the story casts profound doubt on the happy future promised by its ideologues, and in doing so, doubt also on the power of Japanese language to enact fascist desire. The book ends with a brief epilogue, discussing how these writers’ words inflected their lives in the postcolonial Koreas, that is, the afterlife of a period that forced choices of conscience on everyone while also producing some of the most complex and intriguing literary works of mid-twentiethcentury global modernism. Readers may wonder why there is no overt description of censorship here. Clearly censorship is one of the defining features of colonial literatures, which are marked equally by absence and silence as by plenitude and directness. In a sense this makes colonial writing most literary, as it demonstrates in an intense fashion the qualities that already mark literary language, such as the ability to speak otherwise, whether through metaphor or metonym, allegory or other rhetorical device.39 In this book I am more interested in what writers managed to write, and for that reason I have chosen to focus on the productivity of that silence and that otherwise, but also to try to resist the desire to impose substitutes or presume what a writer “really” wanted to say. Of course the impact of censorship on writers varied too: the effect on the antiquarian Yi T’aejun would have been quite different from that on the communist organizer and philosopher Sŏ Insik, and these differences must be marked. When the future disappears time does not come to an end; instead, in late colonial Korea, it entered the entangled realm of an everyday life lived under colonial fascism. Its aesthetic constellations bear witness to a clash of forces and temporalities that are rather easily, sometimes reductively, termed colonial history. I hope that by reanimating those constellations here I set them loose into a new relationship with our supposedly postcolonial present. But I leave the task of ordering that relationship to the reader.

C6548.indb 16

8/29/14 9:22 AM

1 THE UNRULY DETAIL OF LATE COLONIALISM Pyŏngil was not able to make plans for even one confident step into the future. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Walking in the Rain”

C h ’o e M yŏ n g i k ’s d o u b t- r i d d e n h e ro s u f f e r s f ro m a dilemma common to characters in Korean fiction written as the fascist militarism of Japan tightened its hold on its colony: an inability to imagine the future other than as a relentless repetition of the present. Morning and night Pyŏngil trudges along a narrow path through the slums on the outskirts of the city of Pyongyang to reach the office where he works as a clerk in the new and expanding industrial development zone. An interruption of this routine, in the form of an encounter with a photographer running a small portrait studio on Pyŏngil’s route, merely serves to heighten the sense that permeates the story of stymied stasis in the midst of a rapidly transforming urban environment. While Pyŏngil’s route is literally teeming with densely described insects and amphibians, slum residents and passersby, Pyŏngil himself remains isolated and frustrated in the simple goal of gaining the trust of his employer and, hence, a reference. The photographer, meanwhile, has risen from poor studio apprentice to proud studio owner and is eager to dispense advice on his own upward mobility: “The greatest pleasure in the world is to sit in your own home—however small it may be as long as it is yours and not rented—and then you maybe run a business and eat and save anything left over little by little.”1 Such aspirations fill Pyŏngil with disgust, not because he himself shuns work and routine, but because he declares himself to have little faith in turning time “upside down” and saving money for a future that might never arrive. As if to affirm Pyŏngil’s position, by the end of the story the photographer has died suddenly in a typhoid epidemic. The contingent

C6548.indb 17

8/29/14 9:22 AM

18 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

nature of time has undermined the ideology of a guaranteed future, the faith in progress and economic possession as a passage to a better life. Around the time Ch’oe Myŏngik (1903–?) was writing in 1936, cultural critics too began to question the nature of the future, or, more specifically, its apparent disappearance in narrative forms. Perhaps none felt this as intensely as the erstwhile revolutionary poet Im Hwa (1908–53), who as a member of the Communist Party had led the Korea Artista Proleta Federacio (Korean Artists’ Proletarian Federation, known by its acronym KAPF) in its heyday of the late 1920s and then found himself walking into a police station to declare its formal dissolution, under intense persecution, in 1935. In the aftermath of that immense frustration, Im had turned his attention to his other occupation as literary critic, leaving behind hundreds of pages of ruminations about his present, or, to be more precise, how poets and novelists were narrating that present. As Im cast his critical eye over fiction in Korean in the wake of the collapse of KAPF, he was dismayed by what he saw: not only did it seem to lack the unitary direction that the political impetus of KAPF had aimed to impart, but its very nature as narrative seemed to be breaking up, leaving mere mosaic-like pieces that could hardly be entrusted to portray a sustained critical force. The problem was not just that different stories were being told or that some writers seemed more interested in the past than the present, but that the capacity to portray the temporal logic of development, of cause and effect, and with it the forward-moving thrust of revolution, seemed to be disappearing amid a proliferation in narrative detail that he considered to be entirely unruly. If the revolution could not even be imagined or narrated in fiction, it was hard to see how it might happen on the streets. What is striking is how the metaphor Im used to describe this fiction of disconnected detail and futureless orientation resonates with Ch’oe’s own preoccupation with the photographer’s studio. In an essay on the set’ae sosŏl, or novel of manners, that he considered representative of this particular trend, Im described such fiction as “the representation of daily life habits where dense and fine detailed description unfolds like the film of a moving picture.”2 Ironically for Im, the former movie actor, just as fiction had become cinematic, this subverts his revolutionary agenda, or so he believes. The rhetoric of Ch’oe’s story, too, owes much to the cinema: Ch’oe stages the opening scene with a filmic slow zoom in to Pyŏngil as he winds his way through the alleys to work, and later in the story a strange doubling of Pyŏngil emerges from him lying in bed and watching on his ceiling “those scenes of daily life he had witnessed and heard on that road.”3 But here, as in Im’s complaint, it

C6548.indb 18

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

19

is cinema as a series of static images—of photographs—rather than as the motor of a decisively unfolding narrative, that draws Ch’oe’s attention, and it is the world of the studio photographer that gathers both thematic and formal import. That world sets the stage for a debate over the ideals of a class rising to new prominence in the wake of the collapse of the leftist movement and acceleration of the war economy. In Ch’oe’s work the photograph figures the doubled existence of the petite bourgeoisie stranded between ruler and ruled and living out their lives on the edges of expanding cities. Both Im Hwa and Ch’oe Myŏngik associate the technology of the camera and the world it represents with this class, and with the new visibility of something called daily life and its disaggregation into disconnected detail. Yet would this mean that the photograph could only figure the sense of a disappearing future, or could it also offer strategies for disrupting the routines of colonial bourgeois life?

The L anguages of C ol onial P hoto gr aphy “I’m in the habit of always thinking of fiction in relation to pictures,” wrote Ch’oe Myŏngik in a later essay collection, Thoughts on Writing.4 In a small but significant corpus of short stories produced throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ch’oe built up a reputation as a writer of refined technique, a self-styled craftsman whose craft was the fashioning of detailed description of a density previously unknown in modern Korean literature. In his own descriptions of his style, he dwells on the importance of sketching to his writing practice and its nurturing of two capacities in particular: precision and the power of observation. Precision produces, he writes, the beauty of the right word being in the right place, a notion of order understood along a visual model of his “desire to describe and narrate precisely what I wanted to say, the characters and scenes I wanted to show readers.”5 In other words, Ch’oe’s conception of narrative entailed the appearance of protocols of description and use of detail which in his contemporary semiotic order were deemed commensurate to the production of the perception of a visual image. Yet this modeling of writing on the mode of perception associated with sketching and photography was just as much about nurturing a “power of observation” as sketching objects more accurately.6 It was about nurturing a particular observational viewpoint. Thus the visual training that arose with photography and practices of sketching is equally implicated in the production of a certain

C6548.indb 19

8/29/14 9:22 AM

20 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

kind of subjectivity. That subjectivity becomes more concrete in the photographic images of Ch’oe’s time and in the material history of photography in the colony and its meanings, significations, and representations. The scene chosen by Ch’oe for his photographic tale in “Walking in the Rain” (“Pi onŭn kil,” 1936) is the interior of the portrait studio. The protagonist Pyŏngil shelters under its eaves one rainy day on his walk home from work. Thus begins his encounter with the portrait photographer. Ch’oe describes a small, shabby affair located on a peripheral street of Pyongyang. In the display window, made from a simple pane of glass inserted into a hole in the wall, faded and bent photographs of girls from the local rubber factories hang on a background of blue wallpaper decorated with a gold foil pattern and spotlighted by a bare 16-watt bulb. Inside, a sliding door opens to reveal a sloping glass ceiling casting dim light down on a hung background painted with a tree and before it a sofa and a small table, on which stand a Europeanlanguage book and pot of narcissi. When the electric light brightening the tiny room is switched off, the narcissi seem to revert to a China ink painting in the eyes of Ch’oe’s protagonist, Pyŏngil. It is a reversion that recalls the origins of early photographic genres in those of painting, specifically portraiture. Even the term that eventually stabilized as the sign of the photograph, sajin, holds within it the early term ŏjin, just one of the terms that referred to a painted portrait (of a monarch). Early portraits of the 1900s followed the generic rules of painted portraits, tending to capture either the entire body or a three-quarter view of the subject either standing or sitting and facing forward, as omitting a body part was supposed to deny the wholeness of the body inherited from one’s ancestors. The sitter dressed in accordance with his or her status and most often sat or stood beside a table, covered with a tablecloth and holding a vase or potted plant, typically an orchid or small bonsai tree. Such stylized portraits were typically taken in a photograph studio, which provided the appropriate accoutrements, as well as light and warmth in winter for the relatively long sittings, which were required initially due to long exposure times. For many Koreans the first experience of having their photograph taken came through the medium of the portrait photograph and thus with the symbolic space of the portrait studio. In his magisterial history of photography in Korea, Ch’oe Injin wrote at length of these studios, which in the first instance embodied technological modernity but also a shift from a social order in which only high officials or royalty had their portraits painted to a society in which anyone who paid could be photographed.7 This association of the

C6548.indb 20

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

21

photograph with a commodity-driven society in which the mastery of technology could provide upward mobility continues into Ch’oe Myŏngik’s story, where the photographer has completed an apprenticeship in another studio, borrowed the money on installments for his own camera, and now dreams of moving to a studio with an advertising sign in a downtown street. At first Koreans had to travel to studios in Shanghai and Beijing to have their portraits taken, but from 1882–83 the first portrait studios began to appear in Seoul.8 These early studios had demanded a significant investment of money, not only for the camera equipment but for the building itself. Before the widespread availability of electric light and film and processing techniques that could produce good photographs in artificial light, the studio ideally had both a south-facing window and a north-facing glass roof to allow enough natural light to enter the room where subjects sat. In general the one-story design of the Korean house (hanok) was too dark to satisfy these requirements, and portrait studios tended to be built in a Western or Japanese two-story style, with a reception room downstairs to admit and entertain customers and a studio upstairs with a glass roof to take the utmost advantage of natural light. By the 1930s, however, wider availability of electric light and new development technology meant that the building itself bore a less onerous burden to allow the taking of photographs. In turn, camera equipment was becoming cheaper and more widely available, and, according to Ch’oe Injin, with the rise of the amateur photographer the glory days of the portrait studios and their virtual monopoly on camera technology had passed.9 By 1936 a portrait studio could offer a determined apprentice the opportunity to support his own family and dream of a better financial future; it had, in other words, become one paradigmatic route for a petit bourgeois dream. In his story Ch’oe Myŏngik points to the time of the studio interior as one of development—of photographs but also of that petit bourgeois dream. He also calls attention to the photographic frame as Pyŏngil pauses before the photographs of the factory girls and imagines their rough, laboring hands, which are omitted from the portraits of their made up faces. The photograph is held responsible for representing a certain view, and one that here disguises and prettifies another, related form of development: the industrial development shaping the city of Pyongyang, Ch’oe Myŏngik’s hometown. The interior constituted by the photograph and the studio tries to disguise the harshness of the physical process while remaining inextricably entangled with it. Urban photographs of the time tended to depict cities as either clean and bright centers of commerce or monumental displays of colonial power.

C6548.indb 21

8/29/14 9:22 AM

22 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

figure 1.1. 1920s studio portrait by Yi Honggyŏng. Hangilsa.

Photographs of Pyongyang depict a booming, orderly city with a steady horizon of two- and three-story buildings lining the flats of the Taedong River. Pyongyang was fast becoming known as an industrial center on the peninsula, a center not for government but for a proliferating petite bourgeoisie. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, with its extraordinary concentration of Christian missionary activity and a medley of educational institutions, Pyongyang had already produced a distinctive form of proto-bourgeois culture. By the 1930s Pyongyang had become not only a center of education and churches but also a large commercial and industrial city, which was the final major stop on the railroad running from Japan and reaching into Manchuria. In a roundtable discussion organized by the best-selling magazine Chogwang as part of a series focusing on regional cities, distinguished Pyongyang natives boasted of the city’s long history and role in the dissemination of both Buddhism and Christianity across the country, though at very different points in history; its strategic position at the “center of East Asia” with the opening of shipping lanes between Pyongyang and Shanghai and cities further to the north; and the modernity and culture of its inhabitants who, they argued, regularly used Western medicine and crowded into the city’s libraries every

C6548.indb 22

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

23

figure 1.2. View of Pyongyang. Somundang.

day.10 Industriousness was said to characterize the people of Pyongyang, as the visiting Chogwang journalist wonders at the sounds of knocking and chipping emanating from inside all the houses, clearly audible from the street, and speculates that home industries are widespread and form a foundation for Pyongyang’s larger factories.11 In his description the interior is literally a site for industry. Photographs of Pyongyang obey their own set of generic conventions in what might be called the picture postcard urban mode. Here a major road rises and cuts diagonally across the center of the postcard before disappearing on the horizon. Streetcars, pedestrians, cyclists, and horse-drawn carts pass each other on the street in an orderly fashion. Chimney stacks dot the horizon as if to testify to Pyongyang’s status as up-and-coming industrial center; telegraph poles line the streets to point to the presence of electricity; and, above it all, two biplanes hover over the buildings. The photograph is taken from an elevated position, a commanding viewpoint looking down and across the city and into the horizon. This is the city, the photograph appears to say, and it is a center of modernity and, above all, circulation—of people, of

C6548.indb 23

8/29/14 9:22 AM

24 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

traffic, of commodities. Such visions of the city can be found again and again in compendia of photographs of colonial Korea, such as in the two volumes of the Survey of Japanese Geography and Customs published in 1930 that cover the peninsula.12 Such views also dominate the picture postcard collections, such as Famous Sites of Chōsen, that seem to attest to the success of colonial rule in turning Korean urban centers into clean and booming commercial centers.13 When tourists sent such postcards home to the metropole, or elsewhere in the world, they attested to the successful domestication and development of the colony. Such panoramic views, which removed the viewer from the dust of the street and turned the city into an exhibition, were not unique to picture postcards of Korea but have been noted in other photographic traditions that depict what Nancy Armstrong has termed the “flow of the city.”14 Postcards from Korea shared this global aesthetic, but their aestheticizing of urban space as a site of dynamic circulation and clean commerce also legitimated Japan’s “developmental” colonialism. Another major mode for depicting the city took a more direct approach to Korea’s colonial status, adopting metonymy as a literal tour de force by presenting stark, monumental views of major, modern buildings associated with the colonial power—railway stations, banks, government buildings, and schools. These views were usually taken at ground level, looking up at the solid, brick buildings that dwarf pedestrians and the implied viewer. The solidity, magnificence, and awe of colonial power are suggested. In the forefront of the image there are sometimes a few pedestrians in Japanese and Korean clothing, but more often a stark and empty street or square tends to isolate the heavy materiality of a building divorced from human interaction. Wide-open spaces highlight the impact of the appearance of institutions of colonial power in the early twentieth-century version of “shock and awe.” Perhaps some observers read into these images the appearance of modernity and order on the peninsula, but undoubtedly the images also present the city as a colonial frontier: stark, empty spaces presided over by magisterial buildings rendering invisible the traces of any prior social life or residency. What is missing from these urban depictions are the alleys in which Ch’oe sets his story. At the very beginning of “Walking in the Rain,” we are told that Pyŏngil’s route lies off the “city government’s borough map,” away from territorial surveillance and away, too, from the picture postcard aesthetic. At just one point Pyŏngil passes one corner of the city wall, where he is able to catch a glimpse of the city proper: “He gazed again through the gate at the brilliant lights of the city and tried to conjure up those amazing population

C6548.indb 24

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

25

figure 1.3. Postcard of the Keijō Post Office.

figures—one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand!”15 This glimpse of the bright city is immediately dismissed by Pyŏngil’s thought that this huge population is “all preoccupied with their own problems.” He then turns his back on the city to continue on his path, but a crucial spatial divide has been drawn. Photographs of the modern Korean city stood in explicit contrast to the views of the “old city,” which showed a dark mass of roofs and replaced open circulation with a maze of lanes. Some postcards explicitly juxtaposed these two views of the city in a propagandistic attestation to colonial progress in “opening up” and brightening the city.16 But for the most part the alleys did not appear in postcards, which preferred to dwell on those areas where modern principles of urban planning had been applied with grid-like patterns and wide streets designed for motor traffic and electricity poles. Japanese novels set in colonial Korea, such as sometime Seoul resident Tanaka Hidemitsu’s Yoidorebune (Drunken Boat; 1949), also tend to focus on the Korean sections of the colonial city as a mass of dark, impenetrable lanes. In Tanaka’s novel those lanes harbor criminals and conspirators and constitute an explicit

C6548.indb 25

8/29/14 9:22 AM

26 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

figure 1.4. Pyongyang, the old city. Somundang.

threat to Japanese residents and visitors.17 In Ch’oe’s story the same lanes are the very habitat of the “ordinary and unremarkable” scenes of daily life that Pyŏngil reviews each night. If the picture postcard aesthetic tended to dominate the representation of urban space, rural space found its apotheosis in a different photographic economy where the circulation of capital was sublimated into the pictorialist aesthetic. The late 1930s saw the spread of smaller, cheaper camera technology enabled by the industrial production of cameras and developing equipment. As a result, the portrait studios gradually lost their monopoly on the taking of pictures and the amateur photographer emerged. The very first amateur photography clubs had been founded earlier, in 1904 and 1909, respectively, but it was not until the 1930s that the new technology and a growing bourgeois class interested in leisure and art as a hobby combined to produce a small explosion in the number of photographers and photographs taken.18 In 1937 the Chosŏn ilbo newspaper launched an annual amateur photography contest, which continued until the newspaper was forcibly closed in 1940. The

C6548.indb 26

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

27

figure 1.5. Ch’oe Ibok, A Summer Hilltop, 1939.

award-winning photographs published offer insight into the way in which the amateur photography field was developing.19 Ch’oe Ibok’s winning photograph from the 1939 contest illustrates how the rural picturesque had become the dominant landscape with which those urban amateur enthusiasts sought to raise photography to the level of “art” and escape the taint of its early association with commercial ventures. Ch’oe’s image is attuned to a global aesthetic, which at the time prized such “silhouette” pictures.20 Its hyperstylized emphasis on spatial configuration produces a static effect that manages to expel any effect of passing time or history from within the boundaries of its frame. Titled A Summer Hilltop, the photograph is recorded as having been taken outside the city of Taegu where Ch’oe resided. Both the mass of detail that denoted the dynamic circulation of urban space and the heavy monotony of the monumental buildings of the colonial government and economy are replaced here by a different kind of sparsity and singularity. The aesthetic appeal of the photograph relies heavily on the large expanse of empty space across the surface of the image, while striking

C6548.indb 27

8/29/14 9:22 AM

28 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

lines of wind-swept branches bare of leaves and the jutting silhouette of the rural, traditionally shaped roof project diagonally against the sky, much like the branches from traditional ink paintings. A lone figure in Korean clothing walks toward the house from one corner of the photograph, again recalling the paintings of old. In Korea, as in other photographic traditions, the new technology of the camera aped the forms of the paintings that occupied the highly valued realm of art. In doing so, photographers lay claim, whether consciously or not, to the value of their own medium and their identity as bourgeois amateurs. What differentiates Ch’oe Ibok’s image from those paintings is the attention to light in the clouds that rise up over the horizon. The capture of shapes of light constituted the fundamental technique of photography, and so perhaps it is not surprising that it also became its major theme in the pictorialism that dominated these photographs. Here, in the winning photograph from the 1937 competition, Kim Chŏngnae’s In the Vicinity of the Iron Bridge Over the Han River, light is refracted through the water and its reflections, turning the great waterway of the colonial capital into a picturesque arrangement of sails and diagonal lines that mime the black strokes of the calligrapher. The study of light on water turns out to be one of the major themes of Korea’s amateur photographers, a fact that owes much to the fairly novel technical capacity of the camera but also to the guidance handed out to photographers aspiring to enter the competition. Each year a theme was announced; in 1938 it was “Summer Scenes” and in 1939 “Clouds and Water.”21 Clearly these themes contributed to the overwhelming repetition of water scenes. In fact, of the twenty-three prize-winning images eventually published in the newspaper, only five did not feature the water—whether ocean, lake, or river. The majority of images focused on fishermen, naked children splashing around in summer streams, or moonlight on the still water of a lake. Those images that did not include a water scene invariably depicted rural Korea, whether it be the lonely isolation of a rural home or young girls in white dress walking a bare country road. There was, then, a fairly limited repertoire of objects that came into the view of the lens of the amateur photographer who sought to become an auteur. Children, whether naked young boys or young girls in traditional dress, cranes, sails, and country paths; all these had already gathered popularity in the so-called Western-style painting of the period—by which was meant oil and watercolor painting—and had come to be connected through the idea and aesthetic of “local color.” This was often referred to by the English term,

C6548.indb 28

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

29

figure 1.6. Kim Chŏngnae, In the Vicinity of the Iron Bridge Over the Han River, 1937.

or sometimes the Sinicized hyangt’osaek (literally, the “color of native earth”) was used. As the style most explicitly advocated by the Japanese judges of the prestigious annual art exhibition, the Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai, local color had by the late 1930s become the mode of access to the prestigious circles of academic painting, which were dominated by metropolitan interests and concerns.22 Paintings of rural Korea—colorful, exotic, and mysterious but also removed from historical development through figures of the child, mythical animals, and natural landscapes—were popular both in the marketplace and in academic circles, as Japanese residents and art critics alike enjoyed the local color of the colony, devoid of any menace or threat. This popularity had translated into a high valuation among many Korean artists and writers as well. The original call for entries to the Chosŏn ilbo’s photography competition, too, had contained in parenthesis the comment that, “although it is not an absolute prerequisite, we welcome entries full of Korea’s local color.”23 The discourse on local color brought the pictorial conventions of the amateur photographers firmly into the contentious realm of colonial representation. Proximity to the ideal of art seemed invariably to involve representations

C6548.indb 29

8/29/14 9:22 AM

30

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

of Korea as rural and a rurality that lay outside that “reality in development” which Im Hwa saw equally lacking in the fiction of detailed description.24 Peasant unrest, attacks on exploitative landlords, or rural poverty are nowhere to be seen in these images. A certain spatial relation that is also conducive to the maintenance of the colonial relation has come to embody the highest ideals of the aesthetics of art. Photography’s role in visualizing and thus stabilizing relations or social space has been well discussed in the context of colonial projects. Scholars have charted the importance of photographic technology to the archiving and ethnographic practices that most modern empires have used to survey their colonized territory and subjects in order to better exploit their resources, to advertise the superiority of their colonial “improvements” and the backwardness of their colonial subjects and thus legitimate colonial practices, as evidence to bolster theories of racial difference and superiority, and as an exoticizing aesthetic.25 Such work focuses on the claim of photographs to represent the “truth” of certain subjects or localities as self-evident and to appear themselves as detached from any particular point of view. It also relies on the cumulative effect that arises from the repetition of certain kinds of images, and here, paradoxically, photographs tend to produce a particular point of view, or photograph-viewing subjectivity, even as they appear detached. The emergence of a common viewpoint may tip into the realm of the stereotype, as we see in cases of orientalism, where the exoticizing strategy presents the colonized as invariably other, thus constructing the figure of a self as a noncolonized observer. The rise of commercial travel and tourism, aided by the late nineteenth-century technologies of the train and the steamboat, colluded with photography in the form of the picture postcard, which in itself universalized certain modes of viewing a landscape—whether urban or rural—in addition to the ethnographic viewing of peoples as represented by customs.26 The subject positions of observer and observed are not inherently linked to certain racial positions, however; it just as often happens that the colonial elite produce orientalist images of their backward or exoticized brethren.27 Photographs tend to produce and reinforce subjectivities of class or gender, in addition to those of colonial ruler and subjugated, in a complex series of identifications and disidentifications. If the reams of photographic data on imperial possessions tend to reinforce the viewpoint, and ideology, of the colonizer, this coincided historically with a photographic practice that worked equally on the domestic front as a key technology in the production of a bourgeois subject through universal-

C6548.indb 30

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

31

izing both the way that subject sees and the way that subject is seen her or his self.28 Such relationships are embodied most obviously in genres such as the family or individual portrait but also structure the various genres of urban and rural photography, which arose in the world’s expanding cities.29 In some sense, we might think of the work of the photographic image in colonial Korea too as one of visualizing, and thus ordering, a tension between country and city, and between streets and interiors, which is constitutive of an emergent bourgeois subjectivity.30 Yet here the relationship of city and country is overlaid with another relation, that of metropole and colony. Portraiture, the monumental colonial urban postcard aesthetic, and the pictorialist rural aesthetic of art photography are each associated with different economies of production—the private studio; the colonial survey, propaganda, and picture postcard industry; and the amateur photography enthusiast. They thus operate at the nexus between the colonial government and a proliferating bourgeoisie, asking the question of how bourgeois subjectivity might be centered under the colonial regime.31 The photographic apparatus is entering the everyday lives of bourgeois Koreans, to take their portraits at home, at group meetings, or at school, but it has also been appropriated by a colonial state that uses it to define its colonial subjects and territories. Some have argued that there were few Korean photographs in the colonial period, and that Koreans were isolated from taking up the subject position constituted here.32 This seems to deny the experience of the studio photographers and the amateur photographers discussed here, for whom the camera offered upward social mobility, accumulation of economic resources, and the riches of bourgeois leisure. It also offered some access to the disputed realm of representation. To be sure, photography has the capacity equally to upset or destabilize these dominant ways of seeing and identification, and the viewer, too, does not necessarily have to be interpellated into her or his prescribed role. Nevertheless, the sheer accumulation and repetition of certain views of colonial Korea did historically have the effect of contributing to the structuring of certain relationships or social space.33 A glance through the archive of photographs from and of colonial Korea suggests more of a lack of variety in the range of topics and poses than their riotous disruption. The various genres that dominate the archive work with spatial relationships that overlap and entangle with each other—chief among them the urban-rural, interior-exterior, and metropole-colony nexuses. All these involve relationships of class and gender, as well as the colonial relation, and all work with an aesthetic that

C6548.indb 31

8/29/14 9:22 AM

32

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

has a strangely static effect, so that time seems to stop, history pause, and a spatial relation remain intact. It is this aspect of the photograph, I believe, to which writers such as Im Hwa and Ch’oe Myŏngik were responding when they expressed their distrust of photographic representation. The spatial relations of interior and exterior effected through studio portraits, the colonial relation represented by urban photographs presenting themselves as “factual,” and the urban-rural divide addressed in amateur “art” photography help shed light on the significance of Ch’oe’s attempt to narrate a different kind of urban time: one where the stasis of the pictorial image might be disrupted by the material remnants of history, and one where the paradoxes of colonial bourgeois life could be brought into question. For Ch’oe the two problems—of time and of a class subjectivity—are intimately connected and revealed in the photographer’s enthusiastic proselytizing of his own philosophy of time and money. They come together on the fragile ground of the peripheral city street, where the new industrial development district breaks out from the old city wall and the petit bourgeois dream of passing through the city gate and into the center of the city.

A D oubled Life In “Walking in the Rain,” writing seems to offer a way to respond to these images, but in an age of photography, writing could also not escape the photographic aesthetic that had been appropriated by the colonial state. The finely detailed descriptive passages of Ch’oe Myŏngik’s works suggest that for him writing had itself become a kind of photograph, but one that attempted to fall out of the photographic gaze that organized a unilateral view on urban space and thus tried to center a subjectivity both bourgeois and colonial. The commitment to describe miniature objects, experiences, and sights reflects a kind of schizophrenic experience of photographic representation as a relentless visual regime that both subjectifies and objectifies. One might object that the photograph always enacts such a doubling action, but the intensity with which it hit the bourgeois inhabitants of the colony was extreme—caught between subject and object, inside and outside, Japanese and Korean, bourgeois yet colonized, both behind and in front of the camera. How might we think about the situation of these colonial bourgeois subjects interpellated through both the taking and viewing of photographs? Ch’oe’s story suggests that rather than leading split lives—caught in-between, half-subject half-object,

C6548.indb 32

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

33

half-colonizing half-colonized subjects—their lives are doubled in a sense that renders switching between the two positions impossible.34 The doubled nature of bourgeois life appears in the doubled figures that inhabit most of Ch’oe’s stories. His 1938 story “Paradox” (“Yŏksŏl”) provides a good example of the coming together of Ch’oe’s common rhetorical figures of the double and the detail. At the end of the story the main character, Munil, having rejected a suggestion to become the next principal of the school where he teaches English, returns home to find a toad sat drowsily on his doorstep. He follows the gaunt yet stubborn toad along a path into the woods, where it disappears into a collapsed burial mound. Rotten wood and dark red water are slowly trickling out of the hole where the disgustingly wasted toad sits: “Munil thought of that toad, lying down or sitting inside the empty grave from which any traces of a body had long disappeared, and he pictured himself lying in his room.”35 Looking down on the tiny toad with a cane in his hand, Munil feels power and control, but his vision of himself in the grave, disembodied, tiny, and dirty, suggests a dual sense of a lack of control. Munil, who has forgone a chance for more power and upward social mobility, now envisions himself as abject and unsympathetic. There is little doubt of the toad’s metaphorical status, as Munil compares the toad’s legs leading him along the wooded path to hands pulling him into a dream and realizes that he does not walk the path alone each day but in the presence of a smaller double. Munil is supposed to be looking at his self, yet even without such direct comparisons being drawn, the miniature has already functioned to invoke the interior world of the subject.36 Ch’oe’s work is unusual for the degree to which it relies on the metaphorical work of miniaturization that appears most often in the form of reptiles, insects, and other unpleasant animals that register discontent with the social aspirations of Pyongyang’s bourgeoisie. Pyŏngil’s double appears in the symbolic space of the portrait studio in the form of the photographer, who at one point even brings to Pyŏngil’s mind the “white stomach of a cold and slippery frog” with his belly chubby from his frequent consumption of alcohol and chicken. The photographer appears as a spokesperson for the ideal petit bourgeois life, which Pyŏngil rejects while fully acknowledging his own membership of that class. That ideal life is explained through a belief in the proper way to handle money and a future-oriented understanding of time that underlies proper behavior as the photographer chides Pyŏngil for spending all his money on books instead of saving to buy a house. Pyŏngil grimaces at this advice and the notion of saving for the future; what he calls

C6548.indb 33

8/29/14 9:22 AM

34 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

turning “time upside down” to enjoy now the money he will have in ten years’ time. He seems unable to have faith enough in the progress of time to defer the future. Photography is thus associated with the developmental ideology of bourgeois culture, and against this the story posits another figure of doubling in the form of reading. For Pyŏngil reading is a way of controlling what he calls “his time,” a pastime to escape the goal-oriented and forward-looking instrumentalism of the bourgeois life pattern. This escape is very much embedded within bourgeois social life and is far from comfortable: at work rampant words are compressed into type and torture Pyŏngil’s mind as he gazes at columns of figures; he then rushes home each night to peruse the books on which he spends all his wages, only to suffer nightmares of Dostoevsky groaning and Nietzsche striking his bleeding head with a rock. After a temporary temptation by the world of saenghwal—a consumption-driven daily life, represented by the drinks with the photographer and the chiding to marry and start his own business, to “get a life” as it were—Pyŏngil reaffirms his commitment to reading at the expense of social relationships. The story ends with his vow to let “the strangers on the road . . . remain always strangers” and “devote himself to his reading.” The idea of daily life is thus presented through an opposition of ways to live that daily life. Books may seem to offer a critique, but they do so as a salaryman’s pastime and cannot offer an escape. The two different versions of bourgeois life advocated by Pyŏngil and the photographer are distinguished as different values and as different approaches to time, but they are both implicated in the visual regime that helped to construct the bourgeois subject’s viewpoint. Pyŏngil may not be a photographer but is depicted both on film and watching himself on film. The reader is not the only observer to watch Pyŏngil’s life as an event on film, for Pyŏngil himself does too as soon as he lies down in bed at night: Gazing up at the ceiling, he watched again those scenes of daily life he had witnessed and heard on that road (where it was raining tonight) which was the never changing course of his life that he had walked every day for the past two years. This was nothing new. And, of course, it was nothing unusual. It was so ordinary and unremarkable that it was rather he himself who was strange, for storing such things in his head and thinking about them. However, although that dreary reality spread out before him was prosaic, it seemed

C6548.indb 34

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

35

also as if he could see some more powerful rhythm flowing through that prosaic reality. The rhythm seemed to transform into the force of a grave criticism bearing down on Pyŏngil’s chest.37

The story is pedagogical in the way it literally acts out the process of rendering everyday life visible in both its content and its form. Through his double Pyŏngil watches his life unfold on the screen that is his bedroom ceiling, and the reader is simultaneously invited to picture him doing so. As for the content of Pyŏngil’s visions, it is not the chance encounters in the street that are significant so much as the attempt to separate out and delineate a realm of everyday life. Ordinary, unremarkable, prosaic—the repetition of the words suggests the extraordinary effort required to delineate everyday life as a time of repetition and uneventfulness, particularly in such an eventful time. It might seem as if “Walking in the Rain” would be a target for the critic Im Hwa’s attack on writers who abandon larger narratives of revolution and transformation for mosaics of disconnected detail. Yet, as suggested by the criticism that weighs on Pyŏngil’s chest and the perception of a “rhythm” that continues through this monotony, the story manages to figure the category of everyday life and present its emergence itself as a historical event. The story narrates the newly emergent time of the commute: the novel and repetitive rhythm of the walk to and from the factory in an age of industrialization. This alienated industrial time is figured as the experience of watching oneself on the screen and a form of repetition that blocks the imagination of change. This is the everyday, it says, and it is not a comfortable place to inhabit, full of contradictory demands and uneasy human relationships. The time of the commute is insular and highly interiorized: Pyŏngil is alienated not only from his self but from those around him as well. He notices no one else on the street and, after the souring of his relationship with the photographer, swears never to talk to anyone else again on that road. In the story we see the loss of relationships to which Raymond Williams pointed in his long literary history of the “figure in the city,” in which he considered a “profound alteration” to have appeared in the work of James Joyce: “The forces of the action have become internal and in a way there is no longer a city, there is only a man walking through it.”38 The action of “Walking in the Rain” takes a similarly internal road through the mind of this salaryman, who in his conversations with the photographer entertains all kinds of thoughts, but whose responses to the photographer’s stories and questions are reduced to the repetitive banality of a murmured “really, really.”

C6548.indb 35

8/29/14 9:22 AM

36

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

Pyŏngil is thus firmly located within a photographic regime and in a city that is temporalized according to capitalist rhythms, emblematized by the commute. Yet the writing reveals other ways in which the photograph has both entered the text and is challenged by it. First, there is the common gaze on the city that photographic images tended to produce. “Walking in the Rain” is similar to other stories from the period in the way it reorganizes narration around the observing subject in the city. This is revealed most powerfully through the figure of the solitary observer walking through the streets. Here the urban is constituted through a tension between the city as surface detail and a highly interiorized and disembodied mind, which moves through the streets observing the transformation of the environment into superfluous and disconnected details.39 The protagonist is empowered to notice the proliferating detail of his environment with the promise of exactitude, yet confined by that very detail to his own internal angst, and struggling to imagine a different future. Pyŏngil is an example of this as he commutes from the slum to his office, revealing great unease at entering the circulation of commodities. His route is constitutively excluded from the city streets and instead runs along the outside of the city wall. He is cut off from the areas of consumption and governmental authority; instead his steps mimic the repetitive moves of the factory and the clock hand. Pyŏngil’s walk through the city visualizes, and thus orders, the tension between the streets and interiors that is partly constitutive of bourgeois subjectivity. This historical process of seeing, however, implicates a way of looking at the city that is similar to the way of looking at a colony, which raises the question of what happens to the observer in the colonial city once it has been turned into an image. Some critics refer to such figures, which make their first appearance in works during the 1930s, using the term flâneur, but the term is useful more for the way it highlights the disjunct between Baudelaire’s figure who strolls leisurely through nineteenth-century Paris and the figures that walk the streets of Kyŏngsŏng and Pyongyang. Pyŏngil returns home exhausted, only to discover that the streets are inside his head and he must continue to roam those streets even when trying to sleep. If the streets are a kind of interior for the flâneur, who resists the speed of modern life, here the inversion moves in the opposite direction and there is no interior not constituted by the outside, as Pyŏngil is unable to resist penetration by the streets.40 There is, then, a distinct structure of feeling to the way Pyŏngil looks on the city whose streets he walks. Despite being cast outside of the city walls, Pyŏngil is separated to some degree from the slums. Those slums, and the

C6548.indb 36

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

37

daily life associated with them, are presented in the affective mode of pathos. “Mundanity” is figured with an excess of emotion that reflects back more on Pyŏngil, and with him the implied reader, as the subject of perception than on the object being perceived. It is a mode of description of the urban poor that is common in stories from the 1930s and helps to produce a sentimental subject distanced from this population.41 The pathos carves out the perspective of the observing subject in the way it renders certain neighborhoods and populations into spectral presences, clinging to an unchanged daily life in the midst of enormous transformation. This perspective, however, is doubleedged. The alleys Pyŏngil walks are emblematized by the young and fragile figure of a kisaeng who passes him in a rickshaw one night, telling the rickshaw man of her struggles to feed her family. But those alleys are also penetrated in the dark by military figures: a pair of boots lit up in a doorway and the moustache on a passerby that seems to “slice his face in half.”42 The affectivity with which the feminized alleys are perceived separates the observer through his power for empathy, but it simultaneously presents him as vulnerable to the military men and thus places him on the sidelines between two forces. Finally Pyŏngil is unable to maintain even this separation between his self and the streets. He returns home exhausted, only to discover that the streets are inside his head and he must continue to walk them even when trying to sleep. The fantasy of one’s own realm or time is, Ch’oe suggests, simply fantasy. Pyŏngil is unable to merge comfortably with the slum dwellers nor advance confidently on the bourgeois life path, but neither is he able to separate himself from either in this doubled life. After liberation the critic Cho Yŏnhyŏn wrote that, of all writers in the final decade of colonial rule, Ch’oe Myŏngik had been a writers’ favorite who had best captured the experience of the intellectual class under colonial rule.43 The doubled exposure of his protagonists appears to have resonated with the experiences of those who had succeeded in the spheres of education and often work too but were forging paths through a realm of commercial culture that lacked the legitimacy of nationalist purpose or political idealism. We might think of Pyŏngil, who at night dreams of Dostoevsky and Nietzche but spends his days counting numbers under the suspicious eyes of his boss. Or even of Ch’oe Myŏngik himself, who by day apparently ran a small glass factory and presumably spent his evenings fashioning the stories that have been passed down to us today.44 But Ch’oe did not merely highlight the agonistic individuality of such doubled lives, so criticized in Im Hwa’s writing on the breakdown in narrative. He also sought ways to interrupt both their view on the city and

C6548.indb 37

8/29/14 9:22 AM

38

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

the linear time that underlay their lives. His use of detail became a strategy of interruption that could disrupt the boundary of the frame and present an urban space that is dynamic, uneven, and constituted by competing forces and temporalities. This Ch’oe presents as the experience of living on the edges of one of Korea’s rapidly developing cities as the wartime economy emerged, where the bourgeoisie are assailed both from their environment and from their own conscience.

Unruly Detail The viewpoint on the city established in Ch’oe’s story is refracted through multiple levels: the reader watches Pyŏngil who watches the city streets and simultaneously himself watching those streets. In the midst of these multiply refracted gazes, Pyŏngil’s observational viewpoint might seem to have prevailed over his environment. Yet the city does not completely disappear here as the story attempts to unsettle Pyŏngil’s gaze. The urban environment returns in a montage of images that break the flow of the narrative, in a series of noisy, animal presences that cannot be quieted, and in a clash of temporalities that deny the unity of urban time and space. Far from living in an orderly city, Pyŏngil is assailed from all sides. At several points the story is interrupted by images that seem superfluous in the sense that they do not hook up to the plot. Such scenes suggest the potential of the static quality of the photographic image to not simply uphold but also disrupt the forward moving narrative of modernization. For example, the first time Pyŏngil stands in front of the photographer’s studio, there suddenly appears a description of an old lady sitting in a shop window next door, puffing on a long pipe: In the shop window next door some polished green crab apples shone in the light as if they had been coated with oil. An old lady sat puffing on a long pipe. She half-dozed as she watched the smoke rising up into the air. The blue smoke formed a thin line floating up towards the ceiling of the window. As the old lady waved a reed fan, half-hidden in the dark shadows, the wisp of smoke would scatter and disappear into the shiny cheeks of the crab apples.

C6548.indb 38

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

39

Each time this happened, Pyŏngil shivered as if he had heard the faint but sharp sound of a mosquito.45

Except for the faint and repetitious movement of the smoke gently rising and the old lady waving a fan, all movement is stopped here and replaced by the old lady as a bystander, watching on from her shop window as life goes by, a superfluous detail of that left behind but not dead. When we look again at this frozen moment, we find we are looking at a photograph. The old lady inhabits the text as a jarring detail; she reminds us of an early photograph, taken in the mode of a still-life painting but revealing a sharper delineation of detail. What enhances the jarring effect of the old lady’s image is the whine of the mosquito that accompanies it. Ch’oe’s story is full of unruly detail that disrupts both the forward-looking narrative of the photographer and the pathos-ridden gaze on the city, for the city does not completely disappear into image here but returns in the form of noise that suggests its violent juxtapositions.46 The effect of the image of the old woman on Pyŏngil is broken by the sharp sound of a mosquito, and this is not the only animal life in the city. In the twilight zone of this street that strives to join the city, Pyŏngil’s way is populated by the noisy residues of frogs croaking, a “myriad mosquito larvae wriggling in rainwater pools like amputated nerves,” and stories of a snake, which appears on the city gate and provokes a clash between young and old residents over whether to capture it or leave it alone. While the body of the city of Pyongyang is being torn apart by development, bursting out of those city walls along which Pyŏngil walks every day, literally “bruising” the yet unpaved streets, these animals make their presence noisily known from the empty plots bordering that road. Life on the outside of the city gates inhabits the realm of the urban gothic where the past refuses to quietly disappear. At just one point on his walk, Pyŏngil passes by the city gate through which he gazes at the brilliant lights in awe at the thought of two hundred thousand people living there, but this thought is immediately juxtaposed to the shadows of the city gate, where bats “fly out of the black gate tower and then disappear back inside again . . . as if the spirit of the long history of that old city gate were still alive and would roam about with the night.”47 The growth of the city places the old and new in constant juxtaposition. On his daily commute Pyŏngil is buffeted at all times by uneven terrain: from the slums where he walks in the dark, slipping

C6548.indb 39

8/29/14 9:22 AM

40

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

through mud and ice and stepping in the feces of malnourished children as he looks up when distracted by an airplane, he follows a steep path “which did not appear on the city government’s borough map” and comes out on a newly cleared road where “the city development had just begun to break out of the old city walls and penetrate the grassy land outside,” and into the commerce and industry district. The road here is still unpaved: with new houses on one side hiding the old huts behind them, “spread out forlornly like opened tombs beneath the crumbling city wall,” and fuel and timber merchants and factories on the other side.48 Noisily remaining in the midst is an array of toads, insects, and snakes, which are predominantly heard rather than seen. This grotesque mass of insects and reptiles populate the city and refuse to disappear, like residues remaining to croak, to scare, and to wriggle. Such disruptive details recur in all of Ch’oe Myŏngik’s stories and not just “Walking in the Rain.” As details in print, Ch’oe’s disruptive details are simultaneously residues of a previous literary tradition, supposedly cleared out of modern literature at its moment of promulgation, perhaps with a similar logic to that by which urban development presumes the complete erasure of the past. This relationship of Ch’oe’s fiction to an earlier moment of modernization highlights both how Ch’oe’s work reaffirms an earlier theory of writing defined by a photographic order and how it brings it into question. Here we might recall the injunction of the early theorist of modern literature, Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), that the writer “copy truthfully the world” in his iconic essay “What Is Literature?” (“Munhak iran hao?”), which was serialized on the front pages of the colonial daily Maeil sinbo in November 1916. Yi’s essay was one of the earliest elaborations in Korean of modern literature as it is now understood. Originally known simply as the “new literature,” Yi advocated an idea of literature as an aesthetic and national category, organized into genres of the novel, poetry, drama, and the essay, and linked to the imagination as its source of creativity. “What Is Literature?” attempted to shift the meaning of the existing term munhak away from its denotation of scholarship and texts and appropriate it as a translation of the English term “literature,” which had itself undergone a similar transformation in meaning during the eighteenth century.49 Both “literature” and munhak were now to signify the creative, written product of the individual’s imagination and were to cater to the aesthetic realm of the individual’s emotional life. In Yi Kwangsu’s formulation, however, the individual was neither isolated nor alienated, as her or his imagination would find an ethical source in the national community.

C6548.indb 40

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

41

Yi Kwangsu’s essay and, perhaps more important, his own wildly popular attempts to elucidate his theory in the form of the novel heralded one lineage of twentieth-century literary practice as a national aesthetics, establishing a model for the modern intellectual as a thinking, feeling human being, committed to serving the national community and displaying benevolence to the masses of those who are not literate members of the liberal elite. Central to Yi’s notion of modern literature was a question of language: “The new literature must be written in pure contemporary language, everyday language that everyone knows and uses.”50 The new literature was imagined as a rejection of the male elite’s custom of writing in the classical Chinese script, which was being newly envisaged as a discrete national language against which Korean—the vernacular—could be defined. Despite widespread knowledge of han’gŭl and the development of prose and lyrical forms that took advantage of the vernacular writing system, classical Chinese had remained the script of official discourse, and knowledge of its texts and traditions the passage to success in the bureaucracy through the civil service examinations, which had only been abolished in 1895. Yi’s demand that the new literature be written in the vernacular language thus aimed an arrow at this mainstay of the old order and heralded the vernacular as both symbol and medium for a supposedly open new national order. Yet vernacularization also involved a temporal shift. In modern literature, Yi stressed, it was “necessary to use contemporary language in order to describe this contemporary world in which we now live.”51 Rebelling against the old order demanded attention to the new and the time-space of the here and now. The crisis of colonization and the emergence of a young generation who had traveled and studied overseas brought about a concern to understand Korea’s place in the world order of high imperialism, which in turn heightened an often critical interest in the nature of Korean society. This new significance of contemporaneity demanded the isolation and use of what Yi called “ordinary” language, which was free of the literary devices and traditions of the Sinocentric literary sphere. Such language would better describe the daily life that Yi argued was to be the content of modern literature. Yi endowed terms such as myosa (description) and saenghwal (daily life) with a newfound significance as the proper form and content of literature. Clearly description was not a new notion in itself, but Yi’s own discussion of what precisely he means by description is reminiscent once more of Ch’oe Myŏngik’s later theory of writing. There is correct and incorrect description, Yi writes, with “correct” description describing something “that

C6548.indb 41

8/29/14 9:22 AM

42 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

could happen as if it were true.” Such description should be “pure,” which Yi defines as “describing an incident, not roughly but just as one observes it.”52 Thus the purpose of fiction is to “copy truthfully the world inside the writer’s imagination” and to present it “before the reader’s eyes,” where the characters for copy (sajin) are the same characters used to denote the word photograph.53 The purpose of descriptive detail is no longer to attest to the classical tradition or Confucian worldview; it is to present the appearance of the world as seen in a photograph. This world is, however, to be conjured up from the imagination of the individual, freed from the constraints of tradition and living fully in the here and now. For the photographic order not only attests to the world as image but attempts to center a new viewing subject, in this case the young Korean man emergent in the new bourgeois order of the colony to replace the Confucian scholar finding his place in the midst of the texts of the classical tradition. Yi Kwangsu’s essay reminds us that in Korea the histories of modern literature and photography were coextensive so that modern literature itself was always photographic. Ch’oe Myŏngik inherited this semiotic order of writing but also brought it into question. Ch’oe’s unruly details do not present a picture of the world to the reader but noisily disturb the omnipresent picture by insisting that something is leftover. They are writerly at a time when writing is penetrated by the photographic image and remind the reader that “Walking in the Rain” is a heterogeneous text, which suggests the instability of representation outside of the city gates, as different modes of representation are layered upon each other, never quite being subsumed completely. The noise from the fields on the side of the street disrupts a visual order that otherwise remains intact even when subject to criticism, for even when the ability of the photograph to portray reality is questioned, it is in a style that is utterly indebted to photographic representation. At a time when the status of the nation and national culture came under increasing pressure, it is perhaps not surprising that Ch’oe questions Yi’s belief in the forward-moving drive of modernization and its reliance on the nation for ethical and narrative closure. Instead, he focuses on the remnants that are subsumable neither into a bourgeois colonial subjectivity nor into the modernity of empire. Ch’oe names this realm the ordinary, prosaic realm of daily life, which he narrates as a temporality that emerges with capital accumulation—first in the cities—and that mimics the temporality of nature.54 As an example, in “Walking in the Rain,” Pyŏngil’s daily commute is overlaid by the daily rains of the rainy season. The everyday in Ch’oe’s story thus con-

C6548.indb 42

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

43

tests the clarities of both national and imperial time with a dissonance that is materialized in the unruly details of Ch’oe’s fiction. It is in this clash between competing detail that the lingering past in the present is revealed at various levels and suggests the messiness of a colonial everyday.

Detailing the E veryday Although unusual in their density of descriptive narration, Ch’oe’s works appeared in the midst of a more widespread sense of concern over the significance of an increasingly detailed visual descriptive practice and a concomitant disappearance of narrated futures. Critics turned their attention alongside Ch’oe to a newly discovered urban temporality, that of the mundane and repetitive everyday. They differed in their interpretation of its meaning but agreed on its literary symptom, the detail. The detail—the transliteration of the English tit’eil was used, sometimes glossed by the Sinicized sebu (literally, fine part)—rose to the surface of debate as national closure became more problematic and linear narrative seemed less assured. The transliteration suggests the strangely new significance of the term. Some critics praised the rise of the detail and endowed it with aesthetic value, while others professed the belief that the detail opened up new narrative possibilities that signified more than mere progress in description. There was a range of positions on the role of the detail as well as what precisely constituted a detail, but they converged around a shared sense that a decisive transformation in the experience of modernity was under way, which demanded some equivalent revolution in the form of its narration, at the very least to represent the growing complexity of urban life. The critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–64) was one of the first to call attention to this changing mode of description, which he immediately likened to the camera. In a famous essay published in the Chosŏn ilbo in October 1936, Ch’oe acclaimed the achievements of the writers Yi Sang (1910–37) and Pak T’aewŏn (1909–86) in revolutionizing Korean narrative. Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” (“Nalgae”) had been published a month earlier, and Pak T’aewŏn’s Riverside Scenes (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng), although later recognized as one of the major novels of the decade, was still incomplete, with only the first three parts having been serialized from August of that year. In the publication of these two works Ch’oe saw an event that signaled a momentous change, marked by the degree of conscious experimentation these works undertook and their

C6548.indb 43

8/29/14 9:22 AM

44

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

contemporaneity with what he called the two main tendencies in “contemporary world literature,” by which he referred to the literature of the capitalist world.55 Both “Wings” and Riverside Scenes took urban life as their main stage, but whereas “Wings” related in the first person the mental life of an alienated intellectual who confines himself to his dark room except for frantic nighttime walks around the center of Seoul, Riverside Scenes presents a kaleidoscope of life in a poor neighborhood on the Ch’ŏnggye stream, also at the center of Seoul, through multiple viewpoints. Riverside Scenes was one of the most prominent examples of the set’ae sosŏl that Im Hwa had decried for displacing a linear and hierarchically ordered plot with a mosaic of descriptive detail. The narrative revolution of these two works, Ch’oe wrote, lay “not in their materials but in the eyes with which they look.”56 He proceeded to set up a model for categorizing prose narrative, which was to prove hugely influential for subsequent critics and scholars. Pak had, he wrote, “seen the objective world with an objective attitude,” whereas Yi had “seen the subjective world with an objective attitude.” He then linked the works of the two authors by arguing that despite their different subject matter, “the characteristic they have in common is their attitude of observation and their methods of description.”57 The metaphor Ch’oe used to explain this situation is telling: “we can demand of modern literature the effort . . . of the writer trying to become a camera-like existence.”58 In Yi’s and Pak’s cases, detail had achieved that other task so often ascribed to the seeing ability of the camera, which was the rendering visible of new aspects of social life. The urban neighborhood and the alienated mental life of the intellectual became objects of observation functioning to clarify the viewpoint that Yi Kwangsu had termed the “world inside the writer’s imagination” and which are clarified more exactly here as the subjectivity of an emergent bourgeois class. Although Ch’oe was full of praise for Yi’s and Pak’s stories, however, he warned against the trend for meaning in Pak’s fiction to become too dispersed, casting doubt on a perceived lack of “unified consciousness” running through all its “details.”59 Whether it be an ethical view or an economic critique, he wrote, there must be some unifying order to the multiple scenes of the work. Detail was supposed to contribute to this unifying order, in other words, to subordinate itself to a larger order and take its place in the hierarchical structure of narrative. It was Im Hwa who questioned what kind of order was coming into being through what he termed the “trivialism” in 1930s literature that he associated with the rise of descriptive detail. In essay after essay written during the late 1930s, the Marxist poet and cultural critic complained that recent fiction

C6548.indb 44

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

45

had become like a mosaic, where mere description and an excess of detail had taken over narrative and disturbed the plot. Criticizing the recent trend toward what was called set’ae sosŏl, Im wrote: “If the structure of the story is broken up into ‘situations,’ then  .  .  . this finally amounts to nothing more than a conglomeration of detailed description, like grains of sand.”60 For Im, late colonial Korean fiction was characterized by an excess of detail “where it is impossible to have a plot with a typical character and fateful intensity.”61 The result, he argued, was that “in set’ae sosŏl the writer does not concentrate attention on one place. Due consideration is not given to what is important and what is unimportant in contemporary reality—and a true ‘realism’ must distinguish between these two—but rather the writer merely tries to represent artistically reality as it is given entirely through details.”62 Im Hwa’s complaints about the breaking up of the plot into undifferentiated “situations” suggest that he understood the detail to be a textual presence that disrupts both the temporal progression and the hierarchical order of the work.63 In other words, for Im there was good and bad detail. Good detail would reaffirm a purposeful and connected narrative that led toward a revolutionary climax. But this is not what Im saw happening in fiction in the late colonial period, which on the surface seemed more akin to a narrative of devolution than revolution. Stories from the period struggled to reach any kind of purposeful conclusion, more often finding closure in death and other nonlinear strategies of return or a cyclical nature. The question for Im was not just the detail being disruptive of a linearly oriented plot but the kind of realm that the detail elaborated. The specificity of Im’s complaint is important here: “the representation of daily life habits where dense and fine detailed description unfolds like the film of a moving picture.” According to Im, the new focus of fiction had moved to the realm of “daily life,” a rather nebulous term that he seems to understand as being opposed to the political, a realm of consumerism and domesticity inhabited by individual subjects who move through their daily affairs and concerns in isolation and without a sense of idealist purpose that reaches beyond the present moment. In a 1939 essay titled “The Discovery of Daily Life,” Im noted the recent “discovery” of daily life by Korea’s writers and then called, in effect, for its rediscovery. He opposed the “world of everydayness” to “contemporary reality” (hyŏnsil), that is, “reality seen historically, reality in development.”64 The latter represented the reality that the writers of KAPF had attempted to portray in the fiction of “realism” from the 1920s. According to Im, the daily life being excavated now, on the other hand, presented everydayness

C6548.indb 45

8/29/14 9:22 AM

46

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

as a mass of undifferentiated mere “phenomena” that comprised the surface details of a lifetime—“eating, getting married, working, rearing children.” These were the phenomena, or surface details, that tended to obscure historical reality in development. By the time of his writing, Im was reflecting on the earlier collapse of KAPF and what seemed to be a dissipating possibility of presenting a reality in development, or the “hidden sprouts” of a developing future.65 Clearly, for Im, the significance of the disruption of an ordered, linear plot lay in its obscuring of that potential future, but what were the hidden sprouts, and how would they develop in the historical future? Such questions were for Im the proper content of literature. His reflections led him to conclude that the most material aspects of daily life had been ignored in the previous decade’s quest by proletarian writers to narrate contemporary reality. Along with others, he argued that the proletarian movement had been too abstract and focused on political ideals, while ignoring the concrete existence that it attempted to change. Im now called for a discovery of daily life that would link it to that contemporary reality, thus tracking the movement of history within the everyday. The ultimate goal of literature remained the grasping of the “truth,” which was the historical view of contemporary reality and which would necessitate a notion of the future. For Im, unless it was “raised” to the level of historical reality, the realm of daily life was isolated from time in development and thus open to appropriation by, or at least convenient to, the imperial regime. Through its association with the mere phenomena of daily life, then, the detail came to be linked to the collapse of the socialist movement and increase in fascist power. Im’s comments were firmly embedded in his own past as a KAPF leader and his desire to imagine a revolutionary future for the colony, yet they also resonate with the thinking of contemporaries around the world, highlighting the increasingly global nature of historical change and its attendant problems. In Europe the critic Georg Lukács was also isolating literary description as a temporal problem that raised the issue of how change could be envisioned. In the 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” Lukács opposed “narration,” where all the details and scenes in the text form an integral part of the plot and where characters “experience” events, to “description,” where characters are reduced to mere spectators of superfluous and static details. Lukács accused narrative detail of destroying order and the temporality of transformation: “The false contemporaneity in description brings a disintegration of the composition into disconnected and autonomous details.”66 As a result of this evacuation of developing time, according to Lukács, contemporary narrative

C6548.indb 46

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

47

tended to show characters defeated by society without revealing the process that had brought about their defeat. Whether narrating surface phenomena or the interior life of characters, “a succession of subjective impressions no more suffices to establish an epic interrelationship than a succession of fetishized objects, even when these are inflated into symbols.”67 The effects of the Depression, consequent global economic crisis, and looming war had rendered dramatically visible a new sense of simultaneity in many parts of the world, with the convergence of the language of critics such as Im and Lukács one symptom of this larger global process. The category of daily life was greatly debated and contested in Korea during the late 1930s, and there were other views that either did not consider daily life so degraded or saw potential precisely in its abject status. Im Hwa’s critique of disjointed, “panoramaesque” surface description of communities brought about by the accumulation of undirected, uncontrolled detail was taken up by his fellow former KAPF leader Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–53), who considered detail to be not necessarily disruptive but capable of providing that return to the concrete the lack of which he, Im, and others were lamenting in the previous decade’s proletarian works. Kim was less concerned with the problem of the interruption of plot and more eager to promote a positive view of the detail as that which could make meaning or truth visible. For Im Hwa, Kim wrote, “When a fact is treated as one mere fact and no more, then it is not a living tree but no more than a dead piece of wood.”68 But for Kim the truthful detail, once understood as “more than a fact,” should offer access to everyday life. Unlike Im, Kim saw in the revelation of “daily life habits” the possibility for social critique through an analysis at the level of what he called custom. Once the true detail raised the fact or phenomenon to the level of custom, then in that custom would the “essence of the social system be completely embodied for the first time.”69 Once phenomena were understood as more than mere phenomena, and set’ae, or manners, raised to the level of custom, then custom would become a “literary idea.”70 Kim was not alone in seeing the detail as that which would reveal the nature of modern society, through a shifting of the object of examination, or the way the social is détaillé, or “cut up.” Indeed, Kim’s understanding of custom owed a debt to the Japanese philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) and his writing on everyday life. According to Tosaka, social convention was ultimately determined by relationships in individuals’ working lives, and thus “custom” as a category would allow the analysis of phenomena in relationship to the very production structure of society rather than in their mere

C6548.indb 47

8/29/14 9:22 AM

48 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

phenomenality.71 In another sign of simultaneity, this time between metropole and colony, Tosaka’s arguments on custom were often worked out as a critique of the modernologist Kon Wajirō (1888–1973), who in turn had been an inspiration for the set’ae sosŏl of Pak T’aewŏn. In other words, for Kim raising the detail to the level of custom in the Korean novel meant to endow the detail with the truth-value of revealing the very basic structure of society. His work resonates with other contemporary theorists of modernity around the world, who turned to the category of the everyday and a discourse that focused on the details of multiple practices and the mundane, superficial, or trivial as offering access to experience.72 The task for all these thinkers was how to envision transformation when a crisis in capitalism seemed paradoxically to dissipate the imagining of revolution.

The E veryday in Imperial Time Im Hwa’s own complaints about the daily life habits suggest that he was talking about a realm that he saw as somehow not incorporated into national revolutionary time.73 It is no accident, I think, that it was not only with the emergence of big cities but specifically in Korea also with the threatened disappearance of the nation that this everyday emerged as a focus of attention. The fact that the colonial regime’s imperialization campaign later focused on certain aspects of everyday life, such as clothing or housing or rituals of worship, to try to bring it in line with imperial time suggests that the perception of the everyday realm was that it harbored some kind of threat or potential for disturbance. Ch’oe Myŏngik’s work reveals the reconfiguration of everyday life in late colonial Korea to be a messy and uneven business. Ch’oe’s focus on the detail draws attention to the resistance to modernization in the residues of what is rapidly being rendered past. Although Ch’oe continued to publish until 1940, “Walking in the Rain” predates the avowed move toward total mobilization, but it shows that the concern for disappearance had its roots not only in specific assimilative colonial policies but equally in the material transformations of the environment and phantasmic renderings of commoditization. In the story the logic of the commodity produces a particular kind of disappearance in the repetition of the present. Ch’oe’s detail thus constitutes a political project that either cannot or will not rest on preservation or restoration in the face of the loss of the nation.

C6548.indb 48

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

49

Ch’oe’s work also suggests that both historicist narratives of modernization and the stasis of a colonial gaze fail to capture the experience of living in a developing city in a colony being swept up into the war regime. Alongside the hegemonic imperial time and colonial gaze, Ch’oe opens up other possibilities, whether the allegorical, noise, the remnants of the past, or the interlude provided by montage. What unifies the coexisting and competing notions of time embodied in these literary elements is the idea of a mundane and prosaic everyday life. It points to the specific experience of bourgeois alienation that arises in a colony among the class that experiences the contradictions of colonial society in a particularly acute way, being placed in between both temporally and spatially, identifying with the colonized population yet also alienated from it, benefiting from the economic regime yet also bearing the burden of its repetitive subjectivization, at home in the new yet most distant from the past, and unable to synthesize the two. “Walking in the Rain” thus points to the possibilities of disruption from within a doubled life when the everyday coincides with imperialization. Yet Ch’oe’s words themselves might be thought of as another kind of noisy detail that exist with the sole purpose of disruption. By this time Yi Kwangsu was no longer advocating the production of “ordinary” Korean, as in his early manifesto on the nature of literature, but the adoption of the Japanese language as a way of developing imperial subjectivity. Soon the members of the famous Korean Language Society—who were undertaking a different kind of accumulation of words in the form of compiling a dictionary—would be thrown into jail for their work.74 Ch’oe Myŏngik’s production of detail was not oriented toward a project of preservation of something called “national culture”; its concern was less with the past than with the present. Instead his work reveals a fetishistic project of writing that defies assimilation to either a nationalist or an imperial narrative. His accretion of language is rather disruptive of such histories, referring instead to the realm of the everyday as a site to memorialize the transformations under way in his native city of Pyongyang. He manages to describe locality without being swept up into the discourse of local color. Reading Ch’oe’s work opens up a discussion of both writing in an age of photography and writing in the Korean language in an age of imperialization. It was not uncommon for critics in late colonial Korea to link the notion of literary description to an idea of national-cultural progress and understand it to be underdeveloped, somehow inferior to a presumed state of perfection that always lay elsewhere, most often in Europe or Japan.75 The practice of

C6548.indb 49

8/29/14 9:22 AM

50 the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

writers such as Ch’oe shows that, far from registering a necessary cultural lack, description was something far more dynamic and contradictory. As a practice that reflects the way information is organized in daily life, description reveals the ways in which that daily life is contested and transformed by historical forces large and small. A rereading of descriptive practices provides a way not only to appreciate those limits but also to try to read late colonial Korean literature and history itself outside of the historicist path on which that history can do nothing but attest to failure and lack, and perfected description can only be found elsewhere. Contrary to those who doubted the descriptive powers of the Korean language, description hardly seems to be a problem here; instead it is a dynamic site of contestation that confronts headon the problem of narration in a time of national crisis. If the future has disappeared, what replaces it here is a kind of dynamic dissonance called daily life. The chapters that follow pursue this dissonance with a view to exploring the possibilities forged from within late colonialism.

C6548.indb 50

8/29/14 9:22 AM

2 THE SOCIOLO GY OF COLONIAL NOSTALGIA Finally, I must apologize that my interpretation of these rich historical phenomena is so tied to the logical structure of a dry intellect. This attempt to analyze the phenomena through logic is, of course, ideological. Please understand that these clothes are necessary for me, and, furthermore, that I have chosen these clothes on purpose. Sŏ Insik, “The Periodical Nature of Intellect”

I n h i s l a s t k n o w n e s s a y, p u b l i s h e d i n N o v e m b e r 1 9 4 0 , Korean communist revolutionary turned historical philosopher Sŏ Insik (1906–?) turned his attention to the waves of nostalgia that he perceived to be inundating his contemporary world. Against the backdrop of volunteer soldiers being waved off at station platforms to fight a war in China that promised a “new Asian order,” of burgeoning cities with bustling streets and shop windows displaying the latest fashions, of new factory complexes and their expanding workforce, and with preparations under way for a Grand Exposition to be held in one of Seoul’s emergent suburbs, a trend had emerged that seemed to look in the opposite direction from such grand projects and the futures toward which they pointed. Since the mid-1930s scholarly and journalistic circles had published a slew of essays with such titles as “Antiques and Daily Life,” “The Spirit of Cherishing the Old,” “Together with the Classics,” and “The Attraction of History,” historical artifacts were increasingly finding their way into the first museums on the peninsula or onto an international antique market and thence to private collections throughout the world, tourists converged on newly rediscovered ruins and monuments such as the famous Sŏkkuram Grotto outside of Kyŏngju, and antique shops seemed now to attract young dandies in addition to the “old skeletons” that had long fumbled through their shadows, as a contemporary writer, Yi T’aejun, put it.1 What was the meaning of this multifaceted and widespread desire to look backward in time? And why did it attract the interest of the former revolutionary?

C6548.indb 51

8/29/14 9:22 AM

52 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

Sŏ’s essay on nostalgia was the culmination of a philosophical inquiry into the nature of time that was clearly driven by the motivation to locate the temporal coordinates of his own historical moment. On his release from a fiveyear jail term in 1936, Sŏ had grown concerned about the effects of a widespread narrating of Korea into past time. What some considered to be the recovery of a majestic tradition he took to be a compromised abdication of responsibility for the future. To try to recover the future, he turned to the language of his elite imperial education in the philosophy department of Waseda University, publishing the essays that were to form the basis of his 1939 book History and Culture (Yŏksa wa munhwa). Over a four-year period he set about the project of unpacking the various modes in which the past was being explored, including both nostalgia and the building of a classical tradition. He drew attention to the geopolitical underpinnings of that tradition and the ways in which it worked to produce a certain spatial understanding of the world, and he attempted to reappropriate nostalgia from imperialism, opening it up as a dynamic and dissonant terrain of differing politics. His study led him to a theory of time akin to the everyday that had appeared in Ch’oe Myŏngik’s earlier fiction. In the dissonance of the everyday Sŏ saw the potential to refuse relocation to the past and imagine a different future. This chapter attempts to recapture Sŏ’s utopian vision, which aimed to redeem a different temporal practice of nostalgia, extending beyond the imagination of a decolonized Korea to a globally more equitable future. Yet Sŏ’s vision is complicated by its form as his investigation introduced to a Koreanlanguage readership the work of the prestigious philosophers from Kyoto Imperial University, many of whose work is considered to have formed the ideological buttress for Japanese imperialism. Sŏ’s work thus raises the question of whether he was doomed to merely repeat the imperial rhetoric of these Japanese scholars or could forge his own intellectual project within their language, or even confront their logic. This question is more broadly one of how to read colonial era texts and, in the Korean case, how to read the works of the so-called former revolutionaries. Sŏ is associated with the commonly repeated figure of the chŏnhyangja, literally, one who has changed direction, or the converted. Converted is the term used for those leftists and nationalists perceived to have capitulated under harsh suppression in the mid-1930s. The term weaves into past time both communism and the notion of Korea as a politically autonomous unit. Sŏ’s investigation of the past operates on both fronts. But his work brings into question the notion that the wartime regime quelled all expressions of disquiet. In his questioning of nostalgia, he reveals

C6548.indb 52

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

53

the circuitous and strategic ways—the clothes, as he called them—in which political critique continued to be articulated. His work also suggests that critique had to come from within, and not from some imagined outside, of that realm of thought and representation called colonial discourse.

From No stal gia to Decadence If nostalgia is “love at last sight,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s evocative phrase, then it seems appropriate that the last known piece of writing by Sŏ Insik dealt with the subject of nostalgia.2 After this final essay, Sŏ apparently gave up writing and moved down to the southern part of Korea, near Mokp’o. All that is known of his life afterward is that his name is listed in late August 1945 as a member of the Critics section of the Central Committee for the Construction of Korean Culture (Chosŏn munhwa kŏnsŏl chung’ang hyŏpŭihoe) and again in December of that year for the subsequently formed Literary Federation of Korea (Chosŏn munhak tongmaeng), which represented leftist thinkers in a rapidly polemicized postliberation ideological world.3 The silence that follows Sŏ’s essay on nostalgia reformulates that work as a final testament. It is with this sense of an ending that I would like to begin. Yet the ending wrought by nostalgia, as a desire to return to something that is deemed to be now lost, is deceptive. As a temporal practice nostalgia posits a loss, or something prior, in order to conceive of a future and thus contains a utopian dimension, or what Susan Stewart has called “a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.”4 The loss posited by nostalgia spins judgments on the present and narratives for a future, thus positing an ending for a new beginning. To read Sŏ writing about the phenomenon of widespread nostalgia is thus to gain some sense of the contours of late colonial intellectual thought, how time was being divided and history thought. It is also to grasp how the future might have been imagined, whether post-, anti-, or more thoroughly colonial. Nostalgia is a historical concept, and Sŏ invoked its history in his use of the term nostalgie. It was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, who had first coined the term in the seventeenth century from the Greek nostos (return home) and algia (longing) and used the neologism to diagnose the dis-ease felt by the displaced peoples—whether students, soldiers, or domestic servants—of central Europe. The cure proposed was, more often than not, to return to the home that was so badly missed, thus closing the distance between past

C6548.indb 53

8/29/14 9:22 AM

54 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

and present that had thrown up the longing. Nostalgia was considered a “disease of an afflicted imagination [which] incapacitated the body,” and medical treatments such as leeches and purging of the stomach were advised, in addition to returning to the homeland.5 By the twentieth century nostalgia was no longer considered an object of medical treatment, instead it was on the way to becoming universal, or to borrow Svetlana Boym’s terms in her study of the phenomenon, what was once a “provincial ailment, maladie du pays, became a disease of the modern age, mal du siècle.”6 Boym puts this down to changing conceptions of time emerging in industrial societies as the secular notion of progress began to replace previous eschatological understandings of time. She borrows Reinhart Koselleck’s categories of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, writing that while the former allows for the past to be assimilated into the present and remembered, the latter accounts for the thinking of the future in the present. The advent of the idea of progress as the ideology of industrial capitalism was significant, according to Koselleck, as it constituted “the first genuinely historical concept which reduced the temporal difference between experience and expectation to a single concept.”7 Within the time of progress, the past was only important as a time to be overcome. Thus, Boym writes, “nostalgia, as a historical emotion, is a longing for that shrinking space of experience that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations. Nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress.”8 Sŏ Insik might not have disagreed with this diagnosis. Born in 1906 during what is often termed in Korean historiography the “enlightenment” period, he had lived the ideology of progress as both the driving concern of the early nationalist and anticolonial movements and the legitimating proclamations of the Japanese colonial state. After graduating in 1924 from the Kyŏngsŏng Private Middle and High School, he had traveled to Japan, where he studied philosophy at the elite Waseda University.9 He was to withdraw from the university shortly after being listed as an organizing member of the Korean Communist Party in Japan in records of a police investigation into a demonstration and subsequent street battle in front of a Tokyo Musashiya store on August 29, 1928—the anniversary of Japan’s annexation of Korea.10 Sŏ went on to spend periods on the run—the KAPF leader Kim P’albong recalled hiding Sŏ in his house in 1931, the year of the first roundup of communist activists in Korea in the wake of the Manchurian Incident—before being captured later that year and sentenced to five years in jail.11 For Sŏ, the shrinking space of experience must have felt as visceral as the forked tongue that spoke the

C6548.indb 54

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

55

horizon of expectations. His interest in nostalgia lay, however, in its nature as a temporal practice. In this he would have agreed with Boym that nostalgia was, above all, a historical emotion. Late colonial nostalgia formed for Sŏ a constellation; it was neither unitary nor homogeneous in either its causes, its effects, or its longings. In its constellation he found a key to the ways in which past, present, and future were being imagined, denied, dreamed up, and longed for. His final essay was titled “The Sociology of Nostalgia” (“‘Hyangsu’ ŭi sahoehak”), and in it Sŏ presented a tripartite understanding of the sentiment, which he named using the Sinicized hyangsu, in addition to the German nostalgie. Hyangsu, he wrote, was a form of aesu, or longing, but one whose object of “pathos” is the kohyang or hometown. Of the three kinds of hyangsu that Sŏ distinguished, there was, first, the longing for the hometown as a physical object or flesh (yukch’e). This was the longing for the hometown as a “natural landscape,” the “cradle” of our flesh and our physical bodies, which appears to the nostalgic in scenes of landscape in the mind.12 Considering that Sŏ’s was one of the first generations to move to the city from the countryside during the great shifts of the modern period, this would mean for many the village in which they grew up, the streams by which they played, and the woods in which they hunted as children. This physical hometown does not have to belong to the individual alone but could belong equally to a people. The example that he gives, tactfully or perhaps tactically, is the geographically removed one of the significance of the “gaunt” natural landscape of Palestine to the Jews.13 The second and third types of hyangsu were the symbolic and the universal. In the symbolic, our bodies may still reside in our hometown, but our minds may conjure up with longing scenes of a past age or country (kukt’o).14 Once more Sŏ takes his examples from far away: the Greece of Hölderlin and Goethe’s Italy. These are spiritual or intellectual landscapes that have nourished our minds in a manner similar to the cradling of our bodies by the landscapes of the hometown. Here Sŏ invokes the spiritual history of Korean intellectuals, who in their own “real sense of their daily lives” can see the split between the physical hometown and the spiritual hometown, as their intellectual training is steeped in a tradition that originated far away in the European-style thought and education adopted in the early days of modernity. This situation of dual or doubled homes may lead to disharmony, he wrote, and, according to the environment, even become untenable.15 The universal, however, he considers methodologically necessary for a truly metaphysical understanding of nostalgia. This home is the sense of a primeval home that

C6548.indb 55

8/29/14 9:22 AM

56 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

arises from humankind’s self-transcendence.16 Because man is not immanent to his environment, there must be another home that produces the sense of life as a journey departing from and returning to somewhere else. This selfconception is present in religions such as Buddhism and Christianity but also transcends them to produce the longing of poets and songs. Just as Sŏ seems to have spoken the final word on nostalgia, however, he makes a sudden turn to declare the necessity of a “sociohistorical” analysis of nostalgia as a historical sentiment. When forms of nostalgia appear to constitute no less than the dominant sentiment of a particular society, then they “must be examined and understood in relation to the historical conditions of contemporary society.”17 This may sound no less abstract than his previous description of the primeval home, but it is November 1940, two years after a volunteer draft system has been inaugurated, the education system has switched to an all-Japanese curriculum, and use of Japanese names and Shintō shrine worship been enforced. Perhaps for his readers Sŏ had opened up a space for thought, even without additional explanation. Another such space is opened up in Sŏ’s comparison between European literatures and i ttang munhak (the literature of this land), where his commitment to thinking universals—a primary methodology of his thought—manifests itself in the detailed attention he pays to the popularity of so-called nihilism in European and Korean literatures. “All shapes and sizes of nostalgia constitute the mist that fills the empty psychological cave of modern humankind,” he writes. To prove his point he turns to contemporary developments in European literature, stating that “the nostalgia of those who have lost their homeland lies at the base of the so-called ‘traveler’s literature’ and ‘escapist literature’ of Europe too.”18 To dismiss the desires of people searching the “dunes of Africa” and the “forests of the east” as mere nihilism is, he argues, to misrecognize the contradictory nature of the human psyche. The roots of such nihilism have to be sought in “their place, the fact that they could not feel stable in the environment of Europe,” and thus in the “empty cave of the psyches of those who have lost a stable homeland.” The urge to “move their daily lives” arose from a kind of nostalgia that had forced them to move in search of spiritual stability. Finally, he writes that “the situation is no different in this land” with its constant longing for the old and search for the new, which is symptomatic of the historical but also universal state of modernity. Sŏ had no problem relating the dis-ease of European imperialism with the nihilism of contemporary Korea.

C6548.indb 56

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

57

In his move from a certain universal “modern humankind” to “this land,” Sŏ’s generalization of the problem once more enabled him to pose a question to which the answer, unspoken, would challenge the current regime. His writing is abstract but suggestive, and this should, I believe, be understood as a tactic and a choice to write in the genre of philosophy, where abstraction could be a strategy to make an argument through gesture rather than filling out a historical and political context, something that was very difficult under the harsh regime of surveillance and censorship.19 When he concludes his essay with the statement that “it is not my objective here to discuss this social evidence for modern nostalgia,” he has already pointed toward a course where such a project might lead. The three kinds of nostalgia laid out in “The Sociology of Nostalgia” formed the basis for the constellation of nostalgia that Sŏ had elaborated in more detail in an essay written earlier that year. “The Beauty of Longing and Decadence” (“Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi”) gives a much more detailed description of the specific politics of various nostalgias in late colonial Korea and of Sŏ’s own stake in exploring them. Prefacing his essay with the remark that “the various facts of reality that lie before us are far too serious to spend our time talking of the beauty of longing and decadence,” Sŏ then defines the two phenomena of longing and decadence in such a way that they no longer seem trivial at all, for they are fundamentally about loss and possession, two charged ideas in the colonial situation.20 Sŏ’s definition of nostalgic longing constructs a relationship between past and present that refuses to trust the linear time of continuity and progress. Longing allows for the recall of something that has passed or been lost, he writes; as the days go by, the “emotional wound eases as if the sharp thorns of chestnut burrs that had stabbed our soul eventually lose their sharpness.”21 The emotion of nostalgia tends subsequently to turn sweet and to focus on “what once was” and “what I once owned,” but it also allows for new kinds of possession. The next sentence strikes at the heart of longing’s potential: When we submerge ourselves in the memories of something old that has been lost, the past returns again to the present like a phantom. Only memories can be mine eternally. No power on earth can steal those memories of old things that rise in our emotional world. But the phantom will always remain a mere phantom. The past is not in a full sense the present. And this is why joy and sorrow are combined in a special form in the emotion of

C6548.indb 57

8/29/14 9:22 AM

58 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

longing. Longing is the sentiment in which these two contradictory emotions combine—joy for the memory that only I can own, and sorrow rising up that those memories finally amount to no more than a phantom.22

It is hard to imagine any of Sŏ’s readers not grasping the explosive potential of the memory which “no power on earth” can take away or the resonance of lost possessions in a violent occupation. His insistence on the phantasmic nature of the past would have been less popular among those who sought the stability and apparent reality of a tradition. Yet the phantom not only interrupted the notion of time as continuity, it enabled him to suggest the phantoms evoked by the assimilationist policies without making any direct accusations that might disturb a colonial censor. What would be the identity of the phantoms to come—the “old” way of life, organizing the Communist Party, a dream of equality, the Korean language? Sŏ’s understanding of the contradictory nature of the present accounts for his association of longing with decadence. Decadence, or the aesthetics of decline and decay, points toward irony and contradiction as the only way to understand and appreciate contemporary experience. The world is full of decadence, Sŏ writes, and Korea particularly so. Indeed decadence may be a universal form of modern beauty, as witnessed when one goes out onto the streets at dusk and discovers the “sorrow for something lost in the tired face of the salaryman on his way home from a long day pestered by work” or the “pale faces of the youths clutching their drinks” in the street bars at night.23 For examples of decadence Sŏ points to that prominent in the European films that were popular at the time, such as von Sternberg’s Morocco or the work of Duvivier, but it is equally present in the fiction of Korean writers such as Yi Sang’s tale of a dysfunctional man who wanders the streets of Seoul at night (Nalgae; 1936) or Ch’oe Myŏngik’s grotesque tale of a former revolutionary dying of heroin addiction in a Harbin room (Simmun; 1939).24 The universality of decadence seems to stem from its reaction to the burgeoning cities of the early twentieth century and the accompanying transformations in social life. The decadent aesthetic seemed equally capable of portraying daily life in the colony and a certain synchronicity of Korean urban life with that of Europe or the metropole. Decadence is as contradictory an aesthetic as nostalgia is a sentiment in that it attempts to affirm all that is negative about humankind. Taken to its highest level, Sŏ believes that it is none other than an ironical affirmation of a “search and thirst for positive value,” the implication being that in contempo-

C6548.indb 58

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

59

rary society it is only through irony that such positivity could be found.25 Adoration and rebellion, pleasure and displeasure are combined in the decadent aesthetic realm; thus irony and contradiction become the tactics for representing and understanding contemporary society. For Sŏ a decadent nostalgia would embrace the irony and contradictions of modernity and affirm the present insofar as it held the powerful phantom of the past in its grip. His is essentially a modernist philosophy that seeks confrontation with his present, not the sweet nostalgia of a return to a precolonial, premodern past, which he accepts to be no more than a phantom.

C onstell ations of No stal gia Sŏ followed up his tripartite typology of nostalgia with an accompanying distinction into three kinds of the various historical nostalgias prevalent in late colonial Korea: the feudal, the modern, and the decadent. The work of the writers he cited as representatives of each nostalgic type reveals the complex layering of times in the colony. Amid these layers Sŏ sought a passage to a future past, one that would render the present old and late colonialism late. If the nostalgia of the German Romantics is understood as a symptom of their longing for the medieval times of their homeland, and if the decadence of France is taken to be an expression of the loss of self, Sŏ wrote, then how does one account for the longing of “this land”? The repetition of “this land” as the designation for Korea marks the loss of a political, territorial, or even cultural entity. Nostalgia is a way to track the experience of this deterritorialization as loss. But Sŏ’s chosen narrative is not one of an overwhelming loss of national autonomy so much as a more pervasive sense of the inequalities of modernity. Feudal nostalgia marked the longing for a native tradition that appears to be on the verge of disappearing, if it has not already done so. Such a nostalgia is common in the histories of many peoples, according to Sŏ, but there was a distinct manner to the mourning of the past in “this land” due to the specific political history of Korea. The short stories of Pak T’aewŏn, set in the neighborhoods of downtown Seoul, and the anecdotal essays of Yi T’aejun were representative of the feudal nostalgia. What is striking today even about the many short stories that Pak wrote in the late 1930s is how they present the mixed neighborhoods around the Ch’ŏnggyech’ŏn stream in the center of Seoul’s downtown as a disappearing way of life.26 The rude banter, gossip, scandalous liaisons, and poignant hard-luck stories of the working-class

C6548.indb 59

8/29/14 9:22 AM

60

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

neighborhood and its petit bourgeois residents and their upwardly mobile aspirations inspire a warmth and fondness that bequeath an air of pathos on them. The reader feels a warm sense of familiarity, even if she originates from a different background and location, and mourns a community of intimacy deemed somehow to be missing from the expanding social fabric of the capital city. Yi, on the other hand, spent the late 1930s writing in the pseudoclassical style of the anecdotal essay, a form that recalled a past tradition of literati self-cultivation but which he used to commemorate the wistful longings of the emergent bourgeois class.27 The object of longing in the two writers’ work may have differed—a past Confucian gentleman’s daily life and a lowerclass urban neighborhood’s camaraderie—but both writers shared the point of view of a modern present and a keen sense of the losses engendered by modernization. In diagnosing Yi’s and Pak’s longing as feudal, Sŏ denied in their work the nature of a modern aesthetic, a position that I hope to complicate in the next chapter with a closer reading of Yi’s work. Sŏ’s diagnosis, however, stemmed from his concentration on objects of representation rather than the mode of their representation. As Yi and Pak appeared to hold more affection for “old things” than the modern present, he deemed them feudal in their attitude. In doing so, he revealed his own unilateral view of the future, which resembled more the revolutionary with his Marxist vision of stages of history than the Japanese philosophers he is so often accused of aping, who were trying to find ways to escape the idea of a unilear path to a single modernity. Sŏ read Yi and Pak as wishing to hold onto the past in the present and thus deemed them a force needing to be overcome. Yet the primary reason that Sŏ considered their nostalgia feudal was to distinguish it from another nostalgic stance that, according to him, found its foundation more firmly in the ideology of modernism. This modern or modernist nostalgia in many ways captures his own intellectual life experience. Modern nostalgia belonged to the intellectuals of the early days of colonial rule, who had traveled as students to the Japanese metropole and then returned to the homeland to try to establish modern institutions—media, schools, literature, poetry, among other practices. As the name of one of the early literary and cultural journals Sonyŏn (Boy) suggests, the youth of these students was represented, and often understood by themselves, as the embodiment of the emerging modern society.28 Born as the new “intellectual customs” were entering the land, these students often had an advantage over

C6548.indb 60

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

61

their parents’ generation in understanding the new laws of the land because of their education in the schools and universities of Japan. They fashioned themselves as leaders and sought to build a new society. Youth thus connoted ambition, energy, and hope for the future and connected individuals to a national community whose enlightenment became the guiding torch of their thinking and being. Moreover, for those youths born in the first decade of the new century—and this is very much the generation who appear throughout this book—there was no lived memory of annexation, just the inexorable fact of its consolidation, followed by the radicalization of an education in the metropole in the 1920s, when socialist thought held sway and nourished special bonds between Japanese and Korean intellectuals. Members of this generation had educated themselves in law, philosophy, science, and literature as they launched demonstrations in the streets and were subjected to harsh surveillance and repression when they returned home to the Korean peninsula. They had subscribed wholeheartedly to the ideology of modernism and pledged to further its goals, “devoted to the ideals and passions of the new age,” but they were also now, as Sŏ pointed out, no longer youths but in their thirties, tired of daily life in the city and feeling like strangers in their own land, where the “loft y (?) spirit had subsided leaving only their corpulent flesh” in his words.29 What did Sŏ’s enigmatic statement mean? A look at the example he cites, of the recent poetry of Im Hwa, sheds light on this problem of the flesh and street life. Im Hwa had worked alongside Sŏ in the Communist Party and established himself as revolutionary poet and leading member of KAPF. It was Im who, along with Kim Namch’ŏn and Kim Kijin, had walked into the Tongdaemun police station in 1935 to declare the official dissolution of KAPF. Their action followed two concerted bouts of police roundups during which Im had been imprisoned for three months on the first occasion and avoided prison a second time only by virtue of being too sick with tuberculosis. By 1940 he was working at the Koryŏ film company and serializing a history of modern Korean literature.30 There is perhaps no better way to understand the sensibility of Im’s modern nostalgia than to read two of his most famous poems, which set a family romance typical of colonial Korea in the heart of the city. Im’s 1929 poem “Suni at the Crossroads” (“Negŏri ŭi Suni”) narrates the story of the orphaned Suni, her younger brother, and her laborer lover from the point of view of the little brother. The literal, or literary, lack of a parental

C6548.indb 61

8/29/14 9:22 AM

62

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

generation—so common to colonial era literature and film—parallels the collapse of the older world of customs as here, where Im figures as mother the passions of youth in a gesture of defiance toward that older world: The mother that wrapped us in her warm embrace Was the passions of youth that know no end, Whispering in the back alley, faithful in the workplace, Meeting in the streets, parting in the streets. When her lover is imprisoned, leaving Suni and her brother to fend for themselves, the brother ends the poem with a declaration of courage and hope: Aren’t we here, right at the Chongno crossroads? Come, let’s you and me take each other’s hands like lightning, Let’s go into that alley for the sake of tomorrow, For your man And for the laboring lovers of all women . . . Isn’t this joyful youth, yours and mine?”31 Im associates the passions and possibilities of youth with the city streets, and famously the Chongno crossroads, which stand at the center of downtown Seoul. He uses the figure of circulation to suggest urban encounters that aim to subvert the security concerns of the colonial administration. Here the chance encounters that the streets enable are appropriated as a symbol of workers coming together as strikes were rocking the country. The year 1929 had seen the infamous Wŏnsan general strike; labor activity had been increasing throughout the 1920s to reach a peak in 1930–31.32 The streets for Im embody this history as a figure of solidarity and hope, and a forward-moving energy contained within the codeword “youth.” Six years later, after handing in official notice of the dissolution of KAPF, Im Hwa returned to the Chongno crossroads in a poem titled appropriately “At the Crossroads Once More” (“Tasi negŏri esŏ”). Again he begins his poem with figures of circulation, but in an entirely different mood: Today still the streets Greet and send off many people, Trains and cars too, From wherever they come or go,

C6548.indb 62

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

63

Are exceedingly busy. At the center of the crossroads one of civilization’s new-style machines Turns its head this way and that In place of the red and green flags of old. Stop—steady—go It’s as if all people, vehicles and animals are being drilled. Are these the only changes in the streets?33 The focus has shifted to detailed attention to the material changes at the crossroads: traffic lights, neon lights, and the surrounding buildings. It is almost as if the sheer materiality of the city has overwhelmed the narrative possibilities of the previous poem. This poem addresses the streets directly as the lost home: Oh, bustling streets! My hometown Chongno! What’s wrong? Have you died, or been sold to strangers? Or have you forgotten everything? In Im’s poem, the lost home of the possibilities of youth and passion are best figured in the familiar rhetoric of the transforming landscape of urbanization. In fact, by the mid-1920s Japanese already owned more than half of the land in Seoul.34 Yet relating the proliferation of commercial activity in the city to the lost possibility of revolutionary streets appears to have been a common trope of the 1930s, as seen, for example, in the following observation from a contemporary essay on the history of Korea viewed through the Chongno crossroads: “When spring arrives, the fact that a historical movement occurred in these very streets appears to have been forgotten like a dream, as people rush into their cars or pack the trams and go to view the cherry blossoms at Ch’anggyŏngwŏn.”35 The historical movement to which the author refers is evidently the March First Movement of 1919, when Koreans of all classes, ages, and genders had taken to the streets to protest Japanese colonial rule and demand independence. On that date a Declaration of Independence had been read out loud in Pagoda Park next to the Chongno crossroads, whereas now Seoul’s residents rush to the zoo that the Government General had, in a highly symbolic appropriation, built in the old royal palace of Ch’anggyŏngwŏn. Leisure and consumption had supposedly trumped politics and revolution. A mere glance at the titles of other poems in Im Hwa’s 1938 collection Hyŏnhaet’an suggests its tone: “Longing for the Hometown,”

C6548.indb 63

8/29/14 9:22 AM

64 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

“Passing my Hometown,” “Where Was Our Happiness?” The collection is entirely ripe for Sŏ Insik’s discussion of a profound nostalgia for a time of intellectual excitement and hope. Perhaps Sŏ, too, had felt tempted by such a sentiment on his release from five years in prison, yet according to his philosophical demand for a universal notion of nostalgia and, I would argue, his remaining desire to think some way out of this malaise, he went on to distinguish a third kind of nostalgia specific to late colonial Korea. The way out did not entail sugarcoating the loss or proposing a substitute object of fancy but required digging deeper into the malaise, to embrace it, to feel its pain, and to accept it as an intimate part of one’s identity. What might be thought of as a decadent nostalgia is the nostalgia with no particular object, the nostalgia of those “intellectual nomads, the generation that wander without a particular object.”36 This decadence arises, according to Sŏ, amid the generation who have no firm base in the old world of native customs and were born too late to experience the hope and energy of the early enlightenment and revolutionary movements. They have no tradition, whether cultural or intellectual, to which they can turn other than with despair or distrust. When this generation confronts their situation, there arises an energy that Sŏ called the affirmation that arises from the midst of total negation. Or, as the renowned critic Yu Chongho has written of the poet O Changhwan (1918–50), who was Sŏ’s example of the decadent nostalgic, “because he could sing of despair we did not despair.”37 Given the prominent position Sŏ assigned O as representative of a decadent nostalgia, with all its possibilities for universal signification, it is worth looking at O’s work in some detail. The poet O was born in 1918, a full decade after Im Hwa, and thus came of age after the Manchurian Incident and the full extent of Japanese militarism was being felt in Korea. O somewhat precociously published two volumes in the late 1930s that shocked with their imagery of illness, decay, prostitution, and wastelands. The sense of shock stemmed from how O juxtaposed such abject themes with what had become by this time almost sacred symbols of native tradition: the nostalgia of the traveling peddler, the authority of the family name, the resonance of the old city wall, or the aura of the classic. When O wrote of nostalgia, he avoided a rose-tinted gaze on the past, choosing instead the image of the magic glass, as in this poem titled “Traveler’s Melancholy” (“Yŏsu”): When I am overcome by traveler’s melancholy, even the slightest trace of hope conceals itself from me. Oh sorrowful heart, trembling like a hand-bell!

C6548.indb 64

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

65

Those strange times belonging to the narrow world of the magic glass, I stood in a wood overgrown with memories. Dusty memories patched together Like the exhausted dreams of an old peddler in an inn, carrying a magic glass, Where is the reality that I can trust! Like the tradesmen, though I knew nothing at all I believed I knew reality. When I rest alone in the middle of a painful journey, Nostalgia sneaks up like a snail, peeking out of its shell through the gate, With your oh so weak mind Who are you to swing those two horns about!38 It is not hard to see the relationship between O’s images in a magic glass and Sŏ’s phantoms of memory. Here that past can be recalled only in the shaking tatters and unreliable images seen through a magic glass in a refusal to trust the reality of the past. The possibility of retrieving a reliable object through the retrospective gaze of nostalgia is not even entertained. The itinerant peddler—a figure of some nostalgia in recent stories such as Yi Hyosŏk’s “When the Buckwheat Blooms” (“Memil kkot p’il muryŏp”; 1936)— is transformed here into an exhausted and deluded figure, rather than being painted as the embodiment of an idealized communal, precapitalist rural economy that Yi had painted in his story. O’s disdain for a nasty nostalgia that longs for stability but can retrieve only fake objects extends to a more general view on the past and the ways in which categories such as the classics and tradition—topics of endless debate at the time—present false promises. In “The Classics” (“Kojŏn”) O locates an antique shop in a dusty, unlit alley: “People who have come to sell ragged underwear; people who have come to buy ragged underwear. Drunks stumble into gloomy alleys wrapped in black manteaux; in the traffic entertaining girls on rickshaws shake their fragile shoulders wafting the fragrance of silk, their lower halves rotting already.”39 O’s poem displays scant respect for the sacred value of the classics as keeper of national tradition or inspiration for future morality. Another poem tackled the family genealogies, which were the guardian of social status for the upper classes in Confucian Korea: “Clever people always made up and traded in their family genealogies. I have no need to trust either history or my family name.  .  .  . If I want to forget those all too self-interested passions I have no need for a genealogy.”40 The disdain and distrust that O proclaims here for the family genealogy appears as a modernist critique of a tradition conceived as conservative. Yet this poem

C6548.indb 65

8/29/14 9:22 AM

66

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

first appeared in 1937, two years before moves were made to have Koreans adopt Japanese names. The campaign to have Koreans give up the names recorded in the family genealogies was seen as a direct attack on Korean native traditions. In the face of the later campaign, this poem must have appeared scandalous to some, but its decadent power emerges precisely from the way it manages to destroy the sign of the traditional nation, thus rendering the Japanese policy futile. If the genealogies are false anyway, then rewriting them again is nothing more than an empty threat. O’s poem is in tune with Sŏ’s universal critique and focus on the present. The two share a refusal to grasp what they consider false straws in a rhetoric of national tradition. O professed neither trust of the present reality nor respect for the past tradition, rendering his poems a biting response to both the wartime regime and the nationalist conservatives. Yu Chongho has declared O’s poem “The Last Train” the most truly representative of both the poet and his age: I bade you farewell from a dusky station front. Oh sorrow! An ailing history carried away by the freight train and The fragments of my youth are scattered, punched like a ticket useless at the ticket gate. The people left in the waiting room Still, For whom do they wait? If I meet Cain here I will cry at the top of my voice. Oh turtle! Slowly carry my memories away! All roads that lead to sadness Sprawl across your back, like a map.41 What is left after tradition and the past have been cast aside? O has no clear answer for this, except for the poem and the possibility of singing of the loss and where that might lead the imagination. It is this radical negation that Sŏ seemed to believe able to express the present as a time of despair, while the power and hope of creation opened up the possibility for transformation. Sŏ argued that nostalgia and decadence were the passive sentiments of those who “live at a distance from a reality with which they cannot compromise either intellectually or emotionally,”42 suggesting that decadent nostalgia responds to the grim reality with which

C6548.indb 66

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

67

intellectuals like himself were faced. Such a sentiment must be overcome, he added in “The Beauty of Longing and Decadence,” but this would hardly be possible in “this land” without some “new transition in the age.” Until then nostalgia and decadence were the most authentic modes with which to face the “facts” of modernity and the “contradictions of reality.”43 Sŏ’s writing on nostalgia was a concerted effort to consider his present without falling into the nostalgia trap himself. This is surely why he privileges a decadent nostalgia that accepts longing as a universal condition of the present but suspends the closure offered by a particular object of longing. The futural direction of his temporal politics is clear: a diagnosis of his backwardlooking present raises the need for a transformation that would overcome the passive sentiments of his fellow countrymen. Such a transformation cannot be thought without a direct confrontation with his present and the ways in which time is being thought. In his writing on nostalgia, then, Sŏ is most concerned with the historical conditions that enable or prevent the imagining of a different future. This is necessarily a critique of his present, despite the fact that in the harsh conditions of that present his critique could hardly be elaborated in detail. Yet Sŏ also acknowledged that the present held within itself an amalgam of temporalities. Just as it contained the seeds for the future, it was also inhabited in different ways by the past. The problem of nostalgia opened up a path for discussion of the ways in which the past inhabits the present. In his only book, History and Culture, Sŏ focused intensely on the question of time, the understanding of the present, and how to work toward a different future. This demanded a consideration of ways other than nostalgia through which the past lives on. Not surprisingly, he turned his attention to a topic that was much discussed at the time—the debates on tradition and the classics.

The Cl a ssical Tr adition From around the middle of the 1930s, an expanding mass media began to trumpet the renaissance of the classics. The phrase kojŏn ŭi puhŭng, or the revival of the classics, appeared on the front page of newspapers and in special editions of journals and was probably also brought to mind by other developments, such as the newly proliferating medium of the radio and its popular segments on the storytelling form of p’ansori, now understood to be a “traditional” and “native” musical form in the face of the popularity of jazz.44

C6548.indb 67

8/29/14 9:22 AM

68

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

The charge was led by one of the major daily newspapers, the Chosŏn ilbo, whose expanded New Year’s Day edition of 1935 included a full three pages devoted to “an examination of Korea’s classical literature.” The articles spread out over the first of those three pages represent the corpus of what today still is understood to be the canon of classical literature: “Interpreting Silla’s Hyangga,” “The Origins of Hungmin chŏngŭm and King Sejong’s Promulgation,” “The Origins and Form of Sijo,” and “Notes on Wŏrinch’ŏngang chi gok: The Oldest Document of a Han’gŭl Song.” The entire second page was given over to The Tale of Ch’unhyang as the first part of a series titled “The Taste of Our Lost Literature Found in the Korean Classics,” and the final page was devoted to The Tale of Hong Kildong. Throughout the month, articles dealt with other sung tales, but the focus on han’gŭl rather than the huge amount of works written in classical Chinese script, and, in the case of the tales of Ch’unhyang and Sim Ch’ŏng, the great interest in versions of these recorded in modern media— records, radio, film—constituted the common thread. Later the newspaper would publish a further series on “Revivalist Thought in Korean Literature,” which opened with Kim Chinsŏp’s essay on “The Significance of the Exploration of the Classics: The Awakening of Historical Sensibility.”45 From the very first day, the significance of these special series had been highlighted in the most vital of tones. An editor introduced the first series thus: “Some frivolous people may dismiss with a smile this new examination of our classical literature today, when our letters and even the literature which was once our lifeblood has been discarded, but just as one can never forget one’s hometown, we cannot forget our literature. As long as we continue to breathe, we must discover our own literature and let its achievements shine.”46 For too long Koreans had been overwhelmed by studying the cultural products of other lands; now it was time to discover the lost literature of the home. Thus the mass media movement united the nostalgia for the hometown with the newly celebrated Korean classics. With such articles the topic of the classics and tradition entered the realm of public debate in the new media. This does not mean that the newspapers invented the idea of tradition, merely that they built on a host of practices that in their aggregate represented a sustained interest in the idea of discovering the past, and that they helped to represent this past in the affective mode of the homeland. Such practices included archeological discoveries, the opening of museums, recording of regional music and rituals deemed to be disappearing, the publication of histories, visiting of heritage sites, and composing of poetry celebrating the glories of Korea’s past. There was

C6548.indb 68

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

69

a wide-ranging, comprehensive aspect to the approaches taken to the classics in the Chosŏn ilbo too, which often elevated the project beyond the realm of rose-tinted nostalgia and launched the beginnings of an archive that has lasted and shaped the understanding of ancient Korean history and culture down to this day. Tradition, Raymond Williams reminds us, represents always a selective view of the past. Moreover, this selective version of the past is used to ratify views of the present or propose a direction for the future. In its attempt to present seamlessly what Williams called a “sense of predisposed continuity,” tradition acts as a powerful channel for the understanding of the present and shaping of the future. At the same time, tradition signifies a temporal break by separating out and isolating the past, whether as something to be disparaged or as something to be upheld.47 The temporality of tradition is thus ambivalent and open to appropriation and manipulation. Williams was adamant that tradition is “the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits . . . always more than an inert historicized segment . . . it is the most powerful means of incorporation.”48 This is a strong argument against understanding tradition as isolated from the present or from political power. Instead with its powers to incorporate—and, one might add, exclude—tradition becomes one ground upon which the battle for dominance and hegemony is fought. It was this same shaping force of tradition that caught Sŏ’s attention. Once more his interest lay in the politics of time and hegemonic practices enabled by this call for revival. His long exposition “On Tradition” (“Chŏnt’ongnon”) reveals that at the base of his interest in the question of tradition lay an understanding of the unique temporal nature of the concept. Sŏ gives a lengthy definition of the special characteristics of tradition, which he sums up as follows: first of all, the content of tradition lies in past history, but not all past history constitutes tradition, which is rather those aspects of past history that are passed down to the present and that form the subjectivity of those living in contemporary society. He develops a dialectical understanding of tradition as that past history which can be objectified by active subjects through negation in order to be reborn as the subjective and contemporary nature of social beings.49 Tradition is, then, for Sŏ a dynamic category of contemporary subjectivity. He distinguishes it from custom, which he defines as belonging to natural time, or a chronological and homogeneous time through which it is passed down from the past to the present. Tradition belongs instead to historical time, which is an amalgam of natural time and the contemporaneity of

C6548.indb 69

8/29/14 9:22 AM

70

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

action. Whereas custom actually disappears through negation, tradition, as an individual and heterogeneous essence, is alternately objectified and subjectified as forms of subjectivity through constant acts of negation. In Sŏ’s understanding tradition belongs to past, present, and future time owing to the nature of this transmission. If it belongs to the past, it is repeated in the present, and through its rebirth as the object of negation it belongs to the history of the future. Custom, on the other hand, is that which is not reborn through negation but either disappears through it or is continued through affirmation. Several important points emerge from this understanding of tradition. First of all, tradition is a point of departure rather than a home to which one returns. Sŏ conceived tradition not as offering the closure of return but as a more open temporal process through which historical change emerges. As a temporality it constitutes an integral part of the self, which persists through creative acts of negation and is inherently oriented toward the future. Sŏ was no fan of those who celebrated tradition as a glorious yet inert object from the past. An understanding of tradition as a past object to be discovered and restored in all its former glory would remove tradition from his dialectical understanding of the historical process. As he wrote, “Many modern traditionalists turn back through history to find the value of tradition in a superior sense. From today to yesterday, and from yesterday to the day before. But does the superior value of tradition really lie in the distant past alone?”50 For Sŏ the answer was clearly no, and instead he sought to relocate tradition clearly in the present and in daily life (saenghwal). If the present was understood as a heterogeneous combination of past, present, and future and the site for political action, then tradition was an equally heterogeneous, future-oriented temporal mix. This explains why he felt it crucial that the category of tradition be rescued from its all too common fate as an object of nostalgia or inert historicized segment. If “politics is the collective expression of human life” and tradition one form of that life, then tradition will inevitably follow the course of politics, Sŏ writes.51 Politics for Sŏ is thus grounded in the everyday, and it is on that same ground that the thinking of tradition should be reformulated. Furthermore, Sŏ located the contemporary traditionalism within a global politics of time. Tradition was not only future-oriented but tied to universal processes, as Sŏ continued: “Of all the distant past [traditionalists] find [value] especially in what is particular: that of Oriental culture in its aspect of difference from Western culture, that of German culture in its difference from French culture. But does the superior value of tradition really lie in the particular?”52 Sŏ believed that a universal modernity offered more potential

C6548.indb 70

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

71

for providing the “superior values,” as it was already a result of the dialectical negation and incorporation of tradition. The category of the universal offered more than a source of hope, however, as it also provided the grounds for understanding why tradition becomes visible at certain times. Sŏ was adamant that the turn to tradition was not unique to Korea but a product of a global modernity. As he wrote, “Modernity is truly a period of historical transformation. . . . To that degree a negative consciousness toward tradition constitutes a global undercurrent. However, the other side of this is the fact that a positive consciousness toward tradition equally comprises a global current.”53 Central to this analysis of the “rise” of tradition is the understanding of modernity as a global category of time within which Korean society is also located. Sŏ staunchly refuses the lure of particularism, which he understands to be an effect of this global time that he calls modernity. This raises the question of what grounds Sŏ’s understanding of modernity (hyŏndae). Modernity is for Sŏ a global category that takes its place in a narrative of world history. Within world history modernity is marked off as a time of yet-to-be-decided transition in which the major world historical concerns arise from the contradictions of capitalism.54 It is distinct from kŭndae, something akin to what is often called early modernity, in which the main problem had been how to deal with feudalism, and hyŏnjae (the present), in which past, present, and future combine dynamically in the time of decisive action.55 If kŭndae is the time when capitalism had emerged in Europe, with its development from the sixteenth century all the peoples of the world had been brought into a “world historical” relation with each other.56 This developing unity is then understood to have been brought into conflict through the machinations of that same capitalism. The development of world history is understood as both the fulfillment of spatial expansion and the revolution of its temporal content, but Sŏ insists that the spatial expansion becomes historically significant only when it accompanies the revolution of temporal content. “And what is the temporal content of world historical ‘modernity’? It is not eurocentrism as a simple logic of Europe, but capitalism as the logic of the world.”57 Sŏ was advancing an understanding of world history associated with Japan’s infamous Kyoto School of philosophers, whose theorization of the Pacific War as a moment of world historical significance through which Japan might overcome the divide between East and West, deemed to be constitutive of modernity, helped to form an intellectual apology for Japan’s imperial actions, especially during the wartime years.58 It would be rash, however, to reduce Sŏ’s reading of such work to one of mere imitation or accommodation.

C6548.indb 71

8/29/14 9:22 AM

72

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

The Kyoto School may well have conceived of the wartime crisis as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, but, as Sŏ wrote, both totalitarian and progressive critics conceived of the world historical present as a moment of capitalist crisis.59 They may have agreed that a resolution to the problem of capitalism was the most pressing project of the day, but their methods of going about this differed greatly. The sense of crisis was heightened by Sŏ’s incessant stressing that the present was an age of transition. At this point the words “transition” and “crisis” seemed as omnipresent as “tradition,” and indeed he understood the craze for tradition to be precisely a symptom of a transition, but what was the nature of this transition? Sŏ wrote repeatedly about the collapse of liberalism and search for a new social settlement. If kŭndae was characterized by the development of a culture of civil society (simin munhwa) and liberalism, this settlement seemed to have outlived its time in a fashion that had become dramatically visible in the aftermath of the Depression and the escalating war in China. The turn to the classics could, then, be understood as a search for harmony between form and content now deemed to have been lost. In this Sŏ echoed arguments, such as those by the early Georg Lukács in the wake of the First World War, in which the happiness of the “integrated civilization” is located firmly in the classical past.60 At times of transition, Sŏ argued, the creation of a new culture appears dressed in the superficial form of a revival of the classics, but he was adamant that the true goal should be the discovery of a new integrated culture for the future.61 Sŏ attacked totalitarianism for replacing history with the myth of the nation, arguing again and again that the solution to the dislocation between form and content in contemporary society would not be found in the unmediated relation of the individual to the nation without some understanding of the historical category of class, both within and between nations.62 He critiqued those in Korea who were heralding the Buddhist golden age of United Silla (ad 668–935) or the culture of the hwarang—Silla’s legendary soldiers—without really understanding the class relations of Silla society, for they risked confusing themselves with the mythic invocations of the theorists of totalitarianism.63 For Sŏ the gaze on the classics had become a retreat from the street to the atelier rather than a stand on the battleground of the present.64 The battle for hegemony carried out through the medium of tradition was being lost to the colonial powers as intellectuals retreated to the “hometown of their hearts” and to their first “state” (kukka), which was the classics. The implications were clear: loyalty to the world of the classics was a distraction from the dire situation of Korea in the present; it might appear like an act of defiance

C6548.indb 72

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

73

to the imperial state (kukka) but was an abnegation of the possibility of an anticolonial state. Once the classics had been reduced to a qualification for a cultivated life or a psychological comfort, they had ceased to function in the history of the present.65 Sŏ’s analysis coincides with the later thinking of the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–61), who considered tradition a colonial problem and argued vociferously for the necessity of standing on the “battleground of the present.” In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon had understood the desire to resuscitate a national past in the field of culture as a reasonable response to the situation of colonialism. This was because colonialism was not content to merely dominate the present and future of the colonized society but had also set about destroying and distorting its past with the effect of presenting the colonial present as an improvement and a legitimate correction and liberation of a barbaric society. Yet if the urge to resuscitate the past by presenting it instead as glorious and superior to the present aimed to correct this colonial view, it was, Fanon insisted, “logically inscribed from the same point of view as that of colonialism.”66 The turn to tradition was thus an inherently colonial act, which accepted the colonizers’ view on the precolonial past even as it attempted to refute it. In the process, it gave over the grounds of the present and future to colonialism. Ultimately Sŏ was seeking a nonrestorationist vision of tradition that was conducive to revolution. He would surely have agreed with Fanon that one cannot “show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation.”67 Yet he was unwilling to give up on tradition entirely. Instead he argued for its dialectical negation in the forging of a future, where the past would not be completely discarded but its role in the present transformed. What complicated his situation arguably more so than that of Fanon, who was writing in the midst of the Algerian-French war, was the geopolitical underpinnings of the discourse on tradition, or the way in which certain spatial coordinates incessantly slipped back in to fill out the temporal terrain of past, present, and future. As Sŏ asked, why did the debates on tradition in Korea constantly resort to the notion of Oriental culture?

The E a st Tradition was rightly a temporal concept, but in practice, Sŏ noted, it was always filled with specific content, what he termed a particular as distinguished

C6548.indb 73

8/29/14 9:22 AM

74

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

from some universal standard. This content took on spatial form, and in the case of late colonial Korea that meant the East (tongbang) or the Orient (tongyang).68 Bringing to light the repressed spatial premises of the discourse on tradition enabled Sŏ to make his most direct critique of Japanese colonialism. This was because when Korean traditionalists invoked the East, they found themselves repeating the logic of Japanese colonialism, which by the late 1930s was touting its defense and renovation of the East against the West as grounds to legitimate its actions. Although the concept of the East had a long history, in the late 1930s it was being filled out by the imperial state in some quite specific ways.69 As the war in China met with strong resistance and took on the appearance of a longterm struggle, Prime Minister Konoe had announced in late 1938 the necessity of building a “new Asian order,” which proposed a Japan-led unified Asia and Pacific region to stand up against Western imperialism and the threat of communism.70 The order morphed into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the spatial concept of the East began to take on a whole new meaning in the context of the encroaching world war. What enabled the rearticulation of the East was late nineteenth-century Euro-American high imperialism with its accompanying orientalist ideologies, but what the East enabled in Asia was the submergence of Japan’s colonies as national entities. The consequence for Korea was the disavowal of the colonial relation and attempted absorption of the peninsula into the economic and social fabric of the Japanese imperial nation, for under the sign of the East disappeared the last hopes for some kind of resumption of sovereignty. Where the articulation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a project for the present and future, however, the elaboration of an Asian cultural sphere took place on the grounds of the past. It was not only promoted by apologists for the Japanese empire but folded into the debates on tradition among Korean intellectuals too. Here, in work such as that by another “former revolutionary” Paek Ch’ŏl (1908–85), the East formed a venue for claiming the superiority of ancient Korean culture using values such as “elegance” (p’ungnyu), which Paek deemed to have been perfected in the Buddhist culture of Silla (57 bc–ad 935).71 According to Paek, the superior qualities of the East had in fact been most manifest in ancient Korea before the arrival of Chinese writing and culture, an argument that in itself repeated moves by Japanese scholars such as the folklorist Origuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), who had sought a true Japanese essence prior to the appropriation of Chinese writing. Celebrations of a glorious Korean past typically bypassed the Confucian dynasty

C6548.indb 74

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

75

of Chosŏn (1392–1910), which Japanese colonizers and Korean enlightenment thinkers alike had so maligned as lazy, impotent, and decadent, and focused instead on the age of Silla, as the site of a pre-Confucian golden age.72 Even as they heralded a distinctly Korean golden age, however, they did so within the framework of an Eastern tradition, as testified by the host of special series elucidating the distinguishing features of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean culture.73 As such, they were compromised by their proximity to the ideological work of imperialism. Sŏ offered a clear analysis of the consequences of arguing for a unique Eastern culture: “If the content of Europeanism is really capitalism, then capitalism cannot emerge as its revolutionizing principle, and if Europeanism is no mere principle of Europe but a global principle, then its revolutionizing principle cannot be the so-called Orientalism that can emerge nowhere but in the Oriental world.”74 Sŏ opposed the “theories of Asian cooperation as an ideological principle being advanced these days” as lacking the universal qualities necessary to overcome the capitalist contradictions that he considered to be at the root of the new order. The categories of Europeanism and Orientalism were mere cultural signs that either disguised or failed to confront the real issue at hand, which was, for Sŏ, capitalism. Proposing the alternative space of the Orient accepted the claims of Europeanism at face value and thus reaffirmed the terms of the imperial powers.75 Sŏ was revealing what Peter Osborne has termed the “repressed spatial premises of the concept of modernity,” whereby a progressive, linear concept of time was mapped onto the world.76 The time of progress that celebrated the modern also helped constitute the geopolitical concepts of the East and the West: the modern was understood to exist in the West, while the East was cast backward into ancient time. The perceived time lag then justified the actions of both European and Japanese imperialists as the colonial enterprise was conceived as a benevolent attempt to bring the colonies forward into modern time. The time of progress thus produced the time of backwardness as it turned the living past into a geopolitical unit known as the Orient. Many theorists of the Orient in late colonial Korea may well have heralded the cultural achievements of the peoples of the East, but those achievements were all firmly located in a distant past. Thus, though they may have aimed to reclaim a more glorious future on the back of the glories of the past, they inevitably reaffirmed the general geopolitical terms of a hegemonic Euro-American modernity. As such, Sŏ dismissed their efficacy in dealing with the problem of Korea’s present.

C6548.indb 75

8/29/14 9:22 AM

76

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

“Was there not development in the East too?” asked Sŏ incredulously at a roundtable discussion with fellow historical philosophers Pak Ch’iu (1909– 49) and Kim Osŏng (1908–?) in March 1940.77 A lively discussion on the differences between Eastern and Western cultures brought Sŏ into disagreement with his fellow debaters who claimed that the East was deficient in scientific thought and civil society. All three discussants, however, appear to have subscribed to the notion of Asian stagnation and lamented the lack of a clear historical progression into and out of a feudal period. The staged understanding of history that defined a distinctive Asian mode of production was powerful for these Marxist intellectuals, but whereas Pak saw this as a symptom of a lack of progress and scientific thought, Sŏ asserted that the distinctive nature of Asian societies lay not in a lack of progress but in the way in which “several ages overlapped, and the dead and the living are mixed up.”78 It is unclear whether this in itself allowed Sŏ to escape the problem of how to narrate Asian history when the hegemonic mode of historical narration was so clearly defined by the narrative of Western progress and non-Western backwardness. What is clear, however, is that Sŏ refused to relegate the East to the particularized binary opposite of the West, and that his attempt to grasp the particularity of Eastern culture was mediated through a search for the universal aspects of that culture rather than a belief in some unique, homogeneous essence. Sŏ’s most in-depth consideration of the concept of Oriental culture had been serialized earlier that year under the title “The Ideology and Form of Oriental Culture: Its Particularity and Universality,” where he had questioned its coherence as a category and challenged its tendency to obscure universal processes.79 He began by casting doubt on the idea of an Oriental culture in and of itself, for if the term usually referred to the cultures of China, India, and Japan, it was always understood in its nature to be oppositional to the West.80 Whereas he accepts a certain “cultural essence” to the notion of European culture, stemming from a shared history in which Greek classical culture merged with Christian thought from the East to produce a sense of a unified world, he stresses that in Asia the cultures of India and China did not constitute a foundation for unity, and what resulted were decidedly separate nation-based cultures. There might be some similarities in the East at the level of particularities, he conceded, which meant that the term Orient might on occasion be a useful rhetorical device, but it did not take on the form of an “essence.” Referring to Hegel’s notion of world history, Sŏ wrote that, “Whereas Western culture does not display national particularities as clearly as Eastern culture, Eastern culture does not reveal such clear distinct

C6548.indb 76

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

77

periods as Western culture. If the former is a history of exchange between nation and nation, the latter can be seen as a history of coexistence.”81 The history of Asian nations did not fit well into his scheme of historical narrative that was based on European history, but he would not accept an alternative and oppositional belief in a unified Asian culture. What makes this essay most interesting, however, is the way in which Sŏ challenges two of Japan’s most influential and renowned philosophers who had built a philosophical basis for the notion of the Orient. The main body of Sŏ’s essay takes the form of an explanation of “this country’s authority” Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and his theory of Eastern culture based on a metaphysics of nothingness (mu), followed by Kōyama Iwao’s (1905–93) inventory of the contrasting characteristics of the cultures of the East and the West.82 As Sŏ summarized their work, Nishida, the former professor of philosophy at Kyoto University, had sought to ground the cultures of the East in the idea of nothingness as the basis of existence. This was already a comparison with the notion of a European culture that sought the basis of existence in a formed and limited entity, as the title of Nishida’s essay that Sŏ cited suggests: “Ancient East and West Cultures as Seen from a Metaphysical Point of View.” Here European culture was based in a Greek philosophy where that which was absolutely without limit or transcending reality was not considered a real entity. With the rise of Christian thought, absolute transcendence was anthropomorphized in the form of the savior, thus bringing it too into the realm of thingness in medieval times. Mu appeared fundamental to Eastern cultures, on the other hand, in the emptiness of Buddhism, the nature of the Daoists, and the heaven of the Confucians, leading to the idea of European thought as being logical and intellectual against Eastern thought, which functioned through subjective action and intuition. This kind of binary division of characteristics was continued in an essay by Kōyama, a student of Nishida’s, on the philosophy of mu, which Sŏ detailed next. Kōyama distinguished a European logic where the human being stood center stage, directing his efforts toward his environment with an objective goal in mind, against an Eastern culture in which all human effort would originate from and return to a background in what he called “an attitude effecting a subjective home.”83 In the latter the return was enabled by returning to the world of action prior to the subject-object divide, and this would be accomplished through action and not intellectual thought—through, for example, meditation or the truth of fragmentary “life experiences.” Truth was something to be attained through life rather than objectified through study.

C6548.indb 77

8/29/14 9:22 AM

78 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

Sŏ’s essay went beyond this basic summary, however. If all thought was to be negated and actions affirmed, what would stop the East from descending into a world of beasts, he asked, summing up the nature of Oriental culture as “anti-intellectual and anti-human.”84 In a few short paragraphs at the end of the essay, Sŏ turns on Nishida and Kōyama to give his own thoughts on their appropriation of “Eastern” culture. First of all, he asks, when culture is understood as the product of human expression and awareness, then could the world of mu really be considered a culture at all? To those who might argue that his own definition of culture itself relied on European thought, he countered that it was only possible to use the concepts available and that culture attained its universality precisely through being the expression of the daily lives of humans. Far from leading to the purification of Oriental culture, such a concept of a unique Eastern cultural spirit would drain that culture of any purity; “in other words, it would be the cancer of culture.”85 The problem with such characterizations of Oriental culture, he continued, was that they arose only as a result of the comparison with the West, and therefore particularity in and of itself did not constitute Eastern culture. As all particularity must be accompanied by the universal, the task now was to retrieve that universal nature, locate its relationship to these particulars, and understand particular locations within the universal cultural history of humankind. At this point Sŏ stopped, claiming that lack of print space prevented him from continuing, but what he had begun was a critique of Nishida and Kōyama. Sŏ’s critique followed on an earlier article where he had directly confronted the issue of the rhetorical redaction of Asia known as the Asian cooperative body (Tonga hyŏpdongch’e). In “Totality and the Individual in Culture,” published in October 1939, Sŏ walked the line between critique of state policy and affirmation of the ideas of world history elaborated by Kyoto School philosophers such as Kōyama.86 His purpose in the essay was to consider the validity of cooperatism and of arguments that totalitarianism was a historical necessity. Those who considered Japan to stand at a crucial point in world history were demanding its repositioning in a new world order through the consolidation of China, Japan, and Manchuria as the Asian cooperative body (at this point, of course, Korea cannot be named as an independent entity) and a reorganization of internal politics and economy within the sphere. It was not incomprehensible, Sŏ wrote, that there were those who demanded totalitarianism to carry through these projects, but, he asked, “before we simply swallow the unique understanding of totalitarianism bequeathed us

C6548.indb 78

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

79

today, would it not be proper to ponder whether it is appropriate for solving the political and cultural problems that Japan is facing at this moment?”87 In the essay that follows, Sŏ critiques contemporary understandings of totalitarianism and proposes his own alternative understanding of totality. Of the current understanding of totalitarianism—based, he writes, predominantly on the German version, although he could hardly lay out a detailed position against Japan at this point—he finds three main problems: first, totalitarianism presumes inequality both within and between nations; second, it racializes those inequalities in a form of extreme nationalism both within and without the nation; and, finally, it prevents the accomplishment of a “cultural worldiness and universality” by not respecting the independence of either nations or individuals. The latter point is stressed at length: As a cultural principle, on the one hand, [totalitarianism] hinders the cultural worldliness and universality that can be realized only if the autonomy of each individual is assured, while on the other hand it inevitably damages the national and traditional nature of other national cultures which can only be protected as long as each nation can maintain its autonomy. For the particular culture of one nation to attain universality and worldliness, it is vital that the freedom of the individual’s intellectual activities be guaranteed, and for each nation to be able to display its own unique cultural particularity and tradition, the independence of its political and cultural life must not be constrained.88

From such a description it would seem unlikely that Japan—as a colonizing power—would qualify as a worldly or universal culture, and indeed that is the question Sŏ confronts head on immediately following this passage. A short paragraph asks that we compare such a version of totalitarianism with the ideology of the Asian cooperative body being promoted at that time. Sŏ points out that there is little concrete evidence of how the body will develop, but if “it is safe to trust the government,” the body will protect the political sovereignty and cultural independence of East Asian peoples, and, if the claims are more than “simple political gestures and rhetoric,” then such an ideal sphere could not equate to totalitarianism.89 At this point I think we should be reading Sŏ with all the “irony and paradox” that elsewhere he claimed to be proper to literature and a “sharp critique of custom.”90 Surely he is already accusing Japan of the kind of totalitarian behavior that he is critiquing.

C6548.indb 79

8/29/14 9:22 AM

80

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

Sŏ’s critique becomes even more direct as he continues with the phrase, “only that which is equal could give birth to something equal,” linking a country’s behavior inside its borders to its behavior toward other nations. If we recall that at this point Korea is within the borders, the suggestion that equality between the nations of China, Japan, and Manchuria is dependent on equality within the space of Japan is blown apart by the now submerged Japan-Korea colonial relation. What is more, Sŏ directly states that Japan is not “culturally mature” enough to produce a new world culture through the integration of East and West. In fact, using a geographical nomination somewhat akin to the diminuating status of “peninsula” so often thrown at Korea, he writes that Japan seems not to be able to overcome its own “island country” nature, let alone allow the kind of intellectual freedom that would allow a new world culture to appear.91 For those who would believe that late colonial Korea offered no possibilities for criticism, Sŏ’s comments about what he went on to call “backward Japan” are surprisingly direct. Where he ends up walking the line, however, is in his delineation of the proper totality that he would like to recover. According to Sŏ, a proper totality, as opposed to the current forms of totalitarianism, would dialectically mediate the relationship between the individual and the totality in such a way that neither would overwhelm the other. Like so many cultural critics from imperial Japan, Sŏ blames the excessive individualism and instrumentalism of capitalist society for the straits in which capitalist societies found themselves. His new totality would protect that which is best about individualism—its spontaneity and sense of responsibility—but be constructed on a set of social relations within which people related to one another as people and not as objects.92 He distinguished this from the current “mechanical” critique of individualism, which aimed to return to a past age. He then folded this into a new utopian discourse on the “worldly world” (segyesŏng ŭi segye) in which the relation between total and part was so dialectically mediated that there were no relations of center to periphery. In this new world everywhere could become a center, the universal was immanent to the individual, and the world was immanent to each nation. There would be no relations of domination, no Eastern and Western culture, and no metropole and colony, and no individual would have to negate another in order to assert himself or herself.93 Here, however, Sŏ’s utopianism raises doubts about his intellectual soulmates. For the idea of the “worldly world” was not unique to Sŏ but had been discussed by the philosophers Kōyama and Miki Kiyoshi in several articles on

C6548.indb 80

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

81

the new Asian order.94 The idea of the disappearance of relations of metropole to colony clearly could affirm the rhetorical disavowal of the colonial relation while keeping uneven relations intact. At this point Sŏ has often been interpreted as falling into the clutches of the Kyoto School philosophers and repeating their arguments. Nevertheless it is important to hold on to his utopian dreams of a world without colonialism and racialist thought, just as it is important to note his sustained doubting that the current idea of the Asian cooperative body was the form to resolve the contemporary capitalist crisis and overcome the divide between the feudal East and modern West. Again and again he doubted that Japan would be the subject to take the lead in building this new integrated totality. As he asked at the end of his essay, “The only problem is, does today’s Japan have the passion and capability to create the worldly world?”

The Unruly P r ac tice of P hil o s ophy “As a writer without the weapons to discuss culture in modernity, in the writing of this essay I referred often to the humanist thought of Kōyama Iwao.”95 So Sŏ ends his one and only book, the substantially sized History and Culture. The phrase is typical of Sŏ’s endings, which implicate him in a discursive realm associated with the worst kinds of imperialist thought just as it raises a biting doubt about the clarity of his own enunciative position. Who does have the weapons is the question he manages to raise. It is in these endings that there emerge the gaps and fissures of a form of modernism that embraces the language of philosophy as critique and as an unruly practice.96 Sŏ consciously advocated the use of irony and paradox to the fiction writers of occupied Korea, asking them not to retreat to the self-constructed protection of an insular cultural nativism. Instead he encouraged them to stake their claims on the language and weapons of a universal modernity and thus to excavate the place of Korea within the imperial realm, a place drowning in silence despite all the discussions of an Asian cooperative body, in which, once again, Korea could not be named as China and Japan became the duality around which the body was to be constructed. It is hard to imagine that Sŏ himself did not appropriate that irony and paradox in his own writing. “Former revolutionary” are the words I used to first describe Sŏ in 1940, but this demands some clarification. “Former revolutionary” can perhaps better be understood as a figure that emerged in the aftermath of the violent

C6548.indb 81

8/29/14 9:22 AM

82 the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

suppression of the Communist Party in the early 1930s. In the prisons of Japan and occupied Korea, the leading members of the party began to denounce their now “prior” beliefs and actively espouse the cause of the Japanese empire. This act was named chŏnhyang, literally a “change in direction,” and translated most frequently as “conversion.” The conversion narrative presents this directional change as rather sudden, a quasi-religious adoption of support for the Japanese emperor and a spineless capitulation to the assimilationist regime from a postcolonial point of view. The translation “conversion” suggests an exchange of one object for another and that there must be some substitute for the communist belief. Indeed, those official converts who accepted financial support as a price for their statements against communism and nationalism were also obliged to worship at the Shintō shrine, the Chōsen Jingu, twice a month.97 They were, in the terms of the critic Kim Yunsik’s many writings on the subject, forced to substitute “Japan” for their prior beliefs.98 Such a language of substitution, however, poses problems both in the understanding of some previous pristine state of purportedly prior belief and in the feasibility of its entire substitution without any remnant or excess. It repeats, in other words, the language used in late colonial Korea, where another convert—this time from nationalism—Yi Kwangsu could write of the “Japanese spirit” being “poured into” former nationalists and communists.99 Sŏ certainly forged alliances that from today’s viewpoint seem sometimes surprising. “Totality and the Individual in Culture” was published as the lead article in the inaugural edition of the journal Inmun p’yŏngnon, which had been set up in 1939 by the one-time Keijō Imperial University English literature professor and later notorious collaborator Ch’oe Chaesŏ.100 In his writings Sŏ uses key ideas developed by the Kyoto School of philosophers, which might perhaps be furnished as evidence that he had crossed over to the other side. Yet there is no reason to read his work as an imitation. Taking our cue from Sŏ’s embrace of the present as the basis for action, we can see in him a sustained engagement with the ideas of Japan’s philosophers to see if they could build a base of action for himself. Staying grounded in his present as he understood it, Sŏ strove to forge a space in which he could imagine an alternative future for Korea that did not involve colonial absorption into the Asian cooperative body. These efforts led him to a sustained attention to the ways in which Korea was increasingly being narrated into a past through the dominant discourses on nostalgia, tradition and the classics, and the Orient. He chose to linger within those discourses to try to forge a future out of that past.

C6548.indb 82

8/29/14 9:22 AM

the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

83

The most telling of all Sŏ’s endings is the fact that the written record disappears after November 1940. Perhaps the clothes he chose no longer served to cover him, and he chose silence. I have no way to ascertain his thoughts and actions thereafter, but there is no doubt that within the disciplined, overpoliced realm of the colonial archive, silence might speak louder than any shouts or cries.

C6548.indb 83

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 84

8/29/14 9:22 AM

3 A PRIVATE ORIENT When my twittering children have all fallen asleep, and even my wife has retired to her bed like a lonely cloud, that is when we look and neither of us grows tired; at one with these antiques, I am unaware of the deepening night. Yi T’aejun, “Antiques” One has to know how to agonize over one’s own contradictions. It is preferable for the artwork and daily life to come together as one. Yi T’aejun, “Oriental Painting”

On a first reading, agony is not an experience the reader might readily associate with Yi T’aejun’s 1941 collection of anecdotal essays titled Musŏrok (Eastern Sentiments).1 From its opening meditation on the serenity to be enjoyed through the contemplation of a wall, this highly stylized collection moves through a series of elegiac odes to the beauty of a transient nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of contemporary literary trends, an exploration of traces of the past to be discovered in written documents and daily practices and, finally, two travelogues describing journeys to the eastern coast and the far reaches of Manchuria. Agony and contradiction rarely brush the surface of Yi’s reflections on life on the outskirts of Seoul, which exude rather a sense of melancholic solitude and fantastic longing for the refinement of a past literati life. Could it be that Yi ignored his own admonition to scrutinize the contradictions of his daily life when assembling these finely wrought essays, which today still are the most widely read and best loved of his voluminous writings? Certainly Sŏ Insik seems to have thought so when he cited the essays in Yi’s collection as a prime example of that form of nostalgia he termed the feudal. According to Sŏ, the feudal nostalgia manifested itself as an overwhelming preference for old things and rejection of the new, and tended to appear whenever a native tradition was perceived to have disappeared or be on the verge of doing so. It was in some ways a form of escape and a refusal to confront the contradictions of the present by submerging oneself in a love of old objects. Nevertheless even Sŏ noted that the distinctive manner in which

C6548.indb 85

8/29/14 9:22 AM

86

a private orient

an apparently disappearing tradition might be mourned could be traced back in the case of Korea to a political history. In other words, Sŏ understood the antiquarianism of his time as a response to a distinct history and not a mere fad or personal predilection. This already suggests that the “feudal nostalgia” was temporally more complex than a mere clinging to old things might presume and involved a response to a historical and social situation that transcended any individual artist. Perhaps that situation reveals itself most overtly in the spatial framework of Yi’s antiquarianism, which in Eastern Sentiments takes the form of two panAsian visions: that of the solitary Confucian scholar who appears as a phantasm of a shared Asian elite past, and that of Manchuria and the modern edges of the Japanese empire. Conducting his explorations of the past in terms of East and West returned Yi T’aejun solidly to his present and the discourse of Japanese colonialism within which a much heralded cultural divide between East and West hid the contradictions embedded in the unequal colonial relation and the entry of Korea into the regime of capitalism. Those contradictions leave their marks across Yi’s works and especially in the subtle and only apparently anachronistic form of what might be called Yi’s private Orient: a highly individualized exploration of the self within a geopolitical aesthetic of empire as orient.2 In his meditations on the nature of “Oriental culture,” appreciation of orchids, and archival recovery of old literati documents, Yi mimicked a notion of literati daily life as style while being fully enmeshed in the modern economy of the colonial capital as one of the few self-made professional writers of the time. He found an appropriate form for this style in the self-consciously archaic anecdotal essay, which was undergoing a revival. The anecdotal essay is often considered either archaic or trivial, a minor genre, but its revival could be framed differently and more precisely as a response to late colonialism, where the contradictions constituting bourgeois subjectivity are worked out within the allegorical interior of the essay form. Thus the anecdotal essay is no longer an atavistic escape but a coming together of the artwork and daily life. In their most deeply interiorized moments, Yi’s essays tend to shut out the outside, but by choosing to conclude his collection with that outside, Yi leaves the reader with no doubt as to the foundational exterior of the kind of subjectivity on display here. Empire at its most modern, most industrious, and, ultimately, most violent draws the lines between what is considered inside and outside. To later generations, Yi’s love of the past can never quite escape the sense of imbrication with colonial power and the way

C6548.indb 86

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

87

it organized knowledge, history, even aesthetics, and yet why would this be surprising in a colony when art is shaped by the social formation?

The Antique Water Dropper Yi T’aejun took pleasure in old things; indeed, his essays reveal an intensely personal and deeply interiorized literary relationship with past time. There, in his description of himself, Yi sits up in his room at night, alone despite the presence of his wife and children asleep beside him, passing the hours with his antiques. The scene unites some major themes of Yi’s work: a moment of epiphanic communion with past time, materialized here in an object but embodied elsewhere in human beings;3 a Romantic reworking of the Confucian figure of the solitary scholar-gentleman into a cult of the lonely artist, allowing the figuration of the modern individual with a rich mental life; and, finally, the emergence of this most “private” of scenes within the public realm of the text. Yi’s communion with his antiques offers a model for one version of the antiquarianism that rose to popularity in the late 1930s, amid the waves of nostalgia that Sŏ Insik had analyzed, and it suggests the limits of an analysis that dismisses the turn to the past as feudal. Yi introduces his antiques as his closest companions in the solitude of the night hours, but what form of companionship do they provide? And what does Yi’s love of the past signify? Yi at first presents the antique as offering up an intimate world of which one must be wary: We are able to easily shut ourselves up for several days enjoying the hanging of a picture anew or changing the place of one empty dish. We become immersed in stillness and a sense of proximity. It is because of this that the extreme short-sighted nature of antiquarians is apt to form. It is an empty dish and empty vase. It does not contain rice cakes or water, but silence and emptiness. Already it is no longer a vessel but a world, a universe. To someone else it may look no more than a fragment of porcelain, but to its owner it is an endless landscape and a sublime temple.4

Yi’s definition of the antique in terms of a relation, in its offering of proximity, suggests how, as Yi sits in his room, it is through the antique, and through writing about the antique, that he does relate to a wider world. The

C6548.indb 87

8/29/14 9:22 AM

88 a private orient

relationship with the antique has an aura of proximity that appears to displace that with his wife and children or indeed a wider community, and yet since writing itself is a relation, this text too takes part in a social world. A linguistic idiom suggests some of its parameters. The emotional proximity that structures this particular world brings to mind the closing of a distance that is suggested by the Chinese word ch’in, more often translated as intimacy. If ch’inhada refers to a close relationship of affection, ch’in also refers to the father or parent, suggesting the intimacy with a familial relation whom one respects and obeys. Then there is the idiom of ch’inil, literally, to be intimate with Japan, and used to refer to the act of collaboration with the Japanese colonial power. Rather than invoke the usual translation of collaboration, however, the idiom of intimacy might prove more useful in approaching the question of subjectivity toward the end of colonial rule. Is there a connection between the intimacy of time provided by the antique—closing the gap between the past and the present—and that other narrative of intimacy which is more usually referred to in histories of colonial Korea? In the early 1940s, as Korea is absorbed into the wartime fascist regime, what forms of proximity and intimacy does the antique afford?5 “In order to entertain an antiquarian sensibility,” writes Susan Stewart, “a rupture in historical consciousness must have occurred, creating a sense that one can make one’s own culture other—distant and discontinuous.”6 Stewart is describing a transformation in English antiquarianism of the eighteenth century away from the motivated validation of the kingdom as a political unit and toward a romantic nostalgia that focused on a rural culture deemed to be disappearing under the constraints of commercialism. Work on antiquarianism in industrializing Europe has similarly suggested it arose from changing understandings of history and time associated with Romanticism.7 As contemporaneity acquired a new force, antiquarian sentiments arose from a sense of estrangement from the past. Even when those sentiments took the form of love, they were rooted in a present conceived as lying on the other side of a temporal divide. The gap was experienced as a loss of understanding, which antiquarians would then try to relieve through the “reawakening of objects and, thereby, a reawakening of narrative.”8 The antique object, newly visible among the proliferation of mass-produced commodities as the industrial economy emerged, provided the antiquarian with the opportunity to both distance and appropriate, or possess, the past. It provided the means to reawaken narratives of the divide—to reinterpret it, reclothe it, and potentially even close the distance with the past.

C6548.indb 88

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

89

For the colonial antiquarian the temporal divide thrown up by industrialization and urbanization was overlaid by the impermeable imposition of colonial rule. On the far side hovered the fantasy of a past political sovereignty, while on the near side, for some of the population at least, colonial education clothed the knowledge, practices, and objects of precolonial times with an alienating sense of loss and incomprehension ripe for reappropriation. As suggested by Sŏ Insik’s phantoms, which threatened always to return, repossession here could not only salve the antiquarian’s nostalgia but also become a political act. Such an understanding of the antiquarian sensibility as a rupture in historical consciousness is encapsulated in Yi T’aejun’s pithy comment that “distance in time is more exotic and mysterious than distance in space.”9 He was writing of the aura of the classic and a sense that in his time old things seemed more strange than things from far away. The statement is suggestive of the cosmopolitan world of artists and intellectuals in the colonial capital and rubs against the grain of today’s commonsense, which tends to stress the novelty and exoticism of so-called Western consumer objects in the colonial city. Yi’s comment suggests a rupture more profound than one of fashion. The material culture of Seoul has been transformed to the point that old objects, such as bound woodblock printed books, the brushes and porcelain stationery items of the Chosŏn dynasty scholar, and even old-style fishing rods, appear more exotic than the phonograph records, cups of coffee, and print books that populate the studies of contemporary scholars. It is not the mere exchange of utilitarian objects, however, so much as the emergence of new orders of knowledge and the economic regimes that such objects carry with them and of which they are the symbols, that bring about the historical rupture that could stimulate antiquarian tendencies. Yi’s essays reveal the petit bourgeois writer enjoying domestic daily life in a newly built “traditional” house on the outskirts of the city. During the course of the 1930s, when the essays were written, Yi had worked as an editor of the cultural pages at the Chung’ang ilbo newspaper, while also writing short stories and serializing novels in various newspapers at the rate of about one per year. He had taught writing at Ewha Women’s College—founded by missionaries in the late nineteenth century and from where his wife had graduated—and commuted into town by bus to visit the newspaper office and school. Weekends and evenings he indulged in his hobbies of cultivating orchids and appreciating antiques. Born in 1904, the year before Korea was declared a protectorate of Japan, Yi had risen through the colonial education system, studying in Japan, before

C6548.indb 89

8/29/14 9:22 AM

90

a private orient

establishing himself as writer and editor in the commercial print media. Yi’s daily life was lived amid the neon lights of the colonial capital and the quiet retreats of its newly incorporated borders, and especially in the interior of the house built on a subdivided plot of land whose value had risen immensely with the city expansion order of 1934.10 We must pay attention, then, to the particular narratives that Yi attempts to reawaken through his possession of antique objects. Yi stressed the “solemn” nature of the antique and the importance of “feeling” the past before knowing it, of approaching it “with the heart of one visiting a mountain temple.”11 Such an attitude of awe and desire for embodied knowledge reveals an approach to the past of the antiquarian, and not the document-driven rationality of the historian.12 In his essayistic attempts to reawaken an old world of virtue, moral simplicity, and respect for the laws of nature, Yi produces an aesthetic critique of the hyperproductivity, rationality, commercialism, and competition that he depicts as characteristic of 1930s Seoul society. Even the practice of fishing has, he writes at one point, been transformed by the increasingly speedy and competitive lifestyle of the modern city, as old folks leap off the bus and race each other to grab the best spots within a bus ride from the city.13 In fact, Yi devotes an entire essay to fishing, where he describes in great detail the kinds of fishing practiced in the small rural town of Ch’ŏlwŏn where he was born and where fishing in valley streams varies according to season and the opportunistic use of seasonal floods and their subsidence.14 For Yi fishing means to “be with the fish” rather than to catch them, thus to be with nature and in natural cyclical time. It also means to write about fishing, investing many words—often quite obscure and local— in the description of different kinds of baits and fishing rods used according to the occasion and landscape.15 Such objects and practices, whether fishing or words, are cast as a traditional, natural, and rural way of being and endued with a moral value. Yi’s loving adumbration of old objects thus suggests the parameters of a petit bourgeois urban life and its discontents. Residents of Seoul in the midcentury were beginning to experience nostalgia for a lost rural life, but this was rarely separated from the question of authenticating a political unit. As a member of a proliferating bourgeoisie, Yi T’aejun had benefited greatly from the economic settlement of colonial rule, but as a writer and educator whose professional and personal destiny were intimately entangled with the project of writing in the Korean language, Yi was facing the unimaginable prospect of a drastic reduction in Korean language print. It was perhaps an event that confronted him with one contradiction of

C6548.indb 90

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

91

his existence, that of the writer whose fortune had risen in colonial society only to find the terms of engagement turn on him. Nevertheless, to read Yi’s penchant for antiques and things old as love for the nation and an attempt to preserve it during the difficult years of military occupation, as some do, does not do full justice to the forms through which Yi performed this love for the past nor to the degree of rupture that marked the early experience of modernity in Korea. What unites Yi’s descriptions of treasured objects is the fact that they bear traces of lived experience, whether it be of some famous past figure or of peoples unknown, and even if they had, as often, been purchased as commodities in the streets of Insa-dong. The perfectly preserved, exquisitely manufactured objects from other lands—their value destroyed by the slightest chip—are not for him, Yi writes.16 His ideal is a simple piece of craft from the Chosŏn dynasty, such as a nondecorative pot or piece of woodwork, cracked and dirtied from years of handling and serving food. It is the object in which visible traces of a lifetime, or lifetimes, of use remain. It thus reveals the passage of time on its body, but a time that is constituted as an undifferentiated stream of mundane happenings and daily life, rather than the drama of historical event. The ideal object bears the visible traces of its use value, but it is not to be used anymore; it bears witness to a history of continuity but now is to leave the realm of history altogether to become a friend of the artist, an object for aesthetic contemplation, the object that is to be an “entire universe,” a pristine and self-sufficient world untouched in its past, and supposedly in the present too, by the ravages of the market. The object valued for its use in the past is now to be valued for its glorious uselessness in the present, supposedly indifferent to the exchange economy and its instrumentality.17 The irony, of course, is that the antique merely marks a further penetration of that exchange economy as past time itself, embodied in the object, becomes a commodity. Moves like those of Yi T’aejun increased the market value of the unostentatious vessel enormously. Though Yi might purchase objects in the antique shopping district, he is careful to remove them from commodity circulation in his retelling of their origins. Yi is precise about the attraction of Chosŏn pots: They were not developed as commodities, unlike those of China or the Japanese metropole, and so although the hands of the craftsmen were expert, their hearts were as pure as children. Pots made by experienced hands with hearts lacking in worldly desire are closer to nature than to artifice. These

C6548.indb 91

8/29/14 9:22 AM

92 a private orient

pots may not catch the eye at first glance, but the eye never tires of looking at them, and so an attachment is formed. Once our troubled eyes or hearts reach there and find comfort in the absence of words, we begin to think of the distant past, which appears immense, but there is no sense of suffocation, only a pure heart remaining.18

These objects link the present to the past in a seamless stream of lived experience, denying the historical rupture of which they are a symptom. However, they succeed in this function only because of their detachment from their narrative of origins on their entrance into the market economy. The new attraction of the pots lies in their perceived origin in a precapitalist world, where people and objects are supposed to have lived in unmediated community. In Yi’s time the object is being removed from an immediate relationship with the body and at the same time moving into other fictive realms. The pots are testament to the touch of the hand of the potter, a pure touch detached from self-interest or the machinations of the mind. Onto this original touch are placed fantasies of the succession of generations of hands touching. This search for the touch of a hand, or authentic embodied experience and the authentic object that would hold its trace, and a sense of continuity is not unique to Yi but rather seems characteristic of those societies where the abstraction of a capitalist exchange economy is experienced as overwhelming. Here the object becomes the holder of an authenticity that lies beyond the “horizon of present lived experience.” In this “process of distancing . . . the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object.”19 But what does the object remember? The allusive realm of the Chosŏn pot of unknown origin is complex, as the horizon beyond the present constituted not merely the precapitalist utopia but a precolonial memory that necessarily stood as a reminder that colonialism was neither natural nor permanent. And yet the precolonial could prove to be elusive in its own way, as having moved beyond the realm of bodily memory, it could be approached only from a distance that risked affirming the fact of colonialism. It must be recalled that Yi was born in 1904, on the eve of the establishment of a protectorate, and began formal schooling only after colonial rule had been established. He was, like so many of the thinkers and writers discussed in this book, of the first generation to have no conscious memory of life before colonial rule was imposed. For Yi and his friends it was no longer possible to access the past without the mediation of knowledge

C6548.indb 92

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

93

produced by the colonial regime. Intimate knowledge would turn out to be a reconfirmation of distance and estrangement. The description of Chosŏn pots brings us to another fictive realm, which is the body of colonial knowledge produced about Korea by Japanese intellectuals, itself often already a redaction of Western orientalism. It is important to note the terms of comparison through which Yi defines Korean crafts, for it is alongside China and Japan that he locates Korea, thus recentering Korea within a pan-Asian discourse. This is a complex negotiation. Childlike, pure, and less contaminated by the commodity regime, the values Yi ascribes to Korea were associated by so many intellectuals at that time—both Korean and Japanese—with the category of the East, opposed to a West that was seen as mature and fully steeped in capitalism.20 In early twentieth-century Japan, the notion of the geocultural entity of tōyō (Korean, tongyang) had emerged to distinguish both the East from the West and Japan within the East. In tōyōshi, the field of historical studies dedicated to studying and legitimating this entity, China and Korea often functioned as the past or Orient to Japan’s present.21 When Yi uses such terms as “pure” and “childlike” to refer to Korea, he is necessarily speaking within this discourse of tōyō. More specifically, he echoes the work of Japanese collectors such as Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) and Asakawa Noritaka (1884–1964), who brought Korean pots to metropolitan attention during the first half of the twentieth century, taking good advantage of new possibilities for possession brought about by Japanese colonialism. Yanagi was a towering figure in colonial art circles and the folk art movement in Japan. First introduced to Korean pottery by Asakawa, who taught at an elementary school on the Korean peninsula between 1913 and 1946, Yanagi found himself, owing to the vagaries and hierarchies of the colonial market, economically empowered, along with Asakawa, to forge a reputation as a collector of antiques and accrue a cultural capital that would not have been available to him in the metropole.22 Yanagi put that reputation to use as a self-styled appreciator and translator of Korean aesthetics. In the wake of the nationwide anticolonial protests of 1919, he had appealed for sympathy and understanding to be shown to Koreans who had been too harshly treated in the first decade of colonial rule.23 He had personally taken it upon himself to found the first art museum in Seoul as an attempt to forge a model of a more genial relationship between the metropole and the colony in the realm of culture, writing that it was art, religion, and emotions, rather than science, politics, or knowledge, that would bring the Japanese and Korean peoples closer

C6548.indb 93

8/29/14 9:22 AM

94 a private orient

together.24 The museum opened to great fanfare in 1924, but even before that Yanagi had begun to write many articles detailing the beauty and significance of artifacts on the peninsula, such as the Buddhist statuary of the Sŏkkuram Grotto in Kyŏngju, which he placed at the heart of an Asian aesthetic tradition.25 In his work Yanagi attempted to open up a realm of comparative history of Asian culture, where a notion of Korean culture is cherished as an instantiation of a regional Asian culture. This cultural regional imaginary was always entangled with the ongoing regional project of empire. Like other liberal colonialists of his time, Yanagi praised the culture of the colonized to its hilts, but not without locating it within the hierarchical framework of empire. A brief look at one of his more famous essays, “Upon Viewing the Kizaemon Ido,” is revealing both in the light it sheds on that hierarchy and in its echoes of Yi T’aejun’s writing on Korean potters.26 The essay describes a visit to the Kohō-an temple to view the famed Kizaemon tea-bowl. This tea-bowl is, he writes, “considered to be the finest in the world.” He traces the genealogy of its ownership from the sixteenth century when it was first made, recounting the tales and misfortunes of its various owners on whom it was often considered to bring a curse. The singularity of this bowl is tempered by his description of it as the pinnacle of ordinariness. It was a common bowl, made by poor, illiterate people without calculation or ornamentation. Like Yi, he ponders the workmen who produced it: “It is impossible to believe that those Korean workmen possessed intellectual consciousness. It was precisely because they were not intellectuals that they were able to produce this natural beauty. . . . Their beauty is a gift, an act of grace.”27 And yet those same workmen, devoid of calculation, were not able to recognize the beauty they themselves created. The most ordinary bowl could not become extraordinary without the superior art of appreciation, which is attributed to the skill of the Japanese tea masters: “The Koreans made rice bowls; the tea masters turned them into masterpieces.”28 It turns out that the ordinary, illiterate Korean could not be the ultimate creator; that role was restricted to the cultivated, educated Japanese master who had a monopoly on the recognition of beauty: “If Ido bowls had not crossed over to Japan, they would not have come into being in Korea. Japan is the native land of the Ido tea-bowl.”29 Taking the self-aggrandizement of the gesture aside, in a twist of logic, Japan has become the homeland of the beauty of the empire, for empire is the realm at stake here. Yi’s echoes of appreciation of the common Korean pot and potter risk affirming this logic of liberal colonialism, which could bring about that in-

C6548.indb 94

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

95

timacy of the imperial bourgeois elite that often gets termed ch’inil, or collaboration. To think of the colonial relationship as one of intimacy—closing the distance with Japanese thinkers in the moment of closing the distance with the past—helps us to understand how within that relationship distances could be closed through narrative, and in the process intellectuals such as Yi could position themselves as imperial subjects. Central to that narrative were the various ideas of a shared Asian cultural imaginary. Yi and Yanagi were not alone in drawing comparisons that located Korea within a regional imaginary of Asia. Journals of the early 1940s almost obsessively produced their special editions on the trio of Japan, China, and Korea, searching in the particularities of each for instantiations of a contestatory universalism located in the regional category of Asia. They thus affirmed the epistemological framework of Euro-American orientalism, and in such a climate each celebration of Korean values in orientalist terms reinforced the idea of Asian community. In such thinking Asia and Korea are mutually reinforcing categories, and in the process the geopolitical nature of their relationship—the colonial relation of unequal exchange—was hidden. Must Yi be read, then, as merely echoing sentiments preconfigured by the likes of Yanagi and other colonial aficionados of Korean culture? Perhaps to counter this reading of a shared cultural appreciation we could turn to the most singular antique to be found in Yi’s own writing. Yi’s narration of his personal history of antique ownership brings us back immediately to ch’in and the intimacy of the parental relationship, and thus the intimate realm of the past. The first object from the past that Yi possessed was a small water dropper that belonged to his dead father. The water dropper occupies a particularly prominent place in collections of old objects from Korea, even those in major museum collections today. An item of stationery, the water dropper was a small water container used to drop water onto inkstones. Scaled to fit the palm of the hand, the water dropper was often fashioned after the likenesses of similarly small objects or animal and plant life—a fish, a peach, or perhaps a frog. The water dropper offered a combination of formal freedom for the pursuit of artistic creativity and vagaries of personal preference, alongside the intimacy of palm-sized tactility. Perhaps for these reasons, it has occupied such a prominent place in the hearts of antiquarians since at least the early twentieth century. Yi’s water dropper is described in his autobiographical novel, Moonlit Nights of Contemplation, and again at more length in an essay titled simply “Antiques.”30 In the latter the water dropper is anthropomorphized as the “elder”

C6548.indb 95

8/29/14 9:22 AM

96

a private orient

in the house; it is the only thing or person in the household older than Yi himself. The water dropper evokes an image in Yi’s mind, which he does not remember ever witnessing: “I only have to gaze at it in a quiet place and think that it was once used by my father, and a scene of which I have only heard, of my father who enjoyed calligraphy, permeates the room along with the fragrance of ink. Adjusting his sleeves to sit in quiet contemplation is a true lesson that my father passed on by example.”31 In the absence of an ongoing father-son relationship—due to the early death of the father—the water dropper steps in as the bearer of bodily knowledge or behavior passed down from father to son. The patrilineal transmission of experience is mediated by this object in which a past way of life has been invested. The water dropper would seem to be one of those material objects able to bring the experience of the past into the present. This scene from the past is mediated through storytelling, however. The water dropper stimulates a fragrance and tries to connect to a bodily experience, but it is a scene of which Yi has only heard, one that has been passed on by word of mouth. In Yi’s essay, the disjuncture with the past is such that no connection seems possible other than through this ideological nostalgia. In the father is embodied the idea of a past of which Yi has only heard and the vision of a transmissible tradition that might bridge the gap between the past and the present, but this is not the only resonance of the father. The essay continues with another memory provoked by the water dropper: it is the death scene of the father, in exile far away from his homeland in the cold and inhospitable climate of Vladivostok, where “even the sea would freeze.” His father died “still gripped by resentment and regret” at his fate.32 The water dropper stood at his father’s bedside during that time, thus experiencing the father’s resentment, exile, and premature death. Yi’s maternal grandmother had then carried the water dropper in her waistband throughout long peripatetic years, patiently waiting for her grandson to reach an age deemed appropriate for him to take possession of it. The past that this water dropper “contains” is one full of tribulation suffered as a result of Yi’s father having sided with social reformers at the turn of the century and consequently having been exiled by conservatives in Korea only to die in 1909, on the eve of colonial rule. The father’s story dramatizes the imbrication of individual fate with that of the nation, particularly during the national crisis brought on by Korea’s entrance into modernity. The family history, like that of the object, bridges precolonial to colonial times, thus taking part in the narrative construct of the “precolonial,” which emerges in retrospect. Inheriting the water

C6548.indb 96

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

97

dropper also meant inheriting this past and its alternative possible futures. It equated entering adulthood with interpellation into a collectivity that is in conflict, as Yi’s father had been exiled by those within Korea who held a different, although equally anticolonial, vision for the nation’s future. Singular and authentic, to Yi at least, the water dropper mediates Yi’s relation to the past through the story of his father. The truthfulness of that story is dispensable; what is important is that the water dropper enables a story to be told.33 If the water dropper stands in for a father of whom Yi has no bodily memory, perhaps the father also acts as a stand-in for something approaching the bodily realm of the self. Through the story of the father Yi can construct another self, one that laments the fate of the nation, but also one that finds serenity in the stroke of a brush. In that instant life is freed from the regimes of colonialism and commodification, and at the same time, through the touch of a hand, the body is returned to the center of experience, where it is reunited with the imagination. This is the utopian impulse offered by the tiny water dropper. Such a narrative cannot be appropriated by Yanagi, who must necessarily tell a different tale of the father.

The I ntimac y of the E ssay What is at stake in the tale of the water dropper is less the truth of the father than the narrative of self it engenders in the present. The title of one of Yi’s meditations on the antique, “Antiques and Daily Life” (“Kowanp’um kwa saenghwal”), suggests that his concern with the antique is not entirely oriented toward the past.34 The encounter with the past takes place on the grounds of the present and in a particular fashion. Although admiring a ritual vessel may not demand much action, many of Yi’s essays reveal a less passive approach to the past: for example, when he follows his friend, the artist Kim Yongjun (1904–67), to a private collector’s home to view calligraphy by the much admired Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi (1786–1856) and then spends hours over several evenings copying the characters that Kim Yongjun had carefully traced; or when he hires old carpenters to build a new house in the old style using no nails or modern tools. Such instances show a determination to experience what Yi once called the “virtue of copying,” which turns out to be no less than a desire to repeat past time in the present.35 The past time that Yi strives to reproduce is not, as one might anticipate, a heroic time of grand event or decisive action, however; nor is it something decisively anti- or noncolonial.

C6548.indb 97

8/29/14 9:22 AM

98 a private orient

Instead it is something more subtle: a set of practices and customs to which a certain morality is ascribed, what might be called a style of the everyday. Yi’s production of everyday life as a style parallels the consumer lifestyle touted in print culture of the time under the moniker of saenghwal or daily life, but his style is characterized by its surface rejection of consumerism and fashion and its embracing of the past. As a style, it also strives to seal the dissonance of Ch’oe Myŏngik’s everyday, which, however, always threatens to erupt. Writing was central to Yi’s modern re-creation of the everyday life of the scholar-gentleman, just as it had been to that gentleman in the past. As even the example of the tracing of Ch’usa’s calligraphy suggests, the virtue of copying could only be perfected through its embodiment in form and a style of writing distinctive enough to function as allegory for that alternative everyday life. Yi found this in the self-consciously antiquated but increasingly popular anecdotal essay (sup’il), which shares some of the contradictions of Yi’s everyday project. Commissioned by journals needing to fill their pages in the print boom of the mid-1930s, these essays were fully ensconced in the economy of print capital. Yet their ponderous evocation of a past style of literati life—with its appreciation of orchids, old poetry, and the moral force of nature—suggested a degree of continuity in an elite culture that had undergone a revolution under the forces of modernism. Moreover, the essay’s fragmentary nature, with its ability to capture the fleeting moments and texture of daily life, could equally highlight the uneven demands on the residents of Seoul with the fast pace of its commercial life, the authoritarian architecture of the colonial capital, and the surviving lifestyle of old neighborhoods. Despite, or rather because of, its gesture to the past, the anecdotal essay was in many ways the most modern of literary forms in the fashion of Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as that which combines an element of the eternal with the transience of the fleeting moment.36 Yi was sensitive to the importance of forms, but he was as likely to pose their significance in geocultural terms as in temporal terms. “It is preferable for the artwork and daily life to come together as one,” wrote Yi in an essay critiquing Korea’s artists for abandoning the painterly traditions of Korea and adopting wholesale the oils and watercolors of European painters.37 This is where he demanded that the artist “agonize” over his own contradictions. The adoption of European painting styles, according to Yi, had led to absurd choices of subject matter, unsuited to the natural environment of Korea, and the reduction of artistic practice to either fantasy or “mere labor,” as the artist did not live the lifestyle that produced the form of Western-style painting.38

C6548.indb 98

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

99

Who in Korea could lie naked on the grass—perhaps he was thinking of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe—without being scratched by thorns and the like? This mismatch between form and environment reflected, moreover, an imbalance, for Western painters were not struggling to inherit the mantle of artists such as Tanwŏn Kim Hongdo (1745–c. 1806) in the way that Korea’s painters seemed to yearn to become a “second Cezanne”: “Whence comes the need to leave that heritage to rot in order to gaze at the Eiffel Tower on some distant horizon?” Here, as elsewhere, Yi framed the contradiction of his daily life in cultural terms, as a decisive difference and imbalance between East and West, and placed on the artist the burden of representing an entire cultural region. But he was also framing the contradiction as a question of form. What kind of cultural form would offer a solution to the contradictions of daily life with its amalgam of temporalities, languages, and cultures and inequalities of rank, race, and poverty? The anecdotal essay was unburdened by the charge of being a foreign “transplant,” to use the terminology of the time.39 Short essays describing impressionistic thoughts on nature, morality, human relations, books read, or visits to friends had been written throughout the Chosŏn dynasty and included in the personal collections of literati elite. At the same time, by the 1930s the essay was undergoing quite a renaissance and perhaps achieved confirmation of its relevance as a modern, living genre with the inclusion of a volume of essays and travelogues as volume 5 of the pathbreaking, multivolume Collected Works of Modern Korean Literature published by the Chosŏn ilbo newspaper company in 1939.40 These were early days in the canonization of a specifically modern literature in Korean; indeed it was the first attempt by publishers to establish an organized repertoire of major works. It undoubtedly helped both that the four-part generic division of European literatures most popular in Korea included the essay, alongside the novel, the lyrical poem, and the drama, and that some of Japan’s most accomplished novelists and poets, such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Satō Haruo (1892–1964), and Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), were also frequent and consummate essay writers. Indeed the revival of the essay was not unique to Korean writers at this time. The work of Tanizaki and his famous essay “In Praise of Shadows” (“In’ei raisan”; 1933–34) and Zhou Zuoren’s (1885–1967) turn to the essay in the late 1920s amid his reevaluation of tradition and the legacy of the May Fourth Movement suggest not only that the essay was a vital genre but that it offered a locus for a widespread reappraisal of modernity and its pasts throughout East Asia at this time. Clearly the essay as a form allowed for a

C6548.indb 99

8/29/14 9:22 AM

100

a private orient

particular kind of thinking to emerge, or perhaps, to borrow Yi’s terms, the essay allowed for the expression of a particular kind of agony, whether selfconscious or not.41 In the 1930s debate broke out about the flourishing form as more and more writers turned to the essay as a supplement to their fictional and lyrical work and specialist essay writers emerged. Critics clearly felt the need to address the meaning of the form and its popularity. Just as they struggled to define the essay, they expressed fears over its lack of restraint. Again and again anxiety was expressed about the “essayization” of literature itself, as if the essay form were some kind of contagion.42 Some of this rhetoric undoubtedly stemmed from the new association of the essay with commercial journalism and reflects the attempt to create and protect an elite idea of literature as lying beyond commercial interest, whether in the cause of status or an anticolonial politics. Talk had also arisen of a shortening attention span accompanying the dramatic changes in urban life. Yi himself credited the busyness of modern life for the proliferation of short literary forms, such as the short story and the conte. The latter—amounting to no more than a couple of pages— were to be read on the streetcar and disposed of like a lunchbox, according to Yi, who added that “some magazines even add beneath the title of a story a note on how many minutes are required to read it.”43 Yi’s discussion of the various fictional forms being written in Korean does not directly address the anecdotal essay, but his focus on the scale of a work is intriguing. Pondering why the short story, rather than the novel, had become the most authoritative form of fiction, he suggests another adaption of scale to daily life, which is different from that of urban speed: “In environments such as Korea where one encounters a variety of difficulties when trying to handle the general situation either spatially or temporally, it is no exaggeration to say that the most partial and fragmented form of the short story has to be the most appropriate literary form.”44 This is the closest Yi comes to referring to the writerly realities of colonial rule, which limited through either direct censorship or control over the circulation of knowledge the disclosure of the full complexity of social relations in Korea both past and present. In a colony, then, a fragmented form such as the essay might become a representational strategy, whether self-consciously or fortuitously.45 Not unconnected to the colonial reality was the focus that emerged among critics on a particular notion of individuality being developed through the essay. The established modernist poet and critic Kim Kirim (1908–?) forged this debate along with Im Hwa. Kim was very much a fan of the essay, writing

C6548.indb 100

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

101

in 1933 that the anecdotal essay would be the “darling literary form of the age to follow the novel.”46 The reason for his growing attachment to the essay was fundamentally literary, he wrote, for lately he had been thinking about the nature of literature and had come to believe it was essentially a question of writing and thus a combination of words. What defined the literary was not its content, then, but the question of style, and it was in the essay that the “writer’s individual style” emerged the most clearly. Kim decried the dismissive notion of the essay as an impromptu few sentences written “before breakfast” and instead presented the essential essay as a crystallization of effort and care into lucid prose. The special nature of the essay lay, he wrote, “in its fragrant humor, dazzling wit, its reason which is as cool as marble, beautiful logic, and irony and paradox that can pierce to the heart of civilization and human life.”47 All these properties endowed the anecdotal essay with the potential to become the very art of the age of modernity. Kim’s praise of the essay removed it decisively from the “gutter” of the mass media, to borrow Virginia Woolf ’s turn of phrase in her own contemporary and similarly positive appraisal of the modern essay, and simultaneously bequeathed on it the status of being the apex of contemporaneity, if not the art of the future.48 At the heart of Kim’s understanding of the essay lay the notion of literature as a craft to be polished by the individual artist as an expression of individual powers. As such Kim named the writers he believed to have mastered the form most perfectly—Kim Chinsŏp (1903–?), Yi Ŭnsang (1903–82), Mo Yunsuk (1910–90), and he who writes the “most essay-like of essays” and most exemplifies the essay’s nature, Yi T’aejun. At the time Yi was better known as a writer of short stories and serialized novels. But Kim had elsewhere crowned Yi the “stylist” of his time, and so perhaps it should not be surprising that he should focus on Yi as a consummate writer of essays and thus of literary writing.49 Kim’s view of the essay inevitably met a backlash as it expressed an understanding of literature that was highly controversial in the charged atmosphere of colonial society. Within a month a roundtable discussion had been convened by the prominent journal Chosŏn munhak where Kim both reiterated his views and expanded on them to stress the “free form and free subjectivity” allowed by the essay.50 Picking up on an earlier comment that the concept of the novel struggled to include such recent works as Ulysses, Kim suggested that writers were beginning to throw off all “fetters” and search for new forms that allowed them to “express themselves freely.” This was the “essayization” of the novel held in a positive light. Despite the presence of half a dozen writers

C6548.indb 101

8/29/14 9:22 AM

102

a private orient

and critics, the debate turned mostly around Kim and Im Hwa, who agreed that the novel was moving closer to the essay but, far from considering this a hopeful sign for the future, stressed that it was no more than a “musical accompaniment to the decaying tide of bourgeois society.”51 It was precisely the ideology of the individual propagated through the notion of style and creative freedom that seemed to Im Hwa to threaten the ethical mission, which he argued lay at the heart of what literature should be. Im did not exactly dismiss the notion of the essay’s privileged tie to individuality, however. Toward the end of the decade, Im wrote a more sustained appraisal of the essay.52 By this time he had embarked on a project of writing the first history of modern Korean literature and was devoting much thought to the meaning of genres.53 Im hesitated to consider the essay literary when, in his view, it was not a genre with a distinct form. The freedom that Kim heralded threatened the essay’s status as literature in Im’s eyes. According to Im, the characteristic of literature was its subordination of logic to ethics, in a reversal of that of scientific knowledge.54 The question of form should be secondary, as for Im it was ideology, in the form of logic and ethics, that should distinguish the literary from the nonliterary. Ultimately he conceded that the essay could still be considered literature because of its ethical viewpoint, but what distinguished the essay from fiction and poetry was the fact that its ethics was, without the edifice and history of generic structure, always that of the writer him or herself: The essay must be a sincere, individual record of thought or daily life, and not propound something like a system or a formula. This individual nature, the intimacy and sense of proximity that arises when everything is narrated from one perspective, is the special quality of the essay that emerges from its being as literature. However, there is a big difference between the literary genres and the essay, even though they both express thought as morality. To the extent that the essay has a certain morality, it belongs to the writer and is usually expressed in the first person because the writer narrates directly from his own viewpoint and observations.55

Im is hardly disagreeing with Kim here, but whereas Kim sees the strength of the essay in the space it allows the individual for the expression of style, Im goes on to argue that the essay should ideally become a site for the direct encounter between the individual and daily life. If the essay endowed the myriad happenings of daily life with greater meaning, then its individuality

C6548.indb 102

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

103

could transcend the trivial and become a strength. The essay should, according to Im, narrate something that only the individual could notice but raise it to the level of thought itself. Just as each leaf on a tree is a sign of a “strong and fresh life,” everyday phenomena in the essay should be endowed with the full expression of thought and morality.56 The essay must then “fuse thought and reality directly without mediation,” and in this sense only could “the tiny and trivial phenomena of daily life display enormous value through the strong spirit of individuality.”57 Unfortunately, Im concludes, the contemporary essay in Korea is not being written by individuals ready to perform this serious task but has rather fallen into the realm of “oriental hobbydom.” Kim and Im are often understood as inhabiting opposing sides of an entrenched battle between supporters of “pure art” and a “literature of commitment.” It is true that they too adopted these terms, with Im even distinguishing between the essay of “pure literature” and that of “tendency literature”—tendency (kyŏnghyang) being used frequently to refer to the espousal of literature as a political medium.58 Yet perhaps Kim and Im have more in common than not. Both conceive of the essay as a privileged space for the practice of “individuality,” and both clearly find the notion of the modern individual powerful. Their differences lie in the emphasis that Kim places on style as the form through which that individuality is exercised, whereas Im prefers to emphasize individuality, via the essay, as the medium for the discovery of daily life. They are thus equally invested in filling out the still relatively novel notion of the modern individual mind, and in this they have much in common with other contemporary essayists, such as Zhou Zuoren in China, for whom the essay, and the stylization of daily life that it involved, offered “unparalleled intimacy with the immediate experience of the modern individual,” and thus a site for the ongoing intellectual project of enlightenment that was called the May Fourth Movement.59 Rather than dismissing the import of the essay as oriental hobbydom, we might question its complicity in the production of a certain kind of subjectivity. In this light, the form of Yi’s longing for the past is telling. His essays quickly establish their realm in the domestic interior, often at night when the darkness swallows up all exteriority, leaving Yi alone in the mountains of his mind: Sometimes I sit and wait from daylight hours. The night meanders in through the closed door. It removes my mother’s face from a photograph hung on the wall, coils around a lone blossom on my desk, its eyes wide

C6548.indb 103

8/29/14 9:22 AM

104

a private orient

open to the very end, and then I find myself in the depth of the mountains. There I encounter the cries of insects and wait for the dream that will surely visit; deep into the night I hear a cock crow in a village far away.60

In this journey into the landscape of the mind, all exteriority is quickly inverted into interiority, and it is here that Yi encounters his visions of the past. In the depth of the mountains Yi sits with his antiques, admires his orchids, reads old Korean books, and marvels at the virtue of those he considers his ancestors. Even when he recounts social occasions such as visits to the homes of acquaintances, the visit more often finds its conclusion in a solitary experience in his own home. Even, for example, when he accompanies his good friend Kim Yongjun to view Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi’s calligraphy, he returns to his own study with the tracing of Ch’usa’s work done by Kim Yongjun and spends two evenings alone trying to copy the master’s brush strokes.61 The discovery of the past is a mostly isolated affair, couched in terms that would have been unfamiliar to Yi’s ancient friends. Yi writes, “The work is a flower that blooms from the individual alone.”62 He goes on to stress the individual self as the origin of art and creativity: “To be alone, to suffer adversity, to perfect only the self given by nature, that is the glory of the artist alone, not to be experienced by the politician or businessman.”63 The Confucian scholar would certainly have been familiar with the notion of perfecting the self, but that self would not have been located within an understanding of a society separated into distinguishable spheres of politics, business, and literature. Indeed, Ch’usa and so many of those figures that Yi admired for their calligraphy or poetic expression served at the court for long periods of their lives. Yi’s individual, with his isolation as a creative force and disdain of business and politics, is decidedly modern. An ideological subject thus emerges from Yi’s work that is akin to the figure of the Romantic individual that emerged in industrializing Europe. Vociferously opposed to the bustle of the city, the power of money, and the negotiation of modern life perhaps, but in essence a product of the very forces it decries. Yi’s essay displays a paradoxical form of subjectivity, which suggests a common reaction to the upheavals of the industrializing world but under the harsh constraints of midcentury fascist colonial rule. The intimacy with the past produced as an experience of individuality through Yi’s essay is reminiscent of that described by another master essayist fully conversant in the ways of fascism, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin wrote of the entrance onto the

C6548.indb 104

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

105

“stage of history” by the private individual—an entrance he located in midnineteenth-century France—that “The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.”64 Benjamin chose to analyze the interior as a sustaining pillar of the myth of bourgeois individuality. Constituted for the first time in opposition to the workplace and derived from the fantasy of isolating one space from the “dirty” world of business and commerce, the interior was central to bourgeois myths of individual autonomy and privacy.65 In this reading the interior and its objects could be read as the traces of capitalist relations and a new form of subjectivity: “The phantasmagorias of the interior . . . for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.”66 The organization of time and space—the far away and the long ago—around a box looking out onto the world is perhaps more frequently associated with this European bourgeoisie on the brink of imperial adventure—one thinks not only of the antique but of the imperial souvenirs that increasingly inhabited interiors of European bourgeois homes. At the heart of Benjamin’s analysis is a refusal of the presentation of the inner sanctum of the private sphere, with its illusions of individual control and proliferating material objects, as separate from the larger social relations of production. Exterior and interior are phantasms of social space whose analysis must question how forms of subjectivity relate to arrangements of political power and control that promote capitalist social relations. In this light the forms of subjectivity emerging among the colonial bourgeoisie must also be thought in terms of their relation to power, however passive and withdrawn they sometimes seem. In a colony such as Korea the fantasy of an autonomous domestic space was much harder to sustain. Even the richest and most well connected of compradors had eventually to encounter the last instance when their colonial subjecthood was imposed on them. Nevertheless here too notions of the interior emerged with perhaps surprising strength, proving that the European bourgeoisie were not alone in constructing a box onto the world.67 The rise of the essay with its elaboration of a personal realm of the individual imagination is one marker of the delineation of an inner sanctum belonging to the colonial elite. In Yi’s case this sanctum was constructed through an intimate relation with the past, leading critics such as Sŏ Insik to decry the defeated politics of such a temporal orientation with its lack of daring to imagine a future. But Yi’s essays revealed equally a spatial, or geopolitical, orientation in their focus on “eastern sentiment” at

C6548.indb 105

8/29/14 9:22 AM

106

a private orient

a time when imperialization, or the production of willing imperial subjects who could imagine themselves as part of the pan-Asian Japanese empire, was the stated goal of both imperial politics and economy.

P rivate Orient: A C ollec tion A contemporary concept of pan-Asianism draws the curtains around Eastern Sentiments, bringing its antiquarian adventures to a close and establishing the limits of its ending with “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” a travelogue that records a trip Yi made through various regions of the newly instituted state in 1938.68 Where the preceding essays fill out the spaces of the antiquarian interior, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria” seems to revel in the pure exteriority of landscape, or the “enormous space” as Yi designates his destination, and the anxiety of contemporaneity. Whether staring out the window at passing scenes on the interminably long train journey to Xinjing, the capital of Manchukuo, being whisked through the streets of Fengtian (Mukden) on rickshaw and taxi to glimpse the sights of the old Manchu capital and home to the Qing empire, or dragging his tired feet across the dry dirt to visit a remote Korean immigrant village, Yi sees Manchuria as the embodiment of landscape, a set of institutional buildings—museums, orphanages, railway stations—and a view from a train carriage window. That landscape is figured here as the modern and exotic realm of the far expanses of the Japanese empire. Manchukuo is not merely contemporary, it exceeds the contemporary to provoke anxious, or sometimes excited, glimpses into a future yet unknown. As the new state at the heart of the expanding empire, it simultaneously attracted bold experiments in social planning and grounded the frontline for the expansion onto the continent.69 It was the jewel in the imperial crown. That Manchuria is also the solid, unmoving exterior that draws the curtains around Yi’s inner sanctum, the imaginary future against which the past is elaborated, the cosmopolitan and violent empire against which Korea the homeland is delineated. The appearance of the travelogue prevents full submersion into the antiquarian world of Eastern Sentiments, jolting the reader back to the contemporary moment and its violent transformations and necessarily provoking the thought that the solitary journey through the night with the antique might be connected in some way to a different journey—across the inhospitable plains of frontier farmland and into the uncertain future of the Co-Prosperity

C6548.indb 106

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

107

Sphere. The montage immanent to Yi’s essay collection juxtaposes the ancient with the futuristic, but what both share is their geographical orientation. Private Orient refers to the time and space of the collection that Eastern Sentiments comprises. The gathering between one cover of these different essays, many of which had previously been published separately in newspapers and journals, ensures that they emit new meanings when read alongside one another. Yet even before the Asia Express speeds off toward the heart of the continent with Yi aboard, the essays have already been trying to ascertain the place of an educated Korean in this larger region Yi called the Orient. Prior to the journey to Manchuria, the phantasmatic vision of the Orient most often conjures up a shared ancient elite culture, centered in Yi’s version around the Tang and later dynasties of China. It is here where Yi’s writing comes closest to the various attempts to legitimate the contemporary empire through a culturalist vision of the past. Yi turns to ancient Chinese poetry and the thought of Buddhism to stress a distinctly Oriental culture. In his reading, the verse of the famous Tang poet Li Bai (701–62) is not a revelation of poetic genius or the glorious age of Tang but proof of the enduring persistence of an Oriental “state of mind.”70 That state of mind is attuned to the transient state of nature, epitomized by the floating clouds, flitting birds, and flowing water, and the temporary character of all attachments. Ironically there is no such thing as immortality, despite the poet’s sobriquet of “Poet Immortal.” Yet just as the poet’s sobriquet seems to undermine the mainstay of his supposed philosophy, so too does Yi find an enduring nature in something called Oriental culture, even if that nature is actually transience.71 If Yi does not exactly take up the battle cry of his times, he does reveal an understanding of a dichotomized world where notions of being Japanese or Korean are understood in cultural terms and defined as the particularization of more general notions of East and West. The East is to be understood as possessing its own sentiments, which materialize in discrete forms in each nation. Reflection on what is “Japanese” (quotation marks are his), for example, has produced the notion of sabi, “a phenomenon something like the patina of strange-shaped stones.”72 Here Yi is merely echoing the manifold discourse on the cultural essence of the Japanese.73 It is clear that any notion of a recovery of a sense of Koreanness will also have to take place in the cultural, and not political, realm and within the category of the Orient, so that Korea too can embody the sentiments of the East. The acceptance of Korean as a culturalist term and the Orient as subject is where Yi falls most intimately into a relationship with the imperialist discourse of the time.

C6548.indb 107

8/29/14 9:22 AM

108

a private orient

The water dropper too contributes to this vision, but with a far more fragile existence. An item of stationery, the water dropper symbolizes the world of the father, but not so much as the patriarchal modern nation in exile as the elite sphere of the Confucian scholar at the center of a world now disappearing. It suggests the gap between the modern author Yi, whose words appear in mechanical type, and the brushwork of that previous cultural elite. In that world Korean scholars had considered themselves to be at the center of the Sinocentric cultural sphere, sole keepers of the orthodoxy of the Confucian tradition after China fell to the Manchus. Many of the essays in Eastern Sentiments pursue the archeological discovery of this past literati life through the attempt to retrieve ancient language. “Kisaeng and Poetry,” for example, recounts the discovery of an unknown courtesan song in the letters of a certain Ch’oe Kyŏngch’ang (1539–83), who had been gifted a poem of longing in the midst of a passionate love affair with a kisaeng named Hongnang. Yi’s interest in the poetry of kisaeng clearly arose from the desire to trace some continuity from the prehistory of the modern vernacular writing in which he was so invested.74 The image of the kisaeng that Yi invokes is not the highly fetishized female object of imperial and commercial interest but the educated and sophisticated women who were the consorts of the elite literati.75 At a time when classical Chinese was considered the default written script of the elite, kisaeng sang songs in the vernacular. The very nature of the pan-Asian literati life had thus obscured, at least in the written and documentable record, any revelation of a distinctly “Korean” tradition. The decision of early twentieth-century giants of the literary field such as Yi Kwangsu to omit writing in Chinese script from the tradition of the field, in line with the current of vernacular nationalism, left Korean literature looking rather poor and in danger of affirming the colonial deceit that Korea had been overwhelmed by “Chinese” culture and had failed to sufficiently establish its own cultural identity. For these reasons, then, the poetic traces of the kisaeng accrued added significance. Their delicate invocations of deep love, loyalty, and affection provided a literature of an emotional life that threatened only to surpass the pathos of any contemporary writer’s work. Songs of the emotional life provided a prehistory to modern lyrical verse and were testament to an indigenous intellectual life that could rival any other. As Yi wrote, “poetry in our language did emerge and has been handed down to us, if only as a fragile thread.”76 Instead of confirming a line of continuity from the lyric poetry of the past to that of the present, however, the recording of the poem by Ch’oe Kyŏngch’ang

C6548.indb 108

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

109

juxtaposes the Korean and his own Chinese translation in such a way that the desire for continuity is ruptured with a sense of real loss and the impossibility of retrieval. Even the tertiary translation into English gives a sense of the difference between the brevity and crispness of the han’gul version: “I break off this branch of the mountain willow / And send it to you. / Plant it outside your window / And look upon it.” And the classical Chinese, which is embedded in a different tradition of expression: “I break off this willow and send it one thousand miles to my love. / For my sake, try planting it in the garden in front of your room and / Take note of the leaves newly sprouted of a night. / Haggard with grief, brows knit deep in thought, they are your maiden.”77 Even Yi is forced to wonder at the opacity of the meaning of the “Korean” words, which should feel more familiar and resonant with meaning. The words are, in Yi’s terms, “more profound than clear” and testament to the transient nature of language itself. A meaning other than continuity has been produced. The montage of languages of Chosŏn society produces a more nuanced and complicated vision of the past and the (im)possibility of its retrieval than any of the more jingoistic efforts conducted by the colonial state, or indeed by Yi in his more clumsy moments when he latches onto culturalist generalizations of Buddhist resignation and the acceptance of fate. Yi’s attempt to retrieve the figure of Korean literati life within the Orient before modernity is, even at its most nuanced, fraught with contradiction. Yi seems to acknowledge that what he is attempting is impossible, and that the language of old peoples has disappeared. But it is the fact of disappearance that provides the very grounds for the attempted recovery. He is seduced by the aura of loss and the fantasy of the continuing presence of people of old. The “nesting of a distant past,” which he senses in old verses while being well aware that they have been rewritten, allows him to imagine access to the emotional life of ancient peoples.78 Yet what kind of access is this? In a discussion of a Paekche song, “O moon, rise high,” Yi admits that it is not even the phrase itself that is so remarkable but the aura of its age that allows him to sing the verse himself and repeat the words of those “generations of real living people.”79 The beauty of age is something distinct from the beauty of the object, and this is whence the solemnity arises. The beauty of age is nebulous, offering the possibility of a subjective experience of an unattainable time and the possibility of its repeating. What unites the figure of the poet and the water dropper, then, is their production of a notion of the Orient as a most private affair, to be experienced in the quiet solitude of the study and the imagination. The travelogue not only

C6548.indb 109

8/29/14 9:22 AM

110

a private orient

impinges on the temporality of these earlier essays, bringing the reader joltingly into the present, but simultaneously appears to take the subject out into the world, presenting Asia as a huge expanse of land linked together through the modern institutions of the empire. Here Asia is to be visited and explored in person, rather than fantasized within the cloistered realm of the study. Yi visits an orphanage he extols as a model of social compassion and responsibility; he admires monumental architecture and museums; he explores frontier nightlife with friends who are working at the Mansŏn ilbo newspaper; and he concludes his tale with a trip to a Korean immigrant village. The travelogue appears to be an exploration into the exterior, then, but when we look more carefully, we see that this travelogue too is invested in the inner sanctum—it too colludes in producing an effect of solitary, privatized subjectivity. This subjectivity is placed at the forefront from the very beginning of the travelogue as Yi ponders the import of his destination while his train speeds up through northern Korea. “An Enormous Space” is the heading of the first section of Yi’s travelogue, and it suggests the grandeur and awe inspired by the scenery of “the continent.” Yi is, of course, seeing a landscape that he has already known through the mediation of art and literature: The continent  .  .  . is a landscape for which I have long yearned. When I was in Tokyo, there was once an exhibition of new Russian art. A landscape painting that I saw there, titled “Rainbow,” is still freshly imprinted on my mind today. It showed an endless horizon stretching out in the clearest of colors after rainfall, fields scattered here and there with no roads in sight, and a rainbow with just two roots sunk in a field like an arched gate, reaching out over the widest of spaces. I have from time to time seen landscape paintings in other exhibitions since then, but never such an enormous space as that one.80

Although Manchuria seems to be a realm of pure exteriority, the transformation of an environment into a landscape constitutes the location of an observer, a subjective viewpoint that is not necessarily visible but from which the scene may be viewed, like a landscape painting.81 The travelogue as a genre, too, relies on this narrating subjectivity to display the exteriority of the destination, and so although the borders delineating inside and outside may vary, their mutual, and constitutive, interdependence is unquestionable. Manchuria is transformed into a landscape predominantly when viewed through the windows of the express train. Yi declares himself breathless at

C6548.indb 110

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

111

the sheer scale of the land: “in a continuous stretch of countless straight lines, long-furrowed fields opened up and folded in layers, like the ribs of a fan.”82 It is as “vast as might be seen from the peak of some great mountain,” and yet he is not looking down from on high but huddled in the lower bunk of his third-class cabin, catching glimpses of the outside beneath an uplifted curtain. Yi is on the Southern Manchurian Railroad, run since 1906 by Mantetsu, the company at the heart of the exploitation of Manchurian resources and establishment of large-scale, semipublic businesses—freight and passenger services, railway tourism, hotels, hospitals, and, at its peak, coal mines, iron and steel works, and gas and electricity plants in addition to the ongoing transportation of soldiers to the warfront.83 The thousands of miles of rail track that the Japanese colonial government laid in Korea after the establishment of colonial rule all fed seamlessly into the Mantetsu routes up through the heart of southern Manchuria to the capital of Xinjing and further north to Harbin and out to the borders with the Soviet Union, with Mongolia and northeastern China. Yi crosses the border on his way to Fengtian, where he stops to refresh himself at the elegantly colonial Yamato Hotel before switching to the Asia Express to Xinjing. The Asia Express ran from Dalian on the shores of the Yellow Sea up to Harbin in the North; its “dark-green bullet-like streamlined form” represented the height of technological modernity at the time, and it was known as the “fastest train in the whole of the East.”84 Yi revels at the smooth ride and the cosmopolitan culture of the dining car with its White Russian waitresses reminding him of actresses from the movie version of Crime and Punishment. The journey into the heart of Manchuria is narrated with a certain awe at its cosmopolitan modernity but also with a pathos of loss and nostalgia. The White Russian girls remind Yi of Sonya but are fated to “spend their lives looking out onto the monotonous plains without even a homeland to embrace with their homesickness.”85 There is clearly an element of self-identification suggested here, but perhaps reading this as ressentiment would be a mistake; their coffee gives off a “whiff of romance,” and if Yi identifies with them it is in order to fantasize about himself as “a lonely shadow on the endless plain” on the occasion of his visit to a Korean immigrant village the next day. The vision is relentlessly solitary and infused with a mix of melancholy and seduction by the romance of the pioneering spirit that Manchuria represents. Early on, when Yi gazes on the seemingly endless farmland, he sees an “image of the red faces, their veins protruding, that first lay this railroad on an ocean of earth, with no target other than the drifting clouds in the sky, and that still

C6548.indb 111

8/29/14 9:22 AM

112 a private orient

clutched their hammers as they embarked on the first test journey.”86 These are the “main players” basking in the “glory” of their “stage.” The Korean immigrants arrived later, with the stage already in darkness, “moved by its essential nature as earth” as they fled the impoverished Korean countryside in desperate search of land on which they might eke out a living. As they catch a glance of those “people in blue clothes who stood at the head of each field with tools in their hands and stared joylessly at the passing train,” they are struck with the increasing realization that this land, too, is owned by someone else.87 Mantetsu had enabled the incorporation of the endless land into private property, but here it also enables the production of a privatized subjectivity— melancholic, struck by loss but also somehow entranced by it. The rhetorical powers of scale are invoked to present the figure of the tiny individual, overwhelmed by greater forces and seeking identity in the face of loss. The enormous space appears in Russian novels but also evokes the phantom of China, which “pressed down upon our Eastern State over those several centuries in the past, that must also have been through the machination of its enormous space.”88 In the face of the vastness of power, what is Yi? Huddled in a bunk on a train racing across the space: “on this enormous earth, through this enormous space and the night that covers it, this train is like a tiny mudfish, crawling along the ocean bed.”89 A gesture of self-miniaturization is also a gesture of longing for control in the face of the machinations of empire. Yi found this in the archeological excavation of Chosŏn literati life in the face of dominance by China, but where will he find it in his own times? It is clear that a lingering theme through the whole collection is the place of Koreans within larger structures of power, principally the Japanese empire but also the global hegemony of Euro-American culture. Yi finds a figure for the future in the remote regions of a village of Korean immigrants. This is the only point at which imperial violence cuts an explicit slash in the relatively serene world of Eastern Sentiments. The village is in the region of Wanbaoshan, site in 1931 of a violent clash between Chinese and Korean farmers over an irrigation ditch being built by the latter that would destroy the fields farmed by Chinese.90 Exaggerated reports of the clash in the Korean press had led to violent attacks on Chinese residents in Korea itself. Yi recounts an interview with a farmer who downplayed the violence while also giving witness to the struggle between “life and death” that set the settlers upon each other.91 According to Yi, the village now seems calm and food plentiful—the sparse menu is described as a feast—and the sense of violence is dissipated with

C6548.indb 112

8/29/14 9:22 AM

a private orient

113

the sight of three young children on Yi’s long walk back to the railway stop. They are singing a song about tobacco smoking, which features each line in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. It is a glimpse of the younger generation in the far-flung empire absorbing the multilingual inheritance of imperial expansion. The image of violence is transformed into an allegorical parallel to literati life against which Yi can only offer words. The travelogue—and the collection—ends not with the children but by drawing back to the solitary figure of Yi, leaving the settlers behind and traipsing across the plain: “Not a single bird flew through the air. There was only the sound of my footsteps plodding along like those of a young child. Several times I stood still and strained my ears. Not a sound came from anywhere. The eternity was even more desolate than the ocean.”92 Just as the violent exterior of colonial cultural life has interceded, the travelogue pulls back to the solitary experience of the private Orient. The absorption of Koreans into empire—imperialization—is conducted as a private experience of melancholy and loss, which also produces a certain aesthetic beauty. Eastern Sentiments is thus framed by two pan-Asian visions: one a nostalgic longing for a lost era of Confucian literati culture and one a resoundingly modern and melancholic journey through the emergent territory of Japanoccupied Manchuria and its Korean immigrant villages. These two visions— of an old Asian intellectual community and a modernizing Asian empire—are juxtaposed in such a way that we cannot help but ask about the relationship between them. This is the effect of the collection. The montage serves to raise questions that have haunted Yi’s reputation ever since, along with that of all writers who lived through the excesses of the colonial era: Was his antiquarianism that of a dilettante indulging himself in escapism, a scandalous turning away from the political and social pressures of his time and the tightening grip on the Korean peninsula? Or was he, as he argued after liberation, attempting to record and thus save the traces of an honorable Korean cultural past, through its writing, its art, and its poetry?93 Perhaps his work suggests something more subtle, a shifting of the markers of Korean identity into a private sphere of culture within the framework of imperial subjectivity. In Eastern Sentiments he found a way to memorialize this moment, when the Orient of an idealized Confucian literati past crossed with the social and political economy of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

C6548.indb 113

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 114

8/29/14 9:22 AM

4 PERI-URBAN DREA MS Had I not bade farewell to my youth long since? And now I could raise neither passion nor confidence for love or art. Pak T’aewŏn, “Obscene Rain”

I n t h e l at e 1 9 3 0 s a n e w s pa c e a p p e a r s i n s h o rt s t o r i e s written by some of Korea’s most distinguished writers. Around the edges of the city and in the shadows of the old city walls, protagonists build houses, raise families, and potter in gardens. Inside the home the latest household appliances—the electric iron and phonograph player—take pride of place while the study displays prized antiques. This peculiar juxtaposition of the most new with the very old colors the texture of everyday life on the urban frontier in even the most mundane of routines: the morning brushing of teeth in the courtyard, with the Japanese toothpaste ubiquitously advertised in print media of the time, now allows the opportunity for a thoughtful gaze on the ancient and crumbling city walls draped along the horizon; an evening walk along those same walls brings a calming end to a hard day’s work in the city. The walls define the minimum limit of peri-urban space and in their ruination also its temporal palimpsest. The past symbolized by that ruined boundary alternatively provokes fantasies of once glorious collective endeavors and lamentation, or even anger, at ancestors for having not protected what lay inside. The new practice and language of urban planning, meanwhile, sought to convey a definable, and controllable, future on a chaotic breaking out of the old boundaries by the city, powered by rising urban land prices and the in-migration in turn propelled by industrial development and rural depopulation. The peri-urb was, then, not only the site of a dynamic clash of temporal experience but also a product of the encounter between capital and the colonial state. Or rather, it registers that encounter as the

C6548.indb 115

8/29/14 9:22 AM

116

peri-urban dreams

driving force behind the new contradictory experiences of time that governed lived experience on the urban periphery. No wonder it fired the literary imagination so. The literary products of that imagination, however, rarely scan their exterior environment, preferring to dwell within the physical space of the home and the emotional terrain of domestic relations. Middle age is the time of life they explore as they elaborate an interior realm narrated through the trivialities of daily life and the ramblings of consciousness, through compromise and changed aspirations. They can in many ways be thought of as an analog to the anecdotal essay in the way in which they adhere to the rhythms of the everyday and individual subjectivity, as well as in the way in which they blur the lines between fact and fiction. It was the latter tendency that so often attracted the attention of critics at the time, who rued the proliferation of such fiction as further evidence of the essayization of literature and a decline in creative powers. Critics since have largely shared these views, but stories from the peri-urb appear to have been meaningful and popular in late colonial times, even if they have not fared so well in posterity. In many ways, stories from the peri-urb capture the peculiar arrangements of time and space inhabited by the writers featured in this book as war encroached upon the peninsula. The dissonance of everyday life is refracted in the plots they spin or is sometimes displaced into a domestic scene fraught with an unstable moral order. I think of these stories, then, less as failed fiction than as markers of the experience of an increasing gap between capital and national culture, one that was materialized in the contradictory space of the peri-urb and narrated as an everyday in crisis. These stories do not represent a crisis of narrative so much as embody crisis in narrative. If in earlier fiction the figure of the nation had served to shape fictional narratives of capital, here the specter of the nation, having lost its shaping force, haunts the narrative of capital run amok. This is the time of capitalist crisis marking the accelerating expansion of the commodity regime.1 And here it marks also a particular national crisis brought on by the move toward total war and deeper absorption into the imperial economy. Under the forces of imperial mobilization it became harder and harder to avoid conflicts raised by the diverging forces of imperial capital and a Korean national culture, present through the increasingly tenuous figure of vernacular language. Choices about which language to speak or write, or how to make money or not to lose it, became more obviously decisions of conscience in a social field where the nation had once been the guarantor of ethical behavior. This surely explains why fiction from

C6548.indb 116

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

117

the peri-urb negotiates a moral economy of everyday life, where resignation, compromise, and petty quarrels constitute the textual fabric. These stories were not the first to link the material environment of the urban outskirts to a mapping of subjective space. Ch’oe Myŏngik’s work pursued a similar concern with the subject of the everyday. In “Walking in the Rain” the city was also breaking through the city walls and a new life emerging in the twilight zone of the periphery where the industrial development zone abutted rice paddies and frogs taunted early morning commuters. But whereas in “Walking in the Rain” the interest lay in the slums on the outskirts and the lives of those who had no right or reason to walk through those city gates into the city of light, in later stories the focus shifts to those who move to the outskirts out of choice, cradling the dream of owning their own home while continuing to commute into the city. What happens when such teleological dreams confront the contradictory time and space of the peri-urb, which contains both the excess and detritus of the colony, both the future and the past and the evanescent present? What, in other words, can we learn from fictional explorations of peri-urban space?

The P eri-urb The emergence of an urban periphery appears most notably in the works of Yi T’aejun and especially his contemporary Pak T’aewŏn (1910–86), who moved to what are now Sŏngbuk-dong and Ton’am-dong, respectively, during the decade of the 1930s. From the tail end of that decade, many of Pak and Yi’s works are set in newly built homes to which the narrator has moved with his wife, children, and housemaid, having separated from his extended family. This domestic order is established in areas to the north of the city, which offered space and affordable land prices within commuting distance of downtown Seoul to an expanding bourgeois class. Though incorporated into the administrative district of the city mid-decade, these areas functioned throughout the period as neither fully of nor disconnected from the city but intimately defined by their proximity to it. The term peri-urb seems best to capture their liminal nature and significance as emergent social space. Pak T’aewŏn’s own bourgeois credentials are in little doubt. His family lived at the center of the city, along the Ch’ŏngye stream, where chungin traditionally lived. The chungin class, who had traditionally performed various technical tasks of translation or medicine in Korea, were well placed to prosper

C6548.indb 117

8/29/14 9:22 AM

118 peri-urban dreams

in modern society as Western-style knowledge and technologies began to acquire a new significance. Pak’s father owned a large pharmacy next to a hospital run by his uncle, who was a pioneer in Western medicine in Korea, being one of only the second class to graduate from the Kwallip Kyŏngsŏng Medical School in 1903. Pak grew up surrounded by books and the first literary magazines to be published in Korean, such as Kaebyŏk and Ch’ŏngch’un, and with his older brother taking responsibility for the family pharmacy, he had the freedom to pursue his own interests. He played the violin and tennis and was interested in art, even illustrating some of his own stories. When he expressed an interest in literature, none other than Yi Kwangsu— whose wife was friends with Pak’s aunt, a teacher at a women’s school—became his personal tutor, and later he went on to study at Hosei University in Japan.2 By the mid-1930s Pak had established his reputation as a prolific and audacious experimental writer, whose lively evocation of urban customs and commodity culture were held to be at the forefront of the avant-garde while also controversial owing to Pak’s rejection of what he considered the “ideology” of KAPF writers. Pak sought value in writing as a craft or technique rather than a medium for socialist or nationalist politics. At the same time he aligned himself with the best of contemporary writers from around the world, such as James Joyce. From late 1940 through 1941 he wrote a cycle of three mediumlength stories subtitled “Self-Portrait,” which chart a series of mishaps afflicting a family who have recently moved to a dream home on the outskirts of the city.3 These stories have not garnered much attention from contemporary scholars, whose perception is generally that Pak’s period of modernist experimentation was over and that he had receded to writing dreary tales of daily life. To be sure, the playful descriptions of the streets, department stores, and coffee shops of central Seoul that marked Pak’s early work are not apparent in “Self-Portrait.”4 Instead of wandering the city streets decoding the jaunty language of advertising, the protagonist of “Self-Portrait” is firmly ensconced in his home and worrying about how to make the payments on his loans. Yet perhaps this is the logical conclusion to Pak’s witty rap on commodity culture for, in truth, Pak’s later fiction continues his earlier interest in exploring the relationship between language and money, and between form and the spaces of commodity culture.5 In doing so, he shows how the city stages the isolated, and seemingly static, retreat to the domesticated interior as much as the melancholic wandering of the flâneur so well-known from his earlier work.

C6548.indb 118

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

119

Before I turn to “Self-Portrait,” however, I would like to explore a little more of the history of the peri-urb and some of its other literary representations, both differing and comparable. The area of Seoul where the protagonist of “Self-Portrait” has had a new home built especially for his family is Ton’am-chŏng to the northeast of the city. The hamlet of Ton’am-ri was considered part of Hansŏng in the Chosŏn period but had been reassigned to Koyang County in 1914 when the Government General had enacted its first redrawing of the city boundaries, which resulted in a drastic shrinking of the administrative area of the capital.6 Renamed Ton’am-chŏng in 1936 using the Japanese suffix for an urban ward, the area still lay outside the city gates (mun pakk), as the family’s old housemaid describes it, but was now inside the redrawn Kyŏngsŏng/Keijō city boundaries (Kyŏngsŏng sinae) according to the protagonist’s wife.7 “The gates” here refers to the huge gates located to the north, east, south, and west that allowed pedestrians and traffic entrance and exit into the walled city. From old, towns and cities in Korea were contained within fortified walls designed both to delineate their boundaries and for defensive purposes in the case of invading hostile forces. The gates were elaborate two-story buildings facing out onto each direction. Those that remain in Seoul today—Tongdaemun and Namdaemun—are dwarfed by surrounding skyscrapers, but up until the 1960s they towered over the shops and huts crowded around their feet and over the traffic that passed through them. In 1936 the Government General carried out a major reorganization of the city boundaries, incorporating new land around the east to west periphery to the north beyond the city walls to accommodate the masses of people flocking to the city. The new boundaries tripled the area of the colonial capital and increased its population by more than half, from 404,202 (1935) to 636,854.8 Even without this boost in population resulting from administrative changes, the population of Seoul had been growing rapidly. In drawing up the Chōsen Urban Planning Order (Chōsen shigaichi keikaku rei) in 1934, of which the boundary redrawing formed a part, the Government General’s planners had worked on a thirty-year plan that envisaged a total population of 1.1 million in 1965.9 In fact, that total was already reached in 1942, more than doubling the 1935 figure, and although the total would drop very slightly before the end of the war the upward trend was to continue.10 During the thirty years from the time the administrative boundaries of the colonial capital were first delineated in 1914, when Seoul was a smallish city with a population of a quarter of a million, its population had increased fourfold, with most of that growth

C6548.indb 119

8/29/14 9:22 AM

120 peri-urban dreams

compressed into the decade following 1930.11 By the mid-1930s, with the migration of rural populations to the city alongside the influx of Japanese settlers and the increasing development of industrial areas, the city was literally breaking out of its walls. The expansion of the city’s administrative boundaries was part of a longterm urban development plan, aiming to organize a city which was already expanding. The 1934 order was an exemplary act of colonial governance, which not only reorganized the administrative area of the city of Seoul but also relocated authority over urban planning in other towns and cities centrally in the Government General based in Keijō, as Seoul was known in Japanese.12 It categorized urban areas as residential, commercial or industrial and oversaw an ambitious expansion of roads and railways. Announced in 1934, in it the colonial authorities envisioned a course of development ending three decades later. Defeat in war brought the plans to an early end but some parts of the plan were enacted quickly, including the expansion of the tram network to the south-west and north-east of the city, which enabled commuters to take advantage of cheaper land prices on the outskirts of the city, and especially in those areas which had been newly reincorporated into the colonial capital. The plans to expand the city boundaries were enacted in 1936, and with this the old way of referring to the city as “within the city walls” could no longer maintain all the meanings of the city as a modern unit of administration. Thus there emerged a new space which lay outside the city walls but within the city boundaries, and differentiated from the old “city.” A map from 1946 clearly shows the band of newly incorporated land surrounding the city from the north-west to the north-east, the jagged line representing the wall to the inside and the thick line of the administrative boundary on the outside. Mostly lacking in major roads, the undulating band of land appears as a blank—perhaps countryside, hills, or a breathing space surrounding the criss-crossing network of urban traffic but clearly divided by the stark line of the city boundary from the “countryside” beyond. What was this space like? To the immediate north of the city on the map we see Sŏngbuk-chŏng (literally, “ward north of the city walls”), still bearing its Japanese designation one year after liberation. Abutting it to the east (and thus to the northeast of the city center) is marked Ton’am-chŏng with two throughways criss-crossing it. Ton’am took its name from the twoenŏmi (barbarian) hill in its midst, from where foreigners had entered the city during the Chosŏn dynasty, and in 1936 it was, along with Sŏngbuk-ri, upgraded to a chŏng, or urban ward, from a ri, or hamlet.13 Both Sŏngbuk-chŏng and Ton’am-chŏng were designated residen-

C6548.indb 120

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

121

tial areas under the new plan, whereas the industrial zone fueled the expansion to the south-west of the city. To the north populations had already been increasing. Between 1920 and 1930 residents of Sŏngbuk-ri and Ton’am-ri had increased by 85 percent and 74 percent, respectively, from 900 to 1,666 in the case of the former and from 1,412 to 2,462 in the case of the latter.14 During the 1930s the increasing development of roads outside the downtown core and accompanying bus services, as well as the expansion of the rail and tram network, drew more residents to the outskirts. As soon as the city boundaries were redrawn, land prices rocketed in the newly incorporated outer regions. In Yi T’aejun’s short story “A Tale of Rabbits” (“T’okki iyagi”), published in 1941, the increase in value of his land enables Yi’s alter ego to sell off half his lot and build himself a brand new house on the remaining half lot.15 Yi T’aejun wrote frequently about his own project of building a new home in Sŏngbuk-dong. In an exercise in neo-antiquarianism, Yi hired old carpenters who could put together the wooden home without using nails or screws, and whose expertise and dogged clinging to old crafts matched their own inability to adapt to modern commercial practices.16 For Yi, the outskirts offered the space to enact his antiquarian desires while commuting into editors’ offices in the center of town. He savored not only the house but the sight and sounds of the old men building it. In Yi’s stories the peri-urb exhibits a distinct set of social relations. His protagonists wait for the postman and the newspaper delivery boy, from whom they hear the gossip of the neighborhood. Those neighbors are observable but do not overcrowd or overlook. The sense of massed community in close quarters—the arguments that pierce neighboring walls, close relationships, and gangs of hovering children—that characterizes Pak T’aewŏn’s earlier stories of the downtown Ch’ŏnggyech’ŏn neighborhood, for instance, is absent here. Instead there is a rather quiet and leisurely community of neighbors who know one another yet remain distant, and who conceive of their neighborhood as separated from the noise, chaos, and business of the city. Some areas of Seoul, such as Kahoe-dong, located downtown behind the royal palaces, underwent large-scale residential development in the late 1930s. An aerial photograph gives an impression of standardization and regularity, which approximates the sense of order embodied in the suburban housing estate though in a very different architectural style. The neighborhoods to which Yi and Pak moved are less uniform. Blurry contemporary photographs of the Ton’am-dong area reveal a gaunt landscape that seems surprisingly rural, though being opened up for development. Pak’s and Yi’s peri-urban oases

C6548.indb 121

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 122

8/29/14 9:22 AM

figure 4.1. Map of Seoul, 1946. Seoul History Museum.

C6548.indb 123

8/29/14 9:22 AM

124 peri-urban dreams

constitute a much edgier place, located literally on the edge of the old city, for all its inclusion within administrative boundaries. Their neighborhoods have long-term residents for whom the neighborhood is self-sufficient. Those residents run small stores, deliver newspapers, or engage in smallholding, growing vegetables and fruits for themselves and local markets. Into their midst are moving the likes of Yi and Pak and their young families, whose work is centered in the city while allowing them often to work from home and no longer supports a downtown lifestyle in the climate of rising urban land prices.17 The areas are being increasingly drawn into the economy of the city and, with the Urban Planning Order, coming under the eyes of the state. This is an emergent space where residents are being counted and zoning rules applied; bus routes are slowly drawing closer. What distinguishes the peri-urban from the countryside, of course, is its proximity to the city, and that is continually marked by the presence of the ancient city walls. Both Yi and Pak lived in areas that bordered those city walls. In the mornings and evenings they would walk past or even along them, and in Yi’s case the walls literally framed the horizon as he gazed up from his own courtyard. Originally built to both contain and fortify the city in the early Chosŏn dynasty, the walls have exhausted that purpose: the city has expanded to the point where it cannot be contained; the boundaries have been altered so that the walls no longer delineate an administrative unit; and Keijō’s status as the center of colonial government is a trenchant sign of the failure of the fortifications to prevent occupation. Yet as the walls pass into disuse, they do not disappear. They remain as a permanent fixture in the landscape and take on a new life with new meanings for those who see or pass them by. The frequent appearance of the city walls in literature from the 1930s suggests that, far from disappearing silently into a forgotten past, they had become a potent force both for remembrance and for telling tales of the present. O Changhwan—Sŏ Insik’s decadent nostalgic—first published “The City Wall” (“Sŏngbyŏk”) in the journal Siin purak in 1936, but he deemed the work representative enough to be chosen as the title poem of his first collection, Sŏngbyŏk, which appeared the following year and was then reprinted with expanded contents in 1947. The cover of the collection features the dark height of the wall against which the identifying title characters shine out in white. Along the top of the book the distinctive silhouette of the jagged top of the fortifications leaves no doubt about the object depicted here. But why were the walls so important and powerful a symbol to the poet O?

C6548.indb 124

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

125

“The City Wall” curses the ineffectiveness of the walls in a brief but scathing critique: The city wall is said to thrive for ten thousand years as generations change, but it is grimy and packed together like narrow ambition; conservatives did not allow for progress, and now the city wall, which once launched hot water and chili down below, is, after a long rest, covered in moss and vines, a mess, like a chin having long since seen the barber’s blade.18

In O’s poem the walls have become a symbol for a past that has, in his view, not been done justice by conservatives who have failed to adapt and survive. Whereas the walls once witnessed the spritely resistance of a populace hurling weapons from its heights, they now found themselves overgrown with weeds instead. The walls that are supposed to last ten thousand years, a customary number to symbolize eternal stability, have instead deteriorated into an unkempt mess. The blame for this is clearly placed on those in society who have resisted change. But this is certainly not a wholesale rejection of the past, which is recalled with some nostalgia as a time of energy and device; in fact, the past is called forth as having been done an injustice; it is humans who have failed to uphold its legacy. The walls signify a dereliction of duty and a failure to maintain the achievements of ancient peoples. For others that unkempt mess of undergrowth poking out of the bricks could signal a glorious return of manmade artifact to nature and, along with it, the possibility for an intense experience of past time in the present. Here is Yi T’aejun’s description of the view from his courtyard in an essay titled “The City Wall”: Each morning I step up to the inner yard with toothpaste on my toothbrush, and turn around to find my eyes drawn towards the hill across the way. The clusters of the city wall follow the shape of the ridge, sometimes rising above it and sometimes falling short of it. With the high parts of the old city wall as its first target, the sunlight in Sŏngbuk-dong radiates out and down from the wall on the top of the hill. If you gaze up for a while, you can clearly see the gaps between each stone and the shadows cast by the pine trees hanging their branches down over the wall. As I brush my teeth I often find myself surprised by the illusion that it’s those stones that I am brushing. And then, when I look up again with my eyes freshly washed in

C6548.indb 125

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 126

8/29/14 9:22 AM

figure 4.2. Kahoe-dong, 1954 (houses built in 1939). Copyright © Lim In-Sik (Chung Am Photo Archives).

C6548.indb 127

8/29/14 9:22 AM

128 peri-urban dreams

cold water, I can’t help but feel that those walls look more beautiful when the sun sets behind them than in the morning light. In the evening the walls are an unparalleled sight. Those weathered granite stones appear through the haze as if lost in smoke, while the evening sun, bending at its waist in order to shine, is no longer mere sunlight but a spotlight shining upon an ancient work of art.19

In Yi’s essay the walls have become an artwork, their beauty stemming from passing beyond functionality. They are enhanced by the pine trees that have self-shooted along their length, offering further proof of their lack of functionality and return to the elements of nature, for in the past such shoots “would have been plucked out.” And yet, in the silence broken only by “the sound of the wind blowing through the pines and the mountain birds singing,” Yi hears the dialects from all over the country, spoken by the laborers who chiseled the stone and built these walls in the past. He is in awe of an artifact “built on the strength of the entire people” and lit up now morning and night by the sun. It is a symbol of harmony between humans and nature. Yi’s wall is a ruin. The ruin, its beauty at its peak only at the moment prior to its disappearance into shadow with the setting of the sun, becomes a Romantic image onto which is projected the spirit of a past and labor recast as craft. If Yi had read Georg Simmel’s 1911 essay “The Ruin,” he would have understood exactly what Simmel was saying. In that essay ruination heralds a moment of rebirth: “The ruin of a building, however, means that where the work of art is dying, other forces and forms, those of nature, have grown; and that out of what of art still lives in the ruin and what of nature already lives in it, there has emerged a new whole, a characteristic unity.”20 Both Simmel and Yi strive to discover the unity of an artwork in the crumbling stones submerged in undergrowth. The unity is both an aesthetic testament to a certain harmony between man and nature and a mode of experiencing the past in the present. As Simmel writes, “In the case of the ruin, the fact that life with its wealth and its changes once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of a past life, not according to the contents or remnants of that life, but according to its past as such.”21 He continues to compare the ruin to the antiquity, which held in the hand allows us to “command in spirit the entire span of time since its inception; the past with its destinies and transformations has been gathered into this instant of an aesthetically perceptible present.”22 This “extreme intensification and fulfillment of the present form of the past” resembles the aesthetic

C6548.indb 128

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

129

experience Yi encounters as he gazes up at the city wall while engaged in the mundane action of brushing his teeth. As the sun sets on the crumbling fortifications on the horizon, Yi grasps a glorious moment of unity in an indiscriminate past where the nation is whole. Of course, Yi does not consider the practicalities of how those men were mobilized to build the walls; instead the men are mobilized once more, like the carpenters building his house, for an aesthetic experience of dialects and strange words. They become the opportunity for Yi’s expansive subjectivity to roam through time and space all while standing in his courtyard. That time and space allows for a meditation on the imagined community of the nation—a charged event given the colonial context—but that nation is invoked as an aesthetic object whose beauty appears only on condition of its disappearance and uselessness. There is a sense here of Yi accepting what Hannah Arendt called the “natural law of ruin.”23 It is not particularly surprising that in Yi’s stories, the peri-urban home is depicted as a retreat. His 1936 story “The Rainy Season” (“Changma”) offers a good example, where the protagonist leaves his home in the morning after a petty argument with his wife and takes an expansive trip into the city.24 He wanders the city streets, encountering all forms of colonial objects: a difficult bus inspector, a rumination on the changing of street names according to Japanese style, a depressing visit to his friends at a newspaper where they are too busy to practice their art, and finally a chance encounter with a middle-school classmate who has prospered by colluding with the colonial authorities and reclaiming land in order to, as he put it, “enlarge the national territory.” Disgusted by this old classmate’s opportunism, the first-person narrator, na, returns home, having bought his wife her favorite treat of pig’s feet. Peace with and at home is restored, as an escape from the conflict figured by the city. The new space has enabled a fantasy of separation from that city and its dirt and corruption. Huddled in the shelter of the ancient walls, Yi can imagine himself as free from the city while remaining within it. Yet this does not preclude other experiences of the city wall pushing what Andreas Huyssen has called the ruin’s “double exposure to the past and the present” into other directions.25 For those who lived literally in the shadows of the city walls, what role might they have played in their daily lives? What kind of thoughts might they have inspired? No amount of romantic decay could block the double exposure these heavy stones cast on the unstable interiors of the city, which were testament to the fact of occupation: did the city lie within the walls or within the new colonial boundaries? Peri-urban

C6548.indb 129

8/29/14 9:22 AM

130

peri-urban dreams

space is unstable in regard to colonial power precisely because it is a product of that power—as a result of an administrative order—but simultaneously it is a material testament to the location of colonial authority more fully within the walls, where the rising land prices encouraged a greater dominance of Japanese settlers. It seems significant that in the colonial era more stories feature a gaze upon the walls from the outside rather than from within.26 Just as the word “within the city gates” referred to the location of state power in precolonial Korea, now it referred to the location of colonial power. In this sense, the urban periphery obeys the laws of the supplement, which rewrites the terms of meaning of the whole while remaining within—not outside— of it. However much the administrative lines were redrawn, they could not eliminate cleanly the meaning of the city walls. The walls, then, are a kind of palimpsest, forged from brick and mortar and literally carved out of the hillsides. Their double exposure invokes the nation as a spectral presence inhabiting a complex entanglement of temporalities: what once was, what might have been, what is becoming, and what still might be.

E x tr amur al P ursuits In Pak T’aewŏn’s stories the periphery fails to provide a retreat, proving a far more uneven space that offers a challenge to, and not a retreat from, the problem of history. Pak’s stories stress the fantasies that have driven the move to the peri-urb while recording the unease and anxiety that emerge in its midst. The stories thus set up a new form of space, which in its linkage to bourgeois aspirations bears resemblance to that which also appears in the stories of Yi T’aejun. In “Self-Portrait” na’s family has moved into its first newly built home through which the family fantasize its ideal lifestyle. Na has dreamed of leaving the hall bare, a space where he could lie and sit and spend the summer in cool relaxation catching the breeze. Yi T’aejun, on the other hand, builds his ideal study, from where he can listen to the sound of the rain falling on his favorite plantain tree, while his wife decorates their home, picking out curtains and hanging pictures.27 Within these stories we notice the appearance of objects—the phonograph player placed in the hall, a precious electric iron hidden from view—that speak of a newly emerging dream life focused on the home, the appliances within it, and the lifestyle it promises. The move to the other side of the city wall has become the most literal of extramural pursuits. “Self-Portrait” emerges from the encounter with the narrative of development guaranteed by possessions, whether it be a home or the appliances

C6548.indb 130

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

131

therein, and the increasing isolation of the individual within the nuclear family. The double exposure of the wall here refers to the city as the site of colonial power and the city as the site of capital. At first in “Self-Portrait” it is the latter that comes to the fore as Pak narrates daily life in peri-urban space, driven by consumer capitalism and the dreams and limits through which it delineates that daily life. But as the cycle of stories unfolds we begin to see how nation and empire too are both constituted and unhinged in that space as the peri-urb is shown to emerge within the vagaries and crises of the war economy. Na’s house is isolated, away from the noise and bustle of the city center and relying on the extended public transportation that appeared with the expansion of the city boundaries. Located on a hill and backing onto a pinewood beneath the old city walls, the house is the only one built on one of more than ten new lots that have been cleared out.28 It is a suburban colony unable to come into being. This is a marginal space where life is different from that in the city center; although the bus stop is a mere five-minute walk away, residents here do not go out at night, instead hunkering down in their houses as dusk falls. And although there are some houses around them, the family does not appear to settle easily with its new neighbors, many of whom have guard dogs, suggesting a sense of isolation and insecurity. Passersby are few enough that their tracks can be marked by the pattern of dogs barking along the path. The lack of neighborly interaction—laughing, gossiping, and hearing laughter and tears over the wall—means that for na this hardly seems like a life at all. He uses the term saenghwal, or daily life. His choice of term is significant, as it was precisely this kind of daily life that was being exalted at the time in journals, newspapers, and other mass media. Saenghwal was the life or lifestyle that was the focus of commodification, the new life of the city produced through consumption and leisure. Pak suggests a sense of emptiness or lack in a life based in commodity rather than community. In this way it is the home that lies at the center of the narrativization of peri-urban space. Perhaps this is not surprising as it is the desire for the home that has driven the move to the outskirts in the first place. In “Self-Portrait” the home is not only the pretext for a change in location but more crucially a driving force in the reconfiguration of the family and the emergence of a new, angst-ridden subject of domestic life. The specificity of this home is perhaps more clearly visible against other contemporary representations, of which one example would be the so-called family novels (kajŏng sosŏl) that grew increasingly popular during the 1930s. These long novels typically featured multiple generations living under one roof, or perhaps within one compound would

C6548.indb 131

8/29/14 9:22 AM

132

peri-urban dreams

be a more accurate statement when thinking about the wealthy Korean home that characteristically formed the backdrop for these stories. The potency of the home as a metaphor for the nation was clearly appropriated widely by colonial narratives both in Korea and in other colonies around the world. In Korean such classics as Peace Under Heaven (T’aep’yŏng ch’ŏnha; 1938) by Ch’ae Mansik and Three Generations (Samdae; 1931) by Yŏm Sangsŏp follow the interactions and distinctions between generations within one family as a way to figure a notion of society as an uneven whole. In the case of the satirical Peace Under Heaven, the narrative focus lies on a breakdown in those generational distinctions brought about by the evil but pervasive force of money and the commodification of human relations. In both cases, however, the home functions as an allegorical space held to be representative of a stratified national community. The home in “Self-Portrait” is less metaphor than metonym. It is a material structure providing and provoking passage through to the future, a propeller of history itself. It is the newly built home that houses the nuclear family (albeit with maid in tow) and begins to accrue appliances as the accoutrements of urban modernity become more widespread within the occupied city. The nuclear family here is the consuming family for whom the home is only the first stop into a world of architecture, interior design, fashion, and expedience. It has the power to propel an economy, to discipline a family, and to subject its members to a lifetime of expectations and an expected lifetime. Yet it all starts with a multivalent promise: of (relative) independence from the extended family, of proximity to the city, a promise that other, similar families will move into the neighborhood and transform it, and, as becomes clear in Pak’s triptych of stories, a promise that loan payments can be made to secure the house. The temporality of this home is consequently quite different from the large compound housing the multigenerational extended family, for here security lies only in a future that may or may not arrive. Perhaps this is why the stories dwell so relentlessly in an undecidable present. The conditional nature of the peri-urban home’s temporal existence mirrors the in-between status of its location. The home shares the double exposure of the wall in whose shadow it sits. Where other homes may allegorically gesture to the larger figure of the nation, this home is doubly exposed to the capital in its dual sense as both site of capital and center of the colonial state. The undecidability of the peri-urb, as neither urban nor suburban (which would imply a particular narrative of the future) nor rural, also results from this doubling, as does its ability to disrupt all three of those spatial narratives

C6548.indb 132

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

133

and their relationship to those other spatio-temporal narratives of nation and empire. Let me first consider how the exposure to capital governs the time of peri-urban space in “Self-Portrait.” Pak’s stories are narrated in the first person and offer a series of anxious ruminations on problems faced by a homeowner. The na of the narrative has moved to his newly built house with anticipation of freedom from his family and of more space in a stylish new home, but instead of such joys of possession he faces a series of problems, which the stories track through a detailing of his consciousness—worries, fears, retrospection, hopes—as he tries to solve the ongoing crises in his domestic life. All three stories center on the problem of the home and its fragility. In the first story, “Obscene Rain” (“Umu”; 1940), the house is literally collapsing as, with the onset of the rainy season, the rooms begin to leak one by one. Na and his wife spend their sleepless nights moving from room to room in order to empty bowls set up to catch the leaking rainwater; all the while the escalating tension between the couple threatens to explode at any moment, as they struggle to control their bickering and not wake their sleeping children. In “Burglary” (“T’udo”; 1941), a burglar has entered their leaking home at night and taken away all of their clothes. Na’s sensibilities make him sympathetic to a burglar in need of clothes, but his wife pushes him to report the incident to the police in the expectation that the burglar will be caught and punished, causing more conflict between the couple. In the final story, “House Debt” (“Ch’aega”; 1941), the extent of the threat to the home is revealed to reach far beyond that of natural disaster or manmade incident as na is shown to lack the economic foundation for this lifestyle, having built the house on borrowed money. When the intermediary employed by a moneylender steals the interest payments that na gave him to cover the house loan, the family faces losing the house altogether as the intermediary cannot afford to return the payments and the moneylender places responsibility squarely on “I.” Na ends up caught in a financial crisis intimately linked to world war, as no buyer will come forward and purchase his house, and so, far from being on the verge of making money through his land speculation, he is about to lose everything, even the roof over his head. The domestic interior cannot be secured but is penetrated from all sides, including from below as it is shown to reside on a phantasmic base of land speculation. In all three stories, the urban periphery defies the original dream of owning one’s own private space, revealing it instead to be vulnerable on multiple fronts. By the end of “Burglary” na is quivering in fear in his bed at night;

C6548.indb 133

8/29/14 9:22 AM

134 peri-urban dreams

every sound or bark of a dog outside seems to threaten his own well-being, and the notion of moving to the outskirts of the city to own one’s own home and enjoy more space in which to bring up one’s family has been turned upside down with that space shown to harbor threats and envy from the preexisting rural inhabitants. The presumption is that moving to the outskirts means going to an empty space and starting anew, and yet the narrative seems to reveal a doubt in this belief, as life outside the city gates provokes all kinds of fantasies and fears, as well as a few very real threats from other inhabitants. This new space is revealed to be standing on a concealed past that can return with a vengeance. In the story this is coded as a space outside of civilization and order, as na’s wife wonders why police care so little about burglaries in their new neighborhood while stressing rather desperately that they are still within the city boundaries and thus should be equally protected. In these stories the periphery is thus narrated rather like the frontier. In recent years much scholarly attention has been paid to the presence of Koreans at the frontline of Japanese imperial expansion in Manchuria in both historical and literary research.29 This work has alternatively presented Korean pioneer farmers as “carriers” of Japanese imperial economic and political power, as “opening up” the inefficiently farmed lands of the Manchurian desert through irrigation projects and rice farming, as heroic agents of guerrilla warfare, as victims of orchestrated interethnic strife over resources, and as subject to a deterritorialization that stimulated the need for landownership. Manchuria has been presented as a hub of agrarian experimentalism and equally a site for modernist architecture, city planning, and the creative arts.30 Few scholars have attended to the question of a domestic frontier, however, where the petit bourgeois, among them the writer desiring his own study, move to new homes, speculating on future earnings and thus gambling their own future time—their life to come—on a dream of possession. This dream led the process through which the cities gradually outgrew their walls and expanded into the surrounding land, just as the need for space, the search for land to farm, and the hope of a better future life led the migration to the Manchurian borderlands. In this sense the stories from the periurb share certain features with narratives of colonization per se: not only the dream of possession but the dismissal of claims by previous inhabitants on a space in the name of civilization and order, even if there is no direct claim to be cultivating empty space. The domestic frontier shares with its more famed colonial counterpart the ebb and flow of capital accumulation—of territories appropriated and reap-

C6548.indb 134

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

135

propriated, lost, or adapted to different purposes. In retrospect it seems to prefigure the future in various ways, or prefigure different futures, whether they be the trenchant postwar suburbanization or repetition of financial crisis. Pak’s stories, however, point to the peri-urb as a space that defies the progressive logic the term frontier might otherwise suggest. If it lies at the forefront, this does not necessarily mean its path to the future is predetermined. No matter whether we call this uneven, nonlinear, or nonprogressive, the history that Pak’s stories reveal is one of events turning on contingency, of about-turns, chance successes, and failures. In the midst the stories give witness to the powerful effects of progressive ideologies in their collision with this more uneven time of the everyday. Temporally na’s move to the outskirts takes part in a narrative of development that hinges on the forces of modernization, colonization, and urbanization. We have to recall, however, the forces that have brought na to this periphery: he has been pushed through the city gates by property prices within the old city and by the desire to build his own brand-new home; he has borrowed money from a Japanese moneylender who happens to live in a much more stable and well-guarded “culture house”;31 and now the drop in the housing market, coinciding with the deepening war, means that not only is he unable to make a profit, but he has lost all his money. This all with the wartime assimilation policies as a backdrop, which both promised and threatened to turn Koreans into imperial subjects at the same time as they could own their own home. Pak’s tale is one of disappointment and disillusionment that undermines the forward-looking narrative of urban expansion. The narrator’s claim on private space becomes a debate on how high a defensive wall needs to be and whether it should be laced with broken glass or a guard dog should be purchased to ward off unwelcome visitors. Instead of living the dream life, na is paralyzed by a writing block and the incessant distractions of his unstable domestic life. The imbrication of na’s move with other realms of temporal experience points to the complexity of life in the peri-urb. For other temporalities do not just exist in the form of the menace of already-existing inhabitants or the doubled presence of the city wall. In Pak’s stories peri-urban space also reveals a distinct temporality of the subject. There is a complex register of nostalgia, where the what-used-to-be encounters the what-could-have-been. This appears most clearly in na’s passage into middle age. In the first of the three stories na is a writer who has lost the dream of art and love, along with his youth, and now wants merely to bring harmony to a domestic scene that

C6548.indb 135

8/29/14 9:22 AM

136

peri-urban dreams

is riven by petty conflict and anxiety, primarily about money. In this domestic scene he feels no passionate love for his wife but yearns for a conflict-free life and realizes that to make her happy he does not have to write a work of art so much as manuscripts that will earn money. As he writes, “My wife wanted me to sit here and write something, and I wanted to do what she wanted.”32 Pak’s invocation of middle age as a time of love lost risks naturalizing the historical situation of a foreclosed future. The concept of middle age serves to guarantee an evolutionary narrative of a lifetime that would be the foundation of the bourgeois dream, which these stories, however, unsettle. The trajectory of that bourgeois dream in Korea had, in its literary bent at least, interwoven youth with the nation through the ideology of love.33 In early twentieth-century literature, in the throes of vernacular nationalism, the love affairs of young people were burdened as the representative milieu for the “awakening” of the self, that is, the free-thinking, free-willed individual subject who rejected the thoughtless following of past custom and tradition, often in the guise of parents, for the exercise of personal choice and construction of newly privileged horizontal relations.34 By the 1920s love and such literary devices as the love triangle repeatedly surfaced to represent the commitment to the socialist cause. The so-called red love depicted love affairs between Marxist boys and modern girls, whose passion for each other was simultaneously a political passion for a new socialist community.35 Both the bourgeois nationalist and socialist love shared the focus on youth and the metonymic identification of characters with the idea of a young nation among a world of nations, as the protagonist states toward the end of Mujŏng: “[They] were both children . . . who had lost the traditions of thought transmitted for generations from their ancestors . . . thrown into a world without standards for life, or ideals of nation, and without someone to guide them in the world.”36 Youth became the figure for a nation struggling to cope with a new world system and a protagonist suitable to represent the trials and tribulations and education required to adapt to a new world.37 Youth also promoted identification with readers and writers who were themselves so often young and living a different life from that of their parents’ generation as they headed off to Japanese universities and studied European art and history. By the early 1940s not only has this first generation of nationalist writers aged, but both the socialist and nationalist dreams have been dealt a cruel blow. Pak, now entering his fourth decade of life, takes up the theme of midlife and a married couple whose love affair seems a distant memory as they negotiate daily life and young children. The commitment to art, which

C6548.indb 136

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

137

had paralleled the passion for love and the nation, has been replaced by the mundane necessity to pay the bills. In the teleological time of “Self-Portrait,” which occupies the nostalgic register, the love that Yi Kwangsu had considered a constitutive national practice has been renounced but not forgotten. In this sense the nation haunts the narrative as a ghostly memory. What replaces it, of course, is the demand for money. Pak once again proves himself to be the most dedicated pursuant of the rhythms of the commodity regime. For alongside the narrative of loss and memory Pak also depicts the relentless repetition of daily life, whether through domestic events, financial exigencies, or various crises. It is here where we can find a potential politics that gives Pak more credit than the frivolous dandy label with which he has been stuck. For to make a brief comparison, whereas writers such as Yi T’aejun seek in the home a shelter, Pak reveals the commodity regime that produces the dreamworld of the home. His frontier is driven by speculation and the desire to possess, presented as a middle-aged dream of compromise and the relinquishing of youthful passion.

Forms of Crisis “Self-Portrait” is not a linear narrative that attempts to achieve some kind of closure in a legitimization of the nation form or commitment to revolution. Neither, it must be added, does it lead teleologically to other forms of closure in the colonial state or sublimation into imperial subjectivity. Its form is rather a common one for late colonial narrative: a cycle of three stories loosely linked around the theme of the new home but not necessarily having to be read in sequence. It follows the form of everyday life, accumulative but not sequential, repetitive but not homogeneous.38 As narrative form it seems to suggest the kind of temporary and slippery closure that would characterize a time when the nation was losing its capacity to guarantee form.39 It points to the contingent flow of accumulation rather than a smooth progress of expansion. As such, it bears comparison to the anecdotal essay, whose fragmentary nature lent itself to the staging of confrontation between forms of individuality and daily life phenomena and the eschewing of teleological form. Where “Self-Portrait” differs from the anecdotal essay is not just in the scale of the constituent parts of its triptych—stories of a length that surpasses the brevity one might expect of a short story—but in the length of another of its constituent parts, the sentence. Pak had in fact already been nicknamed

C6548.indb 137

8/29/14 9:22 AM

138 peri-urban dreams

“our long-distance athlete Kubo” by none other than Yi T’aejun owing to his extreme experiments in sentence length.40 He had once even written an entire short story of seven pages in just one sentence.41 In “Self-Portrait” Pak’s lengthy sentences endow the writing with a certain relentless quality. Here is one sentence in which na describes the process by which he came to build a house on such a precarious financial basis: Well, me too, it wasn’t that I hadn’t realized from the beginning that it was a little reckless to go into debt in order to build a house, but having lived with my wife’s family for several years now I just wanted more than anything a house of my own, and then when I saw that this piece of land in Ton’amchŏng, that I’d bought on a friend’s recommendation, had almost doubled in value in the three or four months since I’d bought it, so that my wife had tried to insist that even that was a not insignificant windfall and we should sell it quickly, I had become in my own way even more reluctant to give away this plot that had doubled in price in such a short time and finally I had none other than sworn to build a house with my own hands, and, of course, there was no reason for her to believe me, as she said, before you take such an extreme step, just think when would you really be living in your own house, what with twenty or thirty wŏn every month to pay in interest, and we’d pay that even if we rented . . . but then, having said that much, my wife, knowing all too well the extent of my stubborn refusal to yield to others, just said, all right, and refrained from expressing any opposition to my crazy plan, but even so she couldn’t quite rid herself of the unease and suspicion deep inside of her, and asked, what on earth will we do if we end up not being able to pay the interest on time . . . interest payments are much lower on bank or credit union loans than personal loans, but if we can’t pay up when we’re supposed to, we wouldn’t be able to plead our situation to someone at a place like that and would receive no mercy, would we?, it sounded like something my father-in-law would have said at the dinner table when he heard with disbelief what I was planning to do, but my wife laid it all out as if she had thought of it herself, and so I replied that I had already thought about that but, if worse came to worst, we would just move and that would be the end of it, and even though the neighborhood was no Myŏngyun-chŏng, where each kan is worth some seven or eight hundred wŏn, we’d surely receive six hundred at least, and then we might just not fail, so let’s try, I said to try to reassure her though the words seemed more convincing to my ears than hers, and to tell the truth at that point it didn’t

C6548.indb 138

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

139

seem as if I would raise the money and so it wasn’t as if I was about to set to building right then, but when I heard myself speak it seemed that if I could not make a resolute decision at this opportunity then my fate would be damned forever, and so, that’s right, I would listen to nothing anyone said after that and finally I turned the job over to a contractor to whom an acquaintance had introduced me.42

Pak’s meandering sentence tracks the tale of how na had hesitated over building his house, ignoring all the fears of the interest payments that would never end and the possible things that could go wrong. It echoes the twists and turns of consciousness and the calculations that govern everyday life. In doing so it also mirrors the contingencies and unpredictabilities that shape the predicament of the larger story and the financial crisis that threatens na’s home. Perhaps most suggestively, the sentence is finally drawn to a close with na’s felt need for a resolute decision: the necessity of taking some kind of chance to bring about a resolution and some kind of end to indecision and a duration of uncertainty that constitutes not only this sentence but Pak’s larger story as well. The sentence thus embodies the form of crisis at a time when resolute decisions were soon to lead to warfare and self-martyring resolutions with the stated aim of extinguishing crisis. Where in Eastern Sentiments Yi T’aejun’s sculptured archaicisms dispel or conceal the vagaries of the everyday, in “Self-Portrait” Pak returns to his favorite theme of a subjectivity constituted within commodity culture and, as the self-confessed master of technique, reveals through the relentless twists and turns of syntax a subjectivity subject to the twists and turns of the market. There is no doubt that Pak was masterful at crafting long sentences that could suggest the rambling of consciousness. At the level of sentence construction too, then, “Self-Portrait” echoes the repetitive structure of its threepart cycle as long, repetitive sentences cover a page at a time in their attempts to follow the uneven time of consciousness and experience of the everyday. Their duration pits the temporality and rhythm of everyday life against the fast-moving economic speedup embodied by the explosion of the city in development. The slow, repetitious pondering of the consciousness is juxtaposed to the rapid transformations in the urban environment and yet also comes to share the rhythm of uncertainty, of speculation, and of conflict that characterizes the expansion. This common representation of the dreariness of the everyday with its petty worries and quarrels enters language itself to become a major way to narrate late colonial times.

C6548.indb 139

8/29/14 9:22 AM

140 peri-urban dreams

Rather than dwell on Pak’s tracking of capitalist crisis, however, critics at the time focused on a crisis of narrative that revealed itself in a relentless elaboration of a personal sphere, understood as signaling a lack of creative capacity. Crucial to “Self-Portrait” is the locating of the self in the domestic interior. Pak’s triptych takes up the time and space of urban everyday life under late colonial rule and refigures it as personal experience. The critic Paek Ch’ŏl was early to call attention to what he felt constituted a noticeable shift in narrated time to this time of personal experience. In a late 1940 monthly review of short fiction, Paek wrote that “almost all the stories in this issue deal with either the writer’s own private world or a world which could be compared to his private world.” This “return to the writer’s own private world,” for Paek, marked the “inability to negotiate with contemporary reality.”43 Not surprisingly, given his earlier criticism of the popularity of the anecdotal essay, Im Hwa also weighed in on the issue. Im bewailed the rise of “literature with no objective other than existing for one person.”44 Referring constantly to debates of the time, which tended to oppose literary artistry to political activism and which sought to explain the emphasis on the author through cultural theories of deformed subjectivity, Im castigated recent writers for their overemphasis of technique and for their “unsocialized individuality.”45 It was not just the absorption of the individual in his self but the nature of that self that was problematic for Im: “Self! Individuality! These are already names for an impotent existence in human society. That is, being conscious of the self does not mean being conscious of one’s strength and force but being conscious of one’s weakness and impotence.”46 Im believed that the literary dwelling on personal crisis was another sign that the collectivity was under threat. He castigated recent writers, who merely “crawl along the mundane surface of everyday life,” with obvious disdain for the world of the mundane, and yet clearly Pak T’aewŏn was convinced mundanity was worthy of exploration.47 The increasing appearance of such stories attracted much attention at the time because of their association with the “end” of teleological politics. Fiction of the personal sphere was most often understood as a symptom of crisis, although the nature of that crisis was much debated.48 Did the sudden proliferation of stories based on the author’s own life reveal a lack of creative imagination and the poverty of literary ability and potential in Korea? Did it signal the shying away from areas of life deemed more pressing and worthy of serious consideration, such as the future of national life? Was it a symptom of increasing censorship that prevented such weighty issues being discussed?

C6548.indb 140

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

141

Did it point to the rise of a commercial press and obsession with individual self-interest and with the private, domestic sphere? In the 1930s such stories were known as sasosŏl, where sa refers to the realm of the self or the private and sosŏl to prose narrative and the most common translation of the novel. The term was coined in 1920s Japan, where it was pronounced shishōsetsu, to refer to stories read loosely as based on the author’s own experience, where the reader conflates the author and the protagonist.49 Literary critics in Japan had filled many pages alternately praising the form as a uniquely Japanese literary creation, offering a native twist on Western literary models, or excoriating it for failing to provide key criteria of fiction and novelistic form, such as an omniscient narrator passing judgment on characters or a linear plot.50 The term was perhaps inevitably filtered through the discursive divide between East and West that dominated the understanding of culture in both Japan and Korea. Yet there was also a necessary gap between the shishōsetsu and the sasosŏl. I am less interested in the association with the author’s own life, and thus the problematizing of fact and fiction, than with the delineation of a personal realm as temporal experience and a shared currency of that denoted experience and the term in both the metropole and the colony, which seems to suggest a certain temporal synchronization. An interesting minor element of Im Hwa’s gargantuan, 840-page volume of literary criticism published in 1940 is his suggestion of an emergent form of regional literature, which centers around the shishōsetsu as formally distinct from the standards of literary form that were invariably based on European precedents. In his “Methodology for a History of New Literature,” written as he wrestled with the project of writing the first history of modern Korean literature throughout the late 1930s, Im had controversially declared modern Korean literature to be a “transplant” of European form, with the exception of the short story that had come from Japan rather than from Europe: “Long short stories with a scale and content commensurate with the European novella, a unique product of metropolitan literature, have now all but become the special characteristic of the East Asian ‘new’ literature.”51 The emergence of a distinct categorization of form, apparently common to the region, suggests that in important ways a shared sense of time was emerging in the empire. That this is particularly noticeable in the writing of the colonial bourgeoisie suggests not simply their passage through a shared education system but also their strong ties to the imperial economy so that the vagaries of war, prosperity, and depression increasingly mark the time of their fiction.

C6548.indb 141

8/29/14 9:22 AM

142 peri-urban dreams

In 1935 the critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83) wrote in praise of one of Japan’s most famous writers of shishōsetsu, Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), that “there has been no writer who has walked the way of the shishōsetsu as perfectly, where the theory of everyday life becomes the theory of the work exactly . . . that purified everyday life has extinguished the crisis and problem which it had once held.”52 Kobayashi’s appraisal reveals two presumptions: that everyday life has somehow come to be understood as a sphere of crisis, and that art should ideally respond to this realm.53 But it also reveals the desire, or perhaps a necessity, for the extinguishing of crisis. The achievement of “Self-Portrait” lies, I believe, rather in the revelation of crisis and refusal of purification.

C ol onial I nteriors Perhaps it is time, finally, to attend to that other side of the double exposure and the ways in which the home is exposed to the center of the colonial state that has decreed the very boundaries of the peri-urb. Just as those boundaries have displaced the meaning of the city walls, creating new narratives in the process, Pak’s stories suggest the changing boundaries of the domestic interior and a reorganization of subjection as the parameters of the war expanded. In “Self-Portrait” shifting linguistic lines and oppressive power relationships configure the colonial interior. While concerns of financial economy seem paramount and the colonial state appears to govern the future, the national past has not disappeared but haunts the protagonists in the form of a moral economy where innocence and guilt, though not clearly decidable, inflict further debt to be expatiated. These lines of language and of ethics, most properly a dilemma belonging to the colonial bourgeoisie, are particularly visible as each story draws to a close. At crucial moments in “Self-Portrait” Pak’s long and rambling sentences, aping the uncertainty and contingency of speculation, are interrupted and cut across by a limited and definitive linguistic event. Commerce with the figure of the Japanese language ruptures the text, but not so much to open it up as to close it down, and to bring the rambling story to an end with a definitive closure. While the duration of each story is marked by the anxiety of conflict within and concern about confrontations outside the home, the resolution with which each story manages to attain closure involves an encounter with the imperial language.

C6548.indb 142

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

143

In “Obscene Rain” the resolution of na’s tormented inability to write, in addition to his leaking roof and wife’s dissatisfaction, is marked by his sitting down and writing a note in Japanese katakana script to his publisher, asking for two more days to produce the manuscript that he has been unable to begin. The katakana message stands out from the Korean text, a visible sign of a competing language and script, and one that is associated in these stories with a wider, public realm and source of economic power. The writing of the note marks the end of na’s writing block and the decision to write again, but it also accomplishes something more. With the material presence of katakana in the text, attention is suddenly called to the fact that the story is written in han’gŭl, and the naturalized literary language is defamiliarized. The reader apprehends anew that the story is written in Korean. Katakana thus not only represents a language used for commerce outside the home but also has the effect of delineating a linguistic realm of domesticity, an inner sphere of national interiority. Somewhat akin to the way early modern novels end with the protagonists heading off to America with dreams of a future return, here a different traffic with the foreign enables the story to be drawn to a close. As this is a triptych, however, the reader knows that this end is merely temporary. In the succeeding stories it becomes clear that the drawing of lines denoting inside and outside is neither obvious nor fixed. It is not so easy to impose national closure along linguistic lines here. “Burglary,” for example, calls into question the language of speech and the presumption that the domestic scene is articulated purely in the vernacular. Na and his wife supposedly speak to each other casually in Japanese to avoid their children understanding their conversation about the burglar. Their speech is represented by a han’gŭl inscription of Japanese, domesticated into han’gŭl as befits the speech of the domestic couple, and yet leaving behind visible traces of that domestication. “House Debt” is framed by na coaching his eldest child to pass an interview for kindergarten. The future lies in her mastering enough Japanese to succeed into the education system. Embourgeoisification here is imagined as home ownership and the receipt of a colonial education with the acquisition of fluency in the imperial language that it both demands and bequeaths. Within the stories there is a spatial politics to where and with whom na can speak Japanese: within the home it grants him the authority of adulthood, but when he visits the home of the moneylender in “House Debt”—a sturdy house with a guard dog and high wall—it reduces him to the level of the child, complimented on his attempts to speak a language that he speaks

C6548.indb 143

8/29/14 9:22 AM

144 peri-urban dreams

comfortably with his wife and his colleagues anyway. This spatial politics of language reaches beyond the content of the story to call into question the status of the texts themselves; when in each story the wider, public realm is presented as a linguistic problem, what is the meaning of writing and publishing these long novellas in Korean? It is helpful to recall, if only briefly, that the “naturalness” of Korean as a literary language was still a recent construction at this time. Many major writers from colonial times began their writing careers in Japanese and in the late 1930s were again “returning” to that language. Even to call this a “return” belies the complexity of the situation, when a writer such as Kim Tongin, often credited with the formation of a modern Korean literary language, described how in his first attempts to write in Korean he would first write “in his head” in Japanese and then translate his creations into Korean on paper.54 In 1941 the struggle to continue reproducing Korean as the language of literary consciousness could only be entering a new realm of intensity. Was Japanese, then, the “foreign” language intruding, or the “repressed” language resurfacing in the text? Or does Kim’s statement reveal instead the incapacity of any language—whether Korean, Japanese, or English—to live up to the false promise of a nationalized linguistic interiority that had been offered by modern literature? And when the dream for the future, symbolized by the education of the child, demanded anew Japanese fluency, would there be a future for this realm of written Korean or would it enter the archive of the vernacular past? These late colonial stories find resolution only in some kind of overt exchange with the Japanese language. At the level of form the stories lengthen, the sentences lengthen, and the closure is deferred but not avoided. In his praise of Pak as “our long-distance athlete,” Yi T’aejun had commented that it is in the lengthy sentences of Pak that is revealed “the guts of those pale apparitions of intellectuals with the sad and useless fate of trying to live on art in this land.”55 Perhaps this suggests that it is becoming harder, and that ever more work is needed, to attain that closure which constitutes the phantasm of national subjectivity. Or could this not also be a deferral of imperial subjectivity, unable to speak itself as other? We should recall the precise significance of language to writers such as Pak, for however well-versed and comfortable they were in Japanese, they had also forged their identities as writers who renovated and experimented with han’gŭl and were thus deeply invested in it in their professional lives. If they had until this point perhaps benefited from colonial rule, having tasted the cosmopolitanism of its educational institu-

C6548.indb 144

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

145

tions and attained a certain degree of financial security, this had been thrown into doubt by the constraints being newly imposed by a war economy and specifically on a shrinking linguistic sphere of print. Both Pak T’aewŏn and Yi T’aejun were rare writers who made their living from writing fiction, but this living depended on the existence of the vernacular press. As that press was gradually shut down, these inhabitants of the peri-urb found themselves living in a space striving for a suburban narrative but discovering itself rather to be the detritus of the colonial state. It did not mean that it would be impossible to revalue this excess. After “Self-Portrait” Pak, if not Yi, managed to reconstitute himself as an imperial commodity, and when liberation came rather suddenly, he abruptly stopped the serialization of a long novel, begun in May 1945 and written in Japanese, for the newspaper Mainichi shinpō.56 This impossible linguistic attempt to reproduce a national interior does reveal the relationships within which interiority emerges. At the level of plot the encounter with the Japanese language is shadowed by encounters with figures of authority and power. At the center of the stories is na and all his worries, which mostly involve trying to satisfy his wife and her demands that he confront some outside authority figure, whether it be the police, the roof repairer, or the moneylender himself. Each story thus posits an impending confrontation with someone outside the home that is the source of the anxiety that constitutes its duration. In a fashion, this confrontation produces the space of the home and constructs a “self-portrait” of the bourgeois male intellectual as caught between his family’s demands and the larger social structure. In many ways this gendering of domestic space as male points to the coloniality of these stories. For where critics of the everyday, such as Henri Lefebvre, have claimed that women are “sentenced to everyday life,” bearing a heavy burden of its “passivity,” late colonial Korean stories, unlike their postcolonial counterparts attesting to 1970s growth, focus on the male at home, negotiating the exchange between the home and outside authority.57 Whereas the home is on the one hand propeller of an economic history, it is also, as a product of the colonial economy, a place where the male negotiates the moral economy of the colonial bourgeoisie. At the crux of the encounter with these figures of authority emerges the figure of the male whose protestation of innocence and incompetence in the ways of the world brings to mind Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “strategies of innocence.” Pratt coined the term in her elegant survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel literature to refer to the ways in which the liberal traveler presented herself or himself as detached from the history of imperialism, which enabled the

C6548.indb 145

8/29/14 9:22 AM

146 peri-urban dreams

travel itself and to which the travel and discourses of travel contributed.58 Pratt further invoked the notion of “anti-conquest” to describe the rhetoric of naturalist explorers and their distinguishing of their travel practice from that of earlier, more conspicuously violent, imperial travelers. Their “conspicuous innocence,” she explains, acquires “meaning in relation to an assumed guilt of conquest,” which the naturalist tries to escape precisely by invoking the innocence of her or his own work in comparison.59 Pratt’s history of a European domestic subject of travel sheds light on the domestic subject of late colonial Korea. A strong narrative from the peri-urb, strengthened by repetition, appears of the male self, the protagonist, innocent and incompetent in social affairs, a victim of fate but untainted by that fate. The main character is presented as wanting to be morally pure at the same time that he wants to maintain harmony at home, and these two desires come into repeated conflict. In “Burglar” reporting the thief who has done no more than steal some clothes is the only way to satisfy na’s wife’s desires to prove that they are protected by the colonial police and thus belong to the city. In “House Debt” proving the guilt of the Korean loan gatherer is the only way to save themselves from the wrath of the Japanese loan provider. This “anticollusion,” as we might term it, appears not only in Pak T’aewŏn’s works but other writings from the period of the early 1940s. A 1941 story by Yi T’aejun invokes a similar strategy in order to tell the trajectory of the bourgeois home. In “A Tale of Rabbits” Hyŏn loses his job as an editor, with the closure of the Korean-language newspapers, and uses his severance pay to start a rabbit farm in the garden of his purpose-built and prettily decorated home. Just as his rabbits begin to reproduce wildly, the market falls out on rabbit fur and the rise in price of soybeans deprives Hyŏn of an affordable food source (bean curd residue) for his rabbits. While he procrastinates in agony over what to do, unwilling and, he suggests, incapable of putting an end to his rabbits’ lives, his wife calls out to him from the garden one day; her hands are covered in blood and she has just strangled a rabbit with her bare hands. The slaughter that is posited here at the heart of the bourgeois home speaks of a displacement of the violence enacted on the colonial writer, who is now as useless as a rabbit whose market has fallen out and who cannot even feed himself. Rarely for Yi T’aejun, he confronts head-on the commodity regime and blames it for this colonial bourgeois crisis. Yet much effort is spent detailing the anxiety and worries of the male—how embarrassed he is to be spotted gathering grass for rabbit feed on a school campus, and how he enters a bookstore to read up on the six strategies for slaughtering a rabbit,

C6548.indb 146

8/29/14 9:22 AM

peri-urban dreams

147

trembling at the thought of each of them—while it is the protagonist’s heavily pregnant wife who manages to accomplish the deed, compromising her values for the sake of survival. Could the repetition of the figure of the anxious and incompetent male that we see in stories by Pak and Yi, living through the upheaval of wartime development and its concomitant policies of imperialization, not function similarly as a strategy of innocence? If so, this too comes into being only because of the assumed guilt of profiting from the colonial economy. Hence na’s reference to himself as a “poor gentleman,” invoking the term sŏnbi used to refer to the literary Confucian gentleman who abstained from trade and violence. That economic profit may well have begun years earlier, but the guilt could only increase as the course of colonial policy veered more openly toward war and an attack on signs of vernacular culture. Perhaps it is not surprising that the revelation of innocence becomes more urgent, for the situation in which writers such as Pak found themselves was equally—arguably more intensively—as paradoxical as that of European travelers in the age of high imperialism. Themselves agents for a power they decried, they “survived” and sometimes even promoted the changes that would transform notions of a Korean literature. They eagerly taught their children Japanese with a dream for a future, while their writing acknowledged this also meant an end to a past. They both lived late coloniality as “transition” and enabled that transition as agents for imperialism. The artfulness of stories such as “Self-Portrait” should not be underestimated; the pose of yearning for a mundane domestic harmony is no less an ideological construction than was the earlier raising of passionate love to the status of art itself. Although the reconfiguration of domesticity as the war and imperialization policies deepen could suggest some kind of withdrawal to a private world, the three-part “Self-Portrait” forces the realization that the parameters of that private world on the urban periphery were constituted by the supposedly “outside” sphere of imperialism. The periphery haunts the limits of the city with its disquietened dreams and in its tedium disrupts both the drive to national independence and the drive to produce the willing imperial subject. Here the double exposure of the city walls marks the double time of imperialization in which dreams cannot be discarded, as in na’s concerns for his children’s education and future, but neither can they be easily accepted. The emergence of the peri-urb provides the fragile basis for some of the aspirations that garner support for the assimilatory practices of Japanese

C6548.indb 147

8/29/14 9:22 AM

148 peri-urban dreams

imperialism, but it also makes visible the contradictory times that structure colonial society and the insistent haunting of the nation form in its encounter with the spectral power of empire. If it is commonly understood that modern teleological narrative is in some sense guaranteed by the state, then what legitimates narrative in a colonial situation?60 Colonial Korea certainly provides many examples of nationcentered narratives, which find their legitimating closure through the expression of devotion to the nation, with or without explicit anticolonial reference. Yet late 1930s fiction takes us into a much murkier realm, where the certainties of closure become harder to attain and the relationship between subject and state or nation harder to ascertain. In the short and often cyclical narratives of late colonial Korea the linear narrative of nation disappears, and in its stead emerges the uneven terrain of the urban periphery, which bears witness to the subject’s move into imperial time. “Self-Portrait” narrates this as the time of the peri-urb, governed by the repetitious rhythms of consumption and an overwhelming lingering in the present. It might seem incongruous with the violence of global war and industrial revolution but appears as a symptom of those historical events. As such although they were criticized for supposedly visualizing a “disappearance” of politics, Pak’s stories suggest a different critique of daily life being reformed in the wake of commodity culture, a mundane present emerging from beneath larger struggles, and the pain and struggle of reconstruction recorded in their midst. Cast outside the city walls, Pak’s protagonist can only look back and wonder how the dreams that brought him to this place have shaken the ground under his feet and now prevent him from walking back through those gates. The move into imperial time was, of course, enacted in other ways. In the following chapter I turn to the figure who probably embraced the new politics most enthusiastically in the field of literature. As mouthpiece of the Government General at the height of war, Ch’oe Chaesŏ helped formulate the notion of kokumin bungaku—a literature of the people, which here meant the imperial nation with Korea and its other colonies as participating regions. His work, too, began from a diagnosis of unease in daily life, but rather than track the murky rhythms of capitalist crisis, he promised to overcome them, thus installing a new time: the time of the emperor.

C6548.indb 148

8/29/14 9:22 AM

5 IMPERIALIZATION, OR THE RESOLUTION OF CRISIS I offer this book to the spirit of my dead child, Kang. When you died, I vowed to raise the newly born Kokumin bungaku in your memory. Today, I send this humble collection into the world with just a small amount of satisfaction. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Korean Literature in the Age of Transition

T h e t r a g i c d e at h o f a c h i l d o p e n s K o r e a n L i t e r a t u r e in the Age of Transition (Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku), a collection of essays by the eminent literary critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–64) which was published in 1943. Moving as it is, the dedication to Ch’oe’s recently deceased son cannot help but also stun the reader of today as it compresses into just a few lines the narrative of death and rebirth that lies at the heart of the rhetoric of imperialization.1 As the Government General was urging Koreans to die on the battlefield for the Japanese emperor in order to become truly Japanese, Ch’oe’s words offer a variation on this tale of rebirth and an intensely personal witness to the powerful attraction and comfort offered by the possibility of becoming Japanese. How could a literary journal that supported total mobilization salve the dreadful loss of a child? How could a campaign to “imperialize” the population of Korea substitute for the promise of a future lost with the unexpected death of Kang? Kokumin bungaku was the name both of a journal and a literary project, meaning literally the “literature of the national people.” In 1941 the Government General had closed down the two major journals that had supported literary life in Korea from the late 1930s and past the forced closure of the vernacular press in 1940: Munjang, whose antiquarian focus had led an excavation into Korea’s literary past and played a major role in the christening of the classics, and Inmun p’yŏngnon, whose lively debates on literature and daily life were interspersed with articles on foreign literary trends written by its contributors, many of whom were scholars of various European literatures.

C6548.indb 149

8/29/14 9:22 AM

150 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

The reason given for the closure was the need to ration paper, but all knew that the police department, which gave the order, was really aiming at reform of intellectual and artistic life in Korea, as Ch’oe Chaesŏ, then editor of Inmun p’yŏngnon, later acknowledged.2 In October 1941 the first issue of a new journal supported by the Government General appeared; its title was Kokumin bungaku, and its editor was Ch’oe Chaesŏ. At first the editorial plan was to publish eight issues per year in Korean and four in Japanese, but soon, with the escalation toward total mobilization in 1942, Kokumin bungaku became an entirely Japanese-language journal, containing essays, fiction, and poetry written by Korean and Japanese writers and thinkers. Its editorial mandate was to actively support state policy, to raise national awareness (kokumin ishiki) among Korea’s cultural figures, and to promote the creation of a “new culture” that “merged” those of Korea and Japan.3 In other words, Ch’oe—a leading scholar of British modernism and supporter of Korea’s own avant-garde writers—had become a figurehead for the project of inaugurating a literature on the Korean peninsula that affirmed itself as part of the imperial nation and supported its causes, which were invested deeply, and struggling, in war. What had brought the literary critic, who had been so fundamental to the institution of a modern Korean literature, to the point where he advocated the end of writing in Korean and adoption of the imperial cause, the war cause, as a literary cause? Ch’oe’s dedication offers a series of substitutions: of a literary journal for a dead son, of Japanese for Korean, of adoption into the Japanese nation for a lost future of patrilineal succession, of imperial nation for family, of national subjecthood for fatherhood, of rebirth for death, of memory for life. Memories of Kang are not to be suppressed but carried forward into the future as a past that is to be nurtured and protected by the project of a literature for the kokumin, the imperial-national people. Ch’oe’s preface, following on the dedication, presents almost the inverse of this relation of memory to life as he writes of how he has recently recovered the meaning of his childhood love for Japanese things. “Since I was a child I have loved the Japanese language, rooms, that correctness of manners, the endlessly lively scholarly curiosity, and, especially, Meiji literature,” Ch’oe writes, “and so I breathed Japan and was raised inside Japan.”4 Only now, recently, has he realized that this love was all the time a love for the Japanese state. The present has rewritten the memory of his past, provided him in fact with a new narrative of origins, and this was, he stresses, a “shock.” Japanese was what he always had been, or at least wanted to be. Lest this appear too personal a confession, Ch’oe

C6548.indb 150

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

151

adopts the rhetoric of inevitability and destiny in which so much of his book is couched to declare the collective nature of this seemingly individual experience: “Soon I realized that this was a path of thorns across which my compatriots all had to tread.” This most personal of memories and experiences and most intimate of deaths links Ch’oe here to the larger collective of the nation, and with it the collectivity of Korean intellectuals to the imperial nation of the kokumin. Crossing the path of thorns will bring pain and suffering, but as a trial that is to be undergone together it will unite the kokumin and endow each individual death with meaning. A reading of Korean Literature in the Age of Transition shows a constant weaving together of national history with the most intimate of personal discoveries in a fashion that reflects the kinds of subjection demanded by the wartime regime of total mobilization. For Ch’oe, imperialization offers redemption not only for the death of a son but for all ills afflicting modern Korean society. His essays rarely display the nuances and doubts that imbue the works discussed so far, yet their logic is not so far removed in its concerns. For while Ch’oe narrates his resolute decision to support the war cause as a retrospective discovery of identity, his essays reveal a broader unease with social unevenness, with the commodification of culture and the role of art that bears comparison not only to the other texts discussed in this book but also to fascist modernisms from around his contemporary world. Reading Ch’oe offers insight into the conservative turn modernism had taken in colonial Korea and the ways it supported forms of subjection promoted by the fascist imperial regime. Ch’oe was, like the philosopher Sŏ Insik, concerned with searching for a future, or a way of imagining a future distinct from the present at a time when the past seemed to linger uneasily in so many different ways. Sŏ’s disappearance from the written record in 1941 coincides with Ch’oe’s taking up the mantle of kokumin bungaku. Perhaps one difference between the philosopher and the literary critic is that Ch’oe thought he had found a future, but it was one whose political vision and outcome, not to mention understanding of literary and cultural production, took an entirely different direction.

The Current Situation The title of Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s collection of essays indexes them to a specific moment that must be addressed briefly before their fashioning of argument and cause can make any sense. The essays contained in Korean Literature in the Age

C6548.indb 151

8/29/14 9:22 AM

152 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

of Transition were originally published between 1941 and 1943 and are gathered in chronological order into one volume to bear witness to Ch’oe’s own treading of the path of thorns. He signs off the preface with a note of the date: “March 1st Shōwa 18, on the morning of the first anniversary of the landing in Java, at the foot of Rakusan, Keijō.” Not only has the Japanese imperial calendar replaced other calendars previously used in Korea—the solar calendar, the Tan’gun calendar, or the Chinese imperial calendar—but the progress in war has come to dictate the understanding of time and place in Keijō. The transition into imperial time and space, the process of the historical event of imperialization, is tracked in Ch’oe’s lengthy volume written in the imperial language. The early pages of Korean Literature in the Age of Transition repeat several times a chronology of what was commonly called the “current situation.” In his preface Ch’oe calls this the “transition,” which he writes has its “conscious” beginning in the “new regime movement” of the fall of 1940, followed by the closure of the literary magazines in 1941 and the inauguration of the journal Kokumin bungaku, the “call to war” of December 8, 1941 (Pearl Harbor), and the military draft of May 1942, which provided, according to Ch’oe, the “final decision of [the transition’s] own character.”5 For Ch’oe in 1943, the forced draft (there had already been a voluntary draft from 1938) provides the end point that constructs a retrospective narrative of events leading to an inevitable goal, a fulfillment of the true nature of transition, and an act of decision. His narrative expels all contingency from the events leading up to and following the Pacific War, endowing them with the legitimation of fate and inevitability. An earlier narrative of events follows the battlefields of Europe and Asia rather than policies enacted in the colony. In a talk given in various cities around the western part of the country in November 1940 as a part of the Patriotic Arts Lecture Troup organized by the Association of Literary Figures in Korea (Chōsen bunjin kyōkai / Chosŏn munin hyŏphoe), Ch’oe recounted the events leading up to the “new regime.”6 The first “great earthquake,” otherwise known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, where fighting broke out between Japanese and Chinese troops, devolved into what became known as the “China Incident” or the Second Sino-Japanese War. As Ch’oe described it, the objectives of war “gradually progressed” and reached a new level of “clarification” with Prime Minister Konoe’s promulgation of a “new East Asian order” following the fall of Hankou in the autumn of 1938. In Europe, meanwhile, Paris had fallen in the summer of 1940 to Hitler’s Germany, and a “new European order” had been declared. It was around this time,

C6548.indb 152

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

153

Ch’oe explains, that the building of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere had been announced and attention had turned toward Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, which had previously seemed quite distant to inhabitants of the Japanese empire. Finally the dreams of a new Asian order and new European order had coincided with the signing of a Tripartite Pact in September 1940 between Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to the ambition of a “new order for the world.” Crucial to this story, for Ch’oe at least, is the fall of Paris, a dramatic, almost theatrical event that staged the end of the “old” order and the decadent decline of the center of European individualism, which Ch’oe, as a scholar of European modernism, had in many ways made his own. Indeed the fall of Paris seems to hold more affective resonance for Ch’oe than the battles in the Pacific arena, resulting perhaps from his own previous investment in a notion of European culture but also from the way it anchored a new narrative of civilizational conflict and the rise of a revolutionary world order led by Japan. The fall of Paris enables the imagination of a different future where Asia, not Europe, would lead the global avant-garde of culture. Put together the two chronologies of the transition highlight the grand narrative of 1943, of total mobilization for a war that would supposedly herald nothing less than a new world order. In their narrative climaxes, endowed with all the power of fate and inevitability, they bring the advent of this order together with the decisive action of the individual as a soldier on the battlefield. And, as seen in the focus of Ch’oe’s first chronology on the course of the transition in the literary world, they suggest that the transition will demand the participation of not only those soldiers who end up fighting in the Imperial Army, but also each member of society in their own particular field, including the writers and artists of Korea. This is the infamous total mobilization that characterizes late colonialism.

Kokumin bungaku a s M odernist Critique “[Kokumin bungaku] is the literary objective of the reforms that began in response to the necessity of the high-level national defense state regime.”7 So writes Ch’oe on the eve of Pearl Harbor, signaling two aspects to the idea of kokumin bungaku that interest me here: its nature as a conservative revolutionary modernism and its elaboration as a specifically literary response to the so-called high level of national defense. The former, perhaps, helps

C6548.indb 153

8/29/14 9:22 AM

154 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

to explain Ch’oe’s leading role, for some months after the closure of the Korean-language newspapers and the two literary journals Munjang and Inmun p’yŏngnon, which, with their slightly different emphases toward traditionalism and European-style modernism, respectively, had shaped the literary scene over the previous couple of years, Ch’oe seems far from defeated by the loss of his own Inmun p’yŏngnon but is energetically taking up the mantle as editor of the new journal Kokumin bungaku. It is tempting to see this as a dramatic transformation and irrational act of treachery, yet Ch’oe’s essays reveal a continuity in logic and concerns both in his critique of contemporary society and in his views on literature. Embracing the war effort enables him to imagine a brave new world, which promises to wipe away all problems and conflicts reconceived as belonging to the past and replace them with a new aesthetic characterized by harmony and an organic unity. It is a modernist fantasy that tips into fascism, and, like all fascist fantasies, there is logic to its attraction; its stated goal after all is happiness. But it is a fantasy that also reveals its collusions on its very surface, as in statements such as this one by Ch’oe on the nature of modern beauty: “It is modern warfare that displays the pinnacle of collective beauty.”8 Technology, political violence, and aesthetics have merged in Ch’oe’s vision of the collectivity. What differentiates Ch’oe from other intellectuals who urged young Koreans to sign up for the Imperial Army was his elucidation of an aesthetic justification for the cause. What he shares with them is a deep discontent with modern life. Before examining the ways in which Ch’oe elaborated the project of kokumin bungaku and conceived of its role in the high defense state, I would like here to consider the vision of the world that it claimed to improve. As a modernism, kokumin bungaku thrived on a vigorous critique of the present, against which it aimed to set out its uniqueness, superiority, and novelty. Given the tremendous production of self-consciously modern culture over the previous decades, kokumin bungaku could not claim to be the first literary movement to herald the arrival of the truly modern. Too many artists and thinkers had already laid claim to that title. Kokumin bungaku’s distinctiveness lay rather in its claim to resolve the problems that had originated with the modern. Ch’oe’s modernism is a revisionary one. He does not dismiss the modern but aims to improve it, to imagine a new world and a new aesthetic that is authentically modern. As such, his kokumin bungaku phase should be understood on a continuum from his previous modernist practice of literary criticism.

C6548.indb 154

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

155

As a critique of the present, Ch’oe’s fascist modernism reveals his understanding of the fault lines and social conflicts that have developed over the course of the previous decade. Ch’oe conceives of himself as living in a time of historical transition, designated by the term crisis. In one of the earlier essays in his book, “The Transformation of the Literary Spirit” (“Bungaku seishin no tenkan”), he argues that talk of crisis has been around in Japan and Europe since the early 1930s and is by the time of his writing (April 1941) generally accepted as fact. Yet in the early 1940s, having lived the experience of the state of emergency for a full decade, “we,” he writes, understand that this is not just a case of a couple of crazy dictators running amok in Europe, but rather that “history itself ” is on the move.9 Ch’oe believes that he stands in the midst of a true historical transition. He was far from alone in this belief, which was articulated constantly by the mass media and many other thinkers. Where Ch’oe’s understanding of the contemporary moment as one of crisis feeds into support of the regime is in his framing of the nature of crisis in terms of individual morality. Ch’oe brought a philological approach to the ubiquitous term crisis, returning it to its origins in medical Latin and prior to that the Greek krisis, meaning decision or the turning point of a disease, from krinein, to decide. As war in both Europe and Asia intensified he appears to have craved decision and found an appropriate object in the declaration of himself as a subject of imperial Japan. The rhetoric of transition and crisis was central to Ch’oe’s understanding of his purpose, and he laid out the problem in a fashion that focused on the individual through the language of physiology. Where Sŏ Insik, for example, had conceived of the contemporary crisis as the result of a structural convergence of the contradictions of capitalism, Ch’oe focused on the excesses and decadent state of what he called late individualism. “The Transformation of the Literary Spirit” explains that the “European” word meaning “crisis” was originally a medical term referring to that decisive turning point during the progression of an illness, which becomes the junction between the road to death or a turn toward recovery.10 Therefore when a culture is in crisis, Ch’oe writes, we can see this as a danger signal, which not only shows that the illness of the culture is reaching a peak but also warns of the necessity for a decisive transition at that point. The various aspects of anguish that Ch’oe notes in contemporary literature—the falling apart of individuality, the impotence of intellect, the diffusion of decadent atmosphere, a general preference for resistant satire, the prevalence of darkness, the poverty

C6548.indb 155

8/29/14 9:22 AM

156 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

of themes, the loss of morality, the dissolution of character, the carelessness of the descriptive spirit, the loss of a critical spirit, and the various other innumerable irregularities—seem to him a kind of fever affirming that contemporary literature is truly sick. As a fever is both a symptom that reveals the body is sick and evidence that the body is fighting that sickness, the anguish of contemporary literature, too, is both symptom and a transitional state marking the attempt to break through that crisis.11 Ch’oe argues that the nature of the crisis is fundamentally one of morality, and consequently he displaces both the cause of and solution for the current crisis onto the figure of the individual. His critique of individualism paradoxically relies on the individual for its “cure.” If a decline in individual morality is responsible for the historical crisis, then the revival of that individual should reverse the process, or so his logic goes. The reversal has to comprise both restoration and creation of something new to accommodate the current historical and material situation. A decisive commitment by each individual to the collectivity fighting the war cause fits his demand for a cure for individual decadence. Kokumin bungaku was presented as a correction of the worst tendencies of modern culture and a revitalization of an earlier modernism that signified the potential of the modern individual who conceives of her or his primary loyalty to the nation-state. In this sense he was recalling the earlier individualism of the so-called enlightenment nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Ch’oe’s view, such an active and positive modern individualism had been perverted by the bad liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and communism that had flourished in the succeeding decades. Unable to be entirely new, then, kokumin bungaku had to present itself as restorationist but sought its origins in seemingly contradictory places: in both early nationalist thought and a prehistoric imperial order of Japan reimagined to suit the purposes of the modern imperial state. Ch’oe’s diagnosis of decadence and decline is in line with arguments being forged elsewhere about the problems brought about by industrialization. In particular he quotes Oswald Spengler, then famous worldwide for his book The Decline of the West, a huge philosophy of history which was published toward the end of the First World War and touched a chord with those who interpreted the devastation left behind on the European continent as both symptom and result of the collapse of Western civilization.12 Ch’oe’s interest in Spengler lies in the argument that individual morality has failed to keep up with the immense speed of change in lifestyle associated with industrialization and urbanization. As old notions of family and neighborhood are upset

C6548.indb 156

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

157

by these material transformations, the “power to create morality at the same speed as that progress” seems lacking, writes Ch’oe, citing Spengler.13 And lest we think that this is a problem limited to the mere individual, he goes on to state that “order in national lifestyle has been destroyed through a merely superficial progress.” The failure in individual morality is ultimately a failure of national order, which will demand a rethinking of the relationship between each individual and the national community. When Spengler wrote of the superficial nature of progress, he was referring primarily to a divide between urban and rural space and a disjunct in consciousness resulting in those who move between these spaces. He understood this, according to the dominant ideology of progress, in terms of a time lag, whereby the urban was associated with progress and the future.14 For all his reliance on this progressive history, however, he believed that Western civilization was in decline, with Germany representing its peak. Spengler had supported national socialism, but by the 1930s he was to earn the wrath of Hitler for his questioning of the value of technology and the industrial juggernaut that Nazism set loose, particularly in the cause of war. Already in Decline of the West Spengler had concluded with chapters on money and the machine as dominant forms of economic life that he considered to be nearing the end of their success. Where did Ch’oe seek the causes of the debilitating state of late individualism? For him the spatial disjunct was also one of urban versus rural to be sure, but the terms of East opposed to West were more crucial to his thinking. In this view modernity in the East had seen the superficial adoption of the customs and technologies of the West, producing a lag in consciousness similar to that diagnosed by Spengler. Instead of superficially following Western customs, Ch’oe called for the “imperial nationalization of culture” (bunka no kokuminka), where lifestyle and consciousness would no longer be experienced as separated by a gaping void or contradiction.15 For Ch’oe this contradiction between lifestyle and consciousness demanded not the rethinking of technology but rather the reform of consciousness itself. The reform of the individual, by which he really meant the individual’s relationship with the state, was proposed to solve the problem of temporal unevenness, not through attending to the material circumstances of that unevenness but through attention to unevenness in the perception of those circumstances. Culture (bunka) was proffered as a source of unity to that effect. Yet before culture could be presented as the glue that produced the effect of unity, competing notions of culture had to be dealt with. Most of all,

C6548.indb 157

8/29/14 9:22 AM

158 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

culture had to be rescued from the deterritorializing tendencies of capitalism, whose effects Ch’oe detected in two different trends: the culture life and culturalism. Ch’oe begins his 1943 book with a critique of the superficiality of previous adoptions of modern culture, such as the bunka seikatsu or cultured consumer lifestyle of the 1920s. Bunka seikatsu had flourished as a phrase and concept in association with the urban culture that developed during the reign of the Taishō emperor in Japan (1912–26).16 The period saw the emergence of a vibrant mass culture in the vast cities built on the influx of enormous numbers of factory and office workers resulting from the expanding economy. Socalled Taishō culture is associated with mass entertainment—the theater, radio, movies, jazz clubs, social dancing, and the expansion of mass media and publishing. Taishō culture was supposed to be liberal and cosmopolitan, and remarkably, considering the coincidence of the reign of Taishō with the first half of colonial rule in Korea, Japan attempted to export this liberal cultural image to the colonies.17 In Korea, after the huge and threatening uprising of the March First Movement in 1919, an age of “cultural rule” was announced, allowing gatherings and publishing by Koreans and heralding a similar efflorescence of mass cultural forms on the peninsula. Nevertheless, in Korea as in Japan, the dazzling spectacle of urban culture both opened up options for radical politics and attempted through distraction, surveillance, and bullying to prevent that politics from grasping power.18 In his definition of the culture life, Ch’oe focused on the way in which it defined culture through materialism and consumerism. By launching his exposition of kokumin bungaku with a critique of contemporary consumerism, Ch’oe reveals his anxiety about the commodity culture taking root in the cities and his sense that it undermined all sense of tradition and preexisting custom. “The first thing that comes to mind,” he wrote, “is the culture house.”19 The culture house, or bunka jūtaku, referred to housing that combined Japanese and European architectural and living styles, although on the peninsula it might have a little Korean twist to it as well, according to Ch’oe.20 As a commodity, the culture house brought with it a whole lifestyle: as Ch’oe describes it, in the kitchen there would be a gas cooker, and in the reception room a radio and stereo player; the whole family would wear Western-style clothing and drink black tea and coffee; husbands and wives would go to see movies together each week and be generally irresponsible about their children’s education.21 It was a lifestyle that disdained all custom and tradition and whose “only goal was material convenience and cheap entertainment.” It was nothing more than a “superficial imitation of an Euro-American style daily life.”

C6548.indb 158

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

159

Kokumin bungaku demanded of its adherents a real acrobatic leap of faith, for if the cultural schism was to be located in the deterritorializing impulses of capitalist commodification and its destruction of tradition and custom, that might be more immediately located in the dramatic policies of the colonizing power. That so many thinkers, such as Ch’oe, could buy into the notion that the primary force of deterritorialization was not colonialism itself, in fact that colonialism was in Korea acting as some form of protection against that very deterritorialization, attests to the structuring significance of the East/ West divide in the imagining of the twentieth-century world. It was because consumerism was perceived as arriving from the West—to both Japan and Korea—that the superficiality of modern life could open up the fantasy of a contesting Eastern spirituality. According to Ch’oe and others, the shallowness of the culture life must be replaced with the authentic Eastern culture. But in fact that Eastern culture itself arose from and enabled the fantasy of the colonial project. Ch’oe juxtaposed the culture life with the so-called culturalists, or those who believed that culture constituted a separate realm of human endeavor with its own autonomous laws of development and value that transcended time and space.22 The culturalists believed that the purity and sanctity of culture must be protected and, above all, that culture must never be treated instrumentally as a means but always regarded as an end in itself. The value of culture was absolute and self-regulating, even when placed within the larger social order. Neither “individual prejudice nor economic reasons, nor even nonstatist thought” should cause cultural value to waver; rather, only a spirit of selfless devotion to culture should prevail.23 Ch’oe cited Flaubert’s belief in the godlike nature of art as a primary example of culturalism, but he might rather have been referring to cultural debates closer to home where critiques of politicization and instrumentalization of cultural products had circulated since the 1920s, in particular with the rise of the proletarian movement and its critics.24 Interestingly, within the spectrum of positions taken toward culture in colonial Korea, Ch’oe himself had until this point been more usually placed toward the culturalist pole. He had made his name as a literary critic in the 1930s through his introduction of British modernism, and especially the psychological fiction of Joyce and Woolf, and he had heralded the achievements of young Korean authors such as Yi Sang and Pak T’aewŏn for their advancement of literary technique in the depiction of urban life.25 Within the literary terrain of the time, these young writers were often harshly critical of the

C6548.indb 159

8/29/14 9:22 AM

160

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

then dominant stream of proletarian literature and what they perceived to be its unsophisticated technique and instrumental use of art and literature in particular.26 To be sure, Ch’oe had urged them to develop a more consistent attitude or “unified awareness that continued through all the details of their descriptions,” whether that be an “economic critique of society or an ethical critique of life,” suggesting that he was not averse to literature’s tackling of secular themes, but nevertheless he had praised to the hilt their advancement of writing technique.27 In the opening essay of Korean Literature in the Age of Transition, Ch’oe does not even mention the proletarian literary movement, so unimaginable are its tenets at this point. Yet some of its basic positions—for example, that culturalism colludes with capitalist logic—have now been absorbed into his own critique in the name of kokumin bungaku. To return to Flaubert, “we know that the limitless pursuit of ‘culture for culture’s sake’ is, along with the limitless pursuit of ‘profit for profit’s sake,’ one branch of modern individualism.”28 Ch’oe juxtaposes culturalism with the cultured life because he believes that, despite its protestations of placing culture above all other interests, including economic, culturalism actually embodies the values of economic individualism, or capitalism, in a similar manner to the more ostentatious cultured life. Culturalists may claim to be above the capitalist whirlpool, but they actually exist because of its logic and reason. Today, Ch’oe writes, we have to “move one step further, and problematize culturalism from the state’s standpoint.”29 Problematizing economic individualism from the state’s point of view, as Ch’oe demanded, produced a different critique from problematizing it from the position of socialism. Individualism’s limitless pursuit of profit, Ch’oe writes, pushing aside all religious, moral, or state control, leads to free competition between businesses and nations, to free trade and the endless pursuit of expansion of the productive powers, and “once capital moves freely like this, it always stores within itself the economic scares that might invite the destruction of the state itself.”30 The current crisis, Ch’oe argues, has been brought about by capitalism’s zealous pursuit of the rational principle to the point where it is uncontrollable, and, most important, where it threatens the entity of the state itself. If Ch’oe saw in the cultured life the deterritorializing impulse of a cosmopolitan mass culture, in culturalism he saw collusion with the same cosmopolitan evil. If the pursuit of capitalist rationale to the extreme led to the end of the state, at least in his view, then analogously the pursuit of the logic of culture for culture’s sake similarly would lead to the increasing rationalization of

C6548.indb 160

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

161

culture until the category of national culture no longer existed. National here referred to the culture of the imperial nation of Japan, of which Korea formed part. “Shock” was how Ch’oe described his subsequent realization that what was really needed was the privileging of politics and embrace of irrationalism for self-preservation.31 The succinct rhetoric and claim to honesty aim to portray empathy with his readers who might find his conclusions hard to stomach. Ch’oe took the view that protection of culture and protection of the state were one and the same, and that culture was, in a sense, the state.32 The culturalist’s dream of freeing his self from the shackles of the state to pursue the perfection of his art was a fantasy of “nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism” that had been blown away with the “sound of the cannon.” The critique of cosmopolitanism, a key term associated with the liberalism of the Taishō era, was thus central to Ch’oe’s argument that the state must be protected from interference from the outside. Ch’oe’s isolation of the culture life and culturalism as two only apparently different approaches to culture, which reflected the logic of economic individualism, suggests that he was equally sensitive to the way in which national society was divided within. That he conceived of these divisions in terms of the culture life and culturalism undoubtedly reflects the then dominant conception of culture as divided into high and low, or mass, cultures that was intrinsic to cultural discussion in both Japan and Korea. Whereas theorists of proletarian arts had conjured up a cultural consumer called the taejung, or mass, in the factory workers in the city and sometimes also in the peasants that constituted the majority of the population, other artists clung to an elite notion of culture as a rarefied field where correct consumption demanded training and the cultivation of taste. According to Ch’oe, if the masses were accused of cheapening culture, some intellectuals were accused of hiding from daily life.33 In the realm of literature the divide was reflected in the categories of “popular” and “pure” literature that critics at the time so relentlessly discussed.34 Ch’oe argued that culture would now have to overcome these conflicts in both its themes and forms as such conflict would no longer be recognized: “The goal of kokumin bunka is to build a culture that both the absolute majority of peasants and tiny minority of intellectuals can enjoy together.”35 Placing the state as the guarantor of a culture freed from the logic of capitalism necessitated the breakdown of internal divisions and the inauguration of a holistic culture that did not subscribe to conflicts of class, of generation, or between the individual and society.

C6548.indb 161

8/29/14 9:22 AM

162

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

Under Ch’oe’s modernist vision authentic culture would be guaranteed by the imperial state alone, as only the state could be conceived as lying above the vagaries of the capitalist economy and its class conflict. Yet the supposed goal of harmony and easing of conflict merely involved the refusal to recognize real unevenness and disparities of privilege and power whether of class, of region, or even of colonialism, and of the state’s crucial role in their continuance. Terms such as the culture life and culturalism did not even begin to reflect on vast swathes of the population that were touched by neither, in both the countryside and the growing urban slums. Ch’oe’s notion of unity rendered all such social division invisible. When it came to power relations, Ch’oe’s revolutionary vision was nothing short of reactionary, aiming to restore and strengthen the current social settlement and stifle anticolonial and social discontent. He sought a revolution in literary form, however, that would embody his vision of future harmony brought about through a restoration of the ideals of early modernism minus the contradictions held within its very thought. These ideals had been built on a limited understanding of class difference, but the colonial contradiction was not completely submerged in them, perhaps because the practice of modern literature had been so tied to cultural nationalism. In his critique of current literary practice Ch’oe was unable to avoid the question of how the notion of a specifically Korean culture should be understood in the new world order.

The Liter ary Critique Ch’oe was a literary critic by profession, although the new notion of a holistic culture tended to attack forms of specialization and encourage intellectuals to be of the renaissance kind.36 Nevertheless, as the promoter of an imperialnational literature he directed his attention predominantly toward the literary manifestation of the new notion of culture. In this realm current literature fell far short of the goal as its concentration on the anguished individual alienated from society, witnessed so often in the fictions of the personal sphere of the sasosŏl, on generational conflicts in the popular family or social novel, and on class conflict in the proletarian literature all failed to promote the notion of culture as an instantiation of an undivided state, according to Ch’oe’s analysis. Central to Ch’oe’s arguments, therefore, was a wholesale attack on contemporary literary forms of representation and the ways in which they represented the relationship between the individual and society. In his essays

C6548.indb 162

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

163

that tackle more specific questions of literary form, Ch’oe launched an attack both on the fiction of the private sphere, which had become almost the default form for the so-called pure literature, and on proletarian literature with its staunch depictions of class division. Perhaps more surprisingly, he also critiqued the exoticizing colonial representation of Korean culture that had come to be known by the term “local color.” Ch’oe’s critique of the sasosŏl leans on all the rhetorical tropes that he used to define the crisis of his age: the form reflects the sickness of the figure of the individual in decline and the bankruptcy of a civilization where the “greatest goal of man is to perfect his whole character as a small universe.”37 It is symptomatic of the “late individualism” that Ch’oe blames for the downfall of old Europe, as symbolized most dramatically in the fall of Paris, and which he says is ripe in Asia as well. Ch’oe’s reliance on a vocabulary of lateness fits the atmosphere at the time, which tended to understand the contemporary situation through such affective modes as nostalgia, decadence, and decline, and longing for an idealized past. The idea of lateness naturalized the view of the historical transition as organic and irresistible; it also figured a desire for renewal that could fuel drastic policies of transformation. Late individualism functioned to diagnose the need for a transition within a larger narrative of history and allow for the recovery of the newly defined early individualism, which in its Korean redaction did after all coincide with the emergence of the modern literature by means of which critics such as Ch’oe had accrued their authority. Early individualism, wrote Ch’oe, had allowed for the free development of humankind through the Renaissance and its destruction of feudalism.38 The Renaissance had, in fact, been a pan-European “new regime movement”— the term for new regime (shintaisei) being exactly that which was being used to refer to the new historical transition to a pan-Asian order. The choice of terminology was by no means accidental. If a cultural and intellectual movement as significant and decisive as the Renaissance could anchor the new narrative of historical transition, then the new world order acquired the magnitude and dignity that Ch’oe and others sought for it. The point now was that, as the liberating force of early individualism had been stymied, the continued development of humankind could only be assured through the destruction of liberalism. The fostering of individuality and its expression no longer held the active significance it once did; instead late individualism revealed itself in three registers according to Ch’oe: eccentricity, intransigence, and sickness.39 The eccentric individual failed to attain any position of social relevance, whereas the

C6548.indb 163

8/29/14 9:22 AM

164

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

new intransigence was found in resistance for mere resistance’s sake, which was apt to bring forth self-destruction. Sickness signified the widely touted atmosphere of decadence and decline that prospered in the arts and operated as a master metaphor for the times. The three registers of late individualism were deemed to find their ultimate literary expression in the Japanese empire in the form known as the sasosŏl. By this Ch’oe referred to fiction of various lengths that was read as narrating the personal experience of the author: “The aim of such fiction was not to describe other people or the external world like regular fiction, but for the author to shine light on his self as an individual, to reveal some unique kind of ego and then to pour that out in the text through a kind of personal anecdotal style.”40 Such fiction, which tended to present an anguished and impotent intellectual struggling with mental angst and domestic conflict, had been a staple of early Taishō literature and alternately celebrated or excoriated as a uniquely Japanese form, but Ch’oe was quick to disregard such thoughts and proclaim the form to be a symptom of the wrongs of liberalism.41 Some of its confessional characteristics had been in evidence in the early modern fiction written in Korean, but by the end of the decade of the 1930s the sasosŏl had become notably more prominent in Korea too; witness Pak T’aewŏn’s serialized “Self-Portrait.” For Ch’oe the form provided proof of the isolation of the writer and running of the course of liberalism and culturalism, which had raised the life of the intellectual to the status of art to the apparent detriment of forging a deeper connection with the collectivity of the imperial nation. Above all, the form signaled the need for the writer to “fly back into national life” through the medium of kokumin bungaku, a “breakthrough” that had nevertheless, he agreed, ultimately come about through “external force” and the “forced imposition” of the imperial-national standpoint.42 Here Ch’oe’s critique resonates with that of leftist intellectuals such as Im Hwa, who prior to these words from Ch’oe had already accused recent fiction of a retreat from social conflict and abnegation of the class struggle through its intense focus on the life of the intellectual. Im Hwa was particularly vociferous about the ramifications of such literary form, which he argued revealed no more than “the phantom of a skeletal individuality ripped apart from sociality.”43 For Im, the trend toward the narration of the realm of personal experience merely served as acceptance of the impotence of the individual denied a constituting role in society, clearly the case in Korea under fascist colonial rule. Both Ch’oe and Im thus attacked the literary isolation of individual experience from the communal being, but, needless to say, their vision of community was quite different.

C6548.indb 164

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

165

Although he rarely mentions proletarian literature in Korean Literature in the Age of Transition, Ch’oe makes it clear that the goals of the kokumin bungaku project are to protect the state from opposition by nationalist and socialist tendencies, as well as those of individualism and liberalism. He tackles the question of socialist literature openly in an essay titled “The Standpoint of National Literature,” which had been presented in October 1942 as the first “Lecture on National Literature” sponsored by the Inmunsa publishing company.44 A literature that openly advocates socialism has disappeared, he writes, and even mentioning the subject causes him some hesitation. Nevertheless, what he calls the “materialist way of thinking” is still present in the way in which literary works describe the world. Insofar as kokumin bungaku is supposed to bring in a new order, then it must also revolutionize the current order of description. Perhaps he too was bothered by the disappearing future that marked the thick descriptions of writers such as Ch’oe Myŏngik. The materialist viewpoint is too gloomy and pessimistic, reflecting “the inertia of realism,” he wrote. Although individual misfortune, societal faults, and irrational aspects of life undoubtedly still exist, to focus on them in literary works, to exaggerate them and advertise them, “cannot be allowed under wartime national morality.”45 Furthermore, to consider such descriptions of human life to be more serious and possess more literary value is a prevailing tendency that reflects nothing more than “contamination by fin-de-siècle pessimism.”46 The modernist revolution of kokumin bungaku must break through this nineteenthcentury ideology and reconsider its representation of the world. In particular, this would affect the depiction of peasants and laborers who must be seen with “new eyes.” “To view the country and the city of today with such a simplistic way of thinking, that the peasants are slaves to landlords and laborers an oppressed class in thrall to capitalists, is an evil that surpasses a joke.”47 A “bright literature” that looks at such figures with refreshed eyes must be created, or such topics be avoided altogether. If the new literature must avoid the myopic focus on the intellectual’s angst and mental life, it must equally avoid presenting its conventional other—the peasant and the laborer—in the dark and critical mode of the old materialist way of thinking. What was needed was a revolution not in property relations but in their representation. The third and final representational convention against which Ch’oe pits his national literature also attempts to represent a larger world beyond that of the individual psyche, although without the dark and critical point of view of the socialist writer. The depiction of things thought to be Korean—“of old things, beautiful things, sad things”48—eschewed both the languages of

C6548.indb 165

8/29/14 9:22 AM

166 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

class and the tormented psyche for pictorialist scenes of landscape, custom, character, and, above all, objects—books, ceramics, paintings, swords, and other things into which a Korean spirit or past could be read. Ch’oe did not describe it as such, but this literary manifestation of nativism, known more commonly by the term local color, was a distinctively colonial form of representation whose politics swerved between cultural nationalism and a colonial orientalism. As the term local color suggests, visuality and the methods of painting were central to this form of representation, which had a deep influence on literary writing as well. The term had first been used in Korea in the 1920s to describe depictions of rural Korea, primarily in Western-style painting.49 By the late 1930s, however, the notion of local color had become central to academic painting, and this is where the controversy over the concept arises, as it became the dominant mode through which Korean artists could enter the imperial realm of painting. In the art world the medium for the dissemination of this aesthetic was the annual Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai, or Korea Art Exhibition, organized by the Government General from 1922, and the main route through which Korean artists could attain recognition both in Korea and in the Japanese metropolis. From the mid-1930s the criteria of “revealing Korean color” was openly acknowledged to be the guiding standard for the exhibition’s judges, who were Japanese. In 1939 one of those judges, Yazawa Kengetsu, set out those criteria in the Tonga ilbo, demanding that Korean painters “absorb the superior technique of the central art circles” in order to depict the “peninsula’s long traditions” and such “peninsula-like things” as “characteristic color” with the “accurate observation of nature and a free but pure and fresh expressive technique.”50 Local color depicted rural Korean scenes and focused on aestheticized but marginal subjects, such as women, children, old people, animals, and landscape. Such paintings, done by both Korean and resident Japanese artists, were popular in the marketplace. Not surprisingly, the use of color with emphasis on primary colors—red earth, blue skies, yellow stone bridges— helped supplement the depiction of an exoticized rurality, which helped to stabilize the representation of rural Korea as part of the greater imperial realm, and as generally happy, calm, and content, if mysterious. Local color was also influential in the field of amateur art photography, as we saw in chapter 1.51 In the exoticizing world of local color, emphasis is on color, on light, and on nature, but the static conventions allow little sense of historical change, of the transformations brought about both to people’s lives and

C6548.indb 166

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

167

to the landscape by industrialization and urbanization, and no sense of the agency of human beings, who are depicted as beautiful but passive. Most of all it reveals little sense of the ravages being inflicted on the countryside by the colonial economy, or of the possibility that the millions of peasants might oppose their treatment under the colonial regime. As a form of looking at Korea, local color was beloved of Japanese residents and scholars, as well as of many urban Koreans who lamented the loss of scenes of their childhood or country homes they had left behind to live in the city. It could perform a pictorial supplement to the nostalgia craze—driven by the speed of change in Korean society, by fantasies projected onto the Korean landscape, and by the market. Local color was, then, not perceived as dangerous by the colonial government, at least prior to the onset of deep war. It might seem that Ch’oe would not object to such an aesthetic. Yet Ch’oe’s critique of local color in his elaboration of kokumin bungaku raises fears of other significations enabled through the idea of locality. The problem, Ch’oe wrote, lay not in writing about beautiful or old Korean things but rather in the way in which Korea was presented. Recently there were many who seemed to form a “trend to huddle together in a small ball of just Korea” while making great effort to have “no contact with the outside world.”52 Today the idea of “Korea for Korea’s sake alone was not possible.” To write and research about Korean things must be done as a member of the Japanese imperial people (kokumin) and not with the goal of presenting the idea of a separatist or culturally independent Korea. Ch’oe quotes some unnamed authorities, who state that many writers believe that it was their duty to “protect Korea’s independence even if only in literature or culture.”53 Under the new regime the particularity of culture was supposed to acquire new importance as the embodiment of the larger whole of the Japanese nation. Yet this was a fraught and conflicted process. When did local beauty suggest an independent locality and when did it gesture metonymically to a larger, more beautiful whole? And what was that whole? Ch’oe was in praise of the new regime and the idea that it would no longer rely on Tokyo culture and its shallow “imitation of decadent European culture” but reappraise and value the culture of localities. And yet he was fully aware that this project in itself— and the idea of multiple centers without hierarchy that was announced as a defining feature of the new world order—would inevitably raise the question of the status of those other centers. A chief goal and conundrum for kokumin bungaku would be the representation of those centers as instantiations of a beautiful Japanese nation that was all-inclusive of other cultures. Could the

C6548.indb 167

8/29/14 9:22 AM

168 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

metonymy be controlled, so that the gesture pointed to the Japanese nation and not an independent Korea? “If love for the homeland falls into sentimentalism, that is not a simple artistic problem, but a political problem,”54 Ch’oe warned, and writers should be mindful not only of their own intentions but of the different thoughts their works might inspire in their readers. The idea and project of kokumin bungaku was presented as a fundamental critique and revision of the past, including its modes of literary and cultural representation. It articulated a critique of liberal individualism and the excesses of the free market, seen to be embodied in the decadent and sickly tales of the sasosŏl; it showed surprising convergences with proletarian literature and its yearnings for a collectivity yet denied the radical impulse of the latter for equality and political inclusion, and its fundamental readings of the class structure of society and exploitation of peasants and workers; and it presented a revision of colonial representation in its qualified criticism of the conventions of colonial nativism. In short, it promised a veritable revolution in representation. Kokumin bungaku thus shared modernism’s concern to identify itself with change in the present. To do so it resorted to a temporal rhetoric of lateness, taking on itself the goal of sweeping away the decadent remnants of late individualism. The idea of lateness declares the imminence of change as renewal—a brand new start—but also highlights the problem of narrating change within the historical consciousness of modernity, which denotes nothing more than the present. Especially when they become as widespread as in 1940s Korea, concepts such as lateness attempt to open up the homogeneous time of the modern but end up bringing the term into crisis instead, as the difficulty of locating the present and change is brought into view.55 To present itself as new, kokumin bungaku had to move beyond these temporal figures and propose some concrete ideas for the form it might take.

“Art I s P olitic s” Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s attack on the most popular representational forms of his day reveals the degree to which the project of kokumin bungaku was elaborated as a negative critique. Imperialization strove not only to replace a sense of Korean national identity with a belief in oneself as a member of the Japanese people, subjects to the Shōwa emperor, but also attempted to eradicate the belief both in communism and in the imagined autonomous entity of the

C6548.indb 168

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

169

liberal individual. The negative critique was aimed not so much at replacing a definitive Korean identity with something everyone recognized as Japanese but involved the cultivation of a particular kind of subject who would subjugate individual desires and interests to the collective known as the Japanese imperial-national people, or kokumin. It would cultivate, in other words, willing participants in the ongoing war. That war was fought in the name of a new world order, one in which the figurative entity of the West no longer held global hegemony, and one in which the conflicts and crises of capitalism were resolved with the interests of landowners and industrialists intact. Class conflict, unevenness between the country and the city, and even the ugly disturbance of colonial unrest would disappear, not through liberation from colonial exploitation but through the reimagination of the colony as one more region of the imperial nation. The new world order was a modernist dream: all the conflicts and contradictions of modernity erased but with its technology, economy, and class structure intact, and staffed by happy peasants in their rural idyll and efficient workers in clean, fast-moving cities. Ch’oe’s elucidation of kokumin bungaku as a resolution to the conflicts of previous representational orders coincides with this wartime, modernist imagination of the new regime. The focus on the literal ills that have brought about the current crisis and the contradictions that imperialization claims to resolve heightens the sense of the wartime project as a modernist project engaged in the kind of “creative destruction” that David Harvey has described as the modernist response to capitalist crisis.56 Something would have to be destroyed in order for the new to be produced; according to the ideology of modernism, at least, the past could be swept away. Toward the end of his book Ch’oe switches his focus away from the critique that has dominated thus far and begins to elaborate what should constitute the new representational order of the imperial-national literature. As he stresses, the project cannot be entirely one of negation but must also engage in some kind of creation to produce the vision of the future conjured up as resolution to crisis. To phrase the problem in terms of writing, Ch’oe asks, “For the past five or six years, haven’t Korean writers been thinking much more about how not to write than how to write?”57 The apparently simple question betrays a plethora of signification, suggesting the ongoing issues of censorship, declining publication possibilities with the closure of newspapers and journals, and the problems involved in imagining a response to the dramatic events of the past few years. If certain forms of writing and narratives no longer seemed relevant or appropriate, then what did? Ch’oe’s answer is brusque and decisive:

C6548.indb 169

8/29/14 9:22 AM

170

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

there are only two kinds of war literature—that written by participants on the battlefield with the desire to win, and that written by those on the sidelines with a cynical attitude that exaggerated the tragedy of war. Koreans had not the experience to write the former, nor were they allowed to write the latter, but with the introduction of the compulsory draft in 1942, the opportunity was finally open to Koreans, too, to write the literature of the battlefield.58 War resolved the impasse in writing; destruction would bring about creation. In the latter half of Ch’oe’s book we witness the stunning move into what Alan Tansman has recently named the “fascist moment.” In his study on the aesthetics of Japanese fascism Tansman writes that “fascist moments offered images of self-obliteration evoked through the beauty of violence, oft en in the name of an idealized Japan.”59 In these moments the individual is shown merging imaginatively with a “greater whole,” a process that Tansman draws on Christopher Bollas’s psychological analysis of fascism to describe: “an inclination to thoughts, feelings, and acts of binding that purge the mind of the messy diversity of contradictory views and fills the gap left by that purging with ‘material icons’ . . . through this ‘special act of binding’ to a force greater than itself, the mind ‘ceases to be complex’ and achieves a state of simplicity.”60 The predominant icon in Japanese aesthetic fascism was, Tansman writes, the emperor, who makes his first appearance one-third of the way into Ch’oe’s book and thereafter remains a constant presence. It is worth considering this first imperial appearance some more for what it reveals about the “messy” state of mind of the Korean critic. The essay is perhaps one of the most personal for Ch’oe as it tackles the problem of what the new literary criticism should become.61 Beginning with a section titled “The Japanese Way of Thinking,” Ch’oe pursues the question of the “Japanese spirit” and the ideal form of criticism that it should produce. There are two fundamental problems to overcome, Ch’oe writes, one being that criticism is an inherently conservative practice, and the second being that criticism has relied too much on the West.62 The problems raise the awkward position of the Korean literary critic who is a scholar of British literature during the age of imperialization. “Japanese literary critics,” Ch’oe writes, and by this point critics in Korea are included in this group, “have set up a phantasmatic barrier, which they have faced brandishing their swords. On the other side a contest with real swords, on this side solitary sumo. Criticism on the other side was from the beginning real criticism, while on this side it was phantasmatic.”63 As in other colonial contexts around the world in the late nineteenth

C6548.indb 170

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

171

and early twentieth centuries, Ch’oe laments an understanding of the world in which reality is seen as existing in the West while the East is forced to understand itself as a mere phantasm, both haunted and haunting. Benedict Anderson referred to this situation as the “spectre of comparison,” drawing on José Rizal’s classic articulation of colonial enlightenment nationalism in Noli me tangere (1887), where the budding nationalist returns to the Philippines from Europe to find that “he can no longer matter-of-factly experience” the scenery of colonial Manila but sees it “simultaneously close up and from afar,” “shadowed” by the European cityscape.64 Here the colonial intellectual is haunted by the fear of being backward, imitative, or even unreal. The new world order offers Ch’oe the hope of liberation from such anxiety and the prospect of literally returning to the real and, to borrow his prescient metaphor, of brandishing real swords. Concretely, for him the task of the critic now was not only to write a new national literary history but to rewrite the literary history of the world, and so scholarship of European literatures would also play its part in the construction of the new world order. The task would be not to “simply understand foreign literatures but to take up the position of critiquing them.”65 As a scholar of British literature, Ch’oe would no longer conceive of his task as to interpret British literature for a Korean readership but take on its active critique on the stage of world literature. Returning to the real for Ch’oe opens up the Pandora’s box of the return to the East. As a colonized subject of the Japanese empire, for him to recover a sense of subjectivity against the West did not entail the more usual nativist move in this age of imperialization but involved the adoption of an entirely new lineage of tradition, which the inherently “conservative” nature of criticism might otherwise reject. For the real is entered not through an egalitarian vision of the world but through the realization of the Japanese spirit and the values that are anchored by the figure of the emperor: In Japan, such things have been rationalized as the fact that the root of value lies in the emperor, and that the state is not a mechanical agglomeration of individuals but a relationship between the emperor and his children, thus a relationship between endowing with value and bringing that value to life, and so, in other words, the concrete realization of the emperor as the place where value is produced; consequently the relationships between the national land and the people, and between the state and the family, also come to be seen from a different point of view.66

C6548.indb 171

8/29/14 9:22 AM

172 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

Even a dead son can be reborn as a literary project launched in the name of the state. Ch’oe proclaims that “reality in literature too” must be rethought from the “traditions and physical constitution” of the Japanese people, that artistic icons and symbols will take on “new meaning,” and that the “superstition” of the individual forming the source of value will be cleared up; instead of providing sensual entertainment for the individual, literature will make “active pronouncements through national cultivation as an integral pleasure.” He concludes, “when we think about it, when all these limitless, many problems have been cleared up through the Japanese way of thinking, then a Japanese structure of criticism has been established. Enacting this is the sacred duty entrusted to we critics today.”67 Reading Ch’oe I cannot but sense the attraction to him of the opportunity to enter into a reality that has been denied him. Criticism will feel real, and reality in literature will have a concrete anchor and a tradition that can be invoked and trusted. The repetition of the notion of realness and concreteness, replacing sickness and despair, is striking. Rhetorically the essays, gathered together in the order in which they were written, seem to move from a sense of inevitability to a sense of faith. In the early pages of the book the changes demanded of Korean writers and critics are presented in terms of inevitability—we will have to change what we write and think anyway, and so we might as well change of our own accord.68 By the end of the book the structure of being forced to do something—the colonial structure—has been substituted for the proffered opportunity to be a part of reality. That reality for Ch’oe meant not only feeling himself a subject against the dominant West but feeling himself relieved of the colonial burden. When Ch’oe discusses the concrete literary policies of kokumin bungaku, the loss of writing in Korean is more than recompensed by the possibility of liberating oneself from the restrictions that come with being Korean within the Japanese empire. Ch’oe adopts the new view of the Japanese empire as a nation without centers. While embracing the idea of the decentering of metropolitan culture, however, he nevertheless holds on to his own hierarchy within empire. To many, Korean literature becoming a regional literature might well connote disdain for its long traditions and reduction of status to the level of a Kyūshū literature, for example, but Ch’oe criticized those, both Korean and Japanese, who advanced such ideas of the new regime.69 Ch’oe preferred the comparison to British literature and the British empire: Korea should be thought of more like Scotland than Kyūshū, a nation with a long and distinguished tra-

C6548.indb 172

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

173

dition that maintained its own distinctiveness while using the imperial language. In the past, he wrote, when language had still been an issue—in other words, before the almost total shutdown of Korean-language publishing— the comparison had often been made to Ireland, but this was “dangerous.”70 Dangerous no doubt because Ireland had separated from the United Kingdom a mere couple of decades earlier, and because there was a long history throughout Japan’s colonial rule of discussing the situation in Korea through recourse to the historical parallels with Ireland.71 Likening Korean literature to that of Scotland raised the prospect of Korean literature being considered an integral part of a Japanese national literature, thus adding “richness” to its metropolitan partner.72 Henceforth Korea would not have to be a margin but an equal part of the center. For Ch’oe, speaking and writing Japanese was not a bad price to pay for such a reward, one senses. The “complexity” that is replaced with “simplicity” for Ch’oe is the very burden of being marked as a colonized subject. Yet if such a substitution makes a certain sense, the stunning fashion in which Ch’oe moves into the fascist moment causes pause for breath. “How can we explain the serious fact that many millions of people have thrown away their lives for the emperor without the slightest regret but have felt the ultimate glory in the act? What could provide clearer evidence that the emperor is the font of value? If only this were a life worth throwing away without regret, for the sake of the lord and the world.”73 A meaningful life, Ch’oe writes in 1942, is one that sacrifices itself for the emperor. By this time Ch’oe was actively praising the implementation of a compulsory draft in Korea, urging young Koreans to find the meaning of their lives in dying for Japan, pressing Korean writers to join in the glorification of the emperor and the emperor’s war and dissuading them from casting the present moment in terms of gloom and doom. If this seems like an instrumental use of literature of the kind the modernist critic might be expected to disdain, it was not according to the terms with which he newly defined the relationship between art and politics: “Politics has the same objective as culture, and, above all, the arts. Therefore, art is not an instrument of politics but in the highest possible sense the very essence of politics.”74 In the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art—in effect in the abolition of any distance between the two spheres— Ch’oe repeats a common tendency of early twentieth-century fascism, noted perhaps most memorably by Walter Benjamin in Nazi Germany with his famous statement that “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”75

C6548.indb 173

8/29/14 9:22 AM

174 imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

Ch’oe’s fascism lies not merely in the way he closes the distance between the aesthetic and the political, asking both of them to call on the sacrifice of individual life for the collective. It also espouses a certain aesthetic form. In a short essay titled “What Is Poetic?” Ch’oe argues that the move into a new historical period should be accompanied by a change in the standard of beauty.76 He would like, he writes, contemporary poets to reply to the question posed in the title of his essay with the following answer: “Beauty lies in a multitude of things working with a single intent.”77 Of course, this might not sound so different from previously held notions of the unity of an artwork or Ch’oe’s earlier demand that the new urban novels reflect some unitary principle, but in case the new beauty might be mistaken for the old, Ch’oe includes some examples. The new beauty is to be discovered in an entire school’s worth of children marching in formation, revealing a form of “communal beauty” that both transcends the beauty of the individual’s movement and reveals the intention of a whole entity transcending individual desire. Such children were, moreover, not acting mechanically or like wooden puppets obeying some formal rule of rhythm but acting in concert with the intention of the whole. According to this criteria for beauty it was perhaps inevitable that the ultimate display of beauty was to be discovered in modern warfare.78 It was lamentable, he added, that few artworks had been produced that managed to express this ideal. Whereas the art of late individualism had pursued the beauty of isolation, a reflection of decadence and decay, the keywords for the new poetics were wholeness and unity. The new aesthetic would transcend individual experience to present a wider world, but it would have to do so in a particular way. If the new beauty should look outward from inner decay, it should do so in a fashion distinct from previous representations by locating itself in a space transcending country and city and presenting the “repetitive customs of unification.”79 The aesthetics of wholeness displayed in the mass unity of intention should present a different kind of wholeness, that of a geopolitical whole in which the crucial modern divisions of social space were transcended or, rather, obscured. Class division, regional differentiation, and the metropolecolony divide would no longer be representable. The outcome of such wholeness would be nothing less than happiness. In a short essay titled “Happy Literature” Ch’oe wrote of his new year’s wish that he might offer readers something happy to read.80 Again the crucial element in the production of happiness was the overcoming of division and contradiction. Ch’oe returned to the subject of the divide between popular or mass

C6548.indb 174

8/29/14 9:22 AM

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

175

culture and the so-called pure literature. Happy literature should not be confused with the mass urban entertainment that had catered to the masses, nor should it be equated with the insular, intellectual writing in which purity had been attained at the cost of the loss of a sense of a whole. Moreover, so much of the pure literature had been uninteresting and downright insipid, according to Ch’oe.81 Even the new tales of conversion to imperialization, Ch’oe wrote, revealed a tendency to prolong the focus on the intellectual’s mental life and the anguished path taken to adopt the new position of imperial subject.82 Happy literature would represent imperial subjection as joyous; it would appeal to all sectors and classes of society and in doing so attest to the existence of the people, the kokumin, living happily without division and conflict but according to one intention. It would express the joy of imperialization. That joy might be attained through forms not usually conceived of as particularly joyful. The entire sensibility of the masses had changed, Ch’oe argued, such that love stories and erotic literature no longer appealed. As the enormity of the war became apparent, what was needed was a “huge tragedy”: “I wish that there could be a tragedy that would burn us up in one sweep, cleansing us of the unhealthy hobbies and dregs of the past.”83 To those who might protest, Ch’oe argued that the tragedy he desired was not a tragedy in the ordinary sense of the word but in its truly literary sense. Here his training as an English-literature scholar comes to the fore. Such a tragedy would bring catharsis and sublimity; it would wipe away complexity, leaving the simplicity of relief at its end. As the only form that could give expression to the depth and enormity of the feelings that the people held in their breasts, Ch’oe wrote, tragedy would bring happiness at this time. Tragedy would, of course, also present the nobility and inevitability of death in order to provide for the cyclical renewal of the political order, just as Shakespeare—Ch’oe’s cited example—produced in Elizabethan England. We might well recall Fortinbras entering at the end of Hamlet to take up power, looking over all the dead bodies including that of Hamlet, who might “have proved most royally” had he survived. If a good man has died, instead of tears there is an accounting, the calm that follows a bloodbath, and the knowledge that a state of order has been restored. The catharsis of true tragedy returns me to the beginning of Ch’oe’s book and his dedication of the work to the spirit of his dead child Kang:84 “When you died, I vowed that I would raise our newly born Kokumin bungaku in your memory.” The linkage of personal tragedy to the project of the new journal of imperial-national literature suggests how Ch’oe forged his own merging

C6548.indb 175

8/29/14 9:22 AM

176

imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

of the individual with the collective or whole through the medium of literary criticism. It also stimulates the narrative of death and redemption through rebirth into the new imperial state that Ch’oe demanded of his fellow Korean intellectuals. In this sense the death of Kang can be assuaged, although not forgotten, by the alternative future proposed by the project of imperialization. That alternative future is presented as a return to origins, a realization that he had been Japanese all along. Writing in Japanese enacts this return, with every word attesting to the circular return to the origin and the cyclical nature of imperial time. In the next chapter I consider whether the emperor’s language could attest only to imperial time, or whether it could also attest to the “messy diversity” of the colonial present. At a time of prevailing interest in the past and struggle to imagine a workable future, Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s essays suggest how the project of imperialization and adoption of imperial subjecthood could make sense to a colonized Korean intellectual; indeed how it could break a perceived widespread impasse and provide a believable future. The long negative critiques that Ch’oe elaborates as a basis for the desire for renewal show an unease and discontent with social unevenness that shared aspects of the wider modernist discourse in late colonial Korea. Yet the new vision of the imperial nation would bring meaning to life only through death and the catharsis of tragedy. The cost of this merging of modernism with fascism was surely a tragedy, but not of the cathartic kind.

C6548.indb 176

8/29/14 9:22 AM

6 TAKING POSSESSION OF THE EMPEROR’S LANGUAGE Just as I was passing in front of the elementary school [kokumin gakkō], I walked into two lines of children—in second grade perhaps?—flowing out of the school gates for an outing in the charge of four or five teachers and noisily making merry in two military columns. With hands held in pairs and little rucksacks on their backs, what should I say, the procession was lively and bright? I stood still, unaware of the passing of time, and watched over that winding procession of little national subjects [shōkokumin] until its tail had flowed out into the street, kicking up dust. And then, all of a sudden, I thought I could see my own five children in their midst—and wasn’t that Mr. S’s youngest son too and K’s grandchildren also?—I could hardly hold all my thoughts together. Kim Namch’ŏn, “One Morning”

Th e f i na l s e n t e n c e s o f K i m N a m c h ’ŏ n ’s s h o rt s t o ry “One Morning” (“Aru asa”), published in 1943 in Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s journal Kokumin bungaku, present a scene that should be exemplary of Ch’oe’s aspirations for a new standard of beauty: children marching in formation, revealing the intention of a whole entity transcending individual desire.1 Instead of the communal beauty of intent, however, the reader is presented with a melancholic take on the future embodied in the cheery procession of children seen through the eyes of the onlooker watakushi (I).2 The source of that melancholy derives from one word—shōkokumin—for these handholding couplets, making merry on their way to a picnic in two military columns, appear to this protagonist as imperial-national subjects in training. The military arrangement of the little children produces the opposite of unity in his mind, however, as he hallucinates his own children mixed up with the descendants of personages of quite different ethical and political stances as the dignified editor Mr. S and the ambitious businessman K, who have been encountered earlier in the story. Here harmonious unity seems less like a desirable dream than

C6548.indb 177

8/29/14 9:22 AM

178 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

an uneasy vision of the future where difference has been folded into the collective. And yet, another subsumption of difference has also taken place here, which allows the story to be written. This is Kim’s first and only known story written in Japanese, thereby overcoming the “inconvenient difference,” as it was termed by one colonial civil servant at the time, of the Korean language.3 Throughout the colonial era some writers had written fiction in Japanese: some aligning their destiny with the prestige of the imperial language, some dreaming of a larger readership for fame or recognition, or with the goal of pleading the injustices stemming from the colonial occupation to a metropolitan audience and beyond.4 For writers whose language of higher education was Japanese—and by far the majority of writers had made the pilgrimage to the imperial center where they studied to various degrees—the imperial language held a more intimate relationship with the culture of modernity. As state policy on language use within the colony changed during the late colonial era, however, to this degree of difference of prestige and readership was added the threat of the nuzzle of the gun. Clearly Korean writing was seen as more than superfluous, perhaps even dangerous to the colonial authorities, and, indeed, the variety of expression in post-1940 Korean writing attests to what it still enabled despite censorship and surveillance. As the Sino-Japanese War developed and later a second front opened up, venues for Korean print dwindled, and speaking and writing Japanese became aligned with the importance of dying for Japan to become an imperial subject. This brought pressure to bear on those who had made the manipulation of Korean letters their life’s work to bear witness to a new commitment to Japanese letters. “One Morning” was not, then, the first story a Korean had written in Japanese, but it was written by someone who was already established as a writer in the Korean language and who was not writing to a putative metropolitan audience but primarily to the literary community on the peninsula. Kim Namch’ŏn had risen to fame as a leader in the KAPF movement, had served a two-year prison sentence from 1931 to 1933, and had served notice in 1935 alongside Im Hwa of the dissolution of KAPF. Since then he had written both fiction and literary criticism prolifically, including many stories that were read as based on his own life in the wake of the end of KAPF. Like Sŏ Insik, he is known as one of the converted. Fluent in Japanese, he had nevertheless pursued his writing career and intellectual life in his primary language of Korean, until deep into wartime that is. By early 1943, with the exception of the more popular journal Chogwang and some propaganda magazines, there were not many venues left in which to publish fiction. Emblazoned across the cover

C6548.indb 178

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

179

of Kokumin bungaku were the words “The Korean peninsula’s only magazine for the arts.” Even the briefest of readings of some of the stories published in Kokumin bungaku reveals the fallacy of the presumption that stories written in Japanese necessarily subscribed to Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s vision of the future. What emerged in the face of pressure to utilize the imperial language and describe a destiny of happiness was often far more uncertain and circumspect. However much Ch’oe Chaesŏ may have yearned for the catharsis of tragedy that would sweep away all uncertainty and replace it with the clarity of decision and commitment, the stories published in his journal—perhaps with the exception of the stories he himself began to publish—tended to offer a more nuanced and decidedly ambiguous narrative of both present and future.5 In “One Morning” that future approaches inexorably with the anticipated birth of a child, but the moment of emergence is weighed down by a web of memories that prevent the sublimation of messy diversity and a clean break with the past. After liberation, the mere fact that such a story had been written and published in Japanese could label its author a collaborator with the wartime regime, yet rereading Kim’s story we see a preoccupation with themes already established in Korean-language fiction. Kim’s story enables me, then, to draw a close to this book with a consideration of the impact late colonial language policies had on the modernist imagination.

The I nconvenience of Different L anguages Perhaps a good place to begin a discussion of language policy in the late colonial period would be March 1938, when the Government General announced its third revision to the Chōsen Education Code in which Korean language was recategorized as an elective language at schools.6 The change marks a new centrality of Japanese language to the conception of the imperial nation, which the colony was to join. All classes would now be taught in Japanese. The announcement formalized a policy of state monolingualism in which the language spoken in everyday life in the colony was declared superfluous to the realm of state-sponsored knowledge and literacy. This was not merely a case of loss of prestige and authority as a language of culture. As if to expel any doubts about the wide-ranging import of the change in status, Governor General Minami Jirō’s announcement clearly stated the goal of the policy to be the enhancement of imperialization and linked the revision of the

C6548.indb 179

8/29/14 9:22 AM

180 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

Education Code to the promulgation of the Voluntary Armed Forces Code, which had appeared a couple of months earlier and allowed Koreans to “volunteer” for the Imperial Army. If imperialization was the ultimate purpose of both revisions, read the announcement, the elimination of linguistic unevenness would ease discrimination between those who could and could not speak the imperial language. Thus the explicit linkage between language use and wartime state violence was accompanied by the bittersweet promise that all might die an even death in Japanese. As the war deepened toward a second front, there was pressure placed on writers not only to write in Japanese but to produce fiction whose themes were aligned with the wartime cause. In early 1941 Yanabe Nagasaburō advised Im Hwa that there was “poetry in the shooting of a gun,” heralding a shift in the presentation of state-defined aesthetics in the colony. Yanabe was speaking as representative of the newly established Total Mobilization Federation (Ch’ongnyŏk yŏnmaeng / Sōryoku renmei) in an interview designed to explain to writers in the colony what their role under the changing policies was expected to be. A major focus of that interview lay in differentiating the regime of total mobilization from previous occupation policies, even those as recent as the Spiritual Mobilization campaign (Chŏngshin ch’ongdongwŏn / Seishin sōdōin) inaugurated a mere two years earlier, which had included the reform to the Voluntary Armed Forces Code and the Education Code that had rendered Korean supplementary. At the crux of the changes, according to Yanabe, lay a newly activist approach to the question of culture that moved beyond control and surveillance to conceive of the state as a producer of culture. This approach was to include the colonies, now absorbed into the imperial nation as regions, demanding the production of a regional culture that would allow for a fuller mobilization of human and material resources, including, ultimately, the forced draft announced in 1942. The imperial language became an important figure in the imagination of that regional culture in the colonial official’s mind and also on behalf of those who were expected to cease the use of their primary language for most public purposes. The possibilities for artistic experimentation in Korean dwindled rapidly, thus provoking the dilemma of whether to continue a literary project in a secondary language, the imperial language. Total mobilization of the population did not send every person out onto the battlefield but rather called on them in their own professional fields to respond to the war effort and the “spirit of the times.” This point was stressed in the first of two interviews with high-ranking Government General officials

C6548.indb 180

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

181

that were published in the popular journal Chogwang early in 1941.7 The magazine sent two of Korea’s leading literary figures—the poet, critic, and former leader of KAPF Im Hwa and Kim Saryang (1914–50), a young writer who had recently caused a sensation by coming in runner-up for Japan’s most prestigious literary honor, the Akutagawa Prize—to meet up with the officials responsible for implementing the new regime in the field of culture in both Korea and Japan. The main item on the agenda was the proposed rearticulation of Korean culture as a regional culture of the imperial nation: What would this entail exactly? What was to become, as all concerned phrased it, of the “particularity” of Korea? And what would become of the language that not only had come to represent the heart of that particularity but was also the material accretion of everyday social relations on the peninsula? Im Hwa’s meeting with Yanabe Nagasaburō took place on January 15 in the offices of the Total Mobilization Federation in Seoul, where Yanabe had recently been appointed chief of the federation’s newly founded Culture Section.8 In the photographs published to accompany the interview, Yanabe sits back imperiously in an armchair, holding a teacup close to his chest, a small, gray-haired, balding man peeking over tiny, gold-rimmed glasses. The much younger Im Hwa perches intensely on the edge of his chair, leaning into the interview, cigarette in hand, teacup on his knees, a mass of black hair and thick, black-framed glasses highlighting the hierarchy of age that separates them. If Yanabe’s posture already betrays a lifetime as a civil servant, his relentless dodging of Im’s questions reveals his mastery of the noncommittal utterance. The reader can almost sense Im’s frustration at the impossibility of building up a two-way conversation and at being unable to do any more than listen to the commonplace obfuscations of the aged civil servant. The first several pages of the interview focus on the relationship between the federation and previously existing cultural groups, such as the Association of Literary Figures in Korea formed during the National Spiritual Mobilization campaign of 1938. In other words, how would total mobilization differ from spiritual mobilization, and exactly what role would the new movement play in the lives of cultural workers? Surprisingly, Yanabe musters the greatest detail and enthusiasm when he is discussing the formal priority of setting up a proper structure for the organization and appointing directors and secretaries for the new section. Pushed by Im to distinguish the new Culture Section from already existing departments of education and censorship, with their administrative role in surveillance to ensure that cultural activities did not “stray from the route of the state’s point of view,” Yanabe stresses that the new

C6548.indb 181

8/29/14 9:22 AM

182 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

section will not restrict itself to “passive” management but will actively strive to shape culture and to push cultural activities in certain directions.9 In this sense, he says, the federation’s role is much larger even than one of control (tōsei), which the federation will direct at writers.10 The question of culture was posed through the relationship of cultural activities to realms such as politics and everyday life, which had been conceived as separate spheres of human activity in the liberal culturalism that had dominated the previous two decades in both Japan and Korea. If Im had fought the separation of culture from politics in the past, more recent critiques of culturalism from a totalitarian point of view must have left him wanting to claim some kind of distinctiveness for the cultural realm. But Yanabe’s answers become briefer and more ominous when he is prodded to explain how he understands culture as head of the Culture Section. In response to Im’s view that, although culture is not separate from politics and daily life, it is distinct from them in certain ways, Yanabe tersely asserts that culture must form part of an organic whole along with politics and the economy. Im shifts to a military scene to argue that cultural workers are distinct from soldiers in that they are not required to make immediate decisions faced with an enemy on the battlefield; thus the firing of a gun and the writing of a novel are not the same but distinct activities demanding their own rules. This is when Yanabe utters his stark reply: “There is poetry in the shooting of a gun too.” What was important at this moment, he stressed, was unity in support behind the frontlines.11 Henceforth cultural production would no longer be understood as a distinct realm of activity but would be expected to dedicate itself to the cause of war like all other areas of daily life. This raised the question of how Korean language cultural production would fit into the wartime vision. The two men’s positions seem to reflect the contiguous but differing policies of early and late colonial rule. It is jarring to read Im repeating the more liberalist logic of cultural policy as he argues that the imperial-national culture could be formed from exchange and harmony on the basis of distinct history and traditions. But perhaps he is trying to adopt the earlier colonial rhetoric in an attempt to seek legitimacy for a tentative critique of the more extreme present. Or perhaps he is trying to call in a promise, as his wording invokes the notion of naisen yūhwa (literally, harmony between the metropole and Korea), which had dominated colonial discourse during the 1920s when a degree of autonomy in the cultural sphere was accorded Koreans on the condition of “harmony” with Japan. This era had seen the full emergence of Korean print media and the literary scene in which Im

C6548.indb 182

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

183

had played such a central role, and at the same time it had displayed the regimes of censorship and surveillance that underwrote the liberal regime. The model that Im proposes for understanding the relationship between Japan and Korea is one of translation between two disparate but equivalent entities. Language with its capacity for translation could, Im argues, be productive for relations between Japan and Korea as it contained the universal thought they held in common.12 This would be the model that underlay the recent attempts to translate Korean literature into Japanese, seen, for example, in such projects as the three-volume collection of translated short fiction, Chōsen bungaku senshū, published in Tokyo in 1940, or in Im’s articles in mainstream Japanese literary magazines reporting on the literary scene in Korea.13 Yanabe’s response to this translational model suggests an entirely different set of relations that underlay the idea of Korea being rearticulated as a region of the imperial nation rather than a colony of the empire: When it was difficult to travel between Kyūshū and Tōhoku the languages spoken there were not at all similar, but now that such travel has become more frequent the languages are far more mutually comprehensible. Therefore, as travel to Korea becomes more frequent, they [Japanese and Korean languages] will gradually draw closer. Recently, many words have been imported into Korean from the metropole, and there are also many Korean words in Japanese. And then words like “ainoko” have appeared. When we think about it, languages tend naturally toward exchange. Above all, it would be most convenient for people in their daily lives if the languages were to become one. As there is nothing more inconvenient than different languages.14

Translation, with its capacity to create equivalence, would not be necessary or even allowed.15 It is soon clear that what Yanabe terms a natural process of exchange is more akin to an interdiction and silent burial. In the short term, use of the Korean language would be necessary to communicate with peasants in the provinces, Yanabe declares, but it is already unnecessary in “sophisticated discourse.” As the latter clearly encompasses the various literary and cultural linguistic projects undertaken by an intellectual such as Im, Yanabe’s intent was clear: speak and write in Japanese from now on. The Korean language would be recognized only as a language of class and used to entertain and inform the noneducated classes.

C6548.indb 183

8/29/14 9:22 AM

184 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

Yanabe calls the interview to an end, brushing off Im’s plea that he take “our side” with a brusque declaration that there are no “sides” but only cooperation. Despite Yanabe’s late assertion that this is all about cooperation, the interview clearly reveals its unequal nature. At one point Yanabe even utters a direct threat: “You must all make great efforts not to be misunderstood.”16 Far from mutual translation, in the new regime Koreans would have to speak to Japanese in the language which they understood. As they part Yanabe belatedly asks Im about his work, in reply to which Im talks briefly about a publication project to look at texts written in Chinese during the late Chosŏn period. Im is interested in the common interests in science shared by intellectuals in Tokugawa Japan, Qing China and Chosŏn Korea. This offers a very different model of cooperation based on the mutual translatability of classical Chinese and the grounds of a universal science to which the peoples of China, Japan, and Korea come as equals. The exchange between Im and Yanabe raises the question of how to understand the relationship between the new regime and the preceding colonial era. Leo Ching has written eloquently of how to consider the relationship between early and late colonialism in the Japanese empire, which is often distinguished in terms of dōka (assimilation) and kōminka (imperialization).17 The argument revolves around whether these should be conceived as distinct forms of colonial governmentality or understood on a continuum. To overdistinguish late colonial imperialization can have the effect of downplaying the inherently assimilative logic of earlier colonial rule. More important, it ties in with arguments in Japanese historiography that claim the war period as an aberration in Japan’s history of modernity. This in turn obscures the roots of the war in the unequal terms of that modernity. If only the war is rejected, then colonialism per se is not. Yet to reject such an exceptional understanding of the war period does not mean we cannot appreciate that from many anticolonial thinkers’ point of view there was a difference in the way in which assimilation was articulated in the late colonial period, which Ching summarizes as the new emphasis on Japanese identity being “acquired” through dying for the emperor on the battlefield.18 In Im and Yanabe’s exchange we see the shift in late colonialism presented as a move from translation, with its production of equivalence, however unequal, to dominance by one language and thus incorporation and silence. Both linguistic models were built on an unequal colonial hierarchy, but this does not render the difference insubstantial. For a poet who has composed verse in the language of his daily life and a literary critic who has dedicated

C6548.indb 184

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

185

recent years to chronicling the history of literature in the Korean language, the “inconvenience” of different languages left no future for one. We can trace the move between the two approaches to language in the issues of Kokumin bungaku: early issues have both Korean and Japanese language fiction before the journal becomes entirely Japanese language in production. Yet in early 1943, for example, the writer Yi T’aejun could see his story “The Stone Bridge” (“Toldari”) published in a Japanese-language translation by a certain Hiramoto Ippei, whereas thereafter the journal moved to fiction composed originally in Japanese by Korean and Japanese writers.19 The space for translation disappears. The move toward the eradication of translation clearly favored Japanophone writers, such as Kim Saryang. His conversation with Iwata Kunio seems to have been a more even-tempered affair.20 Iwata was the chief of the Culture Section of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Yokusankai), created by Prime Minister Konoe in 1940 as an all-encompassing association cum unified political party to promote the goals of the new regime movement. The two men are closer in age and meet in the Tokyo Imperial Hotel. The location seems appropriate for the young Korean writer and graduate in German literature from Tokyo Imperial University, who had caused a sensation when his short story “Into the Light” (“Hikari no naka ni”) was runner-up for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1939.21 “Into the Light” was a fictionalized account of a half-Japanese / half-Korean boy and his struggle with notions of ethnic identity, hailed by luminaries such as Kawabata Yasunari and Satō Haruo for the way in which it brought social issues into fiction.22 Although Kim also wrote and published in Korean, he had not thrived on the Korean literary scene prior to his success in Tokyo, which had immediately catapulted him to wide attention in his homeland. Having traveled in more ways than one to the heart of empire, Kim was now deemed the best mediator for Korean cultural issues in Tokyo, able to mingle with ease and linguistic and social fluency in the rarefied rooms of the Imperial Hotel. The magazine’s introduction to the interview locates its importance in the centering of the realm of “culture” under the new regime and the consequent concern in Korea about what this would mean for “particular cultures.” The notion of particular culture, which is also called “regional culture” in this interview, is the main subject of conversation between Kim and Iwata, along with the problem of how to deal with different languages, now termed dialects, within the new regime. The interview thus picks up on the two thorniest questions of the meeting between Im and Yanabe but in an altogether

C6548.indb 185

8/29/14 9:22 AM

186 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

more cordial atmosphere. The constant invocation of the notion of mutual “respect,” however, cannot disguise the contradictions in the rhetoric of the new regime, in which it is hard to distinguish between respect and annihilation. Iwata presents himself as reasonable, sympathetic, and demanding of all regions of Japan a transformation equal to that demanded of Korea. Nevertheless, he refuses to engage the unequal fashion in which this transformation might be carried out and the real life consequences for its subjects. At the heart of Iwata’s view on culture, which he claims disarmingly to be “merely his own private view,” lies a relentless modernism. What Yanabe terms exchange, Iwata calls modernization. Utmost importance was to be attached to the building of a new culture in line, of course, with the state’s current “cultural direction.” It was in this light that the problem of “promoting regional culture” was to be understood. Whereas Kim had begun the interview by pushing for a declaration that Korean culture was not a regional culture in the same sense as Shikoku or Hokkaidō, in other words by concentrating on the question of the legitimacy of Korea’s status as a region or a nation, Iwata chose to answer by emphasizing the importance of modernizing all regions, which presumed naturally that Korea’s history as an autonomous entity was over. Although a particular region’s history and traditions constituted the mainstay of the region, he says, it is important not to conceive of regional culture in a restorationist fashion.23 The region must be understood as a developing, growing entity and not be consigned to the past. This principle of progress applied to the Japanese metropole as well and would be the principle that would build a strong entity for the Japanese nation. The principle of progress applied equally to language, according to Iwata. A language was only living if it followed the laws of transformation and progress. It might well feel more comfortable to express one’s sentiments in one’s own dialect, but it was important for the future of the dialect to accept that it too was subject to change. For Iwata, change was a positive attribute, as suggested by his continual invocation of the notion of progress. It was important, however, to ensure that the direction of that progress was “correct.” Citing the example of the Ryūkyūan language, Iwata argues that while retaining its characteristics as a dialect, under analysis it reveals a gradual acquisition of a “Japanese nature.”24 This transformation is not necessarily one of a formal dimension but a case of the very nature of the language “becoming new.” Iwata explains this by saying that language comprises both progressive and conservative aspects, and that the conservative aspect of language

C6548.indb 186

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

187

must not be allowed to prevent the progress that language might otherwise take. He gives an example from the Japanese language, which he considered to be inherently conservative in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). With the Meiji Restoration there was an influx of progressive words and terms, often translated from European languages to refer to new concepts, which pitted the conservative language against a new language. The result, he concludes rather contradictorily, is a language holding the two aspects together in tension, and this constitutes a “weakness” of the Japanese language.25 Clearly the transformation of the Japanese language in contact with European languages is an example of progress in the wrong direction, whereas the transformation of the Korean language in contact with Japanese would be positive. What is positive for the regions and dialects, then, is not required for Japan and the Japanese language. Iwata calls on Korean intellectuals to help themselves and their fellow countrymen and women, by “sincerely” supporting the empire’s new language policy, stating, or threatening, paradoxically that it was “almost the only way to retain the tradition of a Korean language.”26 Again and again he urges that Korean intellectuals should not hold on to the past “too stubbornly,” for to do so would “hinder the development of a healthy culture.”27 Likewise the only way to “preserve” the Korean dialect was to assist in the project of spreading Japanese literacy among the Korean population. According to Iwata’s own rhetoric of reasonableness, it would be “clumsy policy” to completely kill off the Korean language, and so recognizing Korean as a historical (i.e., transient) and necessary demand would offer a better way toward its proper progress. Korean would be preserved through its acquisition of a Japanese nature and as a dialect of Japan. What exactly this meant other than the quality of being new was unclear. The main language used should be that of the metropole (naejiŏ/naichigo), and for this Iwata proposed two justifications: first, the use of Japanese would help bring about Japanese-Korean harmony, an argument that he does not elaborate; second, this would accord with the political idea of eliminating discrimination. The latter argument was a mainstay of the rhetoric of the new regime and, it should be acknowledged, was quite persuasive to a number of Korean intellectuals, particularly those fluent enough in Japanese language and customs to be able to pass in Japanese society. If there were no discrimination against Koreans, then it would not matter that different languages were used, but, in a standard pro-assimilation argument, the adoption of the

C6548.indb 187

8/29/14 9:22 AM

188 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

major language would eliminate that discrimination. The onus was placed entirely on the colonized Koreans to bring about the end of discrimination toward themselves, the blame for which was thus placed at their own feet.28 The interview with Iwata, couched in the language of benevolent colonialism/assimilationism, introduces a further rhetorical device that was central to the new regime’s self-presentation: the state of exception. Iwata claimed that he shared Kim’s “ideal” that the particular culture should add depth and breadth to Japanese culture with its “separate tradition,” but that something he called “reality” intervened: “We cannot say that in reality the preservation of the particularity of which you speak and the strengthening of the universal will always proceed in a ‘smooth’ fashion. Here, I believe that the exceptional complexity of this thing called reality intervenes. We have to consider these issues only after clearing our heads.”29 The reality of “supporting the frontline,” as Yanabe phrased it, demanded that ideals be cast aside and a less harmonious solution pursued. War allowed the rhetorical front of preserving the liberal ideals of mutual respect and cooperation while in effect demanding utter subordination.30 Nothing less than the “movement of the world” demanded that culture be “destroyed” in order to “protect” Japanese culture and to hold more “dazzling hopes.” Whereas the ideal would be a gradual and natural transformation of the Korean language, reality demanded that the transformation be enforced. The rhetoric of Iwata’s interview with Kim helps set the terms of that “reality” which Korea’s intellectuals confronted in the new regime. Korean culture was now considered a region of Japan, and the Korean language a dialect. Whether couched in gruff orders or benevolent claims of sympathy and ideals, the new regime meant the enforcement of a preexisting colonial hierarchy in which the realm of culture was singled out to take on unprecedented importance in the forging of an imperial unity. It was the rhetoric of the state of exception, in the concrete form of the world historical significance of war in Asia and the Pacific, that was mobilized to justify the policies enacted in Japan’s colonies. Writers such as Ch’oe Chaesŏ took up this cause and coproduced the rhetoric of the exceptional nature of reality. Ch’oe asserted that this reality had enabled him to recover a forgotten language of origin in the Japanese language that he had always loved. But what was a writer to do who could not believe in the redemptive value of imperialization? Was it possible to take possession of the imperial language without being possessed by the spirit of the emperor?

C6548.indb 188

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

189

One M orning “One Morning” is perhaps not the kind of story one might expect to find gracing the pages of Kokumin bungaku in the era of total mobilization, even if it is written in the imperial language. Even Ch’oe Chaesŏ described it as a “strange work,” although the word he chose for strange (mezurashii) suggests puzzlement of a more positive connotation.31 From its very title, Kim Namch’ŏn’s story signals to a different time within the state of exception. The so-called reality of the state of exception points to the cessation of routine and the postponement of some previously existing order to satisfy the urgency and extraordinariness of the present moment, even as it installs its own routine as the time of imperial warfare. But “One Morning” takes us to the heart of the most mundane of routines. To the time of the state of exception, Kim poses that of everyday life in perhaps its most paradigmatic form of reproduction and repetition, as its first-person protagonist watakushi (I) describes a morning walk with his children in Samchŏng Park in downtown Seoul as he waits for news of his wife, who is in labor with his fifth child. If this realm seems as far away from imperial life and wartime mobilization as one could get, it is not without its own history. This is the everyday that Choe Myŏngik had established as the repetitive time of the morning commute, that lay bare the social relations of the city, expanding under industrialization and military occupation, and that was revealed in Ch’oe’s case through the dynamic dissonance of description in a writing soon to be declared superfluous. It is the everyday that inhabits imperial time and here persists in the imperial language to mark the fissures in total mobilization. Kim Namch’ŏn’s story offers a good example of how stories in Kokumin bungaku continued to work through the temporal foreclosure that framed modernity in late colonial Korea. It does so through the thematization of one of the most potent symbols of the future: the child. The story takes the form of a brief sketch, written in the first person. It thus follows in the generic conventions of Pak T’aewŏn’s “Self-Portrait” in its stylized purport of autobiography, and the stream of consciousness of the flâneur-type rambles through Seoul and Pyongyang, which had become popular from the mid-1930s on in the fiction of Pak, Ch’oe Myŏngik, and Yi T’aejun, among others. Here watakushi’s rambling thoughts trail his wandering through the park, beginning with the desire to relive the nostalgic memory of being taken out of the space of the

C6548.indb 189

8/29/14 9:22 AM

190 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

house as his own mother was giving birth to his siblings. The story then layers the anxiety surrounding childbirth and the memory of the death, while giving birth, of watakushi’s first wife over his newly acknowledged desire for a first son and the realization, therefore, that he is not quite as “feminist” as he had once thought. This revisiting of the past in the present is woven through a different coexistence of past and present that is conjured up by the walk in the downtown park, where first the memory of dignified encounters with the well-known publisher S—who would ask after watakushi’s writing and children—are followed by an encounter, from a distance, with the personality K, a well-connected businessman who holds court with his entourage in the park. The two figures suggest the humble dignity and intellectual integrity of the past—not insignificantly as a pioneering publisher of Korean language books and journals—and the arrogance of those who have sold out to the wartime regime and thrive in the present. Through the contemporary narrative strategy of a walk through the city—albeit a park overlooking the city rather than the glittering and congested streets themselves—leading a walk through the mind, “One Morning” confronts the crucial question of how these pasts and presents will lead into the future of watakushi’s soon-to-be-born child and what kind of future that might be. Perhaps the most striking line in the story appears toward the end, when watakushi and his children have returned from the park and heard the news that their mother has safely delivered a baby son. Watakushi heads out again to work and passes an elementary school from which two rows of young children emerge, wearing tiny rucksacks and holding hands in pairs. He watches the “little kokumin” (shōkokumin) walk down the street and entertains the idea that in their midst are intermingled his own five children, the youngest child of S, and the grandchildren of K. The vision of all the children—despite their parents’ differing political positions—swept up into a flow of happy little kokumin is strangely melancholy and unelaborated. The final image of the story is arguably ambivalent, yet if the children seem happy and well, with their banal chatter they offer a peek into the mundanity of everyday life under fascism. The explicit naming of the children of such diverse figures being subsumed into one indiscriminate mass points to anxiety about no less than the future community. For when the children flow out of the school gates, what is envisioned is nothing less than the flow to the future. Kim’s story replaces the strident call for support of the war with a vision of the future that is far from decisive or clear. Everything that is messy has not been wiped clean here. The much hoped for birth of a son recalls Ch’oe

C6548.indb 190

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

191

Chaesŏ’s substitution of his own dead son with the project of Kokumin bungaku. A national future defined in the terms of patrilineal descent leads to a vision of the kokumin in both cases, but the structure of feeling is entirely different. In Kim’s hesitant version seems to disappear the very possibility of holding a divergent political opinion as the descendants of a heterogeneous history literally merge into a vision of unitary happiness. The ever present possibility of death is averted with the safe birthing, but the nature of life is called into question. In Ch’oe’s version death and mourning precede the rise of the kokumin, but this then promises only more death. Despite all Ch’oe’s efforts to present the draft—voluntary from 1938 and compulsory from 1942—as the opportunity to truly become imperial, it could not escape anyone’s attention that this opportunity arrived with the threat of impending death on the battlefield. As parents themselves and as members of the reformulated Association of Literary Figures in Korea, which demanded their involvement in the recruitment of young men—especially students—into the army, writers were keenly aware of the targeting of the child as boy soldier.32 That Kim’s story takes up not the honor of volunteering to fight for the empire or a noble sacrifice on the battlefield but rather a rambling and nuanced meditation on the birth of a son provides a different narrative of imperialization.33 What remains after the brave tales of martyrdom is the inexorable persistence of everyday life. The evocation of the everyday in “One Morning” conjures up a heterogeneous time where past, present, and future intermingle chaotically with only the fragile edifice of subjective consciousness to make sense of them. That consciousness faces the impossible, yet unavoidable, task of how to synthesize the memories and experiences of modernity into a coherent narrative: the establishment of Korean-language print culture and the current demand to write in another language, the forced renunciation of socialist beliefs and the rise of an opportunistic capitalist culture, and the fear for a son in a time of war. “One Morning” presents the entangled histories of nation, of commerce, and of political commitment as fundamentally subjective experiences to be managed through the short story form. In a sense the story responds to the demands of the wartime regime to effect a subjective transformation of the colonial population through imperialization, yet it hardly produces a willing soldier for empire. It turns from past events to memory and relocates history to the realm of personal experience, while the future hovers on an uncertain horizon. That history would be legible to the readers of “One Morning,” who all knew that Kim Namch’ŏn had been a major figure in the Communist Party

C6548.indb 191

8/29/14 9:22 AM

192 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

and had, in 1935, accompanied Im Hwa to the Tongdaemun police station to declare the abolition of KAPF. Another of the “former revolutionaries,” he was by this time working in a company and apparently driven by the need to look after a growing family.34 At the beginning of “One Morning,” watakushi ponders the speed of the passing of time when kept busy by daily work. Contemporary readers were well practiced in reading protagonists against the lives of their authors and would surely have identified watakushi with this author and been aware of the significance of this “turn” to daily work. The implication is that the time of the company and workplace has overwritten the time of the potential revolution. The impulse for this is named not as the desire to succeed in business but as the satisfaction of the needs of the family, and the entire story, with its focus on childbirth, centers on the reproduction of that family.35 Domesticity is shown once more to be not a shelter from the throes of colonial reorganization but the very space where the imperial subject confronts the event of imperialization. What holds the diverging strands together here, though, is one word: watakushi. The written character for the first-person pronoun is eschewed and the word spelled out phonetically as if to emphasize the strange weight of the oral tradition being conjured up to synthesize nothing less than history, experience, and everyday life. This is not a history that has been lived under that name and its tradition but one that has to be summoned up anew under a strangely exotic yet familiar sound. Watakushi points to the authorial distance of imperial culture and to what Jacques Derrida, in his moving meditation on his own relationship to the French language, called the “inaccessible authority of a master who lives overseas.”36 Born and raised in Algeria, Derrida described the ocean separating the colony from the metropole as a “chasm, an abyss” that helped figure a notion of “overthereness,” which connoted the hierarchical order of authority—military, economic, political, educational, intellectual—and placed its origin solidly at the heart of empire. The sea figured the colonial difference that distinguished the relationship of the French Algerian to Paris from that of the student from Provence or Brittany. Derrida’s “overthere” signals a distance and a spatial division that colonial Koreans would have understood well and referred to at the time as “across the straits.” That today there is still no single agreed on name for those narrow straits that separate the Japanese archipelago from the Korean peninsula hints at the geopolitical, even psychopolitical, nature of that spatial division.37 Watakushi conjures up the subject of the higher authority of the imperial power that is always conceived at a distance, even as it settles in physical proximity through colonial occupation in the colonial government

C6548.indb 192

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

193

and its institutions of army, school, and bureaucracy, and in the landlords and merchants of colonial economy. Yet watakushi also connotes the “here am I,” and the intimate enunciation of the subject. Here Kim Namch’ŏn’s “here am I” must also be distinguished a little from Derrida’s, for French was the first language for Derrida, despite all the strangeness of language per se and the abyss of the ocean that declared his French illegitimate. Kim had from birth spoken himself in a different tongue. Fluency in the colonizing language could not override the sense of something having come prior to this watakushi. Enouncing the overthere as the “here am I” denoted a schizophrenic state to be sure. Ch’oe Chaesŏ apparently salved this state with the discovery that he had been Japanese all along, thus finding in Japanese the priority of origin. But there is no such sense in Kim’s work. Here watakushi circles under the shadows of a small, wooded park on a downtown hill, neighboring the ancient palace of the now deposed monarch and familiar to all Seoul residents. Watakushi conjures up the self that wanders under the trees with small children, ruminating on a past history of personal encounters and beliefs and contemplating the future, which rests with the little people and not with this melancholy parent immersed in memory. “One Morning” describes nothing less than the reconstitution of the self demanded by imperialization and the impossible but inevitable task of enouncing “here am I,” watakushi.38 A brief return to Kim Saryang’s interview with Iwata Kunio, discussed earlier in this chapter, provides another sense of the weight of this here am I and exposes the necessarily divided state of national subjects, both within and between themselves. One noticeable difference between Im Hwa and Kim Saryang’s interviews with colonial officials lies in the repetition of the first-person-plural pronoun uri by Im and a different repetition by Kim of subjects such as “the Korean intelligentsia,” “Korean intellectuals,” and “Korean people of culture,” or such phrases as “now in Korea.” In his interview Kim Saryang places himself as a mediator between Iwata and Korean intellectuals by not taking up the first-person plural, as if asserting to Iwata, when stressing that intellectuals in Korea were not opposing the new measures, that “they understand the significance of the moment.”39 Such a position distances himself from intellectuals in Korea at the same time as he is allowed to speak for them in the imperial realm. When, at the end of the interview, the colonial relationship has been recast as one of sincerity demanded from the Korean side and more “interest” hoped for from the Japanese side, we see such a relationship embodied in the position that Kim occupies in the colonial structure as a special advocate for sympathy for the colonized Korean

C6548.indb 193

8/29/14 9:22 AM

194 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

in his own fluent and eloquent Japanese-language fiction. Despite Kim undoubtedly feeling troubled by the consequences of the new regime—and he expressed his own worries that his most famous story catered to a Japanese readership—he occupies a different structural location from that of writers, such as Kim Namch’ŏn, who had forged a modernist movement in the Korean language over the previous two decades.40 Whereas those writers had made their careers and identities through the manipulation of Korean words and phrases, his star had risen precisely because of the situation where particularity was becoming representable only within the major language that strove for a new universality—the new Japanese culture that Iwata heralds so frequently throughout the interview.41 The perils of such representational politics become apparent in Kim Saryang’s contribution to Kokumin bungaku, a short story titled “Muruori Island” (“Muruorijima”), which is thematically in tune with the sense of a disappearing future. Here the protagonist takes a boat ride down the Taedong River in search of a new home outside of the city where he might recover from illness.42 It is an area where he had spent his childhood summers at his aunt’s house, playing with the local children, some of whom he meets again on this trip as adults. At the center of “Muruori Island” lies a story recounted by one of them, Mirŭk, who had as a child been the protagonist’s rival for the love and attention of Suni. Mirŭk tells how he had grown up to marry Suni and set up home on a small island in the mouth of the Taedong. Born into poverty, they had attempted to craft a self-sufficient living from the land but been led gradually into debt by an unforgiving landowner to whom they had turned for a loan when floods destroyed their crops. During a second year of flooding Mirŭk had left his wife alone on their small island while he went to beg for more money but had returned to find the island and his wife and home swept away. He now lives a peripatetic life, periodically returning to the small island where he had once been happy. Such an allegory of dispossession from the land and displacement into a roaming diaspora could surely strike a chord at the height of the forced mobilizations of the late colonial period. Yet the story is troubled by Kim Saryang’s fictional “recording” of the oral history of the poor in fluent Japanese. Kim faces the double dilemma of displacing the oral into writing, and thus the illiterate into literacy, and the Korean into Japanese. One senses he is aware of this dilemma as he retells the story mostly in third person parsed with first-person sentences giving a flavor of the “dialect” that Mirŭk is supposedly speaking, albeit here in Japanese. A sense of the translational exercise in which Kim is involved emerges from the

C6548.indb 194

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

195

intermittent sentences that attempt to make it clear in Japanese that the landless peasant is not speaking the standard Korean of the capital. His speech is, of course, unrepresentable, and while this in itself represents a more general aporia between speech and writing, within the late colonial context it heightens the ethnographic distance in operation when a Tokyo Imperial University graduate attempts to plead the “real situation” of a dispossessed peasant.43 In a review of the first year of Kokumin bungaku, the critic Yu Chino praised “Muruori Island” for its depiction of the passionate nature of the people from the western regions and their elevation into the realm of legend.44 Yu returns those people solidly into the landscape as he declares that the Taedong itself is the true protagonist of the story, with Mirŭk representing an anthropomorphized figure of the wild and uncontrollable river. For Yu, Kim had managed to capture the nature of the peoples to the west and north who displayed a passion hard to find, he wrote, around the central plains of the colonial capital.45 If we set aside the question of Yu’s celebration of Kim’s depiction of an exoticized regional particularity at a moment when regionalism was the subject of intense cultural debate, his reading of Kim’s story presents the dilemma Kim and other writers faced when writing about Korea in a language from across the straits. That is, the overthere nature of the language heightens the ethnographic distance already present in the representation of the poor illiterate by their intellectual compatriots.46 Kim cannot transcend this representational dilemma. Rendering the illiterate Korean in fluent Japanese works to reproduce the imperial relation rather than undermine it.47 Kim Saryang has been justly celebrated for his pioneering Japaneselanguage fiction. Yet his dilemma highlights the import of Kim Namch’ŏn’s story, which steers well clear of allegory and ethnography, and in doing so opens up imperial time into the everyday rather than displacing it into legend. One might, of course, read this as a deeper acceptance of imperialization in its adoption of the imperial language to elaborate the domestic realm of the self. But Kim also captures that self standing askew to its subsumption into the happy fascist whole. The memories of dignified encounters with Mr. S—the editor at Kaebyŏk publishing company, which had published an early eponymous journal crucial to the establishment of modern forms of literature in Korean—evokes the shadow of the Korean language now submerged in the text but not disappeared. Those memories cannot help but evoke also the contrasting image of the editor of this journal Kokumin bungaku and his fascistic writings. In doing so, Kim’s story opens up space in the narrative of imperialization by highlighting the impossible promise modernity

C6548.indb 195

8/29/14 9:22 AM

196 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

offered: life but only through death. Only those possessing faith could recognize such a promise, but for others there still remained subsistence. However disengaged from Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s future watakushi might be in “One Morning,” he cannot disengage from daily life, as he reexits the home on the way to work following the birth of his first son. Kim Namch’ŏn’s evocation of the everyday as a time that remains thus opens up the heterogeneous nature of imperial time, which is no longer subsumable purely into death. Kim’s story attests that the imperial subject presented in Kokumin bungaku was neither univocal nor able to overcome the dilemmas of modernity as Ch’oe Chaesŏ had hoped it would. Those dilemmas percolated throughout the fiction of the time and were to reemerge with a vengeance with the advent of liberation.

To P o ssess and Be P o ssessed What to Yanabe Nagasaburō was a mere inconvenience interrupting communication was to writers such as Kim Namch’ŏn and Kim Saryang the language that their thoughts, memories, and social interactions inhabited as their own. Yet their education and other social interactions had also conferred on them fluency in another language, which was undergoing evolution from holding a certain status as a language of modern culture and imperial authority to one aligned with death on the battlefield. As colonial language policies attempted to modernize their first language out of discernible existence, writing became a minefield they had no option but to cross as their fluency and a different kind of intimacy enabled them to write in Japanese. Yi T’aejun’s alter-ego Hyŏn reflects on this fluency in the story “Before and After Liberation” (“Haebang chŏnhu”), written in 1946 and describing his participation in the 1943 Second Greater East Asia Writer’s Conference (Taedonga munhakcha taehoe), which gathered writers from all over the empire in Seoul. Listening to the Manchurian writers’ “awkward” attempts to give speeches in Japanese, Hyŏn ponders the “shameful” fluency of the Korean writers, declaring that the “submission to tragedy happens when a weak nation begins to learn the language of a strong nation.”48 It is important to note that this is a retrospective account of the time, written in a rapidly polemicizing and unstable political environment. Yet there is no doubt that the attempt by the wartime state to enforce monolingualism ensured that in postcolonial times the recorded use of the imperial language would become a potent sign for accusations of treachery.

C6548.indb 196

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

197

Over the years, lists of collaborators with the imperial power have been drawn up many times: from the immediate aftermath of liberation through the most recent attempt by South Korean National Assembly groups, along with the Minjok Munje Yŏn’guso research institute, the Minjok Munhak Chakkahoe writers’ association, and the journal Silch’ŏn munhak, to provide a definitive list in 2002.49 For literary figures, a decisive factor in being named in such a list has been and remains the fact of having written and published in Japanese. Yet despite a few recent attempts to republish these Japaneselanguage works as widely available anthologies in Korean translation, little attention has been given to the actual nature and content of the stories written.50 To do so, perhaps, might threaten the monolingual phantasm of the postcolonial state, for if Japanese could signal treachery, then Korean had to surely figure its opposite. That language is never fully possessable, neither by the colonized nor by the colonial powers, is a fact far harder for any state, whether imperial or postcolonial, to countenance.51 Ultimately, reading through the pages of Kokumin bungaku I am struck by the unruly use of the imperial language, by which I mean not so much that there is clear anticolonial resistance presented in the fiction, but that the fiction so often falls off center and off message. This despite the fact that events from the infamous roundup of the Korean Language Society members to the closure of the vernacular newspapers suggest a firm belief at the highest levels of the colonial government in the power of the Japanese language to convey something beyond mere convenience, that intangible essence of imperial culture. In a roundtable on “self-criticism” held a few months after liberation in December 1945, Yi T’aejun complained that he held the most resentment for those who had chosen to write in Japanese in the final years of the occupation.52 Yi’s resentment in the postliberation roundtable, presided over by Kim Namch’ŏn, was aimed at another participant, Kim Saryang. While accepting that there came a point when publishing in Korean became nearly impossible, Yi contends that continuing to write but not publishing or not writing at all were morally preferable choices at a time when he had feared that the disappearance of the language would equate to the very disappearance of a people and a culture.53 Kim Saryang, who had published the second largest amount of Japanese-language fiction by a Korean writer in Japan, and a much smaller amount in Korea in both Japanese and Korean, was very much on the defensive in 1945, apologizing for what he now deemed to have been a mistake. Nevertheless he also asserted that his motivations for writing in Japanese had been to try against the odds to represent the colonial experience—to “make

C6548.indb 197

8/29/14 9:22 AM

198 taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

a plea for the true situation in Korea, for our daily life and emotions”—in the only way possible.54 That appears to have meant in Japanese at the heart of empire. The roundtable opens up wounds originating from the fissures of colonial rule when the displacement of Koreans, whether forced or voluntary, exacerbated divisions already present in colonial society as well as producing some new ones. At a time when large amounts of this diaspora were returning and staking claims for power, Kim Saryang offers an apology for having written in Japanese and then having left the peninsula to seek what he called the “romance” of revolution overseas in his flight to Yenan in the spring of 1945. His lengthy explanation barely satisfies the other participants, all of whom were silent on the fact that they had all published some pieces in Japanese as they stood firm in their belief that they had born the brunt of Japanese imperialism by staying in Korea. The lingering resentment of paths taken would not be so easy to clear up. In retrospect the decision to write in Japanese is presented as a choice and a decision presupposing free will. But language is never a question of free will, not even or especially under authoritarian regimes. To talk of choice is to ignore the institutional pressures, the weight of history, and contingency of the present moment. By equating language so fully with a people, Yi was in a way accepting the rhetoric of the imperial state, which desired the spread of Japanese for its usefulness in imperialization. His equation of use of the Japanese language with treachery masks a presumption that writing in Korean somehow guaranteed freedom from imperialization, but as my reading of Yi’s essays in chapter 3 suggests, even the most loving and careful exploration of the Korean language could never guarantee such freedom. If language is an accumulation of historical relations, it cannot in itself seal off national histories from each other when those national histories are urgently entangled. What I have tried to evoke in this chapter is language as an inexorable dilemma that has to be lived and not as a choice that signifies either loyalty or treachery. To conceive of language as such a symbol is at once to accept the monolingualism of the state and to reinforce the authority of the state. If we take seriously the proposition that language cannot be possessed, then Japanese belonged neither to the colonized nor to the imperial masters. I do not want to say, therefore, that the only other choice is to write in Korean or not to write at all—as some of the participants said in the roundtable postliberation. What differentiates late colonial writing in Japanese from earlier writing in Japanese is the fact that it becomes the only way to write, and not just to

C6548.indb 198

8/29/14 9:22 AM

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

199

write in advocacy to an imagined imperial audience but to write to those to whom one speaks another language. Kim Namch’ŏn’s story shows the pathos of being only able to construct this thing called the self in the colonizing language. Fluency is not the issue here, but rather writing in a language that is at once one’s own and hails from overthere, and doing so in order to build the so-called deepest recesses of consciousness, the most personal and domestic of spaces in the form that had been practiced in Korean but was now to be performed in the imperial language. Thus “One Morning” shows the relentless necessity and simultaneous impossibility of expressing the self in the language not just of another but of the colonizing power, and of possessing it as one’s own. The removal of Korean language from the required curriculum predated the majority of writing discussed in this book, which was therefore written with the knowledge that its script was undergoing a change in status vis-àvis the colonial educational institution that had to some extent nurtured its spread while also delineating the kinds of things it might be used to express. Not only were the writers discussed here dodging censors and struggling to make a living while conducting their own experiments in writing, but the future of the letters they manipulated appeared tenuous and unsure. One of the ironies of modern literary forms in Korean is that their early flourishing coincided with a rapid expansion of print media and literacy followed by an equally rapid disappearance of spaces for Korean print. Writers followed the fate of their writings, living the ups and downs of a fragile bourgeoisie in quick succession. Theirs was a fragility that could lead as equally to fascism as to the desire for socialist or anticolonial revolution. The sense of a future disappearance of the Korean language in print, and perhaps eventually in speech, linked to other disappearing futures, such as that of the nation and the postcolony as well as socialism. Even the bourgeois dream seemed insecure as war progressed and financial crisis raised its head with increasing persistence. A sense of an ending permeated print culture as teleological narratives fundamental to modernity, not only in Korea but around the world, were undermined by the disappearance of stories projecting imagined resolution and progress into the future. Yet if writers in late colonial Korea seem to have struggled to envisage narratives of transformation and improvement, let alone revolution, this struggle proved paradoxically productive to their experiments with literary and aesthetic form. Colonial subjects of an empire at war, over the course of roughly a decade, the writers discussed here produced a voluminous and creative critique of their

C6548.indb 199

8/29/14 9:22 AM

200

taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

daily lives, where national liberation was neither imminent nor expected and where dealing with the increasingly draconian colonial regime was a necessity. Their works are subtle, full of irony and contradiction, shaped by a colonialism that forced them to find new forms to match their experiences, and by a censorship regime that propelled them to take full advantage of literature’s power to speak otherwise. Some might be tempted to dismiss the disappearing future as mere political pessimism—an acceptance of both the fact of colonial rule and mobilization for war, which brought the worst excesses of fascist militarism to the colony. Another view, elaborated after liberation, holds that this was a form of escapism constituting a temporary shelter for writers waiting for Japan’s defeat in war and change in the regime. In this view the exploration of other spaces and times—the lyrical present, the urban everyday, and, indeed, the romantic antiquarian that became such a powerful presence as the decade wore on—constituted a way to protect the essence of national culture in the face of accelerating policies of cultural assimilation. Neither view acknowledges the wide-ranging implications of the temporal disjunct marked by the apparent absence of the future. Nor does it recognize the rich panoply of aesthetic experiments through which writers attempted to give their explorations in time form. We often imagine that the texts of modernism gesture to a future welcomed in by the exploration of the most new, but late colonial texts suggest that the most new might not usher in the future but instead figure the contradictory disappearance of that which has yet to appear. If modernism has the tendency toward a formal renunciation of the future, we have to see the historical configuration that produces it, not least because its weight falls most heavily in those places not usually written into the history of modernity. In their explorations of their present, Korea’s writers reveal that within the constrained situation of colonial occupation by an empire at war, modernity took the form of foreclosure. Their creative efforts to explore different temporalities amounted to nothing less than the attempt not only to reveal the foreclosure that lies at the heart of modernity but to prize it open and even try to imagine alternative passages to the future. Reading the different aesthetic forms of late colonial Korea again in the early twenty-first century is necessarily equally an attempt to disassemble that narrative of the modern to recover the histories subsumed in the denial of the creativity of the colonized and the complexity and political heterogeneity of creative works responding to the colonial experience that has been central to global modernity.

C6548.indb 200

8/29/14 9:22 AM

EPILO GU E AFTERLIVES As someone who had barely been freed from a long life of slavery to old things in an old world, on this trip to the Soviet Union I was like a bird flying through the sky for the first time, having been freed from a cage. Those few months were truly enchanting. Everything old and bad connected to humans had disappeared; it was a new world with a new culture, new customs, and the new daily lives of new people. Moreover, although it was new by the day, the Soviet Union was moving forward without end just like a great river flows toward the eternally stable ocean. Yi T’aejun, Record of a Journey to the Soviet Union (1946)

L i b e r at i o n c a m e “a s a t h i e f d u r i n g t h e n i g h t ,” wrote the Quaker activist Ham Sŏkhŏn some years after Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War and the subsequent “freeing” of its colonies. The end of colonial rule dawned quickly and unexpectedly in Korea, and not through a long, anticipatory battle against the colonial state. This book has examined the writings of Korean poets, philosophers, and essayists in the years immediately prior to liberation; what might be thought of as the dusky evening before the arrival of the thief. The writers discussed here lived the excesses of a global fascist moment as colonized subjects with combinations of silence, negotiation, and sometimes even an enthusiastic partaking. In the late summer of 1945 the dawning of the postcolonial age soon settled its grip on future dreams as people came to terms with the new situation. A future that had appeared to have disappeared now loomed on the horizon with unrelenting urgency. Less frequently remembered today is the fact that liberation involved the receding of other futures, whether the bright, happy future promised by fascist wartime propaganda or the anxious prospects for the children of empire being groomed for battlefield “glory”; the economic lifestyle of those profiting from the colonial economy or, for those whose political opinions went against the colonial government, the never-ending constraints of harsh censorship. Liberation set loose an explosion of hopes and dreams but at the same time interrupted plans and life courses. For the natural metaphor

C6548.indb 201

8/29/14 9:22 AM

202

epil ogue: af terlives

deceives: as dusk falls we anticipate the coming of night followed by a new day, but no one knew that in the late summer of 1945 Japan’s thirty-five-yearlong colonial rule would come to an abrupt end. When Ch’oe Chaesŏ woke up the morning after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, I wonder what thoughts passed through his mind. A year earlier Ch’oe had been awarded the Government General’s Honor for his contributions to the promotion of the Japanese language, the highest imperial honor bestowed on colonial subjects who enthusiastically took up the campaign to promote the use of the imperial language among the colonial populations during the war. A decade earlier, in the mid1930s, it would have been hard to foresee such an honor. Ch’oe had certainly forged a reputation among Korea’s educated elite, by introducing British modernism to literary circles and becoming the first ethnic Korean to lecture in English literature at Keijō Imperial University—the only university on the peninsula. But Ch’oe had also championed Korea’s own avant-garde artists in the Korean-language press for their vibrant and creative experiments in form and their manipulation of the Korean language toward new heights of sophistication and artistry. Then, when the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars broke out, he had gambled on Japanese being the language of the future, leading the movement to encourage colonial subjects to abandon their customary language and write in the language of the imperial state. He had gone so far as to urge Korean students to sign up for the Imperial Army to experience the joy of “becoming Japanese” on the battlefield. As events unfolded in the chaotic aftermath of a sudden liberation brought on by Japan’s defeat, he must surely have wondered what the future held in store for him now. The wartime years had exacted a different and cruel toll on the philosopher Sŏ Insik. Sŏ’s last known published words, at this writing at least, appeared a full year before Pearl Harbor in November 1940. Sŏ had spent five years in a colonial jail during the 1930s on account of his activities in the Communist Party before briefly publishing some of the earliest works on historical philosophy written in Korean. Those works reveal the ongoing extent of his anticolonial beliefs, presented in the fragmented and, one suspects, strategic form of cultural analysis and abstract philosophical thought. Thereafter follows one of those silences so common to colonial archives that both demands and defies interpretation, and yet when decolonization took the form of national division that silence equally failed to be filled. Where or when Sŏ heard the news of liberation nobody knows, but the listing of his name as a member of the leftist Literary Federation of Korea (Chosŏn munhak tongmaeng) in

C6548.indb 202

8/29/14 9:22 AM

epil ogue: af terlives

203

December 1945 suggests that he did live to see the withdrawal of the colonial power. Perhaps he was one of those former party members who appear in stories from the period, scarcely able to believe the day had come when the words “the party” could be spoken out loud again and they might resume an interrupted political project.1 Most likely he went on to work toward the instantiation of a new society in the nascent Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but for how long his dream survived through the purges that shook the North Korean political elite in the later 1950s we simply do not know. One figure whose fate we do know did not fare so well: the writer Yi T’aejun shocked all those familiar with his devotion to antiquities and aesthetics when he moved his entire family across the 38th parallel to the northern part of the country in 1946. Yi at first flourished as the DPRK was established, traveling twice as a cultural ambassador to the Soviet Union and publishing travelogues that record his excitement at the “new world” he saw opening up. Nothing is more striking than to read the preface to the account of his first journey, where the antiquarian aura of the Sino-Korean character for old 古 has been replaced by the han’gul 낡다 nalgta, not old but old-fashioned, worn-out, degraded.2 What had once been considered virtuous and a source of comfort and morality is now seen as out of time. It is jarring to read Yi, who of all writers in the colonial era had surely undertaken the most extensive and imaginative exploration of Korea’s past in his fictional and editorial work, now proclaim the joy of being freed from old things. Yet exactly what kind of past was he attempting to flee from? From the mid-1950s Yi T’aejun began to be viciously criticized for the bourgeois tendencies of his earlier writing.3 After he lost his prestigious position in early North Korean society, reports suggest he and his family suffered two spells of internal exile before his still unconfirmed death sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. Yi’s old home in Sŏngbuk-dong remains and is today a flourishing “traditional teahouse,” a restoration of which he may or may not have approved. From the vantage of retrospect Yi’s move north appears as a fatal mistake, but reading through his voluminous writing from the late colonial era it becomes comprehensible. From the mid-1930s Yi’s fondness for old Korean things had sought a narrative of nation in the past just as the nation was becoming unspeakable in his present. Yet his explorations were aimed not only at discovering the precolonial but also and decisively at locating the precapitalist. His antiquarian obsession with experiencing a world outside of the commodity regime suggests that what unsettled him in his present was not only the colonial politics that decreed one people inferior to another but

C6548.indb 203

8/29/14 9:22 AM

204 epil ogue: af terlives

also the reconfiguration of social relations that colonialism brought about via Korea’s integration into the global capitalist market. For one so disdainful of the commercialization of modern society, socialism must have felt a more viable protector of the art and antiquities he so cherished than the “free market” being espoused to the south. Yi’s antiquarianism tells us something of the history of the experience of capitalism lived under the intense conditions of colonialism, where economic crisis combined with a very particular national crisis. A less surprising move to the north of the 38th parallel was undertaken by Im Hwa in November 1947, and it might have been expected to have ended in happier circumstances. The relentless critic of late colonial fiction and nostalgic dreamer who longed for the revolutionary fervor and hope of the early days of the leftist movement must have felt at home, although displaced from his hometown of Seoul, in the emerging order of what was to become in 1948 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Appointed as vice president of the Korea-Soviet Cultural Association (Cho-so munhwa hyŏphoe) and editor and publisher at the Haeju No. 1 Printing plant, Im Hwa moved immediately to the center of literary activities on arrival in the North. In 1950 he returned briefly to Seoul in the wake of the North Korean Army’s successful invasion of the South, only to withdraw again rapidly as the southern capital was retaken a couple of months later by the counteroffensive led by the United Nations forces. Im Hwa’s poetry collection from 1951, titled Where Are You Now? (Nŏ ŏnŭ kot e innŭnya) and addressing the daughter from whom he had been separated, must surely have touched a chord amid the chaotic displacements of the war and division, but it soon drew criticism for its tone of nostalgic melancholy. In 1953 Im Hwa was sentenced to death by the Military High Court of the DPRK, having confessed to collaboration with the Japanese, counter-Soviet and countercommunist activities, and spying for the United States. Before the judgment he had reportedly already despaired of his future and attempted to slash his wrists, having broken the thick glasses from behind which he had once confronted the Japanese colonial civil servant Yanabe Nagasaburō.4 Im was shot shortly afterward and his wife, the novelist Chi Haryŏn, was never able to retrieve his body. The novelist and fellow former KAPF critic Kim Namch’ŏn was among those tried alongside Im Hwa and similarly executed at gunpoint. Even such violent deaths failed to draw a close to the scratching over and recopying of the historical record, however, as more recently American Army records have been released that appear to confirm Im Hwa’s unlikely espionage activities. If history does indeed operate “on a field of en-

C6548.indb 204

8/29/14 9:22 AM

epil ogue: af terlives

205

tangled and confused parchments,” as Michel Foucault memorably described it, few could be as entangled as the still undecidable life of the poet Im Hwa.5 It has been equally hard to explain the circumstances in which Pak T’aewŏn might have followed his brother and friends north in the late summer of 1950 as the counteroffensive reclaimed Seoul, leaving his wife and four of his five children behind.6 During the colonial era Pak had been as dilettantish and dedicated to the art of writing as was his close friend Yi T’aejun, but unlike Yi he had not jumped into the political fray after liberation. The historical irony is that this stance seems to have, if anything, protected him throughout the northern regime’s purges of southerners in the 1950s. Although Pak had to leave jobs writing at the National Theater for the Traditional Arts and teaching at the Pyongyang Literature University and was exiled for four years to a cooperative farm, he was allowed to return to writing in 1960. Ultimately he became one of the most prolific of the writers who moved north, completing among other works a three-volume historical novel titled The Kabo Peasant War (Kabo nongmin chŏnjaeng) just before his death in 1986. The novel was critically acclaimed, and Pak was celebrated for his dogged persistence in the face of increasing ill health; he was blind for the last two decades of his life and spent the final decade confined to bed. In fact it was only through the assistance of his second wife, Kwŏn Yŏnghŭi, that he was able to write at all in his later years, and she was listed as coauthor of the third and final volume of his historical epic. Kwŏn herself must have embodied a vital connection to the colonial past for Pak as she had been wife of his good friend and fellow writer Chŏng Int’aek and mutual friend of his erstwhile collaborator Yi Sang. Pak married her after Chŏng’s death in 1955, which was also the year that his first wife apparently returned home finally from imprisonment during the war. She waited in Seoul, ever hopeful of seeing her husband and the father of her children again, but was to pass away before him in 1980. A poignant photograph survives that shows Pak being read to as he lies in bed. In the absence of so much information, its hazy contours draw a fragile symbol of what is known about Pak’s life in the North. Some years after Pak’s death, his children received a letter from their older sister in Pyongyang, whom they had given up for dead during the war. They have since met. While it is hard to imagine why Pak made the decision to leave Seoul—if it ever really was a decision—it must not be forgotten that no one at the time had the benefit of later knowledge that national division would last more than sixty years and be so harshly restrictive to separated families. Neither could

C6548.indb 205

8/29/14 9:22 AM

206

epil ogue: af terlives

they have foreseen how politics would play out in the North and the effects that would be wrought on those who moved there. Of the writers discussed in this book, all but Ch’oe Chaesŏ either stayed in or moved to the northern half of the country, suggesting that Im Hwa’s and Yi T’aejun’s reactions to the prospect of a socialist revolution were far from isolated. Ultimately, the move north with its concomitant commitment to building a socialist society had differing, sometimes dangerous, consequences for artists who were accorded prominent positions as spokespeople for the new society and who suffered if their opinions fell out of line with consolidating political powers. Owing to national division, the endings many lives met are unknown outside the DPRK. For a writer such as Ch’oe Myŏngik, the division of the peninsula involved remaining in his hometown of Pyongyang where, if anything, the centralizing of a new national culture around the new capital seems to have provided increased authority to the writer who had most memorably depicted the northern city’s streets under colonial rule. His extant writings from postliberation far outnumber those produced prior to 1945. Yet Ch’oe Myongik’s biographical dates are, like those of so many colonial era writers, closed off with a question mark. His future, like that of Yi T’aejun, is literally unknown. O Changhwan, the poet who had cursed the conservatives for failing to protect the city walls, followed Im Hwa north but was to die in 1950, after several months receiving medical treatment in a Moscow hospital. This has only recently been confirmed, as have the deaths of other writers as communication between North and South has become more frequent. Kim Saryang, on the other hand, has been long reported to have died from illness in 1950, having followed the North Korean Army down to the south in the early days of the Korean War. The dispersed trajectories and their delayed confirmations reflect the violent history of modernity in a dividing, supposedly postcolonial, space. The past futures of so many of Korea’s writers are being slowly revealed, most literally through the hazy palimpsest of time. As for Ch’oe Chaesŏ, he remained in Seoul and continued to work as a critic and professor until his death in 1964. His reputation remains irreparably tarnished by his wartime activities, which place him near the top of every list of collaborators with the colonial power that has been compiled over the years. In retrospect we might say that he had no future in some sense as his life remained always overdetermined by his past. And yet he was allowed to live a future, in part because of the postcolonial settlement in the U.S.-occupied South, which did little to hold collaborators to account. Para-

C6548.indb 206

8/29/14 9:22 AM

epil ogue: af terlives

207

doxically it was those who went north to find their dream future that so often ended up losing any future at all. There is no straight line that can be drawn to connect the late colonial era to these afterlives, whose entanglements reveal the intensity of global forces of the mid-twentieth century: decolonization and Cold War. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the simple outlines of their biographies, which call to mind words such as destiny or fate as the real historical record lies simply unknown or inexplicable in the general language of historical explanation. And yet they were writers and artists, whose works have survived the harshest restrictions of the Cold War regime to “reappear” in recent years. We can only honor them by reading their work, keeping in mind perhaps what little we know about what later came to pass, but bearing in mind also that what was believed possible at one moment also matters, even if its future remained only on a printed page.

C6548.indb 207

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 208

8/29/14 9:22 AM

NOTES

I ntroduc tion 1.

A further differentiation has been made between those who willingly moved north (wŏlbuk chakka) and those who went unwillingly (nappuk chakka). The latter included such figures as the poet Chŏng Chiyong and critic Kim Kirim, who were both taken north during the Korean War. The lifting of the ban coincided with a surge of republications of works by the writers affected and the beginning of a rewriting of colonial literary history in South Korea. One of the early attempts to reconsider the position of these writers can be found in Kwŏn Yŏngmin et al., Wŏlbuk munin yŏn’gu (Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 1989).

2.

Tatiana Gabroussenko focuses on these purges in her Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and Center for Korean Studies, 2010).

3.

No works by wŏlbuk chakka appeared in anthologies of translated stories until at least a decade following the relaxing of the ban, but even then they did not and still have not assumed the significance they played during colonial times. For example, there are three wŏlbuk chakka among the sixteen authors featured in Kim Chong-un and Bruce Fulton, eds., A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).

4.

The figure of the former revolutionary appears already in fiction from the late 1930s and changes in its signification over time. One powerful redaction has been of the revolutionary as one who supposedly renounced her or his political beliefs in a religiously coded conversion to the support of imperialism. An important exponent of this reading has been Kim Yunsik. See, for example,

C6548.indb 209

8/29/14 9:22 AM

210

introduc tion

“Chŏnhyang sosŏl ŭi Han’gukchŏk yangsang,” in Kim Yunsik sŏnjip 2: sosŏlsa, 215 (Seoul: Sol ch’ulp’ansa, 1996). 5.

Kim argued his case in a roundtable discussion held in 1946. See “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an: chwadamhoe,” in Haebang konggan ŭi pip’yŏng munhak 2, ed. Song Kihan and Kim Woegon, 164–72 (Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1991).

6. 7.

Ibid., 170. Hwang Sunwŏn claimed to have written several stories under colonial occupation even though he published them after liberation. One of these, “Mule” (“Nosae”), has been translated in Kim and Fulton, eds., A Ready-Made Life, 180–91.

8.

Sin Hyŏnggi and O Sŏngho describe how, soon after liberation, literary works in the North began to present colonial era guerrilla wars as precursors to national liberation that enhanced the legitimacy of Kim Il Sung. In some cases authorship was also attributed to Kim retrospectively. See their Pukhan munhaksa: Hang’il hyŏngmyŏng munhak esŏ chuch’e munhak kkaji (Seoul: P’yŏngminsa, 2000), 15–61.

9.

Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 16.

10. Ibid. 11. Recent academic work is considerably more nuanced, but the popular imaginary still relies on the trope of the dark period. For an older example in the realm of literary history, see Song Minho, Ilche mal amhŭkki munhak yŏn’gu (Seoul: Saemunsa, 1991). 12. During the Korean War as the frontline moved rapidly up and down the length of the peninsula, it was not unusual for important figures to be forcibly removed to the opposing side; Yi Kwangsu, for example, was taken to the North, never to return. In the violently polemic postliberation states, executions blamed on accusations stemming back to the colonial era have not been unusual, and they had an especially notable effect in the 1950s on the group of artists and writers who had moved to the North from the South before or during the civil war. The ongoing shame expressed by descendants of key collaborative figures is as raw as ever and is publicly displayed at formal events such as the conferences held in Seoul every year for the hundredth anniversary of famous writers’ births. 13. The National Assembly groups were joined by the Minjok Munje Yŏn’guso research institute, the Minjok Munhak Chakkahoe writers’ association, and the journal Silch’ŏn munhak. 14. There is a long and complex history to the ways in which the late colonial period has been remembered. That history demands a book of its own and is not recounted here. But one might look in the realm of literature at the important role

C6548.indb 210

8/29/14 9:22 AM

introduc tion

211

played by Im Chongguk’s pioneering account of specific writers’ actions during the era, which was published in 1966. See Im Chongguk, Ch’inil munhak ron (Seoul: P’yŏnghwa ch’ulp’ansa, 1966). Since the millennium there has been an enormous increase in books published on late colonial literary works, coinciding with rich explorations of the period’s cultural history more broadly. I have benefited greatly from such research. On literature, some of the major works have been Hwang Jongyon [Chongyŏn], “Han’guk munhak ŭi kŭndae wa pan’gŭndae: 1930 nyŏndae huban’gi munhak ŭi chŏnt’ongjuŭi yŏn’gu” (Ph.D. diss., Dongguk University, 1991); Sanghŏ munhakhoe, ed., 1930 nyŏndae huban munhak ŭi kŭndaesŏng kwa chagi sŏngch’al (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1998); Kim Yerim, “1930 nyŏndae huban mollak/ chaesaeng ŭi sŏsa wa miŭisik yŏn’gu” (Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 2002); Ch’a Sŭnggi, “1930 nyŏndae huban chŏnt’ongnon yŏn’gu: sigan-konggan ŭisik ŭl chungsim ŭro” (Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University 2003); Kim Chaeyong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang: Ilche mal sahoe wa munhak (Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2004); Han Suyŏng, Ch’inil munhak ŭi chaeinsik: 1937–1945 nyŏn kan ŭi Han’guk sosŏl kwa singminjuŭi (Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2005). 15. A classic work in which the Holocaust is understood as a logical consequence of modernity, rather than its antinomy, is Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). Detlev J. K. Peukert turned to the history of everyday life to examine the mundanity of Nazism in his Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Eveson (London: B. T. Batsford, 1987). David Carroll has looked at the integral role fascist thought played in the ideology of European culture in French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). In the case of Japan, Harry Harootunian has examined the relationship between modernism and fascism in Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 16. An important precedent and inspiration has been Kim Chul [Ch’ŏl] et al., Munhak sok ŭi p’asijŭm (Seoul: Samin, 2001). 17. Peter Osborne, “Modernism as Translation,” in Philosophy as Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 57. 18. In scholarship on modern Korean literature, this manifests in the tenaciousness of realism-modernism as a binary framework, which has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the situation of postcolonial national division. On the framework, see the section titled “Realism and Modernism” in Yu Chongho et al., Hyŏndae Han’guk munhak 100 nyŏn (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1999), 561–654.

C6548.indb 211

8/29/14 9:22 AM

212 introduc tion

19. Raymond Williams offered a trenchant criticism of formalist understandings of modernism in his The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989). 20. Osborne, “Modernism as Translation,” 57–59. 21. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 16. 22. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995), 40–42. 23. The phrase “modernist against modernity” is from Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 76, and is applied to Japanese philosophers of the interwar period by Harry Harootunian in his Overcome by Modernity. 24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 206–48. 25. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 205–11. 26. Marilyn Ivy, “Foreword: Fascism, Yet?” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman, viii (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 27. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no tachiba,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 133– 35 (Kyŏngsŏng: Inmunsa, 1943). 28. Some of these issues are discussed in Hwang Jongyon [Chongyŏn], ed., Silla ŭi palgyŏn (Seoul: Tongguk taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 2008). 29. See Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), chap. 3. 30. For a more detailed description of this event, written more than a decade later by one of those imprisoned, see Lee Hi-seung, “Recollections of the Korean Language Society Incident,” in Listening to Korea: A Korean Anthology, ed. Marshall R. Pihl (New York: Praeger, 1973). 31. For sales figures of newspapers throughout the colonial period, see Kim Yŏnghŭi, “Ilche chibae sigi han’gugin ŭi sinmun chŏpjok kyŏnghyang,” Han’guk ŏllon hakbo 46, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 58–62. 32. On the sociology of writing in the colonial period, see Chŏn Kwangyong, “Han’guk chakka ŭi sahoejŏk chiwi,” in Han’guk hyŏndae munhak non’go (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1986). 33. Yi Hyosŏk, “Ch’ŏt koryo,” Pangmun 12 (October 1939): 21–23. 34. Two examples of this are José Rizal’s Noli me tangere (1887), written in Spanish and now known as the first novel of Philippine literature, and Wu Zhouliu’s Orphan of Asia (1945), written in Japanese and known as one of Taiwan’s first modern novels.

C6548.indb 212

8/29/14 9:22 AM

1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

213

35. Yi T’aejun, “The Short Story and the Conte,” in Eastern Sentiments, trans. Janet Poole, 61 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 36. The “time of entanglement” is a phrase borrowed from Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 37. As with so many brief considerations, this one runs the risk of oversimplification. In his recent study of the bildungsroman, Jed Esty has written about how the urge to define the ideal bildungsroman—as a linear, future-oriented tale of development—is consistently undermined by the examination of actual bildungsroman, which rarely conform to the ideal model. Nevertheless, I agree with Esty that this does not negate the usefulness of considering the bildungsroman framework and its alignment of historicism with the novel of progress; nor does it undermine the importance of examining the specific ways in which novels have historically challenged the notions of progress and development underlying the bildungsroman model. See Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 38. Akita Ujaku et al., “Chōsen bunka no shōrai,” Bungakukai 6, no. 1 (January 1939): 277. 39. This characterization of literature is borrowed from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179–200 (New York: Routledge, 1993).

1. The Unruly Detail of L ate C ol onialism 1.

Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 5 (May 1936): 373.

2.

Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron,” in Munhak ŭi nolli, 357 (Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1940; photo reproduction retitled Han’guk munhak ŭi nolli, Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 1998).

3.

Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 4 (April 1936): 297.

4.

Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Sosŏl ch’angjak esŏ ŭi na ŭi kosim,” in Kŭl e taehan saenggak, 96

5.

Ibid., 98.

(Pyongyang: Chosŏn munhak yesul ch’ongdongmaeng ch’ulp’ansa, 1964). 6.

Ibid., 97.

7.

See especially the chapter on portrait photography and portrait studios in Ch’oe

8.

Ibid., 63–72, 178–82.

9.

Ibid., 212–18.

Injin, Han’guk sajinsa, 1631–1945 (Seoul: Nunbit, 2000), 169–221.

10. Kim Yŏnok et al., “Nae chibang ŭi t’ŭksaek ŭl malhanŭn chwadamhoe: P’yŏngyang p’yŏn,” Chogwang 5, no. 4 (April 1939): 260–82.

C6548.indb 213

8/29/14 9:22 AM

214 1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

11. Ibid., 270. 12. Nakama Teruhisa, ed., Nihon chiri fūzoku taikei, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1929–32). 13. Famous Sites of Chōsen (Chōsen meisho) is partly reproduced in Kwŏn Hyŏkhŭi, Chosŏn esŏ on sajinyŏpsŏ (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2005), 143–57. 14. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 89. 15. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 4: 289. 16. See Kwŏn Hyŏkhŭi, Chosŏn esŏ on sajinyŏpsŏ, 120. 17. See Tanaka Hidemitsu, Yoidorebune (Tokyo: Koyama shoten, 1949). 18. The first amateur photography clubs known are the Kankoku shashinkai, founded in 1904 by a group of around twenty Japanese residents, and the Kankoku shayūkai, founded in 1909 and supported by an importer of camera equipment. In 1926 a group of Korean professional photographers founded the Kyŏngsŏng sajinsa hyŏphoe, and sometime soon after that an amateur club, the Kyŏngsŏng  saguhoe, was inaugurated. These clubs hosted lectures, group appreciation meetings, and small exhibitions of their own work and thus actively spread the practice and appreciation of photography. See Ch’oe Injin, Han’guk sajinsa, 259–66. 19. The early amateur photography contests hosted by the Chosŏn ilbo in the late 1930s show the dominance of pictorialism. For the photographs that won the competition, see Chosŏn ilbo, July 10–20, 1937; July 1–9, 1938; and July 20–27, 1939. A selection of these and other art photographs from the colonial era can be seen in Yi Kyŏngmin and Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, eds., K’ameradang kwa yesul sajin sidae: Han’guk kŭndae yesul sajin ak’aibŭ (1910–1945) (Seoul: Ak’aibŭ buksŭ, 2010). 20. For example, these became popular among China’s photographers after the prestigious annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society had selected one such image. See Yi Gu, “Through the Lens of Mount Huang: Perception, Pictorial Photography, and the Image of Nation,” ms. 21. See the call for applicants in Chosŏn ilbo, June 5, 1938, and July 15, 1939. 22. The Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai (Chosŏn misul chŏllamhoe) was inaugurated in 1922 and modeled after the annual art exhibition held in Japan, the Teikoku bijutsu tenrankai (Imperial exhibition). See Yi Chunghŭi, “Sŏhwa hyŏphoe wa Chosŏn misul chŏllamhoe,” in Kim Yunsu et al., Han’guk misul 100 nyŏn 1, 280–83 (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 2006). 23. Chosŏn ilbo, June 5, 1938. 24. Im Hwa, “Saenghwal ŭi palgyŏn,” in Munhak ŭi nolli, 334. 25. Photography’s complicated entanglement with colonialism is opened up in Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

C6548.indb 214

8/29/14 9:22 AM

1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

215

26. Perhaps the most relevant work for thinking through the relationship between the postcard and colonial formations is Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), on photographs of Algeria sent to France. For a fascinating discussion of picture postcards of colonial Korea, see Kwŏn Hyŏkhŭi, Chosŏn esŏ on sajinyŏpsŏ. 27. Rey Chow has discussed the dynamics of so-called self-orientalism in the context of Chinese intellectuals in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 28. Histories of photography in Euro-America have shown how the photograph helped define an exhibitionary viewpoint on the colony/city, which coincided with the bourgeois viewpoint. Nancy Armstrong has described how this viewpoint became a hegemonic national view, where in Victorian Britain the consumers of early photographs were the first to “imagine their nation as a system of images with an urban observer situated at its core.” See Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 33. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 85–107. 31. Clearly other photographic genres and economies existed, perhaps most notably those of journalism and the mass media advertising and entertainment industries, and these were not entirely separate or unconnected from the three genres I am highlighting. Anne McClintock has written insightfully of advertising in the context of imperial Britain. See Imperial Leather, 207–31. 32. This appears to be the gist of Sŏn Il’s introduction in “Singminji Chosŏn ŭl ponŭn nun: Ilche sidae sajin ak’aibŭ,” Bol no. 3 (Summer 2006): 208–21. 33. I am certainly not arguing that it is inevitable or immanent to the form of photography that it collude with colonial structures in this way; rather I am talking about a particular historical conjunction. One only has to see the postwar documentary photography of Im Ŭngsik, for example, to appreciate that photography could equally bring dominant spatial relations into question. See Kungnip hyŏndae misulgwan and Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, eds., Photography of Limb Eung Sik: Kirok ŭi yesul, yesul ŭi kirok (Seoul: Kungnip hyŏndae misulgwan, 2011). 34. Recent historiography on the colonial experience, such as the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, seems inclined to argue for the split lives of the colonial bourgeoisie. My reading of Korea’s colonial fiction disputes this notion. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

C6548.indb 215

8/29/14 9:22 AM

216 1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

35. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Yŏksŏl,” in Changsam Yisa, 23 (Seoul: Ulyu munhwasa, 1947; photoreproduction, Han’guk hyŏndae sosŏl ŏpsŏ 9: Changsam Yisa, Seoul: Taeyŏngsa, 1985). 36. Ch’oe’s descriptive conventions bear comparison to Susan Stewart’s study of postindustrial conventions of description, whereby the miniature is considered a “metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois subject.” See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), xii. 37. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 4: 297. 38. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 243. 39. A later story by Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pyeŏin,” notably uses the same technique. See Han’guk kŭndae tanp’yŏn sosŏl taegye 27 (Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1988), 595–621. 40. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland, 39–41 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” (“Nalgae”; 1936) offers another example of a protagonist’s discomfort at the streets moving into his mind. 41. See the contemporary works by Yi T’aejun and Pak T’aewŏn, for example. 42. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 5: 377. 43. Cho Yŏnhyŏn, “Chaŭisik ŭi pigŭk,” Paengmin, January 1949, 132. 44. Unlike most other writers in colonial Korea, who tended to support themselves financially through newspaper work or teaching, Ch’oe apparently owned a glass factory and thus lived the divide between art and business in much the way Pyŏngil did. For biographical information on Ch’oe Myŏngik, see Kim Haeyŏn, “Ch’oe Myŏngik sosŏl ŭi munhaksajŏk yŏn’gu” (Ph.D. diss., Kyŏngnam University, 1999). Paradoxically, being in business allowed Ch’oe to claim that his art was uncontaminated by commercial interests, as he never actually wrote in order to make money. See Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Chomang mundan’gi,” Chogwang 5, no. 4 (April 1939): 311; also “Suhyŏng kwa wŏngo kiil,” Munjang 2, no. 6 (June/July 1940): 246–47. 45. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 4: 290. 46. My thinking about unruly detail has been greatly informed by the work of Naomi Schor. See Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987). 47. Ch’oe Myŏngik, “Pi onŭn kil,” Chogwang 2, no. 4: 289. 48. Ibid., 287. 49. For an incise discussion of Yi Kwangsu’s essay and its significance, see Hwang Jongyon, “The Emergence of Aesthetic Ideology in Modern Korean Literary Criticism: An Essay on Yi Kwangsu,” trans. Janet Poole, Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter

C6548.indb 216

8/29/14 9:22 AM

1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

217

1999): 5–35. On the transformation of the term “literature” over the course of the eighteenth century in Britain, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 45–54. 50. Yi Kwangsu, “Munhak iran hao,” in Han’guk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa (charyo I), ed. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, 46 (Seoul: Tandae ch’ulp’anbu, 1981). 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 40. 53. Ibid., 44. On the arrival of the photograph in Korea, it took a while to stabilize the term chosen to describe the new object. This is discussed in Ch’oe Injin, Han’guk sajinsa, 11–26. 54. In this sense his literary work prefigures the later theories of Henri Lefebvre, who wrote that “the everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as ‘rational.’ ” Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” trans. Christine Levich, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 10. 55. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nalgae’ e kwanhayŏ: riarijŭm ŭi hwakdae wa simhwa,” in Munhak kwa chisŏng, 98–99 (Kyŏngsŏng: Inmunsa, 1938). 56. Ibid., 100. 57. Ibid., 98. 58. Ibid., 100–101. 59. Ibid., 103. 60. Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron,” 361. 61. Ibid., 358. 62. Ibid., 357. 63. Naomi Schor’s work tracks the ways in which in European literary and philosophical thought the interpretation of the detail veers between understanding it as disruptive of the “internal hierarchic ordering of the work of art” and the idea that it is the holder of a unique truth value. Im seems to straddle this divide: the detail disrupts the ability of narrative to track historical progress, reducing it to empty, chronological progression, but the proper command of detail would enable the grasping of “reality.” See Schor, Reading in Detail, 20. 64. Im Hwa, “Saenghwal ŭi palgyŏn,” 334. 65. Ibid. 66. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn, 132 (London: Merlin Press, 1978). 67. Ibid., 134. 68. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Se’tae wa p’ungsok,” in Kim Namch’ŏn chŏnjip, vol. 1, ed. Chŏng Ho-ung and Son Chŏngsu, 420 (Seoul: Tosŏ Pak Ijŏng, 2000).

C6548.indb 217

8/29/14 9:22 AM

218 1. the unruly detail of l ate col onialism

69. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Ilsinsang chilli wa moral,” in Kim Namchŏn chŏnjip 1, 359. 70. Kim Namch’ŏn, “Set’ae wa p’ungsok,” 421. 71. This phrasing is from Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 121. 72. Harry Harootunian notes the tendency in historians and theorists of everydayness from Walter Benjamin to Siegfried Kracauer to Gonda Yasunosuke to concentrate on “the details of multiple practices, starting with unimportant, shallow, and trivial occurrences.” See Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 71. 73. In trying to think through the everyday as dissonant with national time, I have been inspired by the work of Harry Harootunian, in particular his essay “Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004): 181–94. 74. See Lee Hi-seung, “Recollections of the Korean Language Society Incident,” in Pihl, ed., Listening to Korea. 75. See, for example, Ch’oe Chaesŏ in Kikuchi Kan et al., “Shin hantō bungaku e no yōbō,” Kokumin bungaku 3, no 3 (March 1943; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 5, Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001), 3; and Im Hwa, “Set’ae sosŏl ron,” 361.

2. The S o ciol o gy of C ol onial No stal gia 1.

Yi T’aejun, “Kowanp’um kwa saenghwal,” Munjang 2, no. 8 (October 1940): 208– 9; In Chŏngsik, “Hwoego chi nyŏm,” Munjang 2, no. 8 (October 1940): 200–201; Cho Usik, “Kojŏn kwa kach’i,” Munjang 2, no. 7 (September 1940): 134–35; Kim Chinsŏp, “Yŏksa ŭi maeryŏk,” Chosŏn ilbo, January 23, 1935.

2.

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, 324 (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).

3.

The editors of Sŏ’s collected works advise that listing as a member of these early postliberation organizations does not necessarily confirm his actual participation as the situation at the time was far from stable. See Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn, “Han pop’yŏnjuŭija ŭi sam,” in Sŏ Insik chŏnjip I, 13 (Seoul: Tosŏch’ulp’an yŏngnak, 2006).

4.

Stewart, On Longing, 23.

5.

See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 3–18.

6.

Ibid., 7.

7.

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 268.

8.

C6548.indb 218

Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 10.

8/29/14 9:22 AM

2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

9.

219

These biographical details are taken from the introduction to Sŏ Insik’s collected works. In the absence of other documentation, this brief essay is invaluable. See Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn, “Han pop’yŏnjuŭija ŭi sam,” 5–14.

10. For an account of this demonstration, see Dae-sook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement 1918–1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 169. 11. Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn, “Han pop’yŏnjuŭija ŭi sam,” 10. 12. Sŏ Insik, “‘Hyangsu’ ŭi sahoehak,” Chogwang 6, no. 11 (November 1940): 185. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 185–86. 16. Ibid., 186. 17. Ibid., 188. 18. Ibid. 19. I take this to be also the argument in Ch’a Sŭnggi, “Ch’usang kwa kwaing: chung’il chŏnjaenggi cheguk/singminji ŭi sasang yŏnswae wa tamnon chŏngch’ihak,” in Han’guk hyŏngdae munhak ŭi chŏngch’ijŏk naemyŏnhwa, ed. Sanghŏ hakhoe, 255–90 (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2007). 20. Sŏ Insik, “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi,” Inmun p’yŏngnon 2, no. 1 (January 1940): 55–56. 21. Ibid., 56. 22. Ibid., 56–57. 23. Ibid., 56. A probable misprint in the published version states that one “cannot” find such faces, but I have corrected this. 24. I have written about decadence and this story by Ch’oe Myŏngik in more detail in “Late Colonial Modernism and the Desire for Renewal,” Journal of Korean Studies 19, no 1 (Spring 2014). 25. Sŏ Insik, “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi,” 57. 26. See, for example, the collection of short stories in Pak T’aewŏn tanp’yŏnjip (Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1939). 27. His famous essay collection Musŏrok has been translated as Eastern Sentiments (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 28. Sonyŏn was published between 1908 and 1911. For more on the symbolic importance of “youth,” see Hwang Jongyon, “Nobŭl, ch’ŏngnyŏn, cheguk: Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi t’onggukkagan sijak,” in Han’guk munhak kwa t’alsingminjuŭi, ed. Sanghŏ hakhoe (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2005). 29. The question mark is Sŏ’s. See Sŏ Insik, “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi,” 58. 30. Owing to the large amount of capital and technology it required, the film industry offered less leeway for negotiating imperial power. Now that a film produced by the Koryŏ film company from this period has been rediscovered, we can gain a

C6548.indb 219

8/29/14 9:22 AM

220 2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

sense of the kind of pressures Im faced in the movie world. Chip ŏmnŭn ch’ŏnsa (Angels in the Streets; 1941) tells the true story of a pastor who collected a group of homeless beggar children from the streets of Seoul and built an orphanage to house them in the countryside. It is not hard to see how this inspirational story of self-sacrifice and return to a morally improved countryside fits Im’s ideals of improvement and understanding of urban space as morally degraded. However, despite the film’s rather hard-hitting scenes of the harsh reality of life in Seoul, toward the end of it the pastor and the orphan children suddenly hoist a Japanese flag outside their orphanage and begin to recite the Imperial Oath. The film faced harsh censorship, according to the recollections of one of its child actors, who is interviewed on the DVD collection Palgul twoen kwagŏ (Korean Film Archive, 2007). 31. Im Hwa, “Negŏri ŭi Suni,” in Im Hwa chŏnjip: 1 si, ed. Kim Woegon, 46–48 (Seoul: Pak Ijŏng, 2000). 32. Yu Chongho discusses the context of Im’s poem in his Tasi ingnŭn Han’guk siin (Seoul: Munhak tongne, 2002), 53. On labor activity, see Soon-won Park, “Colonial Industrial Growth and the Emergence of the Korean Working Class,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, 155 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). 33. Im Hwa, “Tasi negŏri esŏ,” in Im Hwa chŏnjip, 92–95. 34. On land possession, see Kim Yŏnggŭn, “Ilcheha ilsang saenghwal ŭi pyŏnhwa wa kŭ sŏnggyŏk e kwanhan yŏn’gu” (Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 1999), 64–71. 35. Yu Kwangnyŏl, “Chongno negŏri,” Pyŏlgŏngon 4, no. 6 (September 1929), 68. Also, on the changing sensibility of the streets, see Kim Yŏnggŭn, “Ilcheha ilsang saenghwal ŭi pyŏnhwa,” 142–53. 36. Sŏ Insik, “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi,” 59. 37. Yu Chongho, Tasi ingnŭn Han’guk siin, 141. 38. O Changhwan, “Yŏsu,” in O Changhwan chŏnjip, ed. Kim Hakdong, 18 (Seoul: Kukhakcharyowŏn, 2003). 39. “Kojŏn,” in ibid., 28. 40. “Sŏngssibo,” in ibid., 40. 41. “The Last Train,” in ibid., 52. The original title of the poem was written in English. 42. Sŏ Insik, “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi,” 60. 43. Ibid. 44. On the so-called return to tradition, see Hwang Jongyon [Chongyŏn], “Han’guk munhak ŭi kŭndae wa pankŭndae: 1930 nyŏndae hubangi munhak ŭi chŏnt’ongjuŭi yŏn’gu” (Ph.D. diss., Tongguk University, 1991). 45. Chosŏn ilbo, January 22, 1935.

C6548.indb 220

8/29/14 9:22 AM

2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

221

46. Chosŏn ilbo, January 1, 1935. 47. See the discussion in Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 48. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 114–15. 49. This definition of tradition is from Sŏ Insik, “Chŏnt’ongnon,” in Yŏksa wa munhwa (Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1939). See especially p. 165 for Sŏ’s summary of tradition’s characteristics. For another discussion of Sŏ’s understanding of tradition, see Ch’a Sŭnggi, “1930 nyŏndae huban chŏnt’ongnon yŏn’gu: sigan-konggan ŭisik ŭl chungsim ŭro” (Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 2003), 85–91. Sŏ’s conviction that tradition was subjective and activated only in the present was shared by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi in interwar Japan. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 381. 50. Sŏ Insik, “Chŏnt’ongnon,” 182. 51. Ibid., 181. 52. Ibid., 182. 53. Ibid., 180–81. 54. Sŏ Insik, “Hyŏndae ŭi kwaje 2,” in Yŏksa wa munhwa, 208. 55. Ibid., 211–13. 56. Ibid., 208. 57. Ibid., 211. 58. Although the idea of “world history” existed previously, it was possibly most famously used to explain the war effort in two roundtable discussions published in 1942 involving Nishida disciples Kōyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, Suzuki Shigetaka, and Kōsaka Masaaki. See “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon,” Chūō kōron 57, no.  1 (January 1942): 150–92; and “Tōa kyōeiken no rinrisei to rekishisei,” Chūō kōron 57, no. 4 (April 1942): 120–61. For a discussion of the first roundtable, see Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 42–43. 59. Sŏ Insik, “Hyŏndae ŭi kwaje 2,” 207. 60. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 29–39. 61. Sŏ Insik, “Kojŏn kwa hyŏndae,” in Yŏksa wa munhwa, 273. 62. See in particular the essays “Munhwa ŭi kujo rŭl nonsulham,” “Chisŏng ŭi sidaejŏk sŏnggyŏk,” “Hyŏndae ŭi kwaje 1,” and “Chŏnch’ejuŭi yŏksagwan,” in ibid. 63. Here Sŏ is referring to intellectuals such as Paek Ch’ŏl, who published a series of articles idealizing the culture of Silla. See “Tongyang in’gan kwa p’ungnyusŏng: Chosŏn munhak chŏnt’ong ŭi ilgo,” Chogwang 3, no. 5 (May 1937): 266–78; and

C6548.indb 221

8/29/14 9:22 AM

222 2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

“P’ungnyu in’gan ŭi munhak: sogŭkchŏk in’gan ŭi pip’an,” Chogwang 3, no. 6 (June 1937): 268–80. 64. Sŏ Insik, “Kojŏn kwa hyŏndae,” 267. 65. Ibid., 279. 66. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, 212 (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 67. Ibid., 223. 68. Sŏ Insik, “Chŏnt’ongnon,” 182–83. 69. For historical discussion of the term tongyang in China, Japan, and Korea, see Ch’oe Wŏnsik and Paek Yŏngsŏ, eds., Tongasiain ŭi ‘tongyang’ insik: 19–20 segi (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 1997). 70. Ch’a Sŭnggi, “Ch’usang kwa kwaing,” 256. 71. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Tongyang in’gan kwa p’ungnyusŏng,” 266–78. 72. See also Hwang Jongyon, “Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl e nat’anan Silla,” Tongbang hakchi 137 (March 2007): 337–74. On representations of Chosŏn society in the early colonial period, see Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 121–29. 73. See, for example, the special feature on “Tongyang munhak ŭi chaepansŏng” in Inmun p’yŏngnon 3, no. 6 (June 1940). 74. Sŏ Insik, “Hyŏndae ŭi kwaje 2,” 212. 75. Once more the argument Sŏ is advancing brings to mind Fanon’s critique of négritude: “The unconditional affirmation of African culture has succeeded the unconditional affirmation of European culture,” he wrote, questioning whether colonialism should be fought on the basis of its own spatializing logic and suggesting that the historical formation of the nation offered better grounds for liberation. See The Wretched of the Earth, 212–13. 76. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 16. 77. “P’yŏngdan 3 in chŏngdamhoe: munhwa munje chonghwoenggwan,” Chosŏn ilbo, March 19, 1940. 78. Ibid. 79. Sŏ Insik, “Tongyang munhwa ŭi inyŏm kwa hyŏngt’ae: kŭ t’ŭksusŏng kwa ilbansŏng,” Tonga ilbo, January 3–12, 1940. 80. This is the concept of the Orient in the East Asian context, which tends to center around China, Japan, and sometimes India, but not the Orient of the Middle East of which Edward Said so famously wrote. 81. Sŏ Insik, “Tongyang munhwa ŭi inyŏm kwa hyŏngt’ae,” Tonga ilbo, January 4, 1940.

C6548.indb 222

8/29/14 9:22 AM

2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

223

82. Sŏ explains that his essay is based on essays by Nishida Kitarō, titled “Keijijōgakuteki tachiba kara mita tō-yō kodai no bunka jōtai” (a chapter in Nishida Kitarō, Tetsugaku no konpon mondai, 1933–34), and Kōyama Iwao, titled “Mu no tetsugaku to haigo no seimei.” 83. Sŏ Insik, “Tongyang munhwa ŭi inyŏm kwa hyŏngt’ae,” Tonga ilbo, January 5, 1940. 84. Ibid., January 12, 1940. 85. Ibid. 86. Sŏ Insik, “Munhwa e issŏsŏ ŭi chŏnch’e wa kaein,” Inmun p’yŏngnon 1, no. 1 (October 1939): 4–15. 87. Ibid., 5. 88. Ibid., 6. 89. Ibid., 7. 90. Sŏ Insik, “Munhak kwa yulli,” Inmun p’yŏngnon 2, no. 10 (October 1940): 22. 91. Sŏ Insik, “Munhwa e issŏsŏ ŭi chŏnch’e wa kaein,” 7. 92. Ibid., 9–10. 93. Ibid., 14. 94. See Ch’a Sŭnggi, “Ch’usang kwa kwaing.” For a more extended discussion of Miki Kiyoshi’s philosophy in the context of the new Asian order, see Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 358–99. Sŏ was clearly very familiar with Miki’s writing on tradition and the present, as well as the concept of worldliness. 95. Sŏ Insik, “Munhwa ŭi yuhyŏng kwa tangye,” in Yŏksa wa munhwa, 314. 96. I borrow the concept of unruly practice from Meng Yue to refer to certain nonessential practices interruptive of colonial and capitalist logic. See Yue Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxvii. 97. Kim Yunsik, “Chŏnhyang sosŏl ŭi Han’gukchŏk yangsang,” in Kim Yunsik sŏnjip 2: sosŏlsa, 215 (Seoul: Sol ch’ulp’ansa, 1996). 98. See also “Chŏnhyangnon” and “1930 nyŏndae hubangi k’ap’u munindŭl ŭi chŏnhyang yuhyŏng punsŏk,” in Kim Yunsik sŏnjip 2: sosŏlsa. 99. Kayama Mitsurō, “Gyōsha,” Bungakukai (March 1941): 80. 100. Some of these connections between Sŏ and Ch’oe are discussed in Kim Chul [Ch’ŏl], “Kŭndae ŭi ch’ogŭk, ‘Nangbi,’ kŭrigo Venetia,” in ‘Kungmin’ iranŭn noye: Han’guk munhak ŭi kiŏk kwa manggak, 62–104 (Seoul: Samin, 2005). It is also important to note that simultaneous with the appearance of Inmun p’yŏngnon, there appeared the journal Munjang, which made the exploration of Korea’s classical tradition one of its chief raisons d’être. Given Sŏ’s position on the revivalist movement, it is not surprising that he would align himself more clearly with Inmun

C6548.indb 223

8/29/14 9:22 AM

224 2. the sociol ogy of col onial no stal gia

p’yŏngnon, which was run by many scholars involved in the study of European literatures.

3. A P rivate Orient 1.

Musŏrok translates literally as “essays written at random,” or possibly “essays without a preface.” In this chapter I will refer to the collection by the title of its English published translation, Eastern Sentiments. I have referred to a 1944 reprint of the original collection, Musŏrok (Kyŏngsŏng: Pangmun sŏgwan, 1941); all quotations are taken from Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, trans. Janet Poole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

2.

In terming this Yi’s private Orient, I have been inspired by Eric Santner’s marvelous My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

3.

Scholars have noted the significance of old, rural, or simple characters in representing the past in terms of a certain morality that struggles to survive in modern Korean society. See Hwang Jongyon, “Han’guk munhak ŭi kŭndae wa pan’gŭndae,” 157–62; and Yu Chongho, “‘In’gan sajŏn ŭl ponŭn chaemi,” in 1930 nyŏndae minjok munhak ŭi ŭisik, ed. Yi Sŏnyŏng, 293–307 (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1990). On Yi T’aejun’s love of old things, see Kim Yunsik, “Yi T’aejun ron,” Hyŏndae munhak (May 1989): 346–65; Sŏ Yŏngch’ae, “Tu kae ŭi kŭndaesŏng kwa ch’ŏsa ŭisik,” in Yi T’aejun munhak yŏn’gu, ed. Sanghŏ munhakhoe, 54–86 (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1993); and Ch’a Sŭnggi, “1930 nyŏndae huban chŏnt’ong ron yŏn’gu,” 67–73.

4.

Yi T’aejun, “Antiques and Daily Life,” in Eastern Sentiments, 143.

5.

For encouraging me to read this relationship as one of intimacy, I thank Leila Wice.

6. 7.

Stewart, On Longing, 142. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

8.

Stewart, On Longing, 142.

9.

Yi wrote this comment at the end of a piece on classics in writing, which formed part of a longer guide to good writing. The guide was first serialized in the journal Munjang and then published as a single volume titled Munjang kanghwa (Lectures on Writing). See Yi T’aejun, “Munjang ŭi kojŏn, hyŏndae, ŏnmunilch’i,” Munjang 2, no. 3 (March 1941): 135. The full guide has recently been republished in an annotated edition; see Munjang kanghwa, rev. ed. (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 2005).

C6548.indb 224

8/29/14 9:22 AM

3. a private orient

225

10. Yi writes of this house and his daily life in the story “T’okki iyagi,” Munjang 3, no. 2 (February 1941): 452–61. 11. “If we try to interpret before fully feeling, we will not avoid being trespassers of the classics. Their classical nature is not something we can know, but something we must first feel.” Yi T’aejun, “The Classics,” in Eastern Sentiments, 126. 12. Yi himself wrote of his distrust of documents in “History,” in Eastern Sentiments, 49–51: “Documents are far too lacking in concrete expression to provide the true reality of a person at a particular time.” 13. Yi T’aejun, “Muyŏn,” Ch’unch’u (June 1942): 138. 14. Yi T’aejun, “Fishing,” in Eastern Sentiments, 132–35. 15. As translator of this piece, I can testify to the obscurity of many of the terms Yi uses to modern readers. The various words used for different kinds of fish showed up only in dictionaries for dialect, or in North Korean dictionaries that portray the language of northern regions in more detail, or on antiquarian fishing websites. This particular essay is a good example of the way in which Yi produced an archive for everyday life and customs. Readers today encounter the same obscurity of meaning in reading Yi’s essay as he described in a later essay about the language of the sixteenth century. See “Kisaeng and Poetry,” in Eastern Sentiments, 82–88. 16. Yi T’aejun, “Antiques,” in ibid., 140. 17. Baudrillard has written of the value of what he called “historicalness” in capitalist societies and the necessity of understanding such antique objects as part of, not external to, the “system” of modern objects. See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 73–84. 18. Yi T’aejun, “Antiques,” 139. 19. Stewart, On Longing, 133. Baudrillard, too, argues in The System of Objects that the antique object offers authenticity and the temporal closure of creation: “Now, the search for the traces of creation, from the actual impression of the hand to the signature, is also a search for a line of descent and for paternal transcendence” (76). Hence, perhaps, Yi’s dual focus on the singularity of the water dropper that belonged to the father and the anonymity of the dirt and cracks on the pots that once belonged to unknown peoples of old. 20. See Kim Brandt’s discussion of Yanagi Muneyoshi and Asakawa Noritaka in “Objects of Desire”: “Japanese writers regularly assumed the position of the colonialist master, or subject, whose consuming gaze rendered everything Korean—landscape, people, and things—into a unified aesthetic object. Often this maneuver was accomplished by means of the same rhetorical strategies that had long been employed in Western texts to subordinate non-Western (including

C6548.indb 225

8/29/14 9:22 AM

226 3. a private orient

Japanese) others. . . . the theme of the childlike Korean unconsciously producing masterpieces of art recurs in texts throughout this period” (736–37). For an example, see the essay “The Kizaemon Tea-bowl,” in Yanagi Sōetsu, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, adapted by Bernard Leach, rev. ed., 190–96 (Tokyo: Kōdansha International, 1989). 21. On tōyō and tōyōshi, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 22. For an in-depth discussion of Yanagi’s and Asakawa’s work and its import, see Kim Brandt, A Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Art in Imperial Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), especially chapter 1. 23. Yanagi’s famous essay “Chōsenjin o omou” (Thinking of Koreans) was serialized in one of Japan’s national newspapers, the Yomiuri shinbun, May 20–24, 1919. It was reprinted as the head essay in a collection of his essays on Korean art and culture titled “Thinking of Korea.” See Yanagi Muneyoshi, Chōsen o omou, ed. Takasaki Sōji (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1984). 24. Yanagi, “Chōsenjin o omou,” in Chōsen o omou, 9. 25. “Butsukokuji no chōkoku ni tsuite” was the first essay in which Yanagi dealt with an Asian and not an European object. Originally published in the journal Geijutsu in 1919, it was republished in Chōsen o omou, 10–35. 26. “Kizaemon ido o miru” was first published in the journal Kōgei in May 1931 and republished in Chōsen o omou, 192–200. Citations are taken from the English translation in Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman, 190–96. I have altered them for accuracy when required. Alan Tansman has also discussed this essay in his The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 109–11. 27. Yanagi, “The Kizaemon Tea-bowl,” 194. 28. Here I have altered the translation according to Yanagi’s version. See “Kizaemon ido o miru,” 196. 29. Again I have altered the translation. See ibid., 197. 30. Yi T’aejun, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip 7: Sasang ŭi wŏlya, rev. 2d ed. (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1996); and “Antiques,” 138–41. 31. Yi T’aejun, “Antiques,” 138. 32. Ibid., 139. 33. I am indebted to my colleague Linda Rui Feng for this phrasing of the issue. 34. Yi T’aejun, “Antiques and Daily Life,” in Eastern Sentiments, 141–44. 35. Yi T’aejun, “Copying,” in Eastern Sentiments, 95–97. 36. “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Charles Baudelaire, “The

C6548.indb 226

8/29/14 9:22 AM

3. a private orient

227

Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Mayne, 12 (New York: Phaidon, 1995). 37. Yi T’aejun, “Oriental Painting,” in Eastern Sentiments, 137. 38. Ibid., 135–38. 39. The term transplant (isik) comes from Im Hwa’s 1940 essay “Sinmunhaksa ŭi pangbŏp,” where he famously declared that “the history of the new literature was a history of transplanted culture.” See Im Hwa, Munhak ŭi nolli, 827. 40. Hyŏndae chosŏn munhak chŏnjip: Sup’il, kihaeng chip, vol. 5 (Kyŏngsŏng: Chosŏn ilbosa ch’ulp’anbu, 1939). On the popularity of the anecdotal essay in the 1930s and Yi T’aejun’s practice in particular, see Kim Hyŏnju, “Yi T’aejun ŭi sup’il ron yŏn’gu,” in Kŭndae munhak kwa Yi T’aejun, ed. Sanghŏ munhakhoe, 219–46 (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2000). 41. Adorno wrote that, “An unequivocal logical order deceives us about the antagonistic nature of what that order is imposed upon. Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its subject matter is always a conflict brought to a standstill.” Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 16 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 42. Ch’oe Chaesŏ uses the term “essayization” in his article “Munhak ŭi sup’ilhwa,” Tonga ilbo, February 3, 1939. Ch’oe expresses dissatisfaction at the recent popularity of the essay, which in his view was turning a form that relied on spontaneity and the status of a pastime into something much more professional that threatened to overwhelm other literary forms for both readers and writers. 43. Yi T’aejun, “The Short Story and the Conte,” in Eastern Sentiments, 61. 44. Ibid. 45. I have written at more length on this question in “Introduction,” in Eastern Sentiments, 1–23. 46. Kim Kirim, “Sup’il ŭl wihaya,” Sindonga 3, no. 9 (September 1933): 144–45. 47. Ibid., 145. 48. Virginia Woolf shared with Kim a sense of the essay as the most polished of all prose styles: “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.” I have no idea whether Yi ever read this, but he would surely have approved. See Virginia Woolf, “The Modern Essay,” in The Common Reader, new ed., 270 (London: Hogarth Press, 1933). 49. In a Chosŏn ilbo article from earlier in 1933, Kim had hailed Yi as the ideal “stylist,” noting that, owing to the relatively recent history of modern literature and the

C6548.indb 227

8/29/14 9:22 AM

228 3. a private orient

early death of so many talented writers, he was one of the few writers to leave an impression of having fully matured his style. See Kim Kirim, “Sŭt’aillisŭt’ŭ Yi T’aejun ssi rŭl nonham,” Chosŏn ilbo, June 25–27, 1933. 50. Kim Kirim et al., “Munye chwadamhoe,” Chosŏn munhak 1, no. 4 (November 1933): 99. 51. Ibid., 100. 52. This was in the essay “Sup’il ron,” which appears in Munhak ŭi nŏlli, 667–82. 53. Im Hwa serialized his “Chosŏn sinmunhaksa ron sŏsŏl” (Prolegomena to a History of Korea’s New Literature) in the Chosŏn chung’ang ilbo between October 9 and November 13, 1935. “Kaesŏl Chosŏn sinmunhaksa” (Outline of a History of Korea’s New Literature) was initially serialized in the Chosŏn ilbo between September 2, 1939, and May 10, 1940. At this point the main vernacular newspapers were shut down by the Government General. Im continued serialization in the journal Inmun p’yŏngnon from November 1940 through April 1941. Im specifically discussed the issue of genre in the essay “Sinmunhaksa ŭi pangbŏp,” which was originally serialized in the Tonga ilbo from January 13 to January 20, 1940, but also included in his monumental volume of criticism published in the same year; see Munhak ŭi nŏlli, 819–41. All three of these works have been republished in one volume. See Im Hwa chŏnjip 2: Munhaksa, ed. Kim Woegon (Seoul: Pak Ijŏng, 2001). 54. Im Hwa, “Sup’il ron,” 672–73. 55. Ibid., 674. 56. Ibid., 676. 57. Ibid., 679. 58. Ibid., 680–81. 59. Xudong Zhang, “The Politics of Aestheticization: Zhou Zuoren and the Crisis of Chinese New Culture (1927–1937)” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1995), 140. 60. Yi T’aejun, “Night,” in Eastern Sentiments, 27. 61. Yi T’aejun, “Copying,” 95–97. 62. Yi T’aejun, “For Whom Do We Write?” in Eastern Sentiments, 53. 63. Ibid. 64. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 38. 65. This section follows my own discussion in “Introduction,” in Eastern Sentiments, 1–23. 66. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 38. 67. The interior of the colonial bourgeoisie often gets coded in cultural terms as a space of protection against the violence and commerce of the colonial economy. It has been a strong presence in recent work by postcolonial theorists and historians of Bengal, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, who turn to

C6548.indb 228

8/29/14 9:22 AM

3. a private orient

229

the interior as a buffer zone of national culture. When the outside is construed as society rearranged according to the capitalist colonial economy, the inside is conceived as holding the traces of the past and a domestic culture that is not yet totally domesticated to capital. Korea’s colonial texts consistently give lie to this phantasmagoria of the interior as distinct from the workings of the colonial state. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6; and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 68. Yi’s travelogue was first serialized under the title “Imin purak kyŏnmungi” in the Chosŏn ilbo, April 8–21, 1938. For a different reading of “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” see Kim Woegon, “Singminji munhakcha ŭi manju ch’ehŏm: Yi T’aejun ŭi ‘Manju kihaeng’,” Han’guk munhak iron kwa pip’yŏng 8, no. 3 (September 2004): 301–21. 69. On the various meanings of Manchuria in the Japanese empire, see Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); and Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 70. Yi T’aejun, “Eastern Sentiments,” in Eastern Sentiments, 57. 71. Ibid., 58. The geographical range of Yi’s Orient is wide, not only encompassing the traditions of China, Japan, and Korea but reaching as far as Persia and the poetry of Omar Khayyam. Khayyam is, Yi writes, representative of the Oriental state of mind with his pessimism and vision of the world as one of suffering. Such sentiments link him to the philosophy of Buddhism and what Yi describes as the receptivity to fate at the expense of daily life. 72. Ibid., 59. 73. Much has been written about culturalism in interwar Japan. See Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity; Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 74. For some background on the ways in which modern literature was invested in the vernacular, see Hwang Jongyon, “The Emergence of Aesthetic Ideology in Modern Korean Literary Criticism.” From June to September 1936 Yi had serialized a novel about Hwang Chini, perhaps the most famous kisaeng owing to her poems. The novel was titled Hwang Chini and appeared in the Chosŏn chung’ang ilbo. It has been republished in Yi’s collected works, Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip, vol. 12 (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1999). 75. For a glimpse of the imperial fascination with the kisaeng, one could look at any number of tourist guides from the period, but perhaps a standard example

C6548.indb 229

8/29/14 9:22 AM

230

3. a private orient

would be a 1939 special edition of the mass-circulation magazine Modan Nippon, which featured a special on the Korean peninsula. The entire edition has been recently translated into Korean and republished; see Ilbon chapchi modŏn Ilbon kwa Chosŏn 1939, trans. Yun Soyŏng, Hong Sŏnyŏng, Kim Hŭijŏng, and Pak Migyŏng (Seoul: Ŏmunhaksa, 2007). A glimpse of the importance of the kisaeng to visual representation of the colony can be had in postcards from the time; see Kwŏn Hyŏkhŭi, Chosŏn esŏ on sajin yŏpsŏ. The coming together of the photographic image and the kisaeng is explored in Yi Kyŏngmin, Kisaeng ŭn ŏttŏk’e mandŭrŏjyŏnŭnga (Seoul: Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, 2005). It is interesting to note a kind of repetition of the fetishization of the kisaeng in contemporary postcolonial scholarship, starting perhaps with Kawamura Minato’s book, published first in Japanese and then in Korean translation. See Kawamura Minat’o, Mal hanŭn kkot kisaeng, trans. Yu Chaesun (Seoul: Sodam ch’ulp’ansa, 2002). 76. Yi T’aejun, “Kisaeng and Poetry,” in Eastern Sentiments, 88. 77. Ibid., 86–87. 78. Yi T’aejun, “The Classics,” 126. 79. Ibid., 125–26. 80. Yi T’aejun, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” in Eastern Sentiments, 166. 81. Karatani Kōjin has highlighted the “discovery of landscape” as one of the inversions he associates with modernity, along with the discovery of interiority and the child. See Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, translation ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 11–44. 82. Yi T’aejun, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” 168. 83. For more on Mantetsu, see Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 31–44. Many famous Japanese writers similarly published travelogues recording journeys on the Southern Manchurian Railway. See, for example, Natsume Sōseki’s Mankan tokorodokoro, which was serialized in the Asahi shinbun from October to December 1909. 84. Yi T’aejun, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” 175. The Asia Express was faster than any train in the Japanese archipelago and as fast as express trains in Europe and America. Equipped with air conditioning and cooling, along with a famous glass-enclosed observation deck, the Asia Express quickly became a symbol of the technological mastery of Mantetsu and the modernity of Manchukuo more generally. See Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 246–47. 85. Yi T’aejun, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” 176. 86. Ibid., 169. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 166. 89. Ibid., 167. 90. Park, Two Dreams in One Bed, 94–95; Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 39.

C6548.indb 230

8/29/14 9:22 AM

4. peri-urban dreams

231

91. Yi T’aejun, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria,” 186–87. 92. Ibid., 189. 93. In a roundtable discussion published in late 1946, Yi argues that language lies at the heart of culture and suggests that, under the conditions of late colonialism, to keep writing in Korean—with the proviso that the content is not entirely reactionary—was more important than to focus on the content of what is written and to write in Japanese. The roundtable has been republished; see Kim Namch’ŏn et al., “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an,” in Haebang konggan ŭi pip’yŏng munhak, vol. 2, ed. Song Kihan and Kim Woegon, 164–72 (Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1991).

4. P eri-urban Dreams 1.

David Harvey discusses the nature of capitalist crisis in The Condition of Postmoder-

2.

See Pak T’aewŏn, “Ch’unhyangjŏn t’amdok ŭn imi ch’uihak ijŏn,” Munjang 2, no. 2

nity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). (February 1940): 4–5. Pak did go to Japan to study at Hosei University, but as a letter he wrote to Yi Kwangsu and which was published in the Tonga ilbo newspaper suggests, his ambitions were high. He writes that he has decided not to live in the neighborhood of Tokyo Imperial University, as he would feel pressure from the students, until he was ready to “move to the center.” See Pak T’aewŏn, “P’anshim,” Tonga ilbo, September 16, 1930. These details on Pak’s life and family background are from Chŏng Hyŏnsuk, Pak T’aewŏn munhak yŏn’gu (Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 1993), 28–60. 3.

The trilogy consists of “Ŭmu,” Chogwang 6, no. 10 (October 1940): 304–17; “T’udo,” Chogwang 7, no. 1 (January 1941): 332–66; and “Ch’aega,” Munjang 3, no. 4 (April 1941): 80–114.

4.

Pak’s most frequently anthologized piece is “Sosŏlka Kubo ssi ŭi iril” (A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist; 1934), but he was a prolific writer who mapped the spaces of leisure and consumption in downtown Seoul in his playful, sometimes melancholic, stories. For a general overview of his work, see Chŏng Hyŏnsuk, Pak T’aewŏn munhak yŏn’gu; and Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).

5.

I have written more on this in chapter 1 of “Colonial Interiors: Modernist Fiction of Korea” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2004).

6.

A large part of the administrative area of Hansŏng was reassigned to Koyang County, Kyŏnggi Province, in the spring of 1914, leaving Kyŏngsŏng (as Hansŏng had been renamed with the colonial annexation) with an area of approximately one-eighth of Hansŏng. See Kim Yŏnggŭn, “Ilcheha ilsangsaenghwal ŭi pyŏnhwa,” 30.

C6548.indb 231

8/29/14 9:22 AM

232

7.

4. peri-urban dreams

Pak T’aewŏn, “T’udo,” 352. During the colonial period the city of Seoul was officially known as Keijō, read Kyŏngsŏng in Korean.

8.

For a map of the 1936 boundaries, see Son Chŏngmok, Ilche kangjŏmgi tosi kyehoek yŏn’gu (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1990), 444–45.

9.

Ibid., 204–5.

10. These population figures are taken from the Government General census figures as reported in Son Chŏngmok, Ilche kangjŏmgi tosihwa kwajŏng yŏn’gu (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1996), 255. The actual population of Seoul in 1965 was around three times that envisaged, at three and a half million, although of course by then Seoul was the national capital of the Republic of Korea. 11. Ibid., 49 (for the 1914–20 figures) and 135 (for the 1920–30 figures). During this period the number of Japanese residents in Seoul almost trebled, from approximately 60,000 in 1914 (just under one-quarter of the total population) to nearly 170,000 in 1942. See ibid., 49, 258. 12. The entire text of the order can be seen in Son Chŏngmok, Ilche kangjŏmgi tosi kyehoek yŏn’gu, 398–403. Son’s book constitutes one of the most detailed discussions of its contents and effects. 13. Sŏul t’ŭkpyŏlsi sap’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, Sŏul chimyŏng sajŏn (Seoul: Sŏul t’ŭkpyŏlsi sap’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, 2009), 204. 14. Again these figures are from Government General records as presented by Son Chŏngmok in Ilche kangjŏmgi tosihwa kwajŏng yŏn’gu, 145. 15. Yi T’aejun, “T’okki iyagi,” Munjang 3, no. 2 (February 1941): 452–61. 16. Yi T’aejun, “The Carpenters,” in Eastern Sentiments, 128–31. 17. Kim Namch’ŏn’s contemporaneous story “Maek” (Barley; 1941) opens with the scene of a salaryman happily moving out of a downtown apartment building and into a new home in a new residential development in Ton’am-chŏng with his new wife, leaving the extended family behind. 18. O Changhwan, “Sŏngbyŏk,” in O Changhwan chŏnjip, 24. 19. “The City Wall,” in Eastern Sentiments, 42–43. 20. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in Essays in Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, 260 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 21. Ibid., 265. 22. Ibid., 266. 23. Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, 74 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). 24. Yi T’aejun, “Changma,” Chogwang 2, no. 1 (October 1936): 312–29. 25. The phrase is from Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, 20 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

C6548.indb 232

8/29/14 9:22 AM

4. peri-urban dreams

233

26. I thank my colleague Linda Rui Feng for this observation. 27. See Yi T’aejun, “T’okki iyagi.” 28. Pak T’aewŏn, “T’udo,” 336. 29. The literature of Koreans in Manchuria was already beginning to attract attention in the late colonial period in such articles as Kim Osŏng, “Chosŏn ŭi kaet’ak munhak,” Kokumin bungaku 2, no. 3 (March 1942; photoreproduction, vol. 2): 18–24. More recently, late colonial stories set in Manchuria have been republished and discussed in Minjok munhak yŏn’guso ed., Ilche malgi munindŭl ŭi manju ch’ehŏm (Seoul: Tosŏ ch’ulp’an yŏngnak, 2007); and O Yangho, Manju imin munhak yŏn’gu (Seoul: Munye ch’ulp’ansa, 2007). 30. See Park, Two Dreams in One Bed; Young, Japan’s Total Empire; Kawamura Minato, Ikyō no shōwa bungaku: Manshū to kindai Nihon (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1990). 31. The culture house (bunka jūtaku) refers to early twentieth-century houses in Japan and its colonies built to eclectic designs, often mixing European and Japanese architectural elements, and associated with the modern “cultural life.” See Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005). 32. Pak T’aewŏn, “Ŭmu,” 317. 33. On love, see Kwŏn Podŭrae, Yŏnae ŭi sidae (Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏn’gu, 2003); Sŏ Yŏngch’ae, Sarang ŭi munbŏp (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2004); Ch’oe Hyesil, Sinyŏsŏngdŭrŭn muŏsŭl kkumkkuŏnŭnga (Seoul: Saenggak ŭi namu, 2000); and Kim Uchang, “Extravagance and Authenticity: Romantic Love and the Self in Early Modern Korean Literature,” Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 61–89. 34. The difficulty of rejecting the past is perhaps only hinted at by the proliferating presence of orphans in stories, an imaginative solution to the problem of how to represent individual subjects forging their own path through confused and exciting times, free from parental interference but also lacking parental guidance. Two famous examples would be the protagonists of Yi Injik’s early story “Hyŏl ŭi nu” (1905) and Yi Kwangsu’s novel Mujŏng (1917). 35. See Kwŏn Podŭrae, Yŏnae ŭi sidae, 199–202. 36. Translation is taken from Ann Sung-hi Lee, Yi Kwang-su and Modern Korean Literature: Mujŏng (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series, 2005), 324. 37. On the figure of the youth and early modern Korean literature, see Hwang Chongyŏn, “Nobŭl, ch’ŏngnyŏn, cheguk.” 38. An interesting comparison could be made with the rise of the so-called linked short story collection (yŏnjak sosŏl) in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of the most intense industrial development. The stories in such collections are usually published separately first in various literary journals before being gathered together and published in one volume. Characters often reappear in multiple stories

C6548.indb 233

8/29/14 9:22 AM

234 4. peri-urban dreams

throughout the collection and share a temporal plane or an event-driven theme, but there is no necessary chronological order to events or their representation and no attempt to construct parts into a seamless whole to which the novel gestures. The collection acts, in true collection fashion, as a montage from which its power and meaning are derived. Many of the most notable works from this period—such as Nanjangi ga ssoaollin chagŭn kong (1978) by Cho Sehŭi and Wonmidong saramdŭl (1987) by Yang Kwija—are such collections, where stories featuring different characters from one community combine to give a sense of a chaotic and fragmented whole in transition. 39. In thinking about this problem I have returned to Homi Bhabha’s idea of the “double-time of the nation,” where he writes of the disjunctive sense of time produced by the interruption of performative into teleological, or what he calls pedagogical, time. Here performative time seems rather similar to the everyday and is similarly credited with some interruptive potential. See Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture, 139–70 (London: Routledge, 1994). 40. Yi T’aejun, “Palmun,” in Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlka Kubo shi ŭi ilil, 298 (Kyŏngsŏng: Munjangsa, 1938). 41. See Pak T’aewŏn, “Pangnanjang chuin,” Si wa sosŏl 1 (March 1936): 23–29. 42. Pak T’aewŏn, “Ch’aega,” 92–93. 43. Paek Ch’ŏl, “Hyŏnsil kwa ŭimi, kŭrigo chakcha ŭi sasegye,” Munjang 2, no. 8 (October 1940), 171. 44. Im Hwa, “Mundanjŏgin munhak ŭi sidae,” in Munhak ŭi nolli, 274–75. 45. Im Hwa, “Pongyŏk sosŏl ron,” 376. The term “unsocialized individuality” would appear to refer to arguments made by Kobayashi Hideo in his “Watakushi shōsetsu ron” that the form reflects the nature of an insufficiently socialized self resulting from an insufficiently modern society in Japan. See Kobayashi Hideo, “Watakushi shōsetsu ron,” in Shinchō Kobayashi Hideo zenshū, vol. 3, 119–45 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978). 46. Im Hwa, “Hyŏndae munhak ŭi chŏngsinjŏk kich’uk—chuch’e ŭi chaegŏn kwa hyŏnsil ŭi ŭiŭi,” 106. 47. Im Hwa, “Sasiljuŭi ŭi chaeinsik,” 77. 48. I have written at length on this in “Colonial Interiors.” See also Chŏng Chonghyŏn, “Sajŏk yŏngyŏk ŭi taedu wa ‘chinjŏnghan chagi’ kuch’uk ŭrosŏ ŭi sosŏl: An Hŭinam ŭi ‘sinbyŏn sosŏl’ ŭl chungsim uro,” Han’guk kŭndae munhak yŏn’gu no. 4 (2001): 132–56. 49. This understanding of the shishōsetsu is laid out in detail in Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

C6548.indb 234

8/29/14 9:22 AM

5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

235

50. Two major examples of these dichotomizing views on the shishōsetsu can be found in Kume Masao, “Watakushi shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu” (1925); and Nakamura Murao, “Honkaku shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu to” (1924). They have been collected, along with other significant pieces of criticism on the issue, in Hirano Ken, ed., Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi I (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1957). 51. Im Hwa, “Sinmunhaksa ŭi pangbŏp,” 829. 52. Kobayashi Hideo, “Watakushi shōsetsu ron,” in Shinchō Kobayashi Hideo zenshū 3, 126 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978). 53. An influential typology of the form by the critic Hirano Ken, building on the work of Itō Sei, distinguishes between the “state-of-mind novel” (shinkyō shōsetsu) and the “I-novel” (watakushi shōsetsu), in which the former strives for a harmonious relationship between the self and the world and the latter reveals that relationship as a crisis without aiming for resolution or salvation. Certainly the dualism describes tendencies we see not only in Japanese fiction but in works by Korean writers too. Whereas Yi T’aejun’s stories strive for resolution of domestic crisis by their end, works by Yi Sang, for example, refuse such closure and dwell in the crisis. See Suzuki, Narrating the Self, 58–65. 54. Kim Tongin, “Mundan 30 nyŏn ŭi palchach’wi,” in Kim Tongin chŏnjip, vol. 7, 334–36 (Seoul: Pokchi, 1986). 55. Yi T’aejun, “Palmun,” Sosŏlka Kubo ssi ŭi ilil, 298. 56. The serialization of this novel, titled Genkō (Real Enemy), undoubtedly contributed to Pak being added to the latest official list of literary collaborators, drawn up in 2002 by a conglomeration of South Korean National Assembly groups, the journal Silch’ŏn munhak, the Minjok munhak chakkahoe, and the Minjok munje yŏn’guso. 57. Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” 10. 58. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 59. Ibid., 57. 60. This argument has been put forward by Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1–25 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

5. Imperialization, or the Res olu tion of Crisis 1.

The character representing Ch’oe's son’s name can be read in multiple ways, according to both Korean and Japanese pronunciation practices. Unfortunately, writing in English forces me to choose a pronunciation of which I cannot be certain. I have chosen to use the Korean reading of Kang, taking into account that Ch’oe himself was surprisingly late in adopting a Japanese name in 1944.

C6548.indb 235

8/29/14 9:22 AM

236

5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

I acknowledge that Kang’s family might well have pronounced his name differently or, more probably, used multiple pronunciations. 2.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Chōsen bungaku no gendankai,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku (Kyŏngsŏng: Inmunsa, 1943), 82–83.

3.

Ibid.

4.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Maegaki,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 4–5.

5.

Ibid., 4.

6.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Shintaisei to bungaku,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 26–42.

7.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no jōken,” in ibid., 53.

8.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Nani ga shiteki de aru ka,” in ibid., 182.

9.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungaku seishin no tenkan,” in ibid., 14.

10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 20-21. 12. Oswald Spengler enjoyed worldwide renown after the success of this book. Titled Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Going Under of the Evening Lands) in its original German, the work was first published in Germany in 1918, was translated into English by 1924, and had clearly made its way to Asia, where no doubt it appealed to those pan-Asianists who believed they stood on the brink of the defeat of the West and the rise of Japan-led Asia. See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926). 13. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungaku seishin no tenkan,” 17. 14. See Spengler, “The Soul of the City,” in The Decline of the West, 2:87–110. 15

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungaku seishin no tenkan,” 23.

16. The culture life is discussed in Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, 194–98; and Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 3–33. 17. This common description of Taishō culture is complicated in Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. part 2. 18. In recent years, in stark contrast with the past, publications have tended to stress the dazzling spectacle of urban culture. A prominent example of this can be found in Kim Chinsong, Sŏul e ttansŭhol ŭl hŏhara (Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏn’gu, 1999). 19. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tenkanki no bunka riron,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 2. 20. For a comprehensive discussion of the culture house, see Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan. 21. This description is from Ch’oe Ch’aesŏ, “Tenkanki no bunka riron,” 2. 22. Ibid., 5–9. 23. Ibid., 6.

C6548.indb 236

8/29/14 9:22 AM

5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

237

24. On debates on culture in the 1920s, see Jin-kyung Lee, “Autonomous Aesthetics and Autonomous Subjectivity: Construction of Modern Literature as a Site of Social Reforms and Modern Nation-building in Colonial Korea, 1915–1925” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000). 25. The most famous essay on this topic is Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nalgae’ e kwanhayŏ.” 26. A good example of this can be seen in Pak T’aewon, “Nae yesul e taehan pangbyŏn.” Chosŏn ilbo, October 21–23, 1937. 27. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng kwa ‘Nalgae’ e kwanhayŏ,” 103–4. 28. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tenkanki no bunka riron,” 7. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid., 9. 32. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungaku seishin no tenkan,” 23. 33. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tenkanki no bunka iron,” 9–10. 34. Yi T’aejun discusses these categories in “Korea’s Fiction” and “This Thing Called the Popular,” in Eastern Sentiments, 66–71 and 79–81. 35. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tenkanki no bunka iron,” 12. 36. Evidence of the centrality of the critique of modernity’s hyperspecialization to intellectual debate in the age of total mobilization is offered by the inclusion of a section on the “problem of civilization and specialization” in the famous “overcoming modernity” debates of 1942 held by intellectuals surrounding the Kyoto School of philosophers. See Kawakami Tetsutarō et al., “Kindai no chōkoku: zadankai,” in Kindai no chōkoku (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1943), 257–64. 37. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungakusha to sekaikan no mondai,” Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 104. 38. Ch’oe’s use of the temporal markers early and late fluctuates between a universalized chronology of European history and a parallel chronology in early twentieth century Korea, which unevenly mirrors the former. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Shintaisei to bungaku,” 35–38. 39. Ibid., 37–38. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. For two good overviews of the shishōsetsu in Japanese literary history, see Suzuki, Narrating the Self; and Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 42. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no jōken,” 59. 43. Im Hwa, “Pon’gyŏk sosŏl ron,” Han’guk munhak ŭi nolli, 376. Han’guk munhak ŭi nolli is a photoreproduction of Im’s lengthy collection of essays written between 1934

C6548.indb 237

8/29/14 9:22 AM

238 5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

and 1940 and published by Hagyesa in 1940 as Munhak ŭi nolli. For the critique of sasosŏl, see such essays as “Chuch’e ŭi chaegŏn kwa munhak ŭi segye,” “Sasiljuŭi ŭi chaeinsik,” “Hyŏndae munhak ŭi chŏngsinjŏk kich’uk,” “Panghwang hanŭn sidae chŏngsin,” “Mundanchŏgin munhak ŭi sidae,” “Pon’gyŏk sosŏl ron,” and “Hyŏndae sosŏl ŭi chuingong.” 44. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no tachiba,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 133–35. 45. Ibid., 133–34. 46. Ibid., 134. 47. Ibid., 135. 48. Ibid., 130. 49. Pak Kyeri seeks the origins of the idea in the rural revitalization campaigns of the late 1920s–1930s and in the contemporary movement in Japan of shinnihonshugi. The former, perhaps, was inspired by German and Japanese attempts to strengthen artistic movements in the countryside, giving rise to such ideas as “peasant literature.” This line of thought could lead to vastly diverging politics— the countryside as a potential source of revolution through empowered and newly literate peasants, or as a depoliticized object of aesthetic appreciation to be enjoyed by urban artists. The shinnihonshugi, or “new Japanism,” movement aimed at further blurring the lines between the categories of Nihonga (literally, “Japanese painting”) and Yōga (literally, “Western painting”) into which Japanese painters often divided themselves at the time. It did so in the name of “pure art” and thus did not share the leftist politics of the rural revivalists. At stake were competing views of the countryside, of the demographic for political inclusion, and of the role of the artist and art. See Pak Kyeri, “Ilche sidae Chosŏn hyangt’osaek,” Han’guk kŭndae misul sahak 4 (1996): 166–210. 50. These criteria are reprinted in full in Ch’oe Yŏl, ed., Han’guk kŭndae misul pip’yŏngsa (Seoul: Yŏlhwadang, 2001), 53–55. 51. The influence of local color is evident across a range of visual media. In the world of cinema the 1939 film ŏhwa (Fisherman’s Fire), for example, tells the story of a young girl from a seaside village who runs away to the city only to be deceived and abused by men and finally safely returned to her rural idyll. Scenes in her home village consistently place Insun at the seashore, waves lapping on the sand in a calm landscape lacking any sign of the modernizing transformations that are discreetly depicted as belonging only to the morally suspect urban space. Landscape in the film not only is quiet and peaceful but is used to convey a sense of Insun’s destiny, for example, in the melodramatic ocean scenes as Insun’s father goes out to sea only to die in a storm. The film thus records an encounter of melodrama

C6548.indb 238

8/29/14 9:22 AM

5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

239

with the rural language of local color. See Han’guk yŏngsang charyowŏn, ed., Palgul twoen kwagŏ: 1930 nyŏndae (Seoul: T’aewŏn ent’ŏt’emŏnt’u, 2007–08). 52. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no tachiba,” 129. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 132. 55. In this sense “late individualism” plays a role somewhat similar to that of terms such as the postmodern. Peter Osborne argues that the postmodern highlights the tensions and contradictions in the concept of modernity, which is associated with certain processes of social and technological change but refers to nothing other than itself as the present. See Osborne, Politics of Time, 3–5. 56. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 10–38. 57. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Chōhei jisshi to chishiki kaikyū,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 211. 58. Ibid., 211–12. 59. Tansman, Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, 18. 60. Ibid. The internal citations are from Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (London: Routledge, 1993), 202. 61. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Atarashiki hihyō no tame ni,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 69–80. 62. Ibid., 69–70. 63. Ibid., 76. 64. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 2. 65. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Atarashiki hihyō no tame ni,” 79. 66. Ibid., 74. 67. Ibid., 75. 68. For example, see “Kokumin bungaku no jōken,” 55. Ch’oe writes: “So where should the writer seek support for the creative spirit? There is no doubt that there is no other option but to seek it in national awareness . . . that is the demand of the state . . . there is no people for whom this belongs to the realm of free choice.” 69. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Chōsen bungaku no gendankai,” 88. 70. Ibid., 89. 71. Early nationalist thinkers had taken great interest in the situation in Ireland, which reached its critical point with the 1916 Easter Uprising and 1919 declaration of independence, bringing on the war of independence, which ended in a truce in 1921. The year 1919 was also the year when nationalists in Korea declared their own independence in downtown Seoul, beginning a months-long pacifist movement that resulted in a brutally violent suppression from the colonial government. In addition to the temporal coincidence, writers took a particular interest

C6548.indb 239

8/29/14 9:22 AM

240 5. imperialization, or the resolu tion of crisis

in Ireland because of the Gaelic revival movement, which was deemed a great success in terms of linguistic and cultural policy. Many Korean writers studying in Japanese universities at the time studied Irish figures. Yi Hyosŏk, for example, who later become one of the most celebrated short fiction writers of the 1930s and author of several classic stories depicting rural society, wrote his thesis on the dramatist and collector of folklore John Millington Synge. 72. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Chōsen bungaku no gendankai,” 94. 73. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Bungakusha to sekaikan no mondai,” 113. 74. See ibid., 100, n. 2. 75. Benjamin goes on to write that “all efforts to aestheticise politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.” Benjamin cites Marinetti’s manifesto for the colonial war in Ethiopia, which repeatedly states the beauty of war, and writes that “only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technological resources while maintaining property relations.” There are striking parallels between these two imperial wars—which fundamentally aim to preserve the colonial property relation—and their aesthetic elaboration. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Selected Writings 4, 269. 76. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Nani ga shiteki de aru ka,” 181–86. 77. Ibid., 182. 78. Ibid. In fact, in a story Ch’oe himself wrote about a reporter summoned to military training, the protagonist is struck by the beauty of being “one person of a whole  moving according to one purpose.” See Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Hōdō renshūban,” Kokumin bungaku 3, no. 7 (July 1943; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 6): 32. 79. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Nani ga shiteki de aru ka,” 186. 80. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Tanoshii bungaku,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 165–68. 81. Ibid., 167. 82. By the “new tales of conversion,” Ch’oe referred to stories that are often known still today as chŏnhyang sosŏl, or “conversion fiction,” in which a leftist writer narrates his abandonment of socialist belief, usually as an embrace of personal life and family, and/or the imperial regime. Although the subjects of such fiction are invariably male, a literary critique of conversion came from the well-known woman writer Kang Kyŏngae in her novel In’gan munje, albeit earlier in the 1930s. The irony that conversion fiction also focuses on the intellectual’s mental life is twofold: most was written by former writers of the KAPF persuasion, who had criticized such solipsistic work in the past, and the embrace of imperialization should ideally lead away from the decadent, late individual works of the past.

C6548.indb 240

8/29/14 9:22 AM

6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

241

83. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Higeki no tokubō,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 169. 84. Ch’oe also published a short essay commemorating Kang’s death, in which he reiterates his linking of Kang to the journal project of Kokumin bungaku. See Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Koyo yasuraka ni,” Kokumin bungaku 1, no. 2 (January 1942; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 1): 90–93.

6. Taking P o ssession of the Emperor’s L anguage 1.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Nani ga shiteki de aru ka,” 182.

2.

Kim Namch’ŏn, “Aru asa,” Kokumin bungaku 3, no. 1 (January 1943; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4): 152–62.

3.

The “inconvenience of different languages” is a phrase brought up by Yanabe Nagasaburō in an interview with Im Hwa; see “Ch’ongnyŏk yŏnmaeng munhwabujang Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam,” Chogwang 7, no. 4 (March 1941): 152. According to a survey of Japanese language fiction from the late colonial period, this is the only known story published in Japanese by Kim. See Hot’ei T’osihiro, “Ilche malgi ilbonŏ sosŏl ŭi sŏjihakchŏk yŏn’gu,” Munhak sasang (April 1996): 44–78.

4.

From the early twentieth century onward, many writers wrote in Japanese, which was also often their language of education. This is equally true of those writers who were experimenting with the language that was to become modern literary Korean. Yi Kwangsu wrote some of his first stories in Japanese, and Kim Tongin famously wrote that even when he was writing in Korean he would think in Japanese first. During the 1930s many writers began to publish in Japanese; the most well-known were Chang Hyŏkchu and Kim Saryang, who both achieved some success in the metropole. Chang expressed the desire to publicize Korea’s “tragic” situation to the wider world, saying he was more likely to be translated if he wrote in Japanese, and indeed he was translated into Esperanto. After liberation he naturalized as Japanese, saying that he could not give up the Japanese language. See Chŏn Kwangyong, “Chang Hyŏkchu ŭi choguk kwa munhak,” in Han’guk hyŏndae munhak non’go, 119–26 (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1986); and Imu Jone [Im Chŏnhye], “Chang Hyŏkchu ron,” Bungaku 33 (November 1965): 84–98. Kim, discussed later in this chapter, achieved the greatest amount of success with his nomination for the Akutagawa Prize in 1939. For a more exhaustive account of Korean writers publishing in Japan in Japanese during the colonial era, see Imu Jone, Nihon ni okeru chōsenjin no bungaku no rekishi: 1945 nen made (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1994).

5.

Ch’oe Chaesŏ published four pieces of fiction in Kokumin bungaku: “Hōdō renshūban” (Correspondants’ Training Camp), Kokumin bungaku 3, no. 7 (July 1943;

C6548.indb 241

8/29/14 9:22 AM

242 6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 6): 24–48; “Suiseki” (Flint), Kokumin bungaku 4, no. 1 (January 1944; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol.  7): 105–21; “Hiji no hana” (Flowers out of season), Kokumin bungaku 4, nos. 5–8 (May– August 1944; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vols. 8–9); “Minzoku no kekkon” (Marriage of nations), Kokumin bungaku 5, nos. 1–2 (January–February 1945; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 10). The last two were published under the name Ishida Kōzō. 6.

Hwang Ho Duk [Hodŏk], Pŏllye wa cheguk: Singminjimal munhak ŭi ŏnŏ, saengmyŏng

7.

Shokuiki hōkō was the term used for “service at work” and is discussed at some

ch’ŏngch’i, t’ek’ŭnolloji (Seoul: Saemulgyŏl, 2011), 190–92. length in “Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam,” Chogwang 7, no. 4 (March 1941): 146–47. 8.

Ibid., 142–55.

9.

Ibid., 145.

10. “Control” had become a buzzword at this time, signaling a perceived change in policy. Ch’oe Chaesŏ wrote a short essay in favor of control, which is included in his book. See “Tōsei no kōka,” Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku, 163–65. 11. “Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam,” 149. 12. Ibid., 150–52. 13. See Chōsen bungaku senshū, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Akatsuka shobō, 1940). For an example of Im Hwa’s writing in Japanese journals, see the Bungei special issue on Korean literature from 1940: Im Hwa, “Gendai Chōsen bungaku no kankyō,” Bungei 8, no. 7 (July 1940): 198–202. 14. “Ainoko” refers to a mixed-blood child or mulatto and is clearly a word that took on new significance as a result of colonial rule. “Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam,” 152. 15. Hwang Ho Duk terms this situation the “politics of no translation.” See Hwang Ho Duk, Pŏlle wa cheguk, 228–83. 16. “Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam,” 147. 17. See Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 89–132. 18. Ching argues that “what is needed in thinking about the relationship between dōka and kōminka is both their theoretical interdependence and their tactical differentiation . . . we need to inquire about the unique drift of kōminka out beyond dōka, starting with the repetition of themes within the Japanese colonial tradition and from the fresh impulse given to it by specific historical conditions.” See ibid., 96. 19. Yi T’aejun, “Ishibashi,” Kokumin bungaku 3, no. 1 (January 1943; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4): 128–35.

C6548.indb 242

8/29/14 9:22 AM

6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

243

20. “Chosŏn munhwa munje e taehaya: Ikch’anhoe munhwabujang Iwata Kunio-Kim Saryang taedam,” Chogwang 7, no. 4 (April 1941): 26–35. 21. On Kim Saryang’s career and work, see An Ushiku, Kim Saryang: sono teikō no shōgai (Tokyo: Iwanami shinshō, 1972); Janet Poole, “Kim Sa-ryang and Minor Literature: Language and Identity in Colonial Korea” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1995); Travis Workman, “Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701–8; Hwang Ho Duk, Pŏlle wa cheguk, 228–83. 22. See the judges’ comments in Akutagawa shō zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1982), 399. 23. “Iwata Kunio-Kim Saryang taedam,” 28. 24. Ibid., 30. 25. Ibid., 31. 26. Ibid., 33. 27. Ibid., 28. 28. The ways in which the use of language and speech—accents, syntax, vocabulary—had been mobilized within the Japanese empire to reinforce ethnic boundaries would have been painfully raw to those Koreans who recalled the massacre that took place in the aftermath of the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923. As rumors spread that resident Koreans had poisoned the water supply and were about to attack Japanese cities, vigilantes took to the streets, summarily executing those they deemed to be Korean. One of the ways in which vigilantes sought their (unreliable) evidence of Korean identity was in pronunciations of particular Japanese words deemed difficult for Koreans. Perceived speech differences became the difference between life and death. On the earthquake, see Jin-hee Lee, “Instability of Empire: Earthquake, Rumor, and the Massacre of Koreans in the Japanese Empire” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2004), 44. 29. “Iwata Kunio-Kim Saryang taedam,” 29. 30. Giorgio Agamben’s work on the state of exception’s foundational role in the early twentieth century suggests that more work is necessary in thinking the relationship between liberalism and authoritarianism. Korea’s colonial history, and the professed liberalism of the so-called cultural rule of the second decade of the occupation, offer a ripe field for such studies. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 31. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no sakkatachi,” in Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku,” 238. 32. The November 1942 issue of Kokumin bungaku carries a short article by Karashima Takeshi, director of the association and professor of Chinese literature at Keijō

C6548.indb 243

8/29/14 9:22 AM

244 6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

University, alongside Terada Ei, editor of the arts pages of the Keijō nippō, and Tsuda Tsuyoshi, editor of the journal Ryokki, explaining the reorganization of the association in order to pursue four main goals: the promotion of the national language (i.e., Japanese) among writers, providing writers with Japanese discipline, cultivating works that comply with national policy, and mobilizing writers to visit strategic sites. Explaining the finer points of conscription was listed under the national policies that literary works were supposed to promote, and strategic sites to be visited included the battlegrounds in China, as well as Manchurian pioneering villages and sites within Korea. See Karashima Takeshi, “Chōsen bunjin kyōkai no kaiso ni tsukite,” Kokumin bungaku 2, no. 9 (November 1942; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4): 42–44. In April 1943 the association merged with other groups under the new name Patriotic Association of Literary Figures in Korea (Chōsen bunjin hōkoku kyōkai). On this, see Karashima Takeshi et al., “Kessen bungaku no kakuritsu,” Kokumin bungaku 3, no. 6 (June 1943; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 6): 40–47. 33. With the explanation and support of military conscription as one of the Association of Literary Figures in Korea’s goals, perhaps it is not surprising that many stories depicted young soldiers or sons hoping to volunteer for the army. Such stories rarely avoided the topic of death in battle but rather presumed that death inevitable as honorable martyrdom. Examples of such stories are Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi’s tales of a mother and son and of a young girl who befriends a group of soldiers: see “Yagikushō” (Wild Chrysanthemums), Kokumin bungaku 2, no. 9 (November 1942; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4): 131–55; and “Maboroshi no heishi” (Soldiers in a Dream), Kokumin sōryoku 3, no. 2 (February 1941): 124–30; reprinted in Kindai Chōsen bungaku nihongo sakuhinshū 3: 1939–1945, ed. Ōmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, 291–97 (Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 2001). Ch’oe is listed as an assistant administrator of the association in Karashima’s article. 34. Ch’oe Chaesŏ, “Kokumin bungaku no sakkatachi,” 235. 35. Conversion was persistently narrated at the time as a return to the family. This is true of Kim Namch’ŏn’s earlier story “Barley,” which offers a rare description of a courtroom declaration of conversion and the protagonist’s simultaneous acceptance of his father’s preferred marriage partner. A similar tale of returning to the family fold as both prerequisite and reward for conversion is told in Kang Kyŏngae’s novel In’gan munje (1934). 36. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 42–44. 37. Korea’s poets seized on the figure of the straits to evoke their relationship with colonial authority. Two well-known examples are Chŏng Chiyong’s “Haehyŏp”

C6548.indb 244

8/29/14 9:22 AM

6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

245

(The Sea Strait; 1933), which describes the excitement of a youth crossing the straits into a bright future, and Kim Kirim’s famous “Pada wa nabi” (The Sea and the Butterfly; 1939), which paints a scene of disillusionment and misrecognition of the nature of the water. See Chŏng Chiyong chŏnjip (Collected Works of Chŏng Chiyong), 2d ed., vol. 1 (Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1988), 98; and Kim Kirim chŏnjip (Collected Works of Kim Kirim), vol. 1 (Seoul: Simsŏldang, 1988), 174. 38. It is true that the subject’s enunciation of the self is always impossible in a sense; nevertheless this does not preclude marking the weight of historical circumstance. For a discussion of colonial history and the negotiation of the relation between a specific historical violence and its elucidation of a more general historical practice, see Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 19–27. 39. “Iwata Kunio-Kim Saryang taedam,” 33–34. 40. Kim apparently expressed this fear about his most famous story appealing more to a metropolitan audience in a letter to the Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tsung. For this reason, he wrote, he did not like the story. Kim’s letter, composed in Japanese, appears in Korean translation in Hwang Ho Duk, Pŏlle wa cheguk, 232. 41. Although Kim became most well-known for his Japanophone fiction, he went on to also write some fiction in Korean in the wake of his success in Japan. 42. Kim Saryang, “Muruorijima,” Kokumin bungaku 2, no. 1 (January 1942; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 1): 231–62. Kim also serialized a novel, titled Taihyaku sanmyaku (The T’aebaek Mountains), in the journal between February and October 1943. 43. Kim Saryang had explained his motivation for writing in Japanese as to “plead the real situation” of Korea and Koreans. See Kim Namch’ŏn et al., “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an,” 166. 44. Yu Chino, “Sōsaku no ichinen,” Kokumin bungaku 2, no. 9 (November 1942; photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4): 10. 45. Ibid. 46. The decade of the 1930s had seen the emergence of a slew of strategies for producing and recording the hierarchy between the capital and the provinces in Korea. The art phenomenon of local color was among these, along with the standardization of orthography and attempts to represent dialect in print. The latter was an integral element of the poetry of Paek Sŏk, for example, and the fiction of novelists such as Kim Tongin, who sought to highlight the unique nature of regional cultures. 47. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has written about the dilemma of writing fiction in the colonizers’ language. See Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, and Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986).

C6548.indb 245

8/29/14 9:22 AM

246 6. taking po ssession of the emperor’s l anguage

48. Yi T’aejun, “Haebang chŏnhu,” in Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip, rev. 2d ed., vol. 3, 22– 23 (Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1995). 49. For a useful history of the discourse on collaboration, see Kwŏn Myŏnga, “Hwanmyŏl kwa saengjon: ‘Hyŏmnyŏk’ e taehan tamnon ŭi yŏksa,” Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu 31 (2006): 374–405. 50. A recent two-volume anthology attempts to complicate the notion that all fi ction in Japanese should be condemned as collaborationist, although it still holds on to the collaboration versus resistance framework for evaluating such fiction by presenting one volume each of collaborationist and noncollaborationist stories. See Kim Chaeyong et al., eds., Singminjuŭi wa hyŏmnyŏk: Ilchemal chŏnsigi ilbonŏ sosŏlsŏn 1 and Singminjuŭi wa pihyŏmnyŏk ŭi chŏhang: Ilchemal chŏnsigi ilbonŏ sosŏlsŏn 2 (Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2003). Rereadings of such fiction appear in Kim Chaeyong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang, and Han Suyŏng, Ch’inil munhak ŭi chaeinsik. A close reading that attempts to read Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi’s fiction in the broader context of a gendered modernity can be found in Kyeong-Hee Choi, “Another Layer of the Pro-Japanese Literature: Ch’oe Chunghui’s ‘The Wild Chrysanthemum,’” POETICA 52 (1999): 61–87. 51. “Because there is no natural property of language, language gives rise only to appropriative madness, to jealousy without appropriation.” Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 24. 52. “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an,” 169. 53. In the mid-1990s a story apparently written by Yi T’aejun in Japanese was discovered and republished in Korean translation. See “Che 1 ho sŏnbak ŭi saphwa” (An Episode Concerning Boat No. 1), trans. Hot’ei T’osihiro and Sim Wŏnsŏp, Munhak sasang (April 1996): 79–93. 54. “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an,” 166.

Epil o gue 1.

Chi Haryŏn’s 1946 story “Tojŏng” describes this experience.

2.

Yi T’aejun, Ssoryŏn kihaeng (Seoul: Chosŏn munhwa hyŏphoe, Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng, 1947), 2.

3.

For an example, see Chang Hyŏngjun, “Ri T’aejun ŭi chakp’umdŭl ŭi pandongsŏng,” Saesedae (April 1958): 53–56.

4.

With information on the early days of the DPRK hard to confirm, varying, often contradictory accounts of the fate of those who went north have appeared. While acknowledging that the “truth” of events is ultimately unconfirmable through the mists of Cold War censorship and propaganda from all sides, I have relied heavily on Cho Yŏngbok, Wŏlbuk yesulka orae ijŏjin kŭdŭl (Seoul: Tolbegae, 2002), 42.

C6548.indb 246

8/29/14 9:22 AM

epil ogue

5.

247

This is from the famous opening section of Foucault’s essay on the writing of history, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 139 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).

6.

For details of Pak T’aewŏn’s move to the Democratic People’s Republic, see Cho Yŏngbok, Wŏlbuk yesulka orae ijŏjin kŭdŭl, 301–21.

C6548.indb 247

8/29/14 9:22 AM

C6548.indb 248

8/29/14 9:22 AM

SELECTED BIBLIO GRAPHY

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W. “The Essay as Form.” In Notes to Literature 1. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Akita Ujaku et al. “Chōsen bunka no shōrai” [The future of Korean culture]. Bungakukai [Literary world] 6, no. 1 (January 1939): 271–79. Akutagawa shō zenshū [Collection of Akutagawa prize winners]. Vol. 2. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1982. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986. An Ushiku. Kim Saryang: sono teikō no shōgai [Kim Saryang: His life of resistance]. Tokyo: Iwanami shinshō, 1972. Anderer, Paul. Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism 1924–1939. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Anderson, Perry. “Modernity and Revolution.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 317–33. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

C6548.indb 249

8/29/14 9:22 AM

250

selec ted bibliogr aphy

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Barlow, Tani E. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 2d ed. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. New York: Phaidon, 1995. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973. ———. Selected Writings. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge, 1993. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Brandt, Kim. A Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Art in Imperial Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. ———. “Objects of Desire: Japanese Collectors and Colonial Korea.” Positions 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 711–46. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Carroll, David. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Ch’a Sŭnggi. “Ch’usang kwa kwaing: chung’il chŏnjaenggi cheguk/singminji ŭi sasang yŏnswae wa tamnon chŏngch’ihak” [Abstraction and excess: Imperial/colonial chains of thought and discursive politics in the second Sino-Japanese War]. In Han’guk hyŏndae munhak ŭi chŏngch’ichŏk naemyŏnhwa [The political interiorization of

C6548.indb 250

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

251

modern Korean literature]. Edited by Sanghŏ hakhoe, 255–90. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2007. ———. “1930 nyŏndae huban chŏnt’ongnon yŏn’gu: sigan-konggan ŭisik ŭl chungsim ŭro” [Late 1930s debates on tradition and their time-space consciousness]. Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 2003. Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn. “Han pop’yŏnjuŭija ŭi sam” [The life of a universalist]. In Sŏ Insik chŏnjip I [Collected works of Sŏ Insik]. Edited by Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn, 5–14. Seoul: Tosŏch’ulp’an yŏngnak, 2006. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Chang Hyŏngjun. “Ri T’aejun ŭi chakp’umdŭl ŭi pandongsŏng” [The reactionary nature of Ri T’aejun’s works]. Saesedae [New generation] (April 1958): 53–56. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Cho Usik. “Kojŏn kwa kach’i” [Together with the classics]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 7 (September 1940): 134–35. Cho Yŏngbok. Wŏlbuk yesulka orae ijŏjin kŭdŭl [Long forgotten artists who went north]. Seoul: Tolbegae, 2002. Cho Yongman. “Kuinhoe ŭi kiŏk” [Remembering the Nine Man Society]. Hyŏndae munhak [Modern literature] 3, no. 1 (January 1957): 126–29. Cho Yŏnhyŏn. “Chaŭisik ŭi pigŭk: Ch’oe Myŏngik ron” [The tragedy of self-consciousness: On Ch’oe Myŏngik]. Paengmin [Common people] (January 1949): 132–37. Ch’oe Chaesŏ. “Hōdō renshūban” [Correspondents’ training camp]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 3, no. 7 (July 1943): 24–48. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 6. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. “Koyo yasuraka ni” [Child, go peacefully]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 1, no. 2 (January 1942): 90–93. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 1. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. Munhak kwa chisŏng [Literature and intellect]. Kyŏngsŏng: Inmunsa, 1938. ———. Munhak ŭi sup’ilhwa” [The essayization of literature]. Tonga ilbo, 3 February 1939. ———. “Suiseki” [Flint]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 4, no. 1 (January 1944): 105–21. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 7. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. Tenkanki no Chōsen bungaku [Korean literature in the age of transition]. Kyŏngsŏng: Inmunsa, 1943.

C6548.indb 251

8/29/14 9:22 AM

252

selec ted bibliogr aphy

Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi. “Maboroshi no heishi” [Soldiers in a dream]. In Kindai Chōsen bungaku nihongo sakuhinshū 3: 1939–1945 [Collection of Korea’s modern literature written in Japanese 3]. Edited by Ōmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, 291–97. Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō, 2001. ________. “Yagikushō” [Wild chrysanthemums]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 2, no. 9 (November 1942): 131–55. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Ch’oe Hyesil. Sinyŏsŏngdŭrŭn muŏsŭl kkumkkuŏnŭnga [What were the new women’s dreams?]. Seoul: Saenggak ŭi namu, 2000. Ch’oe Injin. Han’guk sajinsa 1631–1945 [History of Korean photography 1631–1945]. Seoul: Nunbit, 2000. Ch’oe Myŏngik. Changsam Yisa [Ordinary people]. Seoul: Ulyu munhwasa, 1947. Photoreproduction, Han’guk hyŏndae sosŏl ŏpsŏ 9: Changsam Yisa. Seoul: Taeyŏngsa, 1985. ———. “Che il ho” [Number one]. Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu [Research on national literary history] 17 (2000): 415–42. ———. “Chomang mundan’gi” [Looking at the literary establishment]. Chogwang [Morning light] 5, no. 4 (April 1939): 311–13. ———. Kŭl e taehan saenggak [Thoughts on writing]. Pyongyang: Chosŏn munhak yesul ch’ongdongmaeng ch’ulp’ansa, 1964. ———. “Pi onŭn kil” [Walking in the rain]. Chogwang [Morning light] 2, nos. 4/5 (April and May 1936): 285–97 and 369–79. ———. “Pyeŏin” [Lungfish man]. In Han’guk kŭndae tanp’yŏn sosŏl taegye 27 [Outline of modern Korean short fiction]. Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1988. ———. “Pyŏngsang kwach’un” [Spring in my sickbed]. Chogwang [Morning light] 5, no. 6 (June 1939): 300–301. ———. “Suhyŏng kwa wŏngo kiil” [Bills and manuscript deadlines]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 6 (June/July 1940): 246–47. ———. “Yŏrŭm ŭi Taedonggang” [The Taedong River in the summer]. Ch’unch’u [Spring and autumn] 2, no. 7 (August 1941): 196–98. Ch’oe Wŏnsik. Munhak ŭi kwihwan [Return of literature]. Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 2001. ———. “Seoul, Tokyo, New York: Modern Korean Literature Seen Through Yi Sang’s ‘Lost Flowers.’ ” Translated by Janet Poole. Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 118–43. Ch’oe Wŏnsik and Paek Yŏngsŏ, eds. Tongasiain ŭi ‘tongyang’ insik: 19–20 segi [East Asians’ awareness of the “Orient” in the 19th–20th centuries]. Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 1997. Ch’oe Yŏl, ed. Han’guk kŭndae misul pip’yŏngsa [History of modern art criticism in Korea]. Seoul: Yŏlhwadang, 2001.

C6548.indb 252

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

253

Choi, Kyeong-Hee. “Another Layer of the Pro-Japanese Literature: Ch’oe Chunghui’s ‘The Wild Chrysanthemum.’ ” POETICA 52 (1999): 61–87. Ch’ŏn Chŏnghwan. “1920–30 nyŏndae sosŏl tokcha ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwa punhwa kwajŏng” [The formation and differentiation of literary readers in the 1920-30s]. Yŏksa munje yŏn’gu [Research on historical problems] 7 (2001): 73–100. Chŏn Kwangyong. “Han’guk chakka ŭi sahoejŏk chiwi” [The social position of Korea’s writers]. In Han’guk hyŏndae munhak non’go [Essays on modern Korean literature]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1986. Chŏng Chiyong. Chŏng Chiyong chŏnjip [Collected works of Chŏng Chiyong]. 2d ed. 2 vols. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1988. Chŏng Chonghyŏn. “Sajŏk yŏngyŏk ŭi taedu wa ‘chinjŏnghan chagi’ kuch’uk ŭrosŏ ŭi sosŏl: An Hŭinam ŭi ‘sinbyŏn sosŏl’ ŭl chungsim uro” [The emergence of a private sphere and fictional constructions of the “sincere self ” in An Hŭinam’s “personal fiction”]. Han’guk kŭndae munhak yŏn’gu [Research on modern Korean literature] no. 4 (2001): 132–56. Chŏng Hyŏnsuk. Pak T’aewŏn munhak yŏn’gu [Research on Pak T’aewŏn’s literary work]. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 1993. “Ch’ongnyŏk yŏnmaeng munhwabujang Yanabe Nagasaburo-Im Hwa taedam” [Conversation between Im Hwa and Yanabe Nagasaburō, chief of the Culture Section of the Total Mobilization Federation]. Chogwang [Morning light] 7, no. 4 (March 1941): 142–55. Chōsen bungaku senshū [Selected works of Korean literature]. 3 vols. Tokyo: Akatsuka shobō, 1940. “Chosŏn munhwa munje e taehaya: Ikch’anhoe munhwabujang Iwata Kunio-Kim Saryang taedam” [On the problem of Korean culture: A conversation between Kim Saryang and Iwata Kunio, chief of the Culture Section of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association]. Chogwang [Morning light] 7, no. 4 (April 1941): 26–35. Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ———. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Cumings, Bruce. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: Norton, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Doak, Kevin Michael. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Driscoll, Mark. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

C6548.indb 253

8/29/14 9:22 AM

254 selec ted bibliogr aphy

Em, Henry H. “Yi Sang’s Wings Read as an Anti-colonial Allegory.” Muae 1 (1995): 104–11. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Fritzsche, Peter. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Gabroussenko, Tatiana. Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and Center for Korean Studies, 2010. Gu, Yi. “Through the Lens of Mount Huang: Perception, Pictorial Photography, and the Image of Nation.” Ms. Han Hyo. “Chayŏnjuŭi rŭl pandaehanŭn t’ujaeng e issŏsŏ ŭi Chosŏn munhak” [Korean literature and the fight against naturalism]. In Hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏng charyojip (ibuk p’yŏn) [Documents on modern literary criticism in the North], vol. 2. Edited by Kim Chaeyong, Kim Pyŏngmin, and Yi Sŏnyŏng, 391–522. Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1993. Han Suyŏng. Ch’inil munhak ŭi chaeinsik: 1937–1945 nyŏn kan ŭi Han’guk sosŏl kwa singminjuŭi [Rethinking the literature of collaboration: Colonialism and Korean fiction from 1937 to 1945]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2005. Han’guk yŏngsang charyowŏn, ed. Palgul twoen kwagŏ [The past unearthed]. 2 vols. Seoul: T’aewŏn ent’ŏt’emŏnt’u, 2007–08. Hanscom, Christopher P. The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Harootunian, Harry. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. “Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday.” Cultural Studies 18, no. 2/3 (March/May 2004): 181–94.

C6548.indb 254

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

255

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Hell, Julia, and Andreas Schönle, eds. Ruins of Modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Hirano Ken, ed. Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi I [History of modern Japan’s literary debates I]. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1957. Hot’ei T’osihiro. “Ilche malgi ilbonŏ sosŏl ŭi sŏjihakchŏk yŏn’gu” [Bibliographical research on Japanese-language fiction from the late colonial period]. Munhak sasang [Literary thought] (April 1996): 44–78. Huyssen, Andreas. “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity.” In Ruins of Modernity. Edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, 17–28. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Hwang, Ho Duk [Hodŏk]. Pŏlle wa cheguk: singminjimal munhak ŭi ŏnŏ, saengmyŏng chŏngch’i, t’ek’ŭnolloji [Insect and imperium: The language, biopolitics and technology of late colonial literature]. Seoul: Saemulgyŏl, 2011. Hwang Jongyon [Chongyŏn]. “The Emergence of Aesthetic Ideology in Modern Korean Literary Criticism: An Essay on Yi Kwangsu.” Translated by Janet Poole. Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 5–35. ———. “Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl e nat’anan Silla” [Silla in modern Korean fiction]. Tongbang hakchi [Journal of Eastern Studies] 137 (March 2007): 337–74. ———. “Han’guk munhak ŭi kŭndae wa pan’gŭndae: 1930 nyŏndae huban’gi munhak ŭi chŏnt’ongjuŭi yŏn’gu” [Modernity and antimodernity in Korean literature: Traditionalism in literature from the late 1930s]. Ph.D. diss., Dongguk University, 1991. ———. “Munhak iran yŏgŏ” [The translation of literature]. Tongak ŏmunnonjip [Tongak essays on language and literature] no. 32 (December 1997): 457–80. ———. “Nobŭl, ch’ŏngnyŏn, cheguk: Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi t’onggukkagan sijak” [The novel, youth and empire: Transnational beginnings of the modern Korean novel]. In Han’guk munhak kwa t’alsingminjuŭi [Korean literature and postcolonialism]. Edited by Sanghŏ hakhoe, 263–97. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2005. ———, ed. Silla ŭi palgyŏn [The discovery of Silla]. Seoul: Tongguk taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 2008. Hyŏndae Chosŏn munhak chŏnjip: sup’il, kihaeng chip [Collected works of contemporary Korean literature: Essays and travelogues]. Vol. 5. Kyŏngsŏng: Chosŏn ilbosa ch’ulp’anbu, 1939. Ilbon chapchi Modŏn Ilbon kwa Chosŏn 1939 [The Japanese magazine Modern Japan and Korea 1939]. Translated by Yun Soyŏng, Hong Sŏnyŏng, Kim Hŭijŏng, and Pak Migyŏng. Seoul: Ŏnmunhaksa, 2007.

C6548.indb 255

8/29/14 9:22 AM

256

selec ted bibliogr aphy

Im Chongguk. Ch’inil munhak ron [The literature of collaboration]. Seoul: P’yŏnghwa ch’ulp’ansa, 1966. Im Hwa. “Gendai Chōsen bungaku no kankyō” [The environment of contemporary Korean literature]. Bungei [Literary arts] 8, no. 7 (July 1940): 198–202. ———. Im Hwa chŏnjip [Collected works of Im Hwa]. 2 vols. Seoul: Tosŏ ch’ulp’an Pak Ijŏng, 2000–2001. ———. Munhak ŭi nolli [The logic of literature]. Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1940. Photoreproduction retitled Han’guk munhak ŭi nolli [The logic of Korean literature]. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 1998. ———. “Tanp’yŏn sosŏl ŭi chosŏnjŏk t’ŭksŏng” [Characteristics of Korean short fiction]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 1, no. 1 (October 1939): 127–37. Imu Jone [Im Chŏnhye]. “Chang Hyŏkchu ron” [On Chang Hyŏkchu]. Bungaku [Literature] 33 (November 1965): 84–98. ———. Nihon ni okeru chōsenjin no bungaku no rekishi: 1945 nen made [History of literature by Koreans in Japan up to 1945]. Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1994. In Chŏngsik. “Hwoego chi nyŏm” [The spirit of cherishing the old]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 8 (October 1940): 200–201. Ishida Kōzō (Ch’oe Chaesŏ). “Hiji no hana” [Flowers out of season]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 4, nos. 5–8 (May–August 1944). Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vols. 8–9. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. “Minzoku no kekkon” [Marriage of nations]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 5, nos. 1–2 (January–February 1945). Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 10. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Ivy, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fascism, Yet?” In The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Edited by Alan Tansman, vii–xii. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. Kang Kyŏng’ae. In’gan munje [Human problems]. Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 1992. Karashima Takeshi. “Chōsen bunjin kyōkai no kaiso ni tsukite” [On the reorganization of the Association of Literary Figures in Korea]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 2, no. 9 (November 1942): 42–44. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Karashima Takeshi et al. “Kessen bungaku no kakuritsu” [The establishment of literature for a decisive war]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 3, no. 6 (June 1943): 40–47. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 6. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Karatani Kōjin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Translation edited by Brett de Bary. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

C6548.indb 256

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

257

Kawakami Tetsutarō et al. Kindai no chōkoku [Overcoming modernity]. Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1943. Kawamura Minato. Ikyō no shōwa bungaku: Manshū to kindai Nihon [Shōwa literature overseas: Manchuria and modern Japan]. Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1990. ———. Mal hanŭn kkot kisaeng [Kisaeng: Talking flowers]. Translated by Yu Chaesun. Seoul: Sodam ch’ulp’ansa, 2002. Kayama Mitsurō (Yi Kwangsu). “Gyōja [Pilgrim].” Bungakukai [Literary world] (March 1941): 80–85. ———. “Naisen ittai zuisōroku” [Thoughts on naisen ittai]. In Zainichi chōsenjin [Resident Koreans in Japan]. Edited by Kozawa Yūsaku, 357–61. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1978. Kikuchi Kan et al. “Shin hantō bungaku e no yōbō” [Demands for a new peninsular literature]. Roundtable discussion. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 3, no. 3 (March 1943): 2–14. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 5. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Kim Chaeyong. “Haebang chikhu Ch’oe Myŏngik sosŏl kwa ‘Cheilho’ ŭi munjesŏng” [Ch’oe Myŏngik’s postliberation fiction and the problem of “Number one”]. Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu [Research on national literary history]17 (2000): 396–414. ———. Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang: Ilche mal sahoe wa munhak [Collaboration and resistance: Late colonial society and literature]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2004. Kim Chaeyong et al., eds. Ilchemal chŏnsigi ilbonŏ sosŏlsŏn [Selected Japanese-language fiction from the late colonial wartime period]. 2 vols. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2003. Kim Chinsong. Sŏul e ttansŭ hol ŭl hŏhara [Allow dance halls in Seoul!]. Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏn’gu, 1999. Kim Chinsŏp. “Yŏksa ŭi maeryŏk” [The attraction of history]. Chosŏn ilbo, January 23, 1935. Kim Chong-un and Bruce Fulton, eds. A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. Kim Chul [Ch’ŏl]. “Kungmin” iranŭn noye: Han’guk munhak ŭi kiŏk kwa manggak [The slave called “citizen”: Memory and amnesia in Korean literature]. Seoul: Samin, 2005. Kim Chul et al. Munhak sok ŭi p’asijŭm [Fascism in literature]. Seoul: Samin, 2001. Kim Haeyŏn. “Ch’oe Myŏngik sosŏl ŭi munhaksajŏk yŏn’gu” [Literary historical research on Ch’oe Myŏngik’s fiction]. Ph.D. diss., Kyŏngnam University, 1999. Kim Hyŏnju. “Yi T’aejun ŭi sup’il ron yŏn’gu” [Research on Yi T’aejun’s theory of the anecdotal essay]. In Kŭndae munhak kwa Yi T’aejun [Modern literature and Yi T’aejun]. Edited by Sanghŏ munhakhoe, 219–46. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 2000. Kim Inyong. “Kuinhoe wŏlp’yŏng pangch’ŏnggi” [Listening in on the Nine Man Society’s monthly review]. Chosŏn munhak [Korean literature] 1, no. 3 (October 1933): 84–88.

C6548.indb 257

8/29/14 9:22 AM

258 selec ted bibliogr aphy

Kim, Janice C. H. To Live To Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. Kim Kirim. Kim Kirim chŏnjip [Collected works of Kim Kirim]. 6 vols. Seoul: Simsŏldang, 1988. ———. “Modŏnijŭm ŭi yŏksajŏk wich’i” [The historical position of modernism]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 1, no. 1 (October 1939): 80–85. ———. “Sŭt’aillisŭt’ŭ Yi T’aejun ssi rŭl nonham” [On Yi T’aejun the stylist]. Chosŏn ilbo, June 25–27, 1933. ———. “Sup’il ŭl wihaya” [For the anecdotal essay]. Sindonga 3, no. 9 (September 1933): 144–45. Kim Kirim et al. “Munye chwadamhoe” [Roundtable on the arts]. Chosŏn munhak [Korean literature] 1, no. 4 (November 1933): 99–107. Kim Kŭnsu. Han’guk chapchisa yŏn’gu [Research on the history of Korean journals]. Seoul: Han’gukhak yŏn’guso, 1992. Kim Munjip. Pip’yŏng munhak [Critical literature]. Kyŏngsŏng: Ch’ŏngsaekchisa, 1938. Photo reproduction. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 1997. Kim Namch’ŏn. “Aru asa” [One morning]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] (January 1943): 152–62. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. Kim Namch’ŏn chŏnjip [Collected works of Kim Namch’ŏn]. 2 vols. Edited by Chŏng Houng and Son Chŏngsu. Seoul: Tosŏ ch’ulp’an Pak Ijŏng, 2000. Kim Namch’ŏn et al. “Munhakcha ŭi chagi pip’an” [Writers’ self-criticism]. In Haebang konggan ŭi pip’yŏng munhak [Critical literature from the space of liberation], vol. 2. Edited by Song Kihan and Kim Woegon, 164–72. Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1991. Kim Osŏng. “Chosŏn ŭi kaet’ak munhak” [Korea’s pioneer literature]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 2, no. 3 (March 1942): 18–24. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 2. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Kim Saryang. “Muruorijima” [Muruori island]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 2, no. 1 (January 1942): 231–62. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 2. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Kim, Thomas W. “Being Modern: The Circulation of Oriental Objects.” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (June 2006): 379–406. Kim Tongin. Kim Tongin chŏnjip [Collected works of Kim Tongin]. 10 vols. Seoul: Pokchi, 1986. Kim Tuyong. “Kuinhoe e taehan pip’an” [Critique of the Nine Man Society]. Tonga ilbo, July 28–August 1, 1935. Kim Uchang. “Extravagance and Authenticity: Romantic Love and the Self in Early Modern Korean Literature.” Korea Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 61–89.

C6548.indb 258

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

259

Kim Woegon. “Singminji munhakcha ŭi manju ch’ehŏm: Yi T’aejun ŭi ‘Manju kihaeng’ ” [Colonial era writers’ experience of Manchuria: Yi T’aejun’s “Record of a Journey to Manchuria”]. Han’guk munhak iron kwa pip’yŏng [Theory and criticism of Korean literature] 8, no. 3 (September 2004): 301–21. Kim Yerim. “1930 nyŏndae huban mollak/chaesaeng ŭi sŏsa wa miŭisik yŏn’gu” [Aesthetic consciousness and narratives of fall/rebirth in the late 1930s]. Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 2002. Kim Yŏnggŭn. “Ilcheha ilsang saenghwal ŭi pyŏnhwa wa kŭ sŏnggyŏk e kwanhan yŏn’gu” [The nature of transformation in colonial daily life]. Ph.D. diss., Yonsei University, 1999. Kim Yŏnghŭi. “Ilche chibae sigi han’gugin ŭi sinmun chŏpjok kyŏnghyang” [Tendencies in Koreans’ newspaper consumption under colonial rule]. Han’guk ŏllon hakbo [Journal of Korean media] 46, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 39–71. Kim Yŏnok et al. “Nae chibang ŭi t’ŭksaek ŭl malhanŭn chwadamhoe: P’yŏngyang p’yŏn” [Roundtable on the characteristics of my region: P’yŏngyang]. Roundtable discussion. Chogwang [Morning light] 5, no. 4 (April 1939): 260–82. Kim Yunsik. Han’guk hyŏndae hyŏnsiljuŭi yŏn’gu [Research on Korea’s modern realism]. Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏngsa, 1990. ———. Han’guk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa [History of modern Korean literary criticism]. Seoul: Seoul National University, 1982. ———. Hanil munhak ŭi kwallyŏn yangsang [Aspects of the relationship between Korean and Japanese literatures]. Seoul: Ilchisa, 1974. ———. Im Hwa yŏn’gu [Research on Im Hwa]. Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 1989. ———. Kim Yunsik sŏnjip 2: sosŏlsa [Selected works of Kim Yunsik: History of fiction]. Seoul: Sol ch’ulp’ansa, 1996. ———. “Yi T’aejun ron” [On Yi T’aejun]. Hyŏndae munhak [Modern literature] (May 1989): 346–65. Kim Yunsik and Chŏng Houng. Han’guk munhak ŭi riollijŭm kwa modŏnijŭm [Realism and modernism in Korean literature]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1988. ———. Han’guk sosŏlsa [History of Korean fiction]. New rev. ed. Seoul: Munhak dongne, 2000. Kim Yunsu et al. Han’guk misul 100 nyŏn 1 [100 years of Korean art I]. Seoul: Han’gilsa, 2006. Kobayashi Hideo. Shinchō Kobayashi Hideo zenshū [Collected works of Kobayashi Hideo]. 15 vols. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978. Kong Cheuk and Chŏng Kŭnsik, eds. Singminji ŭi ilsang, chibae wa kyunyŏl [The colonial everyday, government and rupture]. Seoul: Munhwa kwahaksa, 2006. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

C6548.indb 259

8/29/14 9:22 AM

260

selec ted bibliogr aphy

Kōyama Iwao et al. “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon” [The world historical standpoint and Japan]. Roundtable discussion. Chūō kōron 57, no. 1 (January 1942): 150–92. ———. “Tōa kyōeiken no rinrisei to rekishisei” [The historicity and ethics of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere]. Roundtable discussion. Chūō kōron 57, no. 4 (April 1942): 120–61. Krakauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kume Masao. “Watakushi shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu” [The I-novel and the state-ofmind novel]. In Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi I [History of modern Japan’s literary debates]. Edited by Hirano Ken, 108–14. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1957. Kungnip hyŏndae misulgwan and Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, eds. Photography of Limb Eung Sik: Kirok ŭi yesul, yesul ŭi kirok [Photography of Limb Eung Sik: The art of recording and the recording of art]. Seoul: Kungnip hyŏndae misulgwan, 2011. Kwŏn Hyŏkhŭi. Chosŏn esŏ on sajinyŏpsŏ [Picture postcards from Korea]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2005. Kwŏn Myŏnga. “Hwanmyŏl kwa saengjon: ‘Hyŏmnyŏk’ e taehan tamnon ŭi yŏksa” [Disillusionment and survival: The discursive history of “collaboration”]. Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu [Research on national literary history] 31 (2006): 374–405. Kwon, Nayoung Aimee. “Translated Encounters and Empire: Colonial Korea and the Literature of Exile.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007. Kwŏn Podŭrae. Han’guk kŭndae sosŏl ŭi kiwŏn [Origins of modern Korean literature]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2000. ———. “Yŏnae ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwa toksŏ” [Reading and the formation of love]. Yŏksa munje yŏn’gu [Research on historical problems] 7 (2001): 101–30. ———. Yŏnae ŭi sidae [The age of love]. Seoul: Hyŏnsil munhwa yŏn’gu, 2003. Kwŏn Yŏngmin, ed. Han’guk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa (charyo I) [History of modern Korean literary criticism: Documents I]. Seoul: Tandae ch’ulp’anbu, 1981. Kwŏn Yŏngmin et al. Wŏlbuk munin yŏn’gu [Research on writers who went north]. Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 1989. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Larsen, Neil. Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Lee, Ann Sung-hi Lee. Yi Kwang-su and Modern Korean Literature: Mujŏng. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series, 2005. Lee Hi-seung. “Recollections of the Korean Language Society Incident.” In Listening to Korea: A Korean Anthology. Edited by Marshall R. Pihl, 19–42. New York: Praeger, 1973.

C6548.indb 260

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

261

Lee, Jin-hee. “Instability of Empire: Earthquake, Rumor, and the Massacre of Koreans in the Japanese Empire.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2004. Lee, Jin-kyung. “Autonomous Aesthetics and Autonomous Subjectivity: Construction of Modern Literature as a Site of Social Reforms and Modern Nation-Building in Colonial Korea, 1915–1925.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 1991. ———. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Translated by Christine Levich. Yale French Studies 73 (Fall 1987): 7–11. ———. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lukács, Georg. “Narrate or Describe?” In Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Translated by Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin Press, 1978. ———. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). Maeda Ai. Toshi kūkan no naka no bungaku [Literature in the space of the city]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1. Edited by Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. London: Routledge, 1995. Meng, Yue. Shanghai and the Edges of Empires. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Minjok munhak yŏn’guso, ed. Ilche malgi munindŭl ŭi manju ch’ehŏm [Late colonial writers’ experience of Manchuria]. Seoul: Tosŏ ch’ulp’an yŏngnak, 2007. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Muæ: A Journal of Transcultural Production 1, 1995. Nakama Teruhisa, ed. Nihon chiri fūzoku taikei [Outline of geography and customs of Japan]. 18 vols. Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1929–32. Nakamura Murao. “Honkaku shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu to” [The authentic novel and the state-of-mind novel]. In Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi I [History of modern Japan’s literary debates]. Edited by Hirano Ken, 93–97. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1957. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, and Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986.

C6548.indb 261

8/29/14 9:22 AM

262

selec ted bibliogr aphy

O Changhwan. O Changhwan chŏnjip [Collected works of O Changhwan]. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn, 2003. O Yangho. Manju imin munhak yŏn’gu [Research on the literature of immigrants to Manchuria]. Seoul: Munye ch’ulp’ansa, 2007. Osborne, Peter. Philosophy as Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 1995. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Paek Ch’ŏl. “Hyŏndae munhak ŭi sin simnijuŭijŏk kyŏnghyang” [The new psychological tendencies of contemporary literature]. Chung’ang 1, no. 1 (November 1933): 468–74. ———. “Hyŏnsil kwa ŭimi, kŭrigo chakcha ŭi sasegye” [Reality and meaning, and the private world of the author]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 8 (October 1940): 170–82. ———. “P’ungnyu in’gan ŭi munhak: sogŭkjŏk in’gan ŭi pip’an” [Literature of the elegant human: A critique of the passive human]. Chogwang [Morning light] 3, no. 6 (June 1937): 268–80. ———. “Sajo chungsim ŭro pon 33 nyŏndo munhakkye” [The literary world in 1933 seen through trends of thought]. Chosŏn ilbo, December 23, 1933. ———. “Tongyang in’gan kwa p’ungnyusŏng: Chosŏn munhak chŏnt’ong ŭi ilgo” [The Oriental human and elegance: one aspect of Korean literary tradition]. Chogwang [Morning light] 3, no. 5 (May 1937): 266–78. Pak Chonghwa. “ ‘Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng’ ŭl ilggo [One aspect of “Riverside scenes”]. Maeil sinbo, January 16, 1930. Pak Kyeri. “Ilche sidae Chosŏn hyangt’osaek” [Korean local color in the colonial period]. Han’guk kŭndae misul sahak [Historical studies of modern Korean art] 4 (1996): 166–210. Pak T’aewŏn. “Angma” [Demon]. Chogwang [Morning light] 2, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1936): 376–90 and 304–18. ———. “Ch’aega” [House debt]. Munjang [Writing] 3, no. 4 (April 1941): 80–114. ———. “Ch’oehu ŭi ŏngmanjangja” [The last billionaire]. Chosŏn ilbo, June 25–July 1, 1937. ———. “Ch’unhyangjŏn t’amdok ŭn imi ch’uihak ijŏn” [I was reading the tale of Chunhyang before school]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 2 (February 1940): 4–5. ———. “Nae yesul e taehan pangbyŏn” [In defense of my art]. Chosŏn ilbo, October 21– 23, 1937. ———. “Owŏl ŭi hunp’ung” [Warm May breeze]. Chosŏn munhak [Korean literature] 1, no. 3 (October 1933): 8–17. ———. Pak T’aewŏn tanp’yŏnjip [Short stories by Pak T’aewŏn]. Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1939.

C6548.indb 262

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

263

———. “Pangnanjang chuin” [The owner of the House of Fragrant Orchids]. Si wa sosŏl [Poetry and fiction] 1 (March 1936): 23–29. ———. “P’yŏn’ŏn” [A few words]. Tonga ilbo, September 16, 1930. ———. “P’yohyŏn, myosa, kigyo” [Expression, description, technique]. Chosŏn chungang ilbo, December 17–31, 1934. ———. Sŏngt’anje [Christmas]. Seoul: Ŭlyu munhwasa, 1948. ———. “Sosŏlka Kubo ssi ŭi ilil” [A day in the life of the novelist Mr. Kubo]. Chosŏn chungang ilbo, August 1–September 17, 1934. ———. Sosŏlka Kubo ssi ŭi ilil [A day in the life of the novelist Mr. Kubo]. Kyŏngsŏng: Munjangsa, 1938. ———. “T’udo” [Burglary]. Chogwang [Morning light] 7, no. 1 (January 1941): 332–66. ———. “Umu” [Obscene rain]. Chogwang [Morning light] 6, no. 9 (October 1940): 304–17. ———. Yi Sang ŭi piyŏn [Yi Sang’s tragic love]. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1991. ———. Yun ch’osi ŭi sanggyŏng [Yun goes up to the capital]. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1991. Pak Yŏnghŭi. “Ch’wigŭn munye iron ŭi sinjŏngae wa kŭ kyŏnghyang” [New developments and trends in recent art theory]. In Han’guk hyŏndae munhak pip’yŏngsa: charyo 3 [History of modern Korean literary criticism: Documents 3]. Edited by Kwŏn Yŏngmin, 308–27. Seoul: Tandae ch’ulp’anbu, 1982. Park, Hyun Ok. Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Park, Soon-won. “Colonial Industrial Growth and the Emergence of the Korean Working Class.” In Colonial Modernity in Korea. Edited by Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, 128–60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999. Peukert, Detlev J. K. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. Translated by Richard Eveson. London: B. T. Batsford, 1987. Pihl, Marshall R., ed. Listening to Korea: A Korean Anthology. New York: Praeger, 1973. Pincus, Leslie. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pinney, Christopher, and Nicolas Peterson, eds. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Poole, Janet. “Colonial Interiors: Modernist Fiction of Korea.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2004. ———. “Kim Sa-ryang and Minor Literature: Language and Identity in Colonial Korea.” M.A. thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1995. ———. “Late Colonial Modernism and the Desire for Renewal.” Journal of Korean Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 179–203. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

C6548.indb 263

8/29/14 9:22 AM

264

selec ted bibliogr aphy

“P’yŏngdan 3 in chŏngdamhoe: munhwa munje chonghwoenggwan” [Conversation between three critics: A complete look at the problem of culture]. Roundtable discussion. Chosŏn ilbo, March 15–19, 1940. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Sand, Jordan. House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. Sanghŏ munhakhoe, ed. 1930 nyŏndae huban munhak ŭi kŭndaesŏng kwa chagi sŏngch’al [Self-examination and the modernity of late 1930s literature]. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1998. ———. Yi T’aejun munhak yŏn’gu [Research on Yi T’aejun’s literary work]. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1993. Santner, Eric L. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Schmid, Andre. Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987. Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Silverberg, Miriam. “The Ethnography of Modern Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 1 (February 1992): 30–54. Simmel, Georg. Essays in Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics. Edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965. ———. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms. Translated by Edward A. Shils. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Sin Hyŏnggi and O Sŏngho. Pukhan munhaksa: Hang’il hyŏngmyŏng munhak esŏ chuch’e munhak kkaji [History of North Korean literature: From anti-Japanese revolutionary literature to Juche literature]. Seoul: P’yŏngminsa, 2000. Sin Ilyong. “Segyejŏk ŭigi ŭi chŏnmyŏnjŏk ŭiŭi” [The full significance of world crisis]. Kaebyŏk [Creation] (January 1935): 12–16. Sin Pŏmsun. Han’guk hyŏndaesi ŭi t’woep’ye wa chagŭn chuch’e [The decadence of modern Korean poetry and the small subject]. Seoul: Singumunhwasa, 1998. Sin Sujŏng. “Tanch’ŭngp’a sosŏl yŏn’gu” [Research on fiction by the group La Dislocation]. M.A. thesis, Seoul National University, 1992. Sŏ Chunsŏp. Han’guk modŏnijŭm munhak yŏn’gu [Research on Korean modernism]. Seoul: Ilchisa, 1988. Sŏ Insik. “Aesu wa t’woep’ye ŭi mi” [The beauty of longing and decadence]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 2, no. 1 (January 1940): 55–60.

C6548.indb 264

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

265

———. “‘Hyangsu’ ŭi sahoehak” [The sociology of nostalgia]. Chogwang [Morning light] 6, no. 11 (November 1940): 182–89. ———. “Munhak kwa yulli” [Literature and ethics]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 2, no. 10 (October 1940): 6–22. ———. “Munhwa e issŏsŏ ŭi chŏnch’e wa kaein” [Totality and the individual in culture]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 1, no. 1 (October 1939): 4–15. ———. Sŏ Insik chŏnjip [Collected works of Sŏ Insik]. 2 vols. Edited by Ch’a Sŭnggi and Chŏng Chonghyŏn. Seoul: Tosŏ ch’ulp’an yŏngnak, 2006. ———. “Tongyang munhwa ŭi inyŏm kwa hyŏngt’ae: kŭ t’ŭksusŏng kwa ilbansŏng [Ideology and form of Oriental culture: Its particularity and universality]. Tonga ilbo, January 3–12, 1940. ———Yŏksa wa munhwa [History and culture]. Kyŏngsŏng: Hagyesa, 1939. Sŏ Yŏngch’ae. Sarang ŭi munbŏp [The grammar of love]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2004. ———. “Tu kae ŭi kŭndaesŏng kwa ch’ŏsa ŭisik” [Two modernities and the consciousness of gentlemanly retreat]. In Yi T’aejun munhak yŏn’gu [Research on Yi T’aejun’s literary work]. Edited by Sanghŏ munhakhoe, 54–86. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1993. “Sŏjŏk sijang chosagi” [Notes on an investigation into the book market]. Samch’ŏlli 7, no. 9 (October 1935): 382–85. Sŏn Chŏngmok. Ilche kangjŏmgi tosi kyehoek yŏn’gu [Research on urban planning during the Japanese occupation]. Seoul: Ilchisa, 1990. ———. Ilche kangjŏmgi tosihwa kwajŏng yŏn’gu [Research on urbanization during the Japanese occupation]. Seoul: Ilchisa, 1996. Sŏn Il. “Singminji Chosŏn ŭl ponŭn nun: Ilche sidae sajin ak’aibŭ” [Looking at colonial Korea: The photographic archive of the colonial period]. Bol 3 (Summer 2006): 208–21. Song Kihan and Kim Woegon, eds. Haebang konggan ŭi pip’yŏng munhak 2 [Critical literature of the space of liberation 2]. Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1991. Song Minho. Ilche mal amhŭkki munhak yŏn’gu [Research on literature from the dark period of late Japanese imperialism]. Seoul: Saemunsa, 1991. Sŏul t’ŭkpyŏlsi sap’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe. Sŏul chimyŏng sajŏn [Dictionary of Seoul placenames]. Seoul: Sŏul t’ŭkpyŏlsi sap’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, 2009. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Suh, Dae-sook. The Korean Communist Movement 1918–1948. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967.

C6548.indb 265

8/29/14 9:22 AM

266

selec ted bibliogr aphy

Suh, Serk-Bae. “The Location of ‘Korean’ Culture: Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition.” Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 1 (February 2011): 53–75. Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Tanaka Hidemitsu. Yoidorebune [Drunken boat]. Tokyo: Koyama shoten, 1949. Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. New Times in Modern Japan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Tansman, Alan. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ———, ed. The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality.” New Left Review no. 167 (January/February 1988): 91–106. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New ed. London: Hogarth Press, 1933. Workman, Travis. “Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature.” PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701–8. Yanagi Muneyoshi. Chōsen o omou [Thinking of Korea]. Edited by Takasaki Sōji. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1984. Yanagi Sōetsu. The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty. Rev. ed. Adapted by Bernard Leach. Tokyo: Kōdansha International, 1989. Yi Chaesŏn. Han’guk sosŏlsa: Kŭn/hyŏndae p’yŏn I [History of Korean fiction: Modern and contemporary I]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 2000. Yi Hyosŏk. “Ch’ŏt koryo” [My first manuscript fee]. Pangmun 12 (October 1939): 21–23. Yi Kwangsu. “Munhak iran hao?” [What is literature?]. Maeil sinbo, November 10–23, 1916. Yi Kyŏngmin. Kisaeng ŭn ŏttŏk’e mandŭrŏjyŏnnŭnga [How were kisaeng created?]. Seoul: Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, 2005. Yi Kyŏngmin and Sajin ak’aibŭ yŏn’guso, eds. K’ameradang kwa yesul sajin sidae: Han’guk kŭndae yesul sajin ak’aibŭ (1910–1945) [Camera clubs and the age of art photography: The archive of Korea’s modern art photographs]. Seoul: Ak’aibŭ buksŭ, 2010.

C6548.indb 266

8/29/14 9:22 AM

selec ted bibliogr aphy

267

Yi Sŏkhun. “Munhak p’ungt’ogi: P’yŏngyang p’yŏn” [Literary places: P’yŏngyang]. Inmun p’yŏngnon [Humanities critique] 2, summer special (August 1940): 76–79. ———. “Ugam” [Impressions]. Chosŏn mundan [Korean literary establishment], sokkan 1 (February 1935): 20–21. Yi T’aejun. “Che 1 ho sŏnbak ŭi saphwa” [Illustration of the no. 1 boat]. Translated by Hot’ei T’osihiro and Sim Wŏnsŏp. Munhak sasang [Literary thought] (April 1996): 79–93. ———. “Chiwŏnbyŏng hullyŏnso ŭi ilil” [A day at a volunteer training ground]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 9 (November 1940): 126–29. ———. Eastern Sentiments. Translated by Janet Poole. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ———. “Ishibashi” [Stone bridge]. Translated by Hiramoto Ippei. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 3, no. 1 (January 1943): 128–35. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. Munjang kanghwa [Lectures on writing]. Rev. ed. Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa, 2005. ———. “Munjang ŭi kojŏn, hyŏndae, ŏnmunilch’i” [The classics, modernity, and unity with speech in writing]. Munjang [Writing] 2, no. 3 (March 1941): 134–37. ———. Musŏrok [Records written at random]. Kyŏngsŏng: Pangmun sŏgwan, 1941. ———. “Muyŏn” [Without relations]. Ch’unch’u [Spring and autumn] (June 1942): 137–45. ———. “Palmun” [Postscript]. In Pak T’aewŏn, Sosŏlka Kubo ssi ŭi ilil [A day in the life of the novelist Mr. Kubo]. Kyŏngsŏng: Munjangsa, 1938. ———. “Sŏgyang” [Evening sun]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 1, no. 3 (February 1942): 78–103. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 1. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. ———. Ssoryŏn kihaeng [Record of a journey to the Soviet Union]. Seoul: Chosŏn munhwa hyŏphoe, Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng, 1947. ———. “T’okki iyagi” [A tale of rabbits]. Munjang [Writing] 3, no. 2 (February 1941): 452–61. ———. Yi T’aejun munhak chŏnjip [Collected works of Yi T’aejun]. 17 vols. Rev. 2d ed. Seoul: Kip’ŭn saem, 1995–2001. Yi T’an-gu. “Sinp’an Kyŏngsŏng chido: chami innŭn Sŏul iyagi [New map of Kyŏngsŏng: Fascinating tales of Seoul]. Chungang (May 1935): 112–20. Yi Tonggu. “Munye sip’yŏng” [Review of the arts]. K’at’ollik ch’ŏngnyŏn [Catholic youth], no. 7 (December 1933): 58–59. Yokomitsu Ri’ichi. “Junsui shōsetsu ron” [On pure fiction]. In Gendai Nihon bungaku ronsōshi III [History of modern Japan’s literary debates III]. Edited by Hirano Ken, 71–79. Tokyo: Miraisha, 1957.

C6548.indb 267

8/29/14 9:22 AM

268 selec ted bibliogr aphy

Yŏm Sangsŏp. “Kaesŏng kwa yesul” [Individuality and art]. Kaebyŏk [Creation] 22 (April 1922): 1–8. Yŏnse taehakkyo kukhak yŏn’guwŏn, ed. Ilche ŭi singmin chibae wa ilsang saenghwal [Colonial government and daily life under Japanese imperialism]. Seoul: Hyean, 2004. Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Yu Chino. “Sōsaku no ichinen” [A year of creation]. Kokumin bungaku [The nation’s literature] 2, no. 9 (November 1942): 2–15. Photoreproduction, Kokumin bungaku, vol. 4. Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2001. Yu Chongho. “In’gan sajŏn ŭl ponŭn chaemi” [The pleasure of reading the dictionary of mankind]. In 1930 nyŏndae minjok munhak ŭi ŭisik [The consciousness of 1930s national literature]. Edited by Yi Sŏnyŏng, 293–307. Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1990. ———. Tasi ingnŭn Han’guk siin [Rereading Korea’s poets]. Seoul: Munhak tongne, 2002. Yu Chongho et al. Hyŏndae Han’guk munhak 100 nyŏn [100 years of modern Korean literature]. Seoul: Minŭmsa, 1999. Yu Kwangnyŏl. “Chongno negŏri” [The Chongno crossroads]. Pyŏlgŏngon 4, no. 6 (September 1929): 66–69. Yun Sŏnyŏng. “Han’guk taejung munhwa ŭi kŭndaejŏk kusŏng kwajŏng e taehan yŏn’gu” [Research on the modern constitution of Korean mass culture]. Ph.D. diss., Koryo University, 1992. Zhang, Xudong. “The Politics of Aestheticization: Zhou Zuoren and the Crisis of Chinese New Culture (1927–1937).” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1995. Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

C6548.indb 268

8/29/14 9:22 AM

INDEX

Administrative area, of Seoul, 117, 119, 120, 124, 130 Aesthetics of wholeness, 174–75 Agamben, Giorgio, 243n30 Age: beauty of, 109; of transition, Sŏ Insik on present as, 72 Agony, in anecdotal essay of Yi T’aejun, 85, 146

in, 85, 146; antique water dropper, 87–97, 108; intimacy of, 97–106; private orient collection, 106–13 Anticollusion, in works of Pak T’aewŏn, Yi T’aejun, 146 Antiquarianism: historical consciousness and, 89, 90; Munjang focus of, 149;

Akutagawa Prize, 181, 185, 241n4

romantic, 7, 15, 200, 224n9; Sŏ Insik on,

Amateur photography, 21, 26–29, 166,

86; Stewart on, 88; of Yi T’aejun, 86,

214n18, 214n19; of Ch’oe Ibok, 27–28 Amhŭkki (dark period), in South Korea histories, 4–5, 210n11 “Ancient East and West Cultures as Seen

106, 113, 121, 203–4, 225n15 Antiques, 104, 105, 225n17, 225n19; Asakawa Noritaka, Yanagi Muneyoshi and, 93–94, 225n20; Chosŏn pots, 91–94;

from a Metaphysical Point of View”

as commodities, 91; shops, 51, 65, 91;

(Nishida), 77

water dropper, of Yi T’aejun, 87–97, 108;

Anderson, Benedict, 171 Anecdotal essay, 12, 15, 137–38, 227n40; fragmentary nature of, 98; Im Hwa on,

C6548.indb 269

Anecdotal essay, of Yi T’aejun, 60; agony

Yi T’aejun relationship with, 81, 87–88, 90, 95 “Antiques” (Yi T’aejun), 85, 95–96

100, 102–3, 140; individuality of, 103,

“Antiques and Daily Life” (Yi T’aejun), 97

104–5; of Kim Chinsŏp, 101; Kim Kirim

Arendt, Hannah, 129

on, 100–103; of Mo Yunsuk, 101; past

Armstrong, Nancy, 24, 215n28

gesture of, 98; revival of, in late colonial

Asakawa Noritaka, 93–94, 225n20

era, 86; Yi Ŭnsang, 101

Asia Express, 111, 230n84

8/29/14 9:22 AM

270

Asian cooperative body, see Tonga hyŏpdongch’e Association of Literary Figures in Korea, 152, 181, 191, 243n32, 244n33 “At the Crossroads Once More” (Im Hwa), 62–63

index

Calligraphy, of Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi, 96, 97, 98, 104 Camera technology, 21, 26, 28; bourgeoisie and, 19, 31, 32 Capitalism, 44, 86, 92, 105, 191, 228n67; commodification, 159; crisis, 12, 48, 72, 81, 116, 140, 148, 169, 231n1; culturalism

“Barley” (Kim Namch’ŏn), see “Maek”

collusion with, 160–61; fascism and, 7;

Barlow, Tani, 4

kŭndae and, 71; in modernity, 2, 6, 54, 71;

Baudrillard, Jean, 225n17, 225n19

peri-urban dreams and, 131; Sŏ Insik on,

Bauman, Zygmunt, 211n15 Beauty, 129; of age, 109; of intent, communal beauty, 174, 177; of isolation, of late individualism, 174; modern, 154; of sorrow, 8, 58, 113; of war, 240n75, 240n78 “The Beauty of Longing and Decadence” (Sŏ Insik), 57, 67 “Before and After Liberation” (Yi T’aejun), 196 Benjamin, Walter, 173, 218n72, 240n75; on bourgeois individuality, 105; on domes-

133 Capitulation narrative, of late colonial history, 3 Carroll, David, 211n15 Censorship, 169, 178, 199, 219n30, 246n4; colonial, 2, 12, 16, 58, 100; regime of, 12, 48, 57, 183, 200 Central Committee for the Construction of Korean Culture, 53

tic interior, 105; on nostalgia, 53; on

Ch’ae Mansik, 132

private individual, 104–5

Chang Hyŏkchu, 241n4

Bhabha, Homi, 234n39

Chi Haryŏn, 204

Bildungsroman, 13, 213n37

Ch’in (intimacy), 88; of anecdotal essay, of

Bollas, Christopher, 170 Bourgeoisie, 199, 228n67; amateur photography, 26–27; camera technology and, 19, 31, 32; Ch’oe Myŏngik on

Yi T’aejun, 97–106; of colonial relationship, 95 China Incident, of Second Sino-Japanese War, 152

doubled nature of, 32–38; culture of, in

Chinese language writing, 108

Pyongyang, 22; individuality of, 105; Pak

Ching, Leo, 184, 242n18

T’aewŏn as, 117–18; portrait studio and,

Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 7, 82, 202, 206–7, 227n42;

21; Yi T’aejun as self-made, 11

on crisis of morality, 155–56; on culture,

Boym, Svetlana, 54

157–60; death of son, 148, 150, 175–76,

British modernism, 150, 159, 171, 202

190–91, 235n1; on descriptive detail,

Bunka jūtaku (culture house), 135, 158,

43–44; on early individualism, 163–64;

233n31 “Burglary” (Pak T’aewŏn), 133–34, 143, 146

C6548.indb 270

72, 75, 80; Yi T’aejun on, 11, 15, 204 Capital within city, in “Self-Portrait,” 131,

fascist modernism of, 154, 162, 173, 174; imperialization literature campaign, 15,

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

150, 164; imperial language and, 15, 152,

Chung’ang ilbo, 89, 228n53, 229n74

173, 179; on Japanese language, 15, 152;

Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi, 96, 97, 98, 104

on kokumin bungaku, 148, 151; Kokumin

Cinema: fiction, Im Hwa on, 18; influence

bungaku journal and, 150, 154, 241n5;

on Ch’oe Myŏngik, 18–19

on late individualism, 155, 156, 157,

“The City Wall” (O Changhwan), 124–25

163; on local color, 166–67; new regime

“The City Wall” (Yi T’aejun), 125, 128

movement praise, 167–68; on reality in

City walls, of Seoul, 115, 117, 119, 120, 124,

literature, 172, 188; sasosŏl critique, 162, 163, 164; Spengler interest by, 156–57

129–31, 206 Classical tradition, 221n49; custom and,

Ch’oe Ibok, 27–28

69–70; daily life and, 70; interest in,

Ch’oe Injin, 20, 21

68–69; past history and, 69–70; Sŏ Insik

Ch’oe Kyŏngch’ang, 108–9

on, 67–73; temporality of, 69, 70; Wil-

Ch’oe Myŏngik, 1, 2–3, 13, 132, 165, 206,

liams on, 69

216n36, 216n44; on bourgeoisie doubled

“The Classics” (O Changhwan), 64

nature, 32–38; cinema influence, 18–19;

Cold War, 2, 207, 246n4

decadence aesthetics, 58; detailed

Collected Works of Modern Korean, 99

description writings by, 19, 38–43;

Colonial censorship, 2, 12, 16, 58, 100

doubled life in writings of, 32–38, 49; on

Colonial fiction, future absence in, 2

photography, 19–20, 32; on sketching

Colonial history writing: challenges of, 2;

importance, 19–20; on urban everyday,

contingency quality in, 4; on cultural

14, 43–48, 189

assimilationism, 8, 200; future presence

Chŏng Chiyong, 209n1, 244n37 Ch’ ŏngch’un magazine, 118 Chŏng Int’aek, 205

in, 2, 13; past interest of, 14; South Korea’s National Assembly on, 4, 210n13 Colonialism, 7, 74; Fanon on, 73; fascism

Chongno crossroads, 61–63

and, 1–2, 16, 104, 164; Koreans displace-

Chŏnhyangja (the converted): Kim

ment during, 198; McClintock on, 6;

Namch’ŏn, 178; Sŏ Insik association

photography role in, 30–32; Yi T’aejun

with, 52, 82, 178

on, 86; see also Korea, colonial

Cho Sehŭi, 233n38

Colonial relationship, intimacy of, 95

Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai (Korea Art Exhi-

Commodification, 11, 132, 151; capitalist,

bition), 29, 166, 214n22 Chōsen Education Code, 179, 180 Chōsen Urban Planning Order (1934), 119, 120 Chosŏn ilbo, 99, 228n53; amateur photography contest of, 26–27, 29, 214n19; classical literature articles of, 68, 69 Chosŏn pots, Yi T’aejun on, 91–94

C6548.indb 271

271

159; saenghwal and, 131 Commodities: antiques as, 91; culture house as, 158; culture of, 118, 139, 148, 158 Commoditization, 11, 48 Commodity regime, 93, 116, 146, 203; mass-produced commodities in, 88; Pak T’aewŏn on, 131, 137

8/29/14 9:22 AM

272

index

Communal beauty of intent, 174, 177

14–15, 73–75, 94, 162–63, 181, 186, 188; of

Communist Party: Im Hwa as member of,

modernity, 81, 178; oriental, 76, 78, 86,

18, 61; Kim Namch’ŏn, 191–92; Sŏ Insik

107; regional, new regime and, 185–86;

as member of, 14, 54, 61, 82, 202

Yanabe Nagasaburō on, 182

Compulsory draft, 9, 152, 170, 173, 180, 191 Confucian dynasty of Chosŏn (1392–1910), 74–75 Conservative turn, of modernism, 151 Constellations, of late colonial nostalgia, 55, 59–67 Contemporary consumerism, 158

Culture house (bunka jūtaku), 135, 158, 233n31 Culture Section: of Imperial Rule Assistance Association, 185; of Total Mobilization Federation, 181–82 Cumings, Bruce, 8 Custom, classical tradition and, 69–70

Contemporary reality (hyŏnsil), Im Hwa on, 45–46 Contemporary traditionalism, global politics of time and, 5–6, 70–71 Contingency quality, in colonial history writing, 4

Dark period (amhŭkki ), 4–5, 210n11 Decadent nostalgia, 53–59, 64–67, 124 The Decline of the West (Spengler), 156, 157 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Conversion narrative, 82, 240n82, 244n35

(North Korea) (DPRK), 2, 203, 206,

The converted, see Chŏnhyangja

246n4; purges of late 1950s, 3, 209n2;

Co-Prosperity Sphere, see Greater East Asia

war of resistance narration, 3

Co-Prosperity Sphere Cosmopolitanism, 160–61 Crisis, 155; capitalism, 12, 48, 72, 81, 116,

Derrida, Jacques, 192–93, 195, 199 Descriptive detail: Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 43–44; Ch’oe Myŏngik writings, 19, 38–43; Im

140, 148, 169, 231n1; forms, in peri-urban

Hwa on, 44–47; Kim Namch’ŏn on,

dreams, 133, 137–42, 145; of morality,

47–48; Lukács on, 46–47; Yi Kwangsu

Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 155–56

on, 41–42

Crossing-to-the-north writers (wŏlbuk chakka), 2–3, 209n1, 209n3 Cultural assimilation, 8, 200 Cultural exceptionalism, of Korea, 8 Culturalism, 229n73; collusion, with capitalism, 160–61 Culturalists, Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 159–61 Culture: bourgeoisie, in Pyongyang, 22; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 157–60; of commodity,

Detail (tit ‘eil), of everyday, 43–48 Deterritorialization, 59, 134, 158, 159 “The Discovery of Daily Life” (Im Hwa), 45–46 Domestic interior: Benjamin on, 105; Pak T’aewŏn on, 118, 133, 140, 142 Doubled life in writings, of Ch’oe Myŏngik, 32–38; in “Paradox,” 33; in “Walking in the Rain,” 33–34, 37, 49

118, 139, 148, 158; Euro-America, 112;

Doubling, of peri-urban dreams, 132–33

fascism and, 5, 8; global, of modern-

DPRK, see Democratic People’s Republic

ism, 6; Iwata Kunio on, 186; Korean, 8,

C6548.indb 272

Daily life, see Saenghwal

of Korea

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

Early individualism, Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 163–64 Early modernity (kŭndae), 71, 72 East, 107, 171; mu as fundamental to, 77; Nishida Kitarō on, 77; Paek Ch’ŏl on, 74; Sŏ Insik on, 73–81; West compared

273

writings, in Kokumin bungaku journal, 195; Žižek on, 7 Feudal nostalgia: of Pak T’aewŏn, 59–60; Sŏ Insik on, 85–86; of Yi T’aejun, 59–60, 85–86 Fiction, 241n5; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 15, 164;

to, 71, 74, 76, 93, 99, 157; West cultural

cinema, Im Hwa on, 18; colonial, future

divide with, 86, 141, 156; Yi T’aejun on

absence in, 2; forms of, in Korean

Korea values of, 93

language, 99–100; Japanophone, of Kim

East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, 153

Namch’ŏn, 245n41; in narration, of late

Eastern culture, 75, 76–78, 80, 99; Ch’oe

colonial history, 13; realism, 45–46;

Chaesŏ on, 157, 159

wartime cause alignment, 180

Eastern Sentiments (Yi T’aejun), see Musŏrok

Foucault, Michel, 205, 247n5

Essayization, of literature, 100, 101, 116,

French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-

227n42 Esty, Jed, 213n37 Euro-America, 7, 158; culture, 112; imperi-

Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Carroll), 211n15 Future: absence, in colonial fiction, 2;

alism, 74; modernity, 75; orientalism, 95;

anteriority, Barlow advocacy of, 4; disap-

photography, 215n28

pearing, liberation and, 200, 201; pres-

European literatures, 56, 141

ence, in colonial history writing, 2, 13

Everyday life: Im Hwa on, 45–46; in imperial time, 48–50; in late colonial era,

Global culture, of modernism, 6

43–48; in present, 15, 35; see also Saengh-

Global modernity, 5–8, 48, 70–71, 200

wal; Urban everyday

Government General, 148; Chōsen Educa-

Exoticizing strategy, of photography, 30

tion Code, 179, 180; Kokumin bungaku journal support by, 150; Koreans

Family novels (kajŏng sosŏl), 131–32

battlefield death urging by, 149; Seoul

Famous Sites of Chōsen picture postcard col-

boundaries redrawing by, 119; vernacular

lection, 24 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 73, 222n75 Fascism, 46, 88, 190; Bollas on, 170; capitalism and, 7; of Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 154, 162, 173, 174; colonial rule and, 1–2, 16, 104, 164; culture and, 5, 8; history, rewriting, 5; Ivy on, 7; modernism, of Ch’oe

press closure by, 9, 11, 149, 228n53 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 74, 106–7, 113 Greater East Asia Writer’s Conference, Second (1943), 196 Guerrilla warfare, anticolonial, 3, 134, 210n8

Chaesŏ, 154, 162, 173, 174; modernism

C6548.indb 273

and, 5, 151, 154, 155, 176; narrative frag-

Haeju No. I Printing plant, 204

mentation of, 12–13; Tansman on, 170;

Hagiwara Sakutarō, 99

8/29/14 9:22 AM

274 index

Ham Sŏkhŏn, 201

as literary critic, 18; Military High Court

Hankou, fall of (1938), 152

of DPRK execution of, 204; modern nos-

“Happy Literature” (Ch’oe Chaesŏ), 174–75

talgia of, 61–64; on naisen yūhwa, 182–83;

Harmony between the metropole and Ko-

photography representation distrust,

rea (naisen yūhwa), 182–83, 186–88

32; poetry of, 14, 18, 44, 61, 204; on pure

Harootunian, Harry, 211n15, 218n72, 218n73

and tendency literature, 103; on set’ae

Harvey, David, 169, 231n1

sosŏl, 18, 45; Yanabe Nagasaburō inter-

Historical consciousness, antiquarianism

view with, 180–82, 193–94, 241n3

and, 89, 90

Imperialism, 134, 145–46; capitulation nar-

Historical nostalgias, Sŏ Insik on, 59–67

rative and, 3; Euro-America, 74; everyday

Historicist logic, 2, 3–4

life during, 48–50; Korean language

History: of dark period, of South Korea,

elimination attempt, 2, 178; violence,

4–5, 210n11; of fascism, rewriting of, 5; world, 71–72, 76–78, 221n58; see also Antiquarianism; Colonial history writing

112–13; Western, 74 Imperialization, of late colonial era, 9, 147, 149–76; art is politics, 168–76; current

History and Culture (Sŏ Insik), 52, 67, 81

situation, 151–53; everyday life focus,

Hofer, Johannes, 53–54

48–50; forced military draft during,

“House Debt” (Pak T’aewŏn), 133, 143–44,

152; Kim Namch’ŏn on, 15–16; kokumin

146

bungaku as modernist critique, 153–62,

Huyssen, Andreas, 129–30

165, 168, 189; literary critique, 162–68;

Hwang Sunwŏn, 3, 210n7

literary magazines closure during, 152;

Hyangsu (longing): Korean spiritual his-

literature campaign, by Ch’oe Chaesŏ,

tory as symbolic, 55; of Sŏ Insik, 55–56; universal, 55–56, 64 Hyŏnsil (contemporary reality), Im Hwa on, 45–46

15, 150, 164; writers and, 10 Imperial language, 142, 143, 180, 189, 195, 197, 199; Ch’oe Chaesŏ and, 15, 152, 173, 179; culture of modernity and, 178; domination of, 11–12

I (watakushi) (character), 189–90, 192 “The Ideology and Form of Oriental Cul-

Minjok Munhak Chakkahoe writers’

ture: Its Particularity and Universality”

association, 197, 210n13; Minjok Munje

(Sŏ Insik), 76

Yŏn’guso research institute, 197; Silch’ŏn

Im Chongguk, 210n14 Im Hwa, 2–3, 61–63, 164, 228n53; on anecdotal essay, 100, 102–3, 140; on cinema

munhak journal, 197; South Korean National Assembly groups, 197 Imperial regime, 16, 46, 151, 240n82; of

fiction, 18; as Communist Party mem-

censorship, 12, 48, 57, 183, 200; Japanese

ber, 18, 61; on descriptive detail, 44–47;

language use, 3, 184

on everyday life, 45–46; as KAPF leader, 18; on Korea and Japan relationship, 183;

C6548.indb 274

Imperial power collaborators, 246n50;

Imperial Rule Assistance Association, Culture Section of, 185

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

Individualism, 80, 168; early, 163–64; late, 155, 156, 157, 163–64, 174, 239n55 Individuality: of anecdotal essay, 103,

275

Japanophone fiction, of Kim Namch’ŏn, 245n41 Joyce, James, 35, 118, 159

104–5; of bourgeoisie, 105; unsocialized, Im Hwa on, 140, 234n45 Inmun p’yŏngnon journal, 149, 150, 154, 223n100 “In Praise of Shadows” (Tanizaki Jun’ichirō), 99 In the Vicinity of the Iron Bridge Over the Han River (Kim Chŏngnae), 28, 29 Intimacy, see Ch’in

The Kabo Peasant War (Pak T’aewŏn), 205 Kaebyŏk magazine, 118 Kahoe-dong, 121, 126–27 Kajŏng sosŏl (family novels), 131–32 Kankoku shashinkai amateur photography club, 214n18 Kankoku shayūkai amateur photography club, 214n18

“Into the Light” (Kim Saryang), 185

KAPF, see Korea Artista Proleta Federacio

Ireland, 173, 239n71

Kawabata Yasunari, 185

Irony, Sŏ Insik on use of, 81

Keijō Imperial University, 82, 202

Ivy, Marilyn, 7

Keijō Post Office, 25

Iwata Kunio: on culture, 186; Kim Saryang

Khayyam, Omar, 229n71

interview with, 185–88; on Korean lan-

Kim Chinsŏp, 68, 101

guage transformation, 186–87

Kim Chŏngnae, 28 Kim Il Sung, 210n8

Japan: culture of, 8; dark valley of wartime,

Kim Kirim, 100–103, 209n1, 227n49, 244n37

201, 202

Kim Namch’ŏn, 2–3, 61, 197, 232n17,

Japanese language, 4, 144, 145, 194, 241n3,

244n35; Communist Party, 191–92; on

241n4; in capitulation narrative, 3; Ch’oe

descriptive detail, 47–48; on imperializa-

Chaesŏ on, 15, 152; Iwata Kunio on, 187;

tion, of late colonial era, 15–16; in KAPF

Kim Saryang and, 195, 197, 198, 245n43;

movement, 178, 192; Korean language

in Kokumin bungaku journal, 150, 185;

modernist movement, 194; proletarian

late colonial era adoption of, 9–10, 178,

movement and, 47; on urban everyday,

179–80, 184–85, 196–200; in “Obscene

47–48; see also “One Morning”

Rain,” 143; during Pacific War, 10; in

Kim Osŏng, 76

Second Sino-Japanese War, 9–10, 178; in

Kim P’albong, 54

strategy narrative, 3; Yanabe Nagasaburō

Kim Saryang, 194, 210n5, 241n4; Iwata

on, 183; Yi Kwangsu on, 49; Yi T’aejun

Kunio interview with, 185–88; Japanese

on, 197, 198; young writers schooled in,

language and, 195, 197, 198, 245n41,

10, 12

245n43; Koreans depiction in Japan, 3;

“The Japanese Way of Thinking” (Ch’oe Chaesŏ), 170

C6548.indb 275

Kim Kijin, 61

5; Pacific War defeat of, 2, 9, 120, 200,

strategy narrative, 3; translation and, 194–95

8/29/14 9:22 AM

276

Kim Tongin, 144, 241n4

61, 118, 166; Im Hwa as leader of, 18;

Kim Tongni, 245n46

Kim Namch’ŏn in, 178; Kim P’albong as

Kim Yongjun, 97 Kim Yunsik, 82 Kisaeng, 108, 229n75 “Kisaeng and Poetry” (Yi T’aejun), 108 Kobayashi Hideo, 152, 234n45 Kōgei journal, 226n26

leader of, 54; on realism fiction, 45–46 Korean artists, European painting styles adoption, 98–99 Korean Artists’ Proletarian Federation, see Korea Artista Proleta Federacio Korean culture, 8, 74–75, 94, 162–63, 181,

Kojŏn ŭi puhŭng, (revival of the classics), 67

186, 188; narrating of, 14–15; Paek Ch’ŏl

Kokumin bungaku (literature of the people),

on superiority of, 73

167–68, 169; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 148, 151;

Korean language, 50, 52, 144; Chōsen

consumerism and, 158; culture built by,

Education Code on, 179; fictional forms

161; deterrritorialization, 159, 160; mod-

in, 99–100; history of literature in, 185;

ernism of, 153–62, 165, 168, 189; national

imperialism elimination attempt, 2, 178;

defense and, 153–54, 164; as negative

lying in wait narration use of, 3; media

critique, 168–69

flourishing of, in 1930’s, 10; modernist

Kokumin bungaku journal, 177, 179, 194;

movement, Kim Namch’ŏn on, 194; in

Ch’oe Chaesŏ as editor of, 150, 154;

“Obscene Rain,” 143; transformation,

Ch’oe Chaesŏ fiction in, 241n5; fascism

Iwata Kunio on, 186–87; war literature

writings in, 195; Government General

and, 182; writing reduction of, 90

support of, 150; Japanese language of, 150, 185 Korea: antiquarianism in, 7; within Asia

Korean Language Society, member imprisonment, 10, 49, 197 Korean literati life, before modernity, 109

cultural imaginary, 95; cultural excep-

Korean literature, 147, 150, 172, 183, 211n18;

tionalism, 8; Eastern values, Yi T’aejun

Im Hwa on history of, 14, 61, 102, 141;

on, 93; Im Hwa on relationship with

nihilism in, 56

Japan, 183; Japanese colonial occupa-

Korean Literature in the Age of Transition (Ch’oe

tion of, 1; poetry of, 68, 244n37; see also

Chaesŏ), 149, 151, 165; culturalism col-

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea;

lusion with capitalism, 160–61; current

Republic of Korea; Seoul

situation chronology of, 152–53; imperial

Korea, colonial: city growth in, 8–9; nation-centered narratives in, 148; pho-

language of, 15, 152 Koreans: displacement, during colonial-

tography in, 30–32; temporal dislocation

ism, 198; Government General battle-

in, 8–9

field death urging, 149; Kim Saryang

Korea Art Exhibition (Chōsen bijutsu tenrankai), 29, 166, 214n22 Korea Artista Proleta Federacio (Korean Artists’ Proletarian Federation) (KAPF),

C6548.indb 276

index

depiction of, in Japan, 3; photograph experience, 20–21 Korea-Soviet Cultural Association, 204 Koselleck, Reinhart, 54

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

277

Kōyama Iwao, 77, 78, 80–81

Literary Federation of Korea, 53, 202–3

Kŭndae (early modernity), 71, 72

Literary forms of representation, 162–63

Kwallip Kyŏngsŏng Medical School, 118

Literary magazines closure, 152

Kwŏn Yŏnghŭi, 205

Literature, see Munhak

Kwŏn Yŏngmin, 209n1

Literature of the people, see Kokumin

Kyŏnghyang (tendency literature), 103 Kyŏngju, Sŏkkuram Grotto of, 51 Kyoto Imperial University, 52, 77, 78 Kyoto School of philosophers, 14, 71 Kyūshū literature, 172–73

bungaku Local color, 163, 238n51, 245n46; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 166–67; painting, 166–67; photography of, 29–30 Longing, see Hyangsu “Longing for the Hometown” (Im Hwa), 63

Language Society Incident (1942), 10

Lukács, Georg, 46–47, 72

“The Last Train” (O Changhwan), 66

Lying in wait for colonial rule end narra-

Late colonial era, 37–38, 44–50, 153,

tion, of late colonial history, 3

210n14; anecdotal essay revival in, 86; everyday detail in, 43–48; imperial time everyday, 48–50; Japanese language

Mainichi shinpō newspaper, 145

adoption during, 9–10, 178, 179–80,

Manchuria, 110–11, 233n29; anticolonial

184–85, 196–200; language polices,

guerrilla warfare, 3, 134, 210n8; Yi

modernism and, 179–88; narration of,

T’aejun on, 86, 106–7

3, 13–15; peri-urb stories during, 116;

Manchurian Incident (1931), 9, 54

photography languages, 19–32; triptych

Mantetsu, 112, 230n83

narrative in, 137; unruly detail, 38–43;

March First Movement (1919), 63

“Walking in the Rain” writing, 32–38; see

Marco Polo Bridge Incident (1937), 152

also Imperialization, of late colonial era;

May Fourth Movement, 99, 103

Nostalgia, late colonial

McClintock, Anne, 6, 215n31

Late individualism, 239n55; beauty of isolation, 174; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 155, 156, 157, 163; three registers of, 163–64 Lefebvre, Henri, 145, 217n54 Leftist movement, 3, 19, 52–53, 164, 202, 204, 238n49 Liberalism, 72, 94, 156, 161, 163–65, 182, 188, 243n30 Liberation, 37, 120, 169, 179, 210n8; disap-

“Methodology for a History of New Literature” (Im Hwa), 141 Miki Kiyoshi, 80–81 Military High Court of DPRK, Im Hwa execution by, 204 Minjok Munhak Chakkahoe writers’ association, 197, 210n13 Minjok Munje Yŏn’guso research institute, 197, 210n13

pearing future, 200, 201; roundtable on

Modan Nippon magazine, 229n75

self-criticism after, 197–98

Modernism, 13; British, 150, 159, 171,

Literary Confucian gentleman, 60, 147

C6548.indb 277

“Maek” (Kim Namch’ŏn), 232n17, 244n35

202; conservative turn of, 151; creative

8/29/14 9:22 AM

278 index

Modernism (continued) destruction of, 169; fascism, of Ch’oe Chaesŏ, 154, 162, 173, 174; fascism and, 5, 151, 154, 155, 176; global culture of, 6; of kokumin bungaku, 153–62, 165, 168,

40–43; see also Kokumin bungaku; Korean literature Munjang journal, 223n100; antiquarianism focus of, 149; traditionalism emphasis of, 154

189; late colonial language polices and,

“Muruori Island” (Kim Saryang), 194, 195

179–88; negation of, 5–6; nostalgia and,

Musŏrok (Eastern Sentiments) (Yi T’aejun), 85,

60–64; Osborne on, 5–6; politics of, 6 Modernity, 42, 59–60, 98–99, 226n36,

106, 113, 224n1; on ancient language retrieval, 108; imperial violence in, 112–13

237n36; of anecdotal essay, 98; capitalism in, 2, 6, 54, 71; Cold War, 2; colonialism and, 2, 184–85; culture of, 81, 178; Euro-America, 75; foreclosure form of, 189, 200; global, 5–8, 48, 70–71, 200;

crisis, 133, 145; narrative of development, 135 Naisen yūhwa (harmony between the metro-

Korean literati life, 109; Osborne on, 75;

pole and Korea), 182–83, 186–88

technological, 20, 111, 157; universal, 56,

“Narrate or Describe” (Lukács), 46

70–71

Narration, of late colonial era, 3, 13–15

Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman), 211n15 Modernization, 60, 113, 238n51; Iwata

Narratives: of colonization, in peri-urban dreams, 134; conversion, 82, 240n82,

Kunio on, 186; loss of faith in, 1; “Walk-

244n35; fragmentation, of fascism and

ing in the Rain” on, 38–40, 48–49

socialism, 12–13; nation-centered, in colo-

Modern nostalgia, 59, 60; of Im Hwa,

nial Korea, 148; prose, 44; “Self-Portrait”

61–64; KAPF and, 61 Monolingualism, 196, 197 Moonlit Nights of Contemplation (Yi T’aejun), 95 Mo Yunsuk, 101 Mu (nothingness), 77 Mujŏng (Yi Kwangsu), 136

form of, 137–38; triptych, 137, 140 National Assembly, South Korea, on colonial history writings, 4, 210n13 National Spiritual Mobilization campaign (1938), 181 National Theater for the Traditional Arts, 205

“Mule” (Hwang Sunwŏn), 210n7

Nature of time, in modernity, 2

Munhak (literature): city walls in, 124;

Nazi Germany, 5, 211n15

essayization of, 100, 101, 116, 227n42; European, 56, 141; Im Hwa on pure, 103;

Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (Peukert), 211n15

Kyūshū, 172–73; proletarian, 162–63,

Negation, of modernism, 5–6

165, 168; pure, 103, 175; reality in, 172,

Negative critique, kokumin bungaku as,

188; socialist, 165; Taishō, 164; tendency, 103; trivialism of, 44–45; vernacular, 10, 108; war, 169–70, 182; Yi Kwangsu on,

C6548.indb 278

Na (character), 130, 131, 143; financial

168–69 New regime movement (1940), 152, 163, 181, 188; Ch’oe Chaesŏ praise of, 167–68;

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

279

Kim Saryang and Iwata Kunio interview

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and

on, 185–86; regional culture and, 185–86

Community in Interwar Japan (Harootu-

Nihilism, 56 Nishida Kitarō, 77, 78, 223n82

nian), 211n15 Overthere, of Derrida, 192–93, 195, 199

North Korea, see Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Nostalgia: Benjamin and Stewart on, 53; Boym on, 54; decadent, 53–59, 64–67, 124; Hofer on, 53–54; modernism and, 60–64; past and present relationship,

Pacific War, 71, 169–70; Japan defeat in, 2, 9, 120, 200, 201, 202; Japanese language use, 10; Pearl Harbor and, 152 Paek Ch’ŏl, 140, 221n63; on East, 74; on Korean culture superiority, 74

57–58; phantasmic nature of past, Sŏ In-

Paek Sŏk, 245n46

sik on, 58, 89; for rural life, in Seoul, 90

Paintings, 238n49; European styles, Korean

Nostalgia, late colonial, 51–52; classical tradition, 67–73; constellations of, 55,

artists adoption of, 98–99; ink, 20, 28; local color and, 166–67; of rural Korea, 29

59–67; the East, 73–81; feudal, 59–60,

Pak Ch’iu, 76

85–86; historical, Sŏ Insik on, 59–67;

Pak Kyeri, 238n49

modern, 59, 60–64; from nostalgia

Pak T’aewŏn, 2–3, 43–44, 119, 134, 143,

to decadence, 53–59; philosophy and,

146, 205–6; apolitical stories, wartime

81–83; Sŏ Insik on politics of, 13, 14, 57,

economy and, 15; as bourgeoisie, 117–18;

67, 70

on commodity regime, 131, 137; on do-

Nothingness (mu), 77

mestic interior, 118, 133, 140, 142; feudal

Novel of manners (set’ae sosŏl), 18, 45, 48

nostalgia of, 59–60; middle age, 135–36; on peri-urban dreams, 117; sentence

“Obscene Rain” (Pak T’aewŏn), 133, 143 Observer, in colonial city, 36–37

eryday, 43–44, 159; see also “Self-Portrait”

O Changhwan, 2–3, 64, 65–66, 124–25, 206

Paradox, Sŏ Insik on, 81

“One Morning” (Kim Namch’ŏn), 189–96,

“Paradox” (Ch’oe Myŏngik), 33

199; children marching in formation

Paris, fall of, 153, 163

in, 177, 190; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 189; in

“Passing my Hometown” (Im Hwa), 64

Japanese language, 178

Past: colonial history writing interest in,

“On Tradition” (Sŏ Insik), 69

14; gesture, of anecdotal essay, 98; his-

Oriental culture, 76; Sŏ Insik on, 78; state

tory, classical tradition and, 69–70; pres-

of mind, 107; Yi T’aejun on, 86 Orientalism, 30, 75, 93, 166 “Oriental Painting” (Yi T’aejun), 85

ent relationship and, 57–58; Sŏ Insik on phantasmic nature of, 58, 89; Yi T’aejun longing for, 103–4

Origuchi Shinobu, 74–75

Patriotic Arts Lecture Troup, 152

Osborne, Peter, 5–6, 75, 239n55

Patriotic Association of Literary Figures,

O Sŏngho, 210n8

C6548.indb 279

length of, 137–39, 142, 144; on urban ev-

243n32

8/29/14 9:22 AM

280 index

“Patterns of the Heart” (Ch’oe Myŏngik), 1

on, 13, 14, 57, 67, 70; of modernism,

Peace Under Heaven (Ch’ae Mansik), 132

6; teleological, 140; Yi T’aejun on,

Pearl Harbor, 202 Peri-urban dreams: capitalism and, 131; colonial interiors, 142–48; crisis forms, 133, 137–42, 145; doubling of, 132–33;

104, 105 Population growth, of Seoul, 8–9, 119–20, 232n10, 232n11 Portrait studios, 26; bourgeoisie and, 21;

narratives of colonization, 134; Pak

Ch’oe Injin on, 20, 21; in Seoul, 21; of Yi

T’aewŏn on, 117; peri-urb description,

Honggyŏng, 22

117–30; short story of, 115–48; temporal-

Pratt, Mary Louise, 145–46

ity in, 135; Yi T’aejun on, 117, 121, 130

Present: as age of transition, Sŏ Insik on,

Peukert, Detlev J. K., 211n15

72; everyday life in, 15, 35; past relation-

Philosophy, 12, 14, 57, 59, 107, 202; late

ship with, 57–58

colonial nostalgia and, 81–83; of mu, 77;

Private individual, 104–5

unruly practice of, 81–83, 223n96

Private orient collection, of Yi T’aejun,

Photographer (character): bourgeois life of, 34–35; Pyŏngil encounter with, 17, 20 Photographs: depiction of urban, 21–22; of Pyongyang, 22–26, 26 Photography, 215n33; amateur, 21, 26–29, 166, 214n18, 214n19; Ch’oe Myŏngik on,

106–13 Proletarian literature, 162–63, 165, 168 Proletarian movement, 159, 160; Im Hwa on, 46; Kim Namch’ŏn and, 47 Prose narrative, Ch’oe Chaesŏ categorization of, 44

19–20, 32; class and gender in, 30–31; in

Pure literature, 103, 175

colonial Korea, 30–32; Euro-America,

Purges of late 1950s, in North Korea, 3,

215n28; exoticizing strategy of, 30; languages, in late colonial era, 19–32;

209n2 Pyŏngil (character): alley route of, 18,

of local color, 29–30; role in colonial

24–25, 37; cinema staging of, 18; dou-

projects, 30

bled life of, 33–34, 37, 49; photographer

Picture postcard, 26, 30–31, 215n26; of Keijō Post Office, 25; of Pyongyang, 23–24 Poetry, 99, 104, 107, 174, 184; of Ch’oe

encounter with, 17, 20; visions of, 34–37 Pyongyang, 17; alley routes of, 18, 24–25, 37; bourgeois culture of, 22; photographs of, 22–26, 26; photography studio

Kyŏngch’ang, 108–9; of Im Hwa, 14, 18,

in, 20; picture postcard of, 23–24; view

44, 61, 204; of Kim Kirim, 100; of Korea,

of, 23

68, 244n37; of O Changhwan, 64, 66, 206; of Paek Sŏk, 245n46 Politics, 70, 78, 100, 118, 143, 158, 203;

Realism, 7, 211n18; fiction, KAPF on, 45–46

aesthetics and, 8; art is, 168–76; global,

Reality in literature, 172, 188

contemporary traditionalism and, 5–6,

“Record of a Journey to Manchuria” (Yi

70–71; of late colonial nostalgia, Sŏ Insik

C6548.indb 280

“The Rainy Season” (Yi T’aejun), 129

T’aejun), 106, 230n84

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

“Record of a Journey to the Soviet Union” (Yi T’aejun), 201

281

Seoul, Korea, 15, 63; administrative area of, 117, 119, 120, 124, 130; city walls, 115,

Regime: of censorship, 12, 48, 57, 183, 200;

117, 119, 120, 124, 129–31, 206; Govern-

commodity, 88, 93, 116, 131, 137, 146,

ment General boundaries redrawing,

203; wartime, 49, 52, 66, 179, 190, 191;

119; map of, 120–21, 122–23; nostalgia for

see also Imperial regime; New regime

rural life, 90; population growth of, 8–9,

movement

119–20, 232n10, 232n11; portrait studios

Regional culture, new regime and, 185–86 Republic of Korea (South Korea): histories,

in, 21; Yi T’aejun reflections on, 85 Set’ae sosŏl (novel of manners), 18, 45, 48

dark period of, 4–5, 210n11; wŏlbuk chakka

Shiga Naoya, shishōsetsu of, 142

writers ban by, 2–3, 209n1, 209n3

Shishōsetsu, 235n50, 235n53; Im Hwa on, 141;

Revival of the classics (Kojŏn ŭi puhŭng), 67 Riverside Scenes (Pak T’aewŏn), 43–44 Romantic antiquarianism, 7, 15, 200, 224n9 Ruin, 120, 128, 129–30 “The Ruin” (Simmel), 128

Japanese literary creation, 141; of Shiga Naoya, 142 Short story, 12, 100, 233n38; of peri-urb, 115–48 “The Significance of the Exploration of the Classics: The Awakening of Historical

Saenghwal (daily life), 41, 86; Pak T’aewŏn on, 131; short story on, 100; tradition

Siin purak journal, 124

and, 70; Yi T’aejun on, 97–99, 144; see

Silch’ŏn munhak journal, 197

also Everyday life

Silla (57 bc-ad 935), 74, 75

Sasosŏl stories: Ch’oe Chaesŏ critique of,

Sim Ch’ŏng, 68

162, 163, 164; on personal realm as tem-

Simmel, Georg, 128

poral experience, 141

Sin Hyŏnggi, 210n8

Satō Haruo, 99, 185 Schor, Naomi, 217n63 Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), 202; China Incident of, 152; Japanese language use, 9–10, 178 “Self-Portrait” (Pak T’aewŏn), 118, 132, 147,

Sino-Japanese War, second, see Second Sino-Japanese War Sketching, Ch’oe Myŏngik on importance of, 19–20 Socialism, 160, 199, 204; narrative fragmentation of, 12–13

148, 164, 189; anecdotal essay differ-

Socialist literature, 165

ence, 137–38; capital within city, 131, 133;

“The Sociology of Nostalgia (Sŏ Insik),

domestic interior, 140; narrative form of, 137–38; possessions and objects in,

55, 57 Sŏ Insik, 14, 151, 221n63, 222n75; on anti-

130–31; sentence length in, 137–39, 142,

quarianism, 86; background of, 54–55;

144; triptych narrative of, 137, 140

on capitalism, 72, 75, 80; chŏnhyangja

Sentence length, of Pak T’aewŏn, 137–39, 142, 144

C6548.indb 281

Sensibility” (Kim Chinsŏp), 68

association by, 52, 82, 178; on classical tradition, 67–73; on colonial nostalgia,

8/29/14 9:22 AM

282 index

Sŏ Insik (continued)

Tanaka Hidemitsu, 25–26

51–83; as Communist Party member, 14,

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 99

54, 61, 82, 202; on East, 73–81; on his-

Tansman, Alan, 170, 226n26

torical nostalgias, 59–67; on irony and

Tanwŏn Kim Hongdo, 99

paradox use, 81; on liberalism collapse,

Technological modernity, 20, 111, 157

72; of Literary Federation of Korea, 53;

Teleological politics, 140

on nostalgia and decadence, 53–59; on

Temporality: of classical tradition, 69, 70;

phantasmic nature of past, 58, 89; on

in peri-urb, 135

politics of late colonial nostalgia, 13, 14,

Tendency literature (kyŏnghyang), 103

57, 67, 70; on present as age of transi-

Thoughts on Writing (Ch’oe Myŏngik), 19

tion, 72; totalitarianism attack by, 72,

Three Generations (Yŏm Sangsŏp), 132

78–79; on utopianism, 80–81

Tit ‘eil (detail), of everyday, 43–48

Sŏkkuram Grotto, 51, 94 Sŏngbyŏk collection (O Changhwan), 124 Sonyŏn (Boy) journal, 60–61, 219n28

Tonga hyŏpdongch’e (Asian cooperative body), 81, 82; totalitarianism and, 78–80

Southern Manchurian Railroad, 111

Tonga ilbo, 166, 228n53

South Korea, see Republic of Korea

Totalitarianism: Asian cooperative body

South Korean National Assembly groups, 197, 235n56 Spengler, Oswald, 156–57, 236n12 Spiritual Mobilization campaign, 180 “The Standpoint of National Literature” (Ch’oe Chaesŏ), 165 Stewart, Susan, 53, 88, 216n36

and, 78–80; problems with, 79; Sŏ Insik attack on, 72, 78–79 “Totality and the Individual in Culture” (Sŏ Insik), 78, 82 Total Mobilization Federation: Culture Section, 181–82; Yanabe Nagasaburō interview, 180–82, 193–94, 241n3

“The Stone Bridge” (Yi T’aejun), 185

Traditionalism, contemporary, 5–6, 70–71

Strategies of innocence, of Pratt, 145–46

“The Transformation of the Literary Spirit”

Strategy narrative, of late colonial history, 3 A Summer Hilltop (Ch’oe Ibok), 27, 27–28

(Ch’oe Chaesŏ), 155 “Traveler’s Melancholy” (O Changhwan), 64

“Suni at the Crossroads” (Im Hwa), 61–62

Travelogue, of Yi T’aejun, 110–13, 229n68

Survey of Japanese Geography and Customs, 24

Tripartite Pact (1940), 153

The System of Objects (Baudrillard), 225n17,

Triptych narrative, of “Self-Portrait,” 137,

225n19

140 Trivialism of literature, Im Hwa on, 44–45

Taishō literature, 164

C6548.indb 282

The Tale of Ch’unhyang, 68

Ulysses (James Joyce), 101

The Tale of Hong Kildong, 68

United Silla (ad 668–935), 72

“A Tale of Rabbits” (Yi T’aejun), 121, 146–47

Universal modernity, 56, 70–71

8/29/14 9:22 AM

index

The Unknown Craftsman (Yanagi Muneyoshi), 226n26

283

Western culture, 70, 76, 77, 80, 99; Ch’oe Chaesŏ on, 157, 159

Unruly detail, in late colonial era, 38–43

Western imperialism, 74

Unruly practice, of philosophy, 81–83,

“What Is Literature” (Yi Kwangsu), 40–43

223n96 Unsocialized individuality, 140, 234n45 “Upon Viewing the Kizaemon Ido” (Yanagi Muneyoshi), 94 Urban everyday: Ch’oe Myŏngik on, 14,

“What Is Poetic?” (Ch’oe Chaesŏ), 174 “When the Buckwheat Blooms” (Yi Hyosŏk), 65 Where Are You Now? (Im Hwa), 204 “Where Was Our Happiness?” (Im Hwa), 64

43–48, 189; Kim Namch’ŏn on, 47–48;

Williams, Raymond, 35, 69

Pak T’aewŏn and Yi Sang writing on,

“Wings” (Yi Sang), 43–44

43–44, 159

Wŏlbuk chakka (crossing-to-the-north writ-

Urban Planning Order, 124

ers), South Korea ban of, 2–3, 209n1,

Utopianism, Sŏ Insik on, 80–81

209n3 Wŏnsan strike (1929), 62

Vernacular language, 41, 116, 136, 143, 147 Vernacular literature, 10, 108

Woolf, Virginia, 101, 159, 227n48 World history, 71–72, 76–78, 221n58 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 73

Vernacular press, 145; newspapers, 197, 228n53; shutdown, in 1940, 9, 11, 149,

Xinjing, Manchukuo, 106

228n53 Voluntary Armed Forces Code, 180

Yanabe Nagasaburō, 204; Im Hwa interview with, 180–82, 193–94, 241n3; on

“Walking in the Rain” (Ch’oe Myŏngik), 20, 35–36; city slums in, 36–37, 39–40, 117; doubled life in, 33–34, 37, 49; on

Yanagi Muneyoshi, 93–95, 97, 225n20, 226n23, 226n25

modernization, 38–40, 48–49; Pyŏngil’s

Yang Kwija, 233n38

alley route in, 18, 24–25, 37; unruly detail

Yazawa Kengetsu, 166

in, 38–43

Yi Honggyŏng, 22

War literature, 169–70, 182

Yi Hyosŏk, 11, 65

Wartime economy, 15, 19, 131, 145

Yi Injik, 13

Wartime regime, 49, 52, 66, 179, 190, 191

Yi Kwangsu, 13, 44, 82, 118, 136, 210n12,

Watakushi (I) (character), 189–90, 192

231n2; Chinese language writing, 108; on

Water dropper, of Yi T’aejun, 87–97, 108

descriptive detail, 41–42; on individual’s

West, 80, 107, 169, 171, 172; East compared

emotional life, 40–41; on Japanese

to, 71, 74, 76, 93, 99, 157; East cultural divide with, 86, 141, 156; identity and thought of, 6, 7

C6548.indb 283

Japanese language use, 183

language, 49; on literature, 40–43; vernacular language writing, 41, 241n4 Yi Sang, 43–44, 58, 159, 205

8/29/14 9:22 AM

284 index

Yi T’aejun, 2–3, 85, 144, 146–47, 230n84;

by, 117, 121, 130; private orient collection

anecdotal essay, 60, 85–113; antiquarian-

of, 106–13; on romantic antiquarianism,

ism of, 86, 106, 113, 121, 203–4, 225n15;

15, 224n9; on saenghwal, 97–99, 144; as

antiques relationship of, 81, 87–88, 90,

self-made bourgeoisie, 11; travelogue,

95; antique water dropper, 87–97, 108; background of, 89–90; on capitalism,

110–13, 229n68 Yi Ŭnsang, 101

11, 15, 204; on daily life, 97–99, 144; on

Yoidorebune (Tanaka Hidemitsu), 25–26

everyday present, 15; feudal nostalgia of,

Yu Chino, 195

59–60, 85–86; on Japanese language use,

Yu Chong

197, 198; Japanese translation of works

C6548.indb 284

of, 185; on Korea Eastern values, 93;

Zhou Zuoren, 99, 103

longing for past, 103–4; peri-urb stories

Žižek, Slavoj, 7

8/29/14 9:22 AM

SELECTED TITLES

(Complete list at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/weatherhead-studies.html) The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, by Ian J. Miller. University of California Press, 2012. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Postwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel. University of California Press, 2012. Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese, by Paula Harrell. MerwinAsia, 2012. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, by Kirsten Cather. University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan, by Sarah Kovner. Stanford University Press, 2012. Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World, by Aaron Herald Skabelund. Cornell University Press, 2011. Russo-Japanese Relations, 1905–17: From Enemies to Allies, by Peter Berton. Routledge, 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, by David Lurie. Harvard University Asia Series, 2011. Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011. Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, by Shao-hua Liu. Stanford University Press, 2010. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary, by Kenneth J. Ruoff. Cornell University Press, 2010. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing, by Fabio Lanza. Columbia University Press, 2010.

C6548.indb 285

8/29/14 9:22 AM

286 selec ted titles

Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys: Guilty Lessons, by Julian Dierkes. Routledge, 2010. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman. University of California Press, 2009. The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States, by Christopher Hill. Duke University Press, 2008. Leprosy in China: A History, by Angela Ki Che Leung. Columbia University Press, 2008. Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, by Kim Brandt. Duke University Press, 2007. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, by Alexander Des Forges. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan, by Andrew Bernstein. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. The Making of the “Rape of Nanjing”: The History and Memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, China, and the United States, by Takashi Yoshida. Oxford University Press, 2006.

C6548.indb 286

8/29/14 9:22 AM