Journal of Critical Reviews

ISSN- 2394-5125 Vol 7, Issue 5, 2020

Review Article

BECOMING TREE OR BECOMING A BODY OF PURE INTENSITY: AN INDICATIVE READING OF ’S

1Anupama K., 2Dr G. K. Chithra

Ph. D. Candidate, Dept. of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL) VIT, Vellore [email protected] Associate Professor and Research Guide, Dept. of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL) VIT, [email protected]

Received: 22.01.2020 Revised: 04.02.2020 Accepted: 01.03.2020

Abstract South Korean culture has its roots embedded and embodied in the doctrines of Confucius. Thus, its society follows patriarchal lineage and subjugates the female community in terms of education, employment, parenthood and so on. Even though there are laws assuring women’s equality, the customs and practices demand women to stick with the domestic roles that Confucianism promoted. Moreover, Korea is one of the countries where the largest number of cosmetic surgeries happen along with strict oblique rules such as, a girl should not exceed her weight over 50kg and she should have flawless skin, etc. When many are comfortable with these societal rules, a few fights against all the commoditisation of the female body. Korean women start to use film, literature and art as a platform to question the gender inequality prevailing around them. This article undertakes a theoretical analysis of the Booker-Prize winning South Korean novel, The Vegetarian (2016), written by Han Kang, using Deleuzian concept of Body without Organs (BwO) to study how the protagonist Yeong-hye uses her body as a weapon for self-expression and freedom from the conservative South Korean patriarchal powers.

Keywords: , Han Kang, Gender Inequality, The Vegetarian, Deleuze, Body without Organs (BwO)

© 2019 by Advance Scientific Research. This is an open-access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31838/jcr.07.05.124

INTRODUCTION in a certain way and handle a certain role in society. To maintain In East Asia, women have outnumbered men in higher education; the sustainability and consistency of this web of relationships, one hence the working women have higher university degrees than has to stick on to the implied gender roles. And the individual men. Even though, the countries have been investing huge choice has no role in it since there is no single entity in existence. amounts for higher education, they miss out on the positive outcome of their investment. Women’s potential in the economy There are very strict ways in which a woman should behave and is often wasted since they are absent from decision making and live under Confucianism. And if a woman violates those rules, she leadership in working sectors. This strategic mistake has a crucial is not only diminishing the self, but she is diminishes the self that role in the stooping of the South Asian economy. Recent studies exists in the web of relationships or damaging the reciprocal show India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and The Maldives as the existence of the whole entities (O’Hear, 2014, p. 109). Hence, it countries which have the poorest gender gap of an approximately, turns into a deadly sin for women to be themselves. These ancient 40%. rules still affect the life and wellbeing of Korean women in terms of their freedom of expression and independence. This huge gender gap is not confined to South Asian nations alone. An alarming gap can be seen in East Asian countries like Japan and When considering employment, the primary qualification needed South Korea. All these countries have their root embedded and in the Korean job sector is to be a man. Although women are well embodied in the principles of Confucianism, a 2,500-year-old qualified, they have a limited role in a professional environment. doctrine that places women at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is shocking that Korean parents provide a huge amount of Sexism in Confucianism is more pernicious than that of the money for their daughters as graduation gifts to do plastic Western male chauvinism since it is wrapped up the very surgeries since the basic criteria for women to enter a job include cosmology of the doctrine. The principles of Confucianism faultless bodily features, skin and hair type. Korean men, on the resemble Philosophical Posthumanism, which believes that other hand, are always positioned chief in working sectors, human beings are not a single entity, but it is the amalgamation of without putting any great effort. This gender bias reflects in family all the other entities such as nature, animal and non-human life as well. Since men are the breadwinners in the family, women beings. But a disagreement prevails with its concept of get fewer roles in decision making and giving opinions (Mehrotra, masculinity and femininity, which according to Confucianism is 2009). A recent study conducted by the Korean Institute of the expression derived from this web of relationships. In terms of Criminology among Korean men shows that about 80% of men the energy, these two entities produce in the nexus of have physically abused their partners. Earlier in 2018, a mass relationships, masculinity represents dawn, positivity, light, and movement stirred up against the visible gender discrimination of yang; whereas, femininity stands for receptivity, darkness, and Korea. It mainly questioned the government’s indifferent attitude dusks that takes the whining of energy. In Confucius’s point of towards the notorious hidden camera sex crimes that happened view, there is no absolute man or woman. There exists in the web throughout Korea. Later it paved the way for numerous minor and of relationships, the bodies of appropriateness to express things major women’s movements against the suppression and and this will bring the righteousness of humanity. This holistic marginalization of women in domestic as well as in working place. view of existence turns problematic with its further rules regarding the role of each gender. If a person is embodied in a masculine or a feminine body, that person is circumscribed to act

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BECOMING TREE OR BECOMING A BODY OF PURE INTENSITY: AN INDICATIVE READING OF HAN KANG’S THE VEGETARIAN

METHODOLOGY Although, the novel can be easily associated with Eco-feminist This qualitative research proposes an interpretative method to concepts and Animal rights, the Kafkaesque style of the story give a critical analysis of Han Kang’s Man Booker Prize-winning demands more attention to the details. A deeper reading of the novel The Vegetarian with a focus on the underlying gender novel gives the account of an ordinary woman’s plight against disparity and the protagonists’ resistance that is depicted in the discrimination and rigid domestic demands in society which is novel. “Interpretive research is a framework and practice within rooted in ancient beliefs and customs. Yeong-hye prefers a unique social science research that is invested in philosophical and way to resist the male power around her and that makes the novel methodological ways of understanding social reality” (Given, a masterpiece. 2008). Some of the common data collection techniques used in interpretative research includes interviews, observation and RESULT AND DISCUSSION documentation. The Vegetarian has been translated into more “Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my than fifteen languages including Deborah Smith’s acclaimed body, roots are sprouting out of my hands… they delve down into translation into English. Similar to Kang’s previous work Human the earth. Endlessly, endlessly…yes, I spread my legs, because I Acts, which centers around the uprising that occurred in wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide…” South Korea during the 1980s against the strict rule of the then (Kang, 2016, p.152). government, The Vegetarian brings up a relevant theme of gender inequality that exists in the South Korean society since ages. The The human body is adept at multiple tasks other than existing as novel gives an account of the protagonist’s decision to stop a concrete structure required for the completion of one’s survival. consuming meat and how she has forced to face horrible It is a complex unit of organizations that functions methodically to repercussions from her family and society as its result. The produce substances and an existence through that. Normally, the Vegetarian earned attention, criticism, and appreciation from perception of our own body and the complex organs that functions around the world as it became the first novel to exhibit South together inside the body tremendously influences us and that Korea’s lesser-known story of its gender biased society. Often, hinders our capacity to do more and experience immensely. Kang’s writing style is compared to ’s, which However, if a body gets rid of its rules regarding the organs’ blurs the demarcated boundaries between dream and reality, organized functions, it would be liberated and intensified. The human and non-human and sanity and insanity. concept of body has been absent in Western philosophy and cultural studies for a long time. After Descartes's thoughts on the The study uses the theories proposed by the great continental connection between body and mind, it took centuries to become a philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for the sake of topic undergoing intense study. By 20th C., philosophers like understanding how the protagonist uses her body as a shield Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze proposed a lot more against the status quo. Deleuze and Guattari are the greatest post- dimensions and definitions for the idea of the body in terms of structuralist French Philosophers of the late 20th century who identity, power, and gender. It is Gilles Deleuze, the French gave plenty of radical ideas in the doctrine. In their phenomenal philosopher of late 20th C., who addressed the idea of the body works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateau, they propose some of differently. Instead of talking about the duality of body and mind, the benchmark concepts of Western philosophy include Nomad, he talked about continuity and uniformity of body and mind. From War Machine, Body without Organs and Desire. Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Ibrahim Al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone, Iain Banks The Wasp Factory to Han Kang’s Booker-Prize LITERATURE REVIEW winner The Vegetarian, contemporary fiction has also followed the There have been various studies conducted on the novel mainly concept of the human body and its fluidity to alter as a recurring incorporating Ecofeminist concepts which hold the idea that all theme. kinds of oppression are same and men’s domination over women and nature must be addressed together. Rincy Chandran and Human Body as a Shield against the Status quo Geetha R. Pai critically analyze Han Kang’s The Vegetarian along The Vegetarian, written in three parts tells the story of a Korean with the short story, “The Fruit of My Woman” using Eco-feminist woman who all of a sudden decides to become a vegetarian as she aspects. They find out that both the works depict women and had a series of vivid dreams. In the first part titled “The nature equally victimized by patriarchy. Female protagonists from Vegetarian”; readers are introduced to the protagonist Yeong-hye both the works connect themselves with nature which is one of through her husband Mr Cheong’s point of view. The very first line the key ideologies of Eco-feminism (Chandran, 2017). In the study of the novel, “before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought conducted by Izzul Millati Umami finds Yeong-hye’s denial of the of her as completely unremarkable in every way” (Kang, 2016, p.1) consumption of meat as a means of transformative Ecofeminsm shows Mr Cheong’s view of his wife as a very ordinary and (Umami, 2018). Umami studies the novel on the basis of the four unremarkable being. He married Yeong-hye as he finds her as the types of oppressions; Physical, Psychological, Sexual and Verbal most average woman and an underachiever like him, leading a oppressions that can be seen in the text. This study suggests mediocre life in the fast-growing city. One day, he wakes up to find interpreting the novel further using various literary theories. Yeong-hye has given up eating animal products, which, in fact, a very abnormal occurrence in Korean culinary culture. Soon, Donna Haraway states in her influential book When Species Meet, Yeong-hye’s family visits her to dissuade her from becoming a that, “sex, infection and eating are old relatives, whose material vegetarian and her father, in particular, takes some drastic and and syntactic intra-action make the cuts that birth kin and kind” violent measures to try and make her eat meat and be the “proper (Haraway, 2008, p.285). Basically, Haraway suggests that both wife” she is supposed to be. human and non-human beings are interconnected. Thus, one should treat the other with kindness and respect. Recently, in a Yeong-hye’s transition starts from the very beginning, not only by study conducted on Haraway’s Post-human concepts, researcher rejecting meat but also by developing a reserved environment has studied The Vegetarian incorporating Animal Right and around her. It is obvious that Yeong-hye is not following any vegan species hierarchy, the two main concepts of Posthumanism. The diet to support her body, but simply wasting away and becoming study analyses how the protagonist finds a kinship between the unhealthy. As an ordinary woman like Yeong-hye, coming from a non-human entities as a result of accepting (Stobie, very conservative background, her body is the only thing she 2018). Kim in his study on the novel, analyses the human suffering owns. In a country like South Korea, going vegan is a frustrating through the Yeong-hye’s eating style. He gives an in-depth analysis and controversial thing for a family. Here, she rebels against based on a working definition of suffering (Kim, 2019). societal expectations and norms through her body, which is free from all the constraints of organs. Body without Organs (hereafter BwO) is a concept proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in

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BECOMING TREE OR BECOMING A BODY OF PURE INTENSITY: AN INDICATIVE READING OF HAN KANG’S THE VEGETARIAN their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus in 1980. BwO is a family and Divorce, she now becomes the object of sexual condition where a human body detaches from all its constraints of obsession of her brother-in-law. Yeong-hye’s acceptance of her organs. According to Deleuze and Guattari, through the state of a body as a substance is more a Spinozian concept. All the bodies are BwO, any ordinary entity can possibly commit extraordinary in way variations of Spinozian substance. Because, there is no kinds of deeds including acts of violence and cruelty. It refers to a concrete Ontological way the body should be organized. Bodies complete lack of organization within a cluster of organs that seeks could be understood as continuously evolving and experimenting continually self-constructing milieu. In other words, this body entities. prefers intensities over organization and experimentation over interpretation. Here, Yeong-hye appears as an ordinary woman Yeong-hye, like a desert nomad or a war machine which functions but later proves herself as an extraordinary desiring machine within the smooth space, follows a trajectory rather than clearly capable of metamorphoses. Her family gets infuriated as she fails defined path. She has no destination or plans, and whatever she to give a proper explanation behind her decision to be a vegan. She does instinctively, takes her from one point to the other. She has escapes from everyone’s questions by telling, “I had a dream” only one trajectory, which lies in between of those points. A (Kang, 2016, p.21). She soon starts exhibiting a lot of strange trajectory, that curves according to the condition of its behaviours and does get a lot more extreme and erratic as she environment (Stivale, 2005, p. 153). Yeong-hye unlike anyone else becomes a danger to herself. in the novel moves through a smooth space, without any obstacle or rules and that gives her an identity of a nomad. Nothing affects Throughout the chapter, Mr. Cheong addresses Yeong-hye as “my her as she gives a cold approach to the things happening in her life. wife”, rejecting her identity. His only problem with Yeong-hye is that she never wears a bra. This made him agitated many times The final part “Flaming Trees”, narrates through the perspective and especially when they were invited for a dinner party arranged of Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye. In-hye is trapped between her by Mr. Cheong’s boss. “She tried to justify herself by saying that sister’s mental health and the consequences that have bought in she couldn’t stand wearing a bra because of the way it squeezed her own life. In-hye is the stable and the most reliant one in the her breasts” (Kang, 2016, p. 13). Yeong-hye shortly avoids family, who takes care of Yeong-hye, works and maintains the sleeping with Mr. Cheong and that leads to a series of violent household and watches over the child, so that her husband can marital rape. pursue a career in arts. In-hye witnesses her sister's devastation helplessly and accepts herself as a coward in front of the Men and …she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, Society, she encounters in her life. She reveals, as though she were a “comfort woman” dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services (Kang, I have dreams too, you know. Dreams…and I could let myself 2016, p. 30). dissolve into them, let them take me over…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Mr. Cheong compares Yeong-hye as the “comfort women” of China, Because…because then… (Kang, 2016, p.183). who were subjected to be sexual slaves of Japanese soldiers during the Second World War (Soh, 2009, p. 70). Numbness spreads in In-hye is also a victim of the patriarchal power of the society in Yeong-hye’s life and gradually it makes her more reserved and which she lives. Both the sisters have lived a life, which others indifferent. By the time, she has started to dismantle her organs designed for them. Yeong-hye’s decision to reject all the into a Deleuzian BwO. Each one has their own way to make a BwO. conventional norms and live the way she wants to, which is almost It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, and sadness and very frustrating to her family because they wish they could have joy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 183). Likewise, Yeong-hye finds the courage to do that. By the end of the novel, Yeong-hye starts her method by slowly dropping the consumption of food and losing her weight rapidly as she refuses to consume any kind of vandalizing her own body. In the first part, even in the winter cold, food except water. At some point, she considers herself as a tree she remains naked telling that, “because it’s hot” (Kang, 2016, p. and drinks water as it is needed for a tree to grow. One day, Yeong- 6). She starts to treat her body strangely as if it is crass. The first hye goes missing from the hospital and after a long search, the part ends with Yeong-hye’s failed suicide attempt in front of her nurse finds her, “…in an isolated spot deep in the woods covering family who physically forced her to consume meat. the mountain slope, standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees” (Kang, 2016, In the second part of the novel called “Mongolian Mark”, Yeong- p. 134). Yeong-hye transforms into a Posthuman, both Physically hye’s vegetarianism morphs into an obscure format and she and Psychologically, towards the end. When In-hye visits her becomes her brother-in-law’s object of desire. Her unspecified sister in the hospital for the last time, she positioned herself brother-in-law, a budding artist infatuates on her as he finds a upside down, balancing on her hands as a Physical tree. She thinks Mongolian mark on her body. He takes advantage of her that roots will sprout from her hands, flowers will bloom from her insensitive nature to use her body in one of his artworks. He paints legs and branches and leaves will come out of her body (Kang, flowers and buds on one of his friends’ body and asks to indulge 2016, p. 137). Starving continuously for a long period and losing in lovemaking with Yeong-hye who has the same painting on the weight in a life-threatening way, she still manages to stay in an body as well. He plans to record that on camera to showcase that upside-down position of more than six hours. This indicates the in an art exhibition. When brother-in-law questions her unusual changes that occurred in her body as a result of the destratification liveliness in the act, Yeong-hye replies, “It wasn’t him, it was the of the organs. Here, Zizek’s definition of anorexia as the condition flowers… It was the flowers on his body. I couldn’t help myself” that occurs as a result of not “eating anything but as a positive (Kang, 2016, p.74). Soon, he paints the same flowers on his body longing for the ultimate object, nothingness” is entirely justifiable and they indulge in passionate intercourse. The next morning his (Zizek, 2019, p. 2). wife, In-hye finds out the recorded video and calls for an “emergency service”. In the meantime, Yeong-hye remains very In their work, Deleuze and Guattari give two examples for BwO; calm and composed whereas, In-hye’s husband contemplates to first, they take up the question of a Masochist’s treatment of commit suicide. his/her body and secondarily through the example of an egg or something that hatches from an egg. Yeong-hye’s treatment of her This part of the novel carries several powerful portrayals of body as resistant to the Societal norms resembles more to a Yeong-hye’s delirious mind and graphic descriptions of sex, which Masochist’s act of violence on his own body. A Masochist is the one resembles more of animals’ or plants’ mating process than human who expects his mistress to torture him and this tendency can be beings’. Here, Yeong-hye’s transforms into a tree in a more intense tied with Freudian death desire. The Masochist’s suffering is the and determined manner forgetting the assemblage of the organs price he must pay not to achieve pleasure, but to unite the bond inside her. After the Self-harm, Marital rape, Physical abuse from between pleasure and desire as an extrinsic measure. In other

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BECOMING TREE OR BECOMING A BODY OF PURE INTENSITY: AN INDICATIVE READING OF HAN KANG’S THE VEGETARIAN words, the Masochist tries to raise the instinctive connection imposed on her through deterritorializing her body. Yeong-hye’s between desire and pleasure. Likewise, Yeong-hye modifies her story points out the idea that life is picked out for you and what body through starving, so that it would be made of pure strength and courage that really needs to take control of your own intensities. But for that, first of all, she had to fight with her bodily life and body. organizations. In this way, she reaches a state of pain and later to numbness and breaks the limitations of the body. Her body is the Later, in an interview Han Knag says that she got the basic idea for milieu of experimentation and she possesses the potential to the novel from a line of Lee Sang’s poem, “I believe that humans manage the pure intensities that lie inside the body. should be plants”. As Foucault says, there is no natural body, what we carry as body is a politically, culturally and historically altered A person should be very cautious while de-stratifying the body to and modified entity (Foucault, 1998, p. 362). One may find Yeong- a BwO state. Because there are a couple of unfortunate things that hye as Schizophrenic, Anorexic and Delusional with her odd acts, may happen if one approach the process haphazardly. If a body but losing oneself and going beyond the contours of the bodily gets rid of all the strata violently, it may end up with either a limitation is a part of gaining a BwO. Yeong-hye’s liberation of her cancerous body or a suicidal body. It forces stratification to body is an escape from all her sufferings caused by others. She proliferate uncontrollably and this brings a catastrophe. This may discovers the thin line between enlightenment and reality, thus even lead to death as the body will be plunged into a black hole. finds out an alternative way of existing. Yeong-hye little by little but violently de-stratifies herself, leaving nothing behind. This kind of chaotic act will not preserve anything. Abbreviation According to Deleuze and Guattari, being organized while BwO- Body without Organs approaching a BwO is not the worst thing to do, the test of desire, not denouncing false desire but distinguishing within desire REFERENCES between that which pertains to static proliferation or else to 1. Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G.G. (2009). A Glossary of Literary violent destratification and that which pertains to the Terms. Cengage Learning. construction of the plane of consistency (Deleuze & Guattari, 2. Anand, J. (2019). Constricting Life: Constructing/ 1987, p. 192). Deconstructing Violence in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. 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