JOIN USLast August, Anne Rice posted a call to arms — on Facebook, of course — warning that political correctness was going to bring on literary end times: banned books, destroyed authors, “a new era of censorship.” I, a fan of transgressive literature, could not pinpoint why I found her post to be so much more vexing than the usual battle cries of P C-paranoiacs. I finally had my answer after reading Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian: what if “the despised” can stand up on their own?
All the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence — “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” — and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel.
When Yeong-hye awoke one morning from troubled dreams, she found herself changed into a monstrous vegetarian. And that’s where the misleadingly simple echoes of a certain classic premise end. Han’s novella-in-3-parts zigzags between domestic thriller, transformation parable and arborphiliac meditation, told from the points of view of her lousy husband, who works at an office (Part I); her obsessive brother-in-law, who is an artist (Part II); and her overburdened older sister, who manages a cosmetics store (Part III). These 3 characters are defined by what they do for a living, whereas Yeong-hye stops doing much of anything altogether. “I had a dream,” she says in one of her rare moments of direct dialogue, her only explanation of her newfound herbivorism. At first she is met with casual disdain by family and friends. But soon her physical form creates the very negative space those close to her fear: weight loss, insomnia, diminished libido and the eventual abandonment of everyday “civilised” life.
The novel is full of sex of dubious consent, all sorts of force-feeding and purging — essentially sexual assault and eating disorders. A family gathering where Yeong-hye is attacked by her own father over meat-eating spirals several layers darker into self-harm, though it won’t be the last time a man violates her body. Violation of the mind, however, is a different issue. The Vegetarian needs all this bloodletting because in its universe, violence is connected with physical sustenance — in meat-eating, sex-having, even care-taking. Outside intervention, from family and friends and doctors, works to moderate the reality of this story.”
We get brief italicised sequences that describe Yeong-hye’s thoughts, which range from diarylike internal monologues to something approaching a post-language state. At other times the language of devastation needs only the sensory details: a dying bird hidden in a clenched fist, an IV bag half full of blood, painted flowers on a naked body, the unremitting stench of sizzling meat.
Originally published in South Korea in 2007 and inspired by the author’s short story ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, The Vegetarian was the first of Han’s works to be made into a feature film. She has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea and has been published around the world, but it took the enthusiasm of her translator, Deborah Smith, to bring The Vegetarian to publishing homes in Britain and the United States. Smith learned Korean only about 6 years ago, mastering it through the process of translating this book. She inhabits the prose’s terrible serenity and glacial horror — the translator’s hand never overwhelms or underperforms. Both lithe and sharp, syntax and diction never become mechanical and obtuse the way bad translations often render something “foreign.”
There is something about short literary forms — this novel is under 200 pages — in which the allegorical and the violent gain special potency from their small packages. The Vegetarian feels related to slender works as diverse as Ceridwen Dovey’s 2007 novella Blood Kin and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Ultimately, though, how could we not go back to Kafka? More than The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s journals and A Hunger Artist haunt this text.
Still, Han Kang’s is not some cautionary tale for the omnivorous, as Yeong-hye’s vegetarian journey is far from a happy one. Abstaining from eating living things doesn’t lead to enlightenment. As Yeong-hye fades further and further from the living, our author, like a true god, lets us struggle with the question of whether we should root for our hero to survive or to die. With that question comes another, the ultimate question we never quite want to contemplate. “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” Yeong-hye asks.
The Vegetarian
Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith
Hogarth
2016, pp 192
Rs. 1,073