Yi Sang - Korean dadaist/surrealist: a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself

Yi Sang, The Wings, Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2001.


"This slender volume of stories is by a famed Korean author from the colonial period, who died at age 27 with TB in Japan. He came to fame because his writing incorporated influences from French existentialism and Dadaism. As such, the stories are redolent of Cocteau and even Kafka, with an unreliable, not necessarily likable narrator, who merely reacts to the moment and lacks the traditions of male ambition and desire. Despite a few awkward instances in the translation, the deadpan yet richly descriptive voice of this unique modernist writer shines through"

"The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi, Sang's inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. "The Wings," a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. "Encounters and Departures," a tale of ill-fated love revolving around erotic passion and physical illness as metaphors presents a female protagonist modelled on the woman who was, in real life, the author's muse and femme fatale. Similarly, in "Deathly Child," Yi, Sang offers a witty, incisive examination of sexual mores through a fictional reenactment of his ambivalent feelings toward the woman he married toward the end of his life."



"In a recently published essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmunson pleads for a contingency that I hope someone can help us achieve:

If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx’s, Freud’s, Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or whoever’s — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we’d declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we’d give readings a rest.

God knows, after all, how many enjoyable novels and stories have been ruined, for readers, by the academic necessity to pin some kind of theoretical tail to the simple and innocent donkey of the story.
Hey academics, we know, theory is what you have. We don’t want to steal that from you. We wouldn’t steal piercings from teens, Ferraris from 40 year old men, or the Vagina Monologues from Berkeley.
However, if you do take that sabbatical from theory (perhaps have a coffee black instead of your soy-latte with nutmeg and coconut shavings, or have a fight in a bar) and come back? Or even if the tweed is too tight and you refuse to give up the bound paper-teat of your preferred theory?
I give you Yi Sang’s The Wings.
Yi is an author begging for a biography. He died at the romantically young age of 27 (as calculated in Korean years) and from remaining photos, seems to have been ruggedly handsome. His stories in this volume focus on unfortunate and doomed love. The booksleeve darkly hints that Yi had a “femme fatale” in his life, while other sources indicate that he might have had a drug habit (Michael Stephens, The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice in Short Fiction p. 197), an unfortunate attraction to financial insolvency, and a fatal case of consumption. Being Korean, he likely smoked as well. As is traditional for a certain kind of Korean writer of the era, he ran afoul of the Japanese authorities, who certainly hastened his death.
The Wings is his emblematic story, in this volume accompanied by Encounters and Departures and Deathly Child. As I noted in my top-of-the-set-burner, this work is rich with ore for theory miners. It can be read an allegorical complaint against colonial oppression, an existential/Dadaist/surrealist/suicidal withdrawal from the insanity of contemporary life or, more prosaically as the schizophrenic decline of a man who has lost his relationship with his wife. With its dual foci on sexuality and the totemic role of currency, it also lends itself to feminist or Marxist analytics. All this is packed into a relatively slight 33 pages.
The Wings begins nearly randomly, with short paragraphs and semi-nonsensical epigraphs (if that is possible) slowly coalescing into the narrative of a profoundly alienated man and his semi-schizophrenic life with his wife. The plot might have been a bit more opaque when the story was written – this is to say that the modern reader will quickly discern what the wife’s “job” is, but the narrator so convincingly describes his own alienated state that his continual ignorance and avoidance, interlarded with brutal comeuppances that bring him face to face with it, seem perfectly logical.
Near the outset, the narrator notes, “a mirror is a practical thing only when it reflects one’s face.” Yet this narrator can never come face to face with himself or reality. He lurks in the “dusky” corners of the world, despite his nyctalopia, which would suggest brighter environments. He is young, at 26, but seems immeasurably older, partly because Yi is a master at describing long torments in compact prose. The narrator lurches from darkness in his bedroom, to darkness in the outside world, only through the prism of his wife’s bedroom, and the guests she frequently entertains. The narrator is only able to navigate the outside world by virtue of money which his wife awards him in an alarmingly ritual and impersonal way (Here, a perceptive reader can imagine feminism and capitalist critique intersecting). The wife’s money is a necessity for the narrator, but he despises (and loves) it. Initially he won’t spend the money, once he even tosses it into the toilet that, at the time, probably didn’t mean a porcelain fixture. Obversely, without the money, he is helpless.
The other stories work as plot counterpoints to The Wings. Encounters and Departures could serve as partial prequel to The Wings as it tells the story of a husband and wife/prostitute and how they meet and marry (and partially repeat this cycle in classic Korean short-story cyclicality). Encounters and Departures is similar to The Wings in its symbolic uses. The narrators in both stories are presented as preternaturally old looking and hairy. Both narrators seem to exist in a sequestered perpetual time that does not intersect with the prosaic schedules of the remainder of humanity. Yi’s narrators are gaunt and insubstantial, existing in an uncomfortable state of liminality, somewhere closer to Hell than limbo, but in which they are their own Charon, endlessly ferrying themselves from nowhere to nowhere, with only a bleak darkness behind the stage.
The final story, Deathly Child, is brilliantly experimental. Another lost narrator is incapable of navigating day to day relationships, reporting them as absurdist travelogues between mutually incomprehensible natives of the same language, land, city, even the same relationships. The story is in titled fragments and (as the translation reveals it) may be on of the first Korean short stories to include English loan words.
The three stories in this collection are brilliant; painfully dark jewels from an author without much optimism about anything, but with a keen eye for absurdity.
Run out and purchase it online from Seoul Selection.
So, really, since it is online you don’t have to run at all!- Charles Montgomery
"With the charlatans, liars, and robbers at the Republican convention trying to snow me with their ideology of balanced accounts, self-madeness, hard work, a less generous, more ‘austere’ government, etc, which really hides the bloodthirsty greed of the weasels who built and fecklessly crash the anyhow unsurvivable global economoy,  it comforts me to give some thought to writers who reject this “wholesome” ideology all together in favor of a Bataillean bereftness, a limitless pouring out of resources, a going beyond, an excess, a cult of luxury, sensation, and suicide, death, that is, the decadent.

Glimpsing Fi Jae Lee’s ghostly, multi-protuberant, ectoplasmic sculptures of Yi Sang and his wife impelled me to track down books by this crucial Korean Modernist who died of tuberculosis at 27 after a term of imprisonment by the Japanese for thought crimes. A innovator of Korean literature with his intense, indeterminately genred work, he encountered  European modernism while in the schools of the Japanese occupiers. He surely birthed a strange headed  beast from his duress, his split-apart ribs.

The three short prose pieces gathered as ‘The Wings‘ [the Wings, Encounters and Departures, Death Child] create an intense yet diaphanous continuous fabric through which the youthful yet decaying speaker, named Yi Sang, engages in strange transactions with the universe, as embodied by a fitfully attentive/abusive ‘wife’ figure.  The permeable, irregular fabric of these tales prioritizes luxurious sensation over utilitarian shelter, both at the debilitated Yi Sang’s expense.

In the first story the apartment house the two live in is ‘just like a house of pleasures’; eighteen households live side by side behind ‘papered lattice doors’, ‘the cooking holes identical, too.’ Yet, ‘the residents are young as blossoms’. Exposure produces a possibly fragile beauty, a blossom, but a blossom is a growth which has pierced through and which erratically persists. Yi Sang spends his time sleeping, hiding under a quilt while his wife entertains ‘guests’, carefully noting what he can hear and see through this membrane, moving across minute spaces with deliberation:

“It has become a major recreation of mine that I promptly go to the front room in the morning when my wife goes out and watch various bottles on her make-up chest brilliantly glimmer with the sunbeam trickling in through the eastern window I opened.”

Yi Sang opens the window, but looks not at the dawn, that productive signal to good citizens to go out to work, but at the brilliant light in the little makeup flasks. It is a decadent choice, a rejection of both nature and utility in favor of effortfully obtained sensation. It reminds me of Pater: “To burn always with this hard, gem like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

Yi Sang’s mysterious wife gives him a silver coin after her guests leaves, his ‘tip’. The accruing pile of silver coins is at once the only measurable accumulation visible to this tenuous soul and nothing; he  eventually throws them in the toilet. Yet he soon wants more money- value, above all is fluctuating. No value is permanently negated or erased from the world; in each story, the fickle wife keeps coming back; one tale is entitled “Encounters and Departures”.

A ‘Yi Sang’ in the tale ‘Deathly Child’ begins, ‘This is the touching scene my feelers discern’ and later notes,

The suicide verdict that has been handed down to me reads:

“It has been shown that the defendant has hastily squandered his life. To extend the defendant’s life by a day would result in an unnecessary burden to the operational costs of the universe. Therefore, it is decreed that the defendant shall enter the rat hole without turning back even to look at his own tail.”

With this figurative ‘termination notice’ from the universe, Yi Sang declares himself once and for all with those who cannot keep the balanced accounts of respectful society, whose profligacy is so ecstastic that he must be driven down into the ‘rathole’ of dense, irrational, unacknoweldged yet still present space, the kind of black space through which his aesthetic and political inheritor, Kim Hyesoon, moves as muga or shaman, possessed by all that is abandoned. It is this subterranean, blacked out terrain, blacked out and blacked in again and again with the collapsing and corrosive catastrophes of centuries, from which the 21st century’s art and noise must issue, through which its profligate artists must move. - Joyelle McSweeney

"The narrator of "The Wings" is simple, apparently dumb and at least partly autistic. He lives in one room, kept by a wife who works as a prostitute; he understands neither sex nor money, but something of their importance is clear to him. When he begins to go out while his wife is with clients, to wander the streets at night, what order there is to his life disintegrates. The two other stories in The Wings, "Encounters and Departures" and "Deathly Child", are not quite as stark, but they are similarly dark and uneasy. They involve socially alienated individuals, sexual passions and obsessions, and the questioning of sexual mores. It's powerful stuff, and three stories in this vein are probably as much as one can take in a single hit.
A brief biographical paragraph is the only commentary in this collection. Yi Sang died of tuberculosis in 1937, aged only 27, while imprisoned in Tokyo on charges of "thought offense" — and apparently these stories are built out of autobiographical components, which doesn't suggest a happy life! Yi Sang may have been influenced by the writings of the European avant garde, but his stories charted a different landscape" - Danny Yee 

 Yi Sang (real name Kim Hae-gyeong) was one of Korea's most innovative writers of modern literature. He is best remembered for his poems and short stories. In his famous story collection, "The Wings," he explores the dark world of prostitution and poverty, of socially alienated individuals, sexual passions and obsessions. Dark pictures are filled with irony, existentialism and humour and the themes and style, although influenced by the European avant-garde, are unique. He is known as a dadaist, surrealist and symbolist who wrote in Korea, which was colonized by Japan in his time. The stories and poems can be interpreted as political allegories against Japanese rule or a protest against the absurdity of life or a warning against the degradation of humanity. He intensively exploited richness and recursive possibilities of language, relying often on patterns of repetition and deviation. His works are partly autobiographical. Almost unknown during his lifetime, he was rediscovered in the 50s and became very popular.
Yi Sang died very young, at the age of 27, from tuberculosis that he contracted in a Japanese prison, after he was arrested during his visit to Tokyo on “thought crime” charges. Based on his life story, Horse Trade Theater Group & Mocador produced a Sung Rino’s play, "Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen," and won the 2001 Fringe NYC award for Excellence for Overall Production Award.

Major works:
Nalgae (Wings), 1936
Yi-Sang Jeonjip (collection of 15 stories)
From Crow's-eye View 

Excerpt at issuu

Read the story "Wings" in Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology
  
some some excerpts from poems in Three Poets of Modern Korea (trans.by Yu Jung-yul and James Kimbrell):

The toy bride might come back, remembering the rich landscape of noon. She is warm like the notepad in my bosom. The scent of her is all that comes close to me. I waste away.


*
If I give a needle to the toy bride, she will pierce some random objects thoughtlessly. Calendar, book of poems, pocket watch. And the place in my body where the past perches most closely.

This is proof that thorns rise in the mind of the toy bride. That is, like a rose…

*
13 children rush down a street.

(A dead-end alley will suffice.)


The 1st child says it is terrifying.

The 2nd child says also says it is terrifying.

The 3rd child says also says it is terrifying.

The 4th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 5th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 6th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 7th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 8th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 9th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 10th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 11th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 12th child says also says it is terrifying.

The 13th child says also says it is terrifying.

*
Can a man with five viscera and six entrails be distinguished from an underwater cattle shed?

*
I was locked underground like a venomous snake in its high tower and could not move my limbs again• until the sparkling heavens come

*
When I closed my eyes as if ready for the rifle’s blast, what was it that I spit out instead of a bullet?

*
If I die pressing my hand over my mouth, the butterly will fly away as if to stand up just after my sitting down. I’ll keep this secret inside.

*
Red ink spilled from the dummy heart. In my dream (the on I was later for), I was condemned to capital punishment. I did not control my dream. It is a serious crime that separates people who can’t shake hands.