this book’s strange erotic consciousness + physical reaction
I just finished the second part of The Vegetarian this morning and I feel absolutely filled with desire.
Could be simply sexual desire. But see quotes below. It’s different… it’s deep.
The brother-in-law looking at Yeong-hye. Painting her body. (New fantasy side quest unlocked.) His obsession with the flowers on her skin. The filming. The fantasy of her body moving through the dark room. The fact that she doesn’t resist.
I don’t know what Han Kang has done here, but I feel it physically.
She has somehow made looking itself erotic. He is aroused not only by Yeong-hye’s body, but by the fact that she has become so radically herself… renounced, unavailable to ordinary social meaning… almost unbearably compelling.
It’s like the renunciation makes her body more intensely present.
More naked and more defended.
“a body that said so much, and it was no more than itself.”
“…armoured by the power of her own renunciation.”
He sees nakedness and somehow perceives armour. Exposure and impenetrability at the same time. That’s an incredibly charged thing for me to read and think about.
Being more available and completely unreachable.
He wants to get closer to her, but every attempt to represent her seems to make her stranger. Distant.
Is it limits or limitless? Boundaries or none? Just the uncomplicated ‘look but can’t touch’?
Not sure. But I do know that it is not plot twist stuff. Or even the imagined scenes, the fantasy. It’s the prose, the language, these passages. And how, for me, they possess some weird, conductive frequency. It’s not even electric on the page. What he is seeing, what’s being described is done in such a muted, unobtrusive manner. The real voltage is happening in me. Han Kang, you have successfully ran a wire from your mind to mine, and turned the switch on.
Whatever it is, I am sitting here absolutely fucking charged by it.
Edit (one hour later): Did Han Kang just pull a Nabokov on me? Yes. I believe she did.
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