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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. provides a privileged site for Americans to “remember” the Vietnam War. W.J.T. Mitchell writes that
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is antiheroic, antimonumental, a V-shaped gash or scar, a trace of violence suffered not of violence wielded in the service of a glorious cause (as in the conventional war memorial). It achieves the universality of the public monument not by rising above its surroundings to transcend the political, but by going beneath the political to the shared sense of a wound that will never heal…. Its legibility is not that of narrative: no heroic episode such as the planting of the flag on Iwo Jima is memorialized, only the mind-numbing and undifferentiated chronology of violence and death catalogued by the fifty-eight thousand names inscribed on the black marble walls.
[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), 888, cited in Donald E. Pease, “Hiroshima, The Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 569.
[2] This is a revised version of “Locating the Revolutionary Subject: Hwang Suk-Young's The Shadow of Arms” (Hyongmyongjok chuch'e ui charimaegim: Mugi ui kunullon), which appeared in Korean in Ch'oe Won-sik and Lim Hong-bae, eds. The Literary World of Hwang Suk-Young (Hwang Suk-Young munhak ui segye) (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongsa, 2003), pp. 234-246. I am very grateful to Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongsa for allowing the republication of the article in English in Japan Focus. I would also like to thank Mark Selden for critical comments that proved invaluable in the revision process.
[3] For the linkage of free indirect style to the production of character as locus of meaning, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 104-107.
[4] The repetition in the text of the transcripts of official investigations of U.S. war crimes (the rape-murder of a Vietnamese woman, the My Lai massacre, the torture-murder of a Vietnamese boy) serves less to expose the frequency of atrocities than to dismantle the “ethical” workings of institutionalized critique. Rather than prevent atrocities, the prosecutions provide an “ethical cleansing,” assuring that such acts will continue to occur by legitimating the system that carries them out.
[5] Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3. Italics in original.
[6] See Ch'oe Won-sik, “Han'guk sosol e nat'anan Petunam chonjaeng,” in Paik Nak-chung and Chong Ch'ang-yol eds. Han'guk minjok minjung undong yon'gu (Seoul: Ture, 1989); Im Kyu-ch'an, “Pundan ul nomoso?minjok munhak ui hyon tan'gye wa kwaje,” in Minjok munhaksa yon'gu ed. Minjok munhaksa kangjwa vol. II (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongsa, 1995). The Shadow of Arms, as Im Kyu-ch'an suggests, should be located not only in the context of the anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist national and people's literature movement of the 1980s, but also as part of the post-1945 camptown literature addressing the continuing U.S. military occupation of the southern half of the Korean peninsula. It is worth mentioning here that Ch'ae Man-sik's “Mr. Pang” (Misuto Pang, 1946) and Yom Sang-sop's Dawn Wind (Hyop'ung, 1948), two of the earliest texts to address Korean/U.S. relations, understood the U.S. occupation of the southern half of the Korean peninsula following the surrender of Japan not as liberation but as an extension of colonial rule.
[7] Paik Nak-chung, “T'ongil undong kwa munhak” (Ch'angjak kwa pip'yong 63, 1989), in Paik Nak-chung, Minjok munhak ui sae tan'gye: minjok munhak kwa segye munhak III (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongsa, 1990), 108.
[8] Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero,” in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko eds. Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 29.
[9] Hwang's works frequently move to break down the boundary between text and reader. Chungmoo Choi, for example analyzes how the madang guk form in Hwang's “The Hawk of Changsan'got” (Changsan'got mae, 1979), constructs a participatory space, one in which members of the audience cannot stand apart, distanced, but become relocated as co-producers of revolutionary meaning. See Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,” positions 1 (Spring 1993), 92-4. A similar movement, we should note, also occurs in Hwang's recent The Guest (Sonnim, 2001): the exorcism performed by the text's summoning up the ghosts of history (the horrific violence associated with rigidified forms of Marxism and Christianity) effects, in the end, the removal of the text as object, the creation of a participatory space in which the reader cannot stand outside the text, but is also summoned into its space, compelled to articulate his/her position within a dialogizing history of repressed memories.
[10] Hwang Suk-Young, “T'ap” (1970), in Kaekchi: Hwang Sok-yong sosoljip (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongsa, 1994), 374.
[11] Ibid, 400.
[12] Hwang Suk-Young, The Shadow of Arms, trans. Chun Kyung-Ja (Ithaca, Cornell East Asia Series, 1994), 343.
[13] Rey Chow points out that “ethnicity exists in modernity as a boundary—a line of exclusion?that pretends to be a nonboundary—a framework of inclusion—only then to reveal its full persecutory and discriminatory force whenever political, economic, or ideological gains are at stake.” See The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 30.
[14] While Yong-gyu locates the origins of the epithet “gook” in Korea, the term occurs as part of a longer history of white racism in Asia, most likely going back to the Philippine-American War.
[15] Kim Tong-ch'un, Kundae ui kunul (Seoul: Tangdae, 2000), 190.
[16] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 66-7.
[17] At the same time, the armistice agreement has yet to be converted into a peace treaty, and China remains as something much more than an “apprentice” on the global stage. Indeed, as we see in the recent six-party talks, China has emerged as a major political/diplomatic player.
[18] Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 321-2.
[19] Hyun Sook Kim, “Korea's ‘Vietnam Question’: War Atrocities, National Identity, and a Reconciliation in Asia,” positions 9 (Winter 2001), 631.
[20] Hwang Suk-Young, The Shadow of Arms, 202.
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