Just before the new millenium and new century, the idea has recently risen in the arena of the humanity and social studies that the western modern paradigm would be in danger. This threatening crisis derives from the skepticism that the energy of modernity that motivated the development of modern society, on the contrary brought out the fragmentation of human-beings and the desolation of human minds in the society. This skepticism and despair cultivate the fin de siecle nihilism and on the other hand encourage a desire to pursue a new life suitable to the new century. The 'will to the new renovation' of the modernity, which has denied the past tradition and customs, now transforms itself into the desire for a new life in the post-industrial and post-modern scientific rationalism beyond the modern developmental climax.
A sense of retrospection about the modernity has spread around a turn of the 20th century and showed not a little result from itself. But it is not easy to answer to the question as to whether the retrospection drew enough the potentiality of overcoming the modern life we have led. By doing even the most fundamental retrospection, it can be said, most of the arguers did not go so far as to get over the ironical situation of the modernity paradoxical as well as negative. That is why most of the arguers, say or not, think of the modern industrial society as more advanced than the pre-industrial society. Accordingly, for the true rethinking of modern life, we will have to reconsider the idea of what a real creative history is.
The real value of aesthetic judgement on 'historic thought', literature and art as a real introspection of modern life lies in the attempt to review a whole view of modern ideology and its falsehood compared with the conventional life. The attempt means the secret project for a new order of life to get over the repression and mishap of modern capitalized global system, which lost all the true general elements abounding in harmony with the nature. The life and culture in the traditional agricultural society which all through the human history have kept a form of collective living in the organic relation with nature, may be the primary motivation or view capable of completing or compensating for the 'contemporaneity' which is the 'essence of the historical thought' that the modernity has motivated, in other words, 'the introspection of the new'. This is because the internal power to change a direction of the present and future will be never developed without the concrete relation to the past which is certainly the source of "spontaneous energy and pleasure in life".
In this respect, the modern rationalization, the industrialization, and the post-modern information in our society were unfortunately a process of seceding from the rural community of our home and its worsening process. The important point Lee Mun-Gu's Janghanmong and Kwanchon Essay contain in themselves is that the literary language in his novels has an unique function in deterring the corruption of the traditional village community, the setback of its value, its materialism and consequently a pervading alienation in it. So he tries to evoke the traditional standard, or way, of living, and then suggest it as die Zeitgeist of the present day.
The characters in Janghanmong are of the simple low classes in the 1950s and 1960s. We could see them around us without difficulty, but they struggled all through the war and poverty to have an abnormal degree of tenacious life force. The writer admits that such tenacious life force and challenging spirit were born against the modernity having started with the abnegation of tradition, customs and authority, and that they were the driving forces to survive the modernity or modern life. The modern life's subjugation to pleasure principles, however, resulted from the modernizing process of what may be termed 'development and growth of society' in which any measure could be found no more to sustain the society with.
Like this, the writer struggles to take back the traditional moral wisdom and humanity against the absence of self-identity and all the bitter social conditions in the present generation without a firm, cultural standard or measure. The nostalgia of rural community which Lee Mun-Gu evokes in Kwanchon Essay, is concretely embodied by his project to resuscitate the human nature, which in the past was in accordance with the nature and the social wisdom that the old community had preserved before it was irrevocably damaged and cracked.
The many characters in Kwanchon Essay have kept the humanities. What the writer puts emphasis on through many anecdotes in the novel, is above all the 'moral wisdom' and 'integrity'. They are an exemplary model of people with good morality and integrity, so they know well enough about how they should behave themselves even in this society of uncertainty and vicissitude. That is why they have not lost the human integrity against, or over, the cold economic principle of modern capitalism which has been made fetish of in the modern society. In other words, the people are said to have 'a pure mind which pure people might have had before the industrialization.' The mind is the rooted one, what the writer termed 'our unending humanity'. Human-beings came to obtain the mind in the repetitive course of rebirth and circulation of nature since they started their life on the earth.
If we go too far away from the world of nature, losing the proper adjustment and harmony between man and nature, we cannot but have a distorted mind, represented well in his novels before Kwanchon Essay, especially in Janghanmong. Because of ceaseless consumption and production in the modern capitalism, our internal mentality turned into being voracious, so we could not lead our happy life with a peaceful, true 'rooted mind'. Therefore, in order to enlarge the field of historical thought over modernity and so retake the life and culture of rural community, we have to rehabilitate the internal relationship between man and nature, man and man, and to save the destiny and history of our community from our own desire and sensibility subjugated only to the pleasure principle. The writer has kept the sense of subjectivity uncontaminated by the modernity in Our Village of the 1970s, in South Village Over the Mountains of the 1980s, and in his other novels that followed since after.
More important is that his nostalgia illuminates the spiritual meaning of Lee Mun-Gu's literary works. If you go far away from your home, you feel the nostalgia. The fact that the background of his works is about a sense of having lost his home, made it possible for him to describe his home so beautifully and so in detail.
What makes his nostalgia more vivid is his usage of his hometown dialect. The dialect may be the 'only language' and 'consecrated language' to those who left hometown..
And Lee Mun-Gu's writing style is much valid in that it stands opposite to the urban standardized literal language and visual communication for the definite universal, and objective science and technology. The latter language is considered lacking in social wisdom and real experience of the pre-modern rural community. That's why he appropriates the pre-modern writing style of indigenous dialect. Through his stylistics, he seems to show his acceptability of the outer world through auditory sense rich in old stories against the modern prevailing visuality, and to pursue the harmony between the two senses. Moreover, instead of the architecturally constructed plot of modern novel of his contemporary writers, he takes his own writing form using innumerable boshes and episodes for his novels, and he enjoys the writer's emotionality only present in the storytelling style, with scornful dismissive attitude for the dryness and speediness in the modern novels. The auditory storytelling form he employed to write in, ena bles him to pursue in his novels the simple symbiosis life well adjusted to the rebirth and circulation of nature.
Lee Mun-Gu's pursuit of this writing form is, in other words, an instinct, uncompromising denial of the Korean modernity by which only savageness and self-destruction have been brought out rather than happiness in our society. And his writing style shows a concrete reality of life and it is a product of agricultural and 'soil culture' with simplicity and health.
What we get finally from our studies of Lee Mun-Gu's nostalgic works is just an awakening that we lost a root of true spirit and mind in the name of modernization and development. The power his works hold in themselves lies in the nostalgic spirit and mind, in which exists the eternal attractiveness even in such ages of vicissitude as ours. This nostalgia gives us a starting point of looking back over the de-personal, unhealthy and chaotic society, distorted by the modern merciless war and emotionless capitalism. And so it is said that the nostalgia in his novels derives from Lee Mun-Gu's attempt to reveal the whole truth of this modern life. And the effect of tardiness in the oral sentences is not a little valid in subverting our language of modern capitalism holding in itself speediness, desolate personality, forced value, and dehumanization, and it couldn't give us better time to reflect our modern life.