(the) American (Novel of)

Eating Dogs and Women
101
is at the heart of Kristeva’s notion of abjection. It mixes up the categories
of animal and human, as when Song-Hee stuffs food into her
mouth with an ardor that borders on animality, or when she cooks her
husband’s beloved dog Chong-Chong, having caught sight of him kissing
his lover good-bye on the evening of their wedding anniversary. It
mixes up waste with consumable food, as when Song-Hee discovers, by
accident, her neighbor Yoon-Hee sneaking out to the trash with a bag
full of the food that Song-Hee has been preparing for her over the last
several days. Yoon-Hee’s inability to eat is bound up with her father’s
sexual abuse, and the childhood guilt she bears for the death of a little
girl from the neighborhood, who assumed Yoon-Hee was playing hideand-seek
when she saw her enter the meat freezer in her father’s
butcher’s shop, when in fact Yoon-Hee was hiding from her father. The
little girl enters the freezer, wanting to play hide-and-seek too, and
Yoon-Hee discovers her frozen body a few hours later. Women’s bodies,
we understand, are of little more value than the carcasses among which
they hide—commodities to be used, receptacles to contain a stepfather’s
excess sperm, expendable bodies, laboring bodies for the production of
surplus value.
Taking in food has become intolerable to Yoon-Hee, whose father
the butcher fed her food she didn’t want in her childhood and forced
sex on her. Like Bess, in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996),
Yoon-Hee suffers, not for Jan, but for the sins of her father. 7 And her
refusal of the food Song-Hee makes—her only way of expressing affection
and love, it would seem—is intolerable to Song-Hee, who
marches Yoon-Hee back into her apartment, empties the food from the
trash bag onto the table, and, in an uncanny repetition, tries to forcefeed
her, as had Yoon-Hee’s father. The boundaries of inside and outside
are confused, just as they are in the spasm of vomiting by which Yoon-
Hee tries to protect herself, evacuating the intolerable, incessantly redrawing
the boundary between her and the world that has violated her.
She renders the inside outside, vomiting up nothing, because her body
refuses to take in anything more from the external world.
In 301/302 a stepfather’s incest brings on the abjection of a
woman who uses the exclusion of food as a way of tolerating the past,
an exclusion that leads to her inevitable death. Yoon-Hee exercises the
ultimate control over a life that has escaped from her by orchestrating
her own death, a death that is eroticized, ironically, by the cannibalism