The White Book
In honour of author Han Kang winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 2024, we are republishing a review of her novel The White Book that originally featured in Disegno #18.
Snow falls. A woman walks the streets of a European city, probably Warsaw. Here, in a metropolis almost entirely destroyed during the Second World War, she wanders amid “the white glow of stone ruins” where “the fortresses of the old quarter, the splendid palace, the lakeside villa on the outskirts where royalty once summered – all are fakes”. During a self-imposed absence from her Korean homeland, she reflects on the family stories of the fleeting existence of her mother’s first child, who died shortly after being born. “I was told that she was a girl, with a face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake.”
It is along these two parallel axes – historical memory and personal grief – that South Korean writer and Man Booker International Prize-winner Han Kang’s meditation on the colour white unfolds. Ostensibly a novel, The White Book is more a series of thematically linked prose poems, each with its own enigmatic title: ‘Sugar cubes’, ‘Perpetual snow’, ‘White dog’, ‘A thousand points of silver’. The sequence of short vignettes ranges across destruction and effacement, the grief of loss and, finally, rebirth. Amid images of fog and melting candle wax, snow and salt and sticky white rice, Han’s narrator conflates the fate of the city with that of her long-dead sister – a person, she writes, like the city, “who had painstakingly rebuilt themselves on a foundation of fire-scoured ruins”.
That Han turns to white in her exploration of memory, being and grief is perhaps no surprise: Koreans are known as baek yi minjok, the “white-clad people”. White has been an emblematic, symbolically important colour in many cultures, but perhaps especially so in Korea. Unlike its near-neighbour China, where white holds many of the same sinister associations as that of black in Western cultures, white for Koreans has traditionally signified innocence, nobility and respect for the heavens. Consequently, as Bong-Ha Seo writes in the Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles, historically, Koreans wore white “all throughout their lives: from the moment of their birth until their death”. In the 19th century, R.V. Laguerie, a French reporter for L’Illustration, visited Korea and later wrote in his 1898 book, La Coree, that “everyone walked slowly and heavily, all in white”. Following the Japanese-imposed protectorate of 1905, white dress took on revolutionary undertones, according to Bong-Ha. When the Japanese banned white-coloured clothing, “the Koreans wore white clothes more than ever,” writes Bong-Ha. “White clothing united all Koreans into one nation, regardless of their class or occupation, symbolizing Koreans’ anti-Japan movement.”
In its use of meditations on a single colour as a lens through which to approach personal grief, Han’s The White Book bears some resemblance to Maggie Nelson’s 2009 Bluets. Where Nelson’s openly autobiographical narrative displays both rawer emotion and a seemingly stronger personal attachment to blue, Han’s more oblique approach to white and to grief is quieter and more plaintive. If Nelson’s blue is an earth-bound heap of ultramarine powder that can change everything (“You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world”), Han’s white is the “vast, soundless undulation between this world and the next”.
White for Han, as for the Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara, is seen as something elemental and so pure that it is not altogether earthly. “White is
the most singular and vivid image that arises from the centre of chaos,” wrote Hara his 2010 book, White. For Hara, as for Han, the colour is a kind of whispered fragment of a barely remembered dream: “Life comes into this world wearing white, but it begins to acquire color the instant it assumes concrete form and touches the earth, like a yellow chick emerging from
a white egg. White can never be made manifest in the real world. We may feel that we have come into contact with white, but that is just an illusion. In the real world, white is always contaminated and impure.”
And yet, it is here, at the intersection of purity and impurity where white so often runs into trouble. Yes, white is the “swaddling bands, salt and moon” of Han’s narrator’s list of, perhaps elemental, perhaps comforting, white things. But it is also the misinformed cultural superiority of 18th-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reading of ancient statues. White is the troubling argument for the biological superiority of certain races, posited by French
writer Arthur de Gobineau in his 1853 ‘Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines’. Admittedly, white is not the only colour with tricky cultural connotations, and the argument that hues are more importantly understood as perceptual and cultural rather than purely scientific is one expressed by Goethe in his Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours). Refuting Newton’s notion that colour was determined purely by light, Goethe attempted to approach a kind of scientific analysis of the concept as being shaped by perception, including moral associations. “Since colour occupies so important a place in the series of elementary phenomena,” he wrote, “we shall not be surprised to find that its effects are at all times decided and significant, and that they are immediately associated with the emotions of the mind.” After all, scarlet in the ‘Book of Revelation’ is not merely visible light with a wavelength of 625-740nm; it is the shade of the harlot and of the beast. White, unsurprisingly, is the colour of Christ.
Indeed, according to University of Pennsylvania historian Kathleen Brown, this union of white and purity – specifically in Western culture – probably has its roots in religion. In an interview with Nautilus magazine, Brown explained that, “historically, white is one of the ways men of the cloth signified their calling.” These associations with religious purity ultimately evolved into bodily purity, a pre-occupation which continues in today’s obsession with ever more dazzling teeth and skin-whitening products.
Similar links between purity and white were key arguments in Winckelmann’s writings. At a time marked by the rediscoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a vogue for all things Ancient Rome, Winckelmann’s 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums revolutionised the understanding of stylistic changes in Greco-Roman art. And yet, one of Winckelmann’s most influential arguments helped to bury the excesses of baroque aesthetics in favour of the “edle Einfalt und stille Grösse” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) of neoclassicism. Rediscovered after being buried or weathered or otherwise aged, the marble statues and sculptures of classical antiquity were taken to have originally existed in the same state in which they were found: white. Winckelmann, like others before him, chose to view the unadorned stone figures as pure, almost austere, forms. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well,” he wrote.
“Colour contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Colour should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [colour] but structure that constitutes its essence.”
Although subsequent research has demonstrated that many ancient sculptures and temple friezes were painted a variety of colours, the idea of the white statues shaped generations of Western cultural aesthetics. These won’t be easily overturned. When archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann’s garish copies of antique statuary, which first appeared at Munich’s famed Glyptothek in the 2003 Gods in Color exhibition, went on tour across Europe and the US, they were met with shock and occasionally outrage. “You have completely ruined the image we had of antiquity,” said Nikolaos Kaltsas, the director of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, when asked to reactions to Gods in Color when it toured there in 2007. Removing the noble purity of white from the artistic works of our Greek and Roman forebears was somehow tantamount to removing the noble purity of every intervening cultural endeavour. It was Bernini’s David painted green, red and gold. In other words, the reintroduction of colour was a disaster, a kind of destruction.
By contrast, the image of cultural destruction as a glittering whiteness is deployed by Han to powerful effect in her description of the city of Warsaw in 1945: “I saw some footage of this city, taken by a US military aircraft in the spring of 1945 [...] The subtitles said that over a period of six months, starting in October 1944, 95 per cent of the city was obliterated[...] When the film opened, the city seen from far above appeared as though mantled with snow. A grey-white sheet of snow or ice on which a light dusting of soot has settled, sullying it with dappled stains. The plane reduced its altitude, and the city’s visage sharpened. There was no snow covering it, no soot-streaked ice. The buildings had been smashed to pieces, literally pulverised. Above the white glow of stone ruins were blackened flecks as far as the eye could see.”
In 1925, 20 years before Warsaw was reduced to glowing white rubble, Le Corbusier declared, in inimitable fashion, that whitewashed walls had a spiritual and moral cleansing power. His Law of Ripolin (so-called after the popular brand of household paint) declared that every citizen should “replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white Ripolin. His home is made clean[...] Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness for the course adopted leads to refusal to allow anything which is not correct.” Although more frequently appearing in his rhetoric than in his practice, white for Le Corbusier and his contemporaries was a portal to a renewed era; with a single sweep of a paint brush, its perceived rationality, morality and functionality could erase the tarnish of the past.
If Le Corbusier’s and modernism’s obsession with the formal purity, moral rectitude and cleanliness of white was later called into question within architecture and design (a marvellous anecdote in Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends has James Joyce saying, “You don’t know how wonderful dirt is” in riposte to Sigfried Giedion’s praise of some Marcel Breuer houses), in the West at least, white’s symbolism continues to reign over birth, marriage and dentistry.
In Japan, Korea and certain other East Asian countries, the colour’s associations with purity, innocence and nobility of spirit continue to hold great importance in cultural rituals, artistic aesthetics and spiritualism. Han’s The White Book thus draws on a tradition in which white is associated with the fragility of life and the Weltschmerz of things too good for harsh reality, a tradition beautifully encapsulated in a short 15th-century poem by Korean poet Sǒng Kan (1427-1456): “Mountains rise over mountains and smoke from valleys; / The dust of the world can never touch the white gulls. / The old fisherman is by no means disinterested; / In his boat he owns the moon over the west river.”
Echoes of this ideal of white as an elegy for the transient beauty of life – surely a more palatable cultural association than de Gobineau’s racial superiority or Le Corbusier’s tightly bound tyranny or Winckelmann’s expression of perfection of form – permeate Han’s narrative. Her unnamed narrator’s meditations on her ghostly twin, her too-fragile-for-this-world sister, and her reflections on the destruction done by men to each other and themselves are filtered through white. Not Le Corbusier’s white, nor Winckelmann’s, but the “billowing whiteness within us” which recognises the inviolate in “our encounters with objects so pristine [and] never fails to leave us moved”. Throughout The White Book, this sense is reinforced by a series of stills shot by artist Choi Jinhyuk, which document a performance in which Han interacts with white objects, their colour becoming interlinked with the author, while around her tones of grey predominate.
As Han writes, “there are times when the crisp white of freshly laundered bed linen can seem to speak. When that pure-cotton fabric grazes her bare flesh, just there, it seems to tell her something. You are a noble person. Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of.”
Words Crystal Bennes