한 강의 새 책, "Human Acts" translated by Deborah Smith. 뉴욕 타임즈 북 리뷰.

[김충진(뉴저자)]

The Author of ‘The Vegetarian’ Takes On Korea’s Violent Past

By NAMI MUNJAN. 10, 2017

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Han Kang CreditJean Chung for The New York Times 

"한 강"의 새책 “Human Acts” 는 전두환의 만행,  광주 학살사건을 그녀의 시각 나름대로 기술 해 나간다.  

15살 먹은 동호는 그의 친구의  주검을 찿기위해 시청 체육관에 들렸다가 그곳에서 자원봉사 일을 시작하게 된다. 저자 한 강은 어리숙하지 않었다.  그녀는 동호의 끔직하고, 뻔한 시체 처리 일을 독자가 이미 기대 하고 있던 것 처럼 멜로드라마틱하게 그리지 않았다.  그저 아무 일도 아닌 것처럼 평범하게 설명 해 나갔다.  

" 니가 할 일은 뭐 대단한 거 없어, 선주와 은숙이가 벌써 힘든 일은 대충 다 해 놨으니까.  계들은 나무조각과 플라스틱으로 관 비슷하게 만들어 시체를 벌써 그곳에 안치 해 놓았거든.  계들은 벌써 얼굴과 목 근처를 알콜로 께끗하게 닦았고 헝크러진 머리도 빗질을 했어.  그리고 그 시체를 냄새가 덜 나게 하기 위해 비닐 백 주머니에 넣었다..  그러니까 당분간 너는 노트에다 시체 마다 고유 번호를 하나씩 메기고, 각 시체의 성별, 대충의 나이, 무슨 옷을 입었는지, 신발은 어떤 종류를 신었는지 등을 기록해 놓으면 돼.  그리구  같은  고유번호를 다른 종이에 크게 써서 시체 가슴에 붙여 놓고 흰 천을 목까지 오게 덮어 주면 되는거야."

시체 분류 직업을 상세히 묘사 함으로써 저자는 독자로 하여금 그살육 장면의공포스러움에 전율케한다,  그리고 알게 모르게 우리들을 그 체육관 안으로 끌어드린다..  더 나아가서 한 인간이 다른 인간에게 이러게도 처참한 고통을 안겨 줄 수 있겠는가를 생각케 한다. 또 다른 한편으로는 자원 봉사자들의 죽은 자를 깨끗하게 씻기고 다듬는 사자에 대한 경건한 예의를 만나게 한다.  이 짧은 장면에서 우리는 무한히 넓은 인간성의 스펙트럼을 경험하게 된다. 그러면서 왜 세상에는 전두환 같은 살인마가 있는가 하면 선주 은숙이 같은 자원 봉사자들도 있는지 , 왜 이들은 이다지도 틀린 지 생각케 만든다.

인간성의  스펙트럼을 탐구하기 위해 이 책은  대위법적 구조를 이용하여 "불가피성"과 "당연성"을 교차하여 넘나들며 이야기를 전개하고있다.  각 챕터마다 광주 학살 사건에 연루된 개인들의 심층 심리학적 초상화를 제시하고있다. 시체에 고유 번호를 부치고 있는 동호,  굼바리들의 총 칼에 시체가 된 동호의 죽은 친구, ("우리들의 주검은 마치 십자가 모형으로 겹겹이 쌓여갔다"), 검열에 걸린 편집인, 선동죄로 감옥간 죄인의 고문 장면, 공순이 활동가, 동호 엄마, 그리고 마지막으로 이책의 저자 한 강. 그녀는 자기가 9살 때 어떻게 직간접으로 1980년 5월의 10일 동안이 사건 때문에 영향을 받었는 지를 그린다.

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이상은 본 기사 여기에 실린 북 리뷰의 내용을 내 나름대로 조금 적어 본 것이다.  본문을 읽어보시면 아주 상세한 책 소개를 만나실 수 있다.

이책은 아직 발매 되지 않았고 아마존에 pre-order를 할 수 있다.  한국 출신의작가가 똘똘한 번역자를 만나 벌써 맨 부커 상 까지 받고 두번째로 영문으로 번역된 책을 내 놓았다.  자랑스러운 일 아닌가!

HUMAN ACTS
By Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith
218 pp. Hogarth. $22.

In Korean, “Hello” (ahnyoung hasehyo) literally translates to “Are you at peace?” This question-greeting is delivered as a statement, of course, but a certain poignancy can’t be ignored — especially if one considers the violent history of the Korean Peninsula. This slice of land, with China and Japan on either side and Russia in the far north, has suffered invasions, wars, colonialism, occupation and military dictatorships. And South Korea itself, known (without irony) as the Land of the Morning Calm, has as its upstairs neighbor a spoiled tyrant with trapezoidal hair who boasts too often of his small cache of nuclear weapons. Much Korean blood has been shed, and sometimes the bloodletting has been inflicted by the peninsula’s own people.

In early 1980, after the assassination of the authoritarian South Korean president Park Chung-hee (father to current president Park Geun-hye, now under impeachment), the nation — which had been living under limited martial law — seemed destined for change. The economy was declining. Demonstrations were on the rise. Students, professors, artists and laborers — ordinary unarmed citizens — protested and demanded a fair and free election and the lifting of martial law. Park’s protege Gen. Chun Doo-hwan saw an opportunity to maneuver himself into the Blue House. Chun seized power and, using the North Korea card, declared full martial law throughout the nation. He shut down universities, banned political activity and arrested student leaders as well as political rivals. Order was established in most of the country, but not in Gwangju.

In Gwangju, a city located some 160 miles south of Seoul, troops brutally and indiscriminately assaulted not only protesters but bystanders too. Gwangju, however, fought back. Arming themselves any way they could, Gwangju residents forced out the military, and for five days in May the city practiced self-governance. Mothers cooked meals for the community, taxi drivers shuttled pro-democracy rebels wherever they needed to go. Some residents stood in long lines to donate blood, and some, as young as middle schoolers, helped care for and identify the bodies.

This is where Han Kang’s novel “Human Acts” begins. Dong-ho, a 15-year-old boy in search of the corpse of his best friend, ends up volunteering at the municipal gymnasium, where some of the corpses are being stored. Han is smart to focus not on the gruesomeness of Dong-ho’s work — which would be redundant, melodramatic and expected — but on its mundanity:

“There was nothing technically difficult about the tasks you’d been assigned. Seun-ju and Eun-sook had already done most of the heavy work, which involved covering plywood or Styrofoam boards with plastic, then lifting the corpses on top of these boards. They also washed the necks and faces with a cloth, ran a comb through the matted hair to tidy it a bit, then wrapped the bodies in plastic in an effort to combat the smell. In the meantime, you made a note in your ledger of gender, approximate age, what clothes they were wearing and what brand of shoes, and assigned each corpse a number. You then wrote the same number on a scrap of paper, pinned it to the corpse’s chest, and covered them up to the neck with one of the white cloths.”

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By focusing on the logistics of cataloging the bodies, Han lulls us into the horror, and before we know it, we are there, inside the gymnasium, awe-struck by the amount of pain humans can inflict on one another and, in the obverse, the dignity with which the volunteers wash and care for the dead. In essence, we witness the impossibly large spectrum of humanity, and wonder how it is that one end could be so different from the other.

To explore that spectrum, the book’s polyphonic structure comes across as necessary and natural. Each chapter offers a piercing psychological portrait of a character affected by the Gwangju massacre: There’s Dong-ho, labeling the dead in the gymnasium; Dong-ho’s dead friend, who has been killed by troops (“Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross”); an editor facing censorship; a prisoner who has been tortured for his involvement in the uprising; a factory girl activist; Dong-ho’s mother; and finally, the author of “Human Acts” herself, Han Kang, who provides her own testimonial on how she was personally, though indirectly, affected by those 10 days in May 1980, when she was 9 years old.

Human Acts,” much like Han’s novel “The Vegetarian,” which won the Man Booker International Prize, shows Han’s imaginative and meaningful obsession with violence upon the body. It also reveals another, perhaps more fundamental, obsession: dissonance. Each chapter explores what happens when two seemingly dissimilar or even opposing elements try to coexist: when innocence is surrounded by violence, when the dead keep on living, when survivors live like the dead, when freed prisoners still feel imprisoned and when the past becomes the present. Han’s attraction to dissonance is evident even on the sentence level. In one instance, a volunteer “wiped the face of a young man whose throat had been sliced open by a bayonet, his red uvula poking out.” Here, the “red uvula poking out,” so redolent of a child sticking out his tongue, provides a certain softness to an otherwise sharp, grisly image. It is Han’s graceful ballet along this fine line, artfully replicated in Deborah Smith’s translation, that makes this harrowing book about the Gwangju massacre compulsively readable, universally relevant and deeply resonant.

While reading “Human Acts,” whose original Korean title means “The Boy Approaches,” I kept thinking of the Korean greeting ahnyoung hasehyo, “Are you at peace?” My answer, at nearly every page, was a resolute no. This gut-wrenching novel about the Gwangju massacre has no interest, and rightly so, in making us feel at peace. It lacerates, it haunts, it dreams, it mourns, and because of its effective use of the second-person narration, the characters call out to you — persistently — until you feel what the dead feel and, perhaps worse, what the survivors feel.

“What is humanity?” the book asks. “What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?” This question made me rethink — and retranslate — the Korean greeting, and realize how hasehyo could be taken as a more forceful verb, insinuating a command. Instead of “Are you at peace?,” it could also be, “Are you doing peace?” Or “Are you practicing peace?” As in, peace comes not with passivity but with participation. As in, peace requires action, just like violence. And only now do I see yet another aspect of the novel’s English title: “Human Acts,” the tacit verb suggesting that, in the end, perhaps our actions are what matter.

“Human Acts” is, in equal parts, beautiful and urgent. Though it might not have been Han’s intention, her novel reads not only as a lyrical post-mortem on violence but also a call to counter that violence. So, how do we keep humanity “as one thing and not another”? If humanity is under assault, and violence, oppression and authoritarianism rise to the surface, then is it not our human responsibility to act and resist, however forcefully, with everything in our power?

Nami Mun is the author of “Miles From Nowhere.”