'Nolbu' as Korean sociopath
By Michael Bergmann
What can you do when all amounts of wealth and privilege don't bring you joy or happiness? Indulging in others' hardship, bullying the weak, obstructing simple people's honest efforts might not be true pleasure either ― except for the satisfaction that, well, you can do it, that society lets you get away with it and leaves your victims defenseless.
Korean collective mind has not only been aware since pre-modern times of the damage done by sadists protected by social status and, ironically, codes of "decency.” It has probably created the most remarkable image of a "culturally integrated pervert" in world literature: Nolbu, the first-born son of a family with a comfortable inheritance, the elder brother of kind-hearted but unlucky Heungbu.
The way the story was passed down through the generations, however, seems to "humorously" belittle the scandal, if not to re-integrate the perversion. In two interesting articles in The Korea Times on May 20 and 26, Mark Peterson pointed at the numerous imbalances or even fractures in Korean folktales when read as didactic Confucian morality literature, and suggested to rediscover them as "protest literature" instead. Well, how many rebellious creative impulses have not been re-integrated into various cultural traditions at the cost of being buried under layers of mainstream wisdom, shallow humor or tales of magical wrong-righting?
To teach endurance and "knowing one's place" to the disinherited "Heungbus" of the nation, the character of the privileged big brother needed a cuter image, harmless enough to suit the bedtime stories: a little greedy and vicious, but the bones that he breaks are only those of the poor swallow that will initiate his magical punishment.
One has to just consider a few episodes of Nolbu's older characterization, too gross for morality lessons, to feel the victims' defenselessness and the absence of social protection against the sociopath's whims: He spoils the food of the starving, dances at funerals, has fun bullying and torturing the weakest ― the disabled, babies, pregnant women. And my favorite: He defecates in the village well.
The scandal is not that such a character has models in the real world. Every society has its sociopaths. But the village community would act swiftly and decisively against such destructive mischief if the offender were a youngster, a beggar, a vagabond. But the prankster is Nolbu, “well known” in the community, the senior brother, a village native, heir of a respected family!
All that the portrayed society is able to do against this “privileged perversion” is to hope for some magic appearance someday to rectify the injustice. Or maybe a little gossip and storytelling. But one should only whisper the highlights of the story ― the sociopath's social reputation is protected by codes of “respect,” maybe even anti-defamation laws, however shockingly “true” the story may be!
The writer (bergmann2473@yahoo.de) is a teacher in Seoul.