“Tough as Ox Tendons”: Korean Literature and Returning Catastrophe

Abstract

www . flickr . com / people / limone 51 After you died, I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral. After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck. After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain. Everywhere the lights of the temple shrines are burning. In the flowers that bloom in spring, in the snowflakes. In the evenings that draw each day to a close. Sparks from the candles burning in empty drink bottles. – Han Kang, Human Acts I n Korea, as in other technologically developed societies, death ordinarily and unexceptionally comes to us privately, in hospital rooms or at home. Only exceptionally and in extraordinary circumstances is death public and en masse. Our funerals follow suit: the commemorative ritual takes place in a relatively private room that people enter individually , where there is a picture of the deceased to which they bow, and usually some next of kin, who dress in coarse sackcloth and speak in hushed whispers, with whom they may grieve. By tradition, however, in the next room people talk, eat, drink, and chat about their memories and their loss and what it will mean. In this way, the ritual recognizes the extraordinariness of death, but the grieving itself, the feelings of deep sadness and pain that will last a lifetime for the immediate bereaved, is nevertheless kept very ordinary. Perhaps we are better equipped than other nations, at least by our customs, to deal with deaths that are not a single private event but public deaths that must be shared; catastrophic loss and mourning that come together in a form of extraordinary ordinariness, death that is commonly shared, and therefore uncommonly rare. In essay WORLDLIT.ORG 21 Tough as Ox Tendons” Korean Literature and Returning Catastrophe by Eun-Gwi Chung “ the epigraph above, for example, the sites mentioned are public spaces, the units of time are everyday ones, and perhaps there is even something terrifyingly inclusive about the addressee. Who is this departed “you”? Is it a human being or a ghost—and if human, buried or burned? If a ghost, what kinds of public commemoration will have the power to lay it to rest? Jean Baudrillard famously said of the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, “The whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event, but so, too, are the conditions of analysis. You have to take your time.” This is true not just for historians but even more so for writers who would wrestle with ethical and artistic questions that are at first obscured by but later indelibly embedded in the catastrophic event. Any catastrophe is sensational and initially stunning. But each catastrophe triggers huge losses, shared and immediate . But although it might be difficult to restrain moral condemnation or even thoughtless military action against terrorism, because what must follow is deeply personal and private and in many cases lasts the lifetime of the bereaved individual, right decisions about public forms of commemoration, unlike the immediate outpourings of communal grief, are always the products of slow time. Literature is one such public/private form of commemoration , and it too tends to unfold according to the rule of “taking time.” Accordingly, the catastrophes we find in Han Kang’s novel Human Acts are several and several decades old, including the Gwangju Uprising that began on May 11, 1980, and culminated in the massacre of several thousand, and a fire at Yongsan in Seoul in January 2009 that killed five squatters and a policeman. The wide time span of the novel tells well how the creative imaginations of our writers occupy the realm of remembering and mourning when catastrophe leaves the realm of social and political history and enters into the realm of ordinary everyday lives. Catastrophic spots of time in Korean literature are added unfortunately with another catastrophe that came too soon after the Korean original of Han Kang’s Human Acts was published . In many ways prefigured in these pages, too, it is a catastrophe that demonstrates how these truths reenter the fast time of political life of the country from the slow time of those everyday lives: the...