New Yorker Fiction Review #288: "The Middle Voice" by Han Kang

Review of the short story from the Feb. 6, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...

What we have here is a short story by Man Booker International Prize-winning, South Korean author Han Kang. Han Kang won the Man Booker prize in 2016 for her novel The Vegetarian, which deals with a woman's descent into madness as she suffers neglect from her family. The writer of a handful of novels -- two more, of note, since The Vegetarian -- Han Kang's first literary attention came from her work as a poet. 

In the short story in question "The Middle Voice," we have a vignette or glimpse into the life of a middle-aged, urban woman -- the mother of an eight year old boy -- who has lost her voice for the second time in her life. The first time, we learn in a flashback, was when she was 16 years old. Now, 20 or so odd years later, it has happened again, disrupting her career as a literary critic and lecturer and driving her to study ancient Greek in the hopes that the foreignness of the language might jog her vocal chords back into action. 

Han Kang's prose is, at times, like poetry. She uses elaborate metaphors to map the internal terrain of the emotions going on inside the main character -- whom we know in this story only as "the woman" -- who is, herself, somewhat of a philosopher and a mystic perhaps because of her affliction or perhaps it is this mysticism which is the cause of her affliction.

The woman -- at least twice in the short story -- refers to language as something that sort of gets in the way, or rather that words are just things we feel the need to apply to emotions, objects, and actions but which only make things more complicated. Consider the following passage:

"She only looks. She looks, and doesn't translate any of the things that she sees into language...Images of objects form in her eyes, and they move, fluctuate, or are erased in time with her steps, without ever being translated into words."

This passage hints that perhaps there is some kind of deeper understanding to be found in the space between the world and the words, the "middle voice," if you will. The woman, although afflicted with a condition that makes life in society extremely difficult has been, for her trouble, given a glimpse of this deeper understanding. Will it help her? Will it be worth the suffering of not being able to speak?

One's voice is one of their most basic, elemental forms of agency. We ask for what we want. We coerce people. We argue. We help console others. We engage in the working world. We cry out if we are in pain. It is so much a part of our lives, such an often-used tool, that we do not consider it, like a limb, or an organ. 

Thus, what does it mean that this woman has lost her voice? It means, in many ways, she has lost her agency. For one thing, she has lost her job. She can no longer be a lecturer if she cannot speak. For another thing, she is unable to raise her voice in protest at her ex-husband taking their son away to another country to live. The woman has lost more than her voice, she has lost her power. 

We learn that the woman's mother almost had her aborted due to a bout of typhoid during the pregnancy. The woman, it seems, was told and reminded of this (quite cruelly, even if it was unintentionally cruel) as a child. We are further meant to understand that this gave the woman a tenuous hold on her place in the world and a wish to not take up too much space with her body, or her voice. Is it any wonder then, that she lost her voice altogether? Perhaps instead of an affliction, the loss of her voice is meant to be the type of "surrender" that Buddhists and spiritual philosophers speak of. 

When the woman was 16 she regained her voice by learning to pronounce French words and so, as an adult, she studies ancient Greek in order to -- perhaps -- regain her voice once again. The idea of finding one's voice through a foreign language cannot be dismissed or overlooked. In fact, it might be the key to understanding this story. Perhaps the woman is on the path to finding her voice again through the "middle voice." 

Illustration by Lucy Jones.