There is a square not five minutes from where I sit, worn smooth by five centuries of trading. Edinburgh's Grassmarket sells vegetables and second-hand books on a Saturday morning now, tourists photographing the cliff face of the Castle Rock above it, but for over a hundred years — from the 1660s until the last public hanging there in 1784 — it was also where the city hanged its criminals, within sight of the cattle and grain it had traded continuously since the square was chartered in 1477. The gallows and the grocer shared the same cobbles. I have always found something bracingly honest in that arrangement — a marketplace, after all, is simply where a society decides what things are worth, and it has never much minded whether the commodity in question is turnips or human lives.
I mention this because a Korean novel has been sitting on my desk this week that takes the same unflinching arithmetic as its very title: 인간시장, rendered into English as Human Market. It is not, on the surface, the kind of book I would ordinarily confess to. I will admit, with the particular shame reserved for the intellectually snobbish, that I had filed it for years under a heading somewhere between "airport thriller" and "not really my department," on the strength of nothing more than its reputation as a wildly popular potboiler about a vigilante law student thrashing gangsters. It took a rather patient Korean acquaintance to point out, with visible exasperation, that I was dismissing the single most-read Korean novel of the twentieth century without having opened it. I have since opened it. I owe her an apology, and I owe Kim Hong-shin one too.
The numbers alone ought to humble anyone inclined to literary condescension. Serialised from early 1981 in the weekly magazine Chugan Hanguk under the working title "The Autobiography of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old," it was bound into its first volume that September and, within two years, had become the first novel in Korean publishing history to sell a million copies. By the time the series ran its course, it had sold in excess of five million — a figure that would make most literary novelists, myself very much included in spirit if not in output, weep quietly into their tea. It was filmed four times across the 1980s and early 1990s, and adapted for television twice, most recently in 2004. Whatever else one wishes to say about Human Market, one cannot say it failed to find its readers.
Its hero, Jang Chong-chan, began life on the page under a different surname. Kim originally conceived him as "Kwon Chong-chan" — the given name roughly translating as "one who straps on a gun and takes them on," the author's own account of his intent when he sat down, freshly released from a period of legal trouble that had left him with something to prove, to write a novel about a young man willing to fight the corruption everyone else had learned to live with. The surname was changed, by most accounts, out of nervousness that "Kwon" too closely evoked the plainclothes security police of the era — an anxiety that tells you almost everything you need to know about the climate in which this novel was written. Korea in late 1980 and 1981 was a country freshly seized by a military government that had spent the preceding months forcibly merging and shuttering newspapers, sacking journalists who asked awkward questions, and issuing daily instructions on what the press might and might not report. A popular novelist did not need to be told twice that a character's name could be read as a provocation.
And yet the book got away with murder — sometimes rather literally. Jang Chong-chan spends its pages exposing organised crime, the collusion of business and political power, and the casual corruption of officials who had learned that the law bent easily around the well-connected. Korean readers and critics alike have long described him as a modern-day Hong Gil-dong, invoking the legendary outlaw-hero of the Joseon dynasty who robbed corrupt magistrates to give to the poor — a figure roughly analogous, for my own readers, to Robin Hood, though Hong Gil-dong carries the added charge of being a folk hero for the illegitimate and the excluded, a detail that gives the comparison rather more bite than Sherwood Forest ever managed. The trick, as far as I can tell from my own admittedly outsider's reading, was tone. Kim wrapped his social criticism in humour, farce and cheerfully lurid melodrama — a strategy with deep roots in the Korean performing tradition, where masked dancers and pansori singers had for centuries been permitted to mock the yangban precisely because everyone involved could pretend it was only entertainment. A censor watching for sedition finds it considerably harder to act against a joke than against a manifesto.
This is where my own English literary tradition ought to feel a flicker of recognition, though I confess it took me an embarrassingly long while to notice it. Human Market was serialised weekly for a mass audience hungry for the next instalment, its social criticism smuggled in beneath plot, incident and a hero readers could shout for — which is, when one strips away two centuries and several thousand miles, more or less the operating principle of Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist ran in monthly parts in Bentley's Miscellany and was dismissed by a good many contemporary critics as sensationalist entertainment unworthy of serious attention, its workhouse cruelties and its criminal underworld considered rather too much fun for a novel with pretensions to social conscience. History has, of course, rather emphatically disagreed with those critics. I find myself wondering whether Korean literary history will eventually extend Kim Hong-shin the same courtesy it has already extended Dickens — and whether I, sitting here having spent years filing this novel under "not really my department," owe both writers a rather similar apology.
Here, though, is the detail that I cannot quite let go of, and which brings me back to my Grassmarket and its unsentimental arithmetic of worth. As far as I have been able to establish, no English translation of Human Market exists. Han Kang's The Vegetarian — a novel of comparable cultural weight within Korea, though of a wholly different register — found its way into English within a decade of publication and went on to a Booker International Prize and, eventually, a Nobel. Kim Hong-shin's novel, which outsold it many times over on its home ground and shaped an entire generation's sense of what justice might look like when the courts themselves were compromised, has never crossed the same border. I do not think this is an accident, and I do not think it particularly flatters the West. We have shown ourselves rather good, these past few decades, at importing Korean literary fiction that confirms our appetite for quiet devastation — the interior, the traumatised, the beautifully sparse. We have shown ourselves considerably less curious about the loud, the popular, the morally muscular novel that an entire nation actually read on the bus. The marketplace of world literature, it turns out, prices its goods with the same selective blindness as any other.
I walked back through the Grassmarket this morning thinking about Jang Chong-chan and his invented, half-censored name, about Dickens serialised for readers who wanted their conscience delivered with a plot, and about the particular arrogance of a reader — myself, unmistakably myself — who spent years assuming that a novel five million people had loved could not possibly have anything to teach him. The old gallows are gone from the square now; only a pattern set into the cobbles, and a small stone marker at its edge, show where they once stood, easily missed if you are not looking for it. I rather think that is how most literary snobbery ends too — not with a dramatic reckoning, but with a quiet plaque you nearly walk past, admitting, if only to yourself, that you were wrong.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.