Conrad’s Defeat – Victory

Back in the days when critics still puzzled over such questions, there was some debate over whether Victory was Joseph Conrad’s first bad novel or his last great novel. To me the matter is clear: Victory is a failure. Some of the problems with it are simple, but the more interesting issues with it lie within its overall thematic approach and are worth elaborating to understand how to avoid them. Since Victory is still a work by a talented writer, it’s hard to cut off those pieces of the novel that make it not work because they are all interconnected. The themes are embedded in the characters and embedded further in the structure and in the prose itself. Still, broadly speaking, my problems with it concern the narration, the characters peopling the story, and the treatment of the ideas within it.

The Story, approximately

Victory takes place in Southeast Asia, a region that the Joseph Conrad knew well from his time serving on ships there, and sits alongside his other works set in the region, in particular Lord Jim, which even shares with Victory the character of the hotel keeper Schomberg. Today’s novel primarily concerns a gentleman Swede, Axel Heyst, who is a drifter out of personal philosophical convictions handed down from his father, a professional philosopher. Specifically, Heyst drifts as his “defence against life.” Scorning attachment, he wanders inoffensively around the islands of Southeast Asia, before helping an down-and-out acquaintance with some money to get him out of a tight spot and causing thereby the bother that sets the novel going.

To repay the kindness, the friend sets Heyst up to manage a coal mining operation on a small island. The friend then dies away in England and the operation fails to generate the required returns, with the result that Heyst is left alone with great stores of food and a single Chinese servant. It would seem he never has to return to society except occasionally to pick up some hard currency, but he does at one point end up at a dodgy hotel owned by one Schomberg, coincidentally at a time when there are some female musicians visiting. Heyst finds out that a young English girl is among them and on seeing her tormented, rescues her and takes her to his island. Schomberg, who has also fallen in love with the girl, named alternately Alma or Lena, later has two rather sinister guests, Ricardo and Mr Jones, whom he convinces to pay Heyst a visit and rob him, telling them tall tales of Heyst’s vast riches. The criminals arrive, and eventually there is a confrontation and a tragedy.

In terms of theme, really there are two points of interest. The first is the treatment of illusions and deception, and the second is the nature of Heyst himself. While he may not have given his work its title, as did Nostromo or Lord Jim in their works, Victory is very much about Heyst’s psychology. So it is perhaps here that it makes sense to begin.

Heyst and the treatment of mystery in character

Conrad is known for his formal experimentation, where chronology is jumbled and narrators are there beside us framing events. This is an approach that is brilliantly suited to character studies because layering perspectives and confusing chronologies force readers to think their own way through biases to any facts they can find underneath. The former in particular also adds a brilliant reality to Conrad’s work. Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim are literally Marlow telling a story, with us a listener on the boat or at the club, and with his uncertainties and discoveries mirroring our own. Kurtz in the former work is mysterious not only because he only skulks onto the scene for a few pages, but because we hear him first through people Marlow meets on his way up the Congo river, then through Marlow himself. Like Marlow, we need to work out what meaning lurks behind appearances.

Of Heart of Darkness we could state simply that Kurtz is a colonial administrator who went mad and lost his “civilization” from being too long in Central Africa, but this is brutal. It leaves the reader uninvolved, because the story comes straight to her, and because there is no mystery left after it is spelled out thus. Even to enter Kurtz’s consciousness for an extended period would destroy the work. What little we hear from him, (“exterminate all the brutes”), gains its power by its isolation, like flashes in the dark. Too much light and we would not care.

Even without actually considering Heyst’s personality, Victory ruins the mystery. What’s upsetting is the novel has a strong beginning section, adopting a similar approach to many of Conrad’s other works. We have a narrator, living in the area the novel describes, who hears of Heyst through other people, such as the sailor Davidson and Schomberg. “I met a man once… to whom Heyst exclaimed” is a common construction in his telling and a thing of joy to me as a lover of Conrad. We build up Heyst from without, not within. Each thing he says, each thing that is said about him, deepens the mystery, because there is contradiction piled upon contradiction, yet without there ever being the suggestion that Heyst is not a real person underneath the crust of others’ comments. As with Kurtz, we try to find Heyst, deduce him from limited evidence, scraps of phrases. It’s exciting.

But as soon as we finish the first part of the novel, the narrator changes. We have omniscience, inhabiting the consciousness of the various characters, Heyst included. Mysteries disappear or at least fade when we see the ambiguities of character from within as conflict, rather than from without as evidence of complexity. If Heyst’s mysterious personality is the sustaining question of the book, this shift in narrative destroys things.

There are arguments against this. We might say that there are scenes that cannot be witnessed but must be reported, but this is a weak argument. Literature has always found tolerable workarounds, such as the obsession with timely eavesdropping in the early 19th century. Lord Jim, for another example, has quite a significant narrative shift once Jim settles on dry land upriver and Marlow no longer witnesses everything first hand, and while I preferred the first part of the book, Conrad lets Marlow retain a privileged narrative position as the person all information passes through before reaching the reader, even if he no longer sees as much with his own eyes.

Another argument is that such reporting does not sustain a long book – the listeners would have fallen asleep before Marlow got out of the jungle in Heart of Darkness, to say nothing of Lord Jim’s length. My answer here is that Victory is far too long to begin with. It would have worked much better as the short story it began its life as, where mysteries remained rather than being bleached by overexposure to the light of the page. But this is also because I did not find the ideas worth 300+ pages either.

Sad Ideas – Pessimism

That Conrad himself was a pessimist I know from his letters and the accumulation of impressions from his other works, but you’d be hard pressed to miss this fact in Victory either. Heyst comments that “the world is a bad dog”, considers “the illusion of human fellowship on earth”, and contemplates how he is “hurt by the sight of his own life.” A few pages later he notes that “if you begin to think you will be unhappy.” A little after that he notes that “Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation”. I will not give further quotes, but there are plenty. Some of them are quite memorable, but the important thing is that Heyst is Schopenhauer’s representative on earth.

Never has the fatality of Conrad’s work been so obvious; never has it also been so unearned. Heyst’s father was a moody philosopher, so Heyst is a moody person. That’s it. The book, except for its ending, provides no arguments for its pessimism within itself, which turns Heyst’s pronouncements into mere preaching. The pessimism is delivered in phrases rather than in the brute facts of narrative, facts which are always more philosophically convincing than the words of prominent characters. There is a moment when Heyst literally reads his own father’s philosophical works and all I could think as a reader was how unbearably self-indulgent this was. And I say this as someone inclined to pessimistic utterances and self-indulgent writings myself.

So what if one person is pessimistic, or indeed the narrative overall, we might say. Well, when Heyst’s only company for most of the book is an ill-educated girl, there can be no reasonable argument articulated against his views. His voice dominates. This both destroys the mystery (see the section above) but also destroys the curiosity of his ideas, which are never challenged or refined by the work because ultimately Conrad more or less agrees with them.

Bad Ideas – Delusions and Scepticism

Related to the problem of pessimism is that of scepticism and illusion. As with the treatment of pessimism, this is altogether too direct. Every single character is laughably deluded. Lena lives in romantic delusions. Ricardo and Mr Jones think there is silver on the island when there is nothing. Schomberg refuses to realise that he has lost Lena and is in the depths of middle age rather than a strapping young man. Heyst believes he can live without a connection with the world – “he who forms a tie is lost”. Around Heyst there are many rumours, which would have made him more interesting if it were not too obvious, because of the narration, what was true and what false about them. When Ricardo and Mr Jones arrive at the island, Ricardo has to mislead Mr Jones about the presence of Lena, because the other man is terrified of women. And so on. Nobody has a clue about anything whatsoever.

We can say that illusions lead to the novel’s tragedy, which is true. But the problem is that the illusions are relentless, like the pessimism. Conrad seems to say that everyone is a fool, and there’s no hope for any of us. To say all are deluded is also not a thematically rich idea. Nobody really progresses into knowledge, which means that this sense of mistakenness is constant throughout the work, and the work seems ultimately flat. Again, this is not suitable for such a long work. If all illusions lead to tragedy, there’s no weighing up, for example, of different kind of illusions, of the sort which might be more interesting. Is Heyst’s illusion that he should live alone any more harmful that Lena’s illusion that life is a romance novel? Conrad really doesn’t have an answer, only a shrug.

In this way, the two central ideas of the novel – that things are bad, and everyone is deluded, are all too simple and quickly grow stale. There’s neither challenge nor depth to them, and that won’t do.

Other Characters, Other Problems

Of course, the novel does more than this, but not as much more as I think we would wish. Ricardo and Mr Jones are described in Conrad’s typical way for hellish apparitions, with words like “phosphorescent” linking them to that Other Place, and they function as a kind of example of fate. We could conceivably get some paragraphs out of comparing Mr Jones, an exiled gentleman wandering the world and committing crimes, with Heyst, another wanderer but for different reasons. But Jones barely speaks, and because he is not central, any mystery we might build with him along the lines we do with Kurtz is lost from this lack of focus. He remains too fuzzy. Ricardo, on the other hand, speaks too much. He immediately admits to the vaguely respectable hotel owner Schomberg that he and Jones are criminals and gives a long speech about their motivations – something I found hard to believe and all too convenient from a plot perspective.

Wang, the Chinese servant, speaks broken English and his only personality is to be able to “materialize” in various places. Ricardo and Jones also have a servant, Pedro, who is a feral beast because he’s from South America. Both these characterisations I also did not like – not only because they are racist, but because there’s no depth to them, nor any coherence or complexity, especially in Pedro’s case. Pedro joined Ricardo and Jones because… they murdered his brother? Come on.

Conclusions

The problem is that Victory has all the ingredients for a great work. If it were a third of the length and followed a similar formal approach to Heart of Darkness throughout, it would lose nothing in depth, and gain infinitely in effectiveness. Instead, Conrad’s musings on philosophy are boring without action to body them, action which this novel has precious little of. His villains stretch credulity and the overwhelming sense that everyone is deluded is too simple and too dreary to hold our attention for long. It’s a shame, but at least I can say I’m glad I read Victory because I can now better see the achievements in characterisation and form that Conrad achieved elsewhere.

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

Han Kang – The Vegetarian

Writers generally care about justice, and perhaps it is a sense that they can right certain wrongs with pretty prose which first prompts many of us to put pen to paper. Yet with time, as the world has slowly changed, the injustices in focus have shifted too. Among recent novels, I remember being surprised at Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, which takes the injustice of humanity’s treatment of animals as its central theme, as some of J.M. Coetzee’s works had done previously. Despite its title, The Vegetarian, by the Korean writer Han Kang, the Nobel laureate in 2024, is not just about human mistreatment of animals. It is rather about human violence more broadly, and avenues for escaping it – not always ones we might expect.

The novel is divided into three parts, each with a different narrator and hence different angle. Three voices to guide us, yet the most important character is Yeong-hye, who is seen through others’ eyes but remains almost silent throughout a story that is nevertheless her own. It is she whose journey of rebellion begins with vegetarianism, but gradually morphs into something more complex. It is she whom, most of all, we as readers are trying to understand.

In “The Vegetarian”, the novel’s first part, things appear straightforward. As straightforward, in fact, as the viewpoint of Mr Cheong, Yeong-he’s wife. Mr Cheong is an asshole, the kind of casual misogynist I imagine many male readers may find themselves slightly unnerved by their proximity to, as I did. He works, expects his wife to know her place, to follow tradition and to keep silent. To him she is “unremarkable” – always a term of endearment, I have been reliably informed by my own girlfriend – until she stops eating meat. This sets off the novel’s drama, but it doesn’t cause any introspection on the part of Mr Cheong, who is incapable of such things.  

Yeong-hye stops eating meat. She has a dream nobody around her really cares enough to try to understand, and then decides that enough is enough. Her existence becomes poisoned by constant nightmares and the first action she takes to protect herself is to remove the meat from the house. There’s a telling moment when Mr Cheong first finds his wife emptying the fridge – he accidentally steps on the squishy bags of meat on the floor because he was only looking straight ahead. This idea of sight is possibly a central one in The Vegetarian – what is seen, and what we would rather avert our eyes from.

Of course, as readers, we have to pay attention, and the text makes sure we see what others might not. “Beef for shabu-shabu, belly pork, two sides of black beef shin, some squid in a vacuum-packed bag, sliced eel that my mother-in-law had sent us from the countryside ages ago, dried croaker tied with yellow string, unopened packs of frozen dumplings and endless bundles of unidentified stuff dragged from the depths of the fridge.” This is just a list, a hallmark of realistic novel detail. But it’s also a lot of meat. All of which came from animals killed in conditions that were probably not exactly humane. It’s just the contents of a fridge-freezer, but at the same time it morphs into a tablet describing human-inflicted suffering.

Korea, as described here, is a society of meat eaters. Yeong-hye’s decision to abandon meat quickly throws her up against her family and her husband. When at a work dinner with Mr Cheong she refuses to eat meat, she tanks his career. When at a family lunch she does the same, her father actually forces her mouth open to make her eat the food while the rest of her family looks on passively or declares their shame at her behaviour. All this is utterly bizarre, if you think about it. A decision not to do something, which harms nobody, (and in fact protects animals), even if it may not be deemed praiseworthy should at least be easy enough to tolerate.

Yet instead, this minor act of rebellion brings to the surface all of the underlying demands (Korean) society places upon the individual, and in particular upon women, to obey their parents and their husbands. Everyone turns on poor Yeong-hye, even as we see just how much violence there is behind their society through their meat-eating, through their childrearing practices (Yeong-hye was beaten as a child), through their traditions. We see the power of society to enforce its norms even as The Vegetarian reveals the very insanity of those norms.

The second part of the novel, “Mongolian Mark”, takes us in a slightly different direction. Yeong-hye has already been “discarded” by her husband and lives on her own after a stint in a mental hospital, where she continues to break the rules by spending a lot of time in the nude, doing something suspiciously close to photosynthesising. We take the perspective of her sister In-hye’s husband, who is an artist. Like Yeong-hye, he is also haunted by a dream. His, however, concerns filming himself having sex with Yeong-hye while they are painted with flowers.

Such desires are neither wholly appropriate nor generally sensible to act upon. However, Yeong-hye has set herself outside of society, and this allows the artist to believe he can act as he wants with her. He is both disturbed and attracted by her, someone who is like a “Buddhist monk” with her “uncanny serenity.” Having cut herself off from society in her flat, Yeong-hye is able to do what she wants, including let herself be painted and taken advantage of. Eventually, the artist gets what he wants, less because Yeong-hye has consented than because she has already spiritually left her body behind. The experience is too strange to be sexual.

For the reader, it is only uncomfortable. Because Yeong-hye has essentially floated her spirit away, she is reduced to a body for her brother-in-law to use. But this just makes it very obvious how men can treat women – as bodies, nothing more. Especially as the moderate efforts the artist puts in to get close to Yeong-hye really involve no efforts to actually understand her or listen to what she has to say.

In the final section we follow In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, as she tries to take care of her sister, now permanently stored in a mental hospital in the countryside. Yeong-hye has continued her journey out of society, even geographically now. Where in the first part she refused to eat meat, and in the second attempted to photosynthesise, now she refuses to eat at all: “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” Now Yeong-hye’s goal is simply to wither away and become like a tree – silent and harmless. 

If Mr Cheong were the uncaring voice of casual male misogyny, and In-hye’s husband the kind of predatory misogyny that waits for vulnerability, In-hye is interesting for being a far more reflective and responsible human being, even having a son, Ji-woo. She watches her sister’s decline with a kind of jealousy, for she herself cannot imagine throwing off social responsibilities, yet at the same time seems to long to. This jealousy is mixed with anger – because before Yeong-hye revealed the oppression of her world, In-hye had never been aware of it, or at least thought to question it.

Although it is something we increasingly debate, doctors traditionally have had to keep patients alive whatever their own wishes, and as Yeong-hye no longer eats this becomes an increasing challenge for those around her, one resolved with needles and drips, straitjackets and a screaming Yeong-hye. There’s something truly disturbing in the details of this forcing of life upon someone who has dared to question its value, a final attempt to control Yeong-hye and deprive her of any choice, any control over her own body. Meanwhile In-hye, herself increasingly sleepless, struggling as a (now single) mother and as a business owner, finds herself ever more attracted to Yeong-hye’s own fate, and the strange freedom it represents.

While reading The Vegetarian there were two recent works I thought of for their overlap in themes: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Tokarczuk’s novel has vegetarianism and human cruelty towards animals as its focus, but there was less of a sense of rage at society’s treatment of humans themselves. Partly this was because of the book’s rural setting and isolated protagonist, where The Vegetarian is by contrast a very much more urban, social novel, set in Seoul. But partly this seems to be because the narrator of that novel was just more interested in animals than people. Since the narrative of The Vegetarian is focused on human violence, vegetarianism is only a part of a wider picture, where men hit and control women, kill misbehaving dogs, fathers beat children, and hospital workers restrain those considered mad and force them to behave. It reveals the cruelties we had taken for granted.

Yeong-hye’s response to this violence against her is to become a plant: I wonder whether this was driven by an awareness that to be a human at all meant to be complicit in this violence. Even giving up meat and wearing animal products would not be enough to avoid this, as you would still be part of a patriarchal, soul-crushing society. Once you start seeing the violence everywhere, your options are limited – retreat, acceptance, or repression. In-hye attempts repression, while her sister attempts retreat, and most of the other characters are unaware of any violence at all – and in fact are usually its perpetrators.

And so Yeong-hye retreats into her vegetal state. In this she is not unlike the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who also retreats from the world, but this time through drugs rather than a rejection of food. Yet while I didn’t have much love for Moshfegh’s novel, I quite liked The Vegetarian, even though both effectively seem to be “pro-retreat”. The difference, I think, is in the characters. The narrator in MYoR&R is basically a super-privileged person like myself whose criticisms and person seem a bit pathetic, while Yeong-hye actually seems to be in a totally hellish society with extremely limited avenues for self-expression or freedom. Hence her retreat seems more defensible.

I don’t think Han Kang actually believes that we should all become plants, either. I can tell she’s really angry about how badly Korean society treats its women. By contrast, I got the impression that Moshfegh didn’t really care about how society treated anyone. This means that The Vegetarian works as a critique even if we dismiss its apparent conclusions. And indeed, In-hye’s section is quite interesting in this regard, as she challenges herself on her own historical inaction, whether when Yeong-hye was a child being beaten by their father, or at the fateful lunch when she was force-fed by the same man. In other words, the novel doesn’t just say “do nothing, retreat” in the way that MYoR&R seems to. It says retreat is a reasonable option in the face of great suffering, but also that action is better than passivity, even if that action is merely to flee.

Not every book, I know, has to propose solutions. Chekhov believed that the writer’s goal was merely to state the question correctly. Like so many great novels of demonstrating the conflict between society and the individual, The Vegetarian shines a light on so much that is wrong yet taken for granted. If its solutions are depressing, they are only depressing in the context of the book. For you or me, the book itself is already part of a solution, raising awareness of problems we might otherwise have passed over in silence. In that sense, it’s already a greatly moral piece of art.

Congrats on the Nobel.