20th Century Korean History and Literature

In twentieth-century Korean history, there are said to be two periods hard to treat with with absolute objectivity and fairness. One is the period of Japanese imperialism, and the other, the struggle between the Right and the Left, mainly in the post-liberation years.

So said Uchang Kim in his article The Agony of Cultural Construction (Hagen Koo ed. State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Cornell University, 1993).

Memories of those two periods cannot be recalled calmly or be laid to rest, for they involved not only suffering, but also shame and guilt. Memories had also reportedly become troubled dreams filled with trauma and repression.

"The question of collaboration with the Japanese, for instance, had never been faced squarely, but it may be in the process of being forgotten, not only because of the passage of time but also because of its diminishing relevance to the present."

Actually there were attempts to face the question of Japanese collaboration "squarely" since current president Roh Moo-hyun came into power. But that is another story altogether.

Kim also noted that if Korea had witnessed a tremendous upsurge of interest in various aspects of the Korean Communist movement, from the revolutionary poetry of the post-liberation period to the thoughts of Kim Il Sung, it was simply a case of "the return of the repressed."

"This return has been in preparation for quite a while, as the national psyche labored to repossess the whole of the modern history down to the most painful recent past."

Quoting Cho Chongrae, Kim noted that looking at history, there seemed to be validity in saying that the injuries and conflicts of history could not be resolved unless they went through the "filtering process of stories and novels."

"Take the Nazis and Israelis. There had to be innumerable novels, movies and plays before there could be forgiveness, before there could be acceptance. Only after all the tragic facts were brought to light and emotions and feelings were filtered to an equilibrium, there was acceptance ... What we ought to do is to restore tragedies that have been made emotionally uniform and ideologically fixed, for political reasons, and reflect upon them anew. This must be done through literature, not by political slogans or political movements alone."