OUR TWISTED HERO
Yi Munyol, trans. Kevin O'Rourke.
Seoul: Minum Publishing Co. (44-1 Kwanchol-dong, Chongno-gu, Seoul 110-111, Korea), 1988
119 pp., $5.25
Yi Munyol is that rare author - a prolific writer whose works of fiction are bestsellers yet enjoy critical acclaim. In Korea he is widely regarded as a writer of great intellectual power. Barely forty years old, he has already won two of the most prestigious Korean literary awards - the Yi Sang Prize (for the work reviewed here) and the Tongin Prize – one of only a handful of authors to have received both honors. Yi's novels, such as Hail to the Emperor, strike some readers as turgid and didactic, but shorter works such as "The Winter That Was" and the novella Our Twisted Hero show his storytelling talents to good effect.
Readers of contemporary Korean literature in translation owe a debt to Kevin O'Rourke for having temporarily forsaken his first love - Korean poetry - to set his hand once again to a work of fiction. Father O'Rourke has lived in Korea since 1964, holds a doctorate in Korean literature, and h as published a number of translations of Korean poetry and prose. His prose translations are ever fluent and reflect a deep knowledge of Korean culture and an understanding of the myriad subtleties of the Korean language.
Our Twisted is a parable of the corruption potential of power, set in the 1950s in a rural elementary school. The narrator, Pyongt'ae, is a fifth grader recently arrived from Seoul who finds that his new classroom is dominated by the class monitor, Sokdae. In Korean schools, the class monitor is a kind of liaison between pupils and teacher, bringing classmates to order when the teacher enters the room, assigning chores, and running errands. In Pyongt'ae's former school in Seoul, the class monitor was usually chosen on the basis of academic achievement. But Sokdae is a different sort of monitor altogether. Older, bigger, and tougher than his classmates, he has subjugated them through a combination of intimidation, blandishment, and wiles. Having established his physical superiority in playground fistfights, he delegates power to a favored few and collects tribute it the form of "borrowed" cigarette lighters, tasty morsels at lunchtime, and pocket money. Recalcitrant students are soon brought into line through peer pressure, the cold shoulder, or brute force by those who I have previously capitulated. At the same time, Sokdae is able to charm the adults, including the narrator's own parents: Pyongt'ae complains about Sokdae's behavior to his father and is astounded to hear his respond admiringly, "That body is really something….If he's like that already, he's surely heading for great things." And the efficiency with which Sokdae conducts cleanup chores, checks homework, and disciplines the class earns him the blind trust of the boys' teacher.
The lonely road of resistance
Pyongt'ae wages a solitary struggle against this system, which runs counter to the values of reason and logic he learned in Seoul. After a long battle with Sokdae's minions he finds himself near the bottom of the classroom pecking order and finally yields. Sokdae then makes him his right-hand man, and Pyongt'ae soon comes to enjoy the perquisites of power. But in sixth grade the boys' new teacher, a
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