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Kim Seungok: A Literature of and for the Self scrap
by Steven D. Capener
November 9, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Kim Seungok
I first came across the literature of Kim Seungok in the late 1990s while teaching in the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Ewha Womans University. It immediately struck me as different from anything I had read before (and from anything I have read since). My interest was piqued and, later, while working on my PhD in Korean literature, I gave his work a good deal of attention.
Kim Seungok quite literally burst onto the literary scene as a precocious college student in 1962 with the publication of "Practice for Life" in the Hanguk Ilbo. His career as a writer was, comparatively speaking, not particularly prolific nor long (he wrote almost all of his major works in the decade of the 60s); he produced only 15 short stories, three novellas, four novels, two unfinished works, and one collection of essays. The impact of his work on the Korean literary establishment, however, was unquestionably significant. Critics of the period pointed to two aspects of his literature that made it noteworthy: one was that his prose had achieved a “revolution of sensibility,” and the other was that in his writing was a “discovery of the self.”
I found both of these points attractive, but the second, in particular, held more fascination for me. The deeper I went into Kim’s literary world, the more I began to suspect that a major theme running through his work had to do with a subversion of the overriding social project of the day. In 1961, Park Chung-hee came into power through a military coup and in 1963 he was elected president. As everyone knows, he instituted a project of industrialization and export-led growth that changed Korea in a way that has come to be described as “compressed modernization.” No one disputes the great economic strides made during his rule. However, in my opinion, in order to achieve his goals, Park re-made the modern Korean in his own image. He re-Confucianized and re-conservatized society, setting himself up as a father figure and demanding loyalty and sacrifice from his children.
For me, more than anything else, Kim Seungok’s literature is a manifesto of loyalty to the self over this rapidly turning, highly homogenized society. In his debut story “Practice for Life” he talks about having “a world of one’s own,” and describes it thus:
I think a world of one’s own is clearly different than others’ worlds and is like an impregnable fortress. I imagine that the air inside that castle is of a light green hue and shimmers and that there is a garden full of blooming roses. But, for some reason, the people I know with “their own worlds” all live in the basements of their castles where mold grows and spider webs are being continuously spun. And I think these are precious possessions to their owners.
In Kim’s story “Yeoksa” (1963), the protagonist moves from a boarding house in the run-down neighborhood of Changshin-dong near Dongdaemun into a new western-style house where he rents a room from the family who owns it. Here is where we first see the clear emergence of a theme that will dominate much of his literature: the desire to resist this totalizing, homogenizing drive toward progress that was the new spirit of the day. The new house, run by a “small, wiry grandfather” (Park Chung-hee), operates on a very strict schedule from which no one may deviate: Wake-up at six, breakfast together, then the men leave for work; at ten the grandmother and wife run their sewing machines; at noon the radio is turned on; at four the wife practices the piano (always the same song); all must return home by six thirty for dinner; after dinner ten minutes of conversation is allowed then each to their rooms to study; at five or six to ten, all must come to the living room for a cup of barley tea then return to their rooms to sleep. Even the three-year-old baby lives by these regulations. The house is characterized by “cleanliness,” regulations,” and “order.” When the protagonist tries to play his guitar one evening the grandfather appears to sternly rebuke him:
“There are times when you suddenly feel like playing the guitar. This is a natural desire of the emotions and should not be an object of censor. So there I was, tuning the strings of my guitar, when suddenly the door of my room opened and the grandfather came in. He informed me that henceforth, my guitar playing time would be at ten in the morning while the wife and grandmother were sewing. This was the first time that the family traditions of this household were directly applied to me. However, I never once played my guitar during the allowed time. I never felt like playing then.”
He compares this world with the one he came from. His former boarding house was everything the western style house is not: old, small, and most of all lacking in order and regulations. The people who populate it are misfits unqualified to live in the new society under construction: a lame man and his deformed 10-year-old daughter, a prostitute, and a “strong man” who sells his strength as a day laborer and drinks away his earnings. His father was Chinese and his mother Korean and he comes from a long line of Chinese strongmen. Now, he keeps his tradition alive by getting drunk and rearranging the enormous stone blocks of Dongdaemun gate. The protagonist, after comparing these two worlds comes to following conclusion:
“These people’s (the family in the western style house) attitude showed that they really thought they were marching forward. But, even though the lives of those people who lived in the Changshin-dong slum may have seemed to be merely stuck in place, they were fuller lives than could be lived in this house.”
The protagonist comes to the conclusion that life in the house is nothing but an empty husk, with no real life in it and decides to antagonize the grandfather into rejecting him so that (we presume) he can return to Changshin-dong.
Kim Seungok’s literature is full of such depictions of the desire not to be incorporated into the “progress” that was going on around him as the price, he had apparently decided, was too great: the loss of freedom, imagination, and, “self” (a word Kim’s narrators use frequently). He was a courageous writer who did what such writers must: give a voice to those who don’t have one.
Kim Seungok was one of the reasons that I decided to major in Korean literature. Unfortunately, he is woefully under-translated and remains little known even to most Koreans. I hope this changes.
* Steven D. Capener was born in Montana, in the U.S. He received a PhD in modern Korean literature from Yonsei University and currently teaches literature and literary translation at Seoul Women’s University.
Writer 필자 소개
Steven D. Capener
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