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See the Korean Martial Arts (KMA) FAQ and the online search engine for back issues of The_Dojang at http://MartialArtsResource.com Pil Seung! Today's Topics: 1. Three Generations (Ray) --__--__-- Message: 1 From: Ray To: The_Dojang Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:43:31 -0700 Subject: [The_Dojang] Three Generations Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Of possible interest... Begin forwarded message: _Three Generations_, by Yom Sang-seop (Yôm Sang-sôp). Translated by Yu Young-nan. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books. 2005. 476 pages. ISBN 0-9749680-0-5. US $30. _Trees on a Slope_, by Hwang Sun-wôn. Translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. 197 pages. ISBN 0-8248-2767-8 (hardcover), 0-8248-2887-9 (pbk). Reviewed by Brother Anthony/An Sonjae Sogang University The two novels being reviewed here probably have little in common beyond the fact that both are works of Korean literature, and both translations were published in 2005. However, something might be gained by viewing them together. The first, Three Generations, is a work that was first published in 1931, being serialized from January through September in the Chosôn Ilbo daily newspaper. The work, like many other lengthy novels serialized during the Japanese period, was not published in book form until after 1945. Three Generations was finally published as a book in November 1948, and the Afterword notes that the author "revised the second half of the book, making the ending more optimistic" (474). The novel tells the story of a few months in the life (and for the grandfather that includes death) of three generations of the Jo family, but focuses mainly on Deok-gi, the grandson. Deok-gi, a member of a new, pragmatic generation holds a philosophy of life vastly different from the pre-modern outlook of his grandfather, or his father, Jo Sang-hun, who once aspired to become a modern intellectual but lives now in utter dissipation. The underground activities of the socialists Jang-hun and Byeong-hwa in external society propel the narrative action forward, as well as the amorous pursuits of the main characters. The book's brief (4-page) Afterword by Kim Chie-sou situates the novel in the literary and social context of its time: "In 1924, with the formation of the Korean Artist Proletarian Federation (KAPF), proletarian literature became the mainstay of Korean literature. Yom challenged this faction. In a critical article entitled 'Refuting Bak Yeong-hui's View in Discussing Newly Emerging Literature,' he supported the national literature movement, with its basic thrust of 'digging out what is Korean,' which was in opposition to the proletarian literary movement, whose focus was the liberation of the oppressed. While his commitment to this liberation was unwavering, Yom insisted that the quest for Korean-ness should come first" (475). Prior to this, the commentator has stressed that the novel's central figures are representatives of the "Jungin" class, to which the author himself belonged, "which played a pioneering role in the history of Korea's enlightenment (late 19th century)." What is most obvious throughout the novel is that the three generations of men in question enjoy almost unlimited access to inherited, accumulated wealth and have as yet none of the worries of those obliged to scrape a living as best they can. The main thrust of the novel, then, is dominated by considerations of class and social morality, indeed of ideology. There is always a danger when fiction is asked to serve to illustrate social theory. In the present case, the risk is clear that the symbolic, social value attached to each of the main male characters is going to dictate their reactions to situations, at the expense of more subtle, individual psychology. In particular, the identification of the author with the hesitations and scruples of Deok-gi, the most modern and most anxious of the three, might be felt to push him to adopt attitudes that are not clearly motivated at the psychological level. Female characters appear on almost every page and they play a central role at every moment of the story. As the story develops, it becomes clear that in this society, despite the changes it is undergoing, the women always pay the price for the men's feckless irresponsibility. The novel's main sensibility (as opposed to its main ideological thrust) is for the suffering and the strength of the women who are obliged to find real solutions to the real problems that arise in daily life, while the men remain helpless or indifferent. If anyone has to read this work, it will be for its portrayals of resolute women, not for its self-centered, dogmatic, and infuriating men. Just thinking of the work involved in translating such a long work (some 470 pages) leaves one with a headache, and full of admiration for the way in which Yu Young-nan has managed to produce a text where the reader never feels that the translator is not in perfect control of the English style. One of the people providing quotations for the back cover says that the book is "mellifluously translated" and that seems an apt word. Other scholars have, I know, detected a few places where the Korean is not "exactly" rendered, but mostly the cases they quote show only a nit-picking determination to find fault at all costs. This reviewer would say that the translator has been extremely faithful to the original while striving to use English terms and idioms that sound natural to a non-Korean reader. The smoothness of the English does, certainly, suggest a very sensible preference for readability over precise verbal correspondence. The translator does not provide any glossary of unfamiliar cultural terms or customs. She makes Yom's story available in English exactly as it was published in Korean, without explanatory apparatus or commentary. The work is offered, then, above all as a document from the past, as an example of early Korean fiction. The Afterword tells us "it was only in the 1960s, however, that critics began to consider Three Generations a masterpiece of Korean fiction in the 20th centuryŠ.Their consensus is that through this work, Yom instills pride into the generation of citizens who did not receive a Japanese colonial education" (476). Now, that is a very strange reason for calling a novel a "masterpiece," one having a lot to do with nationalist, anti-Japanese ideology, perhaps, but meaning nothing to non-Korean readers, for whom "masterpiece" implies high literary quality: a really well-constructed, well-told, thought-provoking novel. For this reviewer, what is most striking about this work is the way in which he found himself wanting to stop reading and shut the book after only a few pages. In the end, total boredom won. I think I have never tried to read so utterly tedious, uninteresting a work of fiction. The "action" develops at a snail's pace. There is no suspense and no refinement of psychological perception. The male characters remain undeveloped, being mainly seen in stereotyped terms of their social positions and options. There are no vivid descriptions of places, the urban setting being assumed to be familiar to readers. The problems facing Korea as it moved into the modern era were certainly a source of intense conflicts, and those conflicts are the material of the story told here. But they fail to come alive in an interesting manner. The essential difficulty is that Yom does not write narrative in such a way as to carry a reader's interest. It is hard to explain the need for so much of what is written, while dialogues, too, are mostly desultory exchanges without any clear direction or conclusion. Surely people did not talk to one another like this? The narrative employs what can best be called a "flip-flop, zig-zag" manner of writing. Each statement is qualified by at least one "but" or its equivalent. The narratives are never simple when they can turn three times around the bush before getting anywhere. The novel cannot, I think, be read with aesthetic or literary pleasure, nor can it provoke admiration for the quality of the fiction being written in Korea at that time. It is striking that the Afterword says nothing about what works served as models for Yom, or about the origins of the stylistic features just mentioned. What was the influence of Japanese writing, one wonders. There is mention of the Japanese novel The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki, but no developed exploration of the similarities. Hwang Sun-wôn's Trees on a Slope is a very different work in terms of length (190 pages) and readability. Published in 1960, it, too, is constructed around a group of three men, the friends Hyôn-t'ae, Yun-gu and Tong-ho. They are, of course, caught up in the processes of Korean history and social evolution as those in Three Generations were. The novel is divided into two parts of equal length. The first part takes place during the later stages of the Korean War and during the months following the armistice, the second part begins in 1957. During the first part, the three are comrades in the same army unit on the battlefront, then waiting to be discharged. Tong-ho kills himself just before the first part ends, after shooting a prostitute together with her client. In the second part, the two survivors are back in civilian life, and Yun-gu is building up a successful chicken farm, thanks to help from Hyôn-t'ae, whose father is wealthy. Tong-ho has been replaced by Sôk- ki, a former boxer who was obliged to stop boxing by an eye injury. Like Hyôn-t'ae, Sôk-ki is a drunkard. A number of women come into the story, including Sugi, Tong-ho's former girlfriend, and Kye-hyang, an orphan bar-girl. Hyôn-t'ae is about to leave for studies in the US when he casually gives Kye-hyang his knife and allows her to kill herself when she tells him she wants to die. He is imprisoned for having virtually caused her death. The story ends with Yun-gu refusing to help Sugi, who is pregnant after being raped by Hyôn-t'ae. Earlier in the second part of the story, Yun-gu's girlfriend Mi-ran dies after an abortion he arranged for her. >From time to time in both parts the main characters meet An and Sônu. An is a devout Christian, acting as "his brother's keeper" in an attempt to keep Sônu from destroying himself. An explains that Sônu, who once killed a man, is obsessed by guilt. In the first part, when both are soldiers, this leads to violent drinking and strange behavior. In the second part, when Hyôn-t'ae meets An by chance, he learns that Sônu had accepted An's help, started to go with him to church but then began to act strangely and had been hospitalized. He goes with An to the hospital where they find that Sônu, who seemed to be improving, has gone completely crazy. Hyôn-t'ae seems to be aware of a parallel between Sônu and himself, for near the start of the novel he killed a helpless woman, whom they found in an otherwise deserted village, in order to prevent her telling the enemy about their presence. The novel, then, inevitably, is full of violence, whether that of the war or that of brutalized postwar society, where Sôk-ki loses the use of one hand after being beaten and stabbed by drunken gangsters. It stresses the powerlessness of people to overcome the consequences of this self-perpetuating, destructive violence. The Christian An might be thought to represent the author, since Hwang was himself a Christian. An is ultimately powerless, his faith and practice unable to prevent Sônu from sliding into madness, where he takes himself for a second Jeremiah, ranting in solitude. This book, too, has a short, 5- page Afterword in which the translators survey briefly the novel's place in Hwang's work and try to identify its main themes. They suggest that duality and ambivalence are the two words best suited to characterize the way in which the novel approaches the harsh reality it describes. Since this review is already overdue, I cannot now take time to compare the translation with the original, and see no need to do so. As is usual with the translation work of the Fultons, readability is clearly the overriding option. Korean literalists will undoubtedly be troubled by the use of expressions such as "cut the crap", "shut the fuck up," "that's a pretty far stretch," or "what if we call it quits?" But if we are to translate the colloquial speech of Korean soldiers, or ex-soldiers, how else is it to be done? While reading, there is never a feeling of incongruity. In their Afterword, the translators stress one interesting fact: after the end of the war, Korean writers by and large did not take the events of the war as a subject for fiction. Above all we do not, they say, find accounts of outstanding heroism. Certainly, although this novel includes scenes of battle, it too is mainly concerned with other events and incidents. In particular, we need to remember that Hwang did not see military action, he had no firsthand experience of battle. His knowledge comes from what others told him. Could he have written this book if he had been a soldier? It might also be said that this novel has another, very different, unifying theme, with the troubled sexual relationships of almost all the men and women calling attention to the more troubled (and troubling) regions of the human psyche. In the first part, Sugi is only present as a secret memory for Tong-ho. The first evocation of what she means to him comes when the other two go off to spend time with prostitutes and we learn that Tong-ho never goes with them. He recalls the last night before he left for the army, two years previously, which they had spent together in a hotel by Haeundae Beach- at Sugi's suggestion, it is stressed. His memory focuses on the delicate fuzz he noticed on her face. Almost immediately after, on another such occasion, he recalls that night in much greater detail, making it very clear that they had held back from direct sexual contact, with only very limited kissing and touching: "by controlling his desire, he was able to preserve Sugi's dream" (35). In this much longer evocation, it is plain that both are inclined to yield, but "in the end, he thought only of how precious everything about Sugi was, and that she would forever be his" (37) Another, contrary memory strikes him at this point, of something Hyôn-t'ae said, "that you could never make a woman yours till you had conquered her." His inner response is: "But one thing you'll never know, my friend, is the purity and the beauty of having the feel of Sugi on my lips, face, and hands." Both he and Sugi seem to be radical Platonic idealists, unwilling to come to terms with their physicality. That moment of memory is interrupted by the first, lengthy encounter with Sônu. An evening of drinking with bar girls that culminates with "And then she took him" (60). His friends are jubilant, while he cannot stop retching. "He told himself that part of his body was soiled." The following day, "remorse gnawed at his heart" (61), but he then tries to persuade himself that his love for Sugi is "as pure as ever" (62). Returning to the bar a few days later, he demands to meet the same girl, Ok-ju, and learns that she is with the local head of the Youth Corps and he has to wait. After this, his memories of Sugi become complex, he burns her previous letters, refuses to read a newly arrived one. He starts to ask Ok-ju personal questions, "I wanted to know a little more about you" (71). The next time he visits her, he pays for a whole night and tries to repeat the restricted lovemaking of his last night with Sugi, with no great success. Ok-ju understands: "You're looking for the one you love in me. Well, it's not going to work" (79). Then she tells her secret, of having been married and pregnant, but the news of her husband's death in action kills the baby and all she has is the scar of the operation. All her memories have lost their power: "There's nothing as heartless as the flesh. Sometime it scares me" (81). And she draws him to her more gently than before. He finds a "peaceful emptiness" in which he feels neither guilty nor apologetic toward Sugi. Yet one month later, after hearing her come to sexual climax with someone else, he kills her in a burst of rage, then kills himself. The novel is in fact constructed as a diptych, the second part bringing Sugi into the action as, after several years of silence, she tries to learn why Tong-ho killed himself. Neither of his friends will tell her. She finally ends up, for no very clear reason, in a hotel room outside of Inch'ôn with a drunken Hyôn-t'ae. He tells her: "I see now he could never escape that worthless dreamworld of yours-it stifled him till the end and now he's dead" (146). And he rapes her. She meets him once more, and simply says: "The lot of youŠTong-ho, yourself, you're beyond salvation" (164). The novel ends with her leaving Yun-gu after he refuses to allow her to stay at his farm until her child is born. More than any other element, it is this complex story of paradise lost that structures the novel. If the innocence of the night at Haeundae figures the dream represented by prewar Korea in memory, the rape in the hotel in Songdo (Inch'ôn) reveals present-day realities. For Tong- ho, the failure to keep the impossible demand of sexual purity represents a primal fall, where Ok-ju is a kind of Eve. The descent into depravity, all values lost, that follows that fall he blames on her, and at the same time he sees in her promiscuity a reflection of his own betrayal of Sugi's idealistic trust. Yet it is true that Sugi also bears responsibility for what happened; her sentimental idealism placed a responsibility on Tong-ho that he should not have been asked to shoulder. So Hwang's novel provokes reflection in ways that Yom's fails to do, touching as it does on archetypal themes of sin and fall, guilt and damnation, body and soul. It offers little in the way of redemption, unless it can be found in the rather uncertain resolution of Sugi to bear the child. That seems at least closer to redemption than raising chickens, which is the only goal Yun-gu has left to live for. Is this a novel worth reading? Surely. Does it have limitations? Certainly. Perhaps, in the end, the greatest limitation Hwang was faced with was the insoluble problem facing a novelist's would-be omniscient narrator who is obliged to give an account of people who are profoundly unable to give a coherent account of themselves, who do not know who they are, what they feel, or what they want. All of the characters in the novel are, in the end, victims of their lack of self- awareness. Not knowing what it is they desire, they cannot set themselves any goal, make any clear choices. Their actions then become incoherent, fragmented. In the war, one goal was clear: survival. In peacetime, too, the end of the novel seems to say, that emerges finally as the only goal, though it might mean a life spent staring at the behinds of chickens, trying to determine their sex, unwilling to hear the voice that says: "You're beyond salvation." Citation: Brother Anthony/An Sonjae, 2008 Review of _Three Generations_, by Yom Sang-seop (Yôm Sang-sôp), tr. by Yu Young-nan, and _Trees on a Slope_, by Hwang Sun-wôn, tr. by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton _Korean Studies Review_ 2008, no. 3 Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr08-03.htm --__--__-- _______________________________________________ The_Dojang mailing list The_Dojang@martialartsresource.net http://martialartsresource.net/mailman/listinfo/the_dojang Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://the-dojang.net Old digest issues @ ftp://ftp.martialartsresource.com/pub/the_dojang Copyright 1994-2008: Ray Terry and http://MartialArtsResource.com Standard disclaimers apply. Remember September 11. End of The_Dojang Digest