|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Voice of the Korean Ethos
| Article
# : |
18524 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
3,642 Words |
| Author
: |
Marshall R. Pihl
Marshall R. Pihl is the author of Listening to Korea: A Korean
Anthology and The Good People: Korean Stories by Oh Yong-su.
He teaches Korean literature at the University of Hawaii. |
REPRESENTATIVE KOREAN MASTERPIECES: KIM TONG-NI
Yi T'ae-dong, editor
Seoul: Chihak sa, Inc., 1985
Over the past fifty-six years, Kim Tong-ni has had more written about him than any other living Koran author. He so embodies the history of modern Korean literature that one critic has asserted, "For all the credit we give Europe as our model, modern Korean fiction did not take root for sure until we were given the literature of Kim Tong-ni. What we did before him can be dismissed as practice."
Korans respond to him as the voice of their ethos, as a writer who seeks understanding of what it means to be Korean. Accommodating ethnic materials in a perfectly modern aesthetic, he is anything but a "folk" writer. Two early, and still acclaimed short stories, "Portrait of a Shaman" (1936) and "Loess Village Story" (1939) demonstrate his ability to be Korean and worldly at the same time. While set in the Korean countryside, these works are invested with a universality that links the national with the shared human experience. His story "A Descendant of the Hwarang" (1935) is appearing in THE WORLD & I in English translation for the first time [see p. 440]. It was his maiden work and brought him immediate critical acclaim.
Even in his early works, Kim was giving voice to a humanistic nationalism that he believed could "overcome cultural barriers and seek identity with universal trends in world literature." It is the universal language of symbols that lets his work reach out to readers beyond Korea's borders, even while heavily laden with local color.
But Kim regarded "Portrait of a Shaman" an "imperfect work," in spite of the fact that it has long been regarded one of his representative stories. Believing that its theme of the confrontation of Eastern and Western religions could not be handled adequately in the context of a short story, he created the novel Ulhwa the Shaman in 1978.
Religious belief--whether shamanism, Buddhism, or Christianity--is an undercurrent in nearly all Kim's work. He often speaks of his deep concern about the nihilism of the twentieth century and of our inability to answer it with a new set of principles that work. Kim believes it is his literary mission "to seek out divinity and identify the relationship between that divinity and humankind."
Kim
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
