Han Kang traces threads of lifelong questions that shape her art

Nobel laureate in literature reveals driving force behind her three-decade oeuvre in lecture

By Park Han-sol

Han Kang, this year’s Nobel Prize laureate in literature, began her lecture on Saturday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm with a poignant recollection: the accidental discovery of poems she had penned as an 8-year-old, tucked away in an old storeroom.

“Where is love? / It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. / What is love? / It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts.”

The year was 1979, just months before her family’s move from their hometown of Gwangju to Seoul — a shift that preceded one of the darkest chapters in modern Korean history. In 1980, the Gwangju pro-democracy movement in May was met with a brutal military crackdown that claimed or wounded more than 4,600.

Fourteen years later, with the publication of her first poetry, followed by her debut short story and novel, Han fully embraced writing as her profession.

What drew her particularly to novels — often at the cost of “considerable portions of my personal life” — was the way they allowed her to “delve into, and dwell in, the questions I feel are imperative and urgent.”

“Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions; I live inside them,” she said in Korean. “When I reach the end of these questions … I am no longer who I was when I began. And from that changed state, I start again. The next questions follow, like links in a chain or dominoes, overlapping, joining and continuing, and I am moved to write something new.”

The writer subsequently mused on the fundamental questions that have driven her three-decade oeuvre.

In “The Vegetarian” — a surreal tale of a middle-aged housewife who abruptly stops eating meat and begins to believe she is transforming into a tree — she wrestles with the following: “To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human?”

She deepened these inquiries in “Greek Lessons,” which follows the tender bond between two equally fragile souls: a woman rendered mute by the grief of losing her mother and custody of her son and a man whose hereditary condition is slowly robbing him of his sight.

“If we must live on in this (violent) world, which moments make that possible?” she asked while penning the book.

Such a line of inquiry into humanity reached its peak when she turned her gaze to the historical trauma of Gwangju.

Her mind flashed back to photographs she had encountered at age 12 — haunting images of civilians slaughtered with clubs, bayonets and gunfire, juxtaposed with scenes of an endless line of people outside a hospital, waiting to donate blood for the wounded.

What gripped her most was the profound spectrum of human behavior: the capacity for unimaginable cruelty contrasted with acts of selfless compassion and courage. How could such stark dualities coexist in the same world?

“I had to confront this impossible conundrum if I was to move forward, I realized,” she noted. “And I understood that writing was my only means of getting through and past it.”

This reckoning gave rise to Han’s tour de force, “Human Acts.”

Writing the piece, she recalled, felt like “negotiating an impossible way through the empty space between these two precipices of human horrors and human dignity” — a journey that continued in her next novel, “We Do Not Part,” which revisits the 1948 Jeju April 3 Massacre.

Until recently, the 54-year-old believed her literary exploration, from her earliest novel to her latest, could be distilled into two overarching questions: “Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet, how can the world be this beautiful?”

But two or three years ago, a new realization began to surface. Could love — the force that had captivated her as an 8-year-old poet — have been the driving thread all along?

“Hadn’t the deepest layer of my inquiries always been directed toward love?” she reflected. “Could it be that love was, in fact, my life’s oldest and most fundamental undertone?”

Toward the end of her 30-minute lecture, the author revealed that her upcoming novel will be formally linked to “The White Book,” a poetic meditation on grief and loss written “out of a wish to lend my life, for a brief time, to my older sister,” who died just two hours after birth.

In the Booker Prize-shortlisted work, she grapples with the fragility of human existence and memory through 65 white objects — such as a newborn’s gown, breast milk, rice and a shroud — each reflecting the tenuous boundary between life and death.

Han also likened the act of writing to transmitting an electric current of vivid sensations.

“When I sense this current reaching the reader, I am astonished and moved,” she shared. “In those moments, I experience again the thread of language that binds us, how my questions connect with readers through that electric, living force.”