LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
In Search of a Lost Seoul scrap
by Jung Yeo-ul
November 9, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Park Tae Won
Park Tae Won explores Seoul in the 1930s, and in a way
that is impossible to recover solely through photographs,
vividly restores the city to life.
Seoul: population 10,000,000, Miracle on the Han River, sixth highest population density in the world, 13th highest GDP. Yet even with this flowery praise, it’s difficult to see the true Seoul. In order to uncover what Seoul means to the lives of Koreans, we must reconstruct its history and customs. To that end, Park Tae Won’s autobiographical novel, A Day of Novelist Mr. Gubo, is a monumental work. Set in 1934 during the colonial era, a Korean novelist named Gubo pens a fascinating novel based on the record of his aimless wanderings around the city of Seoul for a day. If Walter Benjamin roamed around Paris, the capital of empire in the 1930s, and gazed upon the light and darkness of civilization, then writer Park Tae Won roamed Gyeongseong, the old name for Seoul and the capital of colonized Joseon, while examining the past and future of human civilization. Gubo the young novelist, kept one hand on his walking stick and the other on his notebook as he set out in search of subject matter to write about.
A Day of Novelist Mr. Gubo vividly restores the daily life of Seoul in the 1930s that can only now be found in photographs. The account of Gubo’s aimless expedition around the city shows us – modern people who live repetitive, mechanical lives back and forth along the same path to work each day – that even the same city we walk through every day can become a grandiose spectacle unfolding before us like the adventures of Odysseus. The 1930s were a time when traditions of the past were collapsing and giving way to new symbols of civilization being built all over the city. If the old days of Joseon were like an “old, downtrodden, far too downtrodden, palace” to Park Tae Won, then the ever-changing Gyeongseong was a symbol of modernity with its “lively crowds.”
In Gyeongseong, the old and new coexisted dynamically. It was a city of worldly aspirations “where even lyric poets hoped to strike it rich,” and a space of tradition where the women gathered close together on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon Stream to scrub laundry and talk about the events of the day.
Gyeongseong in the 1930s was much smaller than current-day Seoul, but it lacked for almost none of the requirements of a modern city. Filled with department stores and banks, streetcars and cafes, Gyeongseong revealed the archetype of Seoul, which would become the megalopolis that it is today. Interestingly enough, though Gubo did not have a fixed occupation, he referred to himself as a “modernologist.”
If archaeology revives history and customs through past relics, then “modernology” divines the future from the present through the study of contemporary customs.
Gubo believed that he could become a writer through the process of closely examining Gyeongseong in his own era, the 1930s. The café that he drops into four or more times a day is not simply a space of leisure, but a creative space where he can record his observations of the city. The secret hideout and base camp for this starving artist turned out to be a café right in the heart of Seoul.
Gyeongseong, which was the subject of modernology for Gubo, has now become a subject of archaeology that must be restored anew. A Day of Novelist Mr. Gubo was a record of the present for Park Tae Won, but for people living in 21st century Seoul, it is a legacy of a past that cannot be restored. His novel has been a source of inspiration to countless writers and intellectuals, as well as the subject of various parodies and theses alike. What would happen if we were to follow Gubo’s journey through Seoul, which has become all too familiar to us and lost its newness? Let’s wander the streets of Seoul with A Day of Novelist Mr. Gubo as our travel guide. Perhaps it will take us on a pleasant adventure “in search of lost time.”
Writer 필자 소개
Jung Yeo-ul
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