Jeong Jong-hyun

10.18399/acta.2014.17.1.014

chŏnhyang (conversion) chŏnhyang sosŏl (conversion novel) conversion literature kamsangnok conversion grammar censorship

This article examines Korean “conversion literature” in the context of its analogous relationship to kamsangnok (“record of impressions”) contained in the Kyŏngsŏng District Court (Prosecution Division) Document File at the National Institute of Korean History (NIKH). The kamsangnok at the national archive are essays written by political prisoners. While they appear under many different titles, their purpose was singular: to make prisoners repent their offenses. Leftist intellectuals, for example, recanted their views by writing kamsangnok. In fact, in order to prove their “ideological conversion,” they had to write kamsangnok, not once, but repeatedly, while they were in the custody of the colonial authorities. These essays, which should more properly be called “conversion narratives,” had to conform to certain rules of writing, or what I call “conversion grammar,” in order to effectively serve their purpose. The article describes the grammar, as delineated from representative prison essays, and it argues that the same grammar is found in the chŏnhyang sosŏl, or “conversion novels,” published toward the end of World War II, namely, the end of the colonial period in Korea. The example used in the article for analyzing the relationship between a work of conversion literature and the prison conversion narratives is Tŭngbul (1942) by Kim Namch’ŏn, a member of the Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF, 1925–1935) who became a well-known chŏnhyang chakka, or a writer of conversion literature, upon his release from prison in the 1930s, who then actively re-engaged in communist causes following the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945. In analyzing Kim Namch’ŏn’s work, and in particular its relationship with the prison essays, the article argues that they are analogous not only in terms of their use of the grammar of conversion, but also in terms of the state surveillance system under which they were written. The article further argues that conversion novels in Korea cannot be read as representations of a transparent authorial self, as in Japanese I-novels, but as portrayals of how a normative and schizophrenic authorial self is formed under the disciplinary powers of the state.