Debt and Payback through the Vegetal Imagination

This book is a close and highly original reading of Han Kang's The Vegetarian. Its central concern is that of the violence in the novel directed towards the female protagonist Yeong-hye and in respect to Han Kang's notion of 'innocence.' Employing a sophisticated theoretical approach, the book will argue that Yeong-hye is the epitome of someone trying to embrace the victims of a violent history, symbolized in the novel as uprooted trees. To make this case, Gaston Bachelard's concept of the 'vegetal imagination' will be incorporated within a broader poststructural-psychoanalytic context, namely that of Jacque Lacan's key concepts of the Real and Fantasy. Further still cultural economics will provide further insight in relationship to Margaret Atwood's notion of 'debt' and 'payback,' accounting for Yeong-hye's deeper motivations, crystalized as 'moral debt.' As William Skidelsky insightfully illuminates in his review of Atwood's book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth; "At a time when so many of us are mired in debts of the financial variety, it is worth remembering that it is the other, non-financial debts that we owe-to the planet, and to each other[...]."