Reflections between literature and music

Han Kang – Greek Lessons

(2011, published by Adelphi in 2023)

South Korean author Han Kang won over Italian readers with the surreal, existential visions of "The Vegetarian" and the short story collection "Convalescence." Adelphi has also published "Human Acts," an account of the events that took place during and after the Gwangju uprising, brutally crushed by the South Korean army in 1980. Readers' hunger for new work from her is now finally satisfied with the release of "Greek Lessons," originally published in 2011.

Right from the start, a reflection on Jorge Luis Borges's grave draws us into a world not so far removed from that of the famous Argentine writer's own work. Only here it is transposed into everyday life, into gestures and words, both spoken and unspoken - the kind that sometimes get caught in the throat like the ghosts of a stillborn life. And this is precisely the novel's central theme: the impossibility of communication, blindness both physical and emotional.

Two nameless protagonists wander the streets of Seoul: a teacher of ancient Greek and a woman studying the language. Both are hiding secrets that cut them off from the world. The woman has lost the ability to speak following her mother's death and a custody battle over her son. The teacher, afflicted with progressive blindness, gives his lessons while living a life shaped by fear and denial of his condition.

The novel explores hardship and torment as if it were a Greek tragedy, full of paradoxes, dilemmas and impossible choices. The chapters alternate between perspectives: the woman's voice is in the first person, the man's in the third. This narrative choice offers a different kind of insight into their inner worlds, revealing the circumstances that led them both to seek refuge in the study of ancient Greek.

The woman turns to it to find her way back to her mother tongue. Having spent much of his life in Europe, the teacher has instead returned to his homeland on the eve of losing his sight completely. For him, Greek becomes a "safe, silent room" in which to escape the drama consuming him.

Communication is the novel's central theme: the protagonists long to open up to others but are constantly thwarted by how difficult that proves to be. The teacher's chapters are structured as letters never sent - to a young woman he loved in his youth, to a sister far away, to an old friend. The chapters focused on the woman recount her attempts to find herself again and recover her lost words: her sleepless nights spent making desperate phone calls to her ex-husband, unable to utter a single syllable, trying to make her pain and anger felt through silence alone.

Han Kang's prose unfolds sparingly yet intensely. The images she creates are measured and elegant, rigorously focused on detail. The author uses sentence fragments, giving the text a poetic cadence that often overflows the boundaries of narrative and takes flight, in the way the protagonist's own words cannot.

“Greek Lessons” is a complex, absorbing novel that challenges readers to examine the nature of language and the very limits of fiction, which is stripped down until it becomes pure existence.

Soundtrack: Demetrio Stratos – Cantare la voce (1978, Cramps)

Just as Han Kang's characters are unable to express themselves, Demetrio Stratos breaks every chain and journeys toward the absolute. From this point of view, “Cantare la voce” is at once the antithesis of the Korean author's poetics and perfectly attuned to it. On one side, the impossibility of communication; on the other, a Stratos who actually achieves what her characters can only long for. It provides the perfect soundtrack to those pages precisely because it gives voice to those who have none.

The Greek artist (another link to the novel) uses his larynx as a vehicle for exploring the unexplored, pushing all the way to its outer limits. “Cantare la voce” is a peak of experimentation and innovation. The diphonic and triphonic techniques performed by Stratos free the voice from the constraints of words and of more or less traditional singing. They push it toward limits never before reached by a human being, freeing it from all tradition and letting it soar through the air, granting it a total sense of knowledge and openness.

With his 1978 album, the Area singer boldly challenges the Western conception of the voice as a slave to the word, seeking an alternative use of it that enhances its expressiveness. He throws himself fearlessly into the studio, going beyond what virtuosos of vocal experimentation such as Meredith Monk, Yma Sumac, Cathy Berberian and Tim Buckley had already achieved.

The exploration begins in the Mediterranean, following the tradition of the ancient Greek priests who harmonized the voice with the resonance of the temple, then moves on to Tibet, where monks produce several sounds simultaneously, and finally arrives in Africa, with shamans who modulate sound through the use of their hands.

For her part, Han Kang creates with words what Demetrio Stratos achieves with the voice: even though her characters cannot push beyond their own limits, she makes sure that the writing itself breaks its banks, dissolving every narrative pattern and becoming pure abstraction.

In the end, Kang and Stratos arrive at the same goal: freedom.

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