Greek Lessons

by Han Kang (2011)

Guest post by Nayantara Chandrasekhar

A few months ago, my three-year-old cousin asked me, “if dogs can’t talk to each other, how do they know what each other is thinking?” To the three year old, I merely said that barking was dog-language, and when he proceeded to ask me about different bark-languages, I handed the conversation back to his mother, out of my depth. But his statement struck me for two main reasons: 1) the assumption that language was a means to communicate thought, and 2) language was the only means through which one could communicate thought.

It’s a thesis that I’ve questioned increasingly as I’ve studied more linguistics, stemming from the question, why do we have language? Why do we use it? What does it give us that we don’t get from other forms of communication?

My main conundrum is this: it can’t be to communicate the obvious. For instance, there’s little point in me saying to my friend who is sitting on the sofa, “you’re sitting on the sofa.” That, she already knows In Paul Grice’s words, that would violate the conversational maxim of quantity — saying more than is necessary. It could, then, just be to have a baseline acknowledgement of another speaker, such as a “good morning” or a “hello” — but in that case, why not just use eye contact? Or body language? Okay, it’s for the sake of survival — to communicate detailed information for collective safety. But animals communicate without language and survive just fine, and computers use a binary code to send information to one another. (Whether or not these are Language is its own debate, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they are separate from Human Language). So what makes human language distinct?

There could be countless hypotheses, but the one that I am partial to is this: human language is our attempt to understand abstract thought and emotion. It’s our way of attempting to articulate to each other (or to ourselves) what we feel and why we feel it, to explain why people make decisions, to try and understand the world’s physical, biological, and chemical peculiarities. But like I said — it’s our attempt. It’s not unusual that someone will say something and then, frustrated, cry out “you don’t understand me!” Here, language has failed. There are layers of meaning encoded in words, but what one person gets from a statement may be entirely different from another, and there is no way of reaching that pure, unblemished understanding.

Han Kang, author of Greek Lessons, seems to share my view. (Either that, or my entire interpretation of her novel was confirmation bias, but either way I think it makes for an interesting discussion.) In Greek Lessons, Han Kang explores this miscommunication between her characters, and I believe that she uses the metaphor of Plato’s idea of Form or “Platonic Idealism” to express this perpetual disconnect between speaker and hearer. Plato’s theory essentially says that the reality perceived and experienced by humans is a mere imitation of “true” reality, that underlies all that we experience. Kang narrates that Form is “beauty and virtue and the sublime” and correctly writes that it is inaccessible to human beings. Language, then, becomes merely another way of imitating this form. Meaning gets lost, the speaker’s intention gets lost, and it’s a constant tug of war between interlocutors to try and form a connection that it is impossible to truly create. We are left with a mimicking of thought and assumption of intention, and we have to make do.

In Greek Lessons, Kang points out these flaws of language as a means of creating connection, and seems to say that the less we rely on language, the closer we get to experiencing true Form. The novel follows a slowly blinding Greek professor and his mute student in Seoul, and though the characters initially attempt to use language to understand one another, it begins to fail them — and they must find ways to adapt.

In the first few chapters, we see the characters get increasingly frustrated at the inherent incompleteness of language. In a scene where the mute woman is in therapy, her therapist attempts to sympathise with her early childhood memories and her recent grief, and says, “I understand how much you have suffered.” In response, she merely writes “No. It isn’t that simple.” and offers no further explanation. Her therapist’s use of language fails to accurately capture her client’s experience, and the woman doesn’t seem to have the emotional capacity — or, perhaps, the ability — to explain herself using language.

After this scene, we do not see the woman return to therapy, and language seems to only further distance her from the professor, because it cannot communicate her lived experience and form the connection it is intended to do. But this sentiment is also reflected throughout the novel, in Kang’s narrative style: the reader understands that the woman is suffering from a deep sense of grief, but it is never fully lexically expressed or described. Instead, she uses fragmented, choppy language to attempt to create the feeling of grief without ever justifying it properly. For instance, she describes how

“there are no words nor colour for her until the night is over. Everything is covered by the thick snow…that fractured as it froze, settles ceaselessly over her stiff body…she calls the dream into being, over and over again, to kiss her son’s warm eyelids.”

Instead of explicitly describing her grief, she uses what I can only describe as poetry to communicate her experience — and yet, the reader still finds themselves floundering trying to figure out her actual inner thoughts and relationship with her grief, proving Kang’s point: that language is, fundamentally, insufficient to communicate the true nature of one’s mind — or, as Plato might put it, the Form of Mind remains inaccessible to the hearer.

Of course, the fact that one character cannot speak and another cannot see makes both spoken and signed language almost impossible forms of communication. So, when the two characters actually begin to try and communicate fully with one another one-on-one, language begins to fall apart even further. For instance, when the professor attempts to apologise to the woman after asking about her poetry, he says, “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” She fails to verbally respond, and he attempts to sign, “I came out to say I’m sorry.” Kang writes,

“[the woman] stares mutely at his face, looks at him as he takes another breath, and, undeterred and emphatic, continues signing: ‘We don’t have to talk. You don’t have to make any kind of answer.’”

The woman proceeds to have no response. Although we’ve established that a verbal one is impossible, she doesn’t make an attempt to bridge the communication gap in another way, nor does she seem like she knows how to. At this point in the novel, it seems entirely inexplicable why she wouldn’t attempt to bridge the communication gap in another way — either through body language, hand signals, or nodding or smiling. But in a world that places so much weight on spoken language, how would a woman who’s this isolated know what to do? But in her internal monologue, we learn that her language is almost inaccessible — she describes how “the memory of a long-lost word rises up in her, cut in half, and she tries to grab hold of it…the eternally incomplete, eternally unwhole word stirs deep within her, never reaching her throat.” Her inability to access language makes it impossible for her to use that language to form a connection with anyone else, which, as explained earlier, is arguably the intention of language usage in the first place.

So then, with speech impossible, it seems logical to turn to written language —  because, as any linguist worth their salt will tell you, written language is merely a phonetic representation of what is spoken. So, surely, if you can’t produce the sounds, you can write them. And writing lasts for so much longer than fleeting speech — the same way that Form is permanent, while human life and communication is ephemeral. If we consider that language is a method of forming connection, then perhaps, by extension, writing is a way of solidifying and making permanent that connection. The woman still struggles to write, though.She describes how she “tightens her grip on the pencil” and “the words evade her grasp…like unbodied apparitions, their forms elude touch.” Although she doesn’t capitalise Form, the implication is clear: that words remain a fragmented, flawed way of trying and failing to access Plato’s “true” Form. The woman’s attempts at writing poetry, also, are what lead to the first awkward interaction between her and her professor, where he attempts and fails to apologise to her. This poetry is called back later in the book, where the woman explains how

“the poems she wrote sometime later were different. Little by little, her words began to falter and trial off…breaking into fragmented units, or decaying into formlessness.”

More explicitly, here, Kang explains how writing is bringing the woman further from Form rather than closer to it. This is mirrored beautifully through the narrative, as well. The end of the story, where the two characters’ narrations both seem to descend into formless poetry, is where their connection becomes the strongest. Kang describes how “he kisses her mouth without opening his eyes,” and how “the tips of her cold fingers graze his eyebrows, then vanish,” and the chapter ends with the line, “Hearts and lips touch across a fault line, at once joined and eternally sundered.” There is a sense of desperation, comfort, and overwhelming clarity when both characters realise that the absence of the spoken language the man is used to does not hinder their connection, but complements it. A New York Times review on the cover of the book claims that it’s “A celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language,” but I argue that it’s a celebration that comes in the trust to be found in a lack of language. Kang challenges the notion that language is a means of connection not just by offering flaws in language itself, but offering a clear alternative that brings both characters closer — a movement towards Plato’s Form that goes further than what language can capture.

It’s a little terrifying to me to have Kang entirely dismantle the assumption that language is a prerequisite to connection — perhaps because I am a linguist, or perhaps because I am a chatty individual. But what I love about this novel is that she doesn’t attempt to make connection seem impossible: in fact, the story ends on a distinctly hopeful note. She offers an alternative way of forming it, rooted instead in presence, shared absence, and the mutual recognition of what cannot be spoken — a bond that becomes clearest when language itself begins to fall apart.