Human Acts (2014), We Do Not Part (2021) and White Book ( 2016), written during a visit to Warsaw - dr Bartosz Dąbrowski from the Faculty of Languages at UG discusses the work and character of this year's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Han Kang. We invite you to read the commentary!
The 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to South Korean writer Han Kang reflects a change in the way the Swedish Academy awards this prize after 2018. This is because the prize went to a relatively young - by the Nobel criteria - representative of hitherto rarely awarded Asian literature and at the same time to an author who, using an innovative and original narrative form close to poetic creation, attempts to confront the traumatic experiences of contemporary history.
Han Kang deals with the phenomenon of the long-term impact of the effects of political violence in the lives of individuals and collectivities, consistently addressing the long-term struggle with traumas caused by the experience of war, authoritarian rule and the long impact of all forms of collective enslavement. The source of Han Kang's work is the unhealed memory of the violent era of South Korean dictatorships in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of the emergence of the Korean democratic opposition and the formation of a collective trade union movement that resembled the Polish Solidarity in its stance of moral resistance to evil and injustice. In her novel Human Acts (2014), the author describes the massacre of the civilian population of her hometown Gwangju by General Chun Doo-hwan's military junta in May 1980, focusing on a multifaceted portrait of its victims, including mainly children, young people, students, and women. Han Kang documents not only the circumstances of the killings, torture and drastic repression but also depicts the subsequent fate of the victimised and traumatised participants of the events and their families, weaving into the narrative the perspective of her own childhood memories and subsequent years of research.
Han Kang's prose - elegiac in its tone, being a painful meditation on the fragility of life spent in historical violence and portraying human behaviour in the face of extreme situations - nevertheless also tries to find the sources of human dignity, heroism and solidarity. In her novel We Do Not Part (2021), the writer, describing the fates of three traumatised women, takes up the story of the forgotten genocide on the island of Chinga in 1948 on the one hand, and tells of the will to survive and the desire to save one's humanity on the other.
The novel White Book (2016) can also be considered equally moving and close to the Polish reader. It was written during the writer's four-month stay in Warsaw, a city that became for her a special space of spectral haunting by the past and a field of influence of collective trauma. In this poetic meditation on the fragility of place, the images of Polish history provide the author with a canvas for a literary elaboration of her mother's trauma, pointing to the ways in which the collective meets the individual. White Book contains all the qualities of Han Kang's literary artistry. Her intimate and ascetic prose of extraordinary intensity and linguistic precision, close to haiku poetry, confronts us with the brutality of history and the intimately felt melancholic beauty of the world. However, it is also the utterance of a moralist who, like other writerly proponents of stylistic minimalism - Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett - seeks, despite the ubiquity of evil, to get at what constitutes the essence of our resistance to injustice and violence, making up the true and universal content of humanity.