KJCKorea
Journal Central

What is the nature of ghosts that appear in the realistic novel? According to Derrida, a ghost is an expression of the cardinal state of affairs that is more fundamental than the being as presence which tend to persist in excluding and concealing the state of affairs at issue. In Suk-Young Hwang's novel entitled <Guest>, Yo-Sub's visit to his home village indicates an entrance to the cardinal state of affairs ‘Shinchun Massacre’ that was kept in silence for 50 years since the Korean War. It is an encounter with ‘the moment in which the connections of time have been disassembled’, i.e. facing the others’ time that was thoroughly suppressed by the South-North ideology. Yo-Sub, who belongs to the second generation that comes after the original crime, was born with the destiny of ‘a cannibalistic subject’ whose patrimony cannot be properly worked out without receiving the ghosts. So Yo-Sub who can get cured from the inherited fatal harm only when he rectifies the wrongdoing of the previous generation that acclaimed the guests from the west, desperately attempts to do the mourning work. According to Derrida, the mourning work lies essentially in the internalization and the identification of the other into one's symbolic structure. Finally Yo-Sub recovers, in a paradoxical way, his own self by means of making himself into the other, i.e. taking in Yo-Han's ghost. This accords well with the narrative structure of Ji-no-gwi exorcism in which Yo-Sub becomes a psychic medium, and communicates with the dead people. The cycle activity of exorcism where the task of conjuring up the ghosts is carried out contains an attempt to regain one’s subjectivity by way of recapturing the human relationship with others. In this respect it turns out that a ghost is not the other that is transplanted from the outside but the other that comes from the inside, i.e. the transmitted other. The transmitted other, i.e. a guest, while amending the history's wrongdoing, provides us with an opportunity to experience the true liberation from the sense of guilt.

cannibalism, subject, ghost, Hwang Suk-Young, the novel <Guest>