Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyong'ae's "Underground Village"

Modern Korean literature, which emerged and matured during the period of colonial rule by Japan (1910-45), is conspicuously populated by physically anomalous characters. Following the nine-year period of military rule introduced by the 1910 annexation, the two decades under the relatively more open "cultural policy" ¹ produced an intriguing array of stories with disabled characters. A quick survey of titles illustrates this literary preoccupation: Na Tohyang's "Samnyong the Mute" (1925) and Yi Kunyong's "The Mute Who Speaks" (1936); Chong Ilsu's "The Blind Son" (1932) and Om Hongsop's "Loss of Eyesight" (1940); Song Sunil's "The Deformed" (or "The Sick Body") (1926), Song Yong's "The Story of a Hunchback" (1929), and Kim Pyongje's "The Arm That Fell Off" (1930); An Sokyong's "The Disabled" (1930), Han Int'aek's "Agonies of the Disabled" (1932), and Yi Chaehwan's "The Disabled" (1937). ² Narratives about the allegedly cognitively disabled or mentally ill also emerged, as writers depicted or played on such figurations as "idiot" (ch'onch'i, paekch'i), "fool" (pabo), or "crazy person" (kwang'in). ³ Not just prose fiction, but dramatic works as well, pursued themes of physical and mental impairment. ⁴

More intense thematization of the physically disabled might have been expected in works written in the wake of the internecine Korean War (1951-53). But this expectation is hardly met. To be sure, disability surfaces in a good number of stories produced after liberation from Japan ⁵ --but, given the spectacular increase in publication following the war and the reconstruction, literary narratives that foreground physically impaired people are relatively few, and they differ significantly from their predecessors. After the war, narratives involving disability show the tendency to stress psychological or mental impairments. During the colonial period, however, writers exhibited more interest in bodily anomaly. Moreover, in the colonial period, disabled and impaired figures are presented not as an isolated minority, but as a potential majority. This framing of collectivity, whether national or class-based, is weakened in works of the later period.

Looking afield to vernacular culture, it can be seen that very few traditional Korean tales highlight the disabled figure in the first place. The few exceptions include "The Story of Sim Ch'ong," a narrative of filial piety in which a daughter sacrifices herself to restore her blind father's eyesight; ⁶ "Song of an Old Spinster," a first-person poetic narrative that addresses how the narrator's "deformed" status (pyongsin: "sick body") causes her singleness; ⁷ and a minor and incidental reference in "The Tale of Hungbu," in which blind men from all over the country appear from a magical gourd to chastise the antagonist for his greediness and to extort money from him. ⁸ It thus appears that the proliferation of stories about the disabled during the latter half of the colonial period is no historical accident.

In their introduction to The Body and Physical Difference, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder state that the discourse of disability (presumably in the West) has been largely defined by the genre of autobiography. ⁹ But no authors from colonial Korea who wrote about disability during the colonial period were themselves marked by physical impairment, and no statistics at present suggest that a higher proportion of the population was disabled during the colonial period than in any other time in Korean history. The observation that Korean colonial literature in general is marked by a sense of lack, illness, disability, and incapacity, felt especially by intellectuals, is not new, and indeed fairly common. ¹⁰ And yet few studies have focused on the prevalent figuration of disabled bodies in literary works and explored its relation to Japanese colonialism in a systematic manner. ¹¹

This essay examines the figuration of disability with a view to probing its colonial inflection. In this endeavor, I take into consideration another neglected topic in...