Chang Ha-joon :: Bad Samaritans

The purpose of this blog is to help me better understand a particular national literature: a country’s poetry, fiction and drama… and the writers behind it.

Today, after a long absence, I’m breaking my own rules for the sake of a very special book: Chang Ha-joon’s Bad Samaritans: the Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

I know, I know: the subtitle makes it sound like a conspiracy theory. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I wouldn’t have read a hairbrained conspiracy twice (and thoroughly, at that).

Dr. Chang is a Cambridge-trained Korean economist. He’s adamantly pro-development, and has a bone to pick with neo-liberal policies and their deleterious effect on the world’s poorest countries.

He uses the history of the world’s richest nations to show the benefits of graduated protectionism, lax copyright standards, public enterprise, regulated foreign investment, and– most surprising to me– moderate-to-high inflation.

I enjoy reading about economics, but when I picked up Dr. Chang’s book this spring, it was the first time I’d ever seen a highly respected, world-class economist make hamburger from the sacred cow of low inflation.

“Who,” I thought, “could possibly want to see their savings disappear overnight?” But Dr. Chang makes a compelling case that the people who have the most to lose from inflation aren’t salaried workers like him, me (and probably anyone reading this), but people who make a living on the profits of their investments.

Salaried workers, conversely, are more likely to lose out in the short term and benefit down the road from the opportunities that arise as the economy grows– which it will, and quickly, if inflation isn’t policed too strictly.

Is it just me, or are the implications of that absolutely huge? Inflation is the one matter on which I’ve always given neo-liberal economics the benefit of the doubt. I’d never before come across such a careful, reasoned “shade of grey” argument for abandoning our fixation with ultra-low inflation.

I really love this book. It’s the best piece of non-fiction I’ve read in a long time, and it just so happens to be written by an incredibly bright Korean.

So here it is, and here it’ll stay.

I thought I was the only one.

Tonight I stumbled across another blog on Korean literature in translation:

Morning Calm, Night Terrors

It’s fantastic, and I look forward to using it as a resource.

Maybe I should be bummed about this (My idea! My precious, unique idea!), but this just creates a new set of challenges.

Kim Young-ha :: [still more on] I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I suspect that the the many pieces of art referenced in I Have the Right, when taken together, may be able to provide an important set of clues regarding the tone and thrust of the book. This is something I can sink my teeth into without masticating the hell out of the novel’s best plot points.

Klimt’s Judith is certainly the most significant piece; the painting’s subject represents Se-yeon, whose actions link the book’s two narratives. What most online reproductions avoid– as do the novel’s characters– is the fact that this statuesque painted woman, in a haze of ecstasy, is holding the head of the man she has decapitated: “Klimt excised Judith’s nationalism and heroism and left only fin-de-siecle sensuality” (17). When the narrator takes a turn describing his first encounter with Se-yeon, he refers only to Klimt’s– the creator’s– sensuality, and pays little mind to the head in the corner of the canvas.

Like a painting whose reputation and allure leads to simplification, Se-yeon only allows herself to experience patterns of sex and violence. The character C, one of her two lovers, is able to predict when she will masturbate– usually when she’s bored. In fact, she relishes boredom (41) and predictability, and seems to derive power from it: “She said it was her birthday whenever he went to see her, so each time they drank and slept together” (35).

Late in the book, C compares Mimi (the second woman of significance) to a drawing by Boris Vallejo. “But he couldn’t remember its title” (93). Vallejo’s oeuvre makes the reason for this lapse clear: most of the women in his fantasy paintings are sculpted, tense and powerful– more iconic than they are individually significant. Likewise, Mimi is a performance artist who works naked; her body surpases her. It becomes an instrument– a paintbrush:

Her hair, drenched in blue, was disheveled, and the paint was dripping down her body. It trickled down between her breasts, down her spine, in between her buttocks. (92)

The canvas seems to be intended as a sleight of hand– means by which the audience may be tricked into missing the actual artistic creation: the effects of pigment, adhesion and movement on Mimi’s body. Vallejo’s paintings, too, are like stills from a struggle.

Bookending The Death of Marat is Delacroix’ The Death of Sardanapale (Sardanapalus), again carefully described directly by the narrator. In The Death of Marat, the focus of the slain subject demands attention and creates mystery. In Sardanapale, a kind of inverse applies. The subject of the painting is the perpetrator of all the maddening violence that Delacroix portrays. The title of the painting, then, becomes a promise of the subject’s future damnation.

Perhaps Kim intends the same to be true of I Have a Right to Destroy Myself. Maybe the narrator’s own destruction is the final play in his game– his “important” work, as he calls it.

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At one point in the story, Se-yeon turns a snowball into a sex toy (30). The similarities between I Have the Right and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (just substitute eggs) then go from subtle to overwhelming. I’m surprised this comparison hasn’t come up in any reviews I’ve read. The two stories, taken together and contrasted, actually make Se-yeon and Mimi (her fecund doppelganger who appears later in the narrative), into richer characters.

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A friend of mine has been on my case about writing. (Not this kind– the kind that actually requires creativity.) I was working on a stage adaptation of Sheila Watson’s Double Hook, but it’s an obscure Canadian novel so I doubt I’ll be able to get a copy in Korea. I plan to try writing a few scenes from I Have a Right, though I won’t be posting them here.

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Kim, Young-ha. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. Trans. Kim Chi-young. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

Kim Young-ha :: [more on] I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Summer was good to me. I vacationed in Canada for a month, and I read not so much as a scrap of Korean literature. Time to change that.

I’ve decided not to recount the play-by-play of re-reading I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. I’ll make an update if I happen to gain any insights worth writing about, but that’s not a promise.

In lieu, I’d like to present a bit of information about Kim Young-ha, since I started talking about his first novel without any introduction to the author himself.

I Have the Right is, unfortunately, Kim’s only novel that has been translated into English. (I also have a copy of Photo Shop Murder, a small volume comprised of two short stories.) According to the author’s website, Empire of Lights will be published in English by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt next year.

All of Kim’s novels– five in total– have been published in various foreign languages: French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, etc., and in a couple cases, all of the above. I’m tempted to seek out the French translations (thank you, Canadian school system), but I know I’d be in for a bit of a sacrifice. It’s probably better to be patient.

Interviewers are an impatient lot, though– always quick to capitalize on writers’ childhood trauma. In Kim’s case, the salient details are a nomadic army brat upbringing along the DMZ and an incident of coal poisoning. Death is a key catalyst in much of Kim’s prose, so it’s almost too easy to construct a narrative that originates in the author’s childhood.

With his more recent work, though, Kim admits a change in trajectory. Life has lightened him up a little:

Before marriage, libido influenced me. My work was so aggressive, so much death and speed, no Eros and much Thanatos, Pathos. After marriage I found I could focus just on the writing, just the narrative and story and I began to find the destiny of the story, the destiny of the narrative. (Seoul Times)

Whether the tone of his writing was influenced by his unique childhood is impossible to say. But Kim implies that an increasing distance from his childhood– as a married adult– has come gift-wrapped with some degree of distance from the dark.

Some of Kim’s short fiction is available at Authortrek.com. I’ll make an effort to post comments on this work, as well.

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Kim Young-ha. 2009. [http://kimyoungha.com].

Standaert, Michael. “Korean Author Speaks at US Writing Program.” Seoul Times, 2007. [http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=240].

Tseng, Ada. “Discovering Kim Young-ha.” Asia Pacific Arts, 2007. [http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=83043].

Kim Young-ha :: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I’m taking a break from Ko Un to re-read Kim Young-ha’s novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. I bought it in Canada and read it several months ago, when I had only just arrived in Korea and knew almost nothing about the country.

I’m especially curious to see how many Korean cultural references jump out at me this time around. So far I’ve only re-read Part I; already the narrator’s reference to Insa-dong (an artistic hub and ground zero for cultural tourism– and one of my favourite parts of Seoul) helps to frame his bloated aesthetic hubris and delusions of fecundity.

I rarely re-read books; I’m always plagued by thoughts of all the great things I’ll never have time to read even once. But now that I know the trajectory of I Have the Right…, I can absolutely luxuriate in the flood of clues– the little bits of broken mirror glass– that allow the narrator to jump quickly from foreshadowing to reflection to self-admiration.

The narrator begins by telling the reader about the art book he’s studying and copying. By doing so, he invites us into the minutiae of the decidedly… well… minute (yes), narrow world of a self-professed god. As if the power to create and destroy were not also the privilege of algae, tapeworms and flu viruses.

The artwork he first discusses is The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David. The narrator complains,

I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection of a young revolutionary in the wake of a sudden attack nor the relief of a man who has escaped life’s suffering. He is Marat peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. (3)

In Part I, the narrator already begins discussing his clients– his human canvases– and it’s apparent that his engagement with classic artwork is a time-killer between projects made of flesh– far more unpredictable and challenging than a smear of yellow ochre on a brush in an unstable, mimicking hand.

I have a furious urge to over-explain the importance of this passage in light of the entire book, but on the off-chance that anyone currently reading Kim’s novel stumbles upon this page– guess I’ll know when I’m struck by lightning on the way home from work some day– I wouldn’t want to steal the narrative’s thunder.

And something tells me I’ll steal my own if I get too keyboard-happy over every re-examined macabre (or not so macabre) little detail.

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Kim, Young-ha. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. Trans. Kim Chi-young. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.