Hello Gentle Reader,
After winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with “The Vegetarian,” Han Kang, has become a permanent translated fixture in the English language. An appreciated literary star in the company of Bae Suah and Hwang Sok-yong. “The Vegetarian,” took inspiration from the line: “I believe that humans should be plants,” by the avant-garde Korean writer Yi Sang. What follows is the decision of a woman who decides to stop eating meat. This otherwise mundane decision will have dire and violent consequences for herself, husband and family. “The Vegetarian,” refused to be defined as either a surreal or horror novel, but it proved Han Kang was a master of the slow burn discourse and a cartographer of the interior. Subsequent works translated into English were equally engaged in themes of violence, memory, grief, and guilt. “Human Acts,” poignantly recounts the Gwangju Uprising of the 1980’s and the resulting massacre that took place. “Human Acts,” is a symphonic novel. An orchestral arrangement of voices each rising and adding to the cadences and chorus, recounting event, experience, and memory. Rather than focusing on the massacre itself, Han Kang traces the ripple effect of the events from those historical days through both a macro social lens and individual realities, providing a panoramic novel of different cadences blending into a symphonic narrative chorus detailing the legacy of the uprising and massacre on not only individuals or their families, but also, how it is incorporated into the social and political fabric of a society. In turn, “The White Book,” surveyed private tragedy. A vague composition that defies categorization, “The White Book,” is a psychological exploration of the nature of grief and guilt. At once a meditation on the colour white and its associative items, objects, and appearances in nature, such as: breast milk, swaddling bands, or snow; to the interior monologue of an unnamed narrator, a writer (much like Kang) wandering through Warsaw in a snowy evening. A treatise on memory, the unnamed stand in narrator for Han Kang, recounts the abrupt birth of her older sister, who died two hours later in her mothers’ arms. The narrative is an elegy of grief, guilt, and sorrow, which form a trio of shades of white tinting the narrative. In turn the landscape of Warsaw and its own history of ruin and destruction during the Second World War and rebuilding, becomes a metaphor for the death of the authors older sister and her own life made possible by her passing. Through each of her novels, Han Kang has proven herself to be an unflinching documentarian and cartographer of violence in all its incarnations – be it political or personal – in addition to being a writer of emotional resonance and skilled stylist, whose prose is lyrical and graceful as it is technical, eschewing sentimentality and sensationalism in favour of psychological insights and imagistic brilliance.
“Greek Lessons,” can easily be summarized as a simple story about two individuals maneuvering through the process of loss in a variety of forms. For the woman it is the loss of language, brought on by the death of her mother and loosing the custody of her son; for the man, it is the gradual loss of his sight, due to an inherent degenerative eye condition. The novel is interchanged between their two experiences and perspectives. The woman’s narrative presented in the third person. The man’s in first person singular. Their narratives intersect as they both involved in Ancient Greek language classes. Language is the bedrock and basis of “Greek Lessons.” Language is a writer’s bread and butter. Their tool and craft. Language is an ephemeral subject; shapeless and figureless, lacking physical substance and material, but an immediate and intricate component of an individual’s existence. From advertisements to marketing campaigns, traffic signs and street names, to business names, titles, emails, text messages; then the buzz and conversation of daily life. Language is a continual pulse of human achievement and culture. Always beating and flowing around individuals, and in turn evolving. Many writers have used language as the basis of their literary work, such as Nobel Laurate Elfriede Jelinek, whose linguistic vivisections examines how language creates, constructs, and influences reality, becoming a method of control and exerting power over others. Fellow Nobel Laureate Herta Müller in turn, exemplified how language is extorted, utilized and abused by authoritarian regimes to control and propagate ideological messaging, which run contrary to reality and lived experience; but also, how language can be subverted as a form of resistance, offering a precarious sanctuary. Language wielded by Han Kang neither vivisects its power structures or subverts authoritarian control; instead, language is violent intrusion and projection of an individual’s being:
“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.”
The woman has no driving interest in learning ancient Greek. The language has no utilitarian purpose or value as its extinct. She has no fascination or curiosity with ancient Greek philosophy or literature, which the lecturer often employees to provide context to the dead language’s evolution and exemplifying its complex grammar. No, the woman hopes that by learning ancient Greek she would once again reacquaint herself with her own language. This attempt is a replication of a previous success in its rehabilitative measures, when twenty years prior, the woman found herself exiled from language and verbal communication, only to be reintroduced to it when learning French. Perhaps ancient Greek interests her, because the language itself is considered dead. Its not spoken or utilized beyond niche environments, such as the class. This ritual then of summoning it forth from the river bank of oblivion, awakens the language from its seized silence and brings it back into the world in a hollow state. Parallels of the languages status as being extinct and the woman’s own hollowed out and shapeless existence can easily be deducted.
Language for the woman has always retained a dizzying and psychological affect. Her therapist simplistically diagnosis’s her muteness in terms of traumatic experience brought on by the loss of her mother and custody of her son. She rejects this assessment. Language is more existential; with her inability to incorporate it and manifest it in verbal structures is a disconnect between physiological failure and neurological lapse. For the woman, language is inaccessible, not psychologically blocked. The woman, however, had an apprehensive relationship with speech. Even when she did speak, the woman’s relationship with act of vocalizing language were less then assured:
“Even when she could talk, she’d always been soft-spoken.
It wasn’t an issue of vocal cords or lung capacity. She just didn’t like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.”
Han Kang’s characters often engage in unorthodox and unique forms of rebellion, be it choosing to no longer to eat meat, or in this case participate in speech or inhabit language as a physical projection of one’s self. Perhaps silence is her way of retreating from society and the world. An attempt at self-imposed metaphysical segregation. There again, this may only satisfy her therapists hurried assessment. Throughout the novel, the woman remains locked in silence, but Kang fills the space with beautiful imagistic writing, both of the woman’s wanderings through Seoul at night, wandering to exhaust herself to sleep, and the few personal details that are laced through an otherwise interior distilled perspective.
If the woman’s narrative is adrift and shrinking from the world’s scrutiny; then the lecturer’s is filled with an attempt to continually appreciate and record the world as its presented before him, while his sight is still intact, as it gradually deteriorates. His chapters are full of memories rendered colourfully with vibrant detail; in addition to loss and pain, as well as the unrequited love for his ophthalmologist’s deaf daughter; the estrangement of his family; and how is own relationship with the written world will inevitably change once his eyesight is gone. Throughout the novel, the lecturer and the woman (one of his students) gradually waltz around each other, engaged in their own spheres of loss both physically and personally. In the lectures chapter, introspection and drifting images and rumination are abandoned in favour of an assured and consciousness first person narrative.
“Greek Lessons,” is a bold novel, one which tackles the notion of language as a daily occurrence; a linguistic digression on the nature of phonemes; the three different voices styles of the ancient Greek language; the syntaxial differences and complexities between ancient Greek, the Hangul alphabet, and the German language (the adopted language of the lecturer); but also, how language becomes both a state of self-realization – for the lecturer Korean becomes a homecoming – while in turn, language contorts and mutilates itself, to the point of self-inflicted estrangement, as in the case of the woman. Throughout it all is Han Kang’s beautifully etched lyrical prose is graceful as it is assured, beautifully captured and translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. “Greek Lessons,” is a slow burn, returning to the themes of everyday violence and unorthodox rebellion for Han Kang, it also presents her as an extremely literary talent, capable of not just psychological insight, but also contemplative regarding linguistics and the nature of language as a defining feature of the human experience.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
No comments:
Post a Comment