여순사건의 再現과 暴力

Violence in the Representation of the Yosun Incident

The seven days shaking South Korea of the Yosun Incident(事件) (19 October 1948-25 October 1948) greatly affected the course of the history in South Korea. In front of the outbreak of the Incident, the Republic of Korea (ROK) suppressed the Incident and de-legitimized its causes, ultimately nullifying its historicity itself. But also did the ROK appropriate the Revolt(反亂) for the benefit of the ROK’s state agendas that the polity had to represent itself as a modern nation-state and transform the South Korean people into a disciplined political subject of the ROK kukmin(國民). With this in mind, this article addresses the cultural enterprises of the ROK in general and the representation of the Yosun Incident in particular. The ROK and its loyal cultural workers represented the Yosun Revolt as a violence inflicted upon both human entities and Korean nation. In the course of doing their jobs, representation workers had not only exploited linguistic and visual materiel but also developed variegated representation strategies such as quantitative and visual representation, and representation tactics such as political statistics and photography, in order to beat into the heads of their South Korean audience how violent the Revolt was, and simultaneously to substantiate, and convince their readers of, the argued factuality of their representation. At the same time, the workers, employing literary form in representation work, attempted to erase the temporality and spatiality of their represented violence for the purpose of liberating it from tempo-spatial confinement and generalizing the “diabolical deeds” which happened in specific time and space, and context. Furthermore, they produced prospective victims by means of the political appellation of the wasted and other tactics in order to gain South Koreans’ empathy with the “tragedies” of the “violent Yosun Revolt” fabricated by the representation work, to nationalize the victim of the Yosun Incident and ultimately to produce their animosity against the “Yosun Revolt” and their loyalty to the ROK. These astute chicaneries transformed the Yosun Revolt into and equated it with the violence inflicted not only upon individuals, families, and other human entities but also upon Korean nation per se. On the basis of this equation, the Yosun Revolt was accused as the destroyer of family and the nation, and the perpetrator of homicide, patricide and fratricide. In other words, the equation (i.e., “The Yosun Revolt Is Slaughter!”) dehumanized, de-nationalized, demoralized, and ultimately nullified or de-legitimized the Yosun Revolt. The image of the Yosun Revolt as a venue of slaughter was utilized for the construction of “the street of death” and again of “living inferno,” a dénouement of representation work, which, regretfully, is beyond the scope of this article. This series of representation works occluded from the populace’s sight the national, political and socioeconomical agendas of post-colonial society, which the Revolt expressed (i.e., land reform; the purge of the “pro-Jap traitors”; the establishment of one nation-state; and popular self-governance), and ultimately nullified the historicity of the Yosun Revolt. Unlike the doomed Yosun Revolt, the ROK as a definer of a violence vis-à-vis the defined as a perpetrator of the violence practically and conceptually benefited from the transmutation of the Revolt into the one violent event, one violent thing. This transmutation supplied the ROK with the humanitarian and nationalistic rationale for the oppressing of the “Yosun Revolt” and the strengthening of the ROK’s “state capabilities” under the veils of humanitarian and nationalistic causes. More importantly, the transmutation could ideationally substantiate the ROK’s raison d’être from the vantage point of humanistic, nationalistic, and moralistic concerns, and it could legitimize the ROK per se, to use a common phrase.