In 2024, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Han Kang, the critically acclaimed author of works such as ‘The Vegetarian’ and ‘Human Acts’, and the first ever South Korean person and Asian woman to win this prize. Her ‘intense poetic prose’, to directly quote The Royal Swedish Academy, has taken the world by storm, and ever since receiving the Booker Prize in 2016 for ‘The Vegetarian’, her writings have carved out a niche in the vast domain of Korean and global literature, addressing what is often referred to as the ‘fragility of humanity’ in the cocoon of historical trauma and equally-precarious, vulnerable modernity.
For this piece, we managed to secure an interview with Professor Dickens Leonard, a professor of literary and cultural studies from IIT Delhi, and Uma Madhu, his former student and a PhD research scholar with a background in critical and political theory of contemporary literature, who recently completed her dissertation on Han Kang herself. We believe this panel of interviewees were the perfect fit to provide us with a fresh and insightful perspective into Kang’s literature and history, and help us comprehend the significance of this prize and her works with a more trained eye. It also cascaded into an eye-opening discussion on the transformative currents within literature and its crucial link with the self and the circumstances we’re surrounded by. We’re grateful to them for giving us their precious time.
Who is Han Kang ?
Resident of Seoul, Korea, and the daughter of a teacher-novelist herself, Han Kang is a Korean language and literature graduate who’s taught at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for a decade and a half, and been a published author and poet since 1993 - when five of her poems came out in a magazine, marking the beginning of a long career spanning many more successful publications. As an exclusively Korean writer, she first became a part of discussions about literature globally following the international recognition earned by her book, The Vegetarian, in 2016, after its translation to English for the very first time. Being the only Nobel Laureate who’s written in Korean, she not only highlights the growing awareness regarding the distinct eurocentricity of such accolades in the past, but also the conscious shift to recognize diversity and uniqueness, hence. In the discipline of comparative literature, it becomes extremely important to acknowledge the world beyond just the English language - and Han Kang, fluent in English but still staunchly a Korean writer, is but one of the gems made accessible to us by the boon of translation. As an aside, Prof. Leonard adds, out of the many languages that The Vegetarian has been translated to, Malayalam and Tamil stand out as some of the only Indian languages on the list - a surprising but pleasant feat, probably made possible by the contents (and title) of the book finding resonance within a South Indian audience! Even if one were to take the politics of representation or the question of westernism out of the equation, a large number of avenues open up simply by means of awarding a Korean writer with the Nobel Prize, Prof. Leonard further points out. After all, an audience of millions is now suddenly going back to see what else she’s published, what else she’s been writing about. If she’s written about color and colonization, then on the other hand, she’s also written about a civil war that not everyone knows about. It’s discovery of histories, personalized by Han Kang - but also at the hands of her translators, however many and wherever from! There’s a lot of questions to be asked. And at the helm of it, is an author who’s turned the tides for Korean literature, by writing about the most personal of their national experiences, and receiving the highest of accolades for it.
What is Han?
“So, Han Kang, for me,” Uma says, smiling, in answering what drew her to Han Kang in the first place. “What stood out first was her name. It’s a really unique name.” What compels her to say this about a surname that is quite frankly not uncommon in East Asia, is the fact that ‘Han’ is much bigger than just a name.
As somebody who learned Korean herself for the purpose of the dissertation, Uma points out that in the Hangul (Korean) script, it’s synonymous with the number ‘1’, is often used to address the nation itself, and also lends its name to the river that runs through the middle of Seoul. But, as most pertinent to Han Kang’s work, it’s a kind of undying grief that weighs in you, and lives with you - a post-colonial ‘resentful sorrow’, that is titled an essential element of Korean identity by many.
“Better scholars than me have tried to completely define it and failed,” Uma prefaces, going on to explain. The concept was first introduced in literature by Japanese scholar, Yanagi Soetsu, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, where he characterized Korean art and culture as ‘sorrowful’ - deeming the Koreans to be a naturally sad people. This was a blunt colonial essentialization, that grew further in the 20th century, as Korea became free of its colonizers but fell into a militant autocracy - which is when Han also came to mean righteous rage, signifying the anger of the people.
An anger that is used to rise against those in power who have broken them, trampled them, and denied them their freedom. It is for these reasons that Han is repeatedly evoked as something that is untranslated - something that nobody else will understand, even as it binds together those who do. It is even something you can get treatment for in Korean hospitals, Prof. Leonard adds - a truly modern effective condition, rooted in history and medical science!There exist two schools of thought surrounding Han in the contemporary sphere. There’s few, who believe that Han is irrelevant in today’s South Korea, because life is good, people are wealthy, development is rapid and all is well. However, according to others, there is a significant disconnect between the human condition and the suddenly modernizing infrastructure.
We human beings are flesh and blood, prone to wounds and hurts - and when we are compressed into these compact, unyielding structures of capitalism, which do not have the capacity to account for - or sometimes, deliberately refuse to account for - the vulnerability of human spirit, we get caught within those very mechanisms. The first indication of how this seemingly perfect infrastructure was failing was an incident known as the Seoul Ferry Tragedy, where owing to
overloading of the boat and delays in rescue operations, over 300 young children drowned and hundreds more were injured.
Even more recently, in Itaewon, a crowd surge during Halloween ended up killing 150 people, resulting in a similar outpouring of public grief and shock at how the infrastructure has failed all of these people. The other sect, thus, believes that Han isn’t something you leave behind so easily. One may not become the conscripted citizen of modernity in a blink of an eye - and at the end, there is a great deal of back and forth between what constitutes a nation and what constitutes humanity there. Han Kang’s answer to all of this is simple - fragility and trauma is not entirely historical, or even poetic. It is just - the now. The unresolvable grief is simply a condition of living in modernity. And her works take this dilemma one step further and question - when the crisis is chronic, why must we aspire to wellness?
How do we do it - in fact, can anyone ever succeed in hiding and forgetting their pain in the process of creating this modern, functioning self? In fact, should we, within these circumstances, be well at all or pretend to be? (This sentiment is also exemplified through her own actions, when she refused to hold a celebratory press conference post-receiving the Nobel, stating the on-going Russie-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts as the reason. In Han Kang’s own words,
“People are being taken out in body bags. So, there is nothing to celebrate in this world at the moment.”
Han Kang’s engagement with the concept of Han is a poetic and cultural enterprise - but through all of it, it is also a project of rehumanization and writing that vulnerability and grief back into the human body. And this is precisely why, Uma adds, it is not fair to describe Han Kang’s works as merely historical - as they work within the contexts of the past to talk of the distinctly present world, and the times that we’re living in. As regardless of whether they’re set against the backdrop of Gwangju or Seoul, Han Kang’s works have the ability to transcend geography and become globally understood. And regardless of Han being deemed a Korean, untranslatable entity or not, Kang’s books expose their readers’ souls to something intrinsically indistinguishable - levelling her explorations of trauma, grief, and resilience with universal human experiences, and making Han Kang a global literary phenomenon.
Han Kang’s biggest hits-The Vegetarian and Human Acts
The recipient of the 2016 Booker Prize was Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a book revolving around Yeong-hye, ‘a young woman living an unremarkable life’ who decides to stop eating meat - something that is almost unheard of in South Korea. It is written in three parts, where each is told from the perspective of a different person - none of them being Yeong-hye herself, curiously enough - and is a beautifully written interrogation of normalcy, played up by the emphasis on our very ordinary protagonist.Yeong-hye is a child with an abusive war veteran for a father, she is a woman at a job she does not like, she is married to a man who does not care for her - and she has been having visceral dreams of pain and animal cruelty that make her begin to seek a world of existence that is not predicated on harm. And as the narrative progresses, at cost of giving too much away for the liking of a prospective reader, everything just kind of begins to fall apart.
While ‘The Vegetarian’ won a lot of awards globally and earned her international fame, it was ‘Human Acts’ that was her biggest success within Korea itself. Han Kang has also said that it remains her most cherished work, as the book is based on the Gwangju Uprising, a significant event in Korean contemporary history, and one that had left a deep impression on Han Kang ever since her father had told her about it as a child. Human Acts also involves changing narratives, as characters that are introduced in the initial chapters later appear as the narrator or central protagonist in the following ones - and captures the collective trauma of political violence, telling the story of how one boy’s death within the student uprising at Gwangju unfolds in a series of characters’ lives being changed a forever. It is a tale of collective heartbreak, and contrasts with The Vegetarian by being more directly political, tying individual experiences to a broader historical framework.
Both novels, and Han Kang’s other books such as ‘Greek Lessons’, ‘The White Book’, and ‘We Do Not Part’, are masterpieces in narrative techniques and stylistic writing, but what they also have in common is their tendency to push the boundaries between personal and political trauma, and critique social constructs while highlighting the vulnerability of human experience above all. Moreover, her seamless transitioning between these different kinds of themes highlights her versatility as an author, and make it easy to understand why her stories resonate universally, while remaining deeply rooted in Korean culture and history.
Conclusion
In the discussion with Prof. Leonard and Uma, we talked of Han Kang and her works, the significance of winning a Nobel Prize, and a brief exposition of the themes she writes about, including their close bond with the Korean concept of Han. In the end, it is also necessary to speak to the question of - why now. As people, post the pandemic and in this age of aggressive modernization, we are beginning to lose the threads of our own humanity. For years, the matter of who we are is a question we’ve pushed to the back of our minds to focus on what we do - what we make, where we live, what happens next - but it is now, that the world seems to be coming around to trying to figure out where our lives’ worth really lies.
And the answer it seems to be at the cusp of, is exactly what Han Kang’s writings remind us of as well - a person’s worth is located not in their exterior, but inside them, in the things that break them and the pain that binds them together and in the life that they live. She places the dignity of a human soul in its suffering, and it is this perspective of viewing souls as made of glass and watching them shatter, that the meaning of humanity shines through, just by the virtue of being alive.
As Prof. Leonard concludes, it is in literature like this that there is truly a call to what it means to be a person. And from time to time, across moments of history, this question becomes the most relevant question, and writers like Han Kang - or, for instance, Franz Kafka, in his own era of fierce globalization and world wars - end up becoming stalwarts of their time for attempting to answer it, reaching beyond just penned prose to the realms of literary greatness.
