Interrogating “Feeling Politics”: Animal and Vegetal Empathy in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, this article responds to the polarization in current critical responses to empathy, which is framed either as key to intersubjective understanding and social cohesion, or as distracting and narcissistic. Examining the vegetal metamorphosis of the novel’s protagonist Yeong-hye, the article argues two things: first, that the text’s exploration of animality facilitates an evaluation of intra- and inter-species relationships which leads to a more nuanced account of empathy within a broader context of “feeling politics” (Berlant 111); and secondly, that an irresolvable tension between animality and vegetality persists throughout the novel, which tempers the claim (both within and beyond the text) that we can redeem our humanimality through an escape into vegetal subjectivity.

Powerful criticisms of empathy have emerged from recent scholarship. One challenge frames empathy as laudable but wayward; in generating imaginative identification with an “other,” empathy inclines us toward compassion, but this inclination is more likely to be toward the similar, proximate, and familiar than the distant or strange (Bloom). Another contention is that empathy is fundamentally narcissistic; when it reaches beyond the familiar, it inevitably appropriates or distorts. This is the critique posed by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection (1997), and, more recently, by Namwali Serpell, who frames empathy as slipping “too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it” (Serpell, “The Banality of Empathy” n.p.). These are both criticisms of empathy as ethics. To these we can add a criticism of another order: that the veneration of empathy reflects a conflation of ethics and politics generated by an individualist culture which overvalues the political force of inter-personal feelings. This political framing of empathy, which situates it within what Lauren Berlant terms “feeling politics” (Berlant 111), is key, I shall argue, to understanding the limitations of empathy.

The strength of these objections has not, however, slowed the advancement of empathy, which, as part of an ongoing “revival of sentimentalism” (Aaltola 2), is widely promoted as a panacea to “rescue us from detachment, numbness and the objectification of others” (Aaltola 2). Such a transition has coincided with a transformation of scholarship in Animal Studies, whose current focus on empathy marks a divergence from an earlier “valorization of reason” (Regan cited in Bailey 344), framed by Tom Regan and others as essential for animal thinking to be taken seriously. The identification and development of Animal Studies as a distinct field marks the expansion of animal thinking outwith the Rights model; its employment of more diverse, interdisciplinary methodologies; and its increased focus on affect and embodiment.

Contemporary critical responses to empathy are unhelpfully polarized: one is either for, celebrating empathy, as Martin Hoffman does, as “the bedrock of morality” and “the glue of society” (Hoffman 96), or, provocatively, “against” (Bloom). Lori Gruen’s account of “entangled empathy” (Gruen) exemplifies the turn to empathy in Animal Studies, appealing to “a blend of emotion and cognition” (3) which responds to our complex responsibilities in cross-species relationships. Gruen’s account, however, is susceptible to the criticisms of empathy detailed above: empathy’s influence is limited to individual affective responses which are subject to anthropomorphic biases. Its restriction to sentient life appears to reinforce a long-standing tension between animal and environmental ethics; plants are the “embodied limits to empathy” (Marder, “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy” 260), philosopher Michael Marder contends.

Drawing on Deborah Smith’s English translation of South Korean writer Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, a text in which characters display either too little, or too much, empathy – with each other, with animals, with plants – this article will endeavor to develop a more nuanced approach to empathy. Split into three short parts, “The Vegetarian,” “Mongolian Mark,” and “Flaming Trees,” The Vegetarian recounts the transformation of protagonist Yeong-hye from dutiful wife, “completely unremarkable in every way” (Han 3), first to socially alienated vegetarian, and finally, to her institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital following her refusal to eat. By the end of the text, Yeong-hye is convinced that she is turning into a tree. Critics have begun to examine the connections between human, animal and vegetal in the novel; for Magdalena Zolkos, Han “reinscribe[s] the human subject in post-metaphysical terms” (Zolkos 116) via Yeong-hye’s vegetal metamorphosis. Caitlin E. Stobie contends that Yeong-hye is motivated by “an empathetic realisation” (Stobie 794) of the parallels between the oppression of women and violence against nonhuman animals. Complexifying such claims, this article will contend that the novel’s exploration of animality facilitates an evaluation of intra- and inter-species empathy which leads to ambivalence, and to the framing of empathy as ethically unreliable and politically insufficient. It will argue that an irresolvable tension between animality and vegetality persists through the novel, which questions the narrative that “redemption” (Zolkos 113) is made possible by an escape into vegetal subjectivity.

“Sensing Flesh”: Animality, Abjection and the Limits of Empathy

The three parts which comprise The Vegetarian are narrated by Yeong-hye’s husband, brother-in-law, and sister respectively, with Yeong-hye’s voice infrequently punctuating the narrative as she recalls the dreams which provoked her changed behavior. The text is a painful account of Yeong-hye’s resistance to acts of force: her father’s brutal attempt to force-feed her meat (following, we discover, his violence during her childhood), rape at the hands of her husband, instrumentalisation in service of her brother-in-law’s art, and the medical services’ invasive attempts to prolong her life against her will. Comparing the violence of the force-feeding scene with that in the psychiatric hospital, Han notes in her interview with Bethanne Patrick: “At the risk of oversimplifying, I could say these characters are sharing (and personifying) the similar violence to the determination of Yeong-hye” (Han in Patrick n.p.).

The violence directed toward Yeong-hye is underpinned by a lack of empathy. Her husband, Mr Cheong, is fixated on social propriety, manifested in his “utter mortification” (Han 21) when Yeong-hye attends his work dinner without wearing a bra and his outrage at the “sheer obstinacy” (14) of her vegetarianism. This obscures any empathetic feelings he may have toward her. Empathy, “a complex imaginative process involving both cognition and emotion,” as described by Amy Coplan (Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects” 44), commonly understood as the experience of putting oneself “in someone else’s shoes,” presupposes recognition of the other as an active agent and acknowledgment of their individual experience as meaningful. Furthermore, she notes “[o]nly empathy that combines affective matching, other-oriented perspective-taking, and self-other differentiation provides experiential understanding” (Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects” 17). Whilst Yeong-hye’s husband has clear self-other differentiation from his wife, he resists affective matching and other-oriented perspective-taking. He distances Yeong-hye, who becomes “a stranger, or no, a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order” (30) and ultimately dehumanizes her, regarding it, his brother-in-law narrates, “perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or household appliance” (70). His renunciation of responsibility toward her is facilitated by a denial: “I thought to myself: I do not know that woman” (52), and by reframing his own failure in “imaginative perspective-taking” (Oxley 16), a key component of empathy, on his wife’s inscrutability, as she becomes “utterly unknowable” (25) to him.

The measures that Mr Cheong takes to avoid empathizing with Yeong-hye demonstrate the threat that her transformation poses to the unarticulated assumptions sustaining his way of life. With Yeong-hye’s insubordination – for Mr Cheong a denial of the natural relationship between husband and wife – comes an unraveling of the tenets which uphold “civilisation.” French philosopher Jacques Derrida writes that “Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. […] The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits among themselves” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 244–5). As ecofeminist (Plumwood) and feminist animal studies (Adams) scholarship has effectively demonstrated, patriarchal societies are upheld by the self-declared separation between “human” and “animal” and the devaluing of “woman” through her association with animality or the natural world. Whilst Han is explicit that The Vegetarian “isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy” (Han in Patrick n.p.), the novel exposes the alliance between patriarchy and anthropocentrism which shores up society, and with it, Mr Cheong’s fragile identity. Yeong-hye’s recognition that animals suffer, and that this suffering matters ethically – her “empathetic realisation of the similarities between how animals’ and women’s bodily autonomies are restricted” (Stobie 794), as Stobie frames it – exposes the naturalized power dynamics informing intersubjective and cross-species relations.

Alongside fury and shame, Mr Cheong’s primary affective response to Yeong-hye is “an intense feeling of disgust” which “made my [his] flesh crawl” (44). This is a clear example of abjection, the identity-disturbing experience of a threat, as Julia Kristeva writes, “that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva 1). Often triggered by an encounter with blood, vomit or feces, abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Impelling the subject “toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2), it reveals the disavowed truth, that humans are mortal animals. Contaminated by blood and “the sour tang of semi-digested food” (47), and associated with the naked savagery of the animal, Yeong-hye becomes a figure of abjection for Mr Cheong. Thus, his response to her, to whom, his brother-in-law casually notes, he “could have shown a bit more sympathy” (64), is not, or not only, a superficial act of face-saving cruelty, but rather is conditioned by his terror at the existential threat that she poses. Even in the early stages of her transformation her strangeness is such that Mr Cheong found himself “unable to touch her. I [he] didn’t even want to reach out to her with words” (9). His disquiet is compounded by the scale of Yeong-hye’s transformation; before, she was a woman of “earthy vitality,” “perfectly competent when it came to hacking a chicken into pieces with a butcher’s cleaver” and who “would catch cockroaches by smacking them with the palm of her hand” (18). Her transformation symbolizes the disintegration of the distinction between human and animal (and the misogyny enfolded within this distinction) which scaffolds his worldview.

For Mr Cheong, Yeong-hye’s animality represents physical vulnerability in a world reduced to competitive predation; “[s]top eating meat,” he warns Yeong-hye, “and the world will devour you whole” (48). Throughout the novel, her animal vulnerability is juxtaposed with passive, yet articulate agency. This is exemplified by the force-feeding scene, in which her lucid announcement, “‘I don’t eat meat’” (38), is met with violence as her father slaps her face and tries to force a piece of pork into her mouth. The cruelty of her father, an aging war veteran, can be read as part of a cycle of violence, “symbolic of gendered trauma which lingers after periods of colonization of systemic control” (Stobie 794). Despite their otherwise diverse perspectives, all three narratives stress Yeong-hye’s animality in this episode: her husband hears the “animal cry of distress [that] burst from her lips” (40); her brother-in-law observes “her terrified eyes rolling like those of a cornered animal” (66); and In-hye records that she “howled like an animal and spat out the meat” (136). Yeong-hye’s response to this violation – she takes a fruit knife and cuts her wrists – is legible both as the action of a trapped, frenzied animal hurting itself in an attempt to escape, and a strongly coded and inescapably human call for help. Unlike Mr Cheong, Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law and In-hye are both viscerally affected by this scene; the former “heard a sound like something snapping inside his own body” (66) and In-hye “jerked violently, as though she herself were the one receiving the blow” (136). These experiences are instances of embodied empathy, a process where we “feel in another, empathetically incarnate ourselves in him” and ultimately “grasp him as sensing flesh” (Mensch 23).

For its advocates, embodied empathy nullifies debates as to whether empathy is primarily cognitive or affective by “getting rid of the rigid distinction between body and mind” (Aaltola 104). However, it also exposes the limitations of empathy; the corporeal reactions of In-hye and Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law do not commit them to ethical action; rather, as Lou Agosta contends: “empathy provides access to the suffering of the other. It is a further step to take action to reduce that suffering in line with other ethical conditions and qualifications or run away in empathic distress” (Agosta 75). Such a transition – a reframing of knowledge leading to changed behavior – characterizes Yeong-hye’s turn to vegetarianism.

Yeong-hye’s decision to renounce meat-eating is precipitated by the recollection and reframing of an episode from her past. At nine years old, Yeong-hye recounts, she was bitten by a dog, Whitey. As punishment, the dog was tied to her father’s motorcycle and literally driven to exhaustion, vomiting blood, and then a painful death, before being eaten, a folk-remedy to ensure healing of the bite. Mijeong Kim locates this single incident, or rather its “reinterpretation […] from a new perspective through her [Yeong-hye’s] sudden, consecutive dreams,” as “the real cause” of “Yeong-hye’s agony” (Mijeong 332). Certainly, this is a pivotal episode for Yeong-hye, and for the reader’s understanding of her. Recalling this incident, Yeong-hye is struck by the disjunction between her eye-to-eye engagement with the dog, an encounter between two subjects, and her apparent indifference to its suffering. “I remember the two eyes that had watched me,” she notes, “and how later they had seemed to appear, flickering, on the surface of the soup. But I don’t care. I really didn’t care” (42). In this final sentence, we perceive a fracture between Yeong-hye’s past and present selves, indifference replaced by identification, empathy, and, as we see in the violence of her dreams, horror.

There are clear parallels between the scene in which Yeong-hye is force-fed and that of Whitey’s abuse and death. Both foreground Yeong-hye’s intent gaze; of Whitey, she tells us, “[e]very time his gleaming eyes meet my own I glare even more fiercely” (41), and her brother-in-law notes that during the force-feeding scene she “glared fiercely at each of her family in turn” (66). In this latter incident, however, Yeong-hye takes Whitey’s place as “cornered animal” (66). It is unsurprising, therefore, that Yeong-hye’s recognition that animals suffer is experienced viscerally as a kind of embodied empathy. “Because of meat,” she declares, “I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there [in her chest]” (49). “It is,” as Michael Slote writes of empathy, “as if their pain invades us” (Slote 13).

A shift in focus to the shared vulnerability of human and nonhuman animals has characterized recent Animal Studies scholarship. Derrida’s appeal that we turn from a politics of sovereignty to one which begins from “[b]eing able to suffer,” from “[m]ortality […] as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion” (Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am 28), was an early articulation of this. Anat Pick appeals to creatureliness, Stacey Alaimo to exposure, Myra Hird to vulnerability across environments and ecosystems, Sunaura Taylor to the parallels between speciesism and ableism, and Claire Jean Kim and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson to the intersection between oppression grounded in race and in species. Judith Butler has begun to ask whether concepts of mourning and grievability might be productively extended to the nonhuman. Gruen’s “entangled empathy,” an “experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others […] and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relationships, by attending to another’s needs, and interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes and sensitivities” (Gruen 3), explicitly links the acknowledgment of shared vulnerability to a call for empathy.

Yeong-hye’s transformation – an assumption of responsibility toward the nonhuman – can be read as the displacement of the model of animality held by her father and Mr Cheong, where one is either predator or prey, by a model of animality which acknowledges shared vulnerability and looks to accommodate the other’s needs. This model, and Yeong-hye’s actions, serve as a direct counter to the alliance between patriarchy and anthropocentrism which the novel exposes. Indeed, the text demands an intersectional reading of the animalization of Yeong-hye and the objectification of nonhuman life as part of a network of mutually reinforcing violence. As ecofeminist Val Plumwood writes: “racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture” (Plumwood 4). Carol Adams reflects upon the enduring association between meat and masculinity, analyzing the construction of animal and female flesh as meat for consumption. Yeong-hye both literalizes the patriarchal framing of the female, trying “to hack at […] [her body] like it was a piece of meat” (66), and aligns herself with the vulnerability of the animal. As Mijeong articulates, “Yeong-hye’s rejection of meat is to be read as her struggle to become a ‘non-predator,’ not merely as her resistance to male violence” (Mijeong 333).

Rather than serving as an unequivocal endorsement of the transformative potential of empathy, the figure of Yeong-hye invites us to consider the staging and limitations of empathy. Nine-year-old Yeong-hye, raised in an environment characterized by lack of empathy and the threat of domestic violence – indeed, where killing the family pet is a recognizable form of domestic violence (Adams 71) – is certainly not culpable for her inability to empathize with Whitey’s suffering. Rather, Yeong-hye discredits the preconception that empathy is natural and neutral, emerging spontaneously between living beings. Instead, she illustrates some of the critiques of empathy detailed earlier: that empathy is unreliable and unstable, dependent on a recognition of similarity. In her book Stranger Faces, Namwali Serpell interrogates the model of “The Ideal Face,” which, she argues, “means identity, truth, feeling, beauty, authenticity, humanity” (Serpell, Stranger Faces 12). Empathy too is often grounded in the recognition of or identification with a face. Like Serpell, The Vegetarian asks us to consider “what counts as a face and why?” (Serpell, Stranger Faces 14) and to acknowledge that the legibility of a face is always determined by social expectations (be they racialized, gendered or anthropocentric) and by our own projections.

“Trying to Shuck off the Human”: Identification, Inscrutability and Escape

Yeong-hye’s inscrutability, and the unease it generates amongst her family, pervades The Vegetarian. Even In-hye, whose compassion toward Yeong-hye dominates the final part of the novel, discloses that Yeong-hye “became difficult to read. So difficult that there were times when she seemed like a total stranger” (129). Narrated by Yeong-hye’s video artist brother-in-law, the second part of the trilogy, “Mongolian Mark,” tracks his fixation with a birthmark on Yeong-hye’s thigh and his incorporation of her in an artistic vision which represents his own flight from the human. For him too, Yeong-hye is incomprehensible. In his encounters with her, he is variously transfixed or disturbed by her “empty eyes” (89) and “impassive features” (79), her face “a perfect blank […] devoid of any form of expression” (118). In his preliminary sketches for his video art, the woman’s face is “missing” (59) and thus Yeong-hye’s, “serene as that of a Buddhist monk” (76), seamlessly fills the role.

Whilst the relationship between Yeong-hye and her brother-in-law is less abusive than those between Yeong-hye and her husband and father, and the two share an impulse to escape the human, their connection is limited by misunderstanding and misrecognition, and by the artist’s aesthetic and sexual desire for Yeong-hye. Despite his subversion of the male gaze (Stobie 795), “the artist’s grasp,” contends Magdalena Zolkos, ultimately falls short of “the reciprocity of touch” (Zolkos 114). In framing Yeong-hye as “sacred” (89), insisting on her blankness, and making her a screen for his own artistic projections, the artist short-circuits the possibility of empathetic engagement with her. Indeed, in his reading of her, which concludes that “she could not be called a ‘person”” (89), the artist undermines empathy, where empathy necessitates that one “respect the singularity of the other’s experience as well as his or her own” (Coplan, “Empathetic Engagement with Narrative Fictions” 144).

The novel’s challenge to empathy runs deeper still, as empathy is “contingent upon obtaining an accurate picture of one’s own inner life” (Olson 7) and Han problematizes the idea of self-knowledge. Whilst Yeong-hye’s strangeness is distinctive in that she turns toward it by “voluntarily becoming ‘the other’” (Mijeong 333), the characters in The Vegetarian are strangers to each other and, to a greater or lesser degree, to themselves. The marriage between In-hye and her husband is characterized by alienation. In-hye’s post-coital weeping is incomprehensible to them both; “[h]e couldn’t tell what these tears meant,” we are told, “pain, pleasure, passion, disgust, or some inscrutable loneliness that she would have been no more able to explain than he would have been to understand” (81). As In-hye begins to acquire self-awareness toward the end of the novel, she reflects that she may never have understood her husband’s “true nature,” which resides in a “seemingly impenetrable silence” (131).

The artist and other characters reveal that the self-knowledge upon which understanding of an other must be grounded is rare, fleeting and disquieting. The artist weeps frequently, often unexpectedly, and incomprehensibly to himself. He recognizes himself visually rather than affectively, seeing rather than feeling himself crying, and the anxiety this generates triggers the urge to violently regain control: “to pummel his cheeks until the blood showed through beneath his black beard, and smash his ugly lips, swollen with desire, with the sole of his shoe” (62). He is shocked and disturbed by the unrecognizable “panting sound, as if from a wild animal” (112) that he makes during sex. His feelings for Yeong-hye, which lead him to the “hell of desire” (78), are repeatedly denied or suppressed; her body “made one want to rest one’s gaze quietly upon it” (74), he notes, and insists “that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual” (83). Yet, he is not simply deluded; rather, like Yeong-hye, he shuttles between the urge to escape animality, to be unburdened of the confusion, violence, and loneliness of human life, and the “terrifyingly unknowable compulsions” (85) which return him to his animality.

“Mongolian Mark” does not exempt the artist from ethical responsibility toward Yeong-hye, his wife and his son, nor does it endorse simplistic moral condemnation of him. Rather it follows his reflections: “Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he’d been so sure before” (61). In his inability to comprehend himself, and in the text’s demonstration that this inability is not unusual or aberrant but ordinary, the artist unsettles the foundations of empathy and our assumptions about what it can achieve. “Empathy,” Heinz Kohut writes, “is not just a useful way by which we have access to the inner life of man – the idea itself of an inner life of man, and thus of a psychology of complex mental states, is unthinkable without our ability to know via vicarious introspection – my explanation of empathy … what the inner life of man is, what we ourselves and what others think and feel” (Kohut 306). Such assumptions regarding the “inner life of man,” implicit but largely unspoken in twenty-first century accounts of empathy, return to an account of the subject untroubled by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, or multispecies thinking. Without recourse to the theoretical, and, without fleeing these uncomfortable questions as Mr Cheong does, the artist exposes the simplistic idealism of the fetishization of empathy.

Han and the novel’s commentators frame Yeong-hye’s refusal (to eat meat, and later, to eat at all) as an act of resistance with recuperative potential. For Han, Yeong-hye “is trying to root herself into this extreme and bizarre sanity by uprooting herself from the surface of this world” (Han in Patrick n.p.). For Hayley Singer, Yeong-hye’s attempt “to move into a social order that does not exist” (Singer n.p.) is path-breaking if ultimately unproductive. Stobie sees Yeong-hye’s “attempt to silently abandon her (hum)animality” as an alternative to the “violent rhetoric” (698) of competition between species propagated by anthropocentric ideology. We should be cautious, however, about depicting Yeong-hye as a prospective martyr. Rather, her renunciation of meat is both a rejection of carnistic violence in favor of an account of animality based on shared vulnerability rather than competition, and, more simply and selfishly, a desire to escape her suffering. Her drive to separate herself from the violence of carnism is also an urge to escape punishment, pain or haunting: “‘I thought it was all because of eating meat,’ she notes. ‘I thought all I had to do was to stop eating meat and then the faces wouldn’t come back. But it didn’t work’” (115).

Han comments that the novel is an exploration of “the possibility/impossibility of innocence in this world” (Han in Patrick n.p.). Yeong-hye herself is acutely aware that her position as victim does not offset her complicity; she is, as Zolkos writes, “deeply suspicious about her own claims to innocence vis-à-vis social normalization of non-human suffering” (Zolkos 113). The structural and formal parallels between different kinds of violence in the novel – Yeong-hye both violates and is violated, smacks and is smacked – reinforce the idea that violence is something that we can minimize but not escape. As such, we should be cautious about anything that looks like what Alexis Shotwell terms “‘purity politics’” (Shotwell 7). “Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better” (8–9) she insists.

In the scene that closes “The Vegetarian,” Mr Cheong finds Yeong-hye sitting undressed on a bench outside the hospital, licking her sutured wounds, “her lips stained with blood like clumsily applied lipstick” (52), a macabre parody of the feminine ideals to which Yeong-hye is held. As Mr Cheong opened Yeong-hye’s hand, “[a] bird, which has been crushed in her grip, tumbled to the bench. It was a small white-eye bird, with feathers missing here and there. Below tooth-marks that looked to have been caused by a predator’s bite, vivid red bloodstains were spreading” (52). Looking to conclusively discern whether this scene positions Yeong-hye as predator or prey as some critics do misses the point; Yeong-hye embodies an animality which is fully explained neither by the predator/prey model, nor that of shared vulnerability. In a flash of insight in a scene which parallels this one, the artist reveals this truth, seeing in Yeong-hye both “a kind of violence […] which she would appear to be struggling to suppress” and a profound vulnerability, her “shoulders hunched like a baby chick trying to get warm” (86).

“The Blazing Flower that Was Her Body”: Vegetal Identification, Empathy and Escape

The closing section of the novel, “Flaming Trees,” centers the relationship between sisters Yeong-hye and In-hye as Yeong-hye’s flight from humanimality intensifies. Despite their proximity and mutual care – for Zolkos, “the only example of non-violence in the novel” (Zolkos 115) – this section reveals their different modes of engagement, and ultimately, their divergent paths. Transcending the mere appearance of vegetality under her brother-in-law’s paintbrush, here we find Yeong-hye in a state of complete vegetal identification, near starvation:

What other dimension might Yeong-hye’s soul have passed into, having shrugged off flesh like a snake shedding its skin? In-hye recalled how Yeong-hye had looked when she’d been standing on her hands. Had Yeong-hye mistaken the hospital’s concrete floor for the soft earth of the woods? Had her body metamorphosed into a sturdy trunk, with white roots sprouting from her hands and clutching the black soil? … As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? (170)

Readers are absorbed by this metamorphosis, our disbelief suspended until In-hye interrupts: “‘But seriously,’ she states, ‘What the hell?’” and then, with brutal candor and directly to Yeong-hye: “‘You’re dying’” (170). As we have seen, Yeong-hye’s assertion, “I’m not an animal anymore, sister” (153–4), marks the conclusion of a complex and uncomfortable negotiation with her own animality. Her realization that refusing meat did not entirely liberate her from the violence of animality leads to a disassociation from her body, and “the very life that her body represented” (85), through total vegetal identification.

Critics such as Zolkos, who constructs a “vegetal-feminist reading” (106), and Mijeong, who perceives Yeong-hye’s transformation as a Deleuzian “‘becoming-plant’” (336), characterize “Flaming Trees” as a narrative of redemption. For Zolkos, the sisters “undertake something akin to an escape into the vegetal world” (116), where vegetality undermines the restrictive and exploitative structures of carnistic patriarchy. Drawing on the recent work of Luce Irigaray to illuminate Han’s novel, Zolkos argues that vegetal identification between humans and plants, with the latter understood “as philosophic subjects,” might “offer a pathway to ‘leave the past tradition’” and move toward “post-metaphysical thought” (109). For Irigaray and other contemporary plant thinkers, plant being can provide a model of relationality without hierarchy or domination (Irigaray; Gagliano) and challenge the overvaluation of interiority which underpins Western philosophical thought (Marder). For Mijeong, in “Flaming Trees,” the sisters engage with plant life in this way, demonstrating “that vegetability can be a kind of desire that exists with-in ‘humanity’ as much as does animality” (331). However, these redemptive claims downplay the complexities of the sisters’ relationships with the vegetal.

Despite his declared aims to “give prominence” to vegetal life (Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life 3) and to consider how human thinking might be “rendered plant-like, altered by its encounter with the vegetal world” (10), Michael Marder cautions against empathizing or identifying with plants. If empathy presupposes “the substantial sameness of the empathizer and the empathized with,” then the “formal dissimilarity” (Marder, “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy” 263) between humans and plants means that plants are the “embodied limits to empathy” (260). Human-plant empathy is thus inevitably narcissistic, “a last-ditch attempt to ‘feel into’ what we are not supposed to feel, to reconnect” (271), which inevitably renders the object of empathy a site for human projection.

This desire to “reconnect” manifests differently for the two sisters. Yeong-hye surrenders entirely to “vegetability”; having gone missing, we find her “standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees” (125). It is as if she has been absorbed by the “wet body of the woods” (124). This identification is distinct from her earlier “empathetic realisation” of the parallels between human and nonhuman suffering because it substitutes empathy, which necessitates “a clear differentiation between the sphere of the self as opposed to the sphere of the other” (Aaltola 200), for the dissolution of self within the other. As we see from Yeong-hye’s troubling dreams, empathetic engagement can be painful and disruptive, posing both existential and ethical threats as we open a space for the other “to call us into question in our positing of the world” (Mensch 24). The Yeong-hye of the latter part of “Flaming Trees” is disintegrating under the pressure of empathizing within the strictures of the carno-phallogocentric social order.

Mijeong makes two claims about Yeong-hye’s vegetal identification: first, that she embodies “‘vegetal’ resistance in voluntarily becoming ‘the other’” (333); and secondly, that her identification can be read, via Deleuze and Guattari’s ligne de fuite, as a mode of escape with “a creative and generative ability to change reality” (338). This reading falls short for the following reasons: first, it minimizes Yeong-hye’s psychological damage, misreading the exhaustion of her capacity for resistance as resistance. Secondly, in yielding to vegetal identification and undifferentiated subjectivity, Yeong-hye takes the place of the other, divesting the self which might advocate for “the other,” and thus relinquishing any responsibility for them. There is no meaningful engagement with vegetal life here; the trees are merely a screen for Yeong-hye’s projections. Finally, the conflation of escape with resistance presupposes that flight from animality is both possible and desirable. However, the novel’s shift in attention from Yeong-hye to In-hye implies that real change must be forged through our animality, by opening space for possible worlds in the existing socio-political order, rather than by fleeing to impossible or unsurvivable ones.

In-hye is shrewder and more pragmatic than Yeong-hye, her engagement both with human others and the vegetal world complex and ambivalent. If Yeong-hye’s empathy eventually collapses into total identification, In-hye’s empathy is wary and strategic, informed by a clearly delineated selfhood. In her relationships with Yeong-hye and her husband, punctuated by misunderstandings, illegible silences, and projection, she reinforces the idea that we cannot fully understand either ourselves or others. She is alert to the manipulability of her own emotions; she strategically purges herself of “sympathy” (169) where necessary, coldly abandons her son Ji-Woo, and deploys protective emotional distancing. This is in stark contrast to Yeong-hye, who “absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones” (157). In-hye’s care of Yeong-hye is informed but not dictated by empathy. The differences between them stimulate In-hye’s interest and curiosity; her commitment to care for Yeong-hye is shielded from her own emotional changes.

Unlike Yeong-hye, In-hye’s interactions with the vegetal cannot be classified as an “escape,” but are conditioned either by impenetrability or projection:

There’s no way for In-hye to know what on earth those waves are saying. Or what those trees she’d seen at the end of the narrow mountain path, clustered together like green flames in the early morning half-light, had been saying. Whatever it was, there had been no warmth in it. Whatever the words were, they hadn’t been words of comfort, words that would help her pick herself up. Instead, the tree’s words were frighteningly chilling, mercilessly insistent on life. (169-70)

As with her relations with other humans, In-hye is circumspect about the possibility of genuine communication or understanding with nonhuman life. Substantiating Marder’s skepticism toward human-plant empathy, In-hye demonstrates that we cannot simply – to return to the German origins of empathy, Einfühlung – “feel into” plant being. Rather than advocating escape, “Flaming Tress” complicates it: Yeong-hye “escapes” at the cost of her animality and, inevitably, her life; through Yeong-hye, In-hye is forced to re-encounter a past from which she has been in flight, and, in abandoning her son, is building a future inescapably haunted by the past.

Empathy and “Feeling Politics”

The Vegetarian counsels caution about empathy. It both illustrates the violent implications of a total absence or suppression of empathy and shows its contingency and manipulability. Empathy cannot be relied upon to inform intersubjective or cross-species ethics, or foundational political structures.

Writing presciently at the turn of the century, Lauren Berlant identified a tendency toward a “feeling politics” which centralizes feelings in the construction of collective life; understands the feeling self as singularly authentic; and proposes that political disagreement can be resolved by appealing to the higher “truth” of feelings. Berlant’s essay, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” considers how we should respond when feeling “takes over the space of ethics and truth” (112). Critiques of empathy largely focus on its ethical limitations, but framing it within “feeling politics,” the metonymic substitution of the political by one of its components, enables us to understand these limitations as part of a broader reduction of the political to feelings, perceived as pure, unmediated, and true. Such shortcomings are amplified when we are dealing with questions of animal and plant life, whose difference and distance often inhibit empathetic engagement.

Insufficient critical attention has been paid to the distinction between the ethical and political functioning of empathy; the two are frequently conflated. The Vegetarian exposes both the unreliability of empathy in the ethical sphere (via the fallibility of the characters’ affective responses) and its political impotence in the face of larger structural forces (the carno-phallogocentrism informing the male characters’ behavior, and the restrictive perceptions of illness and treatment determining the medical interventions). As such, the novel reflects on the limitations (for both human and nonhuman life) of a “feeling politics” which continues to prevail. The critics’ celebration of “Flaming Trees” as redemptive or “affirmative” (Zolkos 106), however, is underpinned by their conviction that the characters’ emotional responses are the lynchpin of the novel’s ethico-political positioning. Stobie, for example, regards “Flaming Trees” as characterized by the awakening of In-hye’s ethical consciousness and her subsequent overcoming of “base reactions like disgust and jealousy” (Stobie 797). Endorsing the “purification” of the human animal of its “negative” feelings is both to follow Yeong-hye’s – unrealistic, even fatal – purificatory impulse and to approve a “feeling politics” which restricts the political to the unstable emotions of individual humans. This is simply not borne out by the text, which invites us to observe, understand and accept feelings – as an inescapable part of our humanimality – rather than judging them, and to look to other, more diverse, tools for the construction of political worlds. If the novel advances a tentative affirmation, it is by critiquing political solutions rooted either in narcissism (empathy as projection) or in self-denial (flight to the vegetal), and by acknowledging, unflinchingly, that we can only move forwards as our vulnerable, violent, animal selves.

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Danielle Sands

Danielle Sands is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy (EUP, 2019) and editor of Bioethics and the Posthumanities (London: Routledge, 2022). She held a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for her project Posthumanities: Redefining Humanities for the Fourth Industrial Age, 2018-9, and was Co-Investigator on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project The Philosophical Life of Plants, 2020-2.