[KS] KSR 2001-03: _The Trap of History_

[Stephen Epstein]

Jeong-Hyun Shin, _The Trap of History: Understanding Korean Short Stories_.
Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998.  xv, 115 pages.  $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 Ch™ng-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-s™k'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 an "o" with a breve
(here = O) in McCune-Reischauer appears in five different ways in the
following:  Jin-gun Hyun (Chin-gOn HyOn), Sun-won Hwang (Sun-wOn Hwang),
Hyoseuk Lee (Hyo-sOk Yi), Young-min Kwon (YOng-min KwOn) and Jeong-hee Park
(ChOng-hUi 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 HyOn Chin-gOn skipping right past Jin-gun Hyun.
Carelessness in editing is also evident when Hwang Sun-w™n, 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 Ch™n 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
Sžng-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. 03
Electronic file: http://www.iic.edu/thelist/review/ksr01-03.htm