Literary criticism without a net: my attempt to review Han Kang's "The Vegetarian"

In early November, I finished the re-write of my novel and decided to just read for a few months, taking some time off of writing. The first book I wanted to read was The Vegetarian by Korean writer Han Kang. In order to feel like I was being super productive, I read it in Korean, so I could feel like I was reading good literature and also improving an important skill for me. I got through the first 2/3 of the book okay, but that last part killed me. I ended up taking days off of reading at some spots, and it took me over a month to read this one book, which completely ruined my reading schedule. But since I've committed to blogging about more of my reading projects because I think it makes me a better reader, here is my attempt to say something intelligent about the book after one read-through in a language that is not my native one. 

Quick note of interest for non Korean speakers: When I first heard about this book and someone told me the author's name was Han Kang, I thought either my friend was joking or that is was a pseudonym. Han Kang (Korean: 한강) is exactly the same word for the Han River, which goes through Seoul and absolutely every Korean knows about. But that appears to be her real name, which made me want to love this book. I mostly did.

Review

Every society has subjects that ought to be avoided in polite society. Religion and politics are the old standby examples in our culture. Politics--so the thinking goes--isn't a good subject for a dinner party because the risks of it causing acrimony are greater than the possible benefit from stimulating conversation. Religion is even riskier: by reminding people of the big issues like death and what comes after--the very issues you go to a dinner party to drink away thinking about--you risk not just irritating guests, but genuinely upsetting them. 

What about if you don't have to say anything at all to make the party uncomfortable? What if just by being what you are, you can unnerve everyone in the room without a word? Say, by being a vegetarian at a ribs cook-off? Sure, there will be some people there gleefully wiping their greasy fingers on their bibs and mocking the girl who is just eating corn-on-the-cob, but imagine if she just keeps sitting there, not saying anything, not judging, just not eating the meat? 

The very presence of a vegetarian forces us all to examine what we don't like to examine, something we all prefer to keep as a silent assumption among us all: We have to kill to eat. We overlook this as much as we can. We call cow "beef" and sheep "mutton" and so on. We don't have interactions with food while it's still living if we can help it. When we go to the state fair, we pet the same animals we will eat the next day, and we actually think we've bonded with them. 

Han Kang's The Vegetarian isn't about the reasons to be a vegetarian. The book is about a woman who realizes that life for some means death for others, and, rather than just accept this, begins slowly to pull away from life. This pulling away begins with just abstaining from meat. Eventually, however, it leads to more extreme renunciations of life. 

Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian overnight--literally. She has a bad dream involving a slaughter house, and that night, she throws away all the meat in the house, much to the consternation of her mediocre husband. Yeong-hye's voice is not heard much in the novel--most of the narration is done by or from the point-of-view of other family members who interact with her. The most we hear from her is in part one, when she manages to sneak in snippets of her dream in between the husband's first-person narrative. There's not much to it except flesh and guts and meat and blood. Lots of blood. 

The people who learn about Yeong-hye's vegetarianism aren't so much put off by the fact she doesn't eat meat--although she loses weight at such an alarming rate, they do have some cause for genuine concern--but more by her inability to explain why she isn't eating it. They are all prepared to accept an explanation like her health or the environment. They are even willing to accept that she is doing it for humanitarian reasons, although this would, by implication, suggest that the carnivores were all inhumane. What they cannot accept is her lone, repeated explanation: "I had a dream." 

Most of society merely treats Yeong-hye as odd, looking at her husband with pity for being married to such a queer woman. Her family, however, reacts violently to it. At a gathering, when Yeong-hye refuses to eat meat, her mother yells at her, telling her that, more or less, in this world either you eat meat or the world will eat you. Her stern father tries to pin her and force meat into the mouth of his grown daughter.

The violent reaction might seem out of place, but the mother's "eat or be eaten" attitude says a lot about what eating meat means to the family. Yeong-hye's unwillingness to eat meat means that she is unwilling to assert her right to live more than other things. In a "dog eat dog" world, that is the same as saying you don't care if you live. Yeong-hye's commitment to her own existence is lacking. 

Life isn't something a parent can allow a child to question the value of. You have to take it as a given that life is yours to enjoy and that you are worth whatever resources it takes to maintain your life in comfort. That is the attitude Yeong-hye's husband takes. It is significant that Yeong-hye's vegetarianism comes at a time when the couple are just about to get around to having a child, mostly because it is the time when society judges that they should. Yeong-hye isn't willing to pass along humanity's need to kill to live to others. 

And that's how we arrive at the next two sections of the book, which are about Yeong-hye moving from giving up meat to giving up wanting to live. At the end of part one, her family warns her that while monks can abstain from meat after long training and a special lifestyle, it isn't healthy for her. But as part two moves on, her brother-in-law looks at her and describes her as "calm as a monk." Yeong-hye is moving further on in her renunciation of life. She eschews clothing, which others interpret as a mental illness in her, but which is also something of a monastic trait. 

One could see her story as a kind of Buddhist renunciation of desire. In Buddhism, desire is said to be the cause of suffering. This is one of the four noble truths. Since Yeong-hye seems to be overcoming her desire, one could see this story as the story of her enlightenment. But as Yeong-hye's desires become less pronounced, those of her brother-in-law grow stronger. Specifically, his desire for Yeong-hye. 

The brother-in-law, identified only as "he" or "him" throughout the book, is a video artist who loves to capture winged things in his art. He becomes attracted to Yeong-hye, and convinces her to allow him to paint her naked body with flowers, in accordance with a recurring vision he has been having. In the end, he has a friend paint his naked body as well, and "he" and Yeong-hye have sex on camera with their painted bodies together. 

This is the beginning of Yeong-hye's final transformation. First she was an ordinary wife (her husband's main attraction to her, we learn in the book's first dozen pages, was her ordinariness). Then, a monk. In the book's final third, she is transforming into a plant. 

The flowers "he" painted on her body enabled her to stop having bad dreams, she told "him." She thought abstaining from meat would do it, but it never did. By the third act, Yeong-hye isn't just painted in plants, she believes she is becoming a tree.  

From the movie adaptation of the book. It wouldn't be an art house Korean film without really weird sex in it. 

Her sister and "his" wife, In-hye, saw the video of her husband and sister having painted sex. She had both taken away. The husband went to jail for a time for having had sex with a mental patient. Yeong-hye, meanwhile, went for inpatient care at a mental hospital outside Seoul. While in the hospital, Yeong-hye escapes during her exercise time to the woods on the mountain. There, she is found standing in the rain like a tree. She begins to do headstands, thinking her legs will spread like branches and her arms grow into the ground like roots. She insists she can live on water and sunshine. 

In-hye begins to feel sympathy for Yeong-hye's detachment from the world, and even to feel some level of understanding for her husband, who loved winged things. In-hye is left to care for her sister and her son. Her son, interestingly, is named Ji-U (Korean: 지우), which, to my mind at least, recalls the verb for "to erase," (지우다) a verb that shows up over and over in the novel. 

This is sort of an ironic name, because Ji-U is actually what keeps In-hye rooted to life. He's what keeps her from being erased, from fading away. If Yeong-hye is an enlightened saint detached from life, her effect on others is to reaffirm their commitment to life. She reaffirms the love of life in the artist in all its carnal vigor. She awakens the instinct to care within her sister. 

In-hye, in a sense, can be seen as a sort of Bodhisattva, an enlightened being who chooses to stay in the world out of mercy for those still in it. Enlightened, because she, too, has tasted the disillusionment and the desire to be released from life that Yeong-hye has felt. But she stays to care for others. 

Her son makes her laugh one day, and In-hye concludes that, "Life is strange, she thought after laughing. So many different things can happen, and even after going through terrible ordeals people eat, drink, go to the bathroom, wash themselves, and even laugh." In-hye is a harmonization of her parents, who instill such an ethic of survival in their children they cannot countenance doubt in the value of life, and Yeong-hye, who is free to become lighter and lighter until she dissipates into nothing. In-hye sees the beauty in Yeong-hye's detachment from the world, she just cannot join her in it.