The artlessness is the point: "Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982," by Cho Nam-joo

Where is the line between art that is polemical and art that is political? A similar question might be, "Where is the line between art that is didactic and art that holds a particular thematic position on a question concerning ethics or morality?" Nowadays, "didactic" is almost always a pejorative; we don't trust art when its main purpose seems to have been to teach us a lesson. But we don't have the same reservations about polemical art.

By polemical art--more specifically, by a polemical work of fiction--I mean this: a work that follows the Western courtroom model of disclosing the truth, rather than an objective, dispassionate recorder of truth. In a polemical narrative, it isn't the narrator's job to try to tell a balanced story. It's to tell the side of the story you're on with as much force as you can, and if someone wants to refute it, they can write their own story.

One problem with a polemical narrative like this is that it can be hard to differentiate between what is polemical and what is propaganda. This will likely come down to whether you as a reviewer happen to agree with the stance taken by the narrator.

Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, by Korean author Cho Nam-joo, is without doubt a polemical work of fiction. It's possible the movie based on her book will be the next South Korean film to get the attention of the West, after Parasite swept the Academy Awards this month. The book has already had years of attention in Korea, where it seems to have landed at the exact right place at the exact right time to become a key cultural touchstone in South Korea's #metoo movement.

And did South Korea ever need it. Life is not good for women in South Korea. The gender pay gap is greater there than it is in any advanced nation. An astounding number of women face domestic violence, and it is still customary to try to convince women not to press charges. Confucianism, which influenced Korea for centuries, was openly misogynistic, and even though South Korea has done an amazing great leap in the last 70 years, there are some ideas that just won't die. A South Korean awakening to these problems was necessary and good for the country's future.

What's the book about?

I haven't seen the movie Kim Ji-Young. What I have to say here is about the book. There is an English translation of the novel, but I've only read Cho's original Korean, and any passages here are my own translations.

Kim Ji-young was the most common name for girls in South Korea in 1982, the year the novel's main character was born. The name is indicative of how very ordinary she is. "Compared to her peers, she was neither late nor early" to get her period, and "neither ahead nor behind" describes KJY in every way. KJY is meant to be an everywoman. Her struggles are the struggles of every Korean woman. There is an analysis of the novel in the back of my e-book version, written by Korean author Kim Ko Yeon-ju. Kim Ko titled her analysis, "We are All Kim Ji-Young." That KJY was meant to represent the struggles of all Korean women was not a subtle point.

KJY doesn't face any especially dramatic traumas in her life. As a Financial Times interviewer of Cho put it, the book doesn't have a villain. But KJY is still troubled. As the book opens, she is seemingly being possessed by older Korean women, who are speaking through her. (This is almost the only comical part of the book, as the young KJY is suddenly speaking like a grandma from the sticks.) At this point, I was reminded immediately of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which I've talked about before. In Han's novel, a woman responds to the difficulties of being a woman in Korea by choosing to fade away, becoming more and more spiritual and less rooted to the world. The story begins with her behavior vexing her husband, who had always counted on her ordinariness. It ends with the main character in a mental institution, on the brink of death.

But Kim Ji-Young doesn't match the drama of The Vegetarian. After an intriguing opening, one in which it seemed that generations of women close to the main character were literally forcing her to find her voice by talking through her, the book slows down into a straightforward chronological grind through a series of microaggressions against Kim from the moment she is born to the birth of her own child. The most serious thing that happens in the book is a hidden camera in the bathroom at KJY's office that was responsible for sending nude videos of her's office mates to a room on the Internet. But KJY herself is not one of the people who was revealed in those videos; she had left work to have her child just before it happened. The second worst event is possibly when Kim was almost attacked by someone who followed her home on a bus when she was in high school. She was saved by a random old woman on the bus who got off to help her. The worst part of that affair was the way her father blamed her for it: "Why do you go to a tutoring office so far away from home? Why do you talk to random people? Why is your skirt so short?"

There isn't any one major traumatizing event. That would destroy the point, because it would make the main character extraordinary. The point is that her experiences should all be something every woman in Korea can relate to, and that the cumulative effect of these experiences, along with a culture that abhors women in a million spoken and unspoken ways, are enough to cause mental illness.

Intentional dullness

The narrative style, such as it is, stands out mainly for being entirely non-literary. It neither ascribes to nor achieves any aesthetic achievement. It is the most basic prose, reading often more like a rough draft full of ideas for a novel rather than the painstaking result of dreaming people into life. It's easy for me to believe Cho wrote it in a few months, as she says she did. It reads like that. One of the most arresting characteristics of the prose is the way it intersperses non-fictional facts about South Korean women's lives, complete with footnotes, at nearly two dozen points in the narrative. Having dropped a fact, the narrative then motors on, like we're watching a historical reenactment of an overtly fictional woman's life in Korea rather than watching the development of a fictionally "real" woman's life unfolding behind the suspension of doubt a good story brings. "In 1999, the year Kim Eun-Young (my note: the older sister of the main character) was twenty, a bill outlawing sexual discrimination was passed, and in 2001 when Kim Ji-Young turned twenty, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family was founded." An endnote follows, along with some commentary on the mixed results of these laws, and then the narrative just picks back up in the next paragraph.

The story drones on and on like this, because the objective isn't to bring the reader into the story by making it feel real, thereby making us ultimately sympathize with Kim Ji-Young. It's to bludgeon the reader, to wear the reader down into accepting the point-of-view of the story. In a way, this is really effective, because it's similar to how the story argues women in Korea have been worn down. They're aware they're being treated unfairly, but the costs of standing up for oneself and finding one's voice always seem to outweigh the benefits. So women are silent, until the weight of oppression piles up and they buckle under it.

The novel isn't so much a story with a beginning, middle, and end as it is an extended essay which uses a running series of vignettes about "Jane Doe" to illustrate points.

The effectiveness of a non-aesthetic aesthetic

I can't really argue the novel wasn't effective, given how culturally relevant the book became. Since I'm always wringing my hands about whether fiction can even do any good, maybe this approach is a good one, one that should be used more often. Maybe people don't need a cerebral, spiritual meditation full of heartbreaking beauty like The Vegetarian or Easy Woman, another novel I liked about the struggles of Korean women in the modern world. Kim Ji-Young, unlike most literary novels, certainly had an observable impact.

The Financial Times article I linked above mentioned in passing that some commenters have remarked on the "artless" style of Cho's prose. It then argues that the ordinariness is the point. But this is sleight of hand, substituting "ordinariness" for "artlessness." There are thousands of excellent novels about ordinary people. Whether this is a great novel is up for debate not because Kim is so ordinary, but because there is no apparent effort to even try to forge the raw material of the novel using the skill of a novelist. It's one thing for every woman, no matter how ordinary, to see herself in Kim Ji-Young. It's another thing for every writer, no matter how ordinary, to see herself in Cho.

An essay by Jon Baskin has been making the rounds a lot lately. It's called "On the Hatred of Literature." He argues that the prevailing ideology surrounding literature of the last fifty years--one that held sway when I was a student--was suspicious of emotional attachments to literature because we as readers thought works said true and/or beautiful things. Rather, we were to hold ourselves in a cool, aloof detachment from the work, seeing it as always produced by, and therefore bound to perpetuate, a certain political power hierarchy. This has ended up weakening literature, Baskin argues, by making it impossible for anyone who loves it for the reasons all people have ever loved it do to study it seriously. To quote Baskin at length:

There is nothing wrong with literature participating in—or being used as material for—social and political debates: from Ulysses to The Golden Notebook to Beloved, many of the great works of twentieth-century fiction have served as touchstones in cultural conversations. Surely, though, we lose something when this is all we can figure out to do with literature—as any of the authors of those novels would passionately attest. To their credit, Lerner’s novels at least recollect the possibility of aesthetic enchantment, even if they do so from a remote distance. The viral success of two recent short stories published in magazines, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” and Tony Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist,” gives a more straightforward sense of the way the hatred of literature often manifests itself, in our public discourse, in the simple conflation of fiction and social commentary. (The lack of literary sensibility in these millennial morality tales was a feature rather than a bug: it was what allowed them to generate takes in the same register as the newest fragment of cultural testimony in The Cut.) That language, style and perspective clearly matter to Lerner, however, only makes his distrust of literary experience all the more telling. Not only his turn from aesthetics to politics, but also the suspicious theoretical commentary he embeds at the very heart of his narratives—as one critic has put it, a Lerner novel arrives already armed with “its own critique, and its own defense”—give evidence of just how far the hatred of literature has advanced. No wonder the haters were “cancelling dinner dates” (Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books) when the review copies arrived in the mail; Lerner is their man on the inside.

I did not personally find "Cat Person" as flat a morality tale as Baskin did; at the very least, I found it an interesting kind of experiment, because the story was a kind of Rorshach Test, designed nicely to get everyone who read it to see what they assume to be true about sexual violence as reflected in the story. But her follow-up was far less interesting, and it begins with a line I think shows the limits of the female imagination to see sex through a man's eyes. And I think "the simple conflation of fiction and social commentary" about describes Kim Ji-Young perfectly. There are limits to what polemical fiction can accomplish. Although it may get a lot of clicks or sales, as much from hate as from love, it won't convince many people to change their minds. Polemics aren't meant to do that. They're meant to win a formal debate according to the terms laid down. They're meant to get those who agree with you involved. They're meant to stir up latent convictions. But they aren't meant to convince. Those who don't share the right politics in the view of the polemicist are swine, and if they trample the pearl of wisdom offered, that's just what pigs do. 

When Kim Ji-Young almost wanted to be more

I happen to agree with a lot of the politics of the novel. But that doesn't mean I found reading the novel interesting or even, to use a Christian word, edifying for my political beliefs. I found the novel all the more boring because I agreed with it. Cho said she thought many women who have reacted to the book are braver than she is, and that the book is braver than she is. But the book isn't really all that brave. It could have been much more provocative if it had even the slightest bit of aesthetic merit. I've heard this all before, and the novel didn't really make me feel the urgency of anything it wanted to say.

But at times, it wanted to be more. There is a really nice moment when Kim's friend from her job she has quit to raise her child comes to see KJY and the baby. The friend gives the baby a few gifts, but also gives KJY a tube of lip gloss:

"What's with this lip gloss?" Ji-Young asked."I'm wearing it now. Isn't the color nice? It matches our skin tone."Maybe because she was a woman, she knew not to say, "Don't just sit around the house; get dressed up" or something like that. It was nice. She just said the color seemed like it suited her. That was it. Nice and simple. Kim Ji-Young felt better, and she opened up the lip gloss there on the spot and put it on. It really did look good on her, and she started to feel better still. 

There was an opportunity for more moments like these. The old woman who saves Kim from her stalker tells her it wasn't her fault, and KJY cries, she is so happy to be understood. The best feminist fiction has strong bonds between women. But the bonds in the story are all relatively transitory. They're the kind of thing that happen when you write a novel in eight weeks and don't bother to build a world or backstories for anyone besides the main character. We completely lose sight of Kim Ji-Young's older sister halfway through the novel. No female character stays for long besides Ji-Young. 

The effect of polemical fiction 

I hate when I find myself making statements that sound like conservative talking points, but here I go. The problem with polemical fiction is that in a democracy, winning an argument often means showing there is a more critical need to fix your problem than to fix some other problem. That means you have to show how terrible it is, and if it doesn't seem terrible enough, then you need to find ways to make is sound worse. The end result can be the fetishization of suffering. Women aren't just still struggling to get the equality they deserve and getting fed up with the catch-22 they're in, they're actually dying from psychological trauma. 

There is a lot of space given to how awful child birth is in the novel. There's a story to this. Part of the battle of the sexes in Korea right now (a battle that is far more vitriolic than anything going on in the U.S. right now) goes like this: Men say that if women want real equality, they should also be required to serve mandatory terms in the armed forces, like South Korean men are. Women often respond by saying that their patriotic duty comes from having children. Which isn't really the same thing, but you can make it seem like more the same thing if you really play up the horrors of it.

I'm not about to mansplain to women about why childbirth isn't bad. Mrs. Heretic's childbirth was terrible, and I had a front row seat for all twenty-two hours of it. It's nasty and barbaric, and I can't believe humans come into the world like that.

But nobody is making women have children. Yes, there is social pressure to have children, but having a child isn't mandatory like going into the military is for men. Presumably, women have children because they want to most of the time. And if you're going to do that, it's important not to focus on how horrible it can be, because that's just not a good life strategy for dealing with things that are hard. If you want to be a dancer, you can't focus on how hard it is training. You have to find ways to get past the hard parts so you can get the rewards you want.

Polemical stories--and a polemical approach to life in general--reduce resiliency, because we focus on how bad the situation is for us. We need to in order to make our complaint count for maximum points in the zero-sum game of wrangling for public dollars and attention. In Kim Ko Yeon-ju's analysis after the novel, she goes so far as to say that the current generation of 30-something women in South Korea actually have it worse in some ways than their mothers did. This is laughable. Their mothers lived in a military dictatorship. Their mothers came from crushing poverty. Their mothers had children they had to raise without help from husbands, while still having to hold grueling part-time jobs themselves just to survive.

What is true is that women today are psychologically troubled in ways their mothers weren't, and that they might in some ways be less happy. But we always knew that would be part of throwing off tradition and trying to find a new path. The old ways stuck around so long because they were comforting. Sartre introduced us to the notion that when we stop relying on tradition to tell us how to live our lives and take responsibility for our own happiness, we can experience a kind of nausea when we realize that our own happiness really is up to us. It can be miserable being a woman in a culture that legally considers women less equal, but there can be assurances in making yourself believe it's all part of God's plan. Taking responsibility as an equal member of society, and all that means, comes with challenges the history of the world hasn't prepared us for.

For women of Kim Ji-Young's generation, who were told they could have it all, only to find how hard it is to try to have it all, many of them might really be less happy than their mothers. Their mothers weren't equal, but nobody told them they were. Having been told their happiness wasn't that important, they set aside political goals for the moment and set about to find what happiness was allowed to them. But Kim Ji-Young's generation was told both that they were equal and that they weren't. They spend their energies struggling with the cognitive dissonance of this more than trying to find ways to be happy. Political struggle is noble, but it comes with a cost. We shouldn't act like the struggle can be fought for free.

The need for solidarity and consensus-building

One thing that strikes me in this book is how little women seem to help one another to be happy. Kim Ji-Young has no lasting female relationships that matter, other than her mother. Women do not share their burdens. There is no community of shared concerns. I do not think this was true of the generation before them. The atomization and individualization of culture in South Korea has come along at the same time as the semi-modernization of women's legal standing, and it is wreaking havoc on women who suddenly feel lost trying to find what their freedom/not freedom means.

The book is a long complaint. It offers no solutions. There is little female solidarity to overcome lingering inequality and seek to chart a new path in the absence of traditional rules to guide the way. There are no male allies to work with, only men relatively more or less guilty of being complicit with the patriarchy.

Complaint is necessary. Complaint is de rigeur. I would never tell any oppressed group to just be grateful for what they have and to try to be happy. But it is important to realize that complaint has psychological costs. So does independence. Real stories that sustain us for the long haul don't hide this from us. They don't leave us, like KJY was when she faced the realities of motherhood, bitter that nobody told us the truth. The truth is that you should absolutely fight for your freedom, but that when you get it, you are absolutely going to be overwhelmed with the responsibilities freedom brings.

There is a scene in the book where Kim Ji-Young is accused by passing men of being a "momasite" (Korean: momchoong/맘충). That's a portmanteau of the English word "Mom" and the Korean word for "insect" or "worm." The "choong" part of the word can also mean "parasite," and that is the sense here. The men saw her drinking a coffee with her child in the park, and think she is living the easy life off her husband's money. Speaking of Parasite, there is something Bong Joon Ho's movie has in common with Kim Ji-Young. In Parasite, the poor people down below fail to realize they have common cause. They could all have lived off the rich family if they had just worked together. But they couldn't, and so they ruined a golden opportunity for all of them to improve their lives. Kim Ji-Young's main character is in the same place. South Korea isn't just a rat race for women. There are men struggling with high real estate prices and slow growth of wages. Many are just giving up. The "3-quit generation" and the "7-quit generation" refer to how many young South Koreans are just choosing not to have families.

That means that women aren't alone in their struggle. Men are able to understand many of the things women in South Korea are going through, because they're going through the same things. Women are right to call out behavior in men that unfairly blames women or criticizes them. They are right to demand to be free from violence. But although the book didn't attack men, as some of its critics claim it did, it also didn't seek to find any common cause with people who are suffering from many of the same things described in the book.

A good story will bring others into a movement. It will do that by creating empathy, but also by being so damn beautiful, it's hard to fight it. An argument in the form of a notional story won't do those things.