Park Jeong-shin (3)
Two weeks had passed. In the bet the first editorial team had made over Park Jeong-shin and me, the stakes had risen to one million won per person. There had never really been any special reason for it.
It was the kind of bet men made—one where wordplay and swagger piled up until they turned into something real, and by then no one could back out without losing face. Yang senior asked me the moment he got to work, “M-Mok. Did Park Jeong-shin send the manuscript?”
“No.”
“Phew... thank God. This is weirdly nerve-racking.”
“I keep telling you, he’s not going to hand it over. Park Jeong-shin’s infamous for not submitting on time,” Kim senior said with a snort. “Everyone else has already turned in their manuscripts for the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul. If we don’t get his by this Friday, then it’s a bust again. I think the team leader’s already in contact with another author to cover the gap.”
“Then that means by tomorrow, right? Man. Our youngest has to cough up a million won, huh? Want me to cut you some slack?” Yoon senior teased me with a friendly grin.
Sorry, but I didn’t need that sort of charity. “No. Don’t cut a single won.” Park Jeong-shin was an intelligent writer.
There was no way he could have missed the message hidden in The Interpretation of Dreams. The setting of Moving Dream was, after all, a dream.
A seductive place where things impossible in reality could become possible. If it was Park Jeong-shin, he could make full use of that space.
Especially if he was dealing with fear, there was no better place than a dream. Of course. “...You’re telling me there’s only one day left?” ...I’ll admit it, I was a little rattled. Since that day, there had been no call, no email, no text, no contact of any kind from Park Jeong-shin. One million won was my entire monthly living expenses, rent included.
If I lost this, the damage would be substantial.
But if, on the other hand, I got three million won...?
Just thinking about it made my heart feel warm and spacious. Like a holiday. Love it or hate it, I had to trust him.
If an editor didn’t trust a writer, who would? In the afternoon, I heard some good news.
The autumn issue of Gyeongseong Geul, the one carrying my review, had gone on sale.
In print and on the webzine at the same time. To celebrate, the periodicals department threw a huge company dinner.
The editorial team, the design team, the webzine team, and everyone else.
To fit all of us, they had to rent an entire floor of a barbecue restaurant. Yoon senior said from in front of the grill, “I checked Gyeongseong Geul earlier, and didn’t The Man Who Looks for Ghosts get even better?”
“Yeah. I noticed that too. Something about it felt cleaner and more distinct. Regular readers are going to like it, too.”
“Ah, that.” The team leader spoke up. “Moki gave Choi Bak some advice when they met.”
“Oh....”
“As expected.”
“You really do know how to read a manuscript. It’s not easy to suggest revisions to an author.”
“A junior worth the money we spent on him,” Yang senior said, in that strangely roundabout way of his.
“Spent money? On what?”
“Tsk—Yang Ho-chan and his mouth, honestly. Ji-woon, hand him the present.” A present? “Team leader, already? I was going to give it to him after a few drinks.”
“You already let it slip. Give it now.”
“? What is it, anyway?” Kim senior rummaged through the shopping bag he’d left propped against the wall.
Then he pulled out a plaque shaped like a book. “...A plaque? Am I getting an award?”
“It’s our team tradition. We give this when someone gets their first review into Gyeongseong Geul.” I took the plaque in a daze.
Now that I looked closely, it was made to resemble Gyeongseong Geul itself, and it even had this engraved on it: First Review Award. This award is presented to you for elevating the stature of Editorial Team 1 with a review that displayed genius-level analytical skill and sensitivity. — All the older brothers of Editorial Team 1 I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “What is this? Did you have it custom-made? You did all this for just one review?”
“Just one review, my ass.” Yang senior glared at me. “I still haven’t gotten that plaque. You’re the first person in editorial team history to get one right after joining. Seo-hoon here writes reviews better than anyone, and even he took half a year, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. I cried when I got mine, you know. I was so moved.” Ah. I’d thought it was just a kind of welcome gift.
Apparently there was some meaning behind it after all. I didn’t quite cry, but I was grateful. It had been too long since anyone had looked out for me.
“Thank you. I’ll put it somewhere I can see it.”
Yeah. That was a good place for it.
Right next to Modern Criticism Theory, the textbook that had once smashed into my head.
And then. Buzzz—. My phone rang. “...!” When I checked the screen, I grinned.
Then I held it up for the seniors, who were all chattering away around me. “Looks like you’d better prepare your million won too.” What appeared on the screen was a chat thread with Park Jeong-shin.
Park Jeong-shin: Editor. You said you were younger than me, didn’t you? You were so smug I naturally assumed you were older. Guess that’s why your skin looked so good.
Park Jeong-shin: I’ll let you get away with talking back to your senior just this once.
Park Jeong-shin: There.
Park Jeong-shin: [Moving Dream.hwp]
Park Jeong-shin: ...Thanks.
Park Jeong-shin: I wouldn’t have been able to write it without you.
The seniors’ faces stiffened beautifully.
─┼
What happened after that was as obvious as could be.
The moment Yang senior shouted, “He got the manuscript from Park Jeong-shin?!”,
everyone on the floor turned to look at me. Park Jeong-shin’s reputation really must have been that bad, because people came swarming over from all directions to our team.
-How did you get a manuscript out of that bastard?
-Did you hit him? You didn’t? You should’ve just hit him!
-I’m so dead inside. All I’ve ever gotten are insult texts.
-Mok Hyunsun, you’re insane. Seriously—how did you do it? Even the chief editor has a hard time with him.
-Come on, tell us. What did you do? Teach us your method.
-Yeah, what was your trick?
What could I possibly say to that? “I solved it in a Freudian way.” After Hemingway, it was Freud. In any case, it was a noisy dinner.
Maybe because it looked like a major accomplishment, people hardly left the first editorial team’s side.
That was a little annoying, but the three million won I was about to receive was enough to keep me entertained.
After the dinner ended, I went back to my one-room apartment.
Without even showering, I opened Park Jeong-shin’s novel first.
I was genuinely curious about how Moving Dream ended. The first half was almost exactly as I’d seen before.
But after the protagonist meets another version of himself inside the dream, the story takes a new turn. At first, the protagonist is afraid.
But at some point, he realizes an obvious truth.
That beings inside a dream cannot come out into the world beyond it.
With complicated feelings, the protagonist begins to travel alongside him.
Into fantasies and miracles that cannot exist in reality. It was the kind of novel that made you feel as if you were being pulled inside it.
The story itself had a fairy-tale quality, but the style and structure were modern, so it never felt childish. There was one passage in particular that caught my eye.
[...At some point, I began to feel at ease with him. That being, who seemed to have copied my thoughts, my actions, my entire self. He had neither the need nor the reason to persuade me.
At last, I acknowledged that he was not someone else, but myself. His potential was my potential, and where he arrived was a place I, too, could arrive. That was how we were able to go on.
...After the long journey, I found myself thinking this: even if this wasn’t a dream, it might still be all right.]
It was beautiful writing.
Setting Park Jeong-shin’s personal history aside.
This was the part where the protagonist stepped beyond his limits. And when I thought of Park Jeong-shin himself... it became even more beautiful.
He seemed to have set down some of his old fear, if only a little.
Or perhaps he was trying to set it down.
I couldn’t simply let writing like this pass me by.
By then, a sea of language was already surging in my head.
A sea that wanted nothing more than to be poured out somewhere, all at once. The chief editor had promised.
If I got Park Jeong-shin’s manuscript, he’d run my review.
But before that, there was something I wanted to do first: write a critique of Moving Dream. It still hadn’t been released to the world.
Strictly speaking... I was the only one who had read it.
And this critique would become the first ever written about Moving Dream. The opening... should carry a little weight. Freud defined dreams as a complete world in themselves in The Interpretation of Dreams. Not bad. Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click... My fingers were dancing across the keyboard.
This kind of speed in producing language.
And yet the logic was building up solidly, sentence by sentence.
An objective proof of this novel’s excellence.
The pleasure of unfolding that proof in my own language and making it something unmistakably mine. All of it thrilled me.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click... Let’s make full use of Freud.
But this isn’t about leaning on theory. It’s about using it. Park Jeong-shin was a newcomer, and Moving Dream was a newly published novel.
If I established the grounds for interpretation with a reliable theory, then the weakness of being a “new writer” would fade a little.
And so I finished the critique. “Phew... done,”
?
That was strange.
The critique I’d just written was pretty satisfying.
And the logic of it wasn’t missing anything, nor did it need anything added. So what were these words still left in my head?
It felt like a roar of language was still echoing in there.
Language desperate to get out into the world.
“What is it? What am I missing?”
I could have blamed fatigue.
I’d been drinking at the company dinner, and I’d just finished a critique.
But I decided not to.
Hadn’t I already experienced this?
The things I’d brushed off as luck or mood, only to discover they were the manifestation of a mysterious ability. I had to believe in it. In my ability.
I closed my eyes.
Then I stared into the words in my mind. Keywords surfacing one by one.
dream, copy, fear, change.... Wait, change? What kind of change? And then it happened.
One word burst upward like a gigantic fish. Park Jeong-shin.
“Ah!”
I opened my eyes.
Now I understood.
What I still hadn’t written.
Theory of Park Jeong-shin. In other words, I had to deal with the writer Park Jeong-shin himself. There were many kinds of literary criticism.
Criticism that looked only at the work itself.
Mixed criticism that treated film and other media alongside the novel.
And author criticism, which dealt with the writer. In other words, a theory of the author.
I immediately opened a new Word file.
And typed in the title first: Theory of Park Jeong-shin: What Does a Writer Change Into? — From Modern House to Moving Dream
Modern House, which subtly exposed the fear of being copied.
Moving Dream, which overcame that fear of being copied.
Park Jeong-shin’s body of work clearly had an interesting current running through it. What had changed him,
how he had changed,
and how he would continue to change in the future.
In other words, criticism about Park Jeong-shin the writer himself.
I could render that in my own language.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click... Dawn deepened little by little.
Yet the light in my room showed no sign of going out.
─┼
Chief editor Im Myeong-eul did not come to work yesterday.
He dedicated one day of the week to writing criticism, and yesterday had been that day.
That was why he only heard the news after he arrived this morning. “What? Park Jeong-shin sent in a manuscript?”
“Yes, Chief Editor.” Team leader Lee reported with evident satisfaction. “Yes. Moki, no—Mok Hyunsun did it. In a single meeting.”
...I expected he’d do it eventually.
To be honest, I hadn’t expected us to get it in time for the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul. The deadline was too tight, and besides, a writer needed an absolute amount of time before trusting an editor.
Team leader Lee placed two printed copies of the manuscript on the desk. “This one is the unfinished draft he brought back the day he went to see the author, and this one is the final version we received yesterday.”
“...He handed over an unfinished draft?”
“I couldn’t quite believe it either. But he did bring it back.”
So he’s even skilled at coaxing writers. Chief Editor Im read the two versions one after the other.
Then, with a quiet thud, he set the pages on the desk. “Team leader Lee. Bring Mok Hyunsun in.”
He needed to see Mok Hyunsun right away.
---