The Descendants of Cain (review)

122KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 22 The Descendants of Cain, by Hwang Sun-wön, translated by Suh Jimoon and Julie Pickering. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe/Unesco, 1997. 182 pp., $52.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. An immediate success upon publication in 1954, the fast-paced novel The Descendants of Cain (K'ain üi huye) by Hwang Sun-wön, one of Korea's most accomplished authors, depicts a society in the paroxysms of upheaval. Set amidst the incipient internecine frenzy of the early post-Liberation period and always implicitly foreshadowing the fratricidal bloodbath of the Korean War itself, the story focuses on the disintegration of traditional social structure in rural North Korea upon communist introduction of radical land reform. Hwang, himself a landlord's son who fled from P'yöngan-do to Seoul in 1946, draws on personal experience in his tale of Pak Hun, the scion of a landowner, who watches the world he has known unravel around him and must cope with the loss of his prestige, his ancestral holdings, and even the lives of those near to him. A major source of the novel's dramatic tension arises in Hun's attempts to seek solace in his relationship with Ojaknyö, the daughter of his family's estate agent, who has been keeping house for him since her marriage failed; despite their mutual love, the two find themselves unable to acknowledge fully their feelings toward each other. In this novel, Hwang, seemingly haunted by human reaction to the pressures of extreme historical circumstance, explores the intersection of social change and mass psychology. A tightly focused plot does not prevent him from enlarging the tapestry of The Descendants of Cain to show how turmoil acts upon numerous characters. With consummate skill the author depicts the effects of social upheaval in sharp, telling vignettes, often conveying a stirring tale in a single paragraph. No one in the novel's world is left untouched by sociopolitical change, and ironies soon proliferate. Tosöp, Ojaknyö's father, an erstwhile estate agent and a major beneficiary of the pre-existing hierarchy, becomes the chairman of the peasant committee and one of the most violent proponents of reform. Although he once supervised construction of a monument commemorating the contributions of Hun's grandfather to the community, he now hacks the stone to pieces. The destruction of a monument is especially noteworthy: Hwang's work has consistently concerned itself with the role of memory and the relationship of past and present. That this memorial to a benefactor becomes reduced to rubble that provides "a perfect fulling stone" for a venal village woman underscores not merely the overthrow of the previous order, but the dissolution of generations-old bonds of mutual loyalty. As always, Hwang steadfastly refuses to reduce complexities of human behavior to a monochrome black or white. Kindness and cruelty occur among BOOK REVIEWS123 both the peasant and landholding classes and Hwang heaps ambiguity upon ambiguity as the story progresses. One character cogently advocates land reform: "for some reason, the people who grow food starve, and the people who have nothing to do with growing it have far more than they know what to do with" (37). A compelling enough argument, but we soon discover the speaker to be a doctor "rumored to refuse poor patients." Running as a refrain throughout The Descendants of Cain are remarks that encourage understanding for those driven to extremes of conduct: Hun, for example, observes that one morally questionable act is "nobody's fault . . . it's all because ofthe times" (73). Although a depressing violence pervades the novel, it is offset by an underlying compassion, perhaps most strikingly in references to the Japanese whom Hun encounters straggling behind in Pyongyang, awaiting repatriation. Sympathy is evoked for their "measles-stricken children dying of cold and malnutrition" (140). If any enemy exists, it is that ideology—of any type— which becomes more important than individuals. A particular moment of revulsion occurs after an elderly woman, who has struggled throughout her life to purchase a small plot of land, becomes caught in the purge of landholders and hangs herself. The reaction of Tosöp arouses a shudder: "When you're trying...