The element of memory in Human Acts by Han Kang and its diverse characterisations as constructed by different lead protagonists.

 

The many narratives that comprise Human Acts are written with the hindsight of an author who did due diligence to the memories of those individuals who give her work meaning. As each segment progresses the protagonists draw from their memories: choosing to relive or repress, regret or be at peace, those choose to pass their story on to those who would hear it or hide their scars and pasts from those who ask, from those who didn’t ask. The beauty of reading a work that has the opportunity to give thoughts and lives to individuals who otherwise remain statistics or singular names in dusty newspapers and government records is that it succeeds in attributing a terrifying humanity to everything. Honouring the oppressed, Human Acts lies up to its name with its very human act of remembering the afflictions and aftermaths of the Gwangju Uprising. The element of memory, not limited to the stories the author explores or the characters carry with them, is an element in Human Acts that needs recognition. The shifting nature of memory as it expresses itself - rewriting your story to remove yourself from it, burying it deep, not recording it on Dictaphones, letting it kill you emotionally and physically - is one that bears exploration. In this essay, I shall explore the many characterisations of memory perpetuated by the protagonists in Human Acts and how those memories play an active role in making literature falling in the same genre as Human Acts relevant and necessary reading. 

In the segment of “The Boy. 1980” memory makes its first appearance as Dong-ho removes himself as witness to Park Jeongdae’s massacre when questioned by Eun Sook and Seon-ju. While we do not know that yet, our memory of our own reading elicits poignance: a scene where a best friend is guilt-ridden and terrified that he couldn’t do more, and so instead helps other corpses find their families. This trope of regret and guilt is found in the lines “You shake your head, trying to rid yourself of the memory, the anger lacing your brother’s voice.” (Kang, 8). The act of repression of memory as committed Dong-ho speaks volumes of the guilt he feels for failing his unsaid duties as a friend to Jeongdae and family to his brothers and parents. 

In contrast, Park Jeongdae’s desperate attempts to remember as much of his life as he could is symptomatic of his attachment to a humanity that was stolen from him. This sentiment of humanity is found in the lines “That was the memory I had to cling to, there in the pitch-dark thicket. I had to conjure up every little sensation of that night when I’d still had a body.” (39) and “I needed more memories. I needed to keep spinning them out, quicker, in a continuous stream.” (39 - 40). Park’s projection of his memories of the summer, his sister, his best friend are all that are left of a humanity that was massacred at the hands of soldiers, being reduced to a shadow clinging to his body, seeking freedom with an unceremonial cremation after weeks of decomposition.

The clinical manner in which Kim Eun-Sook attempts to forget her assault - a slap forgotten with each day (49) - is again broken by the memories of a broken 15-year old boy by the name of Dong-ho and the manuscript rewritten by the censor board with ink rollers bathing the pages black. The pathos aroused by the scene of the actors silently mouthing redacted text is compounded by Eun-Sook’s memory of Dong-ho, bringing forth her humanity and sealing her anger with the words “There would never be a day when she would forget the seventh slap.” (69)

Another remnant of memory that is brought to light are ones of fear and trauma. Described by the author as ‘similar to radioactive poisoning’(149 - 150), the memories of a prisoner of the regime are all that exist for him. He no longer remembers things as they were, and instead compares his present to how they used to be when he shared a cell with ninety men. For him “Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.” (91 - 92) As an individual whose humanity was again stripped of him as he was treated like an animal, his story presents a striking contrast to Jongdae's: how a boy who died clings to the memory of his humanity while a man living a nightmare cannot outrun the memories of his inhuman reduction - a sentiment cemented in the minds of the readers with the following lines.

It’s really extraordinary how those young women, their faces, ended up scored into my memory so deeply, you know? I mean, I only caught just a fleeting glimpse of them.

But now, each time I fall asleep, and each time I wake up again, I see those faces. Their pale skin, their closed mouths, their legs stretched out straight … it’s so clear, so vivid, it’s like they’re really there. Just like the face of the man with blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed … etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can’t get at it. Where I’ll never be able to scrape it off. (102)

This casts a light on the many different realities the protagonists suffer as a result of traumatic experiences, and how not one individual’s reality echoes someone else's. 

We find a similar portrait in Lim Seon-ju’s story as she struggles to record her story for Yoon’s book. She can never outrun the gendered violence and severe trauma she suffered as a result of her years of protests. Like the Prisoner, she can never forget. Yet unlike the Prisoner did with the professor, she doesn’t choose to record her story and mark herself as a witness to the tyrannies of the regime. When asked to bear witness to her past by Yoon, she thinks to herself,

Yoon has asked you to remember. To ‘face up to those memories’, to ‘bear witness to them’.

But how can such a thing be possible?

Is it possible to bear witness to the fact of a thirty-centimetre wooden ruler being repeatedly thrust into my vagina, all the way up to the back wall of my uterus? To a rifle butt bludgeoning my cervix?  . . . That I wilfully destroyed any warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.  (121)

By recognising her past, she relives the truth of her present: a massacred humanity living the aftermath of a violence so graphic that it bears remembrance for no other reason than it serving as a reminder of the horrors that were perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism. At the same time, her traumatic past overshadows any memories of a life before the summer of her violations. Here we see another aspect of memory of overriding memory, occurring to the extent that nothing existed before the trauma, and thus the trauma becomes life. As Lim shuts the door and refuses to relive her past, she shuts off her memories of her entire past. This reality finds presence in the text with the lines 

The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you’ve made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed which might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre. (128)

It seems fitting that Han Kang ends her book with “Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.” (152) The act and purpose of writing and reading novels like Human Acts and Night is identical to that of the literature of Partition. Through their unique act of naming real people as characters and recalling memory to be printed for millions to peruse, this literature takes a memorial stand honouring the memories of those who are not with us today, and reminds the world with its bleeding ink that the horrors that our grandparents witnessed were mere nanoseconds ago if universal history were a clock. That these events stain our histories with their terrifying, inhumane acts, and remembrance is key if we wish to protect our loved ones and ourselves from the same horrors. 

The vivid description of the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising is reminiscent of the writings of Manto, Bhisham Sahni, Bapsi Sidhwa, and other writers of Partition, where they have described similar acts of horror and violence. Albeit fictional tales, the violence depicted draws from reality, and were very-often, first and second hand accounts of what actually transpired during the Partition - identical to the nature of Human Acts. The choice to have these acts of violence and genocide, in both Partition and Holocaust literature - literatures of genocides - is a conscious decision to remind its readers that never again can we allow this to happen. Never again.

Work Cited 

Kang, Han. Human Acts.Translated by Deborah Smith. London, Portobello Books, 2016.