Everything was eternal
References

Q.
What beliefs do you want to convey in your novel?

A.
complexity.
I like stories that leave a lot of room for misunderstanding.

The truth is, our lives are all complicated.

I wish novels, like life, were full of layers.
―From an interview with Magazine B, 『JOBS: NOVELIST』

“I’ve always been fascinated by people who can’t do anything.”

Little is known about King Wellington.
Son of Hyun Alice, an independence activist and communist.
Born and raised in Hawaii in October 1927.
In 1945, he became a sailor on an overseas ship.
He studied briefly at UCLA Medical School in 1947.
In 1948, he arrived in Cheb, Czech Republic via France and Germany.
The following year, he entered the medical school of Charles University in Prague.
He became a doctor in 1955.
In 1958, he married Anna Soltisova, a Czech woman of Soviet origin, and they had a daughter, Tabitha.
In October of that year, Wellington renounced his American citizenship and requested Czech citizenship.
Naturalized in April 1959.
In November 1962, he was appointed director of the Central Research Institute of Hep City Hospital.


He committed suicide by swallowing poison in the hospital dissection room in November 1963.
He was a first-generation Hawaiian immigrant and an American citizen, but he was Asian and often faced racial prejudice.
He was a communist who wanted to go to North Korea, but North Korea rejected him as an American citizen.
His mother was executed in North Korea as an American spy.
He worked as a collaborator with the Czech secret police, but the Czech police did not believe he was a communist.
Wellington was not accepted anywhere, not in the United States, not in North Korea, not in the Czech Republic.


Based on this fact, "Everything was eternal," a linear life has little meaning.
Among the briefly described trajectories of Wellington, the part that is mainly dealt with in this novel is his life in the Czech Republic, which began in Heb and ended in Heb.
Jeong Ji-don thinks through Jeong Wellington, filling in the gaps in the facts with conjecture and imagination and mixing up the timetable.
“Time lost its distance in memory, and 14 years ago and 14 years later overlapped on the horizon of consciousness, as if a piece of paper had been folded in half and a hole had been poked with a pen.” As the last period in the Czech Republic and the first time he arrived are cross-edited, Jeong Wellington’s memories and thoughts pour out along with the stories of other characters and texts the author has drawn from outside.


It is clear that Jeong Wellington is a victim of history, an outsider of his time, but what Jeong Ji-don attempts in his novel is not to comfort him (or them), to reveal hidden truths, or to bring about catharsis.
The Wellington that the author envisions exists in a different world from reality.
However, the novelistic reality of a being who has left only a faint trace in history is strangely sad and funny, regardless of the author's intention, but also strangely warm.
This may be the ‘humanity’ that scholar Kim Su-hwan talked about in his recommendation.
“People who do nothing are not incapable, but have the power of negation.
“If competence is the kind of ability that proves oneself, then incompetence is the kind of ability that proves the world.” By following the dilemma of Jeong Wellington, the ‘incompetent’ who was not accepted by the times and the world, we can understand Jeong Ji-don’s novel.


In the novel, Willy, Anna, and Easy have the freedom to think and talk about anything.
In real life, time bound them, so it didn't have to in the novel.
But literature has its own rules, and time always controls us.
I wanted to see the spectacle of homeostasis and mutation reaching into history through discussions of chance and necessity.
The text thinks before I do, so I wanted to see the shapes revealed along the layers of fiction that overlapped before Jeong Wellington's death.
Here, Wellington will not die, so his thoughts will not end.
(p.
158)

The reason I still like this book, which I liked in the past, is because […] I had no choice but to say such things and it resonates with the world in which such things came out.
Grandiose and confident words, gloomy and resentful words, self-deprecating and cynical words, beautiful and miserable words.
Every era makes us dream of every era.
These types of dreams are intertwined with different contexts and lines, and the meaning should be focused on following the traces of the lines rather than distinguishing between right and wrong.
―From “Film and Poetry”

“Every era makes every era dream.”

The title of this novel is likely borrowed from Alexei Yurchak's cultural studies book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was Gone.
This book sheds new light on the way people lived around the time of the collapse of the Soviet socialist system, “the closest ‘end’ experience our time can remember,” and allows us to feel “the strange resonance that everyday life in the ‘late’ socialist Soviet Union creates with our lives living ‘after’ the modern era” (Kim Su-hwan).
What both books have in common is that we can feel a “strange resonance” with our lives today.
From the latter half of the novel, “Looking to the Future,” the observer and narrator, “I,” appears at the forefront.
I and the 'Young Marxist' go to Cheb, the city where Wellington began and ended his life in the Czech Republic, to find traces of him.
While walking, talking, observing and recording everything they experience there, the two of them accidentally/inevitably meet someone who knows Jeong Wellington.
Through this method, which is both a part of the novel and a kind of author's note, Jeong Ji-don attempts to go beyond past love and its display and connect it with reality in a more practical way.


Also, among the various texts that Jeong Ji-don referenced, let's pay attention to 'Letters'.
As the author quotes Riccardo Piglia, the letters are a reflection of the preoccupation with “how to say the unsayable” in a time when censors existed, and “writing a letter is sending a message to the future.”
“While writing a letter, we are having a conversation in the present tense with someone who is not only not there, but whose state we do not even know […], and only later do we read each other’s stories.”
His contemporaries, who “encountered Wellington at some point in history,” exchanged letters constantly.
From grand and serious statements like, "I cannot help but reflect the events of my time," to trivial remarks like, "It's the coldest where I live," we can once again experience the interweaving of past, present, and future by reading letters sent in the past without any particular distance from their future and our present today.
Perhaps the experience of reading Jeong Ji-don's novels is similar to this.

* The cover photo is by Damian Heinisch, a German photographer born in Poland and currently based in Norway.
In 1945, his grandfather disappeared while being deported to Ukraine, and in 1978, his father emigrated with his family to Germany.
Inspired by the train journeys and forced migrations his father and grandfather underwent, Damian Heinisch took photographs of himself crossing Europe by train from Ukraine to Oslo, Norway.
He published this Train Project as a photo book, 『45』, and this photo book was delivered to Jeong Ji-don through novelist Lee Sang-woo.
The two photos used on the cover are works not included in the photo album.
The titles of the photos, whose time and location seem unclear, refer to the distance between cities, but the reference point is unknown.