North Korea and Elegy

At the level of content elegies are, obviously, pretty bleak business--all loss and mourning, occasionally leavened with the relative cheer of nostalgia. But beneath the specific content of an elegy lies a sort of intellectual game: How do you represent absence? Or, to put it in visual terms, how do a paint a picture of something that is no longer there?

This problem can be solved in any number of ways, and thinking about how you might go about it is surely part of the fun (if that is the right word for an elegy) of the form. The air force solves the problem with the missing man formation, in which a physical gap reminds us of the departed. Virginia Woolf uses a somewhat subtler version of the same technique in Jacob's Room, where the emphasis on the room rather than the protagonist sets up a whole series of absences in the text. And there are any number of other options here beyond the evocation of empty space: from the obvious use of clothing specific to the lost individual (or a uniform denoting her rank) to Walt Whitman's rather elaborate metaphor of the captain-less ship, and so on.

What I am interested in here is a much more specific application of this elegiac structural problem: it's relevance to nonfiction stories about North Korea. What I want to suggest is that writers who take North Korea as a subject face something of the same problem of absence faced by elegists. Because no one outside of North Korea (and likely very few people within North Korea) has anything like unmediated access to information about the country, those few writers and filmmakers who choose to work with it find themselves, again and again, trying to capture on the page the feeling of a country that is right in front of you and yet in some sense completely missing.

To take one example, Guy DeLisle's graphic nonfiction novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea works and reworks this problem throughout the text. The first image in the book is a full-page drawing of the Pyongyang airport. The airport though, takes up much less than the entire page, with the rest of the space fading from white and grey toward black edges. Thus the small part of the scene that DeLisle has seen personally bleeds into the emptiness just beyond his access, an emptiness where lives the vast majority of the country. That trick of an image surrounded by either white or black space is repeated throughout the book, as is the image of a small light illuminating only a tiny portion of the page. (This last image is occasionally deployed ironically, as the light in question is sometimes the illuminated torch atop the Juche Tower--thus the only light in the darkness is that of the official North Korean ideology.)

Perhaps DeLisle's best rendering of North Korean absence is his motif of a paper airplane; the book's narrator makes paper airplanes and tosses them from his hotel room window. As the airplanes leave his hand, they often travel not out over a cityscape, but out into white nothingness--the city of Pyongyang to which DeLisle has almost no access.

The structural problem of representing what you cannot see (what is "absent" at least in the sense of being inaccessible to the writer) is at the centre of the whole sub-genre of popular representations of North Korea. Vice, in particular, has made it something of a specialty, returning frequently in their various documentaries about the country to shots of empty restaurants and enormous highways with no cars on them (DeLisle makes use of both of these images as well). Both shots evoke the absent people of North Korea directly and quite effectively, though, in their Vice iteration, they do so with a certain comic brio about which one might have legitimate ethical concerns. The representation of North Korea as absence reaches its ultimate end-point in Vice's documentary on North Korean labour camps in eastern Russia. Here, representing North Korea demands avoiding North Korea all together.

North Korea might be unique in its demand for this particular aspect of elegy. With most other subjects, a writer who failed to gain meaningful access would simply not write the story until she had something more definite to say. The strict isolation of North Korea, though, demands that the writer either evoke absence or say nothing at all. Thus there is a kind of poetic convergence here between form and content: The inaccessibility of North Korea demands the structure of the elegy while the tragedy of its history demands an elegiac tone.