I remember a concept I learned in a college general-literature class: “defamiliarization.” I think it was about one of the positive functions of literature, which breathes freshness into things we always pass by as familiar and helps us see them from a new perspective. At the time I thought, “It must be a translated concept imported from abroad, but still, why did they translate it so carelessly?” Yet if something is easy enough to understand that way, perhaps there is no need to express it in difficult words. Of course, if the phrase itself is used to test whether one knows a concept, that is embarrassing. I feel resistance when people sanctify a word uttered merely to point at something and try not to change even a particle.
“Defamiliarization” is similar. It is fine to use it while saying one means a similar concept, but if one uses it as a technical term toward someone who has never heard it, for example a version of me who never took a general-literature class, then I think that is wrong enough. Still, at this moment I have no other word. I am trying to describe the feeling that the surroundings become the background of something unfamiliar, not daily life. It occurs when, just after waking, I forcibly receive information midway through the process of realizing where I am, realizing inwardly who I am, and realizing outwardly the place and time in which I exist.
On my way to work, while riding the subway, I lowered my head and fell lightly asleep. When I woke, the next thought covered the earlier one, so I cannot know what the writing was about, but I had been imagining writing something in Korean on a manual typewriter. It was not a full dream. It was half-sleep: my hand felt the weight of the phone, and I heard the announcement naming a station while imagining in drowsiness. Then I thought I should check what station we were about to stop at, so I opened my eyes.
The first things that entered my eyes were two empty seats across from me, the window above them, and the scenery outside. The scenery was full of trees. I had expected only sky, so the trees surprised me. Perhaps because spring was nearly turning into summer, they had become completely green. I slowly thought that the trees were not themselves green; rather, countless small green leaves were attached to them, so they appeared that color.
When I closed my eyes for a moment in that state, an image appeared in which countless tiny words saying “green leaves” hung from every tree. Opening my eyes, I thought it might be possible to attach such labels to the trees I was seeing. Even if the name of a tree were inscribed on every cell of it, it would not differ much from seeing the pattern of the cell wall. Whether “leaf” is written on a leaf, or whether one reads a leaf pattern as “leaf,” if the agreement is properly shared so that everyone reads it that way, there is no large difference. No one would object if someone revived the old idea that there should be Chinese characters representing every single thing in the world. If the agreement exists, it will be used; if not, it will not.
What I felt while imagining the lettering of leaves was that I finally understood what it means to say that the same phenomenon can be made unfamiliar through writing. I do not know how it is done. But I know that it can be done. It is like not knowing how to build a car, but knowing how to ride one to Busan. One can use something without knowing why. One can appreciate something without being able to draw or make it.
I imagined the scenery from the sky. Instead of the sound of wind, a grand flow of classical music lay heavily in the air. From gray words reading “cloud,” countless transparent words reading “water” poured down. Through them, a large word “subway,” surrounded by letters reading “steel plate,” passed by. Beneath it ran two rails on which tiny words reading “track” had been written countless times. Along the rails, a large word “gravel bed” repeated itself. Beside it stood gray words reading “soundproof wall.” Outside that stood brown “trees,” and on every stroke of the word “tree,” many green words reading “leaf” were attached fluffily like the fur of a long-haired dog.
Is this not what the world inside writing looks like? A world made of writing, so a world where everything is letters. That may be why, when we open a book, everything is black letters on white paper. Just as our world, made only of atoms and empty space, appears to us who live inside it as if filled with colorful things, if we enter that world, those letters too become substance and fill the space around us. At that point meaning becomes central, so the spaces between strokes of letters lose their importance. Reading and writing are not merely acts of using signs and language. They connect a new world with our world. To read is to put one’s head into a world made of letters and try to experience how it actually looks inside. To write is to convert a new world into letters so that it can be carried. When we bring that new world back and unfold it, we can look inside and feel again the world that was converted.
Original Korean article: 기호로 된 세상