Conjunctures in the Conceptual of Korea* : Taking an Issue of Sattelzeit

Seung-cheol SONG**

This article is aimed to call for reconsideration of the idea of Sattelzeit used in the Hallym Academy of Sciences’ conceptual history project. As the project started under the heavy influence of earlier German and French projects, it teems with an assortment of ideas borrowed from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Handbuch politische-sozialer Grund- begriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, and Sattelzeit is one of the key concept, borrowed from the German scholarship and reset in the Korean historical circumstances. This Sattelzeit, set ‘tentatively’ between the mid-19th and mid-20th century at the start of the project, has worked as a guideline for contributors to the Hallym Academy’s basic concept monograph series, and most contributors kept to the guideline. However, judging from the more than ten monographs published, adherence to the guidelines turned out to vary considerably from person to person, and some contributors suggested that as much attention should be paid to the post-liberation period as a source of conceptual transactions. To resolve the issue of an appropriate Korean framework, this article first sets up three conditions or conjunctures that are presumed to make approaches of conceptual history discourse more rewarding than others. Then, it endeavors to support its hypothesis by

* This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government(NRF-2007-361-AM0001). ** Hallym University 168 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

providing the history of semantic transactions of the concept ‘realism’ from the late 1920s to the present.

conceptual history, division system, national literature, naturalism, realism, Sattelzeit. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 169

1

Around six years ago, the Hallym Academy of Sciences (HAS) set out on a ten-year research program titled ‘Project for the Intercommunication 1 of East Asian Basic Concepts.’ With a considerable portion of its grant funded by the Korea Research Foundation, the program may be succinctly defined as aspiring to a Northeast Asian equivalent to Rheinhardt Koselleck’s Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe or Lucian Hölsher’s European 2 Lexicon Project ─ the latter being yet to be formally proposed. As can be seen from its title, the Project, by emphasizing ‘inter- communication,’ has sought to identify and chart the semantic changes of the ‘basic concepts’ that have played, and will continue to play, key roles in the formation of three East Asian countries: Korea, Japan and China. Earlier, in 2005, the Academy had begun an originary project for publication of The Historico-Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Basic Concepts of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Korea. Academics involved in this earlier project thought that the irregular and anachronistic use of basic concepts with no precise understanding of their meanings was responsible for much confusion in Korean humanities and social

1 This Project is hereafter abbreviated to ‘the Project.’ 2 Lucian Hölsher looks forward to the project: “So coming back to the idea of an European Political Lexicon I guess that we all agree, that it is the main purpose of such a project, to represent and develop the variety and richness of many national cultures within Europe – not in order to perpetuate the former animosity of political and cultural warfare within Europe, but in order to form our common European future on the basis of very different national experiences. We have to know from one another, f.i. concerning political and cultural centralisation what makes French people hopeful, but Germans anxious; we have to know, why English people like to rely on individual autonomy and local self government, whereas many Eastern societies lived better with patriarchal systems, why ….” Hölsher (2003), p.4. 170 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

sciences. This initial research program now looks modest in its aim, and even naive in its belief that the meanings of a concept could be generally agreed through meticulous research. Two years later, however, it was developed into a wider project about conceptual history in Korea, grounded on the premise that such confusions might be resolved by examining the way that concepts have been imported, translated and negotiated by Korean society at specific historical conjunctures since the beginning of modernity. In fact, it is hardly surprising that the earlier project was expanded both in its coverage of the subject matter and its methodology. First, the project was enlarged to cover the whole Northeast-Asian region; however, this widening of perspective was already implicit in the initial program, given that almost all of the basic concepts are of Western origin, but have reached Korea via Japan and China. Along with the widening of coverage came the creation of a new enterprise: going far beyond its original modest aim to promote academic accuracy by minimizing conceptual misuses, the project now sought to understand the roles those key concepts have played in the formation of East Asian modernity. The following is abstracted from the Project proposal, slightly revised to assist readers not familiar with the Korean academic atmosphere.

The Intercommunication of Basic East Asian Concepts takes as its study basic concepts that have played crucial roles in the fields of disciplines, society and everyday life since the modern period of the three East-Asian countries, and it aims: (1) to analyse the distinct ways in which those concepts have been accepted, translated, transformed, and naturalized, in terms of diverse units of analysis, such as nation, region, class, sex, race, etc. (2) to understand other groups of people, and extend communicative competence through the analysis of differences, thereby seeking the genuine Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 171

3 mutual development of the East Asian region. (3) to bring into focus the ardent struggles of East Asians to cope with modernity during the period of Western imperialistic expansion. (4) additionally, to accomplish the dual mission of ‘coping with and getting over modernity’ as an intellectual practice of East Asians, allowing them to move away from intolerant kinds of nationalism and toward postmodernity, in 4 the context of ongoing globalization.

Looking back over the past six years with the benefit of hindsight, there is no question that the Project has been a success; it has produced dozens of monographs on the basic concepts and another dozen translations, including entries from Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, as well as several readers’ compendia commentaries or expositions; not to mention the extramural benefits ─ an enhanced public awareness of conceptual history. Despite these achievements and the continuing interest shown by East Asian as well as Korean scholars, however, the Project has yet to truly obtain its academic citizenship and is still struggling to stand securely on its own feet. Of course, six years is too short a time to make much of a mark upon the established academic world, and other explanations can be suggested for the lack of recognition so far ─ notably that this initiative was undertaken by a local institution in a heavily centralized academic atmosphere. But these circumstantial factors are less fundamental than the uncertainties and unresolved issues to be found within the Project itself and its publications, the foremost among them arising from its essential incompleteness, due to the lack of a distinct methodology suitable for the types and objects of its research. If a new initiative calls for

3 Therefore, it can be said that the Project is an intellectual endeavor to promote solidarity within East Asia through the recognition of differences, as may be the case with European Lexicon Project. 4 Hallym Academy of Sciences (2007), p.6. 172 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

a new methodology, then an appropriate analytical model should be produced from within the Project. But the Korean project was basically an emulation of a European one, and it teems with an untidy assortment of ideas borrowed from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Handbuch politische-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820. One of the key concepts flowing from the German scholarship is the idea of Sattelzeit, which Koselleck defined as a period of transition between a premodern and a modern society. In the German case this period ran from 1750 to 1850 or 1870, during which time a number of key concepts crucial to the political and social formation of the German-speaking world underwent major linguistic transformations involving temporalization, democratization, 5 ideologization, and politicization. Being an initiative of different time and space, the Project should have created a methodology of its own or reappropriated the borrowed one to make it suitable for the Northeast Asian social and cultural circumstances. As so much was predicated on the prior scholarship of German conceptual history, however, the project adopted Koselleck’s idea of Sattelzeit and reset the timeframe to be 1850 to 1950, which in the Northeast Asian case was the key transitional period during which the relevant concepts, mostly imported together with some residual ones, were presumed to have undergone semantic transactions in the form of selective appropriation and negotiation. In a locus like the Korean Peninsula characterized by yangjeol chejae (兩截體制) the period crucial to the formation of basic modern concepts in the humanities and the social sciences is thought to be the one hundred years ranging from 1850 to 1950. It is the period when the three East Asian countries not only encountered and conflicted with a heterogeneous

5 Richter (1995), p.37. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 173

civilization but also experienced concurrent conceptual frictions passing 6 among them. In fact, the Korean Sattelzeit was set ‘tentatively’ at the start of the project as a guideline for contributors to the basic concept monograph series. It should be pointed out that neither the word Sattelzeit nor any similar term was mentioned in the ‘Introductory Remarks to the Publication of the Korea Conceptual History Series’ where the idea is implicit. It was presumed, rather, that some periodization was broadly necessary to properly characterize the time during which the three East Asian countries transitioned from the long-established premodern cultural order, through coping with the impact of cultural as well as military invasions from the West, reshaping their societal structures to attain modernity. And it is evident that almost all contributors understood this periodization as a Korean equivalent of the German Sattelzeit, and kept to the guidelines by restricting their analysis to the semantic trans- actions which occurred during the proposed hundred-year timeframe. However, judging from the ten or so monographs already published, adherence to the guidelines varies considerably from person to person. Park Sang-sop, whose monograph traces the ‘emergence of the concept of the state as nation’ in Korea, comments on the issue of Sattelzeit:

Before any serious attempt can be made to construct a comprehensive conceptual history of matters pertaining to the Korean state, there remain outstanding challenges, notably in defining the Sattelzeit. As already mentioned, the start of Sattelzeit can be set at around 1895, and there are some signals indicating the period of 1905-10 as the height of the Korean Sattelzeit. Thereafter, with the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, discussion about

6 Kim (2008), p.4. 174 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

the concept of the state were either politically suppressed or carried out in a 7 very distorted matter.

Park’s remarks about the period of 1905-10 are pertinent beyond the scope of his topic concerning the state; and these five years, spanning the so-called 1905 Protectorate Treaty and the 1910 Annexation, have been termed the ‘Patriotic Enlightenment Movement Period (愛國啓蒙期).’ Choi Won-sik, who wrote about the conceptual changes affecting ‘literature’ in Korea, also mentions that domestic movements in all walks of Korean society, including the cultural sector, were coming to the boil during these five years, when even the pro-Japanese movement was vigorously promoted; but that those domestic movements soon fizzled out 8 after the annexation. Almost all the cultural movements of the time were concerned with consolidating and restoring a nation which was mired in crisis, but following the annexation they were exposed to the criticism that, at a moment when the last veneer of lingering sovereignty had been usurped, by distracting the attention of the nation’s youth toward sensational issues, such movements were further weakening any remaining 9 capacity to struggle for independence. Roughly speaking, then, we might divide the one hundred years into three phases, with the middle phase constituting the most fertile source for conceptual history, and the last phase being the least amenable to the approach of conceptual history. This testifies to the importance of the existence of a sovereign or inde- pendent state for our methodology, without which the analysis of the (re)appropriation of imported concepts is moot. Moreover, both Park and other contributors have suggested that as

7 Park Sang-sop (2012), pp.31-32. 8 Choi Won-sik (2012), p.70. 9 Shin (1988), p.4. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 175

much attention should be paid to the post-liberation period as a source of conceptual transactions. For example, Park concludes the above-mentioned article by saying that ‘the ideological conflicts that began with the division of the country, shortly after the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, have given to rise a new set of problems, with new, 10 mostly confrontational concepts associated.’ More directly pertinent is Park Myoung-kyu’s, whose study of semantic change in the nation, people and citizens of Korea followed the guidelines less rigidly than other contributors, extending his treatment as far as the 1980s. In a chapter titled ‘Methodological Principles and Composition’ Park acknowledges the importance of the period from the late 19th to the early 20th century, as an analog of Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, but he also insists that the conceptual history in Korea must take the whole of the 20th century into consideration. Political conflicts over the concepts, the process of them becoming subjectivized and others are not only interlocked with the of liberation, division, and nation-building, but also with greater changes of industrialization, democratization and globalization. In fact, in order to ascertain what political connotations such concepts as the national, people, and citizen have implied with them, and what conflicts and tensions they have carried out, it is demanded that we need to understand the process of democratization as well as industrialization, including the establishment of two divided states, South and North, and its entailing political suppression. One step further, concern is duly paid to the influences of globalization, diversification, and informatization since the 1990s. In a sense, it is not until recently that those conceptual idioms, which were not so much concepts immediately related to the real status of ‘Korea’ or to our problems as part of a highly abstract and universalized

10 Park Sang-sop (2012), p.32. 176 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

civilized discourses that have been recognized as the representations of the western modernity, have been changed into conceptual words through which we do reveal the politico-economic problems of the Korean society, 11 that is, our values and thoughts. Here the important focus falls at the end; ‘our values and thoughts.’ In fact, I also wrote to the same effect in an article presented a few years ago, where I claimed that ‘the process of overcoming the divided system after liberation may constitute the most important period in the conceptual 12 history of Korea.’ If conceptual history is to spread its compass more broadly than simply tracing the process of importation of concepts originating from the West and their application to foreign circumstances, then the most fruitful applications for the approach are surely concerned with their self-reflexive and appropriative processes.

2

Every form of discourse, whether academic discipline or literary genre, has its own possibilities and its own limitations; in other words, every discourse is in an interactive relationship with the objects it generally refers to. Therefore, the objects of any specific kind of discourse are never a formless, meaningless hodgepodge of raw material, easily pried open by any discourse that approaches them for interpretation or explanation; rather, this raw material is likely to have some definite intrinsic properties which tend to encourage or restrict its interpretation by an external

11 Park Myoung-kyu (2009), pp.47-48. 12 Song (2009), p.234. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 177

discourse. For example, the ‘New Criticism’ has usually been more rewarding when applied to poetry than to the novel. If we agree that conceptual history should be understood as a particular genre or discourse, then this interrelatedness between a discourse and its intended object must surely be applicable. Although the concept of ‘objectivity’ is surrounded by many misunderstandings, the primary function of a discourse does not endow any subjective meaning to the study object so much as extract some particular objective meaning presumed to be preexisting. If this be so, the effectivity of conceptual history research as a discourse may be deeply constrained by the conditions, or more precisely the conjunctures applied to the raw material. At this point, for the purpose of provoking a controversy over the development of an appropriate method for conceptual history in Korea, I shall dare to hazard a speculative theory of my own. I will propose three factors which I offer as necessary conditions for the object to be amenable to the approach of conceptual history. First, the object country of the study must be a second-rate nation in the global context of the period under consideration or, to borrow a term from Immanuel Wallerstein, it must belong to the semi-periphery of the world system,. Thus far, the major achievements in the field of conceptual history have pertained either to Britain in the early modern period or to the Sattelzeit of the Germanic world from the mid-18th to mid-19th century. Seen from a global historical perspective, early modern Britain was of marginal significance compared with China, and, even within Europe, Britain was a lesser power than Spain or Holland. Of course, the Germanic region during the Sattelzeit was a distinctly second-rate state which did not achieve a unified nation-state till the mid-19th century. The second conjuncture or condition is the cohabitation of political autonomy with instability. In Europe, the fall of the Roman Empire led to 178 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

an epoch of decentralized feudal systems, and only with the Peace of Westphalia did the modern form of the nation-state emerge. David Held argues that:

Nation-states became supreme because they won at war, were economically successful, and subsequently, achieved a significant degree of legitimacy in the eyes of their populations and other states … (and nation-states) won at war because as warfare became more extended in scale and cost, it was larger 13 national states which were best able to organize and fund military power.

The nation-state becomes the supreme form of modern nation purely as a consequence of this condition: because they won at war. Larger nation-states were able to endure and survive wars, because, through economies of scale, they could mobilized the resources for waging wars more effectively than smaller nations. Thus, the absence of a mighty empire at the center exposed political entities to an essential instability where their fates depended on the outcomes of wars; and it was only the larger nations, those capable of displaying a considerable degree of autonomy in that absence, which were able to develop into modern nation-states. With this coexistence of instability and stability, these comparatively larger nations were also the most able to generate a variety of conceptual alternatives for the possible future forms of their societies. But the process of imagining of such alternative forms is never easy for any society; and the last condition which I would stipulate, therefore, is the inheritance of a vigorous intellectual tradition with the resources to allow this cohabitation to produce a creative vision of the future. Supposing my hypothesis about these three conjunctures to have a certain validity, then, what does it tell us when applied to the process in

13 Held (1995), p.84. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 179

which the three East Asian countries endeavored to attain modernity? First we may observe that certain limitations apply throughout the whole of East Asia. When tracing the history of novelistic forms, Franco Moretti once mentioned ‘the fact that — in an integrated market — latecomers don’t follow the same road as their predecessors, only later; they follow a different, and narrower road,’ adding that ‘they are constrained to it by the 14 success of the products from the core.’ Transferring Moretti’s hypothesis to the field of conceptual history, it implies that East Asian countries have not hit the same road as the one their models had taken, but in fact have been ‘restricted’ to take a ‘narrower’ road. The limitations I was referring to thus arise from an unavoidable difference between Europe and East Asia in the way the modernization model was imagined: conceptual alternatives in Europe were actively produced from within, in a context where the future direction was indeterminate; while for East Asia, the existence of an alternative, exterior, model was a de facto constraint. We must also consider the differences in the varying efficacy, as constrained by this limitation, of conceptual history as a methodology among the three Northeast Asian countries. Japan’s modernization looks the most promising of the three. In the mid-18th century, Japan was in a state of relative backwardness within the East Asian Order. At the same time, while it was exposed to the imperialist threat, it still enjoyed a considerable degree of political autonomy, so that it was able to begin to reshape the form of the nation through the Meiji Restoration. This paradoxical cohabitation of instability and autonomy led to the coining of a great many neologisms, so that Japan created its own particular form of ‘modernity of translation.’ In comparison, China looks a little less promising, though still very amenable to the approach of conceptual

14 Moretti (1998), p.191. The emphases are Morretti’s. 180 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

history. It was technically in the state of a colony from the late 19th century, but it never lost the considerable degree of autonomy attributable to its national size and also to its cultural inheritance, being the intellectual center of the East Asian Confucian Order; thus China also produced an abundance of conceptual transactions around the early 20th century. Compared with the other two, Korea may be a less susceptible object to the conceptual approach. Even with the third condition of a rich intellectual heritage there are some differences between East Asia and Europe. Ancient Chinese culture has been argued to play almost the same function as that of classical civilization in Europe, but whereas any of the later European states can claim legitimate ownership of the civilizational inheritance, whose creators had perished at least five centuries earlier, due to the virtual continuity of China as a nation, for Korea to claim the ancient Chinese culture as a shared resource would require a subtle consideration of the modern concept of ‘nation’ and the nature of traditional East Asian international relations. Also, apart from the issue of a shared inheritance, modern Korean history from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century did not feature the tense coexistence of instability and autonomy. Park Sang-sop’s article is relevant here:

In these East Asian states there has never been the absence of centralized state order for an extended period of time, as the West had after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and this continuity allowed the Confucian concept of the state to persist with a remarkable degree of stability. Faced with threats and shocks coming from the West in the late 19th century, however, the traditional political order fell into crisis, so that this traditional concept of the state was 15 finally brought into question.

15 Park Sang-sop (2012), p.27. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 181

But Joseon was unlucky to be deprived of its sovereignty less than 30 years after it had been forced to relinquish its closed-door policy by the 1876 Korea-Japan treaty. It was displaced from the Confucian Order by the threat from the West and its Japanese surrogate, with the consequence that Joseon did not enjoy a sufficient span of coexisting autonomy and instability for it to be able to import and re-appropriate the new concepts required for its future society. During the short Patriotic Enlightenment Movement Period, Joseon was seething with the search for a new conceptual framework, but all this came to an abrupt end with the loss of sovereignty. Up to now I have attempted to apply this hypothesis of three conjunctures to determine whether early modern Korea is a suitable study object for the conceptual history approach, but I would argue here that this is not the whole story. By applying the same assumptions to the post-liberation period of Korea, it would seem that this era may constitute one of the most promising objects for conceptual history to study: it encompasses a series of cataclysmic events including nation-building, the division into two nations, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the post-war reconstruction, followed by very successful economic develop- ment under a military regime and the impressive restoration of democracy through the combination of popular resistance with electoral protest. Let us therefore focus on how the three conjunctures apply to post-war Korean society. From the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, South Korea was truly in a truncated condition, and this division of the nation caused an essential instability. But it turns out now that the Cold-War regime offered a rather considerable degree of stability to the nations located at the periphery of the world system, and ironically, it also helped the Korean people to stage massive resistance against their dictatorship by favoring political stability and economic success as part of 182 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

the containment policy. At the same time, although there had been a certain limited and suppressed accumulation of knowledge and experience of diverse ideological options in the colonial period, during the Cold War, direct contact with Western democracy encouraged the search for future alternatives to flourish. With the requisite three conjunctures in place, overcoming the divided political system emerged as the primary mission of national history. Here it is useful to quote Prof. Paik Nak-chung, who attempts a speculative reinterpretation of this mission from the viewpoint of the world system. Describing the division system in Korea as a ‘singular subsystem that composes an essential link in the present world-system,’ Paik expands the meanings of the struggle to overcome the division, so that they carry global historical purport:

The movement for overcoming the division system thus serves as a middle term and a connecting link between a far-reaching transformation at the world-system level and internal reform movements at the level of each Korean state. And thereby not only the reunification movement but also much more far-reaching movements for the transformation of the globe can take root in the quotidian reality of specific reforms of South Korean society; conversely, here-and-now daily efforts to attain a better life will gain a greater consistency and momentum by acquiring an outlook on the radical subversion of the daily 16 fabric of human life.

In this light, the effort to overcome the fractured polity of the Korean Peninsula takes on an unprecedented significance, greater than a simple unification of South and North, transpiring from the unique situation of the divided Korea in the world system, so that this local effort implies the possibility of shaking up the wider capitalist system which defined the

16 Paik (2011), p.9. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 183

form of modernity that led to the division. In fact, behind Paik’s reinterpretation of the significance of Korea’s division is his understanding that the long struggle of Korean people to overcome the division has prompted a comprehensive reflection on the current form of modernity in South Korean society. Looking back over the impressive achievements of the popular movements for democratization under the system of division, we would expect to find, and indeed we do see, concomitant semantic expansion and transformation in a variety of basic concepts related to the formation of modernity. To mention a few of the most salient: nation, people, the masses, state, unification, reformation and revolution, subject, democracy ─ all these and many others merit investigation; but more important than the length of the list is the fact that the semantic transactions in post-liberation Korea not only show highly creative expansions rarely seen in East Asia or anywhere else, but they also continued to function as practical political alternatives. One of interesting aspects of these new semantic transactions is that, perhaps uniquely in the South Korean case, they have been extensively pursued in the realm of literature. As Melvin Richter points out, the vocabulary of literature and art has been less often employed as a source for the study of conceptual history ― probably because it is less trusted ― than it has been in such disciplines as 17 philosophy, politics, economics, jurisprudence or theology. In the following sections, therefore, I intend to analyse the semantic changes of a specific literary idiom, realism, so as to provide illustrative support for the thesis of this article, that is, the need to reframe the range of Sattelzeit in Korea.

17 Richter (1995), p.39. 184 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

3

As I set off on a descriptive sketch of realism in Korea, I should mention, at the beginning, that it is almost impossible to extract common denominators from, let alone make a neat summary of, the use of realism as a concept in Korean literature. Part of this difficulty arises from the concept of realism itself as a critical idiom. As Pam Morris remarks, realism is a ‘slippery’ word because of its diverse and convoluted usages in 18 a wide range of disciplines, as well as in everyday life. In Keywords, Raymond Williams records the conflict between two contradictory basic meanings: (1) something actually existing, that is, not imaginary but actually perceived and (2) something true or fundamental, in this moment, not actually perceived but deeply implicit. And in the Korean case there is an extra difficulty, attributable to the fact that the concept of realism, though imported from the West via Japan, and heavily indebted to both of them, has developed distinct meanings and forms that go well beyond its original Western model. The words ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ were translated into Korean literature around the late 1910s, mostly as ‘sasiljuui’ (寫實主義) or more often as ‘jayeonjuui’ (自然主義). There was no clear distinction in use between the two at this time, and both were applied to a few works written in imitation of Emile Zola’s attitude and style. Later, both translations were mostly used by leftist intellectuals to deprecate the ‘modernized’ Korean literature that had just begun to be written. The example below is taken from a critical essay by Park Yeong-hi, published in 1924:

In other words, we imported the naturalism of others without so far having

18 Morris (2003), p.2. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 185

tasted the authentic beauty of nostalgia, and then started a life in imitation of the idealism of others, without tasting the serious naturalism of others. Therefore, to repeat again, if it is said that Korean literature has a romantic movement, it is not dense enough to reveal that it was written by Korean hands; if one may say that we have naturalistic literature, it depicts no more than the 19 depravity of a hero, rather than the dark side of life.

As alluded to in this quotation, therefore, this kind of translation had so far remained merely a concept imported from the West, which was not expected to take root in Korean soil. Five years later, however, realism was to emerge as a key concept in a series of controversies about the ‘proper’ form of creativity to help enlighten Korean people, as well as being used to describe reality as it really is. Kim Ki-chin set in motion the first round of controversy by proposing as the proper form what he called ‘byeonjeungjeok sasiljuui’ (辨 證的 寫實主義), as a translation for the English expression ‘dialectical realism.’ In an article under the same title, he distinguished ‘dialectical realism’ from ‘elementary realism’; defining the former as a way of relating superficial phenomena to the historical development of society as a whole, while the latter referred merely to a detailed observation of the lower depths of a society, much as scientists observe insects through a microscope. This distinction shows that realism had become more than a descriptive technique or form, and was now being understood as a way of seeing the world. This distinction seems to have been widely accepted, inasmuch as Yeom Sang-seop, who was ideologically middle-of-the-road, also drew a line between realism and naturalism. In his view, the latter is a mode of expression specific to realism, while the former can be a general

19 Park Yeong-hi (1989), p.281. 186 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

20 creative attitude that is faithful to reality as it is. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, we witness a variety of realisms cropping up during the controversies, including bourgeois realism, proletarian realism, social realism, revolutionary realism, realism of , and so on. This variety may be adduced as evidence to indicate that contemporary critics came to have a deeper understanding of the relationships between form and content in literature. But, at the same time, all the titles have one thing in common: they consist of two words: an epithet that expresses the largely ideological content of the technique, with realism used throughout as the noun. This monotonous combination of adjective plus noun can be argued to indicate a split between content and form. Though realism was interpreted as more than a technique, as deeply related to the way things are seen, the role of the word ‘realism’ in almost all the combinations was reduced to a depictive technique and/or to specify the particular subject matter. In that sense, the major emphasis is still much more oriented toward the content of a work than the function of form itself or the way content is articulated by form. Behind this combination or, to be more exact, split, lies the fact that all these theories were proposed not just as criteria for evaluating literary works, but also as practical guidelines for the literary creations of young writers by the KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federatio, in Esperanto). This organization preferred political vigor to artistic integrity, and formally subsumed artistic activities as part of the political struggle. Kweon Hwan, a critic and member of KAPF, once explicitly declared this principle of placing artistic activism ahead of technical or intellectual excellence which 21 refused to engage politically.

20 Yeom (1929). 21 Kweon (1989), p.193. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 187

Socialist realism, which was introduced around 1933, and soon adopted as the most advanced principle of literary creativity, is surely a case in point. In 1934, Zhdanov and Gorky declared socialist realism to be the official ideology of the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, which provoked another heated round of discussion among leftist Korean intellectuals and critics, as to whether it represented a weakening of the socialist party spirit or a more advanced form that could resolve the often-pointed-out division between worldview and method. At this point, Ahn Ham-kwang, one of the leading leftist critics of the time, arrived at an unusual conclusion in an article about the prospective application of socialist realism to Korea. In his view, what counted was not the epithet but realism itself, and the most crucial issue for discussion should be the scientific analysis of the particularities of Korean reality or the correspondence between the 22 real-life situation in Korea and literary theory. When the concept of realism was introduced to Korea in the late 1910s, its use had been influenced at first by French novelists like Zola, leading to detailed depictions of the seamy side of reality in the naturalist novels. Thereafter, it was adopted by leftist intellectuals, and especially by critics from the KAPF. At the time, the Marxist version of realism like Engels’s theory of typicality was very influential, so that critics began to distinguish a revelation of a structured whole of a society from a mere detailed depiction of poverty. When realism later became the official guiding principle for literary creation, there was a continuing controversy about what form it should take to be applicable to contemporary reality. Such debates about realism often got derailed to become battles of ideological positioning, however, resulting in the production of a variety of forms of realism, typically in the format of an ideological epithet and a noun.

22 See Ahn (1990), p.200. 188 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

Nevertheless, as critics got to grips with the term, they made efforts, despite substantial external influence, to develop their own localized theories which could help produce and appreciate works that reflected the particular situation of their country under colonial rule. One more topic to be considered is the relationship between realism and modernism at this time. The imported principle of socialist realism was pitted against modernist literature, which had also been imported from the West, via Japan. Here, it should be pointed out that in spite of the high profile of socialist realist literature under Japanese colonial rule, modernist literature was also welcomed by some as supporting the restoration of national independence. Korea was not colonized by Western imperial forces but by a kind of surrogate imperialist, Japan, which had no overwhelming or clear-cut superiority to the state of Joseon which it colonized, neither in terms of political liberty or cultural autonomy. This, in part, explains the historically rare situation where the colonial power was obliged to invest considerable resources in the colony, for example by building the cross-country railroad system and developing a heavy chemical industry, in order to justify its control of a country which was closely similar in culture and history. This meant that rather than rejecting Western imperialist policies, many Koreans would have liked instead to thoroughly absorb and acquire the most advanced Western scientific, socio-political, and cultural institutions to outpace Japan and obtain independence through the early ‘attainment’ of modernity. Against the backdrop of the socialist writers’ camp, some modernist writers in Korea responded in highly creative ways, for example Choi Chae-seo employed the term ‘realism’ to highlight the literary merit of two representative modernist works, Nalgae (날개 ) and Scenes along the Stream (川邊風景). Rather than defining realism as relating to the objective world, he was concerned with an objective attitude of observation. For Choi what Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 189

counted was not the subject matter but the eye of the creator, which he likened to the lens of a camera. Therefore, his application of the term realism to Nalgae (날개), a work that delves into the psychological disintegration of a superfluous person, as often featured in modern Russian novels, shows that Marxist literary theories were not the only ones 23 influential among the academics of the time.

4

This conflict between modernist and socialist theories, if it had been allowed to play out fully, would probably have had a very positive effect on the development of modern Korean literature. The debate was curtailed, however, by the oppression of the colonial authorities, especially after the publication of Choi’s article; and Korean writers were forced to adopt Japanese for the much narrower project of ‘national literature’ which was intended to persuade Korean people to actively support and participate in the Japan’s Pacific War. The situation did not improve much after liberation from colonial rule. In fact, except for a short period between 1945 and 1948, the ideological conflict which would eventually lead to the outbreak of the Korean War entirely obscured any reciprocal development that might have resulted from a creative tension between modernism and realism. Unfortunately, the establishment of an ultra-rightist anti- communist regime suffocated, indeed, physically wiped out the tendentious writers and critics of the realist camp who had formerly belonged to the KAPF. But this easy victory for the modernist faction, having been attained through the intervention of external forces, deflected their

23 Choi Chae-seo (1981), p.183. 190 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

creative energies, so that they failed to produce any literary achievements comparable to those of their predecessors. Thereafter realism, tarnished by its association with a hostile socialist ideology, was hardly mentioned as a literary term during the 1950s, whereas conservative and modernist literature survived under the name of ‘national literature,’ with the protection of the anti-communist regime of the time, and was represented as ideologically untarnished, pure literature in a humanist spirit. The only notable exception to this was Choi Il-soo, who tried to approach literary modernity in Korea in terms of both nationalism and realism.

Therefore the philosophical content of literature is also a reflection of the modernity that national consciousness directly demands of subject matter in a historical sprit. In this way the national realism which modern literature pursues reflects the unified national consciousness as the historical Zeitgeist that it is, and furthermore comes to put an emphasis on weak nations securing complete 24 freedom.

This combination of realism with national consciousness is rightly regarded as a rare achievement, anticipating the later emergence, in the early 1970s, of the National Literature movement, but unfortunately his work had too many flaws, from dubious arguments to factual misunder- standings of Western modernism and contemporary Korean works. Only after the student uprising known as the 1960 April Revolution were progressive writers able to proclaim an attitude of ‘Sartrean engagement’ against the highly conservative McCarthyist climate. Resisting the dominant forces inside and outside the literary world, some

24 Choi Il-soo (1976), p.18. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 191

writers who believed in the social engagement of literature reintroduced the concept of ‘realism.’ Like their predecessors, they understood realism as more than merely a descriptive mode. Since the 1920s, those claiming literary realism had espoused some specific ideological content, or, to use Raymond Williams’s phrase, a definite ‘knowable community’ as a prerequisite, from which something could be derived to provide the reemerging realism with its subject matter. But in the context of a divided Korea, and facing the ideological strictures imposed by the authoritarian government, the newly adopted realism had no specific content or perspective to rely on, and simply produced detailed depictions of contemporary everyday life. It was not until the early 1970s, when the National Literature movement arose from the manifest crisis of the divided Korean nation, bringing the Sartreans on board, that realists obtained a concrete conception of their previously obscure understanding of ‘reality’: that is, the recognition of the critical situation of the ‘nation’ and the overcoming of its predicament. In short, the ‘reality’ of realist literature came to refer to the nation and its people in crisis. Since this period, the redefined National Literature movement and the realist project have proceeded in tandem for more than three decades. Paik Nak-chung elaborates on their affinity:

In our situation, the national literature and the realist literature maintain an inseparable relationship. No doubt, the two are not identical concepts in essence. But when our national literature starts from the distinctive recognition and concern with the historical situation of our nation, and aims simultaneously to reach the ultimate level of ‘world literature’ of the highest artistic quality, its final aim cannot be distinguished from that of realist literature which purports to embody the just recognition of reality and is concerned with just engagement. As the realist principle is not limited to any specific national literature, there may be differences of opinion from person to person to what 192 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

extent it necessarily determines the content of the national literature. But since the realist principle should not be abstract but engaged, creating and accepting art only within concrete and real situations, in the case of the modern Korean literature which was born out of a severe national crisis, it is hard to imagine 25 any kind of realist literature that is not also national literature.

Thus realism re-emerged, and this time its meanings expanded beyond the world-view or Weltanshauung that had been reached through the earlier controversies. Now it was understood as the effort to embody ‘the concern of a just engagement’ as well as the just recognition of reality. It is then no surprise that these realist writers and critics took an active part in the pro-democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Realists recognized that the crisis of democracy was primarily caused by the divided system, and by pursuing socio-political engagement for democratization and to overcome the divisions, some of them invested the word ‘realism’ with a very distinct meaning connoting the highest human aspirations. For example, realism was now defined as signifying the historical struggle for human liberation and the embodiment of truth, and also as the driving force for democratization, national unification, and even the overcoming 26 of modernity. National literature and realism, still walking hand-in-hand, together gave rise to a new phase in the 1980s, which presents two distinctive features. First, the sudden emergence of working class writers, mostly poets to begin with and then later novelists; next, the transition of the dominant keyword from ‘nation’ to ‘people,’ which is understood as a vague conglomeration of discrete groups including the working class, the low-income petty-bourgeois fraction, progressive intellectuals, etc. From

25 Paik (2011), p.167. 26 Paik (1979), p.107. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 193

then on, the writers of the national literature camp, who had previously been relatively united, began to split up into several factions. Though none of them relinquished the concept of realism as their guiding literary principle, they began to make their distinct way, reading a new meaning into the term. The influence of the national literature group from the 1970s continued to wane, as a more militant and progressive younger generation of writers launched the concept of ‘popular national literature,’ which focused more on class than on the divided nation. Here I need to mention some sources of conflict affecting the Korean realist literary camp during the first half of the 80s: through its highly successful economic growth Korea had climbed off the bottom rung of the world-system and become a minor player in the global economy, while in the political realm the military regime continued to wield an iron fist, using the economic achievements to justify this. During this period, seeking a path to democratization, a number of progressive college students infiltrated the factories, not only as a strategy to make common cause with and gain support from the proletariat, but also to demonstrate their commitment to a new way of life by actually becoming laborers. The year 1987 was a turning point politically, and also for Korean literature, when an eruption of public dissent finally forced the military regime to accept the popular demands for constitutional reform and democracy. With the marked weakening of the military regime resulting from this explosion of ‘people-power’ and the consequent inauguration of a liberal democratic government, the long-suppressed working-class movement blossomed. This evoked vociferous discussions and much division among writers and critics of the realist camp about the proper form of realism to correspond to the nature of Korean social formation. Progressive writers still retained the word ‘realism,’ but their theories varied from group to group, based on the fundamental question as to what constituted the core of the South 194 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

Korean social formation. Depending on their definitions of contemporary South Korean society and their strategies for social reform, they can roughly be divided into several groups: (1) The old national literature group, which defined the division of the peninsula as constituting the primary contradiction of the society, and continued to embrace realism with no particular epithet as their guiding principle. (2) The popular national literature group, who preferred ‘class’ to ‘nation’ as the key term for the definition of the South Korea society, and came up with ‘popular’ realism. (3) The most radical of activist groups, who produced working class literature under the title of ‘working-class liberation’ realism, a slightly transformed mode of socialist realism. (4) Various other strands of opinion, operating under titles such as ‘popular’ socialist realism, ‘partisan’ realism, and ‘third World’ realism. One of the subjects giving rise to the most heated discussions at that time was the future direction of working-class literature, which was then emerging, and its relation to socialist realism. During this 1980s controversy over the correct form of realism there was an extraordinary advance in the way realism was translated into Korean. Up to this point the debates had been confused by the ambiguity of the concept itself, which implies two different and sometimes contradictory meanings; a technique of representing reality or an attitude toward reality. Around this time, however, South Korean usage began to translate ‘realism’ into three different forms; sasiljuui was reserved for a simple faithfulness to factuality, very close to what Lukács had called naturalism; while hyeonsiljuui (現實主義) was invented to refer to the creative spirit that precedes representation, or the attitude or ethos that determines a representative technique; and at the same time, they also kept the imported notation of ‘REALISM,’ especially when there was a need to stress that attitude and form are interconnected. This three-way Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 195

use of the term is certainly an advance, clarifying many muddy misunder- standings surrounding the word ‘realism.’ At a time when this theoretical flowering of realism seemed irresistible, however, there came two sudden shocks in just a few years. The first blow was the disintegration of the existing socialist bloc, which shattered the expectation, then widespread among some realist groups, that the working-class movement in Korea had reached the stage where it could take the initiative in driving social reform. The original national literature group was the only one to survive this political upheaval, continuing to stress the necessity of the politics of alliance as the first step toward the establishment of a fully-fledged liberal democracy. In fact, during the 1980s, this group repeatedly warned the other ‘epithet’-realist groups that the immaturity of Korea’s reality was incompatible with their radical perspectives on revolutionary change. The second blow was the impact of postmodernist theories and of globalization flooding over Korea, making even the cause of the National Literature movement surviving from the 1970s suddenly seem old-fashioned. One critic gave a succinct summary of the crisis:

Roughly speaking, the two axes that support realism are the principle of representation and the existence of a perspective. denies the legitimacy of representation, and the changes in Eastern Europe raise questions about the potential of the socialist perspective. Combined, they put 27 to the test the premises of the present-stage realist literature.

Furthermore, around this time, a new generation of readers were turning to a host of emerging younger writers who adopted a supposedly ‘postmodernist’ style of writing; they avoided the depiction of immediate political affairs, preferring to represent small, private, everyday matters,

27 Yun (1992), p.18. 196 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

and to indulge in decadent fantasy. In a sense, the 1990s crisis of realism was the logical backlash of the remarkable success of the 1987 pro-democracy movements. I have mentioned above that the 1987 restoration of democracy, though formal in structure, lifted the lid of oppression which had held down the working-class movement, but the working class was not the only social sector whose energies were suddenly released at this time. Other social interests which had been suppressed under the master narrative of the ‘democratic march for freedom’ included feminism, environmentalism and other minority rights movements. If we take the belief in the existence of ‘objective’ reality to be a function of the related existence of the ‘dominant’ class, and the progressive role of realist literature as arising from the perspective of the rising class, then the emergence of fragmentary interest groups may explain the weakening of the version of realism which had been based on the idea of national literature. In this situation, some realist critics set out to rehabilitate the modernist impulse as being more suitable to Korea’s changed social situation; and others rearranged their position, facing the onslaught of postmodernism, but without entirely abandoning their previous stance. Just as in previous debates, the critical point at issue was; at which stage does South Korean society stand? There were many who considered postmodern society to be essentially different from all previous social forms, and, believing Korea to have just stepped over the threshold into a postmodern society, they championed the effectiveness of postmodernist expression for its precise depiction. Meanwhile, those who continued to stand by realist practices argued that postmodernism was just a charade, 28 which paradoxically evidenced the ‘bankruptcy of modernism’ itself.

28 Paik (1985), p.431. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 197

And this controversy, between realism and modernism, still continues within the current literary circles. It is not necessary, here, to give a lengthy exposition of the way in which realism has generally been treated in contemporary literary theories since the advent of structuralism: it can be summed up by saying that realism is an ideological apparatus that deceives us into accepting made things as natural things. Of course, due to the (post)structuralist challenge to the naive idea of reflection, the inherited conception that literature reflects preexisting things which are really ‘out there’ completely lost its footing. To expose the artificial quality of realist literature, (post)structuralist theories looked in every corner to find crevices and fractures in the text, so that they could ‘implode’ it from the inside, or better yet write it off as a lie. And contemporary theories are all concerned with detecting irretrievable hard structures that are supposed to comprise both the subject and his or her perception. Ironically, the recent emphasis on such formal analysis often leads to the wholesale dismissal of the content. Almost always, unconscious motivations are preferred to deliberate and conscious intentions when seeking for where the truth might lie. This format now turns its back on realism, but this movement looks ironic when we remember that it was Engels himself who initiated the analysis of ‘ideology of form,’ and then Lukács who found in the Zolaesque naturalistic mode a process of reification that redirected narrative attention to the level of superficial reality. In this changed terrain, South Korean realists are still struggling with the concept of realism, unable to solve the knotty question of reflection by means of (post)structuralist criticism. 198 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

5

I hope this rough historical sketch of the semantic transactions of the concept of ‘realism’ in (South) Korea have given a glimpse of its distinctive features, which are absent from contemporary Western literary theories. When the concept was first translated as ‘sasiljuui’ or ‘jayeonjuui’ or in the transliterated form of ‘rearism’(레아리즘), in Korea in the 1920s, it was understood as an expressive technique for the recording of reality. But in the process of a series of controversies about the proper form of literary creativity and the ‘official’ way to depict Korean reality, critics began to read more sophisticated meanings into the term. The concept of realism was understood as related to the historical principles of development or to the deep structure of society. Socialist activities were meticulously monitored by the colonial authorities, and literary terms were often manipulated by ideological conflicts, retaining only a veneer of artistic autonomy, so the concept of realism was variously combined with political concepts that functioned from an ideological perspective. This combination tended to be articulated as a bipolar hierarchy between the ‘determining’ political content and an ‘expressive’ technique of representation. For example, the ill-fated socialist realism of the 1930s was deservedly attacked in the West for its ideologically rigid artistic attitude. In this case then, the epithet ‘socialist,’ pertaining to partisanship or perspective, got the better of the matrix ‘realism,’ which was reduced to a method of recording reality. Realism, subdued during the latter phase of colonial rule, was revitalized with the 1945 liberation, but submerged again after three short years, due to the ideological conflicts raging in the divided Korea. Only with the 1960 April Revolution was this concept able to take center stage in the literary field. And this time, realism as a concept not only played a Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 199

key role in Korean literature, but the concept itself unfolded a remarkably rich series of semantic transformations. South Korean realist theories took a lesson from the errors of socialist realism; and to emphasize literary creativity, the concept was translated into three different Korean words: one is reserved for a basic faithfulness to factuality, very close to what Lukács called naturalism, while another applies to the creative spirit or ethic that precedes a simple representation or an abstract perspective. This also means that in realist theories, which since the 1970s have stressed the creative moment, and tried to explain literature through the coordination of the (over-emphasized) cognitive function and the (often neglected) aesthetic practices, a new balance has been established between these faculties. However, the practice by which realism is defined as a kind of creative spirit risks making the concept transhistorical; an experience recalled from the South Korean literary history of the 1970s and 1980s, just as much as the 1920s and 1930s. It was therefore thought essential to place the concept precisely within the historical context of the division system, but, at the same time, the concept was used to escape these bounds and went beyond the historical limitations of the society within which it was rooted. In this way, the concepts of modernity and postmodernity entered realist theories, and the challenges of coping with modernity, as well as ultimately overcoming modernity, were established as the primary missions of modern Korean history. Since Korea had been forcibly incorporated into the capitalist world-system, the pursuit of postmodernity was required for its colonized people to take possession of modernity in a way that would enable them to resist the violent exploitation seen elsewhere in modern times. In The Way of the World, Moretti proposes Bildungsroman as a form that ‘compromises among distinct worldviews’ or, in other words, ‘an elusion of whatever may endanger the Ego’s 200 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

29 equilibrium, making its compromises impossible.’ Perhaps Moretti means that the realist form was intended to help modern man cope with and survive the whirlpool of modern historical change. Instead, here in Korea, the realist principle has been called upon not only to cope with, but also to transcend modernity. Another characteristic of South Korean realism is that realists here continued to deal with the intractable concepts like the ‘partisanship of objectivity’ and ‘practice,’ almost forgotten elsewhere and eclipsed by postmodernist theories insisting on the central importance of relations and differences that tend to weaken the role of an individual will. In the 1970s and 1980s, as has been mentioned, the realist camp was divided into several groups, with the emergence of several forms of realism defined by the addition of epithets, and there was a concern that superimposing partisanship over realism would lead to a repetition of the errors of 1930s socialist realism. Thus, to avoid the risk of becoming lost in empty abstractions, and yet resolve the relationship between objective reality and partisanship, the realist camp wedged the concept of practice between them. Nowadays, after exposure to poststructuralist theories, no realists believe in the existence of ‘objective’ things as actually ‘out there’ waiting for writers to reflect upon them. South Korean realists now also concede that there can be no other reality than the one we live and experience, and that it is conceptually constituted. However, the concept of objective reality has not been reduced to being a lie or an ideology or any such negative realm, instead South Korean realists have developed impressive theories which integrate the positive concept of ‘practice’ into that of objective reality, so that the latter concept still functions as an effective stepping-stone for the betterment of society. Whatever one may think of

29 Moretti (1998), p.191. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 201

such theories, at least they demonstrate a highly creative initiative on the part of South Korean realists from the 1970s, who managed to expand the meaning of realism and apply it in a very practical way. Finally, I should return to the issue I raised at the beginning of this article: the framing of Sattelzeit as the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. But as I hope I have shown, for at least one concept, the case of ‘realism,’ this brief history of its semantic development shows that immensely vigorous transactions were occurring during and since the 1970s and 1980s. In accordance with my earlier theoretical development, I believe that such conceptual vigor can be attributed to the conjunction of several factors, of which the three most important are: (1) there must be a rich heritage of cultural and intellectual resources; (2) the peripheric position of the studied nation in the world system; and (3) there must be a coexistence of political autonomy and instability. Seeing the significance of the post-liberation period to Korean conceptual history, it is surely appropriate to reconsider the timeframe assigned to the Korean Sattelzeit. 202 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA

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