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| Subject |
Loneliness in Blue Crab’s Name |
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674 |
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| Author/Position |
Uh Soo-woong Arts & Culture Reporter, The Chosun Ilbo |
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Stewed eel, samgyetang (chicken ginseng soup), gujeolpan (platter of nine delicacies), vin chaud, beef-bone dishes, Vietnamese noodles, ice cream parfait, marinated crab: these dishes serve as the backbone of Kwon Ji-ye’s works. Her short story “Blue Crab Grave” is redolent with the aroma of simmering soy sauce. The central female character is addicted to crabs marinated in soy sauce, while the male narrator, with whom she lived for a while, says that a crab smell emanated from deep inside her; food permeates the story. The author has said, “You only attain artistry if you explore in depth whatever it is that you do best.”
In the 1990s, Kwon spent eight years in France, during which time she earned a doctorate degree in literature at Paris VII University. Originally, the plan had simply been that she would accompany her husband, an art critic, during his study abroad. What was supposed to be a three-year stay turned into eight years, during which the roller coaster of Kwon’s life careened at a speed that she could never have imagined.
Before leaving Korea, Kwon had been a run-of-the-mill middle-school English teacher, but in France she immersed herself in art and literature. This was not a pursuit of art as a fanciful luxury. She was the eldest of four children; their father was a career military man such that in the first five years of her schooling the family needed to move 19 times. While she was in middle school, her father retired from the army and started up various business ventures, all of which failed. This included molding, tailoring, and fence-building enterprises, for which he was always the CEO. She recalls, “Mother was all the time struggling to pay back loans and every time my name was called out for not having paid the school fees on time I just wanted to die.”
Life in France was not so different. With a monthly income of 1.5 million won (about $1,200), her family of four was forced to make do in a tiny apartment. Still, she refused to abandon her interest in art. She was encouraged by how artistic fulfillment helped to compensate for her lack of material affluence. Every weekend, she and her husband would tour the flea markets to look for paintings. If they managed to scrape together 500,000 won they would purchase a painting. Their once-a-month treat would be having hamburgers at McDonald’s. With this being the only time they could afford to eat out, you can imagine just how cash-strapped they were.
While her husband’s discerning eye as an art critic had a certain influence on her tastes, she was driven by her personal passion for literature. To describe herself, Kwon says, “Tenaciously pursuing things is not my style.” She says she easily grows tired of something, while she is not inclined to depend on others. She confesses: “Only when I’m writing a story, only then do I feel really alive, as if I have sharpened my tools and gotten down to work.”
After nearly 10 years of study, she managed to have her first story published in the Korean literary review La Plume while she was still in France. Since then her literary output has been prolific: collections of short stories such as “Dreaming Marionette,” “Burst of Laughter” and “Blue Crab Grave,” as well as the full-length novels “Beautiful Hell” and “Temptation.” For her short story “Eel Stew,” Kwon earned the 2002 Yi Sang Literary Award, while in 2005, her third collection of stories, “Blue Crab Grave,” received the Dong-in Literary Award. After this award was expanded in 2000, with a permanent jury to consider book-length collections, she became the first woman writer to gain such recognition.
The inspiration for “Blue Crab Grave” came from the marinated crab dish. In 2003, after returning from a trip to Ganghwa Island where she had watched the sunset while dining on marinated crabs, the next day she sat down and wrote, “without eating, without sleeping, without bathing.” When asked about this extreme approach, she remarked, “People used to scorn me, saying I was showing off.” Then she added, “I tend not to tidy up loose ends; if an idea strikes me, I at once give it free rein, and only feel relieved when I’ve reached the end.”
“Blue Crab Grave,” concisely described, is essentially a work about how the solitude of a person might be compared to that of a blue crab. Kwon Ji-ye’s stories invariably depict people who are victims of the torment of loneliness. Personalities and situations vary, but the characters end up being trapped between an impulse toward hateful expression and a willingness to suffer in silence. If the will to exist ends up crumbling in this way, this can result in an explosion of unexpected hatred that sweeps away normal emotions and silence.
The Dong-in Literary Award jury has noted: “The author’s style, in dealing with such raw emotions, is subtle, fresh, and elegant. That is quite amazing. Through a dramatic contrast between the sentiments and the style, she succeeds in a very ‘lonely task,’ transforming into intellectual questions all the savage compulsions lurking deep beneath our contemporaries’ solitude.” That is to say that the primary appeal of Kwon Ji-ye’s writing can be found in the contrast between the repugnance of human emotions and the sophistication of her style.
For most women writers of Kwon’s generation, the collapse and restoration of the family is a common theme, which typically involves two approaches: the main character either rejects the family and leaves home to follow a chosen path, or upon succumbing to morality’s rules of cause and effect, returns home. The critic Kim Hyeong-jung finds in Kwon Ji-ye’s works a new aspect setting out in an entirely different direction. “Instead of familiar accounts of departure and return, Kwon Ji-ye engages in a search for a theory of the elements of morality. Her quest for an essential theory of the contradictory bipolarity of water and fire is of immense value in terms of literary enrichment and is breathing new life into Korean fiction.” To sum up, with her combination of femininity and narrative ability, Kwon Ji-ye stands at the forefront of contemporary Korean literature. |
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