Here, in offering these remarks on Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, I speak not as a critic so much as a contemporary reader of her works. Distanced from both the writer she writes about and the reader who reads her criticism, the critic tosses her gaze down at both. Her language moves in one direction; her critical utterance expresses her superior specialist knowledge about the writer. The contemporary reader, on the other hand, dwells communally among unknown fellow readers in that imaginative space built by the books of their time. Those who cohabitate in this space of contemporary literature are linked together by chance encounters, candid admissions, and the desire to touch one another by sharing the writers and books they love best. In this safe space they may exchange without embarrassment their most intimate feelings about or most trivial experiences with a book.

    On Thursday, October 10, 2024, I was in a meeting with several other people. While paying due attention to the serious discussion taking place around the table, I nonetheless found a part of myself wandering off, wondering who would receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Had I been among my literary cohort, we surely would have made a festive time of the moments before the announcement. These literary friends of mine—oddballs who do not hesitate to buy piles of books, no matter how old or new, that they proceed to stack on shelves already filled to overflowing, and to read with mad delight—had already placed their bets on their favorite authors: Can Xue, Yoko Tawada, Anne Carson, Ali Smith, and Margaret Atwood. But on October 10, I was not among them. At eight o’clock sharp, curiosity got the better of me. I quietly reached for the cellphone in my bag to check the news. And when I did, my heart stopped. The news that I had been so certain would arrive one day was already in my hands. 

    On the way back home that night, I felt gravity had lost its pull; my heart was bursting, my head reeling. Over the next few days, this feeling of weightlessness persisted, even as I exchanged words of joy with my literary friends, students, and fellow writers. “Our beloved writer has won a great prize.” “What great happiness.” “We must celebrate together.” Why is it, then, that even as we congratulated each other in that moment of indubitable, heartstopping joy, we found ourselves strangely unable to laugh out loud? Why did our voices falter? And why did we turn our damp eyes away from each other’s gaze?

    It was only later, during a phone conversation with a friend I had not talked to lately, that the tears finally came. It happens that way sometimes. Some kinds of happiness do not evoke laughter but rather a complex, cathartic grief. At times, it is flowing tears that can best express the happiness we feel. I know there were others beside me who, caught in feelings too difficult to express, also found themselves in tears after the announcement. “I burst out crying when I heard.” “I cried, too.” “The moment it was announced, we all cried. We were hugging one another and crying.”

    The reason we embraced and wept is because, for some years now, even decades, we have been suffering. Budgets for books, publishing, and culture have been slashed. People working in the cultural sphere are fast losing the means to foster creative knowledge and critical thinking. Both online and offline, discrimination and crimes of hate are greatly on the rise, leaving women, disabled persons, the elderly, children, teens, and LGBTQ people increasingly at risk. Those who ceaselessly deny and distort the history of state violence have turned to stigmatizing the victims and their bereaved families rather than consoling them and offering reparation. In recent years, we have lost both the eager spirit and the material means to forge a better today and a better tomorrow. One by one, we have sunk into silence and isolation, hurt by words and images of hate, cynicism, lethargy, and base vulgarity.

    So the tears that sprang from our eyes when we heard that Han Kang had won the Nobel Prize in Literature were not tears of national pride. We did not weep because our national literature finally had arrived at a level we had been long aiming for, or because we finally had received the international recognition we deserved. Rather, we wept because we remembered literature had kept us company through all those brutal and violent years, giving us the strength to continue living—literature that faithfully pieced together historical truth, literature that kept beauty and dignity alive. We wept because we, who are so worn out and weary of words of hate and violence, know that there are words that bestow life rather than death. We wept that these words had been given to us as a gift. The joy that bursts from the wellsprings of a deeply repressed pain must sound like a cry rather than laughter. Think of the first sounds that emerge from the newly born baby embracing the world and expressing the sensation of life with all its body. Think of that stupendous cry.

    This is why we do not hesitate to say the news of Han’s Nobel award must have given new life to someone wasting away, depleted and alone, in some unobserved corner of the world. In Han’s writings, we often come across this theme of a human being deprived of bodily function, language, and willpower, being pushed to the utmost limit of existence. In that very moment when the human being in extremis reaches this limit, a powerful life force reasserts itself. This is why, in those moments when I feel most depleted of energy, the following passage from Han’s early short story “Evening Light” comes back to me. It is a passage that occurs at the very end of the story.

     A darkness both of sky and earth, heavy as a boulder, was crushing Jaein’s body. His flesh rumpled. His spine wilted.  His collarbone, rib cage, knee joints and talus bones came crumbling down in one heap with a loud clatter like tumbling wooden blocks. His muscles and innards burst furiously in all directions into the air. 

    This is a story about two young half-brothers. The older brother, a painter, lives alone by the sea. One day, he boards a fishing boat and is lost at sea. Jaein arrives at the shore just as the sun is sinking beneath the sea that has swallowed his half-brother. He pours libations into the sea. Soon after this gesture of mourning, his body undergoes a startling transformation. The onslaught of darkness takes on formidable, supernatural power as it presses down upon the small, fragile body of a grieving human being. The scene is too fantastic to be real, yet is narrated with such anatomical precision that we cannot brush it off as mere illusion. Step by step, with cool accuracy, the narrator depicts the body crumbling down. It is as if Jaein’s body, for unknown reasons, is shattered before the narrator who watches with unflinching eyes. In this scene, Jaein is destroyed as an individual, but he joins the vast flows of life energy operating at planetary and cosmic levels. This deserves to be called a metamorphosis beyond the realm of death into another dimension of life.

    Han’s novels narrate such moments of transformation when a human being, confronted with the final paralysis of death, manages to rekindle the will to live by tapping into an inner strength, or comes face to face with an overwhelming life force. The waves of energy circulating between word and word, sentence and sentence, page and page, reach out and touch the reader. The reader’s body accepts and absorbs the bursts of life energy emanating from Han’s works. The reader is shaken and shattered by her powerful language, yet through this very process, is reborn.

    In Han’s work it is not only the individual that passes through death to reach a new life. The human community, too, survives destructive violence to arrive at a new existence. Her works do not merely testify to the continuing human cost of political violence in modern Korean history. They confer dignity on the dead and enact consolation. In Human Acts, Han wrote about the Gwangju Democratic Uprising of May 1980, a democratic struggle against the military dictatorship, in which many civilians lost their lives. In We Do Not Part, she testified to the state violence perpetrated against the people of Jeju Island in 1947-1954. Han’s writings, based on meticulous archival research, interviews with survivors and their families, and visits to the sites in question, vividly represent such locations of violence. Her work dignifies those who were willing to lay down their lives as well as those who were innocently sacrificed. Her semi-autobiographical The White Book, set in Warsaw, similarly remembers and commemorates a dark moment in Polish history. During a brief sojourn in this city, which was almost completely razed to the ground by the Nazis after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the narrator repeatedly comes face to face with the sight of new walls raised above the preserved ruins of the old. These walls built on the fragments of the bombed-out walls of the past testify to the deliberate choice made by the people of Warsaw not to erase the traces of past violence. Instead of forgetting, they chose simultaneously to preserve and reconstruct.

    This is an image—and a lesson—the narrator takes home with her. The acts of mourning and reconstruction are the means by which human beings who have experienced near annihilation hold fast to life and history. The writer performs these acts through writing. By reading Han Kang’s works, we share in the work of honoring the dead. And we gain the strength to continue our lives in their wake.

Translated by Min Eun Kyung

Kyung Hee Youn is an author, translator, and literary critic. She has written Wunderkammer (2021) and Shadows and Dawn (2022), and translated Anne Carson’s Nox into Korean. She teaches at Korea National University of Arts.