The Ethical Sensibility of Pak’s Kubo and Scenes from Ch’onggye Stream

Abstract

Pak T’aewŏn’s two most important works from the 1930s, A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist and Scenes from Ch’onggye Stream, remain lively artifacts of life and literature in Seoul during this turbulent decade of Korea’s colonial modernity. In disclosing the uneasy coexistence of the traditional and the modern, as well as sharp inequality, the texts represent everyday life in Pak’s beloved city as a complex mixture of suffering and kindness, aspiration and disappointment, monotony and excitement. But beyond their social critiques and documentary value, I would like to argue, Pak’s works embody a pronounced ethical sensibility, one that calls for continual openness to the other in her or his singularity. In this regard, Kubo constitutes a sort of ethical odyssey, one that is reflected and instantiated in Kubo’s evolving narrative stance, which shifts from totalizing, prefabricated stereotypes of Seoulites to empathetic and open-ended portraits of singular human beings. Ch’onggye Stream, then, may be seen as furthering and enhancing this ethical sensibility, in that here we encounter a more objective and nonjudgmental narrator who provides the “precarious,” struggling to make a life, with nuanced and intricate subjectivities. Amidst all the cruelties and injustices imbued in this patriarchal and colonized society, I would like to argue, Pak nevertheless asserts that the artist and the man, as Shelley wrote, ought to “imagine intensely and comprehensively,” always striving to “put himself in the place of another and of many others.”