Wit(H)Nessing Trauma in Han Kang's the White Book (2016)

Wit(h)nessing Trauma in Han Kang’s The White Book (2016) RUBY JUDD Student Number: 214508596 2020 Submitted in fullment of the academic requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Abstract This dissertation presents a literary analysis of The White Book (2016) by the South Korean writer, Han Kang. In a series of semi-autobiographical prose passages, The White Book (2016) explores the socio-political and spiritual need to process trauma in a cross-cultural, globalised landscape. My aim is to examine how the text offers an alternative, feminine paradigm for representing, reading and bearing the burden of another’s pain. The narrative voice identifies herself as a Korean woman living in Poland. She foregrounds her role as a writer in poetically recounting and rewriting her sister’s life and death. Her metafictional thoughts are reflected through a series of short vignettes or prose passages that meditate on the colour white. Whiteness is closely aligned with the womb, feminine symbols, corporeality, transformation, spirituality, mourning rituals, and transitional and shifting landscapes. I argue that the narrator shares a common zeitgeist with the revisionist thinking of Bracha Ettinger, an Israeli artist, and academic of French psychoanalytic feminism. Going beyond the archetypes of motherhood and creativity, both artists use the pregnant-maternal body as an entry point for expanding our understanding of the aesthetic representation of trauma. For Ettinger, pregnancy forms the basis for a new connection-based, embodied mode of remembering through art she terms wit(h)nessing. Similarly, the narrator of The White Book’s (2016) concern with the colour white as a symbol of border-crossing, instability and maternity, creates a poetry that seems to mediate trauma via visceral connections. Through the lens of Ettinger’s theory, I interrogate how womb imagery and whiteness in the text—both the symbolic representation of the colour as a poetic motif as well as the vast white spaces and photographs which form part of the layout of the text—come to represent a distinctive mode of wit(h)nessing and mourning the death of another through poetry/art. Table of Contents DECLARATION........................................................................................................................................................i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................................................ii Introduction...............................................................................................................................................................1 Literary Background & Theoretical Framework.......................................................................................................1 1.1. Chosen Author and Text...............................................................................................................................4 1.2. Key Area of Investigation and Research Methodology................................................................................7 1.3. Theoretical Framework.................................................................................................................................9 1.4. Structure of this Dissertation......................................................................................................................16 1.5. Han Kang and South Korean Literature.....................................................................................................20 1.6. Research Gap..............................................................................................................................................23 Chapter One: Familial Borderspaces: The Dialectic between the Narrator and her Sister.....................................27 1.2. Chapter One (“I”) and the Metaphor and Pregnancy..................................................................................32 1.3. Chapter Two (“She”) and the Metaphor of Childbirth...............................................................................41 1.4. Chapter Three (“All Whiteness”) and the Metaphor of a Postpartum Mother-child Relationship.............48 1.5. Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................57 Chapter Two: Cultural Borderspaces: The Dialectic between South Korea and Poland........................................58 2.1. The Question of Translation.......................................................................................................................59 2.2. Whiteness as a Universal Language...........................................................................................................67 2.3. Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................71 Chapter Three: Paratextual Borderspaces: The Dialectic between the Reader and Writer.....................................73 3.1. Genre...........................................................................................................................................................75 3.2. The Text as a Translation............................................................................................................................76 3.3. Photographs................................................................................................................................................80 3.4. Blank Pages................................................................................................................................................84 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................................................85 Appendix.................................................................................................................................................................89 Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................90 DECLARATION I ................Ruby Judd.....Student Number: 214508596........................ declare that 1. (i) The research reported in this dissertation, except where otherwise indicated, is my original research. 2. (ii) This dissertation has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 3. (iii) This dissertation does not contain other persons’ data, pictures, graphs or other information, unless specically acknowledged as being sourced from other persons. 4. (iv) This dissertation does not contain other persons’ writing, unless specically acknowledged as being sourced from other researchers. Where other written sources have been quoted then: a) their words have been re-written but the general information attributed to them has been referenced; b) where their exact words have been used, their writing has been placed in quotation marks and referenced. 5. (v) If I have reproduced a publication of which I am author, co-author or editor, I have indicated in detail which part of the publication was actually written by myself alone and have fully referenced such publications. 6. (vi) This dissertation does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet, unless specically acknowledged, and the source being detailed in the dissertation and in the Bibliography. Signed: Name of Supervisor: Dr Samiksha Laltha Date: 9th November 2020 Signature: i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My most heartfelt gratitude extends to the following people, without whom this dissertation would not be possible: To Professor Carolyn Shread, for generously assisting me with access to her research. This project has benefited from her pioneering exposition and expansion of Bracha Ettinger’s theoretical concepts in the field of literary studies. To Dr. Laltha for her invaluable and generous editing skills and for her thoughtful engagement with my research. To my parents, for the love, support and mentorship that has shaped me as a thinker and as a person. ii Introduction Literary Background & Theoretical Framework We live, historically, in a post-traumatic era, that is to say, coming after events of such an extremity and accumulation that they challenge modes of understanding and representation based on what preceded them. ‘We,’ the late-coming witnesses to events that are not our own, through time or geopolitical difference, nonetheless are affected unconsciously by the traces of these disturbances as they resonate across culture: in how we think about human sociality and ethico-political living together after such atrocities against humanity. ––(Griselda Pollock, 2010a: 21) The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek word ‘traûma’ which can be directly translated as ‘wound’ or ‘defeat’ (Barnhart, 1988: 23). In ancient Greece, the word referred primarily to the shock produced by a violent physical injury or an accident. Over time, however, the meaning has expanded to signify the psychic and cultural traces of suffering caused by a painful event that occurred in the past but continues to haunt the present (Boehmer, 2012: 30). The twenty- first century has been described as a “post-traumatic era” by the feminist art critic, Griselda Pollock (2010a: 21) in

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