In a fortnight, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the traffic on my street will stop, a dog two doors down will go on barking regardless, and a few dozen of us will stand on the cold pavement for two minutes without a word. Nobody has to be taught how. The form was handed down along with the names cut into the stone, and its great virtue is that grief arrives already organised: a time, a place, a length, a signal that it is over. Someone near the front will cough, a car door will close, and the street will remember what it was doing. I have stood through that silence more times than I can count, and I have never once had to wonder what I was permitted to feel. I begin there because Han Kang’s Human Acts is a novel about the opposite condition. Its dead were handed no such form. The book is the form that was built for them afterwards, by one writer, out of testimony, patience and a pronoun.
The facts are these, so far as I can state them with confidence. On 18 May 1980 protests began in the South Korean city of Gwangju against the military rule of the day. Paratroop units with tanks and helicopters were sent to put them down, and the Wilson Center, in its account of the episode, speaks of hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of injuries without offering a single figure, which is itself part of the story. For years afterwards the name Koreans now use for the event, the May 18th Democratic Uprising, was effectively forbidden, and books about Gwangju were censored or banned. In 2011 UNESCO placed the uprising’s archives on its Memory of the World register. That is the long silence the novel walks into. Sonyeon-i onda appeared from the publisher Changbi in May 2014, after a run online, and Deborah Smith’s English translation reached British readers in November 2016 as Human Acts. The Korean title is the more exact of the two, and I shall come back to it, because nearly everything else in the book hangs from it.
The book has six sections, each given to a different voice, and an epilogue in which the author appears under her own name. Kirkus Reviews found a dead person among the narrators, a survivor of torture, and a mother tormented by memory, and the sections travel from 1980 to 2013. Deborah Smith, who translated it, compares the whole to a triptych, and says the tone of each part contrasts with its neighbours instead of building towards a resolution; she thinks of it as more visual than novelistic. What links the voices is the killing of one fifteen-year-old, Dong-ho. In the first section he has gone looking for a friend and stays to help at a municipal gymnasium where the dead are laid out. He keeps a ledger of the bodies, gives each a number, and lights candles for those whom nobody has come to claim. I know of no more disciplined image of a boy at work, and it is typical of the book that its great act of resistance is bookkeeping.
The English title was a decision, and Smith has explained it. Han Kang’s Korean titles, she says, deliberately give no clue to genre or moral verdict, which is why she turned down a plain label such as Gwangju Elegy. Human Acts manages to be two things at once. It points to the structure, the acts of a play, in which each section is a scene with its own lighting and its own speaker. It also points to the question the author brought to the material, the one about what a human being is capable of doing to another and, almost as importantly, of doing for another. The ledger, the candles and the hand tugging towards the sun are all acts in that second sense. I am not sure any English phrase could carry the present tense of the original, but this one carries the right amount of everything else.
Restraint is the word reviewers reach for, and it is the right one. Kirkus calls the writing sensory and vivid but controlled, never sensational, and Smith says she steered her English away from bombast, choosing plain words such as erase over grander alternatives and saving obliterate for a single literal use. I find it unusual to meet a translator who describes her work as a campaign against adjectives, and more unusual to find the campaign justified. The material is of a kind that tempts a writer to raise her voice. Han Kang lowers it. The power of the book lives in small exact things, a number, a name, a candle beside someone nobody has come to claim, and the reader’s imagination is trusted to do the rest. That trust is a courtesy extended to the dead and to the reader alike, and it is the quality I should most like to see taught to novelists everywhere.
Then there is the pronoun. In her Nobel lecture Han Kang points out that the Korean title uses the present tense of the verb to come, and that addressing the boy as you brings him forward into the present. He is not remembered. He is arriving. In the Korean I was taught, the plain word for you is what one says to a child, a close friend or someone below one in age and standing, and it is an affront to almost anyone else. A novelist who addresses a dead fifteen-year-old with it is claiming a certain intimacy and a certain duty at once, the way an adult speaks to a child who has not yet been told what has happened. English has no such tool, since our you serves bishops and bus conductors alike, and I do not envy Smith the task of carrying the effect across. That she partly manages it is one reason the English edition reads as it does: like a long, steady address to a person who is not able to answer.
The route by which Han Kang reached the book is worth setting down, since she has told it herself. Her family left Gwangju in January 1980, when she was nine, some four months before the killing began. At twelve, she says, she looked through a secretly published photograph book of the dead when no adult was in the room, and was left with a question she could not put down: whether what she saw was one human being doing this to another. Decades later, in 2012, she tried to write a bright, life-affirming novel and found she could not, so she turned to Gwangju directly, reading more than nine hundred testimonies. She had begun by asking whether the present could help the past. After reading the diary of a young man killed in the uprising, she reversed the question: could the past help the present, and could the dead save the living? I notice that none of these is a question about blame. They are questions about use, which is a humbler and more demanding thing to ask of a dead boy.
The sections that follow the boy are what turn a story into a structure. The friend he was looking for speaks from among the dead. An editor in the mid-1980s learns what the censor’s office thinks of a manuscript. A man who survived imprisonment finds that survival is its own sentence, and a woman who endured interrogation carries it into an ordinary present. I will not describe any of it further, and the reason is not squeamishness. The book never asks to be consumed as spectacle, and I see no reason to oblige it as a reviewer where it declines as a novelist. The sixth section belongs to Dong-ho’s mother, and here the book reaches what I take to be its centre. Han Kang recalls in her lecture that near the end the boy tugs at his mother’s hand, trying to coax her towards the sun. A reader who has followed the ledger and the candles will understand what a small gesture that is, and what it must have cost to put it on the page.
The Greek habit of thinking about this predicament is Antigone, who buries a brother against the order of the state and pays for it. Han Kang’s book is Antigone with the argument removed. Sophocles gives his heroine a quarrel to win, whereas Han Kang gives Dong-ho only a job, and the job is never finished. Nobody here makes a speech about law or conscience, and the person doing the burying work is a child. By her own account, as far as I can judge, she wished the novel to serve as testimony and a gesture of mourning rather than as an accusation, and its refusal of the courtroom voice is exactly what gives it authority. I should add something from the East Asian traditions I studied, as I understand them: obligations to the dead run on for years, and a death left without proper rites remains an open account. Read against that background, a ledger of the unclaimed and a row of candles are not a sentimental flourish. They are the only form of payment available to a boy at the time.
The epilogue puts the writer herself on the page. She goes back to Gwangju in 2013, as I read it, and speaks to people who knew the boy, and what she offers is a visit rather than a verdict. Kirkus singles out a line in which something tender breaks without a sound, and the restraint holds even there. In October 2024 the Swedish Academy gave Han Kang the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing prose that is at once intense and poetic, that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life. The announcement names no particular book, though her lecture afterwards had Human Acts clearly in view. I find the second half of that citation more accurate than the first. The poetry in this novel is mostly a matter of what is left out, and the fragility is what remains on the page when the rest has been taken away.
I have read all this as a foreigner, a Scotsman with no stake in the matter beyond attention, and I have tried not to claim more than that. What I can report is what the book did to a habit of mine. For decades I have stood on that pavement in November and taken the silence as a gift. I now see it as a technology, an old and merciful one, since it has a beginning and an end. On the second Sunday of November someone near the front will cough, and the street will go back to its business. The mercy of that ritual is that it ends. Han Kang’s title is in the present tense, and I read that as a refusal to give the boy a signal that it is over. He is still coming. I find I cannot decide which of the two silences is the more honest, and I am no longer sure the question is mine to settle.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Human Acts, Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Sonyeon-i onda (소년이 온다), Han Kang, Aladin Bookstore
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Han Kang, “Light and Thread”, Nobel Lecture, nobelprize.org, 2024.
- Deborah Smith, “On Translating Human Acts by Han Kang”, Asymptote.
- “The Gwangju Uprising: A Battle over South Korea’s History”, Wilson Center.