Korean Studies
Internet Discussion ListKOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Philip West and Suh Ji-moon, eds. Remembering the "Forgotten War": The Korean War through Literature and Art, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe 2000. xxiii +225 pages. ISBN: 0-7656-0697-6.
Reviewed by David McCann
Harvard University
The Korean War continues-- literally, in the on-again off-again, Two and Three and Four-Party negotiations; and in the volumes of interpretive works about it. M. E. Sharpe adds the present volume to an earlier one, America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory, also the result of a conference at the Mansfield Center, University of Montana. The new book is informative, provides views from Korean and Chinese as well as American perspectives, and delivers on the promise of its subtitle by offering information not only on literature, film, photography, and the visual arts, but also memoirs by Chinese prisoners of war, and historiography.
The present volume begins with reflections by Steven Levine on some of the issues that framed a conference on the Korean War at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, and then the book. He adds more personal comments on a significant parallel history, the suppression of the left in the United States that coincided with the years of the war.
The second chapter, by Suh Ji-moon, introduces a number of Korean poems about the Korean War, a good sampling, with helpful comments about recurrent themes and images. The poems seem, in the main, to deploy imagery of a broken land, and of the war as an out-of-nowhere catastrophe that fell upon the peninsula in June of 1950. They do not reflect the struggle between left and right in the period prior to the outbreak of the war, intimate, fierce, and devastating as it was. The one major exception to the genre-scene structure of many of the poems is a series by Yu Ch'un-do, a nurse with the North Koreans, whose "guileless verses" actually seem more authentic in tone and focus than the productions of those professional poets who had been assigned to record the war for the south. Missing, though, are songs and poems from Korea prior to 1950, which could have added not only more of the disparate voices and views, but also an alternative to the implicit assumption that the Korean War was something that began in 1950 without antecedents.
William Erhart spends the first several pages of his comments on American poetry on the war musing about why there isn't more of it, a theme which recurs throughout the book, returning in various guises. The American poems are startlingly different from the Korean: more given to the vivid image, as when "... A soldier/ fished a bent brown stick from a puddle. It was/ the arm of someone's child." The vignette is powerfully moving because of its careful construction, which deflects and delays the reader's apprehension of what the object is.
The chapter on the visual arts, by Roe Jae-ryung, is a splendid addition to the materials available in English. The author asks why there is so "little evidence of the war in the visual arts," then proceeds to explain that absence in terms of the general suppression of the artistic left both during and after the war, which had the effect of pushing artistic expression into abstraction as a dominant mode. She observes that when literary artists did begin to explore the war more broadly, expression was still limited by the anti-communist political culture of the post-war years; and finally she notes that Korean artists lacked a "working visual vocabulary" for the war. This last point is especially interesting in looking back at the chapter on Korean poets and their poetry, who seem to have suffered from a similar lack, but it also has relevance to Erhart's question. The Korean War may have failed to find expression in American literature for all the reasons that he adduces, political and otherwise; but also because the rhetoric for war had been exhausted by the experience of it in World Wars I and II, a point that Wilfred Owen engaged in his poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est."
Max Desfor describes his work as an Associated Press photographer, and along the way, provides a number of telling verbal snapshots of the war as well. One of the most interesting is of his role in arranging to obtain photographs of American prisoners of war from North Korea.
Several of the Korean and the one American writer, Richard Kim, attending the conference add their responses to a series of questions about the war and memories of it. Pak Wan-sô observes the war's devastation not only in physical terms, but also for the way it allowed pent-up hostilities from centuries under an oppressive social system to explode. The chapter is an unusual opportunity, to listen to Korean writers talking about how they perceive and write about the war, and for whom.
Lary May's chapter on the Korean War in American film is a splendid counterpart to the description of Korean visual arts and the war. May again raises the question of why the Korean War was forgotten, but then pursues it through a description of the American film industry's efforts to build a cold war consensus through manipulation of images of the war. Despite the best combined efforts of the film and Washington establishments, the American public simply did not go for the tale being presented, as the images and the rhetoric in American films did not measure up to the public's sense of what the war had actually accomplished, or failed to.
The following chapter on Korean films on the Korean War, by Suh Ji-moon, is descriptive rather than analytical, and while it provides a nuanced precis of each of the three films it considers, seems to miss something in stating that the (south) Korean public is now "ready to see (the tragedy of the war) ... played out on the screen." Right-wing opposition to the production and circulation of the film "The Taebaek Mountains," for one thing, was fierce, even if, in the end, it enhanced the film's box-office appeal.
The reflections on Chinese POW stories, written by Philip West with Li Zhihua, and based on a 1987 book by Jin Daiying, adds poignant information about the fate of the Chinese POW's upon repatriation, and quite fascinating materials about life in the Koje Island prisoner of war camp, with its forced tattooings, kidnapping of an American army officer, and other events.
William Stueck's chapter on Labeling the Korean War explores the realm of American and British historiography, and the various takes on what kind of a war it was, expressed in the titles and arguments of several books published over the years. Stueck describes changes in the American sense of national self and purpose in the world at large, from the definition of the war at a time when little information was available from sources other than American ones, to the work of Bruce Cumings and others on the indigenous roots of the war, to more recent still, the studies of the Korean War based on materials in the archives of the Peoples Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It would have been interesting, though, to have seen some reference to Korean histories of the war, and what their titles and arguments might suggest about Korean views on the matter. The author does seem to become a bit carried away by his own labeling project where he engages the work of Bruce Cumings. He writes that "Cumings is so intent on promoting a national guilt trip that he glosses over or denies the international aspects of the Korean conflict for the purposes of highlighting the internal, socioeconomic dimension, especially the problem of land distribution." Stueck appears to argue that Cumings was motivated to write a history of the war's origins only to make a stick for himself with which to beat up on Americans for interfering. Stueck's own book, The Korean War: An International History, focuses solely upon the international dimensions of the war , as its title promises, which may help to explain why he seems so intent upon skirmishing with Cumings on this point.
The final chapter of the book presents a series of responses to counter-factual questions about the war's course, causes, and outcomes. Most interesting among these for its contemporary resonance is Donald Oberdorfer's pithy observation that if "Truman had decided that Korea was an area of important interest to the United States and clearly communicated this to Moscow, there would have been no Korean War..." Such a clear sign of interest was one of the things that seemed sorely absent during President Kim Dae Jung's recent visit to Washington.
Citation:
McCann, David R. 2001
Review of Philip West and Suh Ji-Moon, eds., Remembering the "Forgotten War": The Korean War through Literature and Art (2000)
Korean Studies Review 2001, no. 4
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr01-04.htm
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