by Yang Yun-eui

Literary Critic

Yang Yun-eui  began her career in criticism after winning the 2006 Joongang New Literature Prize for Criticism. She has published several collected works of criticism, including Pose and Propose (Munhakdongne, 2013), Alice’s Gramophone (Minumsa, 2020), and Literature is Dangerous (Minumsa, 2019) (co-authored). She currently works as a professor in the Center for Liberal Arts Education at Korea University.

The Well-Made Narrative and Beyond

Let’s take a look at the futuristic horizon of Ha Seong-nan’s novels. Ha’s work has been appraised as having “well-made” narratives which sufficiently embody the traditional structure of a novel. The characters in her stories embody the dispositions of the time period and their stories generate affective, fitting responses such as thinking things anew, reminiscence, foreshadowing, reiteration, climax, and lingering imagery. However, as with so much of aesthetic fate, a perfected form can also be its ruin. Stories with aesthetic potential—that is, newly emerging stories—transgress “well-made” forms and seek to create new forms which ultimately become predominant.

I would like to read this dialectic process of Ha Seong-nan’s work in a new way. The emotion that Ha’s works evoke in readers is “shock,” but this is an emotion that a well-made narrative cannot provide. Shock is close to the sublime and the sublime occurs beyond the limits of well-crafted aesthetic. In order to explain this emotion, one must go beyond conventional narratives to explore different possibilities.^[1] Let’s take the hypernarrative, which transcends narratology, and separates it into its various aspects—the object and space-time. How do objects, time, and space operate within Ha Seong-nan’s heretofore unmentioned hypernarrative? 

Hyperobject

In literature, the object usually refers to, first, the background upon which a character acts; second, the props (things) which suggest a character’s socioeconomic position; and, third, the things (symbols) which represent a character’s mental condition. An object is something that is subordinate and secondary to the character. Furthermore, it is something that can be replaced by another object. However, what if we included objects not as individualized matter, but as actors interacting with the characters? We live our lives creating countless strange connections with matter, environments, ecology, and objects. Timothy Morton has proposed the concept of the hyperobject, which includes the totality of all objects brought together in space and time.^[2]

Matter is what connects the human to the inhuman, the animate to the inanimate, the subject to the object. A plastic bottle is not just a drink container, but a deadly weapon that can choke a sea turtle causing it to starve to death. Oil is not just an energy source that boosts the economy, but a hazardous material that rapidly raises the planet’s average temperature, threatening the ecosystem. Morton sees these objects not as a single plastic bottle or an oil drum, but as working together as part of a whole he calls the hyperobject. The hyperobject cannot be perceived by humans, yet it is highly influential in human life as an important actor in making connections.

There are many scenes in Ha Seong-nan’s work that show objects as more important actors than humans. Her short story, “The Wafer House,” elaborately describes a house becoming abandoned. According to traditional narratology, description is used to show the reader how the house appears. Old houses are signifiers of human fate. However, in this story, the descriptions are understated in comparison to the “family narrative.” Depictions of dust piling up, of slowly collapsing rooms, windows, window frames, walls, ceilings, etc., and of the characters’ faces and the dust falling from their bodies—all of these objects collectively create the present-day house. That is to say, it is the hyperobject as an actor interacting with the family and their neighbors’ lives.

“Flowers of Mold,” a short story appearing in the collection with the same title, tells the story of a man who spies on his neighbors by riffling through their trash bags. The story is filled with detailed, realistic scenes depicting the man digging through the dirty, disgusting garbage. The narrative is not aiming at describing the man’s inner motivations or desires. By going through the neighbor’s trash, the main character actually finds out more about what’s going on between the woman next door and her ex-boyfriend than the ex himself knows. This shows that the object of “trash” has more precise things to say than one person’s suppositions, words, and actions do. Furthermore, it means that the hyperobject of trash has more to say about humans than what people themselves convey with their words and actions. A lumpy, slimy pile of garbage covered in “flowers of mold.”

Hyperspace

In a typical narrative, space is laid out according to the movement of the characters. Because of this, space becomes a type of stage upon which the conditions of life are parsed and arranged. This space is analogous to the three-dimensional space that is usually perceived by humans. When three-dimensional space is combined with one-dimensional time (that is, time which is flowing in only one direction from the past to the future), it becomes four-dimensional space-time. This is how we usually perceive space-time in our everyday lives. People cannot be in two places at once and the Past-Me cannot exist in the same space as the Present-Me (or Future-Me). This is different, however, in hyperspace. Hyperspace exists beyond three-dimensional space,  in fourth or higher spatial dimensions. In this space, characters can appear/disappear beyond the limits of three-dimensional space and they exist in different spaces at the same time. Let’s list some of the results of this. First of all, one object can exist while having a different relationship with humans at the same time. Second, objects (humans) from different times can exist in the same place. Third, objects (humans) from the same time can exist in different places. All three of these cases appear in Ha Seong-nan’s literary work.

First, “Bluebeard’s First Wife” starts with a scene of the paulownia tree wardrobe being brought into the house. The paulownia tree had been planted by a father for his newborn daughter in order to create a wardrobe to take with her when she gets married. “I” meets her husband James, gets married after three months, and emigrates to New Zealand for her husband’s study abroad program. She comes to find out that she has been tricked into a sham marriage used to cover up her husband’s homosexual relationship with an underclassman named “Chang.” As soon as she declares that she will return to Korea, her husband attacks her and locks her in the wardrobe. The place where she used to store her albums, diaries and memories is transformed into her coffin. She takes her husband’s straight razor (the object that made her husband appear to have a “blue beard”), slices his face, and barely manages to escape back to Korea. Objects in this story become different things in the same space. The paulownia wardrobe becomes a paulownia coffin and the razor that gives her husband a “blue beard” becomes a weapon that gives him a scraggly beard that he grows to hide the scar she’s left on his face. The objects that occupy one space become different objects at different times.

Second, “A Tale of Two Women” is a short story that uses “being in two places at once” as a motif. The main character “She” arrives in D city on a business trip and is mistaken for a woman named Oh Eun-yeong. Thirty years prior, “She” and her parents visited somewhere near D city where “She” got lost in the mountains. When the young “She” finally made it down the mountain after four days, she’d found herself in D city. “She” imagines that Oh Eun-yeong is the other half of herself that she left behind on the mountain. If “She” had never come down from the mountain, “She” would have become Oh Eun-yeong. A few days after she was rescued, a shocking incident takes place in D city (implied to be the Gwangju Massacre.) It is as if “She” and Oh Eun-yeong show the two possible lives of people who have come to different decisions about the historical wound that is Gwangju—two people who have lived different lives meeting in the same place.

Third, “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?” also uses the motif of “being in two places at once,” or doppelgängers, but in a slightly different way. One woman is a comedian who gets into a car accident on her way to an event at a university in the countryside and her doppelgänger is a woman who has her photo taken by a passerby while she is waiting at a traffic light. How did this woman become two separate people? It’s all because of a van they encountered on their way home back in high school. The van belonged to a gang of human traffickers who kidnapped women. The girl who didn’t enter the van became the comedian and the girl who was taken into the van experienced a different life altogether before ending up in Suncheon. This is how a woman from one time was split in two and could exist in two places at once.

Hypertime

Hyperspace has been theorized in many fields, from quantum mechanics to String theory. Since it is imperceptible to us humans, there are many theoretical ways in which hyperspace can exist. Hyperspace is predicted to exist in places such as infinite universes, parallel universes, extradimensional universes contained within infinitesimally small space, and more. But hypertime is not even predicted to exist in theory. This is due to the fact that all the matter in our universe is incapable of exceeding the speed of light. In order for time travel to the past to be possible, you would have to move faster than the speed of light, but this goes against the theory of relativity. Accordingly, in our universe, time moves only one-dimensionally, from the past to the future. This may be the case in the natural sciences, but time travel has long been a pillar of literary imagination. Time travel requires a different dimension of time in order to work, and that dimension is what we call hypertime.

Time flows differently for the characters that appear in “Alpha Time.” After suffering a fall, the mind of the character Mother is addled and she confuses her son for a customer calling out “stay and rest a while.” Mother had set up a stall in Sundae Street when the family was down on its luck. “Stay and rest a while” was what the women working on Sundae Street would call out to potential customers. It’s as if the mother is living out her younger days in the present. Among her children are a set of twins who live double or half-lives with even their immediate family unable to tell them apart. The Father had promised his daughter, “I,” that if he succeeded in business, he’d “put up billboards along all the major roadways with a sign that only you will understand,” but his business ultimately fails. Then one day, “I” discovers a billboard collapsing in the forest. The girl depicted on the advertisement wasn’t “I,” so it means nothing to her. She thinks, “I must have my own Alpha timeline which allowed me to see that sign.” This time is the time that exists after the family suffered hardship together. They all live their lives in hypertime: the happy memories where Mother stays; the timeline that is different from the time of the present where promises were not kept, that is, the Alpha timeline where by some strange means the father keeps his promises; and the time that the twins shared between them.

Ha Seong-nan’s Novels and the Hypernarrative

Hypernarrative has been observed in the work of Ha Seong-nan through objects, space, and time. In Ha’s stories, hyperobjects are not the subject matter or part of the background, but an actor just like the other characters. Hyperspace allows for characters and objects to create different relationships through different spatial dimensions, or allows characters to live multiple lives, or allows them to be in multiple places at the same time. Hypertime goes beyond the flow of single dimensional time and appears in literary devices such as several independently flowing timestreams, going backward or forwards in time, and divergences in the timeline. All of this can be called hypernarrative. Hypernarrative is the narratological possibility for the limitations of traditional narrative to be broken and constructed anew.

Translated by Victoria Caudle

      Korean Works Mentioned:

•   “The Wafer House,” Wafers (Munhakdongne, 2006)

    「웨하스로 만들어진 집」, 『웨하스』 (문학동네, 2006)

•   “Flowers of Mold,” Flowers of Mold (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2019)

    「곰팡이꽃」, 『옆집 여자』 (창비, 1999)

•   “Bluebeard’s First Wife,” Bluebeard’s First Wife (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2020)

    「푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내」, 『푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내』 (창비, 2002)

•   “A Tale of Two Women,” “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?,” “Alpha Time,” The Taste of Summer (Moonji, 2013)

           「두 여자 이야기」,  「순천에 왜 간 걸까, 그녀는」 , 「알파의 시간」, 『여름의 맛』 (문학과지성사, 2013)