Illustration: Eagle
Han Kang He is a special person. When she won last year Nobel Prize As for literature, it was widely reported in the South Korean press that she was married to literary critic Hong Young-hee. We’ve already been divorced for years. She has written very little about herself, and while many of the characters and protagonists share aspects of her life story – Writer and Narrator of the Year 2017 Human actions learns about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, Where the Korean army massacred some 2,000 students and workers, from A Hidden Book of Pictures, just as Han did—these details do not illuminate the life of their author so much as establish a narrative consciousness that must be invaded and distorted, again and again, by the surrounding world.
Hahn’s writing is characterized by this controversial marriage between spirit and body, an abstract physical body that focuses as much on physical humiliation—headaches, stomach cramps, bullet wounds—as the world of dreams, hallucinations, and wandering spirits. Human actions It chronicles the Gwangju Uprising and the long tail of its suppression by breaking narrative perspective, telling the story from the perspective of a young boy, a torture victim, and a spirit clinging to her butchered body. By locating the military’s crimes on both physical and spiritual levels, Hahn refuses to consign them to a safe distance from history, lending her narrative, the true story it tells, the visceral immediacy of the blow and the ongoing agony of the wound. .
We don’t participate, Originally published in 2021 and recently translated by e. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris take their style in exciting new directions. Kyunga, the writer who narrates Han’s latest work, is plagued by unbearable nightmares: murderers, massacres, women fleeing violence down a well. I was particularly shaken by a recurring dream in which a valley of blackened logs is slowly swallowed by the rising sea. Insomnia ruins her rest. Migraines make it difficult to think. Abdominal cramps make most foods indigestible. She moves alone to a stuffy apartment outside Seoul, where she lies in bed, calls for a ride, and then vomits it up. “A desolate border has formed between me and the world,” she reflects.
Han’s characters are used to falling apart. They lose the ability to speak, see, eat meat, eat anything, sleep, and remember; To live at all. Sometimes these collapses are the result of some shattering event, or an invasion within by an outside force: chaos, loss, torture. in We are inseparable, This collapse is the outward manifestation of a mysterious inner distress. Kyonga once lived a more sedentary life. She had a family, she wrote books, and even if she wasn’t always happy, her existence was constant. However, over the course of four years, she “breaks away” from her old life, a process she vividly compares to “a snail emerging from its shell to push along the edge of a knife.” The reason for this change is mysterious, and is somehow connected to her dreams and a book she, like Han, wrote about the massacre in Gwangju. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not reconcile these meanings together, haunted by a lingering realization that “life was so fragile…the flesh, the organs, the bones, the souls passing before my eyes, all carried within them the power to break and stop – so easily and with one decision.”
This was confirmed when her friend, a co-worker and former documentary maker named Inson, cut off two fingers in an accident. Eight years ago, Inson returned to her home on Jeju, a volcanic island off the southern coast, to care for her mother, and even after her mother died, she remained there, choosing to live as a carpenter in the family’s mountain home with only two parrots. For the company. However, her artistic drive remains: when Kyunga wants to turn the tree dream into a piece of art, Insun suggests using a plot of land in Jeju that she inherited from her father and continues working on it even when Kyunga asks her to stop.
In her desperation, Kyunga receives a text message from her old friend. As it turns out, Inson’s accident occurred while sawing logs for their project, and she is recovering in a hospital in Seoul. She begs Kyunga to travel to Jeju and feed her surviving parrot, Amma, who has been without food and water for several days. Confused by the news and weakened by her own brush with death, the author has no strength to say no, so she sets off into a blizzard and heads straight to the heart of the traumas that founded her country.
Beginning in late 1948, the government and right-wing paramilitaries violently suppressed a leftist rebellion on Jeju Island. The authorities burned villages, plundered farms, and expelled peasants from the mountainous interior to camps on the coast. Although official estimates vary, the island’s governor told American allies that the army and police killed about 60,000 people, about a fifth of the island’s population. Many of those detained were later secretly executed by the Korean government, an ongoing series of extrajudicial killings aimed at eliminating communism in the South.
How to make art about such atrocities? Human actions He poignantly chronicles Gwangju’s legacy by providing us with multiple perspectives on the event and its aftermath. However, this approach was no longer enough for Han. in We are inseparable, The narrator describes omitting a particularly painful detail from her book about Gwangju: soldiers who set fire to unarmed protesters with flamethrowers, “people rushing to emergency rooms on improvised stretchers, burning blisters on their faces, their bodies covered in white paint from head to toe.” To prevent identification.” When confronted with the true horror of her subject, she felt turned away.
We don’t participate It feels like an attempt to look at this past head-on. Han fills it with documents, memories, photos, and facts, providing as complete an account of the Jeju massacres as she can. However, rather than dramatically reviving victims in order to kill them again, Han keeps her focus on Kyunga, an approach that is both tangible and thrillingly ambiguous at the same time. Kyunga arrives home to find Amma dead in her cage, so she buries the bird in the yard before she loses consciousness. However, when she woke up, the bird had come back to life, and Enson was there too, asleep in the workshop. Are these ghosts, hallucinations, memories? Or is it Kiunga, dead in a blizzard or in a lonely apartment, whose spirit has wandered?
Hahn keeps the question open, the first of many unstable boundaries that she balances keenly throughout the novel. Inson acts like a flesh and blood human being; She lights the candles, opens the folders, and guides Kionga into the history of her family and her island. However, she is also distorted in a hospital bed on the other side of the country, giving all her interactions, every associated memory and truth revealed, a spectral quality, as if Kiunga is like Odysseus traveling to the underworld for knowledge.
The nature of this testimony forms the bulk of the novel, a gradual interweaving of personal and national history. Enson’s mother survived this massacre by chance; Her father hid for several days inside a cave before he was captured and detained for years in several mainland prisons. They both returned to their old village, rebuilt their lives, and lived out the horrors within them to death, retreating to caves and sleeping with a saw under their bed, as if preparing to resume hostilities at any moment. This is endless violence, but it exists in irresolvable tension with everyday life, existing in the bodies and minds of those who survived but did not escape. Hahn returns again and again to images of imposition and projection, something distant and ghostly lying directly above the physical, and likens the process, in a particularly brave passage, to trying to hold a shadow in place.
Although she collected reams of documents relating to her parents’ story, she struggled to transform their suffering into art. Art leaves a lot of things behind, removing the worst details and allowing the intangibles – dreams, memories, nightmares – to slip through your fingers. This leaves testimony and documentation as a haphazard process in a country that seeks only partial reconciliation with the past. This evidence includes newspaper photographs, survivor reports, family stories, memories, and even Enson’s own documentary work, a stunning record of a widely suppressed crime. That this information is provided by a possibly supernatural being does not undermine its unvarnished truth, and Hahn links this slow collapse with cold sobriety, refusing to allow poetic language to pass between the reader and images of mass graves, of thousands upon thousands of mass graves. Carefully cataloged skulls. if Human actions The danger of turning into a drama, We don’t participate It overwhelms us with the stark reality of atrocities like a flood tide gradually washing over us.
In the face of this knowledge, Kiunga’s collapse seems almost plausible. As in many of Han’s novels, it is not the self that hides, but society, which can only survive by relegating its anarchic and violent aspects to the realm of private life. No wonder Kiunga tried to establish those boundaries around herself. “I don’t want to open it,” she says of the Inson collection. “I’m not curious at all.”
And yet it looks, and Han makes us look at it too. We don’t participate It presents us with a series of overlays between fact and fiction, past and present, living and dead, suspending multiple situations at once and trying to reach only tentative conclusions. It is the best kind of storytelling, poetic and mysterious without ever shying away from the terrible historical truth. We don’t participate It resembles one of those birds that Hahn often uses as a metaphor: majestically weak and powerfully weightless, a solid body rising through the air.
