#literature
Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
South Korean writer Han Kang has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Han Kang’s major international breakthrough came with the novel 채식주의자 (2007; ‘The Vegetarian’, 2015). Written in three parts, the book portrays the violent consequences that ensue when its protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to submit to the norms of food intake. Her decision not to eat meat is met with various, entirely different reactions. Her behaviour is forcibly rejected by both her husband and her authoritarian father, and she is exploited erotically and aesthetically by her brother-in-law, a video artist who becomes obsessed with her passive body. Ultimately, she is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where her sister attempts to rescue her and bring her back to a ‘normal’ life. However, Yeong-hye sinks ever deeper into a psychosis-like condition expressed through the ‘flaming trees’, a symbol for a plant kingdom that is as enticing as it is dangerous.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
한 강 Han Kang was born in 1970, in the South Korean city of Gwangju, before, at the age of nine, moving with her family to Seoul.
In the novel 소년이 온다 (2014; ‘Human Acts’, 2016), Han Kang employs as her political foundation a historical event that took place in Gwangju, where she grew up and where hundreds of students and unarmed civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. In seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book confronts this episode with brutal actualisation and, in so doing, approaches the genre of witness literature. Han Kang’s style, as visionary as it is succinct, nevertheless deviates from our expectations of that genre, and it is a particular expedient of hers to permit the souls of the dead to be separated from their bodies, thus allowing them to witness their own annihilation. In certain moments, at the sight of the unidentifiable corpses that cannot be buried, the text harks back to the basic motif of Sophocles’s ‘Antigone’.
