(This was originally written for a college linguistic anthropology course.)
Walking Practice (보행 연습) is a speculative fiction novella by Dolki Min (돌기민) published in 2022. The specific edition to be focused on here is the edition translated into English by Victoria Caudle and published in 2023. The novella centers on an alien stranded on earth using humans as food after having selected and met with them through an online dating application. Queerness is arguably the clearest lens through which to view the work, and a major concern of it is reliance on gender to construct personhood, and the depersonalization and alienation that goes hand-in-hand with failure to perform gender correctly. Walking Practice is interesting on several levels, especially with respect to language. The protagonist’s body (when not carefully and with great effort held in human form) is vague but clearly not-at-all human. Their body, against their wishes, is a loud sign of their alienness, literally and otherwise. Courtney Handman’s work will be employed in further discussion of the body as a sign. Secondly, the text of the novella itself can be linguistically strange. As Matt Tomlinson discusses, language weirdness typically corresponds to other types of weirdness, and the same is true here, as both the original author Dolki Min and the English translator Victoria Caudle work to encourage the alienness of their language to reflect the alienness of their narrator. Caudle by necessity however accomplishes this weirdness differently in her English translation than Dolki Min does in the original Korean text. This leads to a third aspect of the text, where the object to be studied as specifically a work of translation and not simply the original text (the mediation required for an English but not Korean speaker to access it left ignored) becomes clearest and most important. The translator must not only translate the work in the traditional sense, but is faced with the task of translating unintelligibility. Tomlinson will again prove helpful here.
The body, both the lived experience of it and its perception by others, as well as how the two interact, is a major concern for the protagonist. They are forced to live in and interact with a world not made with them in mind. Stairs are a recurring source of agony throughout the novella. This is a site where the protagonist’s disconnect between body and self becomes most unignorable. Each step is a struggle physically and mentally. Courtney Handman’s work concerning Guhu-Samane Christians living in the Waria valley (or Morobe Province) of Papua New Guinea is particularly relevant here. Among this community, individuals’ and the community’s relationship with God came to be seen in terms of a road. This conception developed into an expectation that the spiritual infrastructure between themselves and God would lead to the physical infrastructure of vehicular roads being built to connect their valley with outside places. Having been disappointed for decades by the failure of these roads to materialize, many now often doubt the spiritual infrastructure that is their connection with God as well. “Every footfall, every moment of walking, is instead the result of Satan’s power” (Handman 323). The physical act of moving in their own bodies is an unavoidable sign to themselves of God’s abandonment. The experience of Min’s protagonist in movement is opposite that of the Guhu-Samane, but the negative feelings are similar. Rather than the body’s capability and adaptedness indexing its belonging to an environment in which the individual does not wish to reside, the dysfunction of their body and its unsuitability to its environment indexes its and the individual’s own lack of belonging to a place to which the individual, if not precisely wanting to belong, feels the pressing necessity to do so.
For these Guhu-Samane Christians, their bodies, shaped by walking long distances while carrying heavy baggage if need be, are ever-present and unavoidable signs of them being forsaken by God and instead residing in the domain of Satan. The body is a peculiar type of sign. An individual has less control over “speaking” it in the first place than they typically do with other types of signs, such as speech signs. The body is not an entirely fixed object; as seen through the example of the Guhu-Samane who move between the valley and outside towns, it can change dramatically even at the seemingly basic level through experiencing “radical changes in weight and musculature” (Handman 324) owing to the different environments. However, note that this especially fundamental change occurs indirectly as a result of an event that itself may not entirely be within the individual’s control. Changes on a more superficial level, such as changing one’s hair, using makeup, putting different types or amounts of clothes and ornaments onto the body, physically inserting objects into the body such as piercings, or changing the body’s surface through tattoos or making effort to control light exposure are all possible means of intentionally presenting a certain variation of one’s physical body. However, these variations are all, ultimately, still variations of a certain base with which the individual is forced to work. This fact currently remains true, even as new technologies (albeit often restricted behind such barriers as money, location, and government and medical policies) increasingly allow the individual greater power to shape their body. Transgender technologies are an especially notable example of how even dimensions of the body often traditionally seen as fixed or even fundamental can be molded with intent by the individual.
The protagonist of Walking Practice themself actually does have a radical amount of control over the shape of their body compared to a human, including sex, but even they are still bound by a degree of constancy in the body. They are able to stretch their body to fantastic degrees of change, but in a fashion similar to stretching an elastic band; they can hold their body in a form so different from their default, relaxed state only with extreme discomfort and effort on their part, and if they falter, the body will revert quickly and dramatically back to that default. Additionally, unlike other human types of modifications like those transgender technologies allow, the modifications the protagonist makes to their body are ironically not tailored to their own desires but are a desperate attempt to match the unconscious wants and expectations of others, of the humans who surround them. However, the changeability which allows them to take a human form at length only becomes a further sign of their otherness in their fear of discovery and desperate attempts to instead retain a constant, human form. Again, the protagonist’s experience can resonate with many human experiences, one example keeping the gender focus being the experience of genderfluid or otherwise gender non-comforming individuals. Gender is afterall addressed explicitly as a key part of being recognized as human multiple times throughout the text, and as the protagonist reflects: “I also get the impression that it is only after a gender has been assigned that you are seen as human” (Min 7). For a human, gender is supposed to be fixed and unchangeable; it is “a label that you can’t remove before death. A label that can’t be removed even after death” (107). Even ignoring the fact that the protagonist is not always intelligible as having gender, the mere fact that what recognizable gender they do have (and here “gender” means the socially constructed marker as identified by others) is not constant is a sign of their lack of belonging and inhumanity.
The protagonist’s body is so fluctuating that in fact the protagonist seems to view it as having come apart from their own will, bound not only by no physical base but also only partially by a mental one. They often conceptualize the body as a separate entity from the self which becomes capable of “betraying” them: “My body is a filthy jerk that is constantly keeping its eyes peeled for any chance to betray me. I am certain of it. And I won’t be fooled twice. Normally, it puts on a show of doing its all for me, of serving only me, but if given an inch, it’ll give its owner a good bash to the head” (Min 17). The body as a source of alienation causes frustration, eventually leading to alienation of the individual themself from their own body as the source of their troubles.
Note that a disability reading of the work also comes especially readily. The protagonist’s rather mundane reflection that “there are no-step buses now, but they’ve only just been introduced to the fleet” (Min 4) near the work’s opening is particularly striking in this context for its mundanity. They go on to recall their first time riding a bus, wherein they were thrown off balance and became wedged under a bench in the back. Their fellow passengers made no attempt to help in their disgust at the protagonist’s state. As the protagonist laments, “Ah, I was in far too disgusting of a state to arouse sympathy and a willingness to help. The high degree of concentration required to maintain my humanlike form was in tatters; my eyeballs drifted in opposite directions; my arms and legs contorted; and my abdomen swelled up like a balloon” (5). The protagonist’s loss of control over the shape of their physical form, and the lack of sympathy and disgust that comes from on-lookers in response, mirrors both a disabled experience of the body physically failing to perform correctly and, more symbolically, the mind failing to do the same and the resulting loss of composure. Compare for the latter for instance the experience of a panic attack, or of a meltdown for an autistic individual.
Faced with the knowledge of how others will react to their body otherwise, the protagonist goes to great lengths and pains to force it into and hold it in human form. Their body functions as a sign of their alienness, more specifically as an icon. The author does not allow the reader to forget their protagonist’s body either. Scattered throughout the book are twenty-one black-and-white line drawings of the protagonist. Their form is ever-shifting and difficult to interpret. It often appears vaguely floral, or calls to mind the organs of a cell. Occasionally certain human- or at least animal-like features can be discerned, such as hair, or an eye, or teeth, or once, memorably, a whole mouth full of teeth gaping wide to eat an (unwilling) meal. Their body itself is not just deviant but near completely unintelligible to a human.
The protagonist’s body is not the only aspect of themselves to present unintelligibility; the language of their narration does as well. As Matt Tomlinson discusses, “linguistic otherness being correlated with other kinds of weirdness” (284) is common, including in rituals or for supernatural entities such as spirits. Min’s choice to use linguistic otherness as an icon of their alien protagonist’s biological and cultural weirdness is thus perhaps not surprising. According to Caudle’s translation note at the end of the book, in their original Korean text, Min accomplished this intentional alienation of the reader from the protagonist in a way particular to the Korean language: “In the source text, this is expressed more orthographically due to the fact that, in Korean, the parts of a sentence are marked by postpositions, which make the meaning more trackable when words are torn apart and stitched together” (164). In Caudle’s English translation, “when the tension breaks and [the protagonist]’s consciousness reverts to something less human and indecipherable to others” (165), a variety of techniques are employed, including: addition of spaces within words, replacing letters with numbers and symbols, and variations from standard capitalization and punctuation. Here is a particularly “strange” example, taken from perhaps the linguistically strangest section of the book:
What could the suf focat ing crowds be doing if they aren’t clogging up the trains? Did they j u m p in front of a train? G e t m a n g l e d i n t h e w h e e l s ? Am I d r e a m i n g ? If this keeps up, I’m scared I won’t ever wake up from this dream. The train r a t - t a - t a r a t t l e s a s i t s p e e d s a l o n g . The lights flicker o f f a n d o n a n d o f f a n d o n , the hanging handles s w i n g i n s y n c t o o n e s i d e , then back in place. W h e n t h e t r a i n d e p a r t s I r o l l t o t h e b a c k , a n d , a r r ? ? a t t h e ? t i o n , I r o l l t o t h e f r ? n t . T i l l d e a t h d o I r e p e a t ? ? ? R o l l o l o l o l o l i n g ? I d i d w r o n g ? ? P l e a s e f o r g i v e m e ? I t ’ s a l l m y f a u l t ? ? ? P l e a s e l e t m e o u t o f h e r e ? ? ? P l e a s e s e n d m e h o m e ? ? ? T u c k m e i n t o b e d ? ? ? P l e a s e ? W h a t e v e r I d i d w r o n g ? L e t m e b e g y o u r f o r g i v e n e s s ? ? ? ? ? I d i d w r o n g ? ? ? ? I t ’ s m y f a u l t ? I d i d w r o n g ? ? ? (142)
Here the protagonist’s emotional state and loss of control mirrors the loss of traditional language (or at least writing) conventions. After this point, the narration devolves further in intelligibility into what seems like rows of nonsensical combinations of symbols, for which without the prior context one would assume to not represent the language of another being at all, but only patterns.
Language seems an ideal icon and index of general weirdness. As Courtney Handman addresses in another work of hers on the link between deception and the perception of humanness, language itself and the shared meaning expressed through this conduit have often been cited as the key mark of humanity (726-8). Weirdness or “disruptions” (as Caudle terms it, 164) in intelligibility might index disruptions or breaks in the assumed shared meaning between communicators, or in this case, between narrator and reader. However, Handman herself argues that a primary marker of humanity has actually been the capacity for deception; acts of deception are a sign of the individual’s interiority and moral agency when these might otherwise have been in doubt. Ironically, in the case of Min’s protagonist, their attempted deception is their humanity itself. This deception has a twofold effect: through witnessing their deception, including their motivations for and thought processes reflecting on it, the reader comes to witness and acknowledge their “human” interiority, and secondly, the protagonist in their deception proves that they recognize the binds of human social convention, even against their will. As they declare in their narration: “If I’m going to be stomped, I’ll be stomped as a human, and if I’m going to die, I’ll die as a human” (137). Regardless, viewed from another direction, the protagonist’s attempts only make the moments of unintelligibility conveyed through their language more apparent.
Important to keep in mind, however, is that the unintelligibility presented by the text of Walking Practice did not arise spontaneously. The presented unintelligibility was crafted by not just one but two human authors, and it is presented to their human readers. Tomlinson quotes Kristina Wirtz in writing, “Unintelligibility is a product of active processes of reception as well as production of utterances” (283). What then happens on the reception end, to begin with? The reader must first of all recognize the meaningful “disruption of legibility” (to use Caudle’s phrasing again, 164) as such. As Tomlinson identifies in his examination of glossolalia (or the speech of “speaking in tongues”) at a Fijian Pentecostal crusade, certain criteria, both linguistic and non-linguistic ones such as general demeanor, exist for a speech act to be dubbed as “speaking in tongues” (285).
Unintelligibility is thus not merely the general, nondescript “outside” to the contained and certain “inside” of convention. Rather the unintelligible, the unreadable, the unknowable itself can be characterized and circumscribed. There exist certain recognized types of unintelligibility that mark otherness, and which additionally often index and/or overlap with one another, several of which are present in Walking Practice gender-nonconformity, language “weirdness,” and strange bodies. The constraints on unintelligibility also mean that only certain manifestations of these aspects are read as otherness. On the one hand, this constrains conceptions and discourse of what even otherness can look like, and thus limits of the possible and impossible, leading to a domestication of otherness, but on the other, the formation of these discrete markers of otherness can lead to them being combined in a threatening or liberatory (depending on one’s perspective) excess of the strange and other. Walking Practice arguably represents a case of the latter.
On the production end, Victoria Caudle conducts the unique task of translating unintelligibility. Caudle, as referenced previously, discusses the challenge of translating “the disruption of legibility” in her short translator’s note. Interestingly, she goes on to write that a major challenge was to convey the weirdness of the original Korean’s orthography in English “in the most legible, yet still visually striking and disruptive, manner” (emphasis added). Despite her focusing on disruption of legibility in the text as a key aspect to be translated, legibility in another sense remains a priority for her translation. Tomlinson describes the speech act of ritual speaking in tongues as “meaningful [to the participants] because of its unintelligibility” (281). The same is true of the weird language of Walking Practice. The amount of unintelligibility created by the language of the text can be meaningful to the reader by further emphasizing the otherness of the protagonist and contributing to thoughts about the alienation experienced by certain individuals and demographics within human society. However, the meaningfulness of unintelligibility requires the base of a certain amount of intelligibility, of shared meaning, to be present. The novel would provoke no reactions in the reader if its entirety was the strings of random patterns of text symbols mentioned above. The gap between the familiar and the strange is where meaning develops.
Walking Practice by Dolki Min is in many ways a work about unintelligibility and otherness. The body of the protagonist is unintelligible in its alienness and mutability. The inescapable (even for a being like the protagonist) material reality of the body indexes the self’s otherness to the protagonist and to others. Additionally, the experience of actively moving in it is an index for the protagonist of their own lack of belonging to their current environment. On another level of the text, the weird language used for the protagonist’s narration indexes the general weirdness of the protagonist themself. Victoria Caudle’s act of translating this weirdness, this “disruption of legibility,” introduces the question of what it means to translate (an act which endeavors to make legible what was not before) the unintelligible.
Handman, Courtney. “Walking Like a Christian: Roads, Translation, and Gendered Bodies as Religious Infrastructure in Papua New Guinea.” American Ethnologist, vol 44, no. 2, 2017, pp. 315-327.
—. “Language at the Limits of the Human: Deceit, Invention, and the Specter of the Unshared Symbol.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 65, no. 4, 2023, pp. 726-750.
Min, Dolki. Walking Practice. Translated by Victoria Caudle, HarperVia, 2023.
Tomlinson, Matt. “God Speaking to God: Translation and Unintelligibility at a Fijian Pentecostal Crusade.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 23, 2012, pp. 274-289.