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Kim Jong Il and Religious Imagination in North Korean Literature Authority and Emotions: Kim Jong Il and Religious Imagination in North Korean Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Kim, Sunghee. 2017. Authority and Emotions: Kim Jong Il and Religious Imagination in North Korean Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41140225 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Authority and Emotions: Kim Jong Il and Religious Imagination in North Korean Literature A dissertation presented by Sunghee Kim to The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2017 © 2017 Sunghee Kim All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: David R. McCann Sunghee Kim Authority and Emotions: Kim Jong Il and Religious Imagination in North Korean Literature Abstract This dissertation explores how Kim Jong Il, the supreme leader of North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; DPRK) from 1994 to 2011, established his legitimacy based on constructs of his late father, Kim Il Sung’s, divine authority at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on North Korean historical narratives—produced and circulated under Kim Jong Il’s supervision—this study sheds light on the relationships among the idea of divine authority, the functions and purposes of historical narrative, and the people’s emotions expressed in North Korea’s historical writing. Previous studies often described this historical writing—or what my dissertation explores as the fictionalized biography of Kim Il Sung, the father, and Kim Jong Il, the son—as propaganda for the authoritarian regime while underestimating the religious quality of the propaganda (and more specifically its roots in Judeo-Christian biblical narrative). Scholars in North Korean studies have ignored the roles played by the North Korean people’s imaginations of immortality, encouraged by historical narratives, and their emotions, caused by religious visions, during the great famine and economic difficulties in the 1990s. iii The North Korean state’s ideological constructions—such as Kimilsungism, Kimjongilism, and the Juche idea of self-reliance—display features commonly associated with religion. Particularly in the 1990s, Kim Jong Il stressed this political religion by urging the people to read and discuss state-sanctioned history. North Korea’s leader deployed state-constructed historical prose to consecrate his father as a messiah of the Korean race, justify his own oppressive rule as his dead father’s yuhun (will), and encourage the people’s imagination of yŏngsaeng (immortality) as a way to heal their pain and grief suffered as a result of famine. Thus, I argue that the religious imaginations of immortality in North Korean historical writing helped the son Kim Jong Il control people’s emotions. He sought to suppress negative feelings (e.g., fear of death) and augment positive emotions (e.g., happiness with everyday life) by operating a propaganda apparatus that produced and circulated hagiographic fictions of his father and himself. This study also examines the ways in which the state constructs of religious imaginations of immortality and the afterlife in North Korea presented extended working hours; overwork; industrial accidents; and deaths at factories, farms, mines, and construction sites. Despite the massive scale of famine-related deaths and grievous economic hardship in the 1990s, the Kim Jong Il regime managed to guide the people to cope with these tragic environments by transforming labor into meditation. Meditation is a practice or technique designed for self- regulation of the mind. It is practiced not for material gain but for spiritual enlightenment that generates feelings of tranquility, patience, and forgiveness. I propose that labor (work) can be a meditative practice, if it is incorporated into a daily routine. In North Korea, working—along with participating in various meetings and government-required demonstrations—created a temporal scansion that was intended to calm the North Korean people’s negative emotional iv states, such as anxiety, fear, and depression. I define temporal scansion as a recurrent pattern in people’s everyday lives that made them impervious to the shock and pain of frequently-occurring industrial accidents. The rhythmic cycle is a sine qua non for meditation. During the great famine, North Korean literature and historical writing attempted to depict workers who were overcoming their fear of death, transcending the self, and constructing their life-death continuums by following a temporal scansion that the regime imposed on their everyday lives. North Korean propaganda alleged that North Koreans could make their political life eternal by sacrificing their biological lives for the nation. Deaths at worksites were elevated to martyrdom and deceased workers were celebrated as martyrs. In this state-constructed vision and state-mandated program of reading the state-sanctioned history, North Korean people successfully deal with negative feelings, such as anxiety and fear, by keeping their daily routine, transform their whole lives into service to nation and their leaders with the temporal scansion in everyday life, and have immortality because their experiences in the factories, mines, farms, and constructions sites where they worked live on forever in history. v Acknowledgements I thank the following people: David R. McCann, Sun Joo Kim, Karen L. Thornber, Shin Hyung- ki, Kim Chul, Lee Kyoung-hoon, Jung Hee Mo, Young-Joon Lee, Jamie Jungmin Yoo, Lim Yoo-Kyoung, Jeong Jaeseok, Kang Jiyoon, Ivanna Yi, John Lee, Peter Banseok Kwon, Nuri Kim, Jung Ja Choi, Susan Laurence, Jina Kim, Catherine Glover, Mikyung Kang, EunHee Nah, Hyang Lee, Mia Ackerson, my father Kim Byeongyeon, my mother Kim Jeongja, my sisters Yurim, Sorim, and Hyerim, my son Owen, and above all, my wife Chae Soojung. vi Table of Contents Introduction Authority, Immortality, and Sublimity in North Korean Literature 1 1. Gilgamesh and Kim Jong Il 1 2. History, Novel, Religious Text 5 3. Beyond National Literature and Moral Influence Theory 8 4. Sasang (Idea) and the “Arts of Existence” 16 5. Proximity and Distance 23 6. Chapters 29 Chapter One Overcoming Abhorrence: Idealism and Functionalism in North Korean Studies 32 1. Teleological Narrative after the Cold War 34 2. New Trends in North Korean Studies 37 3. “Multiple Modernities” and “Value-Free Social Science” 41 4. Gonzo Journalism and Moralized Politics 44 5. Teleology, Moralism, and Biological Determinism 48 6. Romanticism and Realism 55 6.1. Forecast of the Past and Archaeology of the Future 56 6.2. Three Ironies 60 vii Chapter Two Authority and Affect: Kim Jong Il’s Narrative-Creating Power and North Korea’s Authoritarian Culture 66 1. Potentia, Affectus, and Auctoritas 67 1.1. Potentia agendi and Affectus 68 1.2. Authority and Narrative-Creating Power 71 2. Authority, Legitimacy, and Ennobled Emotions 72 3. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge 77 4. Samyŏng (Calling) and Sungmyŏng (Destiny) 80 5. The Function of Yuhun (Will or Dying Injunctions) 87 6. Dispossessed of Potentia, Narrative-Creating Power, and Affectus 90 Chapter Three Faith and False Dreams: Positive Thinking and the History of Legitimation in North Korea 92 1. The Functions of History 97 2. The Dodo Bird Verdict 100 3. Damnatio Memoriae and the Domination of “Mu” and “Mun” 105 4. Negotiation and Power Network 108 5. Yeji (wisdom; Sophia) and the Wise Man 112 6. The Return of Rome and the Rule of Virtue 119 7. Men from Mars and the Mu Type of Leader 128 viii 8. Theorized Strategy and the Sharing of Emotion 135 9. A False Dream 140 Chapter Four Prosody of Labor and Narrative of “Working to Die:” North Korean Literature under Kim Jong Il’s Rule (1994-2011) 142 1. Fear of Death 142 2. Songun (Military-First) Revolution 146 3. Requiem for the Living and the Sound of Conscience 151 4. Ryangsim (Conscience) and Ŭiji (Will or Determination) 156 5. Labor and Communal Life 160 6. Labor as a Meditation 165 7. “Dying to Self,” “Body without Organ,” and “Theater of Cruelty” 173 8. Labor as Artistic Performance 180 9. “The Reservoir of Death” 183 Chapter Five Passionate Machines and Deus ex Machina: The Dialectic among Body, Spirit, and Technology in North Korean Literature 185 1. A True Deus ex Machina 188 2. “War is Beautiful.” 192 ix 3. The Location of the Arts 199 4. “Give Them Your Heart!” 202 5. Meal Coupons 208 Conclusion 212 x Introduction: Authority, Immortality, and Sublimity in North Korean Literature 1. Gilgamesh and Kim Jong Il At the very first light of dawn, Gilgameš [was mourning] for his friend (Enkidu). […] He was pulling out his curly [tresses] and letting them fall in a heap, Tearing off his finery and casting it away, […like] something taboo.1 - Tablet VIII of The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic Chang Tuch’il died! Praising him as a pillar of the Hŭich’ŏn machine factory, Father President [Kim Il Sung] favored him. But, Chang Tuch’il, the key figure of the working classes in Chagang Province, strong like a wild buffalo, did not overcome the famine. Being extremely upset and sad, He [Kim Jong Il] grabbed the edge of his desk. His eyes registered profound anguish.2 - Ri Sinhyŏn, Kanggye chŏngsin (The Spirit of Kanggye) Chang Tuch’il dies of hunger in a fictionalized biography of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (1942-2011). Chang, one of the top engineers at the Hŭich’ŏn machine factory in North Korea’s Chagang Province, does not survive the great famine.
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