Han Kang: Once vilified for 'daring' to air South Korea's 'dirty laundry', now a national treasure

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00:00It was dinnertime at home in Seoul when she got the call from Stockholm.

00:04Han Kang becoming the first South Korean, the first woman from Asia to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

00:10The poetess and novelist who won the 2016 Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian

00:17honored for her quote, intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas.

00:23Charlie James has more.

00:26This year's Nobel Prize in Literature breaks with the award's history given to a woman outside of the West.

00:34The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to South Korean author Han Kang

00:40for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.

00:4853-year-old novelist Han Kang is no stranger to literary prizes.

00:53She won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her novel The Vegetarian

00:58in which a woman upends Korean norms by deciding to stop eating meat and suffers horrific consequences.

01:06Despite her prior successes, Kang was caught off guard by her win.

01:24Yeah, it's a very peaceful evening. I was really surprised.

01:29Kang is just the 18th woman to win the prize out of 120 laureates.

01:35And she's the first South Korean winner.

01:38The prize includes a $1 million cash award which comes from an endowment left by the prize's creator,

01:45Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

01:47The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10th, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

01:55For more, let's go to Aqua Bog, New York.

01:58Journalist Euni Hong, the author of such books as The Birth of Korean Cool,

02:03How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture joins us.

02:07Good to see you, Euni.

02:09Hello, Francois.

02:11Were you surprised?

02:13No. I mean, I was surprised it happened this year.

02:16But for the last couple of decades, South Korea has become sort of the bard of human misery.

02:23And first this emerged in film, with films like Parasite and 20 Years Ago with Oldboy.

02:32And these explore themes that are universal about the sort of impossibility of being human.

02:41And I think it was just a matter of time before the Nobel Committee realized the universality of the Korean story

02:48and how uniquely skilled modern Korea is at telling this story.

02:53Yeah, because when we think of France's great cultural time after the Second World War,

03:02it was in rebellion to a conservative society.

03:05It feels like through her writing, it's kind of the same.

03:09I would say that's an incredibly apt analogy,

03:12because I would compare the writings of Hong Kong to Camus or Sartre, in fact,

03:19because they're about how the impossibility of being natural and being human.

03:28Nature is completely the opposite of human existence.

03:31We're the only creatures who do things that are not good for us, that self-harm.

03:38And the idea with existentialism was, well, we did not ask for this.

03:43We did not sign up for this. Why are we here?

03:46And there's this awareness of how alienated we are from every other creature on Earth that Sartre and Camus write about.

03:53And there's a sort of futility.

03:55And one of the things that they wrote about a lot is death.

03:59And it's not so much that with futility comes a desire to die exactly,

04:04but Zygmunt Freud wrote about a death drive, which he called the toteste,

04:08which is not that everyone wants to commit suicide because that's too violent, gruesome,

04:12but everyone wants to be inert.

04:14And that's basically what's happening in The Vegetarian.

04:17She basically wants to become a vegetable.

04:20Or the example that Freud gives is that everyone wants to kind of be a rock.

04:25Not Iraq, the country, but a rock.

04:29I was going to say, so that's the universality in Hong Kong's writing.

04:34What makes it specifically Korean?

04:37Well, as you say, it's coming off of a period of,

04:41Korea, if you go in from being one of the poorest countries in the world to a very, very wealthy country,

04:49and with it came this sense of being thrown completely asunder from their identity.

04:56One thing that would be helpful to understand about Korean culture is that they are very attached to nature.

05:03The original religion in Korea was animism.

05:07They believed that spirits lived in the trees and the mountains.

05:11It's sort of like Celtic mythology.

05:13And there's still a very strong reverence for nature.

05:16And modern life, capitalism, technology,

05:21and things that Korea excels at have made Koreans have a reckoning at how distant they've become from being Korean,

05:30from the trees and the mountains.

05:33I mean, I'm not kidding, actually, and from nature.

05:37And because of Korea's unprecedentedly rapid progress between poverty and richness,

05:43they kind of, within one generation, people were able to see human alienation in progress, basically.

05:51And I think that's unique to Korea.

05:53And that's why they're uniquely qualified to tell this particular kind of story.

05:58You said at the outset that you're not surprised that she gets the Nobel Literature Prize.

06:02Perhaps it's just about the timing a little bit.

06:06And, you know, it's something you write about as well, just the fact that the soft power of South Korea just goes from strength to strength.

06:18Yes, it's impossible to deny.

06:22What's interesting, though, about this is, well, Korean popular culture has been obviously on the rise in the last 10 years or so.

06:32But, you know, historically, pop culture and high culture have always been very separate.

06:37This is just sort of a universal thing.

06:40And I think that the Nobel Committee sort of passed the glitz of K-pop and BTS and so forth,

06:50and they were able to take seriously the sort of philosophical underpinnings of all of the glitz that you see.

06:59So it is and it is not related.

07:03This win is and it is not related to the pop cultural boom.

07:06But definitely it's now part of the ecosystem where sort of one, a rising tide.

07:13What is that expression?

07:16A rising tide raises all boats.

07:18How is she perceived in South Korea?

07:22Well, I think what happens frequently in South Korea, and this is not unique to that culture,

07:28is there's a great suspicion about artists in general as being sort of troublemakers.

07:37And especially if they're women, they face tremendous, tremendous criticism.

07:41There's a strong men's rights movement currently in South Korea, for example,

07:45which is why in turn there are so many Korean novelists who are women.

07:51And so I would say that she also suffered a lot of slings and arrows just by being an outspoken woman

08:00who had the audacity to sort of air dirty laundry, air Korean dirty laundry overseas, basically.

08:08And now she's been redeemed, and now suddenly she's a national hero.

08:11Suddenly she's a hero, and you could feel that already back in 2016 when she wins the Man Booker Prize.

08:19Yes, yes. I think that that was, well, that's always, well, not always.

08:23I mean, people say that the Booker is a horse race and the Nobel Prize is, well, sort of something holistic.

08:30And if you can win both, that's pretty much, you know, she could retire now.

08:35I mean, it's, you know, I'm very proud of her.

08:37Final question for you, Yoonhee.

08:38If we're going to start with one work of hers, for people who've never read her novels and her poetry,

08:46where would you begin?

08:47Well, I would definitely begin with The Vegetarian because, as I said,

08:52it speaks to something that everyone feels, this malaise that everyone feels but doesn't know what the words are.

09:02Her most recent book is Greek Lessons, which is a little bit more, I don't know, niche is the right word,

09:09but it's a book about books, basically.

09:12So if you're into sort of Italo-Calvino or postmodernism, it's a book about, it's about translation, basically.

09:19And then I would recommend that.

09:21All right. Two recommendations for the price of one.

09:24Yoonhee Hong, so many thanks for joining us here on France 24.

09:30Stay with us. There's much more to come.

09:32More news plus the day's business and in sports, tributes pouring in for the King of Clay,

09:38Rafael Nadal, announcing his retirement, which will come after the Davis Cup finals.

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