Thomas M. Ryan

10.18399/acta.2022.25.1.003

Guilt-by association wealth inequality paranoia war literature Lee Chang-dong

This article examines the literary predecessors of contemporary South Korean wealth inequality critiques, arguing for the inseparability of such parables, particularly Lee Chang-dong's (Yi Ch'angdong [inline-graphic 01]) Burning (Pŏning [inline-graphic 02] 2018), from a contested tradition of writing about generational poverty and discrimination. Focusing on literary representations of the Cold War-era guilt-by-association system or yŏnjwaje [inline-graphic 03], it draws out the relationship between the anti-communist epistemologies of authoritarian regimes, the right-wing literature of Yi Munyŏl [inline-graphic 04], and the leftist-nationalist allegories of Lee, a novelist before his turn to film. United by what Eve Sedgwick has identified as paranoid epistemologies of exposure, these diverse forms of writing revolved around the investigation of the identity of the alleged traitor, often the spectral leftist father blamed for the socioeconomic immobility of his surviving family members. Whether reactionary or subversive, such texts affirmed the inescapability and rigidity of patrilineal inheritance, an understanding of identity and kinship that the feminist works of Ch'oe Yun [inline-graphic 05] and Pak Wansŏ [inline-graphic 06] would challenge in two critical ways. First, these works highlighted the mutual constitution of war and domesticity, destabilizing visions of the individual or family as separate from and aligned against the social order; second, they revealed the origins of an enduring Cold War subjectivity of exposure in Korean War-era state apparatuses of identification, drawing attention to the complicity of the act of writing in the perpetuation of the sociocultural structure of the yŏnjwaje even after its legal abolition.