창작과 비평

 

Although 'the age of reunification' appears in the titles of both my paper and this forum, we Koreans are still very much living in the age of division. That accounts for the qualifying phrase in my subtitle: I shall be speaking as a resident of its Southern half, with scant knowledge of the life and literature of the other half of the divided land. I may add, too, that the point of view is that of only one such resident.

 

The term 'the age of reunification' has come into great vogue, and understandably so, since the historic meeting of the leaders of the two Koreas last June. But if reunification now has become a more realistic goal, it is in part because the summit meeting and subsequent developments have forcibly brought into popular consciousness the fact that ours indeed is the age of division. Even the reunion of the long separated families in August accentuated the fact, for they had to part again after only a few days.

 

I bring up the obvious fact of Korea's on-going division because one of the ways in which the status quo has managed to sustain itself--to an extent that may justify our calling it 'the division system'--is by having enough people accept it as an almost natural feature of life or even forget, in the course of their everyday lives, the very fact of division. To retain this fact in consciousness and engage critically with that complex reality has represented the major goal of what in South Korea has been known as the 'national literature movement'. 'National literature' in this context is not to be equated with nationalistic literature, for the 'national' agenda of overcoming the division system and building a more democratic and humane society on the Korean Peninsula cannot be reduced to nationalistic terms, even though nationalism does play a considerable and often meaningful role.

 

Taken as such an agenda, reunification itself proves more of a process than a discrete event to take place (or not take place) at some fixed point of time. Indeed, the process may be termed open-ended, in the sense that a unitary Korean state isn't necessarily the goal.

 

While a 'North-South union of independent states' or a rather loose confederal state ought to come first and then evolve toward a closer political unity, the goal is not any particular state structure as such but the overcoming of the division system, with the largest possible popular input toward creation of a state structure (and a great deal besides) to suit that goal. Reunification as a process of this kind may be said to have begun well before the June summit--as early as the signing of North-South Basic Agreements in 1991, if not even earlier with South Korea's decisive turn to democracy in the June days of 1987. I myself, at any rate, used the phrase 'the age of reunification' in articles published before the summit, and would find a more than rhetorical meaning in the title of our forum.

 

Indeed, only reunification as a complex and extended process gives room for significant intervention by literature. In a time of rather clear-cut historical confrontation as in the struggle against military dictatorships in South Korea, literary interventions of the more immediate, agitational kind would have a large impact and attain artistic merit as well. Our national literature can show ample evidence of such in the 1970s and the '80s. As a rule, however, the influence of genuine literature on a nation's political life tends to be more indirect and should prove the more pervasive for that. A gradual but not indefinitely prolonged process of overcoming the division system offers an instance somewhere inbetween: conscious engagement with this process still claims some priority in literary discourse (though not necessarily for individual literary creators), while overtly agitational works tend to prove inadequate to the needs of the complex process.

 

In an article titled "The Reunification Movement and Literature" (Creation and Criticism, Spring 1989; tr. by Kenneth M. Wells in South Korea's Minjung Movement ed. K. Wells, Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1995) and written at a time when I felt the democratization (and the related reunification) process had entered a new stage as a result of the success of the popular protests of June 1987, I attempted to characterize the importance of literature in these terms:

 

"The creative role of literature is vital both in promoting this kind of self-criticism and self-adjustment among intellectuals [of hand-me-down radicalism] and in energizing popular forces. Of course, this is not the exclusive preserve of literature, nor is it the role of Korean literature alone. But unless South Korea's reunification movement is a creative endeavor of the highest order, it will hardly succeed in its aim of overcoming this unprecedented system of division that, for all its exceptional rigidity and oppressiveness, has nevertheless also produced, both in north and south in different ways, results impressive to the rest of the world. The reunification movement must be pursued as a creative art, so to speak, and all its activists must become artists--artists of history-making. Only as a branch of this art can Korean literature bloom to the full; and where the art of the national tongue fails to do its part, it will be vain to expect artists of historical action alone to turn out for duty without fail." (206-7; translation modified)

 

Nearly a dozen years later, with the reunification process in fuller swing, I would still hold to the tenor of the statement, though not necessarily in the same language. Elements of high art were not lacking in the Pyongyang summit itself, and the vitality of modern South Korean literature despite the colonial past and the continuing division surely had an impact on the history-making that led to the event.

 

Not that actual literary productions of recent decades justify any complacency. The high hopes I held out in the above-mentioned essay for a 'new stage' of national literature have borne only partial fruits. While this is not the place to offer even a cursory survey, let me cite some instances to give an inkling of both the achievements and the problems.

 

Among the writers discussed in that essay, Ko Un has continued on his astonishingly prolific career, consolidating his standing as, all in all, the most powerful presence in contemporary South Korean literature. Nine more volumes of Ten Thousand Lives have followed (vols. 7-9, 1989; vols. 10-12, 1996; vols. 13-15, 1997); the seven-volume epic Paektu Mountain was completed by 1994 (though to my mind the later books did not fully meet the expectations raised by the splendid Part One); to which one should add numerous volumes of novels, essays, travel writing and, above all, more than a dozen collections of shorter verse (or cycles of shorter verse), the genre which, in my judgment, shows him to best advantage. But such prolificity entails, perhaps inevitably, considerable unevenness of quality. And while other poets that I did not mention in that particular essay--such as Shin Kyongnim, to cite only one from Ko Un's own generation--have added to the scene, the newly opened phase in the age of reunification calls for a further concentration of creative effort by our poets.

 

For Hwang Suk-young, whose The Shadow of Arms (tr. Chun Kyung-Ja, Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) I critiqued in the 1989 essay, the ensuing decade proved mostly fallow years--years of exile, imprisonment and only limited productivity, following upon his unauthorized visit to North Korea in 1988. In 2000, however, he made an impressive comeback with the novel The Old Garden, reflecting some of his prison experience and his engagement with the radical activism of the 1980s. Yet it doesn't quite make the ground-breaking masterpiece that one could have wished for from so powerful a talent, though exhibiting anew that talent in numerous ways; while finest works by other novelists of the older generation (Pak Wan-so or Hyun Ki-young, for example) tended to be limited to shorter genres.

 

The younger writers who became prominent in the decade of 1990s are too numerous to attempt to sort out here. If pressed to name a single major work of fiction, I should cite The Solitary Room (1995) by Shin Kyongsuk, a novel that movingly recaptures, through a variety of sophisticated experimentation of narrative technique, the traumatic experiences of a sensitive girl worker in the grim years of the late 1970s and early '80s.To date the work remains a unique achievement even among the author's own oeuvre.

 

In poetry I find the outstanding achievement of the decade in the two collections (1996 and 1999) by Paek Musan, who first made his mark in the '80s as a militant working-class poet (along with the more famous Pak Nohae). Naturally, Kim Myongsu, Hwang Chi-u, Yi Sang-guk, and numerous others also have contributed their share.

 

If for all these achievements few critics are wholly sanguine about the prospects of our literature, we may find causes enough. For one thing, the decade of the '90s that began with the demise of Communism in the Soviet bloc witnessed a new triumph of the market and its consumer culture in the sphere of literature as well. The more genuine works, though not less numerous in absolute terms, would more easily be effaced by products of mere market value, to a degree unparalleled in the preceding decades. And fashionable critics haven't been lacking who would dress up these trends as the dawn of a new sensibility or as ideological liberation--not, of course, without a grain of truth.

 

The global phenomenon of new technological developments has also shifted the center of gravity of cultural production from the printed page to various new media. To bemoan this fact overmuch would be a sign of self-centeredness on the part of the literary world. Yet coupled with the rush of commercialization, and given the fact that in Korea the more popular genres still have only tenuous links with 'the art of the national tongue', this phenomen evokes justifiable concern that the 'art of history-making' too may suffer in this age of reunification.

 

In fact, the mood often approaches despondency among some long-time advocates of 'national literature'. I do not share that despondency. I believe that, while reflecting some real problems including those I have mentioned, it exaggerates their weight by either overprivileging the art of the printed word, or holding on to simplistic notions of 'national liberation' or 'political revolution'--notions that even in the days leading to June 1987 had mostly a tactical value in mobilizing the masses against military dictatorship.

 

But turning from this specific South Korean scene, despondency regarding the prospects of literature in these days of hastening globalization would seem to be shared by many with little sympathy with the concept of 'national literature'. For the age of reunification in Korea happens to coincide with 'the age of globalization', an age apparently inimical to the growth and preservation of genuine literature. And how will this age define or delimit the reunification process?

 

Delimit in one way or another it certainly will. Hence no prospect whatever--if there ever was any since the end of the Korean War--of a Vietnam-type takeover by the North; nor of the result of such a takeover (assuming it for argument's sake) asserting its independence from the world market, a fact amply demonstrated by the current policies of the unified Vietnam. Thus, the conventional wisdom in South Korea after Germany's reunification was that the logic of globalization would bring about a similar result in Korea, namely, the collapse of the North followed by its absorption into the capitalist South. The ensuing decade, however, has belied that wisdom, demonstrating the greater tenacity of Korea's division system in comparison with the worldwide Cold War regime. But precisely the logic of globalization, in combination with the efforts of the Korean people for democracy and reunification, has been destabilizing the division system and will continue to do so.

 

What makes the joint agreements of North and South Korean leaders truly historic is their having opened a way out of this dilemma by deciding to make the reunification process a truly innovative one, precluding either the Vietnamese or the German example. The agreements take sufficient cognizance of the global logic to undertake the process with realism, yet also display the much more uncommon realism that allows for an unprecedented process as an alternative to catastrophe.

 

It is neither ethnocentrism nor 'Korean exceptionalism' to imagine that a genuine overcoming of the division system--to my view the only substitute in the long run for war or chaos on the Korean Peninsula--may prove one of the more significant turning points in humanity's search for a more democratic and eco-friendly world system than the one we now have. In the same way, Korean literature engaging with this process may yet flourish to have provided a stronghold of human creativity in the days of global threat to its very existence.