The Square, by Choi In-hun

By Choi in-hun (m.)

Translated by Kim Seong-kon

(1960, translated 2013)

Library of Korean Literature

(Novel)

Choi wrote The Square in 1960. Who was his audience? I suspect it was meant for college-educated Korean men and patriots who cherish the ideal of a politically pure united modern Korea. Perhaps because it is written for insiders, Choi omits background material that might help the reader comprehend where he is in time and space and what forces are at work on the world stage as he analyzes life in the North and South. Choi juggles at least three disparate elements in his text. The clearest and easiest-to-comprehend narrative is presented by the real-time Myun-jun, the Korean War POW who is aboard a  vessel headed toward Macao. In a nod to Myun-jun’s class privilege, the foreign captain has chosen him to act as interpreter and de facto leader of the other Korean prisoners. When the ship makes a late-night stop at a port, the prisoners cajole and harass Myung-jun, begging him to intervene on their behalf for the captain to grant them a short leave to find “entertainment.” To some extent, Myung-jun understands that after months and years of humiliation and privation, these men are desperately seeking an opportunity to assert themselves as human individuals with agency. The captain certainly understands them. But the Korean men also know in their hearts they are doomed because Myung-jun is a philosopher constrained by his own rigid principles. His impossible commitment to moral correctness handicaps his ability to live in the compromised world of his divided country. We witness the birth of Myung-jon’s vision as Choi takes us back in time to the division of North and South Korea. In his final year of university in pursuit of a degree in philosophy, he comes to a binary understanding of the world and explains it this way: there is the Square, the place of politics, power, influence, and the center of conflict over the ideals of the collective, and there is the Room, which represents the individual. The room can be a scholar’s study, a prison, or a cell in a mental hospital. Choi unleashes Myung-jong’s authoritative philosophical voice at various points in the novel. Perhaps it is intended to sound masterful, balanced, and final like David Attenborough commenting on the conflict between man and nature. Perhaps Cho believes that Myung-jun’s epistemology is an effective tool for comprehending the tension between the needs of the state and the needs of the individual. However, for all the passion behind Myung-jun’s monologues,  these philosophical passages seem more poetic than practical. Choi’s final element is the voice of the young Myung-jun who finds himself in a South Korea that is self-satisfied, fascistic, and full of corruption. His frustration with South Korea climaxes when he is picked up by undercover police and violently interrogated about the activities of his father, who had gone North during the war. At his nadir, he encounters a man who facilitates his flight North. There, he witnesses the emptiness of life in a world he describes as ashen and gray. He meets his father and his new wife, and he is appalled that his father’s fervid activism has disappeared and that he is now committed to disappearing into the banal political theater and daily misery that is life in North Korea. Eventually, the hero is captured and when the war ends, he is given the choice of where he will be repatriated. Should it be any surprise that he chooses neither, opting to begin life anew in a neutral country?

“This was why he could not go back to the North. Yet, on the other hand, could he bring himself to choose South Korea? In the eyes of Myung-jun, South Korea was nothing but a Square for the people who did not exist, borrowing from Kierkegaard. The fanatical belief in the North was terrifying. But the total absence of faith in the South was equally hollow. Compared to North Korea, one merit of the Square of the South was that it gave one the freedom to be corrupt and the freedom to be lazy.” (141)