Riding the Korean Hallyu wave on the back of Han Kang’s contribution to world literature must have given the select members of the Nobel Prize Committee a terrific thrill. That Han’s work, to use her surname in the Korean manner, is unsettling is unquestionable. At the age of 53, Han is being hailed as one of the youngest women to snatch the golden fleece of Literature.
In her best known work, The Vegetarian, which catapulted her to fame when it won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, she sets up a situation that is so bizarre as to be alien, if not alienating. It is like watching Babette’s Feast in reverse, going from the sheer joy of excess consumption to a puritanical denial of food. To focus on The Vegetarian in the context of the Nobel Prize allows one a sharper perspective in gauging Han’s work.
The Vegetarian
Portobello Books
Pages: 183
Price: Rs.499
“My books are variations on the theme of human violence,” Han has said in her interviews. She belongs to a family of writers and artists. Her father, Han Seung-won, who is a novelist himself, has said: “Sentences written by my daughter are extremely delicate, beautiful, and sad.” He also has an interesting aside on the English translator Deborah Smith, whom he describes as belonging to a “traditional British family”, whatever that means, and explains that her long association of “learning Korean for seven years in both Britain and Korea helped her develop a perspective on Korean society”.
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Writing as a vegetarian and an expert on Korean culture, D.C. Zook tells us in a 2016 post on Medium.com that though the title The Vegetarian is clear enough to describe the young woman Yeong-hye, the central character, in Korean, it also means something fairly odd, if not derogatory. Or, as explained by Zook, “a person who eats vegetables” and, even stranger, “an eater of plants”, not out of religious convictions or for health compulsions but out of choice. Zook alludes to the Jain community in India as another example of vegetarianism, sometimes taken to extremes in their voluntary renunciation of life.
‘A Lego couple’
The trajectory of Yeong-hye’s life falls into three parts. In each segment we see her through the eyes of individuals close to her. In the first part, we see the struggles faced by her husband, who is depicted as a typical Korean company executive. He has chosen Yeong-hye for her comfortable anonymity. They could be a Lego couple hoping to be plugged into a smoothly manufactured Lego world, which stock representations of South Koreans routinely celebrate.
In The Vegetarian, which catapulted her to fame when it won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, she sets up a situation that is so bizarre as to be alien, if not alienating. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
She, however, has an inner life. There is a horrendous episode where we are presented with how a dog that has bitten her is tortured, roasted, and fed to her as a form of healing. These images subsume her physical core until her body itself revolts. It disrupts the Lego husband’s world when she repeatedly announces, “I had a dream”, and announces her decision to become a plant eater.
It leads to one of the most violent confrontations within the extended family, as Yeong-hye’s father, an army veteran during the Vietnam War, brutally spears a chunk of meat between her lips. Later, we are told how he beats his younger daughter on her calves to make her obey him. Does it also imply a critique of the overt Americanisation of South Korea as the showcase for capitalism?
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The second segment is named “The Mongolian Spot”. It traces an obsession that her elder sister In-hye’s husband, an artist, has developed for the birthmark by that name that he imagines is ingrained on Yeong-hye’s bottom. The sequence of events that leads to the videographing of the two of them painting each other’s nude bodies with tendrils of leaves and flowers that circle around the birthmark is both erotic and innocent. Is there a reference here to the Greek myth of Myrrha, doomed after an incestuous relationship with her father, Cinyrus of Cyprus, to become a plant? Her tears are said to contain the drops of myrrh used in incense. Her illegitimate son, however, is Adonis.
The final segment belongs to In-hye, the sister. She stands as a reluctant witness to Yeong-hye’s final metamorphosis as she struggles against the draconian regime she undergoes at the mental asylum where she has been lodged. One of her fellow inmates sheds tears like Myrrha.
Yeong-hye’s dreams allow us a glimpse into the violence that Han suggests lies beneath the bland surface of Korean society. Han’s later books, Human Acts, The White Book, and Greek Lessons, tend to be more overt. Authoritarianism comes in many forms. Literature, in all its baffling diversity, offers manifold interpretations of resistance. That is what the Nobel Prize for Literature celebrates.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer, critic, and cultural commentator.
