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A Voice From the Earth
| Article
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19960 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,312 Words |
| Author
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J. Martin Holman
J Martin Holman is a professor in East Asian studies at
Vanderbilt University. He is the editor and translator of
Shadows of a Sound and The Book of Masks, collections of
Hwang Sun Won's later stories by Korean author Yun Heung Gil.
His other translations include The Old Capital and Palm-of-
the-Hand Stories by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari
Kawabata. He taught Japanese and Korean literature at
Wakayama University near Osaka, Japan. |
In writing I Am the Clay, Chaim Potok has given voice in English to a story that is unfamiliar to American ears. For many Americans, the Korean conflict is a war that took place in sort of netherworld that hovered somewhere between Japan and a television lot in Hollywood. Most know little of the political forces that spawned the war, the geography of the country, or the culture and history of its people.
I Am the Clay leaves aside questions of political ideology and brilliant or obtuse military strategy, focusing instead on the struggles of an old Korean couple to survive an upheaval so vast that it can scarcely be comprehended. Already having been short-changed by fate--aging and childless in a culture obsessed with the production of male heirs--the two old people suffer the dislocation of war and wrestle with the specter of the fruitless past as they ponder their precarious future, should they continue to nurse and carry a wounded boy they have found as they flee with other refugees.
The old couple are farmers, as were most Koreans of the time. As the title of the novel implies, the soil of their native land plays a vital role in the story. The earth gives the old man and woman their livelihood. Their lives have been lived in partnership with the soil. The land was their ancestral land. The encroaching war, however, drives the childless couple from their village, and they are forced to scrounge and scavenge for food in a desolate, unpredictable world very different from the one they have known.
In traditional Korean thought, geomancy--the study of the supernatural forces that permeate the land, their divination and proper consideration in the placement of houses, gravesites, and even villages and cities--is a subject of utmost gravity. Although the belief in geomancy came from China and was observed in Japan, the practice reached its height in Korea. Modern Koreans still use it to determine homesites that take best advantage of the mystical powers of the land, or gravesites that will please the spirits of the departed. The concept of geomancy is so pervasive and elaborately developed that it is even possible to construct an interpretation of the Korean War based on its principles: convergences of forces in the land that turned malevolent because of the misdeeds of human beings.
Near the end of the novel, this concern for propriety in geomancy manifests itself when the boy learns that the U.S. Army battalion he works for is to relocate to the spot where the old woman who had saved his life is
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