Haribol Acharya
Word of mouth travels, and a crowd appears.
This quote comes from Trevor Noah, a South African comedian, writer and TV host. That has exactly what happened in the case of Han Kang when she got a couple of international awards. The Vegetarian is a novel that created terrific sensation in South Korea that won instant world recognition, has been trendy of late throughout reading communities. I have heard about the book years ago, but it did not occur to me to buy the book until Han Kang got the Nobel Prize for literature, though it won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Are prizes measures of the splendor of a book? Not necessarily so though it promotes and popularizes the writer instantaneously.
We grew accustomed to reading western books, be it poetry, fiction or nonfiction. We have read a little bit of Chinese literature but few have read Korean and until I came over to Han Kang I haven’t read a single work of Korean writers. With her ever-growing international fame and recognition soon after she won the Nobel Prize in literature, many portals to Korean literature have been opened simultaneously. Now I am also ardent about reading works of other Korean writers henceforth. Only if they get translated and enter our market.
Writing book reviews is a horrendously challenging job. The Vegetarian is the kind that is avant-garde, rebellious written in defiance of the establishment. The review here is reduced to a few aspects of the book taking inconsideration space, patience and time of the reader.
There are indeed so many things centering on the appraisal of the book and one of the beautiful things I came upon the novel is “bodily autonomy.” In other words the writer through the main character, Yeong-hye place emphasis on ‘body’ that drove her to attend a party without wearing a bra. It is promiscuity? Given the societal norm it is against the establishment and a portrayal of crudeness, vulgarity in a world where people live by double standards sticking to two sets of rules simultaneously. What is obscene and decency is a matter of approach that means how you understand phenomena. And it varies from society to society. This sounds transgression in many closed societies when Yeong-hye says: “Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts; nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe.” To delve deep into this point of view one must keep aside the “social canons” since they compel people to live hypocritically though everything is allowed “behind the curtain” or the mask. Passions, compassions, sensualities are bulldozed in a world where power dynamics always come before every human virtue. .
Thru Yeong-hye Han Kang transgressed the societal prototype by exposing the body or choosing to remain nude in public. Korean society was a patriarchal society and women were subjected to social and familial subjugations. Yeong-hye is a character Han Kang has put forward to defy the age old institution, and breaking with the past is not an easy job that is likely to make the book uncouth. Of course conformists always disagree. And they term it social degeneration.
Let us turn to a short biography of the writer. A South Korean writer she experimented through her fictional works that human beings are capable of being violent and her books raised a storm in Korean literature. And her father himself already a noted Korean writer, a novelist but he was financially unsuccessful. As such Han Kang had hard times in her early formative days. She grew up with books that surrounded her in her home, as she had said in an interview, “To me, books were half-living beings that constantly multiplied and expanded their boundaries… Before I made friends in a strange neighborhood, I had my books with me every afternoon.”
The novel takes a dramatic turn when Yeong-hye chooses to be a vegetarian, for in Korea based on the motif in the novel to be vegetarian is to be outlandish and alienated. The reason she took to vegetarianism was she said, ‘I had a dream’ and everything changed since then, she threw away all the meat items stored in the freezer. Her husband, Mr. Cheong, a simple employee found the act quite bizarre. He did everything to convince her that by giving up on eating meat she was doing something nobody did in Korea. When every attempt of her husband failed her parents, brother and sister tried to persuade her and her father had even force-fed her but to no avail. That particular scene in which her father coercively stuff meat into her mouth it seems that the very act is not less pathetic than the scene of rape. Both forced feeding and rapes are done into the body against the will, an immense act of attack and violence. A weirdness the reader comes upon in the novel particularly when Yeong-hye goes to a party and where she declines to eat meat which is unusual in Korean society and the other scene in which she attends the party without a bra that makes her nipples nearly visible. Her husband becomes fiery and feels his career is in jeopardy because of the eccentric demeanors of his wife.
The entire novel has three acts: In part one, Yeong-hye’s husband narrates the story in which he expresses his frustration over her abrupt lifestyle change and her decision of being a vegetarian reveals shockwaves through their matrimonial relationships and the society they were living in. And her behaviors keep growing more strange and erratic he feels he cannot go along with her estranged behaviors. That ends up in divorce.
Part two shifts focus to Yeong-hye’s brother-in -law, a commercially unsuccessful artist who is obsessed with her for a variety of reasons and one of them is sexual urge. The rest are themes of desire, power dynamics, and the intersections of art and reality and that push the boundaries and explores the darker aspects of human desire.
In part three, In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister narrates the episode where familial bonds, her sister’s bizarre choice that invites her ruin that culminates in a deeper understanding of the traumas her sister was going through.
Throughout the novel the reader comes across the inflexible social and familial structures braced up by long-standing, age-old institutions. But all those institutions collapse in Yeong-hyes case.
Her first novel in English, it is something the west and the rest of the world finds shockingly engaging, a story that defies the institution, the structure and the system. Here instinct is at work, and the body is out in full manifestations when Yeong-hye is reluctant to wear a bra, and readies herself to stand nude and allows her brother-in-law to paint flowers on her body. She sits in total nudity outside the hospital exposing every hidden part of her body to let sun rays kiss her innermost parts. It is not dirty to show the body despite the fact that society disgraces nudity. That is one of the themes of the novel that gives it an air of exclusivity.
One woman’s sole decision to reject meat is immense defiance against the social convention and the consequence of it is that she had to undergo huge psychological traumas. The novel centers on a miscellany of themes in which the reader finds autonomy of body, repressions, revealing a darker undercurrent to her simple choice. Alienation and madness stem from rejection of societal expectations and her withdrawals into vegetarianism from conformism has a huge price.
The vegetarian is rebelling against this violent world. The protagonist says,’ “My body is my own; I can do what I want with it.” “I am learning to listen to my body.”
Overall I found the novel transformative, that is to say I am not the same person in terms of my understanding of the world after reading the novel. As regards my understanding of the world, it is full of conventions, phoniness, and hypocrisy. People are two-faced and violent by nature. The central character here flouts and as a result she has to undergo huge sufferings. Freedom is expensive no doubt but ultimately it is the beauty of freedom that matters in life despite all the costs one has to incur. For the thrill of freedom is unmatchable.
