Presented by Barbara Present: Barb, Beth, Betsy, Denise, Jennifer, Katharine, Mariannick, Murielle, Pat, Rosie, Sealia and Reese, Wendy H, Wendy N.
Barbara volunteered to present this book that Denise had chosen because she thought she could identify with it, having herself been a sometime vegetarian. She anticipated that it might be light and humorous but of course it didn’t turn out to be so.
Han Kang was born in 1970. Her parents were novelists.She first wrote poetry then a short story, “The Fruit of my Woman,” which is a precursor to The Vegetarian. Reviewers called it bizarre. A second short story “The Mongolian Mark” won a Korean fiction prize, and it formed the central part of the novel we read.
We then spoke about the mark—someone asked whether it is a real thing. Wendy H. had looked it up and found that many non European babies have it as well as about 10% of European children. It usually disappears early on, but sometimes remains to adulthood, as in the novel. In Chinese culture it’s interpreted as a sign of good luck, but in Korean culture, it’s a mark of trauma. It’s said that the spirit mother beats babies out of the womb at birth.
In 2024 Han Kang won the Nobel prize for literature. The jury commended a body of work that expresses empathy for vulnerable lives and an awareness of connection between body and soul.
Barbara then mentioned a recent article that Wendy sent her about a failed Starbucks marketing drive in South Korea. The company released a new large sized mug on the anniversary of the 1980 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in the city of Gwangju. They called it “Tank Day” and the mug was called a tank. There were demonstrations of outrage with people smashing the mugs. This event reveals the depth of the national trauma following the massacre of the Gwangju student protesters. Han Kang discovered the massacre when she was 12. Hidden on the top shelf of the family bookcase was a secretly circulated memorial album of
photographs taken by foreign journalists. It had been stacked with its spine to the wall to prevent Han and her brothers from finding it. Han says that something broke inside her when she discovered the images. She wrote a novel about the massacre, Human Acts. There is an oblique reference to the event in The Vegetarian. Yeong-hye’s
brother-in-law focused on it in his video art work, so much so that his former girlfriend says: “Your nickname used to be ‘the May priest,’ you know. After Gwangju, your art was so engagé, almost as though you were atoning for surviving the May Massacre. You seemed so serious, so ascetic…all very romantic …”p. 109.
Rosie reminded us that a few years ago the book club chose a book that also mentioned the protests, Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 by Choo Nam-Joo. It reveals a similarly oppressive, authoritarian, patriarchal society to the one depicted in The Vegetarian. We talked about the way progress is often followed by a backlash. The Korean government wants to close its Ministry of Gender Equality because it claims everyone is equal now.
The narrative structure in The Vegetarian is unusual. It is told from three differing perspectives, yet not one of those is the protagonist, Yheong-hye. Aside from a few instances of brief dream-like monologues, readers don’t hear directly from her. The novel begins with the voice of the husband. Wendy asked why we thought the writer made this choice to open the novel. We agreed that it proves that Yeong-hye has no agency. Bizarrely, Mr Cheong begins by saying that he isn’t attracted to Yeong-hye but he marries her because he wants an ordinary wife. Her passivity suits him. Sealia said that instead of being called The Vegetarian, the novel could be called The Eating Disorder. Yeong-hye’s only agency is choosing what she puts in her body.
The three parts of the novel develop in chronological order, but since the conflicts are based on unresolved childhood trauma, memories of past violence emerge. Yeong-hye’s father beat her
often until she married and left home. Beth felt that the dream that prompted the refusal of meat was a kind of psychotic break. The dreams are the result of trauma. Yeong-hye is isolated; she seems to lack connection with anyone. Her mother apologises to her husband because her daughter will not eat meat. Her father
violently forces food on her. Her parents disown her and disappear from the novel. The scene of the family meal puts patriarchal domination on display and shows the role of the family in perpetuating it. One critic uses the word “Carno-phallogocentric”.
Yeong-hye’s presence at her husband’s work dinner is proof of her alienation. Braless as well as vegetarian, she veers further and further away from convention. The scene of the dinner is deeply ironic. We see the husband’s hypocrisy and shallowness through his own description of it. Yeong-hye reveals the monstrosity of her society. We talked about the scene where she eats the bird or seems to, since her mouth is bloodied. It’s perhaps a demonstration of the reality of humans eating animals.
We discussed the middle section, “The Mongolian Mark." This is where Yeong-hye and her brother-in-law break away completely from social boundaries by engaging in forbidden acts. Bodies that are normally covered are bared and then adorned with painted flowers. Readers had different attitudes to this part. For some, the brother-in-law was exploiting a vulnerable and deranged person. His obsession with her Mongolian mark might reveal his attraction to a child-woman, a woman that he can control. Is her passivity OK? Yeong-hye is OK with it, so other readers felt that the video art allowed the two of them to break free from social constraints, achieving a joyful metamorphosis. It’s the boundary crossing that her sister seems to envy at the end. Is it sexual? Yes and no. She is becoming a plant. She loves the flowers blooming from her crotch. Her decisions transform their lives. At the end, In-hye wonders about her husband’s video project. Was it even sexual?: “The writhing movements of those bodies made it seem as if they were trying to shuck off the human. Was it that that had made him film such a thing? To stake everything … stake everything, and lose everything.”
Pat thinks that the core character is In-hye. She’s the good girl and yet she too feels the strain of her feminine role. At one point, she seriously considers not going back to her son. We see contrast with her sister. Yeong-hye falls into the category of madwoman, which, along with that of witch, is a classic way of treating non conformity in patriarchy.
Should we discuss this novel as if Yeong-hye is a real person—Is it a realistic novel? Some parts are realistic, like the scenes in the hospital. Yeong-hye’s physical suffering reminds us that eating disorders are the hardest thing to treat. Eating disorders are often the responses of people who feel they are not in control of their lives. By the end of the novel, Yeong-hye has been admitted to an asylum. Her medical care is like punishment or torture. The novel is almost a kind of horror story. Has she descended into ‘madness’? Or could it be argued that she is fully lucid, in control of her faculties and protesting against the circumstances which have been forced upon her?
The conversation moved to the question of translation. Although it won the International Booker Prize, Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian has been criticised, with some commentators saying the novel contained embellishments and mistranslations. Smith wrote about this controversy in The LA Review of Books, stating “Since there is no such thing as a truly literal translation — no two languages’ grammars match, their vocabularies diverge, even punctuation has a different weight — there can be no such thing as a translation that is not ‘creative’.” Deborah Smith studied Korean for 3 years in order to tackle the book. There are scholarly works on its translation. The translator has always to decide how closely she should adhere to the literal language of the text. Katharine quoted from the article in which the translator discussed the project: “One aspect of the translation that was purely pleasurable, though, was the support I had from both the editor and Han Kang herself, who both made it clear from the start that they see translation as an art and believed that I needed to be allowed a certain amount of artistic license in order to produce an English text worthy of the original.’”
We wondered how much we missed by not knowing very much about Korean history or culture. Sealia thought it was not a stretch to read it as a feminist book. We can identify with the issues beyond South Korean culture. Sealia said that we may miss some cultural things but other themes are universal. Patriarchy is everywhere. Mariannick was reminded of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. One reviewer mentioned Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in which the eponymous character famously repeats “I prefer not to” and refuses food at the end until he dies.
We discussed whether it was fair to generalise about Korean family structures. Korean women can be very strong. The group’s experience of contact with Korean women was mixed. Mariannick spoke of group of women she knew having always to be chaperoned by a man. Pat knows a family that sent their daughter to America to avoid the repressive Korean education system.
Katharine read a quotation from Han Kang about the novel: I think this novel has some layers: questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others; body as the last refuge or the last determination, and some more. It will be inevitable that different aspects are more focused on by different readers and cultural backgrounds. If I could say one thing, this novel isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy. I wanted to deal with my long-lasting questions about the possibility/impossibility of innocence in this world, which is mingled with such violence and beauty. These were universal questions that occupied me as I wrote it.
We discussed the question of the impossibility of innocence. Yeong-hye is guilty in eyes of society. She’s committed to an asylum for having sex with her brother-in-law. Yet in readers’ eyes her sexuality can be seen as natural and innocent. And In-hye seems to realise at the end by that the relation is not sexual but rather an effort to break boundaries. Could we say that you are innocent as long as your actions don’t hurt someone else? Yeong hye seems to want to escape the responsibility for doing harm by becoming a plant. Still, she harms herself by refusing to eat. She also tries to kill herself rather than be forced to eat meat. Murielle asked if she could be seen as a martyr (following on from the theme of last month’s book). Perhaps so.
