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Listening to Unknown Voices: Untold Nights and a Day by Bae Suah scrap
by Bok Dohoon
October 27, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Bae Suah
Bae Suah is a Korean novelist and translator who has published six collections of short stories, 14 novels, and numerous translations since 1993. On paper this may not look so different from the careers of other respected Korean novelists; however, Bae stands out as one of the most risk-taking, experimental writers active in Korea today. Her work from the 2000s onwards has leaned towards the novel-essay, or experimentation with what Milan Kundera dubbed “the possibilities of the novel as essay.”
Bae Suah’s experimentation is not to pass off essays under the name of fiction, but to extend the horizons of the novel through experiments of thought. The novel is different from philosophy or an essay. Thanks to its omnivorous nature, however, the novel is in a unique position to draw inspiration from and rewrite philosophical thought and introspective essays. Bae is one of the few Korean writers to navigate this terra incognita of thought and introspection. In her latest work, Untold Nights and a Day, she takes a visit to the mysterious theater of dreams.
The story is set in Seoul, but as is customary in her novels, the setting of Untold Nights and a Day intentionally resembles a strange, dream-like city. “The name of the city was ‘secret.’ It was a city where all the windows were dark, all the windows were silent, all the windows were opaque, and all the windows were lost in introspection.” The protagonist Ayami, a former actress who now works as part of the staff at Audio Theater, is Korean. She appears, however, to be more like a foreigner who is new to the city of Seoul.
Character and setting are explicit yet dreamlike in Bae’s novels. The action of her novels is written the same way. Untold Nights and a Day opens with the flatly descriptive sentence, “Former actress Ayami was sitting on the second step of Audio Theater, holding a guest book in her hand.” However this sentence is merely an oblique entrance pointing towards the theater of dreams. A series of mysterious events transpire and we are introduced to a number of eccentric characters that are unrelated to each other but whose actions share symmetry not unlike that of a pantomime.
The narrator relies on the auditory and tactile rather than the visual when describing characters and objects, a cross-sensory alchemy that works to form the novel’s dreamlike yet beautiful style. “I am the product of your imagination” is probably this novel’s equivalent to Freud’s “dream’s navel.” The familiar and unfamiliar, native and foreign tongues, and reality and dreams are juxtaposed with meticulous precision, calling for the world inside and outside the text to dream of and mate with each other. And so a text that one imagines might only exist inside a dream walks out into reality.
Untold Nights and a Day is full of minute presences emitting signals “like unknown voices.” A whispering voice urges you, the reader, to read this novel out loud instead of to yourself, to listen rather than to read. One actually feels compelled to do so when reading the novel. And so the novel performs the theater of chasing voices from within and without, all in pursuit of the secret of being.
Writer 필자 소개
Bok Dohoon
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More From Issue Vol.21 Autumn 2013
