Literature Above and Beyond Ideology

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the summer issueof Korean Literature Now. I am particularly excitedabout this issue as the featured writer Choi In-hun is, inmy opinion, one of the most important writers of the modernperiod.I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity tostudy the writings of Choi In-hun in graduate school in acourse titled “Philosophy and Literature.” Anyone who hasread his fiction will understand why he would be included ina course with a philosophical approach to literature. Muchof his writing, especially his longer works like The Square orA Grey Man, are essentially philosophic investigations of theexistential question of identity, or, more precisely, Koreanidentity.In The Square, the protagonist Lee Myong-jun parsesaway the façades created by the regimes of both the Southand North in search of something Korean to “lovest well”that it might “remain,” to borrow the words of Ezra Pound.He finds that the South is characterized by the “private room”where politicians and businessmen meet to be entertained bywomen while making their crooked deals. Here, he is tarredwith the red brush of Communism (by association), so hedefects to the North where he hopes to gather in the publicsquare, dyed the brilliant red of revolutionary blood withother patriotically minded Koreans, only to find that thesquare is the grey color of ash, and filled with empty slogansand mechanical bureaucracy. Thus, his frustration with theself-interestedness of the South (“total absence of faith”) ismatched by his disillusionment with the bankrupt ideology ofthe North (“fanaticism”).He is captured during the war while fighting for theNorth but he knows that upon being repatriated he will notbe thanked but rather perpetually suspected of having beeninfected by “imperialist germs.” In this brutally bifurcatedKorea there is nowhere for Myong-jun to stand, and hechooses to be sent to a third “neutral” country, one to whichhe never arrives. This is a keen indictment of the gap betweenthe rhetoric and the reality of a “we” (uri) that is, if anything,wider now than when this story was written in 1960. Hereinlies the source of Choi’s continuing popularity and relevance,and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of thecauses of the intransigence of the two Korea’s would benefitfrom reading his work.As part of the Featured Writer section, we have anoverview of Choi In-hun’s literature by professor DennisWuerthner of Ruhr-University Bochum, an interview withChoi In-hun by professor Bang Min-Ho of Seoul NationalUniversity, and an excerpt of the novel taken from theexcellent English translation by Kim Seong-Kon, President ofthe Literature Translation Institute of Korea.The summer issue also includes a Special Section whichgives voice to the young generation of Korea. This generationexperienced the IMF bailout early in their lives, and theresulting economic recession, shift in values, and overlycompetitive environment has left an imprint on how they date,dwell, and work. In Bookmark, fiction by Kim Ae-ran, JonKyongnin, Hwang Jungeun, and Yoo Jaehyun and the poetry ofKim Su-Young are introduced in English for the first time.I feel that the summer issue is one of our strongest issuesto date and, with that, let me wish our readers a safe andmemorable summer, hopefully made more enjoyable byKorean Literature Now.

Steven D. Capener 

Associate Professor of Literature and

Translation Studies 

Seoul Women’s University