A shattering revelation on the Korean literary scene in the 1990s, Han Kang, 53, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. The crowning achievement of an exceptional career for this total writer with intense prose, haunted by trauma of Korean history.
Belinda Ibrahim (ICI Beirut website)
Born on November 27, 1970 in Gwangju, Han Kang is the daughter of writer Han Seung-won. Her childhood and her writing will be forever marked by the uprising, bloodily repressed, in her hometown in 1980, when she was 9 years old. Even though her family moved to Seoul just before the tragedy, the chance discovery at the age of 12 of photos of mutilated victims haunted her for a long time.
This traumatic event and other dark pages of recent Korean history permeate all of Han Kang’s work. The Jeju massacre in 1948, the military dictatorship and even the excesses of power under President Park Geun-hye are all buried wounds that she explores without concession.
Individuals grappling with great History, this is the common thread of his novels. The one who returns (2014) fits directly into the context of the Gwangju uprising, through the wanderings of a young man looking for his missing comrades and a woman confronted with censorship. Impossible goodbyes (Foreign Medici Prize 2023) revisits the Jeju massacre.
Beyond national tragedies, Han Kang examines the traumas buried in everyone and the resilience necessary to overcome them. A “correspondence between mental torment and physical torment”, underlines the Nobel jury, saluting a work which “exposes the fragility of human life”.
The body as a central metaphor
At the heart of this exploration of the abysses of the human soul, the body occupies an essential place. Like a physical embodiment of psychological wounds. Receptacle of the stigmata of a violent History, mirror of the vulnerability of our condition, the body is the central metaphor which runs through all of Han Kang’s work.
This is particularly evident in The Vegetarian (2007), the novel that revealed her to the world (Man Booker Prize 2016). The protagonist’s stubborn refusal to eat, her desire to blend into the plant world, are described through a slow physical metamorphosis. The bruised body speaks of the intimate and visceral rebellion of a woman stifled by the social straitjacket.
More broadly, Han Kang makes the body the terrain of a “politics” in the strong sense: a space of resistance and self-affirmation in the face of external dictates. Through its extreme transformations, the body expresses the unspeakable of interior torments, and, ultimately, the revolt of the being against all forms of oppression.
For Han Kang, the body is also the troubled place where the living and the dead, the physical and the spiritual, meet. Many of his characters experience a disturbing porosity between their own bodily contours and those of their deceased loved ones. Like a ghostly incarnation that blurs the boundaries of identity.
Suffering bodies, rebellious bodies, inhabited bodies, metamorphosed bodies… So many variations through which Han Kang probes the complexity of the psyche and the dark side in each of us, making the fleshly envelope a seismograph of the movements of the soul.
Poetic, chiselled, committed writing
The originality of Han Kang’s prose lies in its unique blend of poetry and clinical cruelty. His writing, extremely precise, excels in restoring in minute detail the slow decay of bodies. But this raw realism readily shifts into a fantastic dreamlike world, reminiscent of the world of Haruki Murakami.
Poetry, violence, politics: Han Kang’s language holds this triple challenge. Because, under the finesse of his pen, his intimate portraits and his lyrical flights, there always emerges a sharp criticism of Korean society and its taboos, whether it be stifling conformism, the repression of the past or the feminist question. .
This commitment also led to her being placed on a “black list” of nearly 10,000 artists, under the presidency of Park Geun-hye, banned from public subsidies for their critical outlook. But Han Kang never gave up exploring the gray areas of his country and the human soul.
A total writer, icon of Korean letters
Beyond being a novelist and short story writer, Han Kang is a protean artist. A precocious poet, she is also an essayist, a children’s author and a keen connoisseur of music and art history, all passions which infuse her work.
This unique palette, combined with the depth of her outlook, makes her a “total writer”, a virtuoso of both language and depth psychology. A unique voice that has established itself throughout the world and become, through translations, an icon of Korean literature, in the same way as Hwang Sok-yong or Ko Un.
With the Nobel Prize for Literature, Han Kang offers his country its first supreme recognition. A strong symbol for South Korea and for all East Asian literature. But, beyond this national triumph, this coronation highlights a truly universal work.
Because, if Han Kang examines the Korean soul and its buried torments with a scalpel, she speaks to us all about the pain of being in the world, about the intimate crack in our existences haunted by History with its great Ax. And the resilience of the individual in the face of the crazy march of the world.
Behind his Korean roots and his formal virtuosity, Han Kang’s strength is there: an intensely poetic and political voice, which makes our bodies and our souls the theater of the human condition. A voice now awarded the highest literary distinction in the world.
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