Troublesome Terrains

 Teaching World Literature at the post-graduate level is both a tremendous and troublesome terrain. Per semester, you are travelling with the students across terrific terrains that are vastly different, and yet uniquely similar. 

It was thus that I first met Han Kang, the South Korean author who is to get the Nobel prize for literature this year. I have read just two novels of her rather sparse oeuvre. Yet they are more than enough for getting acquainted with the troubled terrain that is her wor(l)ds.

To begin with, she writes of the family and the tensions therein. Remember Tolstoy who put it so succinctly, 'every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way'?  Kang peels open these unravelled tensions. 'The Vegetarian' , the novel I taught, is , for instance, an exploration of the patriarchy and how it oppresses women. Being vegetarian in a country addicted to the non-veg food becomes a symbol of the female rebellion against patriarchy. 

The novel is, moreover, an exploration of how the consumerist-capitalist society pushes a sensitive, non-conforming individual towards certain lunacy. Invisible but prominent in the process are strains of sexuality. At times, indeed, the novel is much too much to bear. 

Comparatively, the other novel, 'The White Book', is less violent. Set in Warsaw, with its unmistakable atrocities during the Holocaust, it explores the relationship of the narrator with her prematurely born sister who died within two days of her birth.

That death, even more than the similar death of a son aborted, has defined the family. The parents, especially the mother, is  obsessed with the baby she herself delivered, whom she tried to breast-feed, and who died a death the kid would never even understand.

The narrator is aware that she is born at all because of that death. If that baby had survived, she would not even have been conceived/conceptualised. The novel explores this relationship between two selves, one unborn yet forever present, so to say.

Despite such dis-functionalities, her novels subtly stress the familial bonds, especially between sisters. The poetic novels pry open the multiple loneliness-es people, and  societal structures/strictures, impose on themselves. Her writings are troubling texts in this sense, too.

Her language and its poetry shine through the translation. There is a genuine lilt and rhythm to her controlled language saturated with symbolism and imagery. No wonder, the Nobel Prize Committee chose her, may be, as a representative of the South Korean/Asian women authors, despite her quantity-wise fragile, but quality-wise strong writing! 

Pratima@Reading world literature in translation shows you the complexity of human(e) experience, and the beauty of the unusual literary techniques used to explore it.