The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Madness is at Our Core

 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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