1. The Shrimp and the Whale

The narrative of the division of the Korean peninsula has largely taken the form of a well-known Korean proverb: korae ssaum e saeudŭng t’ŏjinda—in a fight between whales, it’s the shrimp who gets his back broken. In other words, after the liberation of Korea with the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945, the victorious world powers simply sliced up the nation at the 38th parallel.Footnote ¹¹ The Soviets and the Americans assumed divided caretaking responsibilities while the Koreans, with no representatives in the decision-making, were the ones to suffer the consequences. Within a few years, so the story goes, the Soviets in the North and the Americans in the South had imparted their respective ideologies, installed puppet leaders—Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee respectively—and set the stage for civil war. Encouraged by the Soviet Union, North Korea invaded the South in 1950 in an attempt to reunify the country; three years of war drew in numerous U.S. allies as well as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the first “hot” conflict of the Cold War. As one of the North Korean officers in The Guest unequivocally tells Yosŏp on his homeland visit, “For the sake of the solidarity of our people, there is one thing you must be sure to keep in mind…. The fundamental reason we’re divided is the influence of foreign powers. Imperialist Japan and Imperialist America have made us this way [ilje wa mije kŭrŏke mandŭrŏttio].”Footnote ¹²

Such a narrative, of course, gives agency only to the political form of the nation-state, and only to the most powerful of these: it is Japan, the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union who are the real historical actors, and North and South Korea their arbitrary creations. This has given impetus, I would argue, for Korea’s distinct brand of anti-imperialist nationalism on both sides of the border,Footnote ¹³ emphasizing the not-yet-completed liberation from colonial status that would result in a unified nation-state of its own. As popularly imagined, the homeland visits that comprise the background to the novel have tended to reaffirm the oneness of the Korean nation, or minjok, sundered by outside forces.Footnote ¹⁴ Following this logic, and regarding the massacre of approximately one-quarter of the population of Hwanghae province that lies at the heart of The Guest, only foreign powers have been deemed capable of such an atrocity.

During his stay in North Korea, Yosŏp repeatedly hears the official story that the Imperialist Americans along with Japanese collaborators and deserters were the perpetrators of the massacre as they pushed northward following General MacArthur’s famous UN-backed Incheon landing. At a museum memorializing the victims, tour guides reveal the grisly details of how “the fiendish American Imperialist murderers enacted the mass slaughter that they had been planning for so long”;Footnote ¹⁵ they locked up hundreds of people in an air-raid shelter in Shinch’on, doused it with gasoline, and set it alight. It takes the length of the novel for the fragments of ghostly witness accounts to build into the horrifying truth that Yosŏp had already suspected: it was, in fact, Koreans themselves and not the American invaders who committed the slaughter. Hwang introduces his novel with a short author’s note in which he recounts that, years after he had actually visited the “American Imperialist Massacre Remembrance Museum” in Shinch’on on his trip to North Korea, he met several Korean Americans who told him eyewitness accounts from their childhood. “As it turns out,” he writes, “the atrocities we suffered were committed by none other than ourselves, and the inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident helped form the roots of the frantic hatred that thrives to this day.”Footnote ¹⁶

The novel powerfully suggests that there is a kind of redemption and ground-clearing in claiming such violence as one’s own, to acknowledge the “inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident.” In Cho’s words, “The truth of the massacre and its confessions are the most important requirements to heal [the massacre’s] wounds,”Footnote ¹⁷confirming the paired logic of truth and reconciliation that has now become commonplace in many postconflict sites. Beyond the logic of catharsis and healing, however, I read Hwang’s novel as a deeper critique about possible forms of political agency and not merely about the shift in responsibility from the Soviets or Americans to the Koreans. In conventional understandings of the massacre, such incredible violence can issue only from the singular nation-state—the very political form put under erasure on the divided peninsula. I suggest the reason Hwang’s novel earned so much ire is precisely its assertion of other kinds of modes of political agency and responsibility. Most significantly, The Guest explores the way imported ideologies—the arrival of Christianity and Marxism—have been indigenized and spatialized during and since the Japanese colonial period.Footnote ¹⁸ Hwang explains in his preface:

Hwang is most interested, then, in how the two foreign “guests” are assimilated to the local conditions of colonial Korea, a society that has already been substantially reorganized by the Japanese, those most obvious and prior foreign “guests.”

At the beginning of the novel, Yosŏp’s older brother Ryu Yohan, a Christian presbyter, passes away in his home in New Jersey, precipitating Yosŏp’s trip back to his homeland.Footnote ²⁰ As mentioned previously, Yosŏp’s return is related in a nonlinear style that blends voices of the dead with the narrative of his contemporary journey back to North Korea. From the ghostly testimonies of a number of Yosŏp’s childhood friends and neighbors, we learn that landowners—including the Ryu family themselves—were able to amass property under the Japanese agricultural system and had generally converted to Christianity, while the peasants and laborers in Japanese mines found Marxist theories then in circulation from Japan and China readily applicable to their own conditions of oppression. Lee explains the confluence of historical factors that linked Christianity to landownership and right-wing politics in this region:

Significant here is the production of a regionalization of northern Korea that predates division and war. Marxism and a Christianized version of nationalism were thus competing ideologies well before liberation and, most importantly, were grounded in distinct relationships to land and property. Byung-ho Chung notes the normalization of this ideological binary such that during the Korean War and its aftermath, “the term ‘War Refugee Crossers to the South’ became synonymous with ‘Christians’ and ‘anticommunists’.”Footnote ²²

Yosŏp gradually learns that his own brother Yohan was one of the most brutal perpetrators of violence during the massacre. Such acts were rationalized—in Yohan’s own ghostly account—because the landless peasants “tried to take away our land, the land that’s been handed down to us from generation to generation. It was the beginning of what they called the ‘land reform.’”Footnote ²³ Yohan’s ghost goes on to detail the particular humiliations that this incurs. Note that here, as elsewhere in the novel, the voices of the dead are told from the present and addressed to Yosŏp:

As Yohan relates, it is precisely the intimacy involved in proposed land reforms that is perceived as most threatening: the thought of the “kids we grew up with” demanding land is, in fact, more outrageous than theft by “some foreign bastards [t’aji esŏ on nomdŭri].” The novel goes on to reveal how the outbreak of violence leading to the massacre is precipitated when the Christians, emboldened by hearing about General MacArthur’s Incheon landing, retaliate for the redistribution of land that they had suffered after the People’s Committee came to power.Footnote ²⁵

From the peasants’ side, the account of injustice is quite different. This perspective is most clearly articulated by the ghost of Uncle Sunnam, an impoverished farm hand who is killed in the violence by Yohan and his fellow Christians.

Hwang presents neither side as the correct moral account of the violence. Rather, what the novel stages is the way colonial space—or more concretely, land—has been produced as fundamentally contradictory, overwritten with competing desires, histories, class interests, and affective resonances. The Shinch’on massacre is thus a complex event involving religion, local class struggles, and land reform as well as foreign involvement. Those unresolved conflicts, carried into the struggle of decolonization, are then precipitated and preserved in the rigid spatial formations of the two Korean states that remain to the present. This is what Paik Nak-chung has described as the “solidifying” of the event of partition in 1945 into the division system [pundan ch’eche] of today.Footnote ²⁷

Concrete historical evidence on the perpetrators of the Shinch’on massacre remains murky. Jodi Kim draws on the work of historian Walter Lafeber to note that before 1950, “a bloody civil conflict had already ensued, with heavy fighting along the 38th parallel and guerilla war on both sides claiming a hundred thousand lives.”Footnote ²⁸ In this account, the main ideological conflict was between right-wing and left-wing Koreans, and not pro- or anti-Soviets or Americans.Footnote ²⁹ Bruce Cumings, the preeminent U.S. historian of modern Korea, is initially circumspect about the responsibility for the Shinch’on atrocities. His 2010 book, The Korean War, devotes two pages to the event in which he describes a visit he made in 1987 to the massacre site: “I visited the charnel house and the tombs, examined original photos and newspaper stories, and spent the day with a survivor; we came away convinced that a terrible atrocity had taken place, although the evidence on its authorship was impossible to document.”Footnote ³⁰ Interestingly, the lack in the historical archive is supplanted by none other than Hwang Sok-yong himself:

Cumings proceeds to cite The Guest for several details on the murders. Hwang’s novel, therefore, does not merely challenge dominant historical narratives from the realm of the literary, but is actively providing an alternative historiography of the event. In theorizing forms of rooted political agency beyond that of the nation-state, it is a work that convincingly undoes the usual binaries of North and South, foreign intervention and native innocence, whales and shrimps, to present the spatial and psychic complexity behind these preliberation struggles.

Moreover, Hwang’s novel effectively introduces internal dissent and heterogeneity into the one myth that both North and South have long agreed upon: the indisputable unity of the Korean people [minjok] forged out of a collective history of suffering caused by external invasions.Footnote ³² As The Guest rewrites the “great powers” narrative of the Korean division and War, the abstract Cold War notion of two competing nation-states, each the container of an overlaid, foreign ideology that stops at its border, is replaced by deeper, older, granular, and everyday struggles over land and labor. The violence of Hwanghae Province and the war is therefore partly predicated on tensions already formed by and through colonial capitalism, and not merely the result of foreign intervention after 1945. Despite Hwang’s title, the novel is in fact less concerned with the content of imported Marxism and Christianity than with their incorporation into local spatial practices by the “host.”Footnote ³³ If the most fundamental processes of capitalism and colonialism include struggles over land, the novel’s two guest ideologies of Christianity and Marxism might best be thought of as ways that Koreans made sense of the contradictions in spatial reorganization that occurred under the Japanese colonial regime.

2. The Return

Avtar Brah has written that “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey.”Footnote ³⁴ The journey, however, may be bidirectional: it includes both the one that produces the dispersal of peoples from a homeland, and a return or orientation toward that homeland. Khachig Tölölyan writes that a

For diasporic Koreans who left the north during the war, such notions of return and restoration are deeply problematic.Footnote ³⁶ “Commitment” to the homeland takes the impossible form of a loyalty to a nonexisting ideal: a unified Korea, the realization of which would (most likely) involve the implosive demise and painful incorporation of the North Korean state into the South.Footnote ³⁷ Meanwhile, simply “maintaining relations” with the homeland in the North is an illegality for many in the diaspora. In this section, I examine the way The Guest posits “the return” neither as a project of restoration nor of maintaining relations with the homeland, but of providing the occasion for a diasporic self-accounting, that is, a way for diasporic subjects to “give an account of the pasts that produced them.”Footnote ³⁸ What are the sedimented spatial formations and ideologies that underpin certain constructions of the diasporic subject? And what regimes of power, to borrow from Brah, might “inform and inscribe the formation of a specific diaspora?”Footnote ³⁹

At one level, Yosŏp’s return to North Korea is revelatory for the very fact that it has happened at all. A facet of the narrative that no commentators, to my knowledge, have discussed is the descriptive realism of North Korean contemporary life, which is sharply contrasted to the much discussed nonrealist ghostly appearances. For a place closed off from much of the world for sixty years and usually associated with cultish leaders, famines, and nuclear standoffs, Hwang’s depiction of North Korea in the 1990s—and Pyongyang in particular—is stunning for its very normality. I quote at length from the novel:

The passage is full of typical details of modern street life: movement, colors, clothing, and character types populate Pyongyang’s spaces on an ordinary workday. Familiar, urban everyday life goes on here. Such a scene of modern street life would not be out of place in a number of twentieth-century urban novels and, at first, this passage seems peripheral to the central drama unfolding in the novel. Yet the urban realism of a place invariably cast as backward and oppressive strikes the reader, as it does Yosŏp, as distinctly unreal. For a novel that abounds with ghosts, it is perhaps these details of North Korean life that appear most spectral.Footnote ⁴¹

A page later we get: “The buildings, the monuments, the milky light of the streetlamps and all those passersby—they were still all too vivid. He felt as if he had walked into some sort of surrealistic painting.”Footnote ⁴² The very unforeign everydayness of this scene—with the exception perhaps of the students’ Leninesque caps—can only be registered by Yosŏp as a simulacrum. Pyongyang is no hellish city of goose-stepping soldiers and famine-starved children. This city scene thus far exceeds its apparent generic function as realist background or setting; it offers an uncanny rendering of the normal that works to undo our usual spatial conceptions of North Korea as aberrant and extraordinary. A similar effect is produced in the representation of North Korean guides. Neither friendly nor unfriendly, they operate in the manner of bureaucrats everywhere and are all too familiar to the reader. Yosŏp gives them unflattering nicknames that are used throughout—“Fatty,” “All Back” (named for his hairstyle), and “Soprano”—and although they are clearly functionaries of the North Korean state, significantly, they are given a minimum of individual subjectivities. In a different analytic mode, we may argue that the novel provides a rare, alternative ethnographic account of North Korean life.

Yosŏp’s return thus makes visible a new social terrain. A familiar, everyday reality exists in a state assumed to be wholly and radically other. Further, the very shape of the return—the particular and plodding topography of Yosŏp’s journey back to North Korea—forces us to recalibrate our usual geographic imaginaries. As the narrative follows Yosŏp back to his home village Ch’ansaemgol, near the site of the massacre, it takes the reader from present-day global city to the remote colonial village of his past. Beginning in Brooklyn, he traverses a number of urban and rural landscapes in the United States, China, and North Korea. The even-toned third-person descriptions of his packing, departures, arrivals, sightseeing, and stays in hotels maintain a realism of time and space into which the ghostly voices and dreamlike imagery of his childhood intrude.

What we note at the formal level of the narrative, however, is that the closer the protagonist gets to his home village, the more the memories and voices of ghosts take up narrative space. Although necessary for the narrative drama to build to its climax, this progression upends our usual idea of spatial hierarchies. That is, as we move through locations from more to less powerful—from New York and New Jersey, to Los Angeles, to northern China, to Pyongyang, to Shinch’on and then finally, to the tiny village of Ch’ansaemgol—the voices and images that will deliver the novel’s final devastating truth expand and dilate, occupying more and more textual space. Toward the end of the novel, Yosŏp’s third-person narrative in the present gives way completely to a full chapter of ghostly testimonials of the actual massacre. The inverse proportions of geographical and narrative space effectively remap the scales and hierarchies within which we normally operate. Thus, New York and Los Angeles—usually understood as the most important diasporic centers for Koreans—are mere stopovers; China is a brief meal and conversation at a restaurant, while the narrative drags and slows the closer we get to Yosŏp’s hometown. Yosŏp’s protracted trip back to the site of the Shinch’on massacre forces us to consider a world-historical event—the violence of the Korean War and its long drawn out aftermath—from a location (Ch’ansaemgol) one actually cannot find on GoogleMaps. Thus, rather than presenting a local event as overdetermined by global forces in the vein of Korean nationalist historiography, the novel very carefully reveals an event of global history from a radically localized epistemology. Simultaneously, it asks us to question how some places—Shinch’on, Hwanghae province—have been written out of the time of both the nation and the diaspora while other places—New York, China, Pyongyang, Seoul—are assumed to be the primary sites from which these collective histories and identities issue. We discover, then, that Yosŏp’s return has little to do with the diasporic subject’s maintaining or restoring relations with the homeland. Rather, for Hwang, the return is spatially and psychically anchored by the deliberate desire to revisit the very violence that accompanied national division and provoked migration in the first place.

At this point we must pause to note that the Korean diaspora has had a different trajectory from other migrations motivated by Tölölyan’s archetypal “catastrophic destruction of the homeland.” First, we must speak of the Korean diaspora simultaneously as intranational and transnational: Ji-Yeon Yuh notes how “internal migration … became an international migration with the closing of the border at the DMZ.”Footnote ⁴³ In turn, the “social alienation in the South” experienced by many refugees from the North often precipitated further migration to the United States or other destinations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Not surprisingly, because of the virulently anti-Communist regimes in the South and the persecution of families whose members defected to the North, almost no mention has been made of the substantial numbers of intellectuals and students who chose to return to the North after witnessing the corruption and repression of the U.S.-occupied South.Footnote ⁴⁵ Regarding the overseas diaspora, we must recall too that unlike many postcolonial populations that gravitate toward the former colonial metropole, for Koreans (like the Taiwanese) the main diasporic destination is not JapanFootnote ⁴⁶ but the United States, where some 1.7 million ethnic Koreans currently reside. Outside of neighboring China, overseas Koreans are vastly concentrated in this one host country in a unilinear rather than the more traditional radial pattern of dispersal to which Tölölyan’s model refers. This configuration has also reinforced the disciplinary boundaries I mentioned earlier between East Asian studies (studies of the territorial Korean nation), Asian American studies (Koreans in the United States) and postcolonial studies (European imperialism and the decolonization of its territories).

To understand these intersections in the Korean context, we must pay attention to the way the inaccurately named Cold War has obscured the material reasons for many of these migrations. In the novel, Yosŏp shares a hotel room with another elderly diasporic Korean, a professor, returning to North Korea on the homeland visit to find the mother he had been separated from more than forty years prior. The professor’s own account of the war and his leaving is oddly doubled: at one point he blames the Communist takeover for their forced exit south: “From the very beginning they refused to believe in anything other than the so-called fundamental class.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet, just a page earlier he remembers, “People kept saying they were going to drop an atomic bomb on us, so we left, left without having any idea how we were going to make a living—we barely knew which was south—we just dragged the entire family out on the road.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The “they” refers, of course, to the Americans, just a few years after their nuclear victory over Japan in World War II and elevation to world power. Jodi Kim writes that “though atomic weapons were ultimately not used [in Korea], relentless aerial bombing and the dropping of a new weapon called napalm almost completely leveled northern and central Korea, resulting in a staggering civilian death toll throughout the peninsula of 3 million and forcing those who survived underground into caves.”Footnote ⁴⁹ There is, therefore, confusion over how to understand the multiple origins of Koreans in the diaspora: on the one hand there is resentment and blame toward the present North Korean state as oppressive and totalitarian; on the other, the embodied memory of imminent military violence from a newly imperial United States. Thus,

Borrowing from the Black British slogan, “We are here because you were there,” Kim argues that the motivations for Korean migrants like Yosŏp and the professor (along with other Asian migrations from Vietnam, Japan, and China) must be profoundly rethought. Migration to the United States is less an escape from atheistic, repressive, or Communist regimes and more the result of U.S. imperialist wars in Asia. In the novel, Yosŏp responds to the professor’s ambiguous personal story with a “vague nod. Even among the North Koreans who ended up in America, there was a distinct trend: the more successful one was, the stronger his or her resentment towards the North.”Footnote ⁵¹ He implicitly registers how a late capitalist logic of liberal market freedoms is retroactively used as an alibi for U.S. Cold War intervention.

Yosŏp’s older brother Yohan, however, leaves home for yet another reason: he cannot face the descent into violence that he himself has helped precipitate. Toward the end of the novel, Yohan’s ghost gives a full confession of his brutality toward “anyone we decided was our enemy,” as well as the unprovoked slaughter of the mother and sisters of a Christian ally who had betrayed him. Leaving home thus becomes a way to escape his own horrific actions:

In this case, the relationship between violence and diasporic subject is reversed: one’s home “needs to be left” because of one’s own complicity in its destruction.Footnote ⁵³ Yuh’s concept of refuge (as opposed to refugee) migration is here entirely applicable. Rather than motivated by clear threats to personal safety or human rights, refuge migrants are motivated by “a deep psychological need to leave behind chaos, insecurity, and trauma” and seek “peace of mind.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yohan’s “hell on earth” is precisely the insecurity and trauma that follow his own acts of violence.

Yet, as I’ve stressed, The Guest does not merely replace foreign imperial aggressors with fratricidal Koreans. It works to proffer an account of migration “that centres on the configurations of power which differentiate diasporas internally.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, if diaspora studies have often “privilege[d] a logic of mobility that has become oddly attached to denunciations of nationalism” (Tölölyan 653), The Guest uses the arrested national desires of Korea to critique the transnational construction of the diaspora. Yosŏp’s return occasions an account of “the past that produced him” only to find such pasts multiple and contested: he must revisit the internal antagonisms of colonial capitalism, decolonization, and war rather than use the ideological shorthand of anti-Communism or the American Dream. The return, finally, has been less about reconfirming Yosŏp’s belonging to his homeland and is more a literary device for making visible new ethical accounts and political imaginaries beyond the congealed binaries of nation and diaspora.

3. One-and-a-Half Nationalisms

Despite sixty years of stalemate between two states still technically at war, and the consolidation of radically different political, economic, and social formations, the nationalist imaginary of both North and South Korea has relied on the notion of eventual reunification and restored wholeness. Paik explains that despite a shared longing for reunification, it is a struggle that “cannot succeed in the old-fashioned nationalist way … because we have more than one nationalism (perhaps it isn’t even a case of two nationalisms but something like one-and-a-half).”Footnote ⁵⁶ As we have seen, the “division system” is something that is “certainly a legacy of colonial rule and even more a direct product of neocolonial intervention, yet that has taken on a systematic nature of its own with self-reproducing anti-democratic structures on both sides of the dividing line.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Consequently, the Korean nationalist agenda on both sides of the DMZ seeks to suture the currently severed national body with the appropriate state form.

Given the competing security states and “one-and-a-halfness” of Korean nationalism, we might consider Hwang’s formal choice to model The Guest on the twelve-part Chinogwi exorcism as an invocation of a single, authentic Koreanness that would transcend both the devastating influences from the outside and variations in local nationalist agendas within. Hwang explains his choice:

Bruce Fulton writes that the exorcism is “a ritual conducted by a practitioner of native Korean spirituality to hasten the journey of wandering and potentially disruptive spirits to the next world.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, the shamanist practice as pre-Christian “native genre” would constitute a method of reconciliation and healing that both the North and the South can participate in to rid themselves of foreign contamination. Yet, despite resembling the earlier practice of the sonnimgut against smallpox, the ritual here is not so much designed to expel the foreign agent as to “relieve the agony of those who survived and appease the spirits of those who were sacrificed.” Just as his use of the return worked to revise dominant accounts of diasporic formation, Hwang uses the “native” genre of the exorcism not to shore up an uncorrupted notion of the Korean ethnos or minjok, but as a further critique of the peninsula’s statist instrumentalizations of the nation. Let me explain my argument by way of a closer analysis of the novel’s formal framing.

In The Guest, the exorcism functions foremost as a specific structuring device that enables the novel to cross generic time and space: it is at once a ghost story, testimonial, and realist (and at times surrealist) ethnographic travel account. Hwang’s author’s note explains: “The ritual consists of twelve separate rounds. As is the case during an actual exorcism, the dead and the living simultaneously cross and recross the boundaries between past and present, appearing at what seem like random intervals to share each of their stories and memories.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The majority of the chapters have little to do with the specific content of the ritual, as would be indicated by chapter titles such as “Parting of the Cloth,” “Clarification before Reconciliation,” and “Separation.” What Hwang is most interested in is the “crossing and recrossing” of boundaries, beyond past and present, living and dead, subjective and objective, via a literary form that can assimilate a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. In the Korean version of the author’s note, he writes of the indivisible nature of subjectivity and objectivity, and the “entanglement” of the “individual’s dreamlike everyday life” with history.Footnote ⁶¹ Hwang’s imagined form of reconciliation is “not a rational solution,”Footnote ⁶² but an explicitly creative one: Yosŏp’s consciousness is offered as the “stage” for different subjects to “tell their own stories and positions.”Footnote ⁶³ The novel figures Yosŏp’s mental space as the imagined terrain for the multiple “stories and positions” that can accommodate the heterogeneity of the nation, a space that cannot take place within either North or South Korean territories. The shamanistic genre thus allows Hwang to make a claim for a concept of nation space that emphatically cannot be instrumentalized by any state.

At the same time, the last four chapters, each only a few pages in length, more deliberately mimic the ceremonial climax of the shamanistic recitation. The final chapter titled “Farewell Guests: Eat your fill and be gone!” introduces the novel’s only section in verse; this striking generic shift imitates the shaman’s concluding lament asking the spirits to finally and firmly depart the world of the living. Beginning with appeals to traditional kinds of troublesome ghosts reluctant to move on to the afterlife—the widower’s ghosts and the bachelor’s ghosts, the ghosts of the drowned and those who died in childbirth—the lament finishes with distinctly modern forms of ghosthood.

The verse can be construed as a melancholy account of modern Korean history from the perspective of those who perished and survived alike: the violence of the civil war wrought both from without—“those bombed by planes overhead”—and from within—“those burnt to ashes by flames.” At one level, we may surmise that this unattributed shaman’s voice is the formal manifestation of the novel’s goal of reconciliation and unity. Yet, on closer inspection, we see that the destruction specifically invokes the domains in which the modern state operates: through the administration of security via militarized violence (“wagons, tanks, trucks, or trains”) as well as the biopolitical concerns of health and disease (“typhus, consumption, or cholera”).Footnote ⁶⁵ While seeming at first a resurrection of a traditional, autochthonous Korean ritual wielded against the foreign guest, the final lament of the novel is, rather, a profound reminder of precisely those technologies of the state (both North and South) that have continually tried to capture the nation.

Brah writes that the very “concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins,”Footnote ⁶⁶ with the totalizing tendencies of the nation-state the main offender. Yet the concluding verse also points to the very complicity between the “division system” and diasporic subject formations: those “ghosts still resentful, ghosts far from home” are a product of the same spatial alibis as the division of the peninsula. Thus, rather than an example of literary nationalism that would invoke a transcendent (or transnational) Korean body to overcome historical division, the exorcism functions foremost to critique the dual statist projects and supporting diasporic formations of the peninsula that have sought to control internal differentiation and dissent.Footnote ⁶⁷The Guest’s ethical ideal of reconciliation thus necessarily posits an alternative spatial figuration of nation space and, in turn, of agency, responsibility, and belonging. Only then can the project of creating future political imaginaries begin.

The last decade has witnessed a burgeoning of South Korean transnational culture, known in Korean as “hallyu,” or the “Korean wave.”Footnote ⁶⁸ During the same years, the numbers of Korean migrants—now often educational migrants of a wealthier demographic—to Western countries has continued to increase, making Korean food, noraebangs (“singing rooms”) and youth culture one of the cosmopolitan flavors of any urban center from Auckland to Toronto.Footnote ⁶⁹ In an age when South Korean pop culture and TV dramas circulate to such an extent that the country’s material prosperity can now be mocked by a global hit dance song,Footnote ⁷⁰ Hwang’s narrative soberly reminds us of the violent (post)colonial origins of some of these migrations and flows in the first place. It also reminds us of the one place from which a globalized Korean culture does not flow: that stubbornly present remainder and reminder of Korea’s arrested decolonization on the northern half of the peninsula.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, even as “Hwang Sok-yong” himself may circulate transnationally in the market place of “world literature” offering a redemptive vision for “all humanity and for all time,”Footnote ⁷² his work indexes the partial blockages and lacunae in our imaginary of the global flow of culture, challenging any easy celebration of the transnational against the nation. Hwang’s novel marks a more radical boundary crossing than that of either the DMZ or national mass culture markets: one that is at once spatial, temporal, and ethical.

I have been arguing that the unremitting desire for a singular nation coterminous with a state is a product of the unique configuration of Korea’s postcoloniality. The longing for state-form has obscured the lived, spatial formations of other histories, subjects, and collectivities. My reading also suggests that Hwang’s formal literary techniques in The Guest are useful for rethinking some of the spatial concepts indispensible to postcolonial studies, whether by dilating and reinscribing certain spaces, or fracturing and interrogating the assumed productions of others. Through such strategies, the novel articulates the desire for a proper ethical stocktaking of war, division, and violence, one that takes a more complex view of the colonial and postcolonial; inside and outside; aggressors and victims; homeland and diaspora.

At the end of the novel, Yosŏp returns to his village and buries the remains of his brother in the soil of his hometown—an act that may seem a sentimental plot line to restore wholeness and identity for the fractured diasporic subject. Yet The Guest’s whole narrative has demonstrated how little it follows the expected contours of division and reunification. Yosŏp’s return, rather, is the act of one whose home space had never been unified or intact, and who has been found partly guilty for the unspeakable atrocities that have acted as alibis for its further ruptures. The hope that remains is for an ethical understanding of the complexity of forces that created division and migration, rather than an impossible return to wholeness.