LIGHT AND THREAD

By: Han Kang (Nobel Literature speech, December 7, 2024)
Translated from English: Granit Zela

Last January, while organizing my pantry before an upcoming move, I came across an old shoe box. I opened the box to find several diaries dating back to my childhood. Among the pile of magazines was a pad with the words "Poem Book" written in pencil on the front. The pad was thin: five sheets of roughly A5 paper folded in half and stapled together. I had added two zigzag lines below the title, one line running six inches from the left, the other sloping down seven inches to the right. Was it some kind of cover illustration? Or just a doodle? The year 1979 and my name were written on the back cover, with a total of eight poems written on the inside pages by the same neat, penciled hand as on the front and back covers.

Eight different dates marked the end of each page in chronological order. The lines written by my eight-year-old self were very innocent and raw, but a poem about April caught my eye. It opened with the following verses:

where is the love
It's inside my chest that I jerk hard.
What is love?
It is the golden thread that binds our hearts.

So, I was taken back forty years, as the memories of that afternoon I spent making the block came over me. The short, hard pencil with the cap covering the tip, the dust from the erasers, the large metal clip I had sneaked from my father's room. I remembered how after learning that our family would be moving to Seoul, I had an urge to collect the poems I had scribbled on scraps of paper, or in the corners of notebooks and workbooks, or between journal entries, and to put them together in a single volume. I also remembered the inexplicable feeling of not wanting to show my "Book of Poems" to anyone after it was finished.

Before I put the journals and pad back where I found them and closed the lid, I took a picture of that poem with my cell phone. I did this driven by the feeling that there was a continuity between some of the words I had written then and who I was now. Inside my chest, in my beating heart. Between our hearts. It is the golden thread that unites – a thread that emits light.

*

Fourteen years later, with the publication of my first poem and my first story a year later, I became a writer. In five years I would publish my first long literary work, which I had been writing for about three years. I was and remain intrigued by the process of writing poetry and stories, but writing novels holds a special attraction for me. The books have taken me anywhere from a year to seven years to complete, giving away important parts of my personal life in exchange. This is what draws me to writing. The way I can go deeper and dwell on questions that I feel are necessary and just as pressing, I decide to accept the compensation with what I get from writing.

Every time I write a novel, I bear the burden of the questions that arise, I live within them. Getting to the bottom of these questions—which is not the same as when I find the answers to them—happens when I get to the end of the writing process. Then, I am no longer what I was when I started, and from that changed state, I start again. The next questions follow, like links in a chain, or like dominoes, overlapping, joining and continuing, and I am overcome with the excitement of writing something new.

While writing my third novel, Vegetarianism, from 2003 to 2005, I was dealing with some painful questions: Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what extent can we reject violence? What happens to the one who refuses to belong to the species called human?

Choosing not to eat meat as an act of rejection of violence, and finally refusing all kinds of food and drink except water, believing that she has turned into a plant, Jonhje, the protagonist of Vegetarianism, finds himself in the ironic situation of hastening his death by his efforts to save himself. Jonhje and her sister Inhje, who are actually the co-protagonists, scream silently through nightmares and heartbreaking episodes, but in the end they are together. I set the last scene in an ambulance, as I hoped that Jonhje would remain alive in the world of this story. The ambulance rushes down the winding mountain road as the big sister stares out the window at the wet leaves glistening brightly, as if reborn. Maybe waiting for an answer, or maybe as a way of protesting. The whole novel stands in a questioning state. Staring and challenging. Awaiting a response.

ink and blood, the novel that followed The vegetarian, is a continuation of these questions. To reject life and the world as an act of rejection of violence is impossible. After all, we cannot turn into plants. So how do we continue the resistance? In this mystery novel, sentences in roman letters and italics condense and collide, as the main character, who has long struggled with the shadow of death, risks her life to prove that her friend's sudden death cannot have was suicide. As I wrote the closing scene, as I depicted him crawling across the floor to find his way out of death and destruction, I was asking myself these questions: Shouldn't we survive in the end? Shouldn't our lives bear witness to what is true?

With my fifth novel, Greek Lessons, I went even further. If we must live in this world, what moments make this possible? A woman who has lost her speech and a man who is losing her sight are walking in silence and darkness when their lonely paths cross. I wanted to participate in the touching moments of this story. The novel unfolds at its own slow pace through silence and darkness until the woman's hand reaches out and writes a few words on the man's palm. In that bright moment that stretches into an eternity, these two characters reveal the softer parts of themselves. The question I wanted to ask here was this: Could it be that by attending to the softer aspects of humanity, by embracing the irresistible warmth that lies within, we can continue to live after all in this temporary, violent world?

After getting to the bottom of this question, I started thinking about the next book. This happened in the spring of 2012, not long after it was published Greek lessons. I told myself I would write a novel that takes another step toward light and warmth. I would fill this life and world-loving work with bright and transparent feelings. I quickly came up with a title and had written twenty pages into the first draft when I had to stop. I realized that something inside was preventing me from writing this novel.

*

I hadn't thought of writing about Gwangju until then.

I was nine years old when my family left Gwangju in January 1980, roughly four months before the mass killings began. When I came across "Gwangju's Picture Book" turned upside down on a bookshelf a few years later and looked at it when there were no adults around, I was twelve years old. This book had pictures of Gwangju residents and students killed with clubs, bayonets and guns as they resisted the new military powers that had orchestrated the coup. Published and distributed in secret by survivors and families of the dead, the book bore witness to the truth at a time when the truth was being distorted by strict media suppression. As a child, I hadn't understood the political significance of those images, and the devastated faces stuck in my mind as a fundamental question about human beings: Is this the action that one person does to another? And then, seeing a photo of an endless line of people waiting to donate blood outside a university hospital: is this the action that one man does to another? These two questions collided and seemed irreconcilable, their incompatibility a knot I could not untangle.

So one day in the spring of 2012, as I tried to write a radiant, life-affirming novel, I once again faced this unresolved problem. I had long since lost a deep-seated sense of trust in people. Then how could I embrace the world? I had to face this impossible conundrum if I was to move forward, I realized. I realized that writing was my only means of coping and overcoming it.

I spent most of that year sketching the lines of the novel, imagining that May 1980 in Gwangju would form a layer of the book. In December I visited the cemetery in Mangwol-dong. It was well past noon and it had snowed a lot just the day before. Later, as the light faded, I walked out of the frozen cemetery with my hand over my chest, close to my heart. I told myself that the next novel would shed light on Gwangju directly, rather than being content with having it as a single layer of the narrative. I took a book that contained more than 900 testimonies and read it every day for nine hours straight for a month. I have read every testimony contained therein.

I read not only about Gwangju, but also about other cases of state violence. Then, looking even further and back in time, I read about the mass murders that people have done repeatedly all over the world and throughout history. During this period of research for my novel, two main questions were most on my mind. When I was in my mid-twenties, I had written these lines on the front page of each new journal: Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?

As I continued to read, it became clear that these were impossible questions. Through this constant confrontation with the darkest aspects of humanity, I felt what was left of my long-lost faith in humanity completely crumble. I had no choice but to give up the novel. Then I read the diary entries of a young teacher at a night school. A shy and quiet young man, Park Yong, had participated in the "absolute community" of self-governing citizens that formed in Gwangju during the ten-day uprising in May 1980. He was shot and killed in the building near the provincial administration headquarters. where he had chosen to stay, despite knowing that the soldiers would return in the early hours. That last night he had written in his diary: “Why, God, should I have a conscience that troubles me and hurts me so much? I want to live".

Reading these sentences, I knew with lightning clarity which path the novel should take. And that my two questions had to be reversed. Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?

Later, while I was writing what would become the novel Human Work, at certain moments I felt that the past was really helping the present and that the dead were saving the living. I visited the cemetery from time to time and somehow the weather would always be clear. I closed my eyes and the orange rays of the sun covered my eyelids. I felt it like the light of life itself. I felt the light and the air envelop me with an indescribable warmth. The questions that stayed with me long after I saw that picture book were these: How come people are so violent? And yet, how is it possible that they can simultaneously oppose such overwhelming violence? What does it mean to belong to the species called human? To negotiate an impossible path through the empty space between these two precipices of human horrors and human dignity, I needed the help of the dead. As in this novel, in Human Deeds, the child Dong-ho squeezes his mother's hand to pull her towards the sun.

Of course, I could not undo what was done to the dead, the bereaved, or the survivors. All I could do was give them the sensations, the emotions and the life pulsating in my body. Wanting to light a candle at the beginning and end of the novel, I set the opening scene in the municipal gymnasium where the bodies of the dead were located and where the funeral services were held. There, we witness fifteen-year-old Dong-ho cover bodies with white sheets and light candles, staring intently at the pale blue heart of each flame.

When the book was finally finished and published in the spring of 2014, I was surprised by the pain readers reported feeling while reading it. I had to take some time to think about how the pain I had felt throughout the writing process and the concern my readers had expressed to me were connected. What could be behind this anxiety? Do we want to believe in humanity, and when this faith is shaken, we feel like we are destroying ourselves? Is it that we want to love humanity and this is the agony we feel when that love crumbles? Does love give birth to pain and is any pain evidence of love?

The Korean title of this novel is Sonyeon-i onda. The last word "onda" is the present tense of the verb "oda", to come. The moment Sonyeon, the boy, is addressed in the second person as you, whether intimate or less intimate, he wakes up in the dim light and walks into the present. His steps are the steps of a soul. It gets closer and closer and it becomes now. When a time and place in which cruelty and human dignity existed in stark parallels is referred to as Gwangju, that name ceases to be a single proper name for a city and instead becomes a common name, as I learned by writing this book. It comes to us – again and again across time and space, and always in the present tense. Even now.

*

That same year in June I had a dream. A dream in which I was walking across a wide field while a rare snow fell. Thousands and thousands of black tree trunks were in the field, and behind every last trunk was a burial mound. In an instant, I was treading water, and when I looked back, I saw the ocean pouring in from the edge of the field, which I had mistaken for the horizon. Why were those graves in a place like this? I asked myself. Would not all the bones have been swept away in the lower mounds nearer the sea? Shouldn't I at least move the bones to the upper mounds, now, before it's too late? But how? I didn't even have a shovel.

The water was already up to his ankles. I woke up and as I looked out the still dark window, I realized that this dream was telling me something important. After I wrote down the dream, I remember thinking that this could be the beginning of my next novel.

However, I didn't have a clear idea of ​​where it might lead, and I found myself starting and discarding the beginnings of several possible stories that I imagined could come from that dream. Finally, in December 2017, I rented a room on Jeju Island and spent the next two years splitting my time between Jeju and Seoul. Walking in the forests, along the sea and on the country roads, feeling Jeju's weather at every moment – ​​its wind and light, snow and rain – I felt the novel project become more tangible. As with Human Deeds, I read testimonies from survivors of the massacre, dug up material, and then, as restrained as I could, kept my eyes on the brutal details that I felt almost impossible to capture. expression, I wrote what became "We do not part". The book was published almost seven years after I had dreamed of those black tree trunks, of that rolling sea.

In the notebook I kept while working on that book, I made these notes:

Life wants to live. Life is warm.
To die is to become cold. Having snow fall on your face instead of melting. To kill is to be cold.
People in history and people in the cosmos.
Wind and ocean currents. The circular flow of water and air that connects the whole world. We are connected.
I pray that we are connected.

The novel consists of three parts. If the first part is a horizontal journey that follows the narrator, Kyungha, from Seoul to her friend Inseon's house in the Jeju mountains through heavy snow to the house bird she is tasked with rescuing, the second part follows a vertical path that leads Kyungha and Inseon through one of humanity's darkest nights—the winter of 1948 when civilians in Jeju were massacred—and into the depths of the ocean. In the third and final part, the two light a candle at the bottom of the sea.

Although the subject of the novel is developed by the two friends, as they take turns holding the candle, the real protagonist and person related to Kyungha and Inseon is Inseon's mother, Jeongsim. She who, after surviving the massacres in Jeju, has fought to recover even a part of her lover's remains so that she can hold a decent burial ceremony. It is she who refuses not to mourn. It is she who endures pain and fights against oblivion. He doesn't say goodbye. Caring for her life, which for a long time was full of pain and love just as strong and great, I think the questions I was asking were these: To what extent can we love? Where is our border? To what extent must we want to remain human to the end?

*

Three years after the publication of the Korean edition of We are not separated, I still hadn't finished the next novel. And the book I imagined would follow was long overdue. It is a novel officially related to The White Book, which I wrote out of a desire to lend my life, for a short time, to the older sister who left the world just two hours after she was born and, also, to tap into the parts of us that remain unbreakable no matter what happens. As always, it's impossible to predict when something will end, but I'll keep writing, however slowly. I will leave behind the books I have already written and move on. Until I reach a bottleneck and find that there are no more rows showing up. As long as life allows me.

As I depart from them, my books will continue their independent lives and travel according to their destinies. Like those two sisters, together forever inside that ambulance as one watches the trees burn. Like the woman, who will soon regain the ability to speak, writing on the man's palm with her finger, silently, in the dark. Like my sister who passed away just two hours after coming into this world, and like my young mother who begged her baby: "Don't die, please don't die", until the end. How far will those souls go—the ones that came together in a deep orange glow behind my closed eyelids, that enveloped me in that warm, indescribable light? How far will the candles travel – the ones lit at the site of every murder, in every time and place ravaged by immeasurable violence, the ones held by people who vow never to say goodbye? Will they pass from wick to wick, from heart to heart, through a golden thread?

*

In the pad I discovered in the old shoebox years ago in January, my past self, writing in April 1979, had asked herself:

where is the love
What is love?

Whereas, until the fall of 2021, when it was published We are not separated, I had seen these two problems as the most fundamental:

Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet, how can the world be so beautiful?

For a long time I believed that the tension and internal struggle between these sentences was the driving force of writing. From my first novel to my most recent, the questions I had kept in my mind kept shifting and unfolding, yet these were the only two that remained constant. But two or three years ago I started to have doubts. Had I really begun to wonder about love—about the pain that binds us—after the Korean release of Human work in the spring of 2014? From my earliest novel to my last, had not the deepest layer of my researches always followed the direction of love? Could it be that love was, in fact, the earliest and most fundamental meaning of my life?

Love is in a private place called "my heart", the child wrote in April 1979. (It's inside my chest that I jerk.) And as for what love was, that was her answer. (It is the golden thread that binds our hearts.)

When I write I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, experiencing softness, warmth, cold and pain, observing the beating heart and the body needing food and water, walking and running, the feeling of wind, rain and snow on my skin as I hold them in my hands. I try to put these vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with the blood flowing through their body into my sentences. Like I'm sending an electric current.

And when I feel that this current is being transmitted to the reader, I am surprised and touched. In these moments I experience again the thread of language that connects us, the process of how my questions connect with readers through that living electric being. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all who have connected with me through this thread, and to all who may come to do so. /Magazine "Academia"/