A letter arrived last week from an old friend of mine: Korean, my own age now, someone I have known since our student days, who has asked, for reasons entirely his own, not to appear under his own name in these pages. I shall simply call him my correspondent, and trust the reader will forgive the discretion; some friendships are worth rather more than a byline.
His letters are rarely about anything in particular. This one ran the usual course: his knees, his daughter's exam results, a complaint about the price of good kimchi in the town where he now lives, a joke at my expense about Scottish weather. I read it, as I always do, with the mild and contented distraction one reserves for news from home, until I reached the final paragraph, tucked in almost as an afterthought.
"I picked up my old copy of 무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 가라 last month, don't ask me why. God knows I have no business feeling anything about a book I first read as a student. But it undid me rather, reading it now. I am not sure whether that is Gong Ji-young's doing, or simply what happens when a man reaches an age where he has broken enough promises of his own."
He signed off after that as if nothing had happened, asking after my mother, telling me to mind the ice on the pavements, and I was left holding the letter, quite unable to return to my newspaper. It was not the sentence itself that caught me, but its casualness: a man does not confess to being undone by a book in passing, between kimchi prices and knee complaints, unless the undoing runs rather deep.
So I went back to Gong Ji-young myself: not the novelist filed neatly under "1990s feminist literature" in the university syllabus, but the one who could, apparently, still reach across thirty years and unsettle a man who had thought himself long past being reached.
For those unacquainted with it: Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros's Horn (1993) opens with a telephone call. Hyewan, a novelist recently and bitterly divorced, hears from her old friend Kyung-hye that their mutual friend Young-sun has attempted suicide. As the three women, university friends of long standing, are drawn back into one another's lives, the tidy fiction of their marriages, careers, and the general appearance of having "arrived" comes apart at the seams, revealing three women who have each, in their own fashion, spent a decade quietly suffocating inside arrangements they did not design. It was, by any measure, a sensation: a defining text of the wave that the Korean press, at the time, dubbed the "Gong Ji-young phenomenon."
The novel takes its title, famously, from Buddhist scripture, and it is here that I think the essay proper ought to begin: with an irony almost nobody writing about this book has bothered to sit with.
The line comes from the Sutta Nipata, among the oldest strata of the Buddhist canon: walk alone, as the rhinoceros walks with its single horn; be like the lion, unstartled by noise; be like the wind, uncaught in any net. In its original context, this is a monk's counsel to himself: the solitude of the renunciate who has voluntarily severed every worldly tie in pursuit of enlightenment. It presupposes nothing about gender. It presupposes no prior wound, no husband who has failed you, no society that has closed its fist around your wrist. It is solitude chosen from a position of spiritual abundance, not solitude imposed by a position of social poverty.
Gong Ji-young takes this serene religious injunction and turns it, quite precisely, inside out. Her characters' solitude is not a discipline undertaken; it is a diagnosis arrived at. Hyewan does not walk alone because she has transcended attachment; she walks alone because attachment, in the form of a husband's infidelity and a society's indifference, has already been stripped from her, and walking is the only dignity left. Where the sutra's solitude is a monk's achievement, Gong's is a woman's survival. It is not Buddhist detachment; it is the coping mechanism of the wounded, dressed, cleverly, in the borrowed robes of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old scripture. I have combed through a fair quantity of commentary on this novel, Korean and otherwise, and nearly all of it treats the title's origin as a charming footnote. Almost nobody asks what it costs a writer to take a monk's serenity and repurpose it as a divorcee's battle cry. That inversion is not incidental to the book. It is, I would argue, the book's entire argument in miniature.
It would be a parochial mistake, I think, to leave the matter there: to read this novel purely within the frame of Korean feminist literary history, worthy though that frame is. Set beside Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) or Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), Gong's novel reveals itself as part of a considerably older and wider argument, one that women writers across very different cultures kept arriving at independently, as though solitude were simply the answer that the sum kept producing. Chopin's Edna Pontellier discovers, a full century before Hyewan, that the roles of wife and mother leave no room in which a self might actually live, and her final swim into the Gulf is not, whatever the shocked contemporary reviewers said, mere despair; it is the only unowned space available to her. Woolf, thirty years on, made the argument almost embarrassingly practical: five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock on the door. Money and space, she insisted, not talent, were what had been withheld from women writers for centuries.
Gong Ji-young's contribution to this lineage is to strip away both the American gothic drowning and the English economic argument and locate the same problem squarely inside the Korean domestic apartment of the early 1990s: inside a marriage that looks, from the street, entirely respectable. Her originality is not that she discovered women's isolation; Chopin and Woolf had already mapped that territory with some precision. Her originality is that she wrote it as rage rather than as melancholy or manifesto. Where Edna drowns and Woolf theorises, Gong's women shout, weep, telephone one another at two in the morning, and occasionally strike each other, verbally, with real cruelty. It is solitude with its teeth still in.
And here I must turn to something I have come to think of as the true subject of this essay: not the 1993 novel alone, but the thirty-year arc of the woman who wrote it, because Gong Ji-young did something almost no novelist manages. She let her own answer to the question change in public, book by book, in full view of the readers who had fallen for the first version.
In the early period (No More Beautiful Wandering, 1989; Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros's Horn, 1993; Mackerel, 1994) the verdict is unambiguous. To separate, cleanly and without apology, from the relationship or the society doing the damage is itself the ethics of the book; it is the whole of the salvation on offer. Solidarity has not yet entered the picture. Each woman's dignity is her own, earned alone.
By 2005, with Our Happy Time, the verdict has reversed almost exactly. Salvation is no longer standing alone; it is a wealthy, suicidal young woman and a condemned murderer meeting weekly across a prison table and, improbably, enduring each other into something like grace. Sin, punishment and forgiveness enter the vocabulary for the first time. And by 2013, with Tall Blue Ladder and the companion volumes of monastery writing that surround it, the setting itself has changed: not a courtroom, not a marriage, but a Benedictine monastery, where reconciliation happens in shared silence rather than solitary defiance. The solitude has become communal. The rhinoceros has, in a manner of speaking, learnt to walk in company.
One sentence, I think, holds the whole trajectory: in 1993, she told her readers to let go and walk alone; from 2005 onward, she was writing that we ought to take hold of a hand and endure together. It is not a retraction. It runs, deliberately, in exactly the opposite direction from where she began. A writer capable of publicly reversing her own founding premise, across three decades and in full view of the readers who loved her for the earlier version, is doing something considerably harder than staying consistent.
This is, I confess, where the essay stops being entirely about literary criticism and becomes, briefly, a confession of my own.
I fell for those early sentences the way one falls off a kerb: without warning, and rather painfully. There was a viciousness to that early prose that I have never entirely got over, short clauses that did not court the reader but seized him by the collar, that bit rather than caressed. My correspondent's letter, I think, undid him for precisely this reason: he had been bitten once, at twenty, and had spent thirty years assuming no book would ever do it to him again.
I will not pretend I do not feel some private grief at the gentling of that voice. The writer who once drew blood now, more often, offers a hand to hold; the sentences that used to leave marks now leave comfort instead. If I am honest, I miss the teeth. But I have come to think that missing them is a poor reason to withhold the far larger thing this essay owes her, which is respect: not nostalgia, respect. Love, properly understood, was never a matter of demanding that someone remain exactly as she was when we first fell for her. It is watching her change and declining, nonetheless, to look away. For a writer to spend thirty honest years turning her own language against her own earlier convictions, in full public view, is a harder and rarer feat than talent. It is courage, and it deserves to be called by its name.
The bite became a hand. I find, rather to my own surprise, that I am glad of it, even as I go on, privately, missing the bite.
I wrote back to my correspondent that same evening. I did not, in the end, have very much to say about kimchi prices or icy pavements. I told him, instead, that I understood exactly what had undone him, and that I rather suspected it would go on doing so to men our age for a good while yet. Then I took my own copy of the novel down from the shelf, the spine long since cracked, the pages faintly yellowed at the edges, and, for the first time in perhaps fifteen years, I sat down and let it bite me again.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Aladin Bookstore
☞ For an accessible English entry point into Gong Ji-young's mid-period turn toward forgiveness and communion, Our Happy Time, translated by Sora Kim-Russell: Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
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