FROM DAPHNE TO YEONG-HYE

In Homer’s The Odyssey the enchantress Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses we see the nymph Daphne transformed into a laurel tree following the incessant, unreciprocated sexual overtures of the god Apollo. In Han Kang’s The Vegetarian we see a woman- Yeong-hye- oppressed by patriarchal forces as well; her father force feeds her meat and her husband sexually assaults her. After enduring these and other aggressions, she begins to believe she is turning into a tree, obsessively fasting since trees need only sunlight. She performs handstands
constantly, thinking that her hands will burrow into the earth and turn into roots, and her legs will become tree branches. In Dante’s Inferno, those who commit suicide are buried upside down and turned into trees. Charles Darwin considered the theory that flowers were similar to humans, but inverted, with their genitals pointed towards the sky. We see the imprisoned Orc in William Blake’s America: A Prophecy in which he emerges from beneath the earth to destroy the ‘virgin’ terrain of America.

The literary tradition of metamorphoses recurs in literary history; in countless cultures and languages, stories of transformations have been translated from language to language, travelled from continent to continent, from ancient Greece to modern reinterpretations. The concept of metamorphoses from human to non-human bodies lends itself perfectly to a study in comparative literature as it is at the same time cross-cultural, philosophical, and intersectional.

Two Particular Examples:
1) The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl”

2) The German- Bohemian Jewish writer Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung

Both works stem from an intrinsic ambiguity, uncanniness and bleakness. Though the texts are set in different times, Kafka’s in 1915 and Cortázar’s in 1955, they both tell stories about isolated, alienated protagonists. In the canon of literary works people find themselves peculiarly perplexed and drawn in by Kafka’s works. Perhaps the prominence of Kafka in the literary canon and prevalence of stories of metamorphoses comes from a pronounced impulse to retreat from society and a yearning for the possibility of escape. That is perhaps why we read and reread these stories, looking time and again for a line of escape.