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[Essay] Shining a Light on the Shadow of Globalization through Shamanism scrap
by Lim Hong Bae
March 4, 2016
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Author Bio 작가 소개
Hwang Sok-yong
“A writer with the breadth of experience and depth of understanding that make it possible to gain insight into both the Korean condition and the lives of ordinary people throughout the twentieth century.” (Wu Chanje, Godokhan gongsaeng (고독한 공생 Solitary Symbiosis), Moonji, 2003)
Hwang Sok-yong is a writer who has built his literary world through a sustained engagement with the political realities of the time.
The Eurocentric narrative of world history began to be questioned during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Johann Gottfried Herder resisted the Western-centric “universal history”with his statement “that which is ethnic is worldly” and promoted the right of non-Western peripheries to historical sovereignty. Going further, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe advocated the concept of “World Literature” (Weltliteratur) with the idea that it holds a great purpose for the Progress of Man when ethnic literature crosses national boundaries and becomes a tool for communicating with the world. Hwang Sokyong has worked passionately to help realize that“ethnic literature is world literature”—an idea that both Herder and Goethe pursued. In his literary career, which spans over forty years, Hwang has shown the reality of a divided Korea, given critical insight into the Cold War, and pursued a deep introspection of the problems of globalization.
Until the 1990s, Hwang Sok-yong’s novels were a model of traditional realism, but since the 2000s he has been trying something new by using traditional Korean narrative forms to explore current issues in East Asia and in world history. The first work in his “East Asia trilogy” is The Guest (2001), where he borrows the form of the Chinogwi exorcism of Hwanghae Province, a ritual used to release the pain and regrets of the dead, in order to write of those who were sacrificed to both the left and right’s ideological conflict during the Korean War. Thus Hwang attempts to knock down the walls built by the Cold War to begin the process of reconciliation. This was followed by Shim Cheong (2003), in which the structure of the tale of Shim Cheong, who sacrificed herself to the Dragon King to ensure a safe passage, is used to discuss the process of modernization through the plunder of East Asia by imperialist powers and its subsequent incorporation into the world market.
The third work in the East Asia trilogy is Princess Bari (2007), which deals with the diaspora issue facing the globalized age through the ordeals that a girl, a North Korean defector, undergoes. Muga or shamanic song, is a traditional Korean narrative form that, like the Greek myth of Orpheus, is structured around going into the underworld to rescue a soul. This novel borrows that narrative structure and takes the character of Bari, who travels to and from the underworld in Korean shamanic legend, and uses her trials and pain to tell the fate of a North Korean defector, a girl who has been tossed into the purgatory of the crashing waves of globalization. Through this story, the author views the starvation of North Koreans and North Korean defectors as the dark shadows of capitalism, which incites international polarization. Bearing that meaning in mind, London, where Bari arrives at the end of her Odyssean journey, carries the spatio-temporal symbolism of being a place steeped in old imperialistic history that receives a large influx of refugees.
Shim Cheong, who sacrificed herself, and Bari, who represents a healer in pain, are both characters comparable to figures in Western literature, like the heroine of Goethe’s play, Iphigenia in Tauris, who negotiated between the Greeks and the “wild men” and who was offered up as a sacrifice for a positive outcome in the Trojan War. Hwang’s novels use a unique style to take the specific fate of an individual and extrapolate it to not just a Korean or East Asian story, but a story of the world. In that aspect, Hwang Sok-yong can be considered to put into practice the most Korean, and at the same time most global, morality. 
Writer 필자 소개
Lim Hong Bae
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