The White Book by Han Kang: an exploration of grief
Can grief turn into something beautiful? I guess it does. Eventually. For a long time, prose and poetry have transformed grief into something manageable, sayable; something lighter. And literature on grief is abundant. Some recent examples that deal with bereavement include Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which have both received critical acclaim. I truly enjoyed these titles, but they did not strike quite so much as Han Kang’s The White Book.
Drawing on Kang’s personal experience, the narrator of The White Book grieves a sister born before her who only survived a few hours. Moving from South Korea to a country which was ravaged during the war (allegedly Poland, where the writer spent some months), grief moves with her across time and space. Thus, Kang shows the all-encompassing power that grief has over those who are confronting it and portrays the shame of survival. The White Book is not a struggle over death, it is a fight for life and the living.
Kang’s purpose is stated early in the book: she hopes it will become something “transformative” that can eventually turn “into something like white ointment applied to a swelling,- like gauze laid over a wound”. Grief, like its potential cure — like the ointment, emerges as something white: the snow and fog that muffle thoughts and recall melancholic sceneries. Against this quietness, the loudness of muttered words: “Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die”. Kang reimagines the premature birth of her sister, moves from swaddling bands to shroud in a short span, and situates herself within the darkness of this short-lived life.
The White Book rejects any simplification of mourning and melancholia and the canonical understanding of these Freudian concepts. It moves in between the two: between letting go and clinging to an event that comes back under different disguises. Through these departures and returns, Kang offers not only a meditation on grief but also on the transience of our own lives. I guess this is one of the purposes of grief narratives: to remind us that nothing is permanent and that without death, there is no life. Everything is made equal in this whiteness.
“And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand.
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers.”
Kang’s modernist poetics suit grief rather well. I do not want to claim that a fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness style is the most apt way to narrate grief, as some theorisations of trauma narratives have insisted. But here, poetic prose, form, and format are seamed together to weave a complex account of loss. The materiality of the book, presented as something tidy, pristine, even soft to the touch, may evoke the idea of grief as a fetish, as that melancholic object of mourning that we cannot let go.
As an anecdote, I’ll confess that I could not underline or highlight any of its pages. It felt like trespassing and bringing unwelcome traces into an intimate, sacred space of mourning. And I could not put it down or back in the shelf. I did not want to let go. Although this is my personal experience, I think that this transference shows Kang’s mastery in portraying grief. And I will keep returning to its beauty. I do not think it is possible for this whiteness to clear one’s memory of such a heavy burden, but I think it does bring clarity and the hope for a lighter journey. After all, we might be “beginning to endure”.
