What does it mean to speak without the hope of a response? To address someone who cannot or will not hear you, who cannot or will not reply? The first three full-length novels by the South Korean writer Han Kang to appear in English pose these questions with an uncompromising starkness. All three books stage conversations hauntingly out of joint, severed dialogues that yearn toward impossible completion. Characters cut off from communication—by death, by time, by life’s other cruelties—often address unreachable interlocutors, struggling to be heard, yet only Han’s reader is there to listen. The reader, like the characters themselves, experiences a loneliness so profound that it verges on physical sensation: a wrenching desire to mend these broken connections.
Human Acts takes place during and after the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, during which hundreds, possibly thousands, of students and other civilians protesting the coup d’état that installed the dictator Chun Doo-hwan were killed by the South Korean military. Here, the living long to speak with the dead and the dead with the living, but the divide is uncrossable. The White Book also extends a hand to the dead, as the narrator addresses her mother’s firstborn daughter, who lived only a few hours, imagining a world in which the infant heard her mother’s desperate command—“Don’t die. For God’s sake, don’t die”—and survived. The Vegetarian, about a woman whose seemingly simple decision to stop eating meat evolves into a protest against being human, takes a slightly different tack, introducing us to living characters who are blankly inaccessible to one another, each contained in the cell-like spaces of belief, trauma, fantasy, and selfishness that they variously occupy.
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The fourth of Han’s novels to reach English-speaking readers, Greek Lessons (translated by Deborah Smith, who translated Han’s other works that appear in English, and Emily Yae Won) seems at first like it may be no different. But while Han’s other three translated books are governed by failures of communication, this novel gives language a much more active role. Equally wonderful and terrible, both insufficient to human purposes and too powerful to tame, it becomes a character itself, a force that must be confronted.
Set in Seoul, the book moves between two unnamed characters, a man and a woman both struggling against the loss of language. The man, who narrates his sections in the first person, is a teacher of ancient Greek who has a degenerative ocular condition yet refuses to learn Braille, inevitably approaching complete blindness and the loss of his ability to read and write. The woman, observed primarily in the third person, is one of his students. She is a poet and lecturer who has become mute after a succession of tragedies: the death of her mother, her own attempted suicide, and being forced to relinquish custody of her young son. This is her second period of speechlessness; the first, when she was 16, was somehow anticipatory, “similar to that which exists before birth,” and ended when a French class brought a new language into her life and reawakened the old. But, as Han writes, “this new silence is more like that which follows death.” Though the woman enrolls in the man’s ancient-Greek class in an attempt to willfully re-estrange herself from her tongue and thus recover it, much in the same way that learning French reopened that channel in her mind, she begins to suspect that this silence is unyielding and possibly final.
At first, it seems impossible that these two characters, enclosed in their own dwindling worlds, might be able to reach each other. Yet, slowly, they begin to articulate themselves, using a basic grammar of glances, gestures, respectful proximity. Ultimately, when the man breaks his glasses and is rendered sightless, they discover a way to communicate through touch—the tracing of letters with fingertip on palm—that could be read as a gently affirming, even triumphant, reclamation of language. The fractured dialogue created by the book’s alternating sections is finally made whole.
But Greek Lessons, like Han’s other books, resists this kind of streamlined reading. When the woman’s therapist, with whom she converses in writing, suggests that this episode of muteness might have been directly provoked by the “clear causes” of her mother’s death and having her child taken away, the woman responds, “It isn’t as simple as that.” The same could be said for the novel itself. We can be touched or relieved to see Han grant these two protagonists the moment of communion that is denied so many of her other characters. Yet Greek Lessons is more than the story of two individuals finding a way to reach each other. There is a third entity that must be reckoned with: language itself.
It may seem odd to claim that the abstract notion of language is an active figure in this novel, yet the further the book goes on, the more concrete and strangely present it becomes. (One might even view the few short chapters that privilege neither the woman nor the man, beginning instead with brief exercises in Greek grammar, as being focalized on this third character.) At times, when the woman is flooded with strong emotions, she feels as though language—creaturely and possibly predatory—is drawing nearer: “Words and sounds track her like ghosts, at a remove from her body, but near enough to be within ear- and eyeshot.” At others, language, like the woman, seems to have suffered a deprivation of its own: “Words that have lost lips, / Words that have lost tongue and tooth-root, / Words that have lost throat and breath remain out of reach.”
By figuring language as a kind of “unbodied apparition,” Han seems intent on reconsidering how humans conceive of their relationship to it. Writers have long lamented the insufficiency of words in the face of the rapture and terror of our emotions; as Flaubert wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.” Yet here, Han asks us to consider another possibility. What if it is not human experience that exceeds the limits of language, but language that extends beyond human limitations, and is capable of expressing concepts and feelings that we might be too afraid to acknowledge or explore?
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The woman, in particular, seems attuned to this destabilizing possibility. Throughout the book, she is overwhelmed by the forcefulness of words: their capacity to harm or create; the way they possess and tax the fragile body. As language “moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips … The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack.” Han emphasizes the poverty of the human instrument over and over again, in the sweat and blood that seep through its pages, in the man’s failing eyes or the woman’s silenced voice, in the scars of old injuries that mark them both. As a young girl, the woman finds the sound of her own voice shameful compared with the terrible lucidity of language itself: “The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice.” Yet at times, language also enlivens the body; remembering a joyful moment, the woman recalls feeling “as though the words inside her body had first burst out into laughter, and it was that laughter that had spread across her face.”
The man, too, must come to terms with the notion that he cannot bend language to his will. He has devoted his whole life to the acquisition and mastery of the written word, the spoken word, the signed word (in addition to teaching Greek, he also knows Korean, German, and German sign language); he clings to that mastery even as his ability to read any of these languages fades. Through a series of letters he writes, we learn that when he was young, he loved a deaf woman whom he lost forever when he asked her to learn to speak verbally—so that when his sight left him and she could no longer sign to him, they could still communicate. It’s only through becoming closer to the woman in his Greek class that he finally understands what he did not in that earlier relationship: that the cultivation of lingua franca demands care and the deepest respect, and is not to be taken for granted or imposed.
Language, like some powerful alien intelligence or a god, must be appeased in order to be reclaimed—and perhaps this can be achieved only by a submission to vulnerability, to those emotions that are too frightening and deeply embedded to say aloud or commit to paper. Over the course of the novel, the man and the woman both give up their defenses and learn to approach each other with what Han has called “infinitely tender touch”—the gentle, ephemeral means they improvise together. This show of human frailty is what calls language back to them both. Woman, man, and language come together at last, leaving the reader with a sense of the hard-won beauty and tenuousness of communication.
