英文摘要 |
This paper analyzes Nora Okja Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman, which focuses on the dead and the survivors of the colonial and sexual violence in Korea during World War II, by applying Jacques Derrida’s discussions on the act of mourning and the alterity of the dead. In Comfort Woman, the narrative alternates between the ex-comfort woman, Akiko, and her daughter, Beccah. After the traumatic experience of sexual violence as a comfort woman, Akiko has been haunted by the dead and becomes a shaman, reckoning with death and responding to the demands of the dead. Likewise, after her death, Akiko’s daughter Beccah learns, through Akiko’s voice recorded in a tape, to mourn for Akiko’s death and is called to fulfill her responsibility to her dead mother. While mourning is a necessary responsibility, how to understand and respond to the infinite alterity of the dead becomes a duty facing the survivors, and according to Derrida, it is also a question of “hospitality without reserve” to harbor the dead. However, the text of Comfort Woman also indicates an alternative picture of the ghost, which is not merely an unknown other but also an agent, with a different trajectory, which the work of mourning follows; that is, in the act of mourning, my conscious “I” should yield to the dead, the other, instead of keeping the dead alive within my memory. |