(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Han Kang:
The Vegetarian
Portobello Books, 2015
I've been a vegetarian for six years. One of the first things I experienced about avoiding meat is that vegetarianism is about much more than food preferences. Food is culture, community, norms and boundaries. To say that I am a vegetarian is not really right, because I eat fish when I get it served. I would imagine not to, but it feels like one for great transgression of boundaries and community.
Limit exceeded. This year's International Man Booker winner, Han Kang, portrays a Korean woman who abruptly decides to become a vegetarian. A belligerent dream makes her wake up in the middle of the night, go to the fridge and throw out all the animal products. In the first of the three parts of the novel, we follow her husband and his steep reaction to his wife's transformation. In the second part, it is the woman's brother-in-law who tells, and in the last part it is the sister. Both the woman, Yeong-hye, and the plot take increasingly strange and more extreme turns, triggered by this first boundary crossing: Yeong-hye sitting on the kitchen floor in the dark, surrounded by frozen beef and large amounts of salt water sole.
None of the men in the family cope with Yeong-hye's conversion, nor do they try to understand her choices. She eventually ends up in a psychiatric hospital, where she moves ever further away from her physical needs. She identifies more with the trees than with the people, and when the brother-in-law, as part of an art project, paints Yeong-he full of flowers, it gives her a new sense of freedom and removes the nightmares.
The Vegetarian is full of striking symbolism. Body and nature merge into a higher entity that asks acute questions about how we treat each other and our planet. The novel's three protagonists, Yeong-hye, her sister In-hye and her husband (who remains anonymous), all try to turn away from a society that suffocates them in various ways. In this struggle, the body becomes important, because it is its needs that bind them to the daily struggle with work, cooking and household chores. In-hye's husband escapes most of the housework, but he struggles with all the evil the human body is capable of performing, and his art projects have revolved around an "atoning for surviving the May Massacre" (a violent attack on demonstrators students in Gwangju in May 1980).
Women are also linguistically locked into a diagnosis, in the 1800th century, as crazy and hysterical; in our time as neurotic and eating disordered.
The body as a combat zone. Controlling the body is a feminist review theme that goes back to the oldest texts we know of. In-hye describes the body as "the only area where you are free to do as you like", a statement that says something about how strong the patriarchal and conformity structures are in Korean society. Precisely because both body and sexuality are so difficult to control, they are linked to so many prohibitions and taboos. Open wounds, blood and other body fluids are commonplace The Vegetarian, and they are constantly hinting at the border blast. Yeong-hye's repetitive dream is about a bloody face, and In-hye feels that the hard-fought existence is disintegrating when she gets a wound inside. The doctor operates her and the bleeding stops, but the wound has literally opened up: "she felt as though there was still an open wound inside her body".
Yeong-hye's stay at a psychiatric institution is reminiscent of Amalie Skram's autobiographical Professor Hieronymus and the iconic "Madwoman in the Attic" of Charlotte Bröntes Jane Eyre. In Skram's work, the institution is used as a control body for women who behave differently from the "normal"; At Brönte all the strange and threatening things are closed in the attic. Women are also linguistically locked into a diagnosis, in the 1800th century, as crazy and hysterical; in our time as neurotic and eating disordered.
Collective shame. It's not just about the boundary between us and the others, but also the other, like the trees, flowers and rain. In-hye's husband has made a number of art films dealing with violent abuses and the gravity of capitalism, and also with him it is now a dream that starts an idea to make a film about two flower-painted people having sex. Yeong-hye is drawn into this project, and the non-human by it pulls her out of her asexual state. Under these dreams, art projects and vegetarianism lies a deep collective shame, where happiness and freedom must necessarily be a place that has not been tarnished by the abuse of power by people. This discourse is very interesting at a time when more and more vegetarians are being drawn to Eastern philosophy and a life with less carbon footprint.
I could follow up with dozens of references and thoughts on the book's theme of the distinction between nature and culture, the normal and the abnormal, the strong and the weak. Precisely because the novel is so good, it sows all those seeds that grow and grow after reading. I don't necessarily think you're a better person by being a vegetarian, but I think you become a better person by reading The Vegetarian.
