Hauntology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

Abstract

This study compares the ontology of ghosts in African American novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zainichi Korean writer Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi s Ghost and explores the possibility of healing for historical scars. While Morrison s novel shows the physical and psychological scars left by the institutional violence of American slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law, Kim s novel deals with the annihilation of humanity itself surrounding the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre, a tragedy of modern Korean history. In these two novels, these ghosts are portrayed as reincarnations of victims of a tragic history who met unjust and untimely deaths or were not mourned sufficiently after death. By comparing the ways these ghosts haunt the survivors, this study tries to inquire how we should mourn the untimely return of the ghosts from time out-of-joint, what is true mourning, and what is the ethical basis for the impossible mourning, using Jacques Derrida s “hauntology” and the theory of mourning as frames of reference. This study concludes that while Beloved the ghost reminds us of the impossible mourning as a complete other who has died but lives in ourselves, Mandogi’s ghost lives with us as a ghostly other who has never left us.