Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction: The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature

Abstract

Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction:The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature Ho Duk Hwang (bio) After Avant-garde, What Can Literature Do? At the moment, in Korea and East Asia, the question of what literature is, is at once an old question and one that is being raised again today. This is because, while the last century's tradition of revolutionary literature or avant-garde literature seems to have ended, some Korean literature still seems to be engaged in the transformation of Asian life not only in Korea but in many places in East Asia. During the past century, in Asia there have been multiple answers in response to what literature is, what it should be, and what it can do. For Natsume Sōseki, one of the founders of modern Japanese literature, literature was emotions incorporated with impressions (F+f). Notably, a Japaneseness, juxtaposed against the Western, or a sort of antimodernist cultural craze, was inscribed in "emotions" (f). Literature was basically the site of the fever of catch-up modernization and the question, Who are we? Even for Yi Kwang-su, who read Sōseki, literature was the medium of emotions (情), which was distinguished from knowledge (知) or will (意). What is interesting about Yi's discussion of emotions (情) is that it understands emotions to be a type of affection that mediates the call for enlightenment or the demand of ethics and tasked it with the national endeavor of overcoming coloniality. In East Asia, questions concerning the rationale for literature often also took the form of questioning what literature must not be. In order to avoid writing a banal literature that is like "toilet paper," Lu Xun and Kim Su-yŏng, the most defiant writers in Korea and China, wrote in the manner of "struggle" (掙扎, zhēngzhá), or "negation," and succeeded in creating the forms of political rationale that truly confronted the times by making everybody, including themselves, uncomfortable. Literature was subversion. [End Page 89] However, the question I am asking is a different one. What can literature really do? In fact, this question was raised by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and also by Hyŏn Kim, the prominent critic of contemporary Korean literature, in 1977. The proposition that "literature uses that which is unusable" or that "literature does not oppress and prompts thinking about oppression through reflection" was the most cited sentence in the last half century (H. Kim 1991, 50, 189). The proposition that literature is useless but does not oppress, and therefore is a liberating movement, wielded enormous influence. Certainly, some may consider that the most orthodox Korean literature is the national literary theory of Nak-ch'ŏng Paek and others, which proposed, against Hyŏn Kim, that the avant-garde aspect of Korean literature simply refers to the avant-garde of the liberation movement of oppressed nations, and that avant-garde literature shares the values of anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and decolonization. Whereas Kim considers the revolution and avant-garde movement of sensibility and imagination the distinction of literature, Paek thinks political subjectivity is the site of literature. However, even Paek's statement of revolutionary literature, which subsumed avant-garde literature into a realism based "national literature," presupposed the avant-garde position of literature (especially political literature). In modern Korea, the belief that "literature," free from capital and politics, is at the avant-garde of not only the imagination but also the intellect, appeared to be an indestructible myth even long after postmodernism and the decline of socialism. As is well known, Kōjin Karatani is the one who spoke of "The End of Modern Literature," based on the transformation of the nature of Korean literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Karatani brought back Sartre's proposition that "literature is the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution," and wrote that such a longing for permanent revolution and the subjectivity of society had come to an end even in Korea (Karatani 2005). While Karatani experimented and sought a general theory in the space of the US, he also highlighted the Asian function of modern literature, which at once confronts remote and internal colonialism. Karatani attributed the possibility of Japanese literature onto...