Han Kang
2023, The New Yorker
Note: ‘The Middle Voice’ is drawn from Han Kang’s 2011 novel Greek Lessons, which was translated to English in 2023. My student Nayantara Chandrasekhar wrote a guest post about Greek Lessons which you can read here.
Most linguists don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the voice. I spend more time trying to get people to forget about voice. Language doesn’t have to be spoken; sign language is language. And not everything we do with our voices should be considered language—our wordless whimpering, humming, grunting, sobbing and screaming are not what make us a linguistic species.
This basic point is central to Chomskyan linguistics but widely adopted across other theories too, and many of the stories we read in this class help drive it home: Mazes, Story of Your Life, Speech Sounds, Embassytown, and Amnesty all encourage us to forget about the vocal tract and imagine other ways language could manifest.
‘The Middle Voice’ does something different. It isn’t sci-fi, but it’s like sci-fi in the way it gets us to dysrecognize something we normally take for granted, in this case the physical human voice. Humans can externalize linguistic messages by pushing out air with our lungs and shaping it into complex sound waves with our larynx and mouth. What does it mean for us to engage with each other via this particular exercise of the body?
What it’s about. The unnamed protagonist of ‘The Middle Voice’ is a woman who has recently lost, in the following order, her mother, custody of her young son, her ability to speak, and her job. She’s presented to us as a silent, isolated, hunched-over, wraithlike figure, dressed head-to-toe in black in the middle of summer, simmering in a strange nervous energy that’s almost painful to read about:
The woman’s lips twitch. She moistens her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. In front of her chest, her hands are quietly restless. She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She holds her breath, then exhales deeply.
That kind of frame-by-frame narration makes me uncomfortably aware of the constant activity and noise of bodies, even resting bodies. And in that state of heightened awareness, the act of speaking starts to seem like a loud and shocking disruption, like a truck horn blasting over the din of a city street. The protagonist is keenly attuned to the way speech ‘vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener.’ She experiences speech as physical contact, an act of touching; she prefers communicating with her eyes.
What’s going on with this woman, to make her experience speech this way?
We learn that her muteness arrived unexpectedly and suddenly—mid-sentence, in front of a classroom (yikes). Her therapist at the time diagnoses it as a reaction to psychological trauma—reasonably enough—and advises her to stop being afraid: ‘It’s all right to speak up. Straighten your shoulders and take up as much space as you like.’ But the woman refuses this neat interpretation: No. It isn’t that simple, she writes to him, and then quits therapy.
She doesn’t think she lives in fear; she doesn’t want to take up more space. She wants to ‘reclaim language of her own volition.’ So she enrolls in an evening course in Ancient Greek.
Greek middle voice. The story is named after a well-known feature of Greek grammar: the middle voice, distinct from the active and passive voice. According to the woman’s Greek instructor (who learns the hard way not to call on her in class), the middle voice is used to ‘express an action that relates to the subject reflexively.’
I’ve never studied Greek morphosyntax, so I looked up some examples in Zuñiga & Kittilä’s Grammatical Voice (2019:§5.4):
- loú-ō ‘I wash (something).’
- loú-omai ‘I am (being) washed’; ‘I wash myself’
- loú-omai tà himátia ‘I wash the clothes for myself’; ‘I wash my clothes’
In (1), the subject ‘I’ is the one doing the washing (active voice). When you add the middle-voice suffix -omai (2)-(3), the subject is understood as the one being washed, or washing itself, or washing something else for itself. Adding the middle-voice suffix changes the way the subject relates to the event, typically by making it reflexive.
With some verbs, the middle-voice suffix has a different (but related) effect: it ‘lays stress on the conscious activity, bodily or mental participation of the agent.’1 If you add the middle-voice suffix to ‘I take,’ the Greek instructor says, it ends up meaning ‘I choose.’ My own favorite example: if you add the middle-voice suffix to politeú-ō ‘I’m a citizen,’ it becomes politeú-omai ‘I perform my civic duties’ (i.e. ‘I’m an engaged citizen’).
We can see why the Greek middle voice catches the attention of this extremely isolated woman. It represents the subject turning in on itself, affecting itself, becoming more self-contained and intensified.
Two kinds of voice. This story raises an interesting question that had honestly never occurred to me before: What does grammatical voice (active, passive, middle) have to do with the physical voice? Why is grammatical voice even called voice; what’s the basis for that polysemy?
Some initial thoughts on this:
- As recognized by Eckert 2019 (§5.3-5.4) and others, the voice reveals something about the speaker as a person. The pitch, volume and quality of my voice can give you hints about my size, age, gender, affective state, energy level, whether I’m presenting myself as a professor or as a mommy. And in a more abstract sense, grammatical voice also reveals something about the speaker: your choice of active, passive or middle voice tells us about your orientation toward the event and its participants, who you see in the foreground and background, who you view as in control, suffering or benefiting—i.e. your perspective.
But what if you don’t want to reveal this kind of information about yourself? What if you don’t even have access to it?
- I remember a moment when I was tongue-tied recently. I was trying to speak German to my friend’s visiting parents, and (on top of being generally rusty) I realized I didn’t know if I should address them with the familiar ihr or the formal Sie. And I couldn’t start any of the conversations I was thinking about (Have you seen Frank’s office yet? What are you doing after this?) without that information. I came up with some cringey work-arounds (‘Hey Frank, have your parents seen your office yet?’) but mostly I kept silent. Missing that one piece of information, about my social position vis à vis my interlocutors, was a powerful inhibitor.
- Part of what fascinates the woman about Greek is its high degree of synthesis. The word loúomai in in (2), for example, can stand alone as a sentence; the subject, tense, mood and voice are all packed into the verb. That means, though, that if you’re missing any of those pieces of information, you can’t form the verb—which means you can’t say anything at all.
The woman in ‘The Middle Voice’ has nightmarish visions of ‘a single word in which all human language was encompassed…One single word, bonded with tremendous density and gravity.’
Imagine the danger you could release into the world by uttering that word, and why you might prefer to keep silent.
‘The Middle Voice’ is a strange, dark story that ends ambiguously. The full novel Greek Lessons is also strange but more lovely, varied and hopeful: we get to see this character moving toward a new kind of connection and expression. You can read my student’s thoughts about the novel here.
I haven’t read ‘The Middle Voice’ with a whole class yet, but I’ve had great discussions about it with individual students. If I do assign it in class, it will probably be toward the end of the semester, when I can better judge how much the group will enjoy connecting it with other things we’ve read—e.g. Speech Sounds, Solitude and especially The Third Tower.
- Smyth 1974:1728, as cited in Zuñiga & Kittilä 2019:§5.4. ↩︎
