Psychoanalysis of the vegetarian by Han Kang; Psychology; Schizophrenia in the Vegetarian; Psychosis in the Vegetarian; Analysis of the Vegetarian
The vegetarian at the center of this story is a Korean woman
whose meat-eating family cannot understand her decision to refuse to eat meat. They are right to be worried – her shift,
precipitated by a vivid dream filled with the blood of dead animals – is not
just a choice of what she will and will not eat, but the beginning of a slide
into madness.
Young-hye, the vegetarian, could be dismissed as simply
being a person with catatonic schizophrenia.
All of the symptoms that are needed are present. She can become rigid. She is worried that any activity on her part
will cause damage to others. Though this
now rather rare variant of schizophrenia is rarely seen in its full splendor because the major
tranquilizers knock out the most characteristic symptoms quite quickly and
effectively, the diagnosis is a poster child for the problem with modern psychological nosology
(classification of disorders). As is often the case in the DSM, a term
that describes a pattern of symptoms is used to identify a disorder, but then
it is also used as if it were the cause of the disorder.
Young-hye could be dismissed in the following way: Who is she?
She is a catatonic schizophrenic.
Why? Because she has the same
symptoms as other catatonic schizophrenics.
What causes her to be this way?
Catatonic schizophrenia.
Fortunately this book, unlike the DSM, does not do reduce her to a diagnosis. Quite the opposite. It invites us to imagine the person who is at the heart of the madness.
In this book, we come to appreciate the complexity of the
central character almost exclusively through the eyes of three important people
in her life, each of whom misunderstands her in his or her own unique way. Each of these people is also, in his or her
own way, every bit as mad as Young-hye, though none of them will be
hospitalized for any length of time and none of them will be treated.
We get direct access to Young-hye’s dreams and little bits
of what she says, but mostly we hear how other people observe her, and we
build, across time, our own version of her internal world – and perhaps only
become conscious that we have done this when the protagonists badly
misunderstand her internal world in the manifold ways that we perceive them to
be doing.
At the same time, I think that we become more and more
suspicious of our own ability to build a veridical model of Young-hye’s
internal world – or we should be. And,
since the central character is mad – and has a particular diagnosis – catatonic
schizophrenia – we might begin to question what we know about madness – and we
might begin to wonder about own madness.
So – the story is told through the eyes of three
people. Roughly a third of the book is
devoted to each perspective and the story generally moves forward in time,
though the second and third stories revisit events previously told so that we
can understand the perspective of the new individual on what happened earlier.
Yeong-hye is the vegetarian.
She is initially seen through the eyes of her husband Mr. Cheong. This third of the story is told in first
person, but we barely get to know Mr. Cheong.
He is so intent on being ordinary that he has all but stripped himself
of personality. He has chosen Yeong-hye
because she, too, appears so ordinary that she would never attract anyone’s
attention – including his. He is,
therefore, free to live his life unencumbered by her.
This sounds strange and perhaps Korean-typical to my western
ear, but it is also not all that different from the ways that some of my
(mostly male) patients have presented over the years. They turn out to be much more interesting
than they allow themselves to be at first, but the effacement of self cannot, I
don’t believe, be attributed entirely to our stereotypes of the orient. That said, this man’s inner life cries out
for us to imagine him as devoid of any special attention – except perhaps our
revulsion that his central wish is to live a life that is entirely unremarkable.
This book could easily be read as a feminist tract – there are
essentially no good men in this book and the vision we have of a society that
caters to these dominant but ineffective men is revolting. But it is not just revolting to our feminine
selves. The men, despite being in
positions of power, are far from happy.
Their attempts to deny the passions that would make their lives human is
deeply disturbing. And Young-hye’s
father, whose abuse of Young-hye both as a child and as a vegetarian is harsh
and disturbing, lives a life that is far from enviable.
When Yeong-hye has a dream – a vivid, horrifying dream – she
decides to become a vegetarian. This is
horribly unwanted in Mr. Cheong’s life.
It is as problematic to him as her decision not to wear a bra – but much
more public and therefore disruptive. He
is ashamed both that his wife does not wear a bra and that she refuses to eat most of
the meal at a company dinner that he has finally been invited to, and then he enlists the aid of her family to convince her to become normal again – to eat
meat.
Here we learn that Yeong-hye has more to her than the bland
appearance and bland life that Mr. Cheong describes. Her father is and always has been brutal and
dictatorial. He attempts to force
Yeong-hye to eat meat – and she, through clenched teeth, refuses. We realize that control over what goes into
her mouth, the most basic control an infant has, may be an important symbol of
her assertion of herself as something other than the property of her father –
or, perhaps, her husband.
After a tense standoff with her family, Yeong-hye uses a
knife to cut her wrists, and she is carried to the ambulance by her
brother-in-law. We never learn his name,
but the next segment of the story, while told in the third person, is told from
his perspective.
The video artist, married to Young-hye’s sister, In-hye, has
been derided by Mr. Cheong as a do nothing who sponges off his wife and
pretends to be artistic. When he takes
over the narrative, we don’t disagree with Mr. Cheong’s perspective, though we
do have more access to and sympathy with the artist’s aesthetic perspective.
The artist has a perfunctory relationship with his
wife. He realized quite early on that he
was much more interested in her sister than he was in her because of her sister’s
physical features – he imagines her to have been his truly intended, but this
thought disappears from his consciousness until the sister becomes a vegetarian
and he witnesses her being forced to eat meat and then cutting herself in his
home. There is something enlivening to
the artist about her plight – and taking her to the hospital covered in her
blood.
Even more exciting is the Mongolian Mark – a blue birth mark
that is common to most Asian people – but one that generally fades. When the artist learns from An-hye, his wife,
that her sister Young-hye’s birthmark has never faded, the artist becomes
obsessed with imagining it – and imagining painting flowers all over
Young-hye. In his imagination, the
painting of the flowers is ethereal, not pornographic. But he is also terribly aroused by the
thought of painting her and of filming the painting and of filming her having
sense – a non-sensual sex – with someone who has painted flowers all over him. There is a deep split within him between his high minded aesthetisicm and his visceral sexuality - which is complicated by the ways that both use the same sensual pathways. One and the same thing is both (in the western vernacular) holy and profane.
That he could get his sister-in-law to consent to all of
this seems very far-fetched. He offers
to check up on his wife's sister, now that Mr. Cheong has left her, and his wife is
surprised and appreciative that he would do something to help her in any way
(she is the bread winner in the family – and appreciates that her husband lets
her work outside the home, but we continue to see him as more of a leach than
his wife appears to). When he goes to
Young-hye's apartment, the artist discovers that Young-hye prefers to be naked at home,
and he discovers that she is amenable to being painted.
One of the virtues of this book is that what I am writing
here that sounds pretty preposterous actually makes sense. Young- hye is open to the world at this point
in a way that mirrors the artist’s openness, and also seems more genuine. The artist is conscious of trying to
represent something, but he doesn’t quite know what. Young-hye is not trying to do anything except
perhaps to live in the moment and to accept what that moment has to offer – as long
as it is not meat. At this point in the book, she seems serene to the point of being close to enlightenment - especially through the eyes of the artist, but also through the eyes of the third person narrator.
Long story short (which is weird to say about a book that is
less than 200 pages), the artist paints Young-hye, then another artist, and video
tapes all of this. The other artist
refuses to have sex with Young-hye, because it would be pornographic, so the
artist paints himself - presumably in order to be able to realize his artistic vision - but also because he has been sexually rebuffed by Young-hye because he is not painted. He and Young-hye
have sex in all their painted glory and In-hye discovers the videotape of this
the next morning and calls the health authorities to take them away. The artist considers killing himself by
throwing himself off the balcony, but does not.
He is briefly hospitalized, but Young-hye is now deep within the clutches
of the mental health system and is hospitalized at a long term care facility.
It is now time for the last third of the book, told in the
third person from the point of view of In-hye.
She divorces the artist, who becomes a marginal person, barely able to
care for himself who is estranged not only from In-hye, but from their
son. He is too ashamed to object to the
divorce.
In-hye becomes the caregiver for her sister who begins to
refuse to eat not just meat, but food of any kind. She believes she will become a plant and be
able to live on sunlight alone. We no longer see this as a sign of being enlightened but as a symptom of being mad. In-hye
reflects on how she was able, as the older sister, to duck the violence from
their father, and to watch what happened to Young –hye without
intervening. This leads her to feel less guilty – though there
is certainly plenty of that – than a deep sense of empathy with Young-hye – so deep that she
herself becomes suicidal and begins to have the kind of burning images that
have haunted Young-hye’s sleep.
This book supports Harry Stack Sullivan’s one genus
hypothesis – that we are all, including those who are most disturbed, first and
foremost human and therefore more alike than different. In fact, it goes Sullivan one higher, suggesting, I
think, that that we are all first and foremost mad, and in that way more alike because
we are fringy rather than alike because we are mainstream.
Setting this book in a collectivist culture that values
conformity makes this point all the more stark.
Setting this book in a culture that views mental illness as deeply
shameful because of its profound aberrance from the norm drives home the point
that we can’t escape our essential humanity – and therefore madness.
This book is written by a Korean woman who spent some time
learning her craft at the Iowa writer’s workshop. It is translated by an English woman who was
more intent on translating meaning than slavishly transliterating language, so
it has been called, by some, an adaptation rather than a translation.
Just as it is hard to know Young-hye because we see her,
largely, through other’s eyes, so it is hard to know the author as a
representative of her culture when we hear her in loose translation and when she has
learned her trade outside of her culture.
What is the Korean position on madness?
In what ways does this book represent that? I don’t know.
The book was, not surprisingly, not well received in Korea, where it was
seen as transgressive. It has been
awarded a Man Booker prize in translation, perhaps in large part because of its
transgressive nature.
I think that Mr. Cheong is intended to be (I’m not sure to
what extent by the author and to what extent by the translator) the
stereotypical Korean man. He is focused
on fitting in and, in the process, creating a space for himself that allows him
to become so invisible that he can do what he wants to do without interference
from others. This may sound foreign, but
I continue to think that this is actually a way that people – perhaps men more
than women – operate much more frequently than we might imagine. I think the author and/or translator wants to
point out that this way of being – far from being healthy – is deeply
pathological. Mr. Cheong cannot
empathize with his wife – he all but berates her for the manifold ways that she
interferes with his ability to serenely detach from the world – and when she
doesn’t support him in his effort to do this, he divorces and abandons her –
presumably to search for someone who is actually as bland as his wife appeared
to be.
The artist, rather than being driven by an internal vision
of himself as Mr. Cheong is, devotes himself to being open to the world. This openness means that he is not a reliable
partner to In-hye and it resolves into a position of being as unempathic
towards her as Mr. Cheong was to Young-hye.
And let’s not even talk about Young-hye’s father and his crazy wish to
force people to conform to the types of behavior they should emit. If Mr. Cheong is remote and clueless, the
artist is sensitive, but only to what the world evokes in him, not to what is
occurring inside of others in the world around him.
In-hye, who becomes more sensitive to her feeling states,
becomes overwhelmed by them. Her son
senses this – tuning into her suicidal thoughts – thoughts that In-hye doesn’t
quite let herself acknowledge that she has.
Figuring out how to live within the confines of a culture, a family, and
the parameters of our own mind, is incredibly challenging. This book helps us appreciate just how
difficult that can be.
I don't know whether it might not also be suggesting that enlightenment might be greeted as madness if it comes in the form of a woman, a vegetarian, or perhaps just by virtue of its being an aberration from what we expect. Further, enlightenment might become madness as a result of our efforts to treat it - to drive it from the person, rather than helping them embrace and explore what it means to be serenely unaffected by the world; to realize, perhaps in part as a result of being traumatized and feeling angry and aggressive in return, that we are violent creatures and that we should consider trying to re-work ourselves in ways that might be considered to do violence to who it is that we are expected to be. The danger of the diagnostic system that I referenced at the beginning of this post is that when we reduce our patients to being the symptoms with which they present and we then work to eradicate the symptoms, the patient can experience us as trying to eradicate them, which is, I think, how Young-hye experienced the mental health system. In so far as she did, this was a re-enactment of her father's attempts to annihilate her and exacerbated her difficulties rather than helping her recover.
As we sit in a world that is ravaged by a pandemic that we can't seem to take seriously enough to kill and by an environmental crisis that may be beyond repair, this book seems to offer an interesting perspective on our seeming inability to accept how radically we may need to rework ourselves in order to save our species - and how unlikely it may be that we can do something that will be viewed as madness by so many of us. In-hye's final, empathic connection with Young-hye's dreams - something that is clearly too little too late, should be a warning to us that we need to here those among us who are having nightmares and acknowledge that we share them - before it is too late.
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