Short biography of the author
The author of the novel “Silently a flower falls”, Ch’oe Yun was born in 1953 in Seoul. Her birth name is Ch’oe Hyon Mu. She studied Korean Language and Literature at Sogang University in Seoul. In 1978 Ch’oe graduated and went to France. There she studied successfully and received the doctorate de 3 ème Cycle de la Université de Provence D.E.A. in Aix-en Provence and Marseilles. Now she has a position at Sogang University, where she is professor for modern French Literature.
Ch’oe publicised her first critical essay in the Korean magazine “Literary Thought” in 1978. But 10 years later she stepped forward. She released her first literary work named “Silently a flower falls”. This short story was published in the literary magazine “Literature and Society”. In this work Ch’oe picks up the cruel happenings of the Kwangju massacre of 1980.
The historical background of the military dictorship and the process of Korea’s division are reflected in two other stories of Ch’oe. “The grey snowman” of 1992 and “Look at the father” of 1990. These stories are about the social conflicts and traumata caused by the epoch of military dictatorship are alwaysed mixed with the unusual perspective of Koreans living or traveling in Western countries.The protagonist of “Look at the father” lives in Paris. , After many years he is meeting his father who deserted during Korea’s war to the North where he was a communist activist. The short story “Nasenka doesn’t exist”, published in 1994, is a story about the travel of a Korean man on his business trip to Venice. During his trip he is searching for a women who he knows from his student days.
Ch’oe Yuns literary work was accepted in Korea and appreciated by Korean literary critics. For the tale “The grey snowman” she gained the Dongin award for literature in 1992 and in 1994 and received the renowned Lee-Sang award for literature for the short story “Nasenka doesn’t exist”.
Besides Ch’oe’s work as an author and professor for modern French Literature she engages herself intensively with the distribution of Korean literature. Therefore she translates personally recognized Korean literature into French. Moreover, she participates in social activities and interdisciplinary meetings of diverse organisations. She intensively supports the rights of women and though participated at the Women’s World convention in 2005 in Seoul at EWHA University.
summary of the book
The repertory of stories from Ch’oe Yun’s book “Silently a flower falls” offers for the first time an insight for German speaking people in her literary work. The variety of short stories are characterized by the topics about the civil war and the bloody conflicts in the society of South and North Korea. Yun applies great stylistic instruments to cover these topics of the history of Korea of the 20th century. She utilises modern literary techniques in her literary work, like to blur imagination and reality in her stories. Ch’oe makes it possible that the reader can look at the events in the stories from different perspectives. Therefore she implements different versions of the events in one story, told by different figures, creating these varieties of perspectives. Another instrument deployed by Ch’oe to create another prospect of an event in a short-story, is the use of time parallel story telling. An outsider often describes the subjects of the radical social changes of modern Korea, the results of the Korean war, the time of the military dictatorships and the division of the country in her stories. But this outsider is nor a hero neither believing in heroes.
In this case Ch’oe Yun invents a delicate literature of the story in the last decades of Korea. Ch’oe herself says about her stories: “If one really wants to understand Korean literature, one must climb a unique time machine, which exist nowhere in the world. The Korean literature is condensed highly like the earth’s atmosphere. There is no country in the whole world like Korea that has run through all steps of the modern time and the modern literature in such a short time.”
The main character of the story “Silently a flower falls” is a young girl of fourteen/ fifteen years. Her mother was killed at the Kwangju massacre in May 1980. The short story is about the girl’s travel, searching for her brother. During her journey she has to bear misery and is weighed down with sorrow. However, she sometimes experiences little helpfulness.
an extract:
“The youngest son of the family Kang from Nasean said he has seen her sleeping peacefully at the edge of the village at the ancestor graves on his way to work. He couldn’t just rout her away, because he felt pity with the girl. Despite, he took her with him to a tavern, where she was able to help out in the kitchen. However, this hasn’t been easy. When the girl saw him in his army jacket and the rubber boots, she wanted to run away. Three times she has jumped off the carriage. But he has not let her run away and took her to woman owning the tavern.”
Although she is weak and doesn’t know if her brother is still alive, she steadily moves on searching for her brother. All of her belongings are a bundle of cloth, her sunday-dress, a gift from her brother and her mother, and the only prove that she is not alone but has a family.
She clings to this shred bundle, like a castaway going to drown but keeping tight to a piece of wood which is the last piece she has from her loved ones. This shredded dress is her last prove to testify her belonging to her family ancestors and her last hope to be recognized, that much she has changed.
With every step the girl is hoping to see its brother alive is fading. Slowly the wish to die arises. Her desire to die is heart-breaking. Often she is so close to death, but her body is still strong enough to survive. Every day she experiences a live which is rather like hell. Furthermore, she helplessly straggles on in an utopian world.
an extract:
“During my passage all the faces which I had met on my way, the sad faces of all these people, caring around explosive dissolved in the water. All of them belong to you, river, the people who have beaten me and the people who have given me medicine and the people who have squeezed their blue birds into my body and then run away. I have no strength anymore and no more place in my head, kind river, you keep all this instead of mine. Keep it as long as the black veil will fall from my head, keep it until the day that I can love myself again. Then I will come back. Thank you, river. Farwell, until we see each other again.”
One day the girl meets a man at a construction site at the riverbank, a man that looks alike her brother. Therefore she is following him. This man, curious that the girl is following him, thinks the girl is maybe drunk; that far she already escaped the reality. He heads for the parkway and rapes her in the thick bushes. But the look of her eyes, dumb and expressionless, makes him furious, so he runs away. But the girl follows him. Since he cannot shake her off and perhaps because he is also afraid of what he has done to her, the man takes the girl with him at home, in a kind of store cellar. There the man maltreats the girl badly. He smashes her up so many times, that she cannot move any more, thinking that every single bone in her body is broken. Afterwards he rapes her again. This procedure takes place after the same scheme for days. She nevertheless doesn’t run away but remains quiet and dumb at his place.
After few days she is begins tidying up the store cellar and to arranges it more comfortable. The man starts to become used to her and fears that she might run away. Though he stops beating her and even starts to care for the girl. Soon the girl begins to pay attention to her appearance, she starts brushing her hair and to put on lipstick. But her eyes are still emptey. Now the strange man isn’t bothered anymore from the girl’s behaviour. He even gets used to her strange mumbles to herself.
Later the girl starts creating certain rituals for herself.She goes every day to the cemetery to collects flowers from the graves, putting them on those where there are no flowers lay down. There she finds rest and peace to recover from the cruelty of the people.
Parallel to the story of the girl and the strange man, another story is told, the one of two young men on a journey, looking for the little girl. These men are
friends of the girl’s brother. After an exhausting search, nonacceptance, many lies and other sad happenings they finally meet the strange man with whom the girl lived for months. But they came too late. The girl has gone away, seeking for her brother, who is already dead.
Critical discussion
The main characteristic of the story is the special way Ch’oe Yun chooses to tell the short- story. The reader has to follow the individual experienced events of every figure introduced in this story until he is able to recognize the outline of the action. This procedure is essential to understand the story. It is like solving a puzzle, one has to go step by step into detail, to see afterwards the whole picture.
The outline of the story is drawn by four main characters, the girl, the strange man, the girl’s brother, speaking to her from the kingdom come and the brother’s two friends, which here can be combined as one character. These four figures appear rotational during the story accompaning the reader through the short-story.
The style and perspective of the story are steadily changing, depending by the figure who is telling the story and strikingly depending from the situation.
The story is divided into eleven sections. Ch’oe Yuns creates through the application of modern techniques and instruments a chaotic atmosphere that reflects the effects on the baffled society during and after the Kwangju massacre. Ch’oe choice to implement such different and dissimilar figures in her story is perfect to restruct the confusion of the massacre. The created structure of several voices is a unique technique, to give the reader an insight in how far the events have influenced the lifes of different people.
The monologues of the young girl, going insane, are a mixture of imagination, distorted visions and the reality. The girl’s experiences are key scenes, in which the language of exaggeration become ambiguities. These scenes open the doors to the history behind the story, to the background of the happening of the Kwangju massacre.
Ch’oe evokes strong emotions in the reader by the application of modern stylistic instruments and means. A report of the terrible event, coudn’t bring the reader any closer to the happenings.
Moreover, appeal her work through the contrasting components, the beautiful on one hand and the ugly on the other hand, the terrible force and the enchanting lyrical pictures. So even the title “Silently a flower falls” can be explained. There is a young girl already associated with a flower, as she always puts flowers in her hair. The metaphor which let the girl become a faded flower is clear. The girl who has lost her mother at the massacre going on the search for her brother is caught up with the cycle of force and fear, again and again. The maltreatments of the society and especially of the men, are a pictorial parable for the political force of the massacre. Like a wilting flower the girl is helpless against these forces. This comparison of the girl with the flower makes her vulnerability visible.
However, no names appeare in this story like in others of Ch’oe Yun. All figures, regardless of which importance for the story they are, remain without name. The main objective why the author uses this technique is to be a neutral observer from the outside. She never points out position in her literary works; she always remains quiet spectator. Ch’oe represents Korea’s history with neutrality, but this doesn’t mean that she isn’t critical in his works. Ch’oe Yun makes it crystal-clearly how horrifying these events for the people in Korea were and how they still effect the present life of the society.
These sensitive considerations to leave out her political position of her work is one reason why she is so successful in Korea. The success would have remained spurned, if she would have forced any expression of a political opinion in her short-stories. And nevertheless are her works full of sharp criticism. The historical happenings are basis of Ch’oes stories, but she nevertheless draws crystal-clear lines to the social events. Ch’oe makes in her works clear, that the behaviour of the society result from this historical epoch of Korea.
