– Yi Sang25
The trope of alternative reproduction tied to other-than-human temporalities also appears in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. This work has been read as a dark critique of aspects of modern South Korean society, focusing on power and gender relations in the multigenerational family.26 Its protagonist, Yeong-hye, wants to escape the guilt of meat-eating, and imagines living only on water and light, as she believes plants do; instead of being inseminated with a human child by her clod-dish husband or predatory brother-in-law, like a plant she will give birth to flowers if she stands on her hands and spreads her legs to the sun. By the end of the novel, she has starved herself close to death and believes she has become a tree. Her sister, In-hye, though also damaged by family violence and tempted by suicide herself, chooses nonetheless to keep living as a human being, implicitly at least in part for her son. Yet she learns from her sister’s alienation that to be human necessarily entails understanding hybrid configurations that challenge a linear temporality oriented to reproductive futurism.
The Vegetarian is not Han’s first exploration of botanical metamorphosis. Ten years earlier, in the magical-realist short story ‘The Fruit of My Woman’ (1997), a husband describes how his wife actually turns into a tree.27 Like The Vegetarian, ‘The Fruit of My Woman’ is set in a recognisable version of contemporary South Korea, but it more directly explores the radical possibilities of alternative sexual reproduction and human/non-human intimacy. In this eight-part short story, a wife living in a small flat in an urban high-rise dreams of growing up ‘tall as a poplar’ through the building’s roof, where she blossoms and extends ‘each branching limb’.28 The husband narrates the first six and the final sections, in which the wife mysteriously undergoes changes linked in particular to her secondary sexual characteristics: ‘More than half of her once-thick armpit hair had fallen out, and the colour had leached from her brown nipples, formerly soft and tender.’29 In the sixth section, he returns from a business trip to find that she has actually turned into a tree:
My wife was kneeling down, facing the grille that stretched across the balcony window, her two arms raised as though she was cheering. Her entire body was dark green. Her formerly shadowed face now gleamed like a glossy evergreen leaf. Her dried radish-leaf hair was as lustrous as the stems of wild herbs. … A single cry, little more than a moan, escaped from between those puckering pale-flecked lips. ‘ … water.’30
When he pours water over her,
her entire body underwent quivering revival, like the leaf of a huge plant. … Her hair sprang up, as though some invisible weight had been compressing it. I watched her glittering green body bloom afresh with my baptism. I felt dizzy.
My wife had never been so beautiful.31
The wife’s voice is heard only in the seventh section, set up as a series of communications to her mother over a series of months. Rather than proceeding through a narrative sequence of events, her account of her gradual metamorphosis condenses around other-than-human sequences, impulses, desires: she connects her affection for an orange sweater of her mother’s with a desire to be enfolded, naked, by sunlight. She describes her changing body’s new connection to biorhythms of all sorts (petals unfolding, larvae emerging, the phyto-motility of roadside trees echoed in her own body). These new sensations occur even as she is losing human sensory experience – ‘seeing, listening, smelling and tasting’ – but this is what she wants: ‘Can you understand? Soon, I know, even thought will be lost to me, but I’m alright. I’ve dreamed of this, of being able to live on nothing but wind, sunlight and water.’32
In the eighth and final section, the husband describes the nearly fully transformed wife-tree in details that emphasise the floralisation of her erotic zones:
[A] thick white spray of roots sprouted out of her inner thighs. Dark red flowers blossomed from her chest. Twin stamens, white at the ends, yellowish and thick at the roots, pierced out through her nipples… Her eyes, a pair of well-ripened grapes; glimmering on their lacquered surfaces, the ghost of a smile.33
The intimate fusion of human and plant forms is confirmed through the husband’s memory of their sexual relations: looking at the plant-wife, he recalls that during their last sexual encounter ‘an unfamiliar, faintly sweet scent had been coming from my wife’s lower half … now, her form retains barely a trace of the biped she once was’; even now he feels from her ‘a hazy sensation that defeats all language, like a minute electric current pulsing out from her body and into mine’.34 Her transformation eventually maps on to seasonal cycles: ‘As autumn drew to a close, her leaves began to fall in twos and threes. Her body slowly changed from its former orange to an opaque brown.’35 When fruit emerges from what had been her mouth, the connecting current is abruptly arrested, ‘like a thin thread snapping’.36 The husband gathers the fruits, which are ‘yellowish green … hard, like the sunflower seeds they serve alongside popcorn as an accompaniment to beer’.37 He eats a few and finds them bitter. The next day he plants the remaining seeds in ‘fertile soil’ in pots on their veranda, next to the pot of his ‘withered wife’. He is unsure whether she will ‘sprout again’ when spring comes or whether anything will emerge from the seeds. The text ends flatly: ‘I just didn’t know.’38 Han’s speculative fiction about a strange arboreal metamorphosis ends with this inconclusive gesture toward a different, vegetal reproductive cycle, one in which the husband’s role as gardener-parent and the tree-wife’s uncertain fertility undermine the idea of ‘natural’ reproduction.39
This ambiguous conclusion – will the wife-tree participate in a natural botanical cycle of death and rebirth? – is revisited, with even greater tentativeness, in the novel that, as Han has explained, developed out of this story. The experience of other-than-human sexualised temporality made possible by the conventions of magical realism in the short story is rewritten in the novel as a woman’s alienation through insanity from her fellow human beings. Given its title, of course The Vegetarian is in part about how humans exploit animals for food, but it is also about our richly entangled relations of fear and desire with an array of non-human others, and it investigates a question central to ethics: is it possible for a human – indeed, for any being – to live without doing violence to others, to be radically innocent? Aristotle’s claim that ‘plant-soul’ consists in passively receiving nourishment and reproducing becomes a model for the protagonist. Yeong-hye’s search for a way of living innocently, which begins with vegetarianism, culminates in the delusion that she has actually become a tree and needs only air and water to survive and reproduce.
In its first two sections, The Vegetarian largely follows the conventions of the realist social-problem novel, offering a scathing critique of the patriarchal and conformist values of Korean society as expressed in the genealogies, literal and figurative, of family life. The protagonist’s father, honoured for military heroism during the Vietnam War, is now a violent man who abuses animals and his children. Yeong-hye’s extended family and her husband’s co-workers perceive her vegetarian diet as an affront: not eating meat will damage both the health of the individual and also the broader fabric of society, and in a horrifying scene at the family dinner table, her father physically jams open her mouth to force her to eat meat. The husbands of the two sisters are selfish and feckless. Mr Cheong explains that he married Yeong-hye precisely for her appearance of ordinariness; he cannot cope with her vegetarianism, let alone her increasing mental instability, and he walks away from the marriage. In the second section, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist obsessed by visions of plant/human erotic encounters, seduces Yeong-hye after her breakdown; he paints his and her bodies with flowers and vines and films their copulation. When his wife finds them together, that marriage breaks up as well, and Yeong-hye is institutionalised after attempting suicide. In effect, the genealogical, future-oriented timeline of the family is blocked.
Part III of the novel, ‘Flaming Trees’, is told from In-hye’s perspective. Having divorced her husband,
In-hye is now raising her son as a single parent and has also taken sole responsibility for Yeong-hye’s care, since their parents refuse to see her. She visits her sister regularly, bringing home-cooked food and fresh fruit that Yeong-hye rejects. In this section, social critique is complemented by an increasingly serious engagement with the ecophilosophical issues raised by Yeong-hye’s desire for radical innocence, both expressed through Han’s complex narrative experimentation. Whereas the first two sections of the novel, narrated by Yeong-hye’s husband and her brother-in-law, follow relatively conventional narrative schemas, ‘Flaming Trees’ is characterised by temporal disjunctions, strange synchronicities and ambiguous attributions of agency to human and non-human beings. I argue that against the realist framework of temporal conventions that has largely governed the novel up to this point, these dislocations produce something like the temporally defamiliarising effects of the shamanic time-voyages described in Lavondyss. Implicitly invoking plant-time, this section confounds both formally and thematically the reproductive futurism of the normatively organised patriarchal family.
The section opens as In-hye is travelling by bus through the forested countryside to her sister’s psychiatric institution outside Seoul, on the day when the medical staff is going to try one last time to feed the starving Yeong-hye through a naso-gastric tube. It ends as she retraces that path in the ambulance carrying her dying sister to a medical hospital in Seoul. In between, however, the narration of the events of the day’s visit is intercut with In-hye’s memories of episodes from different periods of the two sisters’ lives, and these narrative juxtapositions suggest uncanny connections across and against conventional temporal sequence. Other kinds of identity across difference also persistently recur in this section, notably to do with trees and woodlands: the forest the bus travels through becomes itself a vivid and insistent collective presence that fuses discrete temporal moments registered in the narrative, so that a kind of vegetal agency emerges: ‘As they reach Maseok, the late-June woods begin to unfurl on either side of the road. There is something battened down about the woods in this torrential rain, like a huge animal suppressing a roar’ (p. 130). As the road narrows, bringing the ‘wet body of the woods’ closer to the bus, In-hye remembers the night her sister walked away from the institution. She herself had been exhausted from staying up to care for her son, who was ill, and she now recalls the ‘indiscriminate connection’ the rain made that night between herself in the city and her sister out in the woods. Hearing her sister had been found ‘deep in the woods … standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees’, In-hye imagines the scene as one in which her sister and the trees fuse in a kind of catatonic afterlife: she pictures ‘a tree flickering in the rain like the spirit of some dead person’, and nearby her sister ‘standing tall like a ghost’ (pp. 131, 133).
As In-hye’s memories repeatedly circle back to that night, deeper and darker connections between the sisters emerge. On the same night that Yeong-hye went missing in the storm-drenched forest, we now learn, In-hye also went into the woods behind her apartment complex, intending to hang herself – except that she ‘hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her’ (p. 174). If she had hoped that the woods would be a refuge or an escape route, she finds that whatever the trees ‘had been saying, there had been no warmth in it. Whatever the words were, they hadn’t been words of comfort, words that would help her pick herself up. Instead they were merciless, and the trees that had spoken them were a frighteningly chill form of life’ (p. 174). The trees are not, as Marder emphasises, like us: ‘Some of the trees had refused to accept her. They’d just stood there, stubborn and solemn yet alive as animals, bearing up the weight of their own massive bodies’ (p. 175). The imagery of these trees as aliens, with their own forms of agency and intentions that remain opaque to human interests and desires, is threaded through with accounts of the sisters’ individual and joint escape attempts as In-hye recollects them, from their miserable childhood to the present moment here in the institution, where after the storm the sunlight now ‘touches upon Mount Ch’ukseong’s forest, rekindling its summer colours’ (p. 165). In this image of rekindling, as in other passages, connections are made across the landscape and among non-human beings that highlight the obliquity and opacity of relations between humans, belying our assumptions about how, and by whom, meaning can be made and shared.
Despite recalling her own desire to die in the forest, In-hye does not understand Yeong-hye’s intention to become a tree. On an earlier visit, In-hye had found her sister in the corridor standing on her hands, her face flushed bright red from the inversion. Yeong-hye explains that she has realised in a dream that structurally trees correspond to people upside down. Pointing to the forest outside the hospital window, she laughs, ‘Look, over there … All of them, they’re all standing on their heads’ (p. 153). In her dream, she tells her sister, she saw herself as a tree: ‘I was standing on my head … leaves were growing from my body, and roots were sprouting from my hands … I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch, so I spread my legs, I spread them wide’ (p. 154). The secret parts of the human female body, stamped as shameful by her brother-in-law’s perverse seduction, can now be exposed to light. They are redeemed, as it were, by the flowers that signal an innocent blossoming: invisible insemination supported by photosynthesis. Now she tells In-hye not to bring any more food: ‘I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water …’ (p. 154). ‘I’m not an animal anymore, sister … I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight’ (p. 159).
In-hye argues that this is clearly crazy, since plants can’t communicate: ‘What are you talking about? Do you really think you’ve turned into a tree? How could a plant talk? How can you think these things?’ (p. 159). Yeong-hye agrees that plants can’t talk, and adds that soon ‘words and thoughts will all disappear’ (p. 159). It is clear to In-hye for the first time that her sister wants to end her human life, to become instead a plant-soul, and she considers whether this might actually be possible.
What other dimension might Yeong-hye’s soul have passed into, having shrugged off flesh like a snake shedding its skin? In-hye recalled how Yeong-hye had looked when she’d been standing on her hands… As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? When Yeong-hye had balanced upside down and stretched out every fiber in her body, had these things been awakened in her soul? (p. 175)
If the novel hovers here on the brink of imagining that Ovidian transformation as actually possible, as in the magical realism of ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, and that an innocent floral effusion could take the place of the fallen sequences of human sexual reproduction (insemination, gestation, parturition), In-hye quickly rejects it as a destructive fantasy: ‘You’re dying’, she now tells her sister angrily. ‘You’re lying there in that bed, and dying. Nothing else’ (p. 175).
Punctuating and regulating the recursive loops of memory, the narrative has been marking the advancing clocktime of this particular day by reiterating the phrase ‘Time passes’, and its final scenario entwining violence and food is initiated by the phrase ‘Now there’s no more time left’ (p. 176). The medical staff tries to insert the feeding tube, Yeong-hye begins to vomit blood, and she is rushed into an ambulance for transportation to Seoul’s main hospital. Yet even as death seems to close off the future for Yeong-hye, In-hye is mentally engaging other-than-human temporalities. Riding with her comatose sister through the forest, In-hye now remembers the distressing dream her young son had the night she wanted to kill herself: that his mother turned into a bird. She reassured him then that she wasn’t a bird and wouldn’t leave him, but thinking about it now she links her son’s dream to her own intent that night to die. She realises how frighteningly easy it had been to walk out of the apartment, to give in t
o her own fantasy of being welcomed by the trees. Spurred by this memory, she argues to the comatose Yeong-hye that it is crucial to resist the seductive dream of joining the trees. Yet she can’t articulate why: ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because … because then …’ (p. 187). Lapsing into silence, she sees the roadside trees ‘blazing, green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage’ (p. 188). Against the trees’ insistent material presence and the unknowability of their vegetal being so alien to the human life-cycle embodied in her dying sister, In-hye remains in resistance, demanding – and not receiving – a message from them. These are the book’s final lines: ‘In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something’ (p. 188). It is unclear whether there will be any answer. Like the husband in ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, In-hye just doesn’t know – whether her sister will live; what the collective forest-animal is threatening; what lies ahead for herself or her son, that figure of the future who binds her to human temporality. The novel ends with this unresolved question, marking the possibility of connection between human and other-than-human beings.
Hybrid Agencies, Alternative Beings
While ecophilosophy, as I’ve suggested, has not consistently engaged the fundamental strangeness of reproduction, feminist philosophers have noted that from Plato to Merleau-Ponty, pregnancy has served as a powerful metaphor. Yet it was not typically addressed as an actual embodied experience by philosophers until the last quarter of the twentieth century, when phenomenological work by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Iris Marion Young directly engaged its paradoxes. The surreal opening lines of Kristeva’s groundbreaking essay ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ (1975), which emphasise the lively temporality of the gestational process, are often cited to articulate the multiple strangenesses of the pregnant body, including its distinct yet nested temporalities:
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