earticle

영어

One of Freud’s contributions to contemporary narrative technique is the mode of remembering as we see it in the experimental novel by Proust in Modernism and the trauma fictions in Postmodernism. Freud analyzed the patient’s memory and found that trauma was not a cause deeply buried in past but a result produced by dialogue between the patient and the analyst. Due to those transferences, the sequence of cause and effect was reversed. In fact, trauma is like a ghost, haunting repeatedly with different forms, entering the present, and finally the painful story buried in narrator’s mind is realized: the story is not only about the past but about the present.
Since Toni Morrison used a ghost as a crucial metaphor, the search for trauma is one of the recurring themes in the contemporary post-colonial fiction. In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, ghosts control the mother’s life and interfere with her daughter’s love. The narrative produces new meaning as it proceeds, and it reveals three persons’ deaths around which trauma is repeated and composed : the first is the death of the comfort woman, the second is that of the mother, and the third that of the father. This paper traces the roles of these three deaths, focusing on narrating the trauma to produce new meanings. To politicalize the trauma, remembering is not enough: the trauma should be narrated to be listened to by the public. Which death is the most crucial to this purpose? The paper suggests that the third death, the death of the father is
the most crucial to socialize the trauma of the comfort woman. Like the Dead Father in the Freudian sense, as well as the Name of Father in a Lacanian context, the father’s death takes two women's deaths into one readable narration, showing us the transformation of the word, “Chungsindae,” comfort woman, into a real comfort woman, a symbol of Mother Nature. Thus, our memory is possible only with the third ring, the Dead Father, as a function of forgetting and remembering, from which the new story is born.