Confessions of My Past, or Why I Have Come to Dislike Adorno More
An essay where I tell Adorno to shut the fuck up
An acquaintance of mine texted me a few days ago. She is one of the people who have known me since my early twenties, the time when I was trying to live a dual life along with others, that of Puccini’s La bohème and Shaporin’s The Decembrists (someday, I may choose to write about my past prosecutions and trials, but I prefer to stay silent on those matters for now). Those days are gone, and she and I have not met each other, I believe, for five or six years.
It was Silver Needle and Tieguanyin she has kept since 2018 that made her think of me. She asked me whether they would be drinkable. I have always been fond of tea since I was a teenager. I told her that white tea is often good to be consumed after many years, but Tieguanyin would taste rather stale, although drinking it would not, hopefully, kill her.
The conversation naturally continued to what I had been up to. I sent her a link to my story on Necessary Fiction and grumbled that The London Magazine had decided not to publish my work, despite noting that “it stuck out among [their] submissions”.
A few text messages later, I found out she was moving close to my home and remembered where it was. I casually implied that we should meet soon, in my usual manner which often lacks the concrete intention to meet those who care about me. If my memory serves me right, I have met people whom I consider to be my friends twice this year; I do not expect the number to grow dramatically during the rest of 2024.
My acquaintance’s reply was not what I could expect. It turned out that my acquaintance had been thinking the whole time that I was living abroad. Indeed, I had been recounting to her the story of submitting to, and getting published by magazines based in New York, London, and Madrid, but I had never said a word that could be interpreted as I was not in Seoul. I had been giving her an air of being absent, nevertheless.
Since last year, I have described my practice that has to do with literature collectively as “requests of literary exile”. Each acceptance or publishing could be counted as turning in a paper to seek asylum, so to speak. Nonetheless, I still feel that my exile or asylum is yet to be secured: I am still making mere requests, not yet being secured of my standing as a literary émigré.
However, there my acquaintance was, across many messages we managed to exchange in about an hour, somehow having been led to believe that I had deserted South Korea for good. From this realization, I ended up thinking of a passage from Adorno which I have recently discovered in an essay by Edward Said (to be fair, in my bygone (pseudo-)Leninist days, I was never fond of Adorno; I still prefer Marcuse or the student activists of ’68 who publicly mocked Adorno). Adorno writes: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. […] For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”
In my first English essay that was accepted for publication, I wrote about Ivan Bunin, a Russian writer who fled from the Bolsheviks. When I metaphorically say that I am requesting an exile, I often think of white Russian intelligentsia, and rarely do I ever think about their German counterparts who fled from Nazi Germany. Yet, there is something that resonates with me in the passage above, despite my half-intentional decontextualization. I am at home in a sense, but already not at home in another sense, considering how another person may perceive my situation. This indeterminacy is not granting me a place to live, and I am accordingly craving and being forced at the same time, to find a place to live in the act of writing.
Such discovery and musing could have created an affinity, though small, between me and Adorno; yet, one of the reasons why I did not fancy him at first on a personal level seems to linger. He does not know when and what to pass over in silence; simply put, he doesn’t just shut up when he’d better. Adorno goes on: “In the end, the writer is not allowed to live in his writing.”
It is well known that Adorno did not shy away from bashing Romanticism. While I used to bash Adorno mostly coming from the position of the Old Left, now I feel that my instinctive hostility against him may have arisen from the differences in the ways Adorno and I perceive the artist as a personal agent or the human being in general. This may also be able to explain, my religious choice later à la St. Augustine aside, or re-eligere as he would put it, why I could not become a “scientific” socialist deep down even back then, no matter “Old” or “New”.
I may or may not meet my acquaintance again. If I do get to meet her, will I talk about my Marxist past again? I find it unlikely. Even more unlikely is that I ever get to have a conversation about Adorno with her. Rather than mentioning his name, I would better simply tell her to go to a Catholic church and get baptized at best, and that is going to be about it. As of now, I find very little value in writing or saying anything about Adorno furthermore. Thus, this essay shall end too, with the following passage:
Shut the fuck up, Adorno. You can’t tell me what I can’t do.
This was a really interesting read. It feels like I've dived deep into your perceptions. I couldn't help but smile behind the screen. Thank you for sharing Hyun Woo Kim