A tipping point for Korean literature
Published: 16 Oct. 2024, 19:47
The author is the head of the Today-People News team at the JoongAng Ilbo.
French film director Pierre Rissient (1936-2018) was an advocate of Korean cinema. He introduced Korean directors such as Lim Kwon-taek and Lee Chang-dong to the Cannes International Film Festival in France. Since the early 2000s, his name often appeared in the ending credits of films by these directors, and a retrospective exhibition on his works was held at the Gangneung International Film Festival. A Korean film won the Academy Awards, and Korean dramas have high ratings largely due to the accumulation of the invisible activities by advocates like Rissient for more than a quarter of a century.
I met Rissient, who used to come to the Busan International Film Festival every year, and asked him about the charm of Korean culture. His immediately replied, “People.” He was attracted to Korean culture because of the people who freely expressed their unique energy and dynamics even amid a history of tragedy. He noticed Korea’s unique energy in the times when people cheered when a foreigner said hello in Korean with a bad accent and worried that kimchi would become “kimuchi.”
Han Kang’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature can be called a tipping point of this trend, a point where small changes accumulate and suddenly erupt. Beyond the “1-inch barrier of subtitles” that Director Bong Joon-ho mentioned when he won an Oscar for the Best Director in 2020, the fact that literature written in Korean won the most prestigious award has implications beyond simple patriotism. I am puzzled that the joy of reading Nobel Prize-winning works in my mother tongue came so suddenly, but it is fair to say that it’s a result of small changes that accumulated and erupted. Various people, including Korean and foreign translators and publishers, worked behind the scenes toward the tipping point.
And yet, some people are fuming with anger. They use hate speech because they oppose Han’s historical background, saying it goes against certain regional and ideological spectrums. The stubbornness of justifying difference as wrong and the cowardice of relying on the anonymity of online comments are terrifying. I am worried that the accumulation of these hateful energies will lead to some sort of explosion.
Rissient said that the power of Korean culture was expressing what people feel without reservation, clashing with each other but finding beauty in the end. However, the current hate speech has deviated from the path of beauty. It is no time to indulge in the current situation. What comes after the tipping point of the Nobel Prize in Literature is more important.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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