Imagining childhood: Narratives of formation in Korean short fiction of the 1970s

In the 1970s South Korea firmly emerged from post-war poverty to modern industrialized nationhood. An unprecedented social and economic reorganization was accomplished by an authoritarian government bent on rapid economic development. Large-scale socio-economic transformations such as this not only alter macro-level social formations, they also reshape individual psychic structures. In this study, I examine a genre of prose fiction produced in Korea called songjang sosol (the narrative of formation) and I focus on childhood narratives, a sub-genre in which the individual's formation is delimited by the dominance of familial responsibilities. The main problems complicating individual formation that these stories address are the absence of fathers and the double burden of labor this placed on mothers. While the family-centered focus and the lack of paternal authority has been noted by many critics, I argue for the importance of shifting the familial axis from the absent father to the ever present mother. These difficult family circumstances frequently gave rise to either one or both of two coping strategies: a nostalgia for origins and a retreat into fantasy and play. Although this retreat may seem uniformly regressive and escapist, in the stories it sometimes is the very instrument by which the protagonist himself or (more rarely) herself, achieves self-formation by overcoming the chaos of the war, family instability, and poverty. I see in these works that writing, itself a form of play in the creation of fiction, is portrayed as therapeutic and constitutive of a mature self, particularly when it involves a return to the traumatic history of childhood. I conclude that these stories written in the 1970s have served as a discursive space within which Korean intellectuals who were active in the late 1960s and 1970s examine the limits and possibilities of self-formation under the social conditions wrought by authoritarian economic development.