Ordan (2)
Starting from the guide’s words—This ship is not going to Ordan.—the novel reached a decisive turning point. A little boat adrift on the open sea. The only guide who knew the way carried a gun. A murder had just taken place. And aboard that boat were nine people, ordinary citizens through and through.
“This ship is not going to Ordan.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Somewhere. Ordan is already full. We’ve agreed internally that we won’t take any more immigrants. But if we announced that, you people would march on Ordan by force, so we’re using this method instead. Our guides take you out as though they’re bringing you to Ordan, then dump you somewhere along the way.”
“…Where exactly are you planning to dump us? Please don’t say the sea.”
“I’m a believer. I don’t want to pile up karma like that. If I see an island, I’ll dump you there immediately. Whether it’s an island made of nothing but sand or an island full of cannibals. Don’t even think about resisting. I’ve been doing this job for five years and I’ve never once been hurt. You understand what that means, don’t you?”
The guide’s eyes glinted with a cold, lonely light. Fear heavier than sea fog settled over the little boat. A few days later, in the silence, the guide spoke again. “Damn it, the worst thing about this job is that I can’t sleep. Everybody take turns and say something, anything. As long as you don’t start fighting, I’ll allow it.” From that moment on, the passengers began to tell their stories one by one.
One shabby man turned out to be a professor of philosophy. He begged for his life by explaining, in philosophical terms, why he ought to live. But the guide merely savored the sound of his voice as though he were listening to music. Starting with the philosophy professor, everyone began pleading for their lives in earnest.
Why they had to live. What they could offer the guide if he let them go. Their abilities, their goodness, their usefulness—anything they could think of. Then, one day, the boat was hit by a violent storm.
After a night in which they nearly died, tension turned to open conflict. People began blaming one another. Those who knew each other’s pasts dragged out their sins and malice, while the accused scrambled to defend themselves. Before long, no one was speaking for the guide anymore. They were talking without pause to persuade, to attack, to protect themselves. The dialogue was vivid, ferocious, razor-sharp. Just reading it made my chest go cold.
The guide only smirked, because he had seen this kind of thing countless times in the course of his work. A dinghy where every kind of word tangled together, overlapping and knotting into a single mass. Then an old man said, with a tone of resignation, “I’m tired. Why should we live?”
It was a line perfectly suited to that boundless sea. Exhausted, the others fell silent as if someone had doused them with cold water. When this reality, this moment, every single day was so painful, would anything really change even if they made it to Ordan? No—could they even get there in the first place?
And then the pregnant woman spoke, clear and steady. “Because we have to live.” She was cradling her belly. No one could contradict her in the face of that solemn sight. For the first time, a long silence fell. After that, many things happened on the little boat.
The old man could not endure the brutal journey and died in his sleep. Two women came to blows and, after the guide shot them, fell into the sea. Watching death from so close only made the pregnant woman’s conviction sharper. The reason was plain enough: the child in her womb. She made up her mind to take the guide’s gun.
With subtle gestures and tiny glances, she signaled the others. And then, in a single moment, they risked their lives and rushed the guide together. A massacre broke out. It was a struggle for life and death in a heaving sea. Once blood spilled into the water, sharks gathered, drawn by the scent.
Only the young man, the pregnant woman, and the guide were left. The man managed to seize the gun, but there were no bullets left. In the end, the fight turned into a brutal hand-to-hand struggle, and the man was driven back by the guide. Just as he was about to fall into the sea, the pregnant woman—already knocked down by the guide—threw everything she had into one final push and forced him overboard.
The guide became shark food. When the feeding frenzy finally moved on, only two people remained: the young man and the pregnant woman, neither of them knowing how to steer the boat, along with the little dinghy itself. In the end, they surrendered their lives to fate. And then it happened.
Was it a miracle sent from heaven? An island appeared before their eyes. A small island, with water flowing through it and plants growing on its surface. As soon as the pregnant woman, supported by the young man, stepped ashore, she said, “From now on, let’s call this island Ordan.” And that was how the novel ended: “Labor pains began in her belly.”
“…Amazing.” I had already known that Park Jeong-shin could write well, but this was truly beyond my expectations. It felt as if the sea itself were surging before my eyes, with the little boat rising and falling on top of it. I sat on that boat and went back over Ordan, savoring it as the salt spray hit my face in sudden bursts. That spray left behind an exceptionally vivid memory: the wave of language. And that wave was this novel’s most fundamental question.
Why should we live?
I wondered if I could recast that question in my own terms. Why should we read this novel? Then the sea of language split open like the Red Sea. What emerged this time was a desert-like ground.
When I came to my senses, the sea was gone. In its place, two people were crouched in a barren wasteland, waiting for something. I recognized the scene at once. “Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot,” I muttered.
The two men before me began reciting the lines I knew so well.
“When will Godot come?”
“At any rate, let’s keep waiting. He said he’d definitely come.”
Waiting for Godot, one of the towering achievements in literary history, is also called an absurdist play. It is filled with two men waiting for a being named Godot, who never arrives. The audience can’t know who Godot is or what sort of existence he represents. All they can do is watch the two men continue waiting.
The orthodox interpretation of this play, written in the 1940s, is that it embodies the wish to wait out the end of the Second World War. Or perhaps it is about waiting for some “something” that can break the nihilism spreading through a continent at war. In those years, when people were dying by the thousands without distinction, the fundamental question of why to live was swelling across Europe.
Maybe Samuel Beckett hoped that something would one day come to those Europeans—something that would give them a reason to go on living. If Waiting for Godot is a work about waiting for a reason to live, then Ordan would be something like a journey toward finding that reason.
My fingertips itched. I was nearly insane with the urge to pour everything in my head onto the page right away. The projected length was… 18.5 pages of A4. Considering that a normal review usually ended somewhere around ten pages, it was easy to see how many symbols and layers of meaning Ordan handled so deeply. In a word, Ordan was enormous in both length and intellectual volume.
If this review were going into the editorial department’s review section, I would have cut it down to ten pages. That was the length a quarterly magazine allowed criticism to occupy. “But there’s no need for that.” If anything, “I could even make it longer.” I had already made up my mind.
I would write this review as a proposal. If I could design a criticism-focused quarterly of my own, I wanted to show just how far a piece like this could go. The kind of writing that ordinary quarterlies simply couldn’t carry. The title was already there.
I would parody Waiting for Godot. Seeking Ordan. With that decision made, I started writing directly into the proposal form.
The open sea. Ordan as a distant point on the horizon. A boat that could overturn at any moment. Waves rising and falling. The goal growing no closer, only more distant. Reading Ordan, we suddenly find ourselves thinking: This is my life.
It seemed obvious that Ordan was comparing our lives to this little boat’s journey. The guide suddenly opening fire was part of that too—the betrayal of the guide, whom they had trusted, or rather had no choice but to trust. It suggested the many misfortunes of life that erupt from the most unexpected places.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap…
How about this interpretation: that the little boat is a single person’s self, and the voyage across the open sea is the question each of us asks ourselves at least once in a lifetime. In other words, why should I live at all? And the people on the boat try to answer that question in their own voices.
At that point, I introduced the characters. There were quite a few of them, so this section naturally grew longer as well. But that was fine. In a criticism-focused quarterly, length was not a problem. All right, then. It was time to tackle the most important part.
The pregnant woman can be read a little differently. She is carrying something unknown inside her womb. To put it more romantically, what she carries is the time called the future. And the pregnant woman tries to protect that future—recklessly, instinctively, biologically, and, more fundamentally, by sheer survival instinct. In the end, isn’t living, isn’t waiting for the future, exactly this? An unknown energy that cannot be explained—or rather, should not be explained.
Good. From there, I broadened the meaning of Ordan even further.
If you have seen Waiting for Godot, it will be easier to understand what this story is saying. In that landmark masterpiece, Godot is the “reason to live” that one wants to meet even after enduring the emptiness of existence and the long wait. Thus every line, every movement, every story that blooms during that waiting is directed toward a life that will continue into the future.
Ordan is no different. The arguments on the boat, the struggle to survive, the philosophy, even the crying—they all move toward a place to survive in, toward Ordan’s shore…
I kept writing, then savoring what I had written, then writing again, endlessly. It wasn’t only the number of characters that kept increasing. The meaning of the piece kept gaining flesh, becoming richer and richer. The comparison with Waiting for Godot was finished. I was almost there.
“From now on, let’s call this island Ordan.”
Could the final line that closed Ordan be any more beautiful than that? They fought, they were robbed, they seized, they resisted the guide, and in the end they found land where a child could be born. To give that land the name “Ordan” was deeply significant. They were no longer merely the owners of a vague island of survival; they had become the owners of the paradise they had found for themselves, the Ordan they had reached by their own hands.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap…
My fingers moved without hesitation. The language stored in my head was beginning to run low. All right, then. It was time for the final conclusion.
To add one last thought to the discussion above, I dare to say this: if the characters in Waiting for Godot “waited” for Godot, the characters in Ordan “seek” Ordan. Perhaps that active prayer of hope is what brought the little boat to an empty island in the first place.
That was enough. “...Done.” I had finished. My shoulders and fingertips ached from how much I had poured out. I counted the pages. Thirty in all—more than three times the length of the other reviews. There was no reason to hesitate. There was no need to reread it either. I shoved the review straight into the proposal.
At that same time, in the president’s office at Gyeongseong Publishing, Representative Mun and Editor Im were locked in a heated discussion about Mok Hyunsun.
Representative Mun, veins standing out on his forehead, shouted, “Absolutely not. A new quarterly? No matter how you look at it, how could we possibly take such a gamble—”
That was when a sudden mechanical whir cut through the room. Whirr—whirr. Both men turned toward the source of the sound.
Representative Mun’s brow furrowed. “What on earth is that now?”
Paper began to spew out of the fax machine in a steady stream.