Han River Nobel Literature Prize Commemoration Lecture 'Light and Thread' [Full Text]

Light and Thread

Last January, while organizing a storage room for moving, I found an old shoebox. When I opened it, there were a dozen or so diaries from my childhood. Among the stacked diaries, I discovered a thin saddle-stitched booklet with the word 'Sijip' (Poetry Collection) written in pencil on the cover. It was a small booklet made by folding five A5-sized sheets of newsprint in half and stapling them. Below the title, two crooked lines were drawn side by side: one shaped like six ascending steps from the left, and the other like seven descending steps to the right. Was that some kind of cover illustration? Or just a doodle? On the back cover of the booklet, the year 1979 and my name were written, and inside were eight poems, all neatly written in pencil, matching the cover title. At the bottom of each page, different dates were recorded in chronological order. Among the innocent and clumsy sentences typical of an eight-year-old, one poem dated in April caught my eye. It began with the following two-line stanzas.

Where could love be?

It’s inside my heart that beats flutteringly.

What is love?

It’s the golden thread that connects our hearts.

In an instant, I crossed over more than forty years of time and recalled the afternoon when I made that booklet. The stubby pencil with a pen cap, eraser dust, and the large metal stapler secretly taken from my father’s room. After learning that we would soon move to Seoul, I wanted to gather the poems I had scribbled on scraps of paper, notebooks, exercise books, and diaries. I also remembered the feeling that, after finishing that 'poetry collection,' for some reason, I didn’t want to show it to anyone.

Before stacking the diaries and the booklet back into the shoebox and closing the lid, I took a photo of the page with the poem on my phone. I felt that some of the words used by that eight-year-old were connected to who I am now. The beating heart inside my chest. The space between our hearts. The golden thread that connects them ? a thread that shines with light.

*

Fourteen years later, I became a 'writer' by publishing my first poem and, the following year, a short story. Five years after that, I published my first novel, which took about three years to complete. I liked writing poetry and short stories ? and still do ? but writing novels held a special fascination. A novel takes at least a year and sometimes up to seven years to complete, exchanging a significant portion of my personal life. That was what I liked. The fact that I could enter and dwell within questions so important and urgent that I was willing to trade that much time for them.

Every time I write a novel, I live with and endure those questions. When I reach the end of those questions ? not when I find the answers ? I complete the novel. The person who started the novel is no longer the same; transformed through the writing process, I start anew from that state. The next questions pile up and connect like chains or dominoes, leading me to begin a new novel.

Novelist Han Kang is giving a commemorative lecture for winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Swedish Academy on the afternoon of the 7th (local time).
Photo by AFP Yonhap News

From 2003 to 2005, while writing my third novel, (The Vegetarian), I dwelled within several painful questions. Is it possible for a human being to be completely innocent? How deeply can we reject violence? What happens to someone who refuses to belong to the human species for that reason?

The protagonist, Yeonghye, who refuses meat to reject violence and ultimately believes she has become a plant, refusing to eat anything but water, lives in an irony where she approaches death every moment to save herself. Yeonghye and her sister Inhye, who could be considered dual protagonists, silently scream and pass through moments of nightmare and breakdown to finally be together. Because I wished for Yeonghye to survive until the end in this novel’s world, the final scene is set inside an ambulance. The ambulance races through trees like blazing green flames, and the awake sister stares intently out the window, as if waiting for an answer or protesting something. The entire novel exists in this state of questioning ? gazing, resisting, and waiting for answers.

The next novel, (The Wind Blows, Go), goes further with these questions. We cannot reject life and the world to reject violence. We cannot ultimately become plants. Then how do we move forward? In this mystery-form novel, where sentences of identity and italics collide and shake, the protagonist, who has long fought the shadow of death, risks her life to prove that her friend’s sudden death was not a suicide. Writing the last scene, where she crawls out with all her strength from death and violence, I was asking: In the end, must we survive? Must we bear witness to the truth with life?

The fifth novel, (Greek Lesson), goes even further with that question. If we really must survive in this world, at what point is that possible? A woman who has lost her voice and a man who is gradually losing his sight move forward alone in their respective silences and darkness, then find each other. While writing this novel, I wanted to focus on tactile moments. In silence and darkness, the novel slowly advances toward a scene where the woman, with her nails clipped short, writes a few words on the man’s palm. In the light of that moment, swelling like eternity, the two show each other their tender parts. While writing this novel, I wanted to ask: Looking into the most tender parts of a human ? touching that undeniable warmth ? isn’t that how we can finally live, in this fleeting and violent world?

At the end of that question, I imagined the next novel. It was spring 2012, after publishing . I thought I would write a novel that takes one step further toward light and warmth. A novel that embraces life and the world, charged with dazzlingly transparent sensations. I even titled it and wrote about twenty pages before stopping, realizing that something inside me prevented me from writing that novel.

*

Until that point, I had never once thought about writing about Gwangju.

I was nine years old when my family left Gwangju in January 1980, less than four months before the massacre occurred there. A few years later, when I was twelve, I accidentally found a 'Gwangju Photo Album' upside down on a bookshelf and secretly read it. It was a book secretly produced and circulated by bereaved families and survivors to prove the distorted truth, suppressed by the strict media control of the then regime, containing photos of citizens and students killed by batons, bayonets, and gunfire while resisting the coup-installed military government. Being young, I couldn’t fully grasp the political meaning of those photos, so those damaged faces were engraved in me as a fundamental question about humanity. I wondered: Do humans do this to other humans? At the same time, another question arose. In the same book, there were photos of people endlessly lining up in front of a university hospital to donate blood to the wounded. Do humans do this to other humans? These two seemingly incompatible questions collided and became an unsolvable riddle.

So, in spring 2012, while struggling to write a 'brilliantly bright novel that embraces life,' I encountered those unresolved questions within myself again. Long ago, I had already lost fundamental trust in humanity. How could I embrace the world then? I realized that I could not move forward without confronting that impossible riddle, and that only through writing could I pierce through and advance those questions.

For nearly a year afterward, while sketching the new novel, I imagined a story that included the May 1980 Gwangju massacre as one of its layers. Then, in December of the same year, the day after a heavy snowfall, I visited the Mangwol-dong Cemetery. Walking out of the frozen cemetery with my hand on my heart as dusk approached, I thought: I will write not a novel where Gwangju is just one layer, but a novel that directly deals with Gwangju. I obtained a book compiling about nine hundred testimonies and read it for nine hours every day for about a month until I finished it. Afterward, I read materials on other cases of state violence, broadening the places and times, and books about massacres repeated by humans worldwide over long histories.

During that research period, two questions often came to mind. They were sentences I wrote on the first page every time I changed diaries in my mid-twenties.

Can the present help the past?

Can the living save the dead?

The more materials I read, the more these questions seemed impossible. I continuously encountered the darkest parts of humanity and experienced the breaking and shattering of my long-held belief in humanity. When I almost gave up on progressing with this novel, I read the diary of a young night school teacher. Park Yongjun, a shy and quiet person who participated in the absolute community of citizen autonomy during the ten days after soldiers temporarily withdrew from Gwangju in May 1980, and who was killed while staying at the YWCA next to the provincial government building until dawn when soldiers were expected to return, wrote on his last night: "God, why do I have a conscience that pierces and hurts me like this? I want to live."

The moment I read those words, I suddenly knew which direction this novel should take. I also realized that I had to invert the two questions like this:

Can the past help the present?

Can the dead save the living?

Since then, while writing this novel, there were moments when I truly felt that the past was helping the present, and the dead were saving the living. I visited that cemetery again from time to time, and strangely, the weather was always clear when I went. When I closed my eyes, the orange light of the sun filled my eyelids. I felt that was the light of life. An indescribably warm light and air surrounded my body.

Since seeing that photo album at twelve, my questions have been: How can humans be so violent? At the same time, how can humans stand on the opposite side of such overwhelming violence? What does it mean that we belong to the human species? To cross the impossible void path connecting the two cliffs of human atrocity and dignity, I needed the help of the dead. Just like the young protagonist Dongho in this novel, who pulled his mother’s hand strongly and walked toward the sunlight.

Of course, I could not undo anything that happened to those deceased, their families, and survivors. All I could do was lend my body’s senses, emotions, and life. Because I wanted to light a candle at the beginning and end of the novel, I started the first scene at Sangmugwan, where bodies were collected and funerals held at the time. There, fifteen-year-old Dongho covers the bodies with white cloths and lights candles, staring at the bluish flame like a heart.

Novelist Han Kang is giving a commemorative lecture for winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Swedish Academy on the afternoon of the 7th (local time).
Photo by AFP Yonhap News

The Korean title of this novel is (The Boy is Coming). 'Onda' is the present tense of the verb 'to come.' The boy, called 'you' or 'sir' in the second person, awakens in a pale darkness and approaches the present with the steps of a soul. He walks closer and closer until he becomes the present. When the space-time where human cruelty and dignity coexist in extreme forms is called Gwangju, I realized while writing this book that Gwangju is no longer a proper noun referring to a city but a common noun. It is a present tense that continuously returns to us across time and space. Even at this very moment.

*

When I finally completed and published in spring 2014, what surprised me was the pain readers confessed to feeling while reading this novel. I had to think about the fact that the pain I felt while writing this novel was connected to the pain readers said they felt. What was the reason for that pain? Is it because we want to believe in humanity, and when that belief is shaken, we feel ourselves being destroyed? Is it because we want to love humans, and when that love breaks, we feel pain? Does pain arise from love, and is some pain proof of love?

In June of the same year, I had a dream. I was walking across a field where fine snow was falling. Thousands upon thousands of black logs were planted across the field, and behind each tree was a burial mound. At some point, water splashed under my sneakers, and when I looked back, the sea was flooding in from the edge of the field I had thought was the horizon. I asked myself why these graves were placed here. Had the bones of the lower graves all been washed away? Shouldn’t the bones of the upper graves be moved, before it’s too late? But how could that be possible? I had no shovel. The water was already up to my ankles. Waking from the dream and looking at the still-dark window, I felt the dream was saying something important. After recording the dream, I thought it might be the beginning of my next novel.

Not knowing what kind of novel it would be, I repeatedly wrote and erased a few story beginnings that might extend from that dream. From December 2017, for about two years, I rented a monthly room in Jeju and commuted to Seoul. Feeling Jeju’s intense weather of wind, light, snow, and rain every moment, walking through forests, beaches, and village paths, I gradually felt the outline of the novel becoming clearer. Like when I wrote , I read testimonies of massacre survivors and studied materials, observing the cruel details that seemed almost impossible to translate into language, and wrote with as much restraint as possible. I published (No Farewell) about seven years after the morning I dreamed of black trees and the flooding sea.

In several notebooks I used while writing the novel, I wrote these notes:

Life wants to live. Life is warm.

Dying means becoming cold. Snow piled on the face does not melt.

Killing means making cold.

Humans in history and humans in the universe.

Wind and ocean currents. The circulation of water and wind connecting the whole world. We are connected. Connected, please.

This novel consists of three parts. If the journey in Part 1 is a horizontal path where the narrator Gyeongha travels through heavy snow from Seoul to Inseon’s house in Jeju’s mid-mountain area to save a bird, Part 2 is a vertical path where she and Inseon descend together beneath the human night ? to the time of the civilian massacre in Jeju in the winter of 1948 ? and down under the deep sea. In the final Part 3, the two light candles beneath that sea.

Although the novel is carried forward by friends Gyeongha and Inseon passing the candle back and forth, the true protagonist connected to them is Inseon’s mother, Jeongsim. A person who survived the massacre and fought to find even a single bone of a loved one to hold a funeral. A person who does not conclude mourning. A person who embraces pain and resists oblivion. A person who does not say farewell. Looking into her life, where pain and love boiled with the same density and temperature throughout her lifetime, I think I was asking: How much can we love? Where are our limits? How much must we love to remain human in the end?

*

Three years after publishing , I still have not completed the next novel. Another novel, connected formally to (White), which was about my older sister who passed away two hours after birth and my young mother who pleaded with the baby, 'Don’t die, please don’t die,' has been waiting for me for a long time. Predicting the completion time is as impossible as ever, but I will continue to write, even if slowly. I will move forward beyond the books I have written so far, as far as life allows, until I turn a corner and can no longer see the books of the past.

While I go that far, my books, which have become independent lives though I wrote them, will travel according to their own destinies. The two sisters who remain forever together in the ambulance where green flames blaze outside the window. The woman’s fingers writing on the man’s palm in darkness and silence, soon to regain language. My sister who passed away two hours after birth, and my young mother who said to that baby until the end, 'Don’t die, please don’t die.' How far will those souls, glowing with deep orange light behind my closed eyelids, surrounded by indescribably warm light, travel? How far will the candles of those who vow not to say farewell travel, lit in every place where massacres occurred, in every time and space swept by overwhelming violence? Along the golden thread connecting core to core, heart to heart?

*

In the saddle-stitched booklet I found in the old shoebox last January, the eight-year-old me in April 1979 was asking two questions to myself.

Where could love be?

What is love?

Meanwhile, until the fall of 2021 when I published , I had always thought these two questions were my core.

Why is the world so violent and painful?

At the same time, how is the world so beautiful?

I had long believed that the tension and inner struggle between these two questions had been the driving force behind my writing. The phases of my questions changed continuously from my first novel to the most recent, but these questions remained consistent. However, in the past two or three years, I began to doubt that. Did I really only start questioning love ? the pain that connects us ? after publishing in spring 2014? From my first novel to the most recent, perhaps the deepest layer of all my questions was always directed toward love. Wasn’t that the oldest and most fundamental overtone of my life?

The eight-year-old in April 1979 wrote that love is located in a personal place called 'my heart.' (It’s inside my heart that beats flutteringly.) About the nature of that love, I answered: (It’s the golden thread that connects our hearts.)

When I write novels, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling softness, warmth, cold, and pain; a beating heart; thirst and hunger; walking and running; feeling wind, snow, and rain; and holding hands. As a mortal being with warm blood flowing through my body, I try to breathe those vivid sensations into sentences like an electric current, and when I feel that current reaching readers, I am surprised and moved. At the moment I realize that language is the thread that connects us, that my questions are connected to that thread through the light and current of life, I offer my deepest gratitude to all who have connected and will connect to that thread.