Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature

Yoon Sun Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138655041
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317224136
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature provides a comprehensive overview of a Korean literary tradition, which is understood as a multifaceted nexus of practices, both homegrown and transnational.

The handbook discusses the perspectives from which modern Korean literature has thus far been defined, analyzing which voices have been enunciated, underappreciated, or completely silenced and how we can enrich our understanding of it. Taking up diverse transnational and interdisciplinary standpoints, this volume aims to encourage readers not to treat modern Korean literature as a self-evident category but to examine it anew as an uncultivated and uncharted space, unearthing its internal chasms and global connections. Divided into five parts, the themes covered include the following:

• Literature and power
• Borders and boundaries
• Rationality in literature and its limits
• Language, ethnicity, and translation
• Korean literature in the changing mediascape.

By introducing new conceptual paradigms to the field of modern Korean literature, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean, East Asian, and world literature alike.

PART 1

The power of literature/ the literature of power

1
ART AS FREEDOM AND POWER

Kim Tongin and the political legacy of pure literature in modern Korea

Jin-kyung Lee

Introduction

This chapter explores Kim Tongin’s (re-)invention of Western aestheticism in colonial modern Korea through his literary and literary-critical works from the late 1910s to the 1930s. I trace the relations between Kim’s notion of the autonomy of art and the prevailing ideological discourses of the day in the colony, liberalism, and social Darwinism. In particular, I argue that Kim’s one-person movement for establishing the autonomy of art in colonial Korea was closely tied to East Asian versions of the liberal concept of freedom (chayu) and the social Darwinist notion of power. I also suggest that this figure of artist, discursively free from Confucian ethics and contemporary colonial/imperial politics and now endowed with secular transcendental power, laid the groundwork for modern subjectivity in the colony and in postcolonial South Korea. Artists or aesthetic subjects were simultaneously a prototype for modern subjectivity and exceptions to it.

Were Kim Tongin’s efforts to encourage the genesis of a new kind of art in colonial modern Korea just a passing idea? Although the autonomy of art occupied a marginal position, it did become deeply entrenched as it changed its guise and adapted itself to evolving historical and material contexts. In the latter part of this chapter, I discuss how the autonomy of art came to be the “other” perspective against which the dominant camps of nationalists (both left wing and right wing) and (internationalist) Marxists defined their positions on art in later colonial Korea and postcolonial South Korea. The idea of the autonomy of art occupied the position of the marginalized and therefore essential other in the constitution of the larger field of art and art theory in modern Korea. As I will show, the concept of autonomous art played historically contingent and varying roles and took on different meanings in the turbulent subsequent decades on the Korean Peninsula. This relationality between the autonomy of art and politicized concepts/practices of art has revealed the inherent heteronomy of art vis-à-vis the extra-aesthetic forces that constitute it, while, conversely, the imagined and performed autonomy of art has produced real political effects. Once ensconced in the consciousness of artists and intellectuals, I argue, the autonomy of art has always posed the possibility of differently politicizing representations in modern Korea, where the lines of political divisions were often too reductively drawn amid complex circumstances.

Here I am relying on Jacques Rancière’s idea of the inherent interpenetration of art and politics, refuting the widely accepted notion both in the West and in modern Korea that politics and aesthetics are discrete entities, which thus requires us to “know whether or not they ought to be set in relation.”¹ Kim Tongin’s idea of pure art is in fact distant from Rancière’s theorization of art as a more fundamental kind of politics, i.e., spheres of the politics of perception, sensation, and cognition— that is, aesthetics in the etymological sense as politics. Nonetheless, the very idea of pure art operating precisely as a political notion at least planted this possibility of imagining a different “juridical order.” In other words, Rancière’s dissensual politics/aesthetics enables me to assert that the autonomy of art and the non-autonomy of art were inherently intertwined, together shaping modern Korean art.

In considering Europe, Pierre Bourdieu argues, the notion of modern art, art as ex nihilo, was produced in fact ex instituto—that is, out of various and multiple historical and social forces and structures.² Modern art in colonial Korea arose within an even-more complex network: the unequal relations of global and regional systems and institutions. The first was Japanese territorial imperialism and Western cultural hegemony; the second was uneven capitalist structures of domination, including print and commodity capitalism; the third was transcontinental/the West–East Asian discursive formations in political ideology—that is, importation and regional adaptations of liberalism, social Darwinism, Marxism, and fascist thought; and last but most relevant to the present discussion was colonial Korea’s importation from late-nineteenth-century Europe of the idea of the autonomization of art. This was the view that literature and culture as a sphere was delimited and separated from others, such as politics, the market, religion, and ethics—and more specifically, that aestheticism was a particular and extreme instance of autonomous art.

The ultimate Confucian ideal for ethical governance was articulated as munch’i (文治), or governance by respecting mun, the cosmological order.³ It was a holistic institution of discourses and knowledge that included what modernity would separate out as governing ideology (political, economic, and social), philosophy, religion, belles lettres, cosmology, and so on. While being traced to this broad premodern origin, the modern Korean notion of literature (munhak, 文學), emerging in the period of the first two decades of the twentieth century, was a product of the processes of reduction, particularization, and the simultaneous demotion and elevation of its premodern predecessor, mun. The notion of art, yesul (藝術), was an import from the West. In premodern Korea, the respective characters ye and sul making up the neologism yesul signified various kinds of skill. The conglomeration of the forms of artisanship, practical skills, entertainment, and ritualistic performances of the premodern era came to be elevated and together constitute what we now classify as yesul or “art.”⁴ Kim Tongin’s aestheticism in colonial Korea pushed this process of disintegration of the premodern holistic mode of governance a step further and laid the foundation for what later came to be known as “pure literature,” or sunsu munhak, one of the most debated and to a large extent disparaged terms in the history of modern literature in Korea. While the set phrase the sunsu-ch’amyŏ nonjaeng (the debate on pure literature vs. engaged literature) did not come into common use until the mid-1960s in South Korea, the literary establishment of colonial Korea was already divided between the leftists/Marxists and the rightists/anti-Marxists. The now-familiar term sunsu is an adaptation of the notion of pure art and pure gaze from nineteenth-century Europe.⁵ Purity here means separation, distance, and autonomy of meaning, away from politics, the market, and society, and argues for a kind of autogenesis of art. Sunsu holds that art is internally constituted: it derives and produces meaning only from art itself and other art. The most important shift for modern Europe was the “rupture” between aesthetics and ethics; the decoupling of these two was also the most significant lesson that Kim Tongin took away from Europe for colonial modern Korea.⁶

For Kim Tongin, this notion of the autonomy of art functioned like a placebo. The idea had the effect of liberating not only literature and art but also certain aspects of subjectivity presumed to have close connections to art—that is, emotions and interiority—from the extraliterary and extra-artistic structures and relations of power at the regional and global levels. In other words, while the notion of autonomous art did not actually hold that art was autonomously produced or autonomous from other spheres, it had real emancipatory effects. Most notably, the empowerment and independence of art and artist-like human subjects, imagined in the pages of literary works, contributed to the construction of modern subjectivity. The effect of the heteronomous autonomy of art was singular: it staked out an imagined/real space “outside” of the structures of material power at the heart of it.

I turn now to a discussion of how Kim Tongin transformed nineteenth-century European aestheticism into a colonial version, by illustrating how his ideas, from both fictional works and critical essays, contributed to the establishment of art as a modern institution in relation to modern subjectivity and the new collective: ethnonation, or minjok.

I. Inventing creativity (Ch’angjo)

Kim Tongin’s self-funded publication, Ch’angjo (Creativity), was both a creative outlet for writers and a venue for Kim’s own manifestos and manuals for inventing modern literature and by extension art in Korea, the kind of art Kim understood as being produced in the West. Kim Tongin’s essay “A World Created by Oneself (chagiga ch’angjohan segye): A Comparison of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky” asserts that art is the end result of autopoiesis, self-creation or self-production, by an artist.⁷ Kim Tongin rejected the premodern East Asian notion of literature as the rewriting of the classics or existing works in favor of the modern European notion of art as creation that originates with each artist, a homo faber, descended from deus faber. Ch’angjo, or creativity, according to Kim Tongin, was also necessarily linked to the catchword of the day: “new” (sin). Creativity meant creating something new: an artist creates meaning and truth out of nothing, ex nihilo, by themselves and out of their own emotions and intellect.⁸ This figure of artist in modern Europe was made in the ontotheological mode, both “secular and theological at the same time … grounded by desire … for final authority, even if that final authority is no longer named God.”⁹ If the all-important concept of imagination served as a self-inaugural and self-grounding principle for Romantics, then for Kim Tongin, “creativity” functioned similarly, with him claiming autopoiesis or creativity as the self-grounding truth.¹⁰ Furthermore, the West and its cultural authority and the attendant pressure on colonized intellectuals to reject their own traditions and to join the ranks of “civilized” peoples simultaneously functioned as another layer of the ground for Kim Tongin. In his eyes, the autonomy of art in colonial Korea could be heteronomously established only through its cultural hegemon, the West.

II. Art as “free”: the sovereignty of mad genius artist in “Kwangyŏm Sonat’a” (Mad Flames Sonata), “Kwanghwasa” (Mad Painter), and “Paettaragi” (A Ferryman’s Song)

1. Aesthetic freedom as power, will, and voluntarism

The Western notions of art and aesthetics that entered colonial Korea through Japan drew on neo-Kantian philosophy and Romantic literary and critical works that espoused this philosophy. Kant understood human subjects as “absolutely free” and the work of art as having been produced “via free human initiative,” and therefore, for Kant, “the aesthetic product becomes a utopian symbol of the realization of freedom” both in its production and appreciation.¹¹ In Derrida’s critique of the West’s philosophical foundations, he understands this “freedom,” interchangeable with “sovereignty,” in this way: “this freedom as a force, as mastery or sovereignty, as the sovereign power over oneself”; “this definition of freedom as a faculty ‘in charge of itself and of its decisions,’ as the sovereign power to do as one pleases, in short, the power to attain ‘perfect independence.’ ”¹² For Kim Tongin, this Romantic notion of freedom as free will and power was further intensified by the social Darwinist self-justifying concept of power, power for power’s sake, as we will see later. Given that both the unfreedoms and disempowerments that constrained the colony and the power of the West propagated this social Darwinist idea of power, it is no surprise that this notion of sovereignty, the Romantic notion of power, was valuable to colonial intellectuals: they pursued power discursively in the cultural and aesthetic sphere, as it was not attainable in the political sphere.

Kim Tongin’s short story “Kwangyŏm Sonat’a” (Passion Sonata or more literally Mad Flames Sonata), from 1929, is the clearest instantiation of his theory of art—that is, art as an expression of this kind of free will and power. The story features a genius composer, Paek Sŏngsu, who commits a series of violent and perverse crimes, including, arson, the rape of a dead woman, and murder for aesthetic purposes—that is, to be inspired to produce his masterpieces. In this story, Paek’s “genius” is associated with words such as yasŏng (wild nature), yain (wild man), and kwangp’osŏng (violent nature). The title of the story, “mad flames,” refers to the violent force of emotion expressed in the music that Paek composes. Once he commits these crimes, he seems to reach this higher sphere of freedom, which is described as “free and uninhibited” (chayu pangbun).¹³ His music is described in this way: “grotesque emotions that have been imprisoned”; “wild power”; “threatening power and wild nature”; and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on romanization, translation, and capitalization
• Introduction
• Part 1 The power of literature/the literature of power
• Part 2 Crossing borders, redrawing boundaries
• Part 3 Rationality in Korean literature and its limits: scientists, detectives, and doctors
• Part 4 Transnational archives: language, ethnicity, and translation
• Part 5 Korean literature in the changing mediascape: radio, television, and print culture
• Index