Chapter Title: Women, Divorce, and the State Book Title: Rewriting Revolution

Book Subtitle: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction

Book Author(s): Immanuel Kim

Published by: University of Hawai’i Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctvvn309.8

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114

C H A P T E R   F O U R

Women, Divorce, and the State

No, no. I can’t do that. I can’t stand it anymore! Paek Nam-nyong, Friend

Women in Paek Nam-nyong’s Pŏt (Friend, 1988) elude and resist the oppressive patriarchal state order that dictates the construction of female subjects of the DPRK. In the majority of North Korean fiction, the narrative trajectory and con- clusion not only promote the Party and offer “eternal optimism,”1 but also ex- plicitly reinstate a male-dominated sociopolitical order. Whether the narrative takes place in a factory, farm, army, school, or any other social institution, the methodology of reading North Korean fiction is to understand the immanent role of the Party or Kim Il Sung that leads the trajectory of the narrative to the rationalization and legitimacy of a patriarchal society.

Although North Korea officially eradicated sexual inequality by the incep- tion of the nation-state in 1948,2 even after forty years (when Friend was pub- lished), the portrayal of the state-desired submissive women continued to be reproduced in literature. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, women’s participation in the public space was not a promise of their agency but an absorp- tion and submission to the patriarchal state order. North Korean literature is supposed to render a unitary reading, a univocal meaning that complies with Party thought, where difference or otherness is disregarded, eliminated, or simply unthought. However, Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend shows otherwise.

“No, no. I can’t do that. I can’t stand it anymore!” are the words of female protagonist Ch’ae Sun-hŭi, who confirms and reminds herself that she is unwill- ing to compromise with her husband, the judge presiding over her divorce case, and the social model of a submissive wife. The double negation (“No, no”) affirms her resistance (“I can’t do that. I can’t stand it anymore!”) to a social prescription that attempts to mold women physically and spiritually (chŏngsinjŏkin) into state-desired subjects. Spiritually, what a harrowing term for Sun-hŭi! The term is used to refer to a systematic design to transform individuals into rational be- ings, which is nothing more than making all individuals think and act in

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Women, Divorce, and the State 115

accordance with the masculine state. Sun-hŭi refuses to be interpellated into a rational subject of the patriarchal state in two ways: first, her double negation of resistance (“No, no. I can’t do that. I can’t stand it anymore!”) and, second, her response without a response, which I will detail toward the end of this chapter.

In the first instance, Sun-hŭi speaks out against the state’s prescriptive dis- course of constructing subjectivity: “I can’t do that.” It is not that she does not want to be a wife or a mother, but rather she cannot continue to be the state-de- sired wife and mother. The law (male protagonist Judge Chŏng Chin-u) diagno- ses her with a disease of irrationality and attempts to mold her into a rational subject that complies with the Party prescription of womanhood and mother- hood, a discursive practice in North Korean fiction to discipline individuals. Sun-hŭi takes a stance by claiming that she cannot stand it anymore, that she is no longer willing to submit herself to the patriarchal design. Her double negation reveals both her pent up anger against the hegemonic society and her imperative resistance to the state, affirming her decision to file for divorce in the opening passage of Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend.

This chapter will analyze the dual power struggle that a woman confronts against her male counterparts—she confronts, first, the state’s controlling efforts to tailor and construct a subject according to Party directives for revolutionizing the family and, second, the subject-making force that delimits her individual- ity—as an affirmative expression of her agency. Sun-hŭi initially struggles to divorce her husband, whom she finds to be an incompatible partner, but the novel further divulges her struggle with Judge Chŏng Chin-u, her director at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater, and even her son, who sympathizes with his father more than his mother. Sun-hŭi’s male counterparts surround her and suf- focate her very existence as an individual, demanding her submission to the pa- triarchal state order. But the narrative does not render a promising enclosure of her individuality; she does not become the ideal citizen, woman, and mother. The seams of the narrative come undone at the end of the novel, opening up the condition of possibility for multiple readings and multiple interpretations that disavow the novel’s allegiance to a singular meaning and depart from the pre- dictable endings expected in North Korean literature. In Chapter 2, I discussed a particular moment in Friend. Below is the basic plot of the novel.

Ch’ae Sun-hŭi comes to Judge Chŏng Chin-u’s office to file for divorce. Sun-hŭi is a celebrity singer at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater, and her husband, Sŏk-ch’un, is an ordinary factory worker. She claims that her husband is a stub- born and an incompetent worker who cannot win awards for inventing a new machine as other workers have. She complains that her husband has used his

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116 Chapter Four

income to reimburse the factory for all his failed attempts at his new machinery, which he has been working on for the past five years. Chŏng Chin-u has already divorced a couple (Ch’ae Rim and his wife) and is reluctant to see yet another broken family. He, therefore, sets out to rectify the couple’s marital problems.

Chŏng Chin-u pays a visit to Sŏk-ch’un and Sun-hŭi’s house only to find their son, Ho-nam, standing alone outside the house in the pouring rain. Chŏng Chin-u decides to take Ho-nam to his apartment, where he can rest and wait for his parents to pick him up. Sŏk-ch’un is the first to arrive at Chŏng Chin-u’s apartment. There, Chŏng Chin-u gathers information on how Sŏk-ch’un and Sun-hŭi met and fell in love. The judge learns how the two got married and how the turbulence in their marriage has brought them to the brink of divorce.

Chŏng Chin-u visits Sŏk-ch’un’s factory to gather more information from the elderly manager. Chŏng Chin-u learns from the manager that Sŏk-ch’un has been working on the same project for the past five years without any progress, which he attributes to Sŏk-ch’un’s stubbornness and refusal to change with the technologically advancing times. The manager tells the judge that the couple’s relationship has been deteriorating for quite some time. Sŏk-ch’un has resorted to both physical and verbal domestic violence. Sun-hŭi is not completely inno- cent either. Her celebrity status has made her arrogant and vain. She has been degrading her husband in public and ridiculing his incompetence.

Chŏng Chin-u pieces the accounts together and concludes that Sŏk-ch’un is at fault for not improving his technical skills and advancing his position at the factory, and that Sun-hŭi’s arrogance derives from her husband’s incompetency as a man of the new generation. He critiques Sŏk-ch’un for falling behind and suggests taking evening classes at the technical institute. He also critiques Sun- hŭi for not abiding by the ethical principles of what a wife ought to be doing for her husband and her son.

Meanwhile, Chŏng Chin-u deals with another problematic character: Ch’ae Rim. There are two characters named Ch’ae Rim in the narrative. The first Ch’ae Rim, a manager at the Electrical Hardware Factory, is the one who has divorced his wife; the second Ch’ae Rim is Sun-hŭi’s second cousin, the chairman of the Provincial Industrial Technology Commission Board and the one who is causing grief to Judge Chŏng Chin-u. (At first, Chŏng Chin-u confuses the two, but he soon clears up his confusion as he recalls the court trial of the first Ch’ae Rim and his wife.) While Chŏng Chin-u tries to restore Sun-hŭi and Sŏk-ch’un’s mar- ital health, the second Ch’ae Rim stands on the opposing side, urging Sun-hŭi to divorce her husband. Ch’ae Rim is a local cadre with much influence and social power, but Chŏng Chin-u has maintained his legal authority by not conceding to Ch’ae Rim’s bribery. Additionally, he has discovered that Ch’ae Rim embezzled

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Women, Divorce, and the State 117

government funds—which were given to award workers for inventing new ma- chines—for his own personal profit. Chŏng Chin-u charges Ch’ae Rim with fi- nancial fraud and threatens to imprison him. Ch’ae Rim confesses his wrongdoing and promises to return the cash prize to the rightful winners.

Chŏng Chin-u, then, rectifies the couple’s marital problems by reminding them that their duty as citizens is to continue the nation’s revolutionary struggle. Chŏng Chin-u also counsels his neighbors on their marital problems and makes amends with his own wife, whom he has regretted marrying because of her long absences from home and from her domestic duties. In the end, Chŏng Chin-u proves to be more than a legal advisor and more than a marriage counselor; he is the exemplary friend of the community.

The Literary World of Paek Nam-nyong

Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend was published in 1988 and had made its way across the DMZ and into the hands of some South Koreans by 1992. After reading the novel, one of South Korea’s renowned writers, Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, said this: “The first time I went to North Korea, I came across Paek Nam-nyong’s novel, and I was deeply impressed. In this novel, the characters’ individual concerns and cir- cumstances were well described, which shocked me. Through this novel, I real- ized that there are people living in the North.”3 Another South Korean writer, Yun Chŏng-mo, said, “Paek Nam-nyong’s novel is not only the most extraordi- nary of all North Korean novels that I’ve read so far; it contains such shocking realities that it overturns our distorted knowledge about the North.”4 Their genu- ine shock over Paek’s Friend may not have been based simply on its theme of di- vorce but on a deeper level of reading and understanding the tenuous narrative structure and the complex theme of the individual versus the state. In the 2000s, the DPRK sponsored a television drama series based on Paek’s Friend called Ka- jok (Family). There were supposed to be ten episodes, but the series did not tele- vise the last episode for reasons unknown, according to the South Korean re- porter Kim Hyŏn-kyŏng.5 If the television drama series had wanted to remain faithful to the novel, then I can only surmise that the last episode would have provided an ending that the DPRK had never seen before.

This novel makes divorce its central motif, which was extremely rare in North Korean literature before its publication in 1988, as divorce threatens the dissolution of the family-state. Turbulent marital problems, issues with raising children, and the desire to live a comfortable life devoid of Party di- rectives are some of the concerns found in Friend, and none of the characters are without problems. That is, a model citizen is not already made in the

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118 Chapter Four

narrative but must be perfected through interpersonal relations and self-re- flection (or self- criticism).

Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun-hŭi want a divorce because of personality conflicts. The second couple, Ch’ae Rim and his wife (who makes an appearance without a name), have divorced because of irreparable personality conflicts. The third cou- ple, a coal factory worker and a schoolteacher, have been faithfully married de- spite myriad personality conflicts. Finally, the fourth couple, Judge Chŏng Chin-u and his wife, Ŭn-ok, also face marital problems because of her long ab- sence from home to conduct field research.

It may appear as though the novel polarizes two sets of couples to distin- guish the ideal family (coal miner and schoolteacher) from the antirevolutionary one (Ch’ae Rim and his wife). The clear dichotomy of the different couples is sup- posed to provide readers with a framework that maps the superimposition of the Party’s ethicality of a politically driven family. For example, in Ri In-ch’ŏl’s short story “Mangne ttal” (My Youngest Daughter, 1980), the polarization of po- litical ideologies perpetuates the good/bad, white/black, right/wrong binary op- positions.6 In that story, the first daughter is married to a morally depraved capitalist, the second daughter is married to a poor socialist, and the third daughter is about to marry a socialist young man. The short story reveals that the eldest daughter has been living in an unhappy marriage as a result of falling into the trap of capitalism, and the second daughter has been living in a joyful marriage as a result of participating in socialist activities for the DPRK. When the father realizes this, he decides the youngest daughter should marry the so- cialist young man. This story does not take place in the DPRK but in Japan among Korean residents, which would explain the first daughter’s being married to a capitalist businessman. But, despite the geopolitical aspects of the story, the pretense of there being a “choice” as to which couple lives the happier life is the narrative strategy in stories like “My Youngest Daughter,” in which the correct moral values are in fact predetermined. This technique not only depicts the indi- viduals as being flat and undeveloped, but it also limits readers’ options for mak- ing their own choice. In other words, the choice is obvious and prescribed for readers by the Party.

Paek Nam-nyong’s narrative strategy is not to provide a choice between the ideal couple and the antirevolutionary couple. Instead, Paek focuses on each cou- ple’s marital problems to show the transformational process of a dysfunctional family into a revolutionary one. In Pukhan munhaksa (North Korean Literary History), South Korean coauthors Sin Hyŏng-gi and O Sŏng-ho argue that Paek’s Friend shows the revolutionary love of the couple (Sŏk-ch’un and Sun-hŭi) and that no other novel in North Korea has portrayed love as such.7 The novel

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Women, Divorce, and the State 119

certainly raises issues of revolutionary love between couples and how this love ought to be materialized for the nation. Still, all characters in North Korean fic- tion must arrive at an understanding that the family-state is the projection or completion of an individual’s rationality, and thus it is no coincidence that a judge—a legal administrator of the state—is the hero of Friend.

Yet the novel portrays a woman who questions, resists, and undermines the very seams of the typical narrative formula that inscribes the wholesome order of the family unit and its prescribed devotion to the state. Friend ends with ambiguity as to whether the married couple on the verge of divorce will remain unified. The novel demonstrates that human emotions and interper- sonal relationships between married couples resist prescriptivism. This novel, along with Heights of Life and Morning Star, discussed in the previous chapter, creatively explicates raw, undisciplined human emotions and desires in indi- viduals who struggle to negotiate between their public (external, generally su- perficial, obligations to the collective) and their private lives (internal ambitions for themselves).

Although the conflict between individual and state is a recurring theme in North Korean literature, Friend stands out, among Paek’s works and even among other novels published in the 1980s, for its inability to seal off individu- alistic tendencies in its female characters. The “utopian” ending in the novel is artificially contrived to meet the demands of the state; it is a formality. What makes Friend unique is its implication that love and loyalty to the state cannot be forced on or demanded from individuals. Although the novel is supposed to present the divorcees’ ability to transcend their differences and instantiate their obligation to the state, it pursues larger thematic problems between presiding judge Chŏng Chin-u and Ch’ae Sun-hŭi, where Sun-hŭi resists the enclosure of her individualism and thus reasserts the “woman question.” Sun-hŭi’s voice, the marginal voice that utters “I can’t stand it anymore,” poses a threat to the state- desired conjugal family.

I am not suggesting that Friend is an antithetical text in North Korea or what one might call a dissident work. Friend can be read as a didactic narrative that instructs its readers to develop rationality from their irrational impulses, to ac- quire the prosthesis of Kim Il Sung, the Party, or the state as the rationalization of the dysfunctional family. That is, the rationality of the nuclear family finds its completion in the family-state through the process of prosthetization—a foreign extension that is artificial to individuals. It is not surprising to readers of North Korean literature to find the prosthesis of Kimilsungism and Party directives in fictional narratives. The prosthetic element is supposed to reveal the necessity for each individual in the narrative to act as loyal citizens of the DPRK no matter

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120 Chapter Four

how contrived or artificial it may appear. The prosthesis is supposed to be taken seriously as a vital (but artificial) extension of the individual’s life.

As such, the dysfunctional couple in Friend must learn to accept Judge Chŏng Chin-u as the prosthesis that will enable them to recognize the much needed state-ordered and Party-minded rationality. The utopian future of the DPRK is fulfilled by the recognition and acceptance of such prostheses. According to South Korean scholar Ko In-hwan, the portrayal of the problems between Ch’ae Sun-hŭi and Ri Sŏk-ch‘un is not intended to show how one overcomes the other but, rather, how the two acknowledge their mutual problems in order to create a better future for both of them.8 The achievement of this “better future” is ful- filled through gestures of individuals to maintain a harmonious family-state, which in the 1980s was orchestrated by the Hidden Hero campaign.

The Patriarchal Semiotics of the People’s Friend

Nearly all of Paek Nam-nyong’s stories center on the middle management tier of the social and political hierarchy. His other stories, such as Pokmujadŭl (Service- men, 1979), Il-t’ŏ (Workplace, 1979), 60 Nyŏn-hu (After Sixty Years, 1982), Chŏlmŭn Tang-bisŏ (The Young Party Secretary, 1983), and “Saengmyŏng” (Life, 1985), all depict cadres who struggle to improve living and working conditions for the collective, as they have the ethical duty to administer and control the po- litical commitment of individuals to the state. Much like other North Korean stories, Paek’s narratives create a fictional world where the directives of the Party are channeled through cadres. According to Tatiana Gabroussenko, North Ko- rean fiction portrays the “caring cadre,”9 which is a physical embodiment—a liv- ing, walking, talking, and emotional being—of Party directives.

The rhetoric of the Hidden Hero campaign reinforces the patriarchal state’s disciplinary governance over the people in Friend. Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun-hŭi’s mar- ital problems are presumably resolved by the incorporation of a new member into the couple’s family: Chŏng Chin-u, a male judge of the municipal court who administers divorce proceedings. Throughout the novel, Paek Nam-nyong alter- nates between calling him “Judge Chŏng Chin-u” and “Chŏng Chin-u” as appro- priate to the narrative. Paek shows the transformation of Chŏng Chin-u from an impersonal and bureaucratic cadre of society to a personal, paternal friend of Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun-hŭi’s nuclear family. Judge Chŏng Chin-u watches, observes, records, and administers the law to the couple as a close member of the family.

Friend creates an entire lexicon around Chŏng Chin-u as a companion and a pseudo-fatherly figure rather than an indifferent bureaucrat who administers the law from a distance. For example, when Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun-hŭi leave Judge

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Women, Divorce, and the State 121

Chŏng Chin-u’s apartment with their son Ho-nam, the narrator says, “The judge wasn’t their relative or a friend, but to invite the family over to his house and of- fer this kind of hospitality was out of the ordinary. The three left the judge’s apartment.”10 Later, also at Chŏng Chin-u’s apartment, he criticizes Sŏk-ch‘un saying, “I’m advising you not as a judge but as your elderly friend.”11 Finally, to- ward the end of the novel, Chŏng Chin-u asks if he may visit Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun- hŭi on the day of their anniversary: “I want to go over to your house not as a judge but as your friend. Ho-nam will also greet me like his pal.”12 The access code that the novel uses to have an elderly bureaucrat penetrate the domestic space is “friend,” which is far less imposing, threatening, and obstructive.

The family revolution campaign asserts that the nuclear family is only a cell of the society but that proper care and discipline are required to prevent the cell from turning into a cancerous one. In the novel, Chŏng Chin-u cultivates vegeta- bles during Ŭn-ok’s (his wife) absence. Chŏng Chin-u’s nursing of the vegetables in the greenhouse reflects the micropolitics of maintaining and monitoring the nuclear family. He controls the humidity level, measures the temperature, and clears away any weeds that may deter the health and growth of the vegetables. Although he grumbles at his absent wife for leaving him with all the household chores, Chŏng Chin-u faithfully tends to the vegetables as if they were his own. His attitude toward the vegetables mirrors the way he nurses Sŏk-ch‘un and Sun- hŭi back to their marital health. His tenderness toward the couple as their friend allegorizes Chŏng Chin-u as a parental figure rather than a faceless bureaucrat.

North Korean fiction delineates the hidden hero through his work ethic and tireless efforts to overcome obstacles even at the expense of physical pain and emotional distress. In one instance, when Chŏng Chin-u discovers that Sŏk- ch’un’s experiments have been fruitless because of a shortage of the proper type of sand, he goes to the deepest part of the river and digs up a backpack-full of quality sand. This comes with the cost of public humiliation, as locals passing by the river have witnessed Chŏng Chin-u rolling up his sleeves, taking off his trou- sers, and wading into the icy river. As a result, Sŏk-ch’un is overwhelmed by Chŏng Chin-u’s willingness to help him with his project. Moments like this show the discursive construction of Chŏng Chin-u as a qualified hidden hero of the narrative. This particular moment in the novel does not distinguish Chŏng Chin-u from other heroes and heroines in North Korean literature. It is a com- mon or perhaps even an overwrought portrayal of the hero who extends compas- sion to his comrade in times of distress.

What makes Friend unique in this respect is not the hero’s extended service to his people and the community but the hero’s failure to provide the correct kind of assistance. It must be noted that it is Chŏng Chin-u’s effort to help

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122 Chapter Four

Sŏk-ch’un with the sand that moves Sŏk-ch’un and not the quality of the sand itself. Typically, in North Korean fiction, when a hero assists another worker the way Chŏng Chin-u does Sŏk-ch’un, the moral encouragement and the material object with which the hero has helped the worker both prove to be successful. This narrative technique indicates that the hero not only has the passionate heart to uplift the downtrodden spirit of the worker but also knows precisely the right kind of material object needed to help the worker. However, in Friend, this is not the case. Chŏng Chin-u tries to encourage Sŏk-ch’un (which he does) by retriev- ing the sand from the river, but unfortunately it is the wrong type of sand. Al- though Chŏng Chin-u has good intentions of helping Sŏk-ch’un, the sand proves to be useless. This moment in the novel shows a narrative pattern in Friend that is different from the other prescribed short stories and novels from the 1970s and 1980s. Although Chŏng Chin-u still represents the hidden hero who imbues the correct political consciousness in the dysfunctional family members of his com- munity, the novel shows that the correct consciousness alone does not determine one’s heroism. In other words, the novel makes a distinction between the discur- sive construction of the appellative hidden hero and the performative gestures of heroism. North Korean fiction in the past had conflated these two into a singular trope, in which the two are interrelated and causal. However, in Friend, the de- lineation of the hero goes beyond a mere heroic performance and considers the hero’s spatial and temporal locality in society and the way in which the hero af- fects and is affected by his community and his own family.

The family cannot be perceived as an individuated entity that simply exists within society. Much like the phrase “family is the fundamental cell of society,” the family exists in relation to the affectations of social intersections—the inter- lacing of interventions and withdrawals of the state. Policing of individuals, as Jacques Donzelot argues, takes place through the governmentality of the family rather than by enforcing regulatory powers on it. He says the mechanisms of governmentality—the complex web of relations of dependence and allegiance— “induced the reorganization of family life by promoting the new norms as being so many advantages favoring a more complete realization of the family’s goal of increased autonomy.”13 Gilles Deleuze, who wrote the preface to Donzelot’s Po- licing of Families, adds, “Marriage is less a matter of preserving the order of fam- ilies than of preparing people for married life.”14 For both Donzelot and Deleuze, the family exists within the intersections of state power, family tradition, social institutions, and judicial action, affecting and being affected by these intricate relationships.

The hidden hero, then, moves along these intersections of private and public spheres, the family and the state, the self and the other, as his identity affects and

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Women, Divorce, and the State 123

is affected by social apparatuses. The hidden hero goes to the family, is found in the family, works through the family, and affects the family in his pursuit of heroism. Friend illustrates the culture of the legal system in North Korea as Judge Chŏng Chin-u makes unexpected (and often undesirable) visits to individuals’ homes. For example, Chŏng Chin-u goes to Sun-hŭi’s house with the excuse of discussing the divorce issue with her husband, Sŏk-ch’un, knowing that he is still at work. There is no doubt that Chŏng Chin-u earnestly intends to talk with Sŏk- ch’un, but he is more interested in investigating the living conditions of the quar- reling couple: the cleanliness of the inner quarters, the way their son, Ho-nam, is raised, and the way the couple interacts with each other at home. The narrator says, “Although Kang’an District house number 19 was a bit out of the way, he could stop by on his way home from work.”15 The domestic space is never too far from the state’s reach. It may be “a bit out of the way” for Judge Chŏng Chin-u, but the distance is only a minor problem in comparison to the impending task of rehabilitating a dysfunctional family and its misguided individuals. Guiding in- dividuals to the correct state-oriented rationality entails entering into the prem- ises of their living space both literally and metaphorically.

In Friend, the legal representative of the state not only physically enters into the private quarters of Sun-hŭi and Sŏk-ch’un to identify the source of their mar- ital problems, but he also enters into their psyche, their inner thoughts, in order to transform their irrationalism and to provide them with the Party’s directives. Toward the end of the novel, Judge Chŏng Chin-u asks Sun-hŭi if he may visit her family on a Sunday afternoon, which is her wedding anniversary. The judge wants to visit the couple to share the joyous event, hoping that the anniversary will rekindle the dying embers of their marriage. As marriage is a political and social institution in North Korea, the judge feels justified in celebrating the cou- ple’s anniversary with them.

It is not unusual for communist societies and their literature to expose the domestic space to the public, showing the porous nature of the binary. According to Article 86 of the revised DPRK Civil Procedure Code, the court may dismiss divorce litigation if the married couple can reconcile their differences and proj- ect a hopeful future together through the arbitration of the judge.16 The operative word is “arbitration,” not in the sense where the prospective divorcees stand be- fore the judge in court but during the “on-the-spot” investigation procedure where the judge gathers evidence. The judge is not to advise reconciliation pas- sively to the couple, but, rather, he is to expose the faults of the litigants, bring the couple to a mutual understanding, and assign a division of labor regarding the raising of their children among other things by actively persuading the couple.17 In this sense, Paek Nam-nyong’s delineation of Judge Chŏng Chin-u as what

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124 Chapter Four

South Korean scholar Kim Chae-yong refers to as the people’s friend (inminui pŏt) is not an unusual way to characterize judges in the DPRK.18 It is Chŏng Chin-u’s legal duty to penetrate into the domestic space and into the private thoughts of the couple in order to reconcile their differences and reassert the family revolution.

His antithetical position toward the antagonist Ch’ae Rim, who is self- serving rather than serving the needs of the people, further secures his position as the hero. Ch’ae Rim’s obese body symbolizes his opulent lifestyle and power. His silk suits and fashionable neckties display the economic class disparity between elite cadres and workers. Ch’ae Rim is accused of falling into bureaucratism and for- malism—the two most deleterious ideologies to the construction of the Kimil- sungist state.19 He is also charged with embezzling government funds. After Chŏng Chin-u threatens to indict and imprison Ch’ae Rim for criminal activi- ties, Ch’ae Rim confesses his misconduct and promises to restore the funds properly. Unlike villains in the past, the “enemy of the state” in the literature of the 1980s is no longer found outside the Edenic society of the DPRK but rather inside, disrupting the movement of the state toward its socialist perfection.20

The portrayal of the figure “Chŏng Chin-u” as the sympathetic people’s friend who transforms the nuclear family into revolutionary members by elimi- nating familial discord and the figure “Judge Chŏng Chin-u” as the unerring law enforcer who proceeds to prosecute and attack the cancerous individuals in the society runs parallel with the Party’s family revolution. In this respect, Chŏng Chin-u assumes the category of the prototypical hero in North Korean socialist realist fiction as discussed in Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema (2001), where everything is subordinated to the positive figure, including the fate of the entire dramatis personae.21 In other words, the hidden hero is the embodiment of the imagined state with moral virtues that constitute the desired modern sub- ject. The hero learns that he has always been a national subject, and it is this real- ization or recognition that determines his heroism rather than his performance.

Kim Chae-yong discusses Chŏng Chin-u as the hidden hero of Friend, a hero from among the common folk, unlike the militant guerrillas during the colonial era or soldiers on the battlefield during the Korean War. Kim says, “[The hidden hero] must be able to show his objective development as a prototypical hero.”22 In Friend, Judge Chŏng Chin-u is a common civil servant who certainly appears to embody the magnanimous virtue of the state-desired hero. Yet this description of Chŏng Chin-u reduces him to the typical hero or heroine as seen in North Korean literature from previous decades. What makes Chŏng Chin-u the hero of the novel is not his strong moral qualities, unbureaucratic attitude, and keen sense of revolutionizing the family; in fact, it is the opposite.

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Women, Divorce, and the State 125

Friend makes a great effort to reconstruct the image of flat heroes from previ- ous decades in North Korean fiction so that a hero is no longer an unattainable force of absolute virtue and perfection but rather a human being who also dis- plays shortcomings, weaknesses, and character flaws. Even in comparison to rep- resentations of other hidden heroes in 1980s fiction, Friend elaborates on Chŏng Chin-u’s psychological and emotional transformation, providing a sense of hu- manity to his otherwise magnanimous and infallible character. Chŏng Chin-u is by all means not a flat hero who only emits Party-desired virtues. Then again, he is not a rounded character like a papier-mâché figure composed of layers and lay- ers of Party slogans. In Friend, the hero suffers from the revenants of anger, ha- tred, frustration, and regret. Friend delves into the monstrosity of human emotions to show the ambiguity of the novel’s prescribed resolution. That is, rather than posing a materialist problem for the hero to resolve, Friend poses hu- man emotions as the object of dilemma and fright. The image of the hero meta- phorically wrestling with his own emotions produces the aesthetics of a literary character that had been overshadowed in literature by the infallible heroes of the 1970s, whose heroism was mostly based on overcoming their physical environ- ment. The extent to which a literary hero struggles with himself in Friend sug- gests a shift in the aesthetics of depicting heroism in fiction of the 1980s. The hero’s formidable enemy is himself, his decentered self, his divided allegiance to the state, and his delinquent moral attitude. The irony in Friend is that, in the midst of resolving other couples’ marital problems, Chŏng Chin-u cannot seem to manage his own marital problems, which results in his entertaining thoughts of divorcing his wife: “He had to raise his son from kindergarten to the day he went to the military because his wife was gone most of the time. He complied with every one of his wife’s requests and desires. However, now he is frustrated and has been complaining about his wife and their family life. He has become indifferent toward his wife’s research experiment.”23

The judge consigns domestic responsibilities to the woman’s “natural” role as the nurturer of the family. Chŏng Chin-u is frustrated with his wife’s extended absences from her domestic duties. When he comes home to an empty apart- ment, Chŏng Chin-u thinks to himself: “Why do I have to do all the housework? She should be the one doing it; she’s the wife. It’s not like her research is ground- breaking. It’s just cultivating vegetables.”24 Chŏng Chin-u has a sexist perspec- tive on women’s role in society and in the nuclear family. Although he encourages women to partake in national responsibilities outside of the home, he feels that it is also the duty of women to manage the domestic space. For Chŏng Chin-u, these include raising the child, cooking for her husband, cleaning the house, and standing by the side of her husband. His complaints toward his wife come from

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126 Chapter Four

her nonconformity to the societal demands of a housewife. In the later stage of his married life, Chŏng Chin-u has come to expect his wife to assume gendered roles and refers to these specified roles as the woman’s ethical response to her basic nature. For example, when Sun-hŭi comes to Chŏng Chin-u to file for di- vorce, he sends her away saying, “Take care of your husband and your son. Di- vorce is one thing, but fulfilling your ethical responsibility as a wife and mother is another.”25 Chŏng Chin-u conflates Sun-hŭi’s national duty with domestic work as the single embodiment of what all women ought to do in the DPRK. This enduring North Korean cultural code of imbalanced gender roles is manifested in much of Paek Nam-nyong’s writing.

Paek Nam-nyong portrays Chŏng Chin-u, an honorable judge and a state representative, as the caretaker of domestic duties in order to elicit sympathy from his readers. The image of Chŏng Chin-u carrying his son on his back is sup- posed to be seen as an emasculated patriarch rather than a supportive husband. It is not “normal” for a man to have a child hanging on his back in the Korean culture, as this duty is typically attributed to women. The novel adds that Chŏng Chin-u has had to raise his son from kindergarten to the age he entered the mili- tary, which is well over ten years of rearing his son by himself. The portrayal of Chŏng Chin-u’s “domestic” duties does not imply that he has learned the diffi- culty of raising a child and working at the court or that he understands the dou- ble labor, or “second shift,” women have had to face and still face in the DPRK.26 In this sense, Friend maintains the strict dichotomy of gendered roles as pre- scribed by the patriarchal social codes of conduct. Any crossing or inversion of gendered duties in Friend is described as a temporary substitution rather than a reconsideration and rebalancing of gender identity.

In Friend, the patriarchal social dynamics do not come undone with a man doing what is perceived as woman’s duties. But Chŏng Chin-u comes to recog- nize the importance of his wife’s research for the community and that a healthy family must overcome personal interests for the advancement of the state. He, therefore, transcends the limits of his personal angst toward his wife and sup- ports the agricultural endeavors of the collective for which his wife works:

Sometimes I complain and vent my frustrations. But it’s been a rewarding life. This is beyond the expectations of our wedding night. To be honest with you, a few days ago, I was not able to think with such a pure and sympathetic heart. I began to envy other families where the wife stayed at home and lived a normal life. Don’t be discouraged. Radishes and cab- bages have to be considered a success. Don’t you think the villagers at Yŏnsudŏk will be able to enjoy the cabbages and radishes by next year?27

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Women, Divorce, and the State 127

Chŏng Chin-u’s ability to accept his wife’s research indicates he has resolved his emotional and psychological struggles that are not readily overcome with only the correct political consciousness. He does not undo his sexist views be- cause this is not the story of the transformation of a patriarchal hero. Instead, he is a projection of a malleable subject that absorbs and manifests a virtuosity of compassion for his wife. Unlike most of the gung-ho, flat, and prescribed heroes in narratives of the 1970s and even the 1980s, Chŏng Chin-u’s heroism derives from the understanding of his subjectivity and his surrounding conditions. He resists retaliating against his wife or complaining; instead, he accepts his fate of isolation and emasculation as a husband who needs to perform the domestic du- ties. His magnanimity as a hero in the novel is a result of a shift in recognition: he does not fight to change circumstances; he endeavors to change his perspective of the existing circumstances.

Very much like Hegel’s Absolute Spirit (Geist), spirit in North Korea is self- consciousness recognizing itself in relation to other self-consciousnesses. Through this dialectical process (Aufhebung), self-consciousness becomes aware of the fundamental unity of its rationalized reality. North Korean literature, then, demonstrates the process of self-consciousness recognizing itself amid its social environment. The protagonist begins as a conscious being who is simply aware of his surroundings. Through the course of the story, the protagonist comes to recognize his own identity and desires through the presence of another character. The protagonist is now self-aware in relation to another self-conscious being. As the two (or more) characters in the story conflict and resolve their per- sonal issues, they come to recognize their true identity, which is in the identity of the collective.

The regime of the Same in the North Korean context established the spirit (chŏngsin), rationality, and absolute patriarchal tyranny at the center of all epis- temological apparatuses that make up the political society. Spirit is supposed to be devoid of sexed/gendered bodies, as women were desexualized in the discur- sive construction of motherhood. Spirit relates only to self-consciousness. Through fiction, the North Korean state has been asserting the unisex nature of thought, the “unsexed” discourse that does not differentiate between male and female ways of thinking. The state is correct in that there is a unisexual thought; however, the uniform thought it has adopted is masculine.

The family revolution campaign through the elevation of the hidden hero has engendered a patriarchal, phallocentric, logocentric, and misogynistic preroga- tive of the Same, reinstating state-orchestrated hierarchies: man/woman, hus- band/wife, and father/mother. The male-centered discourse creates its own territory in which women are subjected, drawn into the regime of the Same

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128 Chapter Four

under the guise of sexual and gender equality. But the discourse turns out to be a tyrannical institution of oppression, discipline, and reconfiguration. Women in North Korean literature find themselves at the mercy of the political linguistic system. The sexual difference of women is effaced, elided, and displaced from the totality of the state, which paradoxically claims that there is no sexual difference in the realm of political consciousness. Within the parameters of the masculine state politics and epistemology, women are required to become “rational” beings and to disregard any sense of ontological differences.

By the 1970s, the spirit of the socialist collective had faded into the forgetful- ness and the patriarchal spirit of Kimilsungism had found its home in the regime of the Same. Kimilsungism became the logocentric, phallocentric, and patriar- chal center through which every aspect of North Korean society is governed and subjugated. In establishing Kimilsungism at the center of thought, behavior, and performativity, the regime of the Same reconstructs and normalizes the episte- mological understanding of society, culture, and politics, particularly in its rela- tion to women. The regime of the Same is a male-centered political system that proscribes women from recognition, consideration, and participation in the po- litical forum of men. In Friend, Judge Chŏng Chin-u criticizes only the men in the narrative; he does not articulate the Party’s directives to the women. This is because the narrative is about the transformation of men. Friend appears to fol- low the formulaic structure of typical North Korean fiction on families with the restoration of men as the patriarchs of the family and by extension the strong- hold of the nation. Chŏng Chin-u compels Ch’ae Rim to confess his fraudulent misdeeds; he criticizes the director at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater for not maintaining social and ideological harmony at work; he convinces the coal miner to quit drinking and to pursue his long-lost passion; he transforms Sŏk- ch’un into a “new man” (sae in’gan),28 helping him to acquire the latest techno- logical skills appropriate to the Party’s demands; and, most important, he undergoes his own state-desired transformation, qualifying him as the hero of the narrative. For Chŏng Chin-u, the family is structured with the male as the head of the family and everyone else subordinate to him. The husband and wife share a balance of power according to the DPRK Family Law, but, in practice and for Chŏng Chin-u, the man is the ultimate administrator of power within a so- cially contrived patriarchal system.

However, there is an unresolved issue in the novel. The end of the novel does not fulfill its enclosure of the narrative as in most cases in North Korean fiction. The story does not ensure that the men indeed have transformed. The contrived ending seems to resist closure or, at least, suspends the completion of the novel. Readers are left with the thoughts of Chŏng Chin-u, who claims that Sun-hŭi

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Women, Divorce, and the State 129

and Sŏk-ch’un will resolve their differences and build an optimistic family: “Chŏng Chin-u looked at Ho-nam and tried to quell his envious thoughts. Don’t worry, child. Your parents will remarry. They may not have a wedding ceremony, but they will prepare a new family. It will be a spiritual wedding.”29 For Chŏng Chin-u, a “new family” is built not only on conjugal relations but more impor- tantly on the spiritual (chŏngsinjŏkin), or the recognition of the Kimilsungist ide- ology. Indeed, the spiritual wedding does not refer to the reformation of the nuclear family but to a new commitment to the patriarchal state, a political vow to the Great Leader, and a reincorporation into the regime of the Same. The nu- clear family is supposed to elevate itself, sublate itself, go beyond itself to and for the state. Meanwhile, where are the women in the novel?

Apolitical Tears of Women

At face value, Friend appears to typify the commonplace narrative pattern in North Korean fiction where a male authority figure brings contending individu- als to a better understanding of what the state desires from each of them and thus restores the harmony of the conjugal family, and by extension the community. Although this is accurate for the men in the novel, the women offer a different perspective of the patriarchal social structure. Each woman in Friend contests, resists, and questions the oppressive discourse of the Same through the shedding of tears, which diverge from the metaphoric conventions of tears in other North Korean literature.

The trope of tears in North Korean fiction exemplifies the external manifes- tation of a character’s determination to live a life wholly committed and devoted to the state. The most important and prevalent kind of tears women shed (and in some cases men as well) in North Korean fiction is a reflection of their ineffable emotions on encountering Kim Il Sung. For example, the leader comes to a fac- tory or a collective farm, and the overzealous people respond in the form of tears. The mere presence of the leader evokes tears. Another kind of tears is tears of disappointment, shame, regret, memory, and joy shared among characters. For example, a woman is frustrated with her coworkers; a worker is shamed before his comrades for not living up to Party standards; a man regrets his days of not abiding by the Party’s directives; an elderly man remembers the day when Kim Il Sung liberated Korea from Japan; men recall a nurse who sacrificed her life dur- ing the Korean War; a woman is overjoyed at the success of machinery at her factory; a mother is proud of her children fighting for the revolution; a soldier returns home after military service—the list goes on. The common denominator in the majority of the narratives that have characters in tears is the understanding

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130 Chapter Four

of one’s love (or lack thereof) for Kim Il Sung, the Party, and the state. Tears in North Korean fiction are metonyms of collectivity that respond to social, politi- cal, and historical events; they do not pertain to the crying individual.

When Kim Il Sung died in July of 1994 and when Kim Jong Il died in Decem- ber of 2011, many DPRK citizens wailed along the streets as the funeral proces- sion drove by. At Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum, numerous North Koreans shed tears as they observe the embalmed body of their leader. The death of Kim Il Sung was called the Great National Bereavement, as the entire nation mourned the loss of its one and only leader. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung state that the image of collective lamentation was at once familiar and deeply alien to South Koreans, who viewed the event on television news: “It was familiar to the extent that the way in which individual mourners expressed their grief was akin to how Koreans would express grief at family funerals, according to the custom of public lamen- tation. The spectacle in Pyongyang’s public squares appeared alien, however, be- cause public lamentations in traditional Korean custom are usually for the loss of a close kinsman rather than a political leader.”30

The public display of lamentation for the deaths of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il was a political response to the people’s solidarity and collectivity. The veracity of one’s true emotional response was of little concern in the public space. The very fact that the individual was present in the public square—whether out of one’s own volition or because one was forced to be present—demonstrated his or her political participation. In the public sphere, the individual’s emotional re- sponse was part of a shared response demonstrating how the nation felt, grieved, and displayed its loss. Kwon and Chung claim that the death of Kim Il Sung was akin to the death of a father for many North Koreans, that it was a family affair.31 The exhibition of tears was a participatory gesture of paying respect to the father of the nation. Whether or not a citizen of the DPRK cried at the announcement of the deaths of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the solitude of one’s private sphere was a political statement in and of itself—unresponsiveness was also a response.

Although tears for Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il interpellate the crying indi- vidual as a subject of the state, at times those very tears are indecipherable and uncertain as to whether they are representing the spirit of the state or undermin- ing it. The four female characters in Friend produce tears that are radically differ- ent from the conventions of shedding tears in North Korean fiction. The tears of these women reveal that individual emotions dwell beneath the surface of collec- tive political utterances. Ch’ae Rim’s wife, the schoolteacher, Ŭn-ok, and Sun-hŭi are worth examining, as their tears are directed at the injustice of the patriarchal system in the DPRK.

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Women, Divorce, and the State 131

The tears that Ch’ae Rim’s wife exhibits in court are of regret for supporting her callous husband over the years while he was a university student rather than living for herself. The novel does not provide the reader with the name of Ch’ae Rim’s wife—she is simply referred to as the “wife.” Her nameless character is al- ready marginalized from the main narrative and the correct political life she is supposed to live. She is a passing character, not even a secondary character. She is given neither a name nor a voice in the narrative—she has no spoken lines. She only dwells in Chŏng Chin-u’s memory, and, in that memory, she only cries. But her tears move Judge Chŏng Chin-u more than words.

The wife had been working for a reforestation company to support her two children and her husband, who is away at a university in the city. Her hands had become calloused from planting trees, her skin burnt from staying out in the sun for extended hours, and her body emaciated from lack of nutrients. She never spent her hard-earned wages on herself (e.g., to purchase new clothes or eat well). She wired most of her wages to her husband in the city. When she would visit him, he would mistreat her and embarrass her in front of his city-slicker friends. He never appreciated her but took advantage of his submissive wife. She finally filed for divorce, and Judge Chŏng Chin-u approved the case. At first, Judge Chŏng Chin-u was concerned for the wife’s well-being, but he saw the wife’s de- termination to live a healthier life without her husband:

She stated quietly that she could no longer live with her husband. She began to cry incessantly. These were tears of regret for having lived a life of misery. Although they could be perceived as the tears of a frail woman, they were tears of a firm determination for a new day ahead of her. She was the kind of person who worked harder when her hands hurt from planting trees in the mountains. Like a wild chrysanthemum, she will emerge from the undergrowth of the dead forest.32

This passage reveals the emotional and psychological strength of the wife, and her determination to live independently from the constraints of marriage. Her strength derives neither from community support nor from her platonic love for Kim Il Sung. Her focus is on her new life journey without her husband and with- out the social construct of wifehood. The divorce verdict releases the wife from the bondage of marriage, which the text describes as a “dead forest” that has been obstructing her identity as a woman in a tightly structured patriarchal society. The divorce is not only from Ch’ae Rim but from the institution of marriage on which her entire life painfully hinged. Now she has the ability to redefine her iden- tity as a woman and to utter the one word that has been so alien to her: freedom.

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132 Chapter Four

The novel does not explicate what the wife does with her newfound freedom. On one occasion, Chŏng Chin-u runs into her in the city, but the wife lowers her head and walks past him without greeting him. The wife has decidedly distanced herself from engaging in small talk with the judge. Divorce in the DPRK may be considered a shameful act of violence against the nuclear family as it affects the harmony of the Great Family, but the wife’s attitude toward Chŏng Chin-u tran- scends the social stigma against divorcées. The wife refuses to speak to a male authority figure. She breaks the code of etiquette to her elder and to a hierarchi- cally positioned legal administrator. The state has granted her the divorce and has empowered her as a human being, and she no longer feels the need to suc- cumb to social authority by reengaging with Judge Chŏng Chin-u.

The second instance of tears comes from the schoolteacher, who lives in the apartment below Chŏng Chin-u. Her tears represent disdain for the court’s decision to divorce Ch’ae Rim and his wife, leaving the children confused by the adults’ selfish reprisal of their happiness. The schoolteacher tells the son, Ch’ae Yŏng-il, about the divorce. She has noticed that Yŏng-il has changed for the worse since his parents’ divorce. One day, the schoolteacher meets Chŏng Chin-u on a road, confronts him about the court’s decision to divorce Yŏng-il’s parents, and expresses her disappointment in a law that cares little for victim- ized children.

The schoolteacher appears to be the most passive character among the women in Friend. She waits in front of the apartment complex every night for her hus- band to return home from work. Chŏng Ching-u respects the schoolteacher for doing this and often wishes his wife would do the same for him. The school- teacher appears to be the ideal housewife who caters to the needs of her husband. She neither reprimands her husband for being an alcoholic nor complains about his complacent attitude toward his work. The schoolteacher is supposed to exem- plify the image of a submissive housewife and an upright member of society.

However, the novel does not simply delineate her as a flat character for the purposes of polarizing good and bad, moral and immoral, and submissive and defiant characteristics. In fact, the schoolteacher is the only character in Friend who reprimands Judge Chŏng Chin-u directly to his face, causing him to regret his decision to divorce Ch’ae Rim and his wife. Chŏng Chin-u is supposed to be the people’s friend and the hero of the narrative. Yet the schoolteacher has been harboring disdain toward the law and toward Chŏng Chin-u, waiting for the ap- propriate moment to confront him. When she meets the judge on the road, she proceeds to tell him about her student Yŏng-il. During lunch at a school picnic, she had gathered all of the students but recognized that Yŏng-il was missing. She searched the entire park, but Yŏng-il was not to be found. She finally went to the

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Women, Divorce, and the State 133

riverbank and saw Yŏng-il, sitting by a large boulder. As she approached Yŏng-il, she noticed that he was not sitting alone but with his sister, Yŏng-sun. They were sharing lunch. They hid from the other students and from their teachers in order to avoid public scrutiny. They chose not to participate in the collective school activity but to take a short moment to remind each other of the strength of their family bond. The schoolteacher says: “No matter how much a teacher loves her students and would, therefore, do whatever it takes to help her students succeed, I realized that the love of a teacher wanes in comparison to the love between blood-related siblings. And it’s precisely these kids, whose parents have kept apart their love for each other, it’s precisely these kids who suffer most.”33

The schoolteacher is incorrect in her statement. The parents have not kept the siblings’ love apart, but rather the law has separated the siblings. The law has de- termined that the siblings will no longer live under the same roof with a single parent. However, the schoolteacher is correct in saying that neither the siblings’ parents nor the law can sever the love between the siblings. The schoolteacher recites the proverbial “blood is thicker than water,” stating that neither a state institution such as school nor any comrade from that institution can supplant the familial bond that exists between the siblings and their biological mother.

The argument essentializing family members as a natural bond contrasts that familial bond with the artificial political bond with the Great Family of the DPRK. Friend illustrates that the love between siblings outweighs state- prescribed emotions toward the Great Leader, the Party, and the nation. Judge Chŏng Chin-u’s divorce verdict is not enough to keep the siblings apart, as Cre- on’s verdict was not enough to keep Antigone away from her brother. The law may advise or direct people to live a certain way, but it cannot fully control hu- man emotions and human experience. Upon discovering the siblings, the school- teacher does not admonish the two for alienating themselves from the collective. She, too, understands the strength of their love for each other and allows them to enjoy the precious moment together. The siblings’ love overwhelms the school- teacher and causes her to doubt the law’s verdict on their parents’ divorce. In short, the schoolteacher articulates a humanitarian cry to Judge Chŏng Chin-u that prioritizes family commitment above legal or political commitment. “Whether the divorce was done legally or not, I feel that separating these kids was a crime. Comrade Judge, why did the court permit the divorce? Was it for the adults’ new life, their newfound happiness? Can there be happiness for parents who have stripped away the happiness of their children?”34

The schoolteacher’s words are strong and visceral. For the schoolteacher, the law may be rational and may legislate the best interests of the citizens of the DPRK, but, if it has no compassion for the people, it is utterly criminal. She feels

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134 Chapter Four

that separating the children from each other and from their parents is a “crime,” regardless of the legal rhetoric of child welfare. Judge Chŏng Chin-u has divorced Ch’ae Rim and his wife, thinking that he was doing the wife a favor. But he now realizes that the children have been negatively affected by the divorce, and this, in turn, has affected the schoolteacher. She expresses the law’s inhumanity to- ward the people whom it is supposed to serve. Although there is nothing Judge Chŏng Chin-u can do about the divorce at this point, he can feel the embittered tears of the schoolteacher that are directed toward him.

Through the tears of the schoolteacher, Paek Nam-nyong reaches into the depths of human love. Although the legal system of the DPRK is supposed to provide civil rights, freedom, and happiness for its citizens,35 the schoolteacher criticizes it for its lack of true compassion and love for the people. The school- teacher questions the ethical fiber of the court’s all too easy verdict of guilty/not guilty without recognizing the consequences of such a decision. The school- teacher may have appeared passive and submissive throughout the novel, but it was only a matter of time before she confronted the judge. The schoolteacher has worked all her life for her country, but, on this day, on this road, in the face of Judge Chŏng Chin-u, she turns her face with disapproval. This is a not a sign of rebellion or anger toward the state. Instead, she is expressing her sincere desire for her beloved country to improve the sociopolitical infrastructure and living conditions for its citizens, including the children.

The third set of tears comes from Chŏng Chin-u’s wife, Ŭn-ok, whose mind is constantly on her field research back in her hometown rather than on her role as a housewife. Ŭn-ok studied biology in order to research a hybrid vegetable that can withstand the rough terrain of her hometown farm. At first, Chŏng Chin-u promises to support Ŭn-ok with her research plans. But he never anticipated her long absences from him and from her duties as a wife. On the night of their mar- riage, Ŭn-ok stares out of the window with tears in her eyes, longing to be with the villagers in the place of her true residence: “I can’t help but recall my child- hood. I feel like I’m still in that place. It feels like some other woman got married. I’m scared. I feel guilty for leaving Yŏnsudŏk over there while living over here. In that village, there are the old-timers and comrades whom I grew up with.”36

Chŏng Chin-u mistakenly perceives her tears as joyful tears at being married to him. Although Ŭn-ok is supposed to be overwhelmed with the thought of starting a new revolutionary family with her husband, she is unable to depart emotionally and psychologically with her hometown family members, whom she grew up with and whom she cares for more than her husband. Ŭn-ok’s longing for her villagers must not be understood as a desire to live among the collective or an expression of the correct political consciousness by desiring to assist her

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Women, Divorce, and the State 135

hometown village for the sake of the country. In other words, her desire to go back home must not be read as unfailing political commitment where she will sacrifice even her husband for the Great Leader. Instead, Ŭn-ok’s tears of nostal- gia are indicative of her yearning for an imagined community that lies beyond her political reality.

Ŭn-ok is never home throughout the narrative. At the beginning of the novel, Chŏng Chin-u returns to his empty home to find only a short letter from Ŭn-ok saying that she has had to return to her village because of an emergency. He re- sents Ŭn-ok for prioritizing her research before her family. Meanwhile, he is the one who raises their son, and her long absences make Chŏng Chin-u a self- sustaining man. Of course, Chŏng Chin-u changes his resentful attitude toward Ŭn-ok through the course of the narrative. At the end of the novel, Chŏng Chin-u expects his home to be empty but is pleasantly greeted by Ŭn-ok. After the two have dinner, Ŭn-ok softly asks permission to leave for her hometown again.

Ŭn-ok is constantly moving from one location to another; she is never settled in one particular place for any length of time. The only place that is stable and unchanging is her hometown, which is the creation of her imagination. She cre- ates the space and makes the time to leave for her hometown. Her research to improve the vegetation of her hometown will never be successful (she is aware of this as well), but she returns to the place of her youth and memories because that is where she finds her identity.

Ŭn-ok is not a defiant character in the novel. However, she may be the only female character in all of North Korean fiction who fails to conform to the stric- tures of what a housewife ought to do from the beginning to the end of the nar- rative. She is never reprimanded for her domestic negligence but is accepted has having duties beyond the parameters of domesticity and femininity. She is not an antagonistic character who is evil in the eyes of the other characters or readers. She appears to be performing her national duties as an intellectual assisting her technologically and agriculturally less advanced village. There is nothing errone- ous about her actions in the narrative. But Ŭn-ok unassumingly breaks all the social and cultural codes of a housewife. She does not change or even attempt to conform to the role of the state-prescribed housewife. Instead, Chŏng Chin-u undergoes a transformation from a chauvinistic to an open-minded husband.

The character delineation of Ŭn-ok is arguably the most creative in all of North Korean fiction. Ŭn-ok is literally the most elusive character in Friend be- cause of her perpetual absence in a narrative that tries to cement the family revo- lution to the responsibility of women. Even at the end of the narrative, Ŭn-ok does not come home to celebrate success in her research as the majority of North Korean narratives typically would have her do but rather claims that she must

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136 Chapter Four

return to her village for more tests. It is evident that Ŭn-ok’s research will be continuous, well beyond the scope of the narrative. The story does not end “hap- pily” for Chŏng Chin-u, and the family revolution will not be completed. Ŭn-ok must return to her hometown and be among her friends and villagers. This is the only way to dry Ŭn-ok’s tears and keep her happy. She is the missing link in the unity of the family revolution, but she would prefer to maintain her connection with her childhood memories than with a politically institutionalized formation of the nuclear family. She is not alone in thinking this. In the next section, I will closely analyze Ch’ae Sun-hŭi’s tears, which, unlike Ŭn-ok’s, carry a resounding and thunderous cry against the patriarchal state.

Song of Sun-hŭi: A Different Linguistic System

Sun-hŭi imagined divorce would be as swift and easy as her performances on stage. She imagined her unhappy marriage would end with her plea to the judge. She imagined leaving the courthouse as a new and liberated woman. She imagined never seeing Sŏk-ch’un toiling over his invention again. She imagined starting a fresh life with only her son. She never imagined her divorce would be a struggle against a most formidable opponent—Judge Chŏng Chin-u.

Although the main conflict in Friend appears to be between the two antago- nistic cadres Chŏng Chin-u and Ch’ae Rim, the implicit conflict is between Chŏng Chin-u and Sun-hŭi—a power struggle between the state and an indi- vidual. Ko In-hwan allegorizes Sŏk-ch’un as the state and Sun-hŭi as the family, and argues that the harmony of the state and the family represents the fulfill- ment of the family revolution promoted by the Party.37 Ko’s observation is cor- rect in its prima facie reading of the married couple and perhaps captures the reading the Party expects from the readers. The view that Chŏng Chin-u repre- sents the failure of the state, the one who is unable to stem the individualistic tendencies in Sun-hŭi, thus creating fissures in the community, may be an icono- clastic reading. However, it is this reading that resists the novel’s optimistic en- closure and allows difference and multiple readings—a new linguistic system—to become visible from the margins of the narrative.

Sun-hŭi pleads for divorce not for the purpose of disrupting the harmony of the state but simply because she cannot live with Sŏk-ch’un anymore.38 Her cry “I can’t stand it anymore” refers to her intolerable relationship with Sŏk-ch’un. Sun-hŭi’s initial request for divorce derives from her incompatibility with her husband—from her private marital affairs. But Sun-hŭi quickly recognizes that her contention with her husband has become a larger issue beyond the limits of her private world, an issue that involves the state. “Marriage is a legal binding”

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Women, Divorce, and the State 137

are the words of Chŏng Chin-u, indicating that Sun-hŭi’s marriage to Sŏk-ch’un irrefutably belongs to the state. Sun-hŭi learns that her private affairs have been in the public purview from the moment she stepped into the contractual agree- ment of marriage, an institution that is protected by the state. The narrator says: “When a man and a woman fall in love and decide to marry, it’s their freedom. But, they have to register their new family. The law protects the entity of a family. Divorce is disconnecting the relationship between a husband and wife; it’s not a personal matter. The family’s fate as the fundamental cell of society is concerned with the greater family of the society and sociopolitics.”39

In Friend, a wife’s marital problems with her husband are a metonym for her dissatisfaction with the institution of marriage, her resistance to becoming a state-desired woman, wife, and mother. The notion of the family revolution de- vises standard protocols by which husband and wife ought to behave. The rheto- ric of the family as the fundamental cell of society is the state’s method of controlling and administering power over the people so that each family can re- flect and recite the Party directives for emulating the members of the Great Rev- olutionary Family. Sun-hŭi is aware of this subject-making discourse and asserts that she has made efforts to be the state-desired wife: “I have been faithful to my husband’s demands. I have stood by him and his work, the one thing he consid- ers more important than me! I’ve been submissive to him while he has been working on a single project for the past five years. I didn’t care if he did not bring home a salary or if he didn’t help me with house chores. I’ve endured it all and continued to live with him.”40

Sun-hŭi’s attempt at being an ideal wife proved to test the limits of her agency and individuality. It may have been her choice to love and marry Sŏk-ch’un, but it was not her choice to become a manufactured product of the state-prescribed wife. Her faithfulness and submission to the patriarchal order has reduced her and forced her to conform to the state against her will. She is the oppressed and disenfranchised victim of the patriarchal state. This is because the concept of “woman” marks a point of dispute and problematizes language itself so that her injustice cannot be registered in the grand narrative of the DPRK. She cannot appeal her injustice to the court of men not because she does not have a legitimate case, but because she does not belong to the linguistic rules of men. The patriar- chal state has inscribed the woman into its discourse and has oppressed her through its sexist semantics. If she speaks, she has to use the language of men to make her case. Sun-hŭi is frustrated with Judge Chŏng Chin-u because he cannot seem to understand her plea. The conflict between Sun-hŭi and the judge is about the legitimacy of her divorce petition, but it is more about rationalizing the woman who refuses to be rationalized under male standards of consciousness.

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138 Chapter Four

Sun-hŭi feels the more she speaks “rationally” to the judge about her case, the more she loses her identity as a woman. She is caught in an aporetic situation: she cannot express the wrong done to her by the male-centered social system unless she articulates the language of logocentrism, which would then subjugate her back into the hierarchical structure in which women are at the mercy of the men. The woman is the victim of North Korea’s patriarchal discursive conditions, in which she cannot express her loss or suffering as “damage” that deserves restitu- tion. Lyotard calls this a différend, which is when something “asks” to be articu- lated but then suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into words right away.41 Lyotard says, “A différend is born from a wrong and is signaled by si- lence”; when there is a différend, damage has already occurred.42 A wrong takes place when one’s loss or suffering cannot be given a determined meaning (a value) and cannot be reified in the language of exchange, or, if it can be reified, the exchange is blocked for lack of currency—the damage cannot be rectified. Sun-hŭi is the victim of a différend in the jurisdiction of her male counterparts, but, at the same time, she perpetually questions the ontology and epistemology of the grand narrative of the state as the permanently contested site of meaning.

Sun-hŭi faces an additional problem when the state orders her to “let go” of her child and become the ideal self-sacrificing mother. Sun-hŭi realizes her pow- erlessness before the law. She has given birth to her son, but she realizes that her son was never hers to begin with. The law does not decide what is best for indi- viduals but what is best for the state: “As soon as she grabbed Ho-nam and pulled him into her arms, Judge Chŏng Chin-u reprimanded her as he had at his office. ‘Comrade Sun-hŭi, let the child go.’ She realized that the law supported her son’s welfare over hers.”43 The law tries to reduce Sun-hŭi to a mother whose duty is to “let go” of what is rightfully hers to the state like the mother in the film and novel Sea of Blood. The state instructs her to give up what is legally the state’s and ex- pects her to become reabsorbed into the discourse of the Same.

The law is more concerned for Ho-nam not only because he is an innocent victim of disputing parents but because he is the future of the state.44 In a previ- ous divorce hearing, Chŏng Chin-u had remanded a boy to his father’s custody for the benefit of the boy’s future, which was related to his physical and mental growth.45 It is the state that “establishes” the child’s patriarchal identity, while the mother “raises” and “lets him go.” This logic asserts that children need to be well fostered in order to pass from the family to the state in Hegelian terms. “The fam- ily attains completion in the bringing up of children and the dissolution of the family.”46 For Hegel, ethical life derives from the family but soon suppresses, in- terferes, preserves, and sublates the spirit of individualism. Though each individ- ual originates from a family, the ethical calling for the individual is not to remain

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Women, Divorce, and the State 139

in the family but to break away and even dissolve the immediate family for the state in order to become a completed individual. Hegel says, “The youth goes forth from the unconscious life of the family and becomes the individuality of the com- munity.”47 The family is a temporary space, the realm of the unconscious, before the individual (most notably men for Hegel) secures his identity in the state. Motherhood, then, as Suzy Kim discusses, is the selfless channel that allows for the son to enter into the state.48 While Sun-hŭi tries to hold on to what is hers, the ominous administrator of the law orders her to “let the child go,” reminding her that the tug of war is not with her husband but with the state.

Even Sun-hŭi’s best friend at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater advises Sun-hŭi to “let go” of her stubbornness and submit to the patriarchal order. On her way to work, Sun-hŭi runs into Ŭn-mi, her best friend, who says, “Sun-hŭi, it’s about time that you let it go.”49 Ŭn-mi, with the best intentions, tries to as- suage Sun-hŭi’s anxiety by attempting to sympathize with her marital problems. Ŭn-mi shares how she deals with her own husband: “I just shut my mouth, bite my tongue, and take it all in.”50 Ŭn-mi represents the submissive, rational wife in Friend whose individuality has been subsumed in the patriarchal system.

However, Sun-hŭi continues to assert her agency to the political order. When her director at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater blames Sun-hŭi’s marital prob- lems for interfering with the business, Sun-hŭi says, “If I am bringing shame to the company, then I will quit.”51 Sun-hŭi’s claim is initially aggressive and threatening to the status quo. The prospect of quitting her job at the Provincial Performing Arts Theater, which is under the aegis of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation, reveals an antagonistic attitude that indicates her lack of the correct ideology. Sun- hŭi is faced with an indeterminable choice between her career and defending her in- dividuality against the patriarchal state. As soon as she utters these words, Sun-hŭi realizes her consequent fate: “In order to persist in her desires, she would have to sacrifice her fame and all that came with her future as a singer. And she would be ostracized from the large family called society.”52 Author Paek Nam-nyong carefully describes this crucial moment in Sun-hŭi’s life as a decision that generates unutter- able pain and agony for Sun-hŭi. Sun-hŭi’s torment is intended to show that such decisions are not “ready-made,” prescribed, or resolvable by the application of the state’s formulaic directives. Although Sun-hŭi may be willing to abandon her career and fame to resist the male discourse, “all her frightening thoughts derived from her anxiety and despair at accepting the fact that she would be a wretched being.”53

Sun-hŭi would be left without a job, a family, her son, and, most important, her dignity as an individual. Her wretchedness derives not only from the pros- pect of her deprivation of society but also from her inevitable absorption into the very social order she has tried so hard to resist. Sun-hŭi has nowhere to turn, no

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140 Chapter Four

one to depend on—her best friend Ŭn-mi urges her to remain married, her direc- tor nearly fires her, Chŏng Chin-u refuses to divorce the couple, and even her son seeks his father. Where can Sun-hŭi find refuge?

Memories. Although Chŏng Chin-u asks Sŏk-ch’un to recall the romantic days to tenderize Sŏk-ch’un’s calloused feelings toward Sun-hŭi, the judge does not solicit Sun-hŭi’s past. The narrative does not dwell on her side of the story. Her voice is not part of the grand narrative of the patriarchs. Sŏk-ch’un’s story is brought in to reestablish his responsibility as the head of the family, where even the idea of memories serves the construction of the patriarchal state.

Memories in North Korean literature are supposed to function as the opera- tive trope to reconstruct a new identity for the protagonist. Most memories recall the messianic deliverance of Kim Il Sung in the arduous days of the colonial pe- riod or the indelible trauma of the Korean War. Sometimes memories of Kim Il Sung visiting a factory or collective farm or of how the workers have sacrificed their lives for the construction of the nation determine the positive outcome of individuals’ actions. However, Friend is exceptional in that individuals do not recall the nation’s past but their own personal pasts. Of course, these memories serve as a narrative strategy to contextualize the couple’s relationship in the logic of the narrative. In that sense, even these so-called personal memories contribute to the construction of the dominant patriarchal order as they fail to tap into the unconscious level of the storyteller but remain at the conscious level.

Chŏng Chin-u attempts to constitute memory for Sun-hŭi by reminding her of her tenth wedding anniversary. He hopes that thoughts of her anniversary will somehow move her and compel her to accept the social norms that are expected of her. The judge’s attempt to reinforce social and cultural norms in Sun-hŭi’s life proves to be futile when she responds: “Those kinds of days are only meant for normal families.”54 For Sun-hŭi, celebrating her wedding anniversary is a state affair since marriage is institutionalized by the state. To partake in commemo- rating her wedding anniversary would normalize her selfhood to that of a state- desired wife. Sun-hŭi asserts her agency before the face of the law in one last act. When Judge Chŏng Chin-u asks if he may participate in Sun-hŭi’s anniversary celebration, she responds with a nonresponse:

“Would it be fine for me to stop by your house on that day?” asked Chŏng Chin-u.

“Please, who can stop you, Comrade Judge,” responded Sun-hŭi. “No, I’m not going to your house as a judge but as a friend,” said

Chŏng Chin-u. Sun-hŭi left without saying a word.55

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Women, Divorce, and the State 141

Sun-hŭi’s nonresponse is a tacit refusal to acknowledge Chŏng Chin-u’s “friendly” gesture. It extends beyond their dialogue and encroaches upon the disavowal of the entire patriarchal system. She refuses to participate in or be in- corporated into the discourse of the Same—the unitary voice of state-prescribed individuals. Sun-hŭi offers neither tacit consent nor a verbal refusal to the judge. She is not exhibiting a submissive docility to the state’s legal administrator. In- stead her (non)response is a demonstration of her affirmative agency against the tides of the dominant and oppressive system of patriarchs. It is a (non)participa- tory act of ultimate defiance, a defiant act without words using a language that is foreign to the language of the Same. Her deafening silence disrupts the discourse of the Same, throwing it into confusion and chaos.

To Judge Chŏng Chin-u, Sun-hŭi is acting irrationally: she adamantly refuses to remain married to her husband and she breaks the social codes of conduct by leaving the court without bidding farewell to an elderly man. She no longer per- ceives herself to be a docile participant in this systematic patriarchal order but as an anomaly to the family-state. Her words, any words, would have been consid- ered as the participatory kind of rationalism that the state seeks, a rationalism that recognizes the other in Sun-hŭi and attempts to sublate her. Instead of al- lowing herself to fall prey to such rationalism, she chooses of her own volition to exercise her individuality by disregarding the judge’s imposition and by making herself unrecognizable to such rational logic. For Sun-hŭi, the judge’s actions (no matter how innocent they may be) infringe upon her identity, causing her to be- come more defensive rather than to yield to his directives.

But who can stop the law from entering into the premises of Sun-hŭi’s house? Even on her wedding anniversary, the state watches the couple through the gaze of Chŏng Chin-u. The judge attempts to approach Sun-hŭi not as a cold and im- personal bureaucrat but as a gentle and trustworthy friend. The state imposes it- self through the threshold and into the domestic space with familiarity and a smile. It urges Sun-hŭi to let go of her resistance and conform to the normality of her social conditions.

However, normality, for Sun-hŭi, means the effacement of her individuality and the denial of her selfhood. Sun-hŭi understands “normal families” to be those that abide by the dictates of the law, perform the set of practices instructed by the state, and conform to the unitary language governed by the totalizing power of patriarchy. Her attempt at distinguishing herself from normal families does not indicate a claim to sever all ties or to leave the community but to proffer a differ- ent linguistic possibility—albeit a scandalous or marginal claim—from the nor- malizing discourses of the social order. It is a claim that conditions the possibility of otherness, a resistance that does not become reabsorbed into the Same.

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142 Chapter Four

Sun-hŭi’s voice is not heard at the end of the novel. The conclusion is in the voice (or narration) of the judge. Although reading practices in North Korea may instruct readers to accept that Sun-hŭi resigns her obstinate individuality and goes on to forge a new family, the narrative of Friend does not dictate such an ending. It is an inconclusive conclusion. Chŏng Chin-u projects his own utopian imagination at the end of the novel. It is the state’s forceful and contrived imagi- nation that cries for the abnormal to become normal, the irrational to become rational, and women to become wives and mothers. But such binary oppositions do not compel Sun-hŭi to conform to the state directives. She retains her own language, a natural language (not an originary language), a language inextricably tied to her individuality and identity as a woman. Sun-hŭi’s natural language is found in her reveries and not in memories mandated by the state.

Sun-hŭi’s refuge is in imaginings that transgress the limitations set by the subject-making law. Sun-hŭi’s memories are of her childhood and not of the time she dated and married Sŏk-ch’un. Her childhood memories are fused with her imagination, making it difficult to decipher truth from fantasy:

During her carefree childhood days, her dream-filled teenage years, and her pure blossoming adulthood, nature had blessed her with warm and beautiful memories. The dripping sound of rain from the eaves had been an enchanting, vibrant sound. Sun-hŭi thought that each drop of water contained the universe and was the fountain of life. At first, it had dripped like a stringed instrument, but soon it made the sound of a symphony orchestra, producing harmonious melodies as it fell on the pear tree leaves, barn roof tiles, wooden fences, flower gardens, clay pots, and on the dirt path. It seemed that the neighborhood children, who were also listening to the sound of the falling rain, were soon going to all gather at Sun-hŭi’s house. A song was heard. Sun-hŭi’s clear voice joined the voices of the neighborhood children.

“Mom?” What a familiar voice. That voice was now pulling at her shirt, drag-

ging her away from the reveries of her youthful days. Sun-hŭi was tossing and turning in her bed as she returned to reality,

leaving her youthful days with the neighborhood children in her ephem- eral dreams.56

This is the only account of Sun-hŭi’s private, unconscious moments in the novel, the only moment in which gender, class, and the Party do not determine her identity. Sun-hŭi’s reveries open up the realm of the unconscious that

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Women, Divorce, and the State 143

suspends temporality from progressing along its teleological path. Her reveries open up a space that is devoid of temporality. It is uncertain at which point in Sun-hŭi’s life this memory occurred. She is not recalling a specific time but an atemporal space that suspends and dissociates any enclosing narrative. Sun-hŭi’s memory is essentially a nonnarrative. A story is not being told to any particular reader, but rather the narrative of the nation often found in North Korean fiction through memory is being untold by this still frame of Sun-hŭi’s reveries. The state cannot own or become the proprietor of Sun-hŭi’s imaginings. But it will try its best to “pull” and “drag” her away from ungrounded, unconscious, and unideological reveries, which is the dangerous ground on which Sun-hŭi stands. Sun-hŭi inevitably, against her will, must return to reality, to the conscious level, to her ethical and societal responsibilities as her son—the future of the state— gently beckons her.

We must remember that Sun-hŭi’s occupation is as a singer for the Provincial Performing Arts Theater, a bodily medium through which the state’s ideology is reverberated. She is a musical propagandist, an animate instrument of ideology, a vocalist who is supposed to sing in unison with Party directives. Her singing is not only a performance on stage but is supposed to move her audience members to conjoin their sentiments with the state ideology. In this sense, she is a repre- sentative of the state much like Judge Chŏng Chin-u. She also has been speaking the discourse of the Same, the very language that she tries to resist. The differ- ence is that she has managed to disrupt the regime of the Same through her af- firmative resistance to the male discourse and, moreover, her resistance to the enclosure of the narrative form in North Korean literature that decides once and for all the definition of woman.

Sun-hŭi’s reveries are musical; they are a song from nature, perhaps the only song in which she wholeheartedly enjoys participating. Sun-hŭi becomes one with nature as she sings along with its melody. Nature allows her to imagine a universe beyond her social conditions. It is nature that allows her to imagine, that empowers her to think beyond the scope of patriarchal rationality and pro- duce new thoughts, new voices, and new linguistic systems. Her imagination es- capes from the patriarchal economy in which she is supposed to participate. She is not interested in dominating or mastering nature, as the creed of communism would suggest. Instead, she learns from nature the power of self-becoming. After all, nature (chayŏn 自然) contains its own implicit definition of self-becoming. The song of Sun-hŭi is not a Bildungsroman, where a prescribed image (Bild) of a character constructs the teleological narrative. No, Sun-hŭi articulates her thoughts clearly on this issue when she says, “I can’t stand it anymore.” Sun-hŭi’s song is more organic than that. She sings of the unpredictability of human

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144 Chapter Four

nature, self-becoming with no clear direction or ideological teleology like that to which characters in fiction are subject.

The narrative trajectory of Friend is structured in three “acts”: Act 1 is called “Their Love” (Kŭdŭl’ui sarang), Act 2 is “Two Lives” (Tu saenghwal), and Act 3 is titled “Family” (Kajŏng). “Two Lives” suggests the bifurcation of Sun-hŭi and Sŏk-ch’un’s marital relationship in the second act. Sun-hŭi’s reveries begin and end on the same page in the opening of Act 2. They are a flickering moment in the novel, much shorter than in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, where Mrs. Mallard experiences “freedom” from her marriage for only an hour. But Sun- hŭi’s reveries are enough to suggest that perhaps Friend is referring as well to the two separate lives that coexist within Sun-hŭi, her bifurcated life for the state and for herself. This bifurcation is nevertheless a porous relationship, where she negotiates her two lives on a daily basis in public and at home. Sun-hŭi’s reveries do not indicate how an individual ought to behave as a citizen of the DPRK; in- stead, she indulges in a space where imaginings that enable her self-becoming dictate her behavior, her ethics, and her being.

Sun-hŭi establishes herself as the agent that decenters and destabilizes the rhetoric of state-desired womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood—she is abnor- mal in every way. Paek Nam-nyong does not categorize or generalize the aber- rant symptoms of Sun-hŭi in the same way Hegel determines the place of Antigone. Antigone, in committing her crime against the state, becomes Hegel’s person of interest and an allegorical figure for all womankind. Hegel categorizes Antigone’s act of resistance as pertaining to the divine law that women uphold (the law of kinship), which is in opposition to human law or the ethical life (Sit- tlichkeit) that produces the norms of social intelligibility and political rationality. As Hegel maps out his philosophy on reading Antigone, woman stands in oppo- sition to the state and therefore disrupts the completion of the state. However, according to Judith Butler, by supplanting Antigone with “womankind,” Hegel performs the very generalization that Antigone resists.57

In Antigone’s Claim, Butler finds the binary model of man/woman and state/ kinship problematic, as it already establishes an essential relation between them. Butler says, “[Antigone] absorbs the very language of the state against which she rebels, and hers becomes a politics not of oppositional purity but of the scandal- ously impure.”58 Unlike other feminist scholars, who consider Antigone to be a feminist heroine, Butler refutes this claim because Antigone dies at the end of the play. For Butler, Antigone neither makes a strong affirmative claim against the state nor does she live to witness the effects of her claim. Rather than viewing Antigone as a feminist representation, Butler reads the heroine as the “political possibility that emerges when the limits to representation and representability

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Women, Divorce, and the State 145

are exposed.”59 In other words, for Butler, the relationship between family and state is not diametrically opposed and firmly established in its own right but rather implicated in one another in ways that suggest that there is no simple op- position between the two.60

How much of Sun-hŭi’s resistance has been successful or has materialized? Can her voice stand against the thunderous voice of that which she contests? Un- like Antigone and Mrs. Mallard, Sun-hŭi does not die in the end. Sun-hŭi’s trag- edy may be the fact that she will have to continue to live in her patriarchal society without any recourse to a law that will empower her womanhood. She is put back in her place, the domestic space. At the end, when Chŏng Chin-u, who comes to the train station to welcome her back from her tour, asks Sun-hŭi how her trip went, she does not reply. Sun-hŭi’s nonresponse to the judge’s question reflects her position of disassociating herself from the oppressive linguistic hegemony.

The narrator speaks for Sun-hŭi: “She felt the utmost respect and humility before the representative of the law. Her heart grew warmer, and the hope of starting a new life enraptured her.”61 It appears as though (or it is supposed to be understood that) Sun-hŭi has finally given up and has “let go” of her obstinacy and submitted to the existing social order. But Paek’s choice of the words “new life” (saengsinhan sam) suggests new resolve regarding how she will live and practice her individuality within her social conditions. It does not suggest that she has absolutely submitted to the judge’s directives, and the narrator does not suggest that this new life involves her husband—it is undeterminable. After this encounter, Chŏng Chin-u takes Ho-nam to a park to leave Sŏk-ch’un and Sun- hŭi alone. Chŏng Chin-u hopes to reignite the couple’s love for each other. The novel ends as such: “A family is where the love of humanity dwells and is the beautiful world where hope flourishes.”62 Will his hope be transferred to the stoic couple? Does this “family” also include Sun-hŭi?

The state’s agenda is precisely to convert an aberrant individual like Sun-hŭi to a normal state-prescribed woman. Although the law may have legitimized Sun-hŭi and Sŏk-ch’un’s marriage and although Judge Chŏng Chin-u may have brought the couple physically together by the end of the novel, there are no con- crete indications to suggest Sun-hŭi has chosen the path to normality. Sun-hŭi sings her song in her own language with her own melody and her own rhythm. She is not a woman, a wife, and a mother—everything that locates, categorizes her, and fixes her as the complementary and specular other of man—but rather a complex and multilayered embodied subject who has opted to distance herself from the institution of femininity.63

The song of Sun-hŭi does not threaten the stability of community because the narrative of Friend is told mostly from Chŏng Chin-u’s perspective. Sun-

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146 Chapter Four

hŭi’s voice is marginalized and must remain entombed in the deep chambers of the patriarchal society. The criteria for revolutionary fiction are met in Friend: the presence of a positive hero, criticism of problematic individuals, and over- coming a conflict and finding a solution. This may be a universal narrative framework, but North Korean literature lays emphasis on the process of trans- forming aberrant individuals to become loyal followers of the Party. In my read- ing of Friend, Sun-hŭi’s highest obligation is to herself rather than to the ubiquitous demands of the Party. The unitary language coupled with the total- izing ideology of the state attempt to enclose and homogenize Sun-hŭi’s voice into the Same, where stories like hers have never had a chance to challenge the oppressive patriarchal language, perhaps until the publication of Friend. Sun- hŭi is ultimately a voice for which there is no language, thus wholly incompati- ble with the regime of the Same.

But we must not read Friend as a tragic or hopeless narrative. The double ne- gation of Sun-hŭi’s resistance (“I can’t do that! I can’t stand it anymore!”) is an affirmative proclamation of women’s agency against the prescriptive delimita- tions of the patriarchal social order. She speaks to the man, against the man, in his face, to his face, in his own language; and, even in her silence, she makes sure that he hears her. Speaking out against the patriarchal society is a method of ex- ercising her agency.

The next chapter analyzes the expression of a mother’s agency through her deliberate reconstruction of memory that alters the nation’s grand narrative of history. Much as Sun-hŭi’s memory diverges from the national narrative, the mother’s memory in the next chapter also digresses from glorifying the nation. In her memory, the mother reprograms her son—the future of the political soci- ety—not in accordance with state standards of education but in accordance with her own desires and values.

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