This Paradise of Yours
- Author
- Yi Cheong-jun (written by)
- Publisher
- Munji Publishing | Published 2012-09-28
- Category
- Novel
- Book intro
- The pinnacle of the literary world of Yi Cheong-jun, a master of Korean fiction! The essence of Yi Cheong-jun's literature...
Did I, in a way, hope this novel would end as a 'dystopia'? I closed the book feeling the ending was a little different from what I'd expected, but on calm reflection I recalled that in works like 'The Snow Path' the novel ended while depicting a fairly positive vision of the future in its own way, so I was able to finish this book too while accepting it to some degree. It doesn't seem to have taken longer than expected, nor shorter. Holding on to this book for about a week (though I actually only read it over 3-4 days), it was nice to have come to favor the word 'statue,' and it was also good that it became an occasion to reflect on myself for having been so neglectful of Korean literature. After closing the book, seeing that the last page of the cover listed the Complete Works of Yi Cheong-jun at over 30 volumes, that 'feeling' of agonizing over which book to buy next was really nice too. I realized it was a novel that, for the first time in a while, stirred up energy in me. Let me stop the talk outside the book here and get down to writing in earnest about this book.
'This Paradise of Yours' is a novel depicting events that take place on Sorok Island. It depicts the events after an army colonel named 'Cho Baek-heon' takes office as the hospital director of Sorok Island during the military regime period, and this novel is one that fictionalizes reality. In a thesis on This Paradise of Yours at the back of the book, it's stated that this book modeled Cho Baek-heon on the 17th director Cho Won-chang, and there was an account that various materials were prepared in advance so that the story of Sorok Island at the time could be recorded relatively realistically. However, as that thesis points out, when you compose a character based on fact, one problem arises, and that's precisely the matter of 'characterization.' When you're bound to reality, the novel's characters don't come alive, but Yi Cheong-jun seems to have wanted to express reality without being bound to it. This very reality appears as two characters possessing modernity and an artistic temperament. As Yi Sang-uk and Cho Baek-heon.
I had pegged the protagonist and narrator of this book as 'Yi Sang-uk.' Right up until around past page 200. But around the time the novel was wrapping up, at some moment 'Yi Sang-uk's' presence couldn't keep up with even the tip of 'Cho Baek-heon's' foot. The 'narrator' was no longer Yi Sang-uk either; before I knew it Yi Sang-uk had disappeared and a third-person someone was narrating the situation, and it was concentrating on depicting Cho Baek-heon's story and inner psychology, and the crowd psychology of the hospital residents. In the end, 'Cho Baek-heon' was the protagonist. Cho Baek-heon's story became this very 'This Paradise of Yours.' Colonel Cho Baek-heon's every action was more extraordinary than expected. It might be a different matter, but I lean strongly toward a skeptical disposition, and hearing this 'Yi Sang-uk's' story, my skeptical disposition began to catch fire a bit, and along with that I thought Cho Baek-heon, too, would inevitably be someone dominated by his environment—but he wasn't. As the saying in 'Understanding the Novel' goes, in post-modern-era novels the protagonists are figures who pursue their own values against the contradictions of their environment (the existing wrong paradigm), and Cho Baek-heon was such a figure too. Of course it wasn't a perfect overcoming of his environment, but his actions ultimately became a struggle against the situation. The struggle against the situation also signified precisely Cho Baek-heon's 'modernity.'
Cho Baek-heon is a modern figure, and Yi Sang-uk is the liberal artist type, and here this 'modernity' refers precisely to Western modernism. As is the case with most nations, rather than achieving 'modernity' on their own, nations other than the great powers all had modernization carried out by external will, and in that respect Cho Baek-heon can be called someone who tries to modernize others, and to that extent he's a figure who takes an active stance toward others and moves under the thought, in a decidedly doctor-like mindset, that things 'must be fixed.' That's why Cho Baek-heon made staunch efforts to turn Sorok Island into a paradise for the lepers. The one who tried to block people attempting to escape and to make it so they could live well inside here was precisely Cho Baek-heon. But Yi Sang-uk was different. He didn't want to lay any burden upon them. Moreover, Yi Sang-uk didn't want the patients on the island to be confined to the island because of their illness. He wanted to let them live the lives they wished to live, as they desired, using their freedom.
The freedom Yi Sang-uk speaks of is a structure that can never be achieved in the 'paradise island' Cho Baek-heon desires. Yi Sang-uk says that in a world full of 'freedom,' a paradise of lepers cannot exist. I didn't know that Yi Sang-uk was the son of the constable 'Yi Sun-gu,' who had died in the past. I only learned later, but it seems that ever since he was born with difficulty in childhood and left the island, Yi Sang-uk had been unable to forget Sorok Island. And since he met Cho Baek-heon, who was trying to do something similar to Director Ju Jeong-su—who had become a tyrant when he was born—his fear must have doubled. Those moments when everyone suffered grievously because of a single statue of Ju Jeong-su. Yi Sang-uk's point was that one's own paradise island, the lepers' paradise island, would in the end create an invisible barbed-wire fence. You can understand it in more detail if you read the book, but I think it's necessary to explain it briefly here.
For example, when there's a very serious infectious disease, and if you release that disease among the general population everyone could catch it and die, the people representing the safety of the majority would expel the infected and gather them in one place. But can that camp become a paradise? In the end, that paradise too is merely a paradise created by outsiders, the general public. As you can see in the film 'Blindness,' which gathered people afflicted with an incurable yet fatal disease, it was very disorderly and chaotic. It's truly difficult for them to create a paradise among themselves. But Yi Sang-uk wished for it. He didn't want to live with a barbed-wire fence set up in his heart, believing Sorok Island to be a 'paradise island.' What Yi Sang-uk wished for was simply to live through 'freedom.'
As I kept reading the book, I thought it would be hard to make people happy with Cho Baek-heon's mindset, but contrary to my and Yi Sang-uk's expectations, it was ultimately shown that he truly did not want his own statue. However, the book's ending—through the scene where he rehearses in advance the congratulatory speech for the wedding of Yun Hae-won and Seo Mi-yeon—shows that a true 'reconciliation' has not yet been achieved. Here, Yi Sang-uk shows an inscrutable smile upon seeing Cho Baek-heon rehearsing the congratulatory speech, and the novel ends.
As I said at the start, I think I've somehow become rather skeptical. My disposition seems to have hardened that way recently. Constantly, those above don't want things resolved through the freedom of those below, and nailing things down however they please right then has become routine. That's no different now than before. In the 1980s, President Chun Doo-hwan declared that sending wedding invitations was wrong and banned it by law. I didn't really know before, but each of these decisions really seems to have been carried out with a thoroughly 'military' mindset. By the method of immediately rooting out phenomena that appear 'wrong.' It's no different here either. I ultimately can't bring myself to like this organizational structure that immediately implements a decision—one the people actually involved judge to be wrong—just because someone above said a single word.
But that said, leaving even my expectations of reality in a skeptical state seems wrong. I think it's time to look at and approach the world a bit more positively again. After all, what both Yi Sang-uk and Cho Baek-heon wished for was, in the end, people's 'happiness.' I'd like to say it's just that the methods differ.
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