Lee Hyo-seok and Walt Whitman: The Way to Rule the Melting Pot

The short novel, named Leaves of Grass, written by Lee Hyo-seok in 1942 is an interesting text. Lee wrote the inscription as follow: "Having Walt Whitman is a happiness of mankind." As it is suggested in its title and inscription, Lee inserted some parts of Whitman's serial poetry and showed his affection and interest about Walt Whitman in this narrative. This text has been read as a text that claims an individual desire is more important than a public duty. However, I think it's more complicated than it seems. First of all, when Lee talks about Whitman's poem in the noble, he tells as follow: It seems like everyone is beautiful, equal, and lovely to him(Whitman). There are no ugly, uneven thing. It seems like he talks about the voice, which organizes "The melting pot" to a module, as Franco Moretti told in Modern Epic. In this sense, we can sense the affinity between Lee's short novel and the discussions about the governing legitimacy of the Japanese Emperor, which tried to change the relationship between the emperor and the colonized subjects to father and his son. This article aims to read Lee's Leaves of Grass as an allegory, as a text which tried to imagine the alternative governmentality, The Greater Asia. The objects of this article are texts about the Manchuria written by Lee Hyo-seok in late1930s and 1940s. Lee liked to be in Harbin(???) and he wrote many travel essays and nobles set against a backdrop of this city. Since the Manchuria become a place of imagination about the alternative government, people in colonial Korea were also fascinated by this melting pot in Asia. By reading Lee's texts written about the Manchuria in the perspective of his Leaves of Grass, we will be able to re-examine the political imagination performed by Lee.