[The Editors' Verdict] Han Kang's Profound Exploration of the Human Psyche

The writing of novelist Han Kang breathes. It is not an easy breath. Sometimes it accompanies unbearable pain. At times, it plunges the reader into an inescapable swamp. This is the underlying sketch of a writer who refuses to leave others' suffering lonely and unattended.

Han Kang thus shares the arduous inner world of humanity with the world. The more one immerses in his writing, the more one feels connected by some invisible line. An experience that makes pain, joy, and suffering feel not just someone else's but a part of oneself. The color that permeates Han Kang's novels is close to ash gray. The stories in that ash gray contain how much violence is dissolved in human life. While someone groans in pain every day, the world exposes the reality of neglecting violence under the name of convention.

There is a ripple in Han Kang's writing. The sentences flow naturally like water, but they are not entirely smooth. They reveal the bumps and grooves of a rough floor as they are, forcing a direct confrontation with reality. This is why Han Kang's writing is difficult to explain with the single term "poetic prose." To understand Han Kang, one must delve beyond literary analyses such as the use of rhythm or imagery. Ultimately, it touches on the essential question of who humans are.

"A powerful poetic prose confronting historical trauma and revealing the fragility of human life." The Nobel Prize in Literature selection reason announced by the Swedish Academy is not unrelated to this context. The history Han Kang pursues is closer to a tributary reflecting the life of ordinary people than the vast waves of the Yangtze River. It is a process of projecting humanity with a calm gaze and finding a path. The delicate approach is such that the development of the novel can change with a single ripple of emotion hidden within the human heart.

Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, is giving an acceptance speech at the '2024 PonyJeong Innovation Award' ceremony held on the afternoon of October 17, 2024, at PonyJeong Hall in Samseong-dong, Seoul. Photo by Joint Press Corps

Han Kang's attitude toward life and reality is also exceptional. As surprising as the news of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was, his attitude toward the award astonished the world. At a time when countless media interviews filled with praise and a glamorous celebration stage should have been arranged, he made the unexpected choice of distancing himself from the world. Han Kang shared the background with Swedish public broadcasting: "I want to be quiet. There is much suffering in the world, and we need to be a little quieter."

We live in an age of barbarism. Is the world only cruel where bullets and shells fly? What else is an age of barbarism if not the reality itself, which becomes increasingly numb even while witnessing the echoes of cries of pain?

The condition of having to endure a time of despair of unknown length, squeezing one's body into a small coffin. Can this be simply concluded as the story of a gloomy protagonist in a novel? If someone accepts it as their own story, it means the novel has already crossed the threshold of reality. The boundary between novel and reality ? we are now wandering somewhere along it. Han Kang's novel is a journey to find that unknown coordinate.

The fate of a writer who sometimes must step forward as a social accuser and a witness of history. Recording an age of barbarism is pain. Han Kang willingly endured the pain of embodying the shadows within the human heart. And she posed the question of reflection to the literary world and to all who write.

About how to live so that the graphite traces left on manuscript paper are not remembered as a shuddering shame...