The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [34]
Their air of intimacy removes all doubt that they are fictional: no North Korean would think that a mere writer could have been privy to the great man’s private thoughts and conversations. Lest anyone still contrive to miss the point, these accounts are published as “short fiction” (tanp’yŏn sosŏl) and reviewed accordingly, with critics either praising or—much less often—faulting a writer for the story he has dreamed up.23 The reader is nonetheless expected to believe that the work is true to the essence of the great man. (A comparison can be made to the non-Biblical tales of Jesus taught to Christian children.) With paintings it is somewhat harder to tell imaginary scenes from purportedly historical ones, though the latter are more likely to include dates and locations in their titles.24
It may seem odd that such a repressive regime would allow writers and artists to cast the leader in situations of their own imagining, but only the most trusted members of the cultural apparatus are commissioned to create such works. In doing so they must not only meet the party’s demands for a certain topical theme—a campaign to boost agricultural production may call for depiction of the leader at a farm—but also follow the Text’s rigid iconography. Artists, for example, must copy the face already familiar from canonical pictures; there are none of the minor stylistic variations evident in Soviet paintings of Stalin or Lenin.
Stories of Kim’s “on-the-spot guidance” are alike not only in their depiction of the hero, but in their storylines and secondary characters as well. The latter usually include a rather slow-witted aide—a different man each time, the better to play up his comic astonishment at the leader’s every word and deed. Things usually start off with Kim in an unidentified office. (In contrast to the Stalin cult, with its many paeans to the “light in the Kremlin window,” the Text does not associate the leader with any particular residence or workplace; he was and is everywhere, for he is at the heart of every Korean.) The standard plot: the aide reports on a problem in a remote farm or factory, the leader jovially suggests a road trip, and the two men head out in the presidential sedan, throwing everyone into a tizzy when they arrive. The leader must then be shown solving the problem, but without coming off as cerebral and therefore un-Korean. Both problem and solution are thus described in terms a child can grasp.
Indeed, the Leader’s published remarks are always trite: “Rainbow trout is a good fish, tasty and nutritious.”25 Foreigners who mock these platitudes fail to realize that the content of Kim’s guidance is not as important as the time and effort he takes to administer it. (In many pictures of these visits, he is merely listening with a smile.26) After all, to impart consciousness and discipline to the child race would be to make it less pure and childlike, which must never happen. Nor could Kim pose as an educator or disciplinarian without seeming an imperfect embodiment of Koreanness. In short stories, the emotional climax comes after Kim’s breezy solution of the problem, usually in a scene in which he fusses over someone in the adoring throng who looks cold or tired.27 It is this loving attentiveness on the part of the world’s busiest man that moves the characters