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Human Acts
Human Acts: why was it written? A hypothesis
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Very interesting. I will have to re-read that introduction.
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"Why did the author write this novel"?
A delightfully boring-sounding question. To me it is key to the whole thing. It is the back-door key, also, to the controversy about the book that emerged vocally in some quarters. Asking the question in this open of a way avoids bogging down in any he-said-she-said sinkholes and also will tend not to produce people popping up to attack you immediately (I'd hope).
Han Kang has spoken and written about her decision to write the book. She even wrote about the decision in her own novel's Epilogue, fairly directly. "Directly," that is, if you're conversant in the context of her references.
(I expect the large majority of the Western readers of this novel missed in-references; missed a lot of subtext in the book. This tendency was probably not helped by Deborah Smith's work, but the task of literary translation and cross-cultural translation are no easy task for anyone. I lost much confidence and trust in Deborah Smith after reading, in the copy of the book I got, a just-atrocious "historical introduction" by the translator.)
In the Epilogue, Han Kang sort of inserts herself as a character in her own novel. By this literary device she (deliberately, I think) muddies the waters of the fiction-from-fact
What we know is this: Han Kang decided to write this novel in December 2012, right after the election of conservative presidential candidate Mrs Park Geun-hye; and the loss by progressive Mr Moon Jae-in. (The latter's people later succeeded in sweeping her out and putting him in, in the impeachment-frenzy of 2016-17.) Moon Jae-in was the huge favorite of the Jeolla people at the time. It seems Han Kang was a strong supporter, and, to take her at her word, took the loss hard.
Someone at the RAS Book Club meeting quoted Han Kang herself as addressing the "why/when" of her writing of "Human Acts." Han Kang herself framed it through two pairs of questions (characteristically for someone who has for some time sought to project the persona of the professional author):
On the purpose of her "Human Acts" book, Han Kang claims the two questions she started with were:
- Can the present help the past?
- Can the living save the dead?
As she got going and "got into" Kwangju-1980 research, she claims the two questions one day flipped on her, and she was awed by this sudden change and pursued the project with renewed urgency. The new questions were:
- Can the past help the present?
- Can the dead save the living?
A big criticism of "Human Acts" is that we see it only from one side's perspective. (At least two people in the RAS Book Club discussion in Jan 2025 made this point, one saying "the soldiers could have been victims too.") That is an easy-enough criticism. The criticisms of this type are to the effect that Human Acts is "biased" in favor of the Gwangju-uprising people and against the government of the time; and by extension biased in favor of the Left and against the Right.
I think these criticisms are valid but to get to my own view on the purpose of the book I'd push myself further. If I'm not already out on a limb, here I go:
There are clear spiritual elements of the book and I sense something of a folk-religion element. Then, with this talk of "the dead saving the living," it is just staring right at you. Or so I'd incline to argue.
Do others detect, as I do, a trace of "ancestor worship" at play? It's political, maybe, but not fully. It's not about any-old suppression of civilians, but one tied to the author's native region and so forth.
A tacit ethnic-political syncretic religion, made to appeal to a modern Korean population and based on an ethno-political gospel. There is plenty of tradition for this kind of new-religion on the Korean Peninsula. The historically important Chondogyo religion is quite a lot like this. Han Kang and others are on hand as curators -- as hagiographers? as prophets? -- of the martyrs of this quasi-religion. A close re-read of Human Acts, with that in mind, may find many examples.
(Think again of the controversy from the Right, in which a portion of South Koreans effectively protested the Nobel Prize decision. They may not phrase it quite as I've done, but they perceive themselves as being erected as villains, devils?, of this unnamed, tacit, politically-tinged neo-religion.)
Korean folk-religion expert Dr David Mason says that in the present century signs point to a new religion being bound to emerge on this peninsula, probably tied with long-run unification. The exact shape of this Korean Religion of the Future we cannot predict, he says, but the outlines or tendencies we can already identify, or at least many of them. He believes shamanism is going nowhere, for one thing. Mountain-spirits and such will be part of this new religion, along with the increasingly-revered "Dan-gun" quasi-god (the alleged "founder of ancient Korea"; the ROK as a state has long used Oct 3 for a holiday honoring Dan-gun, for some reason).
Talk of a religion that incorporates such things as Dan-gun (a figure it is claimed lived 4,500 years ago) seems fanciful. Less fanciful however is the raw material of religion I believe we also see in "Human Acts": spirituality, the great question of Death and its meaning; ghosts who observe and comment on the living; martyrs, villains, angels and devils; this interesting question of "the dead saving the living"; the controversy over "who are the legitimate Korean people," with the connotations or subtext of a (politically-coded) chosen people and a morally-tainted oppressor people.
The Nobel Prize press-release said Han Kang had been chosen "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." This one-line summary-justification for the controversial decision to give her this award has two parts: The second part is in the realm of the spiritual. And historical traumas, too, are also often used in/for/by religious-"genesis" periods (if you will; yes, a reference to the first book of the Bible).
Briefly considering a reading of "Human Acts" by Westerners, many of whom in the 2020s will tend to hold broadly-sympathetic views to Koreans (or "Asians" in general; but especially Koreans in the K-Culture era): I foresee Westerners often bypassing, or not seeing, anything like the political and ethno-national angle(s) to the novel that I've alluded to. They do see that some sort of spiritual themes are still there. These themes cannot really be ignored. They are, however, unrooted from the meanings with which they will tend to be associated have in the original.
A Western "spiritual but not religious" crowd will be quite okay with the decontextualized spirituality. Such people are, effectively, reading a different novel than many Koreans might be reading.
I asked at the RAS Korean Literature Club meeting in Jan 2025: When Koreans and Westerners read this novel, do take away different things? In many cases, it's inevitable that they do, I think.
I've now gotten around to "answering" my own question to my satisfaction. The question was "Why did Han Kang write 'Human Acts'?" The answer: with the ascendance of the Kwangju-1980 incident to sacrosanct-mythological status (there is a kind of blasphemy law against publicly defaming the civilians who died at Kwangju), the project is one of laying a foundation-stone for a modern-Korean (21st-century) ethno-religious-political consciousness, of the kind that is the raw-material of religion of the future and the outlines of which we already see. The question of unification also looms here.
The above is a hypothesis for this novel.
A "hypothesis" is a narrative-explanation that seems to plausibly fit observed facts. It is not "proven" and would need to be corroborated by examination of more evidence. I'm not even sure I myself am fully convinced of the neo-religion hypothesis. I present it here, anyway, because others may find it of interest or use. Writing for this discussion-group has given me the impetus to put these ideas down in what I hope is coherent form.