“At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras.”
— Sumana Roy, 'How I Became a Tree'
My thesis on Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian started out with a simple and clear self-directive, the desire to help other women, trapped in bodies with invisible illnesses. Eventually, that grand ambition trickled down into a small act, i.e., the act of reading. In many ways, I replaced my body, with this book, in search of answers that I wasn’t able to find in doctors’ offices.
We get to know Yeong-hye, the female protagonist of The Vegetarian, as she is being read by her husband, brother-in-law, and sister. I say “read” specifically because they are constantly trying to interpret Yeong-hye as they narrate the novel.
Yeong-hye is described as an ordinary woman – an obedient wife – until she quits eating meat after having dreams. Uncannily vivid and violent dreams, “But the fear. My clothes still wet with blood. Hide, hide behind the trees. Crouch down, don’t let anybody see. My bloody hands. My bloody mouth. In that barn, what had I done? Pushed that red raw mass into my mouth, felt it squish against my gums, the roof of my mouth, slick with crimson blood.”
She proceeds to throw out all the meat in their home away and starts laying out vegetarian meals sans eggs, beef, pork, chicken, saltwater eel, clams, etc. Yeong-hye’s husband hardly ever praises her but even he acknowledges that she is a good cook. Meat-eating is not a mere pleasure in her life. She has years of practice in the preparation and eating of meat. When she quits it, her husband is worried, because she refuses to cook meat for him as well. Her eccentric behaviour also worries him: not wearing make-up, not wearing a bra in public thus making her nipples visible, staying up all night, seemingly losing interest in everything around her.
He is also frustrated that she no longer wants to have sex with him because he smells of meat. Sex is a habit in their marriage. Compliance is a given – it is a form of silent habituation. It assumes consent and thus does not require the force of violence to be further habituated. However, when she stops complying, she is made to sleep with him. Yeong-hye’s rape is not the event that drives the plot of this novel and that tells us something very crucial. The novel is more concerned with how violence is normalised than with the punitive measures required to curb it.
Yeong-hye and her sister In-hye were also hit by their father privately, pervasively, and daily in their childhood. The way in which violence contaminates the bodies of the sisters is habitual. The novel is concerned with how violence breeds more violence. Violence breeds more violence effortlessly because its habituation allows it to function in an unthinking manner. It becomes an auto-pilot mode of action. One habit is used to force her back into another habit. Brute force is used to shove meat down her throat:
“Eat it! Listen to what your father’s telling you and eat. Everything I say is for your own good. So why act like this if it makes you ill?”
Though he parted her lips with his strong fingers, he could do nothing about her clenched teeth. Eventually, he flew into a passion again and struck her in the face once more. “Father!” Though In-hye sprang at him and held him by the waist, in the instant that the force of the slap had knocked my wife’s mouth open he’d managed to jam the pork in. As soon as the strength in Yeong-hye’s arms was visibly exhausted, my wife growled and spat out the meat. An animal cry of distress burst from her lips. “Get away!” At first, she drew up her shoulders and seemed about to flee in the direction of the front door, but then she turned back and picked up the fruit knife that had been lying on the dining table.”
Slitting one’s wrists seems like a disproportionate reaction to having to eat meat. Yet, the novel does not present this incident as Yeong-hye wanting to kill herself. The use of a fruit knife that is just around implies that the choice of instrument and the timing of her action are not planned. She commits an act of strategic or tactical violence to her own body to escape the external violence of being force-fed meat. In her desire to escape the violence, she enters a space in which her body is almost categorised as that of an animal. Yeong-hye is described as having an “animal cry of distress”, she “clenches her teeth”, she “growls” – she uses her body as a defence tactic and that is described as animalistic. Her offensive tactic is to resist through language by using the phrase “get away” and finally by slitting her wrist. Her defence is described as animalistic while her offense can be described as human. The difference between her defence and her offence emphasises that the human response is more violent.
Yeong-hye has complete clarity about her decision-making. This is important to note because her ability to choose for herself has not been hindered. She is taken to a hospital after this incident, put on medication, and then released. This is her first bout of illness, so to say. If the novel had presented this act of Yeong-hye slitting her wrists, as a display of her will to die, then it would have been much simpler. We could have said then, yes, Yeong-hye has a mental illness which has been ignored by her family. She needs a diagnosis and her wanting to commit suicide is a symptom of a mental illness.
However, the novel makes it abundantly clear that Yeong-hye’s actions are in response to her family’s force. It’s a last resort for someone who’s been backed into a corner. Thus, at the hospital when she is diagnosed with an apparent mental illness, it’s a diagnosis of convenience rather than a diagnosis of care. She is diagnosed with a vague mental illness because there seems to be no alternative explanation for her behaviour. The label of mental illness offers nothing to Yeong-hye in the form of knowledge or care. She is ill but to what effect? Through my reading, I began questioning whether Yeong-Hye is even ill to begin with.
As I searched for the definitions of both “illness” and “sickness” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I realised that they are used interchangeably. To locate what I refer to as illness, I will use Anne Boyer’s description. She says, “The history of illness is not the history of medicine – is the history of the world – and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interest of the few”. Yeong-hye is considered to be ill, or rather mentally ill, by almost everyone in the novel. Some suggestions towards a diagnosis are made in the novel, but they don’t offer clarity on her symptoms, behaviour, or mode of treatment. There is a knowledge problem attached to Yeong-hye’s body; one that arises because she does not fit into our pre-existing definitions of illness.
I’m going to go as far as to argue that the example of Yeong-Hye is especially important because she was never ill to begin with. Being admitted to a psychiatric hospital still does not amend the knowledge problem of her body, “but we’re still not sure exactly why it is that Kim Yeong-hye is refusing to eat, and none of the medicines we’ve given her seems to have had any effect”. It is safe to say that the medicines given to her are not the solution to Yeong-hye’s apparent mental illness. We can make this assumption because they do not make her better. The psychiatric hospital staff is confused because Yeong-hye is aware of her surroundings: she can speak, but she still refuses to take medicine and keeps trying to pull the IV needle out. She is forced into submission by injections. Yeong-hye is conscious of the choices she is making despite literally being made unconscious.
Yeong-hye or her family not knowing why she is really ill is important because the lack of knowledge involving her illness is directly linked to the kind of care administered to her. If Yeong-hye is ill, we can assume that the knowledge of her illness, or knowledge of some illness will help her. We can assume that being able to identify as an ill body allows us to be cared for. Thus, we can also assume that not being able to identify oneself as an ill body means that there is a separate category required for such bodies: sickness. No one simply arrives at sickness.
Both Nietzsche and Boyer refer to sickness as well. Nietzsche says, “There is not a single sickly trait in my character; even in times of grave illness I did not become sickly; you will not find a trace of fanaticism in my being”. He associates sickness with being something that occupies you wholly and from within. In contrast, Nietzsche continues to be proud of his illness. He even goes as far as to say that it lets him see reason. Unlike Nietzsche, I don’t think Boyer differentiates between illness and sickness. She uses sickness to describe the experience of being in an ill body.
I am arguing that sickness is neither a mental state that occupies you wholly and from within nor the experience of being in the ill body. Sickness is not a condition that follows from illness. Sickness is a category of bodies that do not have the luxury of fitting into illness. The problem of sickness has to do with bodies that are not allowed to know themselves and are not allowed to be understood. The common denominator between illness and sickness is the body. However, what separates the ill body from the sick body is being embedded in a system of knowledge that can help you get better. You are pushed into sickness when you are not afforded helpful knowledge or care regarding an illness. You are ill without the knowledge of what makes you ill or you are ill without the care you need to get better. The unknowingness of illness is the state of sickness. The lack of care afforded to an ill body is also the state of sickness.
It can be said that Yeong-hye was living her routine life when the violent dreams began. After the dreams, only the flowers drawn on her body had provided some respite. Though even that knowing was short-lived, and used against her amid sexual assault by her brother-in-law, and the cycle of violence continued. Life at the hospital too is far from what is considered “normal”. However, towards the end of the novel, she insists on focusing on self-pleasure, “It isn’t that she’s not conscious, exactly – rather, it’s as if her conscious mind is so completely concentrated on something, or somewhere, that she isn’t aware of her immediate surroundings”. There is something about this pleasure that is less sexual and more ascetic in nature. The pleasure that she focuses on has to do with being less aware of the world around her and more in touch with this inner natural world she has accessed through the ruptures in her obedient psyche.
By now, she is outside of the subject-object paradigm of material desire for another body. She materially desires flowers, plants, and trees as well. However, in the final act, she seems to have transitioned into a desire that is even more impossible, i.e., the desire to not be in a human body. More precisely – the desire to become a tree. She does not want to eat and needs to be kept sedated to stop her from vomiting. However, she is aware of this. She says, “They say my insides have all atrophied … I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight”. She desires to transition from an animal body to a non-animal body. She desires to stop eating and to live on fresh air, sunlight, and water. She can stop eating but she cannot prove that she can live on sunlight or air or water. She does not ever ask for soil. She knows that she cannot be planted and she knows that she will die. She is at peace with this knowledge.
In this section of the novel, In-hye reads Yeong-hye as we are all inclined to: with grave distress, concern, and confusion. She tries to reason with her: does she really think she turned into a tree? Most of all she cares for her, “It’s a peach, Yeong-hye. A tinned Hwangdo peach. You like them remember? She tries everything until she can’t see her sister suffer this way anymore: not a single undamaged vein is left to put an IV. In-hye is described as a carer and so is the nurse at the psychiatric hospital. The difference between their forms of care is that In-hye begins to understand that Yeong-hye needs to be freed. She too starts having haunting dreams. She begins to think of the ways in which she didn't protect her sister, of their childhood, and how Yeong-hye had been more easily hurt. She realises that over the years this hurt has also unlocked something in her. She is no longer detached from Yeong-hye; she is a part of her.
There is no explanation for Yeong-hye’s desire to become a tree. The novel just does not offer us any. The reading of her desire is buried in the non-reading of it – in the acceptance of it. To not give in to the impulse or urgency to read it by any pre-existing framework. To allow her desire to compel us as if it were the best surprise that we have encountered.
This piece is excerpted and derived from the author’s undergraduate thesis written at Ashoka University, Department of English, under advisors Professor Mandakini Dubey and Professor Clancy Martin.
I have been ill. I have been sick. The difference has been in the knowing and care afforded to me.
The Vegetarian, Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith, Penguin Random House.
