The Korean War Novel: Rewriting History from the Civil War to the Post–Cold War

Placing the Korean War at the intersection of the global Cold War and Korean postcolonial politics, Suk Koo Rhee examines six novels on the Korean War by Korean and Asian American authors. Specifically, Rhee focuses on how authors, from Choi In-hun to Ha Jin, deploy and frame the Korean War, ranging from an international conflict between superpowers to a gender war. Central to this analysis is an understanding of the Cold War as an episteme—that is, a framework for the production and dissemination of knowledge that brings to light some things while burying others. Probing the histories and stories these novels expose as well as the ones they conceal, Rhee sheds light on the relationship between literature, history, and the various epistemes of the Cold War, bringing to the fore the roles of Koreans as perpetrators and victims of violence fueled by the division of the peninsula.Chapter 1 focuses on Richard E. Kim’s 1964 novel The Martyred. Rhee calls into question the novel’s praise by earlier critics, who hailed the work as an anti–Cold War text given the reduced visibility of the United States military in its plot. Instead, the conspicuous absence of American forces in Kim’s novel serves to highlight the persecution of Christians in the North and to frame the war as a metaphysical conflict between Christianity and communism, echoing orthodox perspectives of the Cold War. Nevertheless, Kim’s decision to obscure the persecution of communists in the South by focusing on the plight of Christians unintentionally reminds readers of the former, given the parallels between the two, fueled in both cases by suspicion and guilt by association.In chapter 2, Rhee turns to the gender dimensions of the war as depicted in Ahn Junghyo’s 1964 novel Silver Stallion. In the novel, following her rape by an American soldier, the protagonist—ostracized by the local patriarch from life in her village—resorts to sex work at a nearby United Nations military base. Through this story, Ahn frames the war as a gender war fought by the Korean patriarchy to preserve its control over the bodies of Korean women, a privilege threatened by new gender norms as well as by the presence of non-Korean men on the peninsula. In return, Rhee notes, sex workers, such as Ahn’s protagonist, find agency through sororal economic cooperation, especially through their insertion into a “web of capitalist relations” that enables the women to achieve full subjecthood despite social alienation (76). Rhee concludes the chapter by contrasting these forms of resilience with the impotence of the traditional patriarchal elites in the face of the twentieth-century transformations of Korean society.Susan Choi’s 1998 novel The Foreign Student is the subject of chapter 3. Returning to the theme of silences introduced in the first chapter, Rhee questions assessments of Choi’s novel as a progressive challenge to imperialistic and nationalistic narratives of the Korean War. Instead, Rhee argues, by concealing the nuances of postcolonial politics in South Korea after 1945, The Foreign Student allies itself with orthodox paradigms of the Cold War, neglecting the role played by the American occupation government and the Syngman Rhee regime in engendering postcolonial protests throughout South Korea in the 1950s.Political neutrality in Ha Jin’s 2004 novel War Trash stands at the core of chapter 4. Particularly, the chapter centers on Jin’s “neutral” critique of the politics of Chinese prisoners of war (POWs) in camps located in the South. Unlike other works discussed by Rhee, which could be excused for misrepresenting history, Ha Jin’s stated goal for War Trash was to write an objective history of the POW camps of the Korean War (117). Yet a closer look at Jin’s characters and their motivations reveals a novel that embraces a capitalist ethos, compromising its claim to objectivity. Ultimately, Rhee contends, history cannot be simply retold. Instead, it “comes into being only through and after interpretation” (147).The last two chapters include some of Rhee’s most thought-provoking analysis, highlighting the ways in which Korean writers have emphasized the postcolonial nature of the Korean War and its aftermath. In chapter 5, Rhee dissects Choi In-hun’s 1960 novel The Square. The novel, Rhee suggests, offers a poignant critique of “victimhood nationalism”—that is, of the articulation of national identities and discourses through historical grievances. Specifically, Choi constructs his critique through the biography of his protagonist, who, having suffered persecution and alienation at the hands of both the North and South, becomes an irredeemable petty tyrant in his romantic life and is (like South Korea) unable to escape the violent logic of the Cold War.Finally, in chapter 6, the postcolonial dimensions of the Korean War are made explicit in Rhee’s analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s 2001 novel The Guest. The novel tells the story of the Sin’chŏn Massacre of 1950 as a struggle between Christianity and communism, two foreign ideologies. In so doing, Rhee notes, Hwang denies agency to the North Koreans involved in the massacre. Thus, digging beneath the surface of Hwang’s framework, Rhee discovers in The Guest the story of the massacre as anti-postcolonial violence, with land ownership (not ideology or religion) as its main fault line.The Korean War Novel is insightful and effective throughout. Relying on historical scholarship both old and new, Rhee sheds new light on well-known works of literature, bringing into relief the paradigms of the Cold War espoused by these novels. Nevertheless, some important questions remain unaddressed. Greater attention could have been given to how the six novels discussed in the book are representative of the larger corpus of Korean and Asian American literary works on the Korean War. Likewise, the question of how the six novels form a coherent whole (if at all) represents a potential avenue for future scholarship. These limitations notwithstanding, Rhee’s work advances our understanding of the cultural and literary histories of the Korean War, the broader Cold War, and its transpacific legacies, and will be welcomed by specialists and general audiences alike.