Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith
Human Acts opens with a note from the translator, Deborah Smith, discussing some of the challenges of translating Korean to English, and among the points she makes is one about how Han Kang refers to the boxes left behind when we die:
The alternation in the original between words whose meanings shade from ‘corpse’ or ‘dead body’ to ‘dead person’ or simply ‘body’ reflects a status of uncertainty reminiscent of Antigone. In the Korean context, such issues can also be connected to animist beliefs and the idea of somatic integrity – that violence done to the body is a violation of the spirit / soul which animates it.
That idea—that violence done to the body is a violation of the soul—is one which runs right through Human Acts. The novel itself opens with a bunch of kids, some only in Middle School, who are, through horrendous circumstance, either guardians of the dead, or dead, or in some cases about to die.
We are in the city of Gwangju, in South Korea, in 1980, during a student-led uprising against the murderous dictator Chun Doo-hwan. The students and their supporters are mostly unarmed, or if in possession of guns then not prepared to use them. They are mown down and stabbed by soldiers with guns and bayonets. Their bodies are brought to a collecting point in a gymnasium, where we meet a boy, Dong-ho, fifteen, alive, but destined to be murdered by the soldiers, engaged in documenting the dead.
In this opening chapter, Han Kang’s graceful writing combines being almost unbearably moving, with being fittingly, jarringly horrible. Her characters—kids against armed soldiers—are already in a moving situation, of course, but the writing never feels manipulative, or as if it’s tugging heart-strings. Instead, deep emotion is treated coolly, and deftly, in asides such as this:
When the bereaved families brought the coffins in, pushing them in handcarts – was it sweat or tears that made their faces shine? – you had to move the existing coffins closer together to make room.
That “you” refers to Dong-ho; the opening chapter is written in the second person, for reasons which become heartbreakingly clear at the very end of the novel, when Han Kang, a native of Gwangju, reveals in what I took to be her own voice, that she based her character Dong-ho on a real boy Dong-ho, who died in the uprising:
Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.
When she asks one of the real Dong-ho’s surviving brothers if she may write her book, he replies:
Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.
What a challenge. And Han Kang rises to it, brilliantly, and unsparingly. The first chapter slams the reader against horror again and again. Was there ever a more revoltingly completely right simile than this, linking decaying corpses, and convention-goers?
That night, looking around at all those dead bodies crammed into the gym hall , you though to yourself how like a convention it seemed, a mass rally of corpses who were all there by pre-arrangement, whose only action was the production of that horrible putrid smell.
The putrid smell is mentioned often: Hang Kang insists on the physicality of a body’s decay. For instance here, when describing the corpse of a slight woman now bloated to the size of a man:
... the sheer rate of decomposition stuns you. Stab wounds slash down from her forehead to her left eye, her cheekbone to her jaw, her left breast to her armpit, gaping gashes where the raw flesh shows through. The right side of her skull has completely caved in, seemingly the work of a club, and the meat of the brain is visible. These open wounds were the first to rot, followed by the many bruises on her battered corpse. Her toes, with their clear pedicure, were initially intact, with no external injuries, but as time passed they swelled up like thick tubers of ginger, turning black in the process.
After reading this, it is as well to remember Deborah Smith’s note that in Korea, violence done to the body is thought to be at the same time violence done to the soul, because Han Kang proceeds to investigate how violence done to the body is also violence done to the soul—how violence done to the body impacts on the soul, considered literally, as an insubstantial something connected somehow with the body. Indeed, the second chapter is actually written from the point of view of a ghost, or soul; the ghost, or soul of Dong-ho’s friend, Jeong-dae, also fifteen, and, at the opening of the novel, newly murdered. A chapter written from the point of a view of a ghost could easily have been twee, but the quality of Han Kang’s writing is such that the chapter does not seem affected, but truthful, and certainly not quaint—Hang Kang continues to insist on brutal descriptions of death and of decaying bodies.
Subsequent chapters explore the impact of the events of 1980 over the following thirty years, on a number of characters who were present with Dong-ho in the days leading up to his murder, and whose lives, and souls, have been blighted by the violence they witnessed, and experienced then. We meet an editor who, in 1985, is working on a play that has been so heavily censored the actors perform it in silence; a man who was imprisoned in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, and who, in 1990, is recounting his experiences for a professor; a woman, Seon-ju whom, in 2002, still blames herself for Dong-ho’s death, because she failed to insist he went home to safety from the Provincial Office where they were awaiting a military attack, on the night he died.
Seon-ju is not the only woman who blames herself for Dong-ho’s death; so does his mother, whom we meet, in 2010, just after she thinks she has caught a glimpse of her son’s ghost on the street, leaving her “dizzy as a whirligig”. She speaks to her son directly, using the second person, as Han Kang had done in the first chapter, or else calling him “my Dong-ho”:
My Dong-ho, I was thirty when I had you. My last-born.
She has not been able to assimilate that she and another, older son had gone to the Provincial Office on the night of Dong-ho’s death in an attempt to persuade him to come home, but that they had left without him. When it became clear that if this older son had gone inside to look for his younger brother he would never have come out, his mother hurried him away. “And that was how I lost you.” She tells Dong-ho
... and the two of us walked back home through those deathly silent streets, with the tears streaming down our faces.
After the mother has spoken, we have the epilogue, from Han Kang herself, in 2013, listening to Dong-ho’s brother telling her she can write her book, if she does so in such a way that no one will ever be able to desecrate his brother’s memory again.
I hope this surviving brother has read Human Acts; if he has, I am sure he must feel that the trust he placed in Han Kang was justified. She’s written a challenging novel that stretches the reader in all directions, which is at the same time a moving and mystical memorial to Dong-ho. Human Acts deserves not only to be read, but also to be re-read, by readers everywhere.