Characters neither see nor speak evil in the most recent translation of Han Kang’s oeuvre, Greek Lessons. The story focuses on two central characters, one being a mute woman whose only son is being taken away because her mutism has made her, in the eyes of the courts, unfavourable relative to her ex-husband. She shares a mutual vulnerability with the other main character, her Greek teacher, who is going blind and needs to memorize the text of his lessons because he can no longer make out small words. Their conditions create between them a tender bond and their relationship becomes the central driving force of the novel.
Told alternatingly between them, the narrative reveals small moments without ever fully disclosing the timeline, causation, or outcome of these characters’ strangely joined fates. Despite being stylistically rich, there’s a kind of terseness to the narrative that imbues the novel with a somewhat mysterious and ethereal voice. Admittedly, I found myself struggling to navigate the gaps in the story, projecting motivations and narratives that dwelt beneath the surface, particularly in the early stages of the Greek teacher’s sections.
For example, about a third of the way through the novel there is a section where the Greek teacher appears to be writing a letter to the mute woman in the second person: “You watched my lips intently,” he writes, “then met my eyes with a dazed look” (41). However, he’s actually writing letters to a lost love who was deaf. The moment is a tragic one because the Greek instructor then tells his love that “at some point we would live together, and that I would go blind. That when I was unable to see, we would need spoken words” (41). It’s a moment riddled with pain. His insistence on spoken language becomes a form of betrayal to his young love and an ignorant oversight of her feelings. He admits, of course, “You couldn’t have known how often I longed to turn back time, how much I wanted to take back those foolish words” (41). Kang offers a surprising parallel, though, in the future of the novel. Temporarily temporally confused, I found myself making connections across the narratives. The moment above could be transplanted into the future where the Greek instructor falls in love with a mute woman. There are (at least) two possibilities here. On the one hand, we can see the seeds of the relationship’s destruction early on: eventually words will fail them. The more optimistic reading is that the Greek instructor has learned from his past and, driven by his regret, is ready to accept a relationship without the spoken word.
In addition to the emotional charge of the moment, the passage is elevated through Kang’s lush descriptions:
Your face turned cold and hard and you threw me out of the workshop, where the scent of the wood had been intensified by the drizzle. You wouldn’t see me anymore, of course wouldn’t kiss me, wouldn’t let me bury my face in your long black hair, the sweetly scented nape of your neck, or your delicate collarbone, wouldn’t let me slide my ardent hand under your shirt to feel your heartbeat, steadfastly refused to see me even when I loitered in front of your house from the early hours, slammed the workshop door shut whether my fingers got caught or not, and eventually, one night a few weeks later, punched my frantically beseeching face. (41).
The heartbreak of the moment—those small moments that devastate us—rings so true in Kang’s description. Even the construction of the sentence, a prolonged, caesura-rich expanse emulates that experience, that longing for a connection rendered remote.
I have a profound admiration for authors who write profoundly different books. As much as I love, say, Kafka, all of his books are essentially the same. Not so for Kang; all of her books have a different flavour. That said, Greek Lessons does have certain echoes of her other works: the mutism of The Vegetarian, the flashes of second person narration from Human Acts, and the poetic and linguistic precision of The White Book all find home here. What makes the project even more intriguing to me is the context in which it exists. There were controversies in Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, and Kang has found an additional translator here, but it’s interesting in that I’m dealing with a book written in Korean, translated into English, which deals with characters translating Korean into German, German into Korean, Korean into Greek, and vice versa, with a character who can’t vocalize words from the language. The layers of translation form their own complex network of puzzles for the possibilities of language.
Kang seems to reflect on this throughout the text, as well. There are a number of reflections on the structure and vocabulary of the Greek language. For instance, there are some considerations about how in Greek the form of words changes based on its role in the sentence, hence you must know the complete idea before you opt to meander your way through step-by-step; it’s a language that requires wholeness. Kang offers the following musing:
A language as cold as a pillar of ice.
A language that does not wait to be combined with any other prior to use, a supremely self-sufficient language.
A language that can part the lips only after irrevocably determining causality and manner. (16)
That final line offers, perhaps, an avenue for explaining the main character’s lack of speech. How can one speak without having complete knowledge of what to articulate?
Other grammatical reflections circulate around the “middle voice”, bringing agency into question. Kang gives credence to Wittgenstein’s adage that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — the linguistic structure of our language gives rise to the philosophical possibilities we can explore. One phrase uses the middle voice to explain that “truth destroys foolishness” and the Greek teacher questions its validity in his letter: ”When truth destroys foolishness, is truth necessarily altered by the encounter, influenced by the very thing it has destroyed? Does a fissure form in foolishness when it destroys truth? When my foolishness destroyed love, if I claim that that foolishness was equally undone in the process, would you call that sophistry?” It all comes back, he notes, to “Voice. Your voice. The sound [he] has not forgotten in more than twenty years.”
As you can probably see, there’s a wistful romance (in both the literary and conventional sense) that underpins the novel as a whole, though it exists in a melancholic register. There are several gorgeous sequences of wandering (again: lack of purpose, perhaps) that are all seasoned with sadness. The student walks through the streets and we are provided with the following passage:
The lily magnolia, lit by the glow from the street lights, scatters its bruised petals to the winds. She walks past the voluptuous blooms straining the branches and through the spring night air, which is thick with an anticipatory sweetness of crushed petals. She occasionally raises her hands to her face, despite the knowledge that her cheeks are dry. (17).
The beauty of the images are consistently undercut. The petals are “bruised”, the glow of street lights “scatters” them. The “voluptuous blooms” are “straining the branches” before the mention of the petals being “crushed.” That ability to balance the lush and the grim is a nicely crafted approach. When Kang references the character’s cheeks being dry, we get the sense of the impossibility of expression; beyond her mutism, even her body refuses to communicate her interiority. Just a few pages later the narrator states: “If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. / If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow” (19).
Almost halfway through the book later, the mute woman is on another journey at night. Her son has gone to bed and she wanders the city streets. It’s a beautiful sequence, and its culmination is a masterful move:
When midnight is near, she discovers that she has arrived at the entrance to an unfamiliar cinema. The lights are off in the booth; all the tickets for the final film have been sold. Without realizing what she is doing she approaches the booth’s translucent acrylic partition. She brings her lips close to its eight black holes, then flinches away. As if a terrifying force might blast out of those neat, orderly holes and forcibly aspirate her voice from her lips and throat. (89).
I love how ominous this moment is. The image is perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Her being barred from the seeing the film—locked out of the conversation—is a nice touch, but that image of the booth with all those big holes for speaking into takes on a monstrous quality. It’s like a haunting invitation of mouths, which she almost brings herself to kiss. Their vampiric quality, the idea that it could forcibly “aspirate her voice from her lips and throat” is incredibly powerful to me. It’s a perfectly climactic moment to end the scene and one of the most memorable images from the book.
There’s a sense in which poetry flows through the characters. Kang’s juxtaposition of images craft the mood well. In one scene, we have a list of ‘red’ details:
“A rose.”
“The inner red of a watermelon, blooming like a flower, when you split it open.”
“The night of Buddha’s Birthday.”
“Snowflakes.”
“The face of a woman long gone.”
“I won’t be waking from a dream and opening my eyes;
the world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” (146).
“The world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” Parse that sentence. Kang’s grammar, even in translation, is a surprise. The fact that that comes at the opposite of a rose (famous for opening into a beautiful bloom), a closing of the world outside of a dream adds layers to the text.
The parallels that run throughout the text create a tightly wrought novel. The evocation of a dream above is not the first. In fact, the Greek instructor recounts a recurring dream that also draws parallel to the mute woman’s walks. He notes that he had “ceaselessly recurring dreams [he]’d had since [his] teens, when [he] began [his] new life in Germany” (64). He notes, “In these dreams it was always dusk, I was on a bus, and the shopfront signs in the street outside bore unfamiliar writing that was neither my mother tongue nor German. My dream-self always wanted to alight from this wrong bus I’d taken, but didn’t know which bus was the right one, or how to get to another bus stop. Nor could I recall my original destination. There was nothing I could do but stay where I was, sitting at the back, staring out into the streets that were darkening moment by moment” (64). The futility and aimlessness of his journey and his own lack of control travelling on bus routes is a nice reflection of the inevitability of his situation. He is going blind (hence the dream being at dusk), and it’s out of his control (hence navigating the world at the whim of others). The closer you look, the more appropriate each of Kang’s artistic choices are.
What’s surprising, perhaps, is just how similar the Greek instructor and the student are, though in a distorted form. Consider some of the key factors above: busses and the lack of mobility, the lack of vision that characterizes the Greek instructor’s world, and so on. The student has a moment where”sleep evades her. She has goosebumps on her arms and at the back of her neck from the aggressive air conditioning” (90). When she looks out the window, she sees a bus. She then sees a range of other fragmentary images: “Muffins and slices of cake in various colors [...] displayed in the clear-glass fridges of dazzlingly illuminated cafes” (90), and a fake diamond necklace at a jewlery show, “an enormous poster covering one side of a building” (90) for a film (evoking her other night walk, too). She then talks about what it was like “after losing words” (91). Kang notes that “there were times when that world rose up in front of her eyes, overlaying whatever scene was already there” (91). If the world closes when she wakes from a dream, here we have a world opening. It’s also a contrast to the Greek instructor’s experience: while his world diminishes, for her there is an “overlay”---a doubling of the world rather than a restriction. And yet, when she rides a bus she gets to the academy and there’s a “long corridor that led to the classroom” (91). It feels restrictive. That said, the imagery is still lush: “When gazing at afternoon sunlight, quiet and trees, leaves, the patterns of yellow light between them. When walking beneath the neon signs and colored bulbs that flashed noisily, as if it fit to burst” (91). First, note how the narration retains visual imagery that would be inaccessible to the Greek teacher. Second, note how there is no subject to these sentences. Neither ‘she’ nor ‘her’ are any part of the experience. The grammatical constructions have removed her, alienated her. The passage culminates with the idea that “Once she lost words, all such scenery became fragmented, each piece distinct and separate—like the colored paper inside the kaleidoscope, shifting silently, repeatedly and in concert to form new patterns” (91). The scenery became fragmented, just like the sentence fragments that present them. And yet, there’s hope for more—the dash amends the loss of images with even more lush imagery.
I liked Greek Lessons, and it’s the kind of razor-thin book that offers more rewards the more attention it is paid. Even in writing this review, I feel like new details have revealed themselves, blooming open. It’s that fine attention to detail that is becoming less feasible for the Greek instructor to such tragic effect.
Take the time. Read—this book, all books, the world—with care. It’s well worth it.
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