In 2024, South Korea’s Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a 54-year-old author of eleven novels—only five of which have been translated into English—Han was viewed by some as an unexpected choice. The Swedish Academy—awarders of the Nobel Prize—praised Han ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.1
The Vegetarian (2007; 2015 in English) is Han’s most celebrated novel. In three parts it tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman who appears to have achieved all that conservative Korean society wants for her: a husband and a home, a job, and a loving family. However, she has a dream that encourages her to stop eating meat. This is the beginning of her fall down from and out of society, involving adultery with her sister’s husband, attempts at suicide, and developing anorexia nervosa. Her husband divorces her; her parents won’t speak to her; her sister has her committed to a psychiatric hospital.
The book only shows a social sense of Yeong-hye’s personal epiphany in the final pages when her sister finally liberates her from the psychiatric ward: ‘”What I’m trying to say … […]. Perhaps this is all a kind of dream. […] I have dreams too, you know. Dreams … and I could let myself dissolve into them.”‘2 The sister’s acceptance of the dream concludes the mysterious centre of the narrative.
It was the dream that triggered’s Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism; and it was also that dream that triggered her husband’s growing disgust of his wife, and a growing sense of unfamiliarity with her. He says that he had an experience ‘as though I was seeing [her face] for the first time’, all because she had said, ‘I had a dream‘ (p. 11). The dream itself—described in several parts—includes descriptions of the dreamer’s bleeding body and ‘Chewing on something that felt so real, but couldn’t have been, it couldn’t. […T]hat strange, horribly uncanny feeling’ (p. 12). At the heart of the dream is a tension between the real and unreal.
I don’t think Freudian dream theory can apply here. Freud details his theory in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) (summarised in On Dreams (1901) if you fancy a more accessible version), and describes four major phenomena identifiable in dreams. Through these, Freud argues that all dreams manifest wish fulfilments.3 But that’s not what’s appears to be going on in The Vegetarian.
The sister’s epiphany in the final pages that the real world is in fact entirely a dream displaces the real. This means that reality should be taken less seriously, which has repercussions when we think about Yeong-hye’s medicalised punishment in the book. This is a lesson that Yeong-hye has already understood, and now enters into the vivid present for her sister.
In the second part of the novel, Yeong-hye is pursued by her brother-in-law. Eventually they sleep together, with flowers painted across both their bodies. This is also prompted by a dream, this time the brother-in-law’s dream of the future, a dream through which he hopes to ‘tease out the inner logi of something,[…] to find a way to make it come alive’ (p. 56). He then pursues this future until it becomes a reality.
In the opening section, when Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian, we read that her dreams carry the trauma of the past, with her saying at one point that she thinks she has eaten too much meat. Without exploring another, significant point here—that this is the section where we hear most of Yeong-hye’s own voice, and yet it appears in italicised descriptions of the dream—it also notable that Yeong-hye’s dreams offer a kind of collective memory.
But she is the only one attuned enough to remember and to pay attention.
In paying attention, and in acting to change her life by becoming a vegetarian, Yeong-hye demonstrates a different point about the reality–dream switch: that a dream of the past holds greater reality than the conservative life she was living.
So, the work of the dream—unlike Freud’s retrospective arrangement or Jung’s prospective arrangement4—is to re-value reality. That is, there is some truth content to dreams that needs to be recognised, and that the work of the dreamer is to fall prey to that truth and escape the clutches of the late capitalist, overly-medicalised, twenty-first-century Korean society.
- See https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/ for details on Han’s award. ↩︎
- Han Kang, The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (London: Granta, 2018 [2007]), p. 182. ↩︎
- The four phenomena are: (i) Condensation: condensing the wish (or wishes) into one dream; (ii) Displacement: displacing the latent wish on to something that can adequately hide the wish; (iii) Figurability: turning an idea into a visual element of the dream; (iv) Secondary revision: the final check to make sure that the dream makes sense as a narrative. ↩︎
- Freud looks back to the previous day’s residues for the manifest content of the dream, while the latent content goes back further in the psyche’s repression of wishes. Jung, another psychoanalyst, thinks of the dream as solving a problem for the subject, something they can act on in the future. ↩︎
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