KJC Korea
Journal Central

Hwang Sun-won’s novel “The Sun and the Moon” (Ilwol), published in the 1960s, received much attention both within and outside the literary world for its treatment of the issue of the butcher. The novel dealt with minorities’ response to social discrimination through brothers from a butcher background. In the novel, the older brother regards his job as sacred, while the younger brother becomes a bourgeoisie while concealing his humble status. This narrative structure was not a unique pattern of this work, but rather a feature founded in many works dealing with minorities. However, in this work, Hwang Soon-won described the butcher as a person discriminated against due to his social status, which is anachronistic considering that 70 years have passed since the class system was abolished. In fact, regarding the butcher’s life during the Japanese colonial period, professional hatred was more realistic than class discrimination. Nevertheless, cracks occurred in the narrative due to the author’s narrow view of defining the butchers only by their social status identity. These limitations were not unique to this work. As a minority, the butcher was at the intersection of not only social status but also occupation, class, and gender. Only by considering this complex perspective will it be possible to reveal in detail the aspects of butchers’ existence and explore various possibilities for solidarity

This article analyzes Kim Sung-jon’s novel “The Eyes of Dawn” to examine how student soldiers and ‘comfort women’, who were forcibly mobilized in the imperial war, are given different historical and social positions through the post-liberation and the Korean War. At the end of the Japanese colonial period, student soldiers and ‘comfort women’ have a sense of solidarity as colonial peoples despite the asymmetric power relationship of ‘comfort women’ in the wartime violence organization called wianso (慰安所, brothels). However, the solidarity formed as a counterpoint to the empire had no choice but to change according to the dynamics of ‘imperial-colonial’. In the post-liberation period, student soldiers advance as the subject of the historical ‘mission’ of nationbuilding, but ‘comfort women’ are again subordinated to the woman’s ‘fate’. At this time, the novel’s strategy to start a new era with a new generation reorganizes the structure of the confrontation between left and right wings during the post-liberation into ‘student soldiers vs. student soldier’. Through this, colonialism that has been passed down from those from the Japanese military is eliminated. These narratives show that ‘comfort women’, who were removed from the solidarity of the colonial people, were excluded from the present history by becoming a symbol of the past. In addition, it shows a mechanism by which the Allied/Korean military ‘comfort women’ that continued to exist on the Korean Peninsula were concealed. This article reveals that ‘comfort women’ were omitted from the representation of young people at the end of the Japanese colonial period represented by ‘student soldier’. Furthermore, it critically examines the paradoxical mechanism of ‘politics of memory’ in which by becoming a ‘symbol’ of history, one is excluded from history.

This article examines the relationship between the bodies and ideologies of unconverted long-term prisoners from the perspective of affect, through the novel of Kim Ha-gi. This focuses on the suffering bodies of unconverted long-term prisoners, and attempts to explore the ethical tension inherent in the act of articulating others' suffering. In Kim Ha-gi’s texts, the unconverted long-term prisoners are particularly described as shedding many tears. This affective plethora is due to the fact that unconverted long-term prisoners were controlled in a way that reduced their body's abilities as much as possible. Every time they experienced physical pain, the prisoners lost their sense of time and were thrown into moments of narrative wreckage. Each time, they sought to restore the narrative of their interrupted lives through storytelling. Strangely enough, the revolutionary optimism they show makes the observer feel cruelty. This is because the optimism inherent in their attachment to ideology constantly threatens their well-being. However, this recognition of cruelty is based on the perspective of an “observer” who has never been a “trapped body.” The conversion system was replaced by the law-abiding oath system in 1998 and abolished in 2003, but it still detains the bodies of unconverted long-term prisoners while deciding whether to repatriate them to North Korea. The case of unconverted long-term prisoners who were not repatriated to North Korea for having embraced religion and thus being considered a convert, questions who is the subject that cruelly shapes their optimism about unification. Therefore, remembering the “trapped bodies” of unconverted long-term prisoners would be the minimum ethical practice.