Abstract:

This study aims to explore South Korean writer Bora Chung’s “The Head” from the writer’s short story collection Cursed Bunny (2021) through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s notion of “the abject”. Haunting readers with its creepy image of a talking head made up of the nameless female protagonist’s bodily waste, “The Head” forces them to ponder on the notion of the abject and the competency of the symbolic order to repress or exclude it, or the lack thereof as represented in Chung’s story. Chung’s story strikingly reflects the gradual process of the disintegration of the female protagonist’s sense of self and unity when “the head” as “the abject” becomes an inseparable part of her life. Despite the woman’s efforts to get rid of the head and thus maintain the symbolic order, the head’s growing influence on the woman’s life as a threatening force on her identity to the point of replacing her in the end hints at the inescapable presence of the abject. By applying Julia Kristeva’s notion of “the abject”, this study will focus on the abject as an integral component of the human psyche and the failure of the symbolic laws and rules to ward off and purify the abject as represented in Chung’s “The Head”. Through a Kristevan analysis of the story, it will be concluded that the semiotic realm as symbolized by what could be called “the triumph of the abject” in the story eventually prevails over the symbolic order by transgressing the boundaries between self/other, inside/outside and cleanliness/defilement and thus making us realize the tenuousness and vulnerability of these borders.