베트남 원혼서사의 성격과 복수담—『傳奇漫錄』의 경우

Abstract

This paper reveals the characteristics of vengeful ghost narratives after looking at traditional Vietnamese narratives. It also approaches Vietnamese traditional narratives with concepts such as “vengeful ghost” and “revenge,” which take an interesting place among the early East Asian narratives. As it is imbued with the characteristics of vengeful ghost narratives, this paper mainly focuses on research of the representative Vietnamese biography Jeongimanlok. In the beginning, this paper focuses on the fact that Vietnamese traditional narratives had an active confrontational structure and that there were many stories involving vengeful ghosts. In Jeongimanlok, there was a tendency to expand and deepen that characteristic and there were various instances of the vengeful ghost or tales of revenge that were included in the story, thus establishing disorder in the narrative itself. Nevertheless, the vengeful ghosts were largely classified into two categories depending on the reasons for death: natural circumstance and human circumstance, and their behavior and personality were divided individually as well. Vengeful ghosts whose death was caused by human circumstances tried to take revenge, and during that process they became a subject of judgement and undoubtedly exposed to an inversed reality. Death caused by natural circumstances such as war however, could relieve the ghost’s resentment, but the embodied characteristics of vengeful ghost narratives in Jeongimanlok spoke of the vengeful ghosts’ behavior as causing critical problems as they were referred to as a “social evil.” The antagonism between revenge and resolution in vengeful ghost narratives resulted from confrontation among Vietnam’s difficult history, domestic and foreign politics during the royal transition and ideological conflict. In Vietnamese history, conflicts between the North (China) and the South (Champa) still existed during the transition from Trần Vietnam to Lê Vietnam, and it was also a time of conversion from a Buddhist society to Confucian society. The people who died during this great period of confusion and transition were likely to roam around as vengeful ghosts. Regardless of how they died, whether it was because of human or natural circumstances, these vengeful ghosts were a product of Vietnamese Wars, but at the same time they were also a paradox that Vietnamese society had to face.