The corridor outside the assembly hall at my secondary school held a varnished oak board, and on it, in gold leaf, the name of the dux of each year, one line to a year, running back further than anyone could remember. Dux is the Scots schoolroom word for the pupil who comes top. Nobody I knew ever stopped to ask how a given name had arrived on the board. We passed it as one passes a war memorial, with a slight lowering of the voice and no questions. Marks were marks, and the board was the board. It came back to me this October, while I was rereading Yi Mun-yol's Our Twisted Hero, a Korean novella in which the best marks in a provincial classroom are produced by nearly everybody except the boy whose name stands above them.
A few facts first, for anyone coming to the book cold. The novella appeared in the summer of 1987 in the journal Segye-ui Munhak, whose title means World Literature, and it took that year's Yi Sang Literary Prize. A film followed in 1992, directed by Park Jong-won. The English edition, translated by Kevin O'Rourke, was published in New York by Hyperion in 2001, and Kirkus Reviews, which has met a good many morality tales, praised it as beautifully constructed and set it beside Lord of the Flies. I understand the comparison and agree with half of it. Golding's boys are alone on an island with a conch and no adult in sight. Yi's pupils sit in rows in a provincial primary school with a teacher at the front whose job is to see, and a good part of the story concerns what the grown-ups do not.
The narrator, Han Byeong-tae, is a fifth-year pupil moved from Seoul to a small country school, where he finds the class governed by its monitor, Eom Seok-dae. The story is set, so far as I can tell, in the late 1950s, and the telling comes decades afterwards from a man who has had time to arrange his memories to his own advantage and may or may not have done so. Byeong-tae is clever and knows it, and he resists. The class does not join him. His isolation is practical rather than dramatic, a matter of who will share a task, who will answer when spoken to, and who will be seen standing near him. In time he gives way, accepts the favours the monitor hands out to his own, and ends up something close to a lieutenant. One English-language reviewer on the KTLit site compares his surrender to Winston Smith's at the end of 1984 and notes how easy life afterwards becomes. It is the easiness that interests me.
The commonest reading, so far as I can tell, treats the novella as political allegory. The classroom is the nation, Seok-dae the strongman, and the new teacher the reformer who arrives to end the regime. It is a sound reading, and the dates support it, since the story reached print in the year of the mass street protests that ended in a promise of direct presidential elections. But an allegory in which a class of children stands for a people has an awkward habit of excusing the people. The children become victims, the tyrant becomes a single bad cause, and the reader goes home satisfied that the lesson concerned somebody else. What the book does instead, I think, is keep its eye on the narrator and on a question that has little to do with the strongman's character. Why is it pleasant to be ruled?
Seok-dae's power, as the novella builds it, is not chiefly a matter of fists. It is an economy. He is made monitor by the institution, which is to say by the adults, and he converts that borrowed title into a private currency of protection, small privileges and a place near the warm middle of the room. For those who will not buy in, the weather of the group simply turns cold. Each pupil's compliance is individually reasonable, and that is the horror of it. Nobody in the class needs to be a villain for the arrangement to hold. They need only be tired, ordinarily self-interested, and children.
The detail that sent me back to the board in the corridor is the way the monitor's brilliance is made. His marks are excellent, and, as I understand the plot, they are excellent because other pupils write his papers, so that the labour of a whole class is poured into one reputation. The adults read the results and are content, having no reason to look closely at a boy whose numbers please them. It takes a new teacher, a young man who arrives for the sixth-year class, to notice what the older staff apparently did not, that the papers carry the traces of other names written and rubbed out. The figures are the cover for the regime, and the regime is what produces the figures, and neither can be examined without the other coming down. A merit manufactured by the many, credited to one, and accepted by the people paid to check it: I know of no shorter description of a gold-leaf board. I do not suggest that the boards at my school were forged. I suggest only that nobody there ever looked.
A word on the title, because translation does something to it. Twisted, in English, is a moral word. A twisted hero has gone bad, and the fault sits inside him. The Korean participle ilgeureojin, as I understand it, describes something bent out of shape, as a face is by pain or a reflection by a warped pane, and it says nothing about who did the bending. The opening word, Urideurui, is a plural form of our, an insistent we that English cannot quite carry. Together they suggest a hero deformed by pressure, with the pressure coming from us. O'Rourke's Our Twisted Hero is the natural English title, and I could not have found a better. It still cannot make the possessive sound like a confession.
The fall of the monitor is the part most summaries treat as the ending, and it is the part the novella treats with least enthusiasm. The new teacher dismantles the regime by force, and the class is made to denounce its former master in a session that one reviewer finds uncomfortably close to a re-education meeting. Pupils who spent a year or more doing as they were told now perform their liberation on demand, with an energy that suggests they have merely changed monitors. Byeong-tae, notably, does not join in. The English Wikipedia summary and the KTLit reviewer agree on that much, though they read it differently. One sees a boy unwilling to give up what the old order gave him, the other the single pupil who refuses to turn witness. I read it as both, which is the novella's gift. A refusal can be loyalty to a tyrant and honesty about oneself at once.
The ending keeps that ambiguity intact. Years later the adult Byeong-tae sees Seok-dae led away by the police, and I understand from one summary that he is overcome that evening and weeps. The novella does not tell us for whom. For the fallen hero, certainly, though pity for the boy who once ran your life is an odd feeling. For the boy who held out for a while and then did not, perhaps. For a class that never quite recovered the habit of being ordinary. I suspect, though the text declines to say so, that he weeps for all three, and that the tears are the only unplanned act in the whole account.
Why open it again now, nearly four decades on? The allegorical reading has aged better than most, but it has also gone slack. The dictatorship it answered is a matter for history lessons, and a fable about a threat that has passed frightens nobody in particular. What has taken its place is a psychological vocabulary. In December 2021 a variety programme on MBC revisited the novel as a school version of Squid Game, and, as MBC's own entertainment site reported, a psychiatrist on the show described the monitor's conduct as gaslighting. The word is useful. It is also, I think, a way of making the book comfortable again. Gaslighting has a gaslighter, and a gaslighter can be blamed. The novella allows no such relief. Its class is not a gathering of the deceived but a committee of the compliant, each member of which knew roughly what was being done and found it easier to know it quietly.
The book's real prophecy, to my mind, concerns the delegation of authority rather than its seizure. Seok-dae holds no power that was not first lent to him by the adults, in the form of a title and a presumption of merit. Anyone who has watched a modern community form will know the shape: the volunteer administrator of a group chat, the moderator with a short temper, the ranking system that rewards whoever the crowd already likes, the follower count that strangers read as a verdict. In each, a small mandate is handed over for convenience, and within a season the holder has learned to spend it. The rest of us, who need the group, adjust our behaviour towards whoever controls its warmth. None of us is wicked. We are, as Yi's pupils were, efficient.
A Scotsman may be allowed to point out that the idea is older than the schoolroom. In the sixteenth century the French essayist Étienne de La Boétie wrote a short discourse on voluntary servitude, whose central claim, in my paraphrase, is that a tyrant stands only because his subjects keep kneeling, and that a good many of them are paid for it. Golding and Orwell, whom the English-language reviews reach for, ask what the strong do to the weak. La Boétie, and Yi after him, ask what the weak do to themselves in exchange for a quiet life. It is the less flattering question and the more durable one.
I should say plainly what I am arguing against, which is the habit of reading the novella as a story that ends when the tyrant falls. Many of the online summaries I have seen stop there, with a tidy moral about courage and the evils of power. The fall is the middle. What remains is a long look at a boy who got what he said he wanted, a more decent classroom, and who is allowed by the novella to half miss the thing it replaced. That is a harder book than the one in the summaries, and a better one. It is also a book that implicates its reader, who spends the first half rooting for the new boy and may not notice the point at which rooting turns into relief that the struggle is over.
I did not go back to my old school this year, and I doubt the board has changed, apart from one more line of gold. I have no evidence that any name on it was earned by anybody but its owner. I notice only that I never asked, and that Yi's novella is about the kind of child who never asks, grown into a man who is still answering for it. The board is probably still in its corridor, a line longer each summer, and I should like to think that somebody, some year, has asked whose hand wrote it. I doubt I shall be the one. Yi's narrator did not ask in time either, and the tears at the end of his story are what asking late sounds like.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Urideurui ilgeureojin yeongung (우리들의 일그러진 영웅), Yi Mun-yol, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: Our Twisted Hero, Yi Mun-yol (translated by Kevin O'Rourke), Amazon
'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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