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Oh T''ae-sôk, The Metacultural Theater of Oh T'ae-sôk: Five Plays from the Korean Avant-Garde, translated by Ah-jeong Kim and R.B. Graves. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. 164 pages. ISBN 0-8248-2158-0, paper; 0-8248-2099-1, hardcover.

Reviewed by Gregory Nicholas Evon
University of New South Wales

[This review also appeared in the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 2.2
(2000)]


In a career that has lasted over thirty years, Oh T'ae-sôk has written roughly as many plays, and Kim and Graves give us approximately one-sixth of his lifetime's output. In addition, they provide photos of the performances and a short, yet first-rate introduction to the playwright, his aesthetic background and development, and the plays themselves. Three of these-Bicycle, Intimacy between Father and Son, and Lifecord-are dramatizations of Korean historical events, while the remaining two-Ch'un-p'ung's Wife and Why Did Shim Ch'ông Plunge into the Sea Twice?-are based on classical Korean narratives.

The first three are drawn from events dating from the 20th, 18th, and 15th centuries, respectively, and each deals with a violent episode. In Bicycle, this is an atrocity with which occurred in Oh's hometown: in September 1950, 127 anticommunists were arrested by North Korean soldiers and later burned to death. The story unfolds in the form of personal recollections recounted by the main character, Yun, whose own family is haunted by that massacre. In it, his uncle and father each played a role, and taken together, their two roles represent a dreadful balance: his father, a victim, and his uncle, one of the men who set fire to the building. On that night when Yun's own family and other townspeople conduct rituals for the dead, his uncle conducts a private ritual: cutting his face with a shard of broken glass. The consequent facial scarification represents psychic wounds of unimaginable depths, and in telling this story, Oh uses flashbacks, apparitions, and a "stream of consciousness" narrative technique, thus suggesting the difficulty of capturing the magnitude of the event itself or its aftermath. Oh also introduces a subplot involving a man and woman who, infected with leprosy, give their two daughters to another family. These two children's fates mirror those events of the past, and while I first thought this portion to be ill-fitting, I was no longer certain after a second reading. It should suffice to say that a theatrical production has possibilities denied the reader.

Bicycle succeeds in evoking the continued presence of the past, and so do Intimacy and Lifecord, though to a lesser degree for a non-Korean reader. Intimacy focuses on the events surrounding the murder qua suicide of the Crown Prince Seja by his father, King Yôngjo, in 1762. The two had a troubled relationship, to put it mildly, and as Seja was bereaved of those closest to him, he grew progressively more unstable, eventually becoming as mad as a hatter-not an altogether inappropriate description considering that one of the signs of his instability was manifested in an inability to dress properly. He had been raised to become a Confucian ruler, but instead turned into a political liability, engaging in wild sexual romps and committing murders with alarming regularity. Yôngjo was thus faced with a dilemma between political necessity and Confucian ethics: while he needed to kill his son, he also wanted to avoid the crime of filicide. Forced suicide was the solution. At first the son made several attempts at self-strangulation upon his father's orders; finally, he was ordered to climb "voluntarily" into a rice chest where he died several days later.

Similarly, Lifecord focuses on the violent events surrounding the usurpation of King Tanjong's throne by his uncle Sejo in 1456. Six loyal scholars attempted to restore the teenage king to the throne; for this they were executed, as was Tanjong. Yet the bloodshed did not stop there. The scholars' wives, children, and their extended families were all executed, also, and this historical episode seems to have made an indelible impression upon Oh. As a boy he "wondered, why [should I] die for my relative's crime?" and drew from this episode the alarming and in no way disprovable idea "that this world grows by eating up its youth" (p. 7).

For a non-Korean, these two plays are likely to be read as dramatizations of bizarre, foreign events; but for Oh, these are "about real people" (p. 11), and while the characters of these plays come alive as distinct, dramatic personalities, the sense that the past lives within the present, so sharply drawn in Bicycle, is here harder to grasp. These two require of the reader not only an appreciation of Oh's conviction that "in every respect, Korea is a tragic country" (p. 3) and a general knowledge of the main themes in Korean history, but more important, an appreciation of how Koreans tend to look at their own history. Through these two plays, Oh shows Koreans as both subjects and actors within their own history: a history best judged collectively, for in the translators' own words, "the Korean people have suffered-and ultimately created-their history together" (p.3). This deeply held notion of collectivity is, I think, what draws Bicycle, Intimacy, and Lifecord together, and if one appreciates this collectivist impulse, then it is not hard to see parallels among those events from the 15th, 18th, and 20th centuries insofar as each was marked by intra-familial murder.

The remaining two plays are satirical and each in their own way, hilarious. Ch'un-p'ung's Wife treats the conflict between a wife and husband, who has gone off and taken up with a famous female entertainer (kisaeng), finally becoming her servant when he runs out of funds. This simple premise leads to a complex web of misunderstandings that are ludicrous and enabled in no small part by two "stupid amphibians" (p. 83), Tôk-jung and Yi Chi, among whom the former is by far the stupider. His literal interpretations of two metaphorical expressions for death used by the wife-"kicked the bucket" and "cut a cold fart"-lead him to inquire about the odor of the fart in question and offer such useful advice as "squeeze your butthole tight so that the cold fart won't leak out," and in the absence of a bucket, "take off your shoe instead, and hold it tight" (p. 85). Such misunderstandings are indicative of the miscommunications that propel the play towards an obscenely uproarious conclusion of sexagenarian sex-and a couple of deaths.

The final play is, however, the most provocative, and here we are forced to laugh in spite of ourselves. It is loosely based on a classic narrative, The Song of Shim Ch'ông, in which the young female protagonist leaps into the sea as a sacrifice to an underwater king, believing that she thus can cure her father's blindness. In Oh's hands, this premise is turned into a comment on the grotesqueness of much in modern Korean society, and through this play, we truly come to understand the translators' evaluation that "Oh's admixture of East and West, old and new" is based on the idea that "cultures be explored as cultures and in relation to other cultures" (p. 19).

What is most grotesque can indeed be found right before us, wherever we live. In answering Why Did Shim Ch'ông Plunge into the Sea Twice?, Oh presents us with a cast of characters simultaneously ludicrous and all too real. The most interesting and unsettling is the Dragon King. In Oh's play, he becomes a pimp, although he has a moral conscience at the start. The play is chiefly devoted to tracing his moral devolution, and in one key instance, he tries to postpone his release from prison because "learning can take place anywhere" (p. 136), which raises the question, "but what are you learning?" The answer is that he is learning how to live in this world, and the transformation of his ignorance into a cynical pragmatism is well marked. Logically, he is initially uncertain about the nature of fire (p. 127), yet we later find him offering petulant self-justifications to a firefighter: "Geez, I didn't know turpentine was so combustible" (p. 132). Finally, this former underwater denizen raises a ruckus because he is afraid of drowning! Critically, this happens just before he gleefully decides to become a seafaring pimp (pp. 142-143), carrying his cargo of young ladies on the Sea Gull F27, a boat powered by a sturdy German engine (p. 144). The make of this engine together with the fact that he had been traveling on "a little boat called Unification" (p. 142) cannot be dismissed as accidental, and at the disturbing conclusion of the play, we see that the Sea Gull F27 might be more aptly named the Sea Anomie.

The script of a play is, by definition, an incomplete project, and neither success nor failure are due solely to the playwright whose indispensable role at the outset wanes as more people contribute to making that vision a reality. Much the same can be said about literary translation. It too is a form of collaboration, but whereas the playwright's words are translated onto the stage and thus aspire to completeness, the writer's words are translated into other words that can be satisfying, though, arguably, never complete. In the case of translating a play, success would seem even more elusive. Yet judging by Kim's and Graves' book translations, they have been most successful, and this satisfying work reflects well upon Oh as an artist and themselves as able mediums of his artistry.

 

Citation:
Evon, Gregory Nicholas 2000
Review of Oh T'ae-sôk, The Metacultural Theater of Oh T'ae-sôk: Five Plays from the Korean Avant-Garde, tr. by Ah-jeong Kim and R.B. Graves (1999)
Korean Studies Review 2000, no. 15
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr00-15.htm


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