The University of Chicago Representations of Colonial Collaboration and Literature of Decolonization in Korea, 1945–1950 a Di
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO REPRESENTATIONS OF COLONIAL COLLABORATION AND LITERATURE OF DECOLONIZATION IN KOREA, 1945–1950 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS BY JI YOUNG KIM CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2016 Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One Interrogating Collaboration in Autobiographical Writings ........................................................... 24 Chapter Two Writer on the Border: Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Dawn Wind, U.S. Military Occupation, and Border Crossing ........................... 57 Chapter Three From 1946 Seoul to 1949 Pyongyang: Yi T’aejun’s Postliberation Migration and Revision of “Before and After Liberation” .............. 92 Chapter Four Myths of Collaboration, Communist Spies, and Red Love: Dubious Portraits of New National Enemies in Early South Korean Literature ........................ 124 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 162 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 173 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation committee at the University of Chicago. Professor Kyeong-Hee Choi has been a dedicated teacher and mentor of both my academic and personal life during all my years in Chicago. Her academic rigor, lively critical mind, and untiring passion have motivated me to open a new phase or possibility in every challenging moment of my research. Without her warm support and great trust in me, my final years in Chicago would have been much more difficult. Professor Bruce Cumings has tremendously influenced the development of my perspectives toward the subject of my dissertation research from its conception. I admire not only his academic contributions to the field but also his deep affection for the people of colonial Korea, as well as his inspiring teaching I can only hope to emulate. His continuous encouragement and penetrating insights helped me develop my literary studies with a sharp historical point of view. Professor Michael Bourdaghs has generously provided me with his reliable judgments, keen insights, and brilliant articulation and conceptualization of ideas whenever I need advice. Also, his balanced optimism and warm encouragement always enabled me to be positive and productive during the long doctoral program at the University of Chicago. My growth as a scholar was fostered at Seoul National University as much as at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to my teachers at SNU. Professors Cho Namhyun, Kim Yunsik, Kwon Youngmin, Park Sung-Chang, Bang Min-Ho, and Kim Sanghwan taught me a critical thinking, literary sensitivity, and methods of rigorous research and writing in this initial stage of my academic career. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues studying with me in Korea, who number too many to list here, but with whom we shared valuable opportunities to learn from each other and whet our passion for Korean literature. iii The generous financial support from the University of Chicago made my research possible. The Century Fellowship supported my first several years in the program. I should thank the Center for East Asian Studies for the Korean Studies Dissertation Fellowship as well as the pre-dissertation research grant. The Division of the Humanities also provided me with the Mellon Humanities Dissertation-Year Fellowship and dissertation research grants. Without my friends and mentors, I would have not survived many dreary winters in Chicago. Professor Norma Field has been a warm and inspiring mentor. I would like to appreciate all of those who have shared a small or large part of their lives with me: Seungjin Kim, Wako Yonemura, Hyun Hee Park, Sohye Kim, David Krolikoski, Jae-Yon Lee, Jon Glade, Yoon Sun Yang, Heekyoung Cho, Namhee Han, Shinyoung Kwon, Junko Yamazaki, Ling Zhang, Tingting Li, Tadashi Ishikawa, Wei-ti Chen, Nick Lambrecht, Minyong Lee, Naeyon Lee, Ingu Hwang, and Noriko Yamaguchi. I also thank Hi-Sun Kim and Ji Eun Kim in the Korean Language Program, and Mrs. Hyerye Kim and Jee-Young Park of the Korean Collection at the Regenstein Library. My friends in Korea—Shin Wooyoung, Park Seulki, Kim Yerhee, and Kwon Heechul—have helped me maintain a good balance between my life and research. I have greatly benefited from countless conversations with Hyonhui Choi across the Pacific, who always encourages me to formulate better ideas about my project as well as provides warm friendship. Lastly, I thank my family in Korea for their unconditional support and love that always make me feel reassured. My mother, Kim Kyung Ja, has had a great influence on my development into a person who naturally reads and studies. Compared to her arduous life as a mother of three children, schoolteacher, and researcher, however, my life may be just too easy. To her I dedicate this dissertation. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation explores Korean writers’ pursuit of decolonization during the politically turbulent era from 1945 to 1950. Decolonization of this period was both from the Japanese empire, the colonial past, and from the newly established national division and Cold War order, the ongoing “neocolonial” present. Literary representations of colonial collaboration (ch’inil) were complicated in Korea’s decolonization process under the solidifying political polarization. Investigating diverse transformations, inflections, and repeated resurfacings that arose in representations of collaboration, this dissertation pays particular attention to the struggles, predicaments, and anxieties faced by postcolonial Korean writers as they grappled with the colonial past and current neocolonial contexts. The dissertation mainly presents two comparable genres: autobiographical writings, the facticity of which is often challenged, and long serial novels. Chapter One examines selected autobiographical narratives by Yi Sŏkhun, Yi Kwangsu, and Ch’ae Mansik, each of whom reckoned with their past acts of collaboration through painful self-reflection. The chapter focuses on the distinctive literary devices used to interrogate the complexity of collaboration and the consequences of the Special Investigative Committee for Anti-National Acts. Chapter Three also deals with autobiographical writings, examining two versions of Yi T’aejun’s autobiographical fiction and the role of state pressure on the representation of collaboration and resistance. The chapter explores Yi’s struggles with the DPRK’s strict literary policies. Chapter Two and Four illuminate the literary reactions of South Korea’s canonical writers to the increasing ideological rigidity of the Cold War. Yŏm Sangsŏp, the key novelist examined in Chapter Two, criticizes the supplanting of the Japanese empire with the U.S. occupation, and poses the act of crossing the thirty-eighth parallel as a way to imagine the space v beyond the border. By analyzing the lesser-known novels of Kim Tongni and Yi Kwangsu, Chapter Four traces how these writers aimed to accommodate, but failed to embody, the state- implemented anticommunist themes in their literature. Postliberation literature provided a reflective space for interrogating collaboration, while challenging political polarization. In their literature of decolonization, postcolonial writers refute the imposition of the Cold War ideology, and thereby, postpone it for those five years. vi INTRODUCTION History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why. ----Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility By day a colony By night my mother country During the night my forbidden mother tongue Secretly was whispered within my slumbering body Liberation has come My mother tongue splendid ----Ko Un, “A Biography” Korea since August 15, 1945: Continuity, Transition, and Decolonization It was on a country bus on August 16, 1945, one day after the Emperor Hirohito announced the defeat of Japan, that the writer Hyŏn first heard the news of Korea’s liberation from Japan. Hyŏn’s elation shortly turned to frustration as he met the tired and indifferent faces of other bus riders. They did not show any excitement at the news of the nation’s independence. Hyŏn “felt like crying at the dispirited looks of the miserable fellow countrymen.”1 This is a scene from a 1946 short story written by Korean writer Yi T’aejun, titled “Before and After Liberation.” The scene captures an interesting moment in which liberation was not unanimously exclaimed as a dramatic and joyful moments—as numerous narratives have previously claimed. Similarly, Chi Haryŏn’s “Path,” another short story from the same year, portrays a young boy’s unexpected crying outburst after hearing the news because he feels sympathy for the Emperor.2 Later, Yi T’aejun rewrote the bus scene