Psychedelic Codes and Close Listening to South Korean Fiction, 1971 – 1989

Abstract This article draws upon the vernacularized psychedelic rock of Shin Joong Hyun (Sin Chung-hyŏn, b. 1938) and youth culture fiction of Ch’oe In-ho (1945–2013) in order to formulate a method for close listening to literary articulations of a shared artistic pursuit of individual liberation through the undermining of established modes of feeling and consciousness. The article overviews psychedelic aesthetics and coding and explicates their recodification by novelist Yi In-sŏng (b. 1953). It then contextualizes the coeval advent of psychedelic counterculture and youth culture in South Korea vis-à-vis the emergence of a nascent middle class. Next the article illustrates how Ch’oe transposed cosmopolitan musical sensibilities onto stories of alienated urban youth and daydreams of class mobility. It then moves from textual reference to formal homology, interpreting the global countercultural call for self-liberation in two novellas by Ch’oe through psychedelic musical codes of noise and upward movement, respectively. Finally, the conclusion draws upon the work of Kim Ch’ae-wŏn (b. 1946) to reflect upon the legacy of vernacularized psychedelic codes in Korean literature. The article argues that close listening to heterodox and hallucinatory resonances across popular music and understudied works of fiction by well-known authors complicates conventional understandings and cultural histories of subversive art.