Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xi, 286 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16518-1.
When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea by Janet Poole is a contemplative and immersive piece of scholarship. In it, Poole demands that we approach the fiction of the late colonial period with eyes and ears that are attuned to the shifts in language policies and concepts of time, and that we remain mindful of the dramatic changes in the social and political fabric that structured late colonial narratives. Her book urges us to better attend to and appreciate the kind of choices writers faced as Korea became increasingly implicated in Japan’s oppressive mobilization policies of the 1930s and 1940s.
As the title indicates, the interrogative impulse in each chapter is driven by Poole’s main argument: that late 1930s modernist fiction and philosophical writing was shaped by the sense of a disappearing future, borne out of the disheartening conviction that Japan’s imperialization, war mobilization, and language policies had sealed the fate of the Korean language and nation. Her purpose, then, is to map out the varied responses of writers to this crisis, and to better understand the significance of their work—not with the advantage of hindsight but on their own terms, as heartfelt responses to what would have been a profound apprehension of a foreclosed future.
According to Poole, this sense of a disappearing future originates partly in the reordering of temporal concepts. She finds that the idea of progressive time, so endemic to modernity, to be one of the more egregious symptoms of the late colonial period. In her reading, the walls of time were closing in; Korea was being launched forward, but was facing a future that was at best unclear, at worst an unambiguous finale marked by Korea’s full absorption into Japan, not just territorially but also culturally and linguistically. She identifies two main responses to this crisis in fiction: a focus on the “unruly detail” of the everyday (Ch’oe Myŏngik, Kim Namchŏn); and the turn toward a private sphere or liminal space (Yi T’aejun, Sŏ Insik, Pak T’aewŏn, Ch’oe Chaesŏ) whose in-between nature produced an effect of “double exposure” that, by capturing multiple temporal layers, also challenged the seemingly inevitable momentum underwritten by colonial fascism.
This engrossing monograph is all the more fascinating when put in conversation with recent publications in the field of colonial literature by Chris Hanscom and Sunyoung Park. These scholars have written about the same time frame and authors, and each has come up with a different explanation for the responses of colonial fiction and non-fiction to the crises of assimilation, wartime mobilization and censorship. Productive questions arise from reading them side-by-side, such as: can modernist writing be best explained through the understanding of the period as a crisis of representation symbolized by the colonial “double bind” (Chris Hanscom, The Real Modern : Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea, Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) or by a disappearing future (Poole)? Was Kim Namch’ŏn’s focus on the mundane objects and routines of the everyday driven by his desire to “resist the excesses of dogmatic socialism and the utopian visions of the pan-Asianist ideology” (863) with the purpose of illuminating the totality of the everyday (Sunyoung Park, “Everyday Life as Critique in Late Colonial Korea: Kim Namch’ŏn’s Literary Experiments, 1934–43,” Journal of Asian Studies 68.03, 2009: 861–893)? Or was Kim Namch’ŏn and Ch’oe Myŏngik’s focus on the everyday an impulse that served to privilege a scientific, objective gaze that could give unmediated access to the world and thus intervene in the “contentious realm of colonial representation” (29) and conjure up a heterogeneous time that allowed for a personal negotiation of the experiences of modernity?
Poole’s overriding argument—that the sense of a foreclosed future is what shaped the fiction and non-fiction of the wartime mobilization period—is compelling, all the more because it demands that the contemporary reader consider the choices that writers who wished to continue their creative lives faced in this period. She pleads that we bear in mind that these writers did not have the privilege of knowing that everything would change after August 15, 1945, and that we remember that “what was believed possible at one moment also matters” (207). Yet while the idea that the future was disappearing is captivating, one wonders if the sense of a disappearing future was the only driving force of creative writing in this period. For example, Hyŏn Tŏk (1909–?) published a series of linked stories in 1938–39 in the Sonyŏn Chosŏn Ilbo that explores the way a society of children navigate the world around them, first by imitating adults and then by inventing creative solutions to issues of economic inequality and gender discrimination in a delightful and optimistic manner. Indeed, the very persistence of children’s fiction written in Korean up until 1940 suggests that not all writers had given up on the impulse to reflect, anticipate, and shape the experience of the future generation with what was a decidedly forward-looking gaze.
Ultimately, however, Poole’s book is arresting and deeply thought-provoking. She crafts her narrative in a lyrical style that is very moving, and she offers a model of close reading with an attentiveness to language, content, and form that serves as a reminder that the ultimate satisfaction from reading can only emerge with painstaking re-reading. Another strength of Poole’s lies in the manner in which she finds sympathetic resonance to her argument in a range of scholarship on colonial literatures and modernities; she invites the reader familiar with Korea to consider the ways in which the conundrum of the colonized as been worked out in other contexts. Lastly, her inclusion of Korean literature in the Japanese language revisits the perennial question of collaboration, and her ability to discuss these works sheds light in the darkest corners of the canon and begs a consideration of how literary histories of Korean may expand through a consideration of Korea’s excised and excluded voices.
Dafna Zur
Stanford University, Stanford, USA