The Listeners

By Kohinoor Dasgupta

Greek Lessons is a 2011 novel by Han Kang, the Korean author who is the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. The American edition of Greek Lessons was published by Hogarth only last year, in an English translation by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.

A woman in her late thirties signs up for Greek lessons at a private academy in Seoul. She is not interested in Ancient Greek. She would have taken up Burmese or Sanskrit, whichever introductory course was available and the most foreign to her. She is not looking to add to her resumé. She seeks a cure. A year ago, in the middle of teaching a Korean Literature class, she became mute for the second time in her life.

She had lost speech suddenly when she was sixteen and received psychiatric treatment for it. She does not credit the psychiatrist with her recovery. She lived a full year without being able to utter a word. It was while learning another foreign language in high school that a single word, "bibliothèque”, unclamped her lips.

One is hardly surprised that a string of unfamiliar alphabets making up a word meaning "library” should have stirred her sleeping words to life. She was no ordinary consumer of words! The day her older brother gave her a cursory explanation of Hangul’s structure, she, then six years old, spent all afternoon thinking about vowels and consonants and mentally fitted diphthongs as if they were Lego pieces. Even in primary school, words were never vocabulary to her, but rather infinite and interlacing meanings and sensations encapsulated in tidy forms, such as this pagoda-like, monosyllabic word in Hangul script: 숲, pronounced s-u-p and meaning "forest”.

After regaining speech during that French class, the woman went on to graduate college, publish three volumes of poetry, and work in the publishing industry. At the time of the second onset of muteness she was a Lecturer who worked in and around Seoul. Additionally, she was a columnist for a fortnightly, as well as a founding member of a cultural magazine.  

You would think that for such an accomplished person, a possibly temporary loss of speech would not be catastrophic. You would think that she would take on non-speaking jobs in the publishing industry while sorting through her problem. However, a deeper affliction lies beneath the muteness. The woman now observes her external world without interpreting its signals. She does not read anything except the material from her Ancient Greek class. She does not write anything except in that classroom.

So, she hopes that the strange new world of a dead language will somehow restore the connections between her soul and her tongue. She wants desperately to resume her quiet conversations with her young son, who no longer lives with her. Her ex-husband brought up the psychiatric treatment she received when was sixteen to make the case in court that she cannot be trusted to bring up her son.

The man teaching the Ancient Greek class expects to be go completely blind in a couple of years. He is about thirty-eight now. While the mute woman feels that a single word which encompasses all the meaning known to human languages is sitting on her heart like an icy mass, the man thinks of time as a "huge, opaque mass” which is erasing whatever remains of his visual world:

"It’s a common belief that blind or partially blind people will pick up on sounds first and foremost, but that isn’t the case with me. The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.”

The man was born in the Suyuri neighborhood of Seoul and, at fifteen years old, emigrated to Germany with his parents and younger sister. He lived in Germany for seventeen years, where he earned a rare and prestigious degree in Ancient Greek Philosophy. He moved back to Seoul six years ago and rents a studio apartment. He teaches Greek and Latin at a private academy.

The man is still oppressed by a few events of his late teens, a time of dread and euphoria and humiliation and sadness. His hereditary eye disease was diagnosed, he fell in love, and he lost a friendship. In Han Kang’s carefully plotted novel the man's memories of the time involve two other teenagers, friends of his for a time, who were also unable to live with complete freedom. One was a girl, the daughter of a Frankfurt ophthalmologist. She was deaf but had adapted well and was well positioned to live her life with as much choice and independence as possible in a developed country. The other friend was a young man who was seriously ill. He had had "dozens of operations” since he was a newborn. His name was (yes, Han Kang names him in this novel in which the protagonists are not given names!) Joachim Gründel. He was a fierce nerd, brought up by his mother to read widely and defy the limitations of his uncooperative body. Propped up on a hospital bed, Joachim once explained why he wanted to read philosophy:  

"You know how they say that, to the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t goodness or nobility, but the ability to do a certain thing in the very best way – arete was their word, the capacity for excellence. Well, think about it. Who would be best able to think about life? Someone who faces death at every turn, someone who, for that reason, is inevitably thinking of death, always, necessarily, urgently … and wouldn’t that effectively mean someone like me possesses the finest arete, at least for contemplation?”

There is thus a quartet of teenagers in the backstory, all affected by sensory or physical challenges. Only the girl who had become mute made a full recovery after a year.

That girl, the woman, the word-whisperer, has always disliked the blunt force of sentences, the way words shrank and withered to convey rigid meaning. In her own writing she aspired to be more:

"Before she lost words – when she was still able to use them to write – she sometimes wished that her own expressions would more closely resemble inarticulacy…”

Some twenty pages on, Han Kang adds:

"To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. …

"Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. When she found that physical process too much to bear, she became paradoxically more verbose. She would spin out long, intricate sentences, shunning the vitality and fluidity of easy conversation. Her voice would be louder than usual. The more people paid attention to what she was saying, the more abstract her speech became and the more broadly she smiled.

"In the periods directly before she lost speech, she became a greater talker than ever. And she was unable to write for increasingly longer stretches. Just as she had always disliked the way her voice diffused through the air, she found it difficult to tolerate the disturbance her sentences wreaked on the silence.”

In smooth, inspired prose Han Kang weaves patterns in Greek Lessons. For instance, the child who was fascinated by the monosyllabic Hangul word 숲 now learns, in Greek class, astonishing, pithy words which were in usage when Ancient Greek was at its zenith.

"This one word – modified to denote that the subject is singular, third-person male; the tense perfect, meaning it describes something that occurred at some point in the past; and the voice middle – has compressed within it the meaning "He had at one time tried to kill himself.”

Here is another echo. One Sunday night a couple of months before the Greek teacher emigrated to Germany, out walking alone, he noticed the full moon obscured by a gray cloud. The fifteen-year-old was perplexed by the purple lunar halo which seemed like "a mysterious, disquieting code”. The memory of that night is still vivid, wrapped in nostalgia for Suyuri and a time when he did not know that he had a degenerative eye disease. Now, partially blind, what does he notice about the silent female student in his Greek class? Does he note that she is always dressed in deep mourning, and that the only color on her person is a dark purple velvet hairband on her left wrist? Can he see the color? Certainly, we do see that the woman herself appears like "a mysterious, disquieting code” to him, but does he detect the specific resonance?

Han Kang/Photo by Park Jaehong

Han Kang begins Greek Lessons with an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who went blind in his fifties. Borges started losing his eyesight in his twenties. In 1938, he suffered a head injury which left him mute for a while.

Greek Lessons is a marvel of harmonies which peers at the unfathomable reaches of human insight and communication.