Han Eun-hyeong: You’ve changed residences from Wonju to Seoul and then again from Seoul to Gwangju. Do you feel a great difference? For example, in your most recent short story collection Who Is Dr. Kim?, which you wrote while living in Gwangju, you didn’t just write “To Me, A Very Ethical Piece of Underwear” there, and you were actually thinking of leaving that short story out.

Lee Kiho: I do really feel a difference. Since it’s a change of space, the people you meet are different, and even my writing seems to have changed. Whenever I publish a new book I see how I’m changing—maybe as a kind of finishing of one stage and moving on to another. “To Me, A Very Ethical Piece of Underwear” seemed like it really went better with my second collection. I don’t think it was just a question of where I wrote that story.

Han: It seems like it plays a transitional role between your second collection, Fumbling, I Knew I’d End Up Like This, and your third.

Lee: Yes, I was hoping it would have that effect. Actually, after the second collection was published I was in a strange place. At the time I was writing a novel, and there was always one thing or another that interrupted the process. Since I kept trying to work on the novel I wasn’t able to work on my short stories, and so it took about three years for me to write one again. As I was putting this collection together it really made me think about that time.

Han: In “Flagpole Romance,” the flagpole gets reimagined as a sexual allegory, and there’s this connection between Kim Il-sung’s death, undergarments, and boxers. As the reader encounters these contradictions there’s an emotional reaction. This also seems a manifestation of your creativity.

Lee: Also in “Prisoner” the process of reunification is haphazard. It’s the result of a radioactive explosion. Political realities like division, things that are sacred like a flagpole or the great leader (a figurative father)… linking these things with the absurd, I think, can demystify or emasculate them. Exposing their falsehoods or breaking down the myths, I think, are acts of resistance.

Han: When reading a Lee Kiho novel, you get the image of a writer torn between the premodern and postmodern. The notion behind the story is quite traditional, but the way in which it’s dealt with is distinctly postmodern, and there’s a very interesting reaction that takes place there. It even creates some great humor.

Lee: I don’t consciously write that in. I mean, what is modern? It’s the rational. I’m from the provinces, I was there until high school. The people I’ve met over the course of my life have either been rational or irrational. So I’ve been influenced by those people. As all of these things come in contact with this genre we call a story, you have this feeling that things are bumping into each other, brushing up against each other by chance. It’s hard to completely separate writer and reader, and I think that since these are works I wrote while I was young, that’s even more the case. Why do novels have to be so rational and level-headed? There were also elements that were just inexplicable. Because we’re talking about the canon, I wanted to follow a path that would counter canonical works, thereby resist the canon itself. I thought that that was the only way I could maintain my identity as a writer. But after I wrote At Least We Can Apologize—that is, before writing Who Is Dr. Kim?—I went through this period of reflection regarding my novels. I wondered: “Have all of my works just been fights with the works that came before?” I was angry at my old books and it felt like I was quarreling with them. It would have been better if I’d been fighting with myself. This time I felt as though I was examining myself as I wrote.

Writers Han Eun-hyeong and Lee Kiho

Han: The point at which that spirit of rebellion becomes extreme is with “Bad Story,” which has the subtitle, “A story someone reads for someone aloud.” Did you write your novel in a spoken, colloquial form specifically to counter ideas that the contemporary novel isn’t to be read aloud?

Lee: Oh certainly. I’ve never liked reading novels silently. I’ve always thought that reading silently was the primary offender in alienating novels from people. My primary concern has always been this question of “How do we get people to write stories together?” I wanted to break out of this idea that novels could only be written by particular people. There comes a point where the division between reader and writer disappears, and I’ve experienced that kind of writing myself.

Han: It seems that with each of your books your style of writing changes. In your first collection, Earnie, we saw a style reminiscent of madangnori (folk theater), and your second, Fumbling, I Knew I’d End Up Like This, was quite confessional. Your third, Who Is Dr. Kim? What kind of writing style might you call that? Something to do with the skeptical?

Lee: You could call it that. I think such changes come from changes in plot. Just as in poet Kim Su-young’s prose in “Poetry, Spit!” I think I felt something similar to his “pushing yourself, moving your body with your body.” It was never my intent to polish it up so that it was perfect. Maybe I would say I trusted my senses and was moved along by them? As that happened I just ended up liking what came of it. I really liked the way the characters talked, how they moved. With these more recent works, only after I’d finished the manuscripts did I feel like starting again. After some time passed I just felt as though I was editing what I’d written.

Han: I can really sense the change. A former version of Lee Kiho once said, “It’s ridiculous to force causal relationships in novels, our lives are so serendipitous!” So, whereas the relationships between characters and the story were once more important than the plot, in Who Is Dr. Kim? the importance of the plot seemed much greater.

Lee: I think that before, I felt as though I had to really push to make the stories convincing. Maybe you could say I was stubborn, mulish even. But then at some point I feel as though I talked myself down from pushing these kinds of causalities. I guess I might say that as these serendipities accumulated, certain things just became inevitable. As writers change, so do their novels, and of course that’s just how today’s novels are. I started thinking that I needed to be more true to life’s inevitabilities.

Han: Might you say that this crossing over from the world of serendipity to the world of inevitability is due to having tried everything you wanted to try?

Lee: I think maybe it’s something more akin to what I said before about the people I met being different. I also have this feeling: After 2008 the atmosphere in Korea seemed different. It seemed as though this generation itself was more mulish. But I wasn’t able to write mulish in a comical way, so that’s where a lot of the dialogue came in. Emotionally, it was difficult, and I think at some point my worldview turned tragic. Of course, maybe that was just because I started working. (Laughs) Paperwork is not a writer’s friend!

Han: So this tragic worldview was what brought you to write a short story like “The Administrative Building?”

Lee: These days I have a regular job, a child, a car. I’ve settled down in an apartment, but to say that my writing went down the same path would be a bit disingenuous. That was something that kept bothering me as I wrote this latest collection. On one hand I had this feeling that I had to meet the expectations of those who enjoyed my former books, and part of me really did try to write that way, but I just wasn’t able to. With this collection I really tried to put “that me” into it as much as possible.

Han: You said yourself that your novel At Least We Can Apologize stood at a kind of crossroads of change. The characters Si-bong and Jin-man in At Least We Can Apologize are the result of a sort of extreme, Lee Kiho-type obsession. For Choi Soon-deok in Earnie, if the question “How did this woman get like this?” is important, you don’t need to ask that for Si-bong and Jin-man. Was this a conscious decision?

Lee: Actually, I did a lot of reworking. You know, it started as a daily series. As such, the parts that explained the causes and effects came out pretty boring. (Laughs) Even then I hadn’t sorted out my thoughts on cause and effect and probability. So I thought, how about a “strong causality?” I think I wanted to use some extreme examples. I think I had a belief that there were also new allegories and symbols that would come about as situations grew increasingly extreme, things I hadn’t even imagined.

I took this line of thinking as my motto as I was writing the stories for Who Is Dr. Kim? I wanted to leave the causes in the margins, someplace unwritten. When I tried to get an overall impression of At Least We Can Apologize, all of these ways of contemplating the reasons behind the events were different—all sorts of reasons that I hadn’t even imagined came pouring out. So I began to wonder if perhaps the core of literature wasn’t somewhere in the margins, in that unwritten space—if maybe what literature can give the reader is the room to imagine the possibilities. And yes, this imagination happens in the margins, so to speak. If the reader can actively fill that space, I wonder if that’s exactly what we mean by a collaborative text.

Han: The stories in your latest work, Who Is Dr. Kim? tend to stop at the point at which these margins are discovered. The meaning behind those margins isn’t explained, and you can really sense that that was your intention.

Lee: If I’d written more at that point it would have made the work more palatable to readers, but that would have only limited their capacity to imagine. The breadth of emotion that a story gives you grows larger the more you leave out. It’s not that I wasn’t able to write more, it’s that I just didn’t, and I think that’s kind of the ethics of writing.

Han: Do you feel that your writing changes your life, or that as a writer your life changes what you write?

Lee: I think it’s the former. Granted, there are also a lot of times when I worry that that’s not the case. And, if possible, I’d like things to stay that way—that novels change who I am.

1. Earnie
Lee Kiho, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.
2004, 334p, ISBN 8932015449
 
2. Fumbling, I Knew I’d End Up Like This
Lee Kiho, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.
2006, 325p, ISBN 9788954602280

3. Who Is Dr. Kim?
Lee Kiho, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.
2013, 404p, ISBN 9788932023939 

4. At Least We Can Apologize
Lee Kiho, Hyundae Munhak Publishing Co., Ltd.
2009, 224p, ISBN 9788972754503