Korean Studies
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Jeong-Hyun Shin The Trap of History: Understanding Korean Short Stories. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998. xv, 115 pp. $15.00 (paper). ISBN: 1-55729-059-8.
Reviewed by Stephen J. Epstein
Victoria University of Wellington[This review first appeared in Asian Studies Review, 24.2 (2000): 288-90.] Jeong-Hyun Shin's The Trap of History has great potential. In the preface the author sets out his aim to "analyze twelve highly regarded Korean short stories by the most prominent writers of modern and contemporary Korean literature to show their achievements and their weaknesses" (xiv). Books of Korean literary criticism are a rarity in the West and this volume, the first to provide a collection of essays in English on such well-known tales as Kim Tong-ni's "Potato," Yi Sang's "Wings," and Cho Chông-rae's "Land of Exile," deserves a warm welcome on this basis alone.
Nonetheless, many aspects of the book limit its appeal. Shin, despite condemning Korean literature's expression of "foreign values in patriotic guise" (xv), among which he counts a specifically political nationalism, provides a consistently nationalistic approach to Korean literature; his main thesis holds that Korea, "one of the most civilized countries in the world" (2), and heir to a rich body of literature from an idealised past, has had its history and creativity torn asunder "by the annihilating urge of Japanese imperialism and the succeeding rule of ignorant totalitarianism" (x). He censures the slowness with which Korean national consciousness has grown this century: "the recovery of freedom and strength demanded of everyone a hard self-searching, but we were just not capable of this self-recognition; during this period we became one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in self-recognition [sic]" (xi). Shin's preferred discursive mode is thus simultaneously collective and exclusionary: "we" always means "we Koreans." The preface goes on to rebuke Korean writers' inability "to learn how to withstand adversity, how to be great in the face of difficulty. Despite so much suffering, loss, adversity and defeat, they failed to learn what life and history are, and what literature, the expression of life and history is" (xi). Grand and damning criticism, implicit in which is the notion that Shin himself knows better than the nation's writers what in fact life, literature and history are.
A particularly egregious example of the author's essentialist discourse opens his chapter on Yi Hyo-sôk's "The Buckwheat Season": "Koreans have the Korean way, which makes Koreans Korean, the Korean way to love each other, to long for something or someone or something, to make mistakes or to feel a sense of grandeur, awe, beauty and loftiness. A person who does not share these traits cannot be called Korean. In the Korean collective psyche are unique racial memories generated by the Korean peninsula and shared by all Koreans" (20-21). Remarks of this nature will not sit well, I imagine, with scholars or students who have little interest in perpetuating totalising stereotypes of "Koreanness", but are more concerned with not only examining the cultural processes that have created Korea's manifold unique qualities, but also considering how such normative views are challenged from within. Shin's method of tackling Andrea Dworkin is similarly telling: rather than engaging her arguments on their own merit, he begins his analysis by stating "as a Korean man, I do not agree with the feminists' argument..." (78). A critic's acknowledgement of positionality is undeniably welcome, but usually accompanies more self-awareness of ideological embeddedness than is found here: the same page yields Shin's unblushing assertion that "a Korean woman's heart is of such large size that it contains every regret, every shame, every sorrow and every adversity."
The twelve readings themselves follow a formulaic presentation: each chapter (all between nine and eleven pages long) begins with a few pages of philosophising observation, followed by quotation and discussion of some well-known Western writer (e.g. Homer, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Eco), before proceeding at last to a summary and reading of the story under consideration. The philosophising in particular proves of little interest, except perhaps as a window into the praxis of a certain school of Korean literary criticism itself. Irritating generalisations continually crop us, such as "The Korean people's way of living with nature is different from Westerners'. Westerners, especially in the modern age, seek to study or exploit nature; Koreans, on the other hand, seek reconciliation or assimilation with nature" (26). Such simplistic and debatable assertions detract from the stated aim of literary analysis both by calling the author's argument into question and by taking time away from close textual reading. Once generalisation, summary and lengthy quotation have been whittled away, we are left with under 50 pages of concerted analysis of the stories themselves.
Technical problems also mar the volume. The author, eschewing the common scholarly practice of McCune-Reischauer romanisation, follows an alternate system, but haphazardly. Thus the vowel rendered as "ô" in McCune-Reischauer appears in five different ways in the following: Jin-gun Hyun (Chin-gôn Hyôn), Sun-won Hwang (Sun-wôn Hwang), Hyoseuk Lee (Hyo-sôk Yi), Young-min Kwon (Yông-min Kwôn) and Jeong-hee Park (Chông-hûi Pak), despite the conventional rendering of the former president's name as Park Chung Hee. The decision to place family name last in Western style does little to dispel confusion. One can easily imagine an undergraduate looking for information on the author known most frequently in English as Hyôn Chin-gôn skipping right past Jin-gun Hyun. Carelessness in editing is also evident when Hwang Sun-wôn, Korea's master of the short story, appears in the headings as Hwan.
I do not wish this review to sound unremittingly negative, however: when Shin engages closely with the texts themselves, he can offer perceptive insights. His reading of Chôn Kwang-yong's "Kapitan Lee," for example, rather than taking the narrative voice at face value, distinguishes between a satiric storytelling persona and the author himself in skillful fashion; his examination of An and Kim, the two alienated protagonists of Kim Sûng-ok's "Seoul: Winter 1964," is likewise compelling. Indeed, it is precisely because Shin displays evidence of critical acumen that one feels a sense of wasted opportunity here. Had The Trap of History expanded its textual analysis at the expense of hackneyed reflection, it would possess far greater scholarly value.
Citation:
Epstein, Stephen J. 2001
Review of Jeong-Hyun Shin, The Trap of History: Understanding Korean Short Stories (1998)
Korean Studies Review 2001, no. 3
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr01-03.htm
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