[Han Ki-wook] Fiction and Film in Popular Culture (3)
The Works of Kim Yong-ha*, Ha Song-nan, and Hong Sang-soo*
Translated by KIm Yoo-sok
3.
When Ha made her literary debut with "P'ul" [Grass; 풀], [12] her unique method of description attracted critical attention. Hers is a "micro" style which painstakingly records the everyday space of the metropolis, as if she were filming everything with a highly sensitive camera. [13] The short story thus starts:
The woman is standing and watching the white sand in the empty playground
below. Like the hour hand and the minute hand of the clock, the slide and its
shadow are apart by 90 degrees. As the sun gradually passes the side of the
building and ascends directly above the rooftop, the slide and its shadow just pass
9:10. With her buttocks half leaning against the ventilator of the air conditioner by
the window, the woman for some time has been watching the buildings and the
shadows they cast on the playground. In between the intersecting shadows of the
buildings is a patch of sunlit ground, shaped like a piece of cake. The slide stands
on that sunlit patch. The tin boards of the slide are blinding. On the other side of
the side street next to the playground are short Western-style houses, in single file.
All of the windows that open toward the buildings are shut by curtains.
The above passage is a description of the view as seen by a woman, the narrator of "P'ul," from the 9th floor of a building. While it can be easily found in the French nouveau roman of the 1950's and 1960's, such description, which meticulously records surrounding objects without any subjective intervention, has been rare in South Korean fiction. [14] Realist fiction of the 1980's, which placed the human narrator in its center, valued restrained, objective description only as far as it was necessary for the theme and dramatic development of the work. Nor did the introverted narrator of the sentimental fiction, which dominated the early 1990's, ever gaze at the world with such coldness. Reminiscent of scenes in black-and-white movies that present the buildings and scenery of a typical metropolis from a bird's-eye view, the above excerpt is also a good example of the visual characteristics of Ha's early works. If Kim's works can be likened to sophisticated ../../image/common of the most impressive scenes from the various objects of popular culture in the metropolis, shot with a highly sensitive camera, then Ha's works are like documentaries on the most ordinary scenes from the space of everyday life in the metropolis, randomly selected but painstakingly filmed. In other words, the result could not be more dissimilar. Nevertheless, while Kim's sensuous ../../image/common seem familiar, Ha's plain yet detailed documentaries are somehow unfamiliar.
In such "micro" descriptions, which characterize Ha's works, the human figure seems to be accorded no privileged status in relation to material objects. In contrast to the massive material world of the metropolis, people are dwarfish and, even worse, alienated and isolated from one another. Moreover, human characters are not allowed individual differences: the major characters are called "the man" or "the woman" and the minor ones "a man" or "a woman." At times, mere physical characteristics replace such nomenclature. In addition, due to the near absence of any noteworthy incident, the author's works lack a dramatic element. Without any dramatization, they seem thus to portray the humdrum, uneventful daily lives of anonymous men trapped in the metropolis.
For example, because "P'ul" meticulously depicts without any commentary the monotonous life of a woman who works in the photograph department of a magazine company, the reader has difficulty in selecting the "important" passages. We can thus draw up a list of the important points in this short story. The woman is troubled all day long because she has lost both the rose bouquet from her lover and the type for the syllable "t'am," which is necessary for mounting advertisement copy, and dejected in turn because of her serious forgetfulness. But she is somewhat comforted by a tuft of grass that she discovers under the slide in the playground. While undressing in a motel together with her lover that same night, the woman at last finds the type for "t'am" on the hem of her skirt. Then, recalling the grass she saw at lunchtime, she asks her lover, "Could you believe in it?" To his "Believe in what?" she murmurs, "Grass." Here ends the short story. Of course, the authorial camera does at times probe into this character's conscious, presenting us with her dearly held memories such as those involving her incompetent father. However, because even her conscious is hardly dramatic and fragmentary, it fails to serve as meaningful commentary on her present. In order for this short story to achieve a minimal level of dramatization, it must be provided with a clue. And this is given to us in the form of a "clamp," which links the world of objects and the human world. [15] In other words, the clamp in this work connects the grass and the misplaced type for the syllable "t'am."
Like the children's book where the reader must find certain "hidden" objects in a drawing that uses optical illusions―the woman reads such a book in the office―( Hwansang-ui Maejik Ai [ The Fantastic "Magic Eye" ; 幻想의 매직 아이]), Ha hides this clamp somewhere in her short story. And unless the reader finds this "hidden picture," "P'ul" will only seem like a bunch of "tiny, sand-like dots," exactly in the way that Hwansang-ui Maejik Ai does to the girl who gazes at the drawings of optical illusions. Consequently, the colleague's advice―"Don't stare at it with so much concentration. Look far, as if you were looking at something that's nearby from afar"―applies not only to the protagonist but also to us, the readers. Indeed, if we follow this advice and look at the work from afar, the single tuft of "grass" and the type for "t'am" will shine out from the world of immense material objects and the world of dwarfed humanity, respectively. When these two objects are connected in the woman's conscious, a small drama is created at last. Weak and fragile as it is, this sparkle is the only hope she can depend on. This is why she quite oddly turns to her lover and asks, "Could you believe in it?"
Indeed, the short stories contained in Rubin-ui Sulchan [ Rubin's Vase ; 루빈의 술盞], [16] Ha's first collection, rely almost wholly on the "micro" description and the "clamp" examined above for their novelistic effect. If the former underscores the world of massive objects in the metropolis, and latter symbolizes the glimmer of hope among the men who live in that world. While restraining her subjectivity in depicting the former, the author projects a strong, subjective will onto the latter. In other words, she resolves the contradiction of somehow having to keep hope alive in a hopeless world through the "clamp" in her early works. Although this hope grows and the "clamp" appears under various disguises in subsequent works leading to Siksa-ui Chulgoum , the basic nature of Ha's hope remains the same. And because it is basically "fabricated" through the "clamp," this expression of the author's will somehow to depict her compassion for the other is always in danger of falling into her subjective sentimentality.
In order to have a clearer understanding of the virtues and limitations of Ha's early fiction, we must here examine briefly "Chigu-wa Kakaun Sohaengsong-gwaui Rangdebu" [A Rendez-vous with a Minor Planet Close to the Earth; 地球에 가까운 小行星과의 랑데부] (henceforth "Rangdebu"), which may be the work most representative of this period. This novella presents in great detail and in turn the everyday lives of a man and a woman who work on the 39th floor of a huge, "U"-shaped 56-story (52 stories aboveground and 4 stories underground) building. The man works for a company that sells devices for straightening out the spinal column; the woman is an office worker at Ch'ungsil Services, which cleans and guards the entire building. Although they work on the same floor, the man and the woman hardly come in contact with one another because their respective offices are located on each "arm" of the "U"-shaped building. One day, he finds a leaf with a message written on it: "Someone please trip me. So that I'd crash onto bare earth. Please. 102." After trying for some time to decipher this message, the man sticks the leaf in his pocket and completely forgets about it. This leaf is the 102nd message that the woman, tired of her routine life, flung from a window, hoping someone would find it; in other words, an SOS. Her only joy is to see the potted trees in her office grow and the trees and the leaves here are no different in their significance from the "grass" in the short story "P'ul."
If this story differs from "P'ul," it does so because of its emphasis on the encounter with a stranger. In this respect, "Rangdebu" may be read as a sequel to the other story, which allowed the woman to discover the buds of hope yet left it unclear as to whether or not she could share it with her lover. But because it can be achieved only through a "rendez-vous," which presupposes efforts from both parties and not a one-sided "discovery," a truly meaningful encounter is far more difficult than discovering the "grass" of hope. That both parties' efforts are needed for a genuine encounter is reinforced by the fact that, here, the man and the woman work in opposite wings of the same building. In terms of narration, each of the two characters independently recounts his or her own life, thus forming another―structural―symmetry. The conclusion of this story, however, is not much different from that of "P'ul." Despite his "amnesia," the man deciphers the message on the leaf after much ado and recognizes the woman who is waving from the window on the other side of the building. Likewise, she recognizes him and waves and shouts to him. In other words, the man and the woman finally have succeeded in communicating and therefore can look forward to a splendid "rendez-vous." Now, they are able to see the reality not only of one another but also of the entire building itself ("To the woman, it was finally apparent that the building was 'U'-shaped"). At this point, the story ends.
If we look without straining ourselves, the accomplishments of this work become obvious. Noteworthy are the virtues of its "micro" descriptions, which present the barren environment of the metropolis and, in contrast, the humdrum existence of dwarfish men by adjusting the perspective. For instance, scenes such as the one where the man looks down, in bird's-eye-view fashion, at the crowd of people who traverse the square between the two wings and enter the building in the morning ("Crawling to the square from all four directions like multiped insects, people form three lines and disappear [into the building] in turn") and the one where the woman, as if to rid herself of the paralysis occasioned by the daily ennui of living in a monolithic building, unceasingly goes in and out of the office and moves about―such passages signal a development from the rather plain and uneconomical descriptions of "P'ul" and can be seen as Ha's unique virtues.
The existence of these virtues, however, should not blind us to the fundamental weakness of this short story. If seen from due distance and without straining one's vision, the encounter between the man and the woman here turns out to be extremely contrived; hence the title "A Rendez-vous with a Minor Planet Close to the Earth." Nevertheless, it would have been better not to have let these characters meet each other at all, as in Kim's "Hoch'ul," if the author had to depend on help from the heavens and such artificial means. For, in this work, hope is virtually a present from a deus ex machina . In order to receive this gift, the woman must resort to the childish act of strewing leaves with her desperate messages written on them; the man must go back all the way to his alma mater simply to be able to finger the word "freedom" that he secretly carved on the bottom of his desk on his high school graduation day. In other words, the junctions of loss, alienation, and pain in the lives of these characters―the woman's memory of being pricked all over the body by needles during her years as a fitting model and the man's love-hate relationship with his mother and hometown―are degraded into mere sentimentality. While there were hints of it in "P'ul," this tendency worsens in Ha's longer works so that it cannot be countered even by better versions of the "clamp" such as "Rubin's vase"―"a shape (diagram) that changes and seems like an entirely different diagram according to the perspective or other conditions."
On the other hand, the artistry that Ha displayed in Yopchip Yoja [ The Woman Nextdoor ; 옆집 女子], [17] her second collection of short stories, differs considerably in tone from that of her first. The most noticeable change lies in the author's use of ambiguity as a key device of dramatization instead of choosing gradually to discard devices such as the "clamp" and "find-the-hidden-picture." In other words, she here opts actively to use the uncertainty inherent in the anonymous community of the metropolis and to create the effect of dramatic reversals through ambiguous endings instead of forcibly linking the world of objects and the human world with artificial devices such as the "clamp." Examples of decisive use of ambiguity would be works such as "Yopchip Yoja," "Angmong" [Nightmare; 惡夢], and "Kipuda Kuju Osyonnae" [Joy to the World, the Lord Is Come; 기쁘다 救主 오셨네], [18] all of which are contained in this second collection. Ha's short stories that make partial use of ambiguity are even more numerous, however. We can then say that ambiguity has now become this author's forte as well as artistic assets. But this is not something that just happened one day. Instead, the "clamp" of earlier works has become increasingly sophisticated―turning into "Rubin's vase" in the process―at last to establish itself as a valid artistic device.
For instance, in "Yopchip Yoja," this device deftly connects the inscrutable heart (identity) of the woman nextdoor and the narrator's forgetfulness and gradually builds up a foreboding atmosphere, finally to create the effect of a chilling reversal through the decisive ambiguity of the ending. Although we as readers have no choice but to judge everything solely on the basis of th first-person narrator's words, she is hopelessly forgetful and even goes on to display symptoms of compulsive neurosis. Consequently, we are faced with a dilemma: should we or should we not trust the narrator's words? If they are true, then she is unjustly accused of theft and mental derangement by her husband and the woman nextdoor. On the other hand, if they are false, then she is unfairly blaming the other two parties because of her hopeless forgetfulness and compulsive neurosis, going mad indeed. When we consider that both amnesia and compulsive neurosis are ailments that can easily develop in people who, in the anonymous space of the metropolis, are unable truly to connect with others, the ambiguity of the whole situation becomes even more piquant. In other words, the mastery of this short story lies in the fact that, no matter what the truth regarding the narrator, the ominousness and sense of loss inherent in this world remain the same.
In addition to ambiguity, stylistic changes also make Ha's recent works interesting:
If this collection differs [from the first one], that difference may lie in an increase in
the sense of dramatic speed in the development of the plot and the description of the
characters. It is a noteworthy progress that descriptions of objects, which, in
previous works, were so monotonous as to be almost tedious and plain, are here
used as appropriate devices, harmoniously blending with narrative tension. An
appropriate degree of tension and relaxation, adjusted according to plot development,
heightens the symbolism of material existence. [19]
Of course, such changes do not signify a complete relinquishment of the "micro" descriptions that characterized the author's early works. Nevertheless, her prose is now capable of maintaining a "sense of dramatic speed" and flexibly controlling an "appropriate degree of tension and relaxation" in accordance with the dramatic development of her works. Consequently, as the tempo of the plots pick up speed and rhythm, Ha's style, "so monotonous as to be almost tedious and plain" in the past, begins to take on new vitality. This does not do full justice to the shifts in her style, however. Another change, one that is as important as the newly acquired flexibility in controlling the tempo of the plot, is dramatic and elaborate visualization. Let us look at the next passage, which is from "Yangp'a" [Onions; 洋파]:
After flying up into the air in a parabola, the sashimi knife skirts the man's cheek,
to go through his bathroom slipper and stab his instep. Shaking, the body of the
knife makes strange noises. They sound like the noises that were made when
someone played a saw on television. After letting out a single shriek, the woman
covers her face and heavily falls into the chair. Clenching the handle with both
hands, the man barely manages to pull out the knife. Each time the temple throbs,
droplets of blood, like apricot blossoms, spring from the man's cheeks.
The above scene from "Yangp'a" occurs when the woman, falling from the chair, accidentally hits the handle of the sashimi knife on the cutting board. This in turn sends the knife flying across the air, finally to stab the man's instep after scratching his face. Admittedly, there are memorable passages in the "micro" descriptions found in author's earlier works. But it is only with Yopchip Yoja that she starts to breathe speed and life into the detailed yet rather monotonous descriptions and give substance to her highly sensitive visualization. In other words, Ha's art has now moved from a world of colorless documentaries to one of dazzling, colorful ../../image/common that quickly capture impressive scenes from the "dead zone" of the metropolis. It is precisely at this junction that her fiction meets popular cinema and approaches the world of Kim's original ideas and sensuous ../../image/common. As such, it would be not inappropriate to call "Yangp'a" a "meditation on knives" and "Komp'ang'ikot" [Mildew Flower; 곰팡이꽃] a "meditation on garbage." When seen from such a perspective, even the unfamiliar spectacle of "Chulgoun Sop'ung" [The Happy Picnic; 즐거운 消風] and even "Yopchip Yoja" become the familiar ../../image/common of cult slasher movies and thrillers. In other words, then, the author's recent works exhibit a tendency to be assimilated into popular film as they become more elaborate in style, theme, structure, technique, and visual characteristics.
In conclusion, I would like to say a few words regarding the vision presented by Ha's world view. She is no different from Kim in her negation of monolithic discourses. Nevertheless, a writer cannot completely wish away monolithic discourses such as "history" and "world view" from his or her works, for they will remain, albeit in transmuted forms or as traces. The most noticeable characteristics of Ha's early works were the "micro" descriptions and the "clamp," which corresponded to the arid space of the metropolis and the wistful hope of men living in it, respectively. This hope had to be artificially created instead of being discovered in real life, however, precisely because of the meticulous eye that was gazing at that reality. In other words, the author's "micro" descriptions and world view left no ground whatsoever for hope from the beginning. While it may faithfully depict the overpowering front of the urban space and the everyday life of the dwarfish narrator-subject, painstaking record of the material world allows no room for profound reflections on either from the outset because it excludes any subjective intervention. For instance, the protagonists of "Rangdebu" display no meaningful thought or commentary regarding the gigantic, "U"-shaped building they are trapped in. As a result, the towering building emerges as a thoroughly objectified entity devoid of any context of human labor or related social relations.
The subject in Ha's early fiction strived to raise hope in a "barren environment." This no longer seems to be the case in her recent works, however, from which rash hope is categorically absent. As such, the feeble warmth discernible in "Kippal" [Flag; 깃발], "Komp'ang'ikot," and "Chaeppit Tosi-e Naeryoanjun Ch'onnong Nalgae-ui Kkum" is but meager consolation for a life crippled by isolation and frustration rather than a premonition of hope. Indeed, the basic sentiment of the author's recent fiction seems to be formulated as "grotesque reality vs. heartless subject" instead, which is especially noteworthy in "Yopchip Yoja," "Chulgoun Sop'ung," and "Kipuda Kuju Osyonnae." Such coldheartedness is problematic, however, because it is contrived for aesthetic effects and not acquired from a cool-headed confrontation with reality. In other words, it is nearly identical to the artificial concoction of hope through the device of the "clamp." For instance, the ending of "Kipuda Kuju Osyonnae" ("Your father is Faust, you know. Even though he's tempted by the Devil, Faust is saved in the end. My baby, I love you") reduces the charm of the story's ambiguity and makes its cynicism sound contrived by revealing Ha's intentions far too blatantly. Seen thus, her artistic task lies in overcoming this artificiality and becoming more natural and down-to-earth.
* All Korean words and names have been romanized in accordance with the McCune-Reischauer system except, of course, established spellings such as "Seoul" and personally preferred renditions such as "Paik Nak-chung." In addition, the names of all Korean figures, fictive or historical, appear with the last name preceding the first. [Translator's note]
* Depending on the source, the hyphen is sometimes omitted. The same holds true for the names of all of the characters from his movies. This article was originally published in no. 111 (spring 2001) of Quarterly Changjak-kwa-Bipyong [ Creation & Criticism ; 創作과 批評]. [Translator's note]
* Literary critic and professor of English literature at Inje University. Works include "Chiguhwa Sidae-?i Segye Munhak" [World Literature in the Age of Globalization; 地球化 時代의 世界 文學]. His e-mail address is englhkwn@ijnc.inje.ac.kr.
[12] Published on January 1, 1996, in the Soul Sinmun [ Seoul Shinmoon ; 서울 新聞], which has since been renamed the Taehan Maeil Sinbo [ Korea Daily News ; 大韓 每日 申報].
[13] See Kim Yun-sik [金允植], "'Kajok Sosor'-e Irugi-wa Nomosogi" [Arriving at and Going Beyond 'Family Fiction'; '家族 小說'에 이르기와 넘어서기], Ha, Siksa-ui Chulgoum [ The Joy of Meals ; 食事의 즐거움] (Seoul: Hyondae Munhak-sa [現代 文學社], 1998).
[14] In his For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction [ Pour un nouveau roman ] (1963), Alain Robbe-Grillet declared that he would pay special attention to "the relationships that exist among objects, gestures, and situations while refraining from any psychological and ideological commentary whatsoever on the characters' actions."
[15] Kim Yun-sik, op. cit., 193-194.
[16] Published by Munhak Tongnae in 1997. While the original Korean title literally translates as "Rubin's goblet," the drawing, famous for its optical illusion, is usually called "Rubin's vase" in English. [Translator's note]
[17] Published in 1999 by Changjak-kwa-Bipyong-sa [Changbi Publishers, Inc.; 創作과 批評社] (Seoul).
[18] Originally published in Chakka [ Writer, ; 作家] (spring 2000).
[19] Paek Chi-y?n, "Chaeppit Tosi-e Naeryoanjun Ch'onnong Nalgae-ui Kkum" [The Dream of Wings of Candle Droppings Alighted on an Ashen City; 잿빛 都市에 내려앉은 촛농 날개의 꿈], Ha, Yopchip Yoja (Seoul: Changjak-kwa-Bipyong-sa, 1999) 274.