Fame (3)
At that moment, I thought of politicians and civic groups, the sort of people who spent half their lives on a podium. That critic knew how to command attention. State-sponsored events were a long way from entertaining.
So unentertaining, in fact, that people joked that enduring boredom was an act of patriotism. Of course, the meaning of the words carved into the artifact had also been covered by the press.
The reporters lacked the finesse to make it land, so most people had only thought, more or less, Oh, so it means something moving.
For that reason, it was true that attention had shifted less toward my critique than toward me.
The legend of winning debut contests at seven newspapers.
And then, from an analysis of an unexpected relic, I had somehow made my mark. I’m not much for literature, honestly. I’ll just go see what that impressive young man looks like. That was what most of the people in the room were thinking.
Then I spoke. “In that case, the ‘you’ in this artifact would be all of you, wouldn’t it?”
It was persuasive.
And at the same time, it was strange.
Once they heard it, they began to feel drawn toward the artifact itself. As a little warmth crept into people’s hearts, I began the reading.
“If you are the sort of person to send such an innocent letter.”
The title was easier than I had expected.
“We received a brief letter of eight lines. By ‘we,’ I mean at the very least everyone who recognizes and sympathizes with the value of the independence fighters. …I imagine the expression on the face of the unknown fighter who carved the word ‘you’ into the letter.”
A silence settled over the hall, but it was different from boredom.
It was immersion.
I explained the contents of the eight-line letter, what that letter, with its hint of fiction, was meant to signify, and the independence fighter’s feelings that might have been contained within it.
“The desire to spend a leisurely moment with someone from the future. Or the dream of such a thing. No one can fault that hope, that romance. Just as no one can trample a child’s dream.”
The image of the “independence fighter” fixed in people’s minds.
A stern, grave face, a mustache, a gun...
All of it collapsed in an instant.
What rose in its place was the face of a single innocent person living with hope.
Young or not.
Male or female.
It didn’t matter.
There are people who are bright from birth and live their whole lives with that same brightness, aren’t there? I was saying that this independence fighter had probably been such a person.
“Ah, how could one possibly not love such an innocent person?”
The word “love” had come out of criticism.
It sank deep into the hearts of people who had not been prepared for it. Someone pressed their lips together as though trying to hold back tears.
“But the most powerful force in life, when you look back on it, has always been hope. Especially the hope possessed only by the innocent. It is strong enough to cross time and space. If you need proof of that, then look at this single shard of pottery that endured so long in the sand.”
The crowd looked silently at the artifact.
What had once been just a meaningful lump of earth seemed to breathe like a person.
“There is much one can feel from this relic. National pride is good, and so is the spirit of sacrifice for a greater cause. All of it is noble, all of it valuable. But now that the age of peace longed for by that anonymous independence fighter has, to some degree, arrived, let us consider him as a human being. And at the end of that thought lies the answer to a question: what kind of person is lovable? What kind of person allows hope to exist in the world? And I believe that answer, that innocent face, will endure beyond time, just as ‘you’ does.”
Rustle.
I lowered the paper in my hand.
“That concludes my reading. Thank you.”
For a moment, silence fell.
Not a single person looked away from the podium.
Each had their own thoughts, questions, feelings, awe, and tears.
All of that energy was pouring toward me and the artifact.
And then. Clap, clap, clap-clap... clap, clap, clap-clap-clap-clap!!!!! The applause swelled louder and louder.
They still couldn’t put what they felt into words.
That was how deep the logic of my critique had gone,
and how rich the emotion beneath it was. All they could do was clap with everything they had.
Anything less would have left them helpless before what they were feeling. They still didn’t know it.
That words could move the heart.
What they had experienced was exactly that.
---
After the event ended, I had to shake hands until my wrist felt as though it might fall off. I could still accept the flood of greetings and handshakes from all kinds of people, but this was something else entirely.
“Critic Mok, your reading was excellent. You also seem to have a talent for lectures. Would you be willing to come give one at our ministry’s public culture forum?”
“Haha, no. I’ll have to decline.”
“This is a reporter from Chosung Daily. We were genuinely disappointed that you didn’t attend the New Spring Literary Contest awards ceremony, but if you could spare even a cup of tea and an interview with our culture desk now...”
“That’s fine. I’ll accept the sentiment, and nothing more.”
And so on.
I was getting better and better at saying no. Events, interviews, lectures, all of it was something I preferred not to do whenever possible.
Well, “dislike” was probably too strong. It was closer to being a nuisance.
No matter how good the words were, it was better to leave them on the page than to toss them around with your mouth. One thing that surprised me was that the artifact would not be installed immediately in the National Museum of Korea.
Professor Tak said, “We’ve decided to continue the research a little longer with Professor Lee. We need to dig more actively through the materials and leave a paper for the academic record as well. We’ll also need to carry out the compositional analysis several more times. Only after all of that is finished will the installation proceed.”
So today’s event had been for the press, then?
Still, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Timing public attention properly was important too.
Of course, I still wouldn’t go into politics even if it killed me.
Anyway, before leaving the museum, I walked over to the jar. Naturally, guards stood on either side, so I couldn’t even touch it.
So I sat down at a distance from it. Eight lines written in Chinese characters. “...It was nice to meet you.”
I offered that greeting to the lovely words.
---
My critique appeared exactly as written in the autumn issue of Gyeongseong Geul.
I was a little worried, since that meant it was no longer an unpublished piece,
but fortunately there was no major impact on sales. The team manager explained it like this: “The reading you did at that event got broadcast on a regular channel too. Of course, people wouldn’t normally watch that kind of thing on daytime TV, but they all captured it and read the text on community boards. Seems like quite a few of them wanted to keep the piece. End of report, from Team Leader Jang of the PR department.”
Whatever the reason, I was glad it hadn’t caused any serious damage to Gyeongseong Publishing.
And I was also glad that this carefully weighted, substantial critique had ended up in Gyeongseong Geul.
For a while, I lived as quietly as a mouse.
I waited for the bubble of attention to burst.
Too much attention was already more than enough in the forest.
In the meantime, all of Soop’s webtoon feeds went live.
Feeding on the followers of the people we called “illustrators,”
Soop grew lush and full once again.
And then something interesting happened.
Or rather, not simply interesting, but significant in a way that mattered.
When I went to a book cafe, I found that issue 2 of [ZZ : NOVEL] had been published.
Since irritation can also become affection, I flipped through it, and there it was:
Yo-mo’s new work, Blue Black Hole.
Without much thought, I started reading.
Blue Black Hole was an unusual novel.
It felt unreal, as though fantasy and science fiction had been blended together,
but on top of that foundation, Yo-mo’s strength in writing relationships between men and women came through with full force.
Deep inside the black hole.
There, people who had been sucked in while riding a spaceship were living out their days.
On Earth, their existence may have been forgotten,
but astonishingly, that place had air and water that human beings could survive with. Inside the black hole, a civilization arose that resembled Earth and yet did not.
But these people lived on, unable to die, burdened by the grief of losing their home,
and by despair at an environment that could not match the abundance of Earth.
There was... no way back.
That drove people to despair. As their hearts grew harsher, they began to quarrel,
and the uglier side of human nature burst out everywhere.
The inside of the black hole slowly turned into hell.
Then, one day, a man appeared.
He lacked the stunned, emptied look peculiar to those who had been swallowed by the black hole.
He seemed as though he had simply grown there naturally,
like wind blowing or waves breaking.
The man moved through the people and began solving their problems one by one.
Food shortages, conflicts between men and women, quarrels, and more.
The solutions that came from his mouth were so simple and clear.
So simple that it made one wonder why no one else had thought of them.
Some called him a “prophet.”
A prophet. Someone who knows in advance.
Of course, there were those who grew wary of him, and those who followed him fanatically. But one thing was certain.
Every time the man acted, people’s circumstances improved and the civilization advanced. The story focuses on the man’s appearance and on the varieties of human nature among the people.
And it depicts the process by which a being called “god” came to exist inside the black hole.
This work, where Yo-mo’s imagination shone,
occupied nearly the length of a novella, and carried a strangely biblical atmosphere. It was an attractive piece.
Especially the craft with which the man was portrayed was quite good.
But what truly astonished me was the fact that Yo-mo had written Blue Black Hole with Soop in mind.
How could I be so sure? [Nothing he said was meaningless, especially when he spoke to difficult people. Resources here were finite, and people’s greed was infinite. Even so, the tip of his fingers always found the places where food could be found. It began with food, then became friendship, then love, and finally hope for living in this place.
The man said that if you did not want the desire to die, you had to open your senses. No matter that we had fallen into a black hole, the fact remained that our bodies existed. He told them to keep their bodily senses open at all times and prove that they were alive today. And he told them to dream as well. It meant that only imagination, only fantasy, could make tomorrow worth anticipating. Sensation and fantasy. That was what kept the people forgotten by the world alive from day to day.]
Sensation, or the empire of sensation.
Fantasy. Those were all themes I had written about in Soop. And, most decisively, [There were no trees here. No grass either. There had never been any seeds to begin with, so there had never even been the possibility of green. But the man always said that this place was like a blue forest.] Even the word forest was mentioned directly.
Leaving aside the fact that she had written the piece with Soop in mind,
I quite liked the idea and the experiment behind the novel. It felt as though the universe were suddenly spreading wide inside my head.
But my universe was a universe of language.
Yo-mo’s words revolved like stars,
and from the relationships between those stars, new languages were born again.
...It was magnificent. And I drifted through that universe in a daze.
The keyword that could describe Blue Black Hole perfectly.
Inside language that kept expanding without end, as though the universe itself were growing,
I found that keyword...
“...god.”
What, after all, was this novel?
It was a novel about the birth of god.
But as always, I didn’t feel like starting off with a triumphant review.
“...Hmm.”
I had to think.
Yo-mo worshipped Soop as though it were a god.
Was she the only one?
I checked my DMs.
Sharp-eyed readers were delighted that a novel in [ZZ : NOVEL] had been published as an allegory of Soop.
People did not seem to have any particular resistance to this worship either.
In other words, Soop’s favorability had risen to the very top.
I had once thought something like this about Soop.
That I needed to make the stage bigger.
That the more important the matter, the more carefully it had to be steeped.
Now I had decided.
I muttered it to myself like a joke meant only for me.
“The time is ripe.”