The Return of the Real in South Korean Fiction

Abstract

This article takes so-called migrant labor fiction in South Korea as an opportunity to think about the long-standing question of the politics of representation. Looking at recent fiction from Kim Insuk, Kim Chaeyŏng, and Kang Yŏngsuk, Hanscom argues that whatever its avowed politics, a text presenting the experience of the migrant laborer must claim a certain veracity or proximity to the real to achieve its effects. That the crossing of geopolitical borders is figured in these examples through the fantastic representation of speech outside of linguistic difference does not diminish the need to think through such representations in terms of the problem of realism, for which fiction is comprehended and valued to the extent that it expresses the actuality of the subject. In these stories, this actuality comes to the reader in two linked forms: the mundanity of the everyday, particularly the trope of urban poverty and the figure of the common people; and the imagined divorce of speech from ethnic-national or cultural context. What the essay finds is that rather than presenting a transcultural ideal of post-national community, representations of speech in these stories instead retain a culturalist impulse for which the “tie of language” remains linked to the “tie of blood.” Beyond the interpretation of an empathetic surface politics that aims to persuade the reader of the humanity of the laborer, culture remains linked to an economy of human types signaled by linguistic belonging.