At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.
Mendelsohn concludes with the wish that he could call the now late Robert Gottlieb “to tell him he was right.” It’s a wish I share, since I met Gottlieb briefly in 1956 and even then cherished his advice: “If you intend to write the great American novel, forget your coming to me for an entrée into ‘publishing’ and take a job—how about as night clerk in a hotel? —and write that novel.” For better or for worse, I did neither, but his advice was and remains cogent.[ii]
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My remit now is to celebrate the Extraordinary Attorney Woo, which centers on a young autistic woman of remarkable gifts in a sitcom that does indeed surprise you continually with its wit and inventiveness. Who else but the gifted writer, the woman Moon Ji-won, would have furnished the heroine with a stupendously complete, encyclopedic knowledge—and love—of whales, her infinitely preferred topic of conversation (indeed, well-past humans, her preferred mammals); and then connected moments of stunning legal inspiration with the sight—Eureka! — of a humpback whale breaching! True, one is forewarned by the lovely visual Intro of baleen clouds and baleen images swimming in the puddles through which Attorney Young-Woo strides, expensively shod, on her way to her office; but … once again … whales? I have an idea about the point of whales and Woo’s celebration of them: it is that they are family, they are society, and they communicate with one another in immediate, transparent, non-verbal language (if whistles don’t count as words). It’s also likely that they do not tell lies. This idea tallies with Woo’s rejoinder to the subtle displays of affection showed her by her handsome colleague, the paralegal Lee Jun-ho. He is concerned to teach her how to read the bodily signs that people display when they are lying. Woo replies that, as an autistic person, she would find it difficult to keep her eyes on all the body parts that might be candidates for exposure—hands nervously clenched, palms rubbed on thighs, nose-tip turning bright pink. So, asks her colleague Jun-ho, why not just trust her instincts? Woo replies: “I can’t trust my instincts. People with autism are well-known for being fooled easily and not being able to lie.” Jun-ho: “Is it because people with autism are innocent by nature?” Woo: “Mmm. It’s more like … people live in a world that’s made up of me and you, but people with autism are used to living in a world that’s made up of only me. … People can think differently from how I do or trick me with different intentions. … I always have to make a conscious effort, so I don’t get tricked by lies.” Clearly, it’s better to be a whale in a pod. And before long, by the sixth episode, the question budding in every viewer’s mind is explicitly broached: “What is it like to be a (mother) whale?” The answer: to feel the impossibility of abandoning one’s calf, which alludes to the counterplot—the “horizontal” mystery requiring a conclusion–of Woo’s motherlessness. In the penultimate episode, Woo situates her own sense of the pod. She has been more and more assimilated to the gang of young attorneys, become more and more comfortable as a friend of friends. When, earlier on, in her moments of legal inspiration, she sees a giant whale breaching, the parallel might lie in the momentary triumph of a member of even a protected, a minority class. Now, her image of herself is of the narwhal she saw in a documentary who has been adopted by a pod of beluga whales.[iii] Being a full-time lawyer among lawyers—no longer a “rookie” hanging on by the fingertips, as it were, of her unique legal intelligence but otherwise unique, she is, as are her viewers, up to a point ecstatic.
On the question of the immense popularity of the series both in South Korea and indeed throughout the world, reflect: Before all this baleen talk, the story must meet and satisfy the axiom for any performance: you must like the performers well enough to enter their world—ideally, to be unwittingly kidnapped until released, somewhat amazed, an hour later. The younger ones—and, above all, Ms. Woo—have charm to spare. Part of this charm is the integrity of the representation of autism–properly, “ASD (autistic spectrum disorder)”—and it is clear that a good deal of research— “honorable intentions”—has preceded this performance. For it must not disturb even the layman’s sense of autism’s effects: uncommunicativeness in society, a reluctance to be touched, a passion for repetition, spasmodic finger movements, a horror of shouting adults and leaf blowers and their ilk. But the decisive, the winning feature of the personality of Ms. Woo Young-Woo is first of all inscribed in the name with which she introduces herself, to us as to the other players: with her keen linguistic consciousness, she is well aware—and makes others aware—that her name is a palindrome. On announcing it, she shouts out to the bewildered listener, “Woo Young-woo,” “Kayak,” “rotator,” “racecar.” Things go too fast on one’s first watching to grasp why she says these seemingly random words: Is it merely that she’s gone off the deep end of the spectrum? No, like her name, they too are palindromes and so not a laughable off-effect of her autism but in fact testimony to her linguistic wit.[iv] Later on, she is told jokes that depend on puns, and she is once again delighted.
She did not speak until she was five, but then, surprised by a brawl between her single father and their fulminating, demented landlord, Woo suddenly let out a torrent of legalese touching statutory punishments for physical harm. (Her father was once a law student and keeps a library of law books at home). Years later, Woo graduates with highest honors from the premier law school in Seoul on the strength of her miraculous capacity—a plausible but (very) rare feature of autism—to memorize every word of every book she has ever read, including the entire law library of South Korea! And now, the former landlord, the same demented brawler, becomes the injured party in the first case she is asked to take. His good but put-upon wife is accused of the attempted murder of her husband after his fits of violence against her; and this viewer—I confess—weeps with joy when Woo, disadvantaged and awkward as she is, produces an antithetical courtroom revelation.
We are fascinated by her personality, a subjective affair; but there is the added sociology, indeed anthropology, because this is another culture: on the first two installments, all male parents (Woo’s single father an occasional exception) are raging madmen consumed by anger and greed, sexually unsettled and invariably on the verge of a brain explosion. Even if attenuated, the patriarchal tradition of arranged marriages continues but not without fierce resistance from the dependent: in the second episode, she is the daughter of one of these wild men. In the midst of a wedding ceremony, on the way to the altar, the bride’s wedding dress falls off, we hear, exposing her breasts. Worse, for her Christian guests, her naked back reveals an elaborate tattoo of a contemplating Boddhisattva, hitherto known to very few other than a lesbian friend, presumably her Buddhist mentor. As a consequence of his humiliation, the father will sue the hotel for an outrageous billion won for its failure to have managed successfully all the wedding preparations—and it falls to Woo-Young to produce, brilliantly, a legal solution for her client. The outcome to the financial plot is a kicker, which I won’t give away; the outcome of the interrupted marriage, however, is the bride’s declaration, on suddenly defying her father at the very point of his collecting his now billions in damages, that it is her Buddhist girlfriend she would marry, if anyone at all. Forget the arranged marriage. It all leaves one, once again, as it is said, smiling through one’s tears.
“It all”: each segment follows a law case until a dispositive end, usually with Woo Young-Woo as its creator. And so, as Víctor López G. writes, “The series is built under the canons of television procedural, presenting self-concluding vertical plots in each episode —in this case, related to the judicial field—while developing its multiple characters and unraveling their conflicts in its horizontal plot.”[v] The law cases are full of contemporary reference, certainly to life in South Korea but to us as well: such “vertical” issues as wrong assertions of copyright, the unfair treatment of the women employees of large corporations, data hacking, academic grooming. The “horizontal” drama supplies a conclusion to the mystery of Woo’s having been raised by a single father and his revenge on the woman, now powerfully-situated, who abandoned her daughter.
There is today a significant literature on autism; but experts, including writers like James Cook who have autistic family members, stress how little is understood. Sections of his TLS review of the memoir of a highly accomplished, autistic woman–Clara Törnvall’s memoir The Autists—have immediate resonance for Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Here is Clara’s list of symptoms: “I don’t pick up on subtext … I struggle with eye contact … I can’t handle being interrupted … I’m sensitive to sound. I wear sunglasses and earphones at all times.”[vi] Until recently, clinical studies focused on boys; but as Cook writes, “Girls’ interests are different from boys’; they might include animals and creativity, for example, rather than trains and cars.” Think: whales! In Sweden, Törnvall has been a prominent media journalist. “But,” Cook adds pertinently, “even in the liberal world of arts journalism, she was surprised and affronted at people’s capacity to say things they didn’t mean and took a long time to grasp that they were colleagues, not friends, competing for each other’s jobs.” The fifth episode of Extraordinary Attorney Woo centers precisely on Woo’s bewilderment at the fact that a rival junior attorney in her office is plotting to destroy her chance of tenure.
In invoking the urge “to call” the late Robert Gottlieb to tell him how right he’d been to recommend Ms. Woo, Mendelsohn concluded by saying that he would suppress the urge for being “sentimental.” I think he was put in mind of this affect from watching the disadvantaged, brilliant, infinitely charming Ms. Woo produce, in one case after another, a stunning legal—and better–existential victory, peak moments of what she calls her “beautiful life.” The affect might be the sort of chaud bonheur earned by one’s own sensibility, a genuine sentiment not needing the expansion (think: “sentimentality”) of being returned to a shade as a gift. The phrase chaud bonheur appears in a remarkable aperçu by André Gorz, Sartre’s amanuensis: “Do you know the chaud bonheur of learning that someone has suffered even more than you for the same great cause?” It comes to mind on thinking that it is Young-Woo herself who sparks this difficult bliss through her struggle against high odds for justice before the law. This bliss might find its proper end as a shared opportunity for the viewer’s “new acquist/of true experience.”[vii]
NOTES
[i] Daniel Mendelsohn, “Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023),” The New York Review of Books (July 20, 2023): 20.
[ii] Actually, many years later, I did write a novel, Borrowed Lives, with Irene Giersing; but it is not American, let alone great. It describes the learned delusions of an expatriate in the south of France. However, I still dream recurrently of entering an unattractive rented room in which to sit down and finish writing the novel. When at a conference I described this dream to a psychoanalyst, she brilliantly paralleled the bareness and ugliness of the room with the desert on which another spiritual hero, John the Baptist, wandered, feeding on locusts and wild honey. The poverty of the environment, she explained, was the necessary condition of the richness of the message and forcefully concluded: “So, write it!” To my everlasting shame, but expressive all the same of an undeniable truth, I replied, “Yes … but what about?” She turned away.
[iii] One can read about this adoption in the Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/adopted-lone-narwhal-traveling-among-belugas-may-produce-narluga-calves-180979695/#:~:text=The%20narwhal%20was%20first%20spotted,appears%20to%20be%20fitting%20in.
[iv] And, by the way, what an elegant feat of transcription to give the American viewer, in sub-titles, palindromic equivalents to God-knows what palindromes in Korean.
[v] https://www.espinof.com/criticas/he-empezado-a-ver-encantadora-woo-abogada-extraordinaria-entiendo-perfectamente-que-este-k-drama-se-haya-convertido-ultimo-fenomeno-netflix
[vi] “Törnvall has written an important, illuminating first book, one that deserves to sit alongside the best insider accounts of autism, such as Naoki Higashida’s revelatory The Reason I Jump. Her story differs from Higashida’s in that it concerns a so-called high-functioning autist (someone who ‘can write a doctoral thesis in theoretical philosophy but has to stop and think when slicing a loaf of bread’), as well as specifically addressing the experience of women and girls on the spectrum. ‘The autistic woman remains unknown in our time,’ observes Törnvall, a situation that she, ably assisted by Alice E. Olsson’s clear prose translation, sets out to rectify in The Autists.” John Cook, a review of “The Autists: Women on the Spectrum,” trans. from the Swedish by Alice E. Olsson,” TLS (June 23, 2023). https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/autists-clara-tornvall-book-review-james-cook/
[vii] John Milton, “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with Slaves,” Samson Agonistes.