The word is built from Greek, and it is not a pretty one: alexithymia, from a, without, lexis, word, and thymos, feeling. It means, roughly, no words for emotion, and I understand that it was coined in the early 1970s to describe patients who could not say what they felt and who often could not tell. I met the word first in a psychiatry textbook belonging to a friend, and I did not meet it again for thirty years. Then I read Sohn Won-pyung's Almond, in which a teenage boy has the condition, and the word came back to me as something very close to a character.
Almond was first published in Korea in 2017 and won the tenth Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Its hero, Yunjae, was diagnosed with alexithymia as a child, and he also finds it hard to recognise fear. The title is anatomical: the almond is the amygdala, the almond-shaped region of the brain associated with emotion, and Yunjae's, in the novel's account, is underdeveloped. His mother and grandmother have spent his childhood preparing him for the social world, drilling him in what other people expect. At fifteen, on a Christmas Eve that is also his birthday, a street attack takes his grandmother's life and leaves his mother in a coma. He is left alone in the second-hand bookshop where the family lived, with a kind neighbour upstairs and a school in which he has no idea how to behave.
It would be natural to read the book as a case study, and a good deal of the English-language reception has done so. I think it is something stranger: a wager. The wager is that kindness, which we habitually treat as the output of feeling, can be produced by other means. If a boy who cannot feel alarm can still learn to behave towards other people with care, then care is not quite what we thought it was, and our habit of treating the two as one thing needs another look.
I come to this as a student of Asian philosophy, and the wager has an old Chinese argument at its back. In the Mencius, the sage asks his listener to imagine a child about to fall into a well. Anyone who saw it, he says, would feel alarm and compassion, and not because he wanted favour from the child's parents or praise from his neighbours. The reaction comes first, before any calculation. From this Mencius concludes, in the account given by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that human beings have tendencies that are innate but undeveloped. He calls them sprouts, and they must be tended if they are to grow into virtue. A person without the feeling of compassion, he adds, is not a human being at all.
Yunjae is the hard case for Mencius. If alarm is the first sprout of compassion, what is to be said of a boy in whom the alarm never sounds? The sage's last sentence, taken literally, condemns him. The novel's answer is that the sentence is wrong, or at least incomplete, and Sohn finds her case less in any Chinese book than in an Edinburgh one.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, Adam Smith argued that our sympathy for other people is not a reflex at all but an act of imagination. We cannot feel what another person feels, he says. We can only picture ourselves in his situation, and the picture is what moves us. Sympathy on this account is a skill, and like other skills it can be trained, and above all it requires attention. Smith lived and worked in Edinburgh and lies buried in the Canongate Kirkyard, which I pass more often than I like to admit, and I have never done so without feeling that he would have understood Yunjae at once.
David Hume, Smith's friend and Edinburgh's other great moralist, held that reason alone never moves anyone to act and that our moral distinctions rest on sentiment. Yunjae is therefore a test case for Hume as much as for Mencius, and a more awkward one. If morality rests on sentiment, and the sentiment is missing, the structure should fall. Sohn's boy suggests that it does not, or not entirely, and that what holds it up is a habit of attention built from the outside in. I find that more persuasive in a novel than I would in a treatise, perhaps because a novel can show the habit being acquired, one awkward afternoon at a time.
This is, as I read it, Yunjae's method, though he would not put it so. He has been taught by a mother who knew exactly what she was doing to notice the signs of grief or pleasure in other people and to produce the response that goes with them. What comes out of such training looks at first like mimicry. But Smith's point is that mimicry and sympathy are neighbours. The man who has learned to place himself in another's situation is not faking compassion. He is doing deliberately what the rest of us do without noticing that we are doing it.
Smith's other great device, the impartial spectator, is also in its way an alexithymic's gift. Smith imagines a figure within the mind who judges our conduct as an outsider would, without the distortions of partiality. Yunjae is, by temperament, that spectator made flesh. He narrates in the first person, as I recall it, in a level and observing tone, reporting what he sees without the interference of the usual flatteries and fears. That voice is the book's chief formal achievement. It lets the reader watch the ordinary machinery of human feeling from a little distance, as one watches a clock with its back off, and to notice how many small adjustments the rest of us make without knowing.
The other half of the book is Gon. Gon is a new classmate with a deprived and traumatic past, a boy whose difficulty is the opposite of Yunjae's: not too little feeling but a flood of it, with nothing to channel it. Their relationship moves, as the novel proceeds, from bully and victim to something closer to friendship, shaped by real danger, and it is the emotional centre of the book. Here the arrangement becomes plain. Yunjae has too little feeling and Gon has too much, and the novel's wager is that each can lend the other what he lacks. It is a very Smithian idea, in that it makes sympathy something exchanged between people and not a possession of either.
Dora, a fellow student, brings out in Yunjae something he had been told he might never have, and the book is careful, it seems to me, not to make romance a cure. The neighbour upstairs, whose kindness is practical rather than eloquent, matters at least as much. Almond is not a story in which love repairs a defect. It is a story in which a small number of patient people behave well towards a boy for long enough that he begins to behave well in return.
Booklist's reviewer observes that as Yunjae risks connection, the almond takes seed. Whether or not the phrase was meant in a Mencian spirit, it fits. A seed is what Mencius calls a sprout, and the question that follows is one the Neo-Confucians of Joseon argued about for years: whether the four moral beginnings and the seven ordinary emotions belong to the same register of the mind. In the sixteenth century the scholars Yi Hwang and Gi Dae-seung exchanged long letters on it, and the so-called Four-Seven Debate became one of the great quarrels of Korean thought. I do not suggest that Sohn had it in mind. I suggest that a Korean novel about a boy whose feelings and conduct have come apart is walking over ground that Korean thinkers surveyed long ago.
I come from a country in which the open display of feeling is regarded with some suspicion, and in which a whole vocabulary of understatement stands in for it. When a Scot says that something is not bad, he may mean that it is magnificent. I would not claim for us the condition of Yunjae, but we have some experience of the gap between what is felt and what is said, and of the neighbours and relations who learn to read it. That may be why the book's account of a household that has taught itself to translate one person's silences felt, to me, closer to home than its setting.
A word about the book's travels. The English translation is by Sandy Joosun Lee, who tells Booklist that she began translating purely for the pleasure of it. I understand from a report by Loyola Marymount University's Asia Media that the novel later won a Japanese booksellers' prize, and that Sohn was, if I read the report correctly, the first author from elsewhere in Asia to receive it. I should add a caution of my own. I am a historian and not a clinician, and the novel's account of alexithymia is a novelist's. Readers who live with the condition, or care for someone who does, will know better than I what the book gets right.
The book is sold as young adult fiction, and the label may have cost it some adult readers, which would be a pity. Changbi issued it first as youth literature, and a separate edition for general readers appeared from the publisher Dazzling in 2023, which suggests that nobody concerned thought adults should be left out. Its subject is not adolescence but the possibility of a moral life without the usual equipment, and adults, who have more to unlearn on the matter, may need it more. Readers should know that violence is part of the story from its first pages, and that the novel does not treat it lightly.
If I take anything from the book into my own life, it is a modest lesson. Most of us are taught that kindness follows feeling, and so we wait to feel kind before we act, and are then ashamed of the long stretches in which the feeling does not come. Sohn's novel proposes a different order of operations. Behave well first, attend closely, say the right word to the person in front of you, and allow the feeling to catch up if it will. This is not a cynical recipe. It is closer to what the older moralists meant by cultivation, a word that has more to do with farming than with refinement.
The word I began with has two halves, and the most hopeful suggestion in the novel is that the first can be taught to the second. Yunjae begins with no words for feeling. To the extent that I can say so without spoiling the book, he ends with words, and the feeling comes afterwards, at its own pace, like a seed that has been mistaken for a stone. I closed the volume with the Greek compound split in two in my head, lexis on one side and thymos on the other, and with the odd conviction that Sohn had shown us how the first could be offered to the second, and how long a patient person might have to wait.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Almond, Won-pyung Sohn (translated by Sandy Joosun Lee), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Amondeu (아몬드), Sohn Won-pyung, 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.
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