KJCKorea
Journal Central

The word ‘Sonnim’ condenses ‘Sonnim mama’. In Korean folk, ‘Sonnim’ means smallpox. It indicates visiter from remote country and awful being. In Hwang Seuk-Young’s Novel, Sonnim, indicates Marxism and Christian faith. Because of having that faiths, people struggled and killed each other in Korean War. That novel mutated forms of Jinoguygut and Sonnimgut and that is folk performance of Korea. It had designed for representation of Sincheon massacre of innocent people, pacification and guidance their spirits to the other (next) world. Besides it pray new history through sacrifice of miserable event. Sonnim represented invisible departed spirits as like live persons so that the departed spirits were included in reality. By accepting the form of Gut, Sonnim expanded the reality from the visible world to the invisible flexibly. This fact have made aware of that the conception ‘reality’ was determined not by literary convention by sociocultural context. Sonnim grafted narrative form of novel genre on the form of Gut performance. Sonnim has taken the plot of Gut, <asking the got → contacting the got →playing the got →sending the got>, and Sonnim’s characters performed the roles of a messenger who takes a dead soul to the other world, the departed spirits, woman shaman. And it’s theme was ‘praying for blessing by removal disaster’, that was the theme of Gut. Sonnim set socialism and christian faith up as disaster, therefore ethnic community became the object of blessing. This novel blamed the western ideology, socialism and christian faith for Sincheon massacre. So That disregarded the responsibility, the social contexts and the political faiths of participants in that massacre. Sonnim’s acceptance of Gut’s form resulted in emotional ethnic and postcolonial attitudes against the western modernity. But eventually that could move the reader’s intention from the dead to lives and bless their new livings.

novel genre, narrative strategy, the form of gut, reality, Sonnim(smallpox), rommmantic nationalim.