Clenched and Empty Fists: Trauma and Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction

Abstract

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

—Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris” (Glück 1992, p. 1)

In Han Kang’s short story “The Fruit of My Woman” (1997), a man comes home from work one day to find that his wife has become a tree. Bewildered, he pots her on their balcony, waters her with some regularity, and when she fruits, he plants her seeds. She grows a little in the open air; then, in the way of potted plants, which manifest their unmet needs in their foliage only belatedly, she withers and dies.

In truth, the man’s wife has been greening for a long time, though even she does not realize what is happening to her at first. A sallow look to her cheeks is misinterpreted as a sign of aging. Mysterious brown marks that mottle her torso are misrecognized as evidence of malnourishment. All movement leaves her “motion sick”, and this is mistaken first for lethargy, then for indolence. She slumps around the couple’s high-rise apartment in immodest states of dress, endlessly thirsty. “You know your own body, so you have to keep it in order”, her husband shouts at her, but she does not know this body, its flesh hardening to pith, any more than he does (Han 2016). In the nighttime, she wraps herself in her mother’s orange sweater, longing for the golden light and warmth of sunrise. Through a viridescent haze, she reflects on her childhood in a rural village by the sea, her roots. While she endures this terrifying transformation, her husband maintains unwavering, mindless fidelity to a routine of long hours at the office followed by drinks with coworkers, where he holds forth about the injustice of having attained middle-class status but having married a woman too slovenly and ungrateful to delight with him in its spoils.

Well before she is a plant, the nameless wife in this story has grown accustomed to her husband’s neglect. Resigned in her dissatisfaction with their upwardly mobile, urban lifestyle—the monotony of which she finds “stifling”—she has ceased requesting reprieves in the countryside, where she might “flush out her lungs with fresh air”, or walks together outdoors, in her “natural environment” (Han 2016). Their infrequent arguments consist of his ranting about this or that minor injury as she bites her lip in silence. Meanwhile, her husband, whose narration frames the tale, cannot remember the last time he has seen her naked or the last time she consented to sex. He objectifies her coldly and unsubtly: “her voice”, he confesses, “put me in mind of an elaborately glazed and lacquered tea table; one of those elegant pieces of furniture which you begrudge getting out for any but the most important guests” (Han 2016). Her words, in the rare moments she dares to utter them, reach him “as a mere disturbance in the fabric of silence” (Han 2016). His indifference toward her humanity is as prominent a feature of the text as her body’s will to shed the human form that demands such recognition.

The man invariably regards his wife’s human qualities—her desires, her mannerisms, her efforts to communicate—as nuisances, so when he stumbles upon the macabre scene of her metamorphosis, it is all too predictable that he finds this wilted, inarticulate, and utterly dependent version of her more appealing than ever before. Watering her verdant figure for the first time is an urgent, amorous affair:

I ran to the sink, turned the tap on all the way and filled the plastic washbowl until it overflowed. The water slapped at the sides with each of my hasty footsteps, sloshing onto the living room floor as I hurried back to the balcony. As soon as I splashed it onto my wife’s chest, her entire body underwent a quivering revival, like the leaf of a huge plant. I went back and refilled the washbowl, returning to pour it over my wife’s head. Her hair sprang up, as though some invisible weight had been compressing it. I watched her glittering green body bloom afresh with my baptism.

(Han 2016)

His ecstatic account of drench and renewal provides the story’s sole representation of pleasure. What is surprising about the narrative, however, is Han’s choice to give the woman voice and perspective through her arboreal awakening. Suddenly, from the loamy prison of her pot, she speaks directly for the first time.

What little scholarship addresses this early work suggests that readers are uncertain what to make of the wife’s uncanny path to green subjectivity. Mijeong Kim, for example, posits the woman’s transformation as an act of Deleuzian “becoming”, wherein the frustration of her desire to live a different life enables a creative effort at “becoming-plant” (Kim 2020, p. 330). Plants, Kim argues, “seek to survive by adjusting to given conditions rather than by changing the surrounding environment” (Kim 2020, p. 330). According to this logic, the woman’s choice to settle down as a sentient flowering plant—to “bloom where she’s planted”—salvages the couple’s marriage by forging a “non-anthropocentric bond (of responsibility, trust, and care)” between them (Kim 2020, p. 331). Others liken the woman in this story to Daphne, the doomed maiden in Ovid’s Metamorphoses whose desperate plea to Peneus to escape Apollo’s advances instead results in her entrapment in a laurel, where the besotted god can partake of her fruits and flowers freely (see, for example, Alexandrescu 2016, p. 129; Cook 2020, p. 127). By comparison to this classic, settling down as a salaryman’s houseplant looks like an especially bad bargain for the woman. As Sumana Roy observes, most literary examples of arboriform transfiguration have unhappy, if not tragic endings (Roy [2017] 2021, p. 21).

Since she speaks, it is important to consider what the woman-become-willow, herself, has to say. She weeps for her mother, remembers her in the scents and textures of the hilly countryside beyond Seoul and in the earth of the family burial plot. She relates the excruciating experience of being vegetal. Occasionally, she remarks on the uncharacteristic tenderness of her husband’s clumsy attempts at care. He had, after all, taken no interest in the annuals and herbs they had kept over the years—he is, by his own admission, not “green-fingered.” Finally, she apprehends in her blossoms the plant world’s telltale signs of distress. “I’m scared, Mother”, she cries from her cramped container, where she languishes; “I will die before winter comes” (Han 2016). It would seem that even a transhuman regeneration fails to improve the woman’s circumstances but for her newfound capacity to bear her own witness. In one stunning passage, she testifies to the evergreen violence that haunts the text: “He cries to see me wasting away, and he gets angry, too”, she explains; “I can detect his warm tears mingling in the mineral water he pours on me. I can sense the air molecules being disarranged, his clenched fist flailing without a target” (Han 2016).

Most readings of this story fail to register the intimate-partner abuse. Though subtle, this violence is not unintelligible. Evidence for it manifests in the bruises/not bruises under the woman’s clothes and in her husband’s discomfort when asked to look at them; in “the bad blood” between the two, “clotting up her veins like cysts”; and in her dissociative turn toward the inhuman that recasts her husband’s human acts as distant and surreal (Han 2016). Eager to illustrate the text’s transgressive, trans-species intimacy, its ecofeminist subversion of the patriarchal order, or its reproductive alterity (the wife’s seeds are planted, and it is her husband who must grow them), scholars sidestep its representations of trauma. Conversely, I argue that a compelling interpretation of the story’s disquieting contiguity between ecology and mythology should heed the moral and ethical imperatives of trauma, where “trauma” is understood as “an experience, a memory, an encounter, an interaction” that “denotes a before and after, a changed subjectivity, a revised embodiment” (Casper 2014). Dryad-like, the woman perhaps “bends or seems to bend” with newfound agency toward her husband, and he toward her, but no reconciliation follows (Ovid 2009, p. 18). Her taxonomical estrangement from him enables her to study his rage at a remove, but not to survive or recover from it. Neither does it allow her to prevent an intergenerational cycle of violence and trauma from beginning anew. Instead, the tale ends with the man’s perspective restored, as he collects, consumes, and buries the bitter fruit of the woman he continues to view as his possession. What shifts along with the woman’s human morphology is readers’ attention, from the man’s estimation of his wife to the adjudicatory “gaze” of other living matter upon his behavior. If we attend to human violence as/with, for example, plants, Han’s story asks, will we find ourselves accountable to and for what we have seen? Can we listen to trees? More importantly, can we listen like them?

This essay situates the nuanced attention paid in Han’s work to the dialectical relationship between witness and testimony—as in trauma studies, where these terms have rich conceptual and clinical histories—alongside recent debates in environmental studies concerning the material and linguistic intersections of nature, culture, and power. From pioneers in the field such as Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub, who theorized the limits of testimony and the role of the listener/witness, to contemporary critical and social trauma theorists like Monica Casper, Maurice Stevens, and Jeffrey C. Alexander, who extend these insights into large-scale cultural, political, and ecological spheres, trauma theory articulates a process by which suffering and loss as individual experiences either “thicken” into collective action or leach into the “soil” of the “life-world” to become “rooted” there as commonplace, inescapable, even “natural” (Alexander 2012, p. 7). I argue that Han’s fiction illuminates certain psychic and material realities of trauma, which complicate the ontological turn in environmental criticism, so often framed by its practitioners as unproblematically liberating.

Approaching Han’s story, for example, through trauma theory begins with eschewing appealing, but reductive transhumanisms and acknowledging that the woman’s being-toward-plants is less a radical choice than a response to the limited options her situation presents. Her hothouse transmutation takes place as an event in which her body leaves out and armors itself in bark, severing her not only from a narrow range of possible futures, but from the realm of human possibility altogether. This rupture manifests corporeally in split lips that ooze and piercing stamens that emit a foul odor as the woman sickens (Han 2016). Though her material remaking deprives her abuser of her vulnerable human form as his fist’s preferred target, the conditions of this resistance come to look more like an affliction than an adaptation or a means of liberation. Simone Weil defines affliction (malheur) as “an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain” (Weil [1951] 1992, p. 118). According to Weil, affliction alienates as it “mutilates” persons physically, psychically, or spiritually; it invites “social degradation” and forecloses compassion (Weil [1951] 1992, pp. 119–20). Despite this distancing effect, Weil urges us to attend closely and carefully to affliction, if not to heal the afflicted themselves, then to mitigate the impact of affliction on the world at large. In other words, focused attention amounts to a kind of spiritual harm reduction—an equation to which, I argue, Han’s work adds an eco-social dimension.

I contend that Han inverts Weil’s ideas about affliction by depicting it as a rooting in bare life exhibited by vegetal figures like the woman in this early story.1 Tracing the evolution of Han’s vegetal figures through two additional works in translation, I demonstrate how a vegetative positionality imposes an ontological distance from which subjects (dis)figured by trauma critique interpersonal and colonialist violence as ancillary workings of a shared human condition. In both The Vegetarian (2007) and Human Acts (2014), focal characters whose modes of being and perceiving align them with nonhuman nature mount impersonal insurrections that harness the resistant forces of organic matter to denounce uniquely human forms of violence, such as biopolitical hyperregulation, the exploitation of women, children, and animals under capitalism, and wanton environmental degradation, as interrelated Anthropocene afflictions in which our mistreatment of the natural world is mirrored in our mistreatment of each other. Han’s writing thus discerns human and nonhuman precariousness as disparate but increasingly entangled concerns in an era largely defined by a thinning margin between the insufficient care of living beings, including one another, and outright harm. Entering the worlds of these novels through their vegetal figures, readers witness fractured campaigns of dissent mounted by materially insecure subjects/actants—battered women, blazing forests, youth protestors, “meat.” As in “The Fruit of My Woman”, the testimonies of “material witnesses” summoned by Han’s longform fiction seek out a trauma-informed practice of listening as they summon us to other, gentler modes of species being.

1. Arm in Arm(s) with the Earth in The Vegetarian

Where the “Fruit of My Woman” offers speculative vegetal proximity as an ethical withdrawal from violence, The Vegetarian tests an ecologically grounded thesis on nonviolent resistance. Conceptually as well as stylistically, The Vegetarian is an adaptation of this story, a revision in which an isolated marital conflict is reinscribed as a pervasive human malignancy. In this later work, Han dispenses with magical realism and renders the domestic violence explicit.2 There is no lacuna to fill with ecocentric possibility—no radical becoming, no maternalistic overcoming of patriarchal domination. Instead, a woman’s growing affinity with plants and trees opens her up to a series of abuses at the hands of those closest to her: her husband, her parents, a self-interested brother-in-law, and, finally, a beloved sister. As the novel’s protagonist, Yeong-hye, is battered, restrained, force-fed, sexually assaulted, and institutionalized against her will—primarily in the name of familial accord—what begins as a refusal to eat or cook meat intensifies toward a wholesale renunciation of the company of human beings in an earnest but ill-fated attempt to grow roots, sustain herself, and thrive as a tree.

The novel is unflinching in its representations of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse and relentless in its barrage of graphic scenes depicting the exploitation of human and animal bodies. Given Yeong-hye’s implied death by starvation, Alix Beeston weighs the costs of framing “female madness as a politically coherent disengagement from the laws of the proper” if all we gain from venturing into that terrifying thicket is “a deep ambivalence about this disengagement from human society” (Beeston 2020, p. 692). As Han revisits her earlier story’s themes “in a darker and fiercer way”, she heeds Weil’s call to tarry with that from which human instinct urges us to recoil (Han, qtd. in (Patrick 2016)). On the subject of suffering, however, the text remains resolutely silent. The harm visited upon Yeong-hye’s body and psyche accumulates as the text’s primary interest, but each section of the novel’s triptych is narrated by one her abusers. Throughout, descriptions of the bloody dreams that influence her vegetarianism disrupt the narrative, sometimes vividly and in her voice; other times, issuing forth vaguely from a chorus of gore:3

Dreams of murder.

Murder or murdered…hazy distinctions, boundaries wearing thin. Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible. Only the violence is vivid enough to stick. A sound, the elasticity of the instant when the metal struck the victim’s head…the shadow that crumpled and fell gleams cold in the darkness.

They come to me now more times than I can count. Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror.

(Han [2007] 2015, pp. 35–36)

Dark as they are, Yeong-hye’s nightmares pale in comparison to the horrors she endures in waking life—horrors readers witness alongside such speechless assemblages as woods, mountains, and falling snow.4

Of the many subversive tactics to be gleaned from the resilience of our earthen kin, the particular talent of plant life lies in the way it “encrypts itself”, as Michael Marder puts it, “by presenting itself in the guise of passivity” (Marder 2013, p. 20). But plants, like people, move and are moved in response to certain events and conditions. They are, likewise, capable of organizing their movements, even their individual deaths, toward a common thriving in what Marder calls the “vegetal democracy…open to all species” (Marder 2013, pp. 52–53). Vegetal subjects in Han’s novels critique the violence that underwrites sovereign power through their commitments to a radical/radicle passivity rooted in and fed by the earth and vindicated by steadfast alliances with organic matter. Their “vibrant materiality”, borrowing Jane Bennett’s term for “the capacity of things…not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own”, demands a revised ethics of relation (Bennett 2010, p. viii). As the excessive vitality of the vegetal being threatens established norms, traditions, and social compacts; however, these characters suffer increasingly overt and extreme forms of brutalization intended not to (further) dehumanize them, but to reinforce a humanizing order upon their lives. Vegetal figures, in turn, defend themselves by relying on what Stacy Alaimo describes as the “insurgent vulnerability” of their “trans-corporeality”—their non-individualistic stance as more than human (Alaimo 2016, p. 5). They become like Donna Haraway’s “children of compost”, who remake the world as they are unmade by it (Haraway 2016, p. 134). Indeed, they “compose and decompose”, which Haraway sees as “both dangerous and promising practices” (Haraway 2016, p. 102). Han’s work dovetails with these materialist conceptions of resistance but grants them no liberatory status, foregrounding, instead, the precarious subjects such biodiverse kinship makes. The women and boys who appear in Han’s fiction as anima, flora, or humus offer readers neither an uncomplicated portrait of martyrdom nor a viable praxis for peaceful protest. Rather, these vegetal figures manifest as reminders of the ecological absorption of the physical violence and psychic suffering of human beings, who make up the planet’s most transformative force in the Anthropocene.

Turning up in multiple works, Han’s vegetal figure might be said to persist in a vegetative state of noncompliance with patriarchal and biopolitical regimes. Catriona Sandilands notes the shifting connotations of the verb “to vegetate” in its application to various life forms. She contends that “when humans or animals vegetate”, especially persistently, “they are considered alive…but not quite fully. When plants and other nonanimal organisms do likewise, they are considered abundantly alive, perhaps even excessively so” (Sandilands 2017, p. 17). Meditating on the vegetative, however, muddies the gulf that divides animalia from plantae. Vegetating, for humans and animals, involves a turning inward but not a turning off; it may look like a “checking out” but rarely warrants an “unplugging.” Sandilands argues that vegetating humans are neither reduced to the inertness of vegetability, nor are they simply “being passive”; rather, their activities and affects are “consistent with the vegetal” (Sandilands 2017, p. 17). They demonstrate self-sustenance, subtlety, or rhythmic temporalities. But while slipping around in semiotics may allow us to “feel the pulsing vibrations of our plant-selves…our common enactments of liveliness”, it will not enable us to become more plantlike, nor does it guarantee that human society will value the plantlike within us (Sandilands 2017, pp. 17–18). Rather, attending to the vegetative processes churning beneath the surface of human consciousness uncovers “the ways in which people and animals are increasingly organized and controlled like and even as plants” under “neoliberal-biopolitical” regimes wherein their growth, reproduction, and movement are surveilled, regulated, and restricted (Sandilands 2017, p. 22). In other words, zoocentric ethics would have us elevate humans above plants, but we are routinely and unequally exploited, manipulated, subjugated, and eradicated in the polis in the same ways as plants—as beings that produce, reproduce, spread, and yield (or do not).

The Vegetarian deploys its vegetal figure, Yeong-hye, as a means of interrogating masculinist habits of consumption, compulsory heteronormativity and domesticity, and coercive forms of caregiving and caretaking that blind us to more empathetic and inclusive acts of care. By contrast to Beeston’s anxiety over the high stakes of Yeong-hye’s vernal wager, Rose Casey identifies Yeong-hye as “a radically pacific being inclined toward tree life”, engaged in a complex project of “feminist world-remaking” (Casey 2021, pp. 348–49). As in “The Fruit of My Woman”, the advent of Yeong-hye’s aberrant biophilia unfolds in the first-person perspective of her husband, Mr. Cheong. Like the husband in the story, Cheong takes Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism as a personal affront, privately irritating but socially embarrassing. His physical abuse begins when, intent on stopping her from throwing away the expensive cuts of meat in their freezer, he grabs her wrist and bruises it (Han [2007] 2015, pp. 17–18). Finding it harder and harder to control his impulses to punish and degrade Yeong-hye, this abuse escalates as Cheong enlists her family’s participation in a campaign to reeducate her in the respectable hungers and respectful behaviors of a “good” wife.5 By the end of the novel’s titular first section, Yeong-hye has been battered and serially raped by her husband, struck in the mouth and force-fed by her father, hospitalized for attempting suicide, and coerced into drinking goat’s blood by her arguably well-meaning mother. “Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole”, her mother threatens (Han [2007] 2015, pp. 55–56). But Yeong-hye longs to be consumed, conjoined with, devoured by, and made whole within a planetary field that exceeds and defies the human in ways that are incomprehensible to her family. In a final, futile attempt to speak their language of androcentric and animal aggression, she bares her chest and tries to eat a live songbird, but the warmth of the sun on her skin and the weight of the bird in her palm call her to the society of trees instead.

While “The Fruit of My Woman” troubles easy distinctions between “benign” neglect and blatant harm, The Vegetarian, by contrast, highlights the ways bodies are (at)tended to—which is to say disciplined and managed, or shaped and pruned—according to the same officious principles and practices that govern our relations with nonhuman nature, especially plants. The novel’s subsequent sections examine several such “corrections”, imposed on Yeong-hye under the pretext of care, including surveillance, crisis intervention, and involuntary confinement—meddlesome strategies which also belong, for better or worse, to the domains of environmental conservation and climate mitigation. Han’s consideration of the biopolitical grows clearer in parts two and three, where these regulatory forms of attention are contrasted with a range of alternatives that evoke and are often prompted by plant intelligence and plant time: listening, soliciting consensus, holding (as in holding still, holding up, holding space, or holding a line), and especially witnessing.

When the “oxblood” curtain rises on the novel’s second act, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, a struggling video artist, becomes enchanted by her arborescence after he is tasked with monitoring her for signs of further mental decline (Han [2007] 2015, p. 63). He is selected by the family to conduct this invasive reconnaissance mainly for the emptiness of his schedule, but some notable similarities between he and Yeong-hye suggest to readers the potential for a mutually beneficial arrangement. No stranger to the trauma of physical violence or to nonviolent protest, he began making art to address his struggles as a survivor of the Gwangju Massacre in 1980. His success as an artist declined when this “engagé” work, subject to the whims of the market despite its anti-capitalist and anti-state politics, no longer appealed to galleries or collectors (Han [2007] 2015, p. 116). Passing seasons waiting for inspiration, suspecting the dormancy of his creative self, he also vegetates. If anyone is positioned to understand Yeong-hye’s militant vegetarianism as a revolutionary calling, it is her brother-in-law.

First spying on Yeong-hye, then spending his aimless days with her, and finally filming her in floral body paint, he is the only person to entertain her green rebellion as such. In contrast to his family’s expectations that he earn a living with his skills and observe a consistent routine, Yeong-hye keeps time with the “lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin” (Weil [1951] 1992, p. 130). He cannot help but be animated by her “big tree energy”; finding it fruitful for kickstarting his “fallow” career, he begins working again (Han [2007] 2015, p. 66). That such vegetal attunement does not lead to this wayward pair’s shared creative flourishing shapes up to be one of the novel’s most frustrating betrayals. Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law could help her channel the rustlings of her budding plant-soul into art, but he sees her as a muse, not a collaborator. He could encode her green ethos in his own artistic work, but he takes advantage of her reticence. The more he believes in the botany of her being, the more it authorizes his manipulation of her. “Whether human, animal or plant”, he determines, “she could not be called a ‘person’”(Han [2007] 2015, p. 95). Reduced thus to the status of resource-object, Yeong-hye seems available for a range of unrestrained, nonconsensual interactions that had not occurred to her brother-in-law before.6 Enthralled by her undeniable vitality, he dreams of her “in a wash of green”, her thighs spread before him like a field of lush grass (Han [2007] 2015, p. 103). He wants to enter her like a dark forest, dissect her like a strange fruit, consume her, even rub her into his skin like an herbal tonic. He confesses, “I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins” (Han [2007] 2015, p. 121). Noting her autonomic arousal at the sight of bodies painted as flowers, he becomes obsessed by his ability to capture something extraordinary by indulging his fantasies with her on camera. The disintegration of possibility in Yeong-hye’s fraught tryst with her brother-in-law contests the notion, popular among environmental humanists, that experiencing “the multiscalar resonance of our constitution in…the ecological” is necessarily recuperative (Stevens 2016, p. 22). Such aleatory encounters in The Vegetarian, as in “The Fruit of My Woman”, seem only to reproduce the destructive, colonizing interactions to which their extra-terrestrial characters call attention.

Part three, “Blazing Trees”, illuminates another path, but a thorny one that aligns the clinical trajectory of trauma and recovery with the narrative of climate crisis and mitigation. Throughout the novel, Han draws subtly on a traditional motif in East Asian literatures, identified by Karen Thornber as “eco-ambiguity”, a tension between the exigency of “environmental protection rhetoric” and the slow, unsteady pace of progress toward meaningful, ecologically centered policies or practices (Thornber 2012, p. 2). As Yeong-hye’s condition grows terminal, the disjointed temporality of emergency and emergency response scenarios juxtaposes her slow decline with the brilliant, green future she imagines for herself. Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye, takes over the narration after catching her husband and sister in a multiflorous mass in Yeong-hye’s fecund bed. Yeong-hye is once again hospitalized, where she refuses to eat, insisting she requires only water, air, and sunlight. In-hye possesses power of attorney, subjecting her sister to IV hydration, intubation, and medical sedation by force. Following repeated attempts to wander off the grounds and root head-first in the earth like the poplars she perceives as other people doing headstands, Yeong-hye is finally restrained to her bed by hospital staff. She implores her sister to grant her bodily sovereignty and authorize her release. “I’m not an animal anymore”, she explains; “No one can understand me…they just force me to take medication, and stab me with needles” (Han [2007] 2015, pp. 159, 162). Having cruelly committed Yeong-hye to punish her for the affair with her husband and to keep her sylvan sibling at arm’s length, In-hye refuses her request, demonstrating Weil’s edict that “one can only accept the existence of affliction by considering it from a distance” (Weil [1951] 1992, p. 123). Only once she observes firsthand the violence her sister’s regimen of care entails does In-hye intervene, and by then, it is too late to correct course or make amends. While climate allegoresis is possible here, the call is not to speedy interventions, aimed at recovery or sustainability, but to thoughtful, collective action, driven by the apprehension of a shared need to live otherwise.

In his aphorism, “The Trees”, another writer preoccupied by metamorphosis and its discontents, Franz Kafka, poses a pithy experiment in green thinking. “For we are like tree trunks in the snow”, the tale begins in medias res, inviting readers to dwell briefly in the forest of simile (Kafka 1995, p. 382). As it plunges from trunk to roots, Kafka’s story proceeds to dismantle its own equivalency. Our likeness to trees, it turns out, is surface deep—a mere “appearance” of rooted resilience. We are stronger than we think but nowhere near as strong as trees. Neither are trees, despite their anchoring underground, as unassailable as they seem. The ground, too, shifts, and, lately, the planet warms and burns, and so on. We are reunited with trees in our common vulnerability. It is not the might or majesty of trees that draws Yeong-hye into the woods surrounding Mount Ch’ukseong but their supportive networking of the fragile woodland ecosystem and their belonging to one another. She puts this simply to In-hye: “All the trees are brothers and sisters” (Han [2007] 2015, p. 150). The forest appeals to Yeong-hye for reasons such as those Sumana Roy outlines for her own arboreous yearning. It extends an invitation into an “imagined communitarianism where self-containment and related self-contentment [are] the abiding ethic” (Roy [2017] 2021, p. 155). In its quiescence, the forest also extends grace to its afflicted: “Trees in a forest do not know abandonment…if illness—disease—comes to a neighbor, they cannot—and do not—run away” (Roy [2017] 2021, p. 166). Yeong-hye deftly uses the fellowship of the vale to chide her sister. Trees, she tells In-hye, “stand with both arms in the earth, all of them” (Han [2007] 2015, p. 153). Her observations of mycorrhizal solidarity imply that her sister’s (and her brother-in-law’s, and her husband’s) performances of care are not only insufficient to her needs; they hurt.

In the forest, Yeong-hye finds herself in ethical, dialectical relations with nonhuman others; or, as Cathy Caruth describes the trauma bond, engaged in a mutually affirming practice of “listening to the voice and to the speech delivered by the other’s wound” (Caruth 1996, p. 8). In-hye lags behind her sister in her own cognizance of this social and ecological imperative, but readers sense its stirrings as In-hye feels herself observed unsympathetically by her sister’s weird kin. Sheets of rain pummel her, moths still their wings as she passes, and hill and dene conspire to conceal what lies on the horizon. More unnerving still, In-hye feels judged by trees. Outside the hospital where Yeong-hye perennially abides, a four-hundred-year-old zelkova snubs her: “On bright days it would spread its countless branches and let the sunlight scintillate its leaves, seemingly communicating something to her. Today…it is reticent and keeps its thoughts unspoken” (Han [2007] 2015, pp. 140–41). Old-growth trees are sometimes called “witness trees.” Originating in the jargon of U.S. surveyors, the term once indicated a natural boundary marker, a margin between worlds of difference in some cases. In popular parlance, a witness tree is one that has stood long enough to become “a repository for the secrets of the past” (Miller 2018, p. 2). From haunted oaks in the U.S. South to Japan’s Aokigahara, the notion that trees witness human trauma and shelter restless spirits endures as a cross-cultural caution against the assumption that any act of violence goes unaccounted for. There is always a record—a body that “keeps score”, a geology into which suffering seeps.7 Speeding in the ambulance with her unconscious sister at the novel’s close, In-hye stares into the forest “as if protesting something”, abundantly aware that the trees blurred together in a unified front beyond the roadside sward return her gaze in stolid silence (Han [2007] 2015, p. 188).

2. Spectral Demonstrations in Human Acts

Han revisits the resisting forests of The Vegetarian in Human Acts, though, this time, they border a site of national tragedy. Locating “the root cause” of her obsession with the capaciousness of human violence in the buried history of Gwangju, Han follows The Vegetarian’s reiterative “gesture of refusal” back to its origin in the 1980 People’s Uprising (Han, qtd. in Shin 2016). She categorizes the two novels as “a pair, their roots entangled” (Han, qtd. in Shin 2016). Human Acts recalls the events of late May 1980, when soldiers fired on university students and factory workers protesting General Chun Doo-hwan’s martial government, resulting in a weeklong bloody standoff between armed troops and mostly unarmed civilians. In this work, vegetality inheres in civil disobedience, as characters unearth memories of bodies planted firmly in stances of passive resistance, plowed through, and mowed down by an invasive force that seemed to crop up overnight. In six fictionalized testimonies and an autobiographical epilogue, heavy, burdened souls and haunted spaces converge, lending the writer’s voice to the silent and silenced witnesses of these events. Combining surrealist aesthetics with extensive documentary research, the novel explores individual and collective trauma in the afterlives of protest movements as well as the cultural consequences of the suppression of human rights violations in official public records.

Human Acts picks up where The Vegetarian leaves off, with ominous skies and distant trees in soft focus that resolve to reveal another time and place altogether. Outside a gymnasium filled with bodies, a teenager, Dong-ho, helps two women catalog the deceased and carry them inside as they amass. He had come initially looking for a friend he saw gunned down in the square near Gwangju station, but seeing the condition of these bodies, dumped first at the Provincial Office and then at the Municipal Gymnasium by the dozens, it dawns on him that he may not know his friend if he finds him. Moved by the ritual of their care work, he joins the women, who organize the bodies by date of arrival, listing any material signifiers the bereaved might use to identify them. The dead become for him a sea of wounds, scars, and birthmarks, of brightly colored sweatshirts, t-shirt insignia, and bloody patterned skirts. Dong-ho paces among them with his ledger, noting the inverse relationship of this “mass rally of corpses”, whose direct action against the living is their “putrid stench”, to the diminishing number of protestors gathered in the streets (Han [2014] 2016, p. 21). Days earlier, his father caught him off guard with a rhetorical question, “How can anyone go up against a gun with only an empty fist?”, but now, Dong-ho thinks he knows the answer (Han [2014] 2016, p. 34). The army of the departed wields a weaponized innocence. Their vibrant corpses, described as “felled trees” and “lumps of meat”, recall Yeong-hye’s defiant embodiment (Han [2014] 2016, pp. 132–33). Dong-ho feels the pressure of a mounting decompositional resistance, not only in the full-court press of coffins in the gym, but in the persistent “respiration” of the trees outside and the insistent flickering of candle flames—an elemental invitation to in(ert)action he eventually accepts (Han [2014] 2016, p. 24).

Elsewhere, this novel’s vegetal figure; Dong-ho’s dead friend; or, the hon of the boy who used to be this friend, Jeong-dae, is waking up in a chilling hereafter. Neither fully spirit nor soma, this voice emanates from the pile of bodies in which Jeong-dae’s is second from the bottom, where specter and rot co-narrate. This speaker for the dead has Jeong-dae’s memories but shares its gruesome physical reality with the other decomposing bodies in the heap, able to migrate up and down the mounting “tower” of flesh at will until it putrefies into an indistinguishable slurry of viscera and larvae (Han [2014] 2016, p. 51). The narrator feels all of this—every oozing exit wound, every fly buzzing in an eye socket, the crush of each new corpse stacked. “We were bodies, dead bodies”, the voice pronounces, “and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us” (Han [2014] 2016, p. 56). Mostly tethered to the festering mound of the unburied, this hungry ghost occasionally presents the perspectives of a nearby wood, inky shadows that shift in the moonlight, and the soil in the surrounding clearing.8 Exercising its earthbound volition, it watches soldiers from these non-anthropocentric vantages as they camp nearby; rather, it makes them feel watched. Finally, fearing the exposure of their war crimes, the anxious soldiers burn the pile. The speaker rises in the smoke briefly, hears ongoing gunfire, and retreats once more into the fetid mass, ashes to dust.

Where the other five chapters of the novel examine the testimonies of survivors and living, human witnesses, these first two imagine the reflections of the dead through their engagements with and in organic processes such as renascence and decomposition. Han’s vegetal aesthetics in these early chapters grapple with a need identified by Eric Wertheimer and Monica Casper for writers, scholars, and practitioners who deal with trauma to “attend to temporalities of re-creation and development in the crushing absence of audible meaning” with care and caution—to strive to “speak…for those whose voices are muted in vulnerability rather than raised in outrage”, but also to pause “to listen to the silences” (Wertheimer and Casper 2016, p. 11). “What do we miss”, Wertheimer and Casper ask, “when we fail to stop at the void, the hush, the space between the inhale and the exhale…how many other grammars are disabled” (Wertheimer and Casper 2016, p. 11)? Human Acts swerves into and out of such ineffable grammars, as formerly- or not-fully-human entities linger at the sites of their undoing. Adhy Kim contends that the recurrence of dehumanized perspectives in Han’s novels serves to “frame human rights violations…within longer arcs of violence that assume the proportions of a natural history”, in which it becomes clear that “the colonial and militarized past releases extra-human scales of human destruction into the future” (Kim 2021, pp. 435, 437). Gwangju, Han explains, retains its bloody history as “radioactive matter lingers” in sinew and soil, “reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle…razed to the ground, and raised up anew” (Han [2014] 2016, p. 204). She feels herself both chilled and animated by the vegetating presence of spectral demonstrators decades later when she visits Gwangju to conduct research for the novel. Their unrest subsumed into the landscape and weather of the city, they remind Han and, by extension, readers of our enduring obligations to past and future generations, concerns which bring the novel into conversation with interwoven legacies of environmental and social justice activism.

The novel proceeds thus in chronological order, propelled from 1980 forward, first by lucid accounts of and from the dead, then by the partial, fragmented, or failed testimonies of the living. The narrative effect is such that human memory increasingly disrupts this order in atemporal loops, lost time, and the odd, intrusive second-person address. Never does the massacre become entirely unmoored from its national historical context, however, even as various characters flatten specific acts of violence or resistance into metaphor—“a uniform brutality…imprinted in our genetic code”, or the collective beating of a “world heart”, respectively (Han [2014] 2016, pp. 134, 116). Matter, not memory, keeps the most reliable record of both anthropogenic acts and ecological resilience. Han registers this through her sense of belatedness, having arrived in Gwangju to find the floor of the gymnasium dug up, the ginkgo trees, “which had borne mute witness to it all…uprooted”, and the old-growth pagoda withered—all physical absences that make it harder to hear the dead speak (Han [2014] 2016, p. 196). But the best example of the way the material world absorbs violence, voice, and testimony appears in the fifth chapter, where a former textile worker, Seon-ju, struggles to commit to record her rape, imprisonment, and torture during the uprising.

The Gwangju Democratization Movement followed a period of rapid industrialization in South Korea, the so-called “Miracle on the Han River”, during which economic opportunity came paired with abusive and unsafe labor practices; poor resource, land, and watershed management; and short-sighted, extractivist policies. Newly unionized industrial workers, many of them women, were among those whose dissent was most violently quelled during the protests. Seon-ju, whose labor union took part in a bus blockade, carries the weight of a dictation machine around with her, but cannot unburden herself of the story of her past abuse. In 2002, Seon-ju is employed as a law clerk, preparing evidence of chronic injuries of another sort for environmental disaster suits. Contrasting Dong-ho’s rapid cataloguing of massacre victims, Seon-ju describes this process as alienating, painstaking, and often ineffectual work documenting the injuries Rob Nixon terms “slow violence”; or, ecological degradation that is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” (Nixon 2013, p. 2). “The killings that you spend your days archiving have all been slow and drawn out”, she observes, followed by a list: “Radioactive elements with long half-lives. Additives that either needed to be banned or had been banned already but were still being used illegally. Toxic industrial waste, agricultural chemicals, and fertilizers that cause leukemia and other cancers. Engineering practices that destroy the ecosystem” (Han [2014] 2016, p. 141). When she compiles a similar list of the physical evidence that would appear in her account of Gwangju—“guns, bayonets, and cudgels; sweat, blood, and flesh; wet towels, drill bits, and lengths of iron piping”—she finds she cannot transmit the gendered violence she experienced to tape (Han [2014] 2016, p. 142). Even the protest songs she sang in exuberant unity with her coworkers seem, distorted by memory, “to issue from the throat of some kind of bird”, as though they, too, belong to an increasingly imperiled natural world that Seon-ju has come to understand is vulnerable and muted in many of the same ways she is (Han [2014] 2016, p. 157).

Struggling herself “to get through the story” in the novel’s final act, Han anchors her experience of Gwangju, her birthplace, in its seasons. It is winter, and breathtakingly cold, when her family moves to from Gwangju to Suyuri in 1980. It is early summer when they learn of the massacre. It is winter again when Han returns, and a vision of Dong-ho drives her to the May 18th National Cemetery to search among the snow-covered plots for his grave. Finding it, she kneels to light candles and remains there until she feels the snow soaking through her clothing, its chill “seeping right through to my skin”, as it had Dong-ho’s in her dream (Han [2014] 2016, pp. 210, 212). This precipitous contact, which so closely parallels her dream, figures a vegetative engagement with the forces of history and the voices of the past. Linked through the dream, she is briefly Dong-ho, and Dong-ho is the fleeting snow, both medium and message. Stephanie Clare observes that “Feeling cold can…be linked with an expansive spatiality from which we might seek shelter… In addition, we identify with sensations such as feeling cold. These sensations index a relationality between our sense of self and the earth” (Clare 2019, p. 16). Han’s willingness to sit in the cold—to be enfolded, permeated, and hailed by it—permits her to attend to the wound at the interstices of human and nonhuman worlds and provides her the exigency to finish the novel. By choosing to endure this discomfort, she tends what Weil calls the “seed” of truth buried in the darkness that, given sufficient light, grows into an “ineradicable” tree (Weil [1951] 1992, p. 134).

Like the cold, the trauma in Han’s work is insistent. It unsettles in fiction what is unsettled in narrative history as well as, it becomes increasingly clear, in deep history—the question of whether our ability to resist the abuse and exploitation of the planet depends on our willingness to resist the abuse and exploitation of one another. As readers, we are asked to attend to domestic, institutional, and ecological strata of violence and trauma and to be, ourselves, unsettled by the probing of such depths. Nevertheless, many ecofeminist readings of Han rest on uncovering the vegetal dimension as a radical and transgressive undercommons, failing to consider its potential in terms of shared struggle rather than a shared essence. Extending trauma ethics to the vegetal politics in Han’s fiction permits us greater insight into the ways Han challenges traditional ecofeminist assumptions about an individual or collective body’s liberation from harmful, human systems vis-à-vis harmonizing fantasies of oneness with nature. Rather, the absence of reconciliation between species, and between the land and its people, in Han’s writing provides a useful template for a kind of Anthropocene negative capability, wherein ecological conflict, reification, and hurt persist in even the most hopeful visions of “greener”, “cleaner”, and more sustainable futures.