Adieu: The Ethics of Narrative Mourning -Reading Nora Okja Keller`s Comfort Woman = Adieu: The Ethics of Narrative Mourning -Reading Nora Okja Keller`s Comfort Woman

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Nora Okja Keller`s novel Comfort Woman participates in the acts of “literary testimony” of, and “literary mourning” for, the unwritten history of the comfort women, expanding the function of the novel to include testifying and mourning and mobilizes the reader to join in such acts. The act of mourning is important because through the act of mourning the natural death of the body is endowed with social meaning, thus completing the symbolic, social death. Without mourning and crying for the dead, the deaths hover in the space between life and death, between the natural and the social death, its social existence in living rendered meaningless. For the portrayal of mourning and for its enactment, Keller employs a mother`s death and the subsequent funeral and mourning as the main event and theme of the novel and also uses a protagonist whose function is symbolic mourning--the figure of a daughter as the obituary writer. Against the backdrop of the frame story of death and the funeral, the novel exhibits the difficulties and impossibilities of mourning and of crying for the dead: mourning for the comfort women is impossible since their deaths are un-marked, un-accounted for; mourning for the mother is blocked for the daughter since she is overcome with grief and melancholic remembrance of her up-bringing tainted with ‘trans-generational haunting.` Keller`s novel effectively demonstrates the effect of ‘traveling history` from one generation to the next, suffering from the ‘secondary victimhood`, and from one space to another, interweaving Korean history with the immigrant history of America. The daughter`s life of Diaspora with the immigrant mother with the traumatic past as a comfort woman is uncanny, existing in a closet of a shanty, haunted; the figure of the father, absent; and the sense of home, ruptured. The emergence of the metonymic figure of the ‘cassette tape` toward the end of the novel is spectacular in this context, a successful narrative device. The cassette tape, the mother`s voice speaking from the side of the dead, from beyond, functions as the anchoring point in novel`s plot with the narrative secret. First, it performs the speech act of confessing and testifying the unwritten history of comfort woman, renders their forgotten names explicit, thus making their social existence into being, retroactively. The mother`s name “SoonHyo” along with other comfort women`s names are called, thus giving their existence as battered bodies social meaning and identities albeit retroactively. Second, the cassette tape enacts the act of mourning for the dead, in songs and performances of the funeral rites. Third, most importantly, the tape demands the daughter to participate in and continue the act of mourning for the dead and the unaccounted for. When the daughter accepts the demand of the voice of the mother from ‘beyond`, she fulfills the ritual of the funeral, and more importantly, accepts the historical responsibility of continuous mourning for the unaccounted for of history. Thus, the event of mother`s death is the most ethical moment in the daughter`s life, catapulting her into an adulthood with the new sense of self and purpose. The mother leaves a gift, a gift in language, in her stead in dying, which will carry the daughter`s subsequent life.