Active Writers in Korean Literature

Active Writers in Korean Literature Choi Jae Bong

Korean Novel Market Love stories which are more or less like melodramas are prevailing in the Korean “popular” novel market. Perfume of Chrysanthemum by Kim In Ha, The Eleventh Apple Tree by Lee Yong Beom, Flower of Tears by Kim Min Gi and other works mesmerize the public with sublime and absolutely pure love stories under adverse circumstances rather than cold reality. Fish of Bones by Jo Chang In, in which the author tells us a story of a father whose wife left him and who is taken ill but looks after his children devotedly by himself until he dies; and Mother by Kim Jeong Hyeon, a story of a mother who gathers her separated family members and rebuilds her family, seem to just substitute the relationship between parents and children for the love between a man and a woman. Except for “fantasy” novels, which are just martial arts novels, modernized to attract teenage readers, other genres of novels including detective stories, thrillers and science fiction, have not yet gained ground in Korea. In the non-fiction domain, humanities and social science are on the decline while practical books such as foreign language learning books, and books on health and how to make money are selling well. In Sangdo (Business Morality), a bestselling novel by Choi In Ho, the author tells us the story of a merchant in the Chosun Dynasty and makes a strong impression on readers who want to learn something about how to make a fortune. Choi made his debut in the late 1960s with short stories about lonely individuals in the city and caught the public’s attention. But after his work Home of Stars became a commercial success, he has “converted” to “commercial” literature. Lost Kingdom, a history novel and A Road without a Road, a Buddhist novel, attracted a lot of attention from the public, but were hardly appreciated in terms of “quality literature”.

Perfume of Chrysanthemum by Kim In Ha

Sin Gyeong Suk

but that changed to “literariness of literature”, i.e. literary perfectionism, in the 1990s. The literary tendency which might be called “estheticism” gained ground. Responding effectively to the changing demand of the time, Sin Gyeong Suk and Yun Dae Nyeong emerged as representative writers of the 1990s. Saseum Beolre Yeoja, a recent work by Yun Dae Nyeong, combines existential questions with a few science fiction devices through the story of an amnesiac man. It is characteristic of the Korean literature in the 1990s that more female writers were active than ever. They attracted women readers not with heavy and epic stories but with amusing ones. Their favourite themes for their novels were isolation and the meaningless life which housewives feel, their escape from them, the shameful consequences of adultery and difficult struggle against the order of the patriarchal system. Two female writers, Eun Hee Gyeong and Ha Seong Ran, impressed readers with Minor League and Hero of My Movie. On a Boat of Glass, I Am Floating on a Strange Sea, a recent novel by Jeon Gyeong Rin, depicts very vividly the love adventure of a woman who loves two men at the same time but in different ways.

Recent Trends At the turning point from the 1980s to the 1990s, “from society to individuals” seemed to be the biggest issue for Korean literature. Writers and critics both regretted and criticized the superfluous ideology of the preceding decade. They made efforts to bring the existential anguish of an individual to light, free from socio-historic burdens. The evaluation criteria of a literary work had been its theme and effectiveness,

Eun Hee Gyeong and her novel Minor League

Fish of Bones by Jo Chang In

A new bookshop in Seoul (photo courtesy of “The Book & The Computer”)

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Hwang Seok Yeong

Song of Sword by Kim Hun

“Literaturism”, which was prevailing in the Korean literary scene in the 1990s, became the target of criticism at the end of the decade. The realization that literature dealt with overly individual and trivial matters and that the sole emphasis was on esthetic perfectionism, led to criticism that it ignored socio-historic issues and its social function. Now there was a demand for literature to be more interested and engaged in social issues in different forms. Along with this consciousness, regret about the commercialism which had tainted literature in the 1990s, and criticism about the “literature power” were brought up. The fact that the so-called “literaturism” in the 1990s was nothing but an excuse for the commercialism of literature publishers, and that critics were silent about such deterioration or even advocated it, became very clear. Kim Myeong In, Kwon Seong Wu, Lee Myeong Won and other young critics attacked the close relationship between publishers and critics and their striving for power.

Notable Writers and Their Novels Hwang Seok Yeong, who was imprisoned for 5 years because of his unauthorized visit to North Korea, is a breath of fresh air to the Korean novel scene. In Old Garden, published in 2000, he rehabilitated the ideology of utopia which had been dominant in Korea, and the “fighters” who had devoted themselves to it. In 2001, his talent was reconfirmed through his second novel Guests after he got out of jail. The latter deals with the reinterpretation of the massacre of innocent people in Sincheon, Hwanghae Province, North Korea, during the Korean War. While the North Korean authorities wrote in the history books that the massacre was committed by the American army, the author, through his visit to the town and interviews with witnesses and persons related with the massacre, found out that it had been committed by Christians. He wrote his novel based on his findings. He describes “Christianity” and “Communism”, both foreign ideologies introduced to the Korean peninsula in the 20th century, as “guests”, and focuses on their effects on the Koreans and the problems which they have caused. In particular, he narrates the story through a shaman’s ritual for a dead person from Hwanghae Province, North Korea, and thus attempts to expand the extensive domain of the realism. Kim Hun, who was once a literature reporter for a newspaper, got his talent as a novelist verified in his second novel Song of Sword, whose protagonist is the admiral Lee Sun Sin, the hero of the Korean-Japanese War from 1592 to 1598. He contrasts the cold-hearted admiral with the feeble-minded king who is full of doubts, and brings their characters to light through the former’s short and dry sentences and the latter’s long sentences full of rhetoric and exaggerations, which he does very skillfully. In addition to the two novels, 6

Kim Seong Dong

he also released Jindo, the Intact Island, a prose collection with photos, which presents the nature and culture of the island in the south of the Korean Peninsula, and also its history and people. Kim Seong Dong, the author of Mandara, also released a novel entitled Dream after a long break. In this novel, he depicts, through the form of a very short dream, the wanderings and searching of a young monk who tries to harmonize love for a woman and ways of searching after truth. He also tells us about his father, who was killed during the Korean War because he was allegedly a leftist, and the author’s own experience of excommunication because he had allegedly attempted to harm the Buddhist order, which is quite remarkable in his novel. Lee Dae Hwan released Slow Bullet, in which he tells us very calmly about a Korean man who participated in the Viet Nam War and suffers from the aftereffects of defoliants; whose disease is inherited by his son and thus destroys his family. (translated by Moon Seung Hyun)

Lee Dae Hwan and his novel Slow Bullet (photos of books and authors courtesy of the author and Korean Publishers Association)

Choi Jae Bong Born in 1961, Yangpyeong, Korea. After he got M.A. in English Literature, Kyonghee University, Seoul, he joined Hankyoreh Shinmun, a Korean daily newspaper in 1988. Since 1992, he worked as a reporter for its department of literature. Writings: Literary Travel to Meet History, Press Dept., Hankyoreh Shinmun, 1997 Choi Jae Bong Reporter, Hankyoreh Shinmun, 103-1403, Hanil Town, 881, Jowon-dong, Jangan-gu, Suwon, Rep. of Korea

ABD 2001 Vol. 32 No. 1