Trans-spatial/subjective Storytelling in Comfort Woman

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and prove that the novel is based on so-called “chronotope of congregation” as literary totality where images congregate to reflect the writers’ concrete experiences in the actual spaces. In this chronotope of congregation, Soon Hyo and Beccah expand their intersubjective relations into trans-subjective relations, reflecting and contrasting voices and experiences from many women who had to suffer from colonialization and patriarchal violence. Soon Hyo, as a trans-subjective/spatial narrator performs and practices shamanic rituals that create poetic relations among women across various spaces. This poetic relations also bring up poetic totality among all beings-in-the-world who/which suffered. In the same token, Soon Hyo’s storytelling supplemented by Korean folklore subverts the hierarchy of truth and lie to resist historical interment of comfort women’s stories and to disinter hidden historical violence. Beccah, as a narratee and translator, contends with and translates stories told by women including Soon Hyo, Soon Hyo’s mother, Induk, and so on. Beccah’s hybrid identity ontologically, linguistically help modal translation across various painful experience women in different spaces testify. With Soon Hyo’s storytelling and Beccah’s translation, the chronotope of congregation turns into a trans-subjective, trans-spatial choral for healing ritual.