초록
This article addresses image and narrative production during 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea. This question encompasses the symbolic order at the intersection of antiquity and the modern; in other words, image culture under emergent print capitalism and the changing constellation of representations in a new social symbolic. Specifically, I will address this new image culture through the rematerialization and repackaging of the agwi (the starving ghost) in mass-centered images and narratives: specifically, reader-submitted cartoons (tokchamanhwa), reportage and colonial literary representations of the starving ghost. An apparition called forth in representations of poverty and starvation, the starving ghost captures the material realities of the Korean lower classes.
키워드
agwi, starving ghost, poverty, colonial period, mass culture
Intro
Karl Marx
Yi Hyo-sŏk (translated by Youngji Kang)
In Yi Hyo-sŏk’s short story written in 1928, “City and Specter” (
Yi’s short story addresses not only the material realities of uneven modern-ization—the mobilization of resources under colonial capitalism, labor shortages and rural pockets of extreme poverty—but also the ways in which these issues are packaged within the socio-symbolic. Exhibiting the persistence of folk beliefs within the narrative of modernity, the cultural representations that filter this complex constellation of structural developments also captures the anxieties of the period as people are displaced and swept along with colonial capital flows. Although Yi’s short story uses the word “specter” and “goblin” to describe this anxiety, this article will focus on a more common specter in colonial mass culture: the starving ghost (
The argument introduced in this article is twofold. For one, the incor-poration of the
Secondly, the “horror” of the
I. POVERTY AND RURAL DEATH WORLDS
An editorial called “Let’s Do Away with Superstition,” published in August 6, 1925 discusses the problem of superstition in Korea in the race of civilizations:
“In social life, above all else, the most important thing is spiritual life. Accordingly, the modern truth is that a country with little superstition is wealthy and powerful, while a country with a lot of superstition is un-civilized.”
The author, in his description of what makes a country uncivilized, calls out against specifically “suicides and
Such editorials echo the familiar dichotomy between civilization or modernization against the past, positing rational modern discourse against folk beliefs, ghosts and the supernatural, attempting to expel these “out-of-sync” elements from the discourse of the modern. However, while these editorials decry the “cracks” in Korea’s modernization during the 1920s and 1930s, a wider scope of the newspaper platform presents a different temporal representation of the nation.
Perhaps the most visually obvious indicator of this temporal representation are the reader-submitted cartoons (
To give examples of the nature of these contests, on May 14, 1923,
Many of these reader-submitted cartoons focus on common problems of the lower classes. This cartoon (
Fig. 1. Starving Ghost. Source: “Kanabogiro,”
As a result of these reforms, it was during this time that many farmers became wage farmers, and an even larger amount of people who could not be assimilated into the labor industry joined the unemployed masses. Ken Kawashima describes these populations of Koreans who migrated during the 1920s and 1930s as “surplus populations,” who often wandered and remained “in limbo” and “in conditions of extreme contingency and precariousness.”
Although Kawashima has used the term “in limbo” to describe the wandering state of laborers uprooted by uneven capitalism, I am doubly interested in the term “in limbo” because of its temporal implications. As much as “in limbo” describes the wandering and necessary emigration of Korean laborers under Japanese imperialism, it also adds a spectral ontological quality that captures certain temporal and spiritual conceptions of labor during the 1920s. Specifically, “in limbo” brings to mind the association of souls “in limbo,” caught between two stages of spiritual existence and on the borders of hell.
Although the illustrations and reportage on
The persistence of the recurring image of the starving ghost in discussions of poverty, labor and the lower classes suggests the grotesque implications of the
An article, in 1924, describes 200 people in a town in Pyŏngwŏn-gun in a northern province who “starved and starved until they finally sold their huts and left their village for the south.” The article describes how the 200 residents of the village felt that, if they stayed, their fate was “to become
Within the newspaper platform, cartoons and articles referencing the starving ghost coexist side by side, presenting an interesting temporal continuum. As Bliss Cua Lim suggests in an application of Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined community,” the inclusion of ghosts and the supernatural in newspapers help bind the “nation’s illusory temporal homogeneity” and suggest an “acknowledgement of enchanted temporalities hidden in the penumbra of national time.”
Despite these inclusions however, these supernatural elements exclusively emerge in the context of the proletarian masses. The uneven concentration of supernatural renderings exclusively about the rural areas and not the city suggest hidden discrepancy and difference under modernization. We can extend this idea to the imperial center and colonial peripheries, as the
Fig. 2. Demon Over Korea. Source: “Famine! Famine!”
The concern with famine in rural villages is echoed in a majority of reports during the 1920s that describe villages on the brink of death, in danger of “becoming
Fig. 3. Shantytowns. Source:
The very corporeal nature of these reports are permeated with visual imagery of life and death: “With our blood, sweat, money and rice, let’s try our best for our brothers and sisters in the surrounding areas who are entering the
Although in the previous example the starving ghost materializes on account of poverty or misfortune, alternatively modernization is also represented as a starving ghost as well. A direct vilification of modernization, this cartoon (
Fig. 4. Monstrous Train. Source:
The train has the words “Railroad Corporation” (
Fig. 5. Starving Ghost 2. Source: “Pyŏngma”
Culminating in the late 1920s, some of the reportage on devastated rural areas called for mobilization of troops to help “
The
7 Kim Kyŏng-ji, “Let’s Do Away with Superstition” (Misin ŭl t’ap’ahada),
8 “Let’s Do Away with Superstition” (Misin ŭl t’ap’ahada),
9 Seung-hee Lee, “Socialist Politics and the Cultural Effects of the Newspaper Cartoons in the 1920s,”
10 Ken Kawashima,
11 The
12 See Pori Park, “Korean Buddhist Reforms and Problems in the Adoption of Modernity during the Colonial Period,”
13 Figal,
14 Mark Driscoll,
15 “Be Well, Hometown of Sanch’ŏn” (Kohyang Sanch’ŏn chal itkŏra!)
16 Lim,
17 Driscoll,
18 “Travelogue of Poor Villages: Six Different Worlds” (Pinminch’on t’ambanggi yuk pyŏl tarŭn segye),
19 “Let’s Quickly Help our Starving Brothers” (Kigŭn hyŏngjae rŭl ppalli kuhaja),
20 Chang Hyŏk-chu, “The Hell of the Starving” (Agwido), in
21 Samuel Perry, “Korean as Proletarian: Ethnicity and Identity in Chang Hyŏk-chu’s ‘Hell of the Starving,’”
II. CAPITAL, POSSESSION AND THE LIVING DEAD
As can be seen by its many representations, within the same newspaper space the figure of the
Although not directly alluding to Marxism, many of these images conjure up Marx’s words that likened capital to the intimate relationship between a vampire and his victim: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lived only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
Because of the strong influence from shaman principles, the critique of capital intersects with cases of poverty because commonly shamans held a central position in protecting villages against natural disasters.
The representation of the
Fig. 6. Demon Eating Korean Youth. Source:
The words that should symbolically ground the
Unlike this cartoon, news report accounts of
“From the reports of those who returned [from this village], the report is that all the villagers had eaten tree roots until they couldn’t anymore and finally started to capture and eat people. [The village] has become a place of danger because of cannibalism where weak women and children are being captured and eaten… it clear that the law of the jungle has opened the door to the hell of the starving.”
The article proposes a mobilization of troops to ban cannibalism in the northern areas, and addresses the issue of
Similar reports to this were also reported from the early 1920s. In a report from August 1921, the writer discusses a fire suicide of 300 people that happened in Russia (Noguk). The reporter describes how in a “village in Russia” the villagers were so starved that in the end they set themselves on fire in a group suicide to avoid living on in an “
Alternatively, newspapers also included exposés on people living in rural pockets of poverty; one such interesting account includes a transcript of an interview with the leader of twelve prostitutes in Chŏngjin village in Hamgyŏng Province. Protesting their working conditions—specifically rape, physical abuse and fraud—the women, with starved, haggard faces and shaved heads, are described as an “
The frequent allusions to villages in the north of Korea and in Russia suggest the underlying transnational ideological configurations of the influence of the folk. An article in 1936 that was written about a murder in Majŏn-dong calls attention to the ways this fantastic
22 Karl Marx,
23 Michael Pettid, “Shamans, Ghosts and Hobgolbins Amidst Korean Folk Customs,”
24 For more on Korean shamans and shamanistic rituals, see Laura Kendall,
25 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,”
26 “Sanxi Province Famine, Terrible Scenes of Flesh eating Cannibalism” (Hapsŏsŏng taegigŭn siginnyuk ch’amgyŏng),
27 “The Truth behind the Ch’ŏngjin Prostitute Strike: A Series of Questions and Answers with Rouge, a Prostitute” (Ch’ŏngjin e saenggin ch’anggi maengp’a chinsang ruju, ch’anggi wa ŭi ilmunil tapke sibilmyŏng i sanggŭm hangjaeng),
28 “The Arrest of a Chinese man for the Murder of a Wife in Majŏn” (Majŏn e ch’amsŏltoen puin pŏmhaenghan Chunggugin ch’aep’o),
29 Although in a different context, Laura Kendall’s study on contemporary shaman practices and consumer culture was very helpful in understanding broadly how shamanism can mediate between past ancestors and present relationships with commodities. See Laura Kendall, “Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption in the Republic of Korea: The commodity becomes ritual pop,”
CONCLUSION
Often times, as Lim points out with the example of ghost films, elements that are inconsistent or do not coincide with “modern homogenous time”
The presence of these elements and the horror of starving ghosts in a projected seamless narrative of modernity reminds us of the importance of acknowledging varied cultural forms in the study of cultural history. By examining the constellation of media in the 1920s and 1930s, it is clear that the starving ghost is both a consistent reminder of the influence of folk beliefs and simul-taneously an important semiotic representation of the problems within Korean modernization and Japanese colonialism.
As Jean and John Camaroff have asked in their examinations of zombie culture in South Africa, what do monsters, zombies—or starving ghosts in this instance—have to do with their contemporary material realities? Reflecting on the present moment and the ubiquitous and stubborn cultural phenomenon of the zombie film, it is undeniable that ghosts play an important role in negotiating shifting social structures, their spectral presence often coinciding with and emerging at a junction of conflicting material and emotional realities: “an un-precedented mix of hope and hopelessness, promise and impossibility, the new and the continuing.”
30 Lim,
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 13.
33 Jean and John Camaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism,”
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1 Thank you to my anonymous reviewer who directed me to this short story. Yi Hyo-sŏk, “The City and the Specter,” trans. Young-ji Kang (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 100.
2 Yi, “The City and the Specter,” 101.
3 Ibid., 103.
4 Though Lisa Cartwright discusses the term “media convergence” in the context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Bliss Cua Lim supplements this idea with the example of theaswang (a vampire-like mythical creature in Filipino folklore) and its multiple cultural reincarnations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. As Lim suggests, the aswang effect is its “media convergent” eventfulness, continually re-manifesting at different temporal moments.
5 Gerald Figal,Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan , (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999) 17.
6 See Bliss Cua Lim,Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique , (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Susan J. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity , (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).