Han Kang, 'The Vegetarian' (2004-7)
The Nobel laureate's most famous novel
Han Kang’s 채식주의자 [chaesikjuuija ‘The Vegetarian’] first appeared, in Korea, as three separate novellas (2004-5), and was reissued in a single volume in 2007. Deborah Smith translated each of the original components into English (2015-16). The work, published altogether in English, won the International Booker prize in 2016. Here, fully-spoilery, is an account of the novel. After that I discuss it, at some length, but perhaps with less insight than it deserves. I shall read more Han Kang, and come back to it.
So: Part 1, ‘The Vegetarian’, concerns a young woman called Yeong-hye who, after a distressing series of dreams, to do with blood and flesh and suffering, a selva oscura and horrors, decides to become a vegetarian. Her husband, Cheong, an office worker, is astonished and affronted by this decision, and by the fact that she has thrown out all meat from the freezer. Cheong, who narrates this first portion of the novel, is an ordinary but unpleasant character, disparaging of his wife, unempathetic, selfish. Yeong-hye herself is unassertive, withdrawn, but unshakeable when it comes to her decision not to eat meat. Her family stage an intervention, bringing meat meals to the apartment and trying to pressure her into eating them. When she refuses Yeong-hye’s father loses his temper, strikes her in the face, and force-feeds her a morsel of pork. Yeong-hye spits out the meat with ‘an animal cry of distress’, grabs a fruit-knife and cuts at her own wrists. After hospitalisation, Yeong-hye displays signs of madness—dissociating, sitting in the hospital garden topless, crushing a small bird to death in her hands. The death of this nameless sparrow is the last moment of Part 1.
Part 2 ‘Mongolian Mark’ follows-on from this situation. The titular birthmark is Yeong-hye’s, a blue spot on her buttock. The narration here shifts to third-person, and the narration is focalised through an unnamed character, a young artist, married to Yeong-hye’s older sister, In-hye. The artist shares a studio in downtown Seoul with a number of other young artists, but is blocked, unproductive, unhappy. He has a particular interest in flowers painted upon naked bodies, and when he learns that his sister-in-law has the blue birthmark he becomes fascinated by her, erotically-fixated. He persuades her to come to his studio, to undress, to allow him to paint flowers all over her skin, and to film her, the movie being the artwork he aims to create. She is unembarrassed and indeed delighted by this embellishment.
‘Shall we go again?’ She nodded and walked over to the sheet. She shed her clothes and lay down again, on her back this time … the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armoured by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes. Her skinny collarbones; her breasts that, because she was lying on her back, were slender and elongated like those of a young girl; her visible ribcage; her parted thighs, their position incongruously un-sexual; her face, still and swept clean ….
This time he painted huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white, covering the skin from her collarbone to her breasts. If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night, these were the brilliant flowers of the day. Orange day lilies bloomed on her concave stomach and golden petals were scattered pell-mell on her thighs. [88]
Later she asks, gesturing at her chest, ‘will this come off with water?’ and when the artist replies ‘I wouldn’t have thought it’d come off too easily. You’ll have to wash it a few times to …’ she interrupts: ‘I don’t want it to come off.’ But simply painting the flowers is not the complete artwork for the artist: he wants to film painted Yeong-hye having sex with a man—not himself, for he does not consider himself attractive enough. His artistic vision is ‘the image of a man and woman, their bodies made brilliant with painted flowers, having sex against a background of unutterable silence … a progression of scenes lurching from violence to tenderness.’ He persuades J, one of the artists with whom he shares his studio, to get naked and be painted, but when he encourages J to have intercourse with the passive Yeong-hye, he revolts.
‘What? You want to make some kind of a porno?’
‘If you don’t feel like it, that’s fine. But if it were possible for you to just naturally …’
‘That’s it. I’m done.’ J stood up.
The artist ends up filming himself having sex with Yeong-hye, and his wife discovers the two of them, the following morning, naked together. Distraught, he rushes to the studio’s balcony thinking to jump off and end his life, but the section ends without him actually jumping:
It was the only way. The only way to make a clean end of all this. And yet he kept on standing there as if rooted to the spot, as if this was the final moment of his life, staring fixedly at the blazing flower that was her body, that body which now glittered with images so much more intense than those he had filmed in the night. [119]
The ‘blazing flower’ of Yeong-Hi’s body looks forward to the blazing trees with which the novel will end. The character’s name literally means ‘flower’ (정수, jeongsu, ‘flower’; the word also means integer, and purification). Her petallic birthmark is the cosmos writing her true name upon her flesh.
When it was first published as a novella, ‘Mongolian Mark’ won the Yi Sang Literary Prize.
The novel’s final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, focuses on In-hye: again, from a third-person narrative perspective, told in the present tense. She has kicked her cheating husband out, and is raising their child alone, whilst also managing her successful shop. It is In-hye who is paying the fees for Yeong-hye’s stay in a psychiatric hospital, and she is the only person to visit her. Mostly uncommunicative, desperately thin, Yeong-hye has taken to standing on her head. She has resolved not to eat anything, neither meat nor vegetables. In-hye visits:
When In-hye laid the food she had brought out on the table, Yeong-hye said: ‘Sister, you don’t need to bring that stuff now.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t need to eat any more … I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water’ [148]
She believes she is a tree. This is why she spends much of her time upside down: ‘I thought the trees stood up straight,’ she tells In-hye, ‘I only just found out now. They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them.’ The prognosis is not good: the doctor tells In-hye, ‘we’ve done our very best, but her condition hasn’t improved … I know I told you this last time, but fifteen to twenty percent of anorexia nervosa patients will starve to death.’
In a call-back to the scene in the first part where Yeong-hye’s father force-feeds her pork, and she stabs herself in the wrist with a knife, In-hye observes the hospital staff force-feeding their patient—a tube is nasally inserted to pump food into Yeong-hye’s body. In-hye cracks: ‘get away from her!’ She tries to stop the procedure.
‘Don’t!’ In-hye screams, her voice drawn out like a wail. ‘Stop it! Don’t! Please don’t!’ She bites the arm of the carer holding her and throws herself forward again. ‘What the hell, you bitch!’ the carer groans … ‘Stop it for god’s sake. Please stop.’ In-hye grabs the wrist of the head nurse, the one who is holding the syringe with the tranquilliser. [176]
Yeong-hye has vomited up a lot of blood, and is transferred to a medical hospital for care. In-hye travels with her in the ambulance, and the novel closes with her watching the trees through the glass.
The ambulance is rounding the last bend in the road, leaving Mount Ch’ukseong. She sees a black bird flying up towards the dark clouds. Quietly she breathes in. The trees by the side of the road are blazing, green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage. In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something. The look in her eyes is dark and insistent. [183]
That’s where the novel ends.
Deborah Smith’s translation has come under criticism. It seems that Smith had only been studying Korean, from a standing start, for only three years before she took on the task of translating this novel. According to Charse Yun, writing in Korea Exposé, “10.9% of the first part of the novel was mistranslated. Another 5.7% of the original text was omitted. And this was just the first section.’ Oddly precise percentage points, there; but Charse says: ‘mistakes included using “foot” (bal) for “arm” (pal) in a door-shutting scene … more serious “mistranslations” include the novel’s opening line: Han writes that the protagonist’s husband never really thought of his wife as “anything special”; Smith renders this as “completely unremarkable in every way”.’ Looks bad! On the other hand, Smith worked closely with Kang on the work, and the author has declared herself perfectly happy with the result.
Lacking Korean, I cannot judge the accuracy question. In a LA Review of Books essay-response to these criticisms, Smith has conceded that there may be some slips in her work, and argues that no translation can be perfect. More, she says, ‘the things that Han Kang has received extraordinarily high praise for’ are things ‘that have nothing to do with the translator, such as The Vegetarian’s “potent images” (the Guardian), “[brilliant] three-part structure” and “crushing climax, phantasmagoric yet emotionally true” (Publishers Weekly). Structure, plot, themes, characterization, et cetera, are all the work of the author.’
That said, I wasn’t particularly persuaded by Deborah Smith’s work as a crafter of English prose: ending her sentences with prepositions (‘he’d been surprised by the speed and decisiveness of his own action, something he’d never before realised her was capable of’ [66]), splitting her infinitives (‘to successfully combine’ [108]), awkward in her conventions of emphasis (‘“leave me alone! Leave me alo-o-one!”’ [173]). There are stylistic repetitions that land clumsily: ‘at last he set the fruit down, flipped open his mobile and dialled her number. He reached the third floor. After putting the fruit down next to the door, he took off his shoes.’ [73] Phrasing slides from elevated poeticism into cliché: eyes ‘greedily drink in’ what they’re looking at, darkness is ‘pitch-black’; the protagonist is ‘a woman of few words’; another woman’s face is ‘wreathed in smiles’. ‘The rain is still pouring down, its measured cacophony slightly less vicious’ [128]—but vicious is the wrong word (what is the vice of which the rain is supposedly guilty?): ‘savage’ or ‘violent’ is meant.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The Vegetarian is Han Kang’s most famous novel, and it is worth addressing how far it ‘works’, whether its narrativity, imagery and obliquity fit together effectively. The first section reads like a version of Bartleby the Scrivener: Yeong-hye’s unswervable withdrawal, her refusal to go along with her boorish husband’s demands, or her bullying family. Someone who knows Korea better than I can say whether insisting upon vegetarianism is a more eccentric, more unusual thing to do there than it would be in the UK—ten million Buddhists live in South Korea, so one would suppose a certainly amount of vegetarianism is usual. Still, Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is not religious, and it is not, as with Bartleby, a pure reflex of refusal. She has disturbing and bloody dreams; she finds the look and smell meat physically disgusting: her refusal is grounded in a somatic reaction. The vegetarianism, though it shades into deliberate self-starvation, is genuinely meant.
The extraordinary passivity of Yeong-hye has something to do with her gender. Cheong, narrating part 1, tells us that he married her precisely because she was so unassertive: ‘the passive personality of this woman suited me down to the ground’ he says [3]. It was what he wanted in a wife. In one scene, he rapes her—she has been avoiding having sex with him because he smells of meat, and she can’t bear it, so he forces himself on her. It’s a shocking scene, all told from the odious Cheong’s perspective:
So yes, on nights when I returned home late, and somewhat inebriated after a meal with colleagues, I could grab my wife and push her to the floor … she put up a surprisingly strong resistance, spitting out vulgar curses, and one time in three I would manage to insert myself. Once that had happened she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, as if she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services. [30]
This novella was published in 2004. Korea didn’t make marital rape an offence until 2007. So, yes, Yeong-hye’s passivity is, clearly, about woman’s experience. But this is not a novel that puts gender politics at the heart of what it is doing. There is a mystery, more existential, more generally afflictive than gendered, in the work.
It is a story of madness. We could say that madness is about legibility, the insane becoming illegible to those around them. The flowers painted on Yeong-hye’s body are multiply-valent sigils, interpretable in terms of her own vegetative yearning, or in terms of her brother-in-law’s sexual desire, her birthmark a stamp or hieroglyph impressed upon her flesh (her meat) by nature. In-hye notes that her younger sister has always been, to a degree, unreadable: ‘Yeong-hye was always difficult to read,’ we are told. ‘So difficult that there were times when she seemed like a total stranger’ [129]
Or more precisely, Yeong-hye is at once banal and mysterious, and her world is at once, for the Western reader especially, banal and strange—space is measured in p’yong, birthmarks are called mongolian marks (‘congenital birthmarks seen most commonly over the lumbosacral area. They are bluish-green to black in colour and oval to irregular in shape. They are most commonly found in individuals of African or Asian ethnic background’). Manners and expectations are unusual, except where they are ordinary and recognisable. Deborah Smith has read the novel, to render it into English, and in places misread it. John Bayley talks about the balance of mystery and banality in literature:
The Sherlock Holmes tales exploit both the puzzle and the adventure, and the humdrum oddness of the society in which they take place: but writers who are cunning by nature or naturally fortunate know that mysteries are not there to be solved. Todorov said that Henry James’s stories mostly depend on a query and a riddle, which their endings formulate with complete artistry but without solving: the puzzle is itself the solution.
Han Kang goes, I think, too far towards solving the mystery of Yeong-hye, or at least of offering a kind of poetic, associative ‘explanation’. Her vegetarianism is less about what she prefers to eat, and more about her sense of self as such. She wants to be, not eat, vegetation, and she pursues this dream by withdrawing from the meat-world of men, and then from society as a whole. Plant-leby the Scrivener. The final portion, where In-hye visits her sister in the asylum and finds her performing handstands, strikes a faintly ludicrous tone: up-ending oneself as a sign of madness. ‘Insanity is a kind of upside-downness’ is a slightly fatuous take on the subject.
Yeong-hye’s inversion is, as she explains, based on the idea that trees have plunged their ‘hands’ into the soil and, I suppose, that their leaves are their ‘toes’ twitching in the air. But this idea of inversion runs, I think, counter to the structural logic of the rest of the novel, which is not about the world turned upside down, but the world disengaged-from, the world evaded, missed. Plants are passive by nature—with the exception of the meat-loving Venus Fly Trap, perhaps. Meat is the cooked flesh of animals, and also what we humans are made out of. I don’t know if the English slang by which meat can refer to the penis has any equivalent in Korean (the painted penises of ‘Mongolian Mark’, all the sex) but I do know that ‘meat’ as food (고기) and meat as ‘substance, content, depth core, essence, kernel’, the meat of the matter (알맹이) is also a distinction Korean makes. How far this novel gets to the meat of the matter is the question. No ideas but in things, fine. But the ideas in this novel are vegetatively inchoate.
A person who chooses vegetarianism, who is beaten and force-fed by her angry family, is clearly being wronged; but an anorexic who is starving themselves to death being tube-fed by medical professionals to preserve life is not such a cut-dried ethical situation. Perhaps you think that people, not in the healthy balance of their mind, should be allowed to injure and kill themselves, but I’m not sure that’s right, and I’m not sure many people would agree with you. If Yeong-hye’s fantasy is to give up food altogether and live on sunlight and water, then her fantasy is delusive, harmful, morbid. Han Kang has said that the germ of the novel was a line from Korean writer Yi Sang that ‘really struck her’: ‘I believe that humans should be plants.’ In an interview, Han has said:
The idea for the book originally came to me as an image of a woman turning into a plant. I wrote a short story, “The Fruit of My Woman,” in 1997, where a woman literally turns into a plant. After several years (2003–2004) I reworked this image in The Vegetarian, in a darker and fiercer way. … [The themes] are questions about human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence. On the reverse side of the protagonist Yeong-hye’s extreme attempt to turn her back on violence by casting off her own human body and transforming into a plant lies a deep despair and doubt about humanity.
But that havering ambiguity of ‘(im)possibility of innocence’ suggests an unsurety, a fallibility of insight. Is innocence possible? Or not? By starving herself to death in the service of her delusive goal, how is Yeong-hye addressing or repudiating despair-worthy, dubious humanity? Disengagement is moral abdication. Are we really so irredeemable?
The story is, across its length, about a woman going mad: Yeong-hye begins as a woman living an ordinary, if limited and frustrating, life; she makes a choice that alienates her from her husband and family, whose angry reaction provokes her to self-harm, killing small creatures, sexual excess, anorexia, delusion and internment in a psychiatric hospital. This is well, if distressingly drawn by Han, although the novel flirts with the notion that, for all that she suffers, for all her mental and physical distress, there is truth in her madness.
David Cooper, one of R D Liang’s collaborators, thought (this is from his introduction to Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation) that ‘madness has in our age become a sort of lost truth’; although Laing himself was more circumspect about his anti-psychiatry project: ‘sometimes,’ is how he put it, ‘transcendental experiences … break through in psychosis.’ Lionel Trilling, who quotes both these lines in Sincerity and Authenticity, does so to disagree. He thinks Laing’s distinction between ‘true’ madness and such madness as is a ‘travesty’ of healing, such that ‘only the “true” madness gives rise to transcendental experiences of heuristic value’ is insufficient to the Langian idea that ‘all psychosis is to be thought of as a process of therapy, not in itself a disease but an effort to cure a disease’. Madness is not existential veracity.
Who that has had experience of our social reality will doubt its alienated condition? And who that has thought of his experience in the light of certain momentous speculations made over the last two centuries will not be disposed to find some seed of cogency in a view that proposes an antinomian reversal of all accepted values, of all received realities?
But who that has spoken, or tried to speak, with a psychotic friend will consent to betray the masked pain of his bewilderment and solitude by making it the paradigm of liberation from the imprisoning falsehoods of an alienated social reality? And who that reads and comprehends the blithe sentences which describe madness (to use the word that cant prefers) in terms of transcendence and charisma will fail to perceive the total refusal of human connection that they express, the appalling belief that human existence is made authentic by the possession of a power, or the persuasion of its possession, which is not to be qualified or restricted by the coordinate existence of any fellow man?
Yet the doctrine that madness is health, and that madness is liberation, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don’t have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane—it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that, in radical psychology as in radical politics, it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence—we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstances that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring—the falsities of an alienated social reality rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity.
This is Trilling in 1971, but I do not think the situation is much altered in the 2020s. We can, in other words, wonder whether Yi Sang’s ‘I believe that humans should be plants’ is a belief worth itself. Should we be plants? Really? If the idea is that vegetation is less harmful in the world, that plants are the portion of existence not red in tooth and claw, not expropriative, repressive, not raping and wounding and killing, I have my doubts. This turns on a romanticised, selective apprehension of plant-ness: the pretty petals of a flower, the nobility of a tall tree. Plant life is life, and as a whole is striving for life in the war of all against all, just as all life is. Vegetative rapacity works on a slower scale than the tiger tearing the windpipe of its prey, or a human stabbing another human, but it works. Weeds run riot. If we left vegetation unchecked it would tear through our roads, crush out buildings, roots would chew through our underground cables and clog our sewers. Particularly in the tropics, vegetation is always threatening to overwhelm. Cheong indulges his rape-fantasy that he is a Japanese soldier and his suffering wife a ‘comfort woman’; but Japanese soldiers also practices bamboo torture, in which prisoners-of-war were fixed over bamboo shoots until the plant forced its growing way through their flesh. I believe that humans should be plants mistakes passivity for the actual, intense activity of plant life: the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books transform various characters into plants, and it is not a comforting or moral business. Southern Reach is, in its planty-ness, more rhizomatic, and Han’s novel, with its final image of the trees blazing their green, more arboreal. Perhaps that makes a difference. I don’t know, though.
I don’t mean to be crass, or point-missing, in my reading. I could say that my reaction to the novel, striking and vivid though it is, was one of resistance to what it is saying, and that the thrust of The Vegetarian is about a kind of transformative, metamorphic acceptance. Maybe I should essay a more herbal, a more pastoral reading of the work. I will, as I say, come back to it.