The Saint of Bright Doors, Human Acts, Evil Does Not Exist
WHM writes about the narrators in Han Kang's Human Acts and the community center scene in Evil Does Not Exist. He also asks for feedback on what topics to write about in the future.
Happy New Year (almost)! I hope your holiday season has been delightful, uneventful, and full of tasty food--or whichever combination of those you most prefer.
I published two things this past quarter:
The Tyranny of the Map: The Saint of Bright Doors and Epic Fantasy
Works and Authors Mentioned by Samuel R. Delany in About Writing (up through the preface and the first 30 pages of the introduction so far)
I mentioned that I was working on the first piece in my last newsletter, and I'm pleased that I finally was able to get it to all come together. It's not that it was necessarily difficult to write, but rather The Saint of Bright Doors contains so much that a critic could write about I had to hone it down to what I most wanted to say about it.
The second is an ongoing project to document all of the authors and works Delany cites in About Writing. The first 30 pages of the Introduction are particularly dense with references, so once I got through them, I figured I had more than enough material to make the project public. I have no idea who is going to use this resource, but I think popular, easily accessible literary history and bibliography is important (seem for example--and on a whole other scale: Andrew Plotkin's Draco Concordans), and I do believe that showing what Delany thinks is important in literature has a value to it. At the very least it may guide some of my own personal reading in the future.
I will mention further updates to the Delany project here in this newsletter.
Speaking of which: I'm strongly considering moving this newsletter to every other month instead of quarterly. I'm finding I have much more to write about than I can squeeze into a single issue. Which is desirable, of course. I don't think anyone should commit to a writing schedule that forces them to pull water from a well so often it runs dry. But moving from four a year to six seems quite doable.
And related to that: I really enjoyed writing a more formal response to The Saint of Bright Doors, and so I'm going to attempt to write more literary criticism in 2025 while also, hopefully, getting back to bringing you some of my fiction, which you haven't seen from me since Big Echo shut its' doors.
A reminder that you can help guide which works I give critical attention to by buying a book for me from my Bookshop registry. Or also see the final item below and respond to it.
For this newsletter, I'm going to focus on two particular aspects of recent encounters with culture I've had: Han Kang's novel Human Acts and Evil Does Not Exist, a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
No major spoilers for either of these works, unless you want to read Human Acts without knowing anything about who narrates it.
On choice of narrator Han Kang's Human Acts
I put Han Kang's Human Acts on hold at my local library back when she was mentioned as one of the frontrunners for this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. It was a smart decision because even though I had to wait for three months to check it out the wait is much longer now.
I ended up reading it two days before (currently impeached) South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, precipitating a democratic crisis that is ongoing, but due to protests and the quick action of the opposition party, ended up much less worse than it could have been.
That much worse includes the specter of the Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy protest, which led to the murder of likely at least 1,000 anti-government protestors (quite possibly double that) and is what Human Acts is about, and the denial of which is a staple of the right-wing politics President Yoon represents.
Other than the devastating acts of violence that are portrayed and the lovely writing, the thing that struck me most about Human Acts is the choice Han makes for who narrates each of the chapters of the novel, all of whom have a connection to a young man--Kang Dong-ho--who was killed during the uprising. These narrators include:
the spirit of one of the victims, who remains tethered to his body, and was a friend of Dong-ho's
a young woman who worked alongside Dong-ho during the uprising but survived it and then later works for a publishing house whose work has to be submitted for review by government censors
the author herself, whose family moved away from Gwangju shortly before the uprising
The strength of this approach is that we untangle not just what happened to Kang Dong-ho, but also the reverberations of the massacre that ended the uprising, which moves the Gwangju Uprising from a horrific but noble precursor to the protests which finally ended dictator rule in South Korea to a both unimaginable and yet very human (as in: what humans are capable of) and ongoing crisis at a personal level for survivors of the uprising, no matter how close/direct their connection to it. I found that this switching of narrators from chapter to chapter kept me reading even though what I was reading was difficult to encounter and process.
In addition, Han's focus on the body--on embodiment (including the chapter narrated by the spirit of the dead friend)--with each of the narrators also grounded the narrative and, perhaps perversely, made it more vivid, more real. More tragic too, but it kept me reading. It'd be easy for such a thing to become the cheap horror that such close attention to the body can become.
It doesn't, though. At least not for me.
Indeed, there's a grace and compassion to the novel, but one that does not diminish the anger in it, which is why Han inserting herself into it in the epilogue does not feel like a post-modern intrusion or a self-indulgent act of auto-fiction. Instead, it becomes inevitable: how can an author not engage in such research and write in such detail and not find themselves part of the narrative itself, especially when you have a family connection to the events you are researching?
It's a harrowing read.
I recommend it.
On the community center scene in Evil Does Not Exist
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist is described as an eco-parable.
And I suppose that's technically correct in the same way that describing it as folk horror is also technically correct: the film is bookended by two long tracking shots of the main character trampling through the woods and fields in search of his daughter who has left daycare to wander her way home. Both sequences are intense, compelling, masterful filmmaking.
But what I love about this film is about how most everything in between is mundanely inevitable, which is the real horror, no parable needed (the way in which the parabolic aspects of the film are deployed and play out deserves much better film criticism than I can provide; I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending even though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want a different one).
In the film, a meadow that sits just above a mountain village in Japan is purchased by a talent agency to develop into a glamping site. The agency is looking to diversify its' income streams because it has taken a financial hit due to the lack of film and TV production during the pandemic. It also is trying to take advantage of government funds to help businesses affected by the pandemic.
Towards the middle of the film, two lower level representatives from the agency meet with the village to go over the plan and assure the village citizens they will not be negatively affected by it, and that, actually, it will be a great boon to the community. Anyone who has worked in construction, enterprise development, and/or for a nonprofit or government agency is aware of, has probably even attended one of, these community engagement meetings, which, of course, tend to have very little impact on the final plans, but take place so that the entity proposing the project can show they consulted all the appropriate stakeholders.
Every organization pays attention to stakeholder engagement. Very few of them take that engagement seriously. It's the consultants, CEO, and the board whose opinions actually count in the end.
In the scene of the village meeting, the two representatives of the talent agency do their best to present the plan and gracefully deflect any criticism, but are troubled to discover that the villagers are able to poke a lot of holes in the plan and ask a lot of questions that it appears the engineers and architects they've relied on for their plan for the glamping site didn't consider (or considered and discarded as unimportant). It clearly demonstrates the importance of local knowledge, and because the film uses non-professional actors the fact of that local knowledge--the locality of it--comes across as genuine, rooted in actual experience.
I won't go into the full details because I really think you should experience it for yourself.
But in short: shit rolls downhill.
As the extent to which the plan doesn't take the village's needs into account unfolds, the villagers grow more and more concerned. But no matter how much they rail against/try to reason with the two staffers who are there in the room and even (sort of) win them over to their side (although how that then plays out is another darkly humorous pleasure/despair of the film), it doesn't matter: the CEO and the consultants aren't there in the room. They don't want to listen, aren't going to listen, the plan is going to go forward even though, technically, there is a process by which things should progress and plans could, theoretically, be modified.
It's a very real, all too familiar moment that speaks to the ways in which democracy at all levels has become a going through the motions that checks a few boxes while letting the wealthy who are in charge do what they want.
We all know that. But as with Human Acts it's the specific, mundane, embodied details that make this film seep in deeper than our surface, social media complaints about what's happening, even as (perhaps because?) the film itself flickers in and out of parable/allegory.
It's a harrowing watch.
I recommend it.
What should I write about in 2025?
I mention above that I want to write a bit more literary criticism in 2025. I have two essays I'm already planning on writing and releasing next year, but I'm also interested in what you all would be interested in me writing about since I hope to have the capacity to write four to six total pieces during the course of the year.
Here is what comes to mind at the moment:
I've said several times that reading Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy as a young teenager was key to the development of my political thinking. Should I revisit the trilogy and see how it holds up in that particular dimension?
I haven't read them all the way through yet but Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form and Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life are both candidates for where I do that thing where I take some of the ideas in a work of nonfiction and see how they might apply to the field of SF&F.
I could write about the latest by Gabriel Josipovici (A Winter in Zurau/Partita). At some point I should write about M. John Harrison.
Oh, and: faith and religion in Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric novellas. Shannon Hale's Princess academy novels and female solidarity (both the power and limits of). The use of genre tropes in kpop videos. Why I collect and also actually read the novels of Anita Brookner (who most definitely didn't deserve the Booker for Hotel du Lac, which is her worst novel, but who also does rather more interesting things in her post-Booker novels). Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo series (I'm really looking forward to third book in that series coming out next year). What I learned reading a bunch of fantasy and science fantasy heist novels. Oh, and the MIT collection on aesthetics and science fiction--not just a review of the stories in it, but some musing on aesthetics in relation to science fiction, especially near future SF.
Finally, I've recently been re-reading some of Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. novels, which are as sexist as I remembered but also a bit more self-aware about that sexism being a parody of noir than I had remembered. This re-reading may either be a precursor to further writing on Cook's work or a critical dead end. I haven't decided yet because I don't think anyone has yet written about how bonkers his most recently published Black Company novel Port of Shadows is on the topic of gender (and specifically as [I think?] a parody and perhaps even condemnation of male heterosexual horniness in relation to epic fantasy). The reason why I decided to dip back into the Garrett series is to see how self-aware Cook is about his writing of female characters to help me determine if it's worth writing about Port of Shadows, and the problem is that even after re-reading four of them, I'm still not sure.
If you have opinions on any of these topics or others, reply to this email or reach out on Bluesky.
See you next year!