Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. x, 223 pp. (Tables.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9780824888725.
The American scholar Sonia Ryang declares in her book on language use in North Korea that she is less interested in “factual verification” than in the “authenticity” of “truth-making” (140, 142). In accordance with Foucauldian custom, the distinction between rulers and ruled is blurred: all North Koreans enact the centre-less “truth” embodied in the dominant discourse. Chapter 1 deals with early purges of Pyongyang’s literati, and chapter 2 addresses efforts to purify the vocabulary of non-indigenous words, as well as with changes in emphasis on the need for polite speech. Chapter 3 covers citizens’ testimonials of encounters with Kim Il-sung, collections of which now number over a hundred volumes. Ryang seems to consider these authentic in the conventional sense, but one is apparently not to care much either way. Chapter 4 discusses Kim Il-sung’s purported autobiography. The conclusion sums up the argument that North Korea’s discourse “is as truthful as our own native truth” (193).
Unfortunately, the book’s assertions about the reception of regime discourse cast doubt on the wisdom of Ryang’s method of “using published texts”—read: heavily vetted propaganda—“as ethnographical raw material” (11). For example, we are told that the aforementioned autobiography, which appeared from 1992 to 1996 in eight lavishly bound volumes, “became one of the most popular works of literature in North Korea” (139). This seems very unlikely, considering the usual effect famines have on demand for 3600-page books. Nor have food, electricity, and leisure time ever been ample enough to make one believe the working classes had the luxury of being “keenly interested in state linguistic reform” (89). It is obvious what associations Ryang wants to evoke by calling a collection of linguistic essays from 1970 the “red book” (69), but not one person in ten thousand would have owned a copy.
Ryang’s assumption that the printing of Kim Il-sung’s utterances in boldface resulted in their widespread memorization (68) seems to derive from her education in a Pyongyang-loyal Korean school in Japan, where students had to memorize his New Year’s greetings and the like. This testimony is fascinating, but had Kim wanted everyone reeling off his sayings he would have mass-distributed a compendium like the actual Little Red Book. Instead, his mythobiography, emotively conveyed in schoolbooks and movies, gets the orthodoxy across without enfranchising people to second-guess the elite. The vast sprawl of Kim’s oeuvre, mistaken overseas for a sign of its authority on all matters, is in fact the giveaway of its display function. Even his “selected works” are so numerous and expensively bound as to preclude use in group instruction, to say nothing of individual study. Spines uncreased, they shine behind locked glass in hushed “study rooms” at the better farms and factories, conveying the simple message that the leader wrote more smart books than anyone in world history.
Ryang’s argument is that the official language works at getting North Koreans to take control of their lives, their state, and their government (67), and even to “fight injustice” (193). More textual evidence is needed for this bold claim than Kim Il-sung’s so-called Juche speech of 1955, which simply reiterated Moscow’s calls for the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to local conditions, or his equally bloc-conform talk of mankind’s potential for mastering its destiny. It is in songs, slogans, and paintings far better known to most citizens that the regime likens them to infants, and both Kim and the Party to nurturing, comforting mothers.
Foucault’s power-knowledge talk is of little help in differentiating truths, as his critics have pointed out. Ryang conflates North Korea’s ideology with the blandly internationalist pseudo-doctrine “man is the master of all things,” exported during the diplomatic charm offensive of the 1970s. (Japan was then a key constituency, which may explain the training Ryang received.) As South Korea’s student leader Kim Young Hwan realized during talks with the Great Leader in 1991, and the latter’s right-hand intellectual Hwang Jang-yop made clear after defecting, Juche and North Korean ideology are different things. A close reading of Ryang’s “ethnographical raw material” leads one to the same conclusion, and to her credit, she admits that publications written in the voice of average citizens are “conspicuously silent on Juche” (130). To compare its listless and airy tautologies with the vivid language and symbolism of military-first nationalism is to realize that only one of those incompatible constructs is doing real-world ideological work.
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for seeking to understand North Korea through its propaganda, as opposed to the hostile practice of mocking the personality cult, or attributing the regime’s longevity wholly to coercion and brainwashing. Whatever one may think of Sonia Ryang’s interpretations, her summaries of official texts are clear and conscientious, as are her philological remarks on key phrases, and there is a thorough index at the back. Language and Truth in North Korea can thus be used as a reference work even by those who disagree with it.
B. R. Myers
Dongseo University, Busan