The Literary Ideas of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il

An Introduction to North Korean Meta-Authorial Perspectives
By Alzo David-West

Kim Il Sung’s Duties of Literature and Arts in Our Revolution (1972) and Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema (1973) are two North Korean cultural policy statements that the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang translated and published in English over three decades ago. Neither document, however, has been formally outlined on comparative terms in English-language scholarship. Since the time both works appeared and especially with the onset of the post-Soviet 1990s, major structural changes have occurred in North Korea: economic crisis, famine, capitalist “reform” measures, penetration of foreign capital, cracks in the information control system, sociological and psychological shifts, and the turn from party to military dictatorship in the post-Kim Il Sung regime of Kim Jong Il.

Literature policies have also evolved from doctrinal espousal of slogans such as socialist realist literature, to Juche (self-reliance) literature, and, recently, to Songun (military-first) literature. The national literature is adapted to the changing policies and tactics of party and state. Consequently, overreliance on two works from the 1970s, whether they were written by or for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, runs the risk of being out-of-date in the appraisal of North Korean cultural politics and state-controlled cultural production.

Despite the fact that Duties of Literature and Arts in Our Revolution and On the Art of the Cinema are dated, both documents stand as political artifacts that are necessary in the analysis of North Korean literature and literary discourse. Their period-specific character and reflection of the political needs of the 1970s do not invalidate them as subjects of examination. 

There are at least four arguments in support of that case: (1) some of the fundamental political needs of the 1970s still exist among the ruling state bureaucratic caste, for example, defense of their social privileges and the so-called anti- Japanese guerrilla tradition; (2) there has been little change in North Korean literary policy, the conceptual structure of the Juche theory of literature, and the works produced through the framework of “Juche realism” (Kim 2008; Kwon 2003, 503); (3) the two said documents contain the substance of the Soviet Stalinist- and Maoist-influenced concept of “Juche-oriented, revolutionary literature and art, national in form and socialist in content” that was first codified in Article 45 of the 1972 constitution and is retained in Article 52 of the 1998 constitution; and (4) the Kims’ definitions of literature, the writer, and characters are authoritative starting points for understanding the political heritage of North Korean literature. Juche was formally established as the state ideology and as the “monolithic ideology” (yuil sasang) of the Workers’ Party of Korea in 1972. --->For download/read full article, click HERE