The Heterogeneity of Reception

We're almost there. We have seen in the previous chapter the cycle of artistic influence has grown vast, complex and diverse in the globalized age. We will now look at a few examples of still heterogeneous reception of increasingly homogeneous forms of art. Regional custom evidently creates difference how a certain foreign work of art 'comes off'. 

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First, it is important to pay attention to the 'foundations' of a culture's sensibility. For many Western cultures, Greek mythology plays the role of the central narrative 'bank'. In East Asia, the same role is filled by the classical Chinese texts, such as Journey to the West and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Quran is the irreplaceable stronghold of Islamic cultures, as Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible are for Judaic and Christian communities. Of course, there are countless overlaps within each culture across languages, governmental systems or religions. In the Protestant-dominant South Korea, many people are deeply engaged with both Christian and ancient Chinese tales. 

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Therefore, some stories, such as the Trojan War or Noah’s Ark, or even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, seem to have grown nearly universal, in that ordinary people who are neither followers of relevant religions nor scholars of relevant literary traditions have at least heard of these stories.

 

Some stories can be more than just

stories; they become metaphorical

representations of observed phenomena

and integral elements of culture. For

instance, many people in South Korea

also often refer to one’s seemingly

negligible yet fatal weakness as their

Achilles’ heel. But, unlike the West, when

Koreans (and much of East Asia) refer to

an object or a quality that is practically

useless but seems too valuable to discard, they use the term ‘chicken

bones,’ which comes from an episode in the stories of the Three Kingdoms in which a general compares a certain territory to chicken bones as he debates whether or not to strategically desert it and retreat.

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Yet despite his distant origin, Achilleus was able to stand for fierceness, and so could Odysseus for quick-wittedness, Don Quijote for deluded idealism, and Huckleberry Finn for youthful adventurousness in my monolingual childhood in Korea. This suggests how extensive globalization has grown, so that certain tales important in one culture can also become the formative narratives that provide metaphorical foundations for a child from another faraway culture.

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Still, it is premature to compile a conclusive list of a 'universal canon', because we cannot expect the same text to induce the same effects in different cultures. In South Korea, not surprisingly, many writers do not enjoy the same proportion of public popularity and prestige as they do in the West. By and large, South Koreans seem to be way more attuned to Hermann Hesse than Franz Kafka, to John Steinbeck than William Faulkner, to Albert Camus than Samuel Beckett, to Milan Kundera than Thomas Pynchon.

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Other great novelists, such as Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, prove immensely popular in Korea as they are elsewhere. But the particular texts that Koreans frequently uphold as their central achievements can be different than what is conventional in the West. When discussing Tolstoy’s novels, for example, Resurrection gets just as much emphasis as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Conversely, regarding Dickens's oeuvre, Bleak House gets very rarely mentioned compared to Great Expectations and David Copperfield.

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Romeo and Juliet is unmistakably central to our

reception of Shakespeare’s oeuvre; and his English

history plays are far less popular. In fact, Sir John

Falstaff barely gets any spotlight.

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Surely, we are to be careful not to assume that these

particular preferences are direct, traceable products

of particular norms and values of the receiving

culture. But because different interpretations arise

under different circumstances, the world (I mean,

the two worlds that I've known) remains curiously

heterogeneous in spite of homogeneous formal

input.

 

When you get familiar with Korean media, you will notice that there is a curious tendency to select the most prominent members of a certain tradition,

classify them together as the representative group of that tradition, and stress the number of constituents in the naming of the group.

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Rough equivalents of this practice familiar in the West would be calling Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides the ‘Big 3’ of Greek tragedy and Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea the ‘Big 4’ of English football in the first decade of this century.

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I recently learned that King Lear, Wuthering Heights and Moby-Dick are commonly grouped together as ‘The 3 Great English Tragedies’. It was a little frustrating that the whole fountain of English-language literature was reduced to such a frivolous coinage that reads like a grade-school ranking. 

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Reading Distant Cultures: Limited Time Only

I used to detest that kind of practice but can

now also recognize its practical benefits.

In a way, South Korea was given little time

to get acquainted with the Western literary

canon. Since we are new to this tradition,

many of us must have thought, there is only

so much time for all of it, so there needs to

be a strategic reading plan—we need to

prioritize the most important ones, and

there needs to be a catchy enough way of

grouping them to initiate their appeal.

 

If this is how it really went, it was an apt choice to use numbers to communicate their superiority, befitting Korea’s history of hyper-rapid development on which our national pride today is most strongly grounded. From such a perspective, numbers are the measure of all things.

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To remind ourselves of how far we’ve made it, for example, we Koreans often employ the same numerical rhetoric, namely that our GDP right after the civil war was the second-lowest in the world, above only Ethiopia. Automobile and timepiece brands, based on their price, emblematize vertical social strata, which sometimes makes me think of the different levels of hell.

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Just like anyone’s ‘Top 5’ of favorite rappers, Korea’s numbered groupings for all the best things Western go on and on. The 3 Great Cars: Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Maybach. The 3 Great Museums: the British, the Louvre, and for the third spot, a bloodbath between the Vatican, the Metropolitan and the Petersburg Hermitage. The 4 Great Musicals: The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Les Miserable, Cats. The 3 Great Ingredients: truffles, caviar, foie gras.

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As regards Shakespeare, there are two variants. The standard one, of course, is ‘The 4 Great Tragedies of Shakespeare’ (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), which is a traditional grouping in the English-speaking world as well. But the group sometimes gets expanded to ‘The 5 Great Tragedies of Shakespeare’, because some of us just can't give up on Romeo and Juliet.

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This is at the same time both an obnoxious reduction and a neat way to expedite consumption and familiarization. And maybe, I began to think, this phenomenon is not unique to South Korea but is increasingly becoming the default reception culture of the online world at large. This is precisely the way artistic products get distributed around the world.

 

When an unfamiliar American indie rock

band releases their album, the only access

most Koreans have to the band's music is

short previews without descriptions on a

tiny page on a big website. Inevitably, the

reception of a foreign artwork tends to be

a reduced version of what it has been for

its native culture. With the advent of the

Internet, the same is true also within a

multicultural nation where various forms

of artistic expression coexist. 

 

We know what 'platforms' we're talking about here. This very moment, there is a new series being uploaded on Netflix, a new album dropping on SoundCloud, a new poem being posted on Instagram. We are bombarded with new art, and we don't have enough life to go through it all, so we all have to cherrypick; hence our all kinds of Top Five favorites of all time. The receiving population is then divided based on what kinds of art they prefer to cherrypick. When this instant valuation of new works of art crosses cultural borders, it can turn into a fast-paced exoticization or essentialization all to easily.

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It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Sometimes, words and expressions get tossed around the world and become exhausted; and they become some sort of pallid zombies. For example, whenever I hear "brevity is the soul of wit" in public, the first thing that comes to mind is not its context in Hamlet but the ubiquitous self-promoting businesspeople who invest all their energy into leading formulaic lives to advertise their 'entrepreneurship' and fiendishly chasing clout. 

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In this age, wisdom from the past coined by powerful language can turn into a mechanically reproduced witticism almost overnight. Strictly in this sense, cultural appropriation cannot be immediately brushed aside as a concept only applicable to dogmatic provincialists. When we find a group of cavepeople, disconnected from the rest of humanity, who use fire only to feel warm in the cave, we can't just take the fire away from them and blame them for failing to see its potential; it is their fire warming up their cave, and we don't understand the relationship they have with the fire because we never experienced it.

 

These moral problems have never been given universal conclusions, so we sometimes feel groundless. In such times, I'm definitely not the only one for whom art and literature provide guidance (that is, rather than prescription). Art can be therapeutic in the way dogs can be therapeutic. Poets, if they could be given a special status, perform the strange feat of bringing the zombie language back to life. How simple is the sentence "Things fall apart", yet how many things can it help us think about?  There is nothing inherently esoteric about it, either.

 

The Internet and globalization make it possible for any of us to navigate artistic traditions around the world and find new sources of inspiration and solace. At the same time, distribution takes place detached from the values and norms associated with the place of production, and the foreign reader is thus bound to receive a somewhat caricatured variant of the original artist's input of labor and talent. We must therefore continuously try to be as perceptive to the underlying beliefs and habits when we read a foreign book or watch a foreign movie, so that we don't miss out on the kinds of inspiration it can offer us.