Mourning and Melancholy in The 1990s and The 2000s Korean Novels—Focusing on Yoon Dae-nyeong and Kim Hoon’s Works

Abstract

According to recent appraisals, despite its pathological aspects, melancholy can be a psychological impetus for spiritual creativity and utopianism. Drawing on those appraisals, this article examines some religious implications of mourning and melancholy in novels of Yoon Dae-nyeong and Kim Hoon in the context of Korean society in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Firstly, Yoon Dae-nyeong’s early works depict an intense sense of loss arising from the compressed pace of Korean modernity, and, throughout religious imagery, they express an aspiration for spiritual renewal. However, in Yoon’s works, spiritual aspiration soon gives way to a sense of resignation. Next, this article explores melancholy in Kim Hoon’s novels. Although Kim’s first two novels share with Yoon’s works an intense sense of loss, the melancholic traits in their characters are sublimated thanks to the characters’ openness to others and patient utopianism. They thus avoid the spiritual trap induced by melancholy’s self-destructive aspect. Kim’s utopianism is expressed again in his more recent works, such as Black Mountain and Harbin, which illustrate the Korean people’s present aspiration toward a spiritual utopia.

1. Introduction

The classic secularization theory, which sees modernization in terms of religious decline, has now encountered its limits. According to post-secularization theory, modernization does not lead to a decline of religious aspiration but rather to religious pluralization in one’s life, as in society at large. One dominant trait of this reorganizing spiritual landscape is expressed by the term “individual religious experience” or by turns of phrase such as “deeply felt personal insight”. In other words, as the unifying influences of institutionalized religious traditions in people’s symbolic life weakens, we tend to start our own spiritual journey with a quest for meaning (Taylor 2003, pp. 111–16; Hervieu-Léger 2003, pp. 173–74).

Starting from the changes occurring in the religious landscape, this article examines the religious implication of mourning and melancholy in two contemporary Korean authors’ novels. The term and notion of “melancholy” have a long history and can be traced back to Ancient Greece, but it is Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (Freud 1957, first published in 1917) that led to the modern discussions of the concept. Since the publication of the book, the discussion has been progressively enriched. Although Freud saw melancholy as a failed mourning, his successors have found rich religious implications in it. According to them, mourning and melancholy can serve as a window into the spiritual and psychological journeys of individuals who search for meaning in their own ways (Homans 2008, pp. 13–41; Brickman 2008, pp. 44–60; Jonte-Pace 2008, pp. 81–92; Capps 1997; Agamben 1993, pp. 4–21). This paper attempts to explore such spiritual quests in the context of Korean society from the 1990s to the early 2000s, through the works of two major contemporary Korean writers.

Of course, it is impossible to draw an integral spiritual landscape of contemporary Korea with just two authors’ works. However, Jonathan Z. Smith’s claim, according to which we need to imagine religion as everyday human experience and activities (J. Z. Smith 1982, p. xiii), helps us to realize the importance of referring to representative literary works for approaching collective religious psyche. Smith’s claim means that we need to be conscious of the “tension between open boundaries and independent identity” of religious studies” and reflect on what is religious (C. Y. Kim 2020, pp. 87–88). In this sense, this article is an attempt to explore lived-religion in everyday settings in contemporary Korea.

I will develop this article as follows. First, I will provide a brief conceptual history of mourning and melancholy, and I will explain why this article pays special attention to the 1990s in Korea. This focus on background will enable us to see in melancholy a desire for spiritual renewal, as well as a psychological impetus that may lead toward Utopianism. Second, I will explore Yoon Dae-nyeong’s works. They show a desire to overcome a sense of loss emanating from the experience of the 1990s through various religious images and symbols, but mourning and resignation eventually prevail. Third, I will examine the expressions of melancholy in Kim Hoon’s early novels. Through it, we will see that the aspiration for regeneration as a religious response, which appeared like a meteor in the 1990s, persists afterward and nurtures a kind of spiritual utopia.

2. Mourning and Melancholy and the 1990s in Korea

2.1. Mourning and Melancholy

“Mourning” and “melancholy” constitute such a vast topic spanning an extremely long history, so this article will start directly with Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia and the subsequent discussions that have developed around it. Nevertheless, for a deeper understanding of these concepts, we need to briefly refer to their history since Ancient Greece. We will see that, throughout the ages, views of melancholy both as a disease and as a source of openness and creativity have coexisted. Furthermore, we will see that if we accept that melancholy may trigger creativity, it then can be related to a desire for spiritual renewal and a longing for utopia.

In ancient times, Hippocrates was seeing melancholy as a disease. He defined melancholy as “a state when fear and woe are prolonged”, and understood its cause through humoral theory. According to his theory, there are four humors in the human body, blood, yellow bile, mucus, and black bile, and we can categorize human temperaments based on these four humors. When there is an excess of black bile or its quality becomes problematic, melancholy occurs In that case, the person usually loses his or her cheerfulness and friendliness and becomes dull, sad, and stiff, with sluggish body movements, irritability, a general dislike of people, and a desire to be alone (Burton 2013, pp. 17–18).

If Hippocrates inaugurates the medical discourse on melancholy, Aristotle initiates the humanistic discussion of melancholy, focusing not only on the negative aspects of melancholy but also on its creative ones. For example, in the thirtieth chapter of the Problemata, Aristotle says that there is a melancholic temperament and points to the relationship between melancholy and creativity. According to him, “genius is linked with madness within the concept of melancholy”, and many creative figures, such as Hercules, Socrates, and Plato, were melancholics (Benjamin 1998, p. 147). In other words, for Aristotle, the melancholy opens up creativity.

In the Middle Ages, negative discussions of melancholy were associated with a disease of the soul that church fathers and monks called acedia (sloth) and tristitia (sorrow). The most comprehensive treatment of those problems, as met by the soul, was proposed by Evagrius Ponticus, who addressed it in his seminal work, Praktikos. According to it, a person afflicted with acedia develops an excessive introversion and boredom with life to the point of soul-sickness, neglects the duties of labor and prayer, and falls into a state of helplessness. Ioannes Cassianus, a disciple of Evagrius, also warned that desert monks living in seclusion could fall into a similar state (Seong and Park 2023, pp. 11–13). These authors did not directly use the concepts of mourning and melancholy. However, several scholars have shown that the medieval authors’ discussions of acedia or tristitia were connected to the discussions on melancholy led in Antiquity. For example, in the first chapter of Stanzas, Agamben deals with the problem of acedia and tristitia with regard to the literature on melancholy (Agamben 1993, pp. 4–21). In this respect, Evagrius and Cassianus’s view was close to that of Hippocrates, who saw melancholy as a disease to be cured.

However, during the Middle Ages, there were also authors who recognized the positive implications of melancholy. For example, while Hildegard von Bingen saw the polarity of melancholy as the sign of the original sin, Hugh of St. Victor identified melancholy with tristitia utilis (useful sorrow). The same applies to Thomas Aquinas. Of course, Aquinas also clearly pointed out the dangers of acedia, but at the same time, he saw acedia as the kind of sorrow that human beings feel from not fully realizing their spiritual dignity. In this context, acedia can be interpreted as a desire for spiritual renewal. Other medieval theologians held views similar to those of Aquinas. For example, Constantine Africanus cites “the desire of religious men to see the identity of the highest good” as one of the main causes of depression, and the 12th-century theologian Guillaume d’Auvergne writes that “men of great faith and great piety have a burning desire to be melancholic”. In other words, boredom and constant sorrow, while dangerous, can be signs of the soul’s longing to grow and thus hold creative possibilities (Agamben 1993, pp. 12–14).

In the modern era, it was certainly Freud’s seminal work Mourning and Melancholia, which revitalized the discussions around melancholy, acedia, and tristitia.1 From the history of the study of melancholy as summarized above, Freud can be seen as a descendant of Hippocrates, Evagrius, and Hildegard von Bingen: just as they focused on the pathological aspects of melancholy, Freud also paid more attention to the pathological parts of melancholia as a failed mourning. According to him, while mourning and melancholy are the same experience of object loss, they differ in their subsequent stages. Normally, when we lose an object, we temporarily stop object relations in sorrow, but over time, we find another object and resume object relations. However, in melancholy, what follows object loss is not such transfer of libido to an alternative object, but rather its withdrawal into the narcissistic ego (Freud 1957, pp. 246, 251–53). Freud finds that this withdrawal of libido into ego can be an important cause for failure of mourning and resultant inability to recover object relations (Freud 1957, p. 244). We need to note that in Freud’s discussion of mourning and melancholy, we can rediscover the problems that appeared traditionally in the Church fathers’ descriptions of acedia and in ancient discussion of melancholy.

Although Freud mainly focused on the pathological aspects of melancholy, his works also offer discussions of its religious and cultural implications. Different scholars have supplemented and extended Freud’s discussion, continuing the position of Aristotle, Hugh of St. Victor, and Thomas Aquinas, who emphasize the creative side of melancholy. Above all, Lacan greatly influenced the interpretation of melancholy by clarifying the object in melancholy, which Freud had left somewhat ambiguous. Unlike the replaceable symbolic object of mourning, in melancholy, the lost object is related to what Lacan calls “the Thing” (Das Ding, la Chose) and is therefore irreplaceable in the first place. This difference between the Thing and the symbolic object can be clearly understood through Lacan’s definition that “the Thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it” (Lacan 1997, p. 125). If we accept Lacan’s definition of the Thing as the object of melancholy, melancholy is the sorrow that comes from loving the unimaginable. As mentioned above, although Freud saw this sorrow as a pathological symptom arising from the inability to recover the object relation, the medieval authors noted its meaning in our spiritual journey and saw in it a “useful sorrow” arising from our waiting for a sublime object and from our desire for growth. Lacan’s definition of the Thing helps us understand why some medieval authors stressed the meaning of melancholy in our spiritual life.

For sure, we cannot stay forever in a state of waiting. Julia Kristeva’s discussion on the sublimation of melancholy (Kristeva 2024, pp. 10, 74–76) may help us to understand how we overcome waiting. Kristeva shares Lacan’s view of the relationship between the Thing and melancholy. However, for her, melancholy is close to a universal psychological condition in modern societies rather than to a specific pathology. According to her, the major cause of melancholy as universally present in modern culture is the loss of the viability of religious images and symbols. In response, she suggests several ways of compensating for the loss of existing religious language: psychoanalysis, literature, and religious exploration. In other words, we can sublimate melancholy via a renewal of religious languages. But Kristeva’s goal is not to cure melancholy permanently. Just as analysis is interminable in psychoanalysis, melancholy and sublimation are interminable. Thus, when speaking of a sublimation of melancholy, Kristeva actually means the fact of living with melancholy by allowing it to be creative rather than defensive. Melancholy helps us to overcome the dogmatic, rigid, and dead language of religion (Jonte-Pace 2008, pp. 86–91).

Agamben’s theory of poetry based on psychoanalysis and the medieval theory of phantasm are other tools that may prove helpful for understanding how the sublimation of melancholy can be achieved. In the first five chapters of his seminal book Stanzas, Agamben connects psychoanalysis with the medieval theory of phantasm to show how melancholy can constitute a fertile ground for spiritual imagination. According to him, modern discussions of melancholy, beginning with Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, can only be fully understood within the context of the medieval phantasmology. In other words, for Agamben, understanding melancholy through psychoanalysis is akin to an attempt to reevaluate the role of phantasm in our spiritual life and can be seen as a modern interpretation of medieval phantasmology. The latter “was born from a convergence between the Aristotelian theory of the imagination and the Neoplatonic doctrine of the pneuma as a vehicle of the soul” (Agamben 1993, p. 23).

The key here is the relationship between the concept of identification in psychoanalysis and “fantasticus pneuma” of medieval phantasmology. In psychoanalysis, identification is known as “the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (Freud 1955, p. 105). With regard to ego development, identification refers to the early stages of ego development. In this early state, our ego is unable to establish clear boundaries between the I and the world and has difficulty distinguishing the I and the object, or reality and fantasy. Over time, as the ego develops, these distinctions become clearer, and the ego establishes a sense of reality and can form stable relations with external objects. In some cases, however, the reality test of the ego can be avoided or temporarily suspended. Losing a loved one in whom we have invested our libido is a representative example. In those cases, as libido invested at the object returns to the ego, the ego returns again to the state of identification where the ego and object are not divided. The point here is that this withdrawal of object libido causes the ego to “go back to the stage of hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes” (Freud 1957, p. 223) and “a hypertrophy of imaginative(phantasmatic) faculty” (Agamben 1993, p. 23).

Of course Freud saw in this withdrawal into one’s inner world and the resultant excessive imagination a sign of pathology, but Agamben connects rich imagination from the withdrawal into inner world and the medieval concept of phantastic spirit (spiritus phantasticus). According to him, Hugh of St. Victor believed that there is a spirit that acts as an intermediary between the material and the immaterial or body and soul. That is spiritus phantasticus. Spiritus phantasticus is “a kind of subtle body of the soul situated at the extreme point of the sensitive soul”, through which we can receive “the images of objects, form the phantasms of dreams, and even “establish supernatural contacts and visions” (Agamben 1993, pp. 24, 97–98). The problem is that this fantastic spirit can be not only the soil of spiritual imagination; it can also become a channel for negative and seductive imagination. To solve this problem, medieval theologians saw the need for phantastic spirits to be transformed into spirits of love. But in what way did the phantastic spirit become a spirit of love? According to Agamben, for medieval people, poetry was a crucial means of helping to transfer pneuma to the spirit of love. For them, poetry was “the instruments of a superior spiritual healing, taking over the role of the spirit as the link between body and soul, tangible and intangible” (Agamben 1993, p. 129).

Agamben emphasizes that when we seek to unite with this spirit of love, we must neither be like Narcissus, who succumbed to his own image, nor Pygmalion, who loved the lifeless image he created (Agamben 1993, pp. 111–21). This is because the topos that poetry creates is a place which awakens love for the object that cannot be possessed and imagined. This kind of paradoxical space of poetry can be called “topos outopos (a placeless place or utopia)” (Agamben 1993, p. 129). These poetics may sound unfamiliar to contemporary readers who are accustomed to modern concepts of literature. Agamben also believes that this tradition of poetry as a passage of spiritual renewal was broken after the 13th-century love poetry. But there are, if rare, some modern literary works which approach this tradition. In the introduction of Stanzas, Agamben says that his book “is intended as a first, insufficient attempt to follow in the wake of the project that Robert Musil entrusted to his unfinished novel” (Agamben 1993, p. xix). In that context, the theme of Stanzas can be summarized as a call for the restoration of the broken poetic tradition of 13th-century love poetry. He says that this tradition will be restored “one day, when poetry culture can take a step back and go beyond itself by performing its origins” (Agamben 1993, p. 130).

Donald Capps, a religious psychologist, also agrees that melancholy can play an important role in our spiritual life, and points out that melancholy can be the psychological impetus for utopianism because the constant sense of “something is missing” in melancholy can lead to the ceaseless search for utopia (Capps 2003, p. 99). According to him, melancholy was central to the lives of scholars who renewed the language of modern religion, including William James, Rudolf Otto, and C.G. Jung (Capps 1997). And various utopianisms found in religious traditions, such as the (Buddhist) Pure Land or the (Christian) Kingdom of God, are related to melancholy. Of course, one could point out that this utopianism from “something missing” tends to overemphasize the sense of not yet. After all, when one closely explores the utopias of religious traditions, one does not just find the sense of a not yet but also the clear apparition of an already. We will come back to this point later.

2.2. The 1990s in Korea

As we have seen, melancholy is a human experience that has been discussed from ancient times to the present. In this sense, melancholy is more than an individual experience: there are periods in history when melancholic sensibility grows in a community. Of course, if we follow Julia Kristeva, we can see melancholy as characterizing modernity itself, but melancholy seems to intensify whenever a community experiences a loss of orientation and seeks a kind of renewal.

It is in this context that this paper focuses on the 1990s in South Korea. According to a cultural anthropologist, “if there is any consensus among scholars about South Korea’ experience of modernity, it’s about its compressed pace” (Abelmann 2003, p. 281). The 1990s can be said to be the time when Korean people saw the fruits of this rapid growth and, at the same time, began to reflect on the meta-narrative of the so-called “compressed modernity” and what they missed in it (Chang 1999, p. 51). During the 1990s in Korea, the first civilian government came to power after a long military dictatorship, a new generation that had never experienced poverty and was therefore more sensitive to the meaning of life than previous generations who had entered society, and a sudden financial crisis in the late 1990s forced the country to confront the problems arising from the process of industrialization. In other words, the 1990s were a period of collision between reflection on the past and a search for the future. Both reflection and search were fundamentally based on a sense of loss, and they thus can be seen as a collective experience of mourning and melancholy.

Just as European 13th-century love poetry tried to lead medieval phantastic pneuma to spirits of love, Korean novels of the 1990s sought to respond to this social climate with a new imagination, moving from the social–scientific imagination that was called for under the harsh political and historical situation (Y.-s. Kim 2000, pp. 267–85; K.-h. Lee 2011, pp. 12–13; H.-j. Kim 2011, p. 14). As we just saw, Agamben said that a time would come when contemporary literature would look back to its origins, reflecting on and restoring a literary tradition that offered a topos for the love of the un-appropriable that had been cut off since the Middle Ages. The 1990s in Korea can be seen as the beginning of such a reflection, if not a sweeping change. In fact, it is in the novels of the 2000s that the problem of fantasies has become clearly prominent in Korean novels and has attracted the attention of researchers (Baik 2015; S.-j. Shin 2019), but the starting point was the 1990s. And Yoon Dae-nyeong’s early novels, showing religious and mythological imagination, are considered to be the starting point of such novels (Y.-s. Kim 2000, pp. 277–80; H.-c. Shin 2010, pp. 281–82). It is a period when the realistic imagination that dominated Korean literature from the 1930s to the 1980s dissolved into fantasy and began to serve as a catalyst for imagining new utopian spaces.

Of course, one may say that this perception of the 1990s and 2000s is overly optimistic, because—needless to say—political and economic priorities still dominate the South Korean society, and it is true that the tension between this world and that world that the novels of the 1990s revealed has weakened in Korean society since the 2000s (H.-c. Shin 2010, pp. 284–85). The sharp weakening of the aspiration for vertical transcendence or rebirth in Yoon’s novels in the 2000s is an indicator of this trend. Nevertheless, I think that the religious impulse and desire for spiritual renewal that manifested itself in Korean 1990s’ novels continue in a faint but sustained stream in the following decade. Melancholy in Kim Hoon’s novels is an example of this. Indeed, unlike Yoon Dae-nyeong’s case, Kim Hoon’s melancholic sensibility is more intense in his second novel, published in 2001, than in his first novel, published in 1995.

Before entering into a detailed discussion of Korean melancholy in the 1990s, it would be good to briefly mention the relationship between melancholy and the Korean han and clarify the position of this article. For melancholy may remind some readers of the discussion of Korean han. It is true that there are similarities between han and melancholy. Basically, han “connotes a collection of continuous, chronic, inter-generational emotions” (Gunnars 2024, p. 449), and this seems to have something to do with melancholy. Nevertheless, I think it is hard to ask if there is a direct relationship between Korean han and melancholy. That is because, as with melancholy, han is a multifaceted concept. Some see han as a unique experience of the Korean people, while others see it as a more universal experience (Gunnars 2024, pp. 450, 468). Some regard han as mere negativity, while others see it as both sadness and hope (H.-j. Kim 2012, pp. 168–69).2

Due to the multifaceted nature of han, some scholars prefer to classify han into several kinds to define it as a certain essence. Andrew Sung Park suggests two types of han: conscious han and unconscious han. Keith Wagner Padgett says that there are seven ways to identify han: a complex of feeling; a set of experiences; a history of collective experiences; a force for creative expression; a balance of positive and negative; a political force; and as having a relationship with the concept of dan, which is related with self-denial (Gunnars 2024, p. 48). Kim categorizes han into four types: resentment toward the other; grief toward oneself; fervent wish; and intense parting feelings (a sense of loss) and nostalgia (H.-j. Kim 2012, pp. 166–70).

Given the complexity and multifaceted nature of han, the most we can do about the relationship between melancholy and Korean han is to point out which of the various positions on han can be matched with the aspects of melancholy that this article focuses on. As we have seen, the melancholy that this article is concerned with is only the type that has been discussed by Freud and his successors, who focus on the relation with the Thing and the utopianism derived from the relation. The sense of loss and nostalgia toward the Thing is close to the type of han which focuses on the sense of separation and intense nostalgia. According to Kim Hye-jin, the han that Kim Dong-ri says underlies Kim Sowol’s poetry is close to this type of han. Kim Dong-ri has characterized Kim Sowol’s emotional trait as “the emotion of longing that cannot be filled by anything forever”. Kim Dong-ri’s definition seems to overlap with this article’s melancholy. The point here is that contrary to han, which originated from Korea’s particular historical and ethnic background, the melancholy of this article is a more universal experience which is open to everyone.

It is now time to look at the spiritual landscape of contemporary Korea as shaped by mourning and melancholy in the novels by Yoon Dae-nyeong and Kim Hoon.

3. Yoon Dae-nyeong and Mourning

Yoon Dae-nyeong made his literary debut in 1990 with the publication of My Mother’s Forest, and was recognized as the writer who best captured the sensibility of the 1990s when he released his short-story collection Sweetfish Fishing Reports in 1994. Since then, whenever Yoon Dae-nyeong is mentioned, it is always accompanied by a reference to the 1990s. For example, he has been described as “the author most happily associated with the 90s” (Cho 2018, p. 222), as the author who captured the sensibility of the 1990s (Choi 2020, p. 88), or even as the author from whom Korean novels found new direction in the 1990s (Y.-s. Kim 2000, pp. 277–80; H.-c. Shin 2010, pp. 281–82).

3.1. The Sensibility of the 1990s

Then, what exactly is the spirit of the 1990s that Yoon captured? As briefly mentioned above, the 1990s were a period of transition which included collision between reflection on the past and the search for a new orientation. Yoon Dae-nyeong expresses this in several ways. The first thing to note is the intense sense of loss of his novel’s characters. In some ways, they may seem like people who are well adjusted to their everyday lives, but in fact, they are usually suffering from a sense of loss for no apparent reason. Freud described the feeling of loss that persists for no particular reason as an “open wound” (Freud 1957, p. 253). In this regard, it is interesting to note that in Sweetfish Fishing Report, the female protagonist calls the male protagonist “one addicted to wound” (Yoon 1995a, p. 65). But the important thing is that the “open wound” leads them to new worlds through chance encounters and unexpected events. The way Yoon Dae-nyeong deals with loss changes slightly as he moves into his later works, but one thing that remains is that his characters are usually dealing with some kind of loss.

Suffering from an unrelenting sense of loss, these characters express a strong desire to return to some kind of origin, which is expressed in various ways. The place of origin is referred to as “a place where time cannot be perceived” (Yoon 1995a, p. 24), “a cemetery that dreams of rebirth” (Yoon 1995a, p. 70), and so on. Of course, although some criticize the vagueness of this origin, such narratives of return to origins are not unfamiliar in the history of thought and religion. It was usually considered as some “higher times”, such as “Platonist eternity, where there is a level at which we are beyond the flux altogether; God’s eternity as understood in the Christian tradition, a kind of gathering of time together; and various times of origins, in Mircea Eliade’s sense” (Taylor 2003, pp. 65–66). In I Went to an Old Movie, Yoon Dae-nyeong even quotes directly from Eliade’s The Myth of The Eternal Return (Eliade 1959), which suggests that belief in a primal moment of chaos in which the world is completely recreated is common in the history of religion (Yoon 1995b, p. 93). Simply put, through this return to origins, Yoon Dae-nyeong expresses his characters’ desire to purify their lives and start anew, and by doing so, he captures the sensibility of the 1990s.

With regard to this desire of going back to the origin, two things play a major role. One is fantasy (Seong 1995, p. 276), and the other is the images of vertical ascent. In other words, it can be said that Yoon’s characters experience the intersection and overlapping of the boundaries of fantasy and reality, and that they go through a process of mourning to recover their identity while dreaming of a leap toward a new reality. But before seeing this, we need to look at the memory work that Yoon Dae-nyeong showed as a kind of preliminary step to the mourning work. According to Freud, this mourning work requires some preparation stage. That is because, before withdrawing libido from a loved object and redirecting it to a new object, we need to spend much time and energy on remembering the lost object in order to release emotional attachment to it (Freud 1957, pp. 243–45). And it is only after this long and hard process of memory that we encounter a faint image of the new object, what Homans calls “something as yet unseen” (Homans 2008, p. 18).

The fact that, in the 1990s, many novels which reminisce about the 1970s and 1980s were published illustrates this memory process of mourning. While Yoon is usually credited with breaking away from realism, it is true that some of his works published around the time show the tie to realism. Unlike Yoon’s other early works, which are basically based on romanticism, those works show a certain tendency toward realism. Some short stories, such as In the Desert, A Deep Spring Evening Meeting Him, or The Eye and Arrow, are representatives (Nam 1995, pp. 293–94). Especially, A Deep Spring Evening Meeting Him provides a clear example of memory as mourning work through a man who reminisces six years of his career life. The story ends with the protagonist watching his old colleague “disappear rapidly into the darkness” and then “turning slowly toward the darkness on the other side” (Yoon 1995a, p. 254). And that ending scene confirms that the protagonist is heading toward the mythical and poetic world of “the other side”, leaving the prosaic everyday life of “this side”. Yoon’s first full-length novel, I Went to See an Old Movie, also shows this memory work.

As mentioned above, however, it is fantasy and the desire to create new reality through it that has played a decisive role in Yoon’s characters returning to origin and rebirth. At least with regard to this, most of his early short stories and novels are not that different from each other. In those stories, when the male characters first meet a female stranger, they are usually described as if they were in a dream rather than in reality, and so are the events that follow. Of course, some have criticized Yoon’s fantasies as escapism, but this may not be so simple. Fantasy, as we have seen, is a phenomenon that occurs when the ego returns to a state of identification and opens itself to the other, and many of Freud’s successors saw fantasy as a passage through which another reality behind the existing reality appears. And as we saw above, some of the medieval church fathers also saw it as a bridge between some disconnected things, such as the material and the immaterial. It can be said that, for Yoon Dae-nyeong too, it is the passage of recognition and affirmation of the multilayered nature of reality.

Another way of returning to origin is the strong sense of break between this world and that world, and various vertical images. In Sweetfish Fishing Reports, the following words spoken by a man to the protagonist at a strange gathering encapsulate this:

The world is divided into this side and that side, and you have just come to that side right now.

(Yoon 1995a, p. 76)

Sweetfish Fishing Reports follows a male narrator in his mid-30s who receives a strange letter from a sender called “Sweetfish Fishing Report” and attends a gathering. In short, the letters he received were messages from a world he had forgotten in his daily routine. At the end of the story, he feels that he is returning to “the place from which he came”, when he is told that, “Now you’re starting to come back, too. You’ve been too far away”, by the female protagonist. It would be helpful to listen to what the male protagonist says in that final scene:

It gradually began to dawn on me that I had been existing in a very strange place, not where I was supposed to be. In the desert of life, on the outskirts of existence.

I barely managed to tell her that I wanted to go back from now on.

Her face flickered for a second in the candlelight, and in that tiny moment, I was dimly aware of the night in Jeju Island when I first met her. Spring, rape blossoms, geese, sweetfish, the moon…… these things. I met her in the midst of these things. Anyway, my thoughts had reached that far, so I mustered up the courage to tell her. Get rid of the falsehoods, the deceit, the shell desires, and this sleepless age.

(Yoon 1995a, p. 79)

After this, the woman replies to him, “No, you have to go further back, you have to get to where you were”. And the man realizes that he needs more time to “get back to that distant origin place of existence, to where he is supposed to be, so to speak” (Yoon 1995a, pp. 79–80). In other works, this “place to return” is presented through somewhat ambiguous but powerful images. The image of “the flaming tree burning red in the mist” in Hear the Sound of the Hooves (Yoon 1995a, p. 129) or “a few strands of blue light” in Sweetfish (Yoon 1995a, p. 10) are notable examples.

Additionally, there are some works in which these ambiguous images are presented as more specific and traditional religious symbols. In such cases, it is not hard to see that Yoon has been influenced by Buddhism.3 But in this case, the Buddhism is close to the logic of negation, and tends to be related to a pursuit of heterogeneous time and space and vertical ascent. A work such as The Blue Road of Silla is a representative example. The story is about a man living in Seoul who stops by Bulguksa Temple’s Seokguram and meets a woman on his way to Gangneung to see his uncle, whom he believes is a living Buddha. Interesting is the fact that he perceives the journey as a process of vertical ascent. This is because he is referring to traveling from Seoul to Gyeongju, which is usually referred to as downbound, as upbound (Jun 2022, pp. 5–11). It reveals that he is on an inner vertical journey to become a living Buddha after meeting a stone Buddha in his daily life.

3.2. Mourning as Resignation

It is worth noting, however, that this pursuit of a qualitatively different world and of vertical ascent is noticeably weakened in Yoon’s post-2000 works. That is, unlike his earlier works, characters of Yoon’s novels from 2000 onward clearly tend to show an attitude of affirmation and even regretful and resigned attitude to life and fate, rather than a desire for a new form of psyche.

At first, Yoon began by turning the focus from the problem of fantasy and origin to reality. Between Heaven and Earth, for example, goes in opposite direction to his previous works, which had a structure of moving from reality to the unreal or fantastic world (Yoon 2001, pp. 161–205). While the protagonist of Sweetfish Fishing Report escapes reality and goes to a fantastic world, Between Heaven and Earth begins with a fantastic experience and ends with the protagonist returning to the problem of reality. This may have appeared as a positive change for those who had previously criticized Yoon’s novels for their escapism.

However, works from the 2000s onward are different from Between Heaven and Earth. Simply put, they tend to show a resigned gaze at reality, rather than a return to or engagement with it. For example, works such as Bitter Orange, Toward the Cypress Wood, and Whale-Shaped Lamp all have such a tendency. Whale-shaped Lamp, in particular, is a representative example. In that short story, we clearly see that the desires for regeneration that were vividly expressed through the metaphor of the sweetfish in Yoon Dae-nyeong’s early works have become faded and desperate by the 2000s (Yoon 2007, pp. 164–91).

Of course, this may just mean for some that Yoon’s mourning has entered a stable stage. Or else, given the influence of Buddhism mentioned above, the resignation and immanence in Yoon’s works of the 2000s may not be understood as mere skepticism or nihilism. As is well known, Mahayana Buddhism, unlike Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes intense tension with this world, embraces two conflicting logics at the same time, the logic of total negation and the logic of total affirmation. And when we follow the total affirmation, we need no more to distinguish between this-world and that-world and to search for transcendence because all phenomena are the true aspect of the universe (Ikeda 2013, p. 112). The sense of resignation in Yoon’s novel can be seen as influenced by this logic of total affirmation.

Additionally, it is true that Yoon Dae-nyeong is an East Asian writer, which means that, even when dealing with transcendence, he is likely to tend toward immanence. As an East Asian, it is hard for him to completely eschew the influence of “immanent transcendence” widely shared by Confucian-influenced societies.4 Consequently, having started the 1990s with an intense sense of loss, by the mid-2000s, Yoon seems to have gained the “words of wisdom”: the true aspect of all phenomena, or total affirmation.

Nevertheless, it is true that some of his works remind us that, in Buddhism, total affirmation must always be paired with total negation. Initially, Yun’s novels always tried to position his stories in the (almost impossible) balance between absolute negativity and absolute affirmation. In other words, his novels were close to “the impossible task of appropriating what must in every case remain un-appropriable” (Agamben 1993, p. xviii), However, since the 2000s, those attempts have seemed to decline, and his characters very often seem helpless. In those cases, Yoon Dae-nyeong’s stories often seem to come close to what Charles Taylor calls “affirmation of the ordinary life” in his critical discussion of the exclusive immanence in modernity (Taylor 1989, pp. 211–26).

4. Kim Hoon and Melancholy

Kim Hoon made his literary debut in 1995 when he published his first novel, Memories of Comb-Pattern Pottery. In the preface of the novel which is a story about a desperate relationship between a young firefighter and a blind woman, Kim Hoon says that he hoped to reach “the pure plain of the time of beginning” through the novel, where “new words and life would sprout” (H. Kim 1995, p. 5). This shows that just as Yoon Dae-nyeong, in a transition period of Korean society, revealed a desire for renewal through a return to a certain zero point, in his first novel, Kim Hoon also reveals a strong nostalgia for some times of origins for spiritual renewal.

4.1. Nostalgia for the Thing Unimaginable

However, unlike mourning subjects of Yoon’s novels, the characters of Kim Hoon’s early novels are melancholic subjects. As mentioned above, contrary to the replaceable symbolic object of mourning, in melancholy, the lost object is related to what Lacan calls “the Thing” and is therefore irreplaceable in the first place (Lacan 1997, p. 125). In short, Kim Hoon’s characters try to “enter into relation with the unappropriable” and “shape the greatest reality” by “seizing the greatest unreality” (Agamben 1993, p. xix). At this point, his novel then becomes a journey toward a placeless place, spiritual utopia. However, despite this difference, Kim Hoon also has no choice but to start with an experience of loss—and he represents it in three ways.

First of all, Kim Hoon’s novels sometimes show radical denial of language itself. For example, the protagonist of the first novel, Jang Cheol-min, has only a few direct dialogues through the novel. In a way, it can be said that he is almost described as an aphasiac, which reveals that he does not want to communicate through language. And in his second novel, Song of the Sword, we can see that his criticism of his era leads to the disillusionment with language itself. Yi Sunsin says, “I did not think of any future conceptualized in language”, and refers to this world as “a world of pointless suffering” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 55). This radical denial of language clearly shows that the object he is looking for is the Thing which Lacan defines as “impossible for us to imagine”, and before it, “all language ceases” (Lacan 1991, p. 164; 1997, p. 125).

Secondly, while this is not the case in all of his works, Kim’s novels tend to be critical of existing religious symbols. For example, at the end of Memories of Comb-Pattern Pottery, the collapse of a grand building shaped in the figure of Bodhisattva Guan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, clearly reveals that tendency (H. Kim 1995, pp. 186–88).5 Similarly, in Song of the Sword, his second novel, the protagonist, General Yi Sunsin, criticizes the Confucian language of the Joseon Dynasty for its emptiness. But if one sees this as Kim Hoon criticizing Buddhism or Confucianism itself, it would be an oversimplistic interpretation. What Kim Hoon criticizes is the fact that existing religious languages have lost their original vitality of opening up new horizons in life and serve as uncritical, direct affirmations of this world (H. Kim 2003a, p. 21). This reminds us of Kristeva’s mention of the loss of viability of religious languages as a cause of modern cultural melancholy.

The last trait can be said to be the result of the former two combined. While Yoon’s works are eventually stories about meeting that-world different from this-world, Kim’s works evoke a near-impossibility of having these two worlds meet. Whereas the protagonists of Yoon’s novels receive messages or succeed in meeting someone from that-world, the relationships between Kim’s characters often end tragically, without the characters ever meeting. For example, in his first novel, the love between the protagonist, Jang Cheol-min, and the blind woman ends with the death of both of them. Even though the novel is basically a love story, there are very few scenes where the two meet or talk in person. The same goes for the death of Yi Sunsin at the end of Song of the Sword. It also shows how difficult it is to find and meet an object at stake in Kim Hoon’s novels.

4.2. Identification, Sublimation, and New Ego Ideal

Of course, if this denial of language and impossibility of meeting keeps going on, it can only lead to narcissistic and extreme self-destructive results. As mentioned in Chapter 2, however, in melancholy the subject returns to the identification of the initial ego, and the inner space of that identification becomes the stage for the activity of the spiritus phantasticus and the spirit of love. In other word, identification is “a preliminary stage of object choice” (Freud 1957, p. 249). In this early stage of development, we form our ego and its higher dimension, ego ideal, through identification with our primary caregivers and other influential people and get ready to have object relations (Freud 1961b, pp. 30–31). This means that melancholic subjects’ returning to identification is not just “regression from object choice to original narcissism” (Freud 1957, p. 249). Indeed, in Ego and Id, Freud admits that he “did not fully understand the significance” of the identification that emerges in melancholy (Freud 1961b, p. 28), for he came to see that identification of ego can be the medium through which constant renewal of ego happens and calls it “ego’s work of sublimation” (Freud 1961b, p. 56).

Here, we need to recall that Julia Kristeva’s emphasis on not the permanent cure and removal of melancholy but the sublimation of melancholy. In this modern world, we need to live with a certain degree of melancholy not to have a fixation with some defensive object relations which can be called “the fetishization of the object” (Agamben 1993, pp. 31–60). Kim Hoon’s characters’ melancholy indicates that they are in the process of (ultimate) sublimation, which escapes the defensive object relation. Of course, it is not that easy because to prevent the “reification” of the Thing from happening (W. C. Smith 1991, p. 50), we have to regularly return to the transformative but feeble, unstable ego of identification. Kim’s characters seem to embrace that laborious process of identification for the renewal of the ego.

In the history of psychoanalysis, perhaps one of the most interesting descriptions of the experience of this return to the ego of identification is the so-called “oceanic feeling”. The “oceanic feeling” is what Romain Rolland described as “a sensation of eternity” or “a feeling as something limitless and unbounded”, and claimed to be the source of religion in a letter to Freud (Freud 1961a, p. 64). Although Freud disagreed with Romain Rolland’s claim that such an oceanic feeling is the source of religion, he affirmed that such a sense of ego could exist and called it “primordial ego feeling” or “the initial stage of the ego sense”. Furthermore, Freud recognizes that although it is not “what the common man understands by religion” (Freud 1961a, p. 74), it can be associated with some mystical mental states such as trance and ecstasy and can be a sign of “a love that does not discriminate” (Freud 1961a, p. 102). Although Freud says he should raise his objection to this love without discrimination because from his view, not all men being worthy of love, he admits that the “readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach”. And he presents St. Francis of Assisi as a prime example of someone who enjoyed the inner bliss of such indiscriminate and universal love (Freud 1961a, p. 102).

In this regard, what we need to note in Song of the Sword is Kim Hoon’s repeated descriptions of the sea. Indeed, in Song of the Sword, there are many scenes where Yi Sunsin is gazing at the sea. Above all, the first scene of the novel begins with Yi Sunsin gazing out at the sea as the sun sets. And after that, many scenes with him staring at the sea constantly appear. For example, he says the following about gazing at the open sea: “The sea is always the new sea because there’s no trace of what’s gone before on it” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 67). In particular, his description of the sea at dawn is noteworthy. He says, “The sea is always strange, primordial” and gives him “new-born time”, and it is “a new time when I and you are not distinguished” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 78). These words of Yi Sunsin’s about the sea reveal that his ego is in the state of identification for the formation of new ego ideal, liberated from the norms of the past. But at the same time, it also means he is enduring the unstable and feeble ego state.

Yi Sunsin’s mystical experience, which appears rather abruptly at the end of Song of the Sword, can be understood in this context. In the final chapter of the novel, while watching the enemy ships filling the sea, Yi Sunsin suddenly confesses, “Then the enemy seemed pious. Not that the enemy seemed pious, but that only the enemy seemed like a mystery which I should revere. A mystery, a mystery, let’s call it”. And he finds himself praying to “a being unknown to himself” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 190). After the prayer, Yi Sunsin is shot by the enemy and dies at Guan Yin-port. Guan Yin (觀音) is a bodhisattva who hears the sounds of suffering in the world. As mentioned above, Kim Hoon destroyed a gigantic building shaped in the figure of Guan Yin Bodhisattva in his first novel. But in his second novel, he resurrects Guan Yin on the open sea. At this point, for Buddhist readers, this likely makes Yi Sunsin overlap on Guanyin Boddhisatva. For one who is adept at psychoanalysis, Yi Sunsin’s somewhat sudden embracing of the enemy as a mystery to be revered can translate into the boundary melting of identification in which ego and the object, the I and the Thou, and love and hatred become ambiguous. And if one is a Christian, Yi Sunsin’s saying of enemy as a mystery which should be revered may remind the reader of Jesus’s words about loving your enemies (Matthew 5: 44–48). Either way, here we can see that Kim’s Yi Sunsin tries to approach the universal love to which Freud showed his objection.

5. Creative Melancholy or the Utopia of the Not Yet

Freud says that not only an individual but “the community also evolves a super-ego (ego ideal) under whose influence cultural development proceeds” (Freud 1961a, p. 141). The fact that Song of the Sword, representing Yi Sunsin, as in melancholic identification was published at the dawn of the new millennium (2001), after the turmoil of the 1990s, and received a strong response from Korean society, can imply that Korean society, at least partly, was in the openness of identification for adding a new dimension to its (communal) ego ideal. The huge success of various fictions, television dramas, and movies about Yi Sunsin following Song of the Sword needs to be understood in this context.6 Of course, the process of transformation to reach a new horizon is bound to go through the ambiguity or chaos, and the danger of collapsing into nihilism. In Song of the Sword, the nuance of suicide implied in Yi Sunsin’s death is a literary device to show the difficulty of this transformation process.7

Nevertheless, the point here is that Kim Hoon consistently explores the possibility of a (nearly impossible) new reality through the imaginaries of his characters. When Yi Sunsin says, “The sea is always the new sea” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 67), he postulates a certain zero point from which the Real can infiltrate into the Symbolic, so that a new social reality can sprout. Andrea Rota calls such a zero point “an antinomian Archimedean point of view” and says that it is the foundation of “utopian imaginaries” (Rota 2024, p. 474). Against this background, what is noteworthy is the relationship between melancholy, religion, and utopia. Donald Capps asserts that melancholy is deeply related to a religious experience and also to utopianism. “Melancholia is something like lovesickness” (Scribner 2003, p. 314). In a similar vein, according to Capps, melancholy is, at least in part, related to a sense of “something is missing” (Capps 2003, p. 99), and this constant sense of loss leads to the ceaseless search for a paradise in the sense of a placeless place.

One could point out that this utopianism from “something missing” tends to over-emphasize a sense of not yet. When one closely explores Buddhist and Christian utopias, one finds not just the sense of a not yet but also a clearly expressed already. For example, the phrase “already but not yet” is a well-known description of the Christian Kingdom of God. The present-tense utopia—the utopia of the already—is related to Jesus’s assertion that “The kingdom of God is within you” when he is asked about the time when the Kingdom of God will come (Luke 17: 20–21). Nevertheless, many Christians believe that we have to wait for the future tense of utopia, the Kingdom of God of the not yet, just as we need sanctification after justification. Buddhism too shares this dual tense of utopia. That is, when one accepts total affirmation, we do not need any other world, and this world itself is already the Pure Land. Nevertheless, at least in the Pure Land tradition, we need to keep the logic of negation in mind and to wait for the Amida Buddha yet to come.

Song of the Sword too reveals this dual tense of utopia. Throughout the novel, Yi Sunsin defines the Japanese as the enemy, but he does not portray them as evil. Furthermore, as just mentioned, even at the end of the novel, he speaks of Japan as a mystery to be revered. At that moment, the world is a utopia that has already arrived. We are already living in the Pure Land and the Kingdom of God. Of course, it is always easier said than done, and this kind of assertion may lead one to criticize religion as “the opium of the people” (Pals 2006, p. 134). But Kim Hoon had been a journalist from the early 1970s to the late 1990s before writing his first novel in 1995, thus closely observing Korean society. He arguably has seen the consequences of the era when too much attention, be it politically or economically, was paid to waiting for a utopia yet to come. In other words, he may have seen enough to know that when a society loses the understanding and memory of the utopia of the already that religious traditions have kept over time, chances are high that the society becomes more destructive and aggressive toward others.

At this point, what may be hard to understand is Yi Sunsin’s prayer following right after his declaring the enemy to be a mystery to be revered. It is natural for a reader who read Yi Sunsin’s mystical experience on the love without discrimination to expect a prayer of forgiveness or mercy. However, Yi’s prayer betrays this expectation. He prays, “Lord, now let me die with my enemies. But let me be avenged on them” (H. Kim 2003b, p. 191). In fact, here Yi Sunsin may seem akin not to St. Francisco but to Samson, who pleads with God for being avenged on the Philistines at his final moment of life (Judges 16: 28). But Yi’s mystical experience shows, even if it was close to a momentary gleam, he experienced the inner feeling of happiness that St. Francisco must have felt through the love of indiscrimination. The problem lies in the fact that, contrary to St. Francisco, Yi Sunsin cannot stay in what Freud calls “the remote regions where the distinctions between ego and objects or between objects themselves is neglected” (Freud 1961a, p. 102). For, as a soldier, he has to be on the battlefield. He suffers from this rift between his inner world and the outer reality, or the utopia of already and of not yet. And it seems that the gap led him to the last battle, and his death he could have avoided if he wanted.

Many of Kim’s works that came after Song of the Sword deal with this problem of rift between the utopia of already and of not yet. For example, in Black Mountain (H. Kim 2011), Chung Yakjeon, who survived the persecution of Christians in 1801 Joseon Dynasty, leaves a seminal book. But it was not a book on neo-Confucianism or Christianity, but a practical book directly related to the lives of fishermen. Contrary to occasional misreading, Kim Hoon is not talking about crude materialism, where practical knowledge is more important than Ren (仁) or Love. But he is simply praying for Ren and Love to happen on earth. The same goes for Kim’s latest work, Harbin (H. Kim 2022). In this novel, Kim Hoon tells the story of Ahn Joong-geun, a Christian with the baptismal name Thomas, who takes up arms for peace in the East. Once again, when one reads this novel, it must be kept in mind that Kim Hoon’s talk of the utopia of yet to come is always set in the context of the utopia of already.

6. Conclusions

We have examined the religious implications of mourning and melancholy in the novels of Yoon Dae-nyeong and Kim Hoon in the context of Korea in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yoon’s religious imagination shone amid the chaos of the 1990s, but it soon lost its melancholic tension with reality. Kim Hoon’s melancholic characters are more symptomatic than Yoon’s, but they show sublimated and creative melancholy in that they exhibit the characteristics of what this article calls dual-tense utopianism (the not yet and the already). And the fact that Kim Hoon’s melancholy has been embraced by Korean society since the 2000 shows that the religious imagination that Yoon Dae-nyeong breathed life into in the 1990s continues in a slightly different way.

Today, melancholy is not only a literary topic; it is also a notable religious form in a contemporary religious landscape centered on “subjectivization of faith” and “de-institutionalization” (Hervieu-Léger 2003, pp. 173–74). If a religion of mourning is about reclaiming unifying symbols and forming a stable relationship with them, then the religion of melancholy can be described as an unstable but patient and fervent relationship with a something that symbols cannot reach. That may be the reason why some scholars assert that in today’s religious and intellectual landscape, which is deprived of the unifying meta-narrative of the past, religious scholars need to pay more attention to melancholy. Kim Hoon’s novels show that there is a silent but salient wait in contemporary Koreans’ melancholy for a meta-narrative which is no more a meta-narrative.