[Kim Yeong-hui] Doing a Literary Journal in a Divided Country
Kim, Yeong-hui
Associate Professor of English Literature at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, with a Ph.D. from Seoul National University, 1991. Her publications include Objectivity and Praxis in Literary Criticism: A Study on F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams (1993) as well as essays on literature and feminism.
Though I am here to represent Changbi, it must be admitted that my talk today cannot be wholly representative. If someone else were here, he or she would draw a somewhat different picture, so please regard this as just one possible survey of the journal.
My talk will be divided into three parts: the characteristics of Changbi, its short history, and its main projects. (You can read brief introduction to Changbi and its history in the English version of the Changbi website: www.changbi.com.)
What kind of journal is Changbi?
Changjak-kwa-bipyong, Creation and Criticism in English and usually abbreviated into Changbi, is a quarterly journal with its primary focus on creative and critical writings in literature. This description, however, does not convey its peculiarity that many foreign observers have found quite striking: its interdisciplinary bent, so to speak, and its appeal to a large and varied readership. One Western observer, Perry Anderson, compared the journal to "the Russian thick journal--that 19th-century form combining critical manifestos and serialized novels, poetry and political essays."(Perry Anderson, "Diary," London Review of Books, October 17, 1996.) Or, as we are now in Japan and many of you must be more familiar with Japanese journals, I'd better quote another comparison proffered by a Japanese economist, Takizawa Hidekki. For him Changbi looks like a combination of three journals published by Iwanami Shoteng, Sekai, Shiso, and Bungaku.(Takizawa Hidekki, " Changbi in Japan, Changbi and I," Changjak-kwa-bipyong 91 (Spring, 1996), P35.) What these observers try to capture is the fact that the journal covers non-literary writings such as socio-political comments and scholarly articles in various disciplines. In this sense, each of the words in the title of the journal, Changjak -creation--and Bipyong --criticism--has a broader meaning of creative and critical thinking, though literature and literary criticism remain the core of each meaning.
This interdisciplinary bent has been both an intentional choice and a reflection of the significant position literature has held in the Korean society. The founders of the journal and their successors believe that literary efforts, creative or critical, cannot be dissociated from broader social interests without inducing serious loss on both sides. This means that literature is not a mere belle lettres but a mode of comprehensive critical reflection on the contemporary society, and that social thinking has a lot to gain by keeping close contact with concrete literary activities. In fact, modern Korean literature has been one of the important arenas where big questions such as democratization and reunification of the country have been tackled, and it has had not a small impact on social movements and trends. This comprehensive coverage of Changbi has proved successful, and has had many followers. With this format, Changbi has contributed to building a public sphere in South Korea.
The brief history of Changbi
C hangjak-kwa-bipyong started as a literary quarterly in 1966 and set up a publishing company with the same name in 1974. As a leading journal and an adventurous publishing house, Changbi has been a central voice in both the literary and intellectual world and also for its democratic national movement in South Korea. Changbi the journal saw its 110th issue this winter, which is an unprecedented achievement for a quarterly publication in Korea. This has been achieved in the face of enormous difficulties, including more than seven years of forced closure under General Chun Du-hwan's rule. Hence the gap of about 30 numbers of issue, as you may have found out with simple arithmetic: 4 * 35 = 140 not 110.
These difficulties are closely related with the political exigencies of Korean society. In the 1970s, Korea was experiencing an accelerated industrialization under the military dictatorship of Pak Chung-hee. Changbi and the intellectuals and writers around it began to develop critical perspectives including the discourse of "national literature," about which I will have more to say later on. This caused frequent clashes with the authorities, which regarded Changbi as a threat to their anti-democratic regime. Changbi the journal and the publishing company had to suffer: frequent bans and confiscations, arrests and/or imprisonments of authors, staff members, and editors. All three of its editors in the 1970s, Paik Nak-chung, Yom Mu-ung and Kim Yoon-su, were dismissed from professorship.
Soon after the coming to power of General Chun, which started with a massacre in Kwangju in 1980, Changbi the journal was forced to cease publication and in 1985 the publishing house, too, was closed down. This produced widespread protests both domestic and international. Many writers' and human rights organizations as well as individual writers and activists protested against such illegitimate measures. And I would like to take this opportunity to express gratitude, on behalf of Changbi, for the support from abroad both on that occasion and on numerous others.
Through these years, Changbi resorted to diverse tactics to get around government bans, publishing, for instance, two special issues of the journal as a 'mook' ('magazine book', i.e., a formally non-periodical volume with a magazine format) and, when one of them brought on government retaliation in the form of revoking the publishers' licence, getting a new one in 1986 with a slightly changed name of Changjak-sa. That is, public outrage forced the government to accept this compromise, in which we had to temporarily sacrifice the word 'bipyong' (or criticism). After the mass protest movements of June 1987, it regained its original name and resumed publishing the journal in early 1988.
Ever since its revival, Changbi has continued to grow both in size and intellectual scope. The company has published about 1,200 titles to date, and the journal usually prints close to 20,000 copies per issue. At the same time, Changbi is facing the difficult task of rethinking its projects and perspectives. The year 1987 when Changbi got its license back was one of the important turning points of Korean history, putting Korean society firmly on the path of continuing democratization. This progress, in conjunction with the changes at the global level, has radically changed the socio-cultural landscape of South Korea. It has increased skeptical sentiments about any radical social change and "the grand discourses" that still try to envision such change. Especially, such terms as nation, class, and/or people are now out of vogue. Changbi is often criticized for its refusal to give up these notions and discourses, while some of its long-standing supporters have been uncomfortable with its attempts to embrace and address new social and intellectual issues.
But we editors of Changbi feel that such controversy is inevitable if we are to rise to the challenges of the times and develop a more flexible and open perspective, while maintaining the rational kernel of our long-standing projects. Now I shall move on to the main projects Changbi has been committed to, and current efforts for their renewal.
Ongoing Projects of Changbi: discourses of national literature, division system, and the double project regarding modernity
It is always risky to sum up the projects of a journal. Still, many would agree that 'national literature' has been a distinctive mark of Changbi ever since the early 1970s. Many critics and writers have elaborated on national literature in its pages, thus helping to constitute a national literature movement, which fought for the democratization of Korea through literary and other practices. Thus, this discourse has had a quite broad impact, reaching over to non-literary intellectuals and activists.
Out of the social and historical reflections contained in this discourse have also developed two other, closely related, themes, especially since the rebirth of the journal in the late 1980s: a critique of the 'division system' on the Korean peninsula, on the one hand, and the related question of modernity, on the other. I shall try to convey the general theses of these three concerns, having in mind their implications for the theories now in vogue across the world, such as postmodernism and postcolonialism.
From its beginning, the discourse of national literature, especially as expounded by Prof. Paik Nak-chung, the founder and still the editor of Changbi, tried to historicize it and distinguish it from any simply nationalistic literature. It was conceptualized not as a universal category but as a historical one that derives its legitimacy from the specific conditions of Korean society under the division system. The epithet "national" in this context refers to commitment to the national ag enda of overcoming the division system, a task that cannot be reduced to nationalistic terms. We believe that nationalism can be mobilized both for and against the progressive forces, depending on the other ideas or causes it is combined with. National literature in Korea has tried to integrate the nationalist thrust with other progressive ideas. Among them we could list the perspectives of class and gender, and increasingly now, the ecological agenda.
Thus, Changbi's stance regarding nationalism always has been neither an uncritical acceptance nor a wholesale rejection. In this, it only partly agrees with the now rather trendy critique of nationalism, as expounded by some postcolonialists. Besides, in spite of the global movement of capital and information that tends to erase its boundary, the nation is still one of the most important arena in which many issues affecting everyday life have to be negotiated.
Still, there has been a change that we have come to maintain a greater critical distance from nationalism. This is partly because the position of South Korea in the world system has been changed from a peripheral to a semi-peripheral one. The negative side of Korean nationalism is coming to the fore. We witness it, for instance, in the racist treatment of laborers from Southeast Asia working in or outside Korea. In the same way, nationalism limited only to South Korean society can work as a negative force that distorts the efforts for reunification of Korea. In fact, the concept of nation becomes much more complex in the divided Korea, compared with other, unified nations. Its reference is double, or even triple: Korea as one nation, and two Koreas as separate states (yet neither of them a 'normal' nation state), to which we may add a third dimension of the broader Korean ethnic community comprising people living all over the world.
This has all along been the case, of course, but with the dramatic progress towards reunification we have seen during the past year, the necessity to theorize the complexity has correspondingly increased. This, along with the socio-cultural changes mentioned above, has led to a new debate about national literature. The issue now is whether it is still a valid conception. As about nationalism itself, Changbi's position is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, we agree that the concept of national literature has become too complicated to be used as a rallying word for progressive writers, so that sticking to the name may cause more harm than benefit, as it risks dividing people and thought into predefined camps and tenets. On the other hand, we refuse to accept that the literary and social perspectives contained in it have become obsolete.
Among the national agenda that we believe to be still legitimate or even to have become more urgent, is that of overcoming the division of Korean peninsula in such a way that the majority of the population will end up living under a better system than the currently dominant one in either half of the peninsula. Thus, the discourse on the division system, again expounded chiefly by Paik Nak-chung, argues that the division of North and South Korea has grown into something like a distinctive system that has its own reproductive mechanisms. The two antagonistic regimes rely on each other in effect for maintaining the status quo.
While Korea's division is unique in that it has taken on a systemic nature, it is still a subsystem of the capitalist world-system (as set for by Immanuel Wallerstein and others). The theory of the 'division system' thus attempts to respect the local specificity of the Korean situation as well as to place this specificity in a global viewpoint. To overcome this system demands not just any reunification, but one that would enable a better society on each side and on the entire peninsula as well. This, in turn, would be possible only when we find out a way of reunification that is different from either the German or the Vietnamese case. In fact, we feel that these options, where one system absorbed the other, are not probable, let alone desirable, in Korea. The peaceful reunification of two Koreas would mean, at least partly, an innovative combination of socialist and capitalist institutions, even though within the confines of the capitalist world-system. This, if realized, will be a valuable experiment that has something to offer to those who dream of a different and better world system than the one we now have. Thus, reunification as a modern project of building a nation state in the Korean peninsula contains as well some postmodern seeds within it.
This leads me to the third main theme, the question of modernity. As you may have guessed already from what I have said, Changbi has developed what we call 'the double project of simultaneously adapting to and overcoming modernity'. Again, the view of modernity is not a simple one. Besides being an inescapable condition for everybody in this age of global capitalism, modernity has achieved many things valuable enough for us to learn and adopt. These achievements, however, have been possible only with the systemic oppression and exploitation of marginal classes, races and ethnic groups, and of the marginalized gender.
Overcoming modernity and reaching true postmodernity, though some mistakenly contend that we are already living it, is the same with building a new, non-capitalist world order and civilization. This is possible only by going through modernity, not by bypassing it. Moreover, if the new order is to be more democratic, humane, and open, every possible resource should be mobilized. Wholesale rejection of modernity is neither realistic nor desirable as an option.
We have to learn not only from the present but also from the past, the traditional, pre-capitalist cultures and civilizations. The traditional ways of living and thinking may provide some clues for building a non-capitalist civilization. Situated in Northeast Asia, Changbi has been interested in the traditional East Asian civilization and its potentialities that could be utilized for alternative cultures and perspectives. This does not mean that the traditional elements, in and of themselves, can be an alternative. For one thing, they have generally colluded with authoritarian and patriarchal systems. If only for this reason, the traditional elements must pass through the fire of modernity.
The question of modernity is in essence a global question. Here and in other projects, Changbi as a journal and a publishing house has committed itself to a dialogue with foreign scholars, publishing their articles and books and holding international gatherings. Among those involved in such dialogue are Perry Anderson, Bruce Cumings, Fredric Jameson, Wada Haruki, Wang Hui, Norma Field, Boris Kagarlitsky, Alex Callinicos, Immanuel Wallerstein, and many others.
I believe that this conference will be a good occasion for Changbi to enlarge its solidarity with progressive intellectuals and activists from Asia and beyond.