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Anatomy of a Story
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17842 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1990 |
3,628 Words |
| Author
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Marshall R. Pihl
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When Hwang Sun-wŏn wrote "Old man Hwang " in the fall of 1942, he had no idea when, if ever, it would see the light of day.
He was twenty-eight years old then, only three years out of college. The unemployed father of two boys, he had just published what was to be his last work to appear for some three years.
Because of the Japanese policy of eliminating use of the Korean language, Hwang had been finding it increasingly difficult to publish. He had decided early that year to continue writing while saving his work in hopes of a brighter day.
In September 1943, he moved from Pyongyang to his native village of Pingjang-ri, in the nearby countryside. There he wrote in silence while the last of World War II played itself out.
Hwang's apprenticeship
It was during the silent forties that Hwang Sun-wŏn completed his literary apprenticeship, which he had begun as a student poet while enrolled in English at Japan's prestigious Waseda University. By graduation in 1939, Hwang already had two published poetry collections to his credit - the lyrical Madly Singing (1934) and the modernist Curio (1936. The outflow of simple sentiment in the former and the crafted nature of the latter foretold the nature of the prose to come from his pen:
"Night on the Yalu River"
(a fragment)
Water water water
Flows. As red as eyes engorged
With blood, silted water flows.
Now raging now crying, water
of the Yalu flows.
(from Madly Singing, 1934)
"Duck"
"2"
mimicked
you.
(from Curio, 1936)
It is notable that Hwang's early poetry demonstrates two propensities that have long characterized his work, his humanistic spirit and his consciousness as an artisan. Taking the two anthologies as wholes, one can say that Madly Singing reveals his humanistic side while Curio evinces his technical concerns. The critic Chon I-du stresses that the world of Hwang's writing is shaped by a confluence of the lyricism of Madly Singing and the intellectuality of Curio and makes the point that this duality explains why Hwang's stories can be so sensitively gentle yet avoid slipping into sentimentality.
By the time Hwang regained his public voice, upon Korea's liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945, he had fully embarked upon his second stage of artistic development - by becoming a specialist in the short story form. He was to remain one until establishing himself as a novelist in the 1960s.
Looking back to
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