The Wings ... Yi Sang

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 1 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

In a recently published essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmunson pleads for a contingency that I hope someone can help us achieve:

If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we'd declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we'd give readings a rest.

God knows, after all, how many enjoyable novels and stories have been ruined, for readers, by the academic necessity to pin some kind of theoretical tail to the simple and innocent donkey of the story.

Hey academics, we know, theory is what you have. We don't want to steal that from you. We wouldn't steal piercings from teens, Ferraris from 40 year old men, or the Vagina Monologues from Berkeley.

However, if you do take that sabbatical from theory (perhaps have a coffee black instead of your soy-latte with nutmeg and coconut shavings, or have a fight in a bar) and come back? Or even if the tweed is too tight and you refuse to give up the bound paper-teat of your preferred theory?

I give you Yi Sang’s The Wings.

Yi is an author begging for a biography. He died at the romantically young age of 27 (as calculated in Korean years) and from remaining photos, seems to have been ruggedly handsome. His stories in this volume focus on unfortunate and doomed love. The booksleeve darkly hints that Yi had a “femme fatale” in his life, while other sources indicate that he might have had a drug habit (Michael Stephens, The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice in Short Fiction p. 197), an unfortunate attraction to financial insolvency, and a fatal case of consumption. Being Korean, he likely smoked as well. As is traditional for a certain kind of Korean writer of the era, he ran afoul of the Japanese authorities, who certainly hastened his death.

The Wings is his emblematic story, in this volume accompanied by Encounters and Departures and Deathly Child. As I noted in my top-of-the-set-burner, this work is rich with ore for theory miners. It can be read an allegorical complaint against colonial oppression, an existential/Dadaist/surrealist/suicidal withdrawal from the insanity of contemporary life or, more prosaically as the schizophrenic decline of a man who has lost his relationship with his wife. With its dual foci on sexuality and the totemic role of currency, it also lends itself to feminist or Marxist analytics. All this is packed into a relatively slight 33 pages.

The Wings begins nearly randomly, with short paragraphs and semi-nonsensical epigraphs (if that is possible) slowly coalescing into the narrative of a profoundly alienated man and his semi-schizophrenic life with his wife. The plot might have been a bit more opaque when the story was written - this is to say that the modern reader will quickly discern what the wife’s “job” is, but the narrator so convincingly describes his own alienated state that his continual ignorance and avoidance, interlarded with brutal comeuppances that bring him face to face with it, seem perfectly logical.

Near the outset, the narrator notes, “a mirror is a practical thing only when it reflects one’s face.” Yet this narrator can never come face to face with himself or reality. He lurks in the “dusky” corners of the world, despite his nyctalopia, which would suggest brighter environments. He is young, at 26, but seems immeasurably older, partly because Yi is a master at describing long torments in compact prose. The narrator lurches from darkness in his bedroom, to darkness in the outside world, only through the prism of his wife’s bedroom, and the guests she frequently entertains. The narrator is only able to navigate the outside world by virtue of money which his wife awards him in an alarmingly ritual and impersonal way (Here, a perceptive reader can imagine feminism and capitalist critique intersecting). The wife’s money is a necessity for the narrator, but he despises (and loves) it. Initially he won’t spend the money, once he even tosses it into the toilet that, at the time, probably didn’t mean a porcelain fixture. Obversely, without the money, he is helpless.

The other stories work as plot counterpoints to The Wings. Encounters and Departures could serve as partial prequel to The Wings as it tells the story of a husband and wife/prostitute and how they meet and marry (and partially repeat this cycle in classic Korean short-story cyclicality). Encounters and Departures is similar to The Wings in its symbolic uses. The narrators in both stories are presented as preternaturally old looking and hairy. Both narrators seem to exist in a sequestered perpetual time that does not intersect with the prosaic schedules of the remainder of humanity. Yi’s narrators are gaunt and insubstantial, existing in an uncomfortable state of liminality, somewhere closer to Hell than limbo, but in which they are their own Charon, endlessly ferrying themselves from nowhere to nowhere, with only a bleak darkness behind the stage.

The final story, Deathly Child, is brilliantly experimental. Another lost narrator is incapable of navigating day to day relationships, reporting them as absurdist travelogues between mutually incomprehensible natives of the same language, land, city, even the same relationships. The story is in titled fragments and (as the translation reveals it) may be on of the first Korean short stories to include English loan words.

The three stories in this collection are brilliant; painfully dark jewels from an author without much optimism about anything, but with a keen eye for absurdity.

Run out and purchase it online from Seoul Selection.

So, really, since it is online you don't have to run at all! ;-)

A Rare Chance to compare Translations

Wednesday is my kick around Seoul and visit bookshops day. On this day I might have had too much coffee, as I bought a book for a second time. The book is "Modern Korean Short Stories and Plays" (Published in 1970 by the Korean branch of P.E.N.). But at least I bought it for a reason, even if that reason was, well, a bit off.

One of the titles, "The Constant Doctor" caught my eye. For some reason I thought it might be another version of "Dr. Chung" (From Hahn Moo Sook’s "In the Depths, reviewed below). When I opened it up I realized that I was dead wrong about that, but dead right that it was a story I recognized. This was in fact an earlier translation of "Kapitan Ri" by Chon Kwangyong, which is one of the stories in "Land of Exile," which I reviewed, a few years ago, for Acta Koreana.

I don't have "Land of Exile" with me at the moment, it is either at work or in storage in Daejeon, but I do have the little blurb I wrote (in the context of the much larger review) about it:

“Kapitan Ri” is a clever portrayal of the collaborator. Dr. Yi Inguk is a cheery collaborator with a “can-do” attitude extending to everyone except Koreans. He is exuberantly proud of his past collaborations and the story is partly of his accepting his new collaborators. Yi reminisces on the tangible fruits of his collaboration with the Japanese, recounts how he came to terms with the Soviets, and comes to realize that the American “big-noses” are another such opportunity despite his discomfort that his daughter is marrying one.

Now I'm dying to get my hands on my copy of the "Land of Exile" and see what, besides the radically different titles, the differences are between "Kapitan Ri" and "The Constant Doctor." I will say, the latter title seems a lot more explicative of the content of the story, and I wonder why the later translation stepped away from meaning and towards specificity?

Some thoughts on the “The Portable Library of Korean Literature”

The Portable Library of Korean Literature (PLKL) is an outstanding collection. It is easy to read, inexpensive, colorfully bound (though the hangeul cover design is in mirrored text, which seems an odd decision), and chock full of great stories, often several to a volume. If there is one flaw in the “The Portable Library of Korean Literature” (published by Jimoondong Publishing in a series of quite readable and slender volumes), however, it is that it has sometimes focused too intently on issues of the Korean War and the bifurcation of the nation.

I don’t say this because I think that these historical realities are not important to Korean literature – in fact those particular histories infuse everything that happens in Korea, even today. There is no denying the history. These issues are also, of course, critical to Korean literature because of the trauma they represent. Literature is often driven by trauma.

In a brilliant essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter notes that May Rowlandson (an early female writer in the US) became a writer largely due to trauma. Rowlandson was "not a highly educated woman, and she might never have become an author had she not been captured, along with her three children, by the Narragansett Indians and held hostage."

Trauma begets literature (as does love and notions of fairies flitting hither, thither, and yon) and war and dissolution are two of the most important traumatic issues to Korea. These issues are important right now and back into history. So I don't say this literature is bad, or that it shouldn't be translated. Rather, I worry at the focus of translated literature as someone who dreams that translated Korean literature will become more popular on an international scale. In addition, the PLKL focus on directly historical themes limits the interest of translated Korean literature for foreign readers who aren't aware of Korean history. This 'unaware' segment is the vast majority of potential readers.

To draw a parallel with my nation of birth, one might say that the Civil War in the United States was its defining national crisis. Similarly, one might claim that the mythical cowboy was the “re-defining” historical figure in the United States re-unifying and growing. If these examples make you unhappy, pick your own critically important figure, moment, movement, or theme.

Once that theme is chosen, however, imagine that 40% (all figures 100% snatched out of thin air) of literature translated from English to other languages solely focused on that theme and how the results of that thematic selection or historical reality damaged and depressed the United States. Such literature would not be improper or bad, but it might alienate a potential foreign audience.

This is close to what you have in the KTLI’s Portable Library. Add in stories focused on the costs of forced industrialization, and you probably move above 70% of the series. Again, everything here is historically accurate, and the literature is good, but is it literature that will read in translation?

Perhaps not.

My point here is a marketing one; it is partly (and only partly) the range of topic in most modern literatures that makes them attractive. I live in Korea and as an expatriate can often only guess about what is happening from day to day, and how social and historical realities affect that daily existence, but I can also tell you that day to day existence in Korea is often an efflorescence of enjoyment. Little of this is displayed in The Portable Library of Korean Literature. In fact, I can only think of A Dream of Good Fortune, in "Land Of Exile." This is certainly partially a function of my newbie status with the literature, but still that is chilling. If an aficionado has to struggle to find these works, how would a casual browser ever find them?

In another way, I suppose, I am being perverse in my argument. One thing I thoroughly enjoy about Korean Modern Literature is that it is about things. It is in no way caught in the “academic trap” that United States modern literature seems to be ensnared in. I await, with horror, the development of a fully throated literary criticism movement in translated Korean literature. It will kill much of the joy of these works.

Unambiguously, the Korea war and succeeding bifurcation are subjects that are real, non-theoretical and non-abstract. Nonetheless, the uniformly dour nature of the translations in the Portable Library series, give me some pause to wonder if this is a) representative (a thing I can’t assess as I can’t read works in Korean), and b) a good marketing strategy (since it inevitably comes back to that in my head)?

I’d like to see some more light-hearted or ephemeral works in this series. After all, South Korea must have its indigenous version of Lemony Snickett, eh?

Somewhat related, while in Busan I went to an excellent bookstore by the 9th exit of the Seomyeong Station (lines 1 and 2) and discovered that while I was napping, the excellent folks at Jimoondong Publishing had pushed the number of titles in the series up to 25. Regardless of my concern with choices of topic, this is an unreservedly good thing, and I look forward to getting them all, reviewing them and trying to develop an online “reader’s guide” to them.

In the Depths

Hahn Moo Sook’s excellent volume of short stories, “In the Depths,” contains nine short stories. These works focus on issues of control and loss of control. The stories, while all satisfying, approach and achieve greatness to the extent that they focus on mechanisms of control, whether these be political, social, personal, or economic. Hahn’s works are weakest when she pulls away from this explicit theme and instead focuses on what I would characterize as symptoms or conditions resulting from lack of control.

The collection begins with a painful trifle, “Shadow,” the story of a woman trapped in amber between the incompletely socialized emergent paradigm of romantic love and the embedded Confucian paradigm of loyalty to family. This piece serves as a kind of appetizer for what is to come.

The second story, “Put Me To Sleep,” along with “Among the Marching Columns,” is one of the two revelatory stories in this collection. Both stories are the tightly plotted intertwinings of lives in which social expectations unsettle existences and, ultimately, destroy lives. “Put Me To Sleep” begins:

The whole thing was neither true nor false; nevertheless it was experienced. One had to accept it through the senses; logic had nothing to do with it.

“Put Me To Sleep” proceeds to follow the story of “marked” child and a “marked” doctor, and the childbirth prophesies which follow, and lead, them to their graves. Hahn does a brilliant job of interlacing instances of symbolic palimpsesting (a father to be writing, erasing, and re-writing messages in sand), precognition, and deja-vu in such ways that they clearly suggest an unusual relationship between the doctor and the child, but when the nature of the relationship finally is revealed, it comes as a shock nonetheless. Hahn also cleverly interweaves flashbacks into her story, and when the final two flashbacks reveal how the doctor and child are related across time, and the outcome of their final meeting, most readers will shudder in mixed amazement and loathing. “Put Me To Sleep” is a remarkable story.

“Among the Marching Columns” also interweaves life stories. In this case two youths whose lives have been connected, far across social lines, since birth. As in “Put Me To Sleep” the narrator is a step out of beat with society. This “semi-detached narrator” in these two stoires is a clever approach, as it allows Hahn to created some narrative breathing-space in her tight plot. “Among the Marching Columns” ends semi-paradoxically, with the main characters finally re-united by tragedy.

“In the Depths” is currently out of print, but on the basis of these two stories alone, it is worthy of a reprint.

Two of the other stories are less dramatic, certainly less claustrophobic, but also quite good. “Dr. Chung” describes the re-union of two doctors, some thirty years after their friendship and competition in medical school. They have taken radically different paths, one going on to fame and fortune, the other to a reduced practice in a backwater village. But there is a link between them still, of less tenuous existence than it initially seems, and the shadow it casts is far more powerful than its narrator might have expected.

“A Halo Around The Moon” is a different kind of story. Its narrator is an elderly woman, widowed early in life, who has cocooned herself in a steely-withdrawal from all things sensual. When one of her tenants goes into childbirth, the widow finds herself face to face with a lifetime spent insulated from physical connection and must decide whether to follow control, or in some way give in to life.

The remaining stories are less strenuously plotted, in fact some tend towards the purely descriptive. These stories are well written, entertaining to read, and often laced with bathos, but they do not rise to the ferocious inevitability of “Sleep” and “Columns,” or possess the narrative strength of “Dr. Chung” or “Halo.” It is not that “slice of life” stories are inherently limited: Cho Se-hui’s “A Dwarf Tosses a Ball” uses the same kind of approach, but by providing more variegated slices of life, Cho puts together a much more coherent picture than Hahn does.

“In the Depths” is a fairly standard bit of melodrama – young lovers, an affair, and madness. I could easily see this work translated to modern Korean TV drama. “By the Fire” tells the story of dispossessed orphans, “Splinters” the story of dispossessed families, and “A Place for Fate and Festivity” (surely one of the worst short-story titles of all time?), tells the story of a woman who will shortly lose possession of her life. All are entertaining, readable, but not spectacular.

The translation is occasionally a bit clunky, but it is serviceable. The book-sleeve alarmingly warns that ‘the western reader may find some minor difficulty” in reading the stores, but this should be taken with a grain of salt; it is more a relic of the era in which the book was originally published (the 1960s) than a real worry.

I found this work available online at Amazon.com. It is always a happy surprise what the internet has done for the availability of out of print works. The bad news is, of course, the seller is asking $98.00 dollars for the work. Oh yeah, it’s also in Chinese!

Fortunately, Bibliomania has an English version available for only 75 dollars, but I may just snap it up.