Recently, I was amused by a Korean newspaper article about Busan, the second-largest city in Korea. The author wrote that since many young people in Busan had moved to Seoul for better opportunities, the once-charming southern harbor city was left with “old men and the sea.” However, he added, Busan has now become a prosperous international city again, bustling with foreign visitors and tourists.
Since Korean does not clearly distinguish singular from plural nouns and lacks definite or indefinite articles, the author wrote that Busan was left with “the old man and the sea,” borrowing from the title of Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novella. While reading the passage, it occurred to me that in addition to "The Old Man and the Sea," there are many titles of literary works that inadvertently reflect Korea’s current situation aptly and amusingly.
For example, we may say that our political arena is always full of “sound and fury.” The "Sound and the Fury" is a celebrated novel by William Faulkner, who borrowed it from a famous phrase in Shakespeare’s "Macbeth." In Act V, Scene 5, Macbeth says in a soliloquy: “Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player. ... / It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Not realizing that sound and fury signify nothing, our overbearing, arrogant politicians seem to choose loud disputes and clashes instead of quiet diplomatic solutions and negotiations. Consequently, angry yelling and furious shouting are rampant in our political environment.
In our society, left-wing politicians are often obsessed with the past. For them, the past is like a home they constantly want to return to. Yet, they cannot go back because times have changed and they must move on. That is what Thomas Wolfe tells us in his novel, "You Can’t Go Home Again." Indeed, when you become a grown-up, you cannot go back home again. Instead, you need to build a new home in the present.
For a long time, we have experienced chronic conflicts between the “haves and have-nots,” which are frequently instigated by ideology-obsessed political activists to win elections. Hemingway wrote the novel "To Have and Have Not" in 1937, during the Great Depression, but its reception was poor because his talent as a writer lay elsewhere. Rather, the theme better fit John Steinbeck, who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939. The dispossessed, disinherited people in Korean society, too, exhibit an accumulated wrath that clusters together like grapes.
Experts describe South Korea as a polarized society split between incompatible, mutually provocative ideologies: left-wing progressivism versus right-wing conservatism, ultranationalism versus globalism and socialism versus capitalism. When an opposing political party is elected to govern, citizens often feel so isolated and alienated that they feel as though they are living in “another country” within their own nation. This psychological displacement mirrors the themes in African American author James Baldwin’s 1962 novel, "Another Country." In it, Baldwin depicts a fractured America where African Americans inhabit a distinct emotional and psychological territory shaped by racial prejudice and alienation, emphasizing a profound sense of internal exile.
Consequently, Koreans frequently find themselves "waiting for the end" of administrations they do not support. Yet, unlike the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play "Waiting for Godot," who are trapped in hopeless, eternal waiting, the Korean people maintain a strong desire for a genuine new beginning. In 1964, Leslie A. Fiedler published a monumental book of literary criticism titled "Waiting for the End." An advocate of pop culture, Fiedler was waiting for the end of modernism’s highbrow literature and the advent of middlebrow literature, such as detective novels, science fiction, fantasy fiction, and even comic books and webtoons.
In Korea, and perhaps across the entire world, those majoring in the liberal arts or humanities are depressed and disillusioned these days because of the collapse of the job market. To make matters worse, AI is rapidly taking away jobs from humanities majors. As a result, they have become “invisible men” or “dangling men,” borrowing from Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" and Saul Bellow’s "Dangling Man." In 1916, James Joyce wrote a modernist novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in which he portrayed a successful young artist named Stephen Dedalus. Unfortunately, the portrait of today’s young artists and humanities scholars is bleak in this postmodern, electronic age.
Due to its geopolitical situation, Korea is precariously located between “War and Peace.” If war breaks out on the peninsula by any chance, everything we have accomplished will be “Gone with the Wind.” Thus, we strongly hope it remains “All Quiet on the Western Front” and northern front. Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Mitchell and Erich Maria Remarque have depicted our situation through the titles of their novels, though unwittingly.
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Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed
khnews@heraldcorp.com