Reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Han Kang's Human Acts Through Butler's Concepts of Precarity and Grievability

초록

The purpose of this study is to examine how George Orwell's seminal work Nineteen Eighty-Four and the 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang's Human Acts represent the dehumanization of human beings and the impossibility of grievability, drawing on Judith Butler's concepts of precarity and grievability. Despite differences in genre and historical context, both novels reveal the dehumanizing effects of authoritarian regimes, where human beings live in extreme precarity. They also depict societies in which individuals are systematically deprived of opportunities to express individual and collective grief. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party controls every aspect of life—and death—through constant surveillance, coercion, and manipulation. Dissidents are made to disappear without a trace, underscoring the arbitrary nature of life and death under totalitarian rule. Similarly, Human Acts portrays the government-sponsored military violence that led to the Gwangju Democratic Movement massacre. In the novel, victims' bodies are often left unclaimed or lost to their loved ones, as the regime silences public mourning, demonstrating the devaluation of human life. By employing Butler's theoretical framework, this study investigates how both novels portray individuals reduced to precarity and stripped of the capacity to grieve or to be grieved under authoritarian rule.

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