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Can There Ever be a Return to an Origin that has Chosen to Leave You Behind? : A Long-Winded Dissection of the Anthology, Seoha

In Seoha (wr. Yakkuk), characters across the short stories carry a persistent desire to return back to the place where a rupture had begun, where a memory lingers still, a desire that trickles through death, whether performed or wanted as its literal form or whether nearly, so metaphorically, undoing oneself to reunite with and find the foundation of a fundamental loss that has been experienced away from the underpinning interruptions and/or initiations. The characters across these four short stories are often prepared or preparing to return to the aspects of themselves at the time where that which had filled them forms a discontinuity with the persons others or they themselves believe them to have become in the present.

It is through the desire of death, recurrence of death, the recalibration, reconsideration, and removal of death that they come to realize themselves – or sometimes even already carry that realization but lack the means or space to express or utter that until a certain moment – as people who are the desiring and the desired. However, this time the origin is an accumulation of fantasy that can only be returned to in memory, one that remains disjointed from their present lives. Violence, then, is the primary act against literal/metaphorical deaths, one which collapses the latency of the losses, which keeps at the edge of every story in Seoha and becomes the entryway into the discontinuity that each character experiences. Violence, as I define it for these short stories, doesn't always explicitly come in the form of action sequences but rather a shock, a relativity between the want and the disappearing; it comes through a severance of the elapsed time. The act of violation as I go on to describe for each story, the definition stretched to an impossible extent in this essay, is more of a forced fissure that is either necessary or necessitated for its own reversal, an awakening towards a renewed capacity for and occupation with desire.

By taking the form of discontinuity and to continue on the trajectory of it means that the place is obtained as habitable within themselves, sometimes away and sometimes towards the dis/misplacement of their own desire [as a form of negation of their own self] onto others. The randomness of the violence, and its repurposing or removal then ushers in the un/certainty of love, and intimacy/desire itself becomes a form of violation that disrupts that which one had been forced to make sensible in rapidly draining moments. Intimacy occupies the place left behind by the wound/s of each act of violence – whether that is the almost-closing distance between the created and the creator, the self-righteous magnanimity of the person who believes in his own willingness and yet refuses to plunge in the depth of honesty, the insistent rise and fall of bringing together the seed of a life lived again, or the familial that remains the only place of familiarity as a way to remove oneself from the the glitches of discontinuity.

In The Sandglass World there's an attempt to surpass the distance of time and reappear as how the protagonist has carefully remembered or thought to have done so in memories, to retain the continuity of the romance – one that has lost shape and can only exist within a fall away from reality – or mostly the image of it. The protagonist knows that the recurrence of that past is unavailable to him – herein the violence inflicted on himself (through substance abuse) is a way to control his own return to that memory in order to keep continuing the performance of an intimacy that has already been lost, even while he realizes its insufficiency and unpredictability. Memory is an act of recourse towards an almost-death-of-the-self; the more the protagonist stays within his memories and hallucinations, the more the world around him chafes away.

Death in this short story is then the desire to keep immersed within memory, erasing ego. The ex-fiance's existence, a mirage, sought for and yet escaped as an illusion remains almost as a guilty precept without any real reason to be returned to. While the woman returns from a place of water/in the presence of water (and memory is exemplified by a dive within water), the two men drive through an endless expanse of the desert which, as we the readers quite early on realize, is a phantasm of solidity that offers none of its form. The line between the imaginal and the reality softens and blurs, between the fantastical that stems from want and the crumple of reality in the form of a rash-mouthed roommate, who remains the only opaque reality within the entire story as he brings the backward-looking protagonist to look towards something real [the only quasi-relation that is explicated within the story], but is constantly evaded by the protagonist. In the notes at the end of volume, Yakkuk jokingly mentions that the black-haired guy seems too pretty to be in a BL. This story, then as a beginning to the volume, teeters somewhere in between dramatic irony and a genuine pursuit that the protagonist cannot accept into his backward-flowing continuity. The balancing act oscillates between his desired return to memory as reality (thus death of the present self) through his self-destructive capacities and the recurring return of and to his roommate who by the end watches in near silence, a violation of the memory itself.

To Come In The Closet remains the least affectively and relationally violent of all the stories within the anthology and comes close to being a story that seeks an interruption and distance from violence. However, it is the one story that penetrates both the individual characters’ selves in vastly different ways – the events begin and obtain, seek, continue and attach through violence which becomes a way of awakening, responding, attaching and appearing as Jaegyeom moves towards Kyuwon, hesitant, agentic and Kyuwon moves away from the world, detached, examining inwards. Both characters then respond to the violence or inversion of violence as a way of being awakened to something that lurks within themselves. Violence to Kyuwon is an appalling and rising despair that dwells from the actions that are attached to his public persona by the absence of his own self, an unrecognition. Jaegyeom's presence remains the least affectively violent in Kyuwon's life whose presence itself and to himself alone has been done to through/by the violence of his previous relationship as his public image and thus own self become inaccessible to himself. Through his dismissal of Jaegyeom's confession and the estrangement from his present self in the form of a suicide attempt, the present is experienced as a recurring past that can never end, a future that cannot appear.

Rather than letting repression bind the future from the space of the present, Kyuwon reaches out towards a past through the attempted suicide before his own existence in this present reality had come through, and thus the only place where he can have access to himself without a penetrating public gaze. Isolation as a preference after his near-death is then reverted through Jaegyeom's own inversion of the screen/photograph as an entry-gaze to Kyuwon's powerlessness, and an agency ripped away from him, into a restoration of quotidian windows and doors – into expressions of Jaegyeom's attention, wonder and desire brimming and echoing until the end of the story. The shocking spray of the showerhead/burst of water is a wake up call to love to Jaegyeom, and it's recalled in response to Jaegyeom's own violence against the people, presumably from their university, spewing homophobic insults at Kyuwon in the restaurant. Love becomes a way for Jaegyeom to not only right what he believes has been wronged by his own actions [what is implied as a wrongly-timed confession that had come through after Kyuwon becomes the target of revenge porn, which Jaegyeom finds out about later] but also something to be proved and remembered upon through violence he can enact as a form of protection and a disruption of what has been done onto Kyuwon. It is Jaegyeom's rushing intentionality and enthusiastic focus that saturates into an inclination towards pleasing Kyuwon as much as himself, one that converts into a future recurring constantly through the warmth of the photographic displays, perhaps making Kyuwon aware of the absences that come through wanting to revert his life back or away.

Each character in the Wizard's Bistro constantly observes to articulate the other across the story – the daughter carefully learns through observation from her father and is constantly aware of and peeved by the protagonist's presence, unable to pinpoint his lingering; the protagonist lurks and wanders along with the owner of the cafe and his daughter, observing, almost detachedly yet irritatedly, an almost bitter reminiscence of perhaps his own childhood that he sees within the relationship of the daughter and the creator, a memory that nevertheless remains stilled with the conviction of wanting to forget it; and the creator observes the motions of the world and the place that his “children” occupy in it.

The protagonist of Bistro has lived among countless people and among countless moments and has made his return back to his creator's place, seeking a name and thus death. When he is given a space to stay the night in, a flurry of memories and emotions rush into him; relief is sought from the human-lived-past through regurgitation which expels the world that he believes to have tainted him; one that has come from living in a static-ed length of time, unnamed by the creator, and refusing or being unable to integrate into the everyday world of people. The solitude of the cafe, its sense of the quiet everyday stands in contrast to his own loneliness from the world that he has not been able to live in. The recurrences nauseate him, specifically the repetitions of his own othering within a mortal society that results in him vomiting as he recalls the words that other him. The voices remain sensitive enough to be remembered with clarity, yet disembodied to the extent that confirms his distance from the world. It is the violence of ejection, a sense of having pushed himself away from his human-past that initiates and pushes the narrative forward, as he converses with the owner. This bodily rejection is an evidence of his place in society, while unspecifiable, it remains permeable to the aspects of a life unlived after his venture to the world away from the immortal creator, and his own immortality. Upon his vomiting, the creator amusedly refers to the unnamed protagonist's absoluteness – a reflection of himself – that he states the protagonist has lost within the human world. We gain a sense of self and who we are in connection and relation to others as we are named by them, but naming his own name for the human world does not overlap with the world of his origination, his beginning and perhaps at one point even a belonging.

The fact of his desire for death, seems to be the destination he seeks away from the aversion he feels when slipping into his memory. Death becomes a distraction from that memory which still permeates and converges his desire to be awarded by and become aware-d of from the creator's awaited and wanted imposition onto him through naming. To seek death by naming is a limitation that elevates the role of the creator, an ascension that ascribes onto him a wholeness that the protagonist lacks, or believes to have a lacking in. Unnamed, he is a part of the creator and to him, a lack in himself can only be filled by the creator who has nurtured each creation of his and is thus a part of each of them and comes as a part of each of them. As the protagonist is urged away by the creator from his desire towards death, he comes to the realisation of his desire's site displaced from death and onto an amatory closeness; the origin thus having been already mutated, interrupted.

It is what is denied and closed to him by the human world that the creator can give to him; an intimacy that can only come through his desire for a sense of self, which is a desire for the creator himself, the creator who is the origin of the protagonist himself. The departure from the human world to regain an understanding of his immortality becomes impossible, the intimacy becomes a disguised attempt of the return to an origin, unfulfilled as the desire for death and desire for the creator remain two sides of the same coin. Death annihilates the human-life he has thus far lived, while the desire for returning to the place of origination remains inhibited as the creator ceases to fulfil that desire. What his limitations as a human deny him in the world, can only be fulfilled by the desire reflected within and through his affectations for the creator. The creator is a part of all the children he has created, but the protagonist includes only him as a part of himself, not of his own violation but due to the fact of his creation. His invention of the protagonist, and his other creations, is to surrender them to the human world. As he watches his creation deny that human path, and return to him; the protagonist has inflicted onto him a wholeness to measure his lack against.

At the centre of Seoha, an open wound remains throughout, unclosed and enclosed within the family-form. The wound is the obscured distance, the paper-thin re-negotiation with the fantasy of the family; its disruptions and its longing which both Seoha and his uncle centre themselves and each other around. Seoha’s story comes at a durative pause at his uncle’s house. Early on we learn of an arrangement which, as is kept hidden from Seoha until much later, is dependent on the uncle being paid a certain sum for keeping Seoha under a roof. However, the lines of reliability on this materiality slowly muddle into something else, perhaps affection, perhaps a condition of his required assistance as he comes to see the conditions under which Seoha persists — his tattered shoes, a loud mouth that keeps him at the edge of being kicked out of school again and a reminiscence of the past which remains open, stuttering across Seoha’s entrance into his life.

Beyond the never-ending well of untruths that both of them keep circling around, towards the beginning of the story there is the persistence on Seoha’s end to keep pushing at his uncle’s buttons, to push him into the well where he can then look into from above, an irritation that is suspect of something murkier lurching underneath, a feeling of his own lack of permanence or permission in any place — a vulnerability he can identify in others but one that he comes to realise only later on. Whether it is an echo of stead-fastedness that is repenting of his life before, of a lost child and wife, or a conjectural possibility of a burgeoning tenderness blurred within pity for his nephew’s situation remains unclear to us, but as a clear mirror to Seoha who recognizes in his uncle the image of his dead father. As he gradually comes to realisations at different times of his uncle’s tendency for unasked momentary attention and affection for him, Seoha is left perplexed; a close up to his eyes widened and whitened, or standing turned away from the staircase of their apartment’s doorway, his path back to that place of incoherency shadowed.

The limitation of Seoha’s bewildered desire is further extended as his uncle appears home drunk after a night out bemoaning his growth (whereas his child remains frozen as an unseen memory, ungrown) and hugging him, the matches of his past having been lit yet struggling to hold up against the shadow which he sees Seoha as, a somewhat reminder of his now dead wife, “immature and mischievous”, what remains of the consequential presence of her in Seoha, and of an unborn child towards whom he feels some sort of an unmoored guilt. The enveloping blackness of his uncle’s form takes over Seoha’s bent silhouette, his disorientation wavering as he seems to give in without any struggle. Yet still, a solemn expression remains on his face, a reminder of his own dependency for that affection he mistrusts and yet cannot help but see as a straddle of light he can step towards, seeking recognition that is affectively incestuous. Boxed-in within that apartment, contained within a nephew-uncle relationship, Seoha at this moment has hesitantly come to realise his own desire, its lack of reciprocity, and one he needs almost to a self-effacing degree. Herein, his desire comes to only within spaces and through people where he can find his vulnerability played with, where he can touch the power circled in impulsivity within others, wherein he knows the men, and one of them, his uncle, provides that affection-desire within disguised stable and scripted categories, ones that have already exceeded upon through each reenaction of materiality. It is only at that fantastical place of the family can the reassurances be evaded and substituted, a site where loss only further evinces the possibility of the wound being left open, uncompensated by any displacement as the rupture in their relationship continues to widen — a widower haunted by the suicide of his wife and death of the child, and a teenager who cannot look at where his own boundaries lie. The family becomes the place from which the wound of want emerges, and the place where that same want is experienced through the shadows of the people who they want to be there as a part of their present life. The deaths and removals from their former families make them return to each other as spaces where they can arrive at a desire for that exclusive relationality, one which makes the disruptions and instability as members/roles within the family comprehensible, at least (or only) until a certain point.

Violence in this story comes in the form of an easy path, a scuffle with a classmate who keeps egging him on and then a sudden kiss without any apparent intention — all a resemblance of a way without evasion or substitution as a way to understand his own loneliness, his own solitude. This violence that reads Seoha like an open book, that pushes him towards the edge of his own boundary that he has kept at someplace he cannot reach, urges a movement away from the fantasy of the family. And yet, with an unexpected phone call from the uncle, Seoha returns to him, his reliance on the temporality of his family which provides a structure to hold onto without having to question his own vulnerability easier than anything else. For Seoha, the familiarity and to return back to within the wound that you're familiar with, that you know is missing, that others can see in you, is the easiest place to return back to. While the return in its imagined totality remains impossible, fracture unreleased, the family becomes the foundational form that provides monetary dependence, stability and affection for Seoha (each reinforcing the other) and a way to bring back a sense of responsibility in another form, salvation, for the uncle. The cold and open road where the uncle and nephew hold each other is now a journey that starts from the “guise of hypocrisy”, each family created as a site of imagining some sort of possibility, even if without potential, even if static, reverberation of an evicted selfishness — again and again.