There is a room in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Surgeons' Hall on Nicolson Street, a stone's throw from where I am typing this, where the body itself becomes a kind of manuscript. Cabinets of preserved specimens line the walls; skulls, tissue, the long taxonomy of human frailty, catalogued and glassed since 1699. Among the exhibits sits the skeleton of William Burke, hanged in 1829 for the murders he and William Hare committed to keep the anatomist Robert Knox supplied with fresh cadavers for his overcrowded dissection classes. Burke's own body, in a grim symmetry the presiding judge more or less ordered from the bench, was publicly dissected by Alexander Monro tertius. He was the third and final Monro of a family that held Edinburgh's Chair of Anatomy for a hundred and twenty-six unbroken years, three generations reading the same text over and over, refining their grammar of the body with each new corpse. It was Burke and Hare's crimes, more than any single treatise, that eventually forced Parliament's hand: the Anatomy Act of 1832, which finally allowed unclaimed and donated bodies to be studied, so that men would no longer need to be murdered to be read. Edinburgh, you understand, has always trusted one idea above most others. The human body is the ultimate text. To truly know a person, in the most literal and invasive sense, is to open them up and read what is written inside.
I have been thinking about that room a great deal this week, because I have just finished Gu Byeong-mo's Jeolchang, and it is, at its molten core, a novel about exactly this: knowing another person through the wound, rather than in spite of it.
The title itself is a small act of literary surgery. Written as it appears on the cover, jeolchang means simply "an incised wound," the kind of clean, deliberate cut left by a blade. But spoken aloud, it is indistinguishable from another word entirely: jeolchang, meaning a masterpiece of song, the finest cry a voice can produce. Gu is far too disciplined a writer to leave this as mere cleverness. The character for "wound" is also the character at the root of "to create," "to originate." Her publisher's own promotional copy makes the point plainly: a relationship is made only at the place where something has been severed and hurt. The miracle of one person reaching another begins there, and nowhere else. Wound and masterpiece, in other words, share a body.
The novel's premise sounds, on first hearing, like something out of a decidedly stylish thriller. A young woman, referred to throughout only as Agassi, "Miss," never given a proper name, discovered as a child in an orphanage that if she pressed her hand to another person's wound, their thoughts poured into her unbidden. It happened first, almost accidentally, when she pressed down on a bleeding friend to stop the flow of blood, and found herself flooded with everything the friend had ever concealed. A businessman named Mun Oh-eon noticed this peculiar gift and installed her in his mansion, a house Gu's editors describe, tellingly, as "temple-like," where he puts her ability to work reading the private wounds of the underworld figures he does business with. Into this arrangement walks our narrator, hired as Agassi's live-in reading tutor. Her entire career has been the patient, professional business of reading books. Now she finds herself reading something far more dangerous: the silence between two people who refuse to be honest with each other, or with themselves.
Early on, the narrator offers what amounts to a working manual for the reader as much as for herself: that it is difficult to think about another person at all without first assuming, as a kind of baseline, that one's reading of them will be essentially wrong. This is not thrown away as a passing aside. It becomes the method. The narrator watches Agassi and Oh-eon circle one another, draws conclusions, revises them, and draws new, equally provisional ones. She never once arrives at the comfortable certainty a lesser thriller would have handed her by the final chapter. I found myself, reading this as a man who has spent a professional lifetime interpreting texts written in languages not his own, quietly chastened by how thoroughly Gu had anticipated my own occupational vanity: the quiet, unexamined assumption that enough study eventually earns one the right to read correctly.
There is a line early in the novel, spoken by Agassi, that I have not been able to shake since I closed the book: until the day she suddenly dies, she says, she could read every human being in the world if it were required of her. Everyone except him. Oh-eon is the one wound she will never touch.
I confess this refusal put me in mind, quite unexpectedly, of a much older and more famous story about touching a wound. In the Gospel of John, the disciple Thomas will not believe his teacher has risen from the dead until he can put his own fingers into the mark of the nails, until he can touch the wound and, through that touch, know. It is one of the few moments in scripture where doubt is not scolded so much as accommodated: here, the text seems to say, if you must have proof, have it in the flesh. Agassi's power is, in a sense, doubting Thomas made literal and permanent: she cannot help but demand proof of everyone she meets, cannot help but reach for the wound to know what is true. Which makes her refusal to read Oh-eon all the more devastating. To decline the one form of certainty available to her is, paradoxically, the closest thing she has to faith. She would rather not know than know and lose the fragile, unverified thing between them.
I recognise this particular cowardice rather better than I would like to admit. There was a woman, once, whose wound I never asked to see, not because I lacked curiosity, but because I suspected, correctly as it turned out, that the asking would end us before the not-knowing did. We are taught, in this country, to call that discretion, or good manners, or simply being terribly, terribly British about the whole affair. Gu's novel has quite ruined that comfortable euphemism for me. It was never manners. It was the same bargain Agassi strikes with Oh-eon: better an unread wound kept forever than a read one that might close the distance and, in closing it, prove there was nothing there worth crossing for after all.
Oh-eon's own name carries a second, quieter cruelty. In Sino-Korean, his given name is written with the character for "crow" beside the character for "how" or "alas." The two look almost identical on the page. They are distinguished by a single stroke. Chinese has an old idiom built on precisely this confusion: characters so similar in shape that a careless copyist turns one into the other, and a crow becomes something else entirely through nothing more than a slip of the brush. It is difficult not to read this as Gu's own private joke at the reader's expense: a man whose very name is a monument to the inevitability of misreading, built into a novel that insists, gently but relentlessly, that misreading is not a failure of understanding but its precondition. In an interview given around the book's publication, Gu herself made this argument directly, saying that misreading others is not a regrettable accident but a necessity, the only honest starting point from which any two people can begin to approach one another. The narrator, a professional reader for hire, spends the entire novel proving her right: she reads Agassi and Oh-eon's tangled devotion again and again, gets it wrong again and again, and somehow arrives closer to the truth each time, not despite the errors but through them.
There is, of course, a long Scottish tradition of turning a wound into precisely the kind of song the novel's title gestures toward. In the Highlands and the Gaelic-speaking west, it was called caoineadh, or in the Lowland tongue, coronach: a formal, keening lament, performed most often by women at a wake, half-shrieked and half-sung, praising the dead and cursing whatever had taken them. It was, by every serious account I have read, a demanding and highly skilled craft rather than raw emotional collapse: a structured way of letting private grief become communal art, of giving a wound somewhere respectable to go. Accounts from the Highlands describe old widow women leading the keening, their hair loosed and streaming, moving between rhythmic wailing and half-spoken verse that named the dead one's kin and deeds, giving the grief a shape it could not have found in silence. The practice largely died out by the twentieth century, dismissed by a more buttoned-up generation as unseemly, even primitive. It strikes me now as its own small tragedy: a culture deciding it would rather suppress its wounds than sing them. I suspect Agassi herself, forced by her own gift into a lifetime of enforced eloquence about other people's pain, would have found the whole retreat bitterly familiar. Gu's title asks the same question the coronach women once answered with their own bodies: what do you do with the cut that will not close? You do not necessarily heal it. Sometimes, if you are fortunate, and if someone is willing to press their hand to it and stay, you make of it something that sounds, however briefly, like the finest song you have ever produced.
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I ought to say plainly, for readers hoping to order a copy for the shelf beside their English translations of Cursed Bunny or The Vegetarian: Jeolchang does not yet exist in English, and given how recently it has arrived even in its own language, I would not expect it imminently. It is, at the time I write this, a Korean-only pleasure. For those without the language, Gu's earlier novel Pagwa offers a fair introduction to her sensibility. Translated by Chi-Young Kim as The Old Woman with the Knife, it gives us an ageing assassin rendered with the same unsentimental tenderness Gu extends to Agassi, and was, not incidentally, the very novel that first carried her name past our shores and onto a cinema screen. It will not give you Jeolchang's particular ache. But it will tell you why a Scotsman in his fifties, pouring over reviews and interviews in a language he studied for decades and still occasionally misreads, felt compelled to write two thousand words about a book he cannot yet buy in his own tongue.
Perhaps that, too, is only fitting. A novel built on the necessity of misreading ought not to travel too easily. Some wounds, I am increasingly persuaded, are meant to be read only by the hand that reaches for them first, and some songs, whatever their language, are simply not meant to carry past the room in which they were first sung.
Recommended Resources
☞ Korean Edition: Jeolchang (Gu Byeong-mo, Munhakdongne) — Aladin
☞ English Introduction to the Author: The Old Woman with the Knife (trans. Chi-Young Kim) — Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
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