Author's Note: Blue Eye

In college I once tried to write an epic novel with animals as its protagonists. It was about animals conquering the world after humanity goes extinct. Korean sources weren't enough, so I dug through foreign research papers, but I lacked staying power and had no conviction in the story. Even after drawing up a long synopsis, I gave it up without writing a single line.

This novel, in which I finally brought animals onto the page after all those years, is the third of the eight novels I completed during my creative march. I have loved watching animal documentaries since I was a child. One day when I was buried in writing, I idly turned on a documentary channel and met the lycaon, the African wild dog, and found it thoroughly unappealing. Wondering why I felt that way, I came up with the framework of this novel.

When I write a novel, I usually make a synopsis of about two A4 pages. The synopsis for Blue Eye was also just two pages. More important than the length was its form: nothing but two tables. One set the chronicles of “I” and of the African wild dog dynasty side by side; the other was the dynasty's family tree. They became my compass, and kept me from getting lost even while I wrote an average of more than thirty-eight manuscript pages a day.

The story of humans and the story of the lycaons unfold in alternation. Hidden in this is a device: their stories, the narratives and chronicles of the two species, are in fact metaphors for each other. I put in the question of what it means to be human, and the thought of what it would be like if love, too, could be rebooted. I hope some readers will pick these out precisely.

What kind of person is a novelist? It may be someone who tells the stories people want to hear. But I don't want to be that kind of novelist. I have not set my sights on being merely a gifted storyteller. I have told the stories people don't want to hear, the uncomfortable and painful ones. I will keep endlessly asking whether it is really all right for us to go on living like this. I want to live as a revolutionary at odds with the mainstream of the world.

I believe progress and creativity start from freely doubting what seems beyond doubt. Dismissing those who doubt as incompetents, layabouts, ignorant drunks, feeble intellectuals or losers is the comfortable, lazy way. Who can tell whether such a person is a prophet? We need the ability to judge whether it is just an excuse or a gripe, or whether it is the truth. We need sensitive ears.

The situation and circumstances of the narrator may seem exceptional. But they are universal. Frustration and despair, disconnection and isolation and the helplessness and surrender they bring, separation and loss, the urge to let everything go and leave for somewhere: we all go through these sometimes. In Africa, the place he chose as the last of his life, the narrator could recover only after looking closely at himself, not at other people or wild animals, but at himself alone.

Childhood memories, the dog-eat-dog world of working life, guilt lying in the depths, even memories of the person he loved: all of it was violence that tormented him. Violence is never far away. Human existence itself is violence to nature. Our prejudices, and the conflicts they cause, are violent too. So is an education that fuels competition, a corporation that turns people into parts, a vulgar capitalism that relentlessly stirs our desires. And what about treating others as means?

The history of human progress must no longer be a history of violence and barbarism. Today's winner-take-all system; the meager, precarious foundations hidden by the worship of growth; the ridiculous system that ranks people by their grades up to their teens and decides their adult lives by it; materialism, lookism, a near-religious devotion to stocks and real estate: in a hundred or two hundred years, if humanity survives that long, won't these look like enormous barbarism?

Writing the novel took less than a month. But I revised it for a long time, and the time it took to prepare before writing was longer still. I aim to write from what I have seen and heard myself, but because of COVID I had to give up on reporting in Zimbabwe. Instead, for months I roamed all over Africa on Google Earth. By the end I could picture the Zambezi basin with my eyes closed.

I should add a few footnotes.

Unlike the novels I had written before, most of the characters in this one were inspired by real people.

I confess that I never hit Sang-tae. But the memory of him still hurts.

In high school I once spent time as an exchange student at a school in Beijing.

While writing this novel I played Maestro Einaudi's “I Giorni” (Italian for “the days”) every day.

“There is always prejudice in the way humans regard the outside world. The African wild dogs I first met in the nature documentaries I loved did not win my affection, because of their ugly looks and their cruel nature. Ten years later, when I met them again with my prejudice set aside, they were endangered, the targets of indiscriminate poaching. I have woven the history of one human being and of an African wild dog dynasty, and the violence that runs through both, as warp and weft.”

This novel was selected for the 2023 Creative Publishing Content Support Program for small and medium-sized publishers. The paragraph above is what I wrote under “intent of the work” on the program's application form. I hope this program, which aims to secure diversity in the publishing ecosystem and promote the growth of the publishing industry, continues, so that books by unknown writers can come out through excellent small and medium-sized publishers and the publishing ecosystem can flourish.

In my previous four novels I used the author's note as commentary for readers. This time I will not. A kind lecture from the author himself does not seem to do much to prevent misreadings or to persuade readers of different tastes. Besides, given that my writing loves allegory, there is far more that I keep hidden even in the commentary.

So, wondering what to write in an author's note instead, I decided to tell, with a light touch, a few not-so-heavy stories about the writing. In exchange, I promise to answer faithfully any questions about the novel that come through email, social media, or the online book club Gmeum.

Gimpo, January 15, 2024.