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Hwang Sok-yong: Healing the Wounds of History, One Book at a Time scrap

by Kang Yu-junggo link October 18, 2014

Author Bio 작가 소개

황석영

Hwang Sok-yong

Hwang Sok-yong was born in Changchun, Manchuria in 1943. After the liberation from Japanese occupation, he moved to his mother’s hometown Pyongyang, where he lived with his mother’s side of the family. In 1947, his family moved to the South and he grew up in Yeongdeungpo. Hwang left Kyungbok High School in 1962 and left home to wander the southern provinces. He returned home in October, and in November of that year he won the New Author Literary Prize from the magazine Sasanggye for his short story, “Near the Marking Stone.” Hwang lived life as a drifter, taking up manual labor and temple jobs until 1970 when his short story “The Pagoda” won the Chosun Ilbo New Writer’s Contest and he began his writing career in earnest. He also participated in the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1970s, Hwang Sok-yong published a continuous stream of works that became well known such as “Far from Home,” “Mr. Han’s Chronicle,”“The Road to Sampo,” and “A Dream of Good Fortune,” becoming a foremost author in the Korean literary world. For the duration of the seventies, he went undercover working at the Guro Industrial Complex and took part in the resistance movement through his membership in the Association of Writers for Actualized Freedom while penning his epic novel, Jang Gilsan. In the 1980s, Hwang completed his full-length novel, The Shadow of Arms, which shines light on the capitalistic world system during the Vietnam War. He did this all while working tirelessly to organize the fight to spread the truth about the Gwangju Democratization Movement as well as a variety of other resistance movements. After visiting North Korea in March 1989, Hwang was unable to return to South Korea and took refuge as an invited author at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1991, he continued his exile in New York. After returning to South Korea in 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released in 1998 after serving five of those years. Following this, he has shown year after year that his creative spirit will not die with the publication of The Old Garden (2000), The Guest (2001), Shim Cheong (2003), Princess Bari (2007), Hesperus (2008), Gangnam Dream (2010), A Familiar World (2011), The Sound of the Shallow Water (2012), and Dusk (2015). He has been awarded the Manhae Literature Prize, the Lee San Literature Prize, and the Daesan Literary Award, among others. Hwang’s major works have been translated and published around the world in countries such as France, the US, Italy, and Sweden.

One might say that the life and works of Hwang Sok-yong are in and of themselves a modern history of Korea. The lives embodied in his works go beyond being unique experiences of individuals, to being concrete examples of Korean history.



The reality revealed in his works is a painful memory of the people Korea literally wanted to overlook. With a cool but penetrating gaze, Hwang exposes wounds that most people want to turn away from and ignore. His gaze casts a heavy anchor in the hearts of readers trying to forget. What he says is that the atmosphere and life in Korea, which we can’t turn away from, are in shreds.



Hwang, who was born in Manchuria, began his literary career while in high school. His remarkable talent, manifest in works spanning the 1960s and 70s, was compressed into a collection titled The Land of Strangers in the 1970s. The Road to Sampo, published in the 1970s, is a record of life in this land, which had suffered in the name of development. Rare is a collection that exposes the issues of industrialization, human isolation, and the loss of a homeland, as masterfully as The Land of Strangers.



Hereafter, the depth with which Hwang deals with reality becomes a bit more decisive. The Shadow of Arms, which is about the Vietnam War, and Jang Kilsan, which reveals the irony of an era through the justifiable nature of the existence of chivalrous robbers, are works that hold fast to life in the “present day,” beyond time and space. All the major works by Hwang deal with important aspects of Korean history so much that the issues captured through his literary perspective are confirmed to be the issues of the present era. It must be noted that Hwang reveals the patterns of a time period by dealing with the society, era, and history, while at the same time dealing with the concreteness that has settled deep in the lives of individuals. In that respect, it would be correct to refer to him literally as a masterpiece writer, beyond such classifications as a realist or a modernist.



His recent works, published since the 2000s, aptly demonstrate the path taken by Hwang, searching for a writer’s ethics by making novel attempts and sympathizing with the era. Hwang has gone beyond the classic framework of facts, compounding different factors such as fact or reality and imagination or fantasy. Through such juxtapositions, Hwang makes life appear unfamiliar, and gives a bird’s eye view of it as a problem, as in The Guest, which sheds new light on the history of this land through the shamanist rite of “gut” (exorcism), or in Princess Bari, based on the narrative of Princess Bari rites.



If Hwang is currently working on a novel, then the subject is certain to be the symptoms of an illness that this nation is suffering. If The Guest deals with the issue of the two Koreas, then that is the issue of the day, and if An Old Garden ruminates on the generation of the democratization period, that too would be the current issue. The paradoxical import of Hwang Sok-yong’s works, which are historical and current at the same time, thus becomes the value of Korean literature. His novels contain a strength that overcomes values or subjectivity. 



 



by Kang Yu-Jung

Writer 필자 소개

Kang Yu-jung

Kang Yu-jung

Literary and Film Critic Kangnam University

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