In January 2023 a streaming service added two of Kang Su-yeon's best-known films to its catalogue, and one Korean newspaper ran the news under a headline carrying the single small character that precedes the name of the dead. One of the two films was The Road to the Race Track, released in December 1991. I read the notice with a particular melancholy. I first met the actress on a subtitled disc, long before I understood anything of the country that had produced her, and I have spent the decades since acquiring that understanding without ever quite catching up with her face.
That face belongs to J, and J belongs to a novel. The reminder is not idle, because the film has long since swallowed the book that begot it. The novel appeared in 1990 as the fifteenth volume in Minumsa's "Writers of Today" series, and it opens at an airport, where J waits to meet a man returning from Paris. Five and a half years of study in France have left him with a degree, a stock of French and a polished disenchantment, and he discovers that none of the three has an obvious buyer. This essay concerns the book. The film, and the prizes it collected, appear here as witnesses, since what a work survives being turned into says a good deal about what it was made of.
The year matters. The Soviet bloc had come apart, and with it went the old assurance that history had a direction and that a serious person was obliged to choose a side. Korean critics have since characterised the literature of that decade by what it turned away from: ideology, the grand collective story, the writer's duty to stand for something. In their place came private appetite, popular culture and a reflexive suspicion of anything sincere. Into that disenchantment this novel arrived less as a book than as an incident. It is credited with igniting the quarrel over postmodernism in Korean letters that same year. Some hailed it as the country's first postmodern novel and a hard stare at a nation still congratulating itself on the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Others were unpersuaded. Reviewers reached, for good or ill, for the French Nouveau Roman, though the label sat on it the way a borrowed overcoat sits on a man of different build.
I have a Scotsman's suspicion of movements, which are usually named by people who turn up after the fact, and "postmodern" is a roomy cloakroom ticket that can be redeemed for almost anything. It is more useful to say what the book does on the page. Its narrative voice, as one English-language critic summarises it, is objective and methodically non-judgemental, and it keeps that posture across a book of no small length, applied to a story that is anything but cool. A Korean e-book listing quotes a professor of French literature who admires the same quality from another angle: a relentless, dizzying description that will have nothing to do with adjectives or metaphors. What results is a curious hybrid of a police report and a lovers' quarrel. Nobody tells the reader what to feel, and the absence of instruction produces a chill that no amount of lyrical distress could have managed. A reader raised on Muriel Spark, that most Edinburgh of unsentimental narrators, will recognise the temperature, though Spark's coolness is amused and this one is not.
The second trait is vocabulary. In the film, R demands to know the ideology behind J's conduct, and he does so with the borrowed Konglish word idaeollogi rather than any native term. The line became a catchphrase in Korea for years afterwards. One English-language reviewer points out that the Korean Film Archive's subtitles flatten it into a plain question about what is causing her behaviour, and with the flattening goes the joke. It is a small joke with a large mechanism inside. A man in the middle of a quarrel over intimacy reaches for the most abstract word the seminar room ever issued him. The absurdity of that reach, theory arriving like a bailiff at a wedding, may well be what a country freshly introduced to postmodern thought looked like to itself. The novel offers its own supply of borrowed speech. R curses in French, merde, as if his native language had not been issued with an adequate stock, and one Korean reader notes the stiff literary diction in which he addresses everyone, a written register that nobody uses across a tea-room table. I cannot say with certainty that the line appears verbatim in the novel, and I would sooner confess as much than let the film's best joke masquerade as the book's. But the habit of mind it exposes, the use of imported concepts as armour against a person, seems to me to sit at the story's core.
The third trait is the condition of the man himself. A Korean academic study groups this novel with two other works of the early 1990s as fiction of anomie, meaning a state in which the norms that once guided a person have gone and nothing has replaced them. Its protagonists reject the worth of the world around them and, having lost their compass, drift through it as strangers. R suits the diagnosis. In the novel he comes home to poor parents in the provinces, to sisters who worked in factories to keep the family afloat, and to a wife who has raised his two children in his family's house. No post awaits him, and he drifts between Seoul and the provinces. About a month after landing he remarks that he keeps feeling he lives inside a fiction, where nothing he sees has a cause, an effect or a meaning he can identify. The doctorate that was meant to be his passport has become a curiosity, like foreign currency in a shop that accepts only the local coin. I know something of that condition. I left a doctorate unfinished myself, and I have never found a bureau de change that would take the pieces.
The novel proved to be the first of a run. Four more books carrying the racetrack in their titles followed between 1991 and 1993, which suggests either an unusual attachment to a single image or an unusual scepticism about endings. A bookseller's author note describes the writer's experiments as resting on descriptive prose and a circular structure. Circling is a structure of its own: a man who moves between two cities and two women without ever quite arriving is not so much plotted as orbited. I say this with caution, because how far the circularity governs this first volume is a matter for readers with the Korean text in front of them. What I can say is that the shape suits the subject. A returnee is precisely a person who keeps going round the same airport.
The settings deserve a word, since they say more than the dialogue does. In the novel, as on screen, R and J meet in tea rooms, in restaurants and in the anonymous rooms of cheap inns, a geography of transit in which nobody is ever quite at home. The return, it turns out, is a matter of moving between waiting rooms. One can read that as an image of a whole society in a hurry, its people talking at length in rented spaces because the permanent kind is spoken for. It is also a very literary economy: few places, many words.
Then there is J, and here book and film part company in a way that helps more than it hinders. J is the figure R cannot account for. In the story as it reaches the screen she has taken her former lover's critical writing and built a career on it, she is perhaps about to marry someone else, and she may be lying or may simply be cornered. The film, like the story it retells, declines to settle which. The same English-language reviewer describes the camera as a third character, an observer. It is a difficult brief for any actress, to play a woman whom the narrative refuses to explain without either apologising for her or prosecuting her.
Kang Su-yeon met that brief, and the industry said so. In the awards season that followed she won best actress at the Baeksang Arts Awards, the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Chunsa Film Festival. Prizes are not literary criticism, and these belong to a film and an actress, not to the novel. Still, an interpretation can only be as good as the thing it interprets. A text that hands a director an observer's distance and hands an actress a woman nobody can fully explain has left room for both, and that room is a literary property even when the furniture arrives later. There is a compliment buried here that the book rarely receives. Its cool surface was not an absence of feeling. It was a design that other artists could inhabit.
A comparative habit of mind, acquired over too many years among the wrong shelves, sends me back a full century, to Tokyo in 1890. Mori Ōgai's Maihime (The Dancing Girl) is told as a recollection aboard the ship carrying its hero home. Ōta Toyotarō, a law student sent to Berlin on a government scholarship, has fallen in love with a German dancer named Elis, and the story closes with Elis left behind, her reason broken. What waits for him in Japan is a bureaucratic career. The comparison is exact in one respect and instructive in another. Both books concern a man who comes back from Europe with an education. But Ōta is returning to a state that has a use for him.
Ōta's country is building itself, and it wants interpreters, lawyers and men who have seen the machinery at close quarters. His guilt therefore has somewhere to go: it becomes a price, paid in exchange for a position. R's country, by contrast, had lately finished staging its own success, and the novel suggests it has no settled place for the man who can explain what it lacks. In 1890 the returnee is absorbed by the state. In 1990 he is absorbed by nothing in particular. The century between the two books may be the distance between a nation that needs its intellectuals and one that has begun to find them decorative, and the postmodern chill of the later book seems to come from that absence rather than from any theory.
Where Maihime arrives as a confession, with its regret laid out for inspection, this novel explains nothing. The flat voice is the argument. A narrator who declines to judge cannot be accused of pleading for the man, and a man nobody pleads for is one the reader must reckon with alone. That is a peculiarly severe kind of hospitality, and I suspect it is why the book divided its first readers so sharply. It gives them no one to side with, at a moment when the culture was still in the habit of asking which side a book was on.
Thirty-six years on, the surprise is how little of it has dated. A returnee in a country that cannot quite employ what it has educated is no period piece. The airport doors slide open, the world outside is not the one that was promised, and the story declines, with a calm more disturbing than any verdict, to say what the man owes his country or what his country owes him. For readers in Britain the practical barrier is language: as far as I can tell, no English translation of the novel exists, which is why the subtitled film has done most of the book's travelling. That is a pity, since the flat sentences that no film can carry are precisely the book's own. A face can say what a sentence is not allowed to say, and I am grateful to the one that said it.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Colin Marshall, "No Sex Please, This Is Korea: Jang Sun-woo's The Road to the Race Track (1991)", Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 August 2020.
- "Mori Ōgai: Maihime", reference entry, J.B. Metzler, via SpringerLink.
- The Road to the Race Track (Jang Sun-woo, 1991), catalogue record with Korean Movie Database summary, Princeton University Library.
- Hankook Ilbo, report on two of Kang Su-yeon's signature films arriving on Netflix (in Korean), 20 January 2023.