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.
—YI T’AEJUN, “The Short Story and the Conte”
Eastern Sentiments is a collection of anecdotal essays and not short stories, yet as essays the writings gathered here are, if anything, more partial and fragmented than any short story, suggesting a connection between their form and the environment of late colonial Korea. The anecdotal essay had been enjoying a surge in popularity when Yi T’aejun was writing in the late 1930s, and his collection is generally considered a masterpiece of the form. an eclectic selection of thoughts on anything from fishing to stone gardens to the melancholy of immigrant life, Eastern Sentiments made fragmentation both its strength and its beauty. In so doing, it offered the possibility of exploring Korea’s past and present at a time when fascism threatened the absorption of every Korean into Japan’s warmongering imperial regime. Yi’s subtly phrased explanation of the difficulties of representation under colonial rule suggests a hesitancy to name the problem outright, perhaps due to fear of upsetting a censor or perhaps simply because there was no need to describe a situation of which his readers were all too intimately aware. under conditions of colonialism neither the spatial expanse of the entire nation, that is, the geopolitical situation, nor the temporal span from precolonial past through (possible post-) colonial future could be freely represented, or, more important, even known. As Declan Kiberd has stated simply and eloquently in his history of modern Irish literature, “one of the objects of colonial policy was to maintain conditions in which the production of serious works of literature describing a society in all its complexity was well-nigh impossible.”1 The essay of the late 1930s has to be understood, then, as a tactical and meaningful way to attempt the representation of everyday life in late colonial Korea, when partiality and fragmentation became modes for understanding historical experience.
Generic Revivals: The Anecdotal Essay
When Yi T’aejun wrote these essays throughout the late 1930s and later gathered them together in 1941 into the collection translated here, the traditional genre of the anecdotal essay (sup’il) was undergoing a renaissance of sorts under the conditions of late colonialism. The essay genre had been popular among the Confucian gentlemen-scholars of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), who would write down short anecdotes from their everyday lives that exemplified their values and aesthetic concerns. Frequent topics included the appreciation of poetry and nature, encounters with people or even animals that allowed for the elaboration of a moral world, and a constant concern with the ideal behavior of the gentleman himself. The language used was, for the most part, classical Chinese, and literacy in that language and its canonical traditions was an essential aspect of the identity of the gentleman as well as his path, through the civil service examination, to a position in government. That examination system had already been abolished in the Kabo Reforms of 1894–1896, and by the 1930s a modern publishing industry based in daily vernacular newspapers, popular monthly journals, anthologies, and individually authored books was flourishing on the back of rapidly rising literacy rates and a consumer culture emergent in the growing cities. The essayists of late colonial Korea may or may not have considered themselves Confucian gentlemen, but their essays appeared in the commercial print media and helped to establish their identity as writers of literature in a modern and professionalized sense.
As the decade of the 1930s wore on, the new essayists faced the growing contradictions and pressures of this flourishing, urban vernacular press and an increasingly harsh wartime regime of colonial assimilation by which that vernacular was repressed, to be replaced by the imperial language of Japanese. This most colonial of contradictions conditions the essay and other representational forms of late colonial Korea. unlike their precedents, the essays of the 1930s were written mostly in Korean, but they still tended to depict topics of nature, books read, and daily life, albeit now a modern life in the city. The genre still granted great privilege to the cultivation of the self, but that self now increasingly resembled the sentimental and private bourgeois subject of consumption. Despite the appearance of continuity, therefore, there are important differences in the function, form, and content of the anecdotal essay that filled the pages of late colonial popular journals and newspapers, that appeared in individual author collections such as this one, and that was being included in the first modern anthologies, such as the Collected Works of Korean Literature of 1939, and thus entering the emergent canon as a minor genre of modern literature. Given this minor status, why might a popular and well-respected writer such as Yi T’aejun, who otherwise spent his time working on novels and short stories, devote so much attention to writing these essays? The fact that he was able to produce some of his best writing in this genre helps to explain his devotion, and then there is the additional factor of the essay’s potential within the historical conditions of Yi’s time.
The revival of the anecdotal essay coincided with widespread debate on generic form that was in essence a debate about literary representation under conditions of colonialism. The term revival might give the impression that the essay had completely disappeared at the turn of the twentieth century, which saw Korea undergo a harsh introduction into the global community of modern nations—as a battleground for both the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and Russo-Japanese (1904–1905) wars before becoming a formal colony of Japan in 1910. There was no period when the writing of such essays ceased completely, nevertheless, momentous changes in literary forms during the first two decades of colonial rule ensured that the essay of the 1930s sat among quite different kinds of writing than it had in Chosŏn Korea. after some years of experimentation with prose narrative forms, 1917 had seen the publication of Yi Kwangsu’s Mujŏng (Heartless), which is generally considered to be the first modern novel written in the Korean language. From this point on the novel—understood along the lines of the nineteenth-century realist European novel—and, to a lesser degree, the short story rapidly became the hegemonic model for literature. The novel was so closely associated with Europe that it dominated models of literary modernity, with its heroes exemplifying the struggles of modern individuals in a changing national community. as in other colonized societies around the world, the novel assumed particular importance in nationalist circles because of its capacity for representing a broad spectrum of society that might adequately figure the nation and its progressive temporal structure, which allowed the depiction of the development of a society, usually embodied in the form of its hero, to a more heightened awareness of itself as a prospective independent nation. Thus the novel took on a greater significance than that of a mere literary form, ultimately figuring modernity itself.
In the mid-1930s, however, literary critics became concerned with what they considered to be the dire situation of the realistic novel. They were particularly distressed by what they considered its fragmented state, which according to them read more like a mosaic of disparate detail than a deliberate and organized narrative progression through time. Critics on the left especially lamented the lack of successful models of socialist realism in the wake of the collapse under suppression of the Communist Party. It was not only the novel that aroused concern. The fuzziness of genres now seemed to represent the lack of a definitive and obvious future for the anticolonial movement. In Korean writing critics perceived a strange mixture of genres: if the novel was too fragmented, short stories could hardly be distinguished from anecdotal essays, the anecdotal essay was itself in resurgence, and even the lyric poem was becoming prosaic. none of this conformed to the ideal modern order of literature as they thought it should be. It may be, however, that literary form actually conformed to the temporal rhythms of late colonial Korean society more than to the ideals cherished by critics and leaders of the socialist and nationalist movements.
The proliferation of shorter narrative forms can only partly be explained by the fact that such forms are more suitable for publication in the journals that dominated the field of literary publication. Yi T’aejun’s own explanation points to the temporal possibilities imaginable in narrative within a colonized society. Conditions of colonialism prevented the writing of the epic realist novel, probably to a similar degree to which they created the desire among critics for such a novel. They seemed to favor shorter genres that took limited temporal possibilities as the very condition of their form. Korean writers thus confronted the same threat that literary realism faced in Ireland and other colonies, but just as Irish writers, such as joyce and Yeats, found formal solutions to the colonial problem, so in Korea too self-expression could not be staunched. In reading beyond the realm of the canonical novel we thus discover the creative forms that responded to seemingly impossible conditions.
In Korea, the essay of the 1930s took on a different meaning precisely because it now existed alongside the novel. Its fragmented, partial form presented a different kind of temporality of the subject than that featured in the linearly oriented novel, which strove to depict the hero in development. Perhaps the essay could more closely track the artist in late colonial Korea, where the future of the nation was becoming increasingly hard to define in the face of violent assimilation and global war. The significance of the anecdotal essay as a colonial form, then, lies in its temporal parameters—its adherence to the repetitive presence of everyday life and its invocation of the past as tradition. These parameters, quite different from those of the forward-moving epic, suited the lives of Korea’s rising bourgeois class—the class most implicated in the modernizing impulses of the capitalist revolution and that, perhaps, suffered most a sense of alienation from the cultural past. Two characteristics of the essay in particular seem to account for its popularity: its fundamentally ironic way of connecting past to present and the contradictory space it created for the difficult elaboration of a bourgeois subject in colonial society.
To take the question of the past first, in choosing to write in the traditional form of the anecdotal essay Yi was confronting a problem that was much larger than the individual self that features so strongly throughout Eastern Sentiments. This was the problem of how to understand the precolonial past as tradition in a society where that past had been appropriated and reinterpreted by the colonial regime. Such a dilemma distinguishes Yi’s traditionalism from similar attempts elsewhere to rehabilitate the past at a time of rampant modernization and frenzied adaptation of all things considered new. For Yi to look back and see what had been lost necessitated an archeological project, so thoroughly had intellectuals in Korea espoused the new “Western” knowledge from the turn of the century, ignoring their own intellectual heritage. He faced, then, a problem of materials: there were few convenient histories or anthologies, oral narratives had been written down over the years thus effacing any possibility of a return to an “original,” and many old texts had been lost and remained known by name only. This practical problem of sources was compounded by the colonial regime’s own “discovery” of Korea’s past. Such colonial knowledge—produced through the practices of archeological digs, studies of shamanism, government surveys of the countryside, among others—inevitably could not free itself from the viewpoint of colonial power. The past was in the process of being discovered and enumerated by forces with institutional resources far greater than the likes of Yi could muster: Korea had no university until 1924 when the Keijō Imperial university was founded and staffed by mainly Japanese professors catering to Japanese residents’ children; and the first museums were likewise founded after the inauguration of colonial rule, on the impetus of Japanese scholars and collectors such as Yanagi Sōetsu. The question then arose of how the past was to be discovered, and this was for Yi a problem of form: how could the past be known and in what form could that knowledge be transmitted?
Yi’s choice was to eschew the empirical and chronological narrative of linear history, which was itself a fairly new object of modern knowledge in Korea at that time. Gazing back over the past with a view to order and endow it with a master narrative leading to the present would mean to openly acknowledge that the past was over and that modern historiographical forms were superior for the understanding of its significance. Yi approached the past rather with the desire to relive it; he believed that it could be experienced once more in the present, at least in its better aspects. Thus the choice to write in a form that could itself be seen as a kind of repetition—of a classical form in a modern afterlife. With its traditional focus on the realm of everyday life, the anecdotal essay was ideal for an attempt to repeat the past, for it was surely only in the personal realm that such a project could be even broached by the 1930s, when the cityscape and professional spheres had been irrevocably transformed from their earlier shapes by urbanization and an encroaching commodity regime.
Of course, Yi’s fundamental attitude toward the past was fraught with contradiction, and this is what makes reading his essays so fascinating. For if in their outer manifestation—the concern with orchids, with his garden, and with Chinese poetry—they share the concerns of a Confucian gentleman-scholar from the Chosŏn dynasty, their interior elaboration is profoundly modern. To start with, the basis for Yi’s lifestyle is far removed from that of the old Confucian scholar. To take the example of the house that is the frequent subject of his essays: it was the redrawing of the city boundaries in 1934, in order to take account of the growing urban population, that sent real estate prices on the outskirts soaring and enabled those such as Yi to sell off partial plots of land to raise the funds to rebuild on what remained. Yi hired old-fashioned carpenters and set about building a house in the old style. as befits this modern act of restoration, his house is then filled with antiques, new household appliances, and bothersome or lovable neighbors.
How are we to understand the fundamentally ironic space of these essays? Yi was not against revealing the contradictions that formed the foundations of his project. We see an example of this when he approaches the question of the proper attitude to take toward the antique. The problem arises of where to locate the value of antiques. For Yi, the answer lies not in their appearance, or simply their age, but, as he writes, “in the traces they hold of having lived together with the people of the past.” His fascination with the simple pot is enhanced by its nature as an object that mediates the relationship with the past especially well by dint of having once served a use in everyday life. all cracks and traces of dirt are deemed a virtue, in Yi’s estimation, for their revelation of the past lives of people. More important, such objects recall a time when the relationship between objects and people was one of use and not mediated by exchange or consumerism. In other words, they recall a time prior to the commodity culture that is reshaping life in 1930s Seoul. Yet, what bothers Yi is not just the fact that objects have been appropriated as commodities but that, during the process, the old order they helped secure is being transformed. While Yi welcomes the surging popularity of antiques in his day, he laments the fact that not enough respect is accorded to the original life of the object. Plates once used to hold leftovers in the kitchen are now hung on the wall in the study, salt bowls become ashtrays, and powder cases now hold ink pads. The reappropriation of old objects to new uses is something with which we are all too familiar today, but for Yi it destroys the proper relationship between people and old things. What he proposes in its stead, however, is far from a “return” to an original relationship of unmediated use, if such a state could indeed ever have existed at all. according to Yi, it is the “proper modern interpretation as a work of art or craft” that will enable a new beauty and life to be infused into the antique, which will then enter contemporary daily life anew.
Something of what was involved in the reinterpretation of the antique as a work of art is suggested by Yi’s essays on the nature of literature. He declares, at one point, that “the work is a flower that blooms from the individual alone.” The modern act of interpretation enables the expression of the expansive self of the artist, which develops in relationship to the antique, preferably at hours of the day when the reality of social life can be best forgotten, such as in the depths of the night as family members sleep. He writes: “these 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.” The antique is elevated to the status of a work of art, which reflects back onto the artist a deep sense of self. at the same time it presents a comfortable notion of the past and not the dissonant juxtapositions between old and new ever present on Yi’s daily walks through the city. This is a past that can be treasured while colonial society strives to efface its traces. The contradiction arises because this too is far from an unmediated relationship with the old object, but rather a complex negotiation in a society now thoroughly absorbed into the colonial structures of the capitalist world undertaken by an artist who lives his life within that structure. Yi produces art for a living and yet longs for a time when art was supposedly free from such commercial contamination. Recourse to a literary form that existed long prior to the new economic reality might well prolong the fantasy of being an artist unimpinged by that reality.
This dilemma of how to relate to the past thus helps construct a division of social space in the present, whereby the realm of the everyday life of the artist is, through its association with the past, supposedly separated from the commercial space of the city. Such a division—whether constituted, as here, through antiquarianism or the personal essay or through ideas of domesticity and the private family—is not unique to the new bourgeois subjects of colonial Korea. Various separations of public and private characterized bourgeois culture around the world, but the hard facts of colonial rule marked the form of that spatialization irrevocably. Many historians of colonialism, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, have called attention to the way that colonial societies tend to produce spaces of interiority that become associated with the native culture against a “public” sphere controlled by the colonizer. The idea is that within a delineated realm there is a freedom from the colonial order; the irony is that very order produces the desired space.
It was another master of the modernist essay writing about imperial society, Walter Benjamin, who perhaps most eloquently explained the relationship between such “inner sanctums” and outer public spaces, stressing the inseparability of the two. They arise, he wrote, at the moment when “the private individual makes his entrance on the stage of history.” For his purposes, this was the reign of Louis Philippe (r. 1830–1848), commonly understood as a time marked by the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and their domination of industry and finance. Rather than chronicle the ups and downs of their ascendance to power, Benjamin strove to account for the aesthetic parameters of everyday life and the material and technological environment within which this bourgeoisie fashioned their lives. He took as a figure for their rise to prominence the place of dwelling or interior, constituted for the first time in opposition to the workplace and derived from the fantasy of isolating one space from the dirty world of commerce and business. as Benjamin wrote:
The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, 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.2
By this understanding the interior is a kind of collection through which we can trace the fantastic illusions that sustained the bourgeois world. 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 a European bourgeoisie on the brink of imperial adventure, but we would be wrong to presume that the European bourgeoisie had a monopoly on the imagining of worlds.
Perhaps Eastern Sentiments is best understood as one such collection, curated by an intellectual from colonial Korea. Between its covers Yi gathered enough details to constitute his own private universe, his phantasmagorical interior. Great effort was required to sustain the illusion of the private individual in a colonized society where autonomy was in principle denied. Yet in reading through these essays we can glimpse some of the possibilities that animated bourgeois society in one part of the Japanese Empire and some of the impossibilities that structured its world. Just as elsewhere, the private individual was always a phantasmatic figure; in reading its universe in these pages we can trace the parameters of that phantasm in all its irony, with its contradictions, its obsessions, and its pleasures. In doing so, we have to keep in mind the options available to Yi for the structuring of his world. What kind of box in what kind of theater was offered him in late colonial Korea?
Late Colonial Korea and Yi T’aejun
Yi T’aejun and Walter Benjamin were contemporaries and, despite their ignorance of each other’s existence and their distant locations in the capitals of Europe and a small colony of the Japanese Empire respectively, their writings reveal remarkable convergences. not least of these is a distrust of the progress touted by those who celebrated modernity. In his final essay from 1940, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin declared all documents of civilization to be documents of barbarity and accused historicism of recording the victories of the rulers and not the vanquished. In a short story written in 1941, Yi’s alter ego protagonist glances over the books that line his shelves and laments the victims of the waves of thought that have crashed on Korea’s shores in modern times. For Yi, being modern meant to have lived several lives and deaths as trend followed upon trend and the constant race to build a new order plunged people into instability.
To be sure, by 1940 Benjamin and Yi were not the only thinkers to consider the history of modern civilization to be a record of barbarity, but there is a special poignancy to such declarations by these two. Benjamin was the jew stuck in occupied Europe, who famously swallowed poison when he thought he was about to be caught by the authorities as he tried to leave Europe through the Spanish border. Yi’s homeland had been declared a formal colony by Japan in 1910, when he was just six years old. By the time these essays appeared, the new order being so noisily proclaimed was that of wartime mobilization. In fact, when the new governor-general Minami Jiro had been appointed in 1936, he had announced a shift in colonial policy toward coercive assimilation, a shift that, as the war in China progressed and Pearl Harbour opened up a second front, was to turn eventually into the infamous total mobilization campaign. Over these years the language of school education would become exclusively Japanese, Koreans were all but forced to adopt Japanese names, and Korean-language newspapers and journals closed down in 1941, leaving only colonial newspapers and journals publishing in an increasingly distorted mixture of Korean and Japanese. It was a catastrophic blow to the burgeoning publishing industry of the 1930s and those, such as Yi, who had emerged from its midst. Yi later wrote that at the time he felt an entire language was at risk of disappearing, and with it a people, whose fate he tied to language. That this moment should be experienced by Yi as the end of the world is not surprising; he had a larger than usual investment in language. Other contemporary transformations included those Korean men drafted into the Japanese Imperial army from the early 1940s, the laborers enticed to Japan to work in dangerous mines, or the women who were often tricked into sexual slavery for the Imperial army or working in munitions factories both in Japan and on the peninsula. More than most, Benjamin and Yi were aware of the barbarous acts committed in the name of civilization.
It seems appropriate that a form such as the essay, molded out of irony and contradiction, should flower in a society that was itself rife with contradiction and crisis. Late colonial Korea—by which is meant the period of the late 1930s and early 1940s—is sometimes called the dark period by Korean historians because of the policy of total mobilization instituted throughout the Japanese Empire as the war in China deepened and Pearl Harbor brought about the opening up of a second front. If this entailed a comprehensive policy of cultural assimilation that aimed to turn colonized peoples into imperial subjects willing to fight for the emperor, it also brought something of a rushed industrial revolution to Korea, which was rich in natural resources and ideally located for the production of war materiel between the metropole and the Manchurian front. The population of Korea’s cities surged with migrants from the increasingly impoverished countryside, new factory workers, and even more military and civil personnel from Japan. By 1940 the population of Seoul had reached one million, of whom almost one third were Japanese.
With the rapid growth of the city, there developed a culture that fed off the gathering of new and diverse groups: resident Japanese, young Koreans away from their country homes and working in the factories or offices, and the desperate poor living off day jobs. Department stores, teahouses, a zoo, and other entertainment places were built and the new media—film, radio, newspapers—flourished. Over the course of the 1930s, newspaper sales tripled in part because of the rise in literacy as a wider range of Koreans began to attend school. The major papers began to publish cultural magazines that carried fiction, poetry, film reviews, and articles on society. as sales of these magazines in turn reached up to ten thousand each month, publishers started to differentiate their audiences through further magazines targeting women and children. The mid thirties are considered the first golden age for publishing; for the first time books could actually turn a profit or at least not drag publishers into the degree of debt endured during the previous decade. Publishing thus took a commercial turn, where previously it had held the aura of a patriotic act undertaken by those with money and education to devote to the nation. It was not until the final years of the war that paper rationing and other restrictions curtailed this emerging mass urban culture. at the beginning of the war at least, wartime conditions hardly stemmed the burgeoning commercial ventures from earlier in the decade, and in fact the new media of film, radio, newspapers, and even literature played an active role in the total mobilization campaign.
Korea’s first major bout of urbanism thus coincided with wartime production and a global age of fascist powers when modernist ideology fueled art movements and armies alike. By the 1930s it was clear to most Koreans that they had been fully incorporated into the capitalist globe. even before the vagaries of the Second World War took off, the Depression of 1929 and its aftereffects on the Korean peninsula merely highlighted the sense that events far away would affect daily life in Seoul. This new sense of simultaneity helped fuel one of the liveliest periods of experimentation among writers and artists in Korea. Like metropolitan modernists, Korean writers’ interests ranged across the territory of urban cosmopolitanism, transhistorical lyricism, and atavistic traditionalism. But whereas the fascist modernisms of Europe seemed torn between the future and the past—a futuristic celebration of the machine or yearning for a preindustrial past—in Korea, as elsewhere in Asia, it was nostalgia for the preindustrial rural community that so often won out. For Korean artists this nostalgia was properly colonial insofar as the preindustrial past was inevitably located before the age of colonialism. The critique of the present was not only a critique of industrial capitalism but of colonialism, or at least it could be hard to separate out the two. There is no doubt, however, that the late colonial imperial policy of cultural assimilation conveyed an urgency to the traditionalist modernisms of Korea, bringing about the paradox of a period of cultural assimilation that actually saw the publication of many of what today are celebrated as canonical works of literature, for example. This proliferation of cultural works seems to work against the prevailing view of colonial assimilation as the death of “culture.” The politics of this culture are ambiguous, however, for just as the works of the 1930s celebrated a culturally Korean identity they often seemed to staunch any hopes for a political Korean subject.
Traditionalism in Korea was always caught between trying to recover a tradition more glorious than the abject present and trying to elaborate the past outside the imperial discourse that also appropriated it. a structural element of that discourse was Western colonialism and U.S. hegemony, which bolstered the idea of distinct realms of the West and the east, in which only the West could possess what it took to be truly modern. In this worldview Japan occupied a peculiar position as being of the east but yet successful in modernization and the appropriation of a supposedly Western culture. This idea was used to justify Japan’s colonial ventures as bringing modernization to a “backward” Asia while successfully standing up on behalf of the east. With the promulgation of the Greater east Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere this appropriation of pan-Asianism reached its pinnacle. The sphere was justified as possessing a common culture and a common threat: Japan, China, and Korea were certainly not deemed indistinguishable, but their newly important particularities were supposed to contribute to a harmonious community. newspapers and journals published reams of articles laying out the cultural particularities of Japan, China, and Korea and their harmonization into “Asia.” When not found in the common threat of the West as earlier, common elements were sought in a shared past, meaning that traditionalism struggled to escape imperial pan-Asianism.
Yi’s essays likewise constantly strive to read Korea’s past within an East Asian framework—and a predominantly Confucian one. Where some turned to shamanism and residual folk culture or Buddhist philosophies of resignation, Yi turned to the figure of the Confucian gentleman-scholar who had been so maligned by nationalists and Japanese colonialists alike for “failing” to bring about economic modernization and thus failing to resist annexation or being in need of some imperial “help” with modernization, depending on one’s point of view. The yangban ruling class of the Chosŏn dynasty, who were supposed to disdain commerce and military activity while excelling at the poetry and arts that enabled their successful move into government, were now understood to be ineffectual and became an object of jokes in circles both Korean and Japanese. There is no doubt that the Confucian ideal of the gentleman-scholar—and it was always an ideal more than a reality—was at odds with the new citizens required by a capitalist society, and it is this, coupled with its not being of the West, that enabled the ideal vision to make a comeback in works such as these essays, where it took on new meaning as that which refuses the rhythms of the newly industrializing society. Yi’s gentleman-scholar clearly disdains the modern capitalist world that is his home.
Yi himself had been born in 1904 into an impoverished but educated family. In the late nineteenth century his father had supported reforms and been sent into exile by conservatives as a result. He then died in exile. Yi was orphaned young but managed to educate himself, ending up at Jochi university in Japan in the late 1920s. Studying in Japan was a rite of passage for Korean intellectuals at this time, as was returning to Korea to find their skills unused in a society that failed to develop sufficient positions for educated Koreans. The figure of the intellectual who had returned from Japan only to save himself from starvation on the streets of Seoul by pawning his copies of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism was prominent in fiction from the thirties, but Yi avoided this fate by lecturing at Ewha Girls’ School and working as an editor at the newspapers. It was Yi who was chief editor of the arts section of the Chosŏn chung’ang ilbo newspaper when it published the avant-garde poetry of Yi Sang to such scandal and protest from readers that serialization was canceled. Only later recognized as a giant of Korean modernism, Yi Sang was to die at a tragically young age in 1936, an event mourned here in the essay “For Whom Do We Write?” Yi T’aejun supported many of colonial Korea’s most experimental writers, but also began to publish his own work from the mid 1920s. early in the following decade he was a founding member of the Kuinhoe, or nine Man Society, an informal coterie that gathered in Seoul’s cafes and launched a self-consciously modernist movement in the literary and visual arts. Yi was not a political radical and welcomed the decline in dominance of the Korean proletarian artists’ association (known by the acronym KAPF), if not the political suppression that brought it about. above all, he was committed to art and writing as technique and dissatisfied with what he considered the KAPF writers’ emphasis on content and use of literature as a political instrument.
In 1939 Yi moved to the forefront of another cultural trend, which was the renaissance in the study of Korea’s classical past. He was one of three editors—alongside his friend the modernist poet Chŏng Chiyong and sijo poet Yi Pyŏnggi—who started the journal Munjang. although responsible for debuting many new young writers before its forced closure in 1941, Munjang had a decidedly classical bent from its very cover, which was designed by Yi’s friend, the artist Kim Yongjun. The editors of Munjang consciously embraced traditionalism in an attempt to reconstitute and revalue an aestheticized Korean classical world—of art and literature—mindful of both the full-scale assimilation policy being increasingly enforced by the colonizers and the overwhelming advocacy of modernization at every level of society that had dominated the previous decades. Its pages included a series on “Korea’s classics,” which began with the first publication of Hanjungnok, an eighteenth-century princess’s diary, translated into English as The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng.3 It was Yi T’aejun himself who took charge of the serialization, writing an introduction where he extolled the elegant writing style practiced by court ladies in their diaries and letters.
In looking at Yi’s traditionalist practices, we cannot help but notice a certain synchronicity with traditionalisms in japan, and this raises the question of his location in relation to imperial discourse. Yi would certainly have been aware, for example, of contemporary attempts in Japan to establish court ladies’ writing at the center of a new national literary tradition. Likewise he would have been aware of attempts to recover a nonsinocized writing tradition as the essence of a native Japanese culture. Some of Yi’s writing on the female entertainers known as kisaeng, for example, takes him perilously close to ideas circulating in Japan that helped to buttress the notion of a unique Japanese cultural essence, ideas that in turn were conducive to the establishment of an imperial identity. But when Yi starts to write about the kisaeng’s role in upholding a native Korean tradition through the literary use of vernacular language, it is with an enormous sense of loss and with the belief in the past existence of something that is not, however, recoverable but evanescent. In the essay “Kisaeng and Poetry” we see that only a taste of the ancient vernacular can be discovered. The structure of feeling is then quite different from the articulation of a similar idea in japan. nor is there any doubt that those cultural practices that supported imperialism, whether wittingly or not, at the center of empire lacked the institutional resources to become as dangerous on the periphery.
Eastern Sentiments was clearly not considered provocative by the colonial authorities, having achieved the remarkable feat of being published in 1941 and reprinted twice in 1943 and 1944, at a time when wartime censorship and paper rationing was at its peak. Its Korean title is Musŏrok, meaning “Records written at random.” The essays had been written over several years and published in various journals, but there is little that is random about their rearrangement as a collection at least. They move through various themes: nature and the transience of life, the Korean literary scene and literary history, contemporary society, and antique collecting and other traditionalist practices. The collection concludes with two travelogues: one of a visit to the seaside and one of a visit to a Korean immigrant village in Manchuria. It thus reflects the range of interests featured in the traditional anecdotal essay and gives us a fascinating glimpse into the everyday concerns of a writer in colonial Korea. By the time Yi gathered together the essays in 1941, he must have felt affirmed in his position as one of the period’s most prolific, respected, and versatile writers. He had been serializing novels in the daily newspapers at a rate of approximately one each year since the late 1920s; he had published his first collection of short stories and was preparing a second comprised from the many stories that had already appeared in various journals; he had acquired sufficient authority as a writer to be serializing lectures on the techniques of writing, later to be published as Munjang kanghwa in 1940. He had the distinction of being one of the very few writers in colonial Korea who actually made a living from writing. But, as he browsed through the pages of his latest masterpiece, his satisfaction must have also been tinged with trepidation at the thought of what lay on the horizon. none could have been as aware as he, whose career depended upon the Korean language press and publishing industry, of the uncertainty that loomed.
until this point, Yi’s career had not been threatened by colonialism, but it had in many ways been shaped by it. With the increasing intensity of the war, the space that had been opened up for publishing was rapidly closed down. The Korean-language newspapers ceased publication in 1941, along with journals such as Munjang. The one official journal established in their place, Kokumin bungaku, published a mixture of works in the Korean and Japanese languages, but this increasingly turned to Japanese. Yi had made a passing attempt to comply with official prescriptions—including a rather bland report of a visit to an army training ground and attending the Greater east Asia Writers’ assembly in 1942—but writing in Japanese seemed to be a line he could not cross comfortably. a collection of his short stories did appear in Japanese in 1943, but it is not clear who was responsible for translating them. Finally, he moved down to the countryside until the end of the war where, he was later to write, he spent his days fishing.
Yi’s intellectual trajectory resonates profoundly with the theory of the evolution of the colonial intellectual proposed by Frantz Fanon. according to Fanon, the native intellectual first proves that he has “assimilated the culture of the occupying power” before deciding “to remember what he is” by immersing himself in the culture of his people. This is when he studies history, wears native clothes, or begins to treasure local arts. Finally he moves into the “fighting phase” when he produces revolutionary literature.4 Fanon was adamant that any attempt to prove one’s nation’s existence through its culture—as opposed to bringing the nation into being through fighting—could never prove subversive to colonial power. On the contrary, he argued, such attempts merely use the techniques of colonial power to annotate a culture that is far removed from the daily lives of the people. Such is the estrangement peculiar to the colonial intellectual, whose immersion in culture goes against both the current of history and the people and who behaves like a foreigner when he tries to return to that people by way of “cultural achievements.” Some might argue that Yi did eventually move into Fanon’s final stage with liberation. after the Japanese defeat, he chose to move to north Korea, taking up a central position in writers’ organizations there and continuing to publish until he succumbed to the purges of the southern communists in the north in 1956. It is not clear what happened to him thereafter or when he died. Various reports place him working in a printing factory or even a brick factory. What is certain is that he could not continue to publish.
It is puzzling to many that the somewhat dilettante figure revealed in these pages would choose to move to the socialist society, but there are at least two factors that should stem our surprise. First, there was no more modernist society than north Korea in its opening years, bravely setting out to build a new national culture and pledging to remove the evils of commodification, which had so bothered Yi, along with all traces of the colonial regime. The work of art that Yi privileged above everything must have seemed better protected in this environment—removed from the vagaries of the market—than in the U.S.-occupied South where money ruled so brazenly. Then, there is the legacy of Japanese colonialism and the greater success of the north in promoting its anticolonial stance. although Yi profited from Japanese rule, at the end it threatened everything that he had built up. He may not have been an anticolonial fighter in Fanon’s sense, but he did live fully the contradictions of colonial society, and we can witness that in these pages.
The final image of Eastern Sentiments suggests that those contradictions find their base in the transforming meaning of the east. after hearing a child sing a song about tobacco in the three major languages of the Japanese Empire—Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—Yi walks solitarily across the Manchurian desert, where there is no horizon, no sound, not even a bird in the sky. The eternity of the moment suggests the disappearance of Korea is located in the diasporic displacement of empire. It becomes clear that the collection is at heart an elegy for a Korea that Yi thought was disappearing. We may criticize him for pessimism, but we must thank him for his loving adumbration of the object in all its detail.
Notes