Han Kang’s Human Acts

(This was written in 2017, for a publication that no longer exists)

At the beginning of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2016), a woman stops eating meat. Her dull and conventional family is confused: to prefer not to, in this way, is literally unthinkable, and so it breaks everyone’s predictable brains. But what begins as a kind of dark comedy swiftly escalates into horror. Her family’s frustration escalates into senseless, compulsive, disciplinary violence; she is cajoled, then she is abused, then she is institutionalized. As Han has explained in interviews, her protagonist’s vegetarianism is an attempt to turn her back on violence: “Eating meat, cooking meat, all these daily activities embody a violence that has been normalized.” Her resolution not to “eat” violence and to live “as a plant,” as she puts it, is precisely as symbolically rich and evocative as it is opaque to her family, and cannot be allowed. And so, the patriarchy violates her, the artist exploits her, and the hospital, finally, kills her.

In 2016, The Vegetarian made Han Kang one of the best known new Korean writers in the English-speaking world, not only winning her a slate of awards—most notably the Man Booker International Prize—but placing the book on a variety of “Best Books of the Year” lists (like the New York Times). Part of its success, I think, was that the central allegory is so basic, and so raw, that it transcends national boundaries: in any language, eating meat is a perfect representation of the banal violence of being part of society, the killing which sustains one’s ability to live. Koreans might perhaps be more carnivorous than some societies—as one reviewer noted, vegetarians in Korea might find this novel less a surreal farce than simple description of what life is like for them—but turning dietary choice into a surrealist parable on the violence in society reaches the universal through the particular.

In Human Acts (2017), her English-language follow-up (also crisply translated by Deborah Smith), Han Kang produced a novel which was, yes, more violent, but also far more moving and beautiful as a result. It’s even hopeful and life-affirming, in a way The Vegetarian was construed through nesting negations. The earlier novel careens towards the impossibility of saying “no” to violence—because society simply will not allow it—but however evocative and symbolically rich, The Vegetarian’s gesture of refusal remains as elusive to the reader as to the uncomprehending society around her. This is probably the point: violence does not reveal truth, but buries it. Human Acts is about the re-birth that follows violence, and about the society that grows out of it. There is dignity in death and decomposition, one might say; if The Vegetarian is about one person’s failed effort to live as a plant, Human Acts is about the collective struggle to grow flowers where before there was only carnage.

Precisely because Human Acts has no grand gestures of refusal or wildly rich surrealistic metaphors, something like hope emerges from the bodies of the dead: it’s a novel aboutthe tiny, quotidian struggles by which “meat” becomes human again. Indeed, in Human Acts, meat is not a metaphor for the violence of society: it is the simple, logistical problem of bodies piled on top of other bodies, and what to do with them. Meat is the social violence that no one can refuse, and of which all of us, together, become the custodians. However grim such a sense of society may sound—with its emphasis on how our shared responsibility to care for the dead is what makes us people—there’s something audaciously idealistic about the novel’s philosophy of dying: because death belongs to everyone, every death reconfirms the oneness of humanity, by those who come together to care for the dead. 

Human Acts begins in 1980, in Gwangju, the part of South Korea, where Hang Kang was born and lived until she was nine. There was an uprising that year against the military dictatorship that had, to that point, ruled South Korea for two decades, an uprising that was put down with stunning force: when thousands of students and labor activists filled the streets and occupied buildings, demanding better working conditions, democracy, and an end to martial law, the government declared them communists and North Korean agents, and the military indiscriminately killed between 200 and 2,000 people, with many more jailed and tortured. Even today—decades since South Korea became a democracy in 1990—the details remain sketchy, clouded by denial, fear, and repression

The novel begins, then, with what might sound like a grisly set-piece: in a makeshift morgue set up in the aftermath of the massacre, a young boy named Dong-ho is helping with the post-massacre problem of un-claimed corpses. As he struggles to keep track of countless dead bodies–cleaning them, covering them with sheets, and helping grieving family members find and identify their loved ones–the prose is matter-of-fact, minutely task-oriented. The problem is logistical, a simple calculation of space and numbers. He lights candles. He records figures and locations on a clipboard. He worries that it might rain: there are so many corpses that they’ve begun stacking them outside, under the Ginko trees and the open sky. He does not worry about himself; instead, he acts.

This chapter could be lurid and horrible, yet it somehow isn’t; as an ad-hoc assortment of volunteers tend the cold and empty bodies, there is something strangely beautiful about their selfless humanity, something unearthly and un-human but moving beyond words. And then, the novel reveals that the dead are not gone, but watching: the scene shifts from the aftermath of the massacre to the aftermath of life, where the spirits of the dead live on, watching, caring, and feeling. The dead, it turns out, are far less dead than the living. 

In a sense, the novel is about a very historical event: the protests, the killing, and the aftermath, as Koreans, today, struggle to remember what was violently buried. Organized into seven “acts,” the novel explores how a handful of interlinked characters struggle to make sense of what happened, in the days, years, and decades that follow, up to the present. It would be glib to say that the dead are the lucky ones—and if there is one thing this novel is not, it is not glib—but the point seems to be that while the dead are at peace, the burden of the living is to live with their death, always. So as we see the survivors struggle with guilt and with wounds that will never heal, as we see parents and siblings live with their losses, and—as the story becomes history, a nation’s dirty laundry—the novel becomes the struggle of publishers and writers and artists to remember. In the final section, in fact, Han Kang herself recalls returning to her childhood home, in Gwangju, to look for remnants of the boy her family knew before they moved away—Dong-ho, the boy whose story the novel begins by imagining.

For all its historical resonance, however, Human Acts is ultimately about something other than refusal, something other than protest. It’s about the decision to live, and to act. There is no false comfort here, and it does not romanticize the efficacy of activism; remembering and mourning will not restore democracy, nor overthrow despots. But in the decades following the Gwangju uprising, as the survivors battle their memories, their scars, and continuing repression, Human Acts explores the quiet heroism of those whose embrace of death allows them to keep living. And in prose as careful and delicate as the hands of a reverent stranger, the novel brings the dead to life in the society of those who come after: a candle to the fallen becomes a light to guide the future.