1960. Translation from Korean by Kevin O’Rourke
The plot of this novel is
comprised of events in the life of Lee Myong-jun from his childhood and adolescence
mostly spent in the house of one of his father’s friends due to the fact that
his father, Lee Yong Do, a communist, had moved to North Korea, and her mother
had died immediately afterwards. After his arrest and exposure to violence by
the South Korean police, he decides to go North where he lives with his
father’s and his father’s North Korean new wife. He returns to South Korea as a
member of the North Korean army in 1950. Finally, as POW, he chooses to settle
in a country other than North and South Korea, namely (probably) India. Two main
love stories are interwoven in this plot - one with South Korean Yoon’hae (who
marries his friend Tae-sik), and one with North Korean Un-hye (who dies in a
bomb attack during the war).
The story is told as a flow of
free indirect speech, and partly also stream of consciousness, mostly in the
third person singular, occasionally shifting to the first person, and it
consists of a patchwork of memories, told in chronological sequence but
recollected as the protagonists crosses the sea on a ship interacting with the
Captain of the vessel and some of his fellow compatriots being transported
abroad.
It is a rather complex
narrative that recalls western modernist works such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway and some of Joyce’s own writing.
The title of the novel derives
from an idea expressed in the first page: “the square”, understood as “a place
where we meet destiny”. This concept is repeated and elaborated in various
sections of the narrative.
The flow of events is fluid as
“the river of life” in which Myong-jun fails to “grasp some complete wholeness
in the stream of time” (p. 18). Water is the unconscious in Jung’s terms, and
therefore relevant to the recollection of the past. And the water of the sailing
crossing leads from the past of Korea to the future of the next location where
the protagonist is going to live. As a transitional allegory, the ship on the
sea is the tool of revising his own life, that does not appear to be seen by Myong-jun
as desperate until the second last page, where he commits suicide, by diving
into water (as it is suggested without an explicit statement – his body is
simply not found on board anymore).
There are several quotations
from the Scriptures (see in particular pp. 14, 20, 25, 63, 115-116). Lack of
trust in God, however is stated, and Myong-jun defines himself as a “man of no religion”,
coming in fact to compare Christians and Bolsheviks as on a par (p. 133).
It is, partly, a philosophical
novel, and the importance of philosophy is often reiterated in the story.
On a political plan, Myong-jun
is obviously disappointed with the way current affairs are conducted both in
the North and the South of Korea. South Korea is defined as a society
characterized by “masked desire for power” (p. 88), where "private desires
were taboo” (p. 95). South Korea “was a square of non-existent people” where “there
was freedom to become corrupt and freedom to be idle” (p. 134). North Korea upsets
Myong-jun more for its “ordinariness” (p. 86) and conformism than due to
Communism as such. North Korea’s is defined as rather the “imitation of a
revolution” than a real revolution, and Myong-jun learns how to behave
according to the rules of that society to the point of becoming an official
tempted to damage his best South Korean friends, even though after being violent
to them he lets them escape, with the thought of having failed even to be
totally evil. “In his store of emotions in South Korea he had never discovered
anything except disdain. In North Korea all he got was disillusion” (p. 122).
An individualist, deluded
sentimentally and disillusioned socially and politically, maybe Myong-jun is an
allegory of total discomfort with environment and fellow human beings.
[Roberto Bertoni]
