문학과 지성사

The monster of our era, and the terror of its amorphous voice.

Today, we live amid various kinds of evil. All of us living in this time are writhing in crimes against the weak, including terrorist attacks all over the world, hate crimes, power grabs and corruption, and sexual harassment. In the face of such crimes, what worsens our fear is the obscurity of the nature and perpetrator of the deeds. In A Century of Terror, people who have shared similar backgrounds and experiences in a community begin attacking their respective targets. Neither their purpose nor driving force is clear, and the distinction between good and evil gets blurry. The dawn of “pure evil” is here, and it lacks shape, essence, or any kind of discernable traits. The achievement of modernity—science and reason— does not help us grasp its nature. Moby, the central character of this novel, is a Frankenstein born to pure evil, an antichrist incarnate. Baek Minseok argues that such evil is the expression of modernity in the order of chaos rather than that of the cosmos, and it may thus be the human condition, or something even more fundamental, that the hellish system mandates us to survive itself.

A reader who had waited for Baek’s return to writing after a long hiatus might have expected another “shock piece” from the author, whose signature writing style engenders a violent, rude awakening from intellectual and emotional complacency rather than a kind of gratifying catharsis one would expect from the genre. In A Century of Terror, the strongest blow comes from the “tongue of fire,” a recurrent motif that links the characters in the novel. The violent energy of Moby spreads to the characters, Kyeong, Shim, Ryeong, Hyo, and Su, through their personal histories and primal memories. By controlling their actions, the instinctual spirit that dominates Mody brings a horrible bloodbath to the world.