Dissent and Memory

From the 1960s to the 1980s South Korea was under military-led governments and was industrialising fast. The survey source says writers in this period wrote against the establishment and about the cost of rapid change. This chapter looks at four writers the articles tie to those years, and at how one event, the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, became a subject of later books.

The Setting

Chapter 7's survey article said that in the 1970s anti-establishment literature addressed rapid industrialisation, "including neglect of farmers". The Kim Chi-ha article describes the regime of Park Chung Hee, who took power in a 1961 coup. The Gwangju Uprising article describes martial law under Chun Doo-hwan in 1980. None of the five pages describes the censorship system or the economy in detail, so I describe neither.

Kim Chi-ha: The Poet Who Went Underground

The article gives Kim Chi-ha (born Kim Yeongil, 1941 to 2022) as a South Korean poet and playwright and a dissident under Park's government. He used the pen name Jiha, which the article says is the Korean word for "underground". His 1970 poem Five Bandits led to his arrest under the Anti-Communist Law; the article notes the poem "says nothing about either communism or North Korea", is read as a satire of Park, and the magazine that printed it was pulled from circulation. A ballad, Groundless Rumors, uses pansori rhythm, as Five Bandits does, to satirise corruption among those in power. He was tried and sentenced to death in 1974, after a public outcry the sentence was commuted to life, and he was later released; he was jailed again after accusing the government of torture in the People's Revolutionary Party case. My reading, not the article's: the use of pansori rhythm (Chapter 5) shows an old form being used for a new purpose. The article says nothing about any international campaign or later controversy, so I say nothing either.

Cho Se-hui: The Cost of Redevelopment

The article on The Dwarf describes Cho Se-hui's 1978 Korean novel (the Korean title, as the article gives it, means roughly "a little ball launched by a dwarf"; the English edition shortened it) as set in 1970s Seoul, around the forced redevelopment of a district and its human costs. A dwarf and his family are evicted when their district is redeveloped; the dwarf dies by suicide in a factory smokestack, one son becomes a murderer, and the daughter turns to semi-prostitution to try to win back the family's home, and her attempt fails. The book is a yeonjak soseol, a linked novel: loosely connected stories first published in Korean magazines between 1975 and 1978, in non-chronological order. The article describes a blend of realism with a fantastic structure and a flat, direct tone, and reads it as social criticism of measurement, standardisation and commodification. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton translated it (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). It was a bestseller in Korea and was adapted as the 1980 film A Small Ball Shot by a Midget. The article hedges: a claim about the title spelling is sourced to an unclear source, and a critic's claim that the novel is paternalistic towards labourers is tagged "citation needed". It quotes Cho's 2009 remark: "I can't believe that novel has been read until the present."

Park Wan-suh: War, Memory and Women's Lives

The article gives Park Wan-suh (20 October 1931 to 22 January 2011) as a South Korean novelist and essayist. She published "The Naked Tree" in 1970, at 40. Her early fiction is grouped under "the tragic events of Korean War and its aftermath", and the Life section says the war separated her from her mother and elder brother and ended her studies at Seoul National University early. From the 1980s she turned toward "problems afflicting women in patriarchal society", and The Dreaming Incubator is cited as a critique of male-centred family expectations. The article says Who Ate Up All the Shinga? sold about 1.5 million copies in Korean. It lists the Yi Sang Literary Award (1981), the Dong-in Literary Award (1994), the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts (2006) and the Order of Cultural Merit (2011), and English translations including The Naked Tree, The Red Room and Sketch of the Fading Sun. It describes her work as "revered" in Korea and, for The Naked Tree, a reading of the mother as "an empty shell" that it attributes to its sources.

Hwang Sok-yong: Vietnam, Gwangju and Prison

The article gives Hwang Sok-yong (born 4 January 1943) as a South Korean novelist, born in Xinjing (now Changchun) in Manchukuo, who studied philosophy at Dongguk University. He served in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps from 1966 to 1969, including clearing up evidence of civilian massacres, and the experience inspired his story "The Pagoda" (1970). His first novel was Mr. Han's Chronicle (1970), and Jang Gilsan, a satirical saga of a bandit serialised from 1974 to 1984, is estimated to have sold a million copies. The Shadow of Arms (1985) is based on his Vietnam service, and The Guest (2002) is about a massacre in North Korea; Mater 2-10 was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. He took part in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, and in 1985 was jailed after agreeing to be credited as author of a Gwangju memoir to help market it. He travelled to Pyongyang illegally in 1989, lived in exile in New York and Germany, returned to Seoul in 1993, was sentenced to seven years under the National Security Law and was pardoned in 1998 after about five years; the article says he staged 18 hunger strikes in prison. He described Korea's reality as a "nation-wide state of homelessness".

Gwangju in Literature

The Gwangju Uprising article gives the dates as 18 to 27 May 1980. Students protested martial law under Chun Doo-hwan, troops suppressed the demonstrations violently from 18 May, armed citizens took control of much of the city, and the army retook it on 27 May. It says Chun cut off communication to and from Gwangju and used disinformation portraying the protests as communist-instigated.

The article says there is "no universally accepted death toll". It also says disputing official figures could once lead to arrest for "spreading false rumors", and that denial of the massacre is "commonly espoused" by conservative and far-right groups, which is its characterisation. It dates memorialisation: a National Assembly hearing and renaming in 1988, an official memorial day in 1997, a national cemetery in 2002, a UNESCO Memory of the World listing for the uprising's documents in 2011 and a Truth Commission in 2020. Among books and films it lists: Human Acts (Han Kang, 2016), The Old Garden (Hwang Sok-yong), There a Petal Silently Falls (Choe Yun, 2008), adapted as A Petal (1996), Peppermint Candy (1999), May 18 (2007), A Taxi Driver (2017) and 1987: When the Day Comes (2017).

Exercises

Next chapter: Contemporary Writers and the Translation Boom.