2015, Vol.8, No.1

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

Im Hwa (林和) — pioneer poet, critic and literary historian as well as reviled collaborator and accused spy—is one of the prominent colonial-period authors whose careers remain controversial because twentieth-century Korean history itself still is. Although a wolbuk (越北) writer whose work languished under erasure until post-Park Chung-Hee democratization in the ROK, critical reading of Im in neither the North nor the South halted entirely after his Pyongyang mass show-trial and execution in 1953. Building on early work by Kim Yun-Sik (金充植) in the ROK, Ōmura Masuo (大村益夫) in Japan, and many younger scholars in the U.S., my contribution within my larger project on pro-Japan Korean intellectuals under Japanese rule, is the history of Im’s reception in postwar Japan, where the legacies of shinnichi/chinil (親日) writers animate their own involved, ongoing anxieties over the unresolved historical consensus of the empire’s record of voluntary and involuntary complicity. I focus on Matsumoto Seichō’s (松本清張, 1962–63) biographical novel of Im, Poet of the North (Kita no shijin, 北の詩人). Instrumental in propagating a far from disinterested portrait of Im that still circulates in Japan fifty years after its publication, Poet of the North is evidence of how one writer’s reputation, already distorted by a lifetime spent initially under imperialism and then Stalinism, continues to be manipulated in Japan amid combined colonial revisionism and Cold War politics.

This paper analyzes several films produced in Korea during the era of its colonization by Japan that pose interesting questions about the problem of internalization, or colonization of the mind. While on the one hand, these works can seem to present examples of Korean characters quite literally internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese authority, they can also problematize the assumption that there is a distinct subject with an established “inside” open to absorbing such commands. This is further complicated, I will argue, by the fact that the cinema of the Japanese metropole was itself often contradictory, despite and sometimes because of its place in a colonial empire. These Korean films offer multiple examples of complex subjectivities crisscrossed by split subjectivities and intersubjective relations that render it difficult to clearly demarcate “internal” and “external.” This paper will be one step in an effort to use close stylistic and film analysis to consider the questions of colonial film and cultural colonization on the level of the cinematic text.

While Beckett, with his aesthetics of ignorance and impotence, has often been claimed as an antihumanist, his abiding artistic concern remained the elusive question of the human and its ends or purposes. Admittedly, this humanism is “cruelly humane,” as it compulsively excavates the depths of human abjection, suffering and infirmity; but even as the human remains unknowable in Beckett, the impetus to “go on” with the endeavor is appallingly resilient and affecting — and, artistically, it is remarkably fruitful. What emerges from this inexhaustible drive for ends and purposes, in a world of “finality without end” or “purpose without purposiveness,” is a kind of play, which ranges from the laughable and pitiful to the excruciating and poignant. And it is precisely in this play, I argue, that Beckettian humanism and Beckettian aesthetics converge. Revising the aesthetic tradition of Kant and Schiller, his work rejects the beautiful, and its putative harmonization of the mental faculties, as the privileged and proper domain of art; instead, it activates a confrontational aesthetic, the experience of which is predominantly one of discord and discomfort. Through its play, this aesthetic takes us back to our human finitude, revealing, in place of freedom and transcendence, the indefinite and grimly humorous. For Beckett, then, play seems to be constitutive of both the art and the human, and we are never more human than when we play. The ends and meaning will remain indefinite, but such play may have the capacity to revitalize the imagination and encourage us to go on, wherever that may be.