The Swedish Academy has a surprise coming up this year: the writer Han Kang. It is the first Nobel Prize in Literature for Korea. This means that the country’s top-class literature is finally joining the global success of South Korean culture.
Writing about people who have warmth within them and whose hearts beat: Han Kang.
Roberto Ricciuti / Getty
People have often been surprised or even annoyed by the Swedish Academy’s decisions – this time, with the choice of the South Korean writer Han Kang, one can be satisfied. In her person, an important nation and great culture is being taken into account for the first time in the awarding of the most prestigious award in the literary world.
Today, South Korea is at the forefront of popular world culture almost everywhere. Only literature has so far received comparatively little attention, despite many original talents. For a long time, the 91-year-old writer Ko Un was considered a candidate, whose personal fight for democracy and his complex poetic work ideally combine what the Nobel Prize seeks – the connection between aesthetics and morality, beauty and emancipation, form and consciousness . However, in recent years, Ko Un has become badly entangled in the pitfalls of “Me too”, so that he was no longer considered as laureate.
Han Kang, born in 1970, belongs to a completely transformed, politically relaxed and cosmopolitan generation of South Koreans. Since the turn of the millennium, this has managed to transform the Han River economic miracle into a pop-cultural awakening that goes by the name “Hallyu” (Korea wave).
Whether films (“Parasite”) or series (“Squid Game”), K-pop or K-rap (“Gangnam Style” by Psy), comics or art, fashion, design or cuisine – South Korean culture has become a global style-former. Seoul has transformed into a hip metropolis, a no longer completely secret insider tip for tourists from China, Japan, Europe and the USA.
The depths of violence
Han Kang was born in Kwangju, southwest Korea, where she spent part of her early childhood. She created a literary monument to the city with the novel “The Work of Man”. In it she commemorated the army’s brutal massacre of students and workers who demonstrated against the military dictatorship on May 18, 1980. She tries profoundly and in quiet tones to capture the tragic horror of these days.
Violence is a theme that recurs in Han Kang’s books. The novel “The Vegetarian”, for which she received the International Booker Prize in 2016 and which opened the doors to Western audiences, offers a completely different approach to this type of “human work”. Han tells the story of a woman who breaks away from the aggression of the world and decides to become a vegetarian. Her quiet rebellion takes on bizarre forms as she tries to become more and more like a plant.
She describes violence, Han Kang once said, because she wants to understand what makes people special, but also where the limits of the comprehensibility of human actions lie. Furthermore, she wants to explore whether and how we can embrace the world in which horror and beauty are so hopelessly mixed.
Han Kang’s childhood was characterized by books and reading. Her literary career was practically born in her cradle. Her father Han Sung Won is a well-known writer. The books became a means for his daughter to cope with loneliness. The family had to move often because his father didn’t earn much, and Han Kang was left without any friends. At an early age she developed a feeling for the strangeness of the world and the lostness of the individual. Literature became a magical counter-universe; the path to writing was obvious. The fact that she chose to study Korean literature fits seamlessly into this CV.
International recognition
Not fiction, but poetry was at the beginning of Han Kang’s literary career. She published her first poems in 1993, but then turned entirely to prose. Since the first story was published in 1994, the author has published a whole series of novels, stories and essays. Her works soon found resonance among critics and audiences. The recognition came in the form of awards, and Han Kang has now won most of the major Korean literary awards. This was followed by an international breakthrough and translation into the world’s most important languages.
In April, Norway’s Future Library Project announced that Han Kang would become the first Asian woman ever to be named Author of the Year. The project consists of selecting someone to write a book every year until a total of 100 works have been collected. All of these books are not scheduled to be published until 100 years after the project began, i.e. in 2114.
What defines Han Kang’s literary work? Like the world of any serious author, hers is complex and has a richness all its own. Han once said about her writing: “I want to write about people who have warmth within them and whose hearts beat.” She likes to write a lot in the winter. The cold of this season, which she felt as a child, was deeply engraved in her body and the sensation of it made her an author. Because in the cold days she is particularly aware of how warm and how fragile the human body is. Then she feels intensely that she is alive, that she is alive.
Han uses simple, quiet language, without pathos. In doing so, she creates a subtlety all her own. The style of her storytelling is reserved and calm and can therefore seem a bit cold. Her prose has its own seriousness and immediacy; it does not contain any ironic breaks. At 53, Han Kang is still relatively young, but her style has refined and clearly taken shape over the years.
The color white
Han Kang likes to use multiple perspectives to make things appear as complex as possible. This narrative technique is not new, but Han uses it to create density and atmosphere, as in “The Vegetarian” and “Human Work”. The novel “Your Cold Hands” has two narrative levels. In “Human Work” various speakers appear who experienced the same tragic event. The living, the wounded and the dead tell their version. Reality weaves itself together from different narrative strands to form a large narrative. In “The Vegetarian” the story is split into three points of view. Three different people tell how they experienced the fate of the protagonist Yeong Hye.
Another feature of Han Kang’s prose is the importance of the body. Physicality plays an important role in her works. This covers a lot of things: we always have a subjective state of mind. We are exposed to the gaze of others, on which our beauty, our desire and our self-image depend. After all, we are vulnerable, feel pain, get sick and die. If we have scars, we try to hide them.
The relationship with your own body is rarely uncomplicated. Eating disorders and physical deformation are motifs that recur regularly in Han Kang’s works. The remarkable, cross-cultural success of her books is undoubtedly due to the fact that they show people in their fragility. Physically, but also in relation to the question of who or what the self is.
Han Kang recently opened up a new subject area with the lyrical prose “Weiss”. The book is a literary gem. In it, Han talks about things that are white. They are short stories, deep and elegant. They make clear how much the world of things is riddled with meanings, signs, memories and emotions. The white wrapping cloth, for example, holds the mystery of birth and death.
For a long time, South Korean literature, which received little international attention, wrestled with the historical traumas of colonization and civil war, division and tyranny – and this in a serious aesthetic of realism. Han Kang is the representative of a playful and skeptical generation of postmodern narrators who have self-confidently and stubbornly connected to world literature without sacrificing their own origins on the altar of globalized arbitrariness. It is worthy and right that their voice has been heard in Stockholm.
