소설「저주토끼」와 드라마 <악귀>에 나타난 마술적 실재론 -‘샤먼의 저주’라는 원격작용을 통한 실재의 새로운 인과성-

Abstract

French philosopher Simone Weil said that real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, and boring, but imaginary evil can be romantic and varied. The recent phenomenon of the revival of the subject matter of evil and curse in korean novels and dramas seems to declare that we are in the era where a more diverse imagination is needed to respond to the unspecified evil that is becoming more massive in reality. This paper seeks to analyze this phenomenon using two cultural terms: Magical Realism and Indigenous Futurism. In particular, among the many works that deal with narratives about evil and curses, we will especially focus on Jung Bo-ra's novel Cursed Bunny and Kim Eun-hee's occult drama ‘Revenant’. Both works have in common that they have developed narratives in a variety of ways by knocking on the door of ‘surrealism’ as a response to the existence of evil that is increasingly different from the existing one in terms of the reality and causality. It has futuristic and magical properties in that it is surreal rather than reality, but it also has a non-Western and alternative aspect in that the material of narratives is taken from the indigenous tradition. These characteristics can be explained by ‘magical realism,’ a cultural term that has existed for a long time. Magical realism already has a folk aspect in the meaning of the term itself. Magical realism is related to postmodernism and a term to describe the non-West tendency. In this respect, Indigenous Futurism and Magical Realism have mutual referential properties. Cursed Bunny sets as the main character a family that has placed a curse on generations from the pre-modern past to the present, and ‘Revenant’ follows the event took place at Jangjin-ri in 1958, when the custom of Yeommae(厭魅), which has been frequently practiced since the Joseon Dynasty. Using the incident as its subject matter, it tells the story of a curse placed on an evil spirit being resolved by folklorists and the brave young woman who sees the ghost. Both narratives have the structure in which the great evil that created capitalist greed is punished through some kind of remote action by shaman magic. Here, evil implicitly reveals a structure that can no longer be solved solely through the modern judicial system. In this respect, this paper explores the new causality of reality through Realistic Magic by Timothy Morton who a 21st century dominant speculative realist. I explored whether futurism, which imagines magical reality, can provide another logic and causality that finds the alternative narrative that explains our vague and uncertain reality.