Book Reviews1

• Turkish(Türkçe)

  [Turkish] Gazing upon the Trembling Statue: Badem (Almond) by Sohn Won-pyung

  now i’ve found the great wall of china that everyone sensed encircled madly now everyone’s irked insensibly so now i get myself into deep water. Turgut Uyar A few years ago, as I wandered the EphesusArchaeological Museum where the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are ondisplay, I saw a little boy standing stock-still, his eyes fixed on the eyes ofthe statue of Antinous. Though his mother persistently kept calling him to herside, the boy couldn’t pull himself away from Antinous’s attentive gaze, thestatue’s neck turned to the side. He gazed upon Antinous as though he could,just by looking, fill in the missing parts of that familiar object. At thetime, I’d thought of the boy’s frozen stance in front of the statue as a kindof admiration, but now when I envision the scene, a different possibility comesto mind. The boy, his fresh ego filled to the brim with curiosity and wonder,was waiting for Antinous, who hadn’t budged for approximately 1,900 years, toblink. Waiting for that inveterate statue, filled with emotion, to tremble. Dwelling on the gaze of that boy as he tried toovercome the sharp border between human and human-statue, dwelling on hisinsistent, staring, expectant focus, I think now about the borders of theobject in his focus, about how the border is itself bounded by everything else,about how every border in our world of perceptions is boundless. And indeed,although we cannot comprehend the bounds of the universe, even the universeitself has a border. Just as we can’t comprehend the boundlessness of so manyemotions whose names we don’t yet know. Last year, a Korean novel titled Badem (Almond) was releasedin Turkish. A “silent” novel in Turkish for the moment, it hasn’t yet beennoticed by readers. And yet, the novel’s senses are open, even as theprotagonist begins his life utterly lacking in emotion due to the insufficientdevelopment of the amygdala in his brain. This is the border that leaves himoutside of culture. He describes emotions by following the traces they leave inthe body, trying to recognize them by describing each one. Like a written text,he attempts to take on each emotion by rationalizing it. The ego, shaped byanger, trauma, and relationships, is, in his ghostliness, a perpetually blankpage. If what we call the ego is an orb of consciousness endlessly pulsing andbleeding in the tower of childhood, then the protagonist of Almond is shrewd but sans ego. He is a freak of nature.As a consequence, we might name him directly by his illness—Alexithymia, theinability to recognize emotions. The organic, pathological border ofAlexithymia makes the protagonist brave, for he knows no fear; tranquil, for heknows no joy; calm, for he knows no rush. In these times when we are trying tohear our inner selves, when we are learning to grapple with our egos throughdifferent kinds of meditation, Alexithymia appears as a freak of nature, as a realphenomenon in the face of the modern person imprisoned by emotions. Though hisbasic senses are highly developed, he lacks the intuition, instincts, andfaculties to turn whatever he touches into individual images or figures ofspeech, and he remains stuck in the realm of description. Because the reasonthe protagonist has been so successful in the realm of description is his lackof poetry. Or, more figuratively, his lack of a heart. It is remarkable thatthe habitat that Alexithymia narrates over the course of the story, purged asit is of emotion and thus of soul, is girded with such towering description.Life exists but its sensuous trace is missing. While the past becomes absolutein material forms, the mind cannot escape from its chronological ordering in analbum. The past, instrumentalized by Chronos, comes to resemble a vacantlandscape, completely disconnected from Cosmos’s involuted, polysemousperceptions. In this novel about a person who is nothing more than arationalized body, the story’s tragic weight is left entirely to the reader. Wefind ourselves taking on all the emotions in this poignant story. It’s almost as though the statue might tremble,isn’t it? At any moment it might tremble: it is about to tremble. We might read Almond as a novel that rather strikingly demonstratesthe possibility of a past without memory. In order to survive and to adapt tosociety, the protagonist has to cast off the appearance of having a heart ofstone by learning the common behaviors that emotions elicit. But that does notsuffice. Because adapting to one’s environment isn’t what makes a human human,but the oikos that forges him into something incomparable. A person in pursuitof the descriptions, figures of speech, and images that abstract the world,from the crudest to the most refined, finds his ego. Every ego is of course transitory. Every egotakes on new forms alongside new experiences; for the ego is not a sturdy,unchanging, fixed entity. As for Almond’s Alexithymia, that blank page in the mind is simultaneously a ballad ofpossibilities. But what I really want to touch on here, beyond the inherentpotential of the ego, is the process in which the protagonist, living on thedark side of its sensuous border, begins to come undone, which is to say, beginsto transform. Following all the horrible things he undergoes, our protagonistfeels neither grief nor solitude nor guilt nor sorrow, but he begins todiscover the oikos where he remains inintractable contact with a peer who experiences his emotions to an excessivedegree. Only a freak can heal another freak. The passage of our protagonistinto humanity scintillates in the relationship he forges with another personwho also could never have been a “normal” human. This novel maps out an unexpected route forthinking about the connections between borders, passages, and transformations;it reverses the usual path that emotions take from the heart to the brain,starting its adventure instead in the brain and coming to an end in the heart.One of the most striking insights that the novel offers the reader through itswayward references is this: that the well of morality is the heart, while thebrain is simply a living abode where moral law is governed. Another significantinsight is that counterparts never become one another. When it comes to theego, every dissimilarity that approaches another, that collides in approach,that bleeds in collision, serves as a sacred text to the outcast. Just asAntinous has stood for 1,900 years, about to tremble in the eyes of a boy, sothe boy there, too, is a prospective poet, ready to be sculpted by Antinous.

  2022-04-13 18:01

  by Sema Kaygusuz

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• Turkish(Türkçe) Others

  Duyguların hissedilmediği bir hayat

  - / August 31, 2021

Related Resources3

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  Chinese(简体) Exhibition printout

  2020 Taipei International Book Exhibition: Sohn Won-pyung Introductory Booklet
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  2022 Korean Literature Global Review Contest: Promotional Video
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  English(English) Publication

  KLN(Korean Literature Now) Vol.65