After Reading 'The Naked Tree.'

It's been a while since I wrote. I had read Park Wan-suh's writing before, but a novella-length work like The Naked Tree was a first for me. Moreover, this novel was one I always kept in mind, but last time—that is, while I was reading a lot of books back in 2016—I couldn't read it. At that time, oddly, I found the opening uninteresting. Back then I also knew little precisely about The Naked Tree, and I had only a vague feeling of 'I should read it, I should read it,' so I wonder if that was why. I don't know the exact reason myself. A lack of schema may be the biggest reason. It wasn't only this novel that was like that at the time. In a similar case, 'The Lone Room' too I opened at first but couldn't read, yet last year I opened it and read straight through, so seeing that, it may be a matter of concentration, or it could be seen as the result of my improved literacy. At any rate, this time was a little different. Strangely, the perspective of the narrator, which I found relatable, drew me in. The story of 'Lee Kyung,' a woman in her twenties, drew me into this book at curious points.

- The structure of the novel

'The Naked Tree' is a work made up of several chapters. Since there is one protagonist, it's easiest to think of the novel as composed from beginning to end of this one person's story. The protagonist 'Lee Kyung' is at times a first-person protagonist within the novel, and in some stories becomes a first-person observer. Probably distinctions like protagonist or observer are distinctions we've created for the sake of convenience in research, in classifying a novel's point of view, so I think it's because they don't always fit. At any rate, this novel is 'Lee Kyung's' story, and in one corner there's also the story of Lee Kyung's mother, and in one part there are the stories of Lee Kyung's relatives and the story of Mr. Ok Hee-do. Because it's divided by chapters, you could call it episodic, but unlike the episodic style of Cheonbyeon Punggyeong, where various protagonists each lead their own stories, this is closer to one protagonist dissolving various experiences into the work, and perhaps because of that the feel is different. Over a total of 17 chapters the protagonist wanders and agonizes throughout, staggering this way and that, and shows that everyone has a path of their own. That is, the protagonist endures a solitude that even a loved one cannot walk through together and that one must bear entirely on one's own.

'Lee Kyung' belongs to the category of a female protagonist who has lost her father but whose mother is alive, and who is experiencing the horrors of the Korean War, having lost her older brother. If I were to describe a few traits of this female protagonist, she is always solitary, is not loved by her mother, and feels guilt over her brother's death. The society of the time had an atmosphere that valued men more, and in the modern Korean family structure where, conventionally, the 'mother' takes interest in the 'son' and the 'father' in the 'daughter,' she appears in the novel as a 'daughter' who absorbs the surviving mother's 'longing for the son.' This Lee Kyung meets 'Mr. Ok Hee-do' in order to fill the absence of her brother and the absence of her father, and the novel shows the process by which she grows and wanders through Mr. Ok Hee-do, then parts from him and matures.

The most central dialogue in the novel is this part.

<Kyung-a. Kyung-a, you must free yourself from me. You didn't love me. You were only fantasizing about your father and brother through me. Now try to become free from that fantasy, all right? Bravely become alone. Become a brave orphan. You can do it, Kyung-a. Accept the fact that you are alone without fear. As an upright and brave orphan, start everything over again. Start love and dreams over again too.>

This is the passage that reveals how Lee Kyung, through Mr. Ok Hee-do, was trying not to stand properly in the world; and that after these words, through Tae-su, who puts a scratch on her own world, she comes to harmonize with the secular world; and yet that her longing for Mr. Ok Hee-do had not been entirely resolved, which she later confirms through Mr. Ok Hee-do's posthumous exhibition. This is a novel in which the growth narrative of 'Lee Kyung,' who tried to fill the painting of the naked tree with 'herself,' concludes by separating Mr. Ok Hee-do from Lee Kyung's own longing.

The biggest reason I come to relate to this novel probably lies in the protagonist's standing on her own. I too want to resolve some absence within me through someone else. But such absence is not resolved by leaning on someone; it is resolved when I myself stand as a subject. Even if that resolution isn't perfect. In the end, this novel was telling me about the solitude of a life in which one cannot lean on anyone and must move forward alone.

References

Na Byung-cheol (2003), Women's Bildungsroman and the Absence of the Father, The Korean Women's Literature Association. Feminist Literary Studies Vol. 10, p183~214