‘국민문학’의 문제

Abstract

This article deals with kokumin bungaku and its intertwined history in Imperial Japan / Colonial Korea in the early 1940’s. The difficulty with translating the very term kokumin bungaku into English clearly reveals the overdetermined nature of kokumin under the exceptionally rigid assimilationist policy of the Japanese Empire. Kokumin bungaku was a hot issue in the Japanese literary journalism during the last months of 1940,where the term simply meant “National Literature,” often with reactionary Japanist connotations; whereas in Korea, where the debate was introduced at the beginning of 1941 and eventually led to the birth of the “pro-Japanese” literary journal Kokumin Bungaku, the term was interpreted (or “appropriated”) as “Imperial Literature”, so that kokumin should include all the assimilated imperial subjects such as Koreans. Against this background, two prominent “pro-Japanese” literary figures,Yi Kwangsu and Choe Chaeso, are featured. Yi Kwangsu was the quicker to arrive at “determination” to become fully Japanese, responding to the interpellation made by such “benevolent” imperialists as Kobayashi Hideo and Hayashi Fusao. Meanwhile, Choe Chaeso acted with “courage” in struggling to appropriate kokumin bungaku to the extent that he even insisted that it be the Koreans themselves who were to create the yet-to-come kokumin bungaku – kokumin being not “Japanese” but the yet-to-come Great East Asian Imperial subjects. In other words, Choe Chaeso theoretically appropriated and re-presented kokumin bungaku as a “problem”, which may well be associated with the postcolonial problematics today. In the end, however, Choe Choeso, too, abandoned such theoretical project and jumped to the same conclusion that Yi Kwangsu had earlier arrived at. I see this “tragedy” not caused by the man’s weakness but led by the fate of Theory “shackled by Universality”. Insofar as Choe Chaeso’s theory is based upon his aspiration for universality, it is doomed to accept the Absolute (the Emperor) as the Universal, once any other alternative universal is denied under the ever-unifying imperial rule. In order to understand the “fate” of Choe Chaeso’s abortive feat of Theory, I propose a theoretical distinction between “universality” and “universalism”. To the former belong “l’universalité idéale” (Balibar) and “l’Idée comme instance problématique” (Deleuze), both of which, being singular-multiple, critical,and insurrectional, pertain to demolition of any kind of “universalism” (i.e.,identitarian thinking, such as Nation, Empire, minzoku, etc.), which is always disguised as “universality” but is, in fact, nothing but generality. In this respect, Choe Chaeso’s kokumin bungaku could have amounted to “universality” by posing such a “problem”, but, instead, he ended up finding a universalistic “answer” in becoming an “authentic Japanese”. It is therefore safe to conclude that the problem of kokumin bungaku is that the kind of postcolonial problematics posed by Choe Chaeso’s theory is indeed doomed to be assimilated to some kind of universalism, unless it adamantly and incessantly struggles to meet the promise of universality by radically questioning its very foundation (as, for example, Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation” does).