2023 Int Booker shortlist - Whale

[David]

I don't get any sense this is satire. Is there an argument that it is?

[WndyJW]

The person responsible for writing descriptions of books for Goodreads called it a satire, “While poignant yet brutal, "Whale" is also a satire of how we the general public, mass media, even artists and writers tend to romanticize voiceless figures of history."

I was interested, but I think I’ll pass.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

That’s the publishers blurb

So yes Europa Editions are arguing it’s a satire.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

Robert’s review and video describe it as a satire (it’s how Robert introduces it) and two of the other 5 reviews on Goodreads talk about it being a satire or satirical (including Alwynne).

[Yahaira]

I never figured out what it was satirizing

[David]

I’m open to an explanation that it’s satire. I’m just not seeing it at all. It seems like something that’s repeated but never explained.

[David]

I read this in a similar vein as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: using the grammar of a formative myth, but making it so violent that it becomes a critique of the system that perpetuates the myth. So I understand Whale as a critique (I think), at least to some extent, but if it is satire I wonder if I didn’t understand it at all.

[Robert]

I saw it as a satire of:

The folk tale - there’s always a dark, sexual element from Grimm to Perrault so why not exaggerate that to obscene lengths.

Satirizing commercialism - take the hunt for the perfect brick then as there is a hatred for concrete but in the end concrete is just as sturdy- that’s just one example

Satirizing industrialism - by see an actual whale in nature , it involves the actual destruction of a village for what ? A recreation of that whale done in bricks for mass enjoyment?

As for the more controversial parts - other than the folk tale element graphic sex will always be used as a tool: you’ve got Candide and I think Gulliver’s Travels but also Trans author Andrea Lawlor uses it (and it’s with college girls) in Paul takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

[David]

Very helpful Robert. I’m still thinking about this one.

[Paul]

Robert puts it very well and I also saw this (indeed I think the author has said this) as in the tradition of bawdy folk tales.

And I would also accept the counter argument that just as Roald Dahl’s books don’t read well in the 2020s, many folk tales don’t either. Indeed Disney sanitised most of the best known folk tales 50+ years ago.

[Alwynne]

That's what I thought, hence my earlier reference to Rabelais has a lot in common with Gargantua and Pantagruel, also hints of Heller, Vonnegut etc all mingled with Korean myth and various digs at Korea's recent history/cultural development. It wasn't to my taste overall, but as before I thought it was inventive as far as representing Korea goes. I also think it's intended to critique Korean patriarchy rather than celebrate it, just doesn't do it that well!

[Hugh, Active moderator]

I am only a quarter of the way through but the style is niggling me, and the repeated use of "This was the law of ..." gets very wearing.

[Alwynne]

The more I think about this one, the weirder it seems in the context of a contemporary shortlist.

[David]

Agreed, Alwynne.

We haven’t even talked about the chapter called “He or She” beginning on page 245 of the Europa. I’m not buying that this is satire.

[endrju]

Robert wrote: "As for the more controversial parts - other than the folk tale element graphic sex will always be used as a tool... but also Trans author Andrea Lawlor uses it (and it’s with college girls) in Paul takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

And therein lies the issue, at least for me who speaks from a particular cultural context. Here, we are talking about a cishet man writing the stuff he wrote about cishet women, cis lesbians, gay cis men, and trans people (all suffering, among else, various forms of sexual abuse by cishet men). Had it been a woman or queer person who wrote that, we would have a different discussion.

[Alwynne]

David wrote: "Agreed, Alwynne.

We haven’t even talked about the chapter called “He or She” beginning on page 245 of the Europa. I’m not buying that this is satire."

Well I think in part it depends on your notions
of what satire is/isn't - the actual definition is surprisingly broad. There's also the issue of what counts as satirical in Western literature versus non=Western literary traditions.

[Paul]

Or indeed what counts as socially acceptable norms in different societies (and at different times). As I've mentioned before elsewhere the last Korean Presidential election was swung by an anti-feminism backlash amongst young male voters for example.

The contemporary shortlist one is also interesting as the IB, and translated fiction, does suffer from that - the books were often written many years earlier. In purely literary terms it's a positive - they are books that have stood the test of time rather than today's bestseller / tomorrow's pulp. But they aren't then always in tune with contemporary issues or social norms.

[endrju]

I don't want to sound harsh, but the book was published in 2004, not four centuries ago. Of course cisheteronormativity is a socially acceptable norm (in South Korea as well as in the West), that's exactly the issue. And from that point of view, it's no wonder the book stood the test of time. It's an exact reflection of dominant social values.

I sort of want to see it win and then see how the jury explains their decision.

[David]

The book we're reading was published in 2023, and this is a UK prize awarded in 2023. The reason I keep coming back to "satire" is because that is the description used by publishers to describe this work. Perhaps it is a different type of critique, but I don't think it's satire at all - as a UK or US reader would reasonably understand that word. That's important because this can be a traumatizing book to read. As I've seen someone point out elsewhere, to have those concerns repeatedly dismissed because the book is billed as satirical feels like gaslighting. There is no translator's note or any other contextualization for the Europa or Archipelago editions.

I was genuinely uncertain about several of these issues when I finished the book. This discussion has been very helpful.

[Greg]

From the discussion, I wonder if this was like City of Ash and Red, another highly disturbing Korean book I read recently?

Sometimes satire isn't meant to be funny and arises out of anger. It's a sort of savage satire where the author deliberately exaggerates something wrong that's socially common in order to show how wrong it really is. It's meant to make people notice and question their own assumptions and behavior, to jar people who accept bad norms into understanding what they're really doing or thinking, by taking it one step further.

Like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where he points out how callous the prevailing attitudes toward the Irish are by suggesting something even more callous, eating them. This sort of satire is not meant to be pleasant. And it's very tough to understand out of social context, without knowing the prevailing norms at the time of writing.

I read The Disaster Tourist, another Korean novel, in a group with someone who lives in Korea, and she said that all of the casual sexism at work were things she experienced everyday. It blew my mind! In America, people would be instantly fired for much, much less.

Anyway, I haven't read Whale so take this all with a grain of salt. I was just curious as I've read several unusual and disturbing Korean books lately that have satirical elements.

[Alwynne]

David wrote: "The book we're reading was published in 2023, and this is a UK prize awarded in 2023. The reason I keep coming back to "satire" is because that is the description used by publishers to describe thi..."

I see now, I wondered why you were so fixated on the notion of this not being satire, I don't assume satire will not be traumatic, hence my references to Rabelais and to Irving and Heller - 'Catch 22' for example is extremely bleak and packed with outbursts of graphic violence, the helicopter on the beach scene for example. There is, as Greg pointed out, a long tradition of so-called 'dark satire' both in the West and in Korean literature - and sometimes a co-mingling of those traditions.

So when I and others were referring to 'Whale' as satire in the thread that does not automatically equate with being dismissive of the idea that it could also be traumatic, although I didn't personally find it so in any sustained sense. Also I didn't interpret episodes such as the character switching gender as referring to and/or suggesting trans identity in any contemporary Western sense or understanding, but more as a fantastical figure undergoing a metamorphosis related to the culture constructed in the narrative - again there's a long history of metamorphosis that manifests via gender switching in fairy tales, in Ovid, in Korean traditional forms, and in various mythologies that doesn't map onto my own understanding of gender or my personal gender politics. So, it didn't offend me as much as reading Jeffrey Eugenides's 'Middlesex' - which was published in 2002 btw - for example, did. But I think for a contemporary prize of this kind, it's a highly problematic text for all the reasons people have pointed it out, and I'm surprised to see it on the shortlist.

[David]

This is all helpful. There is so much to unpack in this book, perhaps more than any recent book I can recall (at least for me).

Problematic texts aren't necessarily a problem - the problem is when they are not seen as problematic. "Very cool, very sexy" and all that.

[Alwynne]

David wrote: "This is all helpful. There is so much to unpack in this book, perhaps more than any recent book I can recall (at least for me).

Problematic texts aren't necessarily a problem - the problem is when..."

What's even more interesting is that it's billed as a 'feminist fable' in a number of recent commentaries on the shortlist. I think it is intended on some level as a critique of patriarchy but not in any sense I can relate to.

I spent some time unpacking the underlying critique of Korean politics and 'official'/dominant interpretations of its recent history but purely because that's an area of interest for me, but I don't find the book particularly interesting beyond that. I also dislike magical realism as a genre in any context which further distances me from engaging with the narrative, I don't find it works as a form for me in general. It's not a book I'd see myself ever returning to.

[David]

I thought your review was helpful in that respect and others. I’ve also seen this described as feminist, but like the satire label, it tends to come without any explanation for how that conclusion was arrived at.

[Ben]

Was it billed as satire when originally released in Korean, or has that label been attached as part of the marketing for the translation?

[Paul]

This is useful from Sora Kim-Russell in terms of Korean literature - she is actually lamenting the lack of satirical comedy on what is usually translated and suggesting this author as one who should be translated more.

https://www.catranslation.org/blog-po...

On this book:

The author themselves described it as follows (google can translate better than I can): '세상에 떠도는 이야기'들을 모두 모아놓은 양 할아버지 할머니한테 듣던 옛날 이야기, 동화책에서 본 설화와 신화, TV 연속극 같은 스토리, 인터넷에 떠도는 엽기 유머 등이 섞여든다.

And a literary professor: “이 소설에는 어떻게 보면 이야기의 백과사전 같은 느낌이 들 정도, 또는 구비문학자료집 같은 느낌이 들 정도로 아주 많은 이야기들이 있다. 물론 이것만이 아니다. 소설이나 영화, 드라마나 연극 등의 고급 장르로부터 엽기 시리즈, 농담, 야설, 포르노 등등 하위 장르에 이르기까지 기존의 것을 연상시키는 에피소드나 그것의 변주가 무궁무진하다. 말 그대로 이 소설은 장터의 시끌벅적한 카니발을 연상시키고, 또 키치적 아우라도 물씬 풍긴다..”

So the emphasis is more on oral history, folktales, offbeat and vulgar humour (포르노 in that sentence is a phonetic rendition of porn)

[Paul]

This winning would be the only thing that would redeem this year's prize for me.

[Ben]

Thanks for doing that digging, Paul - it’s helpful context.

[endrju]

Even if it was a satire including a feminist one, the use of material-semiotic matter (to use a term from critical theory) of queerness by a non-queer person is rather tiring. Especially so when it's used for the gain of symbolic and other kinds of capital.

[Alwynne]

endrju wrote: "Even if it was a satire including a feminist one, the use of material-semiotic matter (to use a term from critical theory) of queerness by a non-queer person is rather tiring. Especially so when it..."

Absolutely, although couldn't the same be said for Hanya Yanagihara's work, and is Alice Winn queer? I can't find anything confirming that she is. For whatever reason seems to be considered acceptable in the US and UK, by many audiences, for cishet women to write explicitly queer-inflected fiction - as long as they write about gay men. At least in the context of Korean literature there are ongoing debates about how queerness is understood/configured/represented in Korea versus the West as discussed in work like Queer Korea.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

Alwynne Alice Winn is I believed married to a male comedian and freestyle rapper called Chris Turner - they even perform together as they met doing improv.

[endrju]

Alwynne wrote: "Absolutely, although couldn't the same be said for Hanya Yanagihara's work..."

Of course it can and it should be said. I'm a bit of queer separatist, so I'm all for that these people get off our backs. It's been quite enough of (ab)use.

[endrju]

Alwynne wrote: "For whatever reason seems to be considered acceptable in the US and UK, by many audiences, for cishet women to write explicitly queer-inflected fiction - as long as they write about gay men."

Apparently, cishet men are getting on board too - just found out about Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds. I almost want to read it.

[David]

Don’t forget the Booker winner was a cishet man with a queer male protagonist. I didn’t have a problem with that.

[endrju]

I've become more radicalized in the meantime. ;)

[Alwynne]

endrju wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "For whatever reason seems to be considered acceptable in the US and UK, by many audiences, for cishet women to write explicitly queer-inflected fiction - as long as they write about..."

I've liked his work in the past but avoided this one exactly for that reason, I just couldn't see him being able to do this convincingly given his usual style, and his approach to masculinity. I don't actually think of myself as separatist but I definitely have a separatist streak that surfaces from time to time!

[Paul]

I was interested to see what Anton Hur had to say on Twitter given he is not shy of expressing views on these type of issues.

I would be extremely happy if WHALE won. As fond as I am of the author, it was because of the long-overdue recognition of Chi-Young Kim, a legend among Korean translators, which made me so happy to see her name on the longlist.

Which is sort of intriguing as “fond” of the author doesn’t suggest he has a major issue but then he doesn’t really mention the book.

[David]

I don't know much about Cheon and have no reason to think ill of his motivations. If the book were presented as an imperfect original text that nevertheless opened a worthwhile dialogue about important issues to Korea and the world, I would feel differently.

[Alwynne]

I read your review David, which I found very interesting although, as before, I disagree with your stance re: satire. Satire is a description of a style, an attitude or a technique, it's not a value judgement i.e. when I say something contains satire I don't mean and that also means it can't be criticised or that excuses any and all material represented in a satirical fashion. Whereas I get the sense from reading your review that you regard the label of satire in relation to this novel as both description and implicit value judgement - and I don't think that's how the term is necessarily being deployed. Obviously I could be misinterpreting you here.

But I'm interested too in your comments on violent acts included in the narrative. I thought the violence in the novel was deliberately hyperbolic/exaggerated, although there was also a grotesque, near-Sadean flavour at times. But I didn't interpret it as explicitly realist or find it realistic, reinforced by the fact that the characters are more archetypal/symbolic than they are realist representations. Their physicality, for example, seemed to be operating in part as a commentary on the obsession in South Korean society with particular standards of beauty. A context in which deviation from a rigid set of norms seems to hold a sort of Chaucerian significance in the culture. I don't mean to say that the novel might not be, or can't be, found offensive or even that I liked or found it effective. But I found the content far less of an issue than I did the violence in A Little Life - which I recently tried to read but couldn't finish. I found the way that violence is represented in that, and dwelt on, so manipulative, and would-be realistic, that it made me deeply uncomfortable, I felt as if I was reading something verging on torture porn, embedded in what seemed to me basically an upmarket version of misery lit.

In the same way that you've asked people to expand on their comments re: satire I'd be really interested to hear more on your thoughts on Whale's content. I know you've described the violent content just as I could, for example, describe a well-known play by picking out a scene in which a woman is raped, her tongue cut out and then her hands removed but doing that doesn't actually convey anything about the context or the delivery or the intent - thinking here of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. So what is it about the representation/depiction of violence in Whale that made it particularly unpalatable? Or is it that you think certain acts should simply never be represented or depicted, so it's enough to point out that they're present in a text?

[David]

Excellent questions. I’ve really wrestled with this one. Let me think through your questions a bit.

[Alwynne]

Not being goady btw, I'm genuinely interested, as it seems to be the dividing line between hating the book or finding it good, or like me finding it good in parts and otherwise not that effective or powerful.

[David]

Not goady at all. Something about this felt beyond the pale in a way that violence usually does not. Let me see if I can articulate why I feel that.

[endrju]

Not to speak for David, as David can do that quite well, what I picked up from David's review is that the main issue is not so much the satire as is power relations. That is, lack of empowerment of the powerless in the act of depicting the violence against them by a person in power. I would add that at best it feels paternalizing. Do we really need a cishet man to tell us something's wrong with the position of women or another oppressed group of people in whatever society?

[endrju]

endrju wrote: "It's been quite enough of (ab)use."

Yes, I'm quoting myself, but I wanted to share a quote from the novel I'm currently reading which is right on the point: "The colonial urge as perpetrated by Empire is that wherein colonizers, lacking their own life force, attempt to absorb, to assimilate, that is, to vampirize, time, attention, every possible labor, leisure, lineage, silence, desire, dreaming, prayer, memory, pleasure, infolding, interdimensional exhalation, spiritual ambit, signal fire, perishable and nonperishable nourishment, prophetic and instantaneous daydream, subterranean reservoir and mesh of myth from those they seek to 'represent', because the colonizer is the vampire of universality, singing: 'It's a small world, after all..'"

The quote is from The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia (pp. 32-33), which I cannot recommend enough. It's still early, but this might be the best trans/queer novel I will read this year.

[David]

Here are a few more thoughts.

To start with, there is just a lot of violence in this book. The scene you mentioned from Titus Andronicus is particularly gruesome, but the violence doesn't continue at that pace throughout the entire play. In some ways, this is similar to the book you mentioned - A Little Life - in terms of the pervasiveness of violence. Sure, there are stretches where violence doesn't occur, but you always know it will return and there are some stretches where it's just page after page of assault.

Personally, I don't have a high tolerance for violent acts that are described on the page. I didn't finish A Little Life for that very reason. I agree that to some extent the more fantastic elements in Whale may have been meant to make the violence readable, but for me it wasn't enough. Take the early scene where the old crone (as a younger woman) rapes the mentally disabled boy (a boy referred to as a "halfwit"). Knowing that his penis is 30 centimeters isn't fantastical enough to make me not want to read it.

So to start, it's the pervasiveness of the violence that I strongly dislike. That violence alone justifies disliking the book as much as I did. I'm willing to recognize - as you did in your review - that the violence serves a purpose and there are other aspects of the book that are doing literarily meritorious things.

But beyond the pervasiveness of the violence, there were two further aspects that made this unpalatable for me. The first, as endrju and others have alluded to, is that the book was written from a position of relative power. There are multiple victims in this book - but none of them are cis men like the author. The second aspect is the way this book is contextualized for readers. We don't need to discuss the definition of satire, but calling it "an adventure-satire of epic proportions" without any further context is a mischaracterization of the book. Any publisher who has a text like this needs to be mindful of readers' sensitivities. An accurate blurb and short introduction would have gone a long way.

So it's all those things. Were it only for the violence, I probably would have given it 2 or 3 stars. But the power dynamics and misleading characterization of the book really soured me on it.

I'm always happy to discuss books, but I think at this point Whale has taken up too much of my mental and emotional bandwidth. So not to be evasive but I probably won't be elaborating further. Others like this and I'm glad they do. This just wasn't for me.

[Greg]

Thanks everyone for all the thoughtful comments. I appreciate it!

I had been thinking of reading this one, but it sounds brutal in the way City of Ash and Red was brutal. If I do decide to read it, at least I'll know what I'm in for.

[WndyJW]

It was a very interesting discussion.

[Alwynne]

Thanks David and Endrju that's really helpful. Not to defend the novel but I saw it slightly differently in that it's a novel also explicitly founded in the experiences of the colonised, which takes and reworks elements of the official response to that in the rebuilding of Korea. In the period after the Korean War, which came not long after decades of Japanese occupation, there was a move to establish/re-establish a Korean identity and culture, one of the strategies was to promote Korean traditional forms, including folktales and myths which were also part of Korean children's education - I think this is the romanticised version of the past that Cheon alludes to in one of his comments on his narrative.

Many of those myths involved archetypal figures, often female, who were in peril, threatened with rape, other forms of violence etc Many were about relations of power in which the powerless managed to escape the clutches of the elite or die rather than be oppressed. Figures like the "crone", the "half-wit" often referred to as the "fool" or "village idiot" - agree didn't work for me as a contemporary reader - are figures who routinely appear in these kinds of myths and fairy/folk tales, so Cheon seems to be directly referencing those archetypal figures, although the incident with the "half-wit" read as if it was partly inspired by a similar episode in Fanny Hill. Although the violence in the narrative was prolific, it didn't seem out of keeping with the levels of violence that were present in that period and earlier periods of Korean history, rape culture, sexual exploitation, state violence were commonplace - continued to be for many years and in the case of sexual violence still a major issue in Korean society. I also didn't feel the violence was quite so lovingly, exploitatively represented as it is in Yanagihara's work, partly because it's not rooted in a realist narrative, partly because I think it's intended as oblique political/historical commentary. Although I agree Cheon's work completely lacks nuance and the attempt at a feminist re-working of elements based on Korea's past is problematic for me and many contemporary readers but in the context of emerging Korean literature at the time when this was first published, I think it was probably quite a radical piece.

[David]

Very good thoughts, Alwynne. This is such a nuanced work. At the end of the day, my assessment was more personal than anything else. Your take as always is very balanced.

[Alwynne]

Thanks, I found it quite a challenging book and disliked it in many ways, but it also reminded me of reading things like The Decameron, similarly using myth/folk tale to comment on historical events. If it hadn't been for my interest in Cheon's reworking of aspects of Korean history and traditional Korean forms I would have given it a much lower rating too!