[Namsan Stroll]From The Solitude Of Novels To A Bustling Reality

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"It is not impossible to read a newspaper while eating. But it is impossible to read a novel. You can only do one of two things: either eat or read a novel."

This sentence appears in philosopher Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller." It rings true. In my twenties I read more than 1,000 novels, yet I do not recall ever reading one while eating. When I was living alone, I often ate by myself, but in those moments I usually watched videos. I liked to watch something light, like cartoons or sitcoms. I have no memory, however, of reading a novel then.

According to Benjamin, reading a novel is an act of "devouring." Reading a novel is not merely empathizing with emotions; it is an indulgence in consumption. The reader does not simply step into the protagonist's shoes, but devours the events that befall the protagonist. Like raw food, the reader absorbs and digests them. The reader is synthesized with the novel's protagonist and becomes a kind of chimera.

This description seems to explain why I was so immersed in novels throughout my twenties, and why, upon entering my thirties, I emerged from them. In my twenties, I stacked up novels mostly featuring young people as protagonists and read them, often feeling as though I were actually them. When I read novels by Hesse, Paul Auster, Dostoevsky, or Salinger, I felt as if I had devoured the protagonists and become them.

As I grew older, I gradually moved away from that state. Instead, I became more interested in deeply inhaling my own life, my own reality, the vivid experiences of this life right before my eyes. So my writing, too, became the work of melting down the life I experienced each day. I no longer wanted to exist in some solitary world of my own; I longed for the experience of blending into this world. The intense journeys through love and parenting, getting a job and becoming independent, and the reality of all that itself became my writing.

By my standards, life lay strangely on the opposite side of the novel. Benjamin says that the novel is born within the "solitary individual." He says the novel exists in a place others can never reach, a place from which one cannot offer advice to others. But I wanted to mix into the world of others, into a world where people exchange advice, into the usefulness of this life, into a reality where I would be flung about in dazzling collisions rather than in solitude. Each day I wanted to move further toward life. And so I gradually stopped "devouring novels."

Benjamin says that the storytellers of our time have disappeared. Those who pass on experience as experience, who speak of advice and usefulness, who share wisdom, have now perished, he says. What remains instead are novels in which solitary individuals immerse themselves in their own worlds. I certainly love the solitude of the novel. Yet I realize that what I truly want to become is not a novelist sinking into my own solitude, but a storyteller who walks among people and speaks of useful experiences. I also realize that I want the pieces I write to be precisely such stories.

We live in an era that says the value of human storytelling is diminishing in many ways because of the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Even so, I believe there are human stories that rise from human experience, which AI cannot produce. That is why I still write every day and keep telling stories. I dream of remaining an "human storyteller" of our time.

Jung Jiu, Culture Critic and Lawyer

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