Finding Freedomon the Wings ofa Writer

It takes a left wing and a right wing for a bird to fly.Such is the profound truth of the natural world, but it may soundentirely implausible in the realm of the human world, where completelydivergent and opposing ideologies coexist in a single place, like theKorean peninsula. It is nearly impossible for writers on the Koreanpeninsula to fly with both wings—a communist wing on the left, forexample, and a capitalist wing on the right. In the current issue of _listwe encounter writers who fly with only one wing in turn.In his novel Our Twisted Hero (see _list Vol. 24, Summer 2014), Yi Mun-yol, the featuredauthor in the current issue, gave a vivid description not only of the formative process andcollapse of absolute power, but also of the petit bourgeois obedient to that absolute power,set in the background of an elementary school in a small city. Many of the youth of those dayswho dedicated themselves to fight against the military regime, found in Yi’s novel a reasonwhy they had to redress the social injustices fatally committed by those in absolute power.But Yi, as paradoxical as it may seem, bore witness to the totalitarian tendencies characteristicof those struggling against the totalitarian regime, and so tried to keep a distance and freehimself from having to choose a side. In The Poet (1991) Yi described the free, aged artist asone who does not belong to any order or regime, but must “forever wander until the very lastmoment of his life.” At last, in 2014, by completing the 12-volume epic novel The In-betweenPeriphery, written from 1986 and published from 1998, he seemed to have completed hisliterary journey of becoming a “truly free, aged writer.” It was under the unique circumstancesof Korea, located on the periphery of “two major imperialist powers of the 20th century, theU.S. and USSR” that the three protagonists in this epic came to their physical, mental, andsocial maturity by “wandering between the ruler and the ruled, the old and the new order, andthe desires of the masses and the individual.”Under somewhat different circumstance, there are writers who were transferred from oneside to the other, not only in the geographical sense, but also in the ideological one. In the“Special Section: North Korean Defector Literature,” we can hear the voices of North Koreandefectors writing about their lives in the North as well as about their escape. Yi Gayeonexpresses the hope and wish that her childhood friend will not starve again in the next life(p. 40). Do Myeong-hak informs us of the fact that even a one-eyed man is valuable in NorthKorea as long as he can shoot a gun (p. 42). Shedding bitter tears of regret after phoning hisdaughter whom he left behind, Lee Ji-myeong ruminates on his life as a writer in the Northand the resulting confusion about his identity in the South (p. 43). Kim Seong-min sings thepraises of freedom only after learning its true meaning, which was deprived of him from hisbirth (p. 44).What is the true meaning of freedom for these writers? If it means a spiritual wanderingwithout settling oneself on one point of view or in one particular place, then the writers in thisvolume of _list have found it in reality and in name. True Freedom! 

by Park JangyunEditor-in-Chief