Silence, Shamans and Traumatic Haunting: A Novel and Accompanying Exegesis

Abstract

Major Work: Typhoon Kingdom In 1653, the Dutch East India Company’s Sparrowhawk is wrecked on a Korean island, and Hae-jo, a local fisherman, guides the ship’s bookkeeper to Seoul in search of his surviving shipmates. The two men, one who has never ventured to the mainland and the other unable to speak the language, are soon forced to choose between loyalty to each other and a king determined to maintain his country’s isolation. Three hundred years later, in the midst of the Japanese occupation, Yoo-jin is taken from her family and forced into prostitution, and a young soldier must navigate the Japanese surrender and ensuing chaos of the Korean War to find her. Based on the seventeenth-century journal of Hendrick Hamel and testimonies of surviving Korean “Comfort Women,” “Typhoon Kingdom” connects two narratives through an examination of language, foreignness and traumatic haunting. The novel seeks to make a unique creative contribution to the small body of literature in English representing the diverse and traumatic experiences of Korean “Comfort Women” and the tumultuous history of the Korean peninsula. Exegesis: Writing at the Intersection of Trauma and Haunting: Narrative Representations of Korean “Comfort Women” in English An examination of narrative representations of the traumatic experiences of Korean “Comfort Women” that explores a new way of reading and writing about literatures on the subject. Chapter One provides an historical context examining events and their forgetting. Chapter Two presents shamanic performance as a seemingly eruptive and counter-hegemonic force that transcends the familiar confines of ritual to enact a communal memory and provide a means of engagement with historical trauma and its ghosts. And Chapter Three asks how Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life exemplify the unsettling power of writing at this intersection of trauma and haunting.