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The Price of Piety
| Article
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20672 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
5,068 Words |
| Author
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Ji Moon Suh
Ji Moon Suh is professor of English at Korea University in
Seoul and has translated numerous Korean short stories into
English. An anthology of her translations, The Rainy Spell and
Other Korean Stories, was published in 1983 by Onyx Press, and
a collection of her personal essays, Faces in the Well,
appeared in 1988. |
HONBUL
(Soul flame)
Choi Myung Hee
Seoul: Hangil Co., 1991
1,159 pp., 16,000 won (approx. $20)
If a novel can contain the soul as well as the accumulated sorrows of a whole nation, surely this one does.
Honbul, by Korean author Choi Myung Hee, is an ambitious, multivolume novel still in progress. Four volumes have been published to date, two more are expected to come out by year's end, and the plot complications have only just begun in earnest. Honbul reconstructs the sorrow-laden and harsh lives of the inhabitants of a traditional village, beginning in the late 1930s, just before the final collapse of the Confucian-based social structure of the Yi dynasty, and carrying through the turbulent and perilous years of World War II. It will go on to recount the cataclysmic changes wrought by national liberation, the subsequent division of the country, civil war and its aftermath, and the formation of a modern state. Volume 4 leaves the reader in the middle of Japan's so-called war for Pan-Pacific Co-Prosperity. The village is dominated by an ancient yangban (aristocratic) clan but is no less the site of a desperate struggle for survival by commoners and a group of "untouchables."
The bitter experience of the untouchables--a caste that included butchers, leather crafters, and shamans--is explored with an unparalleled depth of knowledge and sympathy. The equally harsh condition of life of the farmhands and bondservants is examined in such vivid detail that no reader can fail to empathize with their pain, sorrows, and weariness. But the main focus of Honbul (at least so far) rests with the lineage heir's household of the yangban clan that dominates the village. The novel leaves the impression that life was not much less cruel to yangbans in old Korea than tot the members of the lower castes.
The novel is more than an elegy for the heartbreaks and backbreaking labor endured by Koreans throughout the centuries. It is also a loving and proud commemoration of the infinite care that pre-modern Koreans poured into every ritual of life, big and small. The yangbans observe to the last letter all the formalities connected with weddings, funerals, commemoration ceremonies, dress codes, social rituals, and an infinite number of other matters; the commoners and pariahs adhere to their traditions faithfully and learn their crafts till they become
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