A History of Korea (88 page)

“Five Bandits”—a title in unveiled reference to the “Five Traitors of 1905” (
lsa oj
k
) who had signed the protectorate treaty leading to the Japanese takeover (
Chapter 16
)—is a narrative poem suffused with the lyrical elements of local dialect and the singing quality of shamanistic rituals. Its story revolves around a contest between five bandits—a contest in corruption, that is, among representatives of the five most privileged and powerful groups of people in South Korean society at the time: tycoons of conglomerates, national assemblymen, high-ranking bureaucrats, generals, and cabinet ministers. Each of these five bandits takes turns to outdo the other in debauchery, ostentatious wealth, and venality, and before the poem ends with heavenly retribution, a sixth class of miscreant emerges, a clueless public prosecutor who ends up joining rather than indicting the bandits. The message could not be clearer: the system itself suffered from a comprehensive miscarriage of social justice that divided the populace into the parasitic and exploited. And while Park Chung Hee himself escapes direct mention, “Five Bandits” unmistakably targets him. In the poem’s accounting of the five bandits’ contest, for example, they joyously recall that they had originally gathered “ten years ago” to begin their collective efforts to rob the people. The bandits’ affinity for Japanese ways and brutality, and the fact that one of the five bandits is actually a general, all point to Park. Kim also makes no attempt to hide his own personal connection: the poem’s poor, suffering peasant who makes an appeal to the prosecutor has come to Seoul from Kim’s home region of Ch
lla province.

While not so brazen in their condemnation of the South Korean system, other great writers of the 1970s, too, came to be marked by a pervasive social consciousness in their works. One was Ko
n, who led a campaign in the literary world to bring about Kim Chiha’s release from jail and himself was arrested for his political activities. Like Kim originally from Ch
lla province, Ko
n had spent his twenties as a Buddhist monk, and this Buddhist sensibility infused his perspective on social injustice and the means to overcome it. His breakthrough work came in 1974 with a narrative poem, “To Mun
i Village,” which described and decried the desolate winter landscape in a rural area, and took the snow as a cover for and of death. A social consciousness is only hinted at here, but in later poems Ko exuded a clearer anti-government voice. In “Arrows” (1977), for example, Ko calls on those fighting for democracy to let go of all of their possessions, accomplishments, and even “happiness” for the singular purpose of “becoming arrows and advancing with all our might” toward a bloody struggle. Ko would later establish himself as Korea’s most revered contemporary poet through his epic narrative verse, especially the “Genealogy of Ten Thousand Lives” (
Maninbo
) that recounts his encounters with people both contemporary and historical. His most stirring expressions, though, came in the cauldron of the 1970s.

Many of the great South Korean novelists also made their mark in this decade. Interestingly, three of the most renowned writers—and not only as authors of anti-establishment, social commentary fiction—all made their literary debuts in the same year, 1970, as the publication of “Five Bandits.” Hwang S
gy
ng, considered by some Korea’s greatest contemporary novelist, entered the literary scene in 1970 with a short story with the Korean War as the backdrop (Hwang had just returned from a tour of duty in the Vietnam War). But his big splash came the following year with “Kaekchi.” “Kaekchi,” roughly translated as “strange land far from home” in reference to the story’s focus on struggling factory laborers who had migrated from the countryside, established Hwang as the foremost practitioner of what came to be called “people’s literature,” or
minjung munhak
. In later works, Hwang would display a remarkable versatility in topics and settings, but always through
a concern with the stifled voices of the oppressed. 1970 also was the year Cho Ch
ngnae debuted with the first in a string of novels that discerned the impact of modern Koreans’ historical experiences on their current circumstances. Cho would later expand his literary canvas in the 1980s and 1990s as a prolific producer of the multi-volume historical novel. The best known such work was
The T’aebaek Mountains
, which featured the same connection between historical and contemporary conditions by reimagining the Korean War from a more balanced rather than the conventional anti-communist, Cold War perspective. Finally, the 1970s witnessed the flowering of literature by female novelists, and none more prominent than Pak Wans
, who debuted with a novel published in 1970,
The Naked Tree
. In later works such as
A Hobbling Afternoon
, Pak combined a probing rumination on Korea’s historical experiences, especially that of national division, with a critique, through a distinctly female sensibility, of the emerging middle class existence.