The ‘blank irony’ : movie pastiche in popular literature through Chŏn Myŏnggwan’s works

Résumé En

Preceding the restructuration of the literary world (Mundan, 문단) in South Korea in the 1990s, cinema underwent a large process of legitimization and popularization from the mid-1980s, dovetailing with the democratization of South Korean society. Already promoted as a popular pastime under the dictatorship, cinema acquired a renewed importance in the cultural world both as an artistic form and a political means with a new generation: the Munhwawon sedae ( 문화원세대, the generation of the cultural centers). The contemporary Korean author, Chŏn Myŏnggwan (천명관, born in 1964), began his career in the 1990s as a scenarist within the social network of the Munhwawon sedae. His début in the literary world, however, came eleven years later when he published a successful novel Whale (Korae, 고래, 2004). Fifteen years later, he would return to cinema as a film director with his 2019 film, an adaptation of Kim Ŏnsu’s novel The Boiling Blood (ttŭgŏun p'i, 뜨거운 피, published in 2016, movie to be release in 2021). He is thus an author (chakka, 작가) in both the literary and cinematographic fields. Avoiding ostensibly the elitist side of both worlds, he declares, “Not writing for the rich is the ethical awareness I have as a writer”. A comparative analysis of his original position as a chakka can shed a new light on the renewed meaning of popular author in post-democratization intellectual climate. In Frederic Jameson’s sense of “nostalgic”, the novels of Chŏn Myŏnggwan continuously explore and mythicize the “imagined community” created through the collective enjoyment of cinema, the “ultimate popular art” in the words of Apollinaire (Duval 2016:133). Cinema operates as a common thread in his literary works, both as a narrative subject and as an intertextual object. By considering the literary works of the author around the thread of cinema, I seek to bring a new perspective on the popular dimension (taejung, 대중, understood both as a mass media production and a collective entertainment) of his work. In his novels, the fantasized popularity of the cinematographic experience becomes a new narrative material, and functions as a tool of legitimization for the author. This paper provides a close analysis of his novels My Uncle Bruce Lee I & II (Naŭi samch'on Pŭrusŭ Ri, 나의 삼촌 브루스리, 2012 ), built around a pastiche, a “blank parody” (Jameson, 1991), of the life of Bruce Lee, the martial arts actor. My first aim is to develop an historical and sociological analysis of his position as a popular author; and secondly, I intend to demonstrate how the novel’s narrative, traversing the contemporary Korean history, becomes a nostalgic backdrop where the cinematic experience represents the breaking point for a generation trapped in the inexorable rush of modernity.