Recitation by Bae Suah

Marxist philosopher and critic Louis Althusser discussed the idea of the interpellation of the subject. Essentially, he describes the way in which ideology and power transforms people into subjects as a simple process: power yells out, “Hey, you there!” and you turn around. You’re a subject because you’ve acknowledged the call. That model of interpellation troubles me because it seems so irresistible—is there no way out? No alternative? I wrote about this once during my Master’s and tried to think through a collective response to a call: think of all the people in Spartacus that respond to a call not intended for them.

I bring this up because this problematization of interpellation struck me in Recitation by Bae Suah. The central character of the novel, Kyung-Hee, recounts a moment of false identification. There’s a bizarre scene where Kyung-hee is in bed and her sister, whom she does not know at all, enters her room and begins to strangle her. The scene already feels nightmarish and surreal, but then Kyung-hee gives an account of a strange memory of identification. I’ll include a substantial portion of the account here, hopefully to also demonstrate the rich imagery of Recitation. Kyung-hee

“recalled a scene that had taken place one gathering dusk, when someone called her name. She was walking down the twilit alley. The alley sloped at a gentle gradient, lined by brick walls carpeted with soft, pale green moss, the scent of early roses coming from the gardens beyond. It was an evening in early summer, and I was on my way home from school [...] But, inexplicably, the person walking along the alley is not me but my sister. The retreating figure is that of my sister. The one returning from school is me, the one being spoken to by the objects which the sunlight touches is also me, the soft breath of the evening breeze and the scent of the roses are sensations I am experiencing, no one else; but the composite whole walking down that old alleyway with the rose branches trailing down over the red bricks, where the evening light has gathered, flushed the colour of rust, is not me but my sister” (142-143).

It’s a peculiar moment where her identification is somehow both herself and her sister “And then someone calls her name” (143). Kyung-hee narrates, “I, no, she turns and looks back. In that moment my sensations return to my body, I recover the whole that is I, and I carry on walking down the alley” (143). The moment seems so close to this moment of Althusser’s “Hey you” interpellation that I can’t ignore. But here, there’s a misidentification with her sister or a dual identification. Kyung-hee continues to recount her strangulation and the flashback to the alley. She recalls “the old alleyway where, hearing her name being called, I (she) turned to look back” (157). She continues on to explain how this identification then extends to her physical appearance, too: “the fact that gradually, as I grew up, I outwardly came to resemble my old sister; the moment when, being struck by the intense feeling that my face in the mirror very strongly reassembled someone else’s, I had the astonishing presentiment that that someone might be none other than my sister; all of these disappeared from my memory” (157).

I find this strange moment so compelling because it also fits in with the broader pattern of the text. I’ll have to admit that Recitation is a darn weird book. The novel can be described reasonably simply about a Korean woman, Kyung-hee, who used to work in recitation performances (specifically not acting—recitation). She has minimal action on stage, but one day has a spontaneous toe break. In response, she decides to go walking around the world, somewhat figuratively and somewhat literally. The book is essentially encounters she has with boarders and travellers at places she stays. But there’s something about the style where the shifts happen so oddly that we jump between time frames and characters in ways that require a great deal of attention to detect. The ‘voice’ of the character becomes ambiguous. Even Kyung-hee’s job as a recitation actress is someone else speaking through her. Thematically, the work is very tight in that respect—we never quite know who is talking, who we’re seeing, how they’re interpolating. In the final movement of the book, we see Kyung-hee’s children looking for their estranged mom. I’m a little unclear on whether this happens in reality. The book then ends with a recitation—again, taking us further away from the main character.

I find all of this fascinating, but I also don’t pretend to really understand the novel. There are a number of scenes I found impactful—the toe breaking scene, the strangulation, and some of Kyung-hee’s connections. The book is punctuated by a “Karakorum” organization, which is essentially a network of couch surfers and home exchanges. This allows Suah to incorporate a number of diverse experiences, making the novel read somewhat like a short story collection. In my experience, the novel is best consumed by reading it in prolonged sessions; the elliptical nature of the text requires sustained attention to how these moments are connected.

The novel also is a pursuit of absences. Kyung-hee goes in search of her former German teacher. There’s a character named Mr. Nobody. When the surprise characters arrive (I didn’t even notice the moment Kyung-hee’s narration turned to that of her potential children), they even note that the more they try to pin down the situation, the less present Kyung-hee seems to be. They describe what happens when they are listening to her uninflected recitation:

“But the more we strained to catch the details of what was being said, the more the whispering persuaded us of Kyung-hee’s absence. Kyung-hee had been discontinued. Kyung-hee was finished. Kyung-hee had boiled down. Kyung-hee had been annulled. Kyung-hee had been dismantled. Kyung-hee was the burnt-out past. Kyung-hee had become no one. Kyung-hee was nothing. The woman lacked the fact of being Kyung-hee. Kyung-hee had been extinguished. Kyung-hee was within the sleep of sleep. In other words, doubly asleep. Kyung-hee was with a woman who no one knew, with no way to tell the two of them apart. Kyung-hee was three-fourths Kyung-hee. Notification of the fusion of Kyung-hee’s components. Kyung-hee had slipped down in the form of low hills … The whispering continued night after night, lingering into the hours of broad daylight, clinging to our ears as we rode the bus or the subway or wandered the streets of Seoul, and we didn’t know how to shake it off” (242).

The disconnect feels eerie. The incantatory repetition of the passage is alarming. The more her name is repeated, the less she is there—and there are so many types of absence that the ways of describing it seem innumerable. 

In terms of other angles, I don’t have a lot to say about Recitation. I think the work is masterful and thoughtful. There are so many moments of rich imagery and carefully constructed narratives. The layered nature of the text makes it extraordinarily difficult to follow the specific facts. Even the sentence structure and vocabulary, for a reason I can’t quite place, feels misty. Working through a page of text, I found my mind drifting—which was less than ideal, because the narrative, too, drifted. Trying to grapple with this strange hypnosis made it harder for me to latch onto the text. That being said, I think Suah has something really special here (maybe not as special as Untold Night and Day felt to me at the time). The craftsmanship and layering of the text is a truly impressive, if inaccessible, feat.

Happy reading!