I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself 
(Korean: 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다)
Young-ha Kim
(click here for author website)
Edition: Harvest Originals, 2007 (and Kindle)

Our unnamed narrator, begins by explaining his perverse aestheticization of suicide.  A chilling quote to represent his thought: "People who don't know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don't know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life" (6).  This is why he has devoted his professional life to creating beautiful suicides--finding, consoling, and finally organizing the suicides of his 'clients.'  The bulk of the novel is his elliptical and fragmented report about a group of people connected to one such client.  To demonstrate her centrality in the lives of her acquaintances, she has two names, Judith and Se-yeon and we see clearly how she energizes the lives of the narrator and two other men, named only 'C' and 'K.' 

I am now reading this book, over and over, as I've assigned it for my Reading and Discussion class at my university (I've paired it with Chang Ha-joon's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism--see the relevant post).  I originally read this book during the summer before I moved to Korea.  My impression at the time, as far as I remember, was shock.  I had already watched as many Korean films as I could get my hands on.  I had also worked through a major television drama, Tomato   (토마토).  The television show is from 1999, the novel from 1996.  Now I know all about South Korea's rich field of cultural production, but a few years ago, to a relatively inexperienced American, the contrast was amazing.  Watch this highlight video set to Tomato's theme song for a hint of what I mean



Let's define American pop culture with two examples: the Jonas Brothers and Marilyn Manson.  Or how about Friends and Kill Bill?  Confused and excited?  Well, that's the response I had when, in the same July, I watched this TV show and read this book.

As I'm reading it now, week by week, the book is taking on a new complexity as it teaches me exactly how much I have learned about Korea, about being a foreigner, and about the rise of what is called 'globalization' since moving to South Korea.

After the semester ends, I will sum up what I've tried to do with this book in my classes.  For now, I simply want to note that this is a deceptively simple book.  You can read it in a few hours, especially if you know nothing about Korea.  But, like any remarkable work of fiction, the more attention you invest in  I Have the Right, the more difficult it will become.

For now, my basic reading of the text is as follows.  I Have the Right is a kind of Nietzschean tone poem dropped by the author, like a bomb, on a South Korean scene (mid 90s, remember) just beginning to think about imagining to recover from (please note all the bet hedging!) several decades of dictatorship, beginning to publicly wonder about the doom of freedom, a la Sartre.  Whatever links one might draw between the dueling dictators of the North and South, the book would welcome.  One can't lose sight of the absented protagonist of the story, Judith/Se-yeon, an abused, disaffected sex-worker.  But for me the keyword is 'Nietzschean'--all the gloom, disaster, and pain pinpointed by the novel serve to point out the opportunity for empowerment any of us can grab when our starting point is the sudden realization:

OMG!  I have the right to destroy myself!

Truly, an adventure in sitting still and being quiet.