<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"><FONT BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0">Listmembers may be interested in an article in the current<BR>
Times Literary Supplement by Margaret Drabble, in which<BR>
she reflects on some hostile reactions to her novel <I>The Red Queen.<BR>
<BR>
</I>Ms Drabble is a leading British novelist, now in her 60s.<BR>
As her article relates, <I>The Red Queen</I> has a Korean context:<BR>
interweaving the <I>Tale of Lady Hyegyong </I>- imagined as still a<BR>
ghostly presence today - with another story set in contemporary Seoul.<BR>
<BR>
Not having read the book, it's hard to comment; perhaps those <BR>
who have, will. But the issues are general and important ones.<BR>
<BR>
She's surely right to point out the contradiction between on the<BR>
one hand complaining that the world/the west ignores Korea -<BR>
but then, when someone new and well-meaning enters into an<BR>
imaginative encounter, deploying postcolonialism as if it were<BR>
a policing operation to throw the foreign trespasser off the premises.<BR>
<BR>
Then again, that "39th parallel" (twice) doesn't half grate...<BR>
<BR>
Because the TLS goes quickly to paid archive, I hope the List<BR>
will let me reproduce the whole article as well as give the URL.<BR>
<BR>
all best<BR>
Aidan<BR>
<BR>
AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER<BR>
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University <BR>
Home address: 17 Birklands Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD18 3BY, UK <BR>
tel: +44(0) 1274 588586 (alt) +44(0) 1264 737634 mobile: +44(0) 7970 741307 <BR>
fax: +44(0) 1274 773663 ISDN: +44(0) 1274 589280<BR>
Email: afostercarter@aol.com (alt) afostercarter@yahoo.com website: www.aidanfc.net<BR>
<BR>
________________<BR>
<BR>
http://the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111531<BR>
<BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=6 PTSIZE=22 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0"><B>Only correct</B><BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=5 PTSIZE=16 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0">A reluctant combatant on the Orientalist battlefield</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0"><BR>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=4 PTSIZE=14 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0"><BR>
Margaret Drabble</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Times New Roman" LANG="0"><BR>
27 July 2005<BR>
<BR>
Safely embedded in the Sixth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2000) is an explosive entry on cultural appropriation. Explosive not because it is written in an inflammatory manner (it is notable for its objectivity and even-handedness), but because of its subject matter. It appears anonymously, as do all the entries in the volume, but its author, the Guyanese-born writer Jan Lo Shinebourne, is named in the opening credits. She bravely took on this dangerous topic, and I have been carrying her calming definition round the world with me as a talisman. Cultural appropriation, she notes, is a term "in general used to describe Western appropriation of non-Western or non-white forms, and carries connotations of exploitation and dominance". Shinebourne belongs to the world of crossed borders, and in her summary she covers the field, from Benin bronzes and Lakota war shirts and the Elgin Marbles to the Modernist enthusiasm for African art. She also comments on voice in literature: the appropriation of gender in James Joyce, and of ethnicity in Gertrude Stein. The field she covers is a minefield.<BR>
<BR>
I recently returned from a literary conference on "Writing for Peace" in Seoul, where we travelled north on an outing to the 39th Parallel which divides South and North Korea. Shortly after entering the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) our military escort (who looked Korean to me, but who was tentatively identified by our American poets as a US corporal from the Midwest) pointed to the golf course, and its sign which read "Do not attempt to retrieve golf balls from the minefield". This set the tone for a theatrical tour of staged tension, where opposing armies confront one another on the most heavily fortified frontier in the world. In "Conference Row", which straddles the invisible Parallel, their representatives interpenetrate, like pieces on a chessboard, like the teeth of a pair of pinking shears. We were warned to exchange no glance or gesture with the North Korean guards, standing at one point only a few feet away from us. Communication of any sort was prohibited. A smile, a frown, could be used as propaganda. <BR>
<BR>
This parade of frozen aggression had the advantage of making us feel that the cultural frontiers between West and East, between language and language, were slightly more permeable than the political frontiers. What are conferences for, if not for communication, exchange of ideas, suggestions for translations? Many pious hopes for peace and friendship were aired, and we discovered areas of common ground. Korean scholars spoke of Kant and Derrida and Edward Said and Carl Schmitt. The Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe quoted from T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas and William Blake. Kenyan-born Ngugi Wa Thiong'o diplomatically deployed Aimé Césaire's aphorism, "Contact between cultures is the oxygen of civilization", and I brought out E. M. Forster's "Only connect". George Orwell's ghost was omnipresent. It seemed that, at one level, we were getting on famously, mingling languages and cultures, reciting our poems, and understanding one another well. <BR>
<BR>
But behind this façade of good manners, communication was not simple. Resentments and misunderstandings were dormant, and from time to time erupted. Koreans protested that the cultural traffic was flowing in one direction. The English language was perceived as dominant and exploitative. I was told that Korean children, forced by ambitious parents to learn English too young, have a habit of falling psychotically silent in all languages. The phrase "world literature" usually means "Western literature", argues the distinguished éminence grise of the Forum, Professor Uchang Kim, an intellectual famed for the brilliant obscurity of his spoken discourse and his shining clarity on the page. The novelist Hwang Seok-Young, a combative, once imprisoned, and now much translated writer, argued that what we call universality is a fallacy of Eurocentrism, a boundary put in place by those with power: when Goethe advocated "world literature" he thought the world was Europe. Park Wan-Suh, a celebrated woman novelist (b 1931) who lived through the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War, recorded that when interviewed in France in 1997 about influences on her work, she had mentioned several important Korean writers and one or two Westerners. When she saw the clip of the interview only the names of Dostoevsky and Chekhov had survived in translation. None of the Koreans was cited. She felt they had been stepped over, as though they were ants. <BR>
<BR>
The West has some legitimate problems of perception. Koreans joke that their family names are notoriously similar, with a predominance of Kim, Park and Lee, and variations of transliteration make these names even more difficult to learn and retain. Nevertheless, we took Mrs Park's point. In an underlying agenda, American and European participants were being urged to connect with Korean literature, to listen to Korean poetry, to enter into a two-way discourse, to balance exports with imports. <BR>
<BR>
There were, for me, many painful ironies in these sometimes unspoken suggestions and negotiations. I had first visited Seoul five years before, in 2000, as a guest of the First Seoul International Forum for Literature, on the theme of "Writing across Boundaries: Literature in the multicultural world". I had delivered an innocently academic paper on issues of post-colonialism (The Tempest, Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Naipaul, Marina Warner, Said on Mansfield Park), which as far as I know caused no offence. But that visit moved me to read a celebrated Korean literary masterpiece, the Han Joon Nok, in a translation recommended to me by a scholar in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum in London. This is a book of memoirs written by a Crown Princess of Korea who died, at the age of eighty, in 1815. It had an overpowering effect on me, and I could not get it out of my mind. If anything is world literature, this work is. This woman and her story haunted me. I sought other translations, read as much contemporary material as I could find in English (there are some very fine poems of the period), visited galleries and exhibitions and lectures, and revisited Korea to see the palace where the Princess had been immured for most of her adult life. <BR>
<BR>
If the Forum had intended to arouse my interest in Korean culture, it had succeeded beyond expectation. I decided to try to write a novel based on the Crown Princess's extraordinary story and my response to it - a response which was, of course, as closely connected to life in the West today as to the historical facts of life in the eighteenth-century Chosun court. This was to be a transcultural novel, a novel which raised questions about cultural relativism and essentialism, family dynamics, learned and innate responses, evolutionary biology and the universality (or not) of the Oedipus complex. One of my models was Mark Twain's time-travel fantasy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), with its darkly comic double take on American capitalism and Camelot chivalry. My Crown Princess would glance at the death penalty in the United States, and the abuse of the Hippocratic oath in Britain, with the hindsight of 200 years of history, and pronounce her damning verdict on progress. <BR>
<BR>
Drawing on a Korean narrative for The Red Queen was a foolhardly enterprise, and I was well aware of the dangers, dangers which were an integral part of my theme. Being aware, I proceeded, as I thought, in a correct manner, contacting the most recent and most scholarly New York-based translator, and, through her, the American publishers, and declaring my interest. My translator and I agreed detailed acknowledgement of sources and payment for use of copyright material as appropriate, and I proposed the inclusion of a foreword and afterword by her which could place my fictional efforts in a critical context. I envisaged, with what now seems like a childish naivety, the possibility of shared platforms and public discussions. <BR>
<BR>
For a year or two, I thought I had been welcomed over the boundary into a neutral zone, but I was to discover that I had entered the battlefield of accusations of Orientalism and cultural appropriation, of ignorance, cynicism and plagiarism. <BR>
<BR>
Novelists are always nervous when they hand over the product of three years of solitary labour to a new reader, and I was apprehensive about what I had done, but I had not expected either the tone or the content of the response I received from my first reader in New York. I had tried to behave correctly, but I had not been correct enough. My attitude towards the original classic Korean text was, according to the view from American academe, full of "egregious error". American academe, appearing to speak on behalf of and in defence of Korea, declared that The Red Queen was full of crimes, the least of which was a reference to Korea in the eighteenth century as a frozen land and, by implication, a "hermit kingdom". This latter phrase has been used by Koreans and Westerners for centuries, referring to the Chosun dynasty's undisputed policy of isolationism, but it is, I was told, no longer correct. We are now to believe that the Koreans never were and are not now hermits. They welcome cultural interchange and debate. Nevertheless, the phrase "hermit kingdom" was not to be used, and the publication of my novel could not be approved. The position seemed to me to be paradoxical. (When I commented recently on the fact that the much praised exhibition entitled Encounters: The meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004, contained only one Korean artefact amid a profusion of images from China, Japan and India, I was informed by the curators that this was because there were so few encounters. However, it is incorrect to refer to the "hermit kingdom".) <BR>
<BR>
My novel, I was told, would probably be greeted with ridicule in the United States, because "educated readers" in the US are aware of issues of multiculturalism, and indeed many universities include a one-year course in non-Western civilization in their degree requirement. Had I never heard of Edward Said? (His ideas are embedded throughout my text, and his name appears towards the end, but I don't think my would-be censor got that far.) Was I not familiar with the debate over Madame Butterfly? I had Orientalized the Crown Princess - or had I perhaps Westernized her? Objections came from both sides. It was not clear to me whether I had made her too feeble or too strong-minded, but whatever I had done, it was not condoned. I had also, in an attempt at even-handedness, Orientalized the Romanovs, whose barbaric home life comes in for criticism from my time-and-space-travelling narrator. (My comments on the American twentieth-century habit of executing minors and the criminally insane, a practice condemned within the last months by the US Supreme Court, went unnoticed.) My interpretation of Lady Hong, or the Lady Hyegyong, was inadmissible. It was not even clear which of her names I was allowed to use. <BR>
<BR>
This Korean author, whose words had moved and inspired me, died in 1815. She was disadvantaged in life, and she was being censored, it seemed to me, in death. These objections came not from her own country of Korea, but from the standpoint of contemporary American political correctness, which claimed the right to halt my publication. Was it not the practice in England, I was asked, to submit one's work to peer review? Was this practice uncommon in fiction-writing? <BR>
<BR>
I had clearly caused great offence; I was, in turn, offended. I readily admit to unintended factual errors, some of which could have been removed by a more tactful response. It was a mistake to describe the floors of the Korean central-heating system (the famous ondol flooring) as wooden: they are made of stone covered in varnished paper. It was a mistake to refer to Koreans being obliged to compose the infamous Chinese "eight-legged essays". It was not a mistake to suggest that the Crown Princess might have seen some Western works of art brought to China by the Jesuits, though it was improbable that she had. (I needed to suppose that she had, because I needed to invoke the question of artistic perspective, a concept introduced into Korea at this period.) I was probably right in guessing that she had not heard of her contemporary Voltaire, but wrong to suppose that she could have read Freud or The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, or known about immune-deficiency disorders or stem-cell research. <BR>
<BR>
Enough of this nightmare. It was clear that the level of misunderstanding was profound, and that the kind of critique being offered was irrelevant to my purpose, and directed at some book other than the one I had hoped to write. In my view, copyright was being used as a form of censorship, but it is by no means clear what copyright resides in one translation of an ancient text, particularly when there are other translations available, and the facts are in the domain of history. The novel I actually wrote received no critical attention, either hostile or appreciative. I was accused of appropriation, and that was that. The multicultural censor looked no further. No questions were asked about my text, my intentions, my meaning. I did have a meaning, or I once thought that I did. I was so profoundly shocked that I hardly knew what I had done. <BR>
<BR>
Appropriation, like racism, is an ugly word and an easy allegation, not easily addressed in the courts. The nature and ethics of cultural transmission are endlessly fascinating. When is a borrowing a theft, and when is it a benign sign of cross-cultural fertilization? Is there some common source from which all stories rise? It is strange how subjects catch the Zeitgeist: witness the recent crop of novels inspired by the life of Henry James (and watch out for Wendy Lesser's forthcoming addition to them, The Pagoda in the Garden). Closer to the Orientalist theme, one notes a bizarre clustering of versions of Laclos's 1782 novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, which was adapted by Christopher Hampton for the stage in 1985 and for the screen in 1988. While Hampton and Stephen Frears were working on their film, the director Milos Forman was simultaneously and coincidentally at work on his, which appeared in 1989 under the title Valmont, Hampton's version having pre-emptively appropriated the original title. Years later came the Korean version of Laclos, screened in England in 2005 as Untold Scandal, and set in the eighteenth-century Chosun court at the same period as the events of Han Joon Nok. This sumptuous and elegant film is a clear example of the adoption, adaptation and Orientalization of French material: it is equally clear that the subject reached Korea through England. This is a devious route, but Laclos and Hampton are not calling their lawyers. Stories travel where they will. They have a life of their own. They are not like artefacts: they can exist in more than one place at a time. <BR>
<BR>
In the British Museum there is an illuminated manuscript portraying the lavish ceremony of 1809 that marked the sixtieth anniversary of the consummation of the marriage of the Crown Princess to her husband, the long-dead and brutally executed Prince Sado. Its provenance is dubious: it was captured from its native land by a French admiral, and purchased by the British in 1891. This too was a devious route. My novel, which discusses some of these matters, appeared in Korea in a somewhat mutilated version last year; I rewrote extensively, in an attempt to avoid further difficulties, and felt unhappily driven to employ a degree of self-censorship. After its publication, I received my invitation to the Second International Forum for Literature, and of course was obliged to accept. Honour compelled me to go back to Seoul to retrieve my golf balls from the minefield. And I was curious about the response from Korean readers and scholars. Would it be considered that I had abused historical material? Or would I perhaps find a different level of reading? And how would my novel look in hang'ul? <BR>
<BR>
I encountered, as I had expected, one or two accusatory questions about Orientalism, and some readers who seemed unable to cope with the notion that the "real" Princess of Han Joon Nok could have been (as she clearly was) an unreliable narrator. But I also met with more complex, less defensive responses. Professor Lee Young-Oak at Sungkyunkwan University (founded in 1398) had taught my novel in English, and her students and colleagues engaged in lively discussion about tragedy and tragicomedy, female narrative, the ethics of cross-cultural adoption of babies and books, and the culturally-specific meanings of acacia and of magpies. This debate was full of oxygen. It was exhilarating. <BR>
<BR>
Acacia thrives in Korea. It is an import from the time of the Japanese Occupation, and although pretty, it is also invasive, and it is driving out native species. Magpies are thieves, and in Britain they bring bad luck. In Korea they traditionally bring good luck, or so I was assured. But Korean Americans have adopted the bad luck line, and in my view they therefore misinterpret their own texts. This is confusing. <BR>
<BR>
Not all the week was spent on such trivia. Ethnicity and gender were also considered. Teaching gender studies must be uphill work: the complexion of the conference was overwhelmingly male. There is a flourishing school of African studies in Seoul in Hankuk University, and a surprising number of Swahili speakers, but Korean society is far from multicultural. Ngugi's response to one participant's comment that her three-year-old child thought that black faces were dirty was a model of tact. If she was being interpreted correctly, she seemed to be suggesting that racial prejudice is innate, not learned. Children are very direct, Ngugi said, smiling mildly, before invoking the healing words of Césaire. <BR>
<BR>
The main matter of the conference was not peace but war. Great waves of anti-Bush emotion swelled through speech after speech of helpless and impotent rage. Five years ago, the official talk was of détente, the Sunshine Policy and reunification. "Peaceful and prosperous co-existence" is the new slogan, but Korea is a weak and divided country, with the South occupied by increasingly unwelcome American troops. Calling North Korea part of the "axis of evil" did incalculable harm to prospects of peace in this much-damaged peninsula. What can writers and intellectuals do, in this poisonous atmosphere? They mock themselves for uttering platitudes, and sign or refuse to sign a Peace Declaration. Oe, in Japan, has founded a group of independent intellectuals to resist rearmament and Prime Minister Koizumi's changes to the pacifist Japanese constitution. Oe is an engaging speaker and a Nobel laureate, and his protests do not go unheard. The political scientist Choi Jang-jip, of Korea University's Asian Study Center, spoke passionately about the dangers of the new right-wing Japanese-American alliance, and advocated a counterbalance in the form of an East Asian Union of economic and cultural interests. There is a palpable fear of a "surgical strike" by the US against North Korea, and of further military displays by an overweening and reckless superpower. American diplomats call this new Cold War a game of chess; for those living within an hour's drive of the 39th Parallel it seems less playful. <BR>
<BR>
Meanwhile, as a lone female British postcolonial voice in Asia, I parroted the words "Only connect". But connecting, as Forster knew, is a slow and arduous process, liable to misinterpretation. Connection without accusations of appropriation or invasion is no easy matter.<BR>
<BR>
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