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language: Korean (English tr. Deborah Smith)
country: South Korea
year: 2007
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 21.1.26-26.1.26
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (tr. Deborah Smith) is a wild book to have read in such close proximity to Cavar’s Failure to Comply.
like Failure to Comply, The Vegetarian is a novel about bodily autonomy and the crushing weight of social systems that are designed to control the body and, indeed, any expression of personhood. the novel is structured as a triptych, three sections that trace the ripple of responses to a woman named Yeong-hye who, haunted by dreams of horrific violence, has abruptly decided to become a vegetarian.
the first section is narrated in first person, past tense by Yeong-hye’s husband, an all-too-ordinary man who responds to his wife’s apparent waywardness — refusing to prepare meat for him as she has always done; embarrassing him at a dinner with his coworkers; ultimately barely eating at all —with increasing violence, both directly physical — including rape — and social, drawing her family into an effort to bully her into compliance and culminating in Yeong-hye attempting suicide at a family gathering after her father attempts to force-feed her a piece of meat. this section is a scathing portrait of patriarchal violence, both within marriage and within the nuclear family broadly. it also establishes one of the novel’s key themes, namely that if Yeong-hye’s behavior is not exactly rational (she is, after all, driven by a dream) it is nonetheless a reasonable, or comprehensible, response to the world around her, where the most inoffensive exercise of her bodily autonomy is met with such violence from people who are ostensibly her “loved ones”.
the second section is narrated in third person, past tense, from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, a video artist who finds himself both physically and aesthetically drawn to Yeong-hye after she is released from psychiatric care. there is a thematic shift here that serves as a reminder that the novel is a fix-up of three stories. the second section is, as I read it, concerned first and foremost with the problem of representation. the brother-in-law develops a new video project that involves the two of them having sex — an act which ultimately crosses over into rape. that the project as a whole is a kind of violation is interestingly signaled by another artist, J, who shares studio space with the brother-in-law. while J’s response to the brother-in-law’s new work is initially enthusiastic, when he is roped into performing he becomes increasingly uncomfortable and finally withdraws abruptly: “She doesn’t seem like a prostitute. And even if she was, it still wouldn’t be okay, you know?” here representation as an act of aestheticization is itself an act of (sexual) violence.
the final section is narrated in third person, present tense, from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye, whose marriage has collapsed after her discovery of her husband in bed with her sister, her husband’s abrupt flight, and her institutionalization of her sister. In-hye has been called to the psychiatric hospital to, in effect, sign off on final efforts to control Yeong-hye, who now refuses to eat at all and violently resists attempts to make her do so. moving between the present of the hospital visit and In-hye’s memories as she tries to make sense of her sister’s withdrawal from the world and the collapse of her own marriage, we return to the question of rationality. what I think is most interesting in this section is that Han on the one hand offers an “explanation” for Yeong-hye’s behavior and condition — the childhood trauma of her father’s violence, which she bore the brunt of — but it refuses to let this explanation stand as adequate or complete. instead, it breaks down In-hye’s life, which until Yeong-hye’s decision to give up meat was apparently stable and comfortable. behind this apparent stability, the novel observes, was the same array of social forces that were crushing Yeong-hye: patriarchal violence, the demands of reproductive labor, the violation of bodily autonomy.
the end is grim: if it was a dream that pushed Yeong-hye to assert her autonomy, In-hye asks, what happens after the dream?
I have dreams too, you know. Dreams…and I could let myself desolve into them, let them take me over…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because…because then…
but she trails off. we have to Wake Up, right? we have to be Realistic. we have to Accept. we have to Comply. because if we didn’t — if there were another option —
we have to comply because anything else would be unthinkable. it would mean our suffering had no purpose. that we gained nothing by enduring.
moods: dark, reflective, tense