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Afterword: Trauma in Contemporary Korean Fiction
- University of Hawai'i Press
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191 Afterword Trauma in Contemporary Korean Fiction Bruce Fulton The symptoms of what we understand today as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were identified in writing at least as early as the publication in 1920 of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, part of which is devoted to trauma. But not until 1980, when the syndrome was so designated by the American Psychiatric Association, did it receive a diagnostic cachet in place of what had previously been known by such terms as “shell shock.”1 More recently PTSD has become the focus of a growing body of research on literary works dealing with trauma victims, and in particular individuals traumatized by war-related experiences. Trauma has been a fact of life for Koreans born before the Korean War (1950–1953)—and especially for those inhabitants of Chŏlla Province who, in addition to surviving the civil war, witnessed the 1980 Kwangju Massacre, when elite paratroop forces were dispatched from their posts near the DMZ to the South Chŏlla capital of Kwangju to suppress demonstrations against the authoritarian regime of Chun Doo Hwan. Whether through uprooting from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, firsthand experience of combat, or the violent deaths of loved ones, Koreans have endured a variety of horrors. Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of 192 Afterword witness to the historical upheavals of twentieth-century Korea, and it should come as no surprise that contemporary fiction, while providing comparatively few examples of war literature, yet continues to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence. Some of contemporary Korea’s most important authors—among them Yun Hŭng-gil, Kim Wŏn-il, and Kong Sŏn-ok—were traumatized by events during the Korean War and/or the Kwangju Massacre, and their own trauma informs their works.2 The extent to which trauma figures in post-1945 Korean literature may be understood by the credence given by Korean scholars—manifested in the term division literature—to the notion of contemporary Korean literature being in large part a literature of the division (psychological as well as physical) of the Korean peninsula. One of the most accomplished contemporary Korean literary works that involves trauma is Ch’oe Yun’s novella “There a Petal Silently Falls” (Chŏgi sori ŏpshi han chŏm kkonnip i chigo).3 This work was inspired by the Kwangju Massacre but deals with the horrors in an elliptical and impressionistic way. What distinguishes this work of fiction from “Spirit on the Wind” and “The Red Room” in the present volume is a narrative strand in the former that represents a movement toward healing and closure. That is, although the traumatized protagonists of all three works exhibit what Cathy Caruth terms “possession by the past,”4 it is only the traumatized girl in “There a Petal Silently Falls” for whom hope is held out for ultimate deliverance from the vicious circle of PTSD. This volume opens with Pak Wan-sŏ’s “In the Realm of the Buddha.”5 It is tempting to see much of Pak’s career as a process of working through wartime trauma. She lost both an uncle (executed on an unsubstantiated allegation of treason) and a brother (forcibly conscripted by the People’s Army, never to be heard from again) in the war, and the latter loss figures prominently in her debut work, the autobiographical novel Naked Tree.6 Like others of her works from the 1970s and beyond, “In the Realm of the Buddha” is a dual narrative that shifts between the here-and-now and unresolved trauma of decades earlier. For the narrator trauma is viscerally alive, [44.211.91.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:58 GMT) Afterword 193 an undigested mass inside her that she is desperate to vomit up once and for all. “Spirit on the Wind” is, next to the novel The Bird (Sae), O Chŏnghu ̆i’s longest work of fiction—worthy of note for a writer whose fiction first appeared in print in 1967.7 Unlike the first-person narrative of “In the Realm of the Buddha,” the narrative of O’s novella is divided between a third-person account that takes the point of view of the traumatized Ŭn-su and a first-person account by her uncomprehending husband. We thereby have both firsthand and secondhand access to Ŭn-su’s uncontrollable bouts of wanderlust...