Monday, 20 July 2020

Book Review: The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.


     Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body & Other Parties (2017) is a delicious short story collection which mashes up sci-fi and horror conceits with intersectional feminist thought. Machado can WRITE, her particular strengths being the depiction of appetites (for food or for sex) and the creation of lush atmospheres. Machado uses fiction to explore female desire and the plurality of womanhood, like imperial-phase Angela Carter refracted through queer perspectives. Machado avoids a feeling I often have with short story collections that the constant shifting of characters, premises and narrative forms stops any single story making a deep impression: a couple of the characters and their situations do stand out.

     Among these is the opening tale, ‘The Husband Stitch’. We follow a young woman who makes out with a boy, marries him and has a child with him: so far so conventional. But there is a difference. The woman has a green ribbon on her neck which is part of her body; other women in this world seem to have similar ribbons in various places. The man wants to touch and probe his wife’s ribbon because ‘a wife should have no secrets from her husband’. Yet the protagonist says, ‘the ribbon is not a secret; it’s just mine’. The man becomes more tantalised and more pressing as the story develops, leading the woman to reflect: ‘He is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would do a deep disservice to him. And yet –’. Men can be blatantly shitty, but they can also be shitty in entitled,  insidious and subtly forceful ways.

     Machado suggests that a long-lasting marriage does not mean complete knowledge of the other person: private selves remain intact. The idea of ‘two becoming one’ is a myth and sometimes a damaging one. This is not an entirely new concept; it is treated for instance in James Joyce’s famous short story ‘The Dead’. But Machado formulates a particularly male and particularly possessive desire to know. Knowledge, after all, is power. The almost fairy-tale premise of the ribbons allows some female private self or core of individuality to be physicalised and considered in new ways. Similarly, in the world of ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ an affliction strikes only women where their bodies, at different points in life but inescapably, fade away into translucency, transparency and finally total incorporeality. These women then must go about weaving themselves into the fabric of dresses in lament or disrupting voting machines in protest.

     ‘Eight Bites’ is a great story about what it’s like to live in a body that is all too corporeal. It focusses on a woman whose sisters have all had a procedure that gives them the perfect body so long as they apparently never eat more than miniscule amounts ever again. She must decide whether to undergo the process herself whilst navigating the disapproval of her daughter who is more traditionally feminist and for whom body acceptance is the only acceptable way of thinking. At one point the protagonist says:

 ‘I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.’

 I have not seen this written enough. For many of us our bodies are a source of self-loathing. Body positivity should absolutely be encouraged, but I don’t think it’s un-feminist to want to change your body. It’s un-feminist to not understand why women in particular might want that.

 

    One slight flaw in Machado’s collection for me is that some of the protagonists seem undifferentiated: a chorus rather than solo voices that come together. The worlds of the stories are differentiated but I can still always detect the presence of an author with specific concerns who is perhaps trying to use characters as vehicles for these concerns. That’s fine- Machado is an entertaining and often pleasurable companion, whose interests overlap with my own. But Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian (translated from South Korean by Deborah Smith) achieves something that only a select few of my favourite books do, where I struggle to imagine how anyone could possibly have written it. It seems like something someone dug up or found lurking under their bed, whilst focussing on similar themes to Machado’s collection: female bodies, appetites and protests.

     Kang’s novel may be called The Vegetarian. But, Reader, the eponymous herbivore, Yeong-hye, has not been inspired by Greta Thunberg or a lusciously voiced David Attenborough documentary. No. Yeong-hye is a housewife in an affluent part of Seoul, her husband noting her ‘passive personality’ and excellent cooking. One day, however, she throws out all the meat in their house. She will go on to eat less and less (for reasons I will not spoil). As she detaches herself from a culture that gives prime place to meat-eating and her body begins to first slim down and then waste away, her husband accuses her of being ‘self-centred’- of acting ‘selfishly’ and with excessive ‘self-possession’. She is merely doing what he has always done, but like the husband in Machado’s ‘The Husband Stitch’, the husband here cannot accept that she has a private self inaccessible to him. Female independence is immediately pathologized even before Yeong-hye’s weird dreams take deeper root in her psyche:

 Dark woods. No people. The sharp-pointed leaves on the trees, my torn feet. This place, almost remembered, but I’m lost now. Frightened. Cold.’

 As in this example, chilling impressionistic snapshots of Yeong-hye’s dreams are embedded in indented type into the more ordered main narrative style. These moments are the only direct access the reader receives to Yeong-hye’s psyche, and even they are elliptical and fleeting. Elsewhere the novel’s tripartite structure offers us views of Yeong-hye from the outside- the perspectives of her aggressively average and self-absorbed husband, of her brother-in-law who definitely isn’t just a creepy perv because artists are special, right?

     Lastly we get her sister’s take, for whom Yeong-hye is a figure of equal parts terror, bemusement and inspiration. Yeong-hye’s sole focus on her relationship with herself and her body reveals the fact that In-hye’s identities are primarily relational- she thinks ‘as a daughter, as an older sister, as a wife and as a mother’ and ‘her life had never belonged to her’. Her sister’s ‘magnificent irresponsibility’ provokes admiration and disapproval in equal measure, and the complex development of their sororal bond is at the heart of the narrative’s ending.

 

     As with Machado’s collection Her Body & Other Parties, the power of Kang’s narrative is that there is no direct, on-the-nose allegory- you cannot uncontestably state that in ‘The Husband Stitch’ ‘the ribbon is her private identity’, or that in The Vegetarian ‘Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is a feminist protest’. Though they do seem to contain these meanings, leaving things implied allows for a symbolic resonance murky and powerful. What is clear is that female bodies, with all their protuberances or diminishments, sticking out or wasting away, are the centre of desire, shame and even protest; sci-fi and horror conventions are a potent prism through which to write these experiences.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Glasses in Films

     I have an early memory of Velma in Scooby Doo repeating gormlessly, ‘Where are my glasses? I can’t see without my glasses.’ Glasses are...