Content area
Full Text
Han Yongun (1879-1944) is chiefly remembered as a participant in the March First Independence Movement of 1919 and as the author of Your Silence. For these reasons he holds an important place within Koreans' collective memory of their nation's troubled modern history. Although much has been written about him and Your Silence, little attention has been given to the eroticism in the work. This article offers a perspective on the collections eroticism, Han's overturning of Buddhism's negation of desire, and thus his unusual attitude toward women. The abode of all evil.
--definition of woman in the Nirvana Sutra In general the calamity of fondness for women is not only death, but in many instances. ruin.
-Yi Sugwang (1563-1628) On May 20, 1926, Han Yongun published Nimui cli'immuk (Your Silence). One week later, Yu Kwangnyol published an appreciative essay titled "Impressions on `Your Silence'-A Prayer Offered to the Spirit of the Fatherland," and the following month, the poet Chu Yohan published "Prayers of Love, Love of Prayers-Impressions on Mr. Han Yongun's Latest Work, `Your Silence."" Although Yu's essay seems no longer extant, we can guess from the title that he saw in those eighty-eight poems the conscience of a patriot and that the beloved (nini) serving as the central motif of the poems was Korea itself.
Chu likewise noted the "feeling of patriotism" (aegukchok kibun), but also found the poems to be "filled with spiritual colorings" (sinangjok saekch'ae) and marked by a sense of "separation" (iby6l). Moreover, he emphasized the debt Han owed the Indian poet Tagore and judged these poems to be "Oriental [tongyangjok], meditative [myingsangjok], and spiritual [sinagjok]." Such a criticism highlighting the supposed dichotomy between East and West was, of course, very much in the spirit of the times and owed much to Tagore's fame. Yet Han had also mentioned in his introduction the Buddha, Kant, and the Italian patriot Mazzini as he offered his own ambiguous definition for the protean beloved (nim). Han was, in short, eclectic, and Chu's emphasis on the Oriental is the single point of his essay that seems dated.
The most interesting portion of Chu's critique, however, came at the end. Here he raised aesthetic concerns when he praised Han's "manifest skill of rhythm" (unyulchok kigyo-p'_yohyon) and took...