Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyoong'ae's "Underground Village"

Kyeong-Hee Choi

Modern Korean literature, which emerged and matured during the period of colonial rule by Japan (1910–45), is conspicuously populated by physically anomalous characters. Following the nine-year period of military rule introduced by the 1910 annexation, the two decades under the relatively more open “cultural policy”1 produced an intriguing array of stories with disabled characters. A quick survey of titles illustrates this literary preoccupation: Na Tohyang’s “Samnyong the Mute” (1925) and Yi K¡ny|ng’s “The Mute Who Speaks” (1936); Ch|ng Ilsu’s “The Blind Son” (1932) and ¿m Hongs|p’s “Loss of Eyesight” (1940); Song Sunil’s “The Deformed” (or “The Sick Body”) (1926), Song Y|ng’s “The Story of a Hunchback” (1929), and Kim Py|ngje’s “The Arm That Fell Off” (1930); An S|ky|ng’s “The Disabled” (1930), Han Int’aek’s “Agonies of the Disabled” (1932), and Yi Chaehwan’s “The Disabled” (1937).2 Narratives about the allegedly cognitively disabled or mentally ill also emerged, as writers depicted or played on such figurations as “idiot” (ch’|nch’i, paekch’i), “fool” (pabo), or “crazy person” (kwang’in).3 Not just prose fiction, but dramatic works as well, pursued themes of physical and mental impairment.4

More intense thematization of the physically disabled might have been expected in works written in the wake of the internecine Korean War (1951–53). But this expectation is hardly met. To be sure, disability surfaces in a good number of stories produced after liberation from Japan5—but, given the spectacular increase in publication following the war and the reconstruction, literary narratives that foreground physically impaired people are relatively few, and they differ significantly from their predecessors. After the war, narratives involving disability show the tendency to stress psychological or mental impairments. During the colonial period, however, writers exhibited more interest in bodily anomaly. Moreover, in the colonial period, disabled and impaired figures are presented not as an isolated minority, but as a potential majority. This framing of collectivity, whether national or class-based, is weakened in works of the later period.

Looking afield to vernacular culture, it can be seen that very few traditional Korean tales highlight the disabled figure in the first place. The few exceptions include “The Story of Sim Ch’|ng,” a narrative of filial piety in which a daughter sacrifices herself to restore her blind father’s eyesight;6 “Song of an Old Spinster,” a first-person poetic narrative that addresses how the narrator’s “deformed” status (py|ngsin: “sick body”) causes her singleness;7 and a minor and incidental reference in “The Tale of H¡ngbu,” in which blind men from all over the country appear from a magical gourd to chastise the antagonist for his greediness and to extort money from him.8 It thus appears that the proliferation of stories about the disabled during the latter half of the colonial period is no historical accident.

In their introduction to The Body and Physical Difference, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder state that the discourse of disability (presumably in the West) has been largely defined by the genre of autobiography.9 But no authors from colonial Korea who wrote about disability during the colonial period were themselves marked by physical impairment, and no statistics at present suggest that a higher proportion of the population was disabled during the colonial period than in any other time in Korean history. The observation that Korean colonial literature in general is marked by a sense of lack, illness, disability, and incapacity, felt especially by intellectuals, is not new, and indeed fairly common.10 And yet few studies have focused on the prevalent figuration of disabled bodies in literary works and explored its relation to Japanese colonialism in a systematic manner.11

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Notes

I thank K¡nsik Ch|ng, William Elison, Alice Falk, Oegon Kim, Hyunjeong Lee, S|nok Lee, Hyesuk Pak, Yoshiko Uchida, and Kenneth Wells for their invaluable assistance in various forms, and Candace Vogler in particular for her sustained inspiration through the course of this work.

1. In Japanese, bunka seiji: the policy of ameliorating colonial suppression, prompted by the abortive March First independence movement of 1919. On post-1919 conditions of publication, see Michael Robinson, “Colonial Publication Policy and the Korean Nationalist Movement,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Meyers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 312–43, and Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).
2. Many other prominent authors presented characters with thematically significant disabilities, including Y|m Sangs|p (“Dark Night,” 1922); Yi T’aejun (“Omongny|,” 1925); Yi Hyos|k (“The City and the Ghosts,” 1928); Kim Tong’in (“The Mad Painter,” 1935); Kim Tongni (“The Portrait of a Shaman,” 1936); Yi S|nh¡i (“The Bill,” 1937); and Ch’ae Mansik (Peace under Heaven, 1938).
3. E.g., Ch|n Y|ngt’aek, “Idiot? Genius?” (1919); Yi Kiy|ng, “The Logic of an Idiot” (1926); Yi S|khun, “Record of a Madman” (1934); Paek Sinae, “A Madman’s Memoir” (1938); Ch’ae Mansik, “The Idiot Uncle” (1938); Kye Yongmuk, “Adada the Idiot” (1939); and Ch’oe T’ae¡ng, “Yongch’il the Fool” (1939).
4. E.g., S| Kwangje’s screenplay, The Idiot (1931); and plays by Han S|rya, The Cripple (1932), and Ch’ae Mansik, The Blind Man Shim (submitted to the literary journal Munjang in 1936, this play incurred the censor’s decision to “delete the whole text” and was only published posthumously in 1960).
5. Among the well-known works are Ha K¡nch’an’s “The Suffering of Two Generations” (1957), and Yi Ch’|ngjun’s “The Deformed and the Simpleton” (1967) and “S|p’y|nje” (1976); Han Musuk, O Ch|ngh¡i, and Yun Y|ngsu, as well as Son Ch’angs|p and Ryu Chuhy|n, also wrote works that highlight impairment. Only a handful of postliberation narratives refer to physical disability in their titles. Examples include Kim Mans|n’s “Tolsoe the Cripple” (1946), O Y|ngsu’s “The Disabled” (1957), Song Sang’ok’s “Half-Paralyzed” (1970), and Pak Yongsuk’s “the Blind Uncle” (1972). Stories that alllude to cognitive impairment in their titles include Kwak Haks|ng’s “An Idiot’s Dream” (1956), Im Suil’s “The Pedigree of the Idiot” (1966), and Kang Yongjun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (1970).
6. The motif of the relation between blind father figure and daughter was explored by major modern writers during the colonial period, such as Ch’ae Mansik, Kim Yuj|ng, and Yi T’aejun.
7. “Song of an Old Spinster” [“Noch’|ny|ga”] consists of a prose preface and the spinster narrator’s soliloquy in the traditional kasa form. It is included in a nineteenth-century collection of short narratives titled Sams|lgi [Records of three tales] (ca. 1848), and reprinted in Han’guk koj|n sos|l p’an’gakpon charyojip [Collection of woodblock editions of Korean classical narratives], ed. Kim Tongwuk (Seoul: Kuhak charyow|n, 1995), 1: 24–27.
8. W|ly|ngnangjaj|n, Changky|ngj|n, H¡ngbuj|n, Han’guk koj|nmunhak 100 [Korean classical literature 100], vol. 6 (Seoul: S|mundang, 1984), 231. The term py|ngsin appears on p. 218. The reference to the appearance of the blind men does not appear in a p’ansori performance–derived rendition of “H¡ngbuj|n”; cf. “Pak t’ary|ng” [Gourd t’ary|ng], in Shin Chaehyo p’ansori sos|ljip [Collection of Shin Chaehyo p’ansori tales], ed. Kang Hany|ng, Han’guk koj|nmunhak ch|njip, vol. 8 (Seoul: Pos|ng munhwasa, 1978), 323–445.
9. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. Mitchell and Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 9.
10. E.g., Cho Namhy|n, Han’guk chisigin sos|l y|n’gu [Study of the fiction of Korean intellectuals] (Seoul: Ilchisa, 1984), especially pp. 183–230. For other examples, and also for an analytic overview of critical trends, see Kyeong-Hee Choi, “Colonial Inflections: Censorship and Literary Acts in Modern Korean Literature” (work in progress).
11. Yi Chaes|n explores the representation of disabled characters, focusing on disability in a nonphysical sense, in “Pabo munhangnon” [Discussion of fools], in Yi, Uri munhak ¡n |dis| wann¡n’ga [Where did our literature come from?] (Seoul: Sos|l munhaksa, 1986), 373–89. In her Ph.D. dissertation, Han Hyes|n focuses on the representation of bodily impairment, but does not make a clear link beween the trope of the impaired body with its colonial setting. See Han, Han’guk hy|ndae sos|l ¡i inmul y|n’gu: Sinch’ej|k ky|lsonjingp’yo r¡l chungsim ¡ro (Ph.D. diss., Ewha Women’s University, 1992).