The Aesthetic Genealogy of Korean War Memories A
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FAMILY APART: THE AESTHETIC GENEALOGY OF KOREAN WAR MEMORIES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by We Jung Yi August 2013 © 2013 We Jung Yi FAMILY APART: THE AESTHETIC GENEALOGY OF KOREAN WAR MEMORIES We Jung Yi, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 This dissertation examines the formation of national subjectivity in South Korea through an analysis of what I call “Korean War memory works.” Countering the selective remembering and forgetting of the unfinished war at the level of official discourse, these mnemonic texts have informed the political un/conscious of the divided nation. In tracing how such countermemories contend and negotiate with the statist interpellation of Korean subjects, I direct attention to the trope of the broken family that persistently appears in Korean War narratives and images. While relating this “failed” family romance to a collective mourning process, I also reveal its generative power to produce the fantasy of an originary community. As I unpack the myth of the indivisible family-nation, I further criticize through a feminist psychoanalytic lens the patriarchal symbolic order that underlies the familial imagination employed by oppositional nationalism. The postwar texts selected here for discussion are situated within the historical contexts in which each mode of representation, in association with a distinctive subject of narration, became a hegemonic way of grasping the unresolved past. Chapter One scrutinizes the intellectual subjectivity crystallized in Choi In-hoon’s “novels of ideas,” and reinterprets them as the unfulfilled Bildungsroman of the “4.19 generation.” Chapter Two probes the embodiment of the minjung, foregrounded in the 1980s’ protests against domestic dictatorship and US imperialism, through a review of Jo Jung-rae’s historical novel Taebaeksanmaek. Chapter Three addresses Park Wan- suh’s literary testimonies of the Korean War with an emphasis on the daughter- narrator’s transformation through her confrontation and reconciliation with the (m)other, another witness in silent struggle. Chapter Four discusses the recent phenomenon of Korean War blockbusters, focusing on how such a spectacular memorialization in the “post-Cold War” era deals with the desires and anxieties of contemporary Koreans who in their everyday life encounter simultaneously the haunting legacies of Korea’s partition and the new imperatives of global capitalism. By piecing together dispersed memories of the Korean War in these various aesthetic practices, this study seeks to rethink South Korean cultural identity in relation to its postcolonial history of “national division” and the familial structure of its remembrance. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH We Jung Yi was born in Jinhae, a port city on the southeast coast of the Korean peninsula. She received a BA in Korean Literature and English Literature, and a MA in Comparative Literature from Yonsei University, South Korea. She entered the PhD program in the field of Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in August of 2006, and defended her dissertation in June of 2013. iii To my parents, Kyung Han Lee and Hyun Joo Lee iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My odyssey in Ithaca has been full of adventure, challenge, and discovery. I would have been lost without the guidance, support, and wisdom of all those who have accompanied me on this road. Realizing that I will soon embark upon another journey once I complete this dissertation, I would like to take this moment to acknowledge the travel companions whose inspiration and perspiration have helped me to re-vision the world and myself. First, I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members. Professor Brett de Bary has not only taught me to grapple with the unwritten while reading texts closely. She has always stood by me, providing me with the role model of an all-round scholar, just as Mentor encouraged and advised Telemachus throughout his development. It has been a blessing to have her as my chair and advisor. I am also indebted to Professor Michael Shin. His critical questions in and practical approaches to Korean Studies, combined with his astute comments on my project, have kept me reflecting upon my position and mission as a Koreanist. With his exemplary scholarship on translation theory and intellectual history in Asia, Professor Naoki Sakai has shown me how to situate a national subject within transnational contexts. I cannot appreciate enough the rigorous feedback on my research and unflagging enthusiasm for my work that Professor Petrus Liu has continually given me, in addition to his thought-provoking seminars in which this thesis originated. My thanks are extended as well to Dominick LaCapra at Cornell University, Bruce Cumings at the University of Chicago, Tae Gyun Park at Seoul National University, and Seung-Hee Jeon at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. Generous financial support for my dissertation came from Cornell’s Department of Asian Studies, East Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center for v International Studies, Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Society for the Humanities, and Graduate School. I have also greatly benefitted from the School for Criticism and Theory and the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. To borrow from the protagonist Lee Myong-jun in The Square, my process of research and writing in a “secret room” could have been out of joint had it not been interlocked with many “squares” of coexistence. The abstract space of intellectual practice has become more perceivable and valuable thanks both to my peers here at Cornell and to my old friends across the ocean, who have willingly shared their expertise and experiences over the years: Bohee Han, Eunae Ko, Jison Kim, Ji Yun Jeong, Koonyong Kim, Seung-hwan Shin, Akiko Ishii, Christopher Ahn, Honghong Tinn, Jiwon Yun, Moonyoung Jeong, Moon-hee Lee, and Seongyeon Ko. The caring community of NPR church nourished me spiritually, emotionally, and physically, while the natural environment of Ithaca encouraged the growth of my imagination through exercise. Last but not least, I am infinitely grateful to my parents, Kyung Han Lee and Hyun Joo Lee, for their love, faith, service, and endurance. Sometimes by surprising me with packages that contained homemade kimchi along with materials for my study, often by replacing my anxiety and skepticism with laughter and optimism through their comforting words or hilarious dances, and, most importantly, by praying for me all the time, they never let me forget that our family is always together, even when apart. I dedicate this dissertation to them with my eternal love and admiration. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ....................................................................................................... iii Dedication ...................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ v Note on Romanization ................................................................................................... ix Introduction: Korean War Memories and South Korean Subjectivity ........................... 1 1. After “Division Literature”: Toward a New Korean War Studies ....................... 3 2. The Gender of Korean War Memory and the Fantasy of Family Romance ........ 6 3. Traumatic Memory and Na(rra)tional Subjectivity: To Historicize Korean War Representations .................................................................................................. 17 I. The Third Way in a Divided Korea?: Choi In-hoon and the “4.19 Generation” ...... 26 1. Topics: Writing Self, Living Memory ................................................................ 30 2. The Square: A Portrait of the 4.19 Intellectual ................................................... 42 3. A Grey Man: A Refugee Intellectual’s Tragic Bildungsroman .......................... 60 4. The Tempest: The Third World’s Mimicry of the Empire’s Family Romance .. 77 5. World Citizen: A Man of Intellect ...................................................................... 95 II. Han Revived: Jo Jung-rae’s Taebaek Mountain Range and Minjung Historiography ........................................................................................... 99 1. The Korean War as the Prehistory of the Gwangju Massacre ............................ 99 2. The Chronotope of Taebaeksanmaek: A Genealogy of the Peasants’ Revolt .. 109 3. The Structure of Enlightenment ....................................................................... 117 4. Men Fight, Women Endure: Gendered Materialization of Han ....................... 128 5. The Descendants of the Partisans ..................................................................... 143 vii III. Afterlives of the Traumatized: Park Wan-suh’s Literary Testimony of the Korean War .......................................................................................................... 148 1. Women’s Memory of the National Trauma ..................................................... 148 2. The Naked Tree: The Stripped Self and the Bare Truth ................................... 160 3. Writing for Survival, Writing as Re-vision ...................................................... 187 IV. A Screen Memory for a Globalizing Korea: Korean War Blockbusters “After”