* This text is a revised and rewritten version of “The ‘Victim’ Subject: The Predicament of Narrative and the Problem of Representation,” a response to a text written by So Young-hyun for presentation at a 2019 Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery colloquium.

Can literature be testimony? 

Can literature be testimony? If literature should be testimony, why? These are two premises that must hold true if we are to ask the question of whether it is possible to attest to historical truths through literature. The first concerns whether those truths can be spoken (by means other than the literary form). For the past several years, I have taken every opportunity available to investigate the issue of women’s human rights within the entertainment industry. Those involved have uniformly refused to allow the use of interviews for research purposes. I have had to sign documents stating that the interview details could only be used for the purposes of fiction, such as television scripts or stories—and that even in those cases, it would have to be determined ahead of time that the parties’ anonymity was adequately guarded. The reason that it has been so difficult for sexual violence to emerge as a societal issue is precisely because of the difficulties the victims face in coming forward. At one time, sexual assault was referred to as a “victimless crime.” The “comfort women” issue is a different story. The women’s testimony has been consistently shared in the form of testimony collections, interviews, and statements before international tribunals. The problem is not that their accounts have not been shared; it is that they have not been listened to. So the second premise has to do with why stories that have already been spoken are once again being communicated in the form of literature. The laziest answer might be to use “diversity” as an excuse, suggesting that the aim was simply to “raise wider awareness of the issue”; the most irresponsible answer is to use an examination of the (im)possibility of representing historically real violence as an excuse to keep putting off an answer. In some way or another, testimony literature must provide its own answer to the question of what to represent and how. So what was the answer found by Kim Soom’s novel “One Left” (Hyundae Munhak, 2016)?

Kim Soom’s “One Left” and the status of “comfort women” testimony literature

In Kim Soom’s novel “One Left”, the key narrative device is the idea that it takes place at a time when only one surviving former “comfort woman” remains. It also quotes specific memories and conversations directly from a collection of testimony by the “comfort women” themselves. Why should this device have been necessary? The writer has said that she avoided adding imaginary elements and included footnotes lest the reader believe that its content was merely fictional. Heo Yoon criticizes this approach as emphasizing “veracity” and the idea of being “based on a true story” in a way that sidesteps some of the issues surrounding representation of “comfort women.”^[1] In Korean literature, former student soldiers returning from the Pacific War created so-called “student soldier narratives” documenting the atrocities committed by Japanese troops; in contrast, Heo suggests, there has been a failure to establish both narrative content and form for the “comfort women” issue in the three decades since the first testimony, and that vacuum has ended up filled by a distinctive form that might be called “testimony literature.” But testimony literature in and of itself does not mean using “true stories” as a crutch while ignoring questions about the representation of violence. In his memoir If This Is a Man (Dolbegae, 2007), which is considered one of the preeminent examples of testimony literature, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi adopts a stance of maintaining a certain distance from his own personal experiences and striving not to let go of his perspective as an objective observer—an approach that only enhances the work’s value. But while that approach may represent a literary achievement, it is unclear to what extent it liberates itself. If we consider the example of Levi, who took his own life, or that of Victor Frankl, we may find ourselves wondering what sort of mental health crises it might lead to when a person continues to reactivate traumatic experiences.

One work that is worth examining in terms of not being limited to the parties directly involved, and in terms of illustrating the potential to alter the texture of a standardized narrative without responding to the compulsion to show “veracity,” is the book The Unwomanly Face of War (Munhak Dongne, 2015) by Svetlana Alexievich. Described not as testimony literature but as a “collage of voices,” the book originated in the fact that there was no proper record anywhere documenting the experiences of women who fought in World War II. This active forgetting shows that the experience of women as bodies fighting in war emerged out of an inability to satisfy either side in the magnetic pull of patriarchy and militarism. In this sense, the problem is not the form represented by testimony literature per se; the core of the issue may instead be the question of what sort of questions testimony literature can ask about narratives that cannot be witnessed, narratives that can be witnessed but not remembered, and narratives standardized in such a way as to allow only one particular means of representation.

The uniform narrative norm and the problem of othering

In her analysis,^[2] So Young-hyun argues that the inclusion of actual testimony in fiction is meant not to furnish the alibi of “authenticity,” but as part of a project of “social contextualization” that shows the position of both eyewitness and chronicler. Kim Soom’s fiction evokes the irreplaceability of witnessing as an act of speaking out; it summons forth multiple memories, focusing not on the repetition of individual narratives of victimhood but on the “comfort women” victims who never testified themselves. Transcending the misinterpretation that its approach focuses only on a subset of survivors, it relates to issues of victimized women in the present moment who are “unable to speak.” The critical stance shared by Heo Yoon and So Young-hyun is that the narrative norms surrounding the “comfort women” are excessively uniform. The reason that so little progress is made with the political and social discourse on the “comfort women” is because Korean society’s understanding of that issue relies too heavily on a uniform narrative: that of “underage Korean girls in a colonized country being forcibly abducted by imperial Japanese soldiers.” 

The debate surrounding cultural representation of the “comfort women” truly began with director Cho Jung-rae’s film Spirits’ Homecoming (2016). That film was criticized for ignoring the progress made in exploring the ethics of representing victimization, relying instead on the idea of “historical accuracy” (as ensured by eyewitness accounts) while presenting the “comfort stations” in overhead shots and shooting scenes of sexual assault from eroticized angles. Spirits’ Homecoming premiered on IP TV, and if we consider how it has been categorized in the genre of “sexual assault” in an environment where automatically completed search terms are being created in real time based on user searches—i.e., in an environment of “R-rated” films released straight to IP TV rather than theaters for viewers who consume the sexual assault scenes as a somewhat “rough” form of erotic representation—the criticisms do not seem at all unwarranted. To reiterate, it takes more than a mere basis in fact for literature to become “testimony.” If anything, it stands the risk of becoming another way of exploiting the speech of those involved. So if literature is to become testimony, it should start with questions such as why the stories that have been shared to date have not been heard, or what narrative norms have applied to representations of the “comfort women” in Korea. What this requires, in other words, is not testimony as evidence to prove victimization, but rather a “literary” transformation of the testimony narrative.

From asking to listening, from singular to plural

In the case of Kim Soom’s “One Left”, do the existing narrative norms concerning the “comfort women”—which have been restricted to experiences of a small number of victims—shift from a singular to a plural context by means of the 300 or so footnotes taken from testimony collections and official records? A more important matter than those 316 notes is the question of what testimony the author selected and why. If the focus of the notes’ inclusion is on proving the veracity of this victimization to those inclined to question it—if, in other words, testimony literature focuses exclusively on the “comfort women” victimization narrative while relying on the testimony of survivors, and if it is devoted to depicting the physical memories that emerge from those bodies—then it is unlikely to provide an ideal for (other-excluding) representation based on imaginary identification that demands a high purity of “victimhood” for the sake of sympathy. The power of representation lies in the way it creates social contexts not in terms of the past, but in terms of the present. In that regard, it seems as though today’s testimony literature does not shape social contexts, but instead depends on them.

When the testimony of the “comfort women” is represented, it should be accompanied by a representation not only of the social context of not having been able to speak, but also of the historical context of having constantly spoken—or of having spoken repeatedly but not having been heard. The literary achievement of Kim Soom’s “One Left” is not in those 316 footnotes filled with the testimony of the people directly involved; it lies in the way it begins by imagining the very real possibility that there may be someone alive somewhere who was involved, but who has not been registered with the government and has not been able to speak. The existing “comfort women” movement, in the form of survivors coming forward to demand an apology and compensation, necessarily faces certain temporal constraints as the survivors pass away. The most crucial social context that the novel creates is the very premise of there being a time when only one survivor remains. There is not only “one left.” Even if they were unable to join in the #MeToo wave, the victims’ experiences by no means disappear. The core of #MeToo does not lie in demonstrating the victimization of “me”—it lies in the “too,” and the response of being “with you.” Within this movement, victims have taken on a new form of subjectivity as people actively taking part in #MeToo, rather than as people who have had something “done to them.” ^[3] The staccato stress on the word “too” has broadened the campaign’s scope at the popular level, helping to create a trend without othering the victims or individualizing the problem. What can be said of the narrative norms for the Japanese military “comfort women”? The emphasis was not always on their having been “young girls” who were “taken away by force.” Kim Haksoon declared, “I am a victim,” and that led to a chain of other survivors declaring, “I too am a victim.” As the distance was bridged between speaker and listener, there came a moment when the individual experiences were “heard” both separately and together. 

In the #MeToo movement, participants do not ask about each other’s experiences, yet they connect those experiences in every direction. In that sense, the social context revealed by #MeToo has been one of the temporality and spatiality of violence inflicted on women. To date, the “comfort women” narrative norms have been focused on responding to denialist agitation by proving the facts through nationalist confrontation and international law. Under these circumstances, what literature can and should be doing is not to prove the facts by repeating testimony, but to deploy narrative imagination with respect to human beings who are nursing traumatic experiences and performing the work of surviving. Only then can the social text of the “comfort women” narrative norms be reestablished.