Han Kang’s Light and Thread is a Love Letter to Language

The experience of reading a Han Kang novel can be likened to that of a detective newly arrived on the scene of a poorly covered up crime: laden with clues, grisly, and laced with a complex motive to be teased out. She rewards those willing to follow her trail of ciphers tremendously. Light and Thread is no exception.

The Nobel laureate’s capstone book Light and Thread  is her first work of nonfiction published in English. Kang amasses writings from over the course of her career, beginning with her Nobel lecture and reaching deep into her life’s documents, with diaries, poems, and photographs. In a poem written at eight years old, Kang imagines a “gold thread connecting between our hearts.” That thread, to Kang, is love.

During her Nobel Lecture, Kang repeatedly appeals to language as a means to kinsmanship, describing her feelings of astonishment at its capacity to transmit her interiority to her readers. “In these moments I experience again the thread of language that connects us, how my questions are relating with readers through that electric, living thing,” Kang writes. “I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have connected with me through that thread, as well as to all those who may come to do so.”

Yet Kang hasn’t always painted language with gratitude. Her fiction has long been characterized by gruesome imagery and body horror, often sustained by characters whose psychological torment proves even more distressing than their physical conditions. Deborah Smith, the English-language translator of Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts—and the subject of some controversy surrounding her translation’s creative license, despite Kang’s express backing—has acknowledged the “near-unbearable intensity” of Kang’s wordplay, resulting in a prose where “even the slightest physical contact, no matter how intentionally tender or gently performed, is felt as violence, as violation.”

Examples of such brutality are easily found, but a pattern emerges when we examine who precisely is its agent. Time and again, Kang brandishes language as an instrument of violence, in the most literal sense: the protagonist of Greek Lessons (2011) dreams of language as an “ice-cold explosive in the center of her hot heart, encased in her pulsing ventricles.” Similarly, to the protagonist of We Do Not Part (2021), words appear as “something oozing from the page, something viscous that trickles out caked and thick like red-bean juk, and blood-metallic.” Other times, language and its carnage have taken a more abstract form, one closer to the definition of connection and communion Kang assigns it in Light and Thread. The heroine of The Vegetarian (2007), increasingly revolted by the consumption of meat, mourns its violation of her most intimate flesh: “All those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.”

But if this is the relationship Kang’s characters have historically held with language, Light and Thread seems interested in rehabilitating it. This time, rarely do words serve to injure—instead, she extends each syllable toward us hopefully and expectantly, like an antenna seeking extraterrestrial life, wanting to make contact.

Beyond the standard anxieties of releasing her work to the public, Kang meditates on the act of transmission that occurs in the very articulation of a person’s spirit through words. If she can use language to reach out and touch, she inevitably leaves herself vulnerable to being touched in return. And yet—if language is what pricks and bruises, at least there is proof of blood to be drawn. “Does love beget pain, and is some pain evidence of love?” Kang asks. “I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences.”

Indeed, Kang as a civilian seemingly cannot separate herself from her vocation as a narrator. Her preoccupation with her narrative voice—or perhaps with her agency as a first person narrator, if there’s a difference between the two—begins as a child, where she describes a startling experience of what John Koenig names sonder, realizing that every person is their own first person narrator, or “living as an ‘I’ in their own right.” It carries into the final years of drafting We Do Not Part, during which she refers to herself exclusively in scare quotes in her notebook (“‘my’ own voice,” she writes, and “everyone has left ‘me’”). Her “I” is something that’s simultaneously abstracted and clarified: “I” the person, “I” the storyteller, “I” the purveyor of language. Elsewhere, she takes care to point out that the Korean title of her novel Human Acts, or Sonyeon-i Onda (literally, “the boy comes”), addresses the boy in a second person “you,” placing herself in direct conversation with him. Accordingly, when we as readers encounter the title, we assume the “you” position—placing her in direct conversation with us.

This time, rarely do words serve to injure—instead, she extends each syllable toward us hopefully and expectantly, like an antenna seeking extraterrestrial life, wanting to make contact.

Longtime readers of Kang will appreciate easter eggs throughout the book. In a section titled “Garden Diary,” she describes a particular affection for a maple tree who struggles to thrive in the sunless courtyard, recalling the protagonist of The Vegetarian’s Ovidian dream of turning into a tree and subsisting solely off light. Likewise, Kang’s fears of language failing her mirror the heroine of Greek Lessons, who nearly succumbs to snow, or the “the silence that falls from the sky.” But in Light and Thread, there’s a distinct shedding of Kang’s armor, as though she no longer desires to wield language as a weapon designed to wound. Kang’s highlighting of the first-person and second-person voices is a clear deviation from her Greek Lessons-era fascination with the Greek “middle voice,” whose main characterization was one of self-containment, operating as both the agent and the object of any given action. Her new perspective gazes at us directly, compelling us to meet her eye.

Even the poetics of the select Hangul that makes it into the English translation begin literally to open up: in Greek Lessons, the phonetics of the word 숲 (forest) had symbolized a partitioning, the bordering unvoiced consonants standing in for the woman character’s encroaching muteness and isolation. In Light and Thread, Kang observes that her house is built in the shape of the Korean consonant ㄷ, thus necessitating the use of mirrors to ensure the various fruit trees planted in its courtyard receive sunlight from all sides. Aside from the visible aperture in the character, its symbolism similarly lies in its phonetics. Linguists may notice that this particular consonant on its own remains unvoiced (imagine the breathiness of a “T” sound), but gains voicing when part of a larger collective of syllables in a word (now imagine the sonority of a “D” sound).

And what is the significance of voicing in linguistics? It is the activation of the vocal cords, the hum of friction and vibration, and—seemingly according to Kang—evidence of vitality and pulse. It is resonance created by touch, the result of lifeforms coming into contact. As Kang labors to cultivate the small forest in her courtyard despite the lack of sunlight, she reflects, “Even in this introverted house, there are directions that open outward.” As she watches the snow fall from the sky above the courtyard, she finally finds voicing in its silence: “I listen to the sound of snow, piled on the roof tiles, melting and trickling down the gutter. It sounds like music.”

Before she began writing Greek Lessons, Kang recalls that she “came to imagine a tactile moment in which the softest parts of two people meet.” With Light and Thread, could it be that this touch is at last pain-free? Could Kang finally trust words and readers enough to expose the soft and intricate matter of her mind? Like the maple tree in her garden, Kang lets language unfurl and savor the sun.