A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of my career as a scholar of comparative literature. I would like to thank the colleagues with whom I discussed general and particular details of this book in conferences at the Committee on Literary Theory, ICLA, AAS, ACLA, and AAIS, as well as in talks at the University of Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania, and in particular Lino Pertile, Sowon Park, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, and Paul Oldfield. It goes without saying that any errors of fact or judgment and infelicities of style remain entirely my own. I am grateful to Busan University of Foreign Studies, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Korea University (ICKS) for providing me with positions and opportunities for concentrating on this work. I also express my appreciation to all the staff at Palgrave Macmillan involved in this book. I especially thank my family for their help and encouragement.
Certain parts of this book have been published previously, as follows: Chap. 1 in Arcadia 43 (2008); Chap. 2 in the book Other Modernisms in an Age of Globalization (Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 2002); Chap. 3 in Korea Journal 48:1 (2008); Chap. 4 in Acta Koreana 15:2 (2012); and Chap. 5 in Journal of Global Initiatives 5:2 (2010). I am grateful to the editors for their generous permission to republish the aforementioned parts.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1 OPENNESS
The concept of my book is wholly based on the theory of openness, which provides a way of controlling the contingency of our knowledge and the world. I define “openness” as the process of an original organization of disorder, of oscillation between system and disorder, and of a play of presence and absence. Openness is a process or a field of individual, local, and decentered interpretation of the world and text, and an unending interaction between text and reality, which incessantly produces alternative or counter-interpretations. It is an anti-essentialist concept, for while essentialism operates unilaterally, and thus protects itself against the possibility of change, anti-essentialism does not postulate necessary identities and their relationships. The theory of openness allows for a text which produces no essential meaning with which everyone ought to agree. This implies the escape from dogmatic structures of thought and builds up the individual’s place in the margins of those structures.
My new theoretical context, which is open, porous, and “glocal” (both global and local), moves away from the system of binary oppositions to a comparative inquiry that concerns dynamic interactions among many heterogeneous points in such a way that they maintain their individualities. I have strived to apply my theoretical context and comparative inquiry to interpreting and evaluating literary texts and sociohistorical transitions while oscillating between Korean, East Asian, and European contexts. In this process, I tried to employ the role of a comparatist who should
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 S. Park, A Comparative Study of Korean Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54882-5_1
1
be able to understand and maintain the boundlessness of our approach to the text and the world. From such attempts my reading of Korean and European literatures obtained a uniqueness which does not derive merely from the rarity of comparative studies of these literatures; in fact, I was discussing the role of an interpretive act that can serve to bridge text and reality in a broader sense. Interpretation is directly linked to practicing our ethical and political responsibility, rather than merely excavating the internal coherence of the text or following the preestablished consensus. What matters here is that this kind of interpretive act is also linked to reexamining the universality of literary values, which needs to be highlighted with respect to the questions of what literature is and what it can do. Now we are faced with the consciousness of comparative literature.
I believe that the theory of openness can best operate in comparative study only if it relates itself to the way in which a subject may be bound to the contexts surrounding it. Comparative literature is not confined to merely comparing two or more texts but extends to measuring up our open attitude in facing our world and history. I want my book to be a useful example to show how openness operates in our acts of interpretation and further how much a literary text is said to hold true universal value (which differs from any kind of homogeneous universalism like “European Universalism,” to borrow a term from Immanuel Wallerstein). If by my close reading of some texts I wanted to expose Korean literature in such a way as to attract more attention to the field of world literature, it is because I needed to foreground the problem of what kind of relationship they can form with each other and what kind of new horizon of literariness they can construct in the future. It is true that I focused on reevaluating Korean literature, but it was inevitably possible only from the position of an Other, that of Western literature, for instance. That is, I was compelled to be the subject and at the same time the Other. Indeed this is the possible and useful strategy that a comparatist, if she or he does her or his job well, needs to adopt and maintain: the task of a comparatist is none other than enduring the boundlessness, the oscillation among plural positions, that the work of comparing a variety of literary texts requires. I would be pleased if my work could contribute to leading our comparative approach toward a more open horizon for our intellectual and ethical thought on literature. In this respect, I confess that a basis of political consciousness permeates this book. I emphasize that comparative literature is no longer a pure discipline, but a complex one in which we should be able to operate with more inclusive modes of thought.
This work has in fact led me to revive the concept and role of “openness” in our attempts to understand what literature is and can do. Although it was I myself who tried to expand the effect of the comparative approach, I needed someone who would encourage me to maintain such endless and constant work to reevaluate literary texts ranging from the classics to the post-modern era. Likewise, I hope that Korean literature will be taken as an object to be re-examined in world literature in a more democratic way. If in this process European literature could possibly become an object to be re-examined as well, that would also be a desirable outcome. In any case, I would like to emphasize that our interpretation of literary texts should be involved in a structure intermingled with world literature only insofar as the geography of world literature becomes a more open and just platform for exploring all local literatures. Thus I would say that in order to understand and evaluate a text more properly, we always need more bridges to link it to diverse horizons, which, I believe, can be provided by our more “open” attitude and methodology.
In this book, I aim to shed new light on Korean literary texts and the relevant discourses in relation to three key concepts: universalism, the Other, and literature. The capacity for self-negation is one of the essential conditions of literary universality. In other words, we should be able to define and control universality in that way. Without the ability of selfnegation, a text allows for the creation of external borders, and at this very moment universality disappears. True universality does not omit the particulars or localities but goes beyond them by including them. The process in which a text includes the negations that occur inside and outside it is itself the essential content and condition for building the concept of universality in literature.
When universality excludes the particular or the local, surpassing them in the process, it makes them converge in its center, so as to be condensed within its boundary. This kind of universality is in fact nothing other than the particular or the local. The universal is constituted precisely by the process in which the particular escapes from its specific context while remaining nonetheless intact. In this sense, we can say that the particular and the local never oppose true universality. A text that excludes the particular cannot be said to be truly universal: if it does not include the universal, it is bound to appear universal only in its own peculiar context, precluding its reconstitution of the particular in all contexts. On this plane, the communicative relationship between the particular and the universal, between the plural particulars, becomes stagnant and instead only the oppositions
between them prevail. Conversely, true universality, insofar as it is constituted in such a way as to recognize and maintain the particular and the local without succumbing to them, uses the particular in the process of spreading the universal to new localities. In this way, the particular and the local contribute to constructing truly “universal universality.”
Now we can say that the particular exists by opposing the “particular universality” and at the same time by identifying itself (indeed, the identity itself is open, fluid, and transparent as Jacques Derrida suggests); the particular maintains itself by de-homogenizing itself. In this process we can imagine the meaning of “remaining as the particular” (see especially the case of Yi Kwang-Su in Chap. 6) and the true universality that overcomes all kinds of binary oppositions. Therefore we need to pay more special attention to the practical mode of operation of the terms “universalization” or “universalizability” rather than universality.
Universalism is the political, economic, and cultural issue that we are now facing. In our inevitably flawed globalization, universalism can be considered as a concept that can lead globalization to take on a more positive aspect. However, it should be emphasized that the concept of universalism, in reality, operates with a negative effect. So-called European universalism is only one example; by pursuing such universal values as justice, human rights, and civilization on a Eurocentric basis, it makes them particular instead. In reality, since the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, universalism has served as the motivating force for establishing the modern Western world. In relation to literature, universalism has been reproduced by inventing and maintaining the value of the canon, also called “the classics.” However, such a process of reproduction, by making universalism particular instead, has betrayed the original conception and spirit of universalism and canonicity.
Particularly in literature, universality can be conceptualized as a postfactum concept: it is not prescribed as a fixed norm but only constructed in the literary process. Here the literary process indicates circulation of the literary text in which the author sends out his or her recognition and expression of history, society, and his or her own inner self, and the reader receives, responds, and criticizes. Indeed literary texts bear the origin of a universality that can be established only by negating and escaping from itself. Universality, in the whole literary process, alters as it is intermingled with the particulars’ contexts; that is to say that universality maintains itself by altering. Universality is something that survives by
being questioned in diverse contexts, enduring the “chopping board” of incessant reexamination. Therefore, we should say that the universality of literature is constituted in our acts of interpretation of the text: if the interpretation of a text is poor, its degree of universalizability is decreased while if it is rich, it is increased. How much a text has universal value depends on how much it opens itself to the interpretive acts that deconstruct and reconstruct it. It follows that we can only measure up the universality of a text rather than decide it, and further, the measuring varies according to the context.
Now the march of globalization has been unstoppable and irreversible, uprooting the local, which forces us to reconsider the problem of universality more seriously. The universal is the concept of evaluation. With this in mind, the term “world” in world literature needs to be understood in the sense of evaluating “literature” in diverse aspects, instead of indicating the privileged role of representing peripheral literary texts, and thereby world literature can play the new role of measuring up the differences and commonalities of literatures, instead of ruling over them as a standard. Therefore, we do not need to consider whether a literature becomes world literature or not, but to take the concept of world literature as the platform to help us reconsider universal literary value. We also need to recall that literature is a historical product bound to particular contexts and at the same time a universal construct beyond them (or rather, being bound to context should mean boundlessness, as Derrida holds). In relation to this, I would like to emphasize that Korean literature is, still and from now on, open to the broad horizon of reinterpretation and reevaluation. The consciousness of comparative literature, I believe, provides us with the theory, methodology, and attitude to maintain that openness so as to establish a dialogical relationship with world literature.
In all, in order to recover the authenticity of universality, we need to develop a discourse through which we can revive the location of the Other and operate in the role of the Other, and thereby suggest an example of criticism of it. This is because true universality has to possess the power to span all kinds of Others and to make them communicate with each other, and for this, making the Others participate in this process is necessary. Along with the transversal communication of the Others, the process of negating and surpassing itself and simultaneously maintaining itself is the condition of true universality.
2 UNIVERSALITY
This book relies on my comparative consciousness of national literatures, focusing particularly on the possible work of creating links between the Korean and European literatures. This work is directed toward reexamining their interaction so as to approach the horizon of a true universal value in literature as well as in human thought and activity. This work is built up on such founding ideas as openness, context, alteration, porousness, and boundlessness, which are all created and adopted to offer ways of reading that enable the coexistence of diverse human cultures. The interpretation of cultural metamorphoses shows the open and porous nature of literary migration and attempts to supply missing links in the current discourse on world literature, which seems not yet to have escaped from the trap of centrist thinking. Here arises our tireless will to constitute true universality in literariness by witnessing its own potential to be incessantly negated and renewed.
The problem of how to establish universality in literature, as mentioned above, is strictly related to otherness. As a scholar of comparative literature, I have strived to utilize the perspective of my in-between state to reconstruct critically the literary values produced in the non-Western world. What is most effective for this work is the reconsideration of the universality on which Western civilization has been based, and the reevaluation of non-Western literary works. While doing research on this double project, I, as the particular Other, aim to represent the Other who participates in establishing true universality.
For this purpose, I pursue in parallel the establishment of a theoretical basis and the analysis of Korean literary texts which are linked to the broader aim of the universal construction and practice of literary value. My discussion of the theoretical basis derives from such indispensable topics for my book as the contextual space of East Asia, modernity, and otherness, which are all linked to the issue of universality which we, as decision-making subjects, face in our “glocal” intellectual activities. The next step involves new interpretations of Korean literary texts by Kim Man-Jung, Sin Ch‘ae-Ho, and Yi Kwang-Su, which aim to reexamine the literary value of their works from the comparatist perspective. As a Dante scholar, I take the Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as a new platform for looking at the figures of literary migration in the space of (pre) modern Korea. Finally, I discuss how I can re-contextualize Korean literature and its universalizability and thereby submit this book as
a comparative study of Korean literature pursued in its figures of literary migration. Here the issues of translation and alteration in the dimension of comparative literature are taken into consideration. In particular, observation of the Korean reception of Dante Alighieri leads me to observe Korean literature from a unique and soft perspective, with the effect of looking at it through the concept of migration, and reconsidering the socalled peripheral rebirth of universal language.
What matters here is to note that translation is a field in which diverse cultures encounter each other, rather than a condition by which the achievement of modernity is measured; the achievement of modernity has historically been a unilateral operation initiated at the center and directed toward the periphery, but in the realm of literature translation needs to be understood as a process that involves horizontal relations between cultures. Here we need to admit the comparative literature approach to translation, in which translation can be understood as a contextualized reconstruction in the receiving culture’s dimension.
How many contexts are required to evaluate a text properly depends on the text itself and the aims with which the text is read. Then we can say that the universality of a text derives from its power to overcome any specific space-time, which means that the text should be read differently depending on the space-time of a particular reading and yet at the same time maintain its consistency. This is what I would like to describe as alteration. A high level of diverse alteration, which requires the text to sustain its consistency along with its altered features, guarantees its universalizability. The original context of Dante’s Comedy still remains in Sin Ch‘ae-Ho’s Dream Sky, yet more importantly the scope of alteration in it was rather radical. The alteration rarely occurs directly: alteration needs distance, yet consistency tends to remove distance. I find here the power of universality which is nothing other than the power of embracing the presence and absence of distance.
Dante has his own particular world and all the notes of the Comedy are the supplements added to it. All the notes have the same rights: they color Dante’s particular world only until it maintains itself. The Comedy has been re-canonized by a process of intermingling the original and the alteration. Dream Sky is one instance of such a process: it testifies to the universality of the Comedy and more importantly becomes a new canonical work born in the cultural context of modern Korea, and furthers the lens through which we can observe the ever transforming geography of world literature. The relationship between Korean literature and world literature
is not the problem of whether a text in Korean literature can become world literature or not, in which world literature operates as a criterion for judgment. World literature today is not yet a verified, fixed, and objective value or set of criteria, but is in the process of reconstruction. The two can be located as strictly related in the sense of offering each other the momentum, methodology, and perspective to rethink themselves. In this sense, the consciousness of marginal and reciprocal alteration, of the exquisite balance of maintaining the original text and simultaneously altering it, helps us question whether universal literary value can be maintained in the Others’ contexts and vice versa. The ultimate concern of what I call alteration is to maintain both universal and local contexts. We need to try to maintain a consciousness of the Others’ contexts which enables us to have a more just vision.
It is interesting to note that Korean writers, while importing the concept of “literature,” that was still obscure even in the West,1 were troubled by how it could be harmonized with the concept of “mun” (문) which includes all human intellectual activities in East Asia’s traditions, and their problem could not be resolved by reference to a clearly established concept of literature in the West. For instance, in the essay “What Is Literature?,” Yi Kwang-Su, reminding us of the fact that the term “literature” is a translated one in Korea and paying special attention to the aesthetic aspect of literature, strived to validate the concept of literature as an autonomous and independent art or creation, separate from the traditional concept of ‘mun’ and linked to the individuality and sensibility of human beings.2 If we recall that even in the West “literature” had been used from an aspect that mixed both pre-modern and modern implications, we can infer that Yi Kwang-Su’s attempt to define literature could not be pursued with reference to the West’s concept (which in East Asia was mistakenly perceived as being clearly established), nor by equating it with the traditional East Asian concept of “mun,” which at least to Yi Kwang-Su was a traditional obstacle to overcome in order to establish a Korean “national” literature. His solution was to seek the substance of literature. By this he did not mean that literature is based on a certain principle a priori but rather that it is a medium in-process in which we can convey and communicate individuals’ sensibility and situatedness to reality by locating ourselves in the Others’ places, thereby making ourselves fluid, porous, and communicative.
My ultimate aim is to search for the traces of dynamic efforts at treating “literature” in the space of (pre) modern Korean literature, and to interpret it through a sort of cosmopolitan thought and link it to them (or vice
versa). For this, I refer to the results of Korean Studies and studies in comparative literature, looking at each text from a comparative position and by examining their reciprocal relationships based on the pluralism of literary values and alterity, and at the same time extend them in new directions in the context of our globalized culture and civilization that, ironically, invites us to rethink universality and otherness. I hope this book allows us to reconsider the literary canon in terms of “peripheral universality” and otherness. For instance, by understanding Kim Man-Jung’s Guunmong as an object of re-highlighting in the Other’s context, its universal value can become more authentic. In such a frame, literature will become an effective medium for dialogical and democratic communication.
Questioning the universality of literature is necessary to build up the new “world literature” in our more openly globalized world. We are situated in a position to pose again questions about the universal value of the literary texts which have been recognized as classics. I hope that my interpretation of Korean literature and the related discourse in respect to reestablishing the value of literature can be appreciated as a fresh attempt at illuminating new developments in light of recent research. It follows that we can define literature as a process in which we can constitute universal values, and operate it through the mutual reception and alteration of Others. By examining the possibility of literature in the aspect of transversal communication with Others, I would like to propose the role of literature in the era of crisis in the humanities.
3
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
With the consciousness of comparative literature that I have hitherto described, I arrange my discussions in six chapters, which are summarized below. All of them are not so much strictly connected with each other as united by sharing the common ground on which we are able to reconsider such fundamental issues as literariness and universality.
4 CHAPTER 2. THE CONDITION OF “EAST ASIA” DISCOURSE: THOUGHT AND PRACTICE OF DE-HOMOGENIZATION
East Asia has been recognized, researched, and civilized primarily as an Other to the West, and has existed only in this reflected image. This recognition also shows that the binary oppositions of discourse between the
West and the Rest are firmly entrenched. Any attempt to establish East Asia’s own history and tradition must therefore cope with the heritage of the Western imperial desire for East Asia and its self-reflection. We need to deconstruct the narrative of the origin of East Asia and reconstruct its new identity. A new discourse of East Asia needs to be located outside the dichotomy of Western empire and Eastern colony, and within a critical analysis of the internal and external competitions in which East Asian countries have engaged in the process of constructing the modern nation-state.
Since the 1990s, East Asia has emerged as a problem to be solved and has raised a variety of discussions in such diverse fields as economics, international relations, history, and comparative literature. It would not be possible to introduce all of them here but, in general, it could be said that these discussions have focused on the aspects of policy rather than on the discourse of “East Asia” itself or its possible directions. It should be emphasized that the discourse of “East Asia” needs to be revised continuously: it deals with a historical reality which is always variable, because the research areas related to it show huge complexity and diversity, and because the diverse political interests surrounding the issue of East Asia are so competitive that they may influence academic research on the topic. More generally and importantly, to the extent that East Asia and the West are still haunted by self-centrisms based on self-homogenization, we need to ask repeatedly and continuously what East Asia should be in order for it to be rebuilt with the aim of a truly universal community.
This chapter aims to discuss the conditions for establishing an appropriate discourse of East Asia. Charting a path toward global co-existence, it should avoid state-centered discourses, and constructions of an exclusive community promoted by the West. A truly universal concept of East Asian identity must be inclusive both within and without East Asian states: “East Asia” should permeate and be constituted by each nation-state and the groups, regions, and individuals within them. The identity of East Asia is the process itself in which the whole and the parts incessantly intermingle, change, and generate each other: open, dynamic, and contextualized.
5 CHAPTER 3. POROUS MODERNITY: OVERCOMING MODERNITY IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
The issue of modernity has been broadly discussed, particularly since the spread of cultural influence from the European great powers to the peripheral areas. In the past, Western modernity oppressed the diverse
differences in locality, gender, and generation. What matters now is to recognize the changeability, rather than the originality, of modernity, which we intend to observe in the historical and cultural processes of modernization in pre-modern and modern Korea. Indeed, we need to imagine how a modernity exists; it premises the dichotomy of center and periphery, yet with its blurring relationship, it repeatedly negates and maintains itself so as to be highlighted through its new value. Here, what is called porous modernity arises.
This porous modernity will not be something totally different from the existing modernity but rather something produced by adapting to and at the same time overcoming that modernity. This process is precisely what Korean intellectuals have commonly been pursuing. This pursuit entails, as mentioned earlier, a two-fold process: emulating the Western world’s advanced civilization and effort and simultaneously reviving their own tradition and thoughts. The success of such a double project depends on whether it can be effectively utilized in understanding and overcoming modernity. Korean intellectuals’ endeavors here may serve as a base for generating what is here termed porous modernity.
My aim is to trace how modernity was maintained or evolved in Korean culture and, ultimately, how we can define modernity to clarify that it is bound to context, conditioned by the particular contexts of society and history. This work gives otherness more consideration, discerning the cracks in the configuration of modernities and scrutinizing examples of possible alternatives to Western modernity arising from peripheral contexts.
6 CHAPTER 4. THE WORLD OF CIRCULATION: THE UNIVERSALITY OF LITERARY VALUE IN THE GUUNMONG
This chapter aims to measure the universal literary value of the Guunmong (九雲夢Cloud Dream of the Nine) that the Korean writer Kim Man-Jung (1637–1692) wrote in 1689. To properly measure the universality of the Guunmong, we need to shed new light on its universal dimension, which, however, leads to the inevitable question of what universality is. The literary values in the Guunmong can be communicated to diverse readers, texts, and contexts. This is linked to the work of comparing the classics of center and periphery, and showing the differences and commonalities between them, so as to rethink the significance of the universality of literary value.
The Divine Comedy is adopted for this work, which concentrates on how the Guunmong, as a classic work from the periphery, can maintain universal literary value through its textual power to abolish the division of center and periphery itself. I explain this by analyzing such literary effects located in the Guunmong as folding, harmony, ambivalence, appropriation, inclusion, and relativity, concepts that all constitute the structure and concept of circulation.
Although I intend this work to be a radical reconsideration of universality in literature, I do not necessarily aim to pull down the center in favor of the periphery or vice versa, but rather to clarify that plural universalities exist, and the resultant new horizontal, democratic, and mutually productive relationships among them need to be highlighted in the work of examining literary value. This is what the Guunmong, with its structure and philosophy of circularity, accomplishes so well and what qualifies it as a classic.
7 CHAPTER 5. THE LITERARY VALUES OF SIN CH‘AEHO’S DREAM SKY : A MARGINAL ALTERATION OF THE CANON
As a Korean novelist as well as a historian and a revolutionary seeking national independence, Sin Ch‘ae-Ho (1880–1936) always thought about the importance and possibility of social practice through literature. His activity as a literary writer partly derived from his understanding of the Italian writer Dante Alighieri: he adored Dante as an enlightened intellectual and recognized his Divine Comedy as the record of his salvation, and in writing the Dream Sky he took it as his own pointer for resisting Japanese imperialism.
Although we cannot deny that Dante’s writings were regarded as a symbol of Western enlightenment and, as such, as a key factor in Korea’s process of modernization, his literature can also be understood as a creative counter-force, an object of powerful resistance to the homogenizing influence of modernity and the modern nation-state. This chapter aims to reevaluate the Dream Sky, which Sin Ch‘ae-Ho wrote in 1916 under Japanese imperialism, as an aesthetic reconstruction and thus to concentrate on textual analysis of it, whereby I re-highlight its ability to achieve marginal alteration and dialogical imagination as a literary text.
I focus on three points. First, the particularity of national literature and the alteration based on it as the concepts with which we can reexamine
and reevaluate the universality of world literature; in other words, alteration is a way of seeking both the particularity of national literature and universality of world literature. Second, it is essential to prove the points mentioned above by a comparatist approach to the Dream Sky and the Comedy. However, to repeat, I pay more attention to the close reading of the Dream Sky. This involves reexamination of the phantasmagoria in the text that has hitherto been the main issue, observation of Sin Ch‘ae-Ho’s literary view in relation to his historical consciousness formed through power and struggle, and demonstration of how those subjects are sustained by such literary devices as allegory. Third, I conclude that the consciousness of the writer Sin Ch‘ae-Ho shows the cosmopolitan, dynamic, and universality-bound space in which modern Korean literature unfolded. If we can show that there is a rivalry between modernization and translation in Sin Ch‘ae-Ho’s case, we are able to shed new light on the space of modern Korean literature as a history to which we refer in a new phase of modernization in our more globalized world.
8 CHAPTER 6. NATIONAL LANGUAGE BEYOND NATIONSTATES: VERNACULAR LITERARY LANGUAGE IN YI
KWANG-SU
The influence of Chinese and Japanese language and literature on Korea has been significant. The influence of Western notions of the modern nationstate in East Asia has also been significant. All of these influences collided in Korea. Through translation, the foreign is made comprehensible, but it is also changed and may be misunderstood. Through the process of translation, the influence of one language upon another is often underestimated, misappropriated, or hidden. The best literature attempts to reveal and transcend these hidden or unconscious dimensions. The importance of understanding the process by which such underlying influences impact culture, especially as forms of resistance and as asserting one’s unique identity, may also, unfortunately, be underappreciated. Languages compete when put into the service of nation building. Korean writers under Japanese imperialism such as Yi Kwang-Su (1892–1950) tried to negotiate, resist, and make sense of this new and highly competitive landscape. The collision between multiple national languages may cause an exclusive nationalism. However, if we can hypothesize that the resistance of a national language is not directed to the (language of) outside but rather to
all kinds of homogenized (language) space, we can consider that a national language applies the power of resistance to that homogenized space which is based on nationalism. This kind of literary resistance, which can also be named self-negation, is primarily related to the capacity to allow the Other to exist within oneself. This is the process in which particularity formed through resistance to the universal forms another universality: namely, the endless process of re-appropriating universalities.
Literary language is generated and flourishes in the process of such incessant de-homogenization. Literature, by means of deconstructing the oppression of a universality, receives the Other as a force for reconstructing what yet may become another universality, thus building up a field where multiple universalities are contested. In Yi Kwang-Su’s bilingual way of writing, I try to trace an example of the literature that built up such fields beyond both ideas of “Korean” and “modern”.
Overall, his literature has a contradictory, paradoxical aspect in that it contributes to the identity of a nation and yet simultaneously goes beyond national borders. In this respect, we need to recognize his nationalism as open and even self-negating. This contradiction in Yi Kwang-Su’s literature, which anticipates its cosmopolitan nature insofar as it goes beyond a nation and simultaneously remains in a nation, reveals an ambivalent and transversal positionality, in association with the character of resistance in his literary language. Whether Korean or Japanese, his language can be judged as cosmopolitan insofar as it is founded on resistance to the national homogeneity, a homogeneity consisting of both Japanese imperial nationalism and Korean colonial nationalism. In this respect, Yi Kwang-Su’s nationalism is local and universal at once. His cosmopolitan vernacular and literature make such ambivalence possible.
9
CHAPTER 7. LITERATURE AS SENSIBILITY
TO THE OTHER: DANTE IN MODERN KOREAN LITERATURE
This chapter starts from the supposition that a particular perspective which is non-Western is indispensable to inquire into Dante’s universality. The non-Western perspective helps to decentralize the Western context of Dante, which has historically developed around him, and at the same time to plug him into the Others’ contexts. However, it is also something to be re-examined and scrutinized over and over again. Insofar as it is inclined toward decentering, it should be sustained by continuous marginalization instead of producing another center, and insofar as it is inclined toward
the Other’s position, it should be sustained by incessant othering instead of isolating the Other.
My aim in this chapter is to reconstruct Dante’s universality by exploring modern Korean literature’s reception of Dante and its implications. The way to reach this goal is not linear but winding and sometimes needs detours. This is because “modern Korean literature” is a problematic terminology and time-space with which the problem of Dante’s universality might become more confused. But this confusion rather seems to be a positive aspect and step toward solving the problem of reconstructing Dante’s universality. Further, it might be that the space of modern Korean literature, built up with its unique experience and consideration of modern Western literature, will provide a proper condition for solving the problem.
For East Asia, literature has been a product of the modern West, but that can never mean that literature belongs totally to Western modernity. Literature, through the process of what is called the play of the signifiant, deepens and overcomes the modernity that gave birth to itself, as we can see in the context of translating the term “literature” in East Asia. Modernity and literature cannot be included in the specific context of pre-modern as well as modern Korean literature, but conversely the entire Korean literature gives us the chance to reflect on modernity and literature.
For the cultural context of East Asia, literature has been a modern concept for over a century but cannot be fixed under the term “modern” because of its inherent universal value. Literature may not be a higher concept than individual national literatures; it is located in-between them. Therefore although it is a historical fact that the modern nation-state has been the place of discourse to identify national literature, it should not be misunderstood as including “literature.” National literature tends to betray the nature of literature, and paradoxically it is a particular example of literature to make us rethink the nature of literature. The discourse on Dante in modern Korean literature leads us to verify the substance of literature and the true universality in literature that diverges beyond Western modernity.
NOTES
1. The concept of literature in the West has not been equal in its historical shifts as Terry Eagleton shows. T. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. pp. 15–26.
2. Yi Kwang-Su. “What Is Literature?” Collections of Yi Kwang-Su, Seoul: SamJungDang, 1962. Vol. 13. pp. 506–519.
CHAPTER 2
The Condition of “East Asia” Discourse: The Concept and Practice of De-homogenization
1 PREMISE
In the era of globalization, regional identities are in danger of being uprooted and destroyed by the emergence of “universal” world systems. Although world systems tend to foreground universality, the concept of universality itself is eroded as those same systems alienate and omit the identities of constituent parts. The end of the Cold War brought the hope of peace and stability to many, but the current domination of globalized capital is consolidating the nature of terror immanent in the world order. It is in this negative and uncertain environment that we need to create a strategic plan against this crisis by asking what kind of East Asia we want to achieve, and further to examine the possibility of universal community.
The concept of “East Asia,”1 however, has already been contaminated: the “Declaration of Greater East Asia” made by the Japanese Empire in 1943, which marked the first half of the twentieth century, can be criticized merely as emulating the myth of Western imperial hegemony that even now, in the twenty-first century, is revised and mimicked in East Asia. In reality, East Asian nations are now facing a double contradiction of being situated in a postcolonial or second colonial position on the one hand and being caught up in a unilateral drive toward a new empire on the other.
This complexity of East Asia seems to be derived from its distorted relationship with the modern Western world. Historically, the space of East Asia has indeed been interpreted and constituted by Western perspectives,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 S. Park, A Comparative Study of Korean Literature, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54882-5_2
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and the origins of East Asia were thus already in a heteronomous or an alienated form. Indeed, East Asia has been recognized, researched, and civilized primarily as an Other to the West, and has existed only in this reflected image.
This recognition also shows that the binary oppositions of discourse between the West and the Rest are firmly entrenched. According to Sakai Naoki’s scrupulous analysis,2 influenced by the image of Asia as reflected in the mirror of the West, the unity of the Asian people may be a concept imported from the West. In the same way, the imagined unity of the West (in a position of dominance and universality) is constituted through the imagined unity of Asia (in a position of subordination and particularity). Thus, although Asia has challenged the West politically, economically, and socially, it remains in a complicit relationship with the West, insofar as the image of the West is a foundation for the self-centering of a “unified” Asian identity. We need, therefore, to consider more carefully their complicated relationship, which seems to be more than simply a binary opposition. East Asia, in any attempt to establish its own history and tradition, must cope with inheriting the Western imperial desire toward East Asia and its self-reflection. It is in this respect that we need to deconstruct the origin of East Asia and reconstruct its new identity. For this to occur, a new discourse of East Asia needs to be imagined outside the dichotomy of Western empire and Eastern colony, and instead within the critical analysis of the internal and external competitions in which East Asian countries have engaged in the process of constructing the modern nation-state.
Since the 1990s, “East Asia” has emerged as a problem to be solved and has raised a variety of discussions in such diverse fields as economics, international relations, history, and comparative literature. It would not be possible to introduce all of them here, but, in general, it could be said that these discussions have focused on aspects of policy rather than on the discourse of East Asia itself or its possible directions. It should also be emphasized that the discourse of East Asia needs to be revised continuously: this discourse deals with a historical reality which is always variable; the research areas related to it show huge complexity and diversity; and the diverse political interests surrounding the issue of East Asia are so competitive that they may influence academic research on the topic. More generally and importantly, to the extent that East Asia and the West are still haunted by self-centering based on self-homogenization, we need to ask repeatedly and continuously what East Asia should be in order for it to be rebuilt as a truly universal community.
This chapter aims to discuss the conditions for establishing an appropriate discourse of East Asia. Its ultimate concern is to seek a way toward global co-existence by avoiding both the constructions of exclusive community that have been promoted by the West, as well as the predominance of state-centered discourses within East Asia. In this respect, a truly universal concept of East Asian identity must be inclusive both within and without East Asian states: “East Asia” should permeate into and be constituted by each nation-state and the groups, regions, and individuals within them. The identity of East Asia is the process by which the whole and the parts are incessantly intermingled, changing, and generating each other: an open, in-process, and contextualized identity.3
Antonio Negri holds that we are undergoing a new reality of “empire” that differs from the past imperialism of empire and colony and consists of a new kind of power relations; it is most distinctive, in that it exists and operates everywhere beyond the traditional geography of what were called the empire and the colony.4 In order to construct “East Asia,” a concept through which we can maintain an appropriate view of a community that survives incessantly and endlessly by virtue of resisting “empire,” we should be able to conceptualize a new way to approach power relations. Highlighting such incessant and endless survival, I should like to note, is a feature of “the continuously reiterated post-empire.”
What is here called the reality of “empire” indicates a complicated and ironic situation in which a region and nation, liberated from colonization, become saturated by a new culture. The post-“empire” should come into being as we are able to subvert the concepts of humanity and history coined by the Western empires and then reconstruct a new discourse on them by penetrating the age-old mechanism of psychological oppression of the colonized people and constructing a cultural identity based on resistance to cultural imperialism. The revisions within post-“empire,” in other words, can be established through the concept and practice of dehomogenization: if the concept of de-homogenization allows us to maintain difference, its practice allows us to use that difference to establish a basis of solidarity that incorporates difference. Here difference and solidarity are transformed to a solidarity of difference wherein we can imagine a discourse of community based on the alterative processes of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
The East Asia discourse that I would like to theorize is based on a concept of identity that is fluid, soft, and alterable, so as to be always open to its sub-elements, that bases itself on such experiences and solidarities as
linkages among varying contexts and a variety of minority voices, including even individual subjects. The East Asia discourse is not like a ladder that can be removed after resolving a fixed problem, but instead an ongoing discursive process, a problem-raising consciousness, and a historical reality to be maintained inside East Asia. The capacity and attitude of maintaining such an identity in-process are the virtues required of East Asian nations, groups, and individuals.
How and why East Asia discourse deteriorated into imperialist perspectives at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in the 1990s is the object of my discussion. My discussion seeks to deviate from such modern epistemologies as the distinctions between the borderline of the subject and the other, borderlines of nation-states, languages, races, histories, geographies, and from the modern demarcation of disciplines. By pursuing a theoretical speculation in the dimension of the episteme, I shall examine the conditions for the appropriate discourse for East Asian community rather than suggest its real model or aspect.
2 REFLECTION
2.1
Reconsideration of the Concept of Othering
My judgment is that East Asian intellectuals are now seeking a new way of understanding the structure and meaning of East Asia from their subjective positions, and not any longer as the Other of the West. They wish to be able to say for themselves who they are and who they should be. This approach challenges the way the West has studied the East since Marco Polo’s exploration, as an unknown world to be cultivated and civilized, or the way in which Japan had ordered the space of Asia through its dynamic advance encompassing Arabia and Africa after the mid-nineteenth century.5 East Asian intellectuals now seem to understand well that the problems of East Asian identity have been caused, at least in part, by its relationship with the West as well as by internal competition between East Asian nation-states’ identities.6
The role of the modern nation-state was most important in past discourses for constructing the East Asian community, insofar as it was a fundamental unit that both formed the basis of the regional community and fractured it. There seem to have been two fundamental theoretical positions. The first tried to overcome nationalisms, thus, from an international political perspective, promoting institutional cooperation by weakening
the absolute, privileged position of modern national sovereignty. The second validated the East Asian nation-state, adopting the view that the construction of the modern nation-state was important to defend their sovereignties against the blows of globalization–totalitarianism.7
My judgment is that the two should in reality be pursued at the same time. Insofar as a nation-state strives to form a self-identifying or selfcentered identity for its own homogeneity, a new community among the nation-states can never be fully built up; indeed, it can only be constituted and maintained in the process of crossing over the nation-states. The discursive process of a new East Asian community, in other words, must deconstruct the identity of nation-states presently defined by internal homogeneity, reconstruct a community built among nation-states, and simultaneously reconstruct the nation-state according to the transnational community to which it belongs.8
Here, one must deal carefully with the concept of the Other. If we accept that the notion of East Asia produced by the West is that of an Other,9 we should resist this notion and instead frame East Asian identity in a subjective position as an alternative to Western modernity. We should be careful in constituting the concept of Other not to make the error of inserting the “internalized otherness” into the subjective position: even if subjective East Asian identity includes such indigenous Asian traditions as Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, attempts to revive them can fall into the trap of West-centrism with a vengeance because, if Asia remains a homogenous discourse, any renaissance of Asian identity may still be based on otherness to the West, so remaining in the orbit of the West.10
In general, aspects of time and value such as tradition, modernity, and post-modernity, or the related aspects of space, discourse, emotion, and institution, all incorporate some concept of the Other. In this chapter, I would like to use this concept in a positive sense as a starting point to form an ethical network of responsiveness and responsibility rather than as a crystallized heterogeneity or exclusive relationship. If we consider the Other, we should be able to project heterogeneity into homogeneity so as to make them cooperative. The Other can in this way be understood as the condition and basis for forming a new network. The Other is a concept adopted strategically in the process whereby we objectify the homogeneity formed by the unified category in terms of value, discourse, emotion, and space so as to make it the object of rethinking.11
After all, the Other is to be understood not as a fixed substance but as the momentum for rethinking and networking. Thus, when we say
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C Is that so? Must have been Hepsy Sawyer Hum! Mighty free about advising people to go to other people’s houses. What did she say?
P (doubtfully). You really wish me to tell you?
C . (grimly). Yes, every word.
P . Let me think. She said inasmuch as you had been foolish enough to take in one poor silly imitation of a man, you might be crazy enough to accommodate as big a fool as I appeared to be.
C . Indeed? To pay her for that I will take you. If I’m going to have the reputation of running a lunatic asylum I might as well have plenty of inmates. Who be you?
P . Peter Pretzel Pomeroy. (Bows low.)
C . For the land——
P . From Brookline, Mass.
C . What are you going to do here? Write poetry stuff about the sand dunes and the ocean?
P . Alas, no! I am no poet. I am an agent for the HoltonHolland Co. I am demonstrating a useful little household article, called the Ladies’ Little Charm. No housekeeper can possibly be happy without one.
(Takes a clothes sprinkler from his pocket and shows it to her.)
C . For the land—what is it? Looks like the top of a pepper-pot.
P . You have never seen one?
C . (hesitating). No-o, I guess not. What is it for?
P . Oh, joy! Oh, bliss! Oh, rapture! They haven’t reached Bay Point yet. I’m the first on hand. This, dear madam, is a clothes sprinkler. (Takes a bottle from his pocket.) If you will just let me fill this with water, I will show you how it works. (Takes pitcher from table.) Is this water or champagne? Water, of course! (Fills the bottle and puts on the sprinkler-top. He then places a handkerchief on table.) Spread your clothes on the table and sprinkle lightly, wets
them all over the same. It can likewise be used to sprinkle the floor (illustrating) before sweeping. To water the flowers!
C For the land sakes, stop! There won’t be a dry spot in the house!
P . Likewise to shampoo the hair.
(Waves the bottle over his own head and then over hers.)
C . (desperately). If you will stop I will buy one.
P . You, madame? Never! I give this to you from the depths of a grateful heart. (Bows and places it on the table.) Just show it to your friends. (Abruptly changing the subject.) What room do I occupy?
C . Why, come right up and see! (Goes toward the stairs followed by P .) The best room is taken but I guess I can satisfy you maybe.
P . Not the least doubt of it, madame. To be fortunate enough to secure a room in your house is like finding the dime in a birthday cake. [They exeunt by stairs.
(Slight pause. A enters, ., in a white linen dress, with a cap and sweater.)
A . Miss Cynthy! Miss Cynthy!
Enter L , .
L (stopping and regarding her in astonishment). Ariel!
A (doubtfully, as she turns toward him). Why—why—it’s Lee, isn’t it? (As he moves toward her.) Why, I can’t believe it can be!
L (taking her hand). And I can’t believe it is you! Why, Ariel, how do you happen to be here?
A . My eyes are troubling me and I had to come home.
L . Home? My heaven, Ariel, is Bay Point your home?
A . Yes. Didn’t you remember?
L No. I remembered it was Cape Cod but I didn’t remember the town, and to think that I have come to your home! Ariel, it seems years since I have seen you.
A . Why did you leave New Haven without seeing any of your friends?
L . I know what you must think of me. Things looked too black against me, but, Ariel, I am not as black as I was painted. I have come down here to start all over again. I have been told that I have a brilliant future ahead of me along a certain line. I have splendid opportunity, and I am going to make good or die. Do you understand why I’m so anxious to make good? Did you understand before— before the smash came, how much I cared for you? And I dared to hope that you cared a little, too. Did you, Ariel?
A (breathlessly). Oh, you mustn’t talk this way!
L . Can’t you give me just a word of hope to encourage me to work? I will never bother you. I will never ask anything of you until I prove to you that I am straight. Ariel, didn’t you care just a little?
A (softly). Yes.
L (joyfully). Ariel!
A . Oh, why did I say that? I have no right to offer you any encouragement.
L (stepping toward her). Ariel——
A . Hush! I hear some one coming. (Suddenly.) Why, Lee, I was so surprised to see you that I never thought. Have you taken this house? Has Miss Cynthy gone?
L . Gone? Of course not! I am boarding with her.
A . Boarding with Miss Cynthy? Why, you can’t be! She was going away.
Enter C . by stairs.
L . Well, here she is to answer for herself.
C Oh, it’s you, Arey? I wondered who was talking down here. Do you know Mr. Gordon?
A I have met him before. He went to Yale and my school is near there, you know. We have met at—at some social affairs.
C . (delighted). Well, now, that’s real pleasant, ain’t it? I have taken another boarder, Mr. Gordon. I hope you don’t mind.
L . Not at all. The more the merrier. Who is it?
C . I don’t believe I can ever remember what he said. It’s Peter, I am sure of that much, and he sells clothes sprinklers for a living.
A (amused). What?
L (astounded). Good lord!
C . Real kind o’ comical, ain’t it?
L . I should say it was!
A (taking up the bottle on the table). Is this one of them?
C . Yes, and it works real kind of cute, too.
L (looking at it). Good-night! Oh, Miss Tinker, I got my car up here and I was going to ask you if it would be all right to run it into this little house out back here?
C . Why, yes, if it’s big enough.
L . Just about right, I think. Thank you. I will see you later, Miss Freeman.
A Good-morning, Mr Gordon. (L exits, A goes to C . and throws her arms around her.) Oh, Miss Cynthy, you aren’t going after all! Wasn’t it dreadful sudden, your taking Mr. Gordon?
C . Well, it was rather unexpected. He was hunting around in the fog last night for a place to stay, and he came here, and after he got here he didn’t want to leave.
A . Wasn’t that wonderful?
C . (with a curious smile). Yes, I think it was kind of.
A I’m so glad. I never needed you so much in my life as I do now.
C What’s the matter?
A . Nat Williams came home last night. It—it seems that before he sailed this last time father about the same as promised him that I would marry him after I graduate.
C . Arey, what are you talking about?
A . What am I going to do?
C . As you please, of course. Your father is crazy.
A . It’s so hard. I want to please father and there isn’t a thing in the world against Nat. He is a good man and doing well.
C . There’s lots of good men doing well in this world, but that don’t make it out you got to marry them all.
A . I just can’t make up my mind to marry Nat.
C . Of course you can’t. (Decidedly.) You are too young to marry any one.
A . Why, lots of girls younger than I am marry.
C . Well, because some folks is foolish——(Suddenly stops and looks at her.) Land o’ goshen, Arey, there ain’t some one you want to marry, is there?
A (faintly). I didn’t say so.
C . Who is it?
A . No one in Bay Point, Miss Cynthy. And it can’t ever come to anything. He is just the kind that father wouldn’t approve of.
C . I never knew it to fail.
A And I’m so unhappy. (Begins to cry )
C . (dryly). Of course! Dyin’ of a broken heart!
A (reproachfully). Why, Miss Cynthy!
C (going to her and putting her arms around her). There, child, you know I’m sorry for you. Only you’re so young, it seems so kind of foolish for you to be talking about marrying any one.
A . I haven’t got any mother—and—and—(B . enters, ., unnoticed) dad’s going against me, and—if—if—you don’t stand by me I’ll die!
C . There, child——(Suddenly notices B ., who is trying to make a quiet exit.) Oh, it’s you, Cap’n?
A (springing to her feet). Oh!
C . It’s Cap’n Berry!
A (trying to choke back her tears). Good-morning.
C . Go in my room, dearie. [Exit A , ., hastily.
B . (awkwardly). I’m sorry I happened——
C . That’s all right, Cap’n. I guess you think women folks are always crying.
B . That’s their privilege and safety valve. There’s times when the men would like durned well to cry, but they swear instead. Whawhat did she mean about her—her father’s going against her?
C . Oh, she didn’t just realize what she was saying. I don’t believe Abner would ever really go against her. He worships the ground she walks on, but he is acting queer all of a sudden.
B . What’s the trouble? Of course ’tain’t none of my business, but sometimes an outsider can help, unexpected like, you know.
C . I’m afraid no outsider can help in this. It looks like some trouble between Arey and Abner. He’s set on her marrying Nat Williams.
B . Cap’n Williams that sails for Howland Gordon o’ Boston?
C . Yes.
B . Well, he’s said to be a likely sort o’ chap, ain’t he?
C Oh, yes, but you don’t believe in a girl’s being forced to marry a man she doesn’t care for, do you, even if he is a likely sort of chap?
B . Is Cap’n Abner forcing her?
C . I don’t know as he is exactly, but he’s terrible set on it, an’ I don’t see why. He’s had two spells before this of trying to induce her to say “yes” to Nat. It’s terrible queer. He tries to make her feel that she owes everything, even her life, to him, and it’s her duty to obey.
B . (frowning). Oh, he does, eh? Then she knows she ain’t really Freeman’s daughter?
C . Oh, yes, she knows it, but she doesn’t realize the difference. She wasn’t more’n a year old when he found her.
B . Never had no clues as to whom her own folks was?
C No, I guess not, although I think I’ve heard tell he has some things that were on her, a locket or something, I don’t remember what. He’s been a good father to her all these years. I can’t imagine what ails him now. Well, there’s lots o’ queer things in this world, and lots of unhappiness. (Suddenly.) Well, if I’m going to get dinner for— land, Cap’n Berry, I forgot to tell you. I’ve taken another boarder.
B . Well, you are rushing things, ain’t you? Say, Miss Tinker, do you know anything about the young chap you took in last night?
C . No, not a thing!
B . Seems a good sort of fellow?
C . He certain does. He’s got a real taking way with him. (Alarmed.) What’s the matter, Cap’n Berry?
B . Well, of course there was considerable excitement in town last night, and of course a stranger always causes a lot of talk, and his coming mysterious like——
C . (interrupting). There wasn’t nothing mysterious about it fur’s I can see.
B Well, some people look at it different, especially Hepsy Sawyer. That woman’s got a northeast gale blowing off the end of her tongue fresh every hour. Anyway they’ve got it going that this chap you’ve took in may be concerned, and I expect you will have the whole crowd down here in a few minutes.
C . My land, Cap’n Berry, that boy never had nothin’ ter do with it in this world. He is as innocent as—as—as a little ba-a lamb. Cap’n Berry, you don’t believe that I did wrong in taking him in? You know you—you——
B Yes, I know, and I think you done jest right. I know you wouldn’t have taken a stranger in if it hadn’t been for what I said, and don’t you worry a mite, Miss Cynthy, no matter what any one says, I will stand by you. Where is your boarder? I’d like to have a look at him.
C . He’s out in the back yard trying to get his car into father’s old carpenter shed. Come out and see him.
[Exit, ., followed by B .
Enter L , . He wears his raincoat. P comes down-stairs.
L (joyfully). Well, old man, you got in?
P (with dignity). Certainly. I should worry but what I could get into any place where they would take you. Have you heard the excitement in town this morning?
L No, I have been up shore after the car. What’s going on?
P . Seven pipes were stolen last night.
L . Seven? Why, you said three.
P . I said I took three.
L (puzzled). Well—but——(Staggered.) You don’t mean to say some one else look the other four?
P (looking surprised). Why, I supposed you were the some one else!
L . Well, you have another think. I know absolutely nothing about it. I left that part of the job to you, and why—great heavens, Pete!
Seven pipes? Just the number we planned on taking!
P . Exactly. That’s why I thought you had a hand in it.
L . But what do you make of it?
P . I don’t make. We wanted a mystery. We’ve got it! The sooner we get to work the better.
L . That’s right.
P I’ll go out and see if I can hear something more.
L . Good idea, but whatever you do, don’t let on that you know me.
P . Don’t fret about that. I never saw you before.
(Exit, . L looks after him a second and exits by stairs.)
Enter N W , . He is tall, dark complexioned, about thirtyfive, and rather self-important. He has the appearance of always getting what he goes after. He glances about. A enters .
N (rushing forward and taking her hand). Ariel! I have been chasing all over Bay Point after you. Hepsy said she thought you came down here. I couldn’t wait to see you again.
A (with an effort). How do you do, Nat?
N . I couldn’t realize my good luck when I heard you were at home, although of course I am sorry about your eyes. I wish you would tell me that you are glad to see me.
A . Why, of course I am always glad to see old friends.
N . That is too impersonal. I want you to say you are glad to see me.
A . You are somewhat exacting, aren’t you?
N Ariel, don’t talk to me that way I can’t stand it. You know how much I care, and you must try to care, too.
A . Must?
N . You understand what I mean.
A (wearily). Haven’t we been all over this before?
N . We have several times, and we are going over it again and again. I have thought of you all this home trip, little dreaming that I was coming straight to you. I thought I should have to wait until summer before I saw you again. Now that I haven’t got to wait I don’t intend to lose one minute.
A (impatiently). I shouldn’t say you did.
N . There is no one in my way. I’ll make you care for me.
A (angrily). Will you, indeed? Do you expect to do it by yourself? I guess you will have to call for help.
N . Your father will give me all the help I need.
A . This is something he cares nothing about.
N (growing angry). You know better than that.
A . Oh, what’s the use? We always quarrel. Why start it again?
Enter A , .
N . Captain Freeman, would you mind saying to your daughter what you said to me last night?
A . Oh, never mind about it. Don’t trouble yourself, father. I can imagine what you said, and I can be just exactly as happy if I don’t hear it.
A . Ariel, I don’t want you to go to acting this way with Nat. You just make him mad, and I don’t wonder Sometimes you are enough to make St. Peter swear. Nat wants to marry you, not now, but when you graduate. I don’t see any earthly reason why you shouldn’t promise to. Nat’s a fine fellow and doing well. You haven’t anything against him?
A . Certainly not, but I don’t care to promise myself to any one. Graduation is quite a long ways off yet.
A . Ariel, I don’t very often ask anything of you. I don’t remember that I have ever asked any very special thing. Don’t you think it’s your duty to do this first thing that I ask?
A Oh, dad, how can you make such a request in such a way? (Bursts into tears and runs out, .)
A Well, Nat, this looks mighty foolish to me. If a girl won’t, she won’t.
N . Do you intend to let her do as she pleases?
A . Let her? Good lord, do you expect me to force her into a marriage with you?
N . Don’t you feel that you owe me some recompense?
A . Well, great heaven, won’t anything but Ariel satisfy you?
N . No.
A (angrily). Well, I must say you——
N (quietly). Captain Freeman, what were you doing in the postoffice last night?
A (starting). In the post-office?
N (pointedly). Yes, long after it closed?
A (growing angry). What do you mean?
N . Just what I say. I know you were there. There is no use in denying it.
A (beside himself). Why, you—do you mean to insinuate——
N (calmly). Just explain your presence there. (Slight pause. A remains silent.) You didn’t find what you were looking for, did you? I was before you, Captain Freeman. Before I sailed this last time, I made a midnight visit to the post-office myself, but I covered my tracks. I think something must have scared you off before you had a chance to pick things up.
A . You dare to tell me that you entered the post-office?
N . Oh, yes, you won’t say anything about it. If you did I should be obliged to show the papers I went after, and you wouldn’t have any one see those papers for a farm.
A (desperately). I don’t know what you are driving at.
N Oh, yes, you do. See here, Captain Freeman, all in this world I want is your influence with Ariel. This is a mean way to get it, I’ll admit, but I want the girl and I don’t care how I get her.
A . And if I refuse to bother Ariel any more what is it you are threatening?
N . Why, I don’t know as I have exactly threatened anything. Threatened isn’t a nice word. Of course you know that you owe as much to Miss Tinker as you did to my father. I don’t know exactly how you would come out if the thing was to go to court, but as long as Miss Cynthy is in need of money it looks to me like a question of honor on your part. I understand she is about to leave town to look for work.
A (snapping the words out). She isn’t going! (Beside himself again.) If you think you can frighten me you are mistaken! I absolutely deny that I was inside the post-office last night.
N . Oh, well, of course if you are going to take that stand I shall
A (warningly). Hush!
Enter L . and O ., .
L . Oh, you are here, Cap’n Freeman?
O . (all out of breath). We’ve hunted all over town for yer. Fer the love of John Paul Jones, stay put fer a while until we see if we can get at any facts to help us.
L . What’s become o’ Cap’n Cranberry, an’ where’s Miss Cynthy?
Enter C . and B ., . A enters, .
B . We’re here, Lem. What’s the matter?
Enter H ., ., dragging after her S ., who is not at all willing to be dragged.
H . Lem, here’s Sammy! I’ve chased all over town and I declare ter goodness I’m——
L Never mind where you’ve chased, as long as you got him.
H . And I had to drag him every step of the way. He wuz bound he would not come.
S . (fearfully). I ain’t got nothin’ ter tell, dad!
L . You will tell all right if I get after you.
S . You always said not to tell things, an’ I ain’t got nothin’ to tell.
H Ain’t he the beatenest young one!
B . (picking S . up). You keep him frightened to death all the time. He will tell all about who took the pipe from him when you get ready to hear it.
L . Miss Cynthy, you hev taken a boarder?
C . I have taken two.
H . Two? You don’t ever in this world mean that you have taken in that crazy——
L . Hepsy! Will you hush up? I don’t mean that fellow that’s just come to town this morning selling clothes sprinklers. I mean that fellow who was prowling around Bay Point last night in the fog.
C . (indignantly). Who says he was prowling?
L . I say so. Prowling around——
B . Oh, belay there, Lem! There weren’t nothin’ a stranger could do last night but prowl around. It was hard enough for us folks that lives here all the time.
L . Well, maybe so, Cap’n, but we hev got to inquire what he was doing. (Importantly.) In fact we got to inquire into everybody’s business that was out last night. It ain’t so much those durned pipes, though it certainly beats tunket who took them, but the post-office was broken into, you must remember, and Obed’s safe was broke open.
O . (excited). Gosh all fog horns, yes! And, Abner, I found your pipe on the floor right by the safe.
A (staggered). What? I don’t believe it!
O . (handing him a pipe). Yes, sir! Yours all right! I know your pipe as well as I do my own.
Enter L by stairs, unnoticed.
A (breathing hard). Do you—do you mean to say that you think that I——
(Glances at N and stops abruptly.)
L . Why, o’ course not! The idee, Cap’n Freeman! We know you ain’t in no ways concerned, but don’t you see? It goes to show that the fellow that stole the pipes broke into the post-office?
A (with a sigh of relief). Oh!
L . And now I want to see this boarder of yours, Miss Cynthy.
L (stepping forward). Am I the one you wish to see?
L . I guess you be. I suppose you have heard tell all about what happened in town last night?
L (bowing). Yes.
L . Well, we want to find out everything we can ’bout sech a mystery, an’ we feel obleeged to inquire about any strangers who came ter town last night.
L . I see. Well, my name is Lee Gordon. I came down the Cape from Boston in my auto. I am going to do some sketching.
L . So? Want tew know! Wal, can you inform me if you went near the post-office last night?
L . I may have. I don’t know.
L . Do you know your glove when you see it? Them’s your initials? L. G.?
(Hands L a heavy driving glove.)
L . Yes, this is my glove. Where did you find it?
O . (dramatically). I found it on the post-office steps.
A What?
L . I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised to know that I visited the meeting-house. I couldn’t tell where I was going.
B . Of course you couldn’t. This is all foolishness.
L . Of course if you want to believe I was mixed up in the robbery just because you found my glove on——
(He is carrying his raincoat on his arm and as he speaks he impatiently flings it over onto the other arm and the pipe which S . put in the pocket drops to the floor.)
H . My land! What’s that?
O . (at the top of his voice). It’s a pipe!
(L . picks it up and examines it. L looks at it in astonishment. S . looks frightened and begins to edge toward the door.)
B . Well, by tunket, hasn’t the fellow a right to own a pipe?
L . He has sartain, one o’ his own, but I can’t no wise see that he has any right to yourn, Cap’n Berry.
(Hands it to B ., who is completely staggered.)
A . What? Did you ever? It is! Cap’n Cranberry’s!
S . (thinking things are moving in a manner favorable to him, opens sugar bowl). And here’s another in Miss Cynthy’s sugar bowl!
A . What?
C (dropping into a chair). Mercy sakes!
H . Land, Cynthy’s overcome!
(Grabs clothes sprinkler from table and sprinkles C .)
L . (to L ). Wal, now what hev you got to say, young man?
L Absolutely nothing. I haven’t words equal to this occasion.
L . What room did he sleep in last night, Miss Cynthy?
C (sufficiently recovered to be indignant). I shan’t tell you. He never had nothing to do with this in the world, never!
L (gratefully). That’s mighty kind of you, Miss Tinker, but it is also foolish. (To L .) My room is up-stairs, the first on the right. [Exit L . by stairs.
O . Wal, I cal’late there ain’t much more ter be said.
A (stepping forward). Well, there is a whole lot more. Mr. Gordon is a friend of mine.
A . What? He is?
H . Do tell!
A . Well, how long since?
A . Quite a long time since.
A . Is that so? Queer I never heard of him before. Where did you meet him?
A . At a friend’s in New Haven while Mr. Gordon was at Yale.
N . If you knew Mr. Gordon at Yale perhaps you know how he happened to leave college?
A Yes, I know He left under circumstances which didn’t look favorable to him but none of his friends believed he was at all to blame, any more than I believe it now.
H . Well, do tell!
N Mr Gordon always seems to be found under circumstances which look anything but favorable to himself.
A . How do you happen to know this fellow, Nat?
N . He is the son of Howland Gordon, the man I sail for. After he was expelled from Yale he went to work for his father. He is just leaving his father under circumstances which don’t look favorable. (L . comes down the stairs.)
O . Find anything, Lem?
L . Yes, by Crismus, three more pipes! (Shows them.)
A What? You don’t say? Let’s see!
C . (overcome). My land! My land!
H . (applying clothes sprinkler). There, Cynthy! There!
L . (to L ). Well, young man, I guess I’ll arrest you!
L (with a shrug of his shoulders). All right! Go ahead!
B . (wrathfully). Yes, go ahead, and I’ll bail him out!
L . I’ll admit that you have plenty of evidence against me, but here comes a man who can at least explain my connection with those pipes. (Points to the pipes in L .’s hand.)
Enter P , .
P (stopping short and looking at the assembled company in astonishment). By my faith, I didn’t know it was old home week!
L . (to P ). Young man, what do you know about this fellow?
P (innocently, pointing to L ). What do I know? About him? Absolutely nothing! I never saw him before in my life!
(L . claps his hand on L ’s shoulder and walks him to the door. C . is overcome and H . again applies the clothes sprinkler.)
CURTAIN
