On the occasion of the solemn award of the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm this Tuesday evening, a look back at the journey and the exceptional work of Han Kang, winner of the literature prize this year. Korean Han Kang is the first Asian woman to be awarded this prestigious distinction. She is also the eighteenth woman to obtain this prize out of the 117 writers awarded the Nobel jury since 1901.
Like every year, this evening of December 10, the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics, and peace will officially receive in Stockholm, from the hands of the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, their prestigious award as well as the famous gold medal with the profile portrait of Alfred Nobel on the obverse. The South Korean Han Kang, winner of the 2024 literature prize, will be one of the recipients present at this solemn evening. The proclamation of her name on October 10 by the Nobel committee had, as we remember, created a surprise, because the writer did not appear in any of the bookmakers’ lists. According to specialists, Han Kang nonetheless remains one of the great literary revelations of recent years, with an innovative, rich and protean work to his credit.
Poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, but also interested in art and music, the writer wants to be a total artist. According to Pierre Bisiou, its French translator, it belongs to “ a new generation of authors who are transforming Korean literature, which has long been a masculine fortress in the image of the patriarchal society of the peninsula “. Both experimental and relentless explorer of the unsaid things of a Korean society with a tumultuous history, Han Kang’s work was praised by the Nobel jury for the intensity of ” his poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life “.
Certainly, historical traumas, pain, questions about humanity are the major themes of her work, the author herself recognized in the Nobel Prize reception speech she gave on December 7 to the Nobel Foundation. While wondering, however, if it is not love that has always been the main driving force behind his writing, as in his last novel Impossible goodbyes. This novel, set in the South Korean island of Jeju, tells the story of a mother living with the devastation of losing her loved ones killed during the massacres that stained the island in 1948. Through the story of the long life of this character where we see her burning with pain, but also with an equally intense and poignant love, I believe that the questions I asked myself were the followingexplains the author: Can we love without counting? Is there a limit to love? How intensely should we love in order to remain human to the end? » (1)
Saved by literature
Eighteenth female laureate among the 117 writers awarded by the Nobel jury since the launch of the prize in the last century, and the first woman from Asia to be awarded this prestigious distinction, Han Kang was born on November 27, 1970, in Gwangju, Korea. South. She likes to say that her literary awareness was forged at home, with her father, himself a writer, who loved to surround himself with books. It was when the father wanted to become a full-time writer that the family decided to settle in Seoul, the capital. Han Kang was 10 years old at the time.
In a way, we can say that the future Nobel laureate was saved by her father’s literary passion, because, barely four months after the family’s departure, the writer’s hometown, Gwangju, experienced one of the most atrocious carnages in the country’s history. In May 1980, the military bloodily suppressed a revolt by students and trade unionists, leaving 2,000 civilians dead. Protected by her parents who hid these painful events from the teenager, Han Kang discovered them by coming across the unbearable images of the killing. This original trauma was, according to the author, at the origin of her coming to writing.
Han Kang’s work is certainly crossed by the cruelty of men, but it also speaks of the beauty of the world, and… the natural goodness of humans. The writer remembers seeing, after the Gwangju massacre, men and women gathering in front of the country’s hospitals to donate their blood for free to the injured. This questioning of the meaning of being a man, of being constantly torn between good and evil, is at the heart of the winner’s fiction.
The “Korean Rimbaud”
Author of eight novels to date, Han Kang entered literature through the great door of poetry, with the poet Yi Sang, considered the “Korean Rimbaud”, who died prematurely at the age of 27 as a model. Alongside her university studies, she published her poetry in university magazines, before moving on to short stories and novels.
In her recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the laureate spoke at length about her beginnings in writing and the literary reasons which led her from poetry to fiction. “ I have always been intrigued – and I still am today – by the process of writing poetry and short fiction, while the novel has always held a particular interest for me. It’s true that writing a novel is a long-term undertaking, which requires a long investment, the time – between one to seven years – that I take from my personal life. I accept this sacrifice, because fiction allows me to delve deeper into the questions that seem imperative and urgent to me. Each time I work on a novel, I let myself be carried away by the subjects at the heart of my stories. I am haunted by these questions. And when I reach the end […]I am no longer the same person I was when I started writing. I am transformed and I can start again. »
This is what Han Kang has been doing for more than thirty years, more precisely since 1993 when she published her first poems. After a collection of short stories (“Love of Yesou”), published in 1995, she published her first novel (“Your Cold Hands”) in 2002, which tells the mystery of a manuscript left by a missing sculptor. This very first novel which has not yet been translated into French expresses the young author’s ambition to address through fiction the questions that are close to her heart, relating as much to writing and its mysteries as to the paradoxes and the fragility of life. These questions haunt the entire novelistic work of the writer, whose best-known novels are The Vegetarianpublished in Korean in 2007 (editions Le Serpent à plumes, 2015 for the French version) and Impossible goodbyespublished in 2021 (Grasset 2023, for the French version). (2)
“The Vegetarian”, a modern fable
Winner of the prestigious International Booker prize in 2016, this novel revealed Han Kang’s realistic and experimental writing to the general international public. Halfway between ecological story and feminist tragedy, this novel reads like a modern fable of revolt and resistance. A housewife, tired of serving her husband, the protagonist of the novel Yonghye gets up one night and empties her refrigerator of all the meat it contains. She now refuses to eat meat or serve meat, much to the dismay of her husband and father. Guided by her inner quest, Yonghye aspires to become plant-like and dissolve into the calm and inaccessible existence of trees and plants. Her refusal to eat meat is here the symbol of the protagonist’s revolt against the social and patriarchal control of the female body. At the end of the road, madness and psychiatric internment.
Eminently political, The Vegetarian implacably questions the patriarchal and consumerist society, its morals and its rules that the heroine’s radical decision shatters. The words, however, remain anchored in the grammar of literary imagination from which the author draws the vitality of her writing, which is as innovative as it is radical.
“Impossible goodbyes”, a story of collective trauma
Last novel published by Han Kang, Impossible goodbyes is according to critics the best book by the Korean novelist. It is a masterful story, which masterfully orchestrates the three dimensions of narration: firstthe killing story of a bloody massacre, secondthe snowy landscape of dreamlike beauty and last but not leastthe communion between two friends separated by the circumstances of life and brought together by the quest for a common past of loss and mourning. The friendship between these two women, who have known each other for twenty years, evolves in the shadow of the 30,000 Korean communists massacred on the island of Jeju in November 1948 by the nationalist soldiers, under the aegis of the Americans.
Will the narrator, Gyeongha and her documentary filmmaker friend, Inseon, succeed in unearthing the buried past of their island and realizing their film project on this tragedy that Inseon’s family experienced in the flesh, in particular her mother who survived the massacre? ? This is the challenge of this very beautiful novel which proposes to oppose art and friendship to oblivion, undoubtedly in order to make goodbyes less painful, or even possible.
- “Light and thread”, Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Han Kang. Copyright The Nobel Foundation 2024.
- Impossible goodbyes was translated by Kyungran Choi and Pierre Bisiou. Other Han Kang novels available in French include: Leave, the wind is rising (Decrescenzo, 2014); The one who returns (Feathered Serpent, 2015), Greek lessons (Serpent à Plumes, 2017) and White (Feathered Serpent, 2018).