1.

The Vegetarian is receiving worldwide interest with its peculiar story about a woman dreaming of becoming a tree, however this kind of imagination about the human body is not something that the writer Han Kang has created alone. Rather, it is something made by Korean literature in its entirety. The Vegetarian is the outcome of a unique take on a theme repeated throughout the long history of Korean literature. For a long time Korean literature has both recreated the violence of the body within the regulation of the symbolic order and dreamed of a different kind of body, one which can go beyond the regulation of bodies. Interest in the human body, therefore, is one of the various genealogies that can be traced back within Korean literature. It is fascinating to examine the path of imagination in Korean literature with regards to the human body. Such an endeavor provides an opportunity both to locate the outstanding tree that is The Vegetarian within the forest of Korean literature, and to take in a panoramic view of this diverse and expansive forest.

2.

The current symbolic order does not allow for an individual to have their own individual body or for the individuality of each body. Without having to quote Michel Foucault, it should suffice to say that in contemporary society bodies that do not fit the norm are constantly being repressed and rejected. It has already been a long time, then, since the fall of the human body in the symbolic order to that of a docile body. Korean literature has reflected an interest in the docile body for many decades, but it is the examination of control over the body, or controlled bodies, expressed from the mid-1990s onward that particularly merits attention.

Over the years there have been two main trends in consideration of the human body in Korean literature. One of these is to reproduce the process of the human subject being reduced to a docile body, and examine the way in which these docile bodies exist. For example the poet Shin Kyeong-nim, who was extremely vocal in the struggle for political democracy and unification in Korea that took place from the 1970s onwards, in a recent poem titled “Snow,” compares the body to a “dark and stifling prison.” Choi Seung-ja, who has a strong sense of historical philosophy in which, beneath the weight of the patriarchal order, women have been living as bodies even more systematically regulated—expressed both a strong will to escape from the controlled body and the process by which this is denied in “For the Second Time in Thirty-Three Years.” Through the frustrated attempt at escape described in this poem Choi hints at how solid the wall of the symbolic order is which constrains and confines women.

Hwang Jungeun, who depicts the current sadist symbolic order with a masochistic cheerfulness, describes in detail in the short story “The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train” the physical and linguistic violence committed against an individual in order to restrain a person as a docile body. In “The Third Breast,” Cheon Un-yeong, who often writes about characters that reject the body as emphasized by the symbolic order and instead seek after an individualized beauty of the body, focuses on the cruelty of docile bodies. For the narrator in this short story the greatest happiness of his life is being with a woman who has a unique body, but the moment she tries to leave him he turns on her, committing a brutal murder. In this story we encounter the terrifying nature of the being groomed as a docile body and the way in which it can transform in the blink of an eye, to enact great cruelty when faced with an other who stands outside of the symbolic order. In a similar vein, in Diary of a Murderer, Kim Young-ha, who created a “suicide guide” character in the novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and expressed the depression and strong sense of futility of modern people, this time focuses on a serial killer who has lost his memory. Every time he feels embarrassment towards someone stronger than himself, he coerces this other to the extent that they can no longer put up any resistance, and with this behavior he becomes a habitual murderer. The act of killing becoming the means through which he finds his sole meaning for existence. Diary of a Murderer, through the method of memorization of a serial killer, which brings the logic of capitalism to its extreme, demonstrates in a shocking way just how much of a brutal monster the being who has been degenerated into a docile body by the symbolic order can become.

3.

Another tendency in the imagination of the body in Korean literature is the longing for a completely different body, free from regulation or control. In such works we find a belief that the human body must not be regulated by the symbolic order, and indeed that such regulation is impossible. Such works incite the potential of an individualized body to turn expectations upside down, or else express “organs without a body” that search for the light of truth in the impulses felt by a single body part.

The writers leading this trend in Korean literature today tend to be female. This is probably because, unlike most male writers, their bodies are different from the masculine body as emphasized in the patriarchal symbolic order. By actively expressing the experiences of their bodies, or—taking it further—the sensations of a particular part of their bodies, female writers express a completely new language of the body. For example, in the poem “Person Crafted Out of Water” Kim Sun-Woo, who places high value on the potential for digression inherent in the female body, focuses on female menstruation and hints that as beings who menstruate, women, or “people crafted out of water,” have quenched the dry desolation of the world. In “Memories of Giving Birth to a Daughter,” Kim Hyesoon, who has relentlessly brought back the history of womankind concealed by patriarchy, focuses on the agony of childbirth, and in that agony remembers the maternal line of genealogy which is hidden by the paternal bloodline. In a poem titled “Spuds,” Moon Chung-hee, who believes that female beings who cry together with the pain of others are the doors through which humanity will walk into the future, actively praises “a woman the size of a clay pot” who hides a man, who is being chased by a soldier with a gun, in her “skirt,” and credits this female body with bringing about a world filled with laughter.

At the same time there are also works which dream of becoming an utterly different kind of body, one that can transgress the symbolic order completely. Works such as Lee Seung-U’s The Private Life of Plants and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which have already been translated into various languages and have come to represent Korean literature, receiving acclaim across the world, fall into this category. The protagonists of these works reject the body which endangers the natural environment to sustain itself, and dream of becoming non-human, or to put it more precisely, becoming plants. Also in Kim Un-su’s Cabinet, which displays a peculiar “mutant showroom” imagination, we meet a “man with a ginkgo tree growing out of his little finger.” Instead of removing the ginkgo tree to protect his body he chooses to become part of the tree in order to let it grow. Through this kind of “ginkgo tree man,” Cabinet rejects the idea of the human body as standing atop the apex of the natural order destroying nature and instead aspires to a body that exists in the living natural ecosystem.

4.

With the announcement of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian as the 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner it seems as if people all over the world are taking more interest in Korean literature now than ever before. While this attention is welcome, it also feels somewhat belated. The potential of Korean literature is substantial. Serious literary excavation of the catastrophic situation that the human race is faced with is being carried out at least as fiercely in Korean literature as it is anywhere else in the world, with challenging and exciting works being published one after another. The Vegetarian is a good example of this. However Han Kang’s novel is not only a single work of Korean literature, but rather one of many—something that has taken inspiration from numerous other works of Korean literature. This means, therefore, that the history of Korean literature does not begin and end with The Vegetarian. There are many comparable works lined up waiting for the intrepid reader, and so I very much hope that the interest in Korean literature currently sweeping the world does not simply stop at The Vegetarian, but grows and matures into interest in Korean literature in its entirety. 

by Ryoo Bo Sun
Literary Critic
Professor of Korean Literature
Kunsan National University