10 - Prose

Summary

In the voice of a male narrator whose first sentence abruptly turns to the past, as if caught on a temporal fault-line, South Korean writer Han Kang opens her novel The Vegetarian: A Novel (2007): “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” (3). Without introducing himself, Mr Cheong thus begins the section he narrates, his curt statement aiming to establish control over his sense of time and his newly vegan wife. Narrating in the first-person singular, he traces the end of his marriage to the beginning of his wife’s transformation, angry that his life breaks into a before-time that he cannot reclaim. He looks backward – repeatedly recalling scenes of his wife in the kitchen and preparing meat – pressing the counterforce of his retrospective narrative against the vortex of her turning-vegan. He also insistently refers to her as “my wife,” in a kind of lexical pinning that runs parallel with the physical pinning that takes place when he holds her down and assaults her. It is not until her mother asks after her and her father angrily shouts, “Yeong-hye, are you still not eating meat?” that she shifts out from under the possessive diction and into a name (28). But this naming becomes something she defies too, increasingly unable or unwilling to hear it, even when directly addressed.

As scholars of The Vegetarian have argued, Yeong-hye’s radical disruption of carnivorous consumption threatens all manner of hierarchical ordering and power. Her veganism is read by other characters as distinctly pathological, as Laura Wright maintains, and declared a medical emergency; only as a sick and dangerous vegan is she rendered intelligible in the patriarchal structure of her world. In this chapter, we follow a similarly vegan, feminist route into The Vegetarian but we shift it slightly, away from seeing Yeong-hye as a puzzling object of interpretation. We argue that while Kang introduces Yeong-hye as a kind of closed book – “always difficult to read,” in the words of another character – she also casts her as a reader and writer herself, binding Yeong-hye’s vegan dreaming to her intellectual openness (129).

Just before Yeong-hye materializes in the light of an open fridge – peering into it as if it were suddenly legible as a space filled with dead animals – she is introduced as someone who disappears into books.