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(Re)constructing the Korean War Period Yom Sang-seop’s Hongyeom-Saseon

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2022, 79(1), pp.281-316
  • DOI : 10.17326/jhsnu.79.1.202202.281
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : January 10, 2022
  • Accepted : February 8, 2022
  • Published : February 28, 2022

YU, SEOHYUN 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Yom Sang-seop’s linked novellas Hongyeom (Red Flame) and Saseon (Dead Line), have long been excluded from research as poor works mired in the popular and everyday. However, it is worth re-illuminating the following aspects of these works. First, in relation to the Korean War, Hongyeom-Saseon focuses not on the visible enemy (North Korea and the Communist Camp), but on invisible bearers of responsibility (The United States and South Korean Government). These works remind us that late June, 1950 was not only the eve of the Korean War but also a period in which a United States anxious about the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty deepened the Cold War while preparing the Treaty of Peace with Japan. At the same time, the novellas reveal how the South Korean government, relying too heavily on the US and UN, compounded the confusion in the early days of the war by acting irresponsibly. Second, Hongyeom-Saseon offers insight into the contemporary mind of Yom Sangseop during the liberation period as a centrist and supporter of the 1948 North-South Conference and peaceful unification. Yom presents several specific events occurring in 1948 and 1950 which are connected by the idea of unification via left-right coalition. This context also explains the centering of the novellas’ discussion of the May 30, 1950 elections on the rise of “independent (=centrist)” candidates and peaceful-unification candidate Cho Bong-am. Lastly, Hongyeom-Saseon’s romance narrative not only reveals the limits of Yom Sang-seop’s imagination as a male intellectual in the 1950s, but also offers contemporary readers the possibility of discovering a new politics within it. Yom conveys his concerns about the Korean Peninsula during the cold war by overlapping ‘those responsible for breaking the peace on the peninsula’ with ‘those responsible for breaking the peace of the family.’ In the process, middle-aged women characters who break away from the family become the central object of criticism in the two novellas, yet because these characters become the focal point of the narrative, oppositional decoding is made possible. Turning our attention from the love triangle of SeonokHonam-Chwiweon to the relationship between Seonok and Chwiweon themselves, it is possible to see in Hongyeom-Saseon’s romance narrative not simply the presence/absence of the patriarch, but also a process of women’s identity formation via imitation and recognition between two women.

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