Photographic Memory (3)
57.
I didn't say it out loud, but I found myself thinking that Park Jeong-shin, the one who called Song Man a total psycho, was a psycho too.
Maybe lunatics look normal when seen through another lunatic's eyes. “So? What makes him such a psycho?”
“He originally wanted to become a webtoon artist. He graduated from cartoon creation and spent almost ten years preparing. He's really good at drawing, too.” That was unexpected.
He'd wanted to draw webtoons for that long? “Did you happen to read [Photographic Memory], the piece he released this time?”
“Ah, I only know the title. He was talking about it over drinks back then. Said it was a story he'd been developing as a webtoon for years, and he finally finished it?” A story he'd been preparing for years.
No wonder there were no errors in it. It had been honed and polished over time. “But why did he write it as a novel instead of a webtoon? If the title itself deals with photographic memory, a visual webtoon would have the advantage, wouldn't it? Especially if he's as good at drawing as you say.”
“That's exactly the part that makes him a psycho.”
“?”
“We asked him that too. We said webtoons make a lot more money than genre fiction, don't they? But he answered like this: in a webtoon, you can't cleanly, completely capture one person's field of vision, one person's voice. Once he realized that, he gave up drawing altogether.”
“Field of vision and voice?”
“Yeah. I don't know exactly what he meant, but that's what he said. Hmm— and then what was it?” Park Jeong-shin dragged the memory up with effort. “He said a webtoon can't achieve perfect first person, or something like that.” Ah. Ah! Only then did I understand.
The word Mok Hyunsun in my head.
The word that could replace it: first person.
The self I perceive, the field of vision I feel, the voice I hear in myself, the mind visible only to me.
If that wasn't first person, then what was? [Photographic Memory] was built as a perfect first-person narrative too.
No, it had to be first person. In that sense, Song Man had made the right choice.
A webtoon that showed only the protagonist's point of view? That would be hard to sustain.
Even if it existed, it would probably feel oddly stifling and awkward.
Comics are, by default, built on a third-person gaze, one that looks at the protagonist's face. Park Jeong-shin slowly lay back down again. “That's about all I know about Song Man. Anyway, your writing is seriously the best. I'll read it again... and memorize every last line.” Still lying there, he began gathering the manuscript with clumsy hands.
That was fine.
I didn't have time to chat with Park Jeong-shin either. “Can I use your workspace?”
“Hm? You're still going to work even after coming all the way here? Go ahead.” He let me into the room without hesitation.
It would have been nice if I had my laptop, but since I didn't, borrowing his PC was the only option. I didn't even have time to feel awkward about sitting in someone else's seat.
I opened Word at once,
and started by typing the title: [What Should Have Been First Person].
The reason I could immerse myself in [Photographic Memory] was that the detective's reasoning resembled my own process of extracting keywords.
The method was simple: focus entirely on myself, dig through the inside, and find the answer. All right, enough thinking. Let's write.
I began by rebutting a common assumption. [What is the appeal of mystery fiction? The process of finding the culprit? The thrill of hidden evidence emerging one by one? An "objective," flawless deduction?(...)]
All of that was true. A well-written mystery novel was one that laid all of it out so clearly you could see it with your own eyes. But the idea of being “well written” also contained another virtue: how vividly it rendered the detective's reasoning.
If you remember that deduction happens inside one person's head, in an unknown world no one else can ever see, then perhaps the real key to mystery fiction is showing the detective's subjective mind.
Mystery novels are objective.
But their pleasure comes from the subjective.
That was the biggest thing I felt when I read [Photographic Memory]. [In that sense, choosing first person in [Photographic Memory] was not a choice but a necessity. Every deduction depends on the detective's memory, and that memory is fought over with fierce, intense force. In that process, the detective becomes certain, doubts himself, grows confused, and then becomes certain again until he reaches the answer. That internal current is impossible to tear your eyes away from. The detective can convey that flow to the reader only through first person.(...)]
[And the readers? Before they know it, they're completely attached to the detective, because, as is the nature of first-person fiction, every line of narration is the detective's voice. The reader is bewitched by that voice, follows his memories, and sinks into the deduction with him. In short, they fall into a trance.]
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.... I kept writing about the role first person played in this novel.
How precisely it used first person to present the concrete process of deduction.
How it withheld the result and any big, revealing clue,
while only teasing the reader's appetite just enough. I built my argument from there for a long while. And then, here,
I needed to turn the direction a little.
But first person is not used solely as a device to make deduction shine.
This was the really important part.
From here on, I was going to talk about the final scene of [Photographic Memory],
and I had to walk a very fine line without crossing into spoiler territory.
In literary fiction, some spoilers are tolerated because the purpose is to read the meaning inside the story,
but mystery fiction has a line that has to be respected.
Look at the detective's first-person narration in the moment he recalls the memory that becomes the decisive evidence. When he saw the assistant's face reflected in his wife's eyes, for instance.
At the moment he confirmed that shocking truth, the detective must have been devastated, must have felt grief. And yet his statement in that instant is calm, almost flat. He is a detective, after all, and he has to grasp objective truth.
What we feel in that dissonance is a deeper sorrow. Sorrows deepen when they are suppressed. And I dare say that this kind of psychological narration is an achievement only first person can accomplish. Emotions speak most clearly when they are not spoken at all....
The final paragraph of [Photographic Memory] is the same. Even without saying words like love or trust, don't we still feel it? The detective's feelings toward his wife.
...Clean.
I had said everything I needed to say. There was nothing left to take out.
It was also the first time I'd ever written so much about first person.
“Hmm.” And yet I found myself wanting a little more.
If this detective resembled me... maybe I could weave in a bit of my own story?
Just a little. I put my hands back on the keyboard.
As if the end wasn't really the end, I kept writing. Perhaps writing is like that too. Whether it's fiction or criticism.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.... Writing is not the act of jotting down whatever words and sentences happen to float up. It is the process of choosing the most fitting words from among the countless words drifting through your head. Meaning conveyed precisely by choosing to say something. Or meaning conveyed by choosing not to say it. Perhaps the sum of all those things is what writing is. It's an interesting thought: perhaps the act of writing itself is first person.
The reason is that only the writer knows the writer's own mind. Someone might disagree,
someone might object, but I didn't care. At least for me, it was a rather satisfying ending.
After I finished that criticism for the quarterly journal in one fell swoop,
I came out of the workspace.
Even so, more than an hour had passed,
and Park Jeong-shin was still lying on the living room floor, staring at the criticism of Ordan as if under a spell. Did he like it that much? “I'm heading out. I'll contact you once the new editor is decided.”
“Oh. Take care.” He gave me a casual wave.
I wasn't even expecting a send-off, so I was about to leave lightly when— “Ah, right.” Park Jeong-shin sat up. “I was going to ask you earlier, but what's the name?”
“The name of what?”
“You know, that quarterly journal you're starting. If I know the name, I can promote it on N-Star or something. What's it called, then?”
“...”
“...What, you didn't name it yet?”
To my surprise, I hadn't thought of it at all.
When I just blinked at him, he said, flabbergasted, “Are you serious? You wrote a thirty-page critique before you even thought about a name?”
“Apparently.” And on top of that, I'd just written another fifteen-page critique on the way out.
Of course, a name for the journal had never crossed my mind.
“...You're really not a normal guy either.” Park Jeong-shin shot me that line in utter disbelief.
Unfortunately, I couldn't argue with him.
Thud. The moment I got home, I flopped face-first onto the bed. “...A name.” I hadn't expected to run into this kind of obstacle.
At first, I had thought it would be easy.
Finding keywords was my job, after all. How could I not think of a single name? But... nothing came to mind.
No, that wasn't quite right. Plenty of things came to mind, but they were all far too grandiose. I began with this question: what is criticism? The moment I asked it,
my head went boom—not literally, of course, but that's how it felt to me.
Then every language I had ever criticized, every language I remembered, and in fact every language I knew poured out at once. There were too many to sort through.
They gathered and gathered in real time, turning to steam before my eyes until they dissolved into darkness and became unreadable altogether. ...Because my head was simply too full.
And because all of it could be connected to criticism.
Damn it, life really is a matter of too much of a good thing.
That night,
I tossed and turned, clutching my head the whole time. If I couldn't settle this crowd in my skull,
I felt like I would never settle on a name.
Or I might have to compromise on some half-baked, neither-here-nor-there title.
Now and then, a few promising words surfaced. Paragraph and Criticism There was something plausible about it. But it lacked charm.
Could I come up with something cleaner? Focus I knew what it meant, but it seemed better suited to film criticism.
It needed more of a literary flavor. Literature and Review Somehow that felt cheap.
And besides, I was planning to cover film and other genres too.
Could it be more comprehensive and still sound impressive? Theory and Impression That's too difficult!
Until three in the morning,
I went on erasing one language after another.
Like the so-called grunt work.
“I knew I'd make a living with my head, but I never thought I'd be doing manual labor with my brain.”
And the next day.
“I'm dead...”
Having fallen asleep in a daze before dawn, I dragged my heavy body upright.
My sleep had been poor.
I looked out the window. “The weather's nice...”
My head... was clear.
It seemed the effort of erasing and erasing and erasing language had paid off.
And from that white, clean emptiness, a single character timidly raised its head.
I had driven out letters all through the night, and yet
that last stubborn one had survived.
“Who are you?”
I muttered like a madman and focused hard.
The thing's identity was pyeong.
The same pyeong as in “to evaluate” or “to critique.”
Criticism, commentary, review, appraisal, assessment, evaluation—everything, in short, pyeong pyeong pyeong.
It was a character that could describe everything I did.
“...Pyeong?”
I liked it.
Simple, intuitive, and, in its own way, evocative.
“Not bad.” And so the name of the quarterly journal I was going to create was decided, almost miraculously, on a bright sunny morning.