Mandsager 2 Contemporary writers have many literary tools at their disposal to reveal, critique, and subvert oppressive systems. Two common and effective strategies are allegory and lyricism due to their respective abilities to make structures visible and prompt readers to think differently about them. The definition of allegory is the practice of using extended metaphors at the surface and symbolic level to represent, expose, and criticize violent structures that are concealed or normalized to the point that they are often ignored. Allegories can be seen in contemporary gothic literature and films, which use familiar symbols to represent societal patterns taken to extremes, making these structures clearly visible and showing their horrific potential consequences. These excessive allegories can also have widespread commercial success, confronting large audiences with the horrors of the systems they live in with clarity and intrigue. For example, Jordan Peele’s Get Out offered commentary on structures of white supremacy and appropriation in the United States by using the allegories of hypnosis and zombification. The film depicts Chris, a Black man in a relationship with a white woman whose family lures him into a trap in which wealthy white people entrance Black people, bid on their bodies, then zombify them to live longer and steal their abilities. In Chris’s case, a man who has lost his sight attempts to steal his vision and ability to create art. Within this allegorical trap, Peele reveals and comments on many aspects of white supremacist structures in the U.S. that attempt to dehumanize Black Americans. Many of these structures are rooted in slavery, such as viewing Black bodies as meant for labor and sports, viewing Black culture as something to reduce and appropriate, and viewing Black people as less human than white people. It is through recognizing these structures and plugging his ears to hypnosis, that Chris, the protagonist, is able to fight back and escape them (1:21:40). This film reached millions of people and used recognizable gothic tropes of hypnosis and zombification to confront audience members with a visceral Mandsager 3 revelation and critique of white supremacy in the U.S. This allegorical representation made visible anti-Black racism that is often concealed, denied, and ignored in the U.S., challenging audiences to recognize and reject structures of white supremacy in their own lives. Contemporary writers also subvert violent structures through lyricism. Due to language’s ability to construct and maintain oppressive systems–as argued by Gramsci through hegemony (1004), Althusser through ideological state apparatuses (1336), and Foucault through discourse (107)–using new language challenges these systems, and allows for imagining realities outside of them. Lyricism is the use of unique or unexpected word choice and sentence structure. Writers use lyrical sections in novels that differ from common, straightforward prose to prompt readers to read and think differently. Authors do this using more metaphorical language than is expected, differing sentence length, or breaking grammatical rules for poetic effect. In using lyricism, authors disrupt readers’ constructed perceptions of their society at the level of constructing meaning. This prompts them to view themselves, their relationships, and societal structures anew. Using allegories to make systems visible and lyricism to disrupt readers’ perceptions allows authors to reach wide audiences and prompt them to approach their societies differently. Contemporary authors Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez use these two strategies to reveal and critique patriarchal power structures in South Korea and the remnants of colonial power structures in Argentina with widespread critical and commercial success, causing readers from many different countries to reevaluate local and global systems of power and exploitation. This essay will analyze how Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez use allegory and lyricism to make oppressive systems visible, prompting their readers to reconsider the limits of these systems and how they can pursue desires outside of them. Mandsager 4 Shklovsky explains how lyrical descriptions differ from everyday language use, allowing readers to approach a concept or object anew. He calls this process defamiliarization. Authors use lyricism to allow readers to defamiliarize themselves from what has become familiar by describing the image or symbol outside of its “sphere of automatized perception” (6). These unique, often imagistic descriptions cause readers to change their conceptions. Shklovsky uses Tolstoy as an example: in an essay on corporal punishment titled “Shame!” Tolstoy described “flogging” as one being “stripped, thrown down on the floor, and beaten with switches…as punishment for violating the law” in order to defamiliarize his readers with a concept that has become common to them and confront them with the crude violence of it (6). By describing in detail what happens during a moment of violence, writers force readers to confront it anew. Hélène Cixous's related concept of écriture féminine argues for a new form of feminine writing that exists outside of patriarchal forms. In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she writes: “If woman has always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man…it is time for her to dislocate this ‘within,’ to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers” (887). Cixous argues for a écriture féminine in which women write outside of male-dominated forms that center around masculine desires and pursue societal outcomes that are beneficial to men. She asserts that women should write using their own bodies, minds, and language. In writing this way, women can realize their own feminine desires, inspire other women, and enact change. In similar ways, contemporary authors often use lyrical and poetic segments to subvert systems of control at the level of language using unique syntax and word choice. Using language from outside of standardized structures allows readers to imagine life and desires outside of familiar hierarchies. Lyricism also gives allegories more depth. If allegories metaphorically represent oppressive Mandsager 5 regimes as monstrous, then lyricism offers ways to conceptualize these systems anew and imagine existence outside of them. ​ The works of Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez, read through their translations by Deborah Smith and Megan McDowell, reveal their use of lyricism and allegory.1 In The Vegetarian, Han Kang uses meat consumption as an allegory to reveal patriarchal hierarchy in South Korea and lyricism to defamiliarize the reader from the patriarchal system and suggest new desires outside of it. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Yeong-hye refuses to wear a bra or eat meat and is violently corrected and abused by the men in her life because of it. Over the course of the novel, the escalating discipline and cruelty from the men around her leads Yeong-hye to abandon trying to live as a woman within the patriarchal system and live as a plant instead. Yeong-hye first defamiliarizes herself and the reader from the patriarchal structures that constrain her through lyrical dreams. Her dreams also function as an écriture féminine as the structure and word choice used in them are outside of standardized, masculine language, and they lead her to new ways of existing outside of patriarchal norms. Yeong-hye dreams of “long bamboo sticks strung with great blood-red gashes of meat blood still dripping down. Try to push past but the meat, there’s no end to the meat, and no exit…Chewing on something that felt so real…My face, undoubtedly, but never seen before…that vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling” (18). It is not through a traditionally constructed critical essay on meat consumption and patriarchy that Yeong-hye acquires a desire to resist, she is instead confronted with lyrically described dreams and recollections that come from her own mind. This section depicts Yeong-hye attempting to escape meat processing in which bamboo spears are strung with meat, There are subtle differences in wording between a more literal translation of Han Kang’s original Korean version and Smith’s translation, but to go into the nuances between the Korean and English versions–and the nuances between the Spanish and English versions of Enriquez’s works, as well as the nuances of translation in genenral–is beyond the scope of this paper. 1 Mandsager 6 and ends with Yeong-hye seeing herself, but not herself, consuming meat. The sentences with unclear subjects and missing punctuation, and the repetition of the words “meat” and “no” convey the panic and confusion that Yeong-hye feels being trapped in a violent system that turns living things into meat, and from which there is no escape. Smith’s use of the word “uncanny” along with the phallic symbol of the bamboo spears also calls to mind Freud. In his essay “The Uncanny,” he describes objects that represent deeper psychological conflict, many of which reveal fears of castration and the loss of masculine control (Freud 248). Through these italicized dreams and recollections, Yeong-hye and the reader are defamiliarized from meat processing and prompted to connect it with violent masculinity. In these dreams and recollections, Yeong-hye begins to recognize patterns of violent, patriarchal control around her: Yeong-hye’s father force-feeds her to keep her within the patriarchal hierarchy, Yeong-hye’s husband only values her for her submissiveness and rapes her for disobedience (36). The symbols, references, and syntax in the italicized sections allow for a lyrical and allegorical convergence of meat consumption and violent, patriarchal structures of control, with sex at the center. The lyrical sections and the allegory of meat consumption also display how Yeong-hye confronts her own participation in the violent system. In her dreams and recollections, Yeong-hye still consumes meat, demonstrating her complicity in the patriarchal hierarchy despite her panicked attempts to escape it. Choi Yoo Jin observes that if eating meat represents accepting male supremacy, Yeong-hye’s behavior reflects the “shame that she has been following the patriarchal ideology without due criticism” and a desire to resist now that she has confronted it (16). Yeong-hye’s guilt emerges several times in her italicized sections. Han writes, “Dreams of murder. Murderer or murdered…hazy distinctions, boundaries wearing thin,” depicting Yeong-hye’s feelings of responsibility for the deaths of other beings (33). Another italicized Mandsager 7 section recalls a memory in which a dog bites her and is killed by being dragged behind a motorcycle by her father. The dream ends with Yeong-hye eating meat from this dog. She remembers “the two eyes that had watched me, while the dog was made to run on, while he vomited blood mixed with froth, and how later they had seemed to appear, flickering, on the surface of the soup. But I don’t care. I really didn’t care” (48). These dreams and recollections force Yeong-hye to confront the fact that all animals–including humans–are made of meat. She also reconsiders how she and other beings are controlled, violently corrected, and consumed like livestock in the violent, patriarchal society she lives in. The meat processing, the murder, and the dog, all defamiliarize Yeong-hye from the concept of violence, and make her realize the extent of the control and abuse present in her society and her role in it. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams writes, “people with power have always eaten meat” (36). Adams argues that meat has been a symbol of power that separates upper classes from lower classes and men from women. Adams continues, “worldwide, this patriarchal custom is found,” wealthy men have controlled consumption of meat as part of their efforts to maintain power and strength (37). However, when a family has wealth and regular access to meat, this gendered divide often breaks down (39). In the novel, Yeong-hye’s husband, father, and brother-in-law see her refusal to eat meat as a refusal to acknowledge and celebrate the wealth and power the men in the family have over others. They then attempt to correct the threat she poses to patriarchal control through abuse. Yeong-hye’s dreams make her realize the scope of the violence present in this patriarchal system, and prompt her to imagine how she can exist outside of it. Through these lyrical, disjointed sections that rely heavily on violent and phallic imagery, Han Kang’s readers are challenged to confront patriarchal systems of control and violence alongside Yeong-hye. Mandsager 8 ​ The patriarchal hierarchy is also reflected in the structure of the novel, for beyond the short, lyrical sections in italics, the rest of the story is told from other characters' perspectives. The first two parts of the book are told from the perspective of men who want to use Yeong-hye for their own gratification. Even within the structure of the novel, Yeong-hye struggles to express herself and resist. She can only do so in short, disjointed sections and through the eyes of other characters, demonstrating how her protests and resistance are illegible within the logic of the masculine social and linguistic regime. However, the final section of the novel is from the perspective of her sister, who does see Yeong-hye’s resistance, and changes her own way of living because of it. Despite the structure of the novel, Yeong-hye’s experience and desires remain central. While her desires are abnormal or excessive by societal standards in the novel, Han Kang’s critique is clear, as evidenced by her global popularity with critics and general readers. Han won the Nobel Prize and the International Booker Prize, and many critics have written about Yeong-hye’s modes of resistance and their different facets and implications. For example, Joori Joyce Lee notes the focus on the overlaps between feminism and ecology from writers such as Soo-jeong Shin and Chan Je Wu and offers her own “anti-allegorical” analysis of the literal touch and desire in the novel (3). Lee acknowledges the potential for ecofeminist readings but argues for a more literal reading, focusing on the novel’s human aspects through descriptions of Yeong-hye’s interactions with other characters. While The Vegetarian can be read in multiple ways, highlighting different systems and modes of resistance, Lee argues to approach the book by focusing on Yeong-hye’s desires, despite the difficulty in accessing them. The novel challenges readers by depicting the extremes to which women’s desires are suppressed, but through this depiction, it reveals these desires in Mandsager 9 new ways and critiques the hierarchies that seek to conceal them. Eve Tuck writes about the importance of desire-centered approaches in her essay, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Tuck is an Unangax̂ scholar from the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska, and explains the dehumanizing effects of describing Indigenous communities only in terms of their damage, and the importance of desire-based research. She writes this in response to scholars and researchers in the humanities who publish work focusing on systemic violence, reducing people in those communities to stereotypes and victims of damage. She argues for a counter to damage-based research: “desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives…Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore” (416-17). Tuck and Cixous both ask writers to explore diverse desires related to societal change and the wants of individuals. In The Vegetarian, Han Kang demonstrates the complexities of Yeong-hye’s desires and how she pursues them despite the patriarchal hierarchy around her, rejecting a simple or stereotyped view of women as helpless victims. Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez both explore a variety of complex desires in their books through lyrical descriptions of their characters and their actions. They also use allegory and lyricism to help readers see the limits of systems of control, allowing them to imagine new desires that subvert them. Lyricism: Defamiliarization and New Language Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez use lyricism to defamiliarize their characters and readers from everyday aspects of oppressive systems, and suggest pursuing new desires outside of the systems being critiqued. Both authors also go beyond defamiliarization and abject characters and readers. In The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva describes how objects that Mandsager 10 remind one of death trouble the barriers erected between oneself and the world cause abjection, separation, and isolation to avoid further reminders of death (3). However, she also writes, “the abject is edged with the sublime…the sublime is something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling” (12). Similar to defamiliarization, abjection destabilizes readers’ perceptions. The abject and sublime are also similar to écriture féminine, as abjection can lead one to consider new desires and new ways to expand the boundaries erected around oneself. Both of these authors use defamiliarization, abjection, and new desires to reveal the limits of structures of meaning within different regimes and suggest new ways of living outside of them. Han Kang articulates complex desires through the lyricism of her prose, and in turn, shows the limits of the oppressive regimes the novel depicts. While her characters transgress patriarchal norms in South Korea, their desires are described as sublime in her books and encourage readers to explore new ways of expressing themselves, instead of rejecting them. Cixous comments on new desires that are perceived as monstrous by those who adhere to norms of patriarchal language: “I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs…Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives hasn’t been accused of being a monster…She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing, which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (876). Cixous suggests writers pursue desires that are outside of patriarchal expectations for women and language. Similar to Tuck, Cixous argues that écriture féminine will reveal new ways of perceiving and acting that are often dismissed as abnormal or reduced to stereotypes by oppressive systems that wish to silence resistance to conformity. Articulating these desires in a new language ultimately leads to changes Mandsager 11 in individual and societal perception. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s sister narrates the third section, and observes Yeong-hye’s écriture féminine that is expressed through her body. While she is perceived as monstrous and siloed into an asylum by the patriarchal society around her, Yeong-hye’s unique modes of expression lead her and her sister to new desires outside of the patriarchal system. ​ In the third section of the book, Yeong-hye’s desires progress from escaping meat in her dreams to becoming plantlike through her body, and by describing this process, Han Kang reveals the excesses of the patriarchal systems of correction and how they can be subverted through desires outside of this system. Yeong-hye’s desires and how they are expressed change the perspective of her sister, In-hye. In-hye observes her in the hospital, under the observation and control of the male doctor: “In-hye checks for burst veins and finds them everywhere; on both hands, the soles of both feet, even her elbows. The only means of providing Yeong-hye with proteins and glucose is the IV, but now there are no undamaged veins left where a needle could be put in” (155). Through this invasive correction via needles and constant observation, Han Kang builds on the violent depiction of spears, meat, and entrapment that she started describing in Yeong-hye’s dreams. However, In-hye also describes how Yeong-hye dismisses the invasive, patriarchal system around her and articulates her unique desires through her body. Han writes, “As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? When Yeong-hye had balanced upside down and stretched out every fiber in her body, had these things been awakened in her soul?” (173). Yeong-hye literally turns the patriarchal expectations for herself upside down and envisions herself like a tree, with roots connecting her to the earth through her Mandsager 12 hands. Instead of her crotch being a site controlled by men for gratification and human reproduction, she envisions growing flowers from it. The roots and the flowers demonstrate ways of connecting with other beings and creating beauty that exist outside of patriarchal expectations in her society. Through defamiliarizing Yeong-hye’s body and its functions, Han suggests new ways of conceptualizing bodies. Shannon Finck writes about Yeong-hye’s seemingly vegetal state and notes that “by presenting itself in the guise of passivity,” a plant reacts to and even subverts outside forces while appearing to be still (17). Through this existence that is still but creates and connects, Yeong-hye’s existence completely rejects and inverts the violence that surrounds her. Through these poetic reversals, In-hye realizes the beauty in Yeong-hye’s refusal and reconsiders her own position in the patriarchal society. Han writes, “before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there” (146). Through these lyrical descriptions of Yeong-hye’s desires, Han and Smith defamiliarize In-hye and their readers from conceptualizations of their own bodies and what it means to act in rebellion, suggesting new ways of living that subvert violent systems while appearing to be passive. ​ In Greek Lessons, also by Han Kang, and co-translated by Smith and Emily Yae Won, subversive desires are again presented outside of dominant societal modes of expression through characters losing their ability to speak and see. These deviations from the norm are perceived as monstrous by the South Korean government. The female protagonist transgresses societal expectations around language, and because of her inability to speak, she cannot argue for maintaining custody of her son, and the state takes him away and gives full custody to his father. In an effort to explain her abnormality, the protagonist’s male therapist suggests that her inability to speak stems from rejection from her mother and encourages her to “straighten your shoulders and take up as much space as you like” (48). Building on this approach, Katharina Domschke Mandsager 13 argues that from a psychiatric perspective, her loss of speech is likely an example of “dissociative motor disorder” stemming from “psychological distress following the death of the mother and the loss of custody of the son” (3). However, the protagonist disagrees with her therapist and explanations for her behavior from a psychiatric textbook and argues that her inability to speak cannot be explained in terms defined by the psychiatrist or the state. Similar to The Vegetarian, the female protagonist has a problem with separation, specifically how language articulates and separates beings, objects, and concepts from the rest of the world. Han Kang writes, “when she washes her face with cold water there is no distinction between her and that water. At the same time, she knows that she is neither rice nor water, but some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise” (53). Han describes a character who wants to feel connected to everything around her. She desires to be one with water and the world in general. However, what keeps her separated from everything else is language. The protagonist’s defamiliarization from the structures and hierarchies of language started when she was young and discovered “the most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice” (11). The protagonist recognizes that language is the root of separation in her society. Because every being and object in the world around her is named by a distinct signifier, they are, to her mind, categorized, oversimplified and siloed. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye protests the violence of eating meat and patriarchal control, and in Greek Lessons, the protagonist protests the violence of hierarchical separation maintained by linguistic structures. Han Kang then builds on the protagonist’s new perspective with more lyrical sections in the novel. Mandsager 14 ​ Greek Lessons ends with a chapter written in verse in which the male and female protagonists connect in a way that subverts the separation the woman sees in language. Han Kang writes, “You were not visible. / And I was not visible. / You did not make a sound. / And I did not make a sound…It felt like I was being kissed by time” (168, 172). Throughout the novel, the two characters have struggled with the forces that separate them from others, and in the final section, the barriers between them fall apart. After this moment of connection, the female protagonist begins to speak again. Han Kang includes characters who are terrified of violence and death but are also willing to expand to include new sensations, perceptions from others, and desires. Han then offers these characters as models through which readers can imagine how they can expand their perspectives beyond what is deemed appropriate by societal standards imposed on them by patriarchal and linguistic systems, both of which are maintained by repetition, and are therefore vulnerable to collapse through refusing to repeat the enforcement of the system. This rebellion is also reflected in how Han writes her books, as they signal her characters’ desires through language that subverts normative systems of language and control, and suggest ways of existing outside of them. ​ Mariana Enriquez uses lyricism to depict realms outside of the colonial structures she critiques in her stories. In Our Share of Night, translated by Megan McDowell, a wealthy cult of English expatriates in Argentina uses mediums to summon a dark god in their quest for eternal life. One of the only ways the mediums can escape the control of the violent cult is by entering “the other place.” The other place can only be accessed by mediums through strange doors that go through a “duct or underground passageway” to end up in a forest in the mountains, where the trees have “adornments of interlaced phalanges and femurs fastened with slender twigs into delicate shapes, carnivorous geometries” (377). The other place offers several of these Mandsager 15 ornaments, along with other relics and powers to the medium, Juan. The other place gives mediums gifts in the form of magical artifacts and abilities in return for the offerings of blood and bodies made possible through them. The other place is accessed through a passage that is underground, but is somehow in the mountains; there is no source of light, but visitors can still see. Enriquez’s use of these paradoxes adds to the sense that the other place exists outside of the rules of the oppressive systems that entrap the mediums. While the other place abjects Juan and his allies through the bones and body parts, it also serves as a sublime place where they can exist beyond the control of the cult and develop ways to resist it. Alba Devo Colis identifies the other place and the knowledge, gifts, and symbols it offers as a potential representation of the subterranean groups that produced magazines, music, films, and other media that resisted the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, in which the government tortured and killed thousands of their own citizens (186). This interpretation of the other place as a representation of new and covert modes of expression and resistance further emphasizes its sublime nature. Like hidden political gatherings and art during a dictatorship, the other place is underground, contains secret symbolic messages, and offers new avenues for Juan and his family to resist the oppressive cult from a place they cannot access. While providing a venue and modes of resistance to Juan, the other place is not sublime to the cult family because it kills and consumes with no respect for their authority. When the family enters the other place, they get consumed, and Enirquez describes the other place in abject language: “a swelter in the air, a stench of old meat and sun-warmed crypt, of rotten milk, of menstrual blood and hungry breath, of dirty teeth. The breathing of a filthy mouth” (584). Kristeva uses the same descriptions as examples of the abject in Powers of Horror (4). While the other place was sublime for Juan and Gaspar, as it offered an escape to a new realm outside of Mandsager 16 the cult’s systems of control, for the cult leaders, it is solely abject and represents the collapse of the barriers they have constructed to protect their power and separate them from death. Through these poetic descriptions, Enriquez demonstrates how subversion can be sublime for those who use it to escape an oppressive system, while for the system that is threatened, it can represent chaos and death. Allegory: Oppressive Structures Made Visible Alongside lyricism, Han Kang and Mariana Enriquez use allegories to reveal oppressive systems and their limits. Han uses meat consumption to represent violent, patriarchal hierarchies in The Vegetarian. Han also uses language to reveal structures that separate and silence people in Greek Lessons, prompting her readers to consider new ways of connecting with the world. While Han uses allegories involving individuals and “abnormal” behavior to comment on patriarchal violence and separation in South Korea, Enriquez uses a violent, exploitative cult to comment on the world-system in Our Share of Night. Through the allegory of a powerful cult seeking eternal life, Enriquez critiques how core countries in positions of power exploit those on the periphery for their own profit and power. In “Our Lady of the Quarry,” from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Enriquez uses a group of high school teenagers to represent racial colonial structures that linger in Argentina. Both of these authors use accessible–and sometimes visceral–allegories to reveal systems that are abstract and often hidden. Through her use of allegory, Enriquez builds on a history of gothic literature that has long been used to describe the anxiety that accompanies societal change and contradiction. Gothic tropes are useful in creating allegories for societal anxieties because they are easily identified for their excessive, transgressive nature and because the symbols used have been repeated so many times in literature and popular culture. Common gothic allegories include using vampires to Mandsager 17 signify the destructiveness of greed and crumbling buildings to represent the loss of aristocratic cultures and structures. English colonial authors also used gothic tropes to write about colonialism. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert writes, “by the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening ‘others’” (229). The allegorical tropes from colonial gothic literature, popularized by Rudyard Kipling in “The Mark of the Beast” and other stories, reinforce colonial structures of white supremacy and eugenics. Kipling’s story includes a curse from a “little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god” in India, that transforms an English colonist into an animal-like beast that eats raw meat and snaps violently, overtly representing fears from English nationalists and white supremacists that English culture and white people would “degenerate” as a result of influence from other cultures and races (2). Postcolonial gothic authors “write back” against these narratives, using the same gothic tropes that presented the uncolonized world as horrific to describe the horrors of colonialism. This practice has developed as contemporary authors have blended gothic, horror, and other genre-based tropes to comment on a variety of societal issues. Now, contemporary gothic writers and filmmakers like Mariana Enriquez and Jordan Peele use gothic tropes to identify, magnify, and subvert oppressive societal structures. Through allegories that depict excesses and transgressions, gothic and horror literature and films have revealed oppressive structures and prompted readers and viewers to reexamine the systems they are part of. ​ Mariana Enriquez, like Jean Rhys and other postcolonial gothic authors before her, uses traditional gothic allegories to reveal the structures left behind by colonialism and the world-system, as articulated by Imanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein argues that there is an economic world-system built on the foundations of colonialism, in which core countries exploit periphery countries for resources and cheap labor, then sell products back to those countries at a profit (23). Mandsager 18 Core countries are those that control much of the world economy, and are mostly in Europe and North America. Core countries established the current world-system; they colonized periphery countries, built factories, and created patents and quasi-monopolies that allow them to maintain their strong position in the world-system. Periphery countries are the majority that have been colonized and are now exploited for access to resources. Periphery countries compete with each other to sell resources to core countries and are dependent on core countries for access to products and the ability to participate in the global economy, which is why world-systems theory is also labeled “dependency theory” (Frank 4). While the core and periphery categorizations are not perfect and oversimplify the world, world-systems theory is still a helpful lens for understanding how colonialism and capitalism work together to insidiously maintain a structure where periphery countries are exploited to the point where they are dependent on core countries. The cruel exploitation inherent to the world-system reveals itself most clearly in the Atlantic slave trade, which demonstrates how the world-system dehumanizes people from periphery countries and functions under the assumption that they should be used for the benefit of the core. In Our Share of Night, Enriquez uses a wealthy cult family that kills and consumes people in its search for eternal life as an allegory for core countries’ greed and their exploitation of people from periphery countries. Though she also problematizes this simple categorization, both by showing how the core’s malleability in its efforts to amass power and exploit others, and how those being exploited within the world-system are not always from countries that are commonly labeled as “periphery.” Many scholars have also viewed the book as an allegory for the Argentine dictatorship, where the military “junta” made tens of thousands of Argentinians disappear to maintain power. Helene C. Weldt-Basson notes that “Fernanda Bustamante, Sofía Pérez Martínez, Carlos Enrique Ruiz Figueroa, Mariela Jinett Fuentes, Clara Siminiani León, and Mandsager 19 Ana Forcinito all allege that Enríquez’s novel is political literature, the latter two analyzing its allegorical character with reference to the dictatorship” (75). While there are certainly references to the Argentine dictatorship, the story of the Bradford family and their relationship with the mediums and Guaraní people also represent and magnify the horrors of the larger world-system. The Bradford family, from England and excessively wealthy, tours the world looking for individuals to exploit who can serve as mediums in their quest for receiving information about eternal life from their dark god. The dark god, and “the other place” that it inhabits, is described as “a filthy mouth” that consumes bodies and blood in exchange for information about immortality. The other place ultimately consumes the family, representing how the greed of core countries will ultimately lead to their own destruction (584). Enriquez uses excessive greed and violence and other gothic tropes as allegories to reveal the violent aspects of the world-system that persist and warn of its potential catastrophic consequences. ​ Throughout the novel, the greed of the Bradford family grows, consuming many and ultimately leading to their own destruction, representing the excessive exploitation present in the world-system. The Bradfords colonized their property of “two thousand hectares of jungle…thirty meters from Iguazu falls” in the 1920s in Argentina (92). On this property, the family built an elaborate mansion and continued to build their wealth through farms where they violently exploited their workers. In telling the history of the Bradford family, Enriquez starts with the absurd amount of land they possess, drawing attention to the most tangible, yet often ignored, reminder of colonialism, the hoarding of land by colonizing Europeans, most of which has not been returned. Even though the land the Bradfords colonized was already inhabited by Guaraní communities, the family never considers returning the land. Instead, the cult abuses the local population through exploitative labor practices and horrific violence from a Bradford Mandsager 20 matriarch, Mercedes, who captures and mutilates Guaraní children for the sake of gaining dark power (132). Colis observes: “the sect embodies the suffering and dehumanization of the Other, concepts on which the coloniality of power is based” (181). Colis references Walter Mignolo’s colonial matrix of power, or coloniality, which is the system of language, rules, and behavior colonial powers construct and maintain at the level at which meaning is constructed. Mignolo uses the term “matrix” in reference to the movie and argues for a “delinking” from the system of meaning colonial powers have created (Mignolo 108). This idea is also related to defamiliarization as both concepts argue for a rethinking of the world at the level of construction of meaning. Colis asserts that the cult intentionally hoards wealth and power, then abuses, rapes, mutilates, and kills mediums and Guraní people to maintain the coloniality of power, or in Wallerstein’s terms, their status as superior members of the core (Colis 181). Enriquez’s descriptions of the Bradford family’s violence make visible the way core countries construct and maintain the power structure they operate in, and demonstrate the horrific outcomes of taking this structure to its extremes. Along with the Guaraní children, the cult uses mediums from other periphery locations in their search for eternal life, including the son of a Scottish peasant in 1752, a girl abducted from Nigeria, a girl who lost her family in Francoist attacks in Spain, and Juan, the son of poor Scandinavian immigrants in Argentina. While not all of these people are from countries commonly labeled as periphery, they are all put in a position by the world-system where they can be exploited and made dependent on the family. Through these diverse mediums, Enriquez adds nuance to her critique of the world-system dynamic. The cult makes each of these mediums dependent on the family, then abuses them until their deaths. Through the family’s excessively cruel actions, Enriquez creates a gothic allegory that draws attention to real structures of Mandsager 21 exploitation in the world-system where people in core countries view people and land in periphery countries as objects to exhaust. Enriquez also demonstrates this phenomenon over time. The family survives and uses mediums across multiple countries and over more than a century, revealing how coloniality and the world-system persist beyond the end of formal colonialism. In taking allegories to their extremes, gothic literature illuminates systems that realist fiction does not express with the same clarity and effect. ​ In “Our Lady of the Quarry,” from the short story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed also translated by Megan McDowell, Enriquez comments on the lingering structures of colonialism through the excessive desires of a group of Argentinian teenagers. The story centers around a group of high school girls who want the attention of an eighteen-year-old named Diego. Diego, however, is more interested in an older girl named Silvia. The story is told from the perspective of one of the high school girls as they compare themselves to Silvia and plan to win Diego away from her, eventually resorting to violent, supernatural means. The horror of the story comes from how they treat Silvia, introduced as their “grown-up” friend whom they hate for having her own apartment, a source of income, and seeming to know everything better than the high school girls. The narrator and her friend Natalia resent her not only because of her age and ability, but also because they believe they are more attractive, based on their perspectives rooted in colonial racism and proximity to whiteness. Similar to Get Out’s exploration of racial structures in the U.S., “Our Lady of the Quarry” comments on racial structures in Argentina using an allegory of violent competition over a man involving supernatural powers. The girls describe themselves as having “the super-flat stomach with a belly-button piercing on another; the exquisite haircut that fell just so over the face, legs without a single hair, underarms like marble” and describe Silvia as having “tubby legs…flat ass and broad hips…plus the black hairs Mandsager 22 she never really got rid of–maybe she couldn’t pull them out down to the root, she was really dark” (21,16). The girls cannot understand how Diego would prefer Silvia over them. The girls’ justifications recall colonial structures of defining and understanding race and gender that still linger in existing prejudices and oppressive societal structures today. Telles writes, “In the 17th and 18th centuries, colonial elites in Spanish America often created caste systems (castas) that used a variety of criteria–especially the extent of Spanish, African, and indigenous mixtures–to locate people in social hierarchies” (867). In this story, Enriquez uses the excessive desire and jealousy of a group of young girls to draw attention to how colonialism’s racialized and gendered structures still linger in Argentinian society. The high school girls continue to use colorist thinking to put themselves above Silvia and apply it to themselves by pursuing white beauty standards and judging themselves based on their ability to achieve them. Enriquez’s allegory, and gothic allegories in general, have the unique ability to make oppressive systems visible by amplifying them, demonstrating how they still exist, and showing how they transgress the reader’s sense of ethics. ​ Enriquez continues to demonstrate the structures of colonialism through the story's violent conclusion. In postcolonial tradition, Enriquez reproduces the colonial gothic trope of encountering foreign (to the character) occult objects and attempting to use them for supernatural power–like the English family using “The Monkey’s Paw” from India in the famous story by W.W. Jacobs (16)–and uses the trope to critique colonial racism. Natalia encounters a red-skinned statue and asks it to punish Silvia and Diego. She first thought the statue was the Virgin Mary, but it is later identified by the girls as “a Brazilian thing…It’s a red woman made of plaster, and she’s naked. She has black nipples…That statue had very pretty hair, long and black, darker and silkier than Silvia’s” (23-24). While it is unclear whether Enriquez is referencing any Mandsager 23 specific religion or practice, she seems to be referring to occult practices that blend Catholic and Indigenous elements, as she writes about in Our Share of Night. Natalia asks the red woman for help, after which Diego and Silvia are attacked by enormous dogs. If Enriquez had solely depicted Natalia asking the Virgin Mary for help, this would more easily further the allegory of Spanish colonial racism by depicting a girl who perceives herself as more colonial, appealing to the religion of the colonizing power for help in punishing one who is less colonial. However, Natalia realizes the statue is not the Virgin Mary, but still asks for help, thus demonstrating Natalia’s entitlement to use what could be Indigenous practices to punish Silvia, representing how colonial powers attempt to appropriate and incorporate Indigenous practices into colonial systems of maintaining power. After Natalia returns from asking the statue for help, Enriquez writes, “she smiled and said, ‘It’s not a Virgin’” (23). While the other girls are afraid of the statue, she is not, and is happy to have found another potential source of power to appropriate. When the dogs attack Silvia, Natalia yells, “You arrogant assholes, you’re a flat-ass skank, and you’re a shithead, and those are my dogs” (25). While the narrator is afraid of the statue and the dogs, Natalia is gleeful to have the power to have Silvia attacked, and readily takes ownership over the power and the dogs. The allegory for coloniality is further supported by her identification of the statue as “Brazilian,” as Brazil eventually adopted a “nation-building narrative of race mixture, or meztizaje” while Argentina did not, and instead has a history of “nation-building projects centered on whiteness” (Telles 865, 873). While the mestizaje project has also been used to promote aspects of white supremacy, Brazil has publicly advocated for including Indigenous peoples and people of color in its culture, instead of overtly excluding them. Natalia, an Argentinian using what she thinks is a Brazilian statue, reflects a white supremacist entitlement to marginalize and appropriate other cultures for her own benefit, similar Mandsager 24 to the dehumanizing practices of appropriation depicted in Get Out. In “Our Lady of the Quarry,” Enriquez demonstrates how the girls view their superiority in terms of proximity to colonial ideals of whiteness and the lengths to which they are willing to go to reinforce the system they believe makes them superior. The narrator also tells the story as if she were telling it to a friend, including gossipy criticisms of Silvia told to the reader, making the reader feel as if they are in on the attack. This adds to Enriquez’s approach of using horror and discomfort to defamiliarize her readers from structures rooted in colonial racism, prompting her readers to recognize them in their own lives, and reexamine their roles in maintaining or subverting them. Similar to Han’s approach in The Vegetarian, Enriquez presents Silvia as the sympathetic character, despite the story never being from her perspective. Like with Yeong-hye, the structure reflects that Silvia’s resistance is not legible to the girls in their colonial hierarchy. However, Silvia is sympathetic to the reader because she achieves independence and pursues her desire to explore. Silvia has “her own office at the ministry of education” and visits locations in Mexico and throughout South America (13). She also pursues her desire to be with Diego despite the racism she encounters from the girls, and if the girls represent common perspectives in their society, it can be implied that she persists despite racism from multiple sources. While the focus of the story is on exposing the colorism of the high school girls, and Silvia is not as obvious an example of living outside of oppressive structures as Han’s characters, Silvia is still an example of pursuing desires despite colonial racism. ​ In The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons, Han Kang uses allegories to show how women are silenced by patriarchal structures and how they can imagine lives outside of those structures. In Greek Lessons, the female protagonist’s inability to speak results in her being misunderstood and abused by the men around her. When she loses custody of her son and tries to call his father over Mandsager 25 the phone to stop him from taking him away, she cannot say the words she is thinking: “How could you dream of taking him? That far away? And for so long? You bastard. You heartless bastard” (55). Instead, she is silent over the phone, and the boy is taken from her. The allegory of not being able to speak makes visible the way women are silenced in patriarchal societies, metaphorically and literally. The protagonist continues to reject the oversimplified, categorized language in her society and finds a bodily way to live that connects her to others. Similarly, refusing to eat meat serves as an allegory for refusing to participate in the violent, patriarchal structures. Yeong-hye eventually lives like a plant to completely reject consuming other beings or participating in the violent hierarchy. This extreme allegory allows readers to see the violence of the patriarchal cultures around them and consider ways they can subvert them, perhaps not by acting like a plant or completely rejecting language, but by finding other ways to connect with the world instead of violently overconsuming. Subversion through Lyricism and Allegory in a Global Context ​ Both of these authors make violent systems visible to large audiences using lyricism and allegory in an engaging way. Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” and said in her banquet speech: “the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life” due to its ability to convey new perspectives in ways that make readers empathize more widely (Nobel Prize, 3:56). Han Kang and Enriquez use lyricism and allegories to depict the desires of individuals while revealing and subverting structures of patriarchal and colonial control. The authors make these systems visible through allegories that magnify their excesses. They both offer scenarios of excessive, but not unimaginable violence to make readers see structures that persist in their own societies. They also both offer language to subvert them. Mandsager 26 Han Kang offers a woman who turns the violent patriarchal hierarchy upside down and blooms, and another woman who is able to connect with others without distinguishing them as separate. Through her stories, Enriquez places her readers in gothic amplifications of the world-system and colonialism to reveal how they persist in contemporary cultures and challenges her readers to confront these systems in their own lives. Given their international success, the works of these authors raise questions about the role of world literature and how it should be analyzed. The Warwick Research Collective argues that world-literature is “the literature of the world-system” (8). World literature in the global marketplace cannot be separated from the core-periphery system of exploitation. However, the collective also begs the question “if ‘the way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how we see the world’, what ‘world’ does world-literature demand be made visible?” (48). Mariana Enriquez makes visible aspects of the world-system rooted in violent colonialism and capitalism that are often ignored. Enriquez demonstrates how colonial power dynamics have transformed into capitalist power dynamics through the Bradford family’s ability to maintain power through consuming more and more land, abusing others, and only stopping when their greed to conquer death is consumed by death itself. While Han Kang’s focus in her texts is not directly with the economic exploitation inherent to the world-system, she uses similar allegories and lyricism to reveal patriarchal power structures and the marginalization of the “abnormal.” She also demonstrates the overlap of patriarchal and economic hierarchies through women who are dependent on men due to their lack of income and ability to accrue wealth, making them vulnerable to patriarchal abuse. By revealing their position, Han prompts readers to be more aware of violent systems of maintaining power. Han also focuses her novels on her protagonists’ desires to connect with others and the world beyond the limits of these systems. In response to Mandsager 27 the Warwick Research Collective question, it appears the works of Han and Enriquez demand that the regimes be exposed, named, and their limits drawn. These authors subvert oppressive structures by challenging how they are viewed and offering new ways of perceiving and existing within and outside them. Reading them together, and reading transpacifically, as argued by Bachner and Erber, “has the potential to trouble the naturalized divisions between East and West as well as those of North and South” and “radically rewire how we imagine global connectivity” (vi). Diversifying approaches to “world literature” allows readers to make new connections and see how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal regimes are co-produced and co-maintained, which means that they can be challenged through global solidarities and locally specific resistance. Mandsager 28 Works Cited Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Continuum, 2000. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 1335–61. 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