Two anniversaries fall on the same Wednesday this year, and neither is the kind that earns a plaque. The first is a birthday. Yi Sang, the Korean writer whose pen name is usually explained as a box made of plum wood, though the story has more than one version, was born on 23 September 1910, or so most biographies agree, which makes today his hundred and sixteenth. The second is a publication. In the September 1936 issue of the monthly Chogwang, a short story called Nalgae appeared, known in English as The Wings. Ninety years is long enough for any book to have been misread in most of the ways available.
Yi Sang trained as an architect and took a post in the architectural office of the Government-General of Korea, from which tuberculosis eventually removed him. He then ran a succession of cafés, none of which prospered. His poems, published in a Seoul newspaper in 1934 as Crow's Eye View, drew such a volume of complaint from readers that the serial was stopped at fifteen instalments out of a planned thirty. He died in a Tokyo hospital in April 1937, aged twenty-six by Western reckoning and twenty-seven by the Korean count. The Wings is the work that, by most accounts, persuaded Korean critics that the strangeness had a method.
For readers who have not met it, the story is brief and odd. The narrator, who is never named, lives with his wife in the seventh of eighteen identical households on a Seoul lane that he himself likens to a brothel. His room is at the back and never sees the sun. Hers is at the front and does, and a sliding paper door divides them. When she goes out he lets himself into her room and amuses himself with her hand mirror, her cosmetics, and a magnifying glass with which he scorches tissue paper. Visitors come to her; coins come to him. He is puzzled by the arithmetic. When at last he decides that money is simply the currency of pleasure, he goes out to try it, and the story, which has been a still life, becomes a series of aimless walks.
The plot proper arrives with the medicine. His wife has been giving him what she calls aspirin; it turns out to be Adalin, a sleeping draught. After a day and a night of sleep away from home, he returns meaning to apologise for having suspected her, and walks in on the truth of her trade. He leaves again. By noon he has drifted to the roof of a department store in the centre of the city, a siren sounds, and his armpits begin to itch, in the place where wings might once have grown. The story ends on a wish to shout: wings, grow again; let me fly once more. The verb is wish. The text does not report a flight.
Before any of this, though, there is a prologue: a page of epigrams set apart from the story like a notice pinned outside a door. It opens by asking whether one has heard of a genius who has been turned into a stuffed specimen, a line that has become, I understand, one of the most quoted openings in modern Korean fiction. The word is bakje, taxidermy, the skin kept and the animal gone. The speaker goes on to describe himself as a kind of jeongsin bunilja, which I read as a person whose mind has come apart from itself. He talks of designing a life with a woman in which he would accept only half of everything she has to offer, one foot inside, the two of them staring at each other like two suns and sniggering. To my ear this is as economical a definition of a divided self as any I have met. A reader arriving cold could fairly conclude that the writer is not to be trusted to explain himself. That is the right conclusion, and it is also the first entrance of the double.
I came to The Wings as a Scotsman raised on doubles, and the habit of comparison is, I suspect, no more than that. Still, there is a term for the habit, and it is ours. In 1919 the critic G. Gregory Smith, in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, gave the name 'Caledonian antisyzygy' to what he saw as the coexistence of opposites in Scottish writing, an oscillation between the realistic and the supernatural. Smith meant it as a defence. Scottish literature was being accused of lacking coherence, and his answer was that the incoherence was the coherence, a 'zigzag of contradictions' with a logic of its own. The word has since been worn smooth by use, and it points, as such words do, at a small and famous shelf of books.
James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published anonymously in 1824, gives a young Calvinist a companion who takes on his face and leads him, on impeccable theological grounds, into murder. Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of 1886, gives a respectable London doctor a second self who does what the first will not own to. Edinburgh, which produced Stevenson, also produced Deacon Brodie, cabinet-maker by day and burglar by night, and the city has been selling the theme to visitors ever since, alongside shortbread. Even R. D. Laing, the Glasgow psychiatrist, called his first book The Divided Self (1960) and described the division as one between a private, authentic identity and a false one presented to the world.
Returning to The Wings in this company, what strikes me is how little it resembles them. Wringhim, sure of his own election, and Jekyll, sure of his standing, both live before an audience of the righteous or the respectable, and the double is whatever that audience must not see. That is why their divisions are moral, and why both books end in ruin: a mask, once it slips, cannot be refitted. Laing's false self is likewise a performance for an audience. Yi Sang's narrator has no audience at all. Nobody expects anything of him. He has no name in the story, no employer, no reputation to maintain, and so no mask to wear, because there is no one to wear it for. What he has is a room.
That is a different sort of split, and it accounts for something odd about the story: the double never turns up as a stranger with a familiar face. It is spread through the furniture instead. There are two rooms, one dark and one lit; two people, one kept and one keeping; two halves of a life; two suns. The narrator is himself both the genius and the specimen of the prologue, the skin and the missing animal. Yi Sang had rehearsed the arrangement years earlier in 'Mirror', a poem of 1933 in which the reflection is a left-handed stranger in a silent world who cannot take the hand held out to him. In the story the hand mirror is a toy, and the toy is doing the same work. The paper door between his room and hers is a very thin boundary, and it holds. I have lived alone long enough, with the curtains drawn against a north-facing window, to feel some sympathy for a man who finds the back room agreeable. It is a mistake, all the same, to take agreeable for whole.
The Scottish doubles concern themselves with sin. Yi Sang's narrator concerns himself with money. His great discovery, the one that sends him out of the house, is that coins are a language: his wife's visitors give her money, she gives him money, and the whole traffic apparently produces pleasure. It reads like a joke, and it is also the moment at which a man who has lived entirely outside the economy of the household begins to study it as a foreigner would. The same steady, faintly comic method appears when he investigates his wife's occupation, an inquiry pursued from behind a paper door with the composure of a naturalist observing a species he happens to be living with. I can think of nothing in Hogg or Stevenson quite so mild, or quite so unsettling.
The critic Choe Jae-seo, writing in the Chosun Ilbo that autumn, reviewed the story in terms that are still cited as the start of a long argument about modernism and realism. Set beside Park Tae-won's Cheonbyeon Punggyeong (roughly, 'Scenes by the Stream'), serialised in the same magazine and looking outward at a whole neighbourhood, The Wings, he argued, looked inward with the same steadiness: an objective eye turned on a subjective world. He called the first an expansion of realism and the second a deepening of it. Later scholars have questioned how faithfully he read either book, but the formula has done its work. It says that the strangeness of the story is a way of looking, and that the looking is unusually calm.
One irony deserves a paragraph to itself. The prologue advises, in a tone that is almost rude in its confidence, that the nineteenth century be sealed off wherever possible, and adds that the spirit of Dostoevsky is liable to be a waste. Hogg and Stevenson are nineteenth-century Scots to the marrow, so placing them beside a Korean story of 1936 is faintly impertinent, and the prologue is not short of impertinence itself. It also raises the fair question of whether the comparison illuminates or merely decorates. I think it illuminates one thing, which is the point at which the two traditions part company. That point is the ending.
Hogg and Stevenson end their books with closure of the harshest kind: a confession, a discovery, a body, an explanation that arrives too late. The double is exposed, and exposure is the punishment. The Wings declines to expose anything. The wife's trade is known well before the last page, the narrator's condition is no secret to him, and nothing that happens on the roof alters either. What changes is that a man who has slept through most of his own story starts, at the sound of a noon siren above a crowded shop, to want something. The book ends on the wanting. Whether he recovers the wings, or only the memory of having had them, or merely the pleasure of the sentence that says so, is left exactly where the text leaves it.
A word of caution about the frame I have used. Antisyzygy has not aged wholly well. Critics working in postcolonial terms have objected that it turns a national literature into a case history, as if the Scottish mind were a patient with a divided self rather than a culture with a complicated past. Smith intended a defence; some of his heirs have delivered a diagnosis. I have used the word as a lens rather than a verdict. It brings certain shapes into focus (the double, the mask, the ruinous ending) and leaves others blurred, and The Wings is mostly made of the others.
Ninety years on, the story keeps its door ajar. I have read the ending many times, at different points in my own life, and it has meant something different each time: a recovery, a delusion, a last pleasure and, once, in a bad winter, merely a noise in a crowded building. What I cannot decide is whether the paper door between the two rooms ever divided the narrator at all, or whether it was only ever the place where, for a moment, a single man could see himself from both sides. If a division needs a wall to exist, and the wall is made of paper, what exactly is it that flies?
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Nalgae (날개), Yi Sang, Aladin Bookstore
To my knowledge, English translations exist, among them Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee's The Wings (Jimoondang, 2001).
'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
- Academy of Korean Studies, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, entry 'Nalgae' (Wings).
- G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, Macmillan, 1919.
- Review of Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, in Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 17 (2018).