I Am No Hero, the Alternative to Being a Role Model: The Year in Korea

This essay introduces some characteristics of and current trends in contemporary life writing in South Korea. A common feature of such writing has been a dominant discourse of success stories that began with Korea’s rapid economic development since the 1960s and has lasted to this day. In order to point to a few changes that have recently occurred in how one represents oneself in Korea, the essay more closely examines the poet Kim Hyesoon’s Ana nŭ n iro˘ k’e mal haetta (2016) and the composite artist Enzo’s (Yi Hyŏk’s) Nallari chasŏchŏn (2016).¹ But Kim’s and Enzo’s works suggest changing trends in autobiographical representations in Korea that will likely continue to appear in the future and further modify the current picture of Korean life writing.

Autobiography or autobiographical writing representing the “I” was once understood as a product of Western civilization only, as scholars and critics—including Georges Gusdorf, Francis R. Hart, and Karl Joachim Weintraub—associated the genre with individualism, and assumed that its concept was available exclusively in Western culture. However, studies of life writing in other parts of the world show that modes of self-narration in writing began as early as twenty centuries ago: for example, from the first, tenth, and twelfth century in China, Japan, and the Middle East, respectively. If oral life narratives are included—as they have been produced since the beginning of human civilization—the history of self-representation outside the West likely goes back to much earlier periods.

Autobiography or the self-representation of an individual “I” is not exclusively Western in nature, despite the now-exploded claims of Gusdorf and other scholars and critics that the “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization” (Gusdorf 29). In Korea, such texts began to appear as early as the late twelfth century² and have continued to come out since then. It has not, however, been a common mode of writing. As Ryu Eun Hee, a Korean scholar of German literature, notes, “It is true that in Korean literature autobiography is rare. There are only a handful of autobiographies in Korea that the author unreservedly reveals the ‘I’ using the self as a subject matter” (324–25). Ryu is correct in her claim about the scarcity of such writings across different periods, but it is significant that while her study acknowledges autobiographical content in poems as well as in prose, she does not seem to consider Korean writers’ poetry as a mode of autobiography, and perhaps more surprisingly, she does seem to assume that autobiographies can represent the self in its entirety.

Heavily influenced by Confucian ideology, Korean culture, like a number of other cultures, tends to prioritize the family, the community, and educational, regional, ideological, and professional affiliations. This makes it difficult to produce writing that even reflects upon, let alone centers on “I.” In addition, Korea’s national tragedies in modern times—Japanese colonization (1910–1945), the Korean War (1950–1953); nationwide economic hardships until the mid-1980s, and political instabilities caused by the dictatorial government and then the military regime from the early 1960s to the late 1980s—hardly encouraged Koreans to reflect on themselves as individuals, or even on their past, present, or future.

But with changes in cultural, economic, political, and social atmosphere in recent decades in South Korea, contemporary Korean society has seen more works of life writing, including autobiography, memoirs, and autobiographical novels. Works produced since 2010 include famous Korean soccer player Park Ji-sung’s Tŏk’ŭ n narŭ l wihae narŭ l pŏrida (2010) and Mai sŭ t’ori (2015); singer Ch’oe Sŏng-bong’s Mujogŏn sara, tan han pŏn ŭ i sam inikka (2012);³ musical director Park K’allin’s Kŭ nyang (2010); poet Kim Hyesoon’s Ana nŭ n irŏk’e mal haetta (2015); and composite artist Enzo’s (Yi Hyŏk’s) Nallari chasŏchŏn (2016). Several memoirs have also appeared, predominantly...