The Obsolete for the Inept: Thoughts on Han Kang’s Greek Lessons

“The night is not calm” (Han Kang, Greek Lessons, my translation)

This simple reversal of expectation speaks voluminously about being unable to speak, hear, or see. My preconception says that the night, in literature, is calm. But the sensorial darkness of Han Kang’s characters in Greek Lessons is always turbulent. Rising and falling. Cutting, splitting, breaking. Without the possibility of mending—but with potential for new connections, stronger and deeper, for the very fact of not conforming to existing ideas of human connection.

The story of Han Kang’s Greek Lessons is simple. A woman takes classes on the Ancient Greek language. A man teaches that class. It seems that it is impossible for the two to communicate and connect. But slowly—painfully so—and rather accidentally, they stumble onto a connection.

The woman is unable to speak. Not for some physiological reason, but for the shame of uttering language that is always complete and incomplete, truthful and deceitful, beautiful and hideous all at once. It is painful; “language traps and pierces her like clothes woven with thousands of needles.” All of a sudden—like a self-defense mechanism—language disappears. She stops thinking in language; begins to move and understand without knowledge. Language can no longer incise, but in return, she loses her child. It is a society where being unable to speak signifies the inability to be a mother.

The man, on the other hand, holds on to a mere ghost of an eyesight. He remembers the lost love of his youth: a girl whose hearing would soon fade. Their mutual future would be one of darkness and silence. Soon, she would not be able to hear his voice, and he would not be able to see her signs. The only possible means of liaison for their languages would become—touch. However, their ability to touch was itself forever conceded when he left her for another continent. Although he still has words to remember her by, the memory becomes increasingly intangible.

What connects the woman and the man, in the end, is the obsolete language of Ancient Greece. It is a language for classrooms and metaphysical abstractions. It is safe in its uselessness. Functional in its obsolescence. It is not just the language of philosophy, but philosophy itself. It provides no solution—merely negates the necessity for one.

The woman writes a poem in Ancient Greek:

One person lying down in the snow

Snow in the throat

Dirt on the eyelid

Nothing can be seen

One person stops and stands in front

Nothing can be heard

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag illuminates the problems of imagining others' suffering through images. But what happens when we are unable to regard the pain of others—if snow is stuck in our throats and dirt covers our eyes? What possibilities are left to us then?

Perhaps we may finally stop our futile attempt to regard the pain of others. Perhaps we would learn to regard our own pain—in the presence of another. Perhaps we will stop, stand, and face one another. Each seeing and hearing one’s own scars, but all the more coherent and unified, for our sheer ineptitude for prejudice.