Kultural Revolution

IN THE EARLY PAGES of The Vegetarian, the novel that brought South Korean novelist Han Kang, the new Nobel laureate in literature, to the world, Yeong-hye, an ordinary housewife who refuses to wear a bra and loves reading, stands there in front of the fridge at four in the morning.

That is the beginning of her vegetarianism—and a transformation as Kafkaesque as it could be. She throws away all the meat, setting off a violent play of passions in a world sustained for so long by the quiet conventions of coexistence. Her husband asks her why. “Her profile swam towards me out of the darkness. I took in her eyes, bright but not feverish, as her lips slowly parted.” She said, calmly, “I had a dream.”

Yeong-hye’s dream perforated the outward placidity of a culture. That dream coalesced into the bigger, bolder, rebellious dreams South Korea has been dreaming as a cultural superpower. Its dreams today form a creative surge, already institutionalised by the prefix K, that continues to gain momentum beyond its homeland. The Netflixation of the K-imagination may have made an outlandish splash in popular culture with its clever mixology that made better use of science and sensuality, taboos and temptations, violence and vengeance in a mood that shifted from the manic to the meditative.

The splashiest statement was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning the Oscar in 2020. It was a cultural shock only to those who were not familiar with the Bong oeuvre consisting of monster sagas and post-apocalyptic rides. After genre-bending works like The Host and Snowpiercer, Parasite was milder by his own standards. It took only a few finely chiselled mises-en-scène to turn a social satire into a horror show starring incompatible classes. The price of reconciliation was too high to pay for Bong’s outsiders who dared to shatter the idyll they themselves could never achieve from their wretchedness.

Before Bong, there was Park Chan-wook, the pioneer who made a kind of meta-manga masterpiece with his 2003 film Oldboy, which still retains its cult status for the aficionados of confined ennui and poetic violence. Most recently on television, the master made a comeback with a series based on the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, which portrays the transformative power of the Vietnam War in the memory of the living with the narrative tension of a spy thriller and the big questions of a metaphysical mystery.

K-culture is all pervasive. The so-called K-pop, with BTS and cool names like Blackpink and Balming Tiger leading the rage, has already taken the vintage boy and girl bands in music to the peaks of fandom. Mass-produced Korean series, a staple of the streaming services, make the middle brow look smart. Auteurs like Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho and rebellious novelists like Han Kang complete the globalisation of K-culture on a higher note. The K-boom, like the Latin American Boom of the Sixties and Seventies, opens the door to the new astonishments in storytelling.

But with a difference. In the Latin American Boom, helmed by writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, and with ancestors like Borges and Juan Rulfo, magic was indebted to the harshness of history. The magical made the inherited reality more accessible—and bearable. South Korea, a small country without a long text of history for the imagination to fall back on, seems to have replaced memory with invention. Japan, the old occupying power, may be etched in the subconscious, and that may be one reason why its industry had the revenge by weaponising imitation. Japan, the erstwhile tormentor, set the standards of invention. It is as if South Korea wants to excel with subversive panache, without the luxury of tea ceremonies or ritualistic bloodshed.

Still, South Korea’s achievement is in the way it compensates for the texture of the past with its intense as well as inventive conversation with the present, which can be oppressive as well as hierarchical, with a clear gender bias. A couple of days before Han Kang won the Nobel, the New York Times carried a report on how South Korea, as one of the loneliest countries, finds solace in the company of dogs. Being alone is very South Korean, and being alone in a society with a layered culture of submission and subversion rewards those who intend to break free. It could be this lonely struggle for freedom that allows K-imagination to overcome boundaries hierarchical societies build. The parallel present is the revenge of the mind.

The dream that changed the life of Han Kang’s heroine mirrors the pains and passions of a country where what is concealed is more volatile than what is written and filmed and sung.

Han KangliteratureNobel PrizeSnowpiercerSouth Korean novelistThe HostThe VegetarianYeong-hye