Part 4: The Uncanny: Metamorphosis and Brutal Aesthetics in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
“The slender thread”
“Sister . . . all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.”[i]
“The revolutionary schizophrenic lives knowing that it is not she who is crazy, but, rather, society.”[ii]
“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion.”[iii]
The final stage of plot regarding the unusual woman that Yeong-hye proved to be, Han gives to narratives of the older sister’s attitudes and perspectives. Chapter 3, entitled“Flaming Trees,” contains much about Yeong-hye’s attempts at metamorphosis into a plant and even begins to detail her sister In-hye’s greater understanding about her relationship with her troublesome younger sister. The one sister has taken on a desire for transgressing beyond the human, mental sphere, having chosen and transfixed herself upon becoming vegetal, plant like, tree-like. If one used the philosophical metaphor that she had changed to a different consciousness, we might be inclined to take Yeong-hye’s behaviors as different ways of behaving or imagining, and in the extreme to call her delusional, even schizophrenic.[iv] Richard Powers says this of a character in his novel Overstory who happens to be an extreme environmentalist, an Earth First Activist:
“I’d like to think she is a kind of proxy or emblem for a whole lot of people out there, who when you say ‘the real world,’ don’t think immediately of the fake world that we humans have created, but are dedicating their lives to understanding this place that we need to make our home and that we need to understand if we have any more desire to stay here for much longer.”[v]
In a radical “exit or rescue strategy,” getting out of this here place, some people are willing to take up a movement in favor of the continuation of healthful forestry and human existence must just do the best it can. Richard Powers and Han Kang have both tapped into characters with a predilection for plant-hood rather than carnal reality. Coffee-table books regarding the magic and wonder of trees abound. No doubt there are wonderful behaviors of trees that arboreal scientists have discovered since the middle of the 20th century.[vi] Trees bond together for survival as a woods or forested mountain vale. To state the idea as a communications metaphor, one might say that trees get to know one another, to share their growth, to have a sympathetic relationship. In-hye hears her sister pronounce, “Sister . . . all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.” Powers’ heroine is an arboreal botanist who used a similar literary or poetic metaphor for this communication during a conference paper of her study. Because she gave communal behaviors, implying an intelligence, some level of sentience, to tree groupings, with their interlacing root systems, chemical assistance in defending against pests and other diseases, their sharing of the water table, she was snubbed by the mostly male biologists and made to feel a paraiah among her colleagues. She left for a forest wilderness career in the National Forest Service, as far from humankind as she could be.
In-hye did become her sister’s care-giver, albeit unwillingly, first because she had a 5-year-old son to bring up and then she harbored a life-long psychological grudge against her sister. Old history through childhood bore in on In-Hye and recent history of her husband’s sexual relationship with Yeong-hye piled up as an obstacle not to be surmounted. In “Flaming Trees” In-hye even begins to see the sense of desiring communication with trees and plants, although she cannot be described as delusional or suddenly schizophrenic. However, a woman in such distress as In-hye had to feel, why should she not incline herself to tree-hood. Her marriage had unraveled, and, by the close of the novel, the marriage had completely fallen apart. In-hye is herself a depressed woman; out of despair for her life as a single mother and sole care-giver of her institutionalized sister, suicidal thoughts arise with frequency. For herself, being the obedient, submissive sister who had accepted authority and been socially responsible, her life had become chaos:
“And yet later at the breakfast table, she would all of a sudden find herself wanting to stab herself in the eyes with her chopsticks, or pour boiling water from the kettle over her head.” (p. 169)
“All of this is meaningless. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on any longer. I don’t want to.
She took one more look around at the various objects inside the house. They did not belong to her. Just like her life had had never belonged to her.
Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance., no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.” (p. 170)
Her lessons from the Kim family crisis, the terrible luncheon, had to be encountered before she could grow more independently. What was the reason she hated Yeong-hye, more than the fact that her husband had exploited (seduced or been seduced?) and had had sex with her? The revelation that In-hye observed because of the incident of her unruly sister at the family dinner is precisely the lesson. If there is a major agendum in the storytelling, that Han Kang stresses it has much to do with how forceful a person must be to take back one’s being, to own one’s soul. If society does not allow one to possess one’s own human being, then one must change into another form—call it mad, monstrous, or insane, or even “vegetal.” Just so, the artist noticed this in Yeong-hye, that she had changed into an altered state, not easily definable:
As he painted her with flowers:
“Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a ‘person,’ but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either—more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.” (p. 95)
“Magnificent irresponsibility”: breaking boundaries
In-hye’s despair, she realizes, is from not having lived an authentic life, from being submissive to the mythical authorities, to malignant powers that control normative behavior as others view normalcy.[vii] She now understands a better perspective after reflecting on Yeong-hye’s refusal to accept the force-feeding of meat at the dinner crisis:
“She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never forgive herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social restraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.” (p. 148)
So In-hye has her own transformation from the submissive to a more activist agent in attempting to protect Yeong-hye from the cruel doctor thrusting a feeding tube down the throat of her ailing sister, injuring her and causing a near-fatal hemorrhage. Giving up hastening home to her son Wi-Joo, being taken care of by a neighbor, In-hye takes on the role of attentive care-giver, seeing to her sister’s care as the ambulance speeds to the city hospital where the doctors have sent them. For In-hye this overlooking of her own child for the sake of her sister’s need was evidence of a mother’s irresponsibility:
“She can’t explain, not even to herself, how easy it had been to make the decision to abandon her child. It was a crime, cruel and irresponsible, she would never have been able to convince herself otherwise, and so it was also something she would never be able to confess, never be forgiven for. The truth of the matter was something she simply felt, horribly clearly. If her husband and Yeong-hye hadn’t smashed through all the boundaries, if everything hadn’t splintered apart, then perhaps she was the one who would have broken down, and if she’d let it happen, if she’d let go of the thread, she might never have found it again. In that case, would the blood that Yeong-hye had vomited today have burst from her, In-hye’s, chest instead? (p.186)
Simply put, new laws have to be brought into existence by radical challenges to authority. The sign of effective protest, as the protesters of the Gwangju massacre against the Park dictatorship found out, was to be treated as felonious criminals, their using the same weapons of attack as those of the military. No doubt Yeong-hye showed that her transition from submissive wife and daughter to that of an intolerable miscreant or objector was a successful obstinacy. The physical assaults and threats against her were proof of her success. Her strife was enforced by and for the sake of her own inner daimon, her expression of free-will to have control of her body, her being. Nietzsche would have understood her struggle.
[i] Yeong-hye to her sister, “Flaming Trees,” p. 150.
[ii] Andrew Marzoni, “Foucault in the Valley of Death,” The Baffler, No. 46, p. 40-53. (p. 52)
[iii] Mary Oliver in Maria Popova’s Brainpickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/…/mary-oliver-upstream-stayi…/.
[iv] See Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 2019). Writing about her functional schizophrenia, Wang makes some surprising comments. For example, “Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas defines ‘schizophrenic presence’ as the psychodynamic experience of ‘being with [a schizophrenic] who has seemingly crossed over from the human world to the non-human environment,’ because human catastrophes can bear the weight of human narratives–war, kidnapping, death–but schizophrenic built-in chaos resists sense.” (p.3)
[v] “Statement by Richard Powers in an interview on The Overstory in The Washington Post, Ron Charles.
[vi] Secret Life of Tress. The Wonder of Trees.
[vii] See Han’s second novel Human Acts (2016) for the brutal violence employed by military rule over the prostests of citizens in the Guangju May massacre of President Park’s dictatorial regime. That novel requires steel guts of readers to feel deeply the horror of government belligerence to control large numbers of prostesting citizens of all ages. The artist brother-in-law was practicing during that time and made protest in his art. (see The Vegetarian, p. 116)
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