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“The birth of a baby” and the future of “Imperial subjects”- On Kim Nam-cheon's “A Certain Morning”

Jinhyoung Lee 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I tried to analyze the contents of the writing “A certain morning” focusing on its writing style and also interpret what it tries to say considering the political and ideological environment surrounding the period of the work. Kim Nam-cheon in 1940s understood the novels focusing on the setting and disposition of characters. In the essay “Novels of tow doctors”, he thought that rather than setting the main character having positive (active) personality for the work, it would be better to set the various characters (the type) living in ordinary life to show his theme in the book. His thought like this was realized in the book “A Certain Morning”. In this work, a centeral character “I” is set as an observer. There are also a lot of various kinds of characters surrounding “me” in Late Colonial Era. With this kind of setting, he could show the fall of intellectuals in the period of colonialism, fall of enlightenment idea, appearance of family ideology and loyal man ideology as well as the lifestyle of Korean under the project of Japanese imperial subjectivation (including singing the Japanese military songs, physical exercises and elementary school system). In the understanding of “A Certain Morning”, the personality of “I” is critical as it has the idea of “Imitator of imitator” and “person who respects men but looks down upon women”. First as the personality of imitator of imitator, he showed the internal logic of the project of Japanese imperial subjectivation (imitation mechanism), and exposed the paradoxical mixture of identity (kokumin = loyal man to Japan) and hierarchical heterogeneity (kokumin as a model ≠loyal man to Japan as imitator). Next, the personality of person who respects men but looks down upon women showed the inequality of society. It showed that the society in Late Colonial Era was where the unequal relation was kept to continue while the promise of equality was told. In this work, the motive of “the birth of a baby” went forward to historize the paradoxical status of society. As the future of the baby was raise as a question, the sociey in Late Colonial Era was related to the necessity of repetition of the paradoxical status and the possibility of deconstruction of the paradoxical status. “A Certain Moring” is hard to define as work for either the cooperation with the imperial power or the resistance to it. It is because in this work, there is no way to get out of the paradoxical status of colonial society and Imperial subjects or any visions alternative to this status. Instead, this work has thematized the project of Japanese imperial subjectivation itself that conditioned the cooperation with and resistance to the colonialism, so showed another possibilities in the literary works of Korean's in Late Colonial Era.

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