Korea beyond and within the armistice: Division and the multiplicities of time in postwar literature and cinema

Abstract

The Korean Armistice Agreement has imposed a truce for a war that is not yet technically over and has prolonged the division of the Korean peninsula. Division consciousness, predicated on the present progressive mode of the Armistice, perpetrates a system of violence that is ongoing. One such violence has been in the form of individual voices and memories being disregarded and deemed superfluous. In South Korea, counter-memories-not in alignment with the hegemonic agenda derived from Cold War anticommunist ideology and a history adhering to a strict sense of temporal continuity-have been left hovering over a muddled temporal landscape. This article examines the division of the Korean peninsula, the Korean War, the Armistice, and the aftermath in Korean literature and film. It looks at how these articulations are negotiated through the complex temporal terrain of post-Armistice South Korean society. Literature and cinema have served as the repository for counter-memories of the Korean War and the postwar division era. Writers Pak Wansǒ and Ch'oe Yun and film director Kang Chegyu deal with notions of geography, time, memory, and history. Such texts speak to the concomitance of seemingly incongruent times and spaces, at certain moments neatly compartmentalized and others in disarray, as characters struggle to come to terms with the war and separation. Although these narratives take place decades after the cease-fire, the interminable aftereffects still linger, particularly as present time is filtered through the temporal prism of the war and division.