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8. Subversive Narratives: Hwang Sunwŏn’s P’yŏngan Stories
- University of Washington Press
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The subversive nature of several of Hwang Sunwŏn’s (1915–2000) stories belies the conventional understanding of this major writer as a producer of pure literature and an author who was less engaged than his peers with contemporary social, political, and historical realities. By subversive I mean “tending to undermine or overturn established ideological or political structures.” Nowhere is this subversive tendency more apparent than in the stories set in the author’s native P’yŏngan Province. Far from avoiding historical and political issues, Hwang displays from his earliest stories a sophisticated grasp of contemporary Korean history, society, and culture. But, unwilling to compromise his craft even while foregrounding issues of contemporary importance, Hwang invested several of his most important stories with a subversive subtext that challenges traditional gender-role expectations, Korea’s anomalous position as a colony, and post-Liberation Korea’s status as an occupied land. I wish to examine six stories that incorporate such subtext in various ways. First, in stories such as “Nun” (1944, trans. “Snow” 2001) and “Nae kohyang saram tŭl” (1961, The People of My Ancestral Home),1 which I term kohyang stories, Hwang uses the setting of his ancestral home (kohyang) as a basis for making veiled allusions to Japanese policies such as the grain requisition (kongch’ul) system. Second, in stories such as “Nosae” (1943, trans. “The Mule” 1998) and “Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae” (1947, trans. “The Dog of Crossover Village” 2009) Hwang writes ostensibly about the difficulties of Koreans during the colonial and post-Liberation periods, respectively, but the narratives can be read—again, respectively—as allegories of a colonized land and subsequently a land occupied by outsiders; I term such stories anti-colonial allegories. Finally, Hwang populates seemingly apolitical stories such as 8 Subversive Narratives Hwang Sunwŏn’s P’yŏngan Stories bruce fulton Subversive Narratives 217 “Tume” (1952, trans. “A Backcountry Village” 1993) and “Pulgasari” (1955, trans. “Deathless” 2009) with characters who are memorable for their deception and their subversion of social mores; these stories I refer to as stories of rebellious souls. Taken collectively, these six stories reveal a writer who in his work was able to subvert the intellectual control apparatus of a colonial regime (by concealing his stories from public view at a time when publication in Korean was strongly discouraged), challenge the expectations of readers (a hidden first-person narrator surfaces at the end of “Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae”), and undermine conventional Neo-Confucian values in, for example, his portrayal of a woman who connives in the murder of her husband, in “Tume,” and in the account of a duplicitous salt-peddler and an eloping couple in “Pulgasari.” What all of these stories have in common is their P’yŏngan setting . This is not to say that Hwang’s stories set outside of P’yŏngan are devoid of subversive tendencies; rather, these tendencies are both more marked and more political in the P’yŏngan stories. My hypothesis is that the setting of these subversive narratives in the author’s ancestral home province invests them with a legitimacy and authority deriving from the centuries of tradition and continuity associated with the concept of kohyang and with the distinctive social, political, economic, and class milieu of P’yŏngan Province in late Chosŏn. I argue also that the subversion and resistance that inform these stories are consistent with Hwang’s background as a native of a province formerly at the center of Koryŏ society but subsequently marginalized by late Chosŏn times. That is to say, subversion and resistance are useful strategies for individuals and societies that find themselves outside the political or cultural center. And just as P’yŏngan was distinct from the center in its economic and religious practices, Hwang Sunwŏn can be said to have chosen a path distinct from the didactic inclinations of Korean literati past and present—a path that is posted throughout his career with subversive narratives. HwANg’S p’yŏNgAN BACKgRouND Hwang Sunwŏn was born March 26, 1915, in Taedong County, South P’yŏngan.2 In 1921 his family moved to P’yŏngyang, “the center of northern (Korean) civilization,” where he attended grammar school.3 Hwang was the son of a schoolteacher and activist and an eighth-generation descendant of Hwang Sunsŭng, a man exemplified as a filial son during the reign of King [44.192.93.109] Project MUSE (2024...