Read "Vegetarian" Han Jiang｜Towards the freedom of life and death

This article is written for dear passing collectors :)

I only learned about the book "Vegetarian" after I met@Passenger Collector. Although I have been paying attention to the publication information of various books, when I want to read "Vegetarian", I find that I have never touched Korean literature. Obviously, I love to follow Korean dramas, "Vegetarian" can be said to be my number one. This is a Korean novel (laughs). "Vegetarian" has a small number of pages, about 200 pages, the text is not difficult, and the reading is very smooth. It can be read in about one night. After reading it, I really want to discuss it with passing collectors, but there are too many details in the book. Talking alone is a bit difficult to organize my feelings, so this article was born, and I digested those messy thoughts through writing.

Also, when I checked relevant information, I accidentally found that Korean literature is not very popular in Taiwan. Just to borrow "Vegetarian", I found three libraries, and finally I borrowed books from different libraries. Taiwan is so popular with Korean film and television and K-pop culture, but I didn't expect Korean literature to be ignored. Such a contrast is quite Surprising.

(talk about book content below)

"Vegetarian" can be said to be an alternative metamorphosis. It begins with the protagonist Yinghui who is haunted by nightmares and decides to become a vegetarian. It adopts three chapters and three perspectives, namely Yinghui's husband, brother-in-law and sister Renhui. to explain Yinghui's increasingly extreme behavior and its impact on them. Compared with these characters, although the protagonist Yinghui runs through the whole book, her thoughts are rarely written in the book. Except for the psychedelic paragraphs interspersed in the first chapter, Yinghui's feelings are presented in a way of writing that cannot distinguish between dreams and reality. are the opinions of others. Readers can only spy and speculate on what happened to the protagonist from only a few words? Interestingly, the inexplicable behaviors and words in the book contain deep meanings and occasionally a strange beauty, but the book never gives clear explanations to these images. So I think that when readers try to interpret this book, some parts of them reflect themselves.

I have seen some book reviews saying that this book reflects the patriarchal culture of Korea, and also that it is a voice for women. Just looking at the online profile, I also thought it was true. But after reading it, I don't think it's quite the case. It's about a life mutated by depression, with characters struggling with the line between normal and abnormal. Such a disorder can happen to anyone.

a plant with desire

It was the roars that overlapped heavily, it was the meat, I ate too much meat, and those lives stayed there quietly. That's right! The blood and flesh were digested, scattered in every corner of the body, and the residue had been discharged from the body, but those lives were entangled and stuck there firmly. ─P.58

As each chapter progresses, it can be observed how the protagonist Yinghui goes through physical "food" and appearance "painting", from top to bottom, from outside to inside, from vegetarian to plant. At first, "meat-eating" seemed to embody the nature of this society's need to harm others in order to survive, so Yinghui chose "not eating". Insomnia. But does she really "don't want" to eat meat? Until the end of the first chapter, Yinghui salivaed like a hungry beast when she saw the meat, and at the end she was clutching a dead bird with a tooth mark in her hand, which seemed to express her current situation. Is fighting with the desire to be human.

Everything is perfect. These are pictures he has drawn over and over again. Above her birthmark, the big red flower on his body opened and closed again and again, and his penis moved in and out of her body like a huge stamen. He shuddered. It was the ugliest and most "beautiful" combination in the world. ─P.134

In the second chapter of the story, the brother-in-law invites Yinghui, who has returned from mental treatment, to take a body painting. This reminds me of a sentence in Li Weijing's "I Am Xu Liangliang" that compares people to plants: "I just show any cute, expressive behavior, words, or expressions, or try to establish relationships myself, or To venture out, I was immediately stopped and degraded. So I decided not to move, so I wouldn't be criticized or hurt, maybe it would make it easier to be loved, so I became a plant, but I wasn't loved because of it, Just ignored. I believe my words are ugly and my actions are clumsy. I have always been uncertain and unclear about how I feel, and when I am suffering, I instinctively deny my suffering and tell myself that everything is normal , it may be that my sensory system is wrong, and I have made a wrong interpretation of the normal situation that I think I suffer. (P.95)" I can't help but wonder whether Yinghui's reason for yearning for plants has an intersection with this text. But to my surprise, the way plants are interpreted here is violent and bizarre. It breaks the image that plants are passive and pure in the past. It turns out that it can also have desires. In contrast to the numbness and indifference towards sex in the previous chapter, Yinghui, who is painted with images of flowers all over her body, seems to be driven by the instinct of plants and enthusiastically attaches to another model with painted bodies. The sight struck me as if to say, "If people are ugly, then it's better not to be human."

Look, sister, I was standing upside down, and suddenly leaves grew out of my body, and roots grew out of my hands and stretched into the ground, constantly, constantly... Well, it felt like flowers were going to bloom from the cross, so I opened my legs, wide open...─P.146

In the book, the pursuit of becoming a plant is not only internalized but also exposed. When Ying-hye was admitted to the mental ward again in the final chapter, she radically wanted to be a tree. Not knowing whether to imitate the tree's demeanor, or to return the face in the dream to the correct position, Yinghui began to violate the laws of the human body, standing upside down for a long time and feeding only on water and sunlight. But once a person stops eating, it is equivalent to giving up living, so Yinghui gradually withers away. Will this freedom to live and die finally get liberation or a tragedy?

normal or sick

Whenever "normal people" with different personalities interact with "abnormal" Yinghui in the book, it will give people a strong sense of contrast. It seems that in the eyes of her husband, Yinghui is sick, but he is unwilling to give his wife a trace of care and pity. On the brother-in-law's side, Yinghui has become a pure symbol, which is what his heart desires, so he tries to plunder something from Yinghui in the name of art. In this comparison, normal people appear more cruel and crazy. However, it was another turning point when it came to my elder sister. Both my elder sister Renhui and my younger sister grew up in an environment of high-pressure patriarchy. The disordered younger sister was like a mirror, showing her long-hidden wounds. She once had the same insomnia and dreams as her younger sister. Unlike her sister, her sense of responsibility kept her, and those who chose to "eat meat" lived very hard.

She took a quiet breath, the "flaming" trees on the side of the road stood sideways like countless large beasts. She stared fixedly. As if waiting for an answer, no, as if resisting, her eyes were dark and strong. —P.190

When I read it for the second time, because I already knew the development of the story, I couldn't help but re-examine the plot from a non-human point of view. Assuming that Yinghui in the first chapter is no longer like a plant with a human mind, then facing the rape in the book , incest, and family affection have no meaning to her at all, because the so-called good and bad are judged by "people". If there is no restraint imposed by others, this is not a kind of freedom.

About the structure of the book

"Vegetarian" has a very interesting design. In addition to making different characters appear in each chapter to contrast with Yinghui, similar states or situations will appear repeatedly between chapters to echo the context, such as sex, eyes, death, breathlessness and dreaming, etc. Even the words are the same. In Chapters 1 and 3, Yinghui's husband and sister Renhui said, "It's just a dream." This structure makes the book very layered, like watching a painting. In the process, watching the brush interweave the content on the canvas layer by layer, but what kind of picture is it? That's up to the reader.

postscript

In the first few pages of "Vegetarian", there were professional recommendations, and I saw an article that used "horrible" to describe the book, but I prefer to use the word "magic" to describe this book. After "The Vegetarian", because I wanted to know more about "transfiguration", I went to Kafka's "Metamorphoses" to read. Different from "Vegetarian", the protagonist in "Metamorphosis" is really out of human form and turned into an insect, and he keeps the human mind, always worrying about his family's livelihood, but he is disgusted by his beloved family and finally starved to death. Own. The "transformation" of "Metamorphosis" is to make the protagonist be abandoned by society, while the "transformation" of "The Vegetarian" is to get rid of society. I think "The Vegetarian" is an evolutionary "transformation" choice, which is a kind of social system. resist. But the only thing that doesn't change is that although the two works are separated by a hundred years, the society in the book is still more deformed than the protagonists. Every time I read Yinghui's flesh-eating nightmare, I think of the MV of Japanese singer amazarashi's "Seasons that Gone One After Another", in which the flesh-eating scene has been taken as the appearance of a nightmare (hehe). When I was writing a book review, I kept listening to this song over and over again, and felt that the lyrics in it were somewhat similar to the story of the book.

And thank you for the waiting of the passing collectors. Although the book is read very quickly, it is extremely slow to write (it took two weeks to write it ). Although there are projects that I want to discuss, I am used to writing a little every day. So the article will be somewhat affected by the mood that day. A few days after get off work, I was very tired, and I just reread the chapter on Ren Hui, so I just felt that life was difficult and troublesome with the characters in the book =W=. On Goodreads, out of 5 stars, I gave "Vegetarian" 4.5 stars, and the reason I lost 0.5 is because I can't fully identify and understand the protagonist.

"Life depends on swallowing other life to survive. I will be swallowed by life one day. If only I were delicious" - From Shuntaro Tanigawa "Fear the Dragon World"