We Do Not Part (except when we do): A review of forgetting Han Kang’s Human Acts.

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is a novel about Han Kang remembering having written Human Acts, a novel which I remember remembering a lot better than I remember reading. I have things I say about that novel, of course, because I remember saying them seven years ago, when Human Acts was the “hey, the author of The Vegetarian has this other book!” book, and then, after that, when you could often find copies of it on the remainder shelves at Moe’s or Pegasus. But the “me” who wrote that review is gone, as is every copy of Human Acts that I’ve bought since then, because I would give them away, after I bought them, which I always did, and probably still will, even though her Nobel might mean fewer copies circulating (and not on the remainder shelves).

When I think about Human Acts, I think about the things I’ve said about it over the years: “this is one of the very small handful of books I’ve read that has made me weep,” I will say, because somehow “cry” would not have been enough. Or I would explain that Human Acts was the really great work by an author who was better known (in the West) for writing The Vegetarian, a book that won the Booker prize and a lot of folks who, like me, are never quite sure they’re pronouncing the author’s name right, who have picked up that one refers to her as “Han” not “Kang,” read it and were like “damn, that book goes really hard?” Back in 2017, I felt the need to explain that Human Acts was the better book. When I would give Human Acts away to someone, I would tell them that The Vegetarian is just (“just”) a collection of three linked short stories, and it only hit the way it did (“only”), in the US, during a particular late-2010s trend for stories of feminine abjection. I would declare, as if I was someone who really knew, that Human Acts is more resolutely Korean in its historical specificity—by focusing on the Gwangju massacre, instead of some more universal abstractions—and that it had an organic unity as a novel, that just, you know, made it better.

I’m a little leery of that impulse, now. The Vegetarian and Human Acts are good books, and so is We Do Not Part. Why would “better” or “best” be the way we think about the relationship between them?

In her Nobel Lecture, Han Kang shows why she had to write The Vegetarian to have written Human Acts, sketching the trajectory between them by reference to the questions she wrote them to ask. In The Vegetarian, she asks: “To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human?”; when the protagonist of that book refuses to eat meat, this act is symbolic, a desire to become a plant and opt out from violence which is violently crushed by everyone around her. Because violent acts are entangled with the very core of our beings, Human Acts, asks about this entanglement: on seeing a photograph book of “Gwangju residents and students killed with clubs, bayonets, and guns while resisting the new military powers that had orchestrated the coup”—she asks “Is this the act of one human towards another? And then, seeing a photo of an endless queue of people waiting to donate blood outside a university hospital: Is this the act of one human towards another?” In the latter book she has more or an answer. If The Vegetarian is about how a person can not become a plant—no matter how much we might want to not be human—Human Acts is about how we do become plants after we’re killed, and when we feed those who eat us, with the nourishment of our bodies.

A thing that makes Han the kind of writer that makes you say “Damn! They got one right!” when she gets the Nobel Prize is that her books were written in the order they were written because writing one made it possible to write the next one, or even necessary, because there’s something about what she was working through that the work made it possible to do, and because the work, itself, propelled it forward. So much of what I found unsatisfying about The Vegetarian was exactly what made Human Acts feel like a triumph: 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, that book declares. 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, only meat. Meat is not just a metaphor for the violence of society in that book; it’s the simple, logistical problem of bodies piled on top of other bodies, and what to do with them. Meat is the social violence that, because no one can refuse it, all of us become its custodians. And however grim such a sense of society may sound—in which 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. When death belongs to everyone, every death only reconfirms the oneness of humanity, by those who come together to care.

That’s more or less what I wrote seven years ago, and which I’ve now copied and pasted, about a book that I read and was moved by. But then—instead of reading it again, or even thinking about it in ways that would keep it in my consciousness and in my memory—I started buying that book, and giving it away to other people. That I bought it and gave it away, instead of remembering it, seems like a good way to describe how it’s not a book I found I could live with knowing. I’ve gifted copies I couldn’t help but buy, like I was retweeting a piece of atrocity shared from Gaza that I didn’t actually read or watch: I give it away the way I scroll past a lot of my social media feed, these days, the part that’s just endless documentation of pain that I am incapable of having new thoughts about, or any reaction except referred, projected pain. I might pass it on; I might think that this information or image or sentiment is worth sharing, even important. But what is the point, myself, of pricking my finger, again, with it?

Human Acts makes death beautiful. It’s a book with lots of sentences like “I wait for time to wash me away like muddy water” and paragraphs like this one:

Death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that clean new uniform. If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.

It isn’t even a book about suicide; it’s a book about how death is what we are, to an extent that’s hard to hold in your brain. A friend of mine gives plasma regularly, something she has the raw stones to do without even admitting it’s a thing. After she gives plasma, her body grows more plasma. She can handle it. My grandmother routinely gave blood as often as she was allowed, until the age when her doctor literally made her stop. She, also, could handle it.

We Do Not Part makes me worry about how Han is doing. It feels like an autobiographical novel about Han Kang not being able to handle it. It’s about a writer who can’t stop remembering what she wrote in a book that’s not Human Acts, but isn’t not Human Acts, and who kind of wants to die because of it. The dream the protagonist has, in the opening chapter, is literally a dream that Han describes herself having (in her Nobel Lecture), in the June of 2014, the year she published Human Acts:

I was walking across a vast plain as a sparse snow was falling. Thousands upon thousands of black tree stumps dotted the plain, and behind every last one of them was a burial mound. At some point, I was stepping in water, and when I looked back, I saw the ocean rushing in from the edge of the plain, which I had mistaken for the horizon. Why were there 8 graves in a place like this? I wondered. Wouldn’t all the bones in the lower mounds closer to the sea have been swept away? Shouldn’t I at least relocate the bones in the upper mounds, now, before it was too late? But how? I didn’t even have a shovel. The water was already up to my ankles.

I awoke, and as I stared out of the still-dark window, I intuited that this dream was telling me something important. After I wrote the dream down, I recall thinking that this might be the start of my next novel.

In the novel Han would write, about a protagonist who has a version of this dream (“in the summer of 2014, a couple of months after the publication of my book about the massacre in G—.”) the dream doesn’t spur her to write a novel: instead, the not-Han Kang protagonist goes on  journey I would characterize as an extended, gentle struggle with suicidal ideation, though even “struggle” might be too strong a word. A minute ago, I said that Human Acts “isn’t even a book about suicide,” but I wouldn’t say that about We Do Not Part. There are a lot of very beautiful passages about snow; apparently “In Korean, ‘눈’ can mean both ‘eye’ or ‘gaze’ (目), and also refer to the phenomenon of ‘snow’ (雪)” and “this linguistic duality creates a profound connection between observing snowflakes and exchanging gazes.” I did not know this when I was reading it, and it makes a lot of sense, but the main thing I thought about snow, in this novel, was about how a professor blew my mind in college by telling me that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was a poem about the death drive.

Human Acts is about the kind of pain that makes being alive an unattractive prospect. There is a lot of pain in this novel, pain so banal and chronic and constant and debilitating—migraines, stomach pain, heat-induced weakness, and the sort of pain that a sufferer runs out of words to describe, gets bored by, even forgets about—that it’s senseless in that there’s no sense to be made of it. It just is, and in this novel, it’s become the main part of who the protagonist is: “I spent most of my time in bed, though I barely slept,” she writes; “I didn’t cook. I didn’t venture outside. I subsisted on water and small quantities of rice and white kimchi that I ordered online and had delivered, and when the migraines and abdominal spasms hit, I vomited up what I had eaten.” As pain constricts her life, the protagonist is already about as dead as it possible to be, without dying: she writes and re-writes her will, but with no one to send it to—her family and her friends have all, it seems, been cast off—she can’t seem to finish writing it.

(Han Kang wrote the first two parts of The Vegetarian with a pen, because the pain in her finger joints prevented her from typing; that got worse, and she spent years unable to write at all, until she hit upon using a pen to type the keys of her keyboard. That condition has improved, she has reported, but she still suffers from migraines; “when a migraine comes, I have to stop my work, my reading, my routine,” she has said, “helping me realize I’m mortal and vulnerable.” To say that her work is the way it is because of the pain she lives with seems too banal and obvious to say—after all, every writer writes what they write, on some level, because of how their life has shaped them—and yet too important, too crucial no to say; I have resolved the problem by placing this information in parentheses.)

We Do Not Part never links her migraines and physical agony to her work, explicitly, and never needs to; whether she is drawn to do things like write a book about the Gwangju massacre because of her pain, or the other way around, the existential fact of life being unendurable, and yet continuing, is the point. It is, in this sense, about the peculiar desire to keep going that makes life about the desire to keep feeling pain. One figure for this is a character, an artist, who has cut off the tips of her fingers in a woodworking accident while making art; after they are re-attached, a nurse must painfully prick the fingers with a needle, every three minutes, for a month. For the fingers she makes art with to live and heal, the novel insists, she must feel constant, regular, endless pain.

Why does she keep pricking her fingers? Why, after writing a novel about one set of brutal cold war-era massacres, did Han write a novel about another set of even worse ones?

(Also: why would “worse” be a way to think about the relationship between them? I’ll stash away in parentheses the fact that all of the massacres she writes about were variations on the same theme: American-backed anti-communist Korean governments repressing Koreans, to the tune of hundreds of thousands brutally tortured and killed, in the leadup to and aftermath of what we, in the United States, call “the Korean war,” a war which has never really ended, and which makes Han Kang’s Nobel a very interesting one, given that she was literally blacklisted for writing Human Acts. I, a stupid and ignorant American, didn’t immediately understand that the massacres at the center of We Do Not Part were different massacres than the ones in Human Acts, partly because I am a stupid and ignorant American, who has already forgotten a lot of what I learned from that book about Korean historical geography. For example: Gwangju is a city on the mainland where accused communists and dissidents were massacred by a US-backed authoritarian regime in 1980; Jeju is an island fifty miles from the mainland, but not so far from Japan or even China, where a larger number of accused communists and dissidents were massacred by a US-backed authoritarian regime in the late 1940s. Then again: are they really different massacres? In a sense yes, obviously, but in another, stupider and more American sense, this is one continuous story of how the USA is a rally malign influence on the twentieth century.)

There is something excessive about We Do Not Part. If Human Acts stands alone and is self-sufficient, this is a novel about a person who can’t stop pricking her fingers, who can’t look away, who keeps “reading” Human Acts over and over again, and because of it, because of writing a book about one massacre, needs to write a book about another one. Feeling something means needing to feel it again.

I suspect that I’ll remember this novel better than I do Human Acts, even if I’m not tempted to call it a better novel. The latter half is baggy and filled with the narrative equivalent of block quotes, infodumps about historical atrocity that remind you that you’re reading a novel about a character being told about history by another character. The first half is beautiful in Han’s distinctively gentle way, and quite compellingly strange and evocative: after visiting her painfully convalescing artist friend in the hospital—whose pain made me think, in the same possibly irrelevant way as my Frost recollection, of the Kafka story “In the Penal Colony”—the protagonist journeys to Jeju to feed and water her friend’s bird, which will die if left alone too long, since birds, it turns out, are remarkably fragile creatures. After nearly dying in a sudden snowstorm, herself, she gets to the house and finds the bird already dead.

Then, a beat later, both the bird and her friend are there with her, in the house, alive and unharmed, and they all learn about Jeju’s history together. Despite being a novel about what really happened in Jeju, we never really learn whether “it was all a dream” or “everyone in it is a ghost” (or something else) was the “what really happens” in this novel. There is no closure.

Maybe that’s the point? Maybe the best way to read a novel that asks an unanswered question is to say “that’s the point.” But I think about how the seductive appeal of learning what really happened, and writing a book about it, is the hope that doing so will erase it, will prevent it from having happened in the first place. If we solve a crime after the fact, then we can prevent crime—as a lot of people’s brains have decided is how time works—but the same logic often frames how we think about the relationship between telling and un-told atrocities. Does an unbearable fact—such as yet another set of dead children in Gaza, as yet another set of American bombs kills them—become a little easier to bear if we help it go from untold to told? Is there closure there? Probably not.

This books has made me think about how death really isn’t refreshing, how it doesn’t erase all things in a single sweep, like muddy water. We say phrases like “bearing witness” because witnessing is a burden, and that weight makes the human brain look for ways to slough it off. That, too, is a very human act. And so I’ve been thinking about how Human Acts was an act of witnessing whose necessity, whose power, and whose importance—all unquestionable—leads to a no-less human desire to forget, to revert to silence, in the deep snow. I’ve been thinking about how, maybe, the hardest thing about death is that what it really does is linger, that death is the thing which never stops happening, forever, once it has happened, and that we tell stories in order not to think about that fact.

But maybe not thinking about that is as important as thinking about it, in its time? It is useful to know that after pricking your finger for a month, you get to stop. Time is useful, in this way. Han has said that she’s “been thinking about life a lot lately,” and that she wants “to explore the meaning of being alive … I will probably write it as it comes, but my heart wants to move on from winter to spring.”

I was glad to read We Do Not Part, and to be done reading it, and to read her saying this. It’s an hour or so from dawn, but the sun will rise soon; it’s March 18th, but in two days, it will be the first day of spring. Time will be useful in getting us from here to there.