A hunger for truth

There were no expectant news vans outside Han Kang’s home on October 10, as the Swedish Academy announced this year’s Nobel prize in literature. Unlike most laureates, who receive the award later in life, Han is fifty-three and at the height of her career after three decades of prolific work, comprising eight novels, as well as short stories, essays and poetry. She was reportedly finishing dinner with her son when she received a phone call from Mats Malm, the Academy’s permanent secretary. Admirers of Han’s work might imagine the moment as one lit by the kind of light emblematic of her writing – crepuscular yet stark – where the personal suddenly becomes intensely public.

The next day South Korean media reported that Han had declined to hold a press conference, citing a deference to those suffering in wars. To readers of her work, which probes the limits of human violence as well as the knotty, necessary work of loss and grief, this announcement will have come as little surprise. But the South Korean public, voracious consumers of celebrity culture and accustomed to intimate access to their idols, responded with outrage and derision. The prestige of the Nobel, they felt, belonged to all of them, and they felt cheated of the afterglow.

Much has been written about the extraordinary ascent of South Korean soft power on the global stage since Seoul’s Olympic debut in 1988, which marked the country’s intentional bid for cultural influence. For those not paying attention, it might feel as if we’ve woken to an overnight K-ification, in the form of K-drama, K-beauty, K-pop. The “K-” denotes a cutesy, easily digestible marketing reference to Korea, and to the corresponding manifestations of super-slick, hyper-processed and unapologetically addictive cultural exports.

Han, who was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith), and was a finalist for the same prize two years later for The White Book (also Smith), has made significant contributions to the zeitgeist of Korean cultural prominence in the past decade. But rather than underscoring her country’s shiny rags-to-G20 glow-up, her writing demonstrates a strenuous counterpoint to, or refusal of, the capitalistic, patriarchal workings of the K-universe.

In The Vegetarian, published in Korean in 2007, Yeong-hye, a young woman in contemporary Seoul, becomes haunted by dreams and memories of violence against animals:

The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.

As a result she decides she will no longer eat or serve meat in her home. Her husband, who had married her because he believed her to be “completely unremarkable in every way”, finds this sudden change in her existentially unsettling and begins to wage battle against her body and mind. Because she will no longer sleep with him, as he smells of meat, he finds it acceptable and arousing to rape her. As a last resort, he calls in Yeong-hye’s family, who verbally and physically assault her, and force-feed her pork. When she is hospitalized for a suicide attempt, her mother apologizes to her husband, ashamed by her daughter’s unknowable, degenerate behaviour.

The Vegetarian, according to this synopsis, could be read as a successful, if one-dimensional, work of feminist body horror, of Yeong-hye’s dissociation from the mores of South Korean society that demand that a wife eat, dress and behave in a narrow, circumscribed manner. But in the novel’s second act, “Mongolian Mark”, we see that her character is not simply a negative of current values, but also a hungry demand for a specific, utterly idiosyncratic experience of life free from every constraint. Han’s writing is not only a rebuke; it forms a meticulous record of human need and desire in all its complexities.

While The Vegetarian is Han’s most successful novel in translation, Human Acts (2014; 2016) is considered her most important novel in South Korea. It grapples with the legacy of the Gwangju Uprising (also called the Gwangju Massacre) in May 1980, when the army, operating under the orders of the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, opened fire on students and civilians protesting against martial law, killing as many as 2,300 people in ten days and beating, raping and torturing many more in the aftermath. News of the killings was immediately silenced by Chun’s government and remained taboo for more than a generation. Casualty numbers are still fiercely contested. While May 18 became a day of commemoration for the victims in 1997, Gwangju remains a flashpoint for political conflict. As recently as 2017 Han was blacklisted on grounds of ideological bias by the former president Park Geun-hye’s administration (2013–17), with Human Acts excluded from a national literacy project.

Han was born in Gwangju and was nine years old at the time of the violence, but her family had moved to the outskirts of Seoul earlier in the year. She has said that her life was changed when her father, also a novelist, showed her photographs from the uprising two years later. The memory of her eleven-year-old self absorbing the shock is captured in the epilogue of Human Acts, titled “The Writer, 2013”:

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there.

The breaking of a tender thing – a soul, a conscience or a physical body, as in the case of the characters depicted in Human Acts – is the most urgent subject of Han’s masterwork. In seven parts, each labelled with the name of its narrator and the year in which they speak, we hear from the community surrounding a middle-school student, Dong-ho, who helps identify corpses brought to the Provisional Office. Why a boy, barely a teenager, has been entrusted with this role is a valid question, to make no mention of the question of why these bodies are piling up in the first place. There is no reasonable answer to any of these questions, yet Han’s writing insists that we still bear witness to such atrocities.

In the fourth section, titled “The Prisoner, 1990”, a survivor of government torture struggling to provide testimonies for a professor’s research asks:

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat?

This is the central question running through Han Kang’s work. Her language, often as direct as a conversation with a friend, forces readers to drop their defences and well-worn evasions. The violence she describes shocks until we realize – until she brings us to realize – that the alternative of simply adjusting to its demands is the greater horror.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz is the author of the novel Everything Belongs to Us, 2017. She was born in Seoul and lives in New Jersey

The post A hunger for truth appeared first on TLS.