Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea by Theodore Hughes

Author:Theodore Hughes [Hughes, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Asian, General, History, Asia, Korea
ISBN: 9780231157490
Google: k-wYBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-03-04T01:11:24+00:00

DEVELOPMENT AS DEVOLUTION

While the arrest and prosecution of Nam Chŏng-hyŏn following the publication of his “Land of Excrement” (“Punji,” 1965) in North Korea is generally considered a significant event in postdivision South Korean literary history, Nam’s works themselves have received relatively little critical attention.38 At the same time, Nam is often mentioned as a seminal, if problematic, figure in the narrative of increasing awareness of postdivision U. S. neoimperialism on the Korean peninsula. Kim Yun-sik, for example, writes that “Nam Chŏng-hyŏn’s controversial ‘Land of Excrement’ demonstrates a new understanding of the United States, revealing with a powerful anger its essential character, that of the invader.”39 Im Chin-yŏng considers Nam’s work the product of an era that was the “age of allegory, in other words, the age of authoritarian dictatorship.”40 Indeed, Nam’s work in the early 1960s turns largely upon an allegorizing of the fall of the Syngman Rhee regime as an emancipatory moment that offered the promise of overcoming the neocolonial condition. Park Chung Hee’s May coup, by contrast, signals the return both of the repressive anticommunist state and the economic exploitation of the comprador elite and their foreign (U.S. and, later, Japanese) sponsors.41

Although Nam’s texts of the early 1960s are explicit and specific responses to April 19 and May 16, they should also be seen in relation to the existentialist-inspired calls for social engagement (anggajyumang), resistance (rejisŭt’angsŭ), and action (haengdong) that began in the mid-1950s (Nam made his literary debut in 1958). As in many of his later works, the critique of the South Korean condition in Nam’s early “Inheritance Under the Chimney” (1959), for example, invokes the figure of the superfluous man—the impoverished, college-educated young male intellectual who is precluded from participating meaningfully in society.

Nam differs from other writers such as Son Ch’ang-sŏp Yi Pŏm-sŏn, and Ch’oe In-hun who also deployed this figure in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, in his close association of resistance with the body of the superfluous male protagonist standing in for the ethnonation. This biologizing of resistance should be located in the context of the relation between race and culture that occurred as part of the 1950s discourse on tradition (chŏnt’ong), itself, as we saw in the preceding chapter, a rearticulation of the late-colonial-period pan-Asian local/imperial subject standing against the “occident” (sŏyang).42 Yi Ŭn-sang’s immanentist equation of race with culture to construct a Korea and Korean literature resistant to the modern (noted in chapter 3) finds further inflection in Sin Tong-han’s “Humanism and the Spirit of the Author” (1959). In this article, Sin biologizes Sartrean anggajyumang, associated with existentialism in the 1950s, by linking it to the resisting national body:

Everyone knows that in Korea too there have been numerous historical instances of resistance. This tradition continues to flow as before in the blood vessels of the ethnonation [minjok ŭi hyŏlmaek]. This bodily movement [momburim] to secure autonomous human subjectivity [ingan ŭi chuch’esŏng] is, precisely, the spirit of humanism; it achieves expression through love of fatherland [choguk ae] and love of the ethnonation [minjok ae].

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