Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’

First of all, my understanding of mainstream literary fiction is that it can’t be “spoilt” because although the plot is there for a reason, it isn’t the main point, so there just will be “spoilers” here. Not that it matters.

Han Kang is a South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who also won a big prize of some kind, possibly the Man Booker. You see, this is how ignorant I am in this field. She’s written quite a few novels, one of which, ‘Greek Lessons’, I’m currently reading. ‘The Vegetarian’ (채식주의자) seems to be her best known. It’s quite short. In it, a previously apparently conventional woman, Yung-Hye (romanised differently by the way – her name’s 영혜 I think) who has a series of gruesome nightmares which persuade her to go veggie. Although it’s described as vegetarian, she is in fact vegan. She throws out all the meat in the kitchen and refuses also to wear animal products. Her family problematise all of this and regard her as harming herself and being unnecessarily defiant. She loses a fair bit of weight and eventually her father hits her and attempts to force feed her a piece of pork violently. She then slashes her wrist and is admitted to hospital where she’s psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, then leaves and after she’s found, she’s sitting at a fountain apparently having taken a bite out of a song bird. That’s the first of three sections, called ‘The Vegetarian’ and told from her husband’s viewpoint. In the second section, ‘Mongolian Mark’, her brother-in-law, the new narrator, becomes erotically preoccupied with her and the idea of painting her with flowers because of her Mongolian blue spot, which he thinks of as a petal. She wants to retain the floral body painting. He hires a young man to do the same to, videos it and tries to get them to have sex. When he refuses and leaves, they have sex themselves and fall asleep. In the morning, his wife, that is, her sister, discovers them. The final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, is from her sister’s viewpoint. Yung-Hye is in decline in the mental hospital refusing to eat and insists on standing on her head most of the time. In-Hye, her sister, is aware that she’s wasting away, takes her into her care and leaves the hospital with her, knowing that she’s wasting away and apparently wishing to become a plant.

For me, reading mainstream literature is pearls before swine. I won’t appreciate it or understand it because I’m overcome by stress and a sense of inferiority when I attempt to read it, even if I have an aptitude for following it in the first place, which I probably lack. Also, before I read it, absolutely will not listen to or read anyone else’s take on a novel because I want my reaction to be my own rather than being informed by someone else’s personality. Therefore, what I’m about to say is purely my own reaction. Here we go then.

The novel is unusually structured, being divided into three sections, each expressing a different character’s perception of Yung-Hye. The only time she speaks for herself is through the nightmares she has at the start of the novel. I think it’s clear that this is to deny her agency and illustrate how her perspective and therefore she as a woman in South Korean society is not respected. This theme permeates the whole story. Even initially, her husband finds it embarrassing that she doesn’t wear a bra, making everyone aware of her nipples in his unfortunately probably accurate view. At no point is her decision taken seriously and it’s generally seen as wilfully causing a problem for everyone else. It would be easy to say that the mere fact of her going vegan is one possible symbolisable act among many and is fairly arbitrary, but it isn’t quite that. It’s a reaction against perceived violence, which is not only stereotypically masculine but is shown as such in the story. And to be honest, I am well aware that dietary veganism is often seen as a nuisance by carnists, and I don’t want to go into too much depth here but there is a tendency for carnists to see their own dietary choices as, dare I say, “normal”. This brings about a second theme, that of conformity and the stigmatisation of non-conformity, where the latter is seen as obstreperous and disrespected. There’s no distinction here between rational and irrational decision-making. Yung-Hye can certainly be seen as anorexic but the real point is that no attempt is made at any point to empathise with her and what of her dietary choice means to her is entirely ignored by her family and the psychiatrists.

In the second section, she’s clearly strongly sexually objectified by her brother-in-law. Concern is expressed by others that he’s taking advantage of her but it’s also ambiguous because she does seem to want to become a plant and the sex may be akin to pollination, so he’s fulfilling her desires in one sense and she could be seen as having consented, though very passively. Her brother-in-law is only very distant from his wife and I didn’t get a feeling of outrage from her about his infidelity.

In the final section, Yung-Hye’s sister comes to perceive her as having done something with her life, unlike herself, because all she’s done is conform and not really lived her life at all compared to her sister’s own decision, or perhaps natural drift, into becoming a plant. Even her psychosis is an achievement compared to her own life. At this point, I began to worry that the novel was going to turn out to be magically realist, but thankfully it didn’t. I think magical realism is the kind of thing which needs to be present throughout a story rather than introduced most of the way through, and I half-expected Yung-Hye to turn literally into a plant, which I think would’ve been silly.Okay, so there’s all of that, but I do still have a problem. A fairly unimportant part of this is that I probably missed the significance of almost everything in the story, but there’s a bigger issue, which is that of universalism. I’m aware that South Korea is a distant country on the other side of Eurasia and not much of what goes on there filters through to the Western media, so I know about a few things and as usual a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it may lead to a mental caricature of the country. I know, for example, that it’s a young democracy where there was recently an attempted coup which was defeated by parliamentary representatives themselves, that it’s rather surprisingly mainly Christian, the origin of the Unification Church, and more relevantly that there’s a “4B” movement among women which seeks to avoid sex with men, childbirth, marriage and heterosexual dating — 비섹스, 비출산, 비연애, 비혼 — which is also prejudiced against queer men. Moreover, I’m aware of Chip Chan, a woman who appears to be mentally ill and not receiving much help who has confined herself to her flat and streams everything 24/7 because she wants the world to monitor what’s going on for her personal safety. I have also heard, and this may be incorrect, that they’re highly conformist and anti-vegetarian for that reason. There are other things, like K-pop, which are largely irrelevant to this story, and also the sublime and inspired invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is perhaps a little more so. And this is what gets me, because from those few features I could easily construct a largely inaccurate image of the culture, but at the same time I have to say that this novel does seem to confirm this. I’ve written about Korea before of course. But this is what bothers me. There’s an attitude referred to as Orientalism, which fetishises the specialness of Eurasian cultures outside our peninsula and can be seen, for example, in certain attitudes towards Yoga and the suicide forest in Japan, or even something as simple as taking your shoes off when you go in the house, where utterly routine and prosaic things are othered, so I don’t want a Korean author’s writing to be pigeonholed in this way. All the same, the question of universalism arises. I already find it surprising and disquieting that, for example, Greek drama seems to speak to us today over two thousand years later, because it makes me feel that I’m not letting the work itself speak on its own terms and not hearing the playwright owing to projecting my own preconceptions on it. I tend to find – look, I’ll try to define universalism first as that might help.

This might not be the right phrase, but by literary universalism I mean the way that works separated considerably in space and time, i.e. culturally, still seem to speak to an audience which is very different to the creators. Due to my own background as a Northwestern European, I experience this particularly with the works of William Shakespeare. That said, many people do benefit from reading the notes which often accompany his plays. We may need a study guide, and that makes a lot of sense because of the drastic differences in cultural mores between then and now. I’m sceptical that we’re really able to make a connection and wonder if we’re just hallucinating. It seems to me that there cannot be any kind of phenomenon which facilitates that. At the same time, the Good Samaritan is a relatable parable and if we really could not understand another culture, passing by on the other side would be entirely feasible. I want to give an example of this from my own life. Many years ago I was walking down the street on a windy day and a woman had her umbrella blow inside out and she was struggling with it. I decided it would be an insult to her independence to “help” and walked on by, at which point she irately and sarcastically said “thank you!” to me. This is probably an example of failing to meet expectations of some kind, and it’s also an example of trying to pass by on the other side in a supportive way. There was presumably some kind of script I was expected to follow in these circumstances which I didn’t. Likewise, the tale of the Good Samaritan, among other things, attempts to indicate that one can transcend cultural differences and marginalisation by “being human”, i.e. it does seem to recognise or assert that there is a universal human nature. I imagine that she had a kind of idea of the “done thing” in this situation against which I consciously rebelled in a manner which was supposed to be passively supportive, or rather, because that’s quite patronising, not assuming that she’d want or need any intervention from someone else to deal with her problem. Some years after when I told someone about this incident, they imagined it as a “meet-cute”, which struck me as utterly bizarre but indicates how we might try to cram incidents into particular cultural narratives which have no real significance.

This in a more general sense is what bothers me about ‘The Vegetarian’, or perhaps I should actually be writing ‘채식주의자’ to emphasise its foreignness. I generally try to avoid reading works in translation, partly because I’d then have to trust the translator but also, and mainly, because they’ve then been ripped out of their cultural context and plonked unceremoniously into mine, at which point I will fail to understand them completely while having the illusion that I have. So, looking at ‘채식주의자’, I see it as including themes of women’s oppression, conformity, cruelty and failure of empathy, and I realise that good literature has to try to leave room for ambiguity and not close off the narrative, but I don’t know how what I call veganism and what I call anorexia nervosa maps onto Han Kang’s world view. I am aware that some people, particularly teenage girls, describe themselves as going vegetarian or vegan as a way of masking eating disorders, but I also find it a little irksome that this decision is pathologised in this way. It shouldn’t be associated with what seems to be self-destructiveness because to me that’s a lazy equation which makes concessions to carnism. The trouble is that in a wider setting, Yung-Hye’s vegetarianism and what’s constructed as an eating disorder does actually work very well as a kind of quiet rebellion, shorn of the question of whether it’s primarily a conscious decision, because of its contrast with the inherent violence of Korean, and in fact most, societies. She has nightmares and this provokes her to behave in a manner her peers find unacceptable. Her husband and sister in particular then take her current behaviour and use it to reinterpret her past, as if everything was inevitably going to lead to this. Her behaviour, perhaps, feels like an accusation. She does in fact seem to impose it on her husband by throwing out all the meat and dairy and refusing to prepare animal products, but it may be more out of obliviousness than a conscious attempt to assert herself, and this is probably in fact a theme of the story.

One thing I completely failed to understand is why she seems to have bitten a living song bird, to the extent that I wonder if I got that scene wrong. This indicates a bigger issue: I lack lived experience as a South Korean woman. I don’t know how I can be expected to appreciate any of this, and more broadly how any reader can be expected to appreciate any novel. It seems like an illusion or a form of trickery to me that this seems to be possible.

I don’t know. I just find these things very hard and quite traumatising, and not because of any trauma or conflict portrayed in the pages so much as that I seem to be expected to hear this communication when I don’t know how I possibly could, and it’s quite depressing. I can’t step out of myself far enough to do that, and have doubts that anyone really can.