On the ferry from Oban to Craignure a man in a green waxed jacket stood at the stern rail and fed the gulls his sandwich, one crust at a time. He did it without ceremony, as another man might wind a watch. The birds held station astern, hanging on the air above the wake with hardly a wingbeat, and every crust that left his hand was taken before it reached the water. I watched them for most of the crossing as they followed the ship across the Firth of Lorn and never once looked at the island ahead. When the sandwich ran out they peeled away one by one and went back towards Oban without a backward glance. Gulls follow a ship for what it throws up, not for where it is going. It did not cross my mind again until I reread Choi In-hun's The Square. Its hero is also on a ship, also followed by two white birds, and also unable to say what he wants from either shore.
The Square, Gwangjang in Korean, appeared in the November 1960 issue of the magazine Saebyeok, when its author was in his mid-twenties. Choi In-hun was born in 1936 in Hoeryong, a town that now lies in North Korea, and I understand that his family came south during the war aboard an American landing ship. The timing of the book matters, because a few months earlier a student uprising, known in Korea as the April Revolution, had opened a brief season of public argument. The preface that went with the magazine publication, as a Korean weekly summarises it, treats that new freedom as something worth writing for. Korean accounts commonly describe his subject, the two Koreas set side by side and judged by one measure, as close to taboo before that spring. By the winter it was in print.
The book opens at sea. Lee Myeong-jun, spelled Myong-jun in the English edition, is a prisoner of war aboard a ship carrying men who have refused to go home to either side. Almost everything we learn about him arrives in flashback. He was a philosophy student in Seoul, and his father is in the North. Police interrogation in the South, as I understand it, sours him on the country he lives in. He crosses the border in search of what Seoul lacks and finds a land of meetings, slogans and rehearsed self-criticism. The war puts him in uniform and then in captivity, and at the repatriation interviews he gives the officers a single answer, a neutral country. The ship is Indian, named the Tagore, and the story is the voyage.
It would be easy to file this as a Cold War parable with a tidy moral, and the book will not oblige. Lee goes north expecting the keepers of a last ideal, as Kirkus has it, and finds slogans and bureaucracy where he had looked for the ideal. He is no kinder to the South, where he sees private comfort and public emptiness. The effect is not equidistance but a pair of separate, exact disappointments, each in its own register, and neither side can claim him as a convert. Even on the ship he stays apart from the other former prisoners, a pattern that the Complete Review's round-up of reviews reads as his lifelong failure to belong anywhere.
The title names the idea. In the preface to the first edition, according to that same weekly, Choi proposed that a human being cannot live without going out into the square, nor, he added, without withdrawing into the secret chamber. Gwangjang is the public place, the agora, where a person is seen and counts. Milsil is the private room, where a person can be unobserved and entirely himself. A decent society, the book says in effect, supplies both, and Lee tests his two countries by that standard. The South, he finds, is all rooms, dressed to their owners' rank, with no square worth the name. The North, as I read it, has a square in plenty, but a square of slogans and ritual that leaves a man nowhere to close a door. The South gives him rooms without a square, the North a square without a room, and the ship that carries him offers neither.
I kept thinking, while I read it, of a Scottish novel that Choi may never have opened. Walter Scott's Waverley appeared in 1814. It sends a young English officer into the Jacobite rising of 1745, where he is passed between two camps and two women, Flora Mac-Ivor of the Highland cause and Rose Bradwardine of the Lowland household. If I have my Lukács right, Scott's hero is deliberately a man of middling weight, and that is his use. He is light enough to be carried from one side to the other and can see both without being broken by either. Choi has the same architecture. Lee drifts between two systems, and two women stand for what each of them offers. Yun-ae belongs to the South, Eun-hye to the North, and the second, a dancer, turns up again at the front as a nurse. I would not press the allegory harder than the book does, since the women are people before they are symbols, and to my eye the pages where the novel forgets it are among its weakest.
The difference lies in what the story permits afterwards. Waverley is allowed to go home. The rising fails, the Highland chief who befriended him is executed, and the hero, having seen what both loyalties cost, retires to a restored estate and a good marriage. Scott's century could still offer its middle man a house to retire to. Waverley is permitted to go home; Lee Myeong-jun is the hero who has been left without one. The Korea of 1953 had been cut in two by a line that no middling man could straddle, and the only sanctioned place for someone who refused both halves was a third country that, for Lee, is nothing but a name. Choi's best stroke, to my mind, is to take that name seriously. Neutrality is not a position in this book. It is an absence with a flag.
The history behind the premise is shorter than one expects. Under the armistice arrangements, prisoners who refused repatriation were not simply released, and I believe it was in Indian custody that they were interviewed. According to NK News, on 9 February 1954 a party of seventy-six Koreans and twelve Chinese sailed from Incheon for Madras, eighty-eight men in all, who had turned their backs on every flag on offer. Choi's novel appeared six years later, and its hero is an invention. He is the question those men posed, given a name and a past and sent out on the same water.
Where I come from, the law once supplied the idea in miniature. For centuries a Scottish jury could return guilty or not guilty, and it could also return not proven. That third verdict neither convicts nor clears, and Walter Scott, if I recall his phrase, called it a bastard. The accused walks out of court, but the question stays standing in the room behind him. Choi's neutral country works in much the same way. It lets Lee leave without ever answering what he was asked, and it leaves the question where it was. Nobody is acquitted, and nobody is convicted.
What happens on the voyage is slight and carefully placed. Lee watches two gulls keep pace with the ship and takes them for Eun-hye and the child she was carrying when she died at the front. The final movement takes him out of the book by way of the sea. I shall not linger there, for the page does not. Readers have never settled whether this is despair or a kind of return. One Korean reading I came across calls the sea the one place that is at once a square and a room, wide and public yet closed over him like a private door. That is a tidy resolution, and I am not sure the book has earned it. Yet the image is built so that either reading can stand, and Choi, who went back to the gull scene at least once, seems to have known it.
The more unusual fact about The Square is that it has never stood still. The magazine version ran to something like six hundred manuscript sheets, I understand, and the first book edition of 1961 swelled it to about eight hundred. Choi revised again for a collected edition in 1967, and in 1973 a new publisher's edition turned most of its Chinese-character vocabulary into plain hangul and reworked the gull scene. A collected edition of 1976 was corrected so heavily that Korean commentators speak of it as close to a rewrite. In 2010, as the same weekly reports, he cut roughly fourteen of 194 pages and wrote new ones in their place. Each edition carried its own preface, and the earliest speaks of the April Revolution with evident satisfaction. The 1973 preface calls the book a monument and an epitaph, and describes the later tinkering as washing dirt from the face of a stone. By 1989, if the summary is fair, Choi allows that the story might have been more hopeful had its hero not gone into the sea. He adds that he himself still lives under a political arrangement much like the one his hero knew.
For a reader in English the text is approached through two doors. Kevin O'Rourke's translation appeared in 1985, and Kim Seong-kon's, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2014 in its Library of Korean Literature, is the more recent, though copies now appear to be scarce and dear. Kim's edition prints Choi's prefaces of 1961 and 1989. If I read the reviews rightly, it offers no note on what was revised and when, so the English reader meets a text with a long history and no map of it. Critics writing in English have not been kind to the surface. The prose is stiff, the central metaphor is hammered until it dulls, the romantic episodes now read as dated, and Kirkus found the whole earnest and strange. I recognise most of these charges, and I also think they are the price of the book's method. Choi is writing a novel of ideas about division in a literature for which that was still a new form. The ideas arrive with the clank of a first machine. A book that argues for a public square has itself been a building site for fifty years, and the scaffolding shows.
The ferry docked at Craignure in the early afternoon. The man in the waxed jacket folded the empty sandwich paper into his pocket and went below, and the gulls were already specks off the stern while nobody on deck remarked on any of it. The birds had been more candid than the passengers, because they never pretended to be going anywhere. Lee Myeong-jun's gulls are another matter. They follow him because he needs them to, and the book never quite says whether they are there at all. Choi gave a stateless man the only company he could be sure of, the company of what he has lost, and then spent fifty years washing the stone. I have the Dalkey paperback on the table beside me now, with its two prefaces and no map. The ship in it is still at sea.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: The Square, Choi In-hun (translated by Seong-Kon Kim), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Gwangjang / Gugwoomong (광장 / 구운몽), Choi In-hun, Aladin Bookstore
'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
- The Complete Review, review notes on The Square by Choi In-hun, translated by Kim Seong-kon (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014).
- NK News, “The Korean War POWs who rejected North and South Korea to go to neutral India.”
- Kyunghyang Weekly, “Why did Choi In-hun keep rewriting The Square?” (in Korean), 6 November 2017.