Lives Filled with Injustice: An Exploration of Violence and the Body in 'Whale'

by Tanvi Joshi

“The hardships she had endured were too horrific to utter out loud.”

Like the titular whale cresting the ocean, Cheon Myeong-kwan’s 2004 novel Whale (translated by Chi-Young Kim in 2023) is a tale that is not only enormous and grand in scale, but also concerns itself with enormity and grandeur. Whale takes us through the lives of many characters, through years of history and change. In its huge cast of characters, the story mainly follows the life of Geumbok, an ambitious woman inspired by the sight of a whale cresting the ocean to seek and make grand things, including a whale-shaped theatre. We also meet her daughter Chunhui, who is the opposite of her mother in almost every way, and whose life, inextricably tied with her mother’s, sees its own cruelties. The events of the story start from pre-modern Korea—though the exact time period remains vague— and span the period of modernization and ‘civilization’ over many years. The story bears witness to the magnitude of changes that this transition brought on. What it depicts is not pretty— the world of the story feels, foremost, violent, then also absurd, at times painful, and at others hopeful.

As I read the book, I kept getting caught off guard—by unexpected events, by the degree of violence, and by the twists and turns of fate in the story. There was much that I simply enjoyed in the book, and I write about it here too, but there was also so much that was challenging. The most challenging aspect of the book for me was understanding the role and purpose of violence in the narrative. The book does not shy away from looking at violence, and this forced me to also look at it directly as well, and grapple with it head on.

Visual and gory depictions of violence often come across as vulgar attempts at pulling attention and have been criticized abundantly. But what about those whose lives have been upturned by violence, who have had no choice but to see and experience the same violence a reader/viewer might turn away from? What about those who don’t get to look away from it? With the ongoing genocide in Palestine committed by Israel, news about which is coming largely from Palestinians themselves, the importance of witnessing the violence has become startingly clear, especially as so much of the world looks away. Literature and art often play the role of witness—both for public history and individual lives. Witnessing is not simply looking at a spectacle as it unfolds out of curiosity or amusement, but a more conscious attempt to honour what was, what happened, and what continues to happen. In the face of cruelty and brutality, our instinct is to look away, sometimes even to try to forget about what we saw. But art and literature have often seen their role as being the opposite of that—to look, to honour, to remember.

As Professor Jane Kilby of the University of Salford says in her article on the theories of violence,

“…violence is…a complex reality. That is to say, it is material and symbolic; structural and aberrant; collective and individual; visible and invisible; legal, extralegal and illegal; brutal and subtle; sporadic and everyday; and spectacular and banal. It is a feature of war and peace, and is a source of ambivalence, being legitimate and justified at times, in certain circumstances, and according to specific protocols, but not others. It is a source of (apparent) pleasure for some; the experience of horror for others; and a matter of indifference for many…”(1)

The fascinating and challenging thing about Whale is that it encompasses this entire range of violence. It speaks to a nation’s history—one that was violent—and to a rapidly changing world in which the changes themselves were so big and fundamental as to be a form of violence, and which led to brutality in the everyday lives of so many. This then necessarily involves, as well, violence against the women of the story—perpetrated by both men and women. Some think these depictions to be misogynistic.(2) I’m not entirely sure if I agree. But then what purpose does violence serve in the text?

The Cruelties of Mothers and Daughters

At the heart of this story are two pairs of mother and daughter. First, the ambitious and business-minded protagonist Geumbok and her daughter Chunhui, who is mute and has a keen sensory awareness of the world; and second, the old crone, driven by the desire for revenge against the world for the injustices she has faced in her life, and her daughter, known later as the one-eyed woman, who travels with a cloud of bees surrounding her. These two relationships are, arguably, the first site of violence in the book.

Chunhui’s story bookends Geumbok’s. If Geumbok’s story forms the chunky middle of the story and her actions are the cause—directly or indirectly—for many of the book’s significant events, Chunhui seems to frame these events. Both mother and daughter end up leaving their mark in history: Geumbok through her many ground-breaking businesses and Chunhui through the high-quality bricks she makes. In contrast to Geumbok’s vaulting ambition when it comes to the expansion of her businesses, and through them her money and power, which only ends with her death, is Chunhui’s quiet presence and work that makes an impact long after her death. The many, many bricks she makes without any known purpose are used later to build a theatre, with many theorising on the life of their maker. A movie is made about her as well, though all the significant details are altered for the market. While the mother seeks a name and fortune (a path which cannot be a non-violent one), the daughter just longs for the return of those she loves.

The other set of mother and daughter make sideways appearances in the story at moments that then alter the course of events in significant ways.The old crone, or rather her ghost, is the source of a huge fire at the whale-shaped theatre built by Geumbok. This is one among her many acts of chaos and cruelty in the afterlife, the rampage starting after her daughter, the one-eyed woman, kills her in a scuffle for her money. It’s also Geumbok’s discovery of the old crone’s hidden fortune that enables the many business endeavours she undertakes. The one-eyed woman returns later to claim the money back from Geumbok as well.

To think of the mother-daughter pairs as mirroring each other would be too simplistic, but some parallels are hard not to notice. Significantly, in both the relationships, the two mothers are at best indifferent and at worst cruel, through physical and verbal violence, towards their daughters—the latter when the daughters seem to resemble their fathers. Then, the pain felt by the two daughters who never received their mothers’ affection along with the lives of complete isolation they end up living are also echoes of each other.

Geumbok, inspired by the sight of a whale breaching the ocean, loves and vies for things and people that evoke a similar sense of awe by virtue of their largeness. The narrator tells us, “When she saw the blue whale from the beach, she had glimpsed what eternal life looked like, life that had triumphed against death.” Her love for Geokjong, a hugely-built man of enormous strength; the magnifying and multiplying nature of her own ambition; the grandeur and ostentation of the whale-shaped theatre she constructs in the town of Pyeongdae, all speak to this desire. Yet these feelings towards all that is enormous do not extend to her daughter, who like her father is huge and possesses extraordinary physical strength.

These four women also appear in each other’s lives at unexpected moments. At the end of Chunhui’s prison term after being wrongly accused of arson and murder, she meets the ghost of the old crone—the one who actually committed these crimes. Carrying with her the force of violence born out of a sense of revenge throughout the story, the old woman seems tired now. We don’t know what caused this change but, in this moment of loneliness for Chunhui, the ‘wrong’ mother shows the ‘wrong’ daughter an act of care by giving her a piece of tofu. Later, after living in isolation for a long time, Chunhui encounters the one-eyed woman in the woods. This time the other daughter cures her of an illness. Whatever care we see between the two pairs is thus twisted and insufficient, though significant in that moment, and the violence imparted by these four women seems like the fraught mother-daughter relationship taken to its extreme.

The Violence of Change and Lives Filled with Injustice

In this story, which is always aware of its own storytelling through its frequent narratorial interruptions commenting on the story and how it is told, our attention is often drawn to what is omitted, what we may never know. I felt constantly aware of the questions that remained unanswered and the fact that, ultimately, we build narratives out of things we often don’t understand. In fact, the novel satirizes the process by which these gaps in our knowledge become empty theories and ideologies, or even plain old gossip. But the narrator tells us that if you wonder at what you don’t know,

“…it means you have the talent to become a storyteller, because stories are an exploration into a life filled with injustice [emphasis mine]. It’s not simple to answer any of these questions. Only those with illegitimate intentions attempt to explain the world in simple terms, aiming to define everything in a line or two….”(3)

The splicing of cruelty and violence in the narrative of Whale is then asking us to look at these lives and bear witness to them. In doing so, the goal is not to explain or interpret, but to simply say, “This happened.” The act of witnessing like this then carves a space for the many complex lives that lived through so much history and change and experienced many injustices and triumphs. To spin these into narratives that make sense to us will never do them justice.

As historical forces rupture and shape the characters, the characters also end up shaping historical events, the consequences of which are often unpredictable and outside their control; and as mentioned before, a kind of violence themselves. The experience of watching American films in a theatre is a strong force that shapes Geumbok’s future life in a huge way, culminating in the establishment of her own theatre later. This introduces the town of Pyeongdae to American films as well, a massive cultural shift for a largely isolated town. The establishment of the railway cuts through and modernizes Pyeongdae (and the country) in ways that alter the very lives of its citizens completely. The war between the North and the South leads to deaths no one can make sense of; the establishment of Geumbok’s café creates a whole new culture of blind dates and incorrectly-used English expressions, the language too experiencing a kind of rupture,

“The café offered all kinds of new experiences to once-isolated Pyeongdae residents. This was as powerful as drugs and left an indelible impression on them.

An elegant atmosphere and romantic sentiments were new to them, as was the expression ‘to be stood up.’ So too were the girls who worked in the café, the smash hit ‘A Cup of Coffee’ sung by the Pearl Sisters, chewing gum, soccer, the brave confidence of adopting an ‘American style,’ ‘black’ coffee, and its bitter aftertaste. New slang cropped up referring to people who stayed for hours at a time in the café. Ssanghwa tea, blind dates, the increase of cigarette smoking, the habit of stacking or snapping matches from the big box on each table, quizzes, inane jokes, stolen kisses in dark corners, the game Breakout, King Crimson’s ‘Epitaph,’ small squares of paper one could write song requests on, the appearance of DJs, the popular practice of DJs pronouncing Korean words in an Americanized way, selling tickets to have café girls come to your home for ‘deliveries,’ and the incorrect use of the English word ‘refill’ when people said ‘Can I have some more refill,’ et cetera.”(4)

Among these big shifts, for the characters, the many laws the narrator lays down—ranging from “This was the law of capitalism” to more silly ones like “This was the law of being overly confident”(5)—imply that some things just follow the course nature set out for them, and we are all equally in their thrall.

Among these rules and forces, the thing that seems to constrain the characters of this book more than anything, seems to be their own bodies, and their existence in them. I found this to be one of the most interesting and challenging aspects of the book. It’s the scent that makes Geumbok irresistible to men, the smell of fish that never leaves her first husband, the fishmonger, Chunhui and Geokjong’s large size and immense strength, the old crone’s ‘ugliness’, her daughter’s missing eye, or the fierce appearance of the man with the scar. These aspects of their bodily existence seem to dictate the characters in ways outside their control—in how they are perceived, how they are treated, and how their lives play out. Bawdy depictions abound in this book, never letting you forget that we all exist first in our bodies. However, for the women protagonists, this invariably means violence against them, described in the book through multiple incidents of men brutalising them. This then seems to be the law of female bodies.

Though men are on the receiving end of violence as well, given that the main characters are mostly women (for a large part of the book) and given the time period, a majority of the violence is experienced by the women, though they inflict it as well.

In an interview, the Korean filmmaker, Park Chan-Wook, whose films famously explore violence, says,

“Violence can be seen everywhere. It exists everywhere. It’s something that influences society, organizations, and individuals. It may not be the only influence, but it’s one of the biggest ones. But it seems to me that we often refuse to accept that reality and to acknowledge its true form in popular culture. We focus on the good things like love or hope. And if our expression stopped there, that wouldn’t be enough…. What I’m interested in are the desires that people tend to suppress. One’s desires that can’t be shown to others proudly or openly. I believe that it’s only when we examine those desires that we can truly understand just what kind of beings we are. I think that’s required to express those things, and this may be why I tend to be interested in violence.”(6)

Whale seems to have a similar interest in the cruelty and the ugliness of the world that we would rather turn away from. However, Chan-Wook goes on to say, “…if you take a look at my movies, they’re not actually that graphic. Cutting off a tongue, for example. The story may deal with a person getting his tongue cut off, but the actual scene of it happening is not in the film. I make it possible for the viewer to imagine it.”(7) Here, then was the difficulty: in Whale, the description of this was in excruciating detail and the occurrence at an alarming frequency. One could argue that the medium of the film is necessarily different and therefore requires a difference in depiction, but where does that leave these gruesome written descriptions? Though I’m not convinced that the depiction was misogynistic and I could see that it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek in how it shows that brutality, it did make me stop reading the book several times. Though the narrator makes apologies for it, I was left wondering how it served the story. Is the description of that degree of violence not vulgar? Or is it a witnessing of lives full of injustice? There were many playful aspects to the book too, but this constant presence of violence made it hard to retain that sense of play. Perhaps, that was the point: the simultaneous existence of play and brutality, life and cruelty.

This is not, however, the only way bodies are important to the text. Though the characters are bound by their bodies—violence rooted in the body, the body rooted in violence—there is defiance too. Here, the exploration of the body takes on nuance. If the characters must obey the law of the body, what becomes of their agency? The characters in Whale ultimately defy their bodily existence in many different ways, with the defiance itself becoming a sort of prison. Some instances of this are: a pair of bartending twins believed to have exchanged bodies their whole lives (even after one of the twins dies, the two of them continue to exist in one body); the old crone who refuses to die and her ghost who continues to exact revenge for all the times she felt wronged when she was alive; Chunhui, who lives on despite depriving herself of water for a month.

The most exciting defiance, for me, was the Orlando(8)-esque transformation through which, towards the end of the story, Geumbok becomes a man. The way biological explanations are hinted at but never committed to implies that gender can exist outside the body too: as the book says when talking about the confusion around Geombok’s transformation to a man, “A thingy isn’t always necessary.” Geumbok’s transformation allows him (we, too, will switch pronouns at this point, just as the narrator does) to live his life in a whole new way. The narrator tells us, “She would try to use big things to beat out small things, overcome shabbiness through shiny things, and forget her suffocating hometown by jumping into the vast ocean. And finally, she became a man to hurdle over the limitations of being a woman.”(9) This transformation, too, then is kind of beating out of the feminine body.

However, their defiance does not ultimately prove to be empowering in any way for the characters. Towards the end of Geumbok’s life, he turns to alcohol to numb his guilt about the deaths of the people in his life. He does not remain the dynamic force he was for most of the story. The old crone, as mentioned, seems not to have found satisfaction in the revenge she sought in her afterlife. As for the twins, after the death of one twin, the other kills herself, not being able to suffer the grief, or so the story goes. Perhaps there is no escaping the law of female bodies. But perhaps also this is not the kind of bleak view a text like this holds. In Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival “…laughter and death are intertwined; death and pain are everywhere and are grimly real, only death never has the final word.”(10) When Chunhui wants to die, her body won’t let her. Death may not have the final word, but this is not necessarily to the benefit of those who defy it.

CONCLUSION

You could situate Whale in several literary traditions, and many have already done so: the picaresque/carnivalesque novel, the epic, magic realism, folklore, and so on. The book weaves a narrative so rich, with such a wide cast of characters, and such absurd and grand events that it would be impossible to say everything there is to say about it here. There are many readers who describe the book as a fun read, including the translator Chi-Young Kim who said she was drawn to the book’s “wry humour.”(11) But to me, it was the cruelty and horror of it all that stood out the most.

Early on in the text, the narrator says,

“Is there such a thing as the objective truth? How credible is a story that floats through the world going from mouth to mouth?.... By its very nature, a story contains adjustments and embellishments depending on the perspective of the person telling it, depending on the listener’s convenience, depending on the storyteller’s skills. Reader, you will believe what you want to believe. That’s all there is to it.” (12)

The novel constantly makes us aware of the fact that what we know about the people and events of this story may never be complete. The truth, if it exists, is elusive. So instead of trying to find it and force it into definitive statements, the story expands and deviates and overlays facts with a polyphony of conflicting voices. It speculates on its gaps and doesn’t necessarily fill them. Unlike the railroad in Pyeongdae that “established a universe of horizontality and straight lines that stretched left and right”, our story refuses to be straightened out. It refuses to “define everything in a line or two,” and leads us to questioning its own veracity. That, perhaps, is what made reading its “exploration into a life filled with injustice”, (13) and therefore violence, despite my reservations, such a rich and layered experience.

NOTES:

1. Ray, Larry, and Jane Kilby. 2017a. “Introduction to Special Issue: Theorizing Violence.” Kent, March.

   https://www.academia.edu/32138774/Introduction_to_Special_Issue_Theorizing_Violence.

2. Willow Talks Books. 2023. “Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan BOOK REVIEW.”

3. Myeong-Kwan, Cheon. 2023. Whale. Europa Editions UK.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Tatler Asia. 2024. “Love & Violence: A Tatler Exclusive with Master Filmmaker Park Chan-Wook.”

7. Ibid.

8. Woolf, Virginia. 1995. Orlando: A Biography. Wordsworth Editions UK.

9. Myeong-Kwan, Cheon. 2023. Whale. Europa Editions UK.

10. Emerson, Caryl. All the Same The Words Don’t Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition. Academic Studies Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21h4wh9.

11. Dong-Hee, Hwang. 2023. “[Herald Interview] ‘Whale’ by Cheon Myeong-kwan makes International Booker Prize longlist - The Korea Herald.” The Korea Herald, March 15, 2023. https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230315000662.

12. Myeong-Kwan, Cheon. 2023. Whale. Europa Editions UK.

13. Ibid.

    
    

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Tanvi Joshi teaches Creative Writing, Academic Writing, and Critical Reasoning at FLAME University in Pune, India. She is also a freelance writer and editor, and has previously worked as Assistant Editor at the feminist publishing house, Zubaan. Her interests include South Asian women’s literature, comics, and literature in translation. She is currently studying Korean and hopes to undertake Korean-English literary translation in the future.