MERVEILLES1 STACK005

Text :

At the Korean market, in his bookstore open to most all the winds (those of the northeast
and the southwest at any rate--the favorable ones), walled up on one side by planks, on
the other by sheets of corrugated iron covered by paintings and scrolls, between shelves
equally laden with modern magazines and old bound editions (the thin spines of the
folios gathered together and stitched up like flower stalks, the paper rather poor, but still
a caress for the eyes even before the fingers: a poor man's caress)-the bookseller sits
reading. This country will never cease to amaze. Zuber, our miles glorious, already
remarked on the abundance of books in the most impoverished dwellings, drawing a few
bitter reflections at a time (1866) when the illiteracy of young French soldiers was a
standing source of jokes. But to each his illiteracy: culture began, in Korea, with those
who could read Chinese characters (indeed, the Korean alphabet was invented to help
people correctly pronounce Chinese-and incidentally their own language, but nobody
seemed particularly worried about that). Let's face it, the Korean letters, those little
Miro characters, backbone flutes and crabapples (true, the corée is a cider apple in
Calvados), can only suffer from comparison with the sumptuous bacteria of Chinese
graphics. But the latter are already condemned in their own land: our world is one of
corridors, gangways, escalators- to move with the traffic, words have to put on
functional, interchangeable garb: a nylon. Brocaded and chasubled, festooned with
pennants and aigrettes like the generals of Peking Opera, Chinese characters just can't
make it through anymore.