Reckoning with the Rogue: Calculation, Narration, and the Incomplete Scene of Accountability in J. M. Lee’s The Boy from Paradise

ABSTRACT This article reads the South Korean novel The Boy from Paradise (2013) by J. M. Lee as a work of post-9/11 fiction. It situates the novel within the post-Cold War matrix of geopolitical conflict on the Korean peninsula, held in place by the tension between the neoconservative preoccupation with “holding the rogue to account,” on the one hand, and the neoliberal fantasy of integrating it into the borderless world system on the other. These opposing attitudes toward the North Korean rogue—expressed within a frame narrative in which an American CIA agent interrogates a wanted North Korean math savant with Asperger’s—point to a deeper crisis within the notion of accountability itself as a moral, narrative, and calculative enterprise. However, while the novel attempts to defuse the “North Korea problem” by recourse to a national allegory, its reparative vision is eventually undone by its core conceit—the ableist pathologization of North Korea as an “autistic” nation. Ultimately, this article makes the case for rethinking not only the place of North Korea in the larger contemporary world-literary system but also the literary-ethical consequences of exercising one’s creative license: the very act of writing itself as an intractable form of roguery.