1 This Paradise of Yours published by Actes Sud, 1993
2 The Wounded published by Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2002
3 Io Island published by Actes Sud, 1991

The novels and stories of Yi Chong-Jun (available for years to French readers in translation through the translations of Patrick Maurus, published by Actes Sud) constitute a substantial and often disturbing body of work. Readers who have read the works of other Korean novelists available through many different French publishers (such as Actes Sud or Zulma) will find his work powerfully original. Each reader can uncover, with more or less insight depending on their knowledge of the country’s history, hint after hint of the tragedies that afflicted Korea during the 20th century.

Born in 1939, Yi Chong-Jun was 11years old when the Korean War broke out. In the novel The Face of the Aggressor, he deals with the war through personal and family history. Suddenly the Korean drama, the asundering of the country, is condensed into a cruel fable:

It was as if both sides had persecuted my stepbrother in order to kill him. Paradoxically, they were the ones who helped him to stay alive a little longer. The first group prevented him from being immediately killed by the second. Then, when he was captured by the first group, the second arrived, and in a way, saved him. This was how he found himself like a rabbit hunted by two eagles: the more they fought over the rabbit, the better its chances of survival.

Sometimes, the memories of the Korean War in the works of Yi Chong-Jun may seem strangely familiar to French and European readers who experienced the ravages of World War Two, or who are familiar with eyewitness accounts published in so many books in many different languages, during the second half of the 20th century. At times during the works of this great Korean writer, the sensations of a kind of primal violence remain or return to disturb the later lives of the survivors. This is the case in the story “The Wounded,” in which for one character, the trauma of the civil war comes back in the form of a sound, or rather a terrifying echo: “Deep down, the sound of gunfire remained a vivid memory inside me, because I had heard so many gunshots during the war.”

In Yi’s world, the violence of life might crash down upon his characters from the outer elements, such as war. However, this violence is just as likely born from within the dark depths of his characters and their desires. At the same time, the author also reveals instances of resistance to this violence. In fact, at times violence and resistance become intertwined, becoming nearly impossible to distinguish. This can be seen in his female characters, especially the mothers. The presence of the latter is clearly important to his youthful characters, and ambiguous and even menacing in their desire-loaded stubbornness:

Mother went back to gathering stones in the garden as she hummed in the dark. There seemed to be no end to the stones.

The song was desperate and obsessive. There were so many stones that it seemed like she would never get rid of them. And the boy thought that her singing would never end….

Throughout his work, Yi Chong-Jun searches for forms of continuity across space and time and across the limits of the existence of individuals. In some of the author’s most gripping work, he resorts to the tradition of p’ansori, a traditional form of Korean singing. In one example, a brother tirelessly searches for his sister, and believes he has found her when voice and rhythm finally reunite:

The woman paid no attention to the pain in her throat as she continued to tear songs from it. The man kept the beat on the tambourine, as though seized by a premonition as he faced the woman who would not stop singing.

P’ansori, in its unparalleled bitterness, is in itself a reasonable manifestation of continuity.

In The People of the South, for example, the singing passes from one character to the next like a powerful and autonomous being. Furthermore, in spite of what might seem exotic to someone who is not Korean, the French reader finds himself deeply moved. This is also how this ancient song becomes the modern work that we read today:

Since the twilight began to fall, covering the sides of the mountain, the song that had been hidden in the forest all day long furtively descended along with the dusk, and abruptly threw itself upon the boy’s mother, like a snake pouncing on its prey.

There is an irresistibly musical force in the very composition of Yi’s stories. The Korean author’s frequent flashbacks are at times reminiscent of the obsessive brooding over the past in the works of other authors like Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, or Imre Kertesz.

The fantastic interplay between Yi’s works and Korean history, straddling the boundary between the real and the imaginary, is rich and subtle. Fiction is often valuable as a political experiment. Could the great novel This Paradise of Yours be compared with the famous dystopian works of Zamiatine, Huxley, or Orwell? Going further than any of these works, Yi’s novel is connected to historical and political realities that have already occurred, the exclusion and reinsertion of pariahs, and despotic rule over society. However, it is entirely possible that this novel has created something impossible, even untenable. For through a relentless fictitious demonstration, we see the leader’s ambitions turn into a disaster. When it belongs to someone (a leader) who is detached from others (his subordinates or victims), good intentions can only become tyrannical. That is when the leader begins his foray into the infernal logic of sacrifice.

Yet shouldn’t we perceive another sacrifice, underlying or implied, in the very existence of the books we have read by Yi Chong-Jun? As in the writing of other great writers in any number of languages, Yi’s novels communicate especially historical and political themes through the questions they lead us to ask ourselves. Perhaps this reflectiveness, such as in Io Island, about an island which is divided between reality and imagination, is what makes the novels of Yi Chong-Jun similar to those of the most challenging Western writers, from Flaubert, Joyce, to Kafka.

It would not be surprising, once this author’s importance is understood, to learn that several great films (including Lee Chang-Dong’s A Secret Sunshine) were inspired by his novels and stories. In France, it is through cinema that an author, even one who so far has not been widely read, begins to acquire a larger audience. 

by Claude Mouchard