“I’m so surprised and honored,” exclaimed South Korean writer Han Kang in her first interview with the Nobel Prize after receiving the congratulating news earlier that day, “all [writers] their efforts and strengths have been my inspiration,” she added.
On October 10th, Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” and “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul,” as announced by Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee.
Starting her career in 1993, Han is the only 18th female to receive the prize, as well as the first South Korean. Born in Gwangju in 1970, Han moved to the capital city, Seoul, following her father’s increasing prominence as a reputed novelist. Unfortunately, not long after, Han became witness to the brutal demonstration against Korea’s growing military dictatorship, resulting in over six hundred killed and many more injured in 1980. The event became what is now known as the Gwangju massacre, which cast a monumental shadow over Han’s works, with many of her books exploring subjects of human violence and death.
In Han’s best-read work, The Vegetarian, such contexts extend the resonances of the novel’s symbolism. Published in 2007 and translated in 2015, Han’s novel followed the uprising popularity of vegetarianism in the West.
The plot revolves around protagonist Yeong-hye, a young woman living in Seoul whose various disturbing dreams about human brutality and animal slaughter have propelled her choice to become a vegetarian in a traditional meat-eating society.
The story’s timeline switches between the perspective of those closest to Yeong-hye: her husband, Mr. Cheong, in Chapter 1, her brother-in-law in Chapter 2, and her sister, In-hye, in Chapter 3. Uniquely, none of the chapters takes on the first-hand perspective of Yeong-hye, cementing the distance between the protagonist and her environment as being so great that not even the author, the audience, nor society can generate an accurate depiction of it. Such subtle interpretations shed light on the unconquerable challenge of circumventing prejudices and generalizations of society.
Knowingly, the book stretches beyond the fixture of vegetarianism into the ostracizations surrounding themes of gender, heteronormativity, and domestic abuse. Together with Han’s distinctive language of horror and unease, the novel ends with Yeong-hye feeling the need to become a tree — to absorb sustenance from the soil, the sun, and the rain — a call for the normalized marginalization of human nature and an escape from the dramatized stigmas that everyone holds.
However, Han’s success doesn’t stop at the periphery of literary meaning and instead, trademarks both the mourn and praise of South Korea’s history as a nation.
In Han’s 2014 novel “Human Acts,” she questions the efficacy of the victors and justice of those sacrificed by drawing upon the Gwangju massacre. “Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them,” she writes.
Like many other award-winning Korean productions like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Hwang Dong-Hyuk’s Squid Game, Han was denied access to funding and governmental support. However, the challenging upbringing and weight of censorship these stories bear are the exact reasons for their popularity. Hence, through the spotlighting of individuals who illustrate the bravery of survival, solidarity, and dignity, Han confronts Korea’s historical wounds to create a sense of “familiarity yet foreignness” for her audiences.
On the contrary, Han also recognizes the generations of Korean writers that have propelled her creativity and expression as a writer, noting Korea’s gradual development into a more globalized and inclusive atmosphere.
Regardless, Han now joins the group of creators who have revolutionized not just the cultural stature of Korea but the boundaries of a community’s interpretation of human nature.
Written by Julia Jiang
