The Vegetarian By Han Kang
"‘I
didn’t, you see. I thought trees stood up straight … I only found out just now.
They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them. Look, look over
there, aren’t you surprised?’ Yeong-hye sprang up and pointed to the window.
‘All of them, they’re all standing on their heads.’ Yeong-hye laughed
frantically. In-hye remembered" (from "Vegetarian: A Novel" by
Han Kang)
The above is exclaimed by Yeong-Hye supposed to be delirious
and schizophrenic who refuses to eat to her elder sister In-Hye. And as this
quote grips me, embrace me, I struggle to interpret it- As I often speak about
layers, this speaks to me in layers, from multiple angles- the agency of
Yeong_hye or that of any woman which is almost absent and often are said to
make choices in coercion. Or it is the way we want to look into things, our
empathy and being one with them engulfs us wholly that it destroys us- however
Yeong-Hye questions this tragedy asking, why is it so sad to die?
And when did all these things start? From the moment Yeong-
Hye married for the last 5 years, a docile, almost insignificant house-wife, whom her husband dismisses at the
beginning of the novel as to be completely unremarkable in every way
takes the decision of becoming a vegetarian and gives up eating meat. All hell
breaks loose. In fact it becomes unfathomable and unacceptable to the husband,
as well as to her own parents, siblings.
Her husband almost starts thinking himself as a victim, being denied of
being served non-vegetarian food and of course of sex. Yeong-Hye refuses
physical relationship stating his sweat smells of meat which is abhorring to
her. However that doesn’t stop Mr. Cheong to violate her wishes. And this
violence goes on throughout the book. In
fact Han Kang doesn’t give any voice to Yeong-Hye throughout the novel. Her thoughts are just italicized, as some soliloquys
within herself.
However Yeong- Hye though is an omnipresent character in the
book, the entire novel is written in 3 parts, where the narrator changes from the
first part being Mr. Cheong, Hye’s husband, amazed at his own victimhood (that’s
how he speaks about these incidences), to In-Hye’s (Yeong Hye’s elder sister)
husband. He gets enamored with Yeong- Hye, now divorced and under medication,
post suicidal trauma. In fact consent is something constantly questioned in the
novel. In-Hye seems to be much surer and successful than her artist husband,
who find In-Hye’s goodness almost
oppressive. Its not his
relationship with Yeong- Hye that makes In-Hye turn against him. She thinks him
to be manipulative and selfish, who never thought that Yeong-Hye is unwell and
under medication- and this relationship is again violation of her rights to be
in an “agency to decide”. And this is when the third and final part of the novel
starts. In In-Hye’s voice. Suddenly the successful business woman, the only
woman in the novel who earns her living, takes care of the family, leads a cosmetic
chain and has a voice as a narrator.. feels the futility of her own self. Questions
why she had not raised her voice earlier, when her father tried to force-feed
meat to Yeong-Hye? Why now- when her own husband is in the act? Is it a
personal deceit that she is trying to hide in form of love or concern..
As she reminisces about their childhood, when one day the two
sisters losing their way in the mountains, Yeong-Hye shared the happy
possibility of never being able to trace her way back home… that revelation
dawns upon her..
"Only after all this time was she able to
understand why Yeong-hye had said what she did. Yeong-hye had been the only
victim of their father’s beatings. Such violence wouldn’t have bothered their
brother Yeong-ho so much, a boy who went around doling out his own rough
justice to the village children. As the eldest daughter, In-hye had been the
one who took over from their exhausted mother and made a broth for her father
to wash the liquor down, and so he’d always taken a certain care in his
dealings with her. Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect
their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely
absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now,
with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had
adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had
been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival
tactic. Could I have prevented it? Could I have prevented those
unimaginable things from sinking so deep inside of Yeong-hye and holding her in
their grip? She saw her sister again, as a child, her back and shoulders and
the back of her head as she stood alone in front of the main gate at sunset.
The two of them had eventually made it down off the mountain, but on the
opposite side from where they’d started. They’d hitched a ride on a power tiller
back to their small town, hurrying along the unfamiliar road as darkness fell.
In-hye had been relieved, but not her sister."
She questions the reason of her conformity, so long, to the
parents, to the family, to the husband.. to look at success in this manner..
whereas what does Yeong Hye do in her schizophrenia, giving up meat and then
wanting to be the tree, with hands in the ground, lest the hands become
something else tugging at flesh, plucking and seizing from others.. an act of
violence.. Well non-violence did lead to her death…
The Vegetarian is actually a first of its kind novel for me,
surreal in a sense. In fact its difficult for me to describe the feeling. And of
course I am looking at it from the angle of women and agency in the Asian
context. However also it reflects on the effect of trying to change the norms
or ways of “oppression” (may be), at refusing to violate rights, be it that of the
animals or the plants, to rid one-self of the carnal desires- the state of
Yeong-Hye, from being the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an
object of desire..to becoming a body void of any desire… metaphorically death
and that’s what came to Yeong Hye.
