The Story of Traditional Korean Literature 1604978538, 9781604978537

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Peter H. Lee

Copyright 2013 Cambria Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press University Corporate Centre, 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, NY 14226 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Peter H., 1929The story of traditional Korean literature / Peter H. Lee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-853-7 (alk. paper) 1. Korean literature--History and criticism. I. Title. PL956.L44 2013 895.7'09--dc23 2013024400

For Samantha, Sydney, and Bryan

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi Chapter 1: Higher Narratives in Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Chapter 3: The Storyteller’s Miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Chapter 4: Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Chapter 5: The Imjin nok, or The Record of the Black Dragon Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Chapter 6: Ideal Places in Classic Korean Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Chapter 7: The Road to Ch’unhyang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407

List of Figures

Figure 1: Yi Kyubo, beginning of "Lay of King Tongmyŏng." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 Figure 2: Songs of Flying Dragons (1445–1447), cantos 1-2: 1:1ab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 Figure 3: Beginning of "The Turkish Bakery." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372 Figure 4: Beginning of "Song of P'yŏngyang." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Figure 5: Beginning of The Record of the Black Dragon Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374 Figure 6: Beginning of The Song of the Chaste Wife Ch'unhyang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375

Acknowledgments Research for the papers was facilitated by grants from the Council on Research, Academic Senate, University of California. Los Angeles, and I am grateful for their assistance. My trip to Namwǒn in April 2008 was made possible by an Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council small grant. The papers are used here with the kind permission of the editors of the journals. 1. Delivered as the 88th faculty research lecture at Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall, UCLA, on April 13, 2000. It was included in Steven Shankman and Amiya Dev, eds., Epic and Other Higher Narratives: Essays in Intercultural Approach (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2011), pp. 26– 42. 2. Reprinted from Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture (Korea Institute, Harvard University) 5 (2012): 201–267. 3. Reprinted, with modification, from A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Copyright © by Peter H. Lee 1998 and 2013. 4. Reprinted from the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (Seoul: Sunggyungwan University 6:2 (2006): 137–175.

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5. Reprinted from Korean Studies (Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii) 14 (1990): 50–83. 6. Reprinted from Explorations in Korean Literary History (Institute of Modern Korean Studies, Yonsei University, Seoul, 1998), pp. 41–53. 7. Reprinted from Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 3 (2010): 257–376. The image for the book cover is “A poet contemplating the river of time” by Kang Hŭian (1417–1464). National Museum of Korea.

Preface The seven essays brought together here were published in journals and a book now out of print, between 1989 and 2012. They concern works previously undervalued or suppressed in Korean literary history. Such oral-derived texts as Koryǒ love songs, p’ansori, and shamanist narrative songs were composed in the mind, retained in the memory, sung to audiences, and heard—not read. Other texts were written in literary Chinese, the language of the learned ruling class, which is challenging even when one has been raised on the Confucian and literary canons of China and Korea. To understand fully the nature of these works, one needs to understand the distinction between what were considered the primary and secondary genres in the traditional canon, the relations between literature written in literary Chinese and that penned in the vernacular, and the generic hierarchy in the official and unofficial canons. The major texts the Koreans studied after the formation of the Korean states were those of the Confucian canon (first five, then eleven, and finally thirteen texts). These texts formed the basic curriculum of education for almost nine hundred years. The employment of Confucian scholars at court, the establishment of a royal academy, and the recruitment of

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officials through the civil service examinations sealed the victory of Confucianism and established the hegemony of the Confucian canon. As the sine qua non of education among the ruling class, the canon was the subject of serious and sustained study. As the repository of a cultural grammar, these texts constituted the interpretive community of those with an orthodox education in Korea and elsewhere in East Asia. Administrative and penal codes, cosmology and rituals, the recruitment and education of officials, the inculcation of social virtues, and historiography in Korea (and Japan) all were influenced by the Confucian canon and its ideology. The influence of the Confucian political, historiographic, and moral tradition on East Asian literature was pervasive; it provided rhetorical commonplaces and inspired “mirror for princes” literature and other prose narratives—both official and popular—and allegoresis. These Confucian-inspired works use epideictic formulas, the end of which is didactic. The use of mythological and historical personages from Chinese classics and histories is the common device of comparison and amplification in all genres, primary and secondary. From their inception, the Confucian classics were treated as canonical by the literati in their roles as scholars, officials, and writers. Accepted as binding texts in politics and ethics, they defined the nature and function of the literati, who, as translators of morality into action, enjoyed authority, power, and prestige. Because they were also writers of their times, they played a major role in forming the canon of refined literature. The importance of the Confucian canon in traditional Korean literature is underlined here because most extant literary works were produced in the Chosǒn dynasty (1392–1910), a period in Korean history strongly influenced by Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism. The literati who constituted the dominant social class in Korea wrote almost entirely in literary Chinese, the father language, which dominated the world of letters. This class, which controlled the canon of traditional Korean literature and critical discourse, adopted as official the genres of Chinese poetry and prose. The Wenxuan (Selections of refined

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literature, compiled by Xiao Tong [501–531]), the most widely read and influential anthology, exercised a lasting influence on the formation of the canon. The official canon included most genres of poetry and prose in the Selections of Refined Literature. Poetry was paramount in the generic hierarchy; of the sixty chapters in the Selections, the first thirty-five are assigned to poetry. No single writer tried all prose forms (the Selections lists some thirty). But such forms as memorials, letters, admonitions, epitaphs, treatises, discourses, and prefaces enjoyed a lasting place in the generic paradigm. The three secondary genres in Korea (as in China) are prose fiction, random jottings, and drama. The East Asian term for fiction (Ch. xiaoshuo, K. sosǒl, J. shōsetsu) was used derogatively to designate all traditional prose fiction that created a world other than that sanctioned by the establishment and that offered alternative views of reality. Viewed with suspicion and contempt, fiction was considered to fall outside the literary canon. The literary miscellany, or random jottings, includes reportorial, biographical, and autobiographical narrative, as well as poetry criticism. That literary miscellany was excluded from a writer’s collected works, even in the case of a high state minister, demonstrates its low status in the hierarchy of prose genres. To be sure, some Korean writers wrote in both Chinese and Korean, but they knew that vernacular poetry and prose seldom brought prestige and that such pieces might not be included in their collected works. In fact, only a handful of their works include vernacular poetry in an appendix. As in the primary canon, poetry was the highest of native literary types but was not part of the official curriculum and education. Some writers, including kings, wrote in the vernacular, but no one was censured for doing so. The place of prose fiction was humble; it was considered primarily a recreational form of writing for women, although it was popular beginning in the eighteenth century among the literati and women of the upper and middle classes.1

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Among the works in literary Chinese, I have chosen the foundation myths of Koguryǒ and Chosǒn, which center on the hero’s deeds retold and sung to music composed for the purpose. A literary miscellany written by a marginalized secondary son who strove for honesty in his autobiographical account reflected a new psychological observation, evincing a new consciousness of individual identity. Writing in plain style—rapid, lucid, and direct—he and other writers of the form enlarged the domain of prose, knowing that only fiction is capable of portraying the subjectivity of a third person’s intimate and inaccessible thoughts and feelings. These writers provide the subject’s personal secrets and idiosyncrasies in the way that cultural patterns shape individual behavior and experiences. Hence author Ǒ Sukkwǒn called his work “fiction” and cited eighteen similar works known to him (4:39).2 Moving toward realism, his art is akin more to that of a creative writer than to that of a chronicler. For individuality, freedom, and descriptions of the actual texture of daily life, the miscellany was enjoyed by readers of literature. Fearing its popularity and its effect on contemporary prose style, a learned reigning king issued a ban on miscellany style and advocated a return to ancient styles of prose modeled on the Confucian classics. However, the miscellany of engrossing interest in informal style was popular until the end of the nineteenth century. I show how a Chinese version of the Record of the Black Dragon Year, reflecting the official sanctions against Buddhism as “the perverse theories of western barbarians,” fails to create a Buddhist master as the real hero of the work. Works in the vernacular discussed include Koryǒ love songs, which reveal oral traditional features but have survived only in written form. Lyrics were often censored by officials as dealing with “love between the sexes.” They intensely affect today’s listener and reader, who try to reimagine the role of a general audience assumed to have the same background and concomitant expectations as the composers. Serious studies of the songs began only in the 1950s and 1960s, with the discovery and subsequent publication of key texts. I have tried to recreate the time and place where these songs were sung to provide context. Study of

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Record of the Black Dragon Year was prohibited by the Japanese colonial government until 1945 (in most versions, the Japanese ruler surrenders to Korea).3 The shamanist narrative song The Abandoned Princess, performed at the shamanist ritual for the dead, was made known for the first time in 1937. Between shamans the verbatim transmission of accumulated knowledge, organized mnemonically, required many years of hard work and rote memorization. Before the advent of the transistorized tape recorder, written texts were produced from oral dictation to folklorists. Today songs are recorded at the site of the ritual. Important song texts exist in regional variations, and there are often differences between the dictated and transcribed versions. Shamanist narrative songs are ritualized ideological discourse with an echo of voices from the past and should be appreciated with such a context in mind. Occupying the lowest of social strata, the typical shaman in the past lived a life at best precarious, at worst viewed as subversive by the lettered class. Shamans had to endure suffering imposed by authority, but their faith and rites brought solace to many, powerful and powerless, rich and poor. Some extant written texts are riddled with learned diction —Sino-Korean words and technical vocabulary from Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions. How did the unlettered shamans of the past manage to understand them and commit them to memory, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that shamans depended more on aural intake and oral output than on the eye? Whoever the redactors or interpolators were, they cultivated a hybrid textuality, a learned diction juxtaposed with that of the vernacular.4 P’ansori (“song sung in the performance arena”)—oral narratives sung by a professional singer accompanied by a single drummer—emerged from the narrative shaman songs in Chǒlla province. Originally the singer was from a hereditary shaman household, usually the husband of a shaman. The singer sings, narrates, acts, and moves around physically to create dramatic effects, while the drummer beats the rhythm, cheering and chiming in. Except for a folding fan held by the singer and

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a folding screen providing a backdrop, no stage props are used. P’ansori texts bear clear traces of an oral verse-making technique: use of story patterns, formulas, epithets, topoi, phonomimes, phenomimes, sijo, kasa, syntactic parallelism, and themes all facilitated mnemonic composition. The mnemonic framework is provided by the plot—scenes, episodes, motifs, songs, and narrative—and the singer, capable of lengthy verbatim recall, manages diglossic situations with skill. Equipped with narrative competence and performance skills, the singer’s personality stamps his song, which is sung in a special register of the voice—the p’ansori register. His performance is affected by the place and occasion and the reaction of the audience. In 1753, Yu Chinhan (1711–1790), a literatus, traveled through the southwest region and had the opportunity to hear the performance of the Song of Ch’unhyang and other p’ansori pieces. The following year (1754), Yu wrote the “Song of Ch’unhyang,” a heptasyllabic verse in two hundred couplets in literary Chinese. The nineteenth century witnessed the publication of woodblock editions of the Song, which appeared mostly in Seoul and Chǒnju and generated their own textual communities. Shin Chaehyo (1812–1884), the first known redactor of the p’ansori repertory, who had dual competence in performance and in creating literary texts with copious allusions to Chinese works of verse and prose, can be said to have reshaped the tradition in order to preserve it. Most renowned singers presented the Song of Ch’unhyang, for example, with variations exploring fully the power of words to suit performance in public spaces. Performance is itself part of the meaning: the audience already knows the story but comes for the singer’s ingenious interpretation—his art. Transmission of singing skills requires years of apprenticeship and training, but recorded variants suggest that exact verbal memorization was neither encouraged nor practiced. I read most extant versions, long and short, Korean and Chinese, before choosing the Wanp’an edition, printed in Chǒnju, as my text for study.5 *

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Classic literary works, intertextual constructs, presuppose the reader’s literary competence and invoke and manipulate allusions and reverberant quotations. The educated reader then is able to infer the contemporary horizon of expectations and help bridge the hermeneutic gap between the text and him- or herself. The fusion (not conflict) of horizons, a dialogue between past and present, will enable readers to understand and appreciate the text’s unity of meaning. Only a scrupulously close and deep reading will enable one to read for pleasure and help increase one’s power of engaging in imaginative experience. These works have proved to repay the most careful attention and invite readers back to savor them again. The meanings of some, however, remain indeterminate. The aim of cross-cultural comparison and contrast is to discover differences at points of maximum resemblance. My comparative style is metacritical, transnational, and intertextual, involving also social and cultural issues. My studies attempt to be non-Eurocentric, nonpatriarchal, and nonelitist. I hope this collection of essays will provide current and future generations of literary students and readers with insight into both the works and the challenges of the topics discussed.

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Notes 1. See Peter H. Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5–9. 2. Peter H. Lee, A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 225–226. 3. It ran to forty manuscript versions and three woodblock editions. 4. Peter H. Lee, ed., Oral Literature of Korea (Jimoondang, 2005), v. 5. Lee, Oral Literature of Korea, vi–vii.

Abbreviations CBR CK CKK CN DMB Hambis ICS Kim-1 Kim-2a Kim-2b KMC KMRP

Yu Sŏngnyong, Chingbi rok, in Sŏae munjip 西厓文集 (Taedong munhwayŏnguwŏn, 1958) Yi Yuk, Ch'ŏngp'a kǔktam 靑坡劇談 (CKK, 1910) Chōsen kosho kankōkai 朝鮮古書刊行會 Nam Hyoon , Ch'ugang naenghwa 秋江冷話 (CKK, 1909) L. Carrington Goodrich, ed., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976) Louis Hambis, “Notes sur l’histoire de Corée à l’époque Mongole,” T’oung Pao 45 (1957): 151–218. Yi Hyŏngsŏk, Imjin chŏllan sa 壬辰戰亂史, 3 vols. (Ch’ungmuhoe, 1975) Kim Myŏngjun, Koryŏ sogyo chipsŏng 고려속요집성 (Taunsaem, 2002) Kim Myŏngjun, Akchang kasa yŏnghu 악장가사연구 (Taunsaem, 2004) Kim Myŏngjun, Akchang kasa chuhae 악장가사 주해 (Taunsaem, 2004) Sŏnggyungwan taehakko Taedong munhwa yŏnguwŏn, ed. Koryŏmyŏnghyŏn chip 高麗名賢集, vol. 2 An No, Kimyorok poyu 己卯錄補遺 (CKK, 1909)

xxii KS KSC KSY

NP OS PaC PC PCR PoC PrC Sb Sc SG SjS SMN SnS SnSS So SS SY TS TSh

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Chŏng inji et al., eds. Koryŏ sa 高麗史, 3 vols. (Yŏnse taehakkyo Tongbanghak yŏnguso, 1955–1961) Kim Chongsŏ et al, Koryŏsa chŏryo 高麗史節要 (Tongguk munhwasa, 1960) Kim Kidŏk, Ch’ae Ŭngsik, and Hŏ Hŭngsik, eds., Koryŏ sidae yŏngu 고려시대연구 4 (Hanguk chŏngsin unhwa yŏnguwŏn, 2002) Yi Chehyŏn, Nagong pisŏl 櫟翁稗說 (KMC 2, 1973) Ch'a Ch'ŏllo, Osan sŏllim 五山說林 (CKK, 1909) Yi Illo, P’ahan chip 破閑集 (KMC 2, 1973) Ŏ Sukkwŏn, P'aegwan chapki 稗官雜記 (CKK, 1909) Im Posin (d. 1558), Pyŏngjin chŏngsa rok 丙辰丁巳錄 (CKK, 1909) Ch’oe Cha, Pohan chip 補閑集 (KMC 2, 1973) Sŏ Kŏjŏng, P’irwŏn chapki 筆苑雜記 (CKK, 1909) Sibu beiyao edition Sibu congkan edition Kim Pusik, Samguk sagi 三國史記, ed. Yi Pyŏngdo 李丙 燾, 2 vols. (Ŭryu, 1977) Sejong sillok 世宗實錄 Nam Hyoon, Sau myŏnghaeng nok 師友名行錄 (CKK, 1909) Sŏnjo sillok 宣祖實錄 Sŏnjo sujŏng sillok 宣祖修正實錄 So Chaeyŏng 蘇在英, Imbyŏng yangnan kwa munhak ŭisik 壬丙兩亂과 文學意識 (Hanguk yŏnguwŏn, 1980) Cho Sin, Somun swaerok 謏聞瑣錄 (CKK, 1909) Iryŏn, Samguk yusa 三國遺事, ed. Ch’oe Namsŏn 崔南善 (Minjung sŏgwan, 1954) Tanglü shuyi 唐律疏議 (Peking: Zhonghua, 1983) Sŏ Kŏjŏng, Tongin sihwa 東人詩話 (Chang Hongjae, tr., 1980)

Abbreviations TYS UCN YC

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Sinjŭng Tongguk yŏji sŭngnam 新增東國輿地勝覽 (Kojŏn kanhaenghoe, 1958). Yi Chungnyŏl, Ŭlsa chŏnmun nok乙巳傳聞錄 (CKK, 1910) Sŏng Hyŏn, Yongjae ch’onghwa 慵齋叢話 (CKK, 1909) * References to the Chosǒn dynasty annals are to the Chosǒn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄, complied by the Kuksa p’yǒnch’an wiwǒnhoe, 48 vols., 1955–1958. All Korean-language texts were published in Seoul unless otherwise indicated.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Chapter 1

Higher Narratives in Korea This paper proposes to discuss four works of Korean literature as examples of the higher narrative, which is different from the novel. While the novel deals with characters and milieux that are like, or lesser than, ourselves, the higher narrative deals with characters taken to be of greater stature than ourselves and above the horizon of literary realism.1 The term covers premodern narratives, then, many of which are written in verse, reflect different social orders than ours, and are founded on different assumptions about the kinds of human experience that are suitable for literary development. Another reason for using this neutral term is that the conventional genre names of European derivation—such as epic, romance, and novel—carry connotations and expectations irrelevant to East Asian literary texts. If we group features common to the higher narrative according to their relative importance, we may discover universal characteristics that apply to epics and romances as well. We can then conceive of a category inclusive of epic and romance but not confined to any specific versions of them and extend Western assumptions by examining the common practice of pre-novelistic and nonWestern narratives to offer more evidence for our intercultural inquiry.

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Among these four works of Korean literature, three are in verse and one is in prose. Coming from high culture, the authors of the first two are known; the second two, writing from the perspective of the marginalized, are anonymous. Here I focus on the topoi, motifs, tropes, and conventions of the higher narrative as well as the narrator’s art of creating an image of the ideal character—hero or heroine—in each work. The East Asian term for “hero” 英雄 consists of two sinographs. The first is glossed by an ancient Chinese text as “the best of the flowers.” The second is glossed as “the best of the beasts.”2 What qualities do Koreans prize in their heroes and why? Is the Korean way of looking at heroic figures and actions different from the Western way? Does the Korean heroic narrative in verse and prose share common features with similar works in other languages? These are the questions I wish to address. The first example of Korean heroic poetry is The Lay of King Tongmyŏng (Tongmyǒng-wang p’yǒn東明王篇), a pentasyllabic narrative verse composed in 1193 by Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241) that praises the career of the founder of the Koguryŏ 高句麗 kingdom in 37 BC3 Yi’s sources include the Old History of the Three Kingdoms 舊三國史, which is no longer extant. The story of Chumong 朱蒙 (later Tongmyŏng 東 明, “Eastern Brightness”) exists in several versions, such as the King Kwanggaet’o Stele 廣開土王碑 (erected in 414),4 and in Chinese and Korean histories. Haemosu 解慕漱, a son of heaven, travels through the air in a fivedragon chariot. In the mornings he dwells among humans, and in the evenings he returns to his heavenly palace. One day he catches Yuhwa 柳花 (Willow Flower), the eldest daughter of the River Earl, sporting about in the water. With a riding whip he outlines a pattern of foundations and creates a bronze palace where he flirts with Yuhwa. Angrily the River Earl challenges Haemosu to a contest of transmogrification, but he loses and must consent to the marriage of his daughter. Impregnated by sunlight she gives birth to “a pottle-sized egg.” The egg is abandoned as inauspicious in a horse-corral, but the horses “took care not to trample

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it. / It was thrown down steep hills / But wild beasts all protected it.”5 Yuhwa retrieves and nurtures it till the boy, Chumong, hatches. His first words are: “The flies are nibbling my eyes, / I cannot lie and sleep in peace.” When he is forced by King Kǔmwa 金蛙 of Puyŏ 夫餘 to tend horses, Chumong resolves to go south and found his own state. With his mother’s help, he chooses a beautiful bay, and he and his three wise friends “set south till they reach the Ŏm [northeast of the Yalu].” But when they cannot find a ferry to cross, Chumong raises his whip and “utters a long sad plaint”: Grandson of Heaven, Grandson of the River, I have come here in flight from danger. Look on my pitiful orphaned heart: Heaven and Earth, have you cast me off? Fishes and turtles hurry to build a bridge for them to cross, and Chumong chooses the ideal spot to build his capital. Songyang 松讓, the neighboring king of Piryu 沸流, asks Chumong to be his vassal. Proposing an archery contest, Songyang paints a deer on a target, sets it up within 100 paces, and manages to hit its body. Chumong then has a jade ring hung up at a greater distance, shoots at the ring, and smashes it like a roof tile. By his malediction Chumong brings down a great rain for seven days, and Songyang finally submits when his territory is about to drown. Heaven builds a palace for Chumong where, as Tongmyŏng, he rules for nineteen years till “he rose to heaven and forsook his throne” at the age of forty in 19 BC. From his birth Chumong is an extraordinary person: “His form was wonderful, / His voice of mighty power.” As his name in the Puyŏ language signifies, he is a great archer, supreme marksman, and superior horseman. By striking the water with his bow, he can summon help. With a single curse, he can bring down a torrential rain to intimidate his enemy. As a grandson of heaven and a union of heaven and earth (water), the upper and lower realms, he has the power to invoke divine interven-

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tion, although such interference can be said to diminish the hero’s valor and glory. He leads and serves his people, first as a warrior, then as a king. The poem stresses his strength, courage, and resourcefulness, but it does not describe his bow, arrow, armor, or horse (the paramount animal for the warrior in the heroic age). Many of the motifs common to heroic narrative are here: the miraculous birth, the exposed child, the contest/ rivalry, the journey, divine intervention, early death, the marvelous, and the hero’s ascent to heaven. While the story of Tongmyŏng is a work by a single poet intended to portray the subject as a hero worthy of praise in song—not a heroic song dedicated to a specific political/ideological purpose—the Songs of Flying Dragons 龍飛御天歌 (Yongbi ǒch’ǒn ka, 1445–1447), by contrast, is a Confucian eulogy cycle compiled by a royal committee to praise the founding by General Yi Sŏnggye 李成桂 (1335–1408; r. 1392–1398) of the Chosŏn 朝鮮dynasty in l392.6 Preparation for composing this work, begun in the year 1437, forty-five years after the founding of the dynasty, included the inspection of sacred places connected with the rise of royal ancestors and the collection of oral narratives about the founder’s deeds: presentation by the governor of the northeast of the names of the birthplaces and places of residence of the four royal ancestors; locating Chŏk Island 赤島, where Yi’s great-grandfather escaped the treachery of the Jurchen chiefs; gathering by the governor of the southern provinces of facts and anecdotes from local elders concerning Yi’s exploits during his campaign against the Japanese pirates at Mount Hwang 荒山, east of Unbong 雲峰 (1380); and collecting tales of Yi’s heroism, which were not recorded in the official annals. Thus the compilers gathered both the deeds preserved in the annals and the popular traditions circulating among the people. Consisting of 125 cantos in 248 poems, the Songs presents a text in both Late Middle Korean and literary Chinese, accompanied by massive commentary with interlinear glosses. The stylistic devices deployed to express the eminence of a man’s virtue—comparison and amplification,

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together with traditional formulas and topoi; the standard tropes and symbols that associate the social and moral order with the cosmic or divine to link kingly virtue with the forces of nature; the special vocabulary reserved for the king and his enterprise—are all used to present the founder as the origin, source, and prime exemplar of virtue and wisdom. As the first experimental use in verse of the Korean alphabet invented two years before (1443–44), the Songs is also a manifesto of the policies of the new state, a mirror for future monarchs, and a repository of heroic tales and foundation myths of China and Korea. Its organization may be summarized as follows: 1) 1–2 proem 2) 3–109 celebration of military and cultural accomplishments of six dragons, especially the founder 3) 110–124 admonitions to future monarchs 4) 125 conclusion The Iliadic cantos of the Songs present Yi Sŏnggye as possessing unusual gifts of body and character. Set apart from ordinary men in childhood, he has a splendid appearance (cantos 28–29), superhuman strength (canto 87), and a huge bow and arrows (canto 27). He is a supreme archer (cantos 32, 40, 43, 45–47, 63, 86–89), a master horseman (cantos 31, 34, 65, 70, 86–87), and a superlative tactician (cantos 35–36, 51, 60). With these unusual qualities, he pacifies the Red Turbans 紅 巾賊 (canto 33), the Jurchens (canto 38), and the Mongols (cantos 35– 37, 39, 40–41, 54), and subjugates the Japanese pirates (cantos 47–52, 58–62). Commending his selfless deeds for country and people, heaven not only sends down auspicious omens and portents (cantos 13, 39, 42, 50, 67–68, 83–84) but also comes to his succor (cantos 30, 34, 37). He is kind to his men (cantos 66, 78–79), magnanimous (cantos 54, 67, 77), humble (cantos 4, 81), and consistent (canto 79). He is compared to a number of Chinese paragons, but surpasses them in moral excellence. Admiration and emulation are further stimulated by elements of the

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marvelous: heaven is his ally, and the omens and portents underscore the inevitability of the divine plan over accidents of mere fortune or prowess. The posthumous epithet of Yi contains the formula sinmu/shenwu (神 武 august warrior/divine hero)—a symbol of royal greatness, a pattern of soldierly valor, a model hero. A number of cantos celebrate Yi’s marksmanship. He wielded a massive bow signifying his great military power, and is said to have cut his own arrows from the hu tree, instead of the usual bamboo. As for so many heroes, Yi’s companion in times of peace and war was the horse. He had eight stalwart steeds (canto 70), all of which performed miracles of one sort or another. In peacetime, hunting trips, contests, and games provided him with occasions to perfect his horsemanship. With his physical and spiritual qualities, Yi had a mission to bring peace and order to a nation harassed by successive waves of foreign invaders. In a campaign against the Mongol minister Naghacu 納哈出 (1362), Yi engaged the enemy with the zheng 正 (advance) tactic but won with the qi 奇 (retreat) maneuver (canto 35);7 in the 1377 campaign against the Japanese pirates 倭寇 on Chiri Mountain 智異 山, he marshaled troops unlike others in the single most important victory (canto 47). In the 1380 battle, Yi demonstrated his humanism and strong sense of justice, tempered with timely mercy, in not killing the brave Japanese captain (canto 51). In the 1385 campaign in the northeast against the pirates, he again employed an unusual strategy to confound them, and his war cry in the thick of a battle was enough to worst the enemy (cantos 58 and 61). As a paragon of martial valor, Yi is valiant and resourceful, confident and provident, generous and merciful. He does not parade his deeds before the people but enjoys a warm fellowship with them. Attentive to the army’s safety and morale, he tries always to inspire courage and confidence in his men. The magnitude of the events, their terror or grandeur, is augmented by strange eruptions that portend victory for Korea—such as a red mist (canto 42), a purple mist (canto 39), a red halo (101), and a white rainbow that suddenly fills the sky (canto 50). These

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signs of spiritual attendance not only inspire Yi’s deeds but also reinforce the heroic standard he represents. And as a creature of flesh and blood, he is bitterly aware of the cost of human achievement, inseparable from suffering and loss. Contemplating the horror of war—the corpses that cover the hills and plains—he comprehends the limitations of human activity (canto 50). This is the scene in which the hero recognizes his own mortality. As an embodiment of the struggles of his country and people, Yi’s heroic career has meaning: as a suffering hero, he should be viewed as the incarnation of his people. Certainly this view was sanctioned by Confucian orthodoxy. “When heaven is about to place a great burden on a man,” Mencius says, “it always tests his resolution, exhausts his frame and makes him suffer starvation and hardship, frustrates his efforts so as to shake him from mental lassitude, toughens his nature, and makes good his deficiencies” (6B:15).8 This is how heaven prepares people for great tasks, and they succeed because they are able to take obstacles as a challenge. Through signs and portents, heaven constantly reminds them of the moral significance of their deeds. The scope of Yi’s trials is the measure of his greatness. His ultimate service to his fellow human beings is the only justification for such trials. This, then, is a process in which the hero recognizes not just his limitations but his true mission in society. In accord with the Confucian conception of a man who, by great endurance and action, raises himself to heroic status, the compilers were able to confer on Yi’s deeds a moral and political significance that rendered them ecumenical. Consequently, the heroic achievements of a Confucian soldier lie not so much in his battlefield feats as in his attainment of new peaks of moral excellence. The Confucian soldier is the upholder of justice and humanity, one who scorns violence and unreason by subordinating his passions and desires to a higher purpose. He is endowed with strength and purpose by his sense of duty, his trust in his mission as a carrier of civilization, and his ability to restore harmony and order on every plane.

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He must be able to look to the future: to the unified nation, the willing people, and the dynasty that will stand as a symbol of peace and stability. The cantos that celebrate the statesmanship of Yi Sŏnggye explore the nature and function of kingship, the relations of power and justice, the role of mercy and remonstrance, and the importance of learning and orthodoxy, culminating in the admonitory cantos that conclude the cycle. Indeed, the moral qualities of the Confucian king enumerated in the Songs recall the cardinal virtues of the Christian prince serving as God’s steward on earth.9 Yi possessed benevolence, justice tempered with mercy, learning, wisdom, temperance, compassion, modesty, and brotherly love. Of these, his humaneness/love (仁 in/ren) in its various forms finds expression in his dealings with his subordinates, stepbrother, rivals, and enemies.10 And learning, indispensable to a prince, is emphasized. The classics arm a man with precepts against every contingency. History provides suitable analogies for every occasion. Both are storehouses of examples—political and moral mirrors in which we find truth and can know ourselves. Emphasis on learning is also an affirmation of loyalty to culture. Therefore, like Caesar and Augustus, Yi Sŏnggye, fully accoutered in armor, read books between battles in order to learn the art of government. These two works—The Lay of King Tongmyŏng and Songs of Flying Dragons—share a number of features common to similar works from other cultures: the pattern of heroic life, for example, and the subject’s heroic attributes. Both Tongmyŏng and Yi Sŏnggye embody heroic norms (fortitude, constancy, piety) and are identified with their people. Their stories are told, retold, and sung whenever the occasion calls for it; the music for the Songs was performed at court and in the royal ancestral shrine.11 Both works have a certain grandeur, stature, and comprehensiveness—for example, the Songs was viewed as an encyclopedia of heroic tales in China and Korea and a summa of the concerns of Confucian humanism. Both works are marked by elevated discourse,12 and their artistic integrity comes from the cumulative allusion to tradition—

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indigenous, Buddhist, and Confucian. The correspondence between humans and nature affords, for example, the identification of heaven’s purpose with Yi’s—as illustrated by such motifs as portents and strange eruptions, magical animals (snake, dragon, stag), prophecies fulfilled, and geomancy. The hero, in short, embodies the forces of nature. When nature rallies against a tyrant, a murderer of nature, it does so with a providential sign for its restorer. Indeed, the emergence of a restorer of order is heralded by regeneration on all planes—as, for example, a dead tree putting forth green leaves just before the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty (canto 84). Are Tongmyŏng and Yi Sŏnggye portrayed like a Western epic hero —“a warrior who lives and dies in the pursuit of honor and glory”?13 Certainly they are not cast in the mold of Achilles. This archetypal hero of Western culture is implicitly questioned in this comparison, because in the Korean context, those who disregard the norms of society and test the limits of life, the human condition, are seen as transgressors, victims of hubris, losers. As the repository of princely virtues, by contrast, the dynastic founders are portrayed as having won heaven’s alliance and the people’s allegiance and are praised for their unswerving fidelity to their mission and firmness of purpose. The composite formula of action and contemplation, valor and virtue, is reserved for them, because the ultimate end of valor, after all, is to found a state that restores and safeguards order on all planes. The Chinese ellipsis of battle in the Book of Songs 詩經 (Shijing), its preference for a “cultural heroism,” with an emphasis on rites and arts, has Western parallels.14 James Redfield points to Achilles’ “one-sidedness”: he has force (bie) but not craft (metis); he has glory (kleos), but not a safe return home (nostos). His special excellence (grand heroic moments: aristeiai) is potency, not integration.15 This seems to explain why the East Asian way of looking at persons and actions deemed heroic differs from that of the Western primary epics. Among the tales inspired by the Japanese invasions of l592–98, the Record of the Black Dragon Year 壬辰錄 (Imjin nok)16 is generally

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regarded as the most interesting because it is rich in fiction and subversive in aims. Oral narratives about the invasion had already begun circulating during the war. Thereafter the story went through the process of conflation, selection, and combination and was widely transmitted through oral storytelling and the subsequent circulation of manuscripts and woodblock editions. Its popularity is attested by the number of versions extant, especially those with regional variations, indicating that memories of the war were shared by almost every living Korean. This variety also attests to the unlimited possibilities of selection and combination of motifs at the disposal of storytellers and later redactors. Compared to other wars fought on the peninsula, the Japanese invasion was unparalleled in its brutality, devastation, and hardship for the people. As a record of collective suffering and reflection, this narrative also provides occasion for meditation on history and hope for the future. The Record exists in some forty manuscript versions (mostly anonymous), long and short, in the vernacular and literary Chinese. The vernacular version begins with the phrase kaksŏl 却說 (Now it is said that . . .), indicating that what follows is fiction. What strikes the reader in this tale is an emphasis on action. There are few descriptive passages or accounts of psychological states, and numerous stock descriptions of the hero’s appearance (some heroes are nine feet tall) and his strength (some could lift 3,000 pounds), as well as battle scenes and accoutrements of war. Another feature is the age of major characters. Like Western epic heroes, they are portrayed as in their late teens or early twenties—perhaps to underscore that their “youthful inner compulsion drives them to perpetuate their fame.”17 The narrator loves well-made heavy armor and long swords: the helmet weighs 3,000 pounds; the sword is 7 feet long, and the hero can wield a 3,000 pound mallet or mace. The tale abounds in verbal threats and taunts from heroes to their foes before and after individual combat, reminiscent of boast-and-insult contests (“flyting”) in the primary epics of Europe. Here is the Japanese

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leader Madŭng taunting Admiral Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598): “You mere child, Yi Sunsin, come forth quickly, and let’s compare tactics in sea battles.” A frequent insult is to call an opponent a “day-old puppy,” from the Korean proverb, “A young puppy does not know enough to fear the tiger.” Sometimes characters dispense with the ritual of identifying themselves or taunting their opponents, and reveal their names only when pressed. Leaders on both sides are often described as dancing with swords— perhaps meaning brandishing their sword, or demonstrating their skill with it, probably to strike terror in an opponent. Heroes step out of the ranks and fight in single-handed combat to win fame. They have no qualms about chopping off an opponent’s head, usually couched in a simile, “like the falling leaves in the autumn wind,” appealing to the reader’s visual imagination. Such atrocities as the mutilation of corpses, the cutting off of noses and ears of Korean soldiers and citizens, and the butchering of innocent women and children are passed over quickly—the narrator seldom pauses to meditate on death but suggests nevertheless the sadness of tragic waste. Heroes emerge to save a land ravaged by invaders—hence their actions arise from love of country. Their inner qualities are usually manifested outwardly in physical strength, endurance, valor, and swordsmanship. These qualities evoke awe, and the tale dwells on moments of glory and defeat. To be worthy opponents, antagonists must be portrayed as equally matched in the skills of combat and symbols of power. The appearance of Guan Yu 關羽 (d. 219), a third-century Chinese warrior, as a divine helper shows not only the popularity of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義) in Korea, but also the narrator’s belief that history is subservient to providence. As guardian and benefactor of Korea, Guan Yu not only manifests himself in a dream to warn the Korean king of the imminent invasion and to urge the Chinese ruler to dispatch reinforcements, but also appears in broad daylight to rebuke and crush the spirit of enemy generals, and inspires

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courage and teaches secret tactics to Korean generals. His intervention as the god of war and loyalty has another meaning. Despite the imperfections of the Korean king and his government, the fortune of the House of Yi is ordained to be maintained, and Guan Yu asserts the eventual return of order. The narrator’s construction of the Great Master of Meditation as the real hero is particularly striking. By the end of the tale, most generals on both sides have perished or committed suicide. Great Master Samyŏngdang’s 泗溟堂 (1544–1610) mission is to exact Japan’s submission not by strength of arms but by the power of Buddha’s truth. Knowing that the master is a living buddha, the Japanese test him by various means: burning him inside a copper cell, drowning him in a lake, and freezing him inside a copper house. But possessing the power to fashion things, he can transform the burning copper cell into a cool refuge simply by writing the sinographs “ice” 氷 and “snow” 雪on his cushion and on the walls, thus transforming the literary into the extraliterary. The real is a term of relation, and fantasy is “dialogical, interrogating the single or unitary ways of seeing.”18 The master constantly prays with a rosary with 108 beads and recites the scriptures and can summon dragons and guardian spirits. But it is his mastery of concentration and meditation that brings the Buddha’s help. The belief that no fire, ice, or sword can harm a buddha or bodhisattva is a major motif in Buddhist hagiography, just as in the lives of Christian saints. Only when the master brings down a great rain to flood the Japanese capital does the ruler of Japan surrender. The master represents the order of peace and justice, and his victory is the triumph of spirit over matter (“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” [The Tempest 5:1:27–28]). In an age when Buddhism was officially proscribed and monks were held in low esteem,19 the narrator turned to the great master to redress the wrongs inflicted by Japan. Thus he causes the king to restore a religion hitherto banned as heterodoxy, making Buddhism not only coexistent with Confucianism but superior to it.

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The Record of the Black Dragon Year, therefore, embodies a popular form of historiography that not only favors those from the periphery (most Korean generals and the great master himself are said to have come from the provinces) but also inscribes, in its choice of vernacular prose, an ideologically motivated assertion of the commoner’s place and power in Korean society. It competes with the official annalists and proves itself more comprehensive and efficacious in spreading the news of historical events in an unofficial but subversive way. This nationalistic cultural text is a record of collective suffering, collective reflection, and collective expectations for moral and spiritual recovery. The fourth text, Pari kongju (바리公主 Princess Pari or The Abandoned Princess), a shamanist narrative song, would have been sung to ensure the safe journey of the soul of the dead to the other world (진오 기chinogi, 새남굿saenam kut).20 The text exists in some forty versions with regional variations. The version transmitted around Seoul (dictated for the first time by a female shaman in 1937) best preserves Princess Pari’s mythic features: her heroic deeds, her attainment of sacred status, and the process of her deification as a goddess who governs all shamans and the underworld. The story concerns the seventh daughter born to a royal family yearning for a son. She is cast away, but obtains magic water to revive her dead parents, and becomes a deity who takes charge of the underworld. Applying Propp’s structural analysis of functions (motifemes) constituting the fundamental components of the underlying structure of this narrative results in the following sequence:21 l) Interdiction: A man is warned not to marry in an unlucky year. If he does, he will have seven daughters. 2) Violation: He marries. 3) Consequence: The couple have six daughters.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature 4) Attempt to escape consequence: The prayer results in the birth of the seventh daughter. 5) Interdiction: She is a child who must not be abandoned. 6) Violation: She is cast away. 7) Consequence: Her parents become ill and die. 8) Attempt to escape: She is located, obtains magic water, and saves her parents.

Princess Pari’s birth is foretold in her mother’s dream of the arrival of a heaven-sent child: I saw perched on my right hand a purple falcon, And on my left hand a white falcon. I saw a golden turtle resting on my knees, And the sun and moon rising from my shoulders. On the main beam of Great Bright Hall, I saw entwined blue and golden dragons. A similar dream would portend the birth of a prince or a hero, but instead a princess is born—in this case an unwanted princess. When she is cast away by her parents, A sudden gale arises. Unexpectedly, crows and magpies descend And cushion her with one wing, cover with the other. The princess is put into a jade box, which is cast into the sea, “in the magpie shoal in the sea of blood.” Carried on the back of a golden turtle, the box is discovered by Śākyamuni Buddha, who asks an old man and old woman to rear the girl. When she reaches fifteen, her parents fall gravely ill. In a dream they are told they will die as retribution for casting out the child sent by heaven. Finally they locate the princess, and she returns to the palace. Among the seven daughters, however, it is only

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Princess Pari who consents to fetch magic water guarded by the Peerless Transcendent 無上神仙, that will cure her parents: I have no debt to this country, But grateful to my mother who bore me for ten months, I shall go for my mother’s sake. In the underworld, the Peerless Transcendent demands that she chop wood for three years, build fire for three years, and draw water for three years. He then demands that she marry him and bear seven sons—indeed, she offers herself as a payment for the magic water. She then returns to this world and revives her parents by her contacts through patrilocal marriage. When her parents offer her half of their kingdom, she declines: Had I once held the kingdom, I’d now desire it. Had I once had the clothes, I’d want them. But I never knew fine food and clothes at my parents’ knee, So I will become the progenitor of shamans. The greatness of her lineage notwithstanding, Princess Pari is abandoned because of her gender and is nurtured by the old couple somewhere beneath the Eastern Sea. After her two journeys to the underworld (each taking fifteen years), she returns to this world as a married woman with seven sons. She travels between the two worlds, but cannot return permanently to the living. She forgives her parents and discharges her filial duty as a daughter. But by wishing to become a shaman goddess, she chooses the dark mysterious space, not the world of her parents. Her decision problematizes the inevitable separation between parents and daughters who, despite their filial love, must leave home.22 Thus she registers her anxiety and guilt about forsaking this world, including her own parents, especially her mother. This narrative song, part of a ritual to assure the departed soul a safe journey, is termed “heroic” because of Princess Pari’s difficult life as an abandoned baby and her arduous journey to the underworld to fetch magic water to fulfill her filial devotion. She confronts the terror

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of darkness and silence and masters it. She is a model of forbearance, humility, courage, resourcefulness, and heroic energy. The help rendered twice by Śākyamuni elevates her to the status of a hero with sacred powers. Oppressed by a patrilineal and patriarchal society because of her gender, she nevertheless discharges a great task and becomes a heroine, indeed a goddess, of the underworld—and thus is mythologized as a guardian of the souls of the dead. She appropriates divinity, which in traditional Korean culture is usually equated with maleness, and because she assists the departed souls, we will know her dark mysteries only after death. Princess Pari dramatizes the complexity of female filial emotion, including the institution of motherhood in patriarchy, and the female body as the privileged body. This narrative implicates a wider community of women in its production; her filiality is a collective expression that canonizes the social value of female virtue. The following refrain that recurs throughout the text evinces another aspect of shamanist eschatology: O and alas, one among the dead, If it follows the seventh princess, With prayers for rebirth in the Pure Land of the West, Then it becomes a man and enters the Land of Happiness, Upon this very day. This refrain gives voice to the Buddhist view of females as inherently so profane and polluted that a woman requires a transition from female to male in order to enter paradise. But the princess does not require this sexual transformation. Women, hitherto excluded from certain ceremonies in the public domain, retained legitimate power in the domestic sphere by linking households together cognatically. And active intervention with the sacred is an extension of female domestic roles. Indeed, the Korean heroine rejects those elements of Confucianism and Buddhism that hinder women in their roles as house priests. She solves the contradictions between Confucian obligations to parents and patrilocal marriage for females. As one who participates in two households,

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woman is the exemplary mediator. By becoming the body-governing spirit of shamans, the princess enables them to mediate between the sacred and the profane and care for the souls of the dead, underscoring this mediating ability.23 In Korean folk narrative, Princess Pari is the most powerful incarnation of woman as the mysterious Other. The portrayals of two dynastic founders—a warrior-king of the Iron Age and a Confucian general and statesman of the Korean renaissance in the fifteenth century—are products of high culture. The portraits of a Buddhist monk and a shaman goddess are products of low culture that drew simultaneously on oral and literary traditions, heteroglossic products of conflictual interaction, rich in performative aspects. Moreover, they were suppressed by the ruling elite and recuperated only in the twentieth century. But all four narratives are now thought of as central and canonical texts, written to preserve the name and memory of heroes and heroine. As we have seen, their narrative issues range from origins to borders: magic/history, male/female, life/death, normal/ supernatural. The features I have identified—endurance of trials for high purpose, moral truth, lofty deeds, divine machinery, elevated language, formulaic diction—are epic in character and possess a strong “family resemblance.”24 All four texts assert the impossible as facts, and all four arouse awe and wonder. If we look for attributes of the higher narrative broad enough to embrace European texts as well, we need to decide on the criteria. Such a rubric should be able to include not only literary texts of high culture but also those of popular culture, including disruptive texts that cannot be contained by discourse formations of respective historical periods. No single work embodies all likely features, and some features are more important than others. In short, we are looking for norms common to the higher narrative of East and West, comprehensive and neutral enough to encompass all similar texts regardless of language. Certainly the study of the higher narrative is a most rewarding experience to those engaged in the teaching and study of comparative literature.

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And if you wish to know what happened to the no-nonsense princess, I must tell you what the traditional Korean storyteller told his audience: “Please see me tomorrow at the same time.”

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Notes 1. John Stevens, Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London: Hutchinson, 1973), W.R.J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London: Longman, 1987); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1968) and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) make similar observations. Among Frye’s five literary modes—myth (the hero’s superiority is different in kind from that of other men and their environment); romance (the hero’s superiority is one of degree to other men and their environment); and high mimetic (the hero’s superiority is in degree to other men but not to the environment) may be relevant here. For more see Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 3 passim. 2. Renwu zhi人物志 8:10 (John K. Shryock, The Study of Human Abilities [New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1937], 127–28]). 3. Yi Kyubo, Tongguk Yi-sangguk chip (Kojŏn kanhaenghoe ed.,1958) 3:1a– 9b. Kwŏn T’aehyo , “Tongmyŏngwang sinhwa ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng ŭi taehan ilkoch’al” (A study in the formation of the myth of King Tongmyŏng), Kubi munhak yŏngu 1 (1994): 241–73. 4. YS, Appendix 3–6. For translation see Peter H. Lee and Wm. T. de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 1:23–26. 5. I have used Richard Rutt’s translation, in Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, l993) 1:25–30. 6. The following is from my Songs of Flying Dragons: A Critical Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); the references cited in the book are omitted. 7. Li weigong wendui (Wujing qishu 武經七書, Daibei, 1965) 1:1–5. Sunzi (Sb) 4:4a, 6a (Samuel B. Griffith, Sun Tzu: The Art of War [Oxford: Clarendon, 1963], 34, 43, 91–93). 8. D. C. Lau, tr., Mencius (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 181. 9. Shakespeare presents his list of “king-becoming graces”: justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude” (Macbeth 4:3:92–94). These

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10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature twelve qualities are present in Malcolm, son of Duncan, king of Scotland, who seems to represent Shakespeare’s final portrait of the ideal king. An essential feature of in/ren is that “our highest humanity can only develop through our relationship with the Other,” says Steven Shankman, in Steven Shankman and Massino Lollini, eds., Who, Exactly, Is the Other? Western and Transcultural Perspectives (Eugene: Oregon Humanities Center, 2002), 60. Musical settings for the Songs are notated with the Korean mensural notation (chŏngganbo 井間譜) in SjS 140:1a–145:38b. The elevated diction reserved only for the winner of the mandate of Heaven—the commoner cannot resort to it without provoking a thunderbolt—raises Yi Sŏnggye to the level of heaven. For example, “his heavenly mien noble and mighty” 天姿奇偉 (canto 29); “the natural genius” 天縱之才 (canto 43); “peerless gallantry of a sage” 聖人神武 (canto 88); “his nature was one with Heaven” 性與天合 (canto 122); “sagely nature” 聖性 (canto 124); and “a counterpart of Heaven” 配天 (canto 82). These words are restricted to Yi Sŏnggye in particular contexts, inspiring awe and claiming his immortality in song. Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 69. C. H. Wang, “Towards Defining a Chinese Heroism,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975): 25–35. James Redfield, foreword, The Best of the Achaeans: The Concept of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, by Gregory Nagy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), vii–xiii. For more on this tale see Peter H. Lee, The Record of the Black Dragon Year (Seoul: Institute of Korean Culture, Korea University, and Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, 2000). John Bryan Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 39. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 34, 36. Songs of Flying Dragons, canto 124, brands Buddhism as “the perverse theories of Western barbarians” 裔戎邪說. For a complete translation of this work see Peter H. Lee, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 298–329. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, tr. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). For “motifeme” see Alan Dundes, The

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21

Morphology of North American Indian Folktales, FF Communications no. 195 (Helsinki, 1964), 58–60. Sŏ Taesŏk, “Pari kongju yŏngu: ibon ǔi t’ǔkching punsŏk ǔl chungsim ǔro” (A study of Princess Pari : an analysis of characteristics in different editions), Hanguk kubi munhak sŏnjip (Ilchogak, 1984), 132–186. 22. JaHyun Kim Haboush, “Filial Emotions and Filial Values: Changing Patterns in the Discourse of Filiality in Late Chosŏn Korea,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55 (1995): 161–69. 23. Clark W. Sorensen, “The Myth of Princess Pari and the Self Image of Korean Women,” Anthropos 83 (1988): 403–419, esp. 413–417. 24. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic, 9, 20, 35, 52, 142.

Chapter 2

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean Gesang ist Dasein. —Die Sonette an Orpheus One of the most intriguing and challenging topics in Korean literary history is the love lyrics in Late Middle Korean. By “lyric” I mean a fictional representation of a personal utterance to be sung.1 We do not know when the texts and music were composed. The social settings of these anonymous feminine-voiced songs have almost disappeared. Because the predominant written language among the learned until the mid-fifteenth century was literary Chinese, the prestige language, no song texts could be written down until Chosǒn officials wrote new texts as contrafactum2 (writing new texts for popular melodies) for wellknown Koryǒ songs. Because of the sociolinguistic status of the vernacular, we have memorial (oral) but no written transmission. Moreover, we have no textual history to speak of until the compilation of the Akhak kwebǒm 樂學軌範 (Guide to the study of music, 1493)—and two anonymous compilations—Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Nota-

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tions for Korean music in contemporary use; ca. early sixteenth century; made known only in 1954)3 and Akchang kasa 樂章歌詞,4 an anthology of song texts dating from Koryǒ and early Chosǒn. I consider them diplomatic copies of the songs. These texts must have invited innovation as part of the process of transmission (mouvance = fluidity).5 Thus Koryǒ songs owe their survival to the adoption of their accompanying music for court use in Chosǒn. It is unclear, however, how the texts, dubbed “vulgar and obscene” and expunged by Chosǒn censors as late as 1490,6 managed to survive. Are what we have the precensored or the censored versions? Perhaps these songs were so popular that no one needed to write them down to remember them. Repetition and recurrent refrains—mimetic in origin—of both verse and music made it easy for the unlearned to remember. Oral delivery was the mode of transmission in an orally based poetic tradition, and we can identify the speaker’s gender from verbal features and textual markers: woman, the locus of unrequited love. Songs are inseparable from their performance. The music composed for performance, together with song lyrics, invites a communal identification of singer and audience.7 But the texts do not encode information about the speaker’s social status and economic class: was she a propertied woman like the Occitan trobairitz of medieval Europe?8 The singer re-creates emotions in a specific context and shares those emotions with the audience. Was the song performed before a mixed audience? Did they identify more with the speaker than with the speaker’s target, the beloved? It was not considered indecorous in the Koryǒ period for women to compose and perform songs of love and to take part in public entertainment—a challenge to male monopoly on desire and language. About the same period (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) in the West there flourished Mozarabic kharjas (“exit”; the oldest known secular lyrics in any Romance language, the earliest ca. 1000);9 songs by the troubadours and trobairitz (ca. 1100–1300) in Old Occitan (Langue d’Oc; Old Provençal)10 and by the trouvères of northern France (late twelfth to thir-

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teenth centuries);11 Galician-Portuguese songs (fl. 1200–1350), cantigas d’amor and cantigas d’amigo;12 Minnelieder (twelfth to early fourteenth centuries);13 Goliardic songs including the Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren);14 the Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia);15 and the Harley lyrics (compiled ca. 1314–1325),16 to mention a few. These Koryǒ songs have come to us from anonymous women who lived and sang from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. No contemporary comments survive; the living context for these songs seems lost. Has the twentyfirst century reader the means to understand the texts—can we reconstitute the feminine speakers’ voices, the first and only voices from that period, the inventors of love lyrics in the vernacular?

Background The following observations are offered in the hope of better situating our songs in time and space, that is, in their sociopolitical and cultural contexts.17 My aim is to re-create the time and locality where these songs were sung and to inform the twenty-first century reader about what certain words meant and what symbolic associations they might have had. In the process of writing this work, I have learned that our criteria should be literary. We should pay attention to these lyrics as song texts, not separating author (even when unknown) from text or text from audience. Given our temporal distance from these works and the paucity of contextual materials, the more information we recover, the better it will illuminate the settings of these oral-derived songs18 that seem so near and yet so far.

The Mongol Conquest During its 474 years of history, Koryǒ 高麗experienced several invasions from the north—Khitans (994–1011), Jurchens (1107–1109), and Mongols (1231–1259), the last being the most traumatic. The Koreans put up stout resistance against the invaders, and on January 27, 1233, Kim Yunhu 金允侯, a Buddhist monk at the Ch’ǒin fortress處仁城, Yongin 龍仁,

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killed with a single arrow the Mongol commander Sarta.19 After six invasions over a 30-year period, the Koreans finally concluded peace with the Mongols in 1259. Adopting a policy of reconciliation, Korea proposed that the Korean crown prince marry a Mongol princess, and Khubilai Khan allowed the prince, later known as King Ch’ungnyǒl, to marry his own daughter (1271).20 Thereafter Korean princes married Mongol princesses, thus becoming “son-in-law” kings (kuregen). Korean princes resided in the Mongol capital as hostages until they became king. At times, the Yuan dynasty determined the succession or punished those unfit to rule; at other times, the Korean ruling class, in collusion with the Mongols, schemed to drive a king from the throne. Korean kings took Mongol names, adopted Mongol hairdos and costumes, and used the Mongolian language. It was not uncommon for Koryǒ aristocrats to take Mongol given names and to adopt Mongol hairdos and customs. From Ch’ungnyǒl to Kongmin, the succession was as follows: • Ch’ungnyǒl 忠烈 (1236–1308; r. 1274–1298, 1298–1308, ruled 33 years and 6 months) married Khudulukh-kalmish (d. 1297), a daughter of Khubilai in 1274. He also had three Korean consorts.21 • Ch’ungsǒn 忠宣 (Ijirbukha; 1275–1325; r. 1298/1–8, 1308–1313, ruled 5 years and 3 months), the oldest son of Ch’ungnyǒl, married (1296) Botashirin (d. 1315), daughter of Kammala, Prince of Jin, and Yesujin (d. 1334). He also had six Korean consorts.22 • Ch’ungsuk 忠肅 (Aratnashiri; 1294–1339; r. 1313–1330, 1332–1339, ruled 24 years), the second son of Ch’ungsǒn, whose mother was Yesujin, married (1316) Irinjinbala (d. 1319), the daughter of Asan Temür, Prince of Ying; Ki(ǔ)mdong (married 1324, d. 1325), daughter of Amuge, Prince of Wei; and Bayan Khuldu (married 1333; Princess Kyǒnghwa, sister of Kimdong; d. 1344). He also had three Korean consorts, including Queen Myǒngdǒk (d. 1380; née Hong).23 • Ch’unghye 忠惠 (Putashiri; 1315–1334; r. 1330–1332, 1339–1344, ruled 6 years and 10 months), the eldest son of Ch’ungsuk, married (1330)

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Irinjinbal (Princess Tǒngnyǒng, d. 1375), the daughter of Josbal, Prince of Zhenxi Wujing (Guanxi), great-grandson of Khubilai. He also had three Korean consorts.24 • Ch’ungmok 忠穆 (Batmadorji, 1337–1348; r. 1344–1348), son of Ch’unghye, born of Princess Tǒngnyǒng, died at eleven.25 • Ch’ungjǒng 忠定 (Chosgamdorji; 1337–1352; r. 1348–1351), Ch’unghye’s secondary son, born of the daughter of Yun Kyejong, died at fifteen.26 • Kongmin 恭愍 (Bayan Temür; 1330–1374; r. 1351–1374), born of Queen Myǒngdǒk (d. 1380, née Hong), married Putashiri (d. 1365), the daughter of Bolod Temür, Prince of Wei, in 1349.27 When his beloved queen died of complications from a difficult labor, he drew her likeness, sat before it day and night, wept, and refrained from meat for three years.28 In 1352 he banned Mongol hairdos and costumes, and he stopped using the Mongol reign title in 1356. When the Ming announced the fall of the Yuan, he adopted the Ming reign title in 1370.29 Already in 1368 he had sent an envoy to the King of Wu (later the founder of the Ming). After a reign of twenty-three years, he was murdered by his own eunuchs.30 Thus Koryǒ-Mongol marriage relations lasted almost a century. A glance at the official history of Koryǒ reveals some anomalies in the behavior of Koryǒ kings and Mongol queens (perhaps because they transgressed the taboo). Similar events cannot be found before or after the Mongol domination. Ch’ungnyǒl’s fascination with the hunt and falconry, for example, broke all records, and from 1276 onward he was out chasing birds and beasts several times a month, almost every month, throughout the year.31 In 1282 he went on a hunt in Ch’ungch’ǒng province and crossed the Imjin River. His queen angrily tongue-lashed him, “Hunting is not an urgent business. Why have you brought me here?”32 The king had no answer. In 1287, Ch’ungnyǒl and his queen went on a hunting trip with fifteen hundred horses.33 She had admonished him before, in 1280, for consorting with underlings and chasing

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animals,34 but he refused to give up the pleasures of hunting and hawking in the farmlands of the people. In 1275, she wanted to pulverize the golden stupa at Hǔngwang Temple, but the king was powerless to stop her and could only weep.35 She herself had myriad lanterns lit at the palace and had musicians perform till dawn (1279).36 In 1277, Ch’ungnyǒl moved to Ch’ǒnhyo Monastery because of an ailment. His queen beat him with a heavy stick (chang 杖) to punish him for the small number of attendants following her; when the king entered the monastery before her, she beat him again.37 Perhaps she recalled her father Khubilai beating his ministers when displeased (tingzhang, court beating).38 Because Ch’ungsǒn favored his Korean consort Cho (married 1292), daughter of Cho Ingyu 趙仁規, his Mongol queen Botashirin accused Cho of practicing sorcery and Cho’s mother of placing a curse on her. She imprisoned Cho Ingyu and his family (his wife and their three sons), subjected his wife to harsh interrogations and torture, and finally sent them to Dadu (Khambalikh, Peking) (1298). Ch’ungsǒn himself, falsely charged, was sent into custody.39 Cho Ingyu was banished to Anxi (1299) and released only in 1305. The Mongol empress dowager sent five Buddhist and two Daoist monks to remove the curse. The khan asked the visiting Koryǒ scholar An Hyang 安珦 (1243–1306) why Ch’ungsǒn did not love his queen.40 Indeed, affairs of the heart gave rise to a political and diplomatic crisis. History portrays the Mongol queen as a woman of loose conduct who failed to perform her duties.41 On her return trip to Korea, Botashirin rode in a carriage decorated with silk, silver, and gold, followed by fifty similar carriages.42 The early death of Ch’ungsuk’s queen Irinjinbala was investigated, and her court lady and a Korean cook were taken to the Yuan authorities.43 Annoyed by her jealousy of the Korean consort Tǒk 德妃 (née Hong), Ch’ungsuk slapped Irinjinbala twice, causing a bloody nose.44 As princesses of the victorious nation, with vast military power behind them, they broadened their political power at the Korean court and arrogated the right to meddle, make demands, and report the events

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taking place at court to Peking. Their presence generated widespread tensions. Khudulukh-Kalmish’s wet nurse was a Korean captive taken first to Peking and then to Korea. Personal attendants (C. qieliankou; M. gerin k’eiu)45 of the queens (Uighurs, Tanguts, and Mongols), and darughachi (“one who presses [an official seal]”),46 the Mongols’ surveillance apparatus, indulged in every extravagance—extorted money, accumulated wealth, built mansions for themselves, and had their children intermarry with the Korean upper class, including royal kin. They had come to Korea to enrich themselves. Queens seized land and slaves at will and drove farmers off their land. Ruthless and rapacious, their followers carried out the Mongol policy and served as the queens’ spies and secret messengers to Peking, and helped them to amass wealth. Queens—Ch’ungnyǒl’s, for example—had vast economic power; accumulated gold, silver, and precious stones; and engaged in trade of pine nuts and ginseng in southern China. Ch’ungsǒn raped 蒸 his stepmother (1309), consort Sukch’ang 淑 昌院妃 (d. 1367), Kim Munyǒn’s 金文衍 sister,47 and recruited beautiful virgins. A victim of intrigue and slander at the Mongol court, he was banished to Turfan (Tibet) in 1320, then recalled (1323),48 but died in Dadu (1325).49 Another pathological sexual predator, Ch’unghye, described as “debauched and wicked,” raped (1339) his stepmothers (consort Su 壽妃, née Kwǒn and Bayan Khuldu)50 and recruited some hundred beautiful women, high and low, for his pleasure. History records at least five more rapes by him. He roamed the streets incognito, beat anyone he met, and in turn was beaten by hoodlums.51 Finally six Mongol officials bound him into custody and took him to Dadu;52 Shundi (Toghōn Temür) accused him of exploiting the people. He was banished to Guangdong and died in Yuezhou, Hunan, at the age of thirty (1344; he may have been poisoned).53 Did the Korean kings misinterpret the Mongol leviratic custom that sons could marry their deceased fathers’ wives and concubines, their own mothers excepted?54 They might have considered themselves eligible, but they did not marry the women they raped.

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Frequent visits of Korean kings to the Mongol capital Dadu and to Shangdu (“Xanadu” of Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”), the alternative capital near Zhenglan, some 200 miles north in the steppes of Inner Mongolia, were costly and extravagant. In his 1284 visit, Ch’ungnyǒl’s retinue included 1,200 followers, 630 jin of silver (350 kg), 2,440 bolts (p’il 匹) of hemp, and 1,800 sheets (ting 錠) of paper money;55 his 1296 visit involved some 243 officials, 590 servants, and 990 horses.56 Expenses of Ch’ungsǒn’s 10-year stay in Peking (1298–1308), for example, included 100,000 bolts of cotton and 400 bags of rice.57 The tributes to the Yuan included virgins (the first order for 140 girls came in 1274);58 shamans and conjurers (1292);59 eunuchs and monk copyists for the Buddhist scriptures (1290);60 ginseng (1293);61 Cheju horses (1298) and white horses (1296);62 and sparrow hawks (1288).63 The Koreans received, in return, actors and singing girls (1283);64 grape wine (1285, 1296, 1297, 1298);65 silver (1294) and books (1314);66 bows, arrows, and swords (1353);67 and rice from southern China (1291).68

Life Under the Mongols Words of Mongolian origin entered the Korean lexicon at this time. Some scholars and diplomats appear to have been proficient in Mongolian—for example, Wǒn Kyǒng 元卿 (d. 1302), who accompanied Ch’ungnyǒl and his Mongol queen to the Yuan court and won favor from Khubilai. Summoned by Ch’ungsǒn in Peking, Yi Chehyǒn (1287– 1367) exchanged views on the Confucian classics with scholars there, including Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). Cho Ingyu (1227–1308), fluent in Mongolian, served as envoy to the Yuan court some thirty times and was enfeoffed as Lord of P’yǒngyang. It appears, however, that the words of Mongolian origin current at the time are confined to those connected to horses, falcons, and military affairs, words unique to the lifestyle of nomadic people. We can trace twelve words to the horse—for example, kara mal (black horse); seven words to falconry, for example, kalchige (gaccighai = yellowish falcon); and five words to military matters—for example, kodori from ghodoli (arrowhead) and ba’atur (brave warrior).

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In addition, the word used only at the Korean court for food, sura, may have its origin in sullen.69 This is in sharp contrast to the Norman influence on England for two centuries: “Traces of Norman occupation still survive in the English language today: sixty percent of the modern English vocabulary derives from Romance languages; forty percent from Anglo-Saxon.”70 Korea faced grave challenges to its society and culture, but there was little acculturation to speak of. Mongols had little ideological control over the Koreans as a people. No Korean writer wrote a poem in Mongolian (nor did a Mongol write in Korean), while Uighurs, Turks, Persians, and Syrians under Mongol rule wrote poems in Chinese.71 “Severe indeed is the calamity caused by the Tartars,” reads Kojong’s 高宗 prayer on the occasion of the production of the Buddhist canon. “The nature of their cruelty and vindictiveness is beyond description. With foolishness and stupidity greater than that of beasts, how could they know what is respected in this world and what is called the Buddhadharma? Because of this ignorance there was not a Buddhist image or Buddhist writing that they did not entirely destroy.”72 Mongols burned the woodblocks for the Buddhist scriptures stored at Puin Monastery 符仁寺 (1232) and the stupa at Hwangnyong Monastery 皇 龍寺 (1238). In 1254, the Mongol army under Jalayirtai took 206,800 men and women as captives73—“Mongols regarded captive peoples as booty, as mere property.”74 Were there any witnesses to this mass abduction? How was this figure arrived at—by reports from towns and villages or by a census taken later? Why is there no song in the vernacular or in Chinese? Perhaps because a singer choked in the middle of her utterance, trying to express that which cannot be expressed or considered barbaric the composition of a song after such a holocaust. As many as a quarter million Koreans may have been settled throughout the Yuan empire as slaves, concubines, or farmers.75 A recent study suggests that Korean “clothing styles became fashionable in elite circles in Dadu,” and “the acquisition of Korean concubines became a fad”76—for example, the second empress of Toghōn Temür (Shundi, 1320–1370) was Korean.

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Used as a “resource base”77 to support unsuccessful Mongol conquests, Korea during Khubilai’s failed attempts to invade Japan (1274, 1281) was reduced to utter despair. He ordered 300 warships built (1274), and Korea conscripted 30,500 men for the purpose and mobilized 6,700 navigators to man the ships, with provisions of 34,312 bags of rice.78 Another order to build 900 warships came (1279–1280).79 Mountains and forests were denuded of trees and fields abandoned, and people suffered unspeakable misery. In August 1281, from among 9,960 Korean soldiers and 17,029 helmsmen and crew, only 19,397 returned alive.80 (Some 3,500 warships and 100,000 soldiers from southern China were destroyed in one night by a typhoon that struck the Kyushu coast on August 15, 1281.)81 In 1283 Khubilai decided to abandon his plans to invade Japan. But the unprecedented ravage wrought by the Mongol army may be compared to the Black Death that swept Europe between 1347 and 1351.

Woodblock Printing Koryǒ’s contributions to the woodblock printing of the Buddhist canon and the creation of the graceful beauty of celadon ware exemplify its cultural and artistic achievements. Korea’s possession of rare books was, for example, known to Song China, whose scholars occasionally requested certain works unavailable there (as in 960). The first use of cast-metal type to print Sangjǒng kogǔm ye[mun] 詳定古今禮文 (Detailed ritual texts of the past and present, ca. 1155–1162), a record indicates, took place in 1234—probably the earliest use in the history of the world. With the discovery of a copy of dharani scripture dating from before 751, Silla claims the oldest extant example of woodblock printing in the world. The printing of the first edition of the Buddhist canon began around 1010 in the midst of Khitan attacks. With the Song text as its basis, this edition comprised 5,924 chapters. In 1083 a more complete edition of the canon came to Korea. Based on this and other texts he had obtained in China (1085–1086) and elsewhere, National Preceptor Taegak 大覺國師 (Ǔich’ǒn 義天; 1055–1101), the fourth son of King Munjong, compiled a new catalog of the scriptures and treatises, including works by East

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Asian exegetes and authors, titled Sinp’yǒn chejong kyojang ch’ongnok 新 編諸宗 敎藏總錄 (New catalog of the teachings of all the schools, 1090). It listed 1,010 titles in 4,740 chapters (kwǒn). Ǔich’ǒn also had blocks carved for supplemental materials he had acquired (Sok changgyǒng 續 藏經). Thus by the end of the eleventh century, Korea had one of the most complete collections of Buddhist texts in the world.82 Because the woodblocks for the first edition were destroyed by the Mongols (1232), work on a second edition began in 1236 and was completed in 1251. It includes 1,514 titles in 6,791 chapters—a total of 81,258 blocks, each measuring 10 by 27 inches around and one inch thick, and weighing over 8 pounds. The varnished, insect-proofed blocks were carved from the hard and durable wood of the paktal (Betula schitii regal) tree. The four corners of each block were copper-plated to protect it from cracking. Each block was carved on both sides with 23 lines of 14 graphs each. After over a hundred years’ storage on Kanghwa Island 江華島, the blocks were first moved to Chijǔng Monastery 智證寺near Seoul, then to Haein Monastery 海印寺 on Mount Kaya (1399), where they have been preserved down to the present (Korean National Treasure no. 32). This is one of the oldest and most complete collections of the Buddhist canon in Chinese. Xylographs from these blocks have served as the basis for three versions published in Japan (1880–1885, 1902–1905, 1924–1934).83 As the purpose of the first edition was to pray to all the buddhas and bodhisattvas for divine protection of the country from attacks of Khitans, so that of the second, as King Kojong’s prayer amply indicates, was to guarantee the nation’s safety from Mongol invasions (“to cause the stubborn and vile barbarians to flee far away, and never again let them enter [our] territory”).84 In addition, there were numerous prayer meetings, lantern festivals, harvest festivals, and provision of meager feasts for monks and nuns to accumulate merits and invoke the protection of the Buddha.85

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Monastic Life There was probably no double monastery—double communities of men and women governed by an abbess, as in the West—in Koryǒ.86 The number of nuns in Koryǒ was probably smaller than that during the high Silla, because women, mostly from the royal family and upper class, became nuns when widowed or old. They withdrew not to specific nunneries but to their own hermitages built for them. Pǒbwang Monastery 法王寺 was the largest, where the reigning king attended the P’algwan festival, and at Pongǔn Monastery 奉恩寺 the founder’s portrait was enshrined in the memorial hall. For the size and scale of the buildings as well as the number of monks residing there permanently, impressive were Hǔngwang Monastery 興王寺 with 9,270 square meters of floor space (completed in 1067) and Hoeam Monastery 檜岩寺 (after Sin U). The percentage of literate monks in Koryǒ was not high, probably the same as the proportion of intelligentsia in the capital. The number of professionals (physicians, mathematicians, geographers, musicians) in the capital was higher than the number of clergy. Monasteries and temples were used to shelter the afflicted during the invasions and engaged in setting up Buddhist endowments, relief granaries, and roadside inns for travelers; loaning grain at high interest; making wine; and raising livestock.87 The Arts The fame of Koryǒ ware rests on the invention and use of the technique of inlay, “the most important single contribution to ceramic history.” The development of this technique is dated to the first half of the twelfth century, sometime between 1123 and 1159. Such inlaid wares as a wide-mouthed water container with handles, a melon-shaped eightlobed wine pot, and the “Thousand Crane Vase,” decorated with forty-six ascending and twenty-three descending cranes, were not only demanded by the upper classes. Koryǒ celadons evince distinctively Korean colors, glazes, and shapes, maintaining the native predilection for simplicity and spontaneity. Recurrent design motifs included flowers, cranes, and,

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rarely, human figures; the flower vase is “one of the noblest of all Korean ceramic forms.”88 Korean music (sogak 俗樂) was performed on many occasions: when sacrifices were offered at the circular mound altar to heaven; at the altars of soil and grain; to the dynastic founder, the Divine Husbandman (Shennong), at the Confucian shrine; and when the queen and crown prince were enfeoffed; at the Yǒndǔnghoe 燃燈會 (lantern festival) and P’algwanhoe 八關會 (harvest festival); at the royal mausoleum; and when spirit tablets were enshrined for three years after the death of a king or queen. The dances and songs performed at court (chǒngjae 呈 才) comprised both instrumental and vocal pieces; songs were usually accompanied by an orchestra. Ancestral shrine music, for example, was performed by two orchestras and accompanied by ritual dances. The ritual music at the Confucian shrine was performed antiphonally by two orchestras—the terrace (tǔngga 登架) and the ground (hǒnga 軒架)— and used such rare instruments as bronze chimes, a set of stone chimes, a wooden percussion instrument shaped like a tiger, a rectangular wooden box with a hole on top that was struck with a thick wooden hammer to produce a resounding thump (ch'uk), and a baked clay jar struck at the top with a bamboo rod split into nine sections (pu 缶). Banquet and ceremonial music included Korean and Chinese music; Chinese music (Tangak) included some imported from the Song music bureau (1103– 1120) in 1114 (Dasheng xinyue 大晟新樂) and 1116 (Dasheng yayue 大晟 雅樂),89 as well as melodies for the ci 詞 songs.90 Later the forty-three ci texts were no longer sung;91 a contemporary version is an instrumental piece for orchestra (stone chimes, bronze chimes, Chinese transverse flute, Chinese oboe, large Korean transverse flute). Few Korean poets attempted the ci except for two Koryǒ kings—Sǒnjong 宣宗 in 1089 and Yejong 睿宗 in 111692 —primarily because they did not speak Chinese and knew little about the contemporary song culture of China. But some scholar-politicians like Yi Changyong 李藏用 (1201–1272) knew the ci melodies. In 1264 Yi accompanied King Wǒnjong 元宗 to the Mongol court:

36

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Wang E 王鶚 (1190–1273), Hanlin academician, invited Yi to his residence and entertained him with music. A singer sang two pieces of ci lyrics composed by Wu Yangao 吳彦高. Yi hummed softly song words in tune with the melody. Coming up to Yi and grasping his hand, Wang remarked, “You do not speak Chinese but know these songs so well. You must be versed in music.” He praised him and his respect for him grew.93

Gaoli tujing 高麗圖經 (An envoy’s illustrated account of Koryǒ) lists eleven Korean instruments:94 waist drum (yogo 腰鼓); wooden clapper (pakp’an 拍板); mouth organ made of thirteen bamboo pipes (saeng; C: sheng 笙); large mouth organ with thirty-six pipes (u; C: yu); doublereed oboe (p’iri); horizontal harp (konghu 箜篌); Korean lute (ohyǒn 五 絃); black zither (kǔm 琴); Chinese lute (p’iri); lute of Kaya (chaeng 箏); and large transverse flute (chǒk 笛). The “Monograph on Music” in the History of Koryǒ (71:30b–31a) lists thirteen musical instruments of Korea: six-stringed black zither 玄琴; five-stringed Korean lute 琵琶; twelvestringed lute of Kaya 伽倻琴; thirteen-holed double-reed oboe 大笒; hourglass drum 杖鼓; six-leaved ivory clappers 牙拍; decorated gourd dipper; large barrel drum hung from a frame 舞鼓; two-stringed fiddle 嵆琴; seven-holed double-reed oboe (p’illlyul); thirteen-holed medium transverse flute 中笒; seven-holed small transverse flute 小笒; and sixleaved wooden clapper (pak 拍). The same monograph (71:31a–43a) lists thirty-two pieces of Koryǒ songs without musical notation and song texts, of which three are dance music: “Mugo (舞鼓),” “Tongdong (動動),” and “Muae.” “Mugo” requires two female dancers who beat the drum with drumsticks and dance to music while the female chorus sings “Song of Chǒngǔp” 井邑 詞: 95 O moon, rise high, And shine far and wide. Ǒgiya ǒgangdyori

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Aǔ tarongdiri. . . “Tongdong” begins with two dancers prostrating themselves in front of the king. Raising their heads, sitting on their knees, and holding the ivory clappers, they sing the introductory stanza of the song “Tongdong”:96 Virtue in a rear cup, Happiness in a front cup, Come to offer Virtue and happiness! Aǔ tongdong tari. They then rise and dance, hitting ivory clappers, accompanied by the orchestra and a female chorus. At the end the dancers again prostrate themselves in front of the king and then withdraw. This dance continued to be performed till the end of Chosǒn. “Muae” is attributed to Great Master Wǒnhyo 元曉大師 (617–686) of Silla, who is said to have sung and danced while striking the small gourd dipper.97 Later someone added a bell to the dipper and hung colored cloth from it. Two female dancers holding a gourd dipper would dance and sing, and other female entertainers would respond and sing a “Song of Nonhindrance,” a gatha from the Buddhist scripture. This dance, says the “Monograph on Music,” originated in the Western Regions, and the text reveals Buddhist diction. It was performed at court and in the monasteries until 1829.

Festivals Two important state functions were the harvest festival and the lantern festival. The first was originally a Buddhist ceremony in which a layperson received eight prohibitions that he vowed to observe for one day and one night. With its emphasis on abstinence and discipline, the ceremony has religious significance. In Koryǒ, the ceremony gradually became secularized. In his “Ten Injunctions” (943) the dynastic founder outlined the importance of both ceremonies. The sixth injunction deals with the nature and function of the harvest festival, which

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was to worship “the five sacred and other mountains and rivers, the spirit of heaven, and the dragon god.” He concluded the article with a stern admonition: “Villainous courtiers may propose the abandonment or modification of these festivals. No change should be allowed.”98 A two-day ceremony on the fourteenth and fifteenth of the eleventh lunar month consisted mainly of a memorial service in honor of the dynastic founder at Ǔibong Tower 儀鳳樓; royal acknowledgment of congratulatory messages presented by officials from the central administration and the provinces; royal attendance at the dharma assembly held at Pǒbwang Monastery northeast of the palace to pray for peace within and without the state; and presentation of shows and games. On the fifteenth, merchants from Song, Jurchen, and T’amna presented a list of gifts, and there was a royal banquet at which the king would bestow wine, fruits, flowers, and food on the participants, including musicians and actors. It was a festival in which the sovereign and subjects found pleasure all the while observing order and measure. “Music of the four transcendents” dating from Silla accompanied the games, and performers were called sǒllang. In Silla members of the hwarang 花郞 performed it in order to worship the sacred mountains and rivers as well as dragon kings. In 1168 King Ǔijong 毅宗 lamented the decline of the hwarang institution, “which pleased both heaven and the dragon king and brought harmony among the people,” and suggested that the sons of noble and wealthy families be recruited to revive it.99 It appears that the descendants of hwarang ceased to participate in the ceremony in the eleventh century, and the assembly, which had been religious in nature in Silla and early Koryǒ, became secularized thereafter. Lighting the lantern is among the most important ceremonies of Buddhist origin. By lighting the lantern, devotees seek not only to enlighten themselves and put an end to their ignorance but also to praise the boundless compassion of the Buddha, whose mind is as bright as the lighted lantern. This illumination ceremony probably came to Silla with the introduction of Buddhism. Samguk sagi 三國史記 (Historical record of the three kingdoms; 1146) mentions lighted lanterns as part

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of Buddhist ceremonies in 866 and 880.100 In the Lotus Cloister 法華院 on Mount Chi 赤山 in Shandong, China, whose large Korean community was called “a bit of Korea transplanted to the shores of China,” the Koreans celebrated New Year’s Eve by lighting the lanterns “as offerings at the Buddha Hall and the scripture storehouse of the cloister.”101 Silla belief was influential in the development of the lantern festival— for example, the mother dragon and her son were thought to visit the country in the first or second lunar month to foretell a rich or poor harvest. This idea is then closely connected to the folk beliefs of an agricultural society, and in Silla it became a composite incorporating the ceremony for the dragon king and the Buddhist ceremony of lantern offerings. Finally established as a national function in 551, in Silla the lantern festival was generally held at Hwangnyong Monastery. In Koryǒ the lantern festival was held regularly on the day of the first full moon until 987; in 1010 it was revived during the Khitan invasion by King Hyǒnjong 顯宗, in a temporary palace in Ch’ǒngju 淸州 on the fifteenth day of the second lunar month.102 The festival was held on this day throughout the rest of Koryǒ. After receiving salutations from subjects and viewing shows and games, the king would visit Pongǔn Monastery 奉恩寺 to offer sacrifices to the dynastic founder. In the evening at the royal banquet, both Chinese and Korean music would be performed, and the king and subjects would view the lighted lanterns and exchange impromptu poems. The curfew would be lifted so that the citizens could enjoy the festival late at night. The lantern festival was also held on the eighth day of the fourth month, the Buddha’s birthday, and to celebrate the construction of a monastery, for example, Hǔngwang Monastery in 1067. At both festivals in 1073, female dancers presented Song dances and music. At the lantern festival in 1077, a troupe of fifty-five dancers performed a song and dance forming two four-sinographs phrases each: “kunwang manse” (Long live the king) and “ch’ǒnha t’aep’yǒng” (Great peace under heaven). In these festivals (and at royal banquets), then,

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Korean music and dance alternated with Song music and dance. There are three differences between them: first, in Song dances two pole bearers (chukkanja 竹竿子) leading the dance troupe proceed to the king, accompanied by the orchestra; second, the beginning (ch’iǒ 致語) and end (kuho 口號) of the Song dance consist of songs of uneven lines in literary Chinese; and third, the texts of the Song ci sung during the dance are also in Chinese.103 In the exorcism rite held at court, masked dancers holding a spear in the right hand and a shield in the left chanted a spell and went through the motion of driving away evil spirits. The ceremony consisted of music, song, and dance, performed by seventy-eight members of the troupe, including twenty-four boys from ages twelve to sixteen wearing masks and red gowns (chinja 侲子).104 The ritual included a demon impersonator called Pangsang-ssi (C: Fangxiang shi 方相氏, “he who searches for evil spirits in many directions”). About this figure the Institutes of Zhou comments: “In his official function, he wears [over his head] a bearskin having four eyes of gold, and is clad in a black upper garment and a red lower garment. Grasping his lance and brandishing his shield, he leads the many officials to perform the seasonal exorcism (No 儺), searching through houses and driving out pestilences.”105 Ch’ǒyong 處 容 dance and song were part of this ritual and had a religious function. The ceremony was followed by various shows—a lion dance, actors swallowing a knife or spewing fire, masked dancers, and acrobats walking on a bamboo pole. Sandae 山臺 plays presented sundry shows and games not only at the harvest and lantern festivals but also at royal outings, upon a king’s return from the Yuan, and at court banquets, including those held for victorious generals.106 There were also impromptu plays with witty talk and jokes. The Ha Kongjin 河拱辰 play memorialized Ha, who negotiated the withdrawal of the Khitan army in 1010 but was taken prisoner and killed after refusing to serve the enemy.107 One actor may have played a double role, or perhaps more than two actors were involved. Under King Kongmin,

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actors staged how the slaves of the villainous retainer Yǒm Hǔngbang 廉興邦 (d. 1388) exacted taxes from the people.108 Actors could praise the martyrdom of a patriot or satirize the abuse of power by a corrupt official. Another show depicted traders from the Song, Jurchen, T’amna (Cheju), Japan, and Arabia offering their native products. Some individuals were skilled in Ch’ǒyong dance (Song Kyǒngin 宋景仁 under King Kojong),109 or in a certain game (General Kan Hong 簡弘)110 or dance (Im Chae 林宰),111 or in a kind of mime mimicking a midget (Chǒng Ingyǒng 鄭仁卿).112 In 1387 Shin U 辛禑 assembled actors from six wards of the capital and had them present shows on the eastern river.113 Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1214) viewed a puppet play 弄幻 popular in the streets of the capital;114 Yi Saek 李穡 viewed an exorcism rite (and mentioned masked actors depicting the people from the Western Regions and China, Ch’ǒyong dance, and a puppet play)115 and a sandae play.116 Literati enjoyed the lute of Kaya (Yi Kyubo) and the black zither (Ch’oe Cha 崔滋 [1188–1260], Yi Chehyǒn 李齊賢, and Chǒng Mongju 鄭夢周 [1337– 1392]) in a song accompanied by the zither or as a solo performance. Female entertainers favored the double-reed oboe; monks, the medium transverse flute; and the literati, the large transverse flute.117 When, in 1117, Yejong visited the southern capital (Yangju 楊州), the Khitan refugees there presented Khitan shows.118 Khitans and Jurchens who sought refuge in Korea and later became naturalized probably brought their popular shows and games. After Ch’ungnyǒl became the son-in-law of the khan, male and female actors arrived (1283).119 During the king’s procession, his honor guards performed music of Bokhara, Turfan, and Indian origin. When the king visited the western or southern capital, musicians and actors performed the Bokhara show.120 It appears that Koryǒ kings during the Mongol period loved to sing, dance, and clap hands. At a party honoring the Mongol queen at the Yuan capital, princes and ministers danced (1279);121 in 1288 at a banquet hosted by the ministers, Ch’ungnyǒl rose and danced several times despite the queen asking him to stop.122 In the same year, when

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his generals performed dances and other shows, Ch’ungnyǒl clapped hands, rose, sang, and danced.123 At the birthday celebration of his son, Ch’ungnyǒl clapped hands and danced. In 1292 at a party honoring the elders, Ch’ungsǒn rose and danced pleasing his parents.124 At a banquet hosted by the Prince of Chin at the Mongol capital in 1297, Ch’ungnyǒl danced and his queen sang.125 At Shangdu, at the order of Emperor Chengzong (1294–1307), Ch’ungnyǒl had two Korean attendants sing a Korean song, himself danced, and offered a toast for his long life (1300).126 At one point, his Mongol queen admonished him for his excessive love of music, adding, “I’ve never heard of ruling a state with music!”127 In 1333 Ch’ungsuk’s barge floated down the Taedong River 大 同江 from the Floating Emerald Tower, and music and song were heard within ten tricents.128 In 1343 Ch’unghye went to the new palace, had an exorcism performed, and when ministers offered him wine, he rose, danced, and ordered others to do the same.129 Whether sitting before the likeness of his deceased Mongol queen or visiting her grave, Kongmin would have Mongol music performed when offering wine and recall his happy days with her.130

Koryǒ Society According to Martina Deuchler’s study on Koryǒ upper-class women (almost nothing is known about the kin structure of commoners and slaves), succession was flexible and nonlinear and primogeniture was absent, daughters receiving an equal allotment of the patrimony, both land and slaves. The majority of households included legally adult sons and married daughters with their husbands. Children growing up in their mother’s house developed close emotional ties to their maternal kin. Consanguineous marriage was practiced among the upper class, and union with patrilateral and matrilateral cousins was frequent (as pointed out by a Mongol emperor131). Marriage was performed in the house of the bride, and the bridegroom moved in—uxorilocal residence. Women had favorable economic status from their right of inheritance shared with male siblings. Married women enjoyed a strong economic position,

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retaining their rights as heirs in their natal family. Women did not suffer from separation or the threat of expulsion. After her husband’s death, a wife could remarry. There were no secondary wives, and concubines of lower class were not customary. Men and women enjoyed free and easy contact, which caught the eye of Chinese observers such as Xu Jing 徐兢 (1091–1153), who stayed in the Koryǒ capital for about a month in 1123.132 This situation stands in sharp contrast to what happened to the status of women in the Chosǒn dynasty, as Neo-Confucian scholarofficials slowly restructured the social order by institutionalizing, for example, primogeniture, patrilineal succession, ancestor worship, and virilocal residence. Those who are curious about the social and cultural context from which Middle Korean love songs emerged might wish to know more about the status of women—for example, the percentage of women in the population (there were more women than men),133 life expectancy, and average number of births per woman. Women must have played a vital role in a family’s economic structure and household management. Are there such documents as wills, property transactions, seals, bills, civic records, letters, and literary texts? How many women owned books (and what kinds)? Did peasant girls marry later than upper-class women, as in the medieval West? Who were those on the fringes—did they dabble in theft, violence, and sorcery? Were women beaten? In Europe the law allowed “the right of men of all classes to beat their wives, so long as they did not kill them or do excessive damages.”134 Extant Koryǒ sources do not allude to such practices in Koryǒ, but two trouvères of northern France managed to smuggle endemic wife beating into their songs: Moniot d’Arras (ca. 1213–1239) in “Amor mi fait renvoisier et chanter” (Love makes me rejoice and sing)— Quant pluz me bat et destraint ci jalous, Tant ai je pluz en amours ma pensee. (lines 8–9)135 (The more my jealous husband beats and hounds me, / the more my mind is fixed on love.) —and Monier de Paris in “Je chevauchoie l’autrier”

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature (I was out riding the other day): Tot errant me commencoit a raconteur Comme ses maris la bat por bien amer. (2:7–8)136 (Right away she began to tell me / how her husband beat her for being in love.)

How did Koryǒ society conceptualize sexuality, together with such other categories of identity as gender, race, and religion? Was there sexual contact between members of the same sex? What about the particulars that shaped gender inequity (class and culture included); the status of the uterus; treatment of sterility; policy regarding contraception and abortion; gynecology and obstetrics; and the disorder of pollutions such as nocturnal emissions137—all topics treated by medieval Latin writers and physicians (Constantin the Africanus, Hildegard of Bingen, William of Conches, Avicenna, tr. Gerard of Cremona into Latin, and Jean Gerson)?138 No age can be sufficiently understood until the status and contributions of women are made evident.139 How did the Koryǒ penal code protect women from sexual violence? The first article under “Illicit Coitus” (kanbi 姦非) concerns supervisory and custodial officials: • When they commit illicit coitus with an unmarried woman within their area of jurisdiction, the punishment is two years of penal servitude (to); if with a married woman, two and onehalf years of penal servitude; if by force, three years. When a coitus is by consent, the woman is punished with reduction of one degree.140 The next article concerns illicit coitus by male slaves with commoners: • Between a lowborn (inhabitant of the forced labor area [pugok] or a slave) and his master or his first-degree mourning relatives by consent, the punishment is strangulation; if by force, decapitation. When by consent, the woman’s punishment is reduced one

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degree. When with his relatives of above fifth-degree mourning, their punishment is reduced one degree.141 Other articles of this section deal with the following illicit coitus: • With a secondary wife (ch’ǒp) of father or paternal grandfather, wives of paternal uncles and aunts on the paternal side, sisters, wives of sons and grandsons in the male line, and daughters of brothers—if by consent, the punishment is death by strangulation.142 • With a favorite female slave of father or paternal grandfather, the punishment is reduced two degrees.143 • A laymen with a Buddhist or Daoist nun, by consent, the punishment is penal servitude of one and one-half years; if by force, two years. When a Buddhist or Daoist nun commits it, the punishment is two and one-half years of penal servitude; if by force, no punishment.144 Articles under the “Household and Marriage” (hohon 戶婚) section specifically concern the married woman: • When a wife leaves willfully, the punishment is two years of penal servitude. If she remarries, two and one-half years of penal servitude. One who accepts such a woman as wife will be punished the same, but if he did not know that the woman had a husband, no punishment.145 • When a husband leaves his wife without consulting his parents, he will be suspended from office and life exile without added labor.146 • When she behaves licentiously, she will be entered in the registry of such women and assigned to the needlework artisan group.147 “Great Abominations” (taeak 大惡) includes legal codifications of the ethical norms prevalent in Koryǒ society:

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature • When a wife plots to kill her husband, the punishment is decapitation. When one plots to kill the second-degree mourning relatives of a higher generation, one’s maternal grandparents, or one’s husband’s parents, even when the relative has not been wounded, the punishment is decapitation.148 • When a wife or secondary wife curses with bad language the husband’s grandparents and parents, the punishment is penal servitude for two years. When she beats them, death by strangulation; when she causes a wound, decapitation. When she causes a wound by mistake, penal servitude for two and one-half years. When she kills by mistake, penal servitude for three years.149

The law also specifies the punishment for husband and wife: • When a husband beats or wounds a wife, he is beaten eighty blows with the heavy stick. When he breaks a tooth or more, ninety blows; when he breaks two teeth or more, one hundred blows. When he breaks a tendon and more, penal servitude of one year; when he breaks hands or feet and more, penal servitude of two years; when he injures more than two items, three years of penal servitude. When he causes her death, strangulation; when he intentionally kills her, decapitation. When cranial hair is pulled out and more, sixty blows of the heavy stick. When it is an accidental death, no punishment. • When a wife beats a secondary wife, the same punishment as above. (This is contrary to the medieval West where beating of a wife by a husband was sanctioned.)150 The “Household and Marriage” section includes articles against human trafficking—selling one’s kin, both patrilateral and matrilateral, as slaves by misleading or kidnapping. And under “Great Abominations,” there are punishments for those falsely accusing to the court the seconddegree mourning relatives of a higher generation (or of the same gener-

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ation but older), the maternal grandparents, the husband, the husband’s paternal grandparents, the third-degree mourning relatives of a higher generation (or of the same generation but older), and the fourth- and fifth-degree mourning relatives—even if the accusation is true, they are punished by penal servitude or life exile.151 Koryǒ law acknowledges the brutality of feminine victimization by officials, clerks, professionals, soldiers, and monks, but there must have been a discrepancy between law codes and reality. The law appears to protect women’s bodies and patriarchal family honor,152 but how many marriages, for example, were based on mutual affection rather than political, economic, and familial expediency? How many women were unhappily married, without free consent, and how many men, victims of unfulfilled love and repressed desire? Many such victims found expression in extraconjugal or adulterous love. Who defended women of the lower classes and slaves—the nameless, mute, and rejected; sexual and legal victims of male-defined crimes tried by men?153 Women’s experiences, depending upon their class, education, and occupation, could not have been homogeneous. Can we retrieve what Koryǒ society repressed and marginalized? Women’s experience may not have been homogeneous in education either, and their expectations in life depended on the class they were born into—whether they were propertied elite women, those who married (or were compelled to marry) Mongol soldiers, or were taken to the north to be used as slaves. Estimates of the extent of literacy during the Koryǒ tend to vary among historians. The minority who knew literary Chinese includes members of the royal family and the nobility, administrators, Buddhist monks, scholars, and writers. The portion of adults including women who could read may have been small. In the absence of surviving vernacular manuscripts in hyangch’al 鄕札 orthography, idu 吏讀, or Chinese—spoken Korean was not the literary language until the mid-fifteenth century—we have little evidence about literacy among women; but writers of literary miscel-

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lanies provide intriguing information. Some female entertainers wrote poems in literary Chinese because of their proximity to power and influence, that is analogous to European women writing Latin poems, such as Hrotsvit (fl. tenth century), a Benedictine abbess of Gandersheim in Saxony who wrote Latin poems and plays.154 Yi Illo (1152–1220), for example, says he wrote a poem for a famous female entertainer known as Wǒnok 原玉, alias Uhu 牛後 (1:22).155 Ch’oe Cha (1188–1260) praises the poetic talent of Tonginhong 動人紅, an entertainer from P’aengwǒn (3:47), and an entertainer known as Udol 于咄 of Yongsǒng who wrote a quatrain for her guest Song Kukch’ǒm 宋國瞻 (d. 1250), a well-known writer and minister (3:48).156 Yi Chehyǒn says a poem by a famous entertainer in P’ungju is equal in quality to that composed by Chǒng Sǔmmyǒng (d. 1151), a high state minister (2B:6).157 Some might have been tutored at home by their learned fathers or brothers or at the convent by learned nuns. Some aristocratic nuns may have patronized the production of certain devotional or didactic texts; some convents might have had libraries of similar texts to be read to the people. We do not know whether most people remained essentially within oral-aural culture. Laurie A. Finke’s suggestion in Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England (1999) bears quoting: A literary “artifact” might be written to be read by a single reader. However, it might also be written to be read to a large or small audience, by one individual to another, to be performed, or it might not be written at all. It might be orally composed. In defining reading and writing in the Middle Ages, we must consider all these possibilities. . . . It is possible to have a highly developed culture, including a high level of education, in the absence of written documents. . . .[R]eading was much more likely to be organized as a communal activity than as a private and individual experience. Even women who owned books but could not actually read them could have those books read aloud to a group of women . . . . The practice of collective reading has important implications for how we understand literacy; it may require a radical

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shift in what we mean by “reading” and “writing.” Communal reading . . . constitutes a “textuality of the spoken as well as the written word” . . . , in which literacy relies less on technical mastery of letters than on memory and learning, spreads less through individual acts of reading on the part of single women than by word of mouth among groups of women who may be connected by family ties, by residing in the same convent, or by geographical ties. To understand women’s literary activity, then, we must understand more fully their family and social networks and relationships. Whatever writing medieval women produced must have grown out of the kinds of reading communities to which they belonged.158 Finke’s suggestions can help us understand how the lyrics of Middle Korean love songs came into being and were transmitted for centuries. The practice of communal reading existed throughout the Chosǒn period and up to the early decades of the twentieth century in Korea. We should clarify, then, what we mean by literacy, illiteracy, the role of writing, and an interdependence of oral and written modes of communication. In addition to descriptions of certain women known for their virtue, especially chastity, in the works of male authors of Koryǒ, we have fiftyfour tomb epitaphs (myojimyǒng 墓誌銘), buried in the graves of Koryǒ women, written between 1110 and 1381. A typical epitaph mentions the rank and title of a woman’s husband and son, and her daughter’s status (virgin, married, widowed). Images are filtered through the writer’s own ideology, biases, and concerns. Every woman is presented as a positive character—helped husband and sons to achieve a successful official career, rendered filial devotion to her parents and in-laws, maintained harmony and order in the large extended family under matrilocal postmarital residence. That her husband became a renowned minister is attributable to her virtue—as is even such a minor episode as refusing a request for a favor lest it compromise the husband’s probity. Also highlighted is fidelity after the husband’s death (twenty-five out of forty widows did not remarry). All were members of the upper class and invested with titles (3a–6b) commensurate with their husbands’;

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images of them tell us of male attitudes toward women but are devoid of hostility. Every epitaph mentions weaving and needlework: even the wife, née Kwǒn, of Yi Chehyǒn, a high minister and renowned writer, wove cloth during the day and did needlework at night, perhaps to suggest her diligence and support of the household economy. We recognize the similarities but not the differences among them—indeed, they do not transgress conventional class and gender expectations.159 We cannot find women poets who left works comparable, for example, to those of Li Qingzhao (1084–ca.1151) of the Song and Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), the wife of Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), of the Yuan.160 The only nun honored with the title “Great Master” by the Koryǒ king is Chinhye 眞慧 (1255–1324). Married in 1268 at age fourteen and later widowed with four sons and three daughters (1301), she attended lectures on Buddhist teachings by such eminent monks as Mugǔk 無 極 (1302) and Ch’ǒlsan Sogyǒng 鐵山紹瓊 (1311), went forth from her family with the Buddhist name Sǒnghyo 性曉 (1315), and had a hermitage built for her on Mount South in Kaegyǒng (1320), following the examples of her sisters of the royal and noble families who tended to embrace Buddhism. Her second daughter was one of the virgins offered to the Mongol court.161 At least three eminent women in the medieval West whose counterparts are hard to find in East Asia deserve mention. Known for her intellect and contacts with popes, kings, noblemen, and bishops as well as her religious, scientific, and medical writings (Hildegardis causae et curae) in Latin, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) founded a new convent (later elevated to abbey) at Rupertsberg near Bingen, Germany, where she remained as prioress until her death. She knew Latin, scripture, the liturgy, some biblical exegesis, music, natural science, and medicine and was praised as “one of the more original medical writers of the Latin west in the twelfth century.”162 Renowned among her contemporaries for her learning and overwhelming reputation for wisdom as an abbess of the Paraclete, Heloise (1101–1164) was expert in Latin, Greek, and

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Hebrew; wrote in Latin; and frequently cited both the Old and New Testament, the Church Fathers, and such classical authors as Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, Lucan, Persius, and Macrobius. She also studied Plato and logic.163 The third example is Alienor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine (1122–1204), granddaughter of Guilhem (William), VII Count of Poitiers and IX Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1127), the first troubadour poet of eleven extant songs in Old Occitan.164 She married Louis VII of France and, after annulment of this marriage (1152), Henry Plantagenet of Anjou (later Henry II of England). She accompanied Louis for the Second Crusade (1147– 1149) and led her own troops. The richest heiress of her time and one of the greatest patrons of twelfth-century Europe, she spread the ideology of courtly love, fin’amor, throughout Europe and the development of courtly poetry in Poitiers. She remains the medieval West’s great—if not the greatest—queen.165

The Lyrics The “Monograph on Music” of the History of Koryǒ (71:30b–43b) lists thirty-two titles of Koryǒ songs, most without the original texts, but some with translations by Yi Chehyǒn into heptasyllabic quatrains in literary Chinese (such as “Ogwansan” 五冠山); some are accompanied by the text in Chinese (“P’ungipsong” 風入松), and one by Chang Chin’gong 張晋公 (“Hansongjǒng” 寒松亭) is translated into a pentasyllabic quatrain. From the contextual clues provided in our source, eleven appear to be folk songs; each of eight other songs may have been composed by an unknown individual; and four have the composer identified (such as “Pǒlgokcho” 伐谷鳥 by King Yejong). Eleven are praise songs (“Changdan” 長湍); eight are satires (“Sarihwa” 沙里花); five concern women’s fidelity (“Wǒnhǔng” 元興); and one treats filial piety (“Ogwansan”). In terms of geographical origin, more than half the titles are from the Koryǒ capital and its vicinity. Kaegyǒng 開京, the Koryǒ capital, was an international metropolis. Situated beneath Songak 松嶽 (Pine Mountain; also called Puso 扶蘇), with the Yesǒng River 禮成江 to the southwest and the Imjin River

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臨津江 to the southeast, both emptying into the Han River 漢江, the city was surrounded by three walls: the outer wall 羅城, built 1020– 29, was 14.3 miles long along the ridge line of the mountain, with 25 gates; the imperial city 皇城 wall’s circumference was about 2.9 miles with 20 gates; and the palace city 宮城 wall’s circumference was about 1.3 miles with 4 gates. About 7.5 miles west is Pyǒngnan Ferry 碧瀾 渡, the port for ships bound for coastal cities on the Yellow Sea and for China. The Song envoy Xu Jing, for example, landed there in 1123. The outer wall became the subject of a folk song, “Kǔmgangsǒng,” 金剛城 popular after the return of the king from Kanghwa Island 江華島 to the capital to escape the Mongols. Administratively the city consisted of 5 districts (pu), 35 wards (pang), and 4 suburbs (kyo). The street from east to west—from Sungin 崇仁門 to Sǒnǔi 宣義門 Gates—and Great South Street 南大街, starting from Kwanghwa Gate 光化門, met at the central crossroads (sipchaga 十字街). The official complex was in the northeast of the city, and a commercial district was north of the crossroads with markets for oil, stationery, textiles, tea, and cosmetics, frequented by foreign merchants.166 We can visualize this city as it might have been in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. “The Turkish Bakery” (ca. 1296–1303) mentions Muslim bakeries or pastry shops. We do not know whether Muslim astronomers, Nestorian physicians, Mohammedan engineers, Western Asian ortogh (“partners”) merchants,167 Uighurs, and Persians crowded the broad avenues of the city; we do know, however, that at least four Mongols and four Western Asians rose to high civil and military posts and rendered the country important services as royal messengers to Dadu or as military commanders.168 Indeed, the magistrate of the western capital, P’yǒngyang, Min Po 閔甫, was a Muslim.169 Kaegyǒng’s population was half a million—almost the same size as that of Dadu, with 100,000 households, a figure given by Yu Sǔngdan 兪升旦 (1168–1232) before the transfer of the capital to Kanghwa Island in 1232.170 In the mid-seventh century, the total population of the Three Kingdoms was 2.58 million, and at its height the Silla capital Kyǒngju 慶州 had 178,936

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households.171 The History of the Song estimates Koryǒ’s total population at 2.1 million (no source or time given).172 At the zenith of prosperity, the population of the country was estimated at 2.5 to 3 million. In the early fifteenth century, according to the “Monograph on Geography” of the Sejong Annals, Hansǒng, the capital of Chosǒn, had half a million inhabitants, probably omitting women and slaves.173 In his report of 1471, Yang Sǒngji 梁誠之 (1415–1482), historian, cartographer, and compiler of a gazetteer, gives 700,000 households with 4 million persons for the country.174 The meanings of a number of Late Middle Korean words and phrases are still not settled; hence my reading is tentative until a more plausible deciphering of those words becomes available. This is not because the poets were loading every syllable with ore or trying to exploit the ambiguity of words. Certain words appear only in these texts and nowhere else, so critics have been obliged to offer alternative readings and we have to decide which meanings are most suitable in a given context. Moreover, the lyrics appear without punctuation in the original, and we need to read them aloud to hear their rhythm. Late Middle Korean was a tonal language, and King Sejong’s writing system “provided a way to record pitches”: one dot added to the left of the syllable indicates the going tone (a high pitch); two dots indicate the rising tone (long and rising—a low tone plus a high tone); no dot means it is the even tone.175 The balance of sounds and pauses—the sound experience of each song— enables us to grasp its sound value. Late Middle Korean love lyrics, oral-derived texts (“works that reveal oral traditional features but have reached us only in written form”), are without textual and contextual material that might help us reconstruct traditional referentiality, including inherent meaning accrued over two or more centuries. Extratextual information on history, tradition, and genre in oral tradition is lacking, but a close look at the structure of these songs tells us their provenance. A typical line consists of two or three, rarely four or five, metric segments. These songs are stanzaic, but

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generally the metrical structure of the first stanza is not repeated identically in subsequent ones—that is, the structure is heterometric rather than isometric. The songs are primarily aural, not visual. They do not explore the possibility of homophony, or wordplay, but their consonantal density, intensification of ideas by the accumulation of sounds and key words, reinforces the theme. We do not know whether the texts explore the synesthetic associations peculiar to different categories of vowels (open/closed) and consonants. A basic unifying device in all poetry, repetition of sounds, words, phrases, lines, and refrains, indicates the structural principle in most of these song lyrics. Patterns of formal and thematic recurrence set up “expectations which are strengthened while being fulfilled with each successive instance.”176 Repetition, sound patterns running in parallel with syntactic units, the constant presence of meter—these elements distinguish our texts as songs. Again and again we encounter the repetition of phrases and lines: •“The Turkish Bakery”: “Imalsami . . . namyǒng tǔlmyǒng/ chogomakkan . . . ne marira horira” (I–IV:3–4) repeated in four stanzas.“Kǔi charie nado chara karira/ kǔi chandae kat’i tǒpkǒch’ǔni ǒpta” (I–IV:6, 8) • “Song of Green Mountain”: “sarori ratta” (I:1) repeated in I:2–3; “kadǒnsae ponda” (III:1) repeated in III:2,4; “urǒra saeyo” (II:1, 2) and “kadaga tǔrora” (VII:1, 2) repeated twice. • “Treading Frost”: “irich’ǒ tyǒrich’ǒ” (III:1) and “kiyakiikka” (III:1, 3) repeated; “chongjong pyǒngnyok a seangham t’amugan/ kodaesyǒ sǔiyǒdil naemomi” (II:1–2) repeated. • “Spring Overflows the Pavilion”: I:1–2, 5; II:3; III:1–2, 5; IV:1 and 5; V:1–2, 3–4, 5 repeated. Time is central to the power of repetition. In the Confessions (ca. 397–400) of St. Augustine, what really exists is “the present of things past” (memory), “the present of things present” (sight), and “the present

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of things future” (expectation). The temporal act of measuring the duration of a syllable is referable only to retrospective evaluation. Only when the syllables have all passed into “the present of things past” (memory), when the repetition and variations have all been enacted within the framework of time, can the real experience of meter be apprehended. Thus it is memory that allows the experience to become fixed, that is, susceptible to valuation through retrospective comparison. St. Augustine uses the enigma of poetic meter—the repetitive feature underlying verse —as a metaphor for the human perception of time. Poetic repetition . . . exists . . . for the enhancement of one’s sense of the passage of time in the poem . . . Our experience of the structure of the poem is like our experience of the perception of time. The structure of the poem is controlled by repetitive devices which lend themselves to memory—to the Augustinian sense of “presentness” of that which has been recited before us. [R]epetition makes explicit, in the very act of interpreting the poem, the relation between the shape of the whole and the enunciation of the part. Thus it is poetic repetition which allows the reading process to become one of integration and, finally, of understanding.177 Refrains—the repeated verbatim unit of one or more phrases and lines in the middle or at the end of successive stanzas, always forming part of a given stanza178—are either sung as the accompaniment to a dance (“Ode to the Seasons”) or used to evoke the sounds of specific musical instruments;179 usually they are nonsense phrases that allow the song to carry a tune. • “Ode to the Seasons”: “aǔ tongdong tari” (line 5) repeated thirteen times at the end of each stanza, said to imitate the sounds of the drum. • “The Turkish Bakery”: “tarorǒ kǒdiro” (line 4); “tǒrǒdungsyǒng tarirǒdirǒ,” “tarorǒ kǒdiro tarorǒ” (line 5); “wi wi tarorǒ kǒdirǒ tarorǒ” (line 7).

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The density of repetitions and refrains and the constant presence of meter are a reliable index of traditional song in the oral tradition. In the Cambridge Song 49 (copied ca. 1050), “Veni dilectissime,” one of the four songs that a prude sought to destroy, the refrains go, “et a et o, / et a et o et a et o!” (lines 2 and 4).180 In “The Cuckoo Song” (first half of the thirteenth century) accompanied by music and Latin instructions for singing it, “cuccu” is uttered ten times in the fourteen-line song, ending with a refrain: “sing, cuccu nu, sing cuccu / sing cuccu, sing cuccu nu!”(sing cuckoo, now sing cuckoo).181 In a woman’s song by an anonymous trouvère, “Lasse, pour quoi refusai,” five stanzas end with a threeline refrain (lines 10–12): G’en ferai [I will do] Droit a son plesir, [justice to his wishes,] S’il m’en daigne oir. [If he deigns to hear me.]182 In “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (Ballad of the ladies of time past) by François Villon (1431–1489), the refrain, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” (line 8: But where shall last year’s snow be found?) ends three stanzas.183 In “Prothalamion” by Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552–1599), “Sweete Themmes, runne softly, till I end my Song” (line 18) occurs as refrain at the end of ten stanzas.184 The refrain (Spenser called it “undersong”),185 the most common generic repetend in poetry, easy to

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track in its ability to add progressively to the poem’s meaning, unfolds in time and presupposes a poetic context; it is the unique property of poetry, bound by the poetic line, from which alone it gets its form. As the largest consecutive arrangement of repeated words, a refrain may disrupt and retard the song’s development. These Koryǒ refrains offer a foregrounding symmetry, phonic role dominating, devoid of syntax, that functions as a “caesura song” or a “rhythmic intermezzo.”186 We do not know the approximate time, place, or circumstances of most of these songs. Middle Korean oral poets were all anonymous—we do not know whether they wrote both the texts and melodies or indeed performed their own songs. They drew their material from a common source of reference—a rhetorical tradition developed over the centuries (like the British ballad tradition), the poetic heritage. Performance was relevant to a specific occasion, and the function of performance was entertainment. The songs could be performed by trained singers or ordinary people—preliterate or literate—and are intended to be heard rather than read and hence are inseparable from their performance. The rhetorical devices used are different from those found in a poem designed for reading.187 A reaction to singing is immediate, ephemeral, and unique. Meaning is made inherent from associations accruing over generations—what is less said than implied, less textualized than immanent.188 Audiences participated actively in the actualization of meaning arising from the interplay of text and imagination. To achieve affective meaning requires the listener’s participation, to locate the text within the appropriate horizon of expectations, a context for interpretation.189 But these songs operate within such a universal frame of reference that they can be easily understood and appreciated. The literary and musical climate wherein these songs were first recorded may tell much about their vicissitudes. After the establishment of the new dynasty of Chosǒn in 1392, officials versed in the rites and music tried to collect and evaluate the musical legacy of the previous dynasty. Musicians and singers associated with the music bureau of

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Koryǒ were then recruited and ordered to compile the melodies and song texts popular until the beginning of the fifteenth century for use on ceremonial and festive occasions at court. But until the use of the mensural notations and the invention of the Korean alphabet in 1443–1444, the melodies and texts could not be written down. The earliest date these songs could have been recorded in the vernacular was at least sixty years after the founding of Chosǒn. Some 50 musical pieces to be tested in the process of selecting 518 musicians (akkong 樂工) for the Chosǒn music bureau (changagwǒn 掌樂院) include those of six Koryǒ songs (Kyǒngguk taejǒn 經國大典 3:245–46).190 The major reason for their survival is the practice known as contrafactum—writing new texts for well-known popular melodies. For example, Chǒng Tojǒn 鄭道傳 (d. 1398) wrote “Napssi ka” 納氏歌 (Song of Naghacu) as contrafactum to the tune of “Song of Green Mountain”; “Sindo ka” 新都歌 (Song of the new capital) to that of “Ode to the Seasons”; and “Chǒng tongbang kok” 靖東方曲 (Pacification of the east) to that of “Song of P’yǒngyang.” Yun Hoe 尹淮 (1380–1436) wrote “Ponghwang ǔm” 鳳凰吟 (Song of the Phoenix) to the tune of “Spring Overflows the Pavilion.”191 Thus although the song texts might have been dubbed “vulgar and obscene,” their melodies, probably together with the texts, were able to be preserved for almost six centuries despite occasional criticism of their diction. Song lyrics and musical notations for other songs discussed here are preserved in the Notation for Korean Music in Contemporary Use (early sixteenth century) and Akchang kasa, an anthology of eulogies and song texts (date unknown). There is no one right way to translate the songs of Silla (hyangga 鄕 歌) and Koryǒ (sogyo). Indeed it is advisable to retranslate those songs, because they have the capacity to disclose previously unseen dimensions and new aspects with each reading as one takes into account the latest philological and literary research. Since the publication of The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York, 2002), I have incorporated in this reading the latest linguistic and literary research.

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“Ode to the Seasons” We have seen that the Tongdong dance was performed at court during the Chosǒn dynasty, and existed from the time of Koguryǒ.192 The annual events according to the lunar calendar include: the lantern festival; the Double Five, when women play on a swing; the fifteenth of the sixth month (yudu 流頭), when people wash their hair in the east-flowing river and farmers pray to the dragon god for a good harvest; the festival of the dead, on the fifteenth of the seventh month (paekchung 百中); the fifteenth of the eighth month (kawi); the mid-autumn festival; and the Double Nine (chungyang 重陽), when people collect yellow chrysanthemums and make glutinous rice cakes. The first stanza of “Ode to the Seasons” serves as an introduction— dance and song as an offering to the king. “Nasara osyoida” (line 4), usually read as “come to offer” or “have come to offer,” can also be read as an appeal to gods and spirits to appear and offer blessings to the king. Here the lyric speaker is a woman—she refers to herself as “an abandoned comb” (st. 7) and “a sliced berry” (chomiyǒn parat; st. 11) and addresses her beloved as “my clerk” (noksa 錄事)—a member of the literate class (st. 5)—who throughout the twelve lunar months registers her communications to her beloved. In stanza 2, “river water” (narit mul) now freezes and now melts—winter and spring seem to coexist. There is a change in nature, but none in her status. Although she wishes for a new life, no movement or change seems to arrive. Then she likens her beloved to a “lofty lantern” (st. 3), herself to plums (or azaleas, st. 4)—he is presented here as an admirable person (“your magnificent figure”) who “shines upon the world,” an object of adoration by the people. Like a lantern and plum blossoms, they are separated—she can admire him from a distance and he is not hers alone. In stanza 5 the speaker’s attention changes from sight to sound—the song of the orioles makes her heart ache. They come “without forgetting,” but unlike the revolving seasons, he is “forgetting bygone days.” In stanza 8 on the feast of the dead, she prays that she may be with him even after death—one reading, but not a contextually correct one, proposes that he is dead. Her abandoned self is compared

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to a “comb cast from a cliff,” but at least he looks back at her (torabosil nim), if not “after her.” In stanza 12 the speaker finds herself on a dirt floor with only a sheet to cover her and laments: “O lonely life, more sorrowful than anything else,” or “I’ve burnt my sorrow like fuel.”193 Night seems related to the feminine, the passive, and the unconscious. In stanza 13 she offers him chopsticks carved from pepperwood (punji namu), used as eating utensils in Korea, but “an unknown guest” holds them: her beloved is a permanent absence.

“The Turkish Bakery” “The Turkish Bakery” is ascribed to O Cham 吳潛 (fl. 1296–1345), a crafty sycophant and traitor who tried to flatter and further corrupt King Ch’ungnyǒl—who is described as “intimate with small men,” and reportedly indulged in dance, music, and parties.194 O worked with Kim Wǒnsang 金元祥 (d. 1339) and Sǒk Ch’ǒnbo 石天輔, another traitor. He succeeded in alienating the king from his heir (later Ch’ungsǒn). Later O was sent in custody to the Yuan court and exiled to Anxi (1304), but he was recalled and served two more kings—Ch’ungsǒn and Ch’ungsuk. In collusion with the Simyang prince Ko (d. 1345), Ch’ungnyǒl’s grandson, O attempted to dethrone Ch’ungsuk and steal the throne for Ko, even proposing that Koryǒ be made a province of the Mongol empire. After describing the background of the song, the “Monograph on Music” (71:41a) cites two pentasyllabic quatrains in Chinese titled “Samjang” 三藏 and “Saryong” 蛇龍, respectively: I went to Samjang Temple to light the lamp, A monk grasps me by the wrist. If this story goes out of the temple, You’re a talebearer, little altar boy! [“Samjang”] * I heard a snake bit a dragon’s tail And crossed the top of Mount Tai.

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Even when myriad people say a word, Using discretion depends on two minds. [“Saryong”]195 The first quatrain translates the first four lines of the second stanza of the song in the Akchang kasa, but we do not know the author and translator of the two quatrains. On the basis of the statement in the history that O and others recruited beautiful female entertainers, slaves, and shamans from all over the country and taught them to sing the song, it is possible that they or their subordinates collected popular folk songs that might appeal to the king’s taste and compiled them into a “new song.” In the fifth month of 1299, when this song was introduced, the king, aged sixty-three, reveled with nubile women some forty years his junior, handpicked by his fawning underlings, at a hunting lodge near Sugang Palace on Mount Maje.196 So 1299 must be the terminus a quo for the performance of the song. The date of the song, then, is between 1296 and 1303, the terminus ad quem when O was sent into custody. The first female speaker narrates her adventures at four different places: a Muslim bakery, Samjang Temple, a well, and a tavern. She allows the Muslim baker (Hoehoe 回回 abi), who has a shop in the capital, to grasp her wrist. She has either tempted him or vice versa and asks the actor to keep the secret. From what the second speaker says, it appears that the actor has failed to keep his mouth shut. Hence “I too will go to his bed”! The second speaker is presented as more active than the first and describes the room as “a narrow place, sultry and dark” (tǒmgǒch’ida), whose range of meaning includes “stifling, stuffy, messy, dirty, and packed with things.” Unlike the usual lyric, which is monologic (only one voice speaks), this song is said to be dialogic— perhaps the first woman sang the first part and the second woman the rest of the song beginning “I too will go to his bed.” But lines 6–8 could equally have been uttered by the first woman. She is speechless with surprise at the old Turk’s audacity; but his touch allows her to sensualize and disinhibit her. Then she recalls what her friend has told her about her experience and says to herself, “I too will go to his bed, / A narrow

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place, sultry and dark,” which was her friend’s description and seems to have added more spice and temptation. The well and the dragon in stanza 3 are read by one critic as alluding to the palace and the king. Nonsense sounds consisting mainly of a liquid (r/l) and open-throated vowels whose values are not certain are mimetic in origin, their rhythmic pulsations perhaps evoking erotic sensations. “Tarirǒdirǒ” imitates the sound of the large transverse flute; “tǒrǒ” again the large transverse flute; “tungsyǒng” the drum and large gong; “kǒdiryǒ” the two-stringed fiddle —the mouth sounds (kusǒng 口聲)197 of several musical instruments. Because she does manual chores such as drawing water, buying a bun, and purchasing wine, the first speaker is of low origin according to the same reader, who sees this as a satire on the morally corrupt life of the king and his court rather than the sexual openness of Koryǒ society. Who could have been the speaker, especially the first speaker? Is she a sexually voracious female—an invention of male desire and the source of fascination, mystery, and sexual power? Or does she possess physical perfection—a requisite attribute of the gorgeous heroine in romance? She must have been utterly alluring—free-spirited, adventurous, and sirenic.

“Song of P’yǒngyang” Consisting of fourteen stanzas with a nonsense word (ajǔlkka) and refrains, stanzas 5–8 repeat stanzas 10–11 of “Song of the Gong and Chimes.” “Takkondae” (repaired) refers to the city of Sǒgyǒng 西京, the western capital—that is, P’yǒngyang, also called the “small capital” 小 京. Another reading proposes “where we nurtured our love,” but the word “repaired” in fact modifies “small capital.” “Koesirandae” (line 4) is read, “the place you love, if you love that place, because you love that place.” The speaker declares that she will stop spinning and leave with him. Although she has a lingering attachment to the city and her means of livelihood, which contributes to her support, she will transcend time and space to follow her beloved.198 “Even a heartless person would not abandon me after I gave up my hometown and livelihood.” She stakes her life and death. Stanzas 5–8 (the second stanza in our translation omitting

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the refrains) recur in “Song of the Gong and Chimes,” a pledge couched in impossibilities. The thread is fidelity, but what about the pearls that shatter, the wound inflicted, the agony of separation?199 In part 3 (stanzas 9–12 in the original), the speaker, alienated and deceived, turns her grudge to a boatman on the Taedong River, the river standing for the distance between her and her beloved. The boatman, the third party, becomes her target of scorn, an abetter who has allowed her love to leave, hence a detestable person. The boatman’s job is a mean one, and his wife must be a loose (rǒmnandi) woman. How does our speaker know about her promiscuous conduct? Here, as in Troubadour songs and “The Turkish Bakery,” we have a gossip- or scandalmonger, one of “those who murmur in unadorned speech.”200 She is a cousin of the Western lauzengier. The line has also been read, “Not knowing she too will cross the river” (as you let my beloved cross it, so she too will cross it to follow him)—a forced reading. Or “Stop being a boatman and take care of your own wife!” or “Don’t be so impudent! You will know how I feel only when your wife has crossed the river and left you”— an equally forced paraphrase. “He will pluck another flower” (kǒkkoriiida) has been read as “kǒkkol ida,” the boat will turn over—an unlikely curse. Another reading offers, “I will pluck a flower” (comparing herself to a plant that cannot move or a blossom about to wither that she will pluck out)—contextually implausible. Is it gibberish bewailing her lot? On the basis of the recurring motifs and imagery in extant folk songs, “Song of P’yǒngyang” seems firmly rooted in them.201 In the refrain “wi tuǒrǒngsyǒng taringdiri,” “tuǒrǒng” is the mouth sound of the six-stringed black zither; “syǒng” refers to phonomimes of a large gong or cymbal; “tarangdirǒri” is the sound of the large transverse flute.202

“Song of Green Mountain” The eight-stanza song (ca. 1232–1259) is riddled with textual cruxes. Its historical background may provide a clue to its genesis. At the second invasion of Sarta in 1232, Ch’oe U 崔瑀 (d. 1249), a military strongman, ordered a forced evacuation of the people to mountains and islands;

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this was considered the best way to avoid the ravages of the Mongol hordes.203 In the same year the court moved to Kanghwa Island, but the commoners and farmers could not all follow. The song may have been composed between 1232 and 1257 when there was a cease-fire.204 The two spaces mentioned are green mountain and sea, the first taking up four stanzas but the second only three. Hence, in order to restore a structural balance, some propose that stanzas 5 and 6 should be reversed, the extant version being a copyist’s error. “Sarori ratta” (line 1) is read “I’d like to live, must, will, live.” In stanza 2, “cry” (urǒra) is repeated three times plus “is crying” (uniroda). It may be a command, “cry!”—the bird should share the speaker’s sorrow.205 In stanza 2, “I’ve more sorrow than you”—as a displaced person he has to survive on tree bark and grass roots; however, he does not mention the plain that was reduced to ashes. “The passing bird” (kadǒnsae; st. 3: the bird that has passed) is also read as “the land allowed a tenant for his service, dry or wet fields allowed him” (kaldǒn sarae). The speaker sees not the bird but a patch of land beyond the river with “a mossy plow” (ingmudǔn changǔl), a “mossy woman’s encased ornamental knife, usually hung at the waist,” a “rusted weapon,” or “a red flower.”206 If a person with a mossy plow is not the speaker, then the line says, “Have you seen a man with a mossy plow?” In stanza 4 the speaker appeals to the listeners, “Where no man comes or goes, / How am I to pass the night?” The stone in stanza 5 has been the subject of lively discussion. Do the refugees watch out for an intruder and throw stones at a man who looks like a beggar? Or is it a symbolic statement that his pain is like being hit by stones? “No one to hate or love”—he is expressionless; at his gloomy prospects he gives up hope; he is plunged into despair. If stanzas 5 and 6 are reversed, the number of stanzas devoted to the sea equals that devoted to the mountain. Stanza 5 then begins, as in stanza 1, with a declaration: “Let’s live, let’s live, / Let’s live by the sea.” Stanza 6 introduces another crux, “aejǒngji” or “chǒngji,” read as an “isolated kitchen,” “small kitchen,” or “forked road.”207 “Nama-

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jagi,” according to a report, is found to be greens growing on Kanghwa Island, not “seaweed.”208 “The stag fiddling / perched on a bamboo pole” is one of the acrobatic acts performed by a professional entertainer. The wine mentioned in stanza 8 (“I have brewed strong wine”) should be consumed by someone else, perhaps referring to a group of roving actors. The song ends with “What shall I do now?” (ǒtti hariikko), which recalls “What shall be done?” (ǒtti harikko) in “Song of Ch’ǒyong” (ca. 875–886). The speaker has not reached the sea, but registers resignation.209 Note the repetition of “r” and “o” and enumerative particles repeated (rang/ran) to fit the text to music reminiscent of the typical sound patterns of folk song: mǒrwirang taraerang (with wild grapes and thyme); irigong tyǒrigong (this way and that); orido karido (no man comes or goes); najǔran pamǔran (day . . . night); mǔirido koerido (to love or hate). The refrain, yalliyalli yallasyǒng yallari yalla, may represent the mouth sound of the conical oboe, and syǒng, the cymbal or large gong.

“Treading Frost” Some think this song is not of folk origin but a composition by a member of the intelligentsia, such as Ch’ae Hongch’ǒl 蔡洪哲 (1262–1340).210 In stanza 1 the female speaker is questioning her beloved, who has made her sleepless (“awake half the night”), a symptom of lovesickness everywhere. Following an awful path, it is he who comes to sleep with her, not she going to his place. The dreadful path associated with death cannot be a simile for the speaker (one construes that she is a young widow who is debating remarriage).211 One reader thinks that the changeable weather—rain followed by snow—is compared to her betrayal; hence in stanza 2 she invokes the Avici hell, “the last of the eight hot hells, in which punishment, pain, form, birth, and death continue without intermission.”212 The sound of footsteps down a frost-laden path is perhaps evoked by the alliteration of “s” in “sǒrin sǒsǒksari.”213 In addition to a narrow winding path, the awful path translates “yǒlmyǒngkil,” where ten kings preside over the ten departments of purgatory.214 We do not know why the speaker thinks she deserves such a punishment. Was she

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not faithful? Does her “different mountain path” resemble “a pass in a tangled wood, an awful path”? Their pledge in the past was “let’s do this, let’s do that”—which can be as easily broken as easily made. In the final line she makes another pledge: let’s go together to the same place, let’s live together. As ice comes after frost, and frost and ice betoken severe cold, let’s not bring calamity upon ourselves and keep out of harm’s way. The latest attempt at textual exegesis, especially the middle stanza where two lines are repeated in the original, suggests that the first line consisting of seven sinographs—“pyǒngnyǒk saengham t’amugan” 霹靂生陷墮無間—is something akin to hyangch’al orthography. (No extant Koryǒ songs have a line in seven-sinograph phrasing.) The critic reads “saengham” as a “living pit” (vagina), “mugan” as “without pause,” and “yǒlmyǒngkil” (the awful path) as “the path to ecstasy.” The lines, he proposes, conceal the speaker’s erotic desire behind a highly coded phrase—almost an argot, a kind of underworld jargon: “Tchǒng tchǒng ceaseless thunderbolts on my vagina, / Cause me to die on and on, / Ah, would I let another penis enter my body?” She tries to express an emotion so intense, pleasure so rapturous, that it is akin to the experience of death—she compares her orgasm to thunderbolts striking her sexual organ.215 This reading is calculated to shock by its unexpected and capricious deciphering. But the translator does not assemble philological evidence in support of his reading, thus casting aspersions on the reliability of his proposal. The same lines were hitherto read: “At times thunderbolts, ah, / My body will fall into the Avici hell / And perish at once.” We now understand why this song, especially the middle stanza, was dubbed “licentious” by Chosǒn Confucian moralists. Let us return to stanza 2. I think it likely that this stanza is a later interpolation by someone who knew snippets of Buddhist texts, especially because the line in question does not harmonize with the diction and mood of the song as a whole. It is a soliloquy by the speaker, who thinks she might find herself soon in infernal flames. Were there forces that conspired against her, such as spies that pry into others’ love affairs,

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callous mockers (lauzengier)? She would rather see herself than her beloved in Avici hell, contrary to an anonymous motet for three voices by a trouvère: “But I see someone else here / Who, I think— / May he burn in hell— / jealously guards me.”216 We do not know whether the speaker associates love with death. In our texts no woman wishes to plunge a dagger in her breast or down a cup of poison. The speaker does not believe in revenge, and so great is her genuine contrition that we wish her well.

“Spring Overflows the Pavilion” Yun Hoe (1380–1436) wrote “Ponghwangǔm” (Song of the Phoenix), a revised version of “Song of Ch’ǒyong,” as contrafactum to the tune of this song.217 The anonymous compiler of the Akchang kasa added the term “pyǒlsa” 別詞 (separate text) to indicate what follows. What he called “another text” is in fact the original, and Yun’s new words are another text used as court/ritual music. This tune was also used, with minor changes, for other early Chosǒn eulogies. The song opens with startling imagery. The speaker declares that even if she were to die of cold (-ǔlmangjǒng) on a bed made of bamboo leaves, were she to freeze to death with him on the ice, she would wish their night of love to “run slow, run slow,” perhaps because the arrival of dawn will separate them, as in the alba. “Kyǒnggyǒng” in “Kyǒnggyǒng koch’imsang,” a five-word phrase in literary Chinese, means “uneasy, restless, and alone in bed.” How did this phrase sound to the listener, and what were its associations? “Peach blossoms have no worry” is a trope of personification (prosopopoeia). Peach blossoms “laugh at” (piutta) or “scorn” the spring breeze for its transience. This may, one translator suggests, allude to her beloved’s affair with another woman and hence be expressing jealousy. Such a reading, however, is far-fetched and not supported by the text.218 “May my soul be with yours,” followed by “pǒ.gi.si.dǒ.ni nwi.si.si.ni.ika,” implying “insists,” yields the sense of “Who persuaded

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me this was true?” She has learned that a man’s deep-sworn vow is false, but she does not upbraid him. Now she knows firsthand that such promises of fidelity are meaningless in the reality of an affair.219 The “duck” in stanza 4, which is in dialogue form, is her beloved, represented here as a playboy; the shoal (yǒhǔl) is another woman; the swamp (so) is the speaker. One reading addresses the duck, “Why do you come to me who has her own man?” The duck answers, “If the swamp freezes, the shoal will do.” While the duck is free to move around, both the swamp and the shoal are passive; water in its many forms stands for the feminine. Mount South is read by one translator as “the warmest place on the floor nearest the fireplace,”220 with a jade pillow and a damask quilt. “Sahyang kaksi” (literally “a musk lady”) is a woman festooned with a pouch filled with musk, which is a cure for lovesickness. Stanza 5 spoken by her lover, which connects with stanza 1, represents the acme of the speaker’s imagination, and we respond powerfully to her dream of fulfilled love in perfect harmony. The last one-line stanza begins “Aso nimha,” meaning both “O” and “Know this,” recalling the same in the last line of “Treading Frost” (III:3) and in “Regret” (“Chǒng Kwajǒng” 鄭 瓜亭, line 11). The song ends with a desire to “live forever together.”

“Will You Go?” In stanza 1 of “Will You Go?” (kasiri), consisting of four 3-line stanzas, “Will you go?” is repeated three times. “Nanǔn” (literally “I”) ending line 2 throughout the song is generally read as a meaningless word inserted to keep the rhythm. It is also read as the sound of the double-reed oboe (p’iri). The first part of the refrain in line 3 is meaningless, too, followed by a four-syllable phrase in Chinese (O age of great peace and plenty), a later addition of a cliché in eulogies. Stanza 3 says, “I could hold and keep you,” and the range of meanings suggested for “sǒnhada” includes: candid, displeasing, reluctant, look at each other, by mistake. What it says is, “If what I do is displeasing to you—trying to stop him physically from leaving.” “Sǒrǔn nim” in stanza 4 means “lamentable, distressing.” The speaker, able to suppress sorrow, resigns herself to the situation.

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“Song of Chǒngǔp” In this song consisting of eleven lines without division, of which five are refrains, a woman speaker addresses the moon. “Kom” in “nop’i kom” (high) and “miri kom” (far) is a suffix for emphasis. “Chǒjae” (line 6) is “market,” or the place name Chǒnju 全州. “Chǔndae” (line 6) is read as “mud, muddy road, disgrace, and stain” by extension. The whole line goes, “Don’t cause injury to others, or suffer injury.” “Ǒnǔida” (line 8) means “everywhere, whichever, anyone”; “nok’osira,” “leave and come, leave everything and come.” “Nae kanondae” (line 9) is suggested to mean “where I go, I go out to meet, where I live,” “may darkness not overtake him or me.” Our source provides the following gloss: administratively, Chǒngǔp belonged to Chǒnju. A traveling salesman from Chǒngǔp went on a peddling tour but did not return for a long time. His wife climbed atop a rock on a mountain and awaited him. Apprehensive lest he should get hurt on his night journey, she compared the imagined danger to the filth of muddy water. Tradition says that there is a rock where wives looked out for husbands. “Song of the Gong and Chimes” This song begins with a three-line introduction and continues in 10 three-line stanzas. After offering a series of impossibilities, the song declares that only if these ever occur shall “we part from the virtuous lord” as the refrain in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas states. The use of adynata (impossibilities) as a rhetorical device in the poetry of praise and vow is a commonplace. Stanzas 10 and 11 must have been popular as an independent song, as they occur in stanzas 5–8 of “Song of P’yǒngyang.” The “virtuous lord” (yudǒkhasin nim) is usually construed as referring to a king, but in a song of pledges between two lovers, it is more likely to refer to a beloved.

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Understanding the Songs These songs are known by the titles given by the compilers, not the authors of the texts. Situated to be read first, the title’s presence presupposes a reader. So it is obvious that the titles were given after the texts were written and before they were presented to the reader by someone other than the author. The title “Tongdong” (“Ode to the Seasons”) for a song accompanying a court dance was given probably by the compilers of the Guide to the Study of Music (1493).221 Another song whose title was given by the same source is “Chǒngǔp sa” 井邑詞 (“Song of Chǒngǔp”).222 Chǒngǔp is an old name of Chǒngju in North Chǒlla province; this is said to be the only song dating from Paekche. Several titles come from the first word of the text: “Ssanghwajǒm” 雙花店 (“The Turkish Bakery”), “Sǒgyǒng pyǒlgok” 西京別曲 (“Song of P’yǒngyang”), and “Kasiri” 가시리 (“Will You Go?”). Although “ch’ǒngsan” (green mountain) occurs twice in the first two lines, the current title, “Ch’ǒngsan pyǒlgok,” 靑山別曲 is not really apt, because the speaker also wishes to go to the sea. The title of “Isang kok” 履霜曲 (“Treading Frost”) may have been inspired by the content of the first two lines; “Manjǒnch’un” 滿 殿春 (“Spring Overflows the Pavilion”) does not appear to be the original title, but may be inspired by a ci tune title, “Manting fang” 滿庭芳 (Courtyard full of fragrance). The title should not intrude on the song’s internal space nor impose a perspective on it from outside.223 We have, then, first word/line identifiers,224 as with a sijo or one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Ch’ǒngsalli pyǒkkyesuya” is the first two metric segments of a famous sijo by Hwang Chini 黃眞伊 (ca. 1506–1544), for example, and “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” identifies sonnet 130. Unlike women troubadours (trobairitz), who were “all aristocratic and propertied women from the valley of the Rhone,”225 the speakers of these songs do not encode information about their social status or economic class. The bare minimal diction leaves out most contextual clues. We can identify the gender of the speaker from distinctive verbal features and tropes. The feminine speaker typically employs repetition and nonsense

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jingles, which place her voice close to the roots of lyric and make it easy for the unlearned to remember.226 Her subject is the recurrent universal features of love, especially of separation—“a study in the ambiguities of time. . . . One of those moments called ‘then’ contains [her] beloved.”227 Most songs are by abandoned women, the locus of unrequited passion. Love requires physical presence, and it should survive separation, but the male is the agent of separation. Time, the eater of youth, is also a separator. Her song is an exploration of the torments of love with a sense of urgency. Devastated by the end of a relationship, she speaks as love bids her—a forsaken woman suffering from the pangs of love and hate, the typical female voice, for example, in Mozarabic kharjas appended to the Arabic Muwashshah (composed 1000–1150).228 “Born into this world, I live alone.” “I lie on a dirt floor, with only a sheet to cover me.” “Lonely life, night without you” (“Ode to the Seasons”). “Do you come, who made me lie awake half the night?” (“Treading Frost”). Riding the swell of anguish, she is sleepless with longing, a symptom of lovesickness, telltale signs of which include darkened vision, sunken eyes, sudden sweating, irregular palpitations of the heart, whirring in the ears, jaundiced color, wasted arms, helplessness, stupor, pallor, anorexia.229 Sappho’s “melter of limbs,” Eros, is “sweetbitter” (glukupikron).230 Our speaker compares herself to a comb cast from a cliff, or a “sliced berry,” cruelly mutilated. Her song offers sharp memorable images in plain diction and is able to compress an event into just a few words. Pleasure and pain are inextricable, hence oxymoron is born, such as that of ice that sets the lover on fire (“Spring Overflows the Pavilion”).231 “If only I am with you” (“Ode to the Seasons”); “If you love me, I’ll follow you with tears” (“Song of P’yǒngyang”); “O love, let us be forever together” (“Spring Overflows the Pavilion”); “Ah love, living with you is my vow” (“Treading Frost”); “But return as soon as you leave” (“Will You Go?”). “I am, in the end, complete myself only in and because of my relation to you!”232 The feminine speaker in “Spring Overflows the Pavilion” wishes to build a bamboo mat on the ice and die of cold with her beloved. We cannot

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help responding to her startling imagery, her fondness for particulars, and her imaginative power. She relates emotion in a specific context and shares that emotion with her audience. In the words of Thomas C. Moser Jr., “Erotic situation invites linguistic manipulation, and erotic energy becomes grammatical energy.”233 In these anonymous female-voiced songs, wherein the woman is the subject (the lyric “I”), the central concern is meditation on the contours of absence. This anonymity and the genre dictate a feminine speaker and female authorship. In similar songs in the West, such as medieval German women’s songs (Frauenlieder), and Galician-Portuguese cantigas d’amigo (love songs in the female voice) and cantigas d’amor (love songs in the male voice), “most are composed . . . exclusively by men.”234 “The male poet could choose, with equal legitimacy, between a mode that allowed him to speak as a man and a mode that enabled him to appropriate the imaginary feminine, to speak as a woman [as in traditional China and Korea].”235 “The female voice boasts that a man loves her, whereas the male voice never boasts that a woman loves him.”236 “Thus, whereas for the feminine it is possible to present oneself as both speaking subject and the object of another’s desire, for the masculine it is not.”237 If male poets wished to appropriate female discourse in Middle Korean love songs, they might have sought “a kind of poetic justice, compensating for the suffering inflicted by a cruel or indifferent mistress by portraying a woman who had to beg mercy from an insensitive lover.”238 But such was impossible in a culture where one did not believe that only by love could a man become virtuous and noble as in the western fin’amor / amour courtois. In Koryǒ’s oral vernacular lyric tradition, “a loving woman separated from her beloved might have belonged to the lower popular register”;239 but judging from their diction and imagery, these songs could not have been composed by nonliterate women. We are likely to focus more on the gender of the text and less on the gender of the author and identify with the poetic speaker more than with the speaker’s beloved.240 Our speaker dares to talk of love, to compose,

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to perform her song. The gender of the song’s target audience is male, but it is also a mixed audience. Of course the singer in the here and now is not the speaker, and though a song may be addressed to her single male recipient, it is always meant to be overheard by other people.241 Audiences knew the text by heart and might be expected to join the soloist in singing the refrain. Thus a song invites a communal identification of singer and audience.242 Inseparable from performance, songs are transferable—to be sung by others.243 They are a call for fellowship. The lyric’s inability to belong fully to its personal addressee is universal;244 these songs outlived their authors. Aware of the importance of language to subjectivity and empowerment,245 aware too of the poetic sense of self, a typical author enjoyed the freedom of her linguistic utterance as desirous feminine subject. But a real woman’s experience would have been very different and should be seen “within the context of institutional structures shaped largely by men, reflecting male concerns.”246 Woman’s sexual activity was perhaps less controlled in medieval Korea than in later times by a plethora of fierce prohibitions. Does this reading help us who no longer speak Late Middle Korean vernacular to draw nearer to the medieval Korean literary experience? How can we educate ourselves to read these songs as a speaker of Middle Korean might have done? The poets may have introduced subtle variations, as did their singers and audiences. But unlike the troubadour canso (love song), known to us in many versions, these songs came down in only one version, and we do not know the medieval audiences’ expectations and experiences. Because there has been nothing resembling these songs in Korean literary history before or since, only repeated readings will bring us closer to the experience of the medieval audience. Hundreds of students studied these songs and accompanying music for music bureau examinations until the end of the nineteenth century; and many others did so, we hope, on various other occasions. The songs began to be noticed in the 1920s, but we need more in-depth studies of them as love lyrics from medieval Korea. Each should be understood “as it was in the historical moment of its appearance.”247 The undying power

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of these songs will continue to stimulate literary debate and lead many to discover that they are a watershed—if not a summit—in the tradition of Korean love lyrics.

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Notes 1. *My friend Professor John B. Duncan read the history portion of the paper and offered valuable suggestions. Jonathan Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” in Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 38– 39. 2. Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed., 29 vols. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 6:367b–370d. 3. Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak kwebǒm (Kungnip kugagwǒn, 2000) includes a photocopy of the original. 4. Also called Kukcho sajang. There are three copies, for which see Kim 2a.Three extant copies are in the Hōsa Bunko, Kyoto University (discovered 1967; Kim 2b:3–72); in the Yun Sǒndo family (discovered 1975; Kim 2b:73–146); and in the Changsǒgak (royal library; Kim 2b:147–224). 5. On mouvance see Peter H. Lee, “The Road to Ch’unhyang,” Azalea 3 (2010): 276, n. 29. 6. Sǒngjong sillok 240:18b; see also Kim 1 for relevant passages on Koryǒ songs in Chosǒn dynastic history, 429–605. 7. David Lindley, Lyric (London: Methuen, 1985), 51. 8. Meg Bogin, The Women Troubadours (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 13; Eglal Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Trobairitz,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, eds., F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 201–33. 9. Alois Richard Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and Its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadours (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946); Linda Fish Compton, Andalusian Lyrical Poetry and Old Spanish Love Songs: The Muwashshaḥ and Its Kharja (New York: New York University Press, 1976); J. A. Abu-Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001). 10. R. T. Hill and Thomas G. Bergin, Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Bogin, The Women Troubadours; and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner et al., The Songs of the Women Troubadours (New York: Garland, 1995); Frederick Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973); William D. Paden, The Voice

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11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères. Frede Jensen, Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1992). Olive Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric, 1150–1300: The Development of Its Themes and Forms in Their European Context (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); J. W. Thomas, Medieval German Lyric Verse: In English Translation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). P. G. Walsh, tr. and ed., Love Lyrics from the Carmina Burana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). G. L. Brook, The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of M.S.Harley 2253 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1955); Raymond Oliver, Poems Without Names: The English Lyric, 1200–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). “Everyone knows that the whole context can never be known or represented,” says David Perkins in Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 172. J. M. Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15. KS 23:26a–b. KS 27:24a. KS 28:1a–32:36a; KSC 19:24a–23:16a; Hambis 178–83, 188–89, 192–93. For his Mongol queen see KS 89:1a–13a. KS 33:1a–34:9a; KSC 23:16a–33b; Hambis 183–94. For his Mongol queen see KS 89:13a–17a. KS 34:9a–35:37a; KSC 24:1a–25: 2b–12b; Hambis 194–202, 203–204. For his Mongol queen see KS 89:17a–24b. KS 36:1a–33a: KSC 25:1a–2b, 18b–40b; Hambis 202–205. For his Mongol queen see KS 89 24b–26b. KS 37:1a–16a; KSC 25:40b–53a; Hambis 205–207. KS 37:16a–25a; KSC 26:1a–7b; Hambis 207–208. KS 38:1a–44:34b; KSC 26:7b–31b; Hambis 208–12. For his Mongol queen see KS 89:26b–33a. KS 41:1b; KSC 28:8b. For Koryǒ-Mongol marriage relations, see George Qingzhi Zhao, Marriage as Political Strategy and Cultural Expression: Mongolian Royal Marriages from World Empire to Yuan Dynasty (New

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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York: Peter Lang, 2008), 61 and 204–205; Morihira Masahiko, “Kōrai ōke to Mongoru kōzoku no tsūkon kankei ni kansuru kakusho” (Notes on the marital relations between the royal house of Koryǒ and the Mongol imperial family), Tōyōshi kenkyū 67.3 (2008): 363–401. KSC 29:5b. KS 44:4a; KSC 29:28b. KS 28:13a, 14b, 17a–b, 18b. KS 89:7b. KS 30:8a. KS 89:7b. KS 89:3b. KS 89:7a. KS 89: 4b, 5a. John D. Langlois Jr., ed., China Under Mongol Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19 (for court beatings of ministers when the khan was displeased). KS 89:13b–14b. KS 105:29a–b. KS 89:15a. KS 89:15a. KS 34:23a; 89:17b. KS 89:17b. KS 27b3 and 33b6. Elizabeth Endicott-West, Mongolian Rule in China: Local Administration in the Yuan Dynasty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16–19. KS 33:21a. KS 34:8a, 35:3b–4a; KSC 24:15b. KS 35:17a. King Ch’ungsǒn was well received by Jenzong (Ayurbarwada, r. 1311–1320) and the empress dowager, but under Yingzong (Shidebala, r. 1320–1323), his erstwhile ungrateful eunuch/slave came to harbor grievances against his master (the king had him flogged for his misdeeds and avarice), bribed Yingzong’s close official, and slandered him. With the enthronement of emperor Taiding (Yenzong, Yesun Temur, r. 1324– 1328), Ch’ungsǒn was released and returned to Dadu. Chang Tongik, in Wǒndae Yǒsa charyo chimnok (A collection of materials related to Koryǒ history in Yuan sources [Sǒul taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 1999]) cites 29 materials related to the king in Yuan sources such as poems; prefaces to a collection of royal poems by Wang Yun, Yao Sui, and Zhao Mengfu; letters; an inscription to a stupa; and funeral oration (126–67).

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

KS 36:11b; KSC 25:13b. KS 34:29b, 36:11b. KS 36:16a–b, 30a, 31b, 32a; KSC 25:29b, 32a. KS 36:31b, 32a. Herbert Franke, “Women under the Dynasties of Conquest.” In China under Mongol Rule, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 419. Variorum (Ashgate: Aldershot, Hampshire, 1994), 23–43.; for Korean leviratic custom see Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993–1996), 1:53–55. See also Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204, 244. KSC 20:41a–b. KSC 31:13b–14a. KSC 23:28b. KS 27:46a. KS 30:32b and 30a. Only an example, not a complete list, is given. KS 30:21a. KS 30:39b. KS 30:14b; 29:43a–b; KSC 45:45b. 30:14b. KS 29:43a–b. KS 30:30b; 31:16b, 23b. KS 31:3a; 34:20b. KS 38:8a; KSC 26:13a. KS 30:27b. Hanguk sa 21 (1996): 244–50. Laurie A. Finke, Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England (London: Longman, 1999), 31. Herbert Franke, “Tibetans in Yüan China,” in China Under Mongol Rule, ed. John D. Langlois Jr., 326. Peter H. Lee and Wm Theodore de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 239. KS 24:20a–b. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 629. David M. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 50. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight, 52.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

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Endicott-West, Mongolian Rule in China, 112. KS 27:43b–44b. KS 29:5a. KS 29:36a. KS 29:34a and Franke and Twichett, eds., Cambridge History of China 6: 482–84, and Cambridge History of Japan, ed. Kozo Yamamura 3 (1990): 411–23. Lee and de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition 1: 237–39. See an introduction in Lewis R. Lancaster with Sung-bae Park, The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Lee and de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition 1:238. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was ca. 1400, and William Caxton set up the British press in Westminster in 1476 (Finke, Women’s Writing in English, 79). In 1225 and 1228, for example, Kojong granted such a feast for 30,000 monks at the polo field (KS 22:28b, 35a); in 1279, Ch’ungnyǒl for 500 monks (KS 28:13b); in 1308, Ch’ungsǒn for 2,200 monks and nuns and in 1311, for 10,000 monks and nuns (KS 33:18b, 30a) and in 1347, Ch’ungmok for 4,100 monks (KS 37:12a). Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78–115. Information in this paragraph is based on that provided by my colleague Professor Hǒ Hǔngsik of the Academy of Korean Studies (email dated 10 and 12 October 2009). In about the same period in France, we recall the construction of the abbey of Cluny (founded 910), whose church was one of the largest in Europe; the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux (founded by St. Bernard in 1155); Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163); the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres (mid-thirteenth cent.); the gothic cathedral at Rheims (1210–1311); and Mont-Saint-Michel, a rocky island surmounted by a monastery that held out for seventy years against English attackers in the Hundred Years War. We might add here that the Bayeux Tapestry was “commissioned sometime between 1066 and 1082 by Odo, half brother to William the Conqueror and Bishop of Bayeux from 1049/50–1097,” for which see Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 18–41.

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88. Chewon Kim and Lena Lee Kim, Arts of Korea (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974), 109. 89. K. L. Pratt, “Music as a Factor in Sino-Korean Diplomatic Relations 1069– 1126,” T’oung Pao 57:4–5 (1976): 199–218 and “Sung Hui Tsung’s Musical Diplomacy and the Korean Response,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44:3 (1981): 509–21. 90. Song Pangsong’s article on the subject in Hanguk sa 21 (1996): 453–92. 91. Ch’a Chuhwan, Koryǒ Tangak ǔi yǒngu (Tonghwa ch’ulp’an kongsa, 1983) and Yi Hyegu, “Sung Dynasty Music Preserved in Korea and China,” in Hanguk ǔmak nongo (Sǒul taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 1995), 231– 59. 92. KS 10:19b and 14:10b. Yi Chehyǒn, Ikchae nan’go 10 contains his “changdan’gu” (the long-and-short line ci). 93. KS 102:23a–29a, esp. 24a. 94. The full title is Xuanhe fengshi Gaoli tujing. I have used the Minjok munhwa ch’ujinhoe edition (Sǒhae munjip, 2005), 40:6b (translation on 288–89). 95. KS 71:31a–b; for “Mugo” see Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak kwebǒm, 227–28, 330–31, 503. 96. KS 71:31b–32a; for “Abak” see Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak Kwebǒm, 228– 29, 323–28,502. 97. KS 71:32b–33a; for “Muae” see PaC 3:11b–12a; Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak kwebǒm, 229. 98. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Koran Civilization 1:264 and Lee and de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition 1:155. 99. KS 18:36b–37a. See also KS 69:12a–33b for a fuller description of the festival. 100. SG 11:116 and 118. 101. Edwin O. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China (New York: Ronald Press, 155), 282. 102. KS 69:33a and 1a–11b for a fuller description of the festival. 103. Song Pangsong in Hanguk sa 21 (1996): 477. 104. KS 64:38a; for Pangsang ssi, see KS 64:38a–40a. 105. Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China: New Year and Other Annual Observations During the Han Dynasty 206 BC–AD 220 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 75–81. 106. KS 19:7b, 94:11a, and 126:38a. 107. KS 94:28a–30a. See Yi Tuhyǒn’s article on dance and drama in Hanguk sa 21 (1996): 493–511.

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

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KS 126:28b–29a. KS 23:31a. KS 30:15b. KS 129:41b. KS 30:15b. KS 136:27a. Tongguk Yi-sangguk chip, hujip (KMC 1) 3:3b. Yi Hyegu, “Mogǔn sǒnsaeng ǔi ‘Kunahaeng’,” in Pojǒng Hanguk ǔmak yǒngu (Minsogwǒn, 1996), 294–315 with a corrigenda on 59–61. For the poem see Mogǔn sigo (KMC 3) 21:9a–b; 33:27a. Mogǔn sigo 33:27a. Song Pangsong, Koryǒ ǔmaksa yǒngu (Ilchisa, 1992), 116–34. KS 14:23b–24a. KS 29:43b. Song Pangsong, Koryǒ ǔmaksa yǒngu, 272–73. KS 29:1a; KSC 20:15a. KS 30:12a; KSC 21:7b. KS 30:13a. KS 30:31b. KS 31:16a; KSC 21:42a. KS 31:30a; KSC 22:16a. KS 76:8a–b. KS 33:31a and 89:8b. KS 36:26a. KS 89:29a. KS 28:10b–11a; KSC 19:33a. Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 29– 87. KS 106:40b. Margaret Wade Labarge, Women in Medieval Life: A Small Sound of the Trumpet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 26; Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. Samuel N. Rosenberg, Margaret Switten, and Gerard Le Vot, eds., Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères : An Anthology of Poems and Melodies (New York: Garland, 1998), 296. Rosenberg et al., eds., Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères, 348. Dyan Elliott, “Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray: Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy,” in Constructing Medieval

82

138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–23; Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era (Louvain: Institut Orientaliste, 1988), 274; I. B. Horner, The Book of the Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982),192–97. I owe the above two references to my friend Professor Gregory Schopen of UCLA. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27, 142, 218. Susan Mosher Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 11. KS 84:38b; KSY 185–86; cf. TS 26:416 (easy to locate translation in Wallace Johnson, The T’ang Code, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979–97.]). KS 84:30b–39a; KSY 186–88; cf. TS 26:414. For pugok see John B. Duncan, The Origins of the Chosǒn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 33–34; Pak Chonggi, Koryǒ sidae pugokche yǒngu (Seoul taehakkyo ch’unlp’anbu, 1990) and Chibae wa chayul ǔi konggan: Koryǒ ǔi chibang sahoe (P’ǔrǔn yǒksa, 2002), 130–45 and 516–18. KS 84:39a; KSY 188–89; cf. TS 26:413. KS 84:39a; KSY 188089; cf. TS 26:413. KS 84:39a; KSY 189; cf. TS 26:413. KS 84:41a; KSY 205–206; cf. TS 14:190. KS 84:42a; KSY 212–13. KS 84:41b; KSY 210. KS 84:43a; KSY 221–22; cf. TS 6:55. KS 84:44b; KSY 229–30; cf. TS 22:330. KS 84:44b–45a; KSY 230–31; cf. TS 20:294, 295. KSY 202–04, 232–35; cf. TS 20:294, 295; 24:346. Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 7. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 131. Katharina M. Wilson, “The Saxon Canoness: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim,” in Medieval Women Writers, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 30–63, and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance (Leiden: Brill, 1988). Joan M. Ferrante, “Public Postures and Private Maneuvers: Roles Medieval Women Play,” in

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155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162.

163.

164. 165.

166.

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Women and Power in Medieval Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 221–24. PaC 1:10a–b. PoC 3:26a–b. NP 2B:2b–3a. Finke, Women’s Writings in English, 64, 71. Kim Pyǒngin and Yi Hyǒnjǒng, “Myojimyǒng ǔl t’onghaebon Koryǒ sidae yǒin,” Yǒksahak yǒngu 38 (2010): 37–66. Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) cites six women poets of the Song and some ten of the Yuan. For Li Qingzhao see 89–99 and Guan Daosheng, 126–31. Hǒ Hǔngsik, “Chosǒn ǔi Chǒngyu wa Chinhye: tu sidae yǒsa ǔi pigyo,” Chǒngsin munhwa yǒngu 97 (2004): 175–98. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 70–88; Joan M. Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 16– 17, 22–27; Ken Kraft, “The German Visionary: Hildegard of Bingen,” in Medieval Women Writers, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 109–30. Etienne Gilson, Heloise and Abelard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972); Betty Radice, “The French Scholar-Lover: Heloise,” in Medieval Women Writers, 90–108; and Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages,” 13–15 and 19–22; Eileen Kearney, “Heloise: Inquiry and the Sacra Pagina,” in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carol Levin and Jeannie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 66–79. Gerald A. Bond, The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine (New York: Garland, 1982). Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); and Finke, Women’s Writings in English, 77. Khubilai’s mother, Sorghaghtani Beki (d. 1252), whose four sons became rulers, is compared to Eleanor of Aquitaine in Franke and Twichett, eds., Cambridge History of China 6:414. Pak Yongun, Koryǒ sidae Kaegyǒng yǒngu (Ilchisa, 1996), esp. pp. 147– 65; Kim Ch’anghyǒn, Koryǒ Kaegyǒng ǔi kujo wa kǔ inyǒm (Sinsǒwǒn,

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167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183.

184. 185. 186.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature 2001); Hanguk yǒksa yǒnguhoe, ed. Koryǒ ǔi hwangdo Kaegyǒng (Ch’angjak kwa pip’yǒngsa, 2002). Franke and Twichett, eds., Cambridge History of China 6: 6, 388, 499, 546, 658. Peter Yun, “Mongols and Western Asians in the Late Koryǒ Ruling System,” International Journal of Korean History 3 (2002): 51–69. KS 33:39a. KS 102:6b. SY 1:42. Songshi 487:14053. SjS 127:3b–4b, esp. 4b. Sejo sillok 40:11a. Iksop Lee and S. Robert Ramsay, The Korean Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 288–89. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1036a. Laury Magnus, The Track of the Repetend: Syntactic and Lexical Repetition in Modern Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 1989), quotations from pp. 2, 4, 9–10. Preminger and Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1018b. Chǒng Pyǒnguk, “Akki ǔi kuǔm ǔrobon pyǒlgok ǔi yǒǔmgu,” Kwanak ǒmun yǒngu 2 (1977): 1–26, esp. 23. Ziolkowski, The Cambridge Songs, 49 and 309–11. Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 30–41. Rosenberg et al., eds. Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères, 213. From André Gide, ed., Anthologie de la Poésie française (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 20; English translation is by Richard Wilbur in Katharine Washburn and John C. Major, eds., World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 389. William A. Oram et al., eds., Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 761–69. John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 154–59. Magnus, The Track of the Repetend, 45–61, esp. 51 and 57–58.

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187. Alain Renoir, A Key to Old Poems: The Oral-Formulaic Approach to the Interpretation of West Germanic Verse (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 160. 188. Foley, Immanent Art, 139. 189. Foley, Immanent Art, 40–43. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 24; and Robert Holub, Reception Theory (London: Methuen, 1984), 60. 190. Han Ugǔn et al., trs., Kyǒngguk taejǒn (Hanguk chǒngsin munhwa yǒnguwǒn, 1992), 1:245–46 and 2:443–45. Five hundred eighteen are from the lower class and 397 aksaeng from the commoners, a total of 915 musicians. 191. Peter H. Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 148–50. 192. Sǒngjong sillok 132:4a. 193. Kim Wanjin, Hyangga wa Koryǒ kayo (Sǒuldae ch’unlp’anbu, 2000), 195. 194. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu (Saemunsa, 1990), 182–91. For O Cham see KSC 22:13b–14a; KS 71:42a–b; 125: 17a–21a. 195. For the motif of “a groundless rumor” in the sasǒl sijo, see Peter H. Lee, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 153. 196. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 277. 197. Walter Kaufmann, Musical Notations of the Orient: Notational Systems of Continental East, South, and Central Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 169–70. 198. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 278. 199. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 283. 200. Mariann Sanders Regan, Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 100. 201. Yang T’aesun, Hanguk siga ǔi chonghapchǒk koch’al (Minsogwǒn, 2003), 188–227; repeats the same in Yun Yǒgo et al., eds., Hanguk siga nǒlp’yǒ ilkki (Munch’angsa, 2006), 11–45; Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 187–97. 202. Two Galician-Portuguese songs evoke the stormy sea, waves, and boatman. From Martin Codax we have “Ondas do mar de Vigo” (st. 2): “Waves of the bay of Vigo, / Tell me whether you have seen my friend? / And, oh God, whether he will come soon?” And there is Mendinho’s song, “Sedia-m’eu na ermida de San Simion”: “I have no boatman, and I

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203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215.

216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature cannot row, / I, beautiful girl, shall die in the stormy sea: / while waiting for my friend, / while waiting for my friend” (st. 6). See Fred Jensen, ed. and tr., Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1992), 207 and 235. KS 23:14a–b. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 96–99. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 109. Kim 1:140. Sǒng Hogyǒng, Koryǒ sidae siga yǒngu (T’aehaksa, 2006), 357–77 and 379–87. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 115. Kim Wanjin thinks that the speaker is a woman, esp. in sts. 7–8 (Hyangga wa Koryǒ kayo, 217). KS 108: 11b–13b. Yi Hyǒngsang (1653–1733), in Pyǒngwa sǒnsaeng munjip 8:150, suggests this attribution, Pak, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 187– 97. Yun Sǒnghyǒn, Sogyo ǔi arǔmdaum (T’aehaksa, 2007), 118. William E. Soothill and Lewis Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1937), 383a. Kim Sangch’ǒl reads “sǒrin” as “beset with grief and hope” and “sǒksǒksari” as “dull life” in Koryǒ sidae ǔi siga ǔi t’amsaek (Kyǒngin munhwasa, 2004), 302–308. Soothill and Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, 51b. Cho Yongho, “‘Isang kok’ ǔi ǔimi wa ǔmsajǒk sǒngkkyǒk,” Tongbang hakchi 148 (Dec. 2009): 141–77. See Ulf Malm, Dolssor Conina: Lust, the Bawdy, and Obscenity in Medieval Occitan and Galician-Portuguese Troubadou Poetry and Latin Secular Love Song (Uppsala University Library, 2001) on nudity and explicit genital references (e.g., “con,” “fur,” “forte”). Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères, 236 (no. 69, motet, line 12). For the text and melodies see SjS 146:1a–27b. Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 256. Kim Sangch’ǒl thinks sts. 2–3 are interpolations (278). Pak Nojun, Koryǒ kayo ǔi yǒngu, 262. Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak kwebǒm, 3:8b–9a; 5:7b–8b. Yi Hyegu, Sinyǒk Akhak kwebǒm, 5:10a–b. Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 263.

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224. Ferry, The Title to the Poem, 261. 225. Bogin, The Women Troubadours, 132. 226. Doris Earnshaw, The Female Voice in Medieval Romance Lyric (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 135. 227. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 117. 228. Compton, Andalusian Lyrical Poetry and Old Spanish Love Songs. 229. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, trs., Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 50; Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 40 passim. 230. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 3, 38. 231. Mariann Sanders Regan, Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 68. 232. William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 155. 233. Thomas C. Moser Jr., A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 165. 234. William E. Jackson, “The Woman’s Song in Medieval German Poetry,” in Vox Feminae: Studies on Medieval Women’s Songs, ed. John F. Plummer (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1981), 53. 235. Julian Weiss, “On the Conventionality of the cantigas d’amor,” in Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context, ed. William D. Paden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 132. Earl Miner says, “In cultures with affective-expressive poetics, the poet tends to be identified with the speaker of the poem, and the reader is presumed also to be stirred so much as to be likely to turn to lyric expression,” and “Chinese in particular have identified—in the absence of proof to the contrary— the speaker of a lyric with the biographical poet,” Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 120 and 233. 236. William D. Paden, “Introduction,” in Medieval Lyric, ed. William D. Paden, 7. 237. Weiss, “On the Conventionality of the Cantigas d’amor,” 133. 238. Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères, 13. 239. Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères, 8. 240. Waters, Poetry’s Touch, 2.

88 241. 242. 243. 244. 245.

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Waters, Poetry’s Touch, 19. Lindley, Lyric, 51. Lindley, Lyric, 52. Waters, Poetry’s Touch, 25. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 178. 246. Gold, The Lady and the Virgin, xviii. 247. Amelia E. Van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 209.

Chapter 3

The Storyteller’s Miscellany A Critical Introduction Preamble The chapki 雜記, or literary miscellany, of the early Chosŏn dynasty was the Korean counterpart of the biji 筆記 in China and the zuihitsu 隨筆 in Japan. Written in literary Chinese, it typically comprised critiques of poems, prose portraits, tales, and random jottings. It is characterized by an encyclopedic scope, an abundance of biographical and autobiographical narrative, and a predominance of the first person singular in the plain style. The topics of most early Chosŏn examples are generally uniform, with only minor variation, while works written after the sixteenth century tend to offer a greater variety in form and content. I would suggest that unlike formal prose genres, the literary miscellany is a form well suited to the presentation of the self. Because I am considering only works written before the mid-sixteenth century, I will not include the more autobiographical prose writers of the Ming, such as Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602) and the Yuan brothers (e.g., Hongdao 袁宏道, 1568–1610).

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The P’aegawn chapki 稗官雜記 by Ŏ Sukkwŏn 魚叔權 (fl. 1525– 1554) is a highly individual and interesting example of the genre, and my focus will be on its rhetorical devices, favored topics, and system of values. I have translated P’aegwan chapki as The Storyteller’s Miscellany for several reasons. The labels accorded the literary miscellany by Korean literary historians include such misnomers as p’aegwan munhak and p’aegwan sosŏl. Historically, the p’aegwan (“minor officials”) were hired by the court to note down anecdotes and ditties circulating among the people, in order to gauge the mood of the public and its grievances against the administration. Writers of the literary miscellany in the early Chosŏn dynasty, however, included such high ministers of state as Sŏ Kǒjŏng 徐居正 (1420–1488) and Sŏng Hyŏn 成俔 (1437–1504). Therefore it would be erroneous to associate the literary miscellany exclusively with minor officials. Ŏ Sukkwŏn was, however, a minor official who was denied higher status because of his origin, and an excellent collector and teller of stories. A more important reason for the classification of the literary miscellany as a minor form is that in Korea, the traditional prose narrative, fictional or not, was deemed unofficial because it created a world other than that sanctioned by the court and offered an alternative view of reality. This social and cultural ordering of the Confucian society is mirrored in the spatial taxonomy. The East Asian term for fictional narrative, sosŏl 小說 (xiaoshuo in China and shōsetsu in Japan), literally “small talk,” stems from this prejudice against any writing viewed as unofficial by the custodians and censors of the dominant culture. Hence, the fact that the literary miscellany was excluded from a given writer’s collected works, even in the case of a high state minister, demonstrates its relatively low place in the hierarchy of prose genres. For example, the Saga chip 四佳集, the collected works of Sŏ Kŏjŏng, omits Sŏ’s P’irwŏn chapki 筆苑雜記; and the Hŏbaektang chip 虛白堂集, the collected works of Sŏng Hyŏn, omits Sŏng’s Yongjae ch’onghwa 慵齋 叢話.

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Any canon1 that labels other literary kinds as unofficial—outside the mainstream and secondary—is ideological. How did a traditional literary canon come into being in Korea? The major texts Koreans read and studied during the Chosŏn dynasty were the Confucian canon (first five, then eleven, and finally thirteen texts), which formed not only the basic curriculum of education but also the basic texts for the civil service examinations. As the requisite of the educated and ruling class, the canon was the subject of serious and sustained study. As the repository of a cultural grammar, these texts helped to constitute the interpretative community of those with an orthodox education in Korea. From their inception, therefore, the Confucian classics were treated as canonical by the literati in their roles as scholars, officials, and writers. They were the binding texts in politics and morals, and defined the nature and function of the literati, who, as translators of morality into action, enjoyed authority, power, and prestige. Because they were also influential writers of their time, they played a major role in the formation of the canon of refined literature. The literati who constituted the dominant social class in Chosŏn Korea wrote almost exclusively in literary Chinese, which was the main source of their prestige and power. This class, which controlled the canon of traditional literature and critical discourse, adopted as official the genres of Chinese poetry and prose. The Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature), the most widely read and influential Chinese anthology, exercised a lasting influence. The official canon includes most of the genres of poetry and prose found in the Wenxuan. Of course, poetry was the highest in the generic hierarchy, as attested by anthologies and collected works of individual writers. The literary miscellany was one of the three unofficial genres, the other two being prose fiction and drama. The ideology of prestige and power grounded in the dominant class found expression in literary forms, content, style, acts of canonization, and much else. It is clear why the literary miscellany occupied a low place in the hierarchy of prose

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genres. However, it is seldom asked why the masters of official prose forms and arbiters of literary taste of the day nevertheless turned to this genre. In fact, it is in such works that the subjectivity of Sŏ Kŏjŏng and Sŏng Hyŏn as individual writers is best expressed and preserved. The popularity of the literary miscellany notwithstanding, it only circulated in manuscript form, and the actual number of readers of such works as the P’aegwan chapki, which escaped fire, flood, and the teeth of time for hundreds of years and was printed for the first time only in the twentieth century, is moot at best. The reasons for the relative importance of the miscellany in traditional Korean literary history are not difficult to identify. The literary miscellany is an antigenre that scoffs at the prescriptive conventions and stilted rhetoric of the formal prose genres. It attempts to disregard the hierarchy of relative importance among topics. That is, what is important is not the subject matter, but the activity of the inquiring mind. Although most writers of the literary miscellany were schooled in Confucian historiography and used its formulas and clichés in historical and biographical narratives, they turned to the literary miscellany for its freedom, spontaneity, and diversity. The form allowed the writer to examine his tradition critically, question the stereotyped official view of experience, and adopt an open stance permitting a broader field of inquiry and a hermeneutic expansion of consciousness. Grounded in existence and motivated by the quest for knowledge, the literary miscellany’s “to-and-from movement between subject and object,” in W. Wolfgang Holdheim’s words, is “dialectic between developing idea and elucidated occasion.”2 Although I prefer not to compare the typical entry in the literary miscellany with the Western essay, which is the topic of Holdheim’s study, what he says of the essay’s particular enactment of cognitive processes holds true for the literary miscellany as well: it is similarly a “hermeneutic” genre. On the level of intellectual evolution, essayistic occasionality demonstrates the act of knowing in flagranti—cognition as

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“getting to know.” Far from being a game of solipsistic selfwill, such knowledge reflects our universal condition as finite beings that live in time, that endure only in and through change. The essayistic project respects and enacts nothing less than the perspectivistic character of knowledge. . . . The essay is the hermeneutic genre par excellence.3 The literary miscellany offers a variety of narrative forms and content. These include the reportorial narrative, in which the third-person narrator recounts historical events, with occasional dramatic scenes and attendant commentary, and biographical narratives, such as the prose portrait, in which the third-person narrator, often a direct observer or a contemporary of the subject of the portrait, describes the subject’s behavior and infers from it his thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Here the omniscient narrator freely enters the subject’s mind (zero-focalization), a privilege that is accorded by convention. The subject’s remarks are usually quoted in direct discourse (oratio-recta), with or without the inquit formula, “said.” A single prominent action may be cited to exemplify the person’s character. Another possible form of the literary miscellany is that of the first-person narrative, in which the identity of the realms of the narrator and of the subject signals that the account is autobiographical. Here the narrator’s motive for writing is existential, an attempt to impose some sense of order and meaning on the discontinuous experiences of the self. Distinct from the omniscience assumed by the third-person narrator, the first-person narrator’s horizon of perception and knowledge is limited. He relies on memory to recall the past, or uses his imagination to re-create some segments of it. Finally, the literary miscellany may take the form of a textual commentary on poetry, the sihwa (shihua, “remarks on poetry”), in which the writer discusses the forms, styles, rules, techniques, and topics of poetry written in Chinese by Chinese and Korean poets of the past and present. Of these various forms of the literary miscellany, the prose portrait is the most entertaining, while autobiographical writing is the most valuable, simply because it is so rare. The introduction of the private self in biograph-

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ical and autobiographical narrative was intolerable to the representatives of the official culture. By labeling the literary miscellany as unofficial, however, they plainly implied that there is a version of the self other than the public and official one. The literary miscellany is mainly concerned with the lifestyle and social milieu of a select group of people belonging to the same class, shaped by the same education, and sharing the same cultural assumptions. Even the staunch iconoclast or “outsider” accepts the dominant ideology and shares in a common knowledge of conventions and expectations. Thus the literary miscellany partakes of the same point of view that structures the narrative, the same relationship between author and audience, and the same narrative techniques. The genre expresses the values and visions of the learned community and the habits of mind of its authors. Regardless of the birth and status of the author, a literary miscellany bore more or less the same validity and authority as other texts written in literary Chinese. The difference is its relative place in the hierarchy of prose genres, as the informal discourse of a private individual that answers to his own personal situation. Because of his social status, an author like Ŏ Sukkwŏn is unique when he extends his inquiry to members of such less privileged classes as minor officials, artisans, and secondary sons. Through him and writers from similar backgrounds, the literary miscellany explores the implications of the value systems that the official prose genres leave unaddressed. Because Ŏ Sukkwŏn was a secondary son—an unchosen and inevitable destiny for which he could bear no responsibility—a word must be added about the status of secondary sons as writers in the Chosŏn dynasty. Unlike the situation in Tang or Ming China, or in the earlier Korean dynasty of Koryŏ, children born to concubines of the literati were discriminated against in the Chosŏn dynasty. In line with a rigid interpretation of Neo-Confucian morality, the distinction between high and low was upheld to the letter. Even deeply learned and talented sons of concubines were disqualified from taking the final civil service examina-

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tion, which was the only path to high officialdom, and deprived of their inheritance rights. They were victimized until 1894, when such discrimination was finally abolished. Only during the reigns of Chungjong (1506–1544) and Chŏngjo (1776–1800) were some of these men employed —under the former as interpreters and drafters of diplomatic missives in the office of Diplomatic Correspondence, and under the latter as editors in the Royal Library 奎章閣 (Kyujanggak). Ŏ Sukkwŏn was one of the few secondary sons who left behind writings of his own. Others are Cho Sin 曺伸 (fl. 1470–1494), Kwŏn Ŭngin 權應仁 (d. ca. 1590), Yi Tal 李達 (fl. 1568–1608), and later, Yi Kŭngik 李肯翊 (1736–1806), Yi Tŏngmu 李 德懋 (1741–1793), and Han Ch’iyun 韓致奫 (1756–1814). In his Miscellany, Ŏ Sukkwŏn tries not only to criticize the unjustified discrimination but also to preserve the deeds and writings of the alienated and marginalized. But his work does not belong to dissent literature: it is not written to subvert the ideological bases of the ruling class. Ŏ Sukkwŏn shares their values and does not wage a personal revolt against society. Even in the work of oppositional writers who adopted their culture’s values to stress the discrepancy between theory and practice, vision and actuality, one can see their complicity in the culture they wished to repudiate (for example, the eponymous hero in Hŏ Kyun’s Tale of Hong Kiltong 洪吉童傳). They are as much used by the rhetoric of their adversary as they themselves use it. Thus, Ŏ Sukkwŏn espoused the value system of the Neo-Confucian literati of the Chosŏn dynasty. Historical and political affairs shaped the concerns of Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s writing. One can identify the Storyteller’s Miscellany with Ŏ Sukkwŏn not only because the genre allowed him to write more personally but also because his social status made him scrutinize the world around him more acutely. The decentering of his life prompted by his many travels probably led him to search for himself in writing. A record of his concerns and tastes is a gift to posterity, even if the form lacked organization and was subjected to the fate of reading. He could not have known what the reader would make of it four centuries later, and in English translation!

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The variety and diversity of the literary miscellany inevitably render its study partial and tentative. Because each entry is concerned with one topic and does not arise from a consistent attitude or plan—a characteristic inherent in the genre—a typical literary miscellany is a compilation of disparate pieces that resist generalization. I hope nevertheless that my attempt to comprehend Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s cultural and hermeneutical situation will offer inspiration for future investigation of later examples in Korea, and of kindred forms elsewhere.

Rhetoric and Style One of the characteristic literary phenomena of the Chosŏn dynasty was a flourishing of anecdotes, observations, and comments on various subjects. Works of this kind, written in literary Chinese and bearing in their titles such words as “miscellaneous,” “random,” and “unofficial,” constituted a distinct literary genre for nearly five hundred years. The author of such jottings, which ran from one sentence to several pages in length, was typically a man of letters and affairs, often involved in the major events of his day. A student of the humanistic tradition, he espoused the tenets of Confucian morality and political philosophy. He relished rules, categories, and typology. His interests were encyclopedic, and his habits of mind were such that his fondest hope was to while his time away among cultured companions. He demonstrated a keen sense of analogy, a penchant for quotations, and a reverence for authority, and he expected his reader to follow all his allusions and references. He was, or hoped to be, a critic of both life and literature. He knew that he was not initiating a new fashion in writing but in fact following one. He often used the first-person pronoun or its equivalent to add a note of intimacy. He was usually casual and familiar, chatty and relaxed; but he could also be humorous, pointed, or ironic. Ŏ Sukkwŏn was one such writer of the sixteenth century. A secondary son, Ŏ passed the examination in the documentary style and became an

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instructor of it (1525) in the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence. He went to Peking seven times as an interpreter (2:42), an industrious scribbler (he kept a diary whenever he could, 2:77), an industrious researcher, and a zealous scholar. His works reveal in varying degrees an unquenchable curiosity. He is remembered chiefly for his Kosa ch’waryo 攷事撮要 (Selected essentials on verified facts, 1554), an encyclopedic handbook. The topics discussed therein include relations between Korea and Ming China, Japan, and the Jürchen; exchanges of envoys and tributes; annual functions; the routes of Korean envoys; Chinese and Korean institutions, both central and provincial; and bits of practical advice, such as ways to remove oil stains from clothes or recognize poisonous plants and fish. His second book, the P’aegwan chapki (The storyteller’s miscellany; hereafter The Miscellany), is a collection of Ŏ’s random jottings on a wide range of topics and a representative collection of this sort from the Chosŏn dynasty. Ŏ greatly expanded the possibilities of the genre, but he also inherited many of the strong points and shortcomings of earlier examples. Yi Illo 李仁老 (1152–1220), the author of the first collection of random notes in Korea, suggests that the primary condition that led him to write was leisure.4 Leisure is the product of disengagement from and scorn for wealth and rank, as a solitary, private man who “lives hidden in the mountains and forests” seeks peace of mind and his own identity within the uncompromised self. In his preface to the Nagong pisŏl 櫟翁稗說 (Lowly jottings by old man “Oak”), Yi Chehyŏn (1287–1367) says: The sinograph for “oak” contains nak as its phonetic. It can be said that if a tree which cannot be used as lumber can be far away from harm, it is a joy to the tree; hence I follow the reading nak [“joy”]. Once I was an official but left office to “enjoy obscurity.” Hence I styled myself Nagong, hoping that a tree that would not make lumber might live long. The graph p’ae contains pi as its phonetic. Looking into its meaning, I see that millet is lowly among grains. When I was small, I knew how to read books; but in the prime of my life I gave up learning, and now I have become old. Upon

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In the preface to the Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆, the Song writer Hung Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202) echoes the same sentiments: “I have become old and, growing indolent, do not read much. I have recorded things in whatever order they come to mind and have not put them in sequence, so I look on them as random notes (suibi).”6 Elsewhere in the same work, Yi Chehyŏn says again that he jotted down his notes to “while away time and dispel gloom.”7 The Japanese writer Kenkō 兼好 (ca. 1283– 1352) begins his Tsurezuregusa 徒然草 (Essays in idleness, 1321–1333): “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.”8 Thus the literary miscellany, like Montaigne’s (1533–1592) Essais, was the product of “a melancholy humor . . . produced by the gloom of solitude.”9 In order not to incur blame, a typical writer enters a modest disclaimer to register his inadequacy: his writing is trivial, stupid, and absurd. He also likens the act of writing—casual, tentative, spontaneous, natural, and lively—to a mere game, thus alluding to the Analects, wherein Confucius says, “Those who do nothing all day but cram themselves with food and never use their minds are difficult. Are there not games such as draughts (boyi)? To play them would surely be better than doing nothing at all” (17:20).10 Yi Illo and Yi Chehyŏn advance the view that their kind of writing is better than playing draughts.11 It is a game to be enjoyed in moments of leisure, a recreation to subdue melancholy and boredom. An awareness of his social status (most writers of the literary miscellany belonged to the scholar-official class) or a fear of misunderstanding might have prompted the writer of a miscellany to hide his intentions. But such a sport can be indulged in by one who has studied his culture, is versed in all branches of knowledge, and is aware that he is “the subject

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of his own prose.”12 Studied nonchalance and apparent self-disparagement notwithstanding, the writer’s style proves his awareness of his audience, which in turn affects his style. Hence his disclaimer is also a means of attracting attention. The manipulation of rhetorical skills is intended to maintain the reader’s curiosity, interest, and sympathy: polished phrases to clinch an argument, epigrams and proverbs to drive home a moral, analogies to contrast the past and present, anecdotes to exemplify the virtues in action or to study man’s behavior in specific contexts. Major portions of such earlier specimens as the P’ahan chip 破 閑集 (Jottings to break up idleness, pub. 1260), the Pohan chip 補 閑集 (Supplementary jottings in idleness, 1254), and the Nagong pisŏl (1342) are devoted to poetic criticism (about half of the first, two thirds of the second, and less than one third of the third), and they therefore recall the method and tone of the Chinese shihua (remarks on poetry). The remainder of the works consists of biographical information about the author himself and the writers he discusses as well as reflections on behaviors in public and in private, often illustrated by anecdotes describing a person’s habits of thought or his behavior. This gallery of often pointed and clever portraits resembles the early seventeenth-century English character books, though with some differences in approach and aims. The writers who created Theophrastian characters in England meant to portray general human types by recounting the characteristic behavior of individuals who exemplify specific vices or virtues.13 Sir Thomas Overbury’s “A very very woman,” “A noble and retired housekeeper,” “An almanac maker,” and “An affected traveler”; John Hall’s “The malcontent,” “The flatters,” “The superstitious,” and “The humble man”; or John Earle’s “The young and raw preacher,” “The precise hypocrite,” “A downright scholar,” and “The sordid rich man”—all these characters were meant to represent universal types. Although the habit of seeing men as types was firmly established in East Asian thought by

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classical education, our examples usually do not deal with personified abstractions (“He is the sort of man who . . .”), but rather with historical figures (“Song Ch’ŏnhŭi 宋千喜 was resolute and unyielding”; 2:19). Korean portraits were not always psychological or moral in intent. The writer could seek particularizing details or topoi, parallels or contrasts in the classics, histories, or mirror literature. But if he was to achieve brevity in depiction, he should discover some telling detail of word, deed, or gesture. He was not writing a biography, but he still had to sum up his subject’s character. Generally, the writer was not a taxonomer of social types, not a moralist out to assail vice. He might voice moral indignation, but he usually refrained from overt disapproval, biting irony, or pungent satire. The subjects of earlier specimens therefore comprise some poetic criticism, some character sketches, and some miscellanea. Like later examples of the genre, these earlier works resemble the essay in their informal tone and emphasis on personal taste and judgment. But seldom do these examples achieve the status of an abstract treatise or essay in the Western sense. To produce a more formal and tightly knit discussion, writers could turn to other genres such as the lun 論 (treaties) or the shuo 說 (discourse). And if one compares these pieces with the essays of Bacon, Montaigne, or Lamb, few “dispersed meditations” will be found. What led to the efflorescence of such collections in the Chosŏn dynasty? More widespread literacy, an increase in the number of men of letters, a wider circle of cultivated readers, greater leisure for the lettered classes, and the position of the writer in the bureaucracy and in society as a whole were contributing causes. Let us consider briefly the writer, his audience, and the general cultural milieu. The majority of writers in Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s time were governmental functionaries recruited from the literati; indeed, Ŏ mentions more than a hundred of these. Comparison with the origins of some English writers reveals some differences: Chaucer was the son of a vintner; Spenser, of

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a tailor; Marlowe, of a cobbler; and Herrick, of a goldsmith. In Korea, writers of humble origin were few. The civil service examination system set the mode of life for the literati. From childhood, virtually all aspirants to public service were trained in and read the same, primarily Chinese, works. Upon passing the examinations, a candidate received a political appointment that carried immense social prestige. From early in life he learned that the art of statesmanship and that of literature went hand in hand. The predominance of writers at court provided the courtier with constant encouragement, though it was commonly a source of rivalry as well. It gave him opportunity to talk with and observe a variety of men who had achieved distinction in politics and literature. Such observation of the varied human scene developed insight into human nature. Sharing intellectual pride and literary talent, those at court could exchange erudite views concerning every major event. Apart from courtly functions and official duties, they found the opportunity to write in verse and prose. Poems were produced on every conceivable occasion; the courtiers must have thought in verse. In fact, numerous poems were actually inspired by dreams. In such a cultural setting, none could dispute the place of literature in society and culture, and even a brutal ruler like Yŏnsangun 燕山君 (1494–1506), who delighted in butchering the innocent and upright, left scores of poems behind. Although some rigid moralists saw literature as a vehicle of Neo-Confucianism and called poetry frivolous, few spoke out against it. If censorship and the climate of opinion of the lettered class had to be taken into account, most writers knew how to avoid such controversial issues as the province of majesty and thus avoid official sanction. The audience of the early Chosŏn dynasty writer was first the author’s close friends, among whom manuscripts (or transcriptions) were circulated. Intractable allusions, quotations, puns on persons’ names, numerous poems of friendship, commendatory verse, prefaces, epilogues, appreciations of individual collections: all of these attest to the intimate nature of the group. Here the literati wrote about the literati for the literati. The reader (who was also a writer) was presumed to be

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as knowledgeable as the writer and was expected to follow all allusions and quotations. Literary patronage, a topic hitherto little explored, existed in various forms. Such an enlightened monarch as Sejong 世宗 (1418–1450) set the model through his munificence. In 1420 he established the Academy of Worthies, a royal research institute, and assembled young scholars there. Symbol of enlightenment and the intellectual and cultural center of the nation, the academy nurtured a number of brilliant scholar-statesmen of early Chosŏn. In 1426, he established the Hall of Reading, where the virtuous and talented were given a leave of absence to devote time to reading and writing.14 The institution persisted, with some interruptions, down to the early seventeenth century. When King Sejong learned that one member of the academy, Shin Sukchu 申叔舟 (1417–1475), had pored over rare books while on night duty and dozed off only at dawn, he himself went to have Shin covered with a sable robe.15 Such a touching episode as this illustrates the generosity of the throne toward men of letters, who in turn offered their lord genuine affection. A roll of silk, a basketful of tangerines, a flagon of wine, or a bouquet of chrysanthemums bestowed upon a favorite writer inspired more gratitude than sinecures or pensions. There also existed a sort of informal private patronage, though the Korean writer was less fortunate in this than his counterpart in England, where “every writer before 1475 (or perhaps 1500) had a patron.”16 The best form of patronage was of course an official appointment, the highest recognition a man of letters could receive. Such an appointment did not guarantee uninterrupted literary activity, but this was irrelevant. Poetic talent was presumed to ensure political advancement, and most of the literati combined writing with their official duties. The relative lack of mercenary flattery or fawning is refreshing as compared, for example, with Elizabethan England.17 This may explain why comparatively few works were dedicated to patrons (although dedication was no proof of patronage). No one wrote for pecuniary gain, and no one made a living by writing, ghostwriting excepted. Nonetheless, few forsook literature.

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Literary and rhetorical skills were called for on various occasions: deliberations on state affairs, missions to foreign lands, writing of missives, and production of literary works. East Asia had little rhetorical theory to speak of, partly because of the relative unimportance of oratory,18 except for “private speaking” in the form of advice to, remonstration with, and persuasion of a ruler, patron, or friend. By “rhetoric,” then, I mean not the art of persuasion as practiced by Western orators, but the art of discourse, written and occasionally spoken, the aim of which was to influence in various forms the viewpoints of readers and listeners. East Asian history is replete with speeches of all kinds, and rhetorically minded historians ascribe speeches, dialogues, or summaries of speeches to rulers and ministers. The oldest history in China, the Book of Documents 書經/尙書 (Shujing, or Shangshu), consists almost exclusively of speeches—pronouncements, declarations, or injunctions—although it is uncertain whether they were actually delivered in specific instances. The Confucian classics and later histories abound in speeches, as delivered or reconstructed, the incorporation of which was a historiographic convention. Accusations, defenses, exhortations, and pleas, although not intended as orations, aim to produce verbal effects. The arrangement of the material in such speeches, along with their citing of historical precedents and classical allusions, parallelism, sententiae, subtlety of approach, anticipatory refutation, and other devices to heighten the emotional tone, indicate that they were scrupulously prepared. Actual delivery of speeches was not part of the traditional curriculum of the Royal Confucian Academy, though candidates for the civil service examination were asked to present publicly exegeses of classical texts. Rhetorical consciousness is present, therefore, in all forms of writing, and all use rhetoric effectively. If the law courts were “the primary scene of ancient oratory in the West,”19 the equivalent in East Asia was the royal court, where policies were deliberated daily and men of letters assumed various roles. Education in East Asia was not intended primarily to train public speakers, and no East Asian man of letters would view

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himself primarily as a “patron” in the Western sense, an orator called upon to defend his clients’ interests.20 In the West, training in rhetoric was essential to success in public office, “where all transactions are conducted through the medium of language.”21 In East Asia, a broad grounding in the liberal arts was the prerequisite to public service. A statesman would use rhetorical devices, which he learned from past examples, in the exposition of his political, historical, philosophical, and literary ideals. The adept organization and presentation of ideas was not viewed as a distinct skill but was integrated with other “components of human learning.”22 The typical writer in public service was proficient in writing and delivering speeches, in private or in public. He was at once a man of action and of words, and his duties required ability in persuasion. Parallelism was the foremost rhetorical device used in official documents of all kinds in East Asia (1:11, 12). We may well pity those whose job it was to draw up such documents in the Office of Royal Decrees, the Office of Special Counselors, or the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence. Many writers, however, felt at home in more than one style. Ŏ Sukkwŏn used at least three: parallel prose; a kind of institutional style (imun 吏文, or documentary style in translation); and the plain style, which he used in the Miscellany. Probably no style is more suitable than the plain style for expressing views on contemporary issues, morals and manners, or scholarship and literature. More to the point, it expresses well the writer’s attempts to understand himself and the world that he inhabits, as it resemble the language used when jotting down random thoughts or favorite passages from a poem in a notebook. Eloquence is a hindrance to the plain style, and the association of the literary miscellany with this style is no accident. It is a relief for the modern reader to turn from the labored and ornate official style to a plain style that allows the writer’s thoughts to develop naturally. The difference resembles that between the oratorical Asiatic and the curt Attic style. Symmetry, parallelism (balance and antithesis), and luxuriance were characteristics of the official style. Note,

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for example, the memorial to the Ming emperor, which read in part: “The sun sheds light everywhere; even its least beam thoroughly brightens the obscure and small. Your vast kindness pervades all; its least wavelet thoroughly cleanses the false and the oppressed. Your benevolence covers both the living and the dead” (1:11). Every word of such turgid passages as this had to be carefully weighed (a lack of decorum or the inclusion of taboo words would cost the writer his life), every clause balanced, and every cadence measured. The writer strained after ingenious hints and mysterious allusions. By contrast, the literary miscellany was characteristically loose and choppy in style, but natural and rapid in movement. The difference in style also affects the relation of thought to form. While the movement of parallelism is spatial, movement in the looser mode of structure is linear. One is built upon correspondence, another upon addition.23 As the Ciceronian and the Senecan are combined in the composite style of seventeenth-century English prose, so the florid and the plain are often mixed in Korean writing. Ŏ Sukkwŏn uses verbal skills to produce rhetorical effects. Some arguments resemble the enthymeme, moving either from the premise to the conclusion (e.g., 1:18, 21, 49; 2:6) or from the conclusion to the premise (1:38). In such an abbreviated argumentative syllogism, the obvious (usually the major premise) is omitted to quicken the flow of the discourse and to hold the reader’s interest. Ŏ successfully defines himself to the reader as a man of sound sense, judicious temper, high moral character, and requisite erudition. When his subjects are scholarly or literary, he establishes an effective ethos by his reputation as an interpreter, his competence in spoken and written Chinese, the popularity of his subjects, and his citations of authorities (the topic of testimony). This last in particular identifies him as one who shares the interests and tastes of the literati, and his views are lent force by the esteem in which his society holds the classics, histories, and other literature that he cites. Sensitive and candid, he presents himself as a casual essayist whose approach is tentative and exploratory and whose concern is to inquire and probe. He is often willing to concede points to the opposi-

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tion. The posture Ŏ adopts is more or less the same as those assumed by writers of the chapki and biji. Ŏ also makes extensive use of direct address, exclamations, rhetorical questions, and other devices that impart an exhortatory and rhetorical character to his work. The exclamation (ecphonesis; excalmatio)24 in particular defines his stance. Appearing in the conclusion of an episode and addressed to an absent person, it is an appeal to pathos. For example, “This was terrible error indeed!” (1:21); “This is ridiculous!” (1:43); “How regrettable!” (2:33); “How pitiable!” (2:88); “This is terrifying!” (4:71); or “How strange!” (4:73). The writer may use rhetorical questions at appropriate spots to induce a calculated response in the reader. The answer to a rhetorical question (erotesis; interrogatio) is presumed to be evident from the question itself: “Kim’s Chinese saved the lives of two hundred men. Who could ridicule such a man?” (1:16); “Had not the tradesman taught the Japanese silver smelting, how could evil and corruption have become so widespread?” (1:17); “Is this not fate?” (2:52); “If this is not idiotic, what is?” (2:71); “How can this be considered a trivial matter?” (2:84); or “What will they think of this?” (4:47). The unconsenting reader is challenged. If he does not answer in the affirmative or the negative, the writer will have failed to induce the appropriate response. Ŏ uses another argumentative figure, the aphorism, to “generalize a particular truth.”25 For example: “Ninety tricent (ri) is only half of a hundred. This illustrates the difficulties that attend the last phase of a man’s career” (2:34); “They could be described as tending to their duties while drawing their salaries” (2:50); “It is in the nature of the cock to crow” (in a poem by Yi Pyŏl, 2:60); or “to catch a tiger with a straw net” (3:13). Proverbs or folk sayings, epigrammatic and pithy, can invest a discourse with “moral character,” as Aristotle pointed out long ago. Such is Ŏ’s use of argumentative and stance figures, as well as the logical, the

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ethical, and the emotional modes of appealing. He seldom uses tropes or indulges in defective pathos, however.26 His skillful adaptation of the means to fit the subject, occasion, and audience reveals the workings of rhetoric. Ŏ’s style consists, then, of inherited forms of expression that shaped his thinking and serve to express the reality of experience. Guided by the versatility of his precursors, Ŏ developed the habit of selecting and combining material, which became part of his personality. In his writings he strikes a pose of nonchalance; writing was a pastime for him, and one that in his day was identified with a life of withdrawal and a disdain for ambition and greed. His “negligent” style27 is suitable for the works he dubs his “minor trials” or “small talk,” as opposed to more official and formal writing, characterized by rules, contrivance, labor, and glory. Ŏ associated the former with freedom (to discuss the unmentionable), independence, spontaneity, and subjectivity, and the latter with affection, formality, utility, and distortion of truth. Experience, not books, was Ŏ’s guide, although he, an omnivorous reader, was not averse to quotations or allusions. Ŏ aspired to be faithful to his idea of the natural, but his style represents a particular type of naturalness. He may have espoused nonchalance, but we detect and appreciate the studied art that he put into his work. The 237 pieces in the modern edition of the Miscellany may be divided by topic among various sorts of scholarly and poetic criticism, including textual criticism, bibliography, study of sources, parallel-hunting, and annotation (20 percent); Sino-Korean and general foreign relations (11 percent); contemporary mores (20 percent): and portraits (10 percent). The remainder deal with institutions; the author’s ancestors; and his autobiographical account. The form, style, and organization of each section vary according to the subject, and Ŏ’s collection presents a wide range of rhetorical techniques—he defines, enumerates, asserts, proves, and persuades. Ŏ uses several methods of definition: lexical and historical definition, as in

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baozhi 儤直 (4:44) and chazhi 槎集 (4:48); descriptive definition, as in shugua 樹掛 (4:67; the meaning is given, along with a work in which the term is used); and definition by function, as when he tells us what the strips of white paper or raw silk pasted at the top of a scroll are intended to do (2:3). Clarity and concision mark his attempts to pin down these terms clearly for himself and for the reader. In more lengthy sections, such as those on the chongjŏngdo 從政圖 (a dice game; 2:89) and naozi (arsenic; 4:71), Ŏ resorts to definition by context and example, although the real point of these two sections is the Korean ignorance of current Chinese institutions, while the second discusses the properties of naozi. Alas! Camphor and arsenic have entirely different properties. Now people take arsenic as camphor to mix in medicine; they are lucky if this does not kill the patients! How can one expect it to cure illness? Korean physicians often use prescription books in this way. This is terrifying! Thus, this section concludes with two exclamations, an understatement (litotes), and a rhetorical question to underscore the author’s horror and consternation at the ignorance of Korean physicians. Enumerating might consist of a simple listing for the purpose of illustration, as in lists of Korean painters (2:56), of works in the nok 錄 form (2:62), of Chinese envoys to Korea (2:19), of Korean literary miscellanies (4:39), or of common expressions denoting useless things (4:40). Ŏ also uses enumeration rhetorically, as when he presents examples of Korean authors known in China as evidence for a conclusion of his own: “From these facts I gather that talented Koreans are not necessarily held in light esteem” (2:20). Proof by example was a favorite method of argumentation by the miscellany writer. Ŏ liked this technique, and he used it in his writing to present his comments on society, mores, people, and public responsibility. Ŏ sometimes cites his own eyewitness observations and experiences as evidence to support his arguments. Examples may precede or

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follow the argument. Ŏ substantiates the folk belief that eating gingko nuts will kill a man by citing his own past observations as evidence (1:45), and he cites a Song anthology of fiction (978) to authenticate his own observation that the oriole dies of heartbreak for its fledgling (4:54). Directed as they are to the reader’s experience, the examples cited as evidence constitute versions of experiential induction. The “prophecy come true” may be viewed as another kind of proof by example, based on citations of prophecies, omens, ditties, prescription books (1:25; 2:91; 4:19: 2:66), even poems in prophetic dreams (1:27; 3:5). Some examples are based on reports, others on observation. A typical procedure is to provide the example first, followed by a statement of fact, opinion, preference, or obligation. Ŏ’s statements of obligation are usually couched indirectly and rhetorically to appeal to our emotions. Given force by their placement, usually at the conclusion of the section in which they appear, such statements presume that the readers have certain moral values in common. (“Korean interpreters should answer only what they are told to say by their superiors” [4:63] is an exception.) Indirect statements include, for example, “How could he [the Korean envoy] be said to have lived up to his responsibilities?” implying that the envoy in question should have punished those who cut up a corpse (2:76); “How can one overlook those works simply because they were done by women?” (4:70), a challenge to the literati to dispense with male chauvinism; “Let this serve as a warning to indolent envoys” (2:38), a warning that envoys should diligently attend court ceremonies in China; and “Nothing could be more injurious to public morality than this” (2:33), an indictment of the policy of marrying off wives of deceased criminals against their will. Ŏ often amplifies such statements by quoting proverbs, epigrams, or other weighty sayings from the past and present. Such quotations, familiar as they were to the readers of Ŏ’s day, enhance the clarity, completeness, and effectiveness of the sections in which they appear. They also contribute to the aphoristic style.

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The most acute and accomplished of Ŏ’s proofs by example are his prose portraits. The purpose of these is to demonstrate what man is like by an examination of what he does, a far cry from the enumeration of what each type will do, as in Theophrastus or his English imitators. A penetrating observer and judge of human conduct and motive, Ŏ is intensely interested in the differences between the self and others, and between men of the past and present. He commonly makes an ethical statement, then describes an episode illustrating a given person’s qualities. The diction is adjectival; such key terms as “honest,” “resolute,” “idiotic,” “fierce,” “frugal,” and “studious” all derive from the tradition of Confucian biography and historiography and therefore have associative connotations. Each portrait is epideictic in that the episode chosen is designed to imply praise or blame even when there is no overt comment. The frequent attribution of verbs of inner action to the people being described clearly presents them as subjects. This contrasts with Ŏ’s historical narratives, in which he summarizes reports or reproduces historical materials to portray the people involved as objects about whom an event or a sequence of events is being narrated. When Ŏ speaks of himself, his style is unaffected, frank, and honest, and the first-person narrative achieves a sense of authenticity. In sum, he takes the reader into his confidence. Ŏ Sukkwŏn died before Montaigne withdrew to his tower library near Bordeaux and declared, “It is myself that I portray” (1580).28 Although Ŏ’s culture did not allow him to reveal himself completely, we still listen to his voice as he thinks aloud. All his life Ŏ attempted to be himself; to read his account of this experience is to undergo it with him.

The Favored Topics Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s first task as a critic was to record the poems he judged worthy of transmission. Some in the Miscellany are accompanied by commentaries, others are not. Among the former are a poem by Pak

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Ŭn 朴誾 (1479–1504) (2:14), an impromptu poem (3:9) and a satirical poem about Yŏnsangun (3:10) by Cho Sin 曺伸 (fl. 1470–1494), and some poems by Chinese poets (1:34; 4:1). Among poems without commentaries are those omitted from private collections (1:44; 4:27) or those hitherto circulated orally (4:49, 85). Because of its historical importance, Chŏng Chadang’s 鄭子堂 (fl. 1489) heptasyllabic regulated verse on Yŏnsangun, transmitted orally, is recorded despite a flaw. The details of the poem illuminate the reign of the tyrant. Ŏ laments the fate of occasional poems written on walls or on board, like two of the six poems written by Kim Chŏng 金淨 (1486–1521) during his trip to the Diamond Mountains. Kim’s poems, which are compared elsewhere to those of the Tang poet Li He 李賀 (791–817), must have merited preservation in Ŏ’s view, since he included eighteen of them in one section (4:75). Ŏ comments on words, phrases, or whole lines of poems, often without giving his reasons for praising or criticizing them. The reader learns little about Ŏ’s critical approach, and too few poems are cited to support his judgments. Ŏ seems concerned with the manipulation of words and poets’ alertness to their connotations. Poetic language occupied much practical criticism by Koryŏ and early Chosŏn critics, because a skillful choice and arrangement of words are vital to meaning in poetry. Diction effects surprise and emotion and indicates the character of the writer. Indeed, a poem’s diction comprises its meaning. “The marvel of poetry,” according to Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正, “lies in a single word.” Sŏ goes on to disparage the use of “obscure and elliptical words that are not clear and frank.”29 Poets prefer the evocative and significative language capable of capturing “the feeling or mood of the scene,” as well as the use of as few words as possible to express the meaning, in order, for example, to attain “flavor beyond meaning.”30 But Ŏ finds the phrase “homeland garden” in a poem by Sŏ Kŏjŏng, for example, unsatisfactory because it is “obscure” (1:32), while “rush whip” in Im Ch’un’s 林椿 (d. 1170) poem on a fleeing female entertainer is found inadequate because it “diminishes the fragrant atmosphere of

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a woman’s boudoir” (4:8). Sometimes his comments are unqualified, as in regard to Ch’aeunja’s 採雲子 lyric to the author (“does demonstrate pleasing virtuosity”; 3:8) or a poem by Shin Kwanghan申光漢 (1484– 1555) (“carefully written”; 2:46). His criteria might be the poet’s selection and organization of his material, the function of the elements in the poem, or the relation of the parts to the whole. On the other hand, the reader is asked to take part in Ŏ’s appraisal of Hwang Hyohŏn’s 黃孝獻 (1491–1532) poem sent to him and his elder brother: “The discerning reader will be able to judge whether his style is outstanding or not” (3:3). Yi Haeng’s 李荇 (1478–1534) poem, “In Praise of Zhu Yun,” is “worthy of inclusion in an anthology of Tang or Song poetry” (3:1), and his four poems on curd are indirectly praised by quoting Tang Gao’s comment (3:2).31 Sometimes two poems on the same topic or in a similar style are compared in a terse remark. Thus poems on Ch’wisŭng Arbor (2:65) by Ch’oe Suksaeng 崔淑生 (1475–1520) and Cho Wi 曺偉 (1454–1503) are compared, as are Yi Kyubo’s 李奎報 (1168– 1241) poem on the cock and Ŏ Segyŏm’s 魚世謙 (1430–1500) poem on the chrysanthemum (1:48). Ŏ often cites the opinions of other critics to support his own reading of a poem (1:40, 41; 3:6). The underlying meaning cannot be grasped with one reading, Ŏ feels; one needs to muse on and study the poem to appreciate its “inexhaustible flavor.” An example is Han Yu’s 韓愈 (768–824) poem, “To a Fellow Traveler” (1:39), which the poet has crafted carefully to impart a deeper meaning by the effective use of bird imagery with symbolic overtones. As to the subtleties of poetic structure and language, the reader needs more analysis than is generally given. The poet, Ŏ thinks, must “mull over and polish” (3:21) a poem at length before showing it to others (4:46). Yi Illo and Yi Kyubo emphasize the need for indefatigable assiduousness in perfecting the art, as when the latter advises that one should criticize one’s own poem as if it were written by one’s enemy.32 Sŏ Kŏjŏng, too, cited with approval the way poets of the past showed their works to their teachers and friends for criticism,

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certain poets improved on poems by the ancients by substituting single words or phrases, and major poets willingly accepted suggested changes (for example, Yi Saek 李穡 [1328–1396] adopted his son’s suggestion for a change of a single word).33 Likewise, critics should avoid hasty judgments or forced readings, especially when clarifying allusions (1:23). The use of allusion, especially the use of proper names—personal, geographical, and historical—was a topic of heated debate. Ch’oe Cha 崔滋 (1188–1260) advises against reading the ancient with a view to showing off one’s knowledge,34 while Yi Illo suggests that one may use allusion only if it is as good as new,35 and Sŏ Kŏjŏng fondly traces and explains allusions by comparing poems with similar themes, imagery, and form.36 Such exegeses require erudition, discriminating taste, and an understanding of the relations between tradition and the individual talent. This, Ŏ feels, is in particular a failing of his contemporaries who criticize poetry, ascribable to their poor grounding in literature. “Nowadays,” he says, “those who can barely grasp the underlying thought of a poem, ancient or modern, after one reading are still apt to praise the poems of one writer and criticize those of another. This is ridiculous” (1:39). Such critical lapses bear upon the compilation of anthologies, Ŏ says. Family collections, compiled by the subject’s heirs, relatives, friends, or pupils, often suffer from a lack of rigorous critical standards. No anthology can satisfy every reader, but the primary criterion for inclusion should be artistic excellence. Yu Hŭiryŏng’s 柳希齡 Taedong sirim 大東詩林 (Forest of Korean poetry, 1542) contains some seventy mediocre verses (“crude and in poor taste”) by his own father (2:72). By contrast, the revered fifteenth-century writer Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492) includes only one quatrain by his father in his Ch’ŏnggu p’unga 靑丘風雅 (Airs and elegantiae of Korea). Shin Yŏnghŭi 辛永 禧 wins Ŏ’s high praise by refusing to publish his grandfather’s works (2:74). Indeed, it is an act of filial devotion not to publish the works of one’s forebears, unless they are judged to be superior. Ŏ enumer-

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ates five editorial errors in Yu Hŭiryŏng’s anthology, one of which is the inclusion of poems by women, “even if incomplete.” He accepts the gender asymmetry that perpetuated masculine dominance at that time. Ŏ himself, however, succumbs to this very error (4:70) elsewhere. Although he purports to urge women to exert themselves, rather than “to hide their surpassing talents,” he calls the three poems cited “barely acceptable.” Indiscriminate borrowing and plagiarism are to be shunned. To borrow the substance of a poem was a common practice, and echoes, parallels, and imitations abounded in East Asia, where the anthology of poetry and prose was the staple reading matter of the educated. This was unavoidable, because Koreans were writing in a language not their own. Prototypical Chinese works were read and imitated—the Chinese poets often mentioned include Tao Qian (365–427), Xie Lingyun (385– 433), Li Bo (701–762), Du Fu (712–770), Han Yu (768–824), Liu Zongyuan (773–819), Mei Yaochen (1002–1060), Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), Su Shi (1037–1101), and Huang Tingjian (1045–1105). Yi Kyubo notes that Su Shi, perhaps the most popular poet, was the model for every student in his day37 and suggests that one may follow such a master only after one has mastered his style and essence. Yi then goes on to compare one who plagiarizes to a burglar: the burglar must first familiarize himself thoroughly with the gates, doors, and walls of a rich man’s house before he can break into it without leaving any trace of his crime. If he rummages through every bag and opens every box, he is sure to be caught. A poet wishing to imitate a master’s work must first know what he intends to imitate. Chosŏn poets continued to read and follow Tang and Song masters,38 and they saw the poetry of their day as a continuation and development of tradition—indeed, the poetry of the past was a living thing for them. The most imitated poets up to the mid-sixteenth century were still Su Shi and Huang Tingjian. The consensus was that imitation is unavoidable and even acceptable, if one can achieve a fine effect with it. Some writers were apt to borrow whole phrases to demonstrate their literary taste. As examples Ŏ Sukkwŏn cites a poem by a Japanese monk

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modeled on one by a Tang monk (1:22), an instance of plagiarism that went unnoticed by a Korean scholar. In his poems in the Miscellany, An Ch’im 安琛 (1444–1515) uses two phrases from Yi Kyubo that Yi had borrowed from Li Bo and Su Shi. Here, An may be quoting from the same source or the same intermediary. But it never occurs to Ŏ that An might be indebted indirectly to Li Bo and Su Shi, that influence does not necessarily equal plagiarism. To Ŏ, the crux of the matter is that the poet lacks the resourcefulness and creativity to transform inherited material into something fresh. In another instance, So Seyang 蘇世讓 (1486– 1562) is said to have claimed as his own a poem on the Han River by Yi Haeng. Relying on external rather than internal evidence,39 Ŏ derides So’s claim as “truly shameless” (2:64). Ŏ is anxious to point out shortcomings arising from weakness in tonal patterns and rhymes, colloquialism, and other features of spoken Chinese. As an interpreter of Chinese and a frequent visitor to Ming China, he was singularly qualified to comment on prosody and tonal harmony. Two lines from a poem by Yang Wanli (1124–1206) on plum blossoms are cited to illustrate the use of colloquialisms (2:25), and Ŏ points out an erroneous gloss and an incorrect use of tones and rhymes (2:44) by Sŏ Kŏjŏng (4:21).40 Chŏng Saryong 鄭士龍 (1491–1570) is portrayed as refusing to follow the rhymes used by two Chinese envoys, saying, “The tones and rhymes of our language are entirely different from those of yours. If I am forced to imitate your verse, my own will lack the appropriate style. Therefore I dare not do so.” Chŏng’s frankness elicits the following comment: “It would be more sincere not to have written at all than to write only to be ridiculed. Furthermore, one ought not to feel shame simply because the sounds of the two languages differ” (2:44). Although every Korean writer aspires to be read and admired in China (2:20), Koreans should judge their works by their own standards rather than those of the Chinese (4:62). This comment scarcely requires amplification.

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As a critic, then, Ŏ discusses diction, imagery, tropes, and allusion. He emphasizes the importance of polishing the poetic medium and enhancing the subtleties of the poetic craft. He values innovation over pedantic borrowing. Yet his critical method leaves much to be desired. The aim of the remarks on poetry by Koryŏ poets was to order the genres, kinds, and modes of poetry and prose written in Korea and to preserve such works as were deemed worthy of inclusion; hence those works took the form of a literary miscellany, an anthology of poems with an often terse and impressionistic running commentary. The Koryŏ poets did not study individual poets or works, but instead presented their views on what poetry is, how one should write, what one should read, and what one should avoid without attempting to offer a systematic view of poetry. Although early Chosŏn poets agreed that a critic needs scholarship, taste, judgment, and candor, it is often difficult to see their method in operation. They seldom give their reasons for choosing certain poems, and they do not always seem to consider these same poems worth discussing. Also, they fail to give the criteria by which they rank the effects that poems create, either directly or by implication. Another difficulty is the poets’ critical terminology. Like Chinese writers of shihua, early Chosŏn writers resorted to two-graph compounds or four-graph phrases to describe their impressions of a given poem. They not only repeated the same compounds of Chinese origin but also made up new ones of their own. One therefore cannot expect detailed textual analysis from Ŏ. Nowhere in East Asia was such criticism practiced in his time, and his responses to individual poems reflect the traditional reading of them.41 Ŏ was widely read and was himself something of a poet (2:90 cites his own quatrain), as shown by the suggested endings to a poem that he offers So Seyang in one episode (2:63). At times he is capable of profound appreciation, as in his remarks on Kim Chŏn’s 金詮 (1458– 1523) two-line sacrificial prayer to his son: “How apt his words were, and how deep his feelings. It makes one sad to read these lines” (2:11). Yet he was not primarily a poet and was incapable of such a sustained comparison as that of the poetry of Yi Illo and Yi Kyubo by Ch’oe Cha in

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the Pohan chip.42 Nor is his book exclusively devoted to poetic criticism, as is the Tongin sihwa 東人詩話 (Remarks on poetry by a man from the East, 1474). Nevertheless, his standards are high, and his remarks add something to our appreciation of early Chosŏn poetry. As a scholar, Ŏ shows a zeal for accuracy and indulges in bibliographical and exegetical investigation ranging from the elucidation of individual terms (4:33, 67, 71) or phrases (3:13) to whole pieces of writing or books. He discusses sources and influences (1:42, 43), different editions of texts (4:25, 46, 42), editorial lapses (4:38), and doubtful annotations (2:22; 4:7). He does not hesitate to disagree, even with Han Yu’s praise of Fan Zongshi’s 樊宗師 (c. 808) style (4:43) or Zhu Xi’s gloss on Han Yu’s “Epitaph for Zhang Che” (3:4), although he graciously terms his comments “presumptuous.” The reader sometimes wishes that Ŏ would discuss evidence of authorial revision or attempt to explicate unclear spots in the works he cites. He seldom proposes emendations, questions the opinions of writers, or gathers the comments of others on a given work, either to buttress his own views or for the reader’s information. Like his contemporaries, he sometimes mistakes evidence of commonplace parallels (or any form of resemblance) for direct influence. The most useful entry for the student of Korean literature is that of 4:39, where Ŏ cites eighteen works in the miscellany form and calls them sosŏl 小說 (small talk, fiction)—he knows that only fiction is capable of portraying the subjectivity of a third person qua third person—from the P’ahan chip to the Somun swaerok (Random records of trivia heard).43 A fragment cited in 2:80 from the Jizheng tiaoge (Jizheng code),44 the collection of statutes completed in 1345 to supersede the Tayuan tongzhi and promulgated in 1346, should be of interest to the bibliophile. The work exists only in fragments, of which the passage cited by Ŏ provides one more. The rectification of errors in the genealogy of Yi Sŏnggye (1335–1408; r. 1392–1398) was a thorn in Sino-Korean relations till the latter half of the sixteenth century.45 As a witness to international traffic and an inter-

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preter in the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence, Ŏ was supremely qualified to discuss foreign affairs. He describes vividly the difficulties encountered by the Korean mission: the corruption of Chinese border and protocol officials, with Chinese carters going so far as to steal the Ming decree (1:4, 19; 2:41, 75); the stringent restrictions imposed on the movements of Koreans in Peking (1:3) (although former envoys to Korea were allowed to visit guests in their inns, 1:18); and the difficulty of purchasing books (1:3) and genuine medicines (2:39). Ŏ is sensitive to the behavior of Koreans, especially castaways in China (2:43). He attempts heroically to observe decorum (2:90) and at one point is dubbed a “frog in a well” by his superior (2:41) for his fastidiousness. Perhaps a greater obstacle was the Koreans’ ignorance of contemporary colloquial Chinese and Chinese documentary style. Ŏ illustrates the importance of such knowledge by an incident in which Kim Sehan’s 金 世澣 spoken Chinese saves the lives of many people (1:16). Generally, Ŏ says, the quality of Korean missives is high: the Chinese often praise Korean writing (1:2; 2:42) and some Korean writers have won international fame (2:20), but outmoded phrases sometimes find their way into Korean missives (1:13). We learn that a list of difficult documentary-style idioms and dialect words was often sent in by a special agent for annotation by the Chinese (1:15).46 But it was ability in written Chinese that impressed the Chinese the most. Thus in one episode, So Seyang writes two poems in Peking that win him the esteem of the minister of rites: “Had I known that he had talents, I would have treated him with special courtesy” (4:53). Ŏ fondly describes the reception given Chinese envoys and the elegant pursuits they indulged in, together with Korean welcomers. He lists twenty-two Chinese who came to Korea from 1450 to 1546 (3:19), most of whom had a collection of poems exchanged, titled Hwanghwa chip 皇華集,47 the first of which was printed in 1450. The receptions that Ŏ describes are elaborate ceremonies (3:15), with the welcomer, usually a man of literary accomplishments, sent to the border at Ŭiju to meet

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the envoys and escort them to the Korean capital. The envoys are also accompanied to the border when returning to China. Ŏ mentions Qi Shun 祈順 (came in 1476) and his welcomer, Sŏ Kŏjŏng (1:32); Tang Gao 唐皐 (came in 1521) and Yi Haeng (2:4l; 4:45, 46); Gong Yongjing 龔用卿 (1500–1563), Wu Ximeng 吳希孟 (came in 1537), and Chŏng Saryong (3:21; 4:46, 50, 60); and Hua Cha 華察 (came in 1539) and So Seyang (4:22). Most of the works cited are occasional verses on scenic spots, daily activities, and other casual matters. Some are comic. Some have been inscribed on stone tablets protected by pavilions (4:58). The Chinese and their hosts often display their wit and erudition, and some form lasting friendships (4:50, 52). Upon their return to China, Gong Yongjing and Wu Ximeng continue to exchange poems and letters with Chŏng Saryong. Gong even sends Chŏng a recipe for cooking clams (4:52) but is refused a copy of Korean examination registers and local gazetteers (3:20). Gong and Wu are praised as “men of taste and elegance” (4:59) who give new names to places they visit on their way. Some envoys, such as Dong Yue 董越 and Wang Chang 王敝 (came in 1488) and Ai Pu 艾璞 (came in 1492), are haughty, but they are soon overawed by the erudition of Hŏ Chong 許琮 (1434–1494) (4:24). Ŏ’s portraits of the Chinese, compared with those by his contemporaries, are very generous. In the P’irwŏn chapki 筆苑雜記 (Writing brush garden miscellany, postface dated 1487), Sŏ Kŏjŏng bitterly denounces some, singling out Gao Run 高閏 (came in 1457) as a menace.48 In his Yongjae ch’onghwa (Miscellany of Sŏng Hyŏn, 1525), Sŏng Hyŏn 成俔 remarks that Xima Xun 司馬恂 (came in 1450) does not enjoy writing poetry; Jin Shi 金湜 (came in 1464) is greedy; Qi Shun (came in 1476) is good at poetry; and Ai Pu (came in 1492) is impetuous.49 Ŏ interprets Chinese high-handedness, as when changing the names of Korean places, as a sign of good taste. He goes a step further in concluding that the Chinese are fond of such elegant things as inscribed stones and plaques, or descriptions written on the walls at scenic places, while Koreans are not. He says that “the people of Korea have little

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enthusiasm for elegant matters” (4:61) and neglect stone monuments or verses written on walls (4:47). He makes such hasty generalizations as “provincial officials in Ming China are all talented and well read” on the basis of a single epistle by a prefect (4:23). Generalizations about national character, such as those in the Yongjae ch’onghwa (4:1), are nothing new: the Chinese eat little, while the Koreans eat much; the Chinese are calm and quiet, the Koreans noisy and impetuous; the Chinese fear their superiors, while the Koreans do not.50 These and similar generalizations, however exaggerated and unfair, are to be found in all genres of writing.51 According to one seventeenth-century English writer, for example, the “French are light, the Spanish deceitful, the Italian advantageous, and the Germans true and faithful”52 in making promises. In describing the costumes of Liuqiu, a Chinese protocol officer says, “Like dogs and pigs, [they] customarily wear no trousers” (2:27). Upon reading one memorial from Liuqiu, Ŏ comments that “it contains too many defects to even be called a real piece of writing. The level of culture in the Liuqiu is far inferior to our own” (1:8). Happily, such adverse judgments are offset by the travel accounts of the islands by Chen Kan 陳侃 (2:68; 4:14) and Pak Taeyong 朴大容 (4:55). Also included are poems on travel to Tsushima by Kim Hŭn 金訢 (1448–1492) and Cho Sin (4:25); these are less biased than some others. The salient feature of such literary miscellanies as Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s is their emphasis on portraits of others together with portraits of the author himself. The penetrating observations of human conduct and motives, not only of what one is but also of what one does, set the literary miscellany apart from traditional biographical writing. Early East Asian characterization tended to be by types, with comparatively little attention paid to the subject’s external appearance,53 garb, or habits. Specifically contemporary details are also rare. Biography in the Confucian tradition, including some celebrated narrative passages in the Shiji, produced a series of representative personality types in the form of standard anecdotes used for characterization.54 Likewise, anecdotes from the lives of

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eminent men are presented as examples of Confucian conduct. They assume “an ultraindividual significance”55 and serve to perpetuate the Confucian ethical norm. Paradigms are repetitive and backward looking, directed as they are toward praxis. With virtually no information given about a figure’s private life, such characterizations do little to illuminate or renew our image of humans. Contrarily, the portrait in the literary miscellany endeavors to go beyond the conventional behavior of the public self and reveal the individual. Literary characterization assumes the fundamental consistency of personality. Confucian thought upheld those who strove to maintain their identities. The demands made upon the Confucian gentleman were exhausting and exacting, but the biographer does not tell us how he maintained continuity and coherence in his personality to become an exemplar of the tradition. The way Confucian values were absorbed varied from age to age, but the process of internalizing enduring values emphasized by Neo-Confucianists was seldom depicted in biographies. The portraits in the literary miscellany do not always include a moral or present any psychological analysis. Some sketches recapitulate familiar types, while others vividly depict individual qualities. In his portrait of Kim Puŭi 金富儀 (1079–1170), for example, Yi Illo says, “Kim would sit decorously all day and read books. He did not like to compose poems; when he did, he would never fail to wash his brush in a bottle of ice water.”56 These sparse facts, conveyed in twentyeight graphs, are perhaps intended to evoke Kim’s propriety, his love of learning, and his dedication to poetry. Yi Chehyŏn uses a similar narrative method in his treatment of Hong Ŏnbak 洪彦博 (1309–1363): “Hong would take a bath every evening, put on his cap and gown, and worship the stars. He never neglected his custom, even during his mission to China or when supervising public works.”57 Both Kim and Hong are portrayed as if seen from without, by verbs that designate external action,58 and are thus treated as objects about whom certain episodes are being recounted. In his portraits of the otherworldly monk

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Chisik, Ch’oe Cha uses a single, direct citation, introduced by the verb “to say.” “When Ch’oe U [d. 1249] presented him with tea, incense, and a copy of the Lengyanjing [Sūramgama sūtra], the monk refused to write a letter of acknowledgment; ‘I have severed all ties with the world. How can I communicate with a letter?’59 he replied.” The quotation of speech attributed to Chisik conveys the subjectivity of a third person, presenting him more vividly to the reader.60 Generally, the portraits in the miscellany, like the three simple ones cited above, rely for their effect on verbs of external action, certain externally observed behavioral traits, and occasional direct quotations of speech. If a spare narrative can re-create a memorable scene, an anecdote, or a clever exchange, it can also capture a special moment of feeling or thought—that is, it can tell us what a person is by what he does and says. More accomplished pieces, such as Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s, feature precise phrasing and deftly wrought narrative and use not only verbs of action observed from without but also verbs of inner action.61 Conversely, by portraying the subjectivity of the third person, a writer can transform his narrative from a statement of reality into a work of fiction. Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s sketches of Kwŏn Talsu 權達手 (1469–1505) (2:28) and Kwŏn Kyŏngu 權景祐 (fl. 1470–1498) (2:29), for example, are based on Confucian principles. The choice of details is intended to exemplify Confucian ideals of conduct, moral courage, and adherence to principles in particular. Sometimes a person reveals his character in his writing, as does Yi Sukcha 李叔自 (2:53). The portraits of An Chungson 安仲孫 (2:59) and Yi Pyŏl 李鱉 (2:60) both recall the traditional recluse who has renounced the world, delights in simple rural retirement, and finds joy in communion with nature. To understand natural beauty requires the greatest sophistication of all. An Chungson’s candidness is illustrated by a brief and vivid episode in which he is visited by his superior: “An was in the fields but he returned home in a reed hat and short breeches, a plow slung over his shoulder. Sitting before his gate, he called for unstrained

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wine and offered it to the guests.” Fortune is powerless in the country, and An affirms that he belongs to the earth. Depiction of laudable moral individuals was a convention rooted deeply in tradition, and writers of the literary miscellany often employed the methods and style of classical examples. Some wrote catalogues of virtues, while others merely repeated platitudes, formulaic diction, and detail devoid of distinguishing features. This was due not only to the paucity of biographical material at their disposal but also to their attempt to conform to the requirements or predilections of the age, reflecting the limits of the Confucian view of man: the aim of biography is not to uncover personality, individual character, but to turn him into an example. In the Life of Herbert, which is praised as a “masterpiece” and “the most lyrical of all English biographies,”62 Izaak Walton (1593–1683) writes: “Of the three Sisters I need not say more, than that they were all married to persons of worth, and plentiful fortunes; and lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good in their generations.”63 The sisters might well be characters in a fairy tale, so much does even Walton rely on platitudes in describing them. A number of Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s portraits demonstrate his superior technique and unusual insight. He had a keen eye for the single act that reveals the essence of an individual. Chŏn Im 田霖 (d. 1509), a military man who became magistrate of Seoul, is “crude and fierce in character.” Once he noted that the horse he rode had boils on its back. He then cut into the back of his aged servant, saying, “You did not protect the horse from boils; now feel its pain.” Later when he was critically ill, he arose and became violent. He stared and bent his bow, yelling angrily, “What ghosts are you that dare kill me?” He stomped with rage for a long while thereafter. (4:5) The improvident and sluggish Yu Kŭn, a lecturer in the Royal Confucian Academy, is portrayed in 4:6:

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature When his superior summoned his subordinates for promotion or demotion, Yu arrived around noon. When his superior asked him why he was late, Yu replied, “I was at home having a snack.”

Disgraced by his superior, the incorruptible Sŏl Wi 薛緯 “cast away his official staff and departed,” leaving a poem on his desk, in which he compared himself to Bo Ya (4:26), who broke his zither when his best friend Zhong Ziqi died because he no longer had a friend who really understood his music. Kim Suon 金守溫 (1409–1481) studies behind closed doors: One day he stepped out into the courtyard to urinate. Only then did he notice fallen leaves and realize that autumn had come. . . . Later, when he was gravely ill and about to die, Kim told his juniors, “All of you should take heed not to study the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning. I am in agony, for I see only phrases from these two books!” (4:28) “To spend too much time in studies,” Bacon says in “Of studies,” “is sloth.” Was it because he felt that he had not attained the wisdom of a sage? Or because he found out belatedly that his passion for knowledge was misdirected? The frugality of Cho Wŏngi 趙元紀 (1457–1533) is illustrated by a single episode: He once asked a furrier to make him a cape. Usually, tailors use the thicker fur to make the outside and the thinner fur to line the interior. On seeing this, Cho remarked, “What an unskilled worker you are. We wear capes to keep warm, but you sew the thin fur on the inside and the thick fur on the outside. This is no way to keep warm.” He then ordered the procedure reversed. (4:65) Finally, there is a sketch of the iconoclastic behavior of Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493) used to hide his brilliance (4:29): When an old man from a

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rich family gave him a cassock of white satin, he wore it to the capital, where he rolled in filthy water dozens of times, then took it off and threw it away. Later, when King Sejo invited him to the festival of land and water, Kim “appeared in a tattered cassock, carrying a bundle of herring. Kim left the fish partly exposed throughout his audience with the king. Sejo thought him mad.” Ŏ Sukkwŏn does not think Kim mad; only Sejo the usurper does. In his portraits, Ŏ Sukkwŏn chose essential personality traits that could be illustrated by anecdotes. He did not seek to treat his subject in great detail, but rather to touch upon such essential manifestations of the subject’s personality as his distinctive way of speaking or his personal views and idiosyncrasies. In this sense, Ŏ Sukkwŏn could be termed a biographer of the moment. His sketches, however, owe much of their vitality to the vivid glimpses they give of an individual, without a word of overt approval or disapproval. Each is an arresting, graphic piece that captures a man’s mind and character. Ŏ is in perfect control of his materials, and his style never obscures his subject. The sketches whet the curiosity of the reader to find out more about the lives of the interesting individuals they portray. The traditional Confucian hierarchical society comprised not only the literati, who prided themselves in their knowledge and supplied talented candidates for public service, but also slaves, merchants, doctors, monks, female entertainers, actors, and shamans, all of whom receive some attention in the Miscellany. The Three Bonds and the five relations were constantly preached and upheld in Confucian society, and the inculcation of social virtues to the unlettered masses was a perennial concern of the government. The gates of filial children or chaste wives were customarily marked as a measure to encourage virtuous behavior (2:32). Despite such efforts on the part of the establishment, rapacious and corrupt officials at all levels disrupted the moral and social order. Ŏ’s observations on officials, secondary children, slaves, filial sons, widows, and merchants are not intended to explore the value system or social

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features of sixteenth-century Korea. Yet his perceptions of special social phenomena are an index of his social consciousness. Ŏ’s protest against corruption and extortion takes various forms. The subject of a folk play presented at court is a greedy official who is finally apprehended and punished. “Indeed the actors could impeach a corrupt official” (2:6). In another instance, in a satirical poem pasted to the coffin of a cruel magistrate, an anonymous village poet compares the dead to Hell’s five hungry demons (2:7). The subject of another poem is the forced collection of fruit by harsh officials, in consequence of which the people are constrained to fell their trees: When the people’s bellies are filled with rice, The official’s mouths water, and their anger is aroused. When the people are warm in fur coats, The officials would as soon seize them by the arms and peel off their skins. (2:26) Ŏ Sukkwŏn, himself a secondary son, is critical of discrimination. The fact that he ended up as an instructor in documentary style and an interpreter indicates that he bore a social stigma. Unlike China, where no law restricted the rise of secondary children, Korea had stringent statutes to keep even the most talented of them from high offices: “Even when they had outstanding talents, secondary sons have been thwarted in their aspirations and have usually died in obscurity” (2:88).64 Chŏng Pŏn 鄭蕃, who passes the examination in 1523, is dismissed by the censor-general due to his low origins. Chŏng submits a memorial that obtains him a position as a documentary-style instructor, and he receives unusual royal favors. But the censorate is determined to oust him, and he dies in poverty (2:52). Ŏ comments again elsewhere: “In Korea . . . because of its small size, people pay heed to trifling matters. Koreans’ discussion of one’s character usually centers upon one’s lineage. Few who are not descendants of the literati will be drawn to belles lettres, let alone merchants, workmen, and other common folk” (4:17).

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Concerning the institution of slavery,65 Ŏ presents contrasting examples of inhuman and magnanimous treatment. One rebellious slave is buried alive, while another who has done wrong is pardoned by his master (2:58). A third bribes officials to obtain the praise due a filial son, but once redeemed, he proves to be corrupt (2:36). One filial son becomes a toady to an evil minister (2:34), while Ŏ praises Pak Hŭimun 朴希文 for slicing flesh from his thigh to serve his mother. Even after her death, Pak scrupulously observes mourning and begs for rice to offer her spirit. If people ask him to show the scars on his thigh, he willingly displays them. Some deride Pak, thinking that he had exaggerated the incident to glorify himself. “How could slicing one’s thigh be a hypocritical deed?” Ŏ asks. He concludes that indiscriminate and jealous people discourage goodness in others (2:31). Because of a surplus of women in Korea (3:16), an official’s widowed daughter should not remarry (4:34), says Ŏ. In fact, a certain Chŏng who had his young widowed daughter remarry was dismissed from office. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the sons and grandsons of women who remarried were usually banned from high official careers and barred from the civil service examinations. This measure served to maintain the stability of the family system and to limit the number of officials. At the same time, in a society where every learned man aspired to the privileges of high rank, to be denied the opportunity to take the civil service examinations while those from lower classes were not66 was a great blow to the unfortunate children of second marriages. Therefore Ŏ condemns the practice of pressing the wives of transported criminals to remarry butchers or official slaves. “If a widow cannot be made chaste or constant by force, how can one bear to undermine her determination and make her remarry?” (2:33). In matters of economic disruption, Ŏ cites merchants who illegally trade silver (1:17) or circulate bad cloth for quick profit and thereby cause inflation (2:85). Ŏ upholds orthodoxy and scorns all forms of heterodoxy, such as folk beliefs in the spirits of smallpox and sores (2:83); the worship of local

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tutelary spirits, at whose “objectionable shrine” the ignorant squander their money (2:84); the worship of a wooden idol (2:18); a fraudulent shaman who calls himself a buddha (1:35); and other legends connected with places (2:19). Ŏ inherited this critical spirit from his great-grandfather, Ŏ Hyoch’ŏm (1405–1475), who opposed geomancy (1:29), allowed no shamans or wizards into his house (1:29), and forbade officials, including those in the Office of Inspector General, to offer sacrifices to pugun 府君 shrines with the votive paper money (1:30).67 Ŏ adds the following episode with a straight face: By custom, three and seven days after a death the family of the deceased would take wine and cake to a shaman, who would speak of a new spirit descending and relate things of the past and future. When my great-grandfather’s servants went to see a shaman after his death, he said to them through the medium, “All my life I shunned this sort of nonsense. You had better go home at once.” Ŏ spoofs the hallowed tradition of the Ko clan of Cheju Island, whose members believe that their ancestors gushed forth from a cave north of Mount Halla. During the Zhengde era (1506–1521), one Ko filled a post in the Palace Guard. When a certain military official named Yi returned from a trip to Cheju, Ko asked him if he had seen Mohŭng cave. Yi replied, “I saw it and urinated into it.” Ko was speechless. (3:12) In all likelihood, Ŏ also opposed Buddhism. He cites a story of the banishment of a Confucian student because he proposed the erection of monasteries (2:9). Another episode bears quoting: Buddhists have chosen the way of compassion and nonviolence. Once a mendicant monk in Hwanghae province encountered mounted hunters pursuing a boar. The animal was enraged. The monk confronted the animal, saying, “Poor thing, poor thing.” Then he pointed to the south with his stick and said, “Run quickly

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to the south.” However, the boar attacked the monk and gored him. (2:70) Ŏ is not wholly consistent, however, when he tells of dream prognostications. Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s filial devotion is revealed by his correct interpretation of a dream (a lunar eclipse, a symbol of death)68 that tells of the death of his mother while he is on his way to China (1:31). Sometimes the poet dreams of a poem (1:27, 34; 3:5) that foretells his success, banishment, or death. Sometimes a spirit instructs a writer to choose as his polite name or pen name certain graphs that portend his death (4:1). Ŏ also tells of a diviner who seeks to predict who will place first in the civil service examinations (2:69) by divining the hidden meanings of certain graphs in a person’s name, or dividing a graph into its components. A popular song widespread prior to a historic confrontation (and undoubtedly fabricated by a partisan to the dispute) is said to have predicted the fate of the loser (4:19). And the collapse of the platform at a reception ceremony for Chinese envoys, like that of the portico at Aachen foreshadowing the imminent death of Charlemagne, is said to have foretold the king’s early demise (2:91). Although Ŏ seems to question the prophecy (“The people rumored that this was a bad omen”), in the end he confirms it: “Injong died within four months (1545).” Dream visions, onomancy, and prophecies of various kinds were part of the daily life of people, including the lettered, and Ŏ Sukkwŏn was no exception. Autobiographical accounts are rare in early miscellanies. The few existing episodes relate facts, not experiences: on what occasion the writer wrote a given poem, what position he held, where he went, and sometimes what he liked or disliked. For example, Yi Illo says he once supervised making five thousand ink sticks and wrote a poem on the subject,69 and Yi Chehyŏn talks about his trips in China70 and why he dislikes the philosopher Xunzi.71 A more personal note creeps in at times, as when Yi Chehyŏn worries about the future of his family on account of his son’s early death, and when Sŏng Hyŏn laments that some of his relatives have died young, have gone mad, or were born blind.72 But these

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accounts neither reveal the writer’s passions or prejudices nor illustrate his character, except when Sŏng Hyŏn reports seeing a tall, fiery-eyed apparition on a hill, an account that may reveal a superstitious streak.73 The political, moral, or philosophical issues that might otherwise have engaged the writer are usually discussed in his other works, letters or essays of various kinds. His political activities, which might appear in memorials, accusations, or defenses as “the efflux of his personality,”74 are usually recorded elsewhere. He knows that biographical sketches of him will appear in official histories and in posthumous compilations by his relatives, colleagues, and friends as accounts of his conduct (行狀), chronological accounts of his life (年譜), epitaphs (墓表 or 神道碑), or sacrificial speeches (祭文). Compiled to commemorate the subject’s life rather than illuminate or re-create it, such accounts are marked by an indifference to details of behavior and a penchant for moralizing and generalizing the particular. They transform the subject into a type of character or a pattern of culture—a simulacrum, in sum. His accomplishments and virtues are recorded, but not his imperfections or failings. Any autobiographical urge had to submit to the predominant preoccupations of the time, and specifically to the pressures of a society and culture that presented an officially sanctioned view of man.75 A writer might defy such limitations but still be tempted to conceal or invent details of his life. But because all the biographical information about the writer fails to satisfy the most modest demands of the modern reader’s curiosity, that reader will turn eagerly to more intimate accounts furnished by the writer himself, in the form of letters, records of travel, reflective essays, prefaces, or the literary miscellany. And by virtue of being dubbed “unofficial,” the literary miscellany was probably the only literary form that could give expression to a writer’s autobiographical impulses. Generally, however, even in the miscellany he was reluctant to present a selfportrait or review his life. In addition to a masterful control of his prose and vivid description of scenes, situations, and characters, Ŏ Sukkwŏn has a strong sense of

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the past and of his own identity. The pronoun “I” 我, 吾 appears some thirty times in the Miscellany, often in passing: “When I spoke to Chŏng Saryong and Yi Hŭibo about this [Huang Tingjian’s poem], they agreed with my reading” (1:40); “One day I called on Yi Hŭibo” (1:41); “I have seen several such cases [of dying from eating gingko nuts]” (1:45); “On my way home [from Peking] I observed the behaviors of the castaways and found it to be exactly as Yang had described” (2:43). It was used to introduce lengthier, more intimate glimpses as well: I have been to Peking on official duty seven times in all. The Liaodong [Military Commission] and the Ministry of Rites have never betrayed any signs of misunderstanding when reading letters from Korea. . . . When a carter stole the interpreter Yi Sunjong’s luggage, I was asked to write a letter to be presented to the provincial commander. When Li Tang read the letter, he praised it. “Excellent!” he exclaimed many times. . . . These are two instances from my own personal experience. . . . It is indeed hard to credit the statement that the documentary style of Korea is difficult to understand. (2:42) I lodged in the same inn with Interpreter Hong Kyŏm and called for a lamp so that I could write in my diary. . . . The following day I asked Gong Yongjing about this and ascertained that Hong was telling the truth. (2:77) In the year sinch’uk of Jiajing (1541), I accompanied our envoy to Peking to present birthday felicitations to the emperor. Early one morning I sat for a while outside the gate and observed the majority of the court officials as they sat beneath the eaves of the palace. One clerk asked Interpreter Hong Kyŏm whether he could compose a poem. . . . Hong then pointed to me and replied, “He too can write. Ask him.” I wrote the following. (2:90) I was the youngest and least learned of my colleagues [fellow documentary style instructors]. Still, Ch’oe [Sejin] 崔世珍 dealt

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature leniently with my errors and unceasingly advised and encouraged me. (2:51) I once traveled along the shores of the Yellow Sea for half a year. Later I joined my elder brother in the capital. Hwang [Hyohŏn] sent us the following poem. (3:3) When I was young I had three tubercles on my neck. One doctor saw them and remarked, “If you do not cure them now, you will not be able to later.” Grieved and alarmed, I could not put the matter out of my mind. I would often touch the sores to see whether they had changed size. For six or seven years I applied raw lead and ten-fragrance plaster, but the sore became larger every year, and a small one began to appear. One day I suddenly admonished myself, “Death and life are preordained. Why should I be obsessed with remedies and torture my mind?” I then discarded the medicine and discontinued the treatment. One year later the tubercles disappeared of themselves. It has been more than thirty years now, and only one remains, whose shape one can barely recognize. (2:81)

The first five examples may have been lifted from Ŏ’s diary or drawn from memory to reconstruct his past. The first three concern his public career as interpreter of Chinese and emphasize the factuality of his account. As a member of the diplomatic mission composed of a hierarchy of officials, Ŏ had to project competence and integrity. He strove to present himself to the Chinese in a favorable light, even under pressure, for his every movement was being observed and weighed, every word spoken or written was being scrutinized, and every act was calculated to give a particular impression. Striving to live up to the assigned role, he participated in a ceremony to give an impression consistent with the situation. As a member of the team, he strove to present a unified front. Both sides—the Chinese (the host) and the Koreans (guests)—tried to surround themselves with rituals and artificial mystery to engender a sense of security and distance. To a person like Ŏ, then, all the world was a stage. In the examples cited, Ŏ tried to provide glimpses into more

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relaxed moments of his (and others’) interaction with Chinese officials, as they doffed the masks and put aside mannerisms common to those in their profession.76 As eyewitness accounts, they bear the stamp of the memoir, and Ŏ and others present in the situation may verify the authenticity of his references. These, together with the fourth and fifth examples, relate a private history of Ŏ’s life, but there is little sense of continuity, or any attempt to order and integrate the incidents recounted according to a clearly defined sense of ending. In the last example, which recalls the essays of Montaigne by reflective tone, Ŏ views himself with detachment—he observes himself, the observer. We see the movement of his thought as he tries to rationalize away his fear of death. He draws conclusions from an experience of his own past but finally trusts himself to nature, or fate. He seems to say that each must find his own answers to the problems of life. He is aware of the constancy of flux; he has accepted the reality of death, the human condition. But he stops short of asking “Who am I?” “How did I become what I am?” or “In what sense am I a distinct personality?”77 Did he selfconsciously conceive of himself as an individual? (No one probed such questions in Ŏ’s Korea.) We might recall here that the modern assumptions implicit in my appraisal would be unfair, even anachronistic, if applied to Ŏ; after all, he was not writing a chronicle or an autobiography, a form that did not exist as a recognized literary genre in his time. His brief account of events widely separated in time indicates a method and a style typical of the literary miscellany, which was not intended to give any order to one’s experiences. But the curious modern wishes to know about Ŏ’s childhood and adolescence, his family, his wife and children (personal details about which, in fact, even the Renaissance man in the West was reticent). However, his predilection for autobiographical accounts and his detailed reporting—together with the image of himself he presents as he discusses literature, history, and his fellow human beings—engender a sense of immediacy and authenticity.78 In a society where fiction was subordinate to history, the first examples of the former appeared in the guise of chronicles, journals, letters, memo-

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rials, and biographies. Fiction evinced the influence of historiography in its outward form, then, possibly in order to “pass itself off as literature so as not to seem like ‘literature’ in the pejorative sense.”79 These sketches by Ŏ Sukkwŏn show that he is an autobiographer of the moment. The author of such a sketch tended to deduce the existence of the self and then verify it through a review of his actions. The reader accepts this version of the author’s past as a genuine record of his identity, though the account is devoid of detail, and the reader is left with the task of discerning a pattern that will allow him to arrive at his own understanding of the author’s character. Yet he still cannot know how much of what he reads is fact and how much is fiction. To tell stories about oneself automatically commits the teller to the vices of immodesty, affectation, and vanity. Presentation of the self to an audience, imagined or real, is always display. Commitment to truth may be the writer’s justification, but the reader suspects that a difference may exist between what the writer understands of his past and what he tells, and between his need for self-assertion and his desire for self-concealment through conformity. Also, the past events have no real existence and must be re-created by the experience as an act of the imagination. Indeed, fictionality is inherent in man’s relation to time.80 Writings like Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s Miscellany have been called “unofficial histories” (perhaps because they often expose the lies of official histories) or “small talk” (sosŏl), as Ŏ himself styled these notes. Such works contain, among other things, legends, myths, wonder tales, romances, and satires of social and professional groups like female entertainers, the blind, monks, and shamans.81 A history in the accepted sense is written not by its own dramatis persona, but by a court-appointed committee. The unofficial history is written by an individual who is an eyewitness to and participant in the events he is recording. One such history may be written in the third person, another in the first. In the latter instance, the narrator also records stories heard secondhand, freely shifting his stance from that of eyewitness to that of historian.82 He enjoys the freedom to

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present a personal account in his own name or a fictional account in the name of one of his characters (especially in portraits). In such instances the writer takes pains to stress that he is recounting true events rather than fiction. If his stance is not quite that of a writer of realistic fiction, it is because of his culture’s insistence on historicity and the tyranny of historiography. In fact, the rigid society of Ŏ’s Korea, which masked reality with a veneer of culture in the name of order and continuity, could not tolerate the creation of alternative realities in overtly fictional form. Therefore the Miscellany could not escape the domination of historiography. Note, for example, the beginnings of the portraits (a sensitive and detailed account of the subject’s personal experiences presented for its dramatic appeal) in the Miscellany and the biography in official history. Both begin with a formulaic introduction giving the character’s name, lineage, social position, and some characteristic traits. The temptation to fictionalize is especially strong in the portrait, the veracity of which the reader is helpless to assess. But like a historian who is fond of moralizing, the writer might on occasion stoop to editorialize, as in the portrait of Kim Suon (“Our elders studied as diligently as he did”; 4:28) and elsewhere (e.g., 2:10, 20). Ŏ Sukkwŏn has not yet fully reconciled the conflicting claims of history and fiction, but by his sophisticated critical stance, his emphasis on personal experience and concrete details, and his adoption of the first-person, eyewitness narrative, he has moved one step closer to the art of fiction.

The Value System Ŏ Sukkwŏn portrays a society that upheld the importance of order and degree and saw the fulfillment of mutual duties and responsibilities as essential to the established structure. The balance of power between the king and bureaucracy was delicate and complex and could be upset by any disturbance. The literati (yangban), who occupied the highest social class, monopolized education and access to the examinations. In

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principle, the yangban consisted of civilian and military branches, but power was in fact concentrated in the hands of a small group of high civil officials. Also, the examination system was not open to all qualified candidates, as it purported to be, and success in it was based less on an individual’s learning or talent than on his pedigree and his ancestors’ social status. Every candidate, for example, was required to record at the head of the examination paper the names and ranks of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and the name, title, and clan seat of his maternal grandfather. Because of his origin, a person like Ŏ Sukkwŏn could not reach the rank of yangban. He belonged to the middle people class 中人 (chungin), consisting of lower-ranking administrators and independent skilled workers like doctors (2:79, 81, 82) and artisans (2:80). A member of the chungin could not be promoted beyond a certain rank or hold a post slated for the ruling class. Stories of Cho Sin, a secondary son who became an interpreter (2:6, 47; 4:25, 27); Ŏ Mujŏk 魚無迹, an official slave turned poet (2:26); and Yi Sangjwa 李上佐, a private slave who excelled in painting (2:57), show that some from the middle and lower classes did win recognition, yet such cases were exceptional. There were also nonconformists like Kim Sisŭp, who in Ŏ’s account laments the moral disruption caused by Sejo’s usurpation and abandons the world (2:33); recluses like Yi Pyŏl (2:60) and Pak Kyegang 朴繼姜 (4:17); or a prince of the blood like Chean 齊安 (1446–1526), the second son of King Yejong (1441–1469), who feigned idiocy in order to survive. “Some say that the prince was not truly an idiot,” Ŏ comments. “Being a descendant of the royal line, he might have come to harm if he had distinguished himself too brilliantly, and he therefore disguised his talents” (2:71). In the face of a Confucian ideology that urges the maintenance of order, unlimited obedience to the state, and the dominance of a factious nobility, Ŏ espouses the traditional system of values. Central to this system is authority in its various forms. Ŏ accepts the authority of the monarch as the metaphorical father of the state. The Korean monarch, however, historically owes his legitimacy and authority not only to his own people but also to China’s emperor. That is, the Chinese emperor

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was the father of the Korean king, who was in turn the father of the Korean people. Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s Miscellany is the first work of the genre to begin with a genealogy of the Ming rulers. (It may be a parody of history, or a subtle way of showing its own conventionality or of claiming the privileged status of Ŏ’s work.) By opening with such a genealogy, Ŏ accepts the father figure of the Confucian ecumene who elicits loyalty and fealty. Nowhere does he question the figure of the king in a monarchical state, the only form of government he knows, or the source of his authority, or the way he uses it. From the classics and histories he has learned the requirements for and attributes of kingship. As he accepts the king-subject relationship, so does he accept the father-child relationship within the family. In more than ten episodes he affectionately tells about his ancestors, who were all members of the ruling class. And Ŏ is proud of being a descendant, albeit a secondary one, of a distinguished family that has produced a number of scholar-statesmen. A struggle between father and son is unthinkable. The past, whatever the strengths and weaknesses of its legacy, always bears on the present. The father protects, inspires, and guides the son, as the king does his subjects. Another feature of the Miscellany is its adherence to the norm. Any deviation from conventional behavior on the part of anyone, king or slave, violates the norm. The tyrant Yŏnsangun, who took cruel pleasure in inflicting unjust punishments, represents the antithesis of the virtuous ruler of a harmonious society, the defender of the established order. Yŏnsangun not only goes astray himself but also corrupts others and defies the traditional principles of the Confucian ruler (2:30; 4:10, 49). Such ministers as the greedy Kim Allo 金安老 (1481–1537) (4:12) or Im Sahong 任士洪 (1455–1506), who falsely accuses and kills his impeacher (4:20), and other greedy magistrates (2:6, 7) are represented as corrupt men who abuse their positions. Ŏ constantly questions the validity of beliefs, and especially of all forms of heterodoxy. He even turns to the animal world to describe the weird behavior of dogs, or a horse that gives birth to a human being (4:2). In the realm of language and literature, he laments the general lack of style in writing and the ignorance of current

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Chinese usage. In a society in which success for the educated man hinged upon his mastery of Chinese verse and prose, the assimilation of conventions “constitutive of literature as an institution”83 was a prerequisite of a writer. Ŏ’s interpretations of a variety of literary elements demonstrate that he was a competent reader conversant with tradition and convention. His criticism is usually aimed at the reader who cannot cope with literary texts. Lastly, what strikes the modern reader is Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s loyalty to the privileged status of language and literature. The power of the written word in traditional Confucian society is well known. The Korean literati spoke Korean but wrote mostly in literary Chinese. Most works of history and literature were in Chinese, which was also the language of administration and diplomacy. Language was also a means of protest and denunciation, of “converting passion into a privilege.”84 How the logos is a substitute for praxis is illustrated in poems satirizing maladministration. From the literati’s viewpoint, language transcended its cognitive and communicative functions. The skillful use of written Chinese, the supreme cultural creation, was a status symbol whose value was seldom questioned. If a soldier, merchant, or slave is mentioned in the Miscellany, for example, it is because of his ability to write poetry in Chinese (4:17). Chinese as the only means of cultured expression by the educated in Korea recalls a similar belief in England, where English was sometimes considered “gauche and parvenu,”85 compared to Latin and French. For example, John Skelton (1460?–1529) writes: Our natural tongue is rude And hard to be ennuede With pollyshed termes lustye Oure language is so rustye So cankered and so ful Or frowardes and so dul That if I would apply To write ornately

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I wot not where to finde Terms to serue my mynde. Or Edmund Waller (1606–1687) in “Of English Verse”: Poets that lasting marble seek, Must carve in Latin, or in Greek. . . .86 Given the importance of Chinese to the Korean literati, it is no wonder that to be known in China was the highest honor a writer could hope for. Ŏ mentions a number of Korean writers who have won international fame. The favorite pastime of Chinese envoys and Korean reception officers was to exchange verses, each trying to outdo the other. Some imprudent Koreans, anxious to have their talents recognized, awaited every opportunity to submit their works to the envoys. For example, the Miscellany tells of the unfortunate monk Sŏrong, who is punished for showing a mediocre poem to the Chinese envoy Tang Gao (4:76). The written word had a still deeper significance to Koreans of Ŏ’s day, however: it served to arrest the flow of time. In converting his life into a story, the writer seeking to verify his own existence falls back on his memory, by which he recaptures his past. Whether the idea of selfhood exists in the memory alone or also in the imagination requires study. The sense of continuing identity is a product of our consciousness, which consists in a series of experiences of the moment. Those moments are stabilized and given permanence in the literary portrait. Indeed, the literary miscellany represents a significant response on the part of the Confucian humanist to the Confucian age in Korean history. It was an age of instability and impermanence owing to factionalism and other evils endemic to Confucian systems. Ŏ Sukkwŏn is painfully aware of the tension between ideology and actuality, demand and desire, and of his search for self-knowledge and his submission to the flux of life. In spite of the demands of conformity and commitment, he wishes to probe man’s inner being as he criticizes and evaluates his own being and becoming. His jottings are the products of the tension

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he experiences as he looks within himself and outward upon the world. The literary miscellany is probably the only adequate literary form for a Confucian gentleman like Ŏ Sukkwŏn as he attempts in this way to define himself and assert his identity. The portrait “saves individual identity from pure subjectivity by converting human beings into objects for public contemplation,”87 enjoyment, and judgment. Moments of life are removed from the temporal frame, although the act of reading occurs in time. By creating versions of the self and images of personality, Ŏ Sukkwŏn affirmed the significance of memory and imagination, the power of language to create a sense of identity in objectified form, and the communicability of that identity through selection and evocative writing. I have touched upon the value system implicit in the Miscellany and have shown how Ŏ took into account the reader’s ideological and cultural assumptions in the crafting of his work. The Miscellany cannot mean to us what it meant to Ŏ’s contemporaries. Yet we should nevertheless learn to appreciate its expressive dimensions and literary effects. Our inadequacy as readers stems from our unfamiliarity both with the society and culture that framed Ŏ’s vision of the world and with the assumptions he expects us to share.88 It is difficult, for example, for a modern to imagine being paraded through the streets of Seoul after placing first in the civil service examinations, being commended by the king for his outstanding performance, or entering the Office of Special Counselors of the Office of Royal Decrees for the first time to begin his new job. We cannot assume that the Royal Confucian Academy would have the same effect on a sixteenth-century student as does Seoul National University upon a twenty-first century freshman. The environment of the capital, the court, or the government of Ŏ’s time cannot have been the same as it is today. But we will be better able to appreciate a historical figure’s feelings and reactions if we are familiar with the milieu in which he lived and wrote. In many cases, we know something about the life of a historical figure because he was an official rather than because he was a writer,

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unless there remains a private collection of his works with accounts of his life, “appreciations,” epitaphs, or the like. It is for this reason that the Miscellany is valuable. We should not accept as true every detail that Ŏ relates about his subjects’ own writings, external evidence (letters, diaries), the reminiscences of the subjects’ contemporaries, and autobiographical information he himself supplies (although the autobiographical elements in conventional writing are sometimes of doubtful significance). Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s Miscellany provides ample material reflecting the beliefs, ideas, and literary tastes of the educated of that time. For this reason, the Miscellany interests and rewards the reader even today.

Self as Subject The literary miscellany occupies a unique place in the history of Korean prose narratives written in literary Chinese. Of all prose genres, it is the form that best accommodates the variety and diversity of human types and experiences, allowing the writer to take various postures and perspectives in diverse contexts. It is a medium for self-reflection, wherein the writer portrays himself in order to know himself. As a personal document of his life and times, it embodies the writer in his particularity. The writer’s impulse to contact life at all points compels him to collect samples of human behavior capable of illustrating certain cultural values. Therefore, in addition to giving an eyewitness account of contemporary events cast in objective narrative, the miscellany writer describes his contemporaries, his friends, or historical persons. What strikes him most is human diversity, “merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant.”89 He is an acute observer of the human scene, and his subject is mankind. Unlike more formal biographies in other sources, biographical sketches in the literary miscellany are usually brief and vary in motive, focus, and technique. In some, a man’s actions are described to generalize about his

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personality; in others, single personal anecdotes are offered to capture all that is most typical of the subject. In either case, the writer is subject to the norms of his society and age. In East Asia, biography has traditionally been a means of commemorating, rather than delineating, the subject. As a result of the didacticism of the form, it is a eulogy, a panegyric, or an encomium wherein the subject appears as an emblem, a symbol, or a cultural ideal. A biography might recount the subject’s ancestry, birth, and career (cursus honorum) with an emphasis on fidelity to the historicity, accuracy, and acceptability of the events described. Significant events independent of history are usually omitted. The biographer, usually a colleague, friend, or kinsman of the subject (or a famous writer of later times), may include scenes or events he has not witnessed. He may enter the subject’s mind, attributing to him utterances that have no source or that are “more true in effect than in substance.”90 Sometimes he may transmit not the original utterance, but his own analysis of it. He undoubtedly has intimate knowledge of the subject; indeed, he has eaten, spoken, and argued with him. Close personal ties, however, are more often than not a threat to objectivity. Seldom does the biographer present his own vision of the subject’s character or delve into his private life (not even Boswell presented the contents of Johnson’s consciousness).91 This is not because such personal documents as journals, letters, published works, or contemporary opinions about the subjects are absent, but because the biographer is not responsible for writing a sustained biography in the modern sense. He knows instinctively that his culture demands a public version of the self. Presenting another self in writing was seldom considered a problem. It is an axiom of long standing that examples work more effectively on the mind than precepts. A king rules by example, and history teaches by example. “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use,”92 said Johnson, who viewed private experience as an untrustworthy source of knowledge about anyone. Lives of men

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should be used as examples, especially to representatives of the official culture, who are prone to draw morals from them. They also engage posterity in ideological and moral debate. The efflorescence of biographical entries in the literary miscellany in the early Chosŏn dynasty—sometimes whole works were devoted to such entries—had another cause.93 A succession of factional struggles and literati purges provided copious fodder for men of letters to record their own involvement in the major events of the day. As victims of these conflicts, the literati wished to vindicate their names and provide a unified point of view and personal identity in the framework of a chronology, a version of history. However, the anecdotes concerning the subject of a literary miscellany were not usually included in his official biography. The more famous the man, the more numerous were the anecdotes about him. The contributions to fiction by the miscellany writer may lie in his relatively accomplished portraits of individuals. As the eighteenth-century English novel frequently appeared in the form of imaginary autobiography, fictional narrative in traditional Korea often took the form of an imaginary biography. A typical work carries in its title the graph chŏn 傳 (“tradition,” “story,” “tale”), implying usually that it is a life of a fictional character. An author of such narrative intends to create the illusion that his story records the actual experience of the protagonist. In its style and narrative techniques, such a work presents events in chronological order and in episodic structure, evincing the influence of biography in official history; it also shows the influence of real-life accounts on imaginary ones. Lacking a sustained autobiography form, the writer of fictional narrative, then, uses the format of biography to create an illusion of truth and to gain acceptance among a reading public schooled in historiography. Although his narrative is far from realistic, he often tries to create the sense of real life through physical, and occasionally psychological, detail.

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Of course, the most valuable part of the literary miscellany is the writer’s own account of himself. He often tells the reader what he likes or dislikes; whom he met; to whom, when, and why he wrote poems; with whom he ate, talked, or traveled. The form is that of res gestae, with less emphasis on “the conscious reflection on the inner meaning of these acts for personality.”94 The writer does not see any purpose, connections, or turning points in these random events. Although he alone can verify the authority of his references as eyewitness to his own life, he imputes no meaning to his own past. Autobiographical sketches are not lacking in the East Asian tradition.95 There are letters (Xima Qian’s to Ren An;96 Kim Sisŭp’s to Yu Chahan; 1:33), lyric poems, journals, and other prose works often narrated in the third person.97 There is also autobiographical information on the circumstances under which poems are written; such accounts anticipate Thomas Whythorne, who composed a prose account of his own life full of such information (1576).98 The East Asian writer of the past may have had a sense of his own importance, but seldom was he taught to view himself as an isolated individual. He was a member of his family, clan, class, society, and culture. He identified himself by his pedigree, and his quality as a person depended on the quality of his lineage.99 The efflorescence of clan genealogies in the Chosŏn dynasty is an eloquent testimony to the prevalence of this belief. Like Telemachus, who identifies himself as “the son of Odysseus, the son of Laertes, the son of Autolycus,” the compiler of a genealogy identified himself in terms of his ancestors, and this was the germ of the autobiographical impulse. As in the West, East Asian culture offered models to emulate: the upright official, the Daoist recluse, the wise philosopher, the eminent monk, and the filial son, to name only a few. Every learned man tried to adhere to a prescribed pattern and personality model. His aim was to conform to the normative ideals that provided a model for his life. Therefore, emphasis was placed not on personal variation, but on commitment to the model that formed part of the learned man’s professional self-

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image.100 Hence a distrust of idiosyncratic deviations from the norm, although certain types of deviation were culturally sanctioned. Decisions made in response to one’s inner needs, even to the point of placing oneself in conflict with the established order, were identified with those of one’s predecessors. It is for this reason that biographies in East Asia are often much alike. What few details of private life appear are often included for reasons other than their intrinsic value. One writer may admit his faults because he wishes to prove that he is like other men. Another may point out his own individuality, only to eliminate it even as he reveals it. A third may suppress his unique accomplishments in favor of exemplary conformity. The East Asian man denies his individual self and tends to find his true being in social conformity and in the abiding pattern of collective history. Such are the ways cultural patterns shape the individual’s experience and sense of identity. Where, then, is the locus of the subject’s life? An uncentered life is inconceivable today. The public language of biography or autobiography (terms that did not exist in East Asia until recently) is painfully inadequate to reveal the interiority of an individual life. The language and vocabulary of introspection that came to be developed and refined with the rise of Neo-Confucianism do not seem to have encouraged selfanalysis and self-investigation in the modern sense.101 Usually the self was defined by its interactions with persons and things outside. Such was the result of the emphasis that the Confucian establishment placed on active public life, the public role of personality, together with emulation of role models and the public virtue that was considered vital to human relationships. Hence a focus on what happens, on how a man behaves; it is here that the miscellany writer sought individual peculiarities. Ŏ’s notes were written at various times in the course of his life and compiled either by himself or by others. Characteristically, we do not know when a given entry was written, unless Ŏ specifies that it is an entry taken from his diary, a record made at some point in his past,

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or something wholly reconstructed from memory. It does not appear that he interpolated new material in his entries.102 Capable of viewing himself with detachment, irony, and laughter, Ŏ was willing to learn from every experience. He is something of an exception among the miscellany writers because of his origin. As a secondary son, Ŏ was keenly aware of his difference from others, although he could not put aside the culturally determined view of the self. Like other miscellany writers, Ŏ tried to give an unofficial version of history, glimpses of his private life. He was interested in his own experiences, especially his own significance as an interpreter, his extensive travels, and his participation in Korean diplomacy. He wrote his random notes approximately at the same time John Bayle produced The Vocacyon of John Bayle (1553),103 an account of a single year of the author’s life. Ŏ’s critical temper was evinced by whatever topic he discussed. He felt a kinship with those who, like Ŏ Mujŏk and Cho Sin, shared the same predicament as his, or, like Kim Sisŭp, tried to maintain their private vision of coherence in an age of political and moral crisis. In his writings, he fondly quotes satirical or autobiographical poems and expresses his personality by expressing his opinions and preferences. But unlike Montaigne’s Essais, “a record of the essays of [his] life,”104 Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s Miscellany does not take its author as its subject. Nor could Ŏ say, as Montaigne did, “I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mind alike go roaming,” or “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.”105 Ŏ was reticent and little given to self-analysis or self-revelation. Nor was he consciously aware that the act of writing is a process of discovery.106 But Ŏ shared with Montaigne a love of books, an admiration for learned and virtuous men, a concern with moral questions, a fondness for anecdotes, a rejection of dissimulation, cruelty, envy, and malice, and skepticism regarding medicine and the perfectibility of society.107 While Montaigne’s essays are a literary form devised by him for purposes of self-discovery,108 Ŏ’s random notes follow an inherited form.

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Ŏ felt at home writing within the established tradition and conventions; this was another way of maintaining a sense of continuity with his precursors. At times, he asks us to share in the investigation of his topics, but unlike that of seventeenth-century English prose writers, his style is primarily not meditative.109 Nor is his text composed dialectically, changing or reforming an enunciated thesis or proposition and forcing the reader to modify or rethink the opinions he has been led to form. Indeed, Ŏ’s explicit procedure is not the dialectic tension so characteristic of Montaigne, who presents “the obverse and reverse of every notion he examines”110 so as to demonstrate the difficulty of arriving at truth. As diverse as the lives of the men who wrote them, literary miscellanies still enable the writer to explore the self and others spontaneously and freely without the devices that constrain other formal literary genres. Ŏ’s miscellany is splendidly entertaining, as every entry deals with a new topic with a style, narrative mode, structure, and emphasis adequate to the subject. What enables us to respond are the conventions and norms of the literary miscellany, a deep appreciation of which requires knowledge of the cultural codes, ideological discourses, and literary systems of Chosŏn dynasty Korea—all subjects that merit further study.

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Notes 1. For a comprehensive discussion of literary canons in the West, see Robert von Hallberg, ed., Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 2. W. Wolfgang Holdheim, The Hermeneutic Mode: Essays on Time in Literature and Literary Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 28–29. 3. Ibid., 29. 4. PaC, postscript (KMC 2:2b). 5. NP 2A:1 (KMC 2:1a). Here Yi is alluding to an anecdote about Carpenter Shi and a serrate oak standing by the village shrine in Qi in Zhuangzi (Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu [New York: Columbia University Press, 1968], 63–65). 6. Rongzhai suibi (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978), 1:1. 7. NP 2A:1. 8. Donald Keene, trans., Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 3. 9. Essais 2:8 (Donald M. Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965], 278). 10. Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), 15–16. 11. PaC, postscript: NP 2A:1. For Montaigne’s view of his own essays, see Margaret M. McGowan, Montaigne’s Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 1–19. 12. Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 4. 13. Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastian Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1947); The Polemic Character 1640–1661 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955); and W. J. Paylor, ed., The Overburian Characters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 5–31. 14. Kim Sanggi, “Toksŏdang ŭi yurae wa pyŏnch’ŏn,” Hyangt’o Seoul 4 (1958): 13–39. See YC 4:14 (94–99) for the linked verse composed by scholars at the Chingwan Monastery on Mount Samgak in 1442 (Peter H. Lee, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 232–34. 15. Kim Allo, Yongch’ŏn tamjŏk ki (CKK, 1910), 250; also in Hŭiraktang ko (Kŏnguk taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 1974), 2:8.

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16. J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 28. 17. Phobe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), chap. 1; Saunders, English Letters, chaps. 2, 3; Edwin H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1959), chap. 4. 18. J. I. Crump, Jr., Intrigues: Studies in the Chan-kuo Ts’e (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 99. 19. George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 BC–AD 300 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 434. 20. Ibid., 215. 21. Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 58. 22. Ibid., 263. 23. George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study on Prose from Bacon to Collier (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 52. For Attic prose, see Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), essay 2. For a lucid account of the subject, see Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 103–40. 24. I.e., figures of attitudinizing. “All discourse reflects, and depends on, a particular attitude toward its subject, a stance, and very often it involves some sort of definition of the writer as well.” William J. Brandt, The Rhetoric of Argumentation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 153. 25. Ibid., 125. 26. Pathos is almost always defective “when it intrudes itself into the body of the speech or essay.” The mark of defective pathos is “a cluster of response-demanding figures—the exclamation, the apostrophe, and the rhetorical question.” Brandt, The Rhetoric of Argumentation, 224–25. 27. John C. Lapp, The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine’s Contes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1–43. 28. “To the Reader” (Frame, Essays of Montaigne, 2). 29. TSh 1:21, 30. 30. TSh 2:10; YC 9:12; NP 1A:15. 31. Hŏ Kyun also praises Yi Haeng’s poetry in Sŏngsu sihwa 惺叟詩話, in Hŏ Kyun chŏnjip 許筠全集 (Taedong munhwa yŏnguwŏn, 1972 reprint), 25:233d. 32. See PaC 3:20; PS 28.

150 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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TSh 1:48. PoC 2:20. PaC 3:4. TSh is devoted to tracing allusions and crenological comments (e.g., 1:6, 8, 16, 20; 2:3, 61). Tongguk Yi-sangguk chip 26:4a–7b. Ibid. The study of literary origins, especially of poetic topoi, is a neglected field, and there is no work comparable to John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), “the greatest detective story ever written,” which demonstrates how Coleridge’s “vast and curious reading became sublimated into poetry.” Ŏ cites another instance (1:23), this time on the phrase bufen 不分 in Du Fu’s poem, for which see Tusi ŏnhae 杜詩諺解 (reprint of the 1632 ed., 1975), 23:23a. For example, see Adele Austin Rickett, “The Personality of the Chinese Critic,” in The Personality of the Critic, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 111–34. Ch’oe Cha offers the most sustained comparison of two poets, Yi Illo and Yi Kyubo. For the first see PoC 2:11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 26, 27, 33, 38; for the latter see PoC 2:6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 17, 24, 33. YC 8:6 (199–202) has such a list starting from Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn; in 2:19 (49–50), he lists his own works, as does Chaucer his own poems in The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale and in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Promulgated on April 24, 1346 (Yuanshi, 41). Divided into twenty-seven headings, it contained edicts, codified regulations (tiaoge), and rules for deciding cases. It was introduced to Korea before 1377 (KS 84:30a; 133:22a). The Jizheng tiaoge is now lost, and only fragments survive. See Tōhō gakuhō (Kyoto, 1931) 1:249–84 and 2:251–73. I owe this information to Professor Herbery Franke of the University of Munich. This work is cited in KS 84:1b, 30a; 117:17a; 133:22a, and SnS 22:1a (136:1b). See Hanguk sa 9 (1973): 298–356 for Ming-Korean relations. Kang Sinhang, “Yijo ch’ogi yŏkhakcha e kwanhan koch’al,” Chindan hakpo 29–30 (1966): 325–38. Hwanghwa 皇華 comes from the Book of Songs 163 (Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs [London: Allen & Unwin, 1954], 325). PrC 2:4 (332–35). YC 1:19 (22–31).

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50. YC 9:1. 51. Collected Studies by Chester Noyes Greenough (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1940), 224–45. 52. Ibid., 226. 53. Generally, the chapki neglects man’s external aspect. For example, except in 4:3 an 8:25, YC offers little about external features. Neither does Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa (ca. 1330–1332), except in episode 42. 54. Joseph Roe Allen III, “An Introductory Study of Narrative Structure in the Shiji,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews 3 (1981): 31–66. 55. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 212. 56. PaC 2:2. 57. NP 1B:18 (twenty-four sinographs used). 58. Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilyn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 82. 59. PoC 3:33. 60. Hamburger, Logic of Literature, 83–84. 61. Hamburger, Logic of Literature, 81–84, 139. 62. Vivian de Sola Pinto, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (London: George G. Harrap, 1951), 38, 39. 63. Ibid., 49. For how Walton’s work “suffers from a propensity toward hagiography,” see Virginia S. Davidson, “Johnson’s Life of Savage: The Transformation of a Genre,” in Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron, Harvard English Studies 8 (1978): 57. 64. Hanguk sa 10 (1974): 607–11; Yi Sangbaek, Hanguk munhwasa yŏngu nongo (Ŭryu, 1954), 173–204. 65. Hanguk sa 10:662–93. 66. Yi Sangbaek, Hanguk munhwasa yŏngu nongo, 207–48. 67. His “Accounts of Conduct” (haengjang) proudly mentions the fact. Also a number of other works repeat the same, for example, PrC 2:34 (349– 50) and YC 9:29 (243). 68. Shakespeare, Sonnet 107:5–6: “The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d, / And the sad augurs mock their own presage.” 69. PaC 2:3. 70. NP 2A:5, 6, 16 (also Sŏng Hyŏn mentions his excursion to the Diamond Mountains: YC 8:29). 71. NP 2A:7. 72. NP 2B:26. YC 4:18; 8:21. 73. YC 7:14.

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74. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 6. 75. See Denis Twitchett, “Problems of Chinese Biography,” in Confucian Personalities, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 24–39; James L. Clifford, ed., Biography as an Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 76. I have borrowed some terminology from Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). 77. Karl J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 13. 78. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History 8 (Autumn 1976): 168, comments: “In autobiographical discourse, when the author, the narrator, and sometimes the main character are identical, the identity of the author and narrator separate the ‘referential’ or ‘historical’ genres from all the ‘fictional’ genres.” 79. Robert Alter, Partial Magic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 241. 80. An East Asian contemplating his own spiritual autobiography, Buddhist or Confucian, a story of the cultivation of ideal universals, must contend with paradoxes intrinsic to the genre of autobiography. The changes he undergoes are predetermined and paradigmatic, a design and meaning imposed from without. Thus his story has a plot known in advance. It is a success story at that, a record of sanctioned change in the service of accepted goals. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 268. See also Burton Pike, “Time in Autobiography,” Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 326–42, esp. 337–38. 81. Earlier chapki (e.g., YC) contain episodes on social types that resemble the medieval West’s invectives against the special evils of every calling. Stories and legends are also found in earlier examples: PoC 2:35; 3:43; NP 1A:16; 1B:16, 24; YC 3:1, 12, 17, 32; 5:1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15; 6:1. 82. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), chap. 7. 83. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 50. 84. Roland Barthes, “Racinian Man,” in European Literary Theory and Practice, ed. Vernon W. Gras (New York: Dell, 1973), 340. 85. Saunders, English Letters, 19. 86. Saunders, English Letters, 19, 38.

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87. Spacks, Imagining a Self, 22. This and next paragraph own much to her book (22–23). 88. H. R. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 11–41. 89. Essais 1:1; Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, ed., Montaigne: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 13; Frame, Essays of Montaigne, 5. [Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object.] 90. Ralph W. Rader, “Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson,” in Essays in Eighteenth-Century Biography, ed. Philip B. Daghlian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 33. 91. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 72. Boswell was in Johnson’s company for 276 days and “knows a palpable Dr. Johnson,” says Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: Norton, 1984), 56. 92. Quoted in W. K. Winsatt, Jr., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 97. See Rambler, no. 60, for the function of biography. 93. For example, KMRP lists the victims of purges from 1498 to 1519; Kimyorok sokchip lists 408 names, both instigators and victims of the 1519 purges; and UCN lists 99 people involved in the 1545 purge. 94. Karl J. Weintraub, “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1974–1975): 823. 95. For Chinese examples see Wolfgang Bauer, “Icherleben und Autobiographie im Älteren China,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 8 (1964): 12–40. 96. Translated in Anthology of Chinese Literature 1, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 95–102; compare Peter Abelard’s Historia Calaitatum (History of my misfortune, 1132–1136) and see Weintraub, The Value of the Individual, 72–92, and Evelyn B. Vitz, “Type et individu dans l’autobiographie médiévale,” Poétique 24 (1975): 426–45. 97. For example, Yi Kyubo. See his prose essays in Tongguk Yi-sangguk chip 20:12b–14a; 23:1a–13b. Then, too, East Asia has “autobibliography,” in which the author “impart[s] a little bit about [himself] in discussing, or in simply listing, [his] literary activity” (Weintraub, The Value of the Individual, 53), and “additive autobiography,” in which the author “does not write one self-contained life of himself but reveals himself in various writings” (54–55). Such a writer “has no need to perceive himself as an individuum unified in its own consciousness” (57).

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98. James M. Osborn, The Beginning of Autobiography in England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959); Rudolf Gottfried, “Autobiography and Art: An Elizabethan Borderland,” in Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding, ed. Philip Damon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 111–13. 99. Weintraub, “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” 835–36. 100. Weintraub, “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” 837–38. 101. Cf. Rodney L. Taylor, “The Centered Self: Religious Autobiography in the Neo-Confucian Tradition,” History of Religion 17 (1977–1978): 266– 83; Pei-yi Wu, “Self-Examination and Confession of Sins in Traditional China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39 (1979): 5–38. All men were considered equal in Mahāyāna Buddhism, but few religious or confessional autobiographies came from the lower classes in East Asia mainly because of their lack of education. There is no counterpart to The Book of Margery Kempe, written down about 1436–1438 as she reported her own story. 102. Entries in the literary miscellany in the early Chosŏn dynasty did not have titles. Collections were put together without regard to chronology or subject. The Biji by Song Qi 宋祀 (998–1061), the first work to carry the title biji in China, is classified into three sections: 1) Explanation of customs; 2) Research into antiquity; and 3) Miscellany. See Yves Hervouet, ed., A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), 279. Tōsai zuihitsu by Ichijō Kaneyoshi or Kanera (1402– 1481), the first compilation bearing in its title the word zuihitsu, is topically arranged. 103. Leslie P. Fairfield, “The Vocacyon of John Bayle and Early English Autobiography,” Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 327–40. 104. Montaigne, Essais 3:13 (Frame, Essays of Montaigne, 826). 105. Montaigne, Essais 3:9 (Frame, Essays of Montaigne, 761); 3:19 (821). 106. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual, 178. 107. See Donald M. Frame, Montaigne’s Essais: A Study (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969). 108. Ibid., 73. 109. See Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”, and Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 110. Robert D. Cottrell, Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne’s Essais (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), 89.

Chapter 4

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany The literary miscellany, a form of prose narrative that flourished in Korea from the fifteenth century onward, was the Korean counterpart of the Chinese biji and the Japanese zuihitsu. Written in literary Chinese, it typically comprised prose portraits, tales, essays, and critiques of poetry. The genre is characterized by an encyclopedic scope, an abundance of biographical and autobiographical information, and a predominance of the first person singular in the plain style. My aim here is to reconstruct images of society as presented in literary miscellanies of the early Chosŏn dynasty.1 The subjects of most portraits in early Chosŏn literary miscellanies— up to and including Ŏ Sukkwŏn 魚叔權 (fl. 1525–1554)—are personages from the contemporary scene or recent history. In keeping with the social origin of the writers, most such portraits concerned members of the lettered class. Still, a need for variety resulted in a gallery of memorable portraits of “sundry folk,” sometimes even of subhuman and super-

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natural figures, perhaps the only fictional characters in the genre. Alert to the need for brevity, the writer sought to capture in a few vivid strokes, with fine economy and selective detail, the essence of a person. A typical entry begins with a character sketch of the subject, including characterizing adjectives, followed by a striking and memorable episode to illustrate it. Because writers of the miscellanies served as court officials, some episodes come from personal observation of court scenes and personalities. Others stem from accounts of subjects the author knew by reputation or from personal acquaintance. Its form, matter, and manner of presentation enable the genre to present “brief glimpses of and pungent comments on contemporary social matters.”2 Indeed, the true subject of the miscellany is society. Thus we will examine images of society presented in nine works spanning about 150 years, from the time of T’aejo (1392–1398) to that of Chungjong (1506–1554). While the official encomiast presented his king as the ideal virtuous man, often with the intent of inspiring men to virtue, the miscellany writer acted not as an official historian but as a private and often objective observer. Therefore he refrained from extravagant praise of his subject. The founder of the dynasty had already been extolled as the “counterpart of heaven,” the model of the ideal Confucian monarch, in Songs of Flying Dragons.3 What the miscellany writer found most appealing in succeeding kings of Chosŏn was their love and encouragement of learning, their role as protectors of scholars and poets. Sejong 世宗 (1418–1450), the greatest of all Chosŏn kings and the inventor of the Korean alphabet (YC 7:10), a ruler whose majesty, wisdom, and erudition held his court spellbound, read such classics as the Zuo Commentary (Zuozhuan) and Elegies of Chu (Chuci) one hundred times. His father, T’aejong (1400–1418), had to take books away from his son so that he would not ruin his health (PrC 1:18). Sejong’s son Munjong (1450–1452), equally well-versed in the classics, literature, and calligraphy, was also a model of filial devotion: he planted cherry trees in

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 157 the palace grounds himself so that he could serve cherries to his father, who loved them (PrC 1:24–25; YC 2:3).

Educating the Literati Institutions of learning were established to educate the sons of the lettered class, some of whom would one day become the preceptors of princes. Sejong himself established the civil service examination system (YC 2:2), the examination in literature that began in 1438 (PrC 2:73), and the Hall of Worthies, members of which were granted leave for further study (YC 9:2). The linked verse written in 1442 at Chingwan Monastery 津寬寺 on Mount Samgak by six scholars of the Hall of Worthies illustrates not only the literary prowess of the poets but also the extent to which royal patronage served as a great spur to literary achievement.4 On national holidays and other special occasions, moreover, members received leave for relaxation. One of their pastimes was the capping and exchanging of poems (YC 4:15). Sejo (1455–1468) kept scholars in the Hall of Classics so busy copying books that they had no time for outings (YC 6:28). Sŏngjong (1469–1494) had royal lecturers expound the classics three times a day. The Office of the Royal Lectures 經筵 was charged with indoctrinating the ruler in the virtues of knowledge and the usefulness to the state of the classics, histories, and literature. Sŏngjong’s Hall of Reading 讀書堂, a former monastery on the Han River, was a retreat where his counselors might study (YC 2:1; 9:7). In the evenings, the king would call in a special counselor to discuss with him the classics and administration (YC 2:23). Pursuits fostered by kings included the production of quality paper for official memorials and the annotation of the Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in government) under Sejong (1436) (PrC 2:20), as well as the compilation of books and the printing of classics and literary works under Sŏngjong (YC 2:18; 10:10). Chosŏn kings themselves also wrote, and most left poems of varying quality. While they may not have regarded poetry as their vocation

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(though to do so was not incompatible with court values), few were enjoined from indulging in verse as an avocation. Surrounded by learned poets, the king often found poetry instructive, delightful, and persuasive. Many persons won favor by poetry, which was composed on almost every occasion; not being able to produce a poem when called upon to do so brought the greatest possible disgrace. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the cultural role played by the orator in the West was played in Chosŏn Korea by the doctus poeta. Sejong’s genuine affection for members of the Hall of Worthies, which the literati of the day considered a virtual fairyland,5 is well known. Sejo, who seized the crown in a bloody coup, also had close relations with his officials (YC 2:1; 10:6). Yu Hoin 兪好仁 (1445–1494), Sŏngjong’s favorite courtier, won royal favor with his poetic gifts. When Yu had to leave the court to care for his ailing mother, the king wrote him the following poem: Stay: will you go? Must you go? Is it in weariness that you leave? From disgust? Who advised you? Who persuaded you? Say why you are leaving, you, who are breaking my heart. (Despite the strong ties between the two men, the king never appointed Yu to a post he could not manage—and hence won the admiration of posterity) (OS 116). Among princes of the blood, Prince Anp’yŏng 安平大君 (1418–1453), Sejong’s third son, was outstanding. An accomplished writer, calligrapher, painter, and musician, he loved antiquities and beautiful places and was known for his lavish parties (YC 2:14); however, he was later banished and forced by his own brother, Sejo, to commit suicide. Not all princes were outstanding, however. Prince Yangnyŏng 讓寧大君 (1394– 1462), T’aejong’s eldest son and heir apparent, pursued pleasure, associated with dissolute types, and loathed learning (YC 4:5). One day as the

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 159 prince’s tutor, Yi Nae 李來 (1362–1416), was about to enter the palace, he heard someone calling a falcon rather than reciting the classics: it was the prince. Yi remonstrated with Yangnyŏng on every occasion, and the prince came to regard him as an enemy. T’aejong loved the persimmon tree and one day spied a bird pecking its fruit. He asked, “Can’t someone shoot down that bird?” “The heir apparent can,” his followers replied. The king called the prince in, and he hit the mark. The king, who had been displeased with the prince and had not seen him for some time, beamed (YC 4:4). Some thirty years later, the prince amused Sejo (1455–1468) with satirical quips (YC 7:3). When Sejong established the Royal School 宗學, Prince Sunp’yŏng 順平君 (Chǒngjong’s [1398– 1400] second son), then forty, did not know a single sinograph. He finally managed to learn the first two graphs in the Book of Filial Piety. On his deathbed he remarked to his wife and children, “Leaving you behind pains me, but it is a great relief to leave the Royal School” (YC 6:24). All men of talent aspired to pass the civil service examinations, the only entry to officialdom. Candidates studied the classics, history, and literature, often memorizing important texts. The highest institution of learning was the Royal Confucian Academy in the capital, which enrolled two hundred students selected from all over the country. In Sŏng Hyŏn’s (1439–1504) view, the academy also needed to teach decorum and virtue. But because the majority of students were from prominent families, it was difficult to enforce regulations. One of the students’ favorite pastimes was to pun on teachers’ names and mock them with satirical ditties (YC 6:3).6 Every summer and winter the students would hold a mock court (YC 9:5). Some of the stouter ones, like Ŏ Hyoch’ŏm (1405–1475), would snatch others’ food at mealtimes and terrorize their classmates (YC 9:5). A particularly tactless student, the homely and poorly dressed Kim Yullyang 金允良, once predicted that his friend Kim Pokch’ang 金福昌would die young. Angered by this, Kim Pokch’ang stuffed Kim Yullyang’s mouth full of burning charcoal (YC 6:7)!

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The king himself chose the examiners from a roster prepared by the Ministry of Personnel. At dawn, after roll call, each candidate was sent into an enclosure surrounded by thorn hedges set up to obstruct all traffic with the outside. Their clothes and possessions were then searched for crib notes. If a crib note was found outside the examination site, the candidate was required to wait three years before he was given another chance; if one was found inside, he was required to wait six years. The questions were then posted. At noon the papers were collected, stamped, and returned to the candidates. Toward dusk, drums were beaten to urge the candidates to finish. The papers turned in to the examiners were given over to copyists to ensure that no candidate’s handwriting could reveal his identity. The copyists numbered the papers; folded the bottom margin of the papers over the candidates’ names, which were usually in the lower right-hand corner, and sealed them; and stamped the original answer sheets as well. An officer in charge of sealed names gathered them. The examination papers and their copies were then compared for scribal errors and turned over to the examiners. Only after the grading of papers (four grades were used) were the sealed names opened and the roster of successful candidates prepared (YC 2:2).7 The practice of sealing the candidate’s name in the examination paper was initiated in 1062 by Chŏng Yusan 鄭惟産 (d. 1091) to ensure objectivity (PrC 1:83; KS 73:4a). But at times there were irregularities. In the examination of 1416, Kim Cha 金赭 (d. 1429) took the paper of Yang Yŏgong 梁汝恭 (1378–1431), submitted it as his own, and placed first (YC 9:18). During the examination of 1436, Yun Sagyun 尹士均 happened to enter the examination site as a sightseer, was helped by his friends, and passed the examination. Later, at the palace examination, he could not answer the questions, but a whirlwind arose and blew a piece of paper to a spot in front of him. Yu picked up the piece of paper, submitted it, and again placed first. The paper belonged to Kang Hǔi 姜曦, who passed the examination three years later (YC 9:19). Once, the great scholar-statesman Ch’oe Hang 崔恒 (1409–1474) was denied candidacy as a self-supporting student (saryang

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 161 私糧) at the academy. (He paid his own board.) He submitted a memorial, took the examination, and placed first (YC 9:17). At times even high ministers played tricks on their unwitting colleagues during the examination. At the special examination given by Sejo for officials above the second rank (paryŏng si 拔英試), Yun Chayŏng 尹子榮, who was taking the examination, asked Royal Secretary Pak Chagye 朴子啓 to have paper cut to the right size and brought to him. When, toward evening, Yun asked for paper, Pak replied that he had used it himself. Yun therefore was compelled to write his answers on a sheet of paper he had used to wrap meat. The day was warm, so Yun took off his shoes to sit at the table, which was strewn with books. When he left the site for a moment, No Sasin 盧思愼 (1427–1498), one of the examiners, had the shoes and books removed, and Yun had to leave the palace barefoot. Thus handicapped, Yun placed last and was ridiculed by his colleagues (YC 7:24). Some candidates, like Pak Ch’ung 朴忠, were glad merely to pass the examination, even without distinction. Pak sent his servant to find out the results of the special examination of 1434. Upon his return, the servant reported, “You passed, but without distinction. Ch’oe Hang was first, and you last.” Pak shouted, “You old scoundrel, that’s just what I had hoped!” Since Ch’oe was young and Pak was many years his senior, the servant thought the results disgraceful. Pak, however, considered himself fortunate indeed (YC 9:16). Some, like Kang Sŏktŏk, never took the examination again after failing on the first attempt (CK 29). The king himself sometimes decided who had placed first: T’aejong chose Kwŏn To 權蹈, later Che 踶 (1387–1445), and Munjong chose Kwŏn Nam 權擥 (1416–1465), who placed first three times after several failures (PrC 1:92; 1:70). Those who placed first were treated with respect for the rest of their lives. When T’aejong passed the examination of 1383, Kim Hallo 金漢老 (1367–after 1417) placed first. Later Kim’s daughter married the king’s first son, but the king continued to call him “The First” (YC 7:1).

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At the final examination, the last of a series of five, only thirty-three successful candidates were chosen. When their names were announced, the candidate who had placed third (t’amhwarang 探花郞) would receive flowers from the king on behalf of the first-place candidate (changwŏn 壯 元) and distribute them to the others, who put them in their caps (YC 8:7). Then festivities took place, usually at the house of the candidate who had placed first, and the candidates paid visits to their teachers, relatives, and friends. They were then appointed to the Royal Confucian Academy, the Office of Diplomatic Correspondences, or the Office of Editorial Review. The court honored fathers who had produced five successful candidates; the deceased were promoted in rank, and the living received 20 sŏk of rice per year for life. Yi Yejang 李禮長 and his brothers, for example, and An Chunghu 安重厚 and his brothers, all passed the examinations (YC 8:4). Also honored were those who placed first in more than one examination (PrC 1:89). When both father and son held high office, they were envied by all. Hwang Hǔi 黃喜 (1363–1452), for example, the greatest minister under Sejong, and his son Hwang Susin 黃守身 (1407– 1467) were envied when both became chief state counselors (PrC 1:89; YC 8:5). When Chŏng Hǔmji 鄭欽之 (1378–1439) was minister of punishments, his son was inspector-general. Both were tall, handsome, and had long beards. One day they met by chance at a fair. Onlookers could only stare enviously as the son held his father’s one-wheeled vehicle and conversed with him (YC 8:18). In the Koryŏ dynasty, the ties between examiner (ǔnmun 恩門 or chwaju 座主) and student (munsaeng 門生 or sinǔn 新恩) were deep. An Hyang 安珦 (1243–1306) gave each of his thirty students a sable quilt and a carved silver cup. The tradition continued during the early Chosŏn dynasty, but examiners and students became estranged, and both sides came to harbor malice toward one another and issue mutual denunciations (YC 7:1).8

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 163 The World of Officialdom Those who passed the final examination (sillae 新來) all hoped that their high birth, talents, and rigorous preparation would bring them instant fame, but their success in officialdom depended on the entrenched bureaucracy. In the official induction ritual, a rite of status elevation,9 successful candidates were usually first “humbled.” They had to provide the following gifts: fish (poetically called “dragon”), chicken (“phoenixes”), clear wine (“the sage”), and turbid wine (“the wise”). Only after they had furnished continuous entertainment for some ten days were they allowed to sit with their seniors (YC 1:9). A ritual strictly adhered to by the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence (Sŭngmunwŏn承文院), the Office of Royal Decrees (Yemungwan藝文館), the Office of Special Counselors (Hongmungwan 弘文館), and the Office of Editorial Review (Kyosŏgwan 校書館) prescribed that newcomers pay courtesy calls on their seniors. The seniors would demand gifts to be used later to fund parties. The Office of Editorial Review would give a party in the spring, while the Office of Royal Decrees and the Royal Academy would give parties in early and late summer, respectively (YC 2:4). Newcomers to the Office of Royal Decrees were required to give parties at the time of their appointment and again after their first fifty days in office (myŏnsin 免新). Musicians and female entertainers performed, and the festivities continued until dawn, when all would rise and sing the “Song of Confucian Scholars” 翰林別曲 (Hallim pyŏlgok), clapping their hands and swaying to and fro (YC 4:23). The distinction between high and low officials in the Office of the Inspector-General was strict, and elaborate rituals were observed. Indeed, the initiation ritual for the bailiff 監察 (kamch’al) was so excessively elaborate that Sŏngjong abolished it (YC 1:17). The censors, however, whose job it was to offer remonstrances to the king, did away with empty decorum (except for the party new appointees were expected to give). Moreover, the censors knew how to mix business with pleasure: they regularly held banquets after their formal deliberations were

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finished. Sometimes they would retreat to the rear garden, where they would remove their robes and recline in a thatched arbor. They would also have pears and dates picked and sold to other offices. The revenue (in money or kind) from these sales was used to defray party expenses (YC 1:16; 2:4). By the time of Sŏng Hyŏn, the myŏnsin ordeal extended even to military offices. If the entertainment provided by the newcomers was not to their seniors’ liking, the newcomers were not allowed to sit with them even after a month had passed, a clear abuse of custom. Not even servants were exempted from this burden.10 Some, however, such as Pak Ich’ang 朴以昌 (d. 1451), refused to bribe their seniors. A man of mettle and a glib talker, Pak was not given his seat for fifty days. Finally, no longer able to suppress his anger, he took his seat anyway (YC 4:6). Some positions were coveted more than others. The royal secretary, called “the Scholar of the Silver Terrace,” was looked upon as an immortal; he reported for work early and retired late. Beginning in the time of Sejo, two secretaries were assigned to night duty. Formerly servants attached to the Secretariat had worn silver badges and purple garments and been escorted by a soldier. Sejo did away with the escort. Only when the king bestowed wine were servants allowed to wear purple (YC 1:8). In Sŏng Hyŏn’s view, the Ministry of Rites was the most elegant and least demanding of all the ministries. As minister of rites, Sŏng says, he listened to music almost every day and felt the reception of foreign envoys to be the high point in his routine (YC 2:29). But according to another, the ministry’s duties included three difficult tasks: officiating at state funerals, entertaining Japanese and Jürchen envoys, and administering examinations (YC 9:9). The most coveted position for men of letters was the directorship of the Office of Royal Decrees and the Office of Special Counselors (rank 2a). To attain it, one had first to demonstrate his mastery of all forms of writings as a drafter in the Office of Royal Decrees (4a) (PrC 2:13). These tenured writers, known as munhyŏng 文 衡, were the arbiters of literary taste and fashion in their society.

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 165 The court, where cultural norms were set, was the center of the courtier’s hopes and aspirations, and the pursuit of royal favor was intense. Few courtiers had any opportunity to display their poetic skills and eloquence, at least until they were well known. But some lucky ones did realize their dreams through chance encounters with the king. In 1465 Sejo assembled civil officials at the Kyŏnghoe Tower 慶會樓 and tested them. Ch’oe Chi 崔池 (fl. 1438–1465) strolled into the rear garden humming and there met the king, who was incognito. Not recognizing him, Ch’oe made a low bow but did not prostrate himself. Later, with the arrival of ladies-in-waiting and eunuchs, he realized his mistake and apologized. Afterward the king summoned Ch’oe and tested him in the classics and histories. His erudition was so stunning that the king immediately appointed him second assistant master (saye, rank 4a) at the academy (YC 4:26). Ch’a Ch’ŏllo 車天輅 (1556–1615) tells how an unknown student from the remote countryside was able to win the king’s favor. On the third day of the third month, Sŏngjong sent a messenger to find out how many students were at the academy. The messenger reported that there was only one, who was reciting the classics. The king summoned the student and asked him why he was staying alone. The student replied that he had no relatives or friends in the capital. When the king learned that the other students were picnicking by a stream near the academy, he told this student to go and join them. The king then sent food and wine to be placed before him and bade him invite his friends to eat. The following day, the king examined and passed him (OS 122). In another story, Ku Chongjik 丘從直 (1424–1477), while on night duty, made an unauthorized visit to Kyŏnghoe Tower, where he met Sŏngjong taking a walk. At the king’s request, Ku recited the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) from memory. The following day the king appointed him censor-general (OS 95). The importance of memorization in classical education is well known. A student usually recited or read his texts aloud until he had committed

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them to memory. By listening to their young masters reciting, even slaves and servants were often able to learn scraps of literary Chinese. The Korean culture of the day revered both the written word and the spoken word. Memory helped a writer recall the world of the classics and organize his own thoughts. It was a testimony to his powers of concentration, to his correct understanding of the texts, and to his ability to use the “places” in such texts at will, make the difficult appear easy, and use examples to present his argument effectively. Among those renowned for their memory were Cho Yong 趙庸 (d. 1424), an expert in Neo-Confucianism and headmaster of the academy for twenty years (PrC 1:40); Cho Su 趙須 (fl. 1401–1435), who lectured without notes (PrC 2:72); and Kim Mun (d. 1448) and Yun Ki 尹耆, who could recite everything in the Tongjian gangmu (Outline and details of The Comprehensive Mirror) (PrC 2:65; CK 85). Particularly impressive was Chŏng Ch’o 鄭招 (d. 1434), who could memorize a book in a single reading. A few days before an examination, he glanced at the classics and passed with flying colors. As a boy, he told a monk reciting the Diamond Scripture (Vajracchedikāprajñāpāramitā sūtra) that he could memorize the sutra in one reading. The monk bet that Chŏng would fail. The monk lost the bet and fled (YC 3:19). Im Wŏnjun 任元濬 (1423–1500) could remember the names of five hundred official female entertainers after a single glance at the roster (SS 6). These feats startle the modern reader, who has lost much of his power of memory and can no longer recognize allusions to the classics without numerous footnotes.11 There was more than one route to fame. Pong Sŏkchu 奉石柱 (d. 1465), the best polo player of the day (YC 5:21), and Hong Yunsŏng 洪 允成 (1425–1475), who helped Sejo usurp the throne, were enfeoffed (PrC 2:69; YC 2:11; OS 134). The superlative archer Kim Sejŏk 金世勣 (d. 1490) was made a royal secretary by Sŏngjong for his prowess (YC 10:5). Some won recognition for their skill in capturing tigers or thieves (YC 6:2; PrC 1:63), and even a naturalized Jürchen like Kim Soksi 金束時 enjoyed fame for his mastery of the military arts (YC 5:20). Yi Yangsaeng

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 167 李陽生 (1423–1488) was enfeoffed because of his military exploits at the time of Yi Siae’s rebellion (1467). A secondary son of low birth, Yi originally made sandals for a living, and even after gaining fame he would dismount whenever he saw his erstwhile fellow sandalmakers. What is more, though he was married to an ugly, dirty, and barren woman, a maid of Sŏng Hyŏn’s second aunt, he never thought of taking another wife (YC 4:27). Some, like Ku Chongjik, were favored by Sejo because of their imposing mien (YC 1:1). Others, like the renowned wits Ch’oe Howŏn 崔 灝元 and An Hyorye 安孝禮, won favor by amusing an insomniac king with clever stories and riddles (YC 5:18; 10:4). Sejo, tormented by guilt over his execution of his cousin Tanjong’s loyal ministers, found sleep elusive. Kim Kuji 金懼知 won recognition as a professor without ever having passed the examination. Virtuous and circumspect, Kim had many friends among the famous men of the day, though he was so poor he had no servant. He was widely known as an effective teacher; his pupils included Sŏng Hyŏn. As a teacher of eunuchs and royal kinsmen, he also taught Sŏngjong and his elder brother Prince Wŏlsan 月山大君 (1454–1488; Tŏkchong’s first son) (YC 9:4). Cho Su and Yu Pangson 柳 方孫 (1388–1443), who taught Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正 (1420–1488), were also known for their erudition. Sejong often singled out Yu Pangson, ordering the Hall of Worthies to consult him (PrC 2:72). The students of Yun Sang 尹祥 (1373–1455) included the future Tanjong (PrC 1:57).

The Perfect Gentleman The complete Confucian gentleman had to have equal mastery of classical learning and literature; the two were considered inseparable. In his day, though, Sŏng Hyŏn lamented that scholars of the classics could not write and writers did not regard the classics as the basis of learning. Kwŏn Kǔn 權近 (1352–1409) and his younger brother U 遇 (1363–1419) were well versed in exegetical scholarship and literature, though Kwŏn

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Kǔn’s writings fall short of those of Yi Saek. The Kwŏn brothers were followed by Yun Sang, Kim Ku 金鉤 (d. 1462), Kim Mal 金末 (1383– 1464), and Kim Pan 金泮 (fl. 1399–1445), all of whom served Sejong (YC 1:1). Among the scholars of the Hall of Worthies, Pak P’aengnyŏn 朴 彭年 (1417–1456) is said to have achieved a synthesis: mastery of the classics and excellence in literature and calligraphy. Ch’oe Hang, whom Sejo called a genius, excelled in parallel prose and drafted all diplomatic papers (PrC 1:73). Kim Suon 金守溫 (1409–1481), known for his prodigious scholarship and mastery of all genres of verse and prose, never wrote drafts; fully polished sentences flowed from his mind like water from a spring (YC 4:19). Kang Hǔian’s 姜希顔 (1417–1464) poetry recalled that of Wei Yingwu (b. 737) and Liu Zongyuan (773–819) (PrC 1:53), while Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s poetry recalled that of Han Yu (768–824) and Lu You (1125–1210) (YC 1:2). Also worthy of mention are Kang Hǔimaeng 姜希孟 (1424–1483), known for his natural and refined prose style; Yun Hoe 尹淮 (1380–1436), whom Sejong also praised as a genius (PrC 2:66); Im Wŏnjun; and Kim Pokch’ang (YC 1:2). The well-rounded traditional gentleman was also expected to be proficient in as many arts as possible except the martial arts—whence the widespread neglect of physical training. Prince Anp’yŏng, Kang Hǔian, and Shin Cham 申潛 (1491–1554) were accomplished in literature, calligraphy, and painting (PCR 14); Kim Sŏ 金鉏 in poetry, calligraphy, and music (YC 2:16); and Pak P’aengnyŏn and Yu Hoin in poetry, prose, and calligraphy. The scholarship of Pyŏn Kyeryang 卞季良 (1369–1430), by contrast, was superficial and his prose flaccid (YC 1:2; 3:16). Kong Sŏk 孔 碩 was well read in the classics but could not write a single piece of correspondence (YC 1:1). Nam Kyeyŏng 南季瑛 (fl. 1423–1438) twice placed first in examinations and studied Neo-Confucianism but was ridiculed for not appreciating the poetry of Du Fu (YC 10:29). Sŏ Kŏjŏng was critical of some masters of the past—especially of Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn 崔致遠 (b. 857) (PrC 2:20)12 and Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151), whose Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms he viewed as a mere compilation of verbatim quotations from Chinese sources (PrC 2:31). Sŏ himself was crit-

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 169 icized by Sŏng Hyŏn for using shoddy standards in compiling his Tong munsŏn (Anthology of Korean literature in Chinese, 1478) (YC 10:17). To be known in China was a cherished dream of the literati. To Ŏ Sukkwŏn’s list of such renowned writers (PC 2:20) we might add the names of Ŏ Segyŏm 魚世謙 (1430–1500), who impressed Chinese officials with his knowledge of poetry and protocol (PC 1:46); So Seyang 蘇 世讓 (1486–1562), whose poems were admired by Minister Xia Yan 夏 言 (1534) (PC 4:53); and Chŏng Saryong 鄭士龍 (1491–1570), who maintained close ties with former envoys (PC 4:50). Some made the best use of their gifts during the visits of Chinese envoys. The competition for royal favor and a desire to be known in China motivated much of their forwardness in their dealings with the Chinese. Ni Jian 倪謙 (who came to Korea in 1450) is said to have been impressed by Chŏng Inji’s 鄭麟 趾 learning and poetry (PrC 1:68); Chen Jian 陳鑑 (came in 1457) and Zhang Ning 張寧 (came in 1460), by Pak Wŏnhyŏng’s 朴元亨 (1411– 1469) encyclopedic knowledge of precedent (PrC 1:75); Wu Ximeng 吳 希孟 (came in 1537), by Chŏng Saryong’s rhymeprose (PC 2:45); and Qi Shun 祁順 (came in 1476), by Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s poems (PC 1:32). Hŏ Chong 許琮 (1434–1494), with his imposing mien and encyclopedic knowledge, impressed Dong Yue 董越 (came in 1488), Wang Chang 王敞 (came in 1488), and Ai Pu 艾璞 (came in 1492) (PC 4:24). As mentioned earlier, Ku Chongjik impressed Sejo with his imposing mien, although he had other laudable qualities such as a good memory. The account of his meteoric rise to power may have been intended to underscore the fact that fame often comes fortuitously and that the ruler’s whim, rather than virtue and learning, determines the destiny of some. Even so, it was commonly believed that one born with distinguished features—the “beauty of countenance and graceful carriage” of Castiglione (1:19)—was destined to be exceptional.13 Great monarchs were commonly portrayed as possessing “a prominent nose and a dragon face”—for example, T’aejo, T’aejong, Sejong, and Munjong. The fortunes of some ministers too were bound up with their appearance. Chŏng

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Kapson 鄭甲孫 was majestic in stature with a splendid beard (YC 4:3); so were Hong Iltong 洪逸童 (d. 1464) and Chŏng Inji (YC 4:11). The Liuqiu envoy who came in 1477 told the interpreter that one of the “three splendors” he saw in Korea was the noble mien of Chief State Counselor Chŏng Inji (YC 7:21). Hŏ Chong, the greatest minister under Sŏngjong (PCR 29), was said to be eleven cha tall (over three meters––clearly a hyperbole) (OS 124). The miscellany writer also had a keen eye for those poorly endowed by nature. Thin and feeble Kim Hyŏnbo 金賢甫 was the butt of jokes by Ŏ Segong 魚世恭 (YC 9:30). A certain Shin is described as being short and bent and having a brown beard, while Shin In 辛鏻 was tall, largeeyed, and cowardly (YC 10:25). Kim Yangil 金亮一 was blind in one eye; Ch’ae Su suggested that he implant a dog’s eye and then added, “But then you will think the privy is filled with delicacies” (YC 1:20; CK 7). Wŏn Poryun’s 元甫崙 nose is described as being “as red as the fruit of the hawthorn” (YC 7:13). Even some eminent figures merited mention. For example, it is noted that Ŏ Hyoch’ŏm had thick lips (PrC 1:31). Sŏng Kan 成侃 (1427– 56), who died of overstudy, was so ugly that Sejo remarked, “You’re talented, but because of your looks I don’t want you serving me as royal secretary” (PrC 2:75; CK 35). A certain Song was ugly, narrow-minded, and crosseyed. After passing the examinations, he served as a provincial teacher before being assigned to instruct female physicians, who had been chosen from among young public servants. Surrounded by powdered girls, he was like “an old bear crouching among flowering trees” (YC 7:13). We may attribute these portraits to the prevalence of physiognomy, for at times there is some attempt to connect people’s looks with their personalities. For instance, the corpulent Kang Hǔian’s love of pork is contrasted with his penchant for gorgeous attire (YC 6:5). But when the writer casually mentions that the short, brown-bearded Shin was unre-

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 171 lenting, disliked the watershield plant and mushrooms, and was ridiculed in a poem (YC 8:25), we fail to see the connection. Jealousies, rivalries, and selfishness among courtiers often led to calumny and violent reversals of fortune. Yi Chonghak 李種學 (1361– 92), the son of Yi Saek, was falsely accused and executed. Before his death, he summoned his two sons and told them: “My literary fame has brought me to this pass. Never take the examination, and be careful.” His sons followed their father’s injunction (YC 3:20). To the modern reader, Kim Chongsŏ 金宗瑞 (1390–1453) seems exemplary as a statesman and as the commander of the army that pacified the northern border. He possessed both valor and wisdom (he was nicknamed “Great Tiger”), but his mind was poisoned by jealousy. When Hwangbo In 皇甫仁 (d. 1453) was first royal secretary, Kim, who was second secretary, made light of him. Then An Sungsŏn 安崇善 (1392–1453) took Hwangbo’s place, and Kim resented him. When An, as minister of war, was later implicated in a crime and banished, it was generally thought to have been Kim’s doing (YC 3:35). When Sŏng Yŏwan 成汝完 (1309–1397) reprimanded his son Sŏng Sŏngnin 成石璘 (1338–1423), a master of poetry and calligraphy, for displaying his poetic talent, it was because he worried that the son might be slandered (YC 9:11; TSh 2:28). Victims of disparagement were many, but it was indeed difficult to hide one’s brilliance and win recognition at the same time. Some protected themselves by feigning madness, blindness, or idiocy (YC 3:6). Another hazard for writers, especially those who wrote diplomatic papers, was insufficient knowledge either of contemporary literary taste and style in China or of the Chinese emperor’s temperament. Memorials by the best writers of the day might be subjected to intense scrutiny in search of outmoded expressions (PC 1:13), inappropriate allusions and metaphors, or unintended breaches of decorum. The founder of the Ming (r. 1368–1398) pored over every memorial sent him. When he found disrespectful passages, he would order the writer arrested and brought to him for judgment. Kim Yakhang 金若恒 (d. 1397) and Chŏng Ch’ong

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鄭摠 (1358–1397) were sent to Nanking, sentenced to banishment somewhere else, and died. Later the emperor allowed two family members to come to claim the bodies, but they could not be found. An old maid of the Kim household, pretending to be a member of the family, went as far as the Yangzi, but she too returned empty-handed (YC 3:14). Stupefied with grief over his father’s death in China, Kim Ch’ŏ 金處 became demented. Cheated by children and women and abused by servants, he would sleep during the day and, when he awoke, would dance, wail, and sing the “Song of Kwandong” (Kwandong pyŏlgok), by An Ch’uk 安軸 (1287–1348). At night he would wander about, humming the tune (YC 3:26). Possibly he found solace in poetry. The master calligrapher Ch’oe Hǔnghyo 崔興孝 was flogged and banished for no more than failing to include the date in a memorial to Emperor Chengzu (r. 1403–1425) (YC 10:32). Yet minor slips by officiators, such as the miscopying of their own names in the prayer offered at the royal tomb, sometimes went unpunished (YC 7:5). When the censor Hyŏn Maengin 玄孟仁 could not read a certain word in a prayer at the royal sacrifice, however, T’aejong angrily demoted him to myriarch (YC 7:4). Yi Chŏngbo 李廷甫 was once reprimanded by Sŏngjong for his poor handwriting (YC 10:31).

From Integrity to Eccentricity The demands upon the Confucian gentleman were exhausting, and he sometimes showed signs of strain. A symbol of order, authority, privilege, and tradition, he constantly sought to achieve perfection in both virtue and knowledge. Like the gentleman of Renaissance Italy, he held nonchalance, grace, and ease as his highest ideals.14 His exalted place in society called for the full use of his talents and accomplishments, but without design or calculation. As a public servant, he had to be a mirror of fashion and a model of righteous behavior. Since he emphasized the importance of rule by virtue and example to his sovereign, he himself had to embody this traditional social ideal. His every action was measured against the norm, and he was under constant scrutiny.

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 173 In his portraits, the miscellany writer chose essential personality traits that required illustration by anecdote. Some traits transform persons into types, but not all approximate the ideal Confucian gentleman. The aim of the portraitist was not to draw a complex image but to set the subject apart from others by selectively depicting his manner of speaking, his opinions, his personal idiosyncrasies, and his likes and dislikes. Successful portraits are more than mere variations on the theme of the ideal gentleman; each shows how its subject understood and exemplified the values and qualities that defined his culture. At the same time, each portraitist spoke for his own class and culture; although he refrained from overt praise or disparagement, it is not difficult to recognize what he most admired. Hwang Hǔi is portrayed as magnanimous, tolerant, and unconcerned with trifles. He would seldom reveal his feelings. When urchins pilfered the cherries from his garden, he would merely say, “Leave some for me.” If a servant’s child urinated on his book, he would simply wipe it off. When the children of slaves pummeled him, he would playfully protest, “Ouch, that hurts.” He was wont to say, “Slaves, too, were created by heaven; how could I mistreat them?” (PrC 1:49; YC 3:17; CK 5; PCR 15). Another example of tolerance is Sŏng Sahyŏng 成士衡. One night while he lay awake, a maid sneaked into his room, slit open a sack, and stole some rice. The following morning, his wife began to beat the maids and servants. Sŏng then told her he knew who the culprit was. “Why didn’t you wake me?” asked his wife. “I didn’t want to disturb your sleep,” he replied (YC 9:21). Pak Ansin 朴安新 (1369–1447) is an example of resourcefulness and integrity. As fourth inspector, he, together with Maeng Sasŏng 孟思 誠 (1360–1438), interrogated Cho Taerim 趙大臨 (1387–1430), lord of P’yŏngyang, without royal permission (1408). When he learned of this, T’aejong shook with rage and had Pak and Maeng carted through the streets to be beheaded. Maeng was trembling, but Pak managed to scribble on a piece of broken tile the reasons the inspector-general’s

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office was important to the state, and had the tile taken to the palace. Second State Counselor Sŏng Sŏngnin then remonstrated with the king, and Maeng and Pak were spared (PrC 1:41; YC 3:22; TSh 1:35). This episode contains indirect censure of a king who acted in anger, his power untempered with piety, as well as indirect praise of one who accepts good counsel. In Chosŏn-dynasty Korea, temptations of profit and delight were many and those beyond reproach were few. One of these was Hŏ Cho 許 稠 (1369–1439), known for his purity, discipline, and exemplary management of his household. Thin, efficient, impartial, and strict with his subordinates, he was nicknamed the “Haggard Eagle Minister” (YC 9:23). One day Inspector-General Chŏng Kapson 鄭甲孫 (d. 1451) requested that the throne impeach Chief State Counselor Ha Yŏn 河演 (1376–1453) and Minister of Personnel Ch’oe Pu 崔府 (1370–1452) for employing the wrong men. The king defended both officials. After the audience, when they came out into the garden, Ha and Ch’oe were dripping with sweat. With no sign of fear or regret, the urbane Chŏng remarked: “Each of us is trying to discharge his proper duties. I have nothing against you two.” Then he said to a petty official, “These gentlemen seem to be feeling the heat. Fan them!” (YC 4:3; CK 34). While Chŏng was governor of Hamgil, his son passed the provincial examination. Upon his return from Seoul, Chŏng scolded the examiner: “My son’s learning is shallow. How could he have passed?” He then deleted his son’s name from the roster (PrC 1:65). As ministers of personnel, both Hŏ Sŏng 許誠 (1382–1442) and Ku Ch’igwan 具致寬 (1406–1470) rejected all requests for favors. If someone asked Hŏ Sŏng for a position in Seoul, he would post him to the northern border (PrC 2:38; CK 28); in order to ensure fairness in employment, Ku Ch’igwan would consult his colleagues before filling even a low office (PrC 1:72). Han Kyehǔi 韓繼禧 (1423–1482) is commended for his modesty in declining Sejo’s offer to appoint him minister of personnel on the grounds that he was not equal to the task (PrC 2:49).

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 175 Those known for uprooting official corruption were also known for their modesty and poverty. They knew the relative value of wealth and power, as well as the workings of fortune. Their denial of ambition was often a veiled criticism of contemporary affairs. The unaffected An Chi 安止 (1377–1464), director of the Office of Royal Decrees and first minister without portfolio, lived in a thatched cottage near Mount Inwang. Often he went without food, but he was unconcerned (YC 10:33). Yu Kwan 柳寬 (1346–1433), director of the Office of Royal Decrees and second deputy director of state records, also lived in a small cottage and would receive guests at the gate in sandals or barefoot, even in winter. Like the beatus vir, he often tended his vegetable garden, preferring solitude to society (PrC 1:44; YC 4:1). T’aejong had hedges planted for him at night and sent him food and delicacies (CK 6; Chibong yusŏl 15:147). When, during the monsoon, Yu’s roof leaked, he sat under an umbrella. Turning to his wife, he asked, “How would one get by without an umbrella in this rain?” “He’d have made other preparations,” his wife replied. Others oblivious to household economy include Kim Suon, who once had a huge locust tree in his garden cut down because he needed firewood to cook rice (YC 4:19); Hŏ Chong 許琮 (1434–1494); Maeng Sasŏng; Son Sunhyo; and Kim Pokch’ang, who preferred to rent rather than buy his own house (YC 6:14). Magistrates were bulwarks of the social order and had to exemplify sterling behavior. They existed to serve the people. Greedy ones were often satirized in poems and drama (PC 2:6, 7), and some therefore attempted to protect their name from detractors. As magistrate of Hapch’ŏn, Cho O 趙吾 did not allow his family to eat perch, the local product, even when the fish were rotting in the summer heat (PrC 1:54). As magistrate of Yŏnan, Ki Kŏn 奇虔 (d. 1460) would not touch the crucian carp. As magistrate of Cheju, he would not eat globefish for three years for the general public’s consumption, for which he is praised (PrC 1:61).

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Son Sunhyo 孫舜孝 (1427–1497) is cited for his sincerity and honesty. As governor of Kangwŏn, he prayed for rain. When it began to rain one night, he went down to the courtyard and thanked heaven. When a petty official came out with an umbrella, Son said, “How can I use an umbrella when I’m praying to heaven?” As governor of Kyŏngsang, he would dismount and bow twice, even in the rain, whenever he passed a gate marking a filial son or chaste woman. Thus, we are told, he honored the virtuous and encouraged the people to emulate him (YC 7:6). Examples of devoted sons include Kim Hŏ 金虛, the son of Kim Yakhang, who after the death of his mother spent three years in a thatched hut near her grave reciting passages from the Book of Filial Piety. The sound of his voice, clear and sorrowful, moved everyone within earshot to tears (YC 3:37). Similarly, the keening of Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492) drew tears from passersby (CN 11). Sŏng Sŏngnin’s prayer was enough to cure his father when he was ill (PrC 1:45), and Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s filial piety helped him interpret a dream that told him of his mother’s death while he was traveling to China (PC 1:31). Pak Hǔimun 朴希文 sliced flesh from his thigh to serve to his ailing mother (PC 2:31). Cho Ŏjŏng 趙於玎, by contrast, though his gate was marked for his devotion to the memory of his mother, later turned out to be a henchman of an evil minister and was put to death (PC 2:34). Similarly, a private slave who had obtained the honor due a filial son by bribery indulged in extortion as a clerk and died under the heavy bamboo stave (PC 2:36). Those who disregarded their own appearance include Chŏng Tojŏn, who once came to court wearing one white shoe and one black (PrC 1:38). When Yi Sach’ŏl 李思哲 (1405–1456) and his friends forgot to bring a wine cup on an excursion to Mount Samgak, Yi used his friend’s horsehide shoe as a substitute (PrC 1:64). Hong Iltong 洪逸童 (d. 1464), who wrote sinewy verse and spoke Chinese well, was not concerned with cleanliness: he would seldom wash his face or comb his hair. When fishing, he would cut earthworms with his teeth if he could not find a knife. When he accompanied Sejo to China, he once kindled horse

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 177 dung to warm a bun. Of him Sejo joked, “This man is unclean; he cannot officiate at a sacrifice” (YC 4:11). Some, however, preferred appearance to substance. When a certain Mok was enrolled in one of the Five Commands, he arrived in full martial array but could not hit the target once. This incident gave rise to an expression used to describe one who is showy: “Moksŏbang kŏan” 睦書房擧案 (Mr. Mok’s preparation) (YC 5:25). The portraitist also collected samples of likes and dislikes, which often reveal a person’s character. One day Nam Kan 南簡 (fl. 1419– 1436) visited a superior and was served meat. When he refused to eat, his host remarked, “Your obstinacy is absurd.” Nam, however, believed himself to be fastidious and modest. Before his death, he asked that all his fingernail and toenail clippings be put in his coffin. “This is the way to fulfill propriety!” he added (YC 3:41). Ki Kon abstained from abalone; Kim Hyŏnbo 金賢甫 eschewed beef (YC 10:16); Chŏng Yŏch’ang 鄭汝昌 (1450–1504) would not touch scallions, garlic, or meat (SMN 4). Among those with marked eccentricities was Kim Suon, who would tear pages from any book he wanted to commit to memory. Needless to say, no one wished to loan him books (YC 4:19). Ŏ Hyoch’ŏm would carry his rain gear even on sunny days; “How do you know it won’t rain today?” he would ask (YC 9:29). An Wŏn 安瑗, who loved hawks and dogs, had the habit of caressing his hawk with his left hand while turning the pages of a book with his right. Once, on his way to Seoul, Yi Ch’ŏm 李瞻 (1345–1405) heard someone reading aloud in a mountain valley: it was An Wŏn reading the Tongjian gangmu, a hawk perched on his left hand (YC 3:25). A certain Shin could not stand flies (YC 6:37). Another hater of the summer flies was a military man named Yang. As magistrate of Kwangju, he ordered his subordinates to bring him at least one peck of dead flies every day. Some had to trade hemp for flies in order to satisfy him (YC 7:32). Pyŏn Kyeryang was stubborn, stingy, and never loaned anything to anybody. While he was compiling the Kukcho pogam (Treasure mirror of the reigning dynasty), Sejong bestowed food upon

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him and ministers sent in delicacies and wine. He hoarded the food until it rotted, giving none away to his servants (PrC 1:47; YC 3:16; Chibong yusŏl 15:152). Two officials, Yi and Paek, were dismissed as magistrates when they failed to show hospitality to their friends and superiors (YC 7:9). Conversely, Kim Sŏ, who loved to entertain, continued to visit his friends in a bamboo sedan chair even after his legs became paralyzed (YC 2:16). Some characters are the subject of humorous anecdotes. Chŏng Chayŏng 鄭自英 (d. 1474) was given a fledgling falcon by the king. He did not know how to hold it, however, and it scratched his hands. “What does it eat?” he asked. “It eats raw meat,” his colleagues replied. Chŏng said, “We don’t have any raw meat––only some dried venison. I’ll soak it in water first. Will that do?” (YC 4:13). When appointed headmaster of the academy, Yi Ch’ik 李則 worried about the commuting distance (YC 9:20). The honesty of the scholar Kim Chongnyŏn 金宗蓮 verged on naïveté. When Sejo was about to offer sacrifices to the spirits of mountains and rivers, Kim, as bailiff, was ordered to look after the sacrificial animals. When the oxen refused to eat, Kim addressed them: “Oxen, oxen, why don’t you eat your food? Try harder, lest I be blamed.” (YC 7:25). A certain Minister Min’s attachment to life is illustrated by the following episode. On New Year’s Day, one of his cousins said, “May you live a hundred years.” Min drove him out. Another said, “May you live a hundred years and then another hundred,” and Min received him warmly (YC 2:25). One who possessed a special skill was Yi Haeng 李行 (1352–1432). He once visited with Sŏng Sŏgyŏn 成石珚 (d. 1414; Sŏng Hyŏn’s great-grandfather). Tea was prepared for him, but in the process some water leaked out of the pot and more was added. When Yi tasted the tea he declared, “You used two different kinds of water” (YC 3:29). Unlike Castiglione’s courtier, whose true profession was that of arms, the Confucian gentleman in Chosŏn Korea was almost exclusively devoted to letters. He might spend his leisure time practicing calligraphy, drawing, or playing a musical instrument. In addition to annual obser-

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 179 vances, he might accompany the king hunting or watching fireworks and naval exercises (YC 1:13).15 He might go fishing, play dice or chess, or indulge in a game called “pitching arrows into a pot.” But seldom would he engage in physical exercise, which was the province of the military corps. One of his chief pastimes was writing poetry and exchanging poems with his friends (or capping their poems). A gathering of friends was the usual occasion for such diversion; wine, women, and music were the main ingredients. Gentlemen and wine were inseparable. Wine was a means of release from anxieties and fear—in Tao Qian’s words, a “caredispelling thing” (“After Drinking Wine,” 7:3), the best medicine to ease the tensions besetting the gentleman.16 Among early Chosŏn kings, Sŏngjong was known for his love of strong liquor. Perhaps due to overindulgence, he would sometimes vomit blood, spattering the white screen in his room (OS 108, 120). The seeds of Yŏnsangun’s 燕山君 love of wine and women are said to have been sown by his father. Gentlemen were expected to demonstrate their capacity for wine at royal entertainments or receptions for foreign envoys. Yi Sungmun 李 淑文, for example, was singled out by the Liuqiu envoy for the way he gulped down wine (YC 7:21). Such illustrious ministers as Nam Sumun 南秀文, Ch’oe Ch’iun 崔致雲 (1390–1440), and Yun Hoe 尹淮 were all reprimanded by Sejong for their heavy drinking (PrC 1:60; 2:66). Hong Yunsŏng 洪允成, who abused royal favor by killing his own uncle and misused his power, was nicknamed “The Whale” by Sejo because of his huge capacity for drink (OS 134).17 Chŏng Yŏch’ang 鄭汝昌, once a great drinker, abstained after being reprimanded by his mother (SMN 4). Those who virtually lived on wine include Sŏ Kŏjŏng, Hong Iltong 洪逸童 (d. 1464) (PrC 1:79), Son Sunhyo, and Chŏng Inji (CK 88). When summoned by Sŏngjong, Son Sunhyo arrived late and quite drunk, but somehow managed to draft a memorial to the Ming court. One day at a royal entertainment he fell down drunk and began to snore; the king covered him with his own gown (OS 111). Son even asked that a bottle of strong liquor be placed under his tombstone. Victims of wine include Prince Ch’uksan

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竺山君, Min Poik 閔輔翼 (fl. 1483), and An Ǔngse 安應世; the last died at the age of twenty-six (YC 9:31). The educational function of music had classical authority. Music, which embodies melody and rhythm, was seen as reflecting cosmic and political harmony. Former kings therefore used it to “adorn the transforming influence of instruction and transform manners and customs.” Pak Yŏn 朴堧 (1378–1458), who became director of the Office of Royal Decrees, was a master of many musical instruments and had perfect pitch. He helped Sejong regulate all aspects of court music, especially the renovation of music performed at royal sacrificial rites and the manufacture of bells and chimes (1423–1431). Pak was held in great esteem. Whether standing or sitting, he would place his hands on his chest and practice fingering (PrC 1:19; CK 71; YC 2:21). At the time of Sejo’s usurpation (1454), he was dismissed and decided to return home. During a farewell party in the boat, Pak played his large transverse flute three times before taking leave of his well-wishers (YC 8:26). Maeng Sasŏng 孟 思誠, known for his honesty and simplicity, also played the large transverse flute well. Visitors could tell whether he was in or out by listening for the sound of his flute 笛 (PrC 1:41). Chŏng Ku 鄭矩 (1350–1418) and his brother Chŏng Pu 鄭符 were masters of the black zither 玄琴 (hyŏngǔm), a six-stringed instrument that was plucked. Every time his wife was away, Chŏng Pu would play the zither and gaze at the clouds and hills (YC 3:26). Pak Kon 朴棍, the secondary son of a prince, was a great teacher of music well versed in both theory and performance. The undisputed virtuoso of the twelve-stringed zither of Kaya 伽倻琴 (kayagǔm) in Sŏng Hyŏn’s time was the octogenarian Kim Toch’i 金都 致. Yu Panghyo 柳方孝, barred from holding office because his father had suffered banishment, knew music theory (YC 2:15). Sŏng Hyŏn also mentions a number of musicians from other classes, including some accomplished female entertainers (YC 1:5).

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 181 Men, Women, and Romance Women of the upper class seldom appear in the miscellanies, except in stories with a didactic intent. Examples include the jealous wife of Yi Maenggyun 李孟畇 (1371–1440), who was her husband’s undoing (YC 3:18); the nymphomaniac Pak Ŏudong 朴於于洞, daughter of a wealthy official who married a royal kinsman and, with the help of her maid, seduced young officials and hoodlums and was finally executed by royal decree (1480) (YC 5:22; CN 17; Sŏngjong sillok 120:1b and 122:6a–7a); and the concubine of a soldier who remarried after his death, thereby breaking her earlier vow of chastity (PC 2:37). One official who had his young widowed daughter remarry was dismissed from office (PC 4:34). Unmarried daughters of the nobility were seldom allowed to go out. When the daughters of a certain Minister Yun wished to view the welcoming ceremony for the Chinese envoy, their father told them a moral tale and dissuaded them from venturing out (YC 5:10). Marriages were always arranged, and a young woman never saw or met her prospective bridegroom before the ceremony; thus we find episodes in which two brides were wed to the wrong men (CK 23) and two old widowers were rebuffed by younger women who had a chance to peek at them (YC 6:27). The candid reply of one educated girl is refreshing. Once many matchmakers thronged about her. One said she knew a good writer, another a good archer, a third a rich man, and a fourth a man whose member was so powerful that if a bag full of stones were attached to it, he could swing it over his head. The girl chose this last man (YC 6:8). Antifeminine invective reminiscent of the fabliau is rare, as are tales of misfortune befalling married men. The miscellany writer remained silent on the place of women in society. Most amorous anecdotes concern romance between the literati and the female entertainers (or sometimes female slaves) in the capital and in the provinces. For example, Ŏ Sukkwŏn records the romances between Kang Hon 姜渾 (1465–1519) and Ǔndaesŏn 銀臺仙 (PC 2:10); Shin Chongho 申從護 (1456–1597) and Sangimch’un 上林春 (PC 4:9); Shin Yonggae 申用漑 (1463–1519) and

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Sadŏk 四德, an official slave girl (PC 4:10); and the competition among Prince Hǔngwŏn 興原君, Yi Subong, and Ch’oe Kukkwang 崔國光 for the affections of Soch’unp’ung 笑春風 (Chuckling spring breeze) (PC 4:13), who won renown after entertaining Sŏngjong (OS 115). Most such episodes were the subjects of poems by the literati. According to Sŏng Hyŏn, the gifts sent by the bridegroom to the bride had formerly included cloth. On the eve of the wedding, moreover, clansmen were entertained with a meal and three cups of wine. In Sŏng’s day the bridegroom sent silks and satins, sometimes dozens of rolls, and guests were entertained lavishly. The bridegroom’s saddle was magnificently appointed, and he was usually followed by a man carrying a chest of valuables. After the law forbade this practice, the chest was sent before the marriage (YC 1:10). When Yu Hyot’ong’s 兪孝通 (fl. 1403–1431) son married a daughter of Hwangbo In, he sent three chests of books as a wedding present (CK 63). Governor Ham Purim 咸傅霖 (1360–1410) loved a certain female entertainer. When his term ended, he gave her his badge so that she could follow him, but her love proved fleeting (YC 8:9). Scholar Kim’s love affair with a certain Taejungnae 待重來 had a happier ending: after the two parted, Kim’s wife died; Kim then married Taejungnae, who later bore him two sons (YC 5:23). While studying for the examinations in a mountain retreat, Kwŏn Kyŏngyu 權景裕 and Yu Sunjŏng 柳順汀 heard of the beauty of the female entertainer Okpuhyang 玉膚香 (Fragrance of jade skin) from her brother. They fell in love with her and made a pact that the first to pass the examinations would become her lover. Kwŏn and Yu both passed after three years, but Kwŏn was first to locate Okpuhyang and realize his dream (CN 20). Such happy endings were rare. An example of a dullard who was the victim of unbridled desire is a certain Pak, who accompanied Sŏng Hyŏn to Peking. Pak was dirtylooking, simple-minded, and rustic, but whenever he saw a beautiful female entertainer en route he would make every effort to form a liaison with her. A handsome student once powdered himself and dressed up

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 183 as a woman just to fool him. At Ǔiju, Pak could not bear to part with a young lady and cried until his eyes were red (YC 7:33). Some men were deceived by fickle and faithless women. Chŏn Mok 全 穆 loved a female entertainer named Golden Orchid in Ch’ungju. When they parted, she vowed that she would be faithful until Mount Wŏrak crumbled, but soon she took a station master as her lover (YC 6:9). Upon finding his concubine sleeping with another man, a certain scholar who was quick tempered and liked cleanliness tried to restrain the couple by force. Failing in this, he fell on the ground speechless and soon expired (YC 3:40). The famous and clever female entertainer Purple Cloud 紫 雲 would grade the gentlemen she had entertained. When an inexperienced female entertainer at Suwŏn refused a guest and was flogged, she protested: “That whore Pak Ŏudong was punished for her lechery, but I am punished for not being lewd. Why are the country’s laws so iniquitous?” (YC 6:13). Prince Yŏngch’ŏn 永川君 had to yield his beautiful mistress, Chadongsŏn 紫洞仙 (Transcendent of the Purple Grotto), to the Chinese envoy Jin Shi 金湜 (came in 1464), who had heard of her reputation in China (CK 65). The following episode seems to praise a marriage that crossed social boundaries and was based on undying love. A certain An, member of a powerful family in Seoul, was a widower. He married a beautiful girl, the maid of a high minister. When An’s brothers protested to the minister because he gave An preferential treatment, the minister had the couple separated but they kept on meeting in secret. The minister finally decided to marry the maid off to another of his servants, but she committed suicide on the eve of the wedding. As An was walking home three days later, he saw a well-dressed woman following him. Upon closer examination, the woman proved to be his dead wife. Though he ran away in fright, she followed him. He ran into his home, but she was waiting for him there. Soon he lost his mind and died (YC 5:11). Some men, including Prince Chean 齊安君, Han Kyŏnggi 韓景琦 (1472–1529), and Kim Sŏ’s son (YC 2:17; PC 2:71), shunned women

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for various reasons. But others found female charms irresistible. Hong Ch’ŏngi 洪天起, a beautiful woman official in the Bureau of Painting, was accused of a crime and arrested at the same time that the young Sŏ Kŏjŏng was arrested for disorderly conduct. By chance, both were kept in the same prison, and Sŏ found himself unable to avert his eyes from Hong. When Inspector-General Nam Chi 南智 (fl. 1435–1453) intervened to obtain Sŏ’s release, the latter deeply regretted having to part with his beautiful companion (YC 6:29).

Monks and Nuns Monks (and occasionally nuns) are often the butt of satire in the miscellanies; they stand accused of greed, avarice, and sexual proclivities. Often they were beaten and robbed by enterprising young students in the academy (YC 6:30; 9:14). The anti-Buddhist sentiment of the literati generally echoed the state’s official policy of proscribing Buddhism as heterodoxy. Nonetheless, most early Chosŏn kings espoused Buddhism at one time or another, except for T’aejong (his second son, Hyoryŏng, however, was a pious Buddhist) (YC 5:16) and Sŏngjong. Under Sejo’s protection of Buddhism, officials could not restrain apostate monks, and even students in the academy offered the king religious relics (no doubt counterfeits) in hopes of winning royal favor (YC 8:1; Yejong sillok 5:22b). According to one estimate, some eighty thousand monks received certificates of ordination. Skimming over Buddhist scripture by reading the beginning, middle, and end of each chapter was common practice (YC 2:22). Despite an official ban, it was customary for the literati to call in monks to chant prayers before the dead 法席 (pŏpsŏk) and to make the seventh-day offering, which was held in a mountain temple and attended by relatives, friends, and colleagues. A monk officiated at memorial services 僧齋 (sǔngjae) as well. King Sŏngjong later prohibited this and forbade the issuing of certificates to monks (YC 1:15). He also banished an examination candidate when he suggested in his essay on national policy that the government erect monasteries as a means

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 185 of warding off calamity (PC 2:9). The royalty and literati usually had small temples erected near their tombs (though T’aejong had none), not because they were Buddhists, but because they wanted monks to guard their remains (YC 2:20). Monks, too, had examinations, and the first in line to succeed his teacher used to play tricks on him (YC 5:4). Some monks were variously accomplished, and others were unusual in other ways. Tunu 屯雨, the chief disciple of Honsu 混修 (Hwanam 幻 庵, 1320–1392)18 and an accomplished poet, was often consulted by the scholars of the Hall of Worthies. Even in his nineties, he sat up straight and read books throughout the night, never reclining and never closing his eyes. He wrote a poem for the Japanese envoy, the monk Bunkei 文 溪 (YC 6:19). The monk Haech’o 海超 at Naksan Monastery was quick at repartee (YC 6:11). Iram 一庵 was pure and determined. Although mediocre in poetry and in his knowledge of the Buddhist texts, he cultivated friendships with high and low; Shin Sukchu was his protector. Iram was often visited by Chinese envoys in his retreat in Munhwa (noodles were his favorite dish) (YC 7:30). The tall monk Changwŏnsim 長遠心 would sleep under walls and lie down in the marketplace when sick. He frequently prayed for rain or other calamities, and loved to bury abandoned corpses. Once he tried to immolate himself but was unable to go through with it. His disciples, however, thought he was dead and grieved for him. When they returned to the monastery, they found him sitting in the meditation hall. “I have returned from the Western Paradise,” he said. “My earthly body is gone, but the Dharma body abides” (YC 6:20). One monk remarked to another, “As a monk you should cultivate the Path in the mountains. Why are you doing humble chores like repairing bridges, roads, and wells?” The monk replied, “When I was young, my master told me to practice austerities for ten years. I did as I was told, but it was fruitless. Then I was told to read the Lotus Scripture (Saddharmapuṇḍarika sūtra) one hundred times; again it was ineffective. I’ve therefore resolved to do small deeds for the country” (YC 7:10). Another, who

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was small and limped, would tour every house of the rich and noble. He was so good at mimicking the sounds of the cock and hen that he was known as the “Crowing Monk.” He would sing ditties that were similar in tune and rhythm to the farmers’ songs sung by thousands of children. He once boasted, “My servants outnumber those of the three state counselors” (YC 6:21). To win renown and amass wealth, the evil monk Hakcho 學祖 (fl. 1464–1520) had his disciple turn a statue of Buddha around and then asserted that it had walked by itself (1480). Ch’oe Harim 崔河臨 (1455– 1486) sent five memorials to Sŏngjong concerning Hakcho’s charlatanism, but Hakcho went unpunished (YC 6:22). Sinsu 信修 of P’aju was a dissipated monk who lived with the young wife of a poor old man who had come with her to seek shelter in the monastery. The woman gave birth to a son and daughter. Sinsu also drank heavily and ate meat. Once he declared, “It is better to give in to one’s desires than to suppress them!” (YC 6:22). Another monk, in Pogwang Monastery, secretly kept a wife in the village. When he died, he became a snake. During the day the snake stayed in a jar; at night it slept in the woman’s room. Sŏng Hyŏn’s father-in-law had the jar brought to him, enticed the snake into a box, and sealed it. After having Buddhist rites performed, he had the box thrown into the river. Nothing more happened to the widow (YC 5:9). When a certain monk tried to make love to a beautiful widow, he was bound to a pillar and clubbed by the widow’s young lover (YC 5:7; 5:5, 25).19 Nuns too broke their vows. Under Sŏngjong, all nunneries in the capital were destroyed except for one. Although the nuns were driven out beyond the East Gate, some of the older ones still managed to defraud widows and indulge in extortion (YC 8:2).

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 187 Healers and Merchants Most medical men came from the “middle people” class; if they made names for themselves, they might be given posts. No Chungnye 盧重禮, for example, correctly diagnosed a scholar’s fever and headache as being caused by a fall a year before and cured him. The famous physician Paek Kwirin 白貴麟 never charged fees and therefore eked out a scanty livelihood. The Chinese envoy saw him and asked, “Who is that old man in tatters?” The interpreter replied, “He never takes other people’s things. He’s so dirty because he spends most of his time in the tavern.” (YC 4:12). The envoy is said to have respected Paek. The perfect physician was rare, however, and the miscellany writer delighted in lampooning charlatans. Kim Sunmong 金順蒙 was good at curing swellings; he healed thousands of people with his needle and medicine, but he killed a woman who had leucorrhoea through mistaken diagnosis and treatment (PC 2:82). The military officer Kim Suryang 金 遂良, a specialist on scrofula, kept his method of treatment a secret. One of his patients, Yun Injŏn 尹仁仝, who had tubercles on his neck, bled to death (PC 2:81). Kim Sanggon 金尙昆 could not understand the books detailing prescriptions, but he toured monasteries, applying his art to sick monks. He killed about half of his patients (PC 2:79). Some medicinal substances not available in Korea were eagerly sought in China, but were sometimes difficult to purchase because of the connivance between Chinese physicians and merchants (PC 2:39). At the same time, such local products as the ikkal namu, whose leaves resemble those of the Chinese cypress and whose sap instantly reduced swelling sores, were offered as tribute to China (PC 4:72). The common treatment for dysentery involved drinking one or two large bowls of water drawn from the well early in the morning (PC 4:74). For common swellings, whether induced by poisons or not, one drank a bottle of fine wine along with some three pints (sheng) of honey (PC 4:74).20 The people, and sometimes even scholars, would observe elabo-

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rate taboos to propitiate the spirits of smallpox and would pray to local tutelary spirits in times of sickness (PC 2:84). Unlike Boccaccio, who among writers of novellas was “the great champion of merchants,”21 miscellany writers knew little about the mercantile world. They never bought day-to-day necessities for themselves, since slaves and servants shopped for them. Seldom did they have direct contact with the commodities market; only popular outcries and complaints to the court over inflation and the shortage of certain goods turned their attention to the subject. Sŏng Hyŏn blames the rise of prices in his day on the extravagance of those in power (YC 1:8, 11). Ŏ Sukkwŏn notes the rise and fall of silver prices and the bad quality of cloth. Toward the end of Chungjong (mid-sixteenth century), Korean traders and silversmiths went secretly to Japanese ships anchored in the harbor and taught the Japanese how to smelt silver with lead. Afterward Japanese visitors spent many ounces of silver, and the price of silver in the capital dropped rapidly until an ounce could buy only three or four rolls of poor cloth. Those who visited the Ming carried as much silver as possible. Despite government regulations, merchants went north to trade with the border people and the Chinese. The Japanese, too, loaded their ships with silver and sold it in Ningpo. The cost of silver gradually increased in Korea (PC 1:17). The quality of cloth became steadily worse. One roll of cloth might be only a little over three meters long; sometimes merchants split a roll down the middle. As prices rose, people began to reweave cloth into a finer weave, thereby making good profits (PC 2:85). One story concerns Kim Adong 金阿童, a maker of gold foil who accompanied an envoy to Peking. There he learned how to smoke silver foil to make the false gold used in painting and in manufacturing gilded paper. The smoke was produced from dry grasses bought in China. Kim became wealthy from the sale of his gilded paper. Eager to popularize the technique, the Ministry of Punishments summoned him for questioning. But he would not disclose his method

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 189 and was tortured and died in prison. Like the tanners, he wanted a monopoly (PC 2:80).

Tales of the Blind A number of episodes concern blind people. Aiming for comic effect, these anecdotes depict blind people’s exaggeration of ritual, ridiculous solemnity, stupid mannerisms, and unabashed zeal in protecting themselves and their class. Such humor often convulsed readers with laughter.22 Some blind people won fame as fortune-tellers, called sŏnsa 禪師 for their close-cropped hair (YC 8:23). These include Chin 眞, Kim Sukchung 金叔重, Kim Hyosun 金孝順, and Kim Sansil 金山實 (YC 8:15). When the blind diviner Chang Tǔksam 張得三 refused to surrender to the court a book on divination he was rumored to have, he was imprisoned and tortured (YC 3:33). Others were accomplished musicians: Yi Pan 李班, who played the black zither, was loved by Sejong; Chŏng Pŏm 鄭凡, who played the zither of Kaya, was a favorite of Sejo (YC 1:5). But to be born blind was considered a calamity. Sŏng Sŏngnin, known for his uprightness and benevolence, had second and third sons who were born blind, as was the son of his third son. Sŏng Hyŏn laments that accumulated virtue does not always bring luck to a family (YC 8:21). Blind men are often portrayed as cuckolded husbands. In one case a libidinous wife and her lover were in a room together when her blind husband came in. In her fright the wife covered her husband’s eyes with her skirt and asked, “Who are you? Where are you from?” Thinking that she was jesting with him, the husband answered, “I’ve been at a funeral in a minister’s house in the north.” She then wrapped his head with her skirt and made him lie down. Seizing the opportunity, her lover fled (YC 6:10). In another story, a youth asked his blind friend, “I’ve met a beautiful woman on the street. Could I borrow your room for a while?” The friend agreed, whereupon the youth made love to the man’s wife. When

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the youth did not emerge, the blind man urged him, “Hurry up! If my wife finds out about this, I’ll be in trouble.” Shortly thereafter his wife entered and asked, “Were there any visitors?” “Only the student Shin,” he answered (YC 5:15). An unfaithful blind man who always lusted after beautiful women was duped by his own wife when she and a neighbor connived to make him believe he was spending the night with a certain beauty, who was impersonated by the wife. That night he said to her, “If I were to compare you to food, you’re the bear’s paw and the leopard’s womb. My ugly wife is like a soup of goosefoot and cooked chaff.” The following morning the wife returned home and waited for her husband. “Where have you been?’ she asked when he came home. He replied, “I was chanting the scriptures at a minister’s home. I’ve got a stomachache and need wine and medicine.” The wife then said, “You’ve been gorging yourself on bear’s paw and leopard’s womb! No wonder you’re sick.” Thus the blind man finally realized that he had been fooled by his own wife (YC 5:14). Myŏngt’ong Monastery in Seoul was a gathering place of the blind, who would assemble on the first and fifteenth days of each month to read scriptures and pray for their own welfare. Honored participants would sit on the veranda while low-ranking ones stood in a row before the gate with lances to keep intruders out. A student once jumped over the lances and perched himself on the main beam to fool the blind people. They learned of his presence through divination, however, and began to strike the beam with sticks. Unable to bear the pain, the student fell, was bound and beaten, and had to crawl home. Not deterred, he hid in the privy with a long hemp rope the following day. When the chief of the blind came in, the student tied the rope around the blind man’s member and yanked hard. While the victim screamed for help, the others gathered around him shouting: “Our chief is under the spell of the privy ghost!” (YC 5:12).23

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 191 Tales of Slaves Slaves, the lowest of the lower classes, did all manner of menial work. Most of them were farmers by origin, but some engaged in handiwork as artisans, carpenters, potters, fishermen, metalworkers, paper manufacturers, and traders. Sometimes they were recruited into the army, especially in times of foreign war or internal rebellion. The wealth of upperclass people was measured by the amount of land and the number of slaves they owned. One prince is said to have had ten thousand slaves to cultivate his land. Not only were slaves bought and sold, but the owner had the right to kill his slaves after obtaining government approval. The womenfolk of live-in slaves often became concubines or maids. The offspring of royal kinsmen and female slaves might escape their class origins, but those of commoners and slave women seldom could. Slaves figure in several episodes in the miscellanies. One private slave, Yi Yangdong 李良童, tried to gain his freedom by bribing a local magistrate (PC 2:36). When a certain scholar’s slave plotted to kill his master, the master dug a deep hole, stood the bound slave in the hole, and buried him alive (PC 2:58). The slave of Yi Hanp’yŏng 李漢平, who served in the palace as an artisan, likewise plotted against his master. Although the slave deserved death, his master’s magnanimity saved him: when the eunuch who reprimanded the slave sent the indictment to Yi, the master said, “Because the tyrant (Yŏnsangun, r. 1494–1506) has lost his way, confusion has arisen between superior and inferior. How can the slave be blamed for his evil conduct? Nevertheless the bonds between us are ruptured, so he is no longer my slave.” He then gave the slave to his brother-in-law (PC 2:58). Ko Tǔkchong 高得宗 (fl. 1413–1448), a native of Cheju, went to visit his mother. His ship foundered in a typhoon, and he and a slave found themselves clinging to a single board. The slave said, “The two of us cannot survive; I must bid you farewell,” and threw himself into the raging sea (YC 4:2). Perhaps the most famous slave who was freed by royal order was Yi Sangjwa 李上佐, a skilled painter unparalleled in landscape and portrai-

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ture. On Chungjong’s order he was attached to the Office of Painting, where he painted portraits of the king and meritorious subjects. Indeed, he himself became a first-class meritorious subject. His son Hǔnggyo, equally good at painting, was given a military post in appreciation of his portrait of Myŏngjong (PC 2:57).

Tales of the Supernatural The supernatural and subhuman––ogres, ghosts, and demons––often intrude into the orthodox world of the Confucian gentlemen portrayed in the miscellany. One writer praises someone who denounced the worship of wooden idols (PC 2:18). Another writer praises someone who exposed a fraudulent shaman (PC 2:19). But some miscellany writers evince a morbid fascination with the subject. It was an age in which a gentleman trained in the classics and histories constantly sought correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the realm of nature and that of humans. He believed that heaven would take the side of the virtuous and punish the wicked: the execution of an innocent man brought a great flood in Inch’ŏn (CN 16), and a peasant son who beat his mother was struck dead by lightning in a barley field (CK 11). Some premonitory dreams came true: Sŏng Kan’s 成侃 (1427–1456) dream portended his early death (YC 2:28); in the same way, examination candidates sometimes learned that they would pass (YC 6:16). While sharing a room with Yi Pangwŏn (the future T’aejong), Pak Sŏngmyŏng 朴錫命 (1370–1406) dreamed of a yellow dragon beside him; this portended that Yi would become king (YC 3:21). Some diviners, such as Kim Hyomyŏng 金孝明, cast lots to predict who would place first in an examination (PC 2:69). Sometimes an animal’s unusual action might be prophetic: Yi Chik’s 李稷 grandson placed first in the examination and received a flower for his cap from the king. As he was about to mount his horse, the animal bit off the flower and chewed it up. Shortly thereafter, both Yi Chik and his grandson died (YC 10:30).

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 193 Sŏng Hyŏn’s father-in-law supposedly could see ghosts, exorcise the possessed, and expel demons (YC 3:30). Once, his maternal uncle was on his way to a villa in Suwŏn when he found himself surrounded by ghosts brandishing fireballs. He spurred his horse on and broke through. After he had crossed a hill, ghosts again blocked his path. Waving his sword, he again galloped through them. The ghosts then scattered, clapping and laughing, into a nearby wood (YC 3:31). Sŏng Hyŏn says that he himself saw, on a hill, a tall apparition with fiery eyes. He said to himself, “If I lose heart, I may become its victim.” He dismounted and stood still, and after a while the apparition disappeared into thin air (YC 8:22). The house of Sŏng Hyŏn’s boyhood friend Ki Yu 奇裕 was haunted. Ki moved out but later decided to move back in. Many weird things happened, and before long Ki died. Yi Tu’s 李杜 house was haunted by the ghost of his aunt; Yi also perished (YC 4:28). It was a common belief that a demon could tell fortunes and knew people’s secrets. A servant girl in the household of Sŏng Hyŏn’s mother-in-law was able to communicate with a demon. During the day the demon stayed in the air, and at night it perched on a beam. When a neighbor’s wife lost her prize hairpin, she accused the maid of the crime and had her flogged. The maid then asked the demon what had become of the hairpin, but it said, “I can’t tell you. Have your mistress come herself.” The neighbor’s wife came with millet seeds as a gift, but the demon still refused to speak. When the woman finally lost patience and scolded the demon, it said, “You went into the mulberry patch with your lover. Your hairpin is hanging on a branch” (YC 3:22).

A Mirror of the Time We have seen that the literary miscellany presents a wide spectrum of social types and is characterized by an abundance of actors and a variety of actions. Unlike the Western novella, which was “a predominantly middle-class form of entertainment,”24 the Korean literary miscellany

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was a genre of and for the lettered class. Most of its portraiture is devoted to the lettered class, little to the commoners. While there is, to be sure, an assortment of simpletons, madmen, braggarts, scamps, and frauds, there are few judges (PrC 1:55), foreigners, usurers, merchants, astrologers, alchemists, Daoists, or butchers. This bias may indicate the attitude of the writers toward other classes or possibly their indifference to certain classes and professions. The miscellany writer, concerned with producing an objective account of events in a sober style that recalls the art of the chronicler, tended to neglect the deeper motives and complex purposes underlying human personalities and actions. We would like to think that the gentleman always pursued lofty ideals and aspired to live by virtue, but he must have been more than a mere composite of virtues. The miscellany writer’s choice of adjectives to describe Confucian virtues—the ideal categories of the age and culture that qualified action—also presents problems. Such stock adjectives as “irreproachable” and “constant”25 are at best vague. We know their etymology and usage in the classics and histories, but the miscellany writer typically used these polysemous words according to his own understanding, often without drawing a connection between a subject’s actions and his perceptions. Different writers’ accounts of the same deed by the same man illustrate this point. Pak Ansin, on his way to the execution ground, managed to scribble a message on the importance of his job as inspector and have it delivered to the king; thus he was pardoned. Sŏ Kŏjŏng praises Pak’s “natural capacity, which was broad and extraordinary” (PrC 1:43), while Sŏng Hyŏn praises his serene mind and lack of fear (YC 9:26). Was Pak facing death with complete peace of mind, or was he merely anxious to save his life? Was this a majestic assertion of the ideals of an inspector or a protest against an abuse of royal privilege? Or take the story of Chŏng Pu, who plucked the zither and gazed at the clouds and hills while his wife was away. What is the connection, if any, between his wife’s absence and his music? Why was he looking at the clouds and hills? Was

Images of Society in the Early Chosŏn Literary Miscellany 195 he seeking inspiration in them or, like Bo Ya before him, re-creating with his music the loftiness of the hills and the freedom of the clouds? Was he longing for his wife, or did he practice the instrument only during her absence? The answer may be all of these and more; perhaps the educated reader of the time knew at once what the anecdote was about when first he read or heard it. At times the modern reader cannot share the feelings of the characters appearing in a given setting. When Yi Ch’ik 李則 (1438–1496) began bragging at a party given by No Sasin, for example, Yi Sukham 李淑瑊 (fl. 1454–1490) commented, “Your spirited talk recalls Fan Kuai 樊哙.” Becoming exultant, Yi Ch’ik replied, “Fan Kuai was a famous Han general. Your comparison is apt.” Then Yi Sukham added, “Fan Kuai should have been beheaded.” Yi Ch’ik was struck speechless, and the whole company shook with laughter (YC 9:26). Yi Ch’ik, once headmaster of the academy and third minister without portfolio, was known for his prose writing as well as his virtue, foresight, and outspoken advice. Fan Kuai, a loyal general and great counselor to the founder of the Han dynasty, once saved his king’s life.26 We can understand a comparison of Yi Ch’ik with Fan Kuai based on a shared penchant for straight talk. But why was Yi Ch’ik taken aback by Yi Sukham’s remark? Did he think his friend was turning against him or had found him impudent? Or was it because he could produce no clever retort? Did the group find the exchange so ridiculously amusing because Yi Ch’ik, not fully versed in the rules of the game, failed to laugh himself? Perhaps the crux of the anecdote is the disparity between the Yi Ch’ik who thought himself a Fan Kuai and the real Yi Ch’ik, who failed to display the strength of character and resourcefulness attributed to the Chinese general. Yi Ch’ik’s boastfulness and conceit, manifested by his fondness for the comparison with Fan Kuai, ruled his conduct for a moment. Perhaps this was considered out of tune with his usual decorous self, a momentary lapse of his dignity and self-possession. The episode, told in sixty-eight sinographs, is narrated with fine economy,

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but we are not given enough information to determine what provoked Yi Sukham to violate the rules of the game with his aggressive humor. Minor flaws––or what appear as such to the modern reader––do not diminish the charm of the literary miscellany, which reflects the customs, manners, and spirit of its time. Not all writers were equally successful with the medium. But all were avid collectors of stories, and each wished to render in a memorable fashion what he saw and heard: the “manifold foibles, virtues, and follies of man.”27 Each endeavored to penetrate his subject’s public self—which acted behind a mask of role and status using stylized gestures, actions, and verbal exchanges—to find the individual qualities that set him apart from all others. Marked by urbanity, wit, and a zeal for depicting real life, the miscellany offers us a world of undeniable excitement and delight. Times may have changed, but, like the audience of the past, we come away with our experience enriched.

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Notes 1. A typical literary miscellany should contain four kinds of topics in the plain style—biographical, autobiographical, critical (in the form of sihwa, talks on poetry), and cultural comments. A subtler distinction of such kindred genres as yasa (oesa, p’aesa), yadam, and sihwa is lacking in contemporary Korean scholarship, as evinced in relevant entries, for example, in the Minjok munhwa taebaekkwa sajŏn (Korean Encyclopedia, 27 vols., 1991). An exception is Chŏng Myŏnggi, ed., Yadam munhak yŏngu ŭi hyŏndangye, 3 vols. (Pogosa, 2001), especially articles on p’ilgi, 141–205. If we glance over the Taedong yasŭng 大東野乘, it becomes clear that not all works included in that series are examples of the literary miscellany as I have defined it: for example, Sŏktam ilgi (or Kyŏngyŏn ilgi) is a diary of political events from 1565 through 1581 and Haedong chamnok, a compilation from earlier sources. These works are unread today, for the most part, and are perhaps in their entirety uninteresting. My reading of select works rests on an assumption that the literary miscellany is still the only literary form that enables the writer to explore the self and others spontaneously and freely without the devices that constrain other literary genres. The present study constitutes, therefore, a very modest effort to right the scant critical and literary attention it has hitherto received. In the following, I have omitted “king” before the temple name (e.g., Sejong, not King Sejong) and secondary studies on persons or topics. 2. Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 92. 3. See my Songs of Flying Dragons: A Critical Reading (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 97–98, 264. 4. One linked verse is translated in Peter H. Lee, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 232–34. 5. Haedong Yaŏn quotes Yongch’ŏn tamjŏk ki (CKK) by Kim Allo (1975 ed.), 165. 6. From 1411 they wore blue-collared uniforms. 7. See Peter H. Lee, ed., A History of Korean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–5, esp. sources cited in note 1 (2).

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8. For more see PoC 1:15; PoC 1:12; NP 1A:12, 20; SS 9; CK 52. 9. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 169. 10. For more see Tanjong sillok 6:39a–b; Sŏngjong sillok 36:2b–3a; 58:2b–3a; 277:22a; 278:35a, etc; Chǔngbo munhŏn pigo (Kojŏn kanhaenghoe ed., 1957), 132:8a. 11. James A. Notopoulos, “Mnemosyne in Oral Literature,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 69 (1938): 491. 12. Yi Hwang also denounces Ch’oe in T’oegye sŏnsaeng ŏnhaeng nok, in T’oegye chŏnsŏ (Taedong munhwa yŏnguwŏn ed., 1958) 2:5/13b. 13. Charles S. Singleton, trans., The Book of the Courtier (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 35–36. See Xunzi, “Against Physiognomy,” in The Works of Hsüntze, trans. Homer H. Dubs (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1928), 67–75. 14. Lauro Martines, “The Gentleman in Renaissance Italy: Strains of Isolation in the Body Politic,” in The Dark Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason, ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 77–93. 15. For annual observance see YC 1:12, 14; 2:8, 9, and 13; for pitching arrows into a pot see YC 9:14 and Richard C. Rudolf, “The Antiquity of T’ou hu,” Antiquity 24 (1950): 175–178. 16. James R. Hightower, The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 133. 17. For a contrasting portrait see CK 18; PrC 2:69. 18. For Honsu see Tongsa yŏlchŏn (Tongguk taehakkyo, 1957), 2:48–49. 19. For comparison see “Nigu sifan尼姑思[下]凡,” in Wang Jilie, ed., Yüzhong qupu 與衆曲譜(Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947), 8:91– 108. For a translation see “Longing for Worldly Pleasures,” in A. C. Scott, Traditional Chinese Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 2:21–37. 20. Medicine, Montaigne says (2:37), is a vain, supernatural and fantastic art. “Even the choice of most of their [doctors’] drugs is in some way mysterious and divine: the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for us colicky folk (so disdainfully do they take advantage of our misery), pulverized rat turds, and other such monkey tricks that have more the appearance of magical enchantment than of solid science. . . . When their irresolution, the weakness of their arguments, divinations, and grounds, the bitterness of their contesta-

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21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

tions, full of hatred, jealousy, and self-consideration, come to be revealed to everyone, a man would have to be preternaturally blind not to feel that he runs a great risk in their hands.” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 584. Clements and Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella, 130. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines the ridiculous as “a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others.” Cicero saw turpitude (ugliness) as the essence of the comic. “A ridiculous face is ugly without being painful,” says Pietro Valla (1498); and Trissino divides ugliness into ugliness of the mind (ignorance, imprudence, credulity) and ugliness of the body (deformities). See Marvin T. Herrick, “The Theory of the Laughable in the Sixteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35 (1949): 1–16. The blind fared no better in Japanese literature. Semimaru, a blind musician at Ausaka Barrier, is an example. In Zeami’s play Semimaru, he appears as a blind prince, who, exiled by his father, becomes a beggar at Ausaka Barrier and a patron saint of professional lute-playing bards. See Susan Matisoff, The Legend of Semimaru: Blind Musician of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). In the kyōgen, the zatōmono pokes fun at the blind. See Nonomura Kaizō and Andō Tsunejirō, eds., Kyōgen sambyakubanshū 狂言三百番集, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1942), 2:317–45. Clements and Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella, 76. “Reality is change, unceasing modification of the self,” Odette de Mourgues comments in Two French Moralists: La Rochefoucauld & La Bruyère (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 51. Biography in Shiji 95, and Hanshu 41. The relevant passages in Shiji 56 read: “When word came that Lu Wan, the king of Yen, had revolted, [Gaozu] appointed Fan Kuai as prime minister of Yen and sent him to lead an army against the rebels. After Fan Kuai had departed, however, someone began to speak badly of him. The emperor, believing the slander, was in a rage. “‘Fan Kuai saw that I am ill, and now he is hoping I will die!’” he declared. On the advice of Chen Ping, he summoned Zhou Po, the marquis of Jiang, to his bedside and delivered these instructions: “‘Chen Ping is to hasten at once by relay carriage with Zhou Po, who will replace Fan Kuai as commander. When Chen Ping reaches the camp, he is to decapitate Fan Kuai on the spot!’” See Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:161–163.

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27. Yvonne Rodax, The Real and the Ideal in the Novella of Italy, France and England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 128.

Chapter 5

The Imjin nok, or The Record of the Black Dragon Year Among the stories inspired by the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, the Imjin nok 壬辰錄 (Record of the Black Dragon Year) is the first of the war tales 軍談小說 (kundam sosŏl) produced, and is generally regarded as the most interesting. The Imjin nok exists in many manuscript versions, long and short, in the vernacular and in literary Chinese.1 During the Japanese occupation of Korea, the tale was not circulated owing to stringent censorship, and study of it began only in the late 1940s. I have chosen four versions of the tale to give some notion of the differences in the art of storytelling, content, and structure among its many extant variations. I will present a brief outline of each version, a brief comparison and analysis of major motifs2 in the narrative structure, and some critical remarks on the tale as a whole.

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Versions of the Imjin Nok The four versions under consideration are: A. The Paek Sunjae 白淳在 copy, entitled Hŭngnyong ilgi 黑龍日記 in pure Korean script, comprising eighty leaves, sixteen lines per page, twenty-five to thirty letters per line. A mimeographed edition prepared by Kim Kŭnsu 金根洙 was published in Sosŏl charyo chipsŏng 小說資料 集成 (1962), pp. 37–116, and a printed edition was edited by Kim Kidong 金起東, Imjin nok (Sŏmun mungo 268; 1978), 233–311. B. The Yi Myŏngsŏn 李明善 copy, entitled Hŭngnyong nok 黑龍錄, written in mixed Korean and Chinese. It was first published under the title Imjin nok by Kukche munhwagwan in 1948. A later printed edition under the same title and annotated by Yi Kyŏngsŏn 李慶善 was published by Chŏngŭmsa (1962), 9–100 and reprinted in Kim Kihyŏn, Imjin nok (Egŭrin ch’ulp’ansa, 1975), 85–163. C. The manuscript text included in Kim Kidong, ed., P’ilsabon kojŏn sosŏl chŏnjip 筆寫本古典小說全集 [Collection of classic stories in manuscripts], a photolithographic edition of which was published in ten volumes by Asea munhwasa (1980). The text appears in volume 6:197– 281. The transcriber’s handwriting is fairly clear, but he or she left no space in the text, as is customary, and added no punctuation. A printed edition is in Kim Kidong, ed., Imjin nok (Sŏmun mungo 268:1978), 165– 229, and Chang Tŏksun and Ch’oe Chinwŏn, eds., Hanguk kojŏn munhak chŏnjip 韓國古典文學全集 (Posŏng ch’ulp’ansa, 1978), 1:65–169. D. The Chinese version in literary Chinese, written in the square style and included in the P’ilsabon kojŏn sosŏl chŏnjip 2:357–381. It comprises twenty-five leaves, ten lines per page, twenty-five to twenty-seven sinographs per line, except for the last page, which comprises three lines (the last line of the story: a notation that reads, “In the year of ŭlmi, I began copying on the 13th day of the 12th month and finished on the 15th day”; and two lines of heptasyllabic verse: “Useless old stories will not do you any good. / Enterprises of the sage have limitless joy”). The tran-

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scriber sometimes used simplified versions of sinographs (for example, for “dream”), and used symbols to indicate the repetition of the same graphs. The text from p. 378, line 8, to p. 380, line 4, is written by a different hand.

Narrative Style The narrative style in the three vernacular versions is more or less uniform in the use of typical locutions common to traditional tales, with minor variations. In the first version (A), the narrator almost exclusively uses ittae e (“at this time”) to indicate temporal sequences and changes of topics. Ittae nan (“it was”) is used to date an event. The characteristic of A is the inclusion of brief interlinear glosses to provide occasional details. For example, under Yi Hangbok 李恒福 is found Paeksa 白沙, chŏngsŭng 政丞. The first is Yi’s pen name; the second, meaning “high state minister,” is his status. The B and C versions begin the narration respectively with kaksŏl 却 說 (“Now it is said that,” “to resume our story”); it is used ten times in C, and hwasŏl, chaesŏl, and ch’asŏl are also used, which is often followed by ittae (“at this time” or ch’asi), or ttae nŭn. In all three versions, quoted speech is preceded by wal (“said”) and often followed by hago, hadŏni, hani (“said”). It might also be marked by hago and hani after the speech, without wal. Thus most direct speech begins or ends with this or other indications that somebody spoke, like the Western “loquitur-formula.” The Chinese version (D) begins with the date in the annalistic style: “Great Ming, Chongzhen, imjin, autumn, night of the fifteenth day of the seventh month.” Despite the semblance of accurate dating, the narrator or copyist mistook the reign title of Shenzong, and Wanli for Sizong 思 宗 (r. 1628–1645). The time is indicated by exact, but usually erroneous, dates, or the phrases sisi (“at this time”) or sinyŏn (“in this year”). Kaksŏl is seldom used.

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These tales have certain stylistic traits in common with other traditional tales. There is an emphasis on action, with few descriptive passages3 or accounts of psychological states. There is no firstperson narrator. However, rhetorical questions posed by the omniscient narrator—perhaps indicating that the story was recited before a live audience—together with parenthetical comments on the events and characters, help to establish a more direct, personal, and intimate relationship with the listener and the solitary reader. Reliance on the omniscient narrator also creates a more objective tone. The description is often figurative, with use of allusion. There are numerous stock descriptions of the hero’s appearance, strength, and valor, as well as of battle scenes and accoutrements of war. For example, the narrator describes close combat between the two sides: “The sound of bugles and drums and their battle cries shook heaven and earth, and the whirl of their glittering swords covered the sky. [Both sides fought] like ferocious tigers competing for prey, or like billowing dragons in the depths of the emerald sea” (B, 56). The tale abounds in verbal threats and taunts from characters to their opponents before and after individual combat (especially in C). When one character challenges another to fight, his valorous shout probably helps him master the fear of violent death. The Japanese Madŭng taunts Yi Sunsin 李舜臣, “You mere child Yi Sunsin, come forth quickly, and let’s compare our tactics in sea battles” (C, 205). A frequent insult is to call an opponent a “one-day puppy,” from the Korean proverb, “A young puppy does not know enough to fear the tiger.” Sometimes characters dispense with the ritual of identifying themselves or taunting their opponents, and oblige with their names only when pressed. For example, “Why should I identify myself to the ignorant Japanese outlaw? If you insist on knowing, my name is Kang Hongnip 姜弘立” (C, 209). Leaders of both sides are often described as dancing with swords (k’alch’um ch’unda). I take this to mean “brandishing [his] sword,” or “demonstrating [his] skill with a sword,” probably to strike terror in an opponent. It is sometimes unclear if individual combatants are riding on

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horseback or not, but if one character is, his opponent must be. Descriptions of killing and dying are matter-of-fact. A character will have no qualms about chopping off his opponent’s head, usually couched in a simile, “like the falling leaves in the autumn wind,” a device probably intended to demonstrate the character’s prowess. Such atrocities as the mutilation of corpses, the cutting off of noses and ears of Korean soldiers and citizens, and the butchering of innocent women and children are passed over quickly—the narrator seldom pauses to meditate on death. Sometimes nature scenes—sympathetic or indifferent—are used as metaphors for a character’s state of mind. Upon arriving on Hansan Island 閑山島, Admiral Yi Sunsin is struck by loveliness as he senses the enormity of his mission: “Mountains were thick with trees, and azaleas bloomed in the crags, half smiling and welcoming him. Birds flew about frolicking with spring dreams. He felt sad in spite of himself” (B, 16). Scenes and episodes cover the spectrum from the realistic to the incredible, all the way to the impossible and the supernatural. But the conscious choice of detail is a literary strategy, and a given episode, however incredible, is often a valid dramatization of a certain issue at hand. The narrator’s image of his characters reflects the power of imagination—the more consistent the character, the more fictional he is. The narrator’s manner is objective, abrupt, and issue oriented, as befits the general episodic structure and the chronicle style that allows a sweep of persons and events.

Version A: The Hŭngnyong ilgi (The Diary of the Black Dragon Year) [Sosŏl charyo chipsŏng, 1962, 37–116] (1) From 1589 onward, omens foretell invasions at various parts of the country—the waters of the Han and Taedong Rivers appear bloody (37– 40). (2) Yi I 李珥(1536–1584) proposes training troops to prepare against war,4 but he is banished to Haeju. Earlier, Yi I visits Yi Sunsin and

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discusses military tactics. Yi I also has an arbor built and coats it with pine oil, which proves to be useful later (40–41). (3) Yu Unyong (or Ullyong) warns his younger brother Yu Sŏngnyong 柳成龍 (1542–1607) to bring to him a suspicious visiting monk.5 The monk, who is brought to Yi Unyong’s house, proves to be Kiyomasa 淸 正 in disguise. Yi reasons with him patiently and asks him to leave Korea (eleventh month of 1591) (42–44). (4) Kim Hŭimun interprets King Sŏnjo’s 宣祖 dream correctly (45). (5) Hideyoshi 秀吉 wishes to open trade with Korea, and Korea sends Kim Songil 金誠一 and Hwang Yungil 黃允吉 as envoys.6 Upon his return, Kim predicts no invasion, while Hwang predicts an invasion (46). Kiyomasa’s sister does not approve of the invasion (47–49).7 (6) The Japanese land at Pusan on the thirteenth day of the fourth month [May 23] of 1592 and advance along seven routes. Shin Ip 申砬 loses a battle at Ch’ungju 忠州 (49–52).8 (7) As the enemy approaches, the king leaves Seoul, accompanied by Yi Hangbok 李恒福 (1556–1618), despite the opposition of Kwŏn Hyŏp 權悏.9 During the night crossing of the Imjin River 臨津江, Kim Hŭimun sets fire to the Hwasŏk Arbor, built by Yi I to illuminate the path. The king regrets his rejection of Yi I’s advice (52–55). (8) As Seoul is attacked, Guan Yu 關羽 appears and rebukes Hideyoshi (55–56). (9) Shin Kak 申恪, Magistrate of Yangju, wins a battle,10 but the jealous Kim Myŏngwŏn 金命元 (1524–1602) and Yu Hong 兪泓 (1524–1594) have Shin beheaded on charges of disobedience.11 This makes the people angry (58). (10) Yi Sunsin wins sea battles but is wounded by a bullet.12 The turtle boat is described (59–65).

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(11) At P’yŏngyang, Yi Hangbok suggests that the king flee to Ŭiju 義州 and request aid from the Ming.13 Guan Yu appears to the Ming emperor in a dream and urges him to send a relieving force (65–67).14 (12) The Ming general Shi Ru is killed in action near P’yŏngyang.15 Zu Chengxun 祖承訓 withdraws, and Shen Weijing 沈惟敬16 and Kiyomasa negotiate (67–68). (13) Many raise a loyal army, and Kwak Chaeu 郭再祐 (1552–1617),17 nicknamed the Red-Clad General, recovers some towns. (68–69). (14) The Korean troops led by Kim Sangwŏn 金相元 and Yi Wŏnik 李元 翼 (1547–1634) fail to drive the Japanese from P’yŏngyang, until Guan Yu helps them do so (69–70). (15) With the help of Kyewŏrhyang 桂月香, Kim Ŭngsŏ 金應瑞 slays a subordinate of Kiyomasa (70–71).18 (16) Kwŏn Yul 權慄 (1537–1599) wins at Haengju 幸州 (72–73).19 (17) After losing a battle, Chŏng Munbu 鄭文孚 (1565–1624)20 escapes in disguise. He meets a shaman at Yongsŏng who predicts success for him in the future. He retakes the north (73–74). (18) Kang Hongnip (1560–1627), nicknamed Great Tiger General大虎將 軍, distinguishes himself (74–75). (19) Kim Tŏngnyŏng 金德齡 (1567–1596) becomes the victim of slander (76).21 Implicated by the rebel Yi Monghak 李夢鶴 (d. 1596), Kim is killed (95–97). (20) Kiyomasa besieges Chinju and falls in love with Nongae 論介, who plunges into the river with him (76–77).22 (21) Japanese stragglers desecrate the mausoleums of Kings Sŏngjong 成宗 and Myŏngjong 明宗,23 and Great Master Sŏsan 西山大師 (1520– 1604) is sent to the Japanese camp to protest (77).

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(22) Yi Hangbok welcomes the Chinese reinforcements. Li Rusong 李 如松 (1549–1598)24 finds fault with King Sŏnjo’s appearance and spirit and threatens to withdraw. When the king climbs into a jar and weeps, Li changes his mind (79–80). The Ming troops recapture P’yŏngyang but lose a battle at Pyŏkche 碧蹄 and retreat to Kaesŏng 開城 (81). Yu Sŏngnyong builds a temporary bridge over the Imjin River for the Ming troops to cross (81).25 (23) Kuk Kyŏngin 鞠景仁, a subordinate of Han Kǔkham 韓克諴, Magistrate of Pukp’yŏng, hands over two Korean princes to the Japanese. Shin Sejun captures the rebel and beheads him (82–84).26 (24) Yi Sunsin wins a sea battle (85). (25) The king returns to Seoul,27and peace negotiations begin. The two princes are set free, but China and Korea reject the terms of peace (87– 89). (26) Wŏn Kyun’s 元均 slander of Yi Sunsin is bared.28 Yi Sunsin destroys Japanese ships that attempt a sneak attack at night (89–91). (27) Ch’oe Kyŏnghoe崔慶會,29 Right Navy Commander, pitches his camp on a mountaintop and has heavy wooden and iron helmets made. When his men pretend to flee, they leave iron helmets behind. These strike the Japanese with awe (91–92). (28) Hwang Shin’s 黃愼 mission to Japan fails (93–94).30 The rebel Yi Monghak implicates Kim Tŏngnyŏng (see 19 above). (29) Yi Sunsin willingly dies in action at Hansan Island, saying that it is better to die heroically than to be slandered by small men (98). (30) Kim Ŭngsŏ and Kang Hongnip volunteer for an expedition to Japan. Kim Tŏngnyŏng’s spirit appears to Kang Hongnip and urges him to delay his departure for three days. The reckless Kim advances and is defeated at Yokohama. Kang rebukes Kim and kills him (90–103).

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(31) Great Master Samyŏngdang 泗溟堂 (1544–1610) goes to Kyoto to persuade Hideyoshi to surrender. There he undergoes tests, obtains a surrender document dated the fifteenth day of the twelfth month of 1596, and returns with the pledge of a tribute of three hundred human skins and three hundred pairs of testicles. Upon returning to Seoul, he explains that his intent in requesting such tributes is not to take lives, but to enhance the prestige of Korea abroad. As a monk he cannot bear to take life (103–113). (32) In 1597, the Japanese invade again, but Kwŏn Hyŏp brings in reinforcements from the Ming. A multitude of mice chew up the enemy arms, and the allied army defeats the Japanese everywhere (113–116).

Version B: Imjin nok [Imjin nok, Pakssi chŏn, ed. Yi Kyŏngsŏn, 1962, 9–100] (1) In the third month of 1592 Ch’oe Illyŏng 崔一令31 correctly interprets King Sŏnjo’s dream but is banished to Tongnae (9–10). (2) At Tongnae, Ch’oe sees the Japanese ships approaching Korean waters. He alerts the magistrate of Tongnae, but Sosŏp (Konishi 小西)32 lands and kills the magistrate. Kiyomasa sends his army of 700,000 to various provinces, and during his march to Kangwŏn province, Sosŏp receives a letter from his sister that warns him to avoid places whose names contain the sinograph song 松 (pine) (10–14). (3) Yi Sunsin’s fleet crushes the Japanese ships, but Yi himself dies in action (15–17). (4) Kiyomasa’s forces cross the Bird Ridge. There they confront the army led by Shin Ip, who has taken up a position near T’angŭm Terrace 彈琴 臺, and defeat Shin (17–19). (5) As the Japanese troops approach Seoul in the fourth month of 1592, the king discusses defenses. Chŏng Ch’ullam goes to Ch’ungju with fifty thousand men, where he kills one Japanese general but is slain by Kiyomasa (20–24).

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(6) The Japanese march to Seoul, sweeping away everything before them, and the king escapes. At the siege of Seoul, Guan Yu appears and rebukes Kiyomasa, who then marches to P’yŏngan province (24–26). (7) Fifteen-year-old Kim Tŏngnyŏng (Kim Tongyang in the text) of P’yŏnggang hears of the invasions and asks his mother for permission to go to war. She refuses, but Kim doffs mourning clothes, enters the Japanese camp, and humiliates Kiyomasa with Daoist magic (28–31). (8) Ch’oe Illyŏng arrives in T’ogok from Tongnae and recommends Kim Ŭngsŏ to the king. At the suggestion of Ch’oe, the king decides to request military aid from the Ming, a mission for which Yu Sŏngnyong volunteers (33–37). (9) Ch’oe then sends Kim Ŭngsŏ to the camp of Sosŏp where, with the help of the Korean female entertainer Wŏrch’ŏn, Kim assassinates Sosŏp (37–42). Yu Sŏngnyong returns without a commitment from the Ming (42–43). (10) Taira Hideyoshi’s army of thirty thousand camps in Chinju. The local female entertainer Moran (Nongae) entertains the Japanese soldiers at Ch’oksŏk Tower矗石樓 and plunges into the river with the drunken Hideyoshi (43–45). (11) Guan Yu appears to the Ming emperor in a dream and urges him to send Li Rusong to Korea with an army of eight hundred thousand. Li Rusong finds the king lacking in sincerity and threatens to withdraw. At the suggestion of Ch’oe Illyŏng, the king has an altar built, climbs into a jar, and keens. Li is moved and calls his generals together to plan an attack. Li holds a game to test the skill of the Korean generals. Yu Sŏngnyong is placed in charge of provisions; Li then makes outrageous demands: one thousand jars of wine, dragon broth, a pair of speckled bamboo chopsticks, and one hundred white steeds. Kim Ŭngsŏ provides all the required items (46–54).

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(12) Li marches to Wŏnju. Kim Ŭngsŏ distinguishes himself in single combat. In a duel between Li and Kiyomasa, Guan Yu intervenes and Li beheads Kiyomasa (54–58). (13) The rich Kim Suŏp 金守業 in Sakchu 朔州 provides military provisions (61–62).33 (14) The king receives Ming forces and Li in T’ogok. Li then tours Korea to sever the veins of mountains and rivers (62–63). (15) The king returns to Seoul and distributes honors to his ministers and generals. Kim Tŏngnyŏng is falsely accused and executed (64–68). (16) Kim Ŭngsŏ and Kang Hongnip (Kang Hongyŏp in the text) lead an expeditionary force to Japan. In Tongnae, in the ninth month of 1598, a spirit appears to Kim and asks him to postpone departure for three days. Against Kim’s entreaty, Kang continues his march with his men but falls into an ambush at Tongsŏl Pass and is routed. Then Kim and Kang meet the Japanese generals in single combat and overwhelm them. The Japanese king sues for peace and marries the fifteen-year-old princess to Kang. Kim then kills Kang and himself. Kim’s horse carries his head back to P’yŏngyang, where his wife places it in a coffin and journeys to Seoul to report to the king. Kim’s spirit appears to the king in a dream and pledges undying loyalty (69–83). (17) In the third month of 1600, Great Master Sŏsan at Anbillak Monastery 安貧樂寺 goes to Seoul to warn the king of the danger of another invasion, proposing Samyŏngdang as envoy to Japan. With the Buddha’s help, Samyŏngdang overcomes attempts on his life and finally compels the Japanese king to sign the surrender document. With the promise of yearly tributes of three hundred pieces of human skin and three piculs of testicles, the master returns. Both masters decline royal honors and return to their mountain hermitages (85–99).

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Version C: Imjin nok [P’ilsabon kojŏn sosŏl chŏnjip 6:197–281] (1) Guan Yu foretells the birth of a son to the wife of Ch’oe Wigong in P’yŏngan. Ch’oe Ilgyŏng is born in Sakchu; he becomes Minister of Personnel at sixteen and Third State Counselor at nineteen (197–199). (2) In King Sŏnjo’s dream, a woman appears from the east carrying on her head a bag of broomcorn millet that she places on the palace step. Then fire erupts from eight provinces and people are panic stricken. When Ch’oe Ilgyŏng correctly interprets the dream, the king rebukes Ch’oe for stirring up public sentiment in a peaceful time and banishes him (199– 200). (3) On the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 1592 (June 7, 1592) the Japanese army invades (200–203). (4) Yi Sunsin is aware of the invasion beforehand. He builds turtle ships, goes to Chŏnju, and fights a sea battle, but dies in action (203–206). (5) A part of the invading forces attacks Cheju Island, but Kang Hongnip singlehandedly repulses them and gallops straight to Seoul (207–210). (6) Chŏng Ch’ungnam 鄭忠男 is sent to check the advancing enemy, but he is defeated and dies (210–213). (7) The enemy approaches Seoul, and the king plans to escape. When no one is present to hold his horse’s reins, the seventeen-year-old Kim Togyŏng volunteers and accompanies the king to Ŭiju (213–215). (8) The Japanese occupy P’yŏngyang, and the Japanese general Chosŏp 調攝 spends his days with the Korean female entertainer Wŏlsŏn. Ch’oe Ilgyŏng rushes to Ŭiju from his place of exile and recommends General Kim Ŭngsŏ, aged twenty (215–218). (9) Upon consultation with Ch’oe, the king decides to request aid from the Ming, and Yu Sŏngnyong volunteers for the task (218–220).

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(10) When Kiyomasa is about to occupy Seoul, Guan Yu appears and rebukes him. Kiyomasa then retreats to Kangwŏn province (220–222). (11) Kim Tŏngnyŏng, who was observing mourning for his father in Koksan, Hamgyŏng, rushes to Kiyomasa’s camp and humiliates him with Daoist magic. Kiyomasa receives a letter from his sister that warns him of Heaven’s design (222–225). (12) Ch’oe Ilgyŏng has Kim Ŭngsŏ go into Chosŏp’s camp and, with the help of Wŏlsŏn, assassinate Chosŏp (225–235). (13) Yu Sŏngyong’s mission to Nanking fails. When Guan Yu appears to the Ming emperor in a dream and urges him to help Korea, the emperor sends Li Rusong (232–236). (14) Upon reaching the Yalu, however, Li refuses to cross it under the pretext that the river is swollen. By Daoist magic, Yu Sŏngnyong builds a bridge. Li then wishes to eat dragon broth. Yu fills a jar with water, drops in a line, and catches a dragon. Li demands a pair of ivory chopsticks. Yu produces these from his sleeve. Li admires Yu’s skill, crosses the Yalu, and sees King Sŏnjo. Li finds the king’s physiognomy unworthy of a monarch and predicts his help will be useless. At the suggestion of Ch’oe Ilgyŏng, the king has an altar for seven stars built in front of the Ming camp and keens upon it. Upon hearing him, Li is moved and says that the king’s voice befits a monarch (236–241). (15) In Sakchu, Kim Suŏp provides provisions for the troops (243–244). (16) Li’s allied armies march with five Korean generals (Kim Ŭngsŏ, Kang Hongnip, Paek Sŏllam, Yu Hŭngsŏ, and Kim Ch’igyŏng). First, Kim Ŭngsŏ and Kang Hongnip lose an engagement with Kiyomasa; Li himself advances. During a hot and indecisive duel between the two, Guan Yu appears and rebukes Kiyomasa. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Li beheads Kiyomasa. The defeated Japanese retreat southward and finally return to Japan (244–252).

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(17) King Sŏnjo returns to Seoul. Ch’oe Ilgyŏng becomes Chief State Counselor but soon dies. The treacherous Kim Sundal accuses Kim Tŏngnyŏng (Kim Togang in the text) of neglecting his duties. Attempts to behead Kim Tŏngnyŏng fail, and Kim vows that if a tomb inscription is made for him, he is willing to die. He then removes a scale from the crook of his knee and surrenders to the executioner (252–255). (18) After the retreat of the Japanese army, Li Rusong tours Korea and severs the veins of mountains and rivers in an attempt to prevent the future rise of famous heroes in Korea. One day, an old man astride a black ox passes by; Li pursues him to a high mountain. The old man receives him in his thatched hermitage and asks Li to punish his eight unfilial sons. Li catches one son but cannot subdue him. Thereupon, the old man rebukes Li and orders him to return to China (255–259). (19) Korea sends Kim Ŭngsŏ and Kang Hongnip to attack Japan and receive her surrender. A god of the Eastern Sea urges Kim to delay his departure for three days. However, the vanguard led by the impetuous Kang advances and falls into an ambush, whereupon it is defeated. Kim and Kang enter the Japanese capital and wait for an opportune moment. When attempts by Japanese generals to kill them both fail, owing to the duo’s superb swordsmanship, the Japanese sue for peace. Kang is made a son-in-law of the Japanese ruler, but Kim refuses to accept bribery. Accusing Kang of disloyalty, Kim kills both Kang and himself. Kim’s horse returns to Korea with Kim’s head, which it delivers to Kim’s wife. The king praises Kim’s fidelity (259–273). (20) Great Master Sŏsan at Naksan Monastery on Mount Myohyang in P’yŏngan dreams of the country’s future, goes to Seoul, and presents his plan to stop another invasion of Japan. His disciple Yujŏng (Samyŏngdang, aged nineteen) is dispatched to Japan to obtain a peace treaty. Hearing that Yujŏng is a living buddha, the Japanese ruler tests him, intending to kill him. He fails, however, and finally proffers a surrender document that promises fealty to Korea as Japan’s father. Yujŏng obtains a promise of tributes of three hundred thousand catties (kŭn) of copper

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and iron, three thousand catties of peony bark, and three thousand catties of other items. He then returns safely to Korea (273–281). (21) Great Master Samyŏngdang withdraws to P’yoch’ung Monastery表 忠寺 in Miryang 密陽, Kyŏngsang, where he dies on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. The king decrees that the nation honor Samyŏngdang in spring and fall, henceforth offer vegetarian rites on the day of his death, and respect the Path of the Buddha (281).

Version D: Imjin nok [P’ilsabon kojŏn sosŏl chŏnjip 2:357–381] (1) On the night of the fifteenth day of the seventh month of 1592, King Sŏnjo dreams of Guan Yu. A Japanese spy-monk is caught and kills himself (357–358). (2) On the third day of the ninth month, the Japanese invade Kŏje Island 巨濟島, Taira Hideyoshi heads for Bird Ridge, Konishi for P’yŏngyang, and Harabuk 賀羅北 for Seoul. The court orders Kwak Chaeu to stop the enemy’s northern advance (358–359). (3) In the southwest, the fortress of Chinyang falls, and Nongae (Nonga in the text) jumps into the river with a Japanese commander, Chongno (359–360). (4) When Seoul is about to fall, some wish to surrender, but Yi Hangbok and Yi Tŏkhyŏng propose that the king escape to Pukhan Fortress (Pukhan Monastery in the text) and ask for Chinese help. The mission, headed by both Yis, fails. While Yi Hangbok returns to Korea, Yi Tŏkhyŏng stays behind and implores the emperor for seven days. The emperor is moved to dispatch fifty thousand men (360–362). (5) During his second mission to China, Yi Hangbok obtains from a mysterious old woman a portrait of Li Rusong and implores the emperor to send Li. The emperor calls Li back from his northern campaign (362– 365).

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(6) Upon his arrival, Li wishes to eat the liver of a dragon, which Yi Hangbok provides. Li demands provisions for his troops; again Yi Hangbok supplies what is required (365–367). (7) On the eleventh day of the tenth month of 1593, while studying the skies (“the heavenly ether”), Li Rusong learns that a famous general, Kim Tŏngnyŏng, lives in Koryŏng, Kyŏngsang. Li asks Kim to kill Konishi (Chosŏbi or Sŏbi in the text). Knowing that his former beloved, Hwawŏl 花月, is now a concubine to Konishi in P’yŏngyang, Kim enlists her help and kills Konishi (aged thirteen) (380). Kim also defeats Chodal (367– 373). (8) On the third day of the third month of 1594, at the suggestion of Guan Yu, the Korean king leaves his mountain fortress but meets a Japanese attack and goes back to the fortress (373). (9) On the eighth day of the first month of 1595, after recapturing P’yŏngyang, Li meets the Korean king at Pukhan Fortress. However, Li finds the king’s physiognomy lacking and threatens to withdraw. The king wails atop Mount Samgak 三角山, and Li reconsiders (373–374). (10) Kim Tŏngnyŏng defeats Harabuk and finally, at Bird Ridge, kills Taira Hideyoshi (aged fifteen) (380), who was hovering in midair by magic (374–378). (11) On the eighth day of the first month of 1597, at the suggestion of Guan Yu, Li Rusong appoints Yi Sunsin (Yi Sunsŏng in the text) admiral. Yi defeats the Japanese fleet but dies in action. The Japanese praise him as a “divine general” (378–379). (12) At the final battle in the first month of 1598, the Japanese try to bribe the Ming troops with gold, but they are routed (379–380). (13) Being jealous of the beauty of Korean mountains and rivers, Li Rusong cuts the veins of mountains and waters and sets fire to them. The fire rages for months, inflicting more damage than was done by the Japanese during the previous seven years. One day Li sees a youth astride

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a green donkey and asks Kim Tŏngnyŏng to seize him. When Kim fails, Li himself pursues the youth to T’aebaek Mountain and stumbles into a thatched cottage [of an old man, who sternly rebukes Li for his designs on Korea and orders him to leave the country] (380–381).

I. The King’s Dream The content of a dream varies in the four versions. In A, “a certain woman holding a curved stick in her left hand and carrying on her head a sheaf of rice plants marches through the broad streets of the capital and heads for the palace gate, but she suddenly disappears.” In B, she carries a sack of millet on her head; in C, she wears her hair loose and, weeping, places her sack of millet on the palace steps. The interpreter of the dream is Kim Hŭimun, who had a similar dream himself (A), Ch’oe Illyŏng (B), or Ch’oe Ilyŏng (C). All three interpret the dream correctly: the stick stands for the radical for man (radical 9), and the graph “woman” (radical 38) under that for “growing grain” (radical 115) makes the graph for wae 倭 (Japan). However, in the Chinese version, the person who appears is Guan Yu who, with “a sword as a stick and fully accoutered, comes from the south and, knocking on the palace gate, calls out loudly, ‘Is the king asleep or awake?’ ‘Who is it?’ the king asks. Guan Yu answers, ‘I am Guan Yunchang of the Han.’” Guan Yu then advises the king to “seize the Japanese monk Sukchu, who will enter the capital through the South Gate tomorrow afternoon with a basketful of carved wooden figures of famous generals of the past. These will turn into real generals and attack Korea.” Thus D offers the content of the dialogue between the king and Guan Yu. As noted above, C begins with the birth and rise of Ch’oe Ilgyŏng, while A lists ill omens that occur everywhere for some ten years before the invasion. Elemental disturbances and the consequent human fear seem to direct our attention to the Koreans’ fatal weakness of ignoring signs from the worlds of humans and nature. So is Yi I’s wise counsel

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rejected by the king,34 but Yi I’s foreknowledge and wisdom seem to be further underscored by his selection of Yi Sunsin. Also, Yu Unyong’s chasing away Katō Kiyomasa, who spies on Korea disguised as a monk, seems to place the blame on the king, who, lulled by apparent peace, neglects the defense of the country. Patriots endowed with prescience do their utmost to warn of and thwart the enemy’s designs on Korea, but without a concerted effort by the government, individual actions cannot avert the disaster. These events appear very much like fiction, but they illustrate the truth about the contemporary situation. These episodes, together with others to come, offer bitterly ironic glimpses of the court and present a valid dramatization of the ineffective government at that time.

II. The Invasion Having visited every corner of Korea to find strategic spots, Kiyomasa returns to Japan, makes preparations, and invades Korea with sixty thousand ships (A). The approach of the enemy fleet of a thousand ships is first sighted by the exiled Ch’oe Ilgyŏng in Tongnae (B). C dates the event to the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month, when the astrologer observes that “the sun loses its light in the east, death is in the air, the waters touch the sky, the black clouds gather. . . . Then ten thousand ships with mounted cannons draped with blue curtains [appear] over the sea. Drumbeats and war cries shake the waters, and the enemy soldiers land and at once kill the Magistrate of Tongnae” (200). The date in D is the third day of the ninth month, when beacon fires on Kŏje Island give notice that a hundred Japanese ships anchored near the island the day before and destroyed every town on their path (358). Although there are variations in the names of Japanese and Korean officials and generals, as well as places and the outcome of battles,35 the four versions unanimously lament the fact that, totally unprepared for the invasion, Korea suffers a crushing defeat from the beginning, owing to factional struggles and divided opinions at court.

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III. The King’s Fight “The king, fully accoutered, holding a whip in his hand, emerges from the Tonŭi Gate,36 while the queen, accompanied by some ten court ladies, walks out through Inhwa Gate. It is so dark that they cannot see even an inch ahead until Yi Hangbok leads them with a candle” (A). “As the enemy crosses the Han River, the king summons General of Military Headquarters 御營大將 Ch’oe Talsŏng 崔達性 and General of the Royal Guard 禁衛大將 Paek Sumun to mobilize citizens to guard the four gates of Seoul. Then the king emerges from the South Gate but does not know where to go. At this time Kim Wŏngdonga says, ‘Pyŏngan province is still safe, Your Majesty. Let’s go there,’ and accompanies the king to the north” (B, 25). In C, “the king weeps and orders the soldiers to guard the four gates and officials to protect the altars of soil and grain. Led by Minister of War Yu Sŏngnyong (1542–1607) and followed by Sŏ Wŏnjik, the king emerges from Sosu Gate, crosses Muhak Pass, and is carried on the backs of both Yu and Sŏ” (213). In the Chinese version, Yi Hangbok and Yi Tŏkhyŏng (1561–1613) oppose the suggestion of surrender and advise the king to escape to Pukhan Monastery. The king agrees and says he would not surrender to the “chuan 戎 barbarians” (360–361).37 The text of his petition for a Ming relief army follows at this point. The choice of details is realistic and human. Abandoned by his officials and citizens, the king has only a handful of loyal followers. As he passes through Kaesŏng and P’yŏngyang, people weep and complain, especially regarding unjust treatment by some officials or the maladministration38 and greed of others. Sometimes they block his path and even throw stones at him and his party. In Seoul, hearing that the court has abandoned them, the angry mob burns palace buildings, together with registers of slaves, and take part in looting. In the provinces, they loot government granaries and humiliate and kill local officials.

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IV. The Request for Chinese Reinforcements The Korean envoy to China is Yi Tŏkhyŏng (A, together with Yi Hangbok in D) or Yu Sŏngnyŏng (B, C).39 But it is Guan Yu who moves the Chinese emperor’s mind to quickly dispatch reinforcements (A, B, C), or Yi Tŏkhyŏng’s seven-day entreaty that brings the Chinese help (D). We have seen above under what pretexts Li Rusong refuses to cross the Yalu or threatens to withdraw his troops.40 If the king’s features lack the dragon face that reflects the mandate of Heaven, his weeping inside a jar—perhaps in order to magnify his voice—is a humiliation. The king is not dubious, but he is ineffectual. He may have birth, but not virtue and merit. The narrator has in mind the king’s failure to read signs from Heaven and his consequent failure to protect his people and country from the whims of overreachers. Hence Li Rusong sees that the throne is empty. He meets the king but does not see him. The intent of the episode may be to emphasize Li’s arrogance or his attempts to test the king’s sincerity, or to criticize indirectly a king who abandons his capital and is compelled to seek Chinese help to defend his country and people.

V. Kim Ŭngsŏ and the Korean Female Entertainer Kim Ŭngsŏ, an obscure general at the time, is called upon to render service. In version A, he already holds the rank of Touring Defense Commissioner (sunan pangŏsa), infiltrates the Japanese camp, and, with the help of Kyewŏrhyang, beheads a vice general of Kiyomasa. In B, the description of Kim Ŭngsŏ recalls that of famous heroes in war tales in China and Korea: “His eyes are the color of the waters of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. He is eight feet tall, dons a golden helmet and armor, and holds in his left hand a ninety-pound long spear and in the right an eighty-pound iron hammer.”41 Here the name of the female entertainer is Wŏlch’ŏn (Wŏlson in C),42 and the victim is Sosŏp (Konishi).43 In the Chinese version, the name of the hero is Kim Tŏngnyŏng, who was discovered by Li Rusong, an indication that, unlike the Korean king,

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the Chinese general is capable of using men of ability. With the help of Hwawŏl, he beheads Chosŏbi (Konishi). In the first three versions, the female entertainer introduces the hero to the Japanese as her brother. In all four versions the hero also beheads the female entertainer and offers both heads to the king (B), or the head of the Japanese to Li Rusong and that of the female entertainer to her mother (D).

VI. Nongae and Her Righteous Death Nongae (Moran in B and Nonga in D; d. 1593),44 surname Chu, is a government female entertainer in Chinju. When upon the fall of that walled town, the Japanese troops celebrate the victory at Ch’oksŏk Tower, Nongae entices a drunken commander and leaps over a cliff with him into the South River. The monument and shrine by the river honor her spirit (usually on the twenty-ninth day of the sixth month), and the gate at her birthplace in Changsu is marked to commemorate her integrity.45 Her victim varies: Kiyomasa (A), Hideyoshi (B), or Sŏk Chongno (D). Version C omits this episode. The reason for Nongae’s suicide is her “keen sense of honor that does not allow her to give herself to the enemy’s embrace” (A). Her name is intertwined with a number of legends about the hero’s rock or the rock of falling blossoms. Later legends and romances that dramatize the same episode seem to indicate that her death is a highlight of the invasions. In his poem “At the Shrine of Nongae,” Han Yongun 韓龍雲 (1879–1944), one of the most original poets of the twentieth century, immortalizes her.46

VII. General of the Loyal Army Kim Tŏngnyŏng In real life Kim Tŏngnyŏng (1567–1596), born in Sŏkchŏ Village, Kwangju, was a poor private citizen, humble and unrecognized; he had valor and physical strength; he was in mourning for his mother but volunteered to fight the invaders; he was slandered by jealous foes and went, innocent, to his death.

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His birthplace varies from Kwangju (A) to P’yŏnggang (B), Koksan (C), and Koryŏng (D).47 The narrators idealize Kim’s strength: “He wears on his waist a 100-pound double iron mallet, can eat a picul of rice, and can catch a running dog. He comes in and out of the window on horseback, slides down from the roof to the eaves and enters the attic. Once he shot a tiger with an arrow, then impaled the raging animal’s chin with a spear, and left the immobile tiger to die after two days.” The narrator concludes that “Kim’s wisdom is that of Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 [181–234] and his bravery that of Guan Yu” (A). He can “lift a thousand pounds and eat a picul of rice, and he surpasses Zhuge Liang in tactics and magic” (B). Or he is praised as a “heaven-sent general whose valor surpasses all” (D). In the tales Kim is observing mourning for his father and lives alone with his mother. At the news of the invasions he volunteers, despite his mother’s opposition. He goes alone to the enemy’s camp, humiliates Kiyosama with magic, and orders him to leave (A, B, C). In fact, however, he worked closely with loyal soldiers. In Tamyang he obtained several thousand men, and in Chinju he was in command of the loyal army. Because of tactical errors made by Yun Tusu 尹斗壽 (1533–1601)48 and Kwŏn Yul 權慄 (1537–1599),49 the campaign proved unsuccessful and Kim had to withdraw. Yi Siŏn 李時言 and Kim Ŭngsŏ were jealous of Kim’s prestige. Thus, despite his efforts, Kim was unable to crush the enemy. The court continuously rejected his plea for close battle, because deceptive and jealous counselors tried every means to prevent him from achieving brilliant military results. No wonder the author of the Chinese version attributes to Kim the feat of killing a number of Japanese generals, including Hideyoshi (D). The historical Kim Tŏngnyŏng was arrested and executed by the court. In the tale, the accuser is the rebel Yi Monghak 李夢鶴 (d. 1596) (A) or Kim Sundal (C). In fact, on his way to subjugate the rebel Yi Monghak, Kim heard that the rebellion had been quelled and withdrew his troops. Shin Kyŏnghaeng 辛景行 (fl. 1573–1604) accused him of being in league with the rebel, and he was arrested. In B, the king orders Kim arrested for

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not rendering service at times of national crisis and going into the enemy camp alone without authorization. Kim asserts his innocence even after six tortures, as recorded, but says that he is willing to die if he is given a plaque or tomb inscription that reads, “Immortal Loyal Subject and Devoted Son Kim Tŏngnyŏng.” He then has the executioner (or himself) remove a scale from the crook of his left knee or under his chin (A) and dies. The scale is that of a dragon, a talisman that adorns the heaven-sent hero in folklore and myth. The fact that no sword or club can kill Kim indicates his supernatural birth and strength. Only after he removes the scale, thus becoming a mortal, can the evil ones rob him of his life. The king orders Kim slain while conferring upon him the title of “Immortal Loyal Subject.” This deed bares his falsehood and stresses the legitimacy of the popular hero. Kim is daring toward the invaders from outside but passive toward the enemy within. He accepts death but asserts his innocence and loyalty. The country needs to mobilize its total power to repulse the invaders, but it kills an innocent and loyal general. Kim’s real enemy is not the Japanese but his own people. The corrupt authorities frustrate the zeal of a patriot as he exerts himself to make history. The more difficult his trials, the more the people respect such a hero. Therefore, the narrators depicted Kim Tŏngnyŏng as a hero of the nation and the people.50

VIII. Admiral Yi Sunsin Extant versions all praise the admiral (1545–1598) as a great tactician and commander who is loved by his men and Chinese allies alike and feared by the enemy. His talent is recognized by Yi I and Yu Sŏngnyong (A) or by Guan Yu and Li Rusong (D). He can read signs in nature, such as the goose’s honking at midnight (A). All except D describe the turtle ships (most extensively in A) that inflict deadly blows on the Japanese fleets. Whenever the Japanese sight Yi’s ships, they “cry and stamp their feet,

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panic-stricken” (A, 60–61). In one battle, Yi’s vessels kill or drown fifty thousand Japanese soldiers (C). The admiral dies from an enemy arrow or bullet. A bullet passes through his left rib and lodges in the shoulder. Yi has it removed after the battle. In other versions, he dies from a bullet wound (A, D). At the battle near Hansan (Hansandong in the text) Island 閑山島, a Japanese arrow wounds the admiral in the shoulder, but he keeps on fighting until he dies. At the news of his death, one Japanese general joyfully exclaims, “Now that Korea no longer has a great admiral, we can destroy it” (B, 17). In version C, the Japanese general first sends a bullet into Yi’s chest and then beheads him. Yi Sunsin is also a victim of jealousy and slander. The narrators portray Wŏn Kyun (d. 1597) as cowardly, treacherous, unprincipled, unfeeling, and untrue, and censure him for his ambition, pride, poor judgment, greed, and malice. Wŏn is wont to run away or lose a battle; only then does he ask for Yi’s help. The evil Wŏn is never at peace, however. He hunts and drinks and sleeps with women when he should train his men and bolster their morale.51 Is it an assertion of order that causes him to lose every battle? At one point Wŏn’s machinations are exposed, but he has supporters at court, the Easterners, who act from political expedience and self-interest. Yi is painfully aware of the implication and the effects of such factional strife on the outcome of war and on his own person. In fact, Yi was imprisoned and questioned under false charges and was released as a commoner in duty. The narrator of version A gives greater rein to his imaginative insight when he has Yi Sunsin declare that he would rather die in action than suffer another disgrace.

IX. Kim Ŭngsŏ and Kang Hongnip’s Expedition to Japan This episode is based on the Korean expeditionary forces under Kim (1564–1624) and Kang (1560–1627) sent to help the Ming repulse the Manchus in 1619. In the battle at Sarhu 薩爾滸, the Ming forces were

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routed, and Kang surrendered to Nurhaci (1559–1626).52 However, Kim attempted to have a paper detailing the Manchu positions smuggled out to Korea, but was betrayed by Kang and executed. The intent of the episode is regarded as Korea’s attempt to avenge herself for the wrongs done in the past by the Japanese invaders. The main elements are the following: the departure by Kim and Kang; before they set sail from the southern coast, a spirit appears to one and warns him to delay sailing for three days; one of the two refuses and falls into the enemy ambush; the Japanese ruler tries to bribe both, but only one yields; the loyal one kills the traitor and himself; and the horse of the loyal one carries the head of its master back to Korea. In the beginning, Kim volunteers to head the expedition and names Kang as vice-commander (A), or the king dispatches them (B), or both Kim and Kang volunteer (C). The spirit that appears is that of Kim Tŏngnyŏng (A), the Korean spirit named Oedonggyŏng (B), or the naked spirit of the Eastern Sea (C).53 In the first case, the spirit appears to Kang; in the second and third, to Kim. Thus, it is Kim who advances, ignoring the warning, and is defeated at Yokohama (A), or Kang who falls into an ambush at Tongsŏl Pass (B) or Tongjul Pass (C). Then Kang rebukes Kim for his impetuosity and kills him (A), or Kim kills the disloyal Kang for becoming the son-in-law of the Japanese ruler and kills himself (B, C). The one who carried Kim’s head is Kang, who is censured by the king and stripped of his rank (A). In this version, the narrator conjectures that Kim’s death is caused by the vengeful ghost of Kyewŏrhyang, who was earlier beheaded by Kim Ŭngsŏ, to show that time’s circle is vicious. In other versions, Kim Ŭngsŏ’s horse carries the head of its master back to Kim’s wife (B) or to the king, who is instructed by Guan Yu where to retrieve it (C).

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X. Li Rusong’s Desecration of Korean Topography The narrators credit Li Rusong with attempting to change the topographical features of Korea so that they will not be in harmony with local currents of cosmic breath (qi). Li severs the veins of famous mountains and watercourses and sets fire to them. “He toured the country with some hundred soldiers to sever the veins of mountains and rivers, saying ‘There are too many heroes in a small country like Korea’” (B). The same allegation is made in C and D. Li then encounters an old man astride a black ox and pursues him to a deep mountain, or follows a youth astride a green donkey to T’aebaek Mountain (D). After being reprimanded and ordered to go back to China by the old man, Li bids farewell to the king and says, “Korea is my home country, and my ancestors’ graves are here. How can I betray it? May your majesty enjoy everlasting life” (C, 258– 259). This probably refers to a tradition that “his ancestor in the sixth generation was a Korean who moved to Tieling in the early years of the Ming from a town on the south bank of the Yalu River.”54 Mountains will crumble and change the contours of the earth. Whether descending from above or springing from beneath, rivers diverted from their usual courses will become unbridled and overflow their banks. The land, which stands for sanctity and harmony, will become a symbol of disorder, disrupting the correspondence between humans and nature. Nature then can no longer teach order and harmony to humans. A cataclysm in nature will surely bring the same cataclysm to society and culture. Knowing Li’s intentions, the tutelary god of the land of Korea must intervene. The old man (his eight sons may represent eight provinces of Korea) and the youth55 are guardians of Korean mountains and waters, and their appearances in this episode may reflect the narrator’s intention to cut the circularity of time to stop the vicious repetition of history. We know of Tang designs on Korea after helping Silla to vanquish Paekche and Koguryŏ in the seventh century, and people might have feared that after the Japanese retreat the Chinese soldiers would stay on. Or the episode

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may be another way of saying that Korea does have a large number of heroes and able people. More important, it reflects the consciousness of Korea as an independent state and a wish to wipe out the disgrace of the earlier humiliation when the king was compelled to weep before Li Rusong. Also, Korea served the Ming outwardly with decorum, but inwardly it resented stringent Chinese demands. This episode also indicates the popular sentiment about the Chinese general, who is not always portrayed favorably in the tale.

XI. Great Master Samyŏngdang Humiliates Japan The master’s mission is to exact Japan’s submission not by means of arms but by the power of Buddha Dharma. The recurring elements include his departure, his trials, and obtaining surrender with terms of annual tribute. Knowing that the master is a living buddha, the Japanese test him by various means: burning inside an iron room, drowning in a lake, and freezing inside an ice house (A). In this version, the master carries along two magic objects: a peaked bamboo hat made from the bamboo grown on the highest peak of Mount Halla 漢拏山 and the ocean seal, the diagram of Dharmadhātu 海印圖 carved on jade.56 In the B version, trials include: reciting from memory 10,990 verses (18,090 verses in C) written on a screen; sitting on a bronze cushion afloat on a lake; choosing between damask and wooden cushions; burning inside an iron room; and riding an iron horse.57 As befits his person, the master constantly prays with a rosary with 108 beads and recites the scriptures from the Korean Tripiṭaka. He can summon dragons and guardian angels and transform himself into a mighty warrior when required. But it is his mastery of concentration and meditation that brings about the Buddha’s help. This alludes to a belief that no fire, ice, or sword can harm a buddha or a bodhisattva, a major motif in the lives of saints. Only when the master

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brings down a great rain to flood the Japanese capital does the Japanese ruler or Hideyoshi surrender. The master then rebukes the Japanese ruler for wrongs he has done to Korea, including the desecration of two royal mausoleums (A), for which he requests that Japan send two golden effigies in golden coffins as atonement. The items of tribute include three hundred pieces of skin from women below twenty years of age and three hundred pairs of testicles from men below twenty (A, B; C has three hundred pieces of human skin). But in his report to the king upon his return, the master explains that as a monk who is compassionate and unwilling to take life, his real purpose in exacting such items is to teach Japan a lesson, and that the king must be lenient (A). In spite of their ostensible patriotism, the narrators did not truly understand the tenets of Buddhism. Vengeance accepts that time is circular, but awakening in Buddhism cuts asunder the chain of causation, the endless births and deaths. Vengeance will breed more vengeance, and to have the great master of meditation demand such a barbaric tribute discredits his accomplishments. Historically, Great Master Samyŏngdang (1544–1610) did confer with Kiyomasa three times and did go to Japan in 1604 and returned with Korean captives.58 He gathered loyal troops and, as commander of monk soldiers, took part in the recapture of P’yŏngyang. In his Chingbi rok 懲毖錄, Yu Sŏngnyong says, “The master was at P’yohun Monastery表 訓寺 in the Diamond Mountains when the war began. Monks escaped when the Japanese soldiers entered the monastery. But the master, unperturbed, continued his meditation. The enemy dared not approach him, and some even pressed their palms together to show their respect.”59

The Imjin nok as Narrative Fiction The first version of the Imjin nok shows the narrator’s knowledge of his sources, while the other versions rely more on popular traditions. We understand the procedure and insight of fiction, how multiple layers

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of traditions are at work. Episodes, narrated seriatim, have little to do with factual accuracy, more with motive and effect. The narrator is free to expand his sources if that produces the desired effect. This tendency is evident in the portrayal of historical persons, drawing on folklore, legends, and myths that clustered around them. The Chinese version, which assumes an outward historiographic form and is written in an annalistic style, includes an edict (361–362) and a song in the sao form, composed and sung by Nongae (360),60 evincing the same tendency in its great divergence from what we know as factual truth. The general patterning in each version may not be clear at first, but we do note moral patterns and purposes of certain episodes. For example, how and where Yi Sunsin suffered a wound varies, but the point is that the admiral fought on despite his wound. In the episode of Kang Hongip and Kim Ŭngsŏ, what matters is not which one was the traitor, but that one was and the other was not. That Li Rusong severed the veins of Korean mountains and rivers is fiction, but the narrator’s intent is to show his self-awareness as a Korean and his awareness of the country as an independent state upon which no one should have designs. Likewise, Samyŏngdang’s demand of an inhuman tribute is fiction, as the narrator himself is at pains to point out. We read the Imjin nok as literature, not as history, and we must remember that history contains its share of fiction. Heroes emerge to save the land tyrannized by invaders; hence their actions arise from love of their country. They remain constant, already formed by nature and experience before the tale begins. Their inner qualities are usually manifested outwardly in their physical strength, endurance, valor, and swordsmanship. These qualities evoke awe, and the tale dwells on moments of glory and defeat. Antagonists must be portrayed as equally matched in combat and symbols of terror and tyranny. When Kim Ŭngsŏ enters the Japanese camp to decapitate a general, he has the help of a woman entertainer with an intimate knowledge of the adversary’s habits and weaknesses, but it is Kim’s mastery of fear that is recognized. Later, when the same Kim or Kang refuses to

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be bribed by the Japanese ruler, he is portrayed as an example of loyalty and integrity. Kim Tŏngnyŏng, on the other hand, is a wronged hero whose filial piety and loyalty stirred the popular imagination to idealize him when he had become a memory. His use of magic is symbolic of his mastery of the arcana of military tactics (he sticks a piece of white paper on the forehead of every Japanese soldier and retrieves all the pieces at once by magic), but his untimely death, wrought by the king’s blindness and factious ministers, highlights the magnitude of his suffering. Kim’s persecutors are corrupters of justice through their arbitrary use of power; hence the narrator portrays Kim as the pattern of constancy and patience to evoke our pity and sorrow. A paragon of the wise and generous soldier, Admiral Yi Sunsin is a leader dedicated to a cause. The image of the hero dying as he wins his last decisive battle evokes a strong sense of mortality. These achievements of major characters are the values the narrator finds noble and enduring in his tradition, as he assesses the complex significance of their deeds. The artful use of popular traditions shows the narrator’s matter and manner. The appearance of Guan Yu as a divine helper61shows not only the popularity of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in Korea but also the narrator’s belief that history is subservient to providence. Addressing the Ming emperor in a dream, Guan Yu declares, “I am Guan Yunchang. My elder brother Liu Xuande [Pei] is reincarnated as the Son of Heaven, and Zhang Fei is reincarnated as the king of Korea” (A).62 As guardian and benefactor of Korea, Guan Yu manifests himself in a dream to warn the Korean king of the imminent invasions or to urge the Chinese emperor to dispatch reinforcement, and even appears in broad daylight to rebuke and crush the spirit of enemy generals, or inspires courage and teaches secret tactics to Korean generals. The intervention of Guan Yu, the god of war and loyalty, has another meaning. Despite the imperfections of the Korean king and his government, the fortune of the House of Yi is ordained to be maintained, and Guan Yu asserts the eventual return of order. When Kim Ŭngsŏ succeeds

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in beheading the Japanese general, the headless Konishi starts up, seizes his sword, and strikes the rafter of the Yŏngwang Arbor before expiring (B:41). The description echoes that of the typical goblin or monster in fairy tales, where the headless goblin is not really dead until something else, usually ashes, is applied to his neck. In the close combat between Li Rusong and Hideyoshi (D), the latter changes himself, by magic, into a magpie and then vanishes into the air. Kim Tŏngnyŏng flies up forty fathoms high and stabs Hideyoshi sitting inside a cloud, and Hideyoshi falls to his death. The monster hiding in a cloud is a folklore motif, but whereas magic used by Hideyoshi is perverse and destructive, relating him to the dark realm of unbounded ambition, Kim’s power of levitation is regenerative, for he is able to eliminate the agent of destruction and save the Ming troops. Samyŏngdang is not a general but a great master of Meditation (Sŏn 禪). He represents the order of peace and justice, and his victory is that of spirit over matter. As Prospero says, “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (The Tempest, 5:1:27–28). He is immersed in the lives of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and his words, gestures, and deeds echo those of the enlightened and immovable one. In an age when Buddhism was officially proscribed and monks were held in low esteem by Confucian literati, the narrators turned to the great master to redress the wrong done by Japan. Buddhism is alive, the tale seems to say, among the people who need faith for refuge and solace. The conspicuous absence of this episode in the Chinese version is suggestive. Reality is not what happened in history, but what has lived in the memories of humans. The narrator also looks back to the past for a common store of references to enrich the narrative texture. It is the technique of superimposition. The B version alone invokes Emperor Shun, the First Emperor of the Qin, Liu Bang, Xiang Yu, Han Xin, Sima Xiangru, Zhuo Wenzhun, Chao Yun, the legendary beauty Xishi, and Precious Consort Yang. The narrator may not personally have read the Shiji and Sanguozhi, but these names appear in quotation books and mirror literature and are known

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to every schoolboy. Upon surveying Shin Ip’s troops pitched with their backs to the river, the learned Kiyomasa at once recalls how almost eighteen hundred years before, the troops of Han Xin (d. 196 BC) drew up ranks with their backs to the river (18).63 In her speech to dissuade her son Kim Tŏngnyŏng from entering the Japanese camp singlehandedly, his mother cites the precedent of Xiang Yu (232–202 BC),64 and says even he, “with strength enough to pluck up the hills,” had to flee before the Han army (29). After watching one of his subcommanders being slain, Li Rusong rebukes Kiyomasa, saying, “Your ancestors deceived the First Emperor (d. 210 BC) and landed on your island with five hundred virgins and boys and stayed on to multiply. . . . Relying only on brutality, you have invaded a country of decorum like Korea. I am indignant. You are not my match, so receive my sword” (57; also in A).65 And in describing his daughter of fifteen, the Japanese ruler compares her beauty to that of Xishi and Precious Consort Yang (77–78). Thus the narrator openly acknowledges his cultural heritage, multiple layers in his material, and fictive elements in his fabric. Concerned with affect and response, the narrator introduces a moral dimension into his tale with parenthetical comments, usually couched in rhetorical questions. On the false accusation of Kim Tŏngnyŏng, the narrator comments, “In a small country such as Korea, there is a tendency for one to eliminate anyone better than oneself. What a disheartening state of affairs!” (A, 76). And when Kim finally dies under torture, the narrator continues, “Fortune has deserted the country, and the heartless people kill such a famous general without a crime” (A, 97). The same narrator has the rebel Yi Monghak relate to Kim Tŏngnyŏng the purpose of his rebellion: “The king does not soothe the people, and ministers maltreat them. The people are alarmed. I would therefore like to raise a loyal army, put the court in order, arrest corrupt officials, and stabilize the feelings of the people. . . . Why not save the people from distress and rectify the crimes of the authorities?” (95). The objects of criticism in these comments are the king and his court. That the king did not prevent the invasion is indictment enough, but here he is blamed for

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his lack of wisdom, prudence, temperance, and justice. He has encouraged discord and succumbed to slander; hence he cannot be the model for his people, the repository of princely virtues. By not ruling by example, he disqualified himself. It is therefore not fortune but his unprincely conduct that has brought about disaster. Hence the villains are the king and his officials, who should exist for the people, not vice versa. The narrator skillfully voices his deeply felt conviction, the commonplace of epideictic rhetoric. The death of Nongae is an occasion to lament the cowardice of Korean generals who fled without putting up resistance. “A frail woman trapped the famous foreign commander. How could hundreds of famous generals in Korea not feel ashamed?” (77). Women have the same nature and virtue as men, if not more, the narrator seems to be saying, as evinced also in an episode where the sister of Hideyoshi or Kiyomasa warns her brother of the futility of the invasion. Even when there is no authorial comment, events are narrated in such a way as to explore their multiple implications. At the beginning of the tale, the portents reflect disturbances in humans and the state, a comment on the current state of affairs. But intoxicated by a smug surface peace that breeds idleness and decadence, the king ignores the portents and thus fails in his first duty as the defender of the established order. In the king’s flight from Seoul, one notices at once the conspicuous absence of the encomiastic topic of “the allegiance of the people”—the roads are not lined with cheering multitudes.66 The king is not surrounded by good advisors and loyal subjects. His war is a righteous war that a Confucian king is bound in honor to undertake—the ultimate test of the country’s unity and the ultimate challenge to the king —but he cannot inspire courage and dedication among his own people. Then the successive flight, defeats, and mutual incriminations among his generals and officials are symptomatic of political and moral chaos. The humiliations the king suffers at the hands of Chinese officials and generals adorn his official annals, as they are telescoped into the episode of his weeping inside a jar—hardly a symbol of majesty.

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Amid the din of battles and exploits of heroes is an unremitting hum of resentment by the victims of slander. The manipulators of passions wreak havoc with their politic flattery and acid tongues, and the reader is outraged at the strife that is loosed upon society. Wŏn Kyun slanders Yi Sunsin; Kim Myongwŏn and Yu Hun accuse Shin Kak; Cho Hŏn envies Kwak Chaeu; Yi Monghak or Kim Sundal (C) slanders Kim Tŏngnyŏng (Yi Siŏn, Kim Ŭngsu, and Yun Kŭnsu hate him). But the king does not punish the evil ones and fails to see to it that justice is done. Against the background of discord, heroes like Yi Sunsin distinguish themselves by their efforts to fulfill their appointed tasks. In a society where there is no reward for the virtuous and no punishment for the wicked, whatever is powerful (or official) is right. In the Confucian system, true government is attainable only by a real ruler, but such a ruler is nowhere to be found. As the past served as a mirror for the present, so the present must provide important lessons for the future. The narrator invests the most dramatic moments of his narrative with moral overtones. The audience listening to a speaker would react to his voice and be stirred to contemplate the implications of his comments. But such authorial asides reflect the perennial concerns of mirror literature, such as the qualifications of the ruler and the mutuality of existence. They make us ponder our shining virtues and frailties and imperfections, and question what is worthy of praise and blame. The root of order and harmony in humans is virtue, and the ruler who does not embody it cannot guarantee the possibilities of our happiness, peace, and prosperity. Hence the image of the king who cannot reconcile vehement rivalries between the factions and cannot inspire virtue in action. The narrator draws not only on history but also on legends dealing with political rhetoric of disorder. He offers his meditations on history and popular traditions in order for us to desire and renew what is admirable and lasting, for what is truly of value—the exemplary deeds of heroes —will live on and sustain humans. That the comments are ultimately political and moral in the context of the Confucian cultural system does not surprise the modern reader. In this tale and in its particular vision of

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life and the world, the narrator offers what is truly of value to his time and to the present, what is vital to the maintenance of ideal political and moral order.

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Notes 1. So 11–86; Hanguk kososŏl mongnok (Catalogue of Old Korean tales) (Hanguk chŏngsin munhwa yŏnguwŏn, 1983), 75–76, lists twelve versions. 2. William Freedman, “The Literary Motif: A Definition of Evaluation,” Novel 4, 2 (1971): 123–131; and Claude Bremond, “A Critique of the Motif,” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982), 125–146. 3. Cf. P. Hamon, “What is a description?” in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 147–178. 4. This episode (also in So 1) appears in the Sindobi myŏng by Yi Hangbok, for which see Yulgok chŏnsŏ (Sŏnggyungwan taehakkyo Taedong munhwa yŏnguwŏn, 1958), 36, appendix 4:39a, ICS 3:1356–57. 5. This might be a story about Genso, who came to Korea in 1588–89, 1589– 90, and 1591. ICS 1:91–96, 102–109. The penetration by Japanese spies is a minor motif: eight Japanese generals spy (1:7, 8); a spy is rebuked by a Daoist master (So 6); a monk spy is caught but commits suicide; Yu Unyong banishes Kiyomasa (1562–1611) and Genso (So 13) or Sosŏp (So 19). 6. Kim and Hwang left Seoul on April 9, 1590, and returned in the third month of 1591. SnSS 25: 2a–4a; ICS 1: 97–102; 3: 1577–78; CBR 1: 3b–6a. 7. She is a sister either of Kiyomasa (So 2, 4, 5, 12, 18, 19) or of Sosŏp (1556?– 1600) (So 13, 14, 15, 17). 8. Shin’s battle took place on June 5–7. ICS 1:267–77; CBR 1:17a–18b. 9. The king left Seoul on June 9 (SnS 26: 3a; CBR 1:18b–23a). Kwŏn Hyŏp (1542–1617) was then Third Inspector. For Yi Hangbok see Yi Chŏngsin, Paeksa Yi Hangbok iltaegi [A life history of Yi Hangbok] (Hyesŏng ch’ulp’ansa, 1977). 10. For Shin see ICS 1:281–84, 287, 301–06. 11. Actually Kim Myŏngwŏn (ICS 1:286–87, 306) and Yu Hong, Third State Counselor, were jealous (CBR 1:23b–24a). 12. See ICS 1:287–98, 309–12, 314–21, 394–204; 2:808–16, 1032–39, 1117– 29. Ha Taehung, trans., Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sunsin (Yonsei University Press, 1977), and Imjin Changch’o: Admiral Yi Sunsin’s Memorial to Court (Yonsei University Press, 1981); CBR 1:6b–8b, 41b–

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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43b; 2, 32a–33b, 21a–22b, 24b, 27b–28b, 32a–33b. Yi Unsang, trans., Yi Ch’ungmugong chŏnsŏ, 2 vols. (Ch’ungmuhoe, 1960). The king left P’yŏngyang on July 19 at the suggestion of Yun Tusu (SnS 27: 4a–b). Also in So 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15–21. Sin was killed in action on August 23 (SnS 28: 18a). In most versions the first Chinese relief force is headed by Shi Ru and Zu Chengxun, and the second, by Li Rusong. For Shen see ICS 1: 452–53; SnSS 26: 34b–35a; CBR 2: 11a–13b; Nanhu chapki 10b–14b. Also in So 1, 3, 7, 9, and 10. For Kwak see ICS 1:429–24; 2:813–15, 1006; CBR 1:49a; 2:16a, 24b–25b. For his nickname, see SnS 27: 19b. For the nature and role of the righteous or loyal army see Ch’ŏe Yŏnghŭi, Imjin waeran ŭi sahoe tongt’ae—ŭibyŏng ŭl chungsimŭro [Social movement during the Japanese invasions, especially the righteous army] (Hanguk yŏnguwŏn, 1975) and Yang Hyŏngsŏp, 1592–98 nyŏn choguk chŏnjaeng esŏŭi inmin ŭibyŏng t’ujaeng (Struggles of the people’s righteous army during the Imjin wars of 1592–98) (P’yŏngyang: Kungnip ch’ulp’ansa, 1957). ICS 1:452 quotes Kwansŏ ŭpchi as source. See Yun Tusu, ed., P’yŏngyang sokchi (Kyujanggak ed.), 2:52a–b. Kwŏn’s victory occurred on March 14, 1593, for which see ICS 2:697–707 and SnS 35:49a ff. ICS 1:527. According to the yŏnbo [chronological biography] in the Kim Ch’ungjanggong yusa (2:1a–22a), Kim was born on January 15, 1569 (2, 1a), and died on September 13, 1596 (2, 12b). ICS 2:766, 781–82, 802, 813– 15, 817–22; SnS 78:5a, 17b, 20a, 21b. For Yi Monghak see ICS 2: 830–34 and SnS 77:19a. Hanguk sa 3:645; Chŏng Tasan chŏnsŏ (Munhŏn p’yŏnchan wiwŏnhoe, ed., 1961–62) 13:33b–34a; Yu Mongin, Ŏu yadam (Hanguk kojŏn munhak taegye 13, 1976), episode 109, pp. 242–245. SnSS 26: 44a; SnS 30: 8a. Also in So 1 and 7. DMB 1:830–35. Yu Sŏngnyong says that Chang Usŏng built a floating bridge over the Taejŏng River and Min Kyejung built one over the Ch’ongch’ŏn River (CBR 1:40b). Also in So 1, 2, 3, and 7. Kuk’s rebellion took place on August 29 (ICS 1:421, 824–27; CBR 1:25b–27a; SnSS 26:25n–27a, 28b). He was killed on

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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December 3 by Shin Sehan, a student in Hoeryŏng (SnS 26:40b–41a; CBR 1:25b–27a). The two princes were released on August 30, 1593 (SnS 41:13a). CBR 2:17a; SnS 43:1a–b. Also in So 1, 2, 5, and 11. Ch’oe was a general of the righteous army in Chŏlla (ICS 1:601–605, 738). SnS 82:7b–13a. Hwang left in the intercalary eighth month and returned on December 24, 1596. Ch’oe Illyŏng (So 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20) or Ch’oe Ilgyŏng (So 16). DMB 1:728–733. Also in So 2, 6, 12,14, 16, 17, 19, 20, and 21. SnS 26: 20b reports that Yi Ch’unnan donated four thousand sŏk. See Ch’oe Yŏnghŭi, Imjin waeran ŭi sahoe tongt’ae—ŭibyŏng ŭl chungsimŭro, 111–125. Also, Cho Hŏn memorialized the throne but was banished to Kapsan (So 1, 2, 3, 7). SnS 26:1a ff. For a detailed account of battle, see Samuel Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society: Korea Branch and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2005). The west gate, one of the eight gates in Seoul (TYS 1:15a). Shiji 110:2881, 2882, n.4; Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 2:156. For example, on June 11, 1592, a certain person in Kaesŏng suggested that Chǒng Ch’ŏl (1536–1593), who was in exile in Kanggye, should be released (CBR 1:21a–b; SnSS 26:8a–b). For the people’s misbehavior in P’yŏngyang, see CBR 1:28b–29a. The name of the Korean envoys varies; Yi Hangbok (So 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18); Yi Tŏkhyŏng (So 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10); Kim Sŏngil (So 8, 11); or Yu Sŏngnyong (So 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21; SnS 211:7b–8b). Also in So 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, and 21. Robert Ruhlman, “Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction,” in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 141–76. The name of the female entertainer is Kyewŏrhyang (So 4, 7); Wŏlch’ŏn (So 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20); Wŏlsŏn (So 12, 16, 18); or Hwawŏl (So 8, 10, 11). The Japanese victim is Chongil (So 1–3); Sosŏp (So 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20); Chosŏbi (So 8); or a subordinate of Konishi (So 4). She is called Nongae (So 2, 3, 4, 8, 11); Oksŏn (So 5, 6); Moran (So 13, 14, 15); or Nonga (So 10).

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45. The Japanese general is Kiyomasa (So 4); Sŏk Chongno (So 8, 10, 11); Hideyoshi (1537–98) (So 13–15); P’yŏng Sugŭi (So 6); or unnamed (So 2, 3, 5, 11). 46. For the legends see ICS 1:347; for Han Yongun’s poem see Peter H. Lee, ed., The Silence of Love (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), 22– 23. 47. His birthplace varies; P’yŏnggang (So 2, 5); Ich’ŏn (So 3), or P’yŏngsang (So 11, 16) in Kwangwŏn; Yonggang (So 14) or Ch’ŏrsan (So 18, 19) in P’yŏngan; Koksan in Hamgyŏng (So 21). 48. SnS 136:6b. 49. ICS 2:697–707; SnS 35:49a ff. 50. Cho Tongil, “Imjin nok e nat’anan Kim Tǒngnyŏng” (Kim Tŏngnyŏng in the Record of the Black Dragon Year), in Sangsan Yi Chaesu paksa hwallyŏk kinyŏm nonmnjip, ed. Sŏ Susaeng (Taegu: Hyŏngsŏl ch’ulp’ansa, 1972), 483–502. 51. For Wŏn’s debauchery see CBR 2:22b–24b; see also Yi Chaebŏm, Wŏn Kyun chŏngnon (A fair story of Wŏn Kyun) (Keymyŏngsa, 1983). 52. Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), 1:594–99. Kwanghaegun ilgi (Chŏngjoksan ed.), 138:1a ff., esp. 9a. Kang Hŭiyong, Kang Hongnip changgun (Yasilsa, 1981). 53. The name of the spirit varies: Ŏdukkang (So 3); Chŭnggak (So 6); Tugang (So 11); Waedŏnggang (So 13); or spirit of the Eastern Sea (So 12). 54. DMB 1:830a–b. 55. Li Rusong is banished by a hermit (So 6), a god of Mount Songni (So 8), a youth on Mount T’aebaek (So 9, 10), a god of Mount T’aebaek (So 12), or a blue-clad youth (So 21; most detailed). 56. The most famous diagram in Korea is that by the Great Master Ŭisang (625–702), for which see Taishō Tripiṭaka 45:1887a. 57. The number of the master’s trials varies: five (So 3, 7, 14, 18, 21); four (So 2, 5, 6, 12, 17); and three (So 11). 58. His conferences with Kiyomasa took place on June 1, August 28, 1594, and January 31, 1595 (SnSS 28:4a; 55:16a). His return with captives is noted in SnSS 39:3a. For the master’s works see Korean Tripitaka 152 (Tongguk yŏkkyŏnghoe, 1969), which contains his poetry and prose. For a comprehensive study see Kim Tonghwa et al., “Hoguk taesŏng Samyŏng taesa yŏngu” (A study of Great Master Samyŏng, the Great Saint who protected the state), Pulgyo hakpo 8 (1971): 13–205. 59. CBR 1:50a.

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60. The same poem is in So 8. For inclusion of other poems see A, 100. 61. Guan Yu appears to the Chinese emperor in a dream (So 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15–21). Sanguozhi 36:939–42; Robert Ruhlman, “Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction,” in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 173–75. For the worship of Guan Yu in Korea see Sŏae munjip 16:23b–24b. 62. Lo Guanzhong, Sanguo yanyi (Peking: Xinhua, 1953) 1, 4–5. 63. Shiji 92:2616. 64. Shiji 7:333 (Watson 1:70). 65. In “Lament on the Water” (“Sŏngsangt’an,” 1605), Pak Illo朴仁老(1561– 1643) agrees that descendants of those “boys and girls” settled on Japanese islands and became ancestors of the Japanese people:“The First Emperor believed in empty words / And sent maidens and boys to solitary isles / to procure the pills of immortality. / Thus he spawned unruly bandits / on those islands / and brought great indignation and shame / upon the Middle Kingdom.” See also Bo Zhui’s poem, “Magic,” in Arthur Waley, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (New York: Knopf, 1918), 195–196. 66. See Peter H. Lee, Songs of Flying Dragons (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 158–160.

Chapter 6

Ideal Places in Classic Korean Poetry Most of the classic Chinese ideal places, such as the time of Perfect Virtue 至德之世,1 the Village of Not-Even-Anything 无何有之鄕, the Broad and Borderless Field 壙埌之野,2 the Land of Virtue Established 建德 之國,3 the country of Utmost North 終北之國,4 and the dream land of Huaxu 華胥氏之國,5 represent versions of chronological and cultural primitivism, models of simplicity, freedom, spontaneity, and ease. These well places (eutopoi) are really no places (outopoi), which can, as the speaker in Liezi avers, “be reached only by a journey of the spirit” 神遊 而已.6 Likewise, Peach Blossom Spring 桃園,7 the first Chinese literary locus amœnus created by Tao Qian (365–427), haunted the imagination of later poets. In depicting man’s first and ideal state, uncorrupted by the conventional system of values and conventional standards of judgment, the creators of a perfect society or a good place emphasized its “negative amenities”8: no distinction between good and evil, no useless knowledge and writing system, and freedom from pride and envy, sickness and decay, sorrow and anguish, lust and hate, labor and war. The goal of the Daoist concept of enlightened living is embodied in the Nameless

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Man’s advice to Tien Gen in the Zhuangzi (7): “Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views” 游心於淡, 合 氣於漠, 順物自然, 而無容私焉.9 In addition to recurrent allusions to these places, descriptions of pleasant places are found in the prose genre of the record 記 (ki)— descriptions of buildings (house, arbor, tower) and the natural riches surrounding them; and in the records of a dream journey 夢遊錄 (mongyu rok)—works that begin and end with dreaming and awakening, often in a pleasant place. Both are written in literary Chinese; the aim of the first genre, like the seventeenth-century English country house poems, is to stress the idea that the dweller’s virtue is reflected in the edifice and environment, and the second genre, akin to the Western dream allegory/vision, aims to criticize the present or seek the ideal future. In this paper, I will discuss how classic Korean poets in the vernacular discovered a pleasant place here and now, in history, and what forms, themes, and techniques they employed in their works.

1. Courtiers who helped found the new dynasty of Chosǒn sang of a peaceful golden age as the product of the prowess of the Confucian soldier-statesman, and later of the reigning monarch’s enlightened rule. Maeng Sasǒng (1360–1438), who served the great king Sejong as Chief State Counselor, sings of simple joys of country life. His Kangho sasi ka 江湖四時歌 (Four seasons by the rivers and lakes) is the first sijo sequence, and his image of an age of peace and prosperity consists of simple rural felicity. Spring gives him uncontrollable rapture (mich’in hǔng), and he drinks turbid wine by the river with damask-scaled fish as a side dish. In summer, the river sends to the speaker, who has no work, a breeze to keep him cool. Summer comes to the rivers and lakes,

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I am idle at the grass hut. Friendly waves in the river only send a cool breeze. I can keep myself cool because of royal favor.10 In autumn, when every fish is sleek, he casts a net from his boat and leaves it to the stream’s flow. In winter, when snow piles up more than a foot high, he wears a bamboo hat and a coarse-woven garment to keep warm. That he can enjoy leisure and seasonal pleasures in the country —nature’s bounty and his comfortable life—are the gifts of the king. By simple panegyric topography, Maeng has constructed the golden age under the benevolent rule of his king. The idea that the peace the speaker enjoys is a gift of the king recurs in other similar works, such as the first song in the original “Fisherman’s Songs” in twelve stanzas, preserved in the Akchang kasa: The old fisherman living in the cove says: “Life on the water is better than life in the hills.” Cast off, cast off! A neap tide in the morning, a flow tide at night. Chigokch’ong chigokch’ong ǒsawa.     Even a fishing rod and bright moon are royal favors.11 In the first of a twelve-stanza sequence, the speaker again builds a simple panegyric landscape and affirms the truth that the world of politics is not far away from the vision of a golden age.

2. The epideictic strategy of the Korean country house poems, such as Chǒng Ch’ǒl’s 鄭澈 “Little Odes on Mount Star” 星山別曲 (Sǒngsan pyŏlgok) and Pak Illo’s 朴仁老 “Hall of Solitary Bliss” 獨樂堂 (Tongnaktang), bears similarities to seventeenth-century English country house poems: the ideal landscape as reflecting the virtue and character of the

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subject, like the paradisal setting blessed with soil, air, wood, and water in Penshurst; an absence of display; the idealization of the subject by associating him with paragons of virtue in the tradition; emblematic association of plants and animals with his virtue; and a combination of the topographical and the didactic. On the other hand, such Korean works omit any description of buildings or their pedigree; the role of the landed aristocracy in the rural community; tenants, retainers, and servants; communal life (public meals and gatherings); the subject’s forefathers; and hyperbolic flattery with political implications. The epideictic poet’s job is to create an enduring monument of poetry to stimulate emulation; hence the poem dwells on the subject’s moral beauties and their lasting impact on society and culture. The praise of moral and spiritual excellence calls for a context of solitude and nature. Often explored are the dialectic patterns of withdrawal and emergence, the contemplative and active, self and the world, contemplation as a necessary stage for an active career, moral cultivation as a prerequisite for public service, and the individual’s moral sense as the only safeguard for institutions. Thus, in the course of describing the subject’s moral beauties—be he a Daoist immortal or a Confucian sage—through praise of landscape, the poet reaffirms traditional cultural values and parades his knowledge of history and literature. Written to praise the elegant life that Kim Sǒngwǒn 金成遠 (1525– 1598) had established at the Mist Settling Hall and Resting Shadow Arbor on Mount Star in South Chǒlla province, Chǒng’s “Little Odes on Mount Star” (c. 1578) catalogues the delights of the four seasons, for example: Floating clouds at the sky’s edge come and go nestling on Auspicious Stone Terrace; their flying motion and gentle gestures resemble our host. White waves in the blue stream rim the arbor; as if someone stitched and spread

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the cloud brocade of the Weaver Star, the water rushes in endless patterns. On other mountains without a calendar who would know the year’s cycle? Here every subtle change of the seasons unrolls before us. Whether you hear or see, this is truly the land of transcendents. . . . I follow the peach blossom causeway over to Fragrant Grass Islet. As I stroll to the West Brook, the stone screen painted by nature in the bright moonlit mirror accompanies me. Why seek Peach Blossom Spring? Earthly paradise is here.12 That Mount Star exceeds in beauty Tao Qian’s Peach Blossom Spring —is, in fact, “the land of transcendents”—is a topos of outdoing, but it could also be a reflection of the patriotic theme. The expansive landscape reflects Kim Sǒngwǒn’s own liberality, freedom, and unworldliness, and the floating clouds and waterfowl (duck) mentioned elsewhere in the poem symbolize the mind and courtesy of the host. Thus, the poet is all the more cautious against the intrusion of cultural barbarians: Don’t boast of the recluse’s riches lest some find out this lustrous, hidden world. At the end, the poet, enraptured by the music his host plays on the black zither, avers that Kim is the true immortal in harmony with the workings of the universe, metaphorically flying high on the back of the crane. The crane is not only a symbol of longevity but also a fitting emblem of unity

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and harmony. It soars above the world while maintaining an intimate relation with it, uniting time and space, time and timelessness. The “Hall of Solitary Bliss”13 by Pak Illo (1561–1643) was written on the occasion of his poetic pilgrimage to the Hall of Solitary Bliss on Mount Purple Jade in Kyŏngju, where the remains of Yi Ǒnjǒk 李 彦迪 (1491–1553) are preserved, and Pak paid tribute to the master’s memory. Yi Ǒnjǒk served as Fourth Inspector and Second Censor before he suffered in the 1530 purge and withdrew to Mount Purple Jade to study Neo-Confucian philosophy. In 1537, he was recalled by royal order and filled a number of high posts. The “Hall of Solitary Bliss” does not dwell on his political achievements, however, but on his exemplary virtues. As a statesman he was equal to Hou Ji or Lord Millet, ancestor of the Zhou dynasty, and Jie, a wise minister under the legendary Emperor Shun. But, caught in a political purge in 1547, he was sent into exile to the north where, like the Grand Tutor Jia Yi (201–168 BC) in Changsha, he spent seven years in cold Kanggye. There he transformed the rigors of the political winter into the bliss of a virtuous spring. The poem utilizes such metaphors of natural harmony as graceful mountain peaks, a winding stream, straight bamboo, a caressing wind, and a dense pine grove, and implies that these were spared by heaven and treasured by earth so that their riches could be handed down to the true “owner.” The emphasis is on the beauty, purity, and spontaneity of nature, symbolic of the subject’s harmonious, enlightened state of mind. The hall itself is a center of moral cultivation; what is praised is a way of life in the ideal setting, a mode of existence vital to the preservation of the enduring norms of the lettered class. Friends there are said to include such emblematic animals as hawks and fishes. These classical images from song 239 in the Book of Songs14 imply the self-contentedness of even birds and fish as first, as in the original context, a sign of the extent of moral transformation effected by an ideal ruler (though here fish do not jump into the fishermen’s nets in their eagerness to serve the owner)15

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and second, as emblems of the workings of the Confucian Way—how it is clearly seen in heaven and on earth. Yi’s retreat surpasses in beauty and purity the Garden of Solitary Bliss of Sima Guang (1019–1086); Censer Peak on Mount Lu, sung of by Li Bo (701–762); the Tientai Mountains in Zhegiang; or even Peach Blossom Spring, the Chinese Arcadia. In moral and spiritual stature, Yi Ŏnjok is compared to Mount Tai or the polestar, supreme emblems of Confucian moral rhetoric. Such hyperbolic description and metonymical representation create the locus amœnus—an ideal microcosm that mirrors the ideal state built on the Confucian political-moral philosophy. But on another level—since in Confucianism the disrupter of social and moral harmony is man himself—the poet has subtly introduced a satirical bite. That is, the images of perfection and hyperbolic praise indirectly deride those ignorant of the ideal pattern of emergence and withdrawal, the art of biding time, and cultivation of the self. A victim of political machinations and senseless bloodshed that upset the moral and cosmic harmony, Yi saw his dream of creating another golden age shattered and the country become a wasteland. Still, even in exile he “cultivated virtue, the forthright Way,” and history eventually vindicated his name, private academies enshrined him, and he was worshipped in the Confucian Shrine, the highest honor accorded a scholar-statesman. Thus he was able to make use of adversity as a trial of spirit. “Jade is concealed in the rock, yet the hill is refulgent with it,”16 says a passage in Lu Ji’s Rhapsody on Literature文賦, aptly evoked to exalt the master’s rural solitude, contemplative leisure, and complete modesty. Virtue therefore serves as a bulwark against mutability. The man who dwells in the Hall of Solitary Bliss has conquered time by his paradigmatic acts, and his enduring virtues are bright as the sun and moon, eternal as the cool wind that blows through the hall itself. Heaven so high and earth so rich, they, too, will dissolve into dust. None is eternal but the cool wind that blows

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature through the Hall of Solitary Bliss.

3. My third example is The Angler’s Calendar 漁父四時詞 (Ǒbu sasi sa, 1651) by Yun Sǒndo 尹善道 (1587–1671), the product of his leisurely life at a favorite retreat, the Lotus Grotto in southwest Korea. In intricate stanzas differing from the conventional sijo form, a pair of foursyllable words is added after the first line, and three-syllable onomatopoetic words after the second line. Throughout the cycle Yun Sŏndo introduces a number of subtle variations in form and organization. The emphatic syntactic division expected in the third line to introduce a deliberate twist in phrasing or meaning is often replaced by a different technique. In the first poem of spring, the third line continues the description of a given spring scene (line numbers refer to the original): line 1: fog lifts, the sun shines line 2: night tide neaps, high waters rush on line 3: flowers in the river hamlet, distant views. A similar structure recurs in the first poem of winter: line 1: clouds roll away, the sun is warm line 2: heaven and earth are frozen, water is clear line 3: the boundless water is a silk brocade. Here and elsewhere, Yun Sǒndo wishes to create an ideal landscape with memorable, fresh particulars, the radiance of spring with visual freshness, as in the first example. He is aware of the power in the landscape and attempts to reflect it in his description; at other times, a given landscape is designed to harmonize with his mood and superior solitude. Images of nature that demonstrate the excellence of his estate in spring include: gulls (2); a distant fishing village (4); supple and sweet willows

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and flowers (6); fragrant grasses, orchids and angelica, the moon (7); peach blossoms (8); and the cuckoo (9). Indeed, Yun has broken the sijo canons to help create a place rich in natural beauties and to suggest that the fisherman lives in a state of joyful harmony—otherwise, nature imagery would be meaningless. Lastly, what strikes the modern reader is a frequency of four-letter Chinese phrases (I count thirty-two instances), especially when such a sonorous phrase, followed by a Korean marker, begins the third line, occupying the first hemistich (ten instances in the cycle). Here I cite four examples. This angler’s life is [ǒbu.saengae.nǔn 漁夫生涯는] how I shall pass my days. (Spring 10) Northern coves and southern river, [pukp’o.namgang.i 北浦南江이] does it matter where I go? (Summer 3) Do you hear an oriole calling [pyǒksu.aengsǒng.i 碧樹鶯聲이] here and there in the green grove? (Summer 7) In an empty boat, with straw cape and hat, [koju.sarip.e 孤舟蓑笠에] I sit and my heart beats fast.17 (Winter 7) Often called in to satisfy metrical requirements and to say much in little space to create an echo, these Chinese phrases produce a slow and solemn effect, like a succession of spondees. Chosen for orotundity, they stand out amid the Korean letters calling for an educated response. This dramatic shift in tone and diction recalls the use of Latinate elements in English poetry. The poetics of sijo calls for two metric segments in the first hemistich of the third line, but the examples cited offer one fivesyllable segment that calls attention to its deliberate irregularity, slowing down the line with a distinct stress on each syllable.

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The ten poems in the spring cycle depict a day’s activities of a fisherman as he sets sail, scanning the river hamlets and distant views. Gulls accompany him and the boy, and he makes sure that a wine flagon has been loaded. Passing hill upon hill, he hears a cuckoo and sees the willow in the distance. He then asks the boy to have an old net ready. But being reminded of “The Fisherman,” attributed to Qu Yuan,18 where the wise fisherman advises the wronged idealistic courtier on the art of swimming in the sea of life, he asks himself if he should catch fish at all, especially when Qu Yuan’s soul might reside in a fish. Twilight approaches; the speaker wishes to return to the shore and reaffirms that rank and riches are not what he wants. He then realizes that now the moon has occupied the boat, “small as a leaf.” The drunken speaker sees the peach blossoms floating down the stream, perhaps from Tao Qian’s literary utopia, an indication that he is far away from the world of humans. On the boat he wishes to view the moon through a “bamboo awning.” Accompanied again by the cuckoo’s song, the speaker registers his heart’s rapture, treading fragrant grasses and picking orchids and angelica, as he wends his way to his cottage after passing a day as a wise fisherman. Delighting in the manifold richness and beauty of nature, Yun devoted his life to the truth of feeling. Consider spontaneous expressions of his freedom and joy as a fisherman: The Fisherman’s Song stirs my fancy; I have forgotten all about fishing. (Spring 5). The heart shouts its peak of joy, I have lost my way in the dark. (Spring 9). Rod on my shoulder, I can’t still my loud heart. (Summer 1). Whelmed by my exalted mood, I had not known day was ending. (Summer 6). I’ll angle there, of course, but

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my zestful spirit is enough. (Autumn 4). In an empty boat, with straw cape and hat, I sit and my heart beats fast. (Winter 7). In all these passages, Yun uses the technical term hŭng 興, signifying a surplus of emotion, and its various combinations. Verging on ecstasy, or a sensible ecstasy—for he has not thrown decorum overboard—his subjectivity characterizes his poetry, his sense of himself as individual and center. No other sijo poet I know wrote like him, and no other sijo poet would prove more exhilarating and rewarding. Ideal places evoked in these examples are not at some immeasurable distance from the present, elsewhere and some other time; nor are they an enclosure, gated and walled; nor a country of the mind to be attained only by the force of the imagination. Maeng Sasǒng finds his pleasant place in the rural landscape and sings not only of his happy life but also of virtuous royal work that guarantees such a lifestyle. In the country house poems, the pleasant landscape is the metonymic representation of the virtues of the subject. The epideictic poets such as Chǒng Ch’ǒl and Pak Illo affirm the values of history and culture that insist on the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, society and nature. Subtly underlying the poems is the poets’ conviction that the return of political-moral harmony depends upon harmony between humans and nature. The restoration of civil order calls for man’s moral regeneration, but action might bring about a faster change, hastening the application of the Arcadian vision to the world of politics. Such a dream, combining the active and contemplative, finds expression in the country house poems. As a man’s dwelling expresses his virtue, so should a dynasty. Only a ruler’s bestowal of virtue on people and country can transform chaos into order and reaffirm the values of civilization. The ideal landscape, then, provides a setting in which to contemplate the enduring norms of history and culture.

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Yun Sǒndo, working on the topos of the fisherman as sage, indicates that the happy fisherman’s discovery of self and nature is the result of his renouncing the world. Hence the poems celebrate the newly discovered values by means of a pleasant landscape. But his place is not an unattainable ideal, a dream world, or only an interior landscape: it is here and now (Pogil Island 甫吉島, 18 km SW of Wando, South Chŏlla province). As a seasoned politician who served four kings and spent fourteen years in exile, Yun is content to bring in harsher realities and does not banish politics, generally considered inimical to a good life in nature, from his rural contemplation. Poetry cannot be divorced from reality; it is involved in history and, as Yun says, we cannot dismiss its political and social engagements. “Is it a fairy land, or Buddha’s realm? / It can’t be the world of man,” avers the poet, viewing his estate covered with snow (Winter 4). It is in the pleasant place (Arcadia) that the poet learns the significance of the transformation of self by nature and the values of the creative independence of poetry. Arcadia is indeed “a place of witness, the place where . . . the Individual Talent [is] brought into confrontation with the Tradition.”19 Korean poets understand life in relation to the fundamental patterns of nature, and their poems become the vehicle for their acceptance of the human condition. Korean creators of ideal places have successfully expressed their view of life that combines both action and contemplation and that includes a relationship with reality. And they have shown their capacity to transform a common place into an ideal/pleasant place. “A heart that is distant creates a wilderness around it,” declared Tao Qian.20 As long as humans live in joyful harmony with nature, they will always find a pleasant place.

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Notes 1. A Concordance to Chuang Tzu, Harvard Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series Supplement 20 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 9:23; Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 105. 2. Concordance 7:20 (Watson, 93–94). 3. Concordance 20:52 (Watson, 211). 4. Liezi jishi (Peking: Zhonghua, 1970), 163 (A. C. Graham, The Book of Liehtzu [London: John Murray, 1960], 102–103). 5. Liezi jishi 41 (Graham, 34). 6. Liezi jishi 41 (Graham, 34). 7. James R. Hightower, The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 254–58. 8. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 117. 9. Concordance 7:20 (Watson, 94). 10. Sim Chaewan, Kyobon yǒktae sijo chǒnsǒ (Sejong munhwasa, 1972), nos. 124, 127, 115, and 116. The last line of the summer poem no. 127 (47–48) reads: imomi sǒnulhaeomdo yǒk kunǔn isyatta. 11. Akchang kasa (reprint, n.d.); not listed in Sim Chaewan, Kyobon yǒktae sijo chǒnsǒ. The last line reads: ilgan myǒngwǒri yǒk kunǔn isyatta. 一 竿明月이 亦君恩이샷다. 12. Peter H. Lee, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,2002), 178, 181. For more on poems of praise and friendship, see Peter H. Lee, Celebration of Continuity: Themes in Classic East Asian Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 43-48, 145-59, and 170-71. 13. Peter H. Lee, Pine River and Lone Peak (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 106–12 for translation. 14. Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), 213. 15. Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” lines 32–33, and Thomas Carew, “To Saxham,” lines 27–28. 16. Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 210; Victor Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York:

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17. 18. 19. 20.

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Columbia University Press, 1994), 129: “When the rock embeds jade, the mountain glows.” The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, 117–28. David Hawkes, Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 90–91. Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London: Methuen, 1971), 47. “Twenty Poems After Drinking Wine,” 5:4 (Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese [New York: Vintage, 1971], 83).

Chapter 7

The Road to Ch’unhyang A Reading of the Song of the Chaste Wife Ch’unhyang Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is already on the way to writing. —Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing The story of Ch’unhyang 春香, known to all Koreans, is the subject of narrative fiction for the eye or sung in a p’ansori 판소리 version for the ear. It concerns Ch’unhyang, daughter of a wealthy retired female entertainer and Second Minister Sǒng 成參判, who meets and marries Student Yi 李道令. When his father, the magistrate of Namwǒn 南原, is transferred to a position at court, Yi follows him to Seoul to prepare for his civil service examination. Meanwhile, a new magistrate arrives and demands that Ch’unhyang become his mistress. When she refuses because she is married, she is tortured and put in prison. Yi then returns to Namwǒn as a secret royal inspector and saves his beloved.

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Background There are some 120 different editions of the Song of Ch’unhyang, short or long, in literary Chinese or in the vernacular, in narrative fiction or in p’ansori to be performed by a professional singer (kwangdae 廣 大), lasting from five to eight hours depending on which version has been compiled by which singer. The earliest extant version (1754), by Yu Chinhan 柳振漢 (1711–1791), is in literary Chinese1 and consists of 200 heptasyllabic couplets. Chinese is the language of official tradition, authority, and power, indeed, the language of the symbolic father; vernacular is the language of the people. Chinese is a fixed language; vernacular, in a state of continual flux. In a hybrid culture that practiced written and oral circulation of stories and, as well, a bicultural society in which Chinese and vernacular literacies interacted with vernacular orality, it was inevitable that Yu’s version, a memorial reconstruction of a version heard (or slightly misheard) on stage, must have effaced much that was distinctly oral. As a literatus, Yu was probably moved by the power of the human voice and the singer’s competence and formal excellence. And the Song of Ch’unhyang he heard dealt with common material so that the broad outline of the plot was known in advance. P’ansori was a popular art form that joined the people in the immediacy of performance; but reception is a “unique, fleeting, irreversible act—no same performance experienced in an identical manner by any two audience members.”2 “Textuality gave to utterance a materiality that memory does not have.”3 Traces of earlier oral productions may be seen in the frequency of parataxis, formulas, episodes, myths, and elements of literacy—orality and literacy merged and supported each other. We may speculate that the earliest version was composed orally in performance. The text was almost exclusively transmitted in performances, which survived only in written versions.4 By “oral” I mean, with Paul Zumthor, “any poetic communication where transmission and reception at least are carried by voice and hearing,” and by “performance,” “the complex action by which

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a poetic message is simultaneously transmitted and perceived in the here and now.”5 Among multiple retellings of some 120 versions, the one I have chosen is the Wanp’an wood-block edition, meant to be sung, titled Yǒllyǒ Ch’unhyang sujǒl ka 烈女春香守節歌 (Song of the chaste wife Ch’unhyang; 84 sheets, 168 pages). This version focuses on Ch’unhyang; it is the most well wrought, the richest in sound and sense, form and style, and probably the most literary and most readable.6 Written from a pluralistic narrative perspective, with different voices and their corresponding value systems, it is polyphonic and heteroglossic, recognizing and exploiting to the fullest intralingual and interlingual features of the language. As an introduction, allow me to discuss for a moment the issues of orality and performance in Korean poetry, the oral narrative known as p’ansori, the female entertainer (kisaeng 妓生), and the professional singer (kwangdae).

Orality and Performance E però sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può de la sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia. —Dante, Convivio (“Everyone knows that nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muses can be altered from its own to another language without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.”)7 Le poème—cette hesitation prolongée entre le son et le sens. —Valéry, “Rhumbs,” Tel Quel 8 (The poem, this prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.) La traduction n’est nullement destinée a faire disparaître la différence dont elle est au contraire le jeu: constamment elle y fait allusion, elle la dissimule, mais parfois en la révélant en souvent en l’accentuant, elle est la vie même de cette différence, elle y trouve son devoir auguste, sa fascination aussi, quand elle en

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(“Translation is the sheer play of difference: it constantly makes allusion to difference, dissimulates difference, but by occasionally revealing and often accentuating it, translation becomes the very life of this difference, and it is under the spell of this difference that translation discovers its august duty whenever it proudly sets out to bring the two languages closer together through its own power of unification, a power like that of Hercules drawing together the two shores of the sea.”)10 In Korea all poems—more precisely, songs—were intended to be sung. Musical notations with lyrics dating from the early sixteenth century preserve both the musical settings and Late Middle Korean song words. Orality and performance were the salient characteristics of Korean poetry, and it was performance that helped to preserve classical vernacular poetry; for example, from the time of their emergence to their first transcription, Silla (Old Korean) songs were orally transmitted for about four hundred years and Middle Korean songs for about three hundred years. The postface to the Korean alphabet emphasizes the language’s power to describe the “sound of the wind, the whoop of cranes, the crowing of cocks, and the barking of dogs.”11 This phonetic complexity, explored to the full by poets, known and unknown, makes translation into another language problematic. The translator must re-create not only the sense but also the sound, its structure and function, and convey how certain sounds suggest certain meanings—indeed, often the meaning depends on the intricate sound pattern. If fluency and transparency are essential for a successful translation, how does the translator make up for the loss of the sound—phonomimes, phenomimes, and nonsense sounds? In the literary history of Korea, poetry written in literary Chinese and poetry in the vernacular are termed differently: si (poetry) was reserved

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almost exclusively for the former and ka (song) for the latter. This difference came from the ideological bias and cultural elitism of the literati, who espoused the Confucian and official Chinese literary canon and, through their alliance with the court and the ruling class, exercised power in Korea. The labeling of vernacular poetry as songs can, however, be interpreted not merely as pejorative but as suggesting other implications and may even indicate an understanding of orality and performance in their poetry. The names of most native poetic genres in Korea (and Japan) contain the graph ka (song) or its cognates (yo, cho, and the like in Korean). Indeed, this designation of vernacular poetry as “song” does not merely distinguish it from poetry written in literary Chinese. Orality and performance had always been the distinguishing characteristics of vernacular poetry in Korea. While the performance aspect came to be less prominent in China and Japan, it became the most significant feature of vernacular poetry in traditional Korea. Like all subsequent vernacular poetic forms in Korea, Silla songs known as hyangga 鄕歌 (sixth to tenth century) were sung. The forms and styles of Korean poetry therefore reflect its melodic origins. The basis of its prosody is a line consisting of metric segments of three or four syllables—the rhythm that is probably most natural to the language. In the ten-line hyangga, the ninth line usually begins with an interjection that not only indicates heightened emotions and a change in tempo and pitch but also presages the poem’s conclusion. Musical notations indicate that the musical divisions of each popular Koryŏ song, signaled by an interjection followed by a refrain, are different from its poetic (stanzaic) divisions. Furthermore, the association of verbal and musical rhythms can be seen in the refrain of Koryǒ songs. Nonsense jingles or onomatopoetic representations of the sounds of the drum, for example, attest to the refrain’s musical origins and function. Unlike other vernacular genres with extant musical notations, however, hyangga has no musical settings.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature oda oda oda [We have come, have come, have come,] oda syŏrŏptara [How sad, we have come!] syŏrŏpta ŭinaeyŏ [Sad are living beings,] kongdŏk takkara oda [We have come to garner merits.]

This is a popular song (ca. 635) sung during the construction of a sixteenfoot-high Buddha statue when men and women eagerly carried clay for the work. The compiler Iryǒn (1206–1289) adds that it was popular even in his day, almost six hundred years after its composition, and was sung when pounding rice or constructing buildings.12 Beginning with a succession of spondees, the repetition of oda (come) and syǒrǒpta (sad), simple native words, leads to the fourth line with kongdǒk, a Sino-Korean Buddhist technical term. Kongdǒk (Skt: guna), usually translated as virtue or merit, refers to the merits a devotee’s pious acts can accumulate; the repetition of the velar plosive /k/ provides a sharp awakening effect. The predominance of such bright vowels as a and o diminishes the influence of dark vowels (u and ǒ). The tone, therefore, is not sad: the devotees accept the fact that they are born as human beings to accumulate merits in whatever they do with devotion. The second stanza of “Che mangmae ka” (“Requiem for the dead sister”) by Master Wŏlmyŏng (ca. 742–765) recalls in simile and theme the words of Homer, who compared the generations of humans to those of leaves (Iliad 6:146–50): ŏNŭ kasal iRŭN paRaMae [ n, s, l, r, n, p, m ] ie chŏe ttŏdiL Niptai [ ch, tt, l, n, p, t ] haNan kajae Nago [ h, n, k, j, n, g ] kaNoNgot ModaoNdyŏ [ k, n, n, g, m, d, n, d ] Consisting of a group of native words, the stanza creates its effect by sound. The accumulation of appropriate sounds—euphonious soft bilabial nasal, alveo-dental nasal and liquid—creates a languid but sad effect, /d/ recalling an emotion that goes with such English words as “dread,” “dead,” and “darkness.” The sound values of the original, which

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resonates with the lamenting voice, cannot be adequately re-created in translation: We know not where we go, Leaves blown, scattered, Though fallen from the same tree, By the early winds of autumn. The characteristic songs of Koryŏ (918–1392) were all performed and transmitted orally until the early sixteenth century, when music books such as Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Notations for Korean music in contemporary use), the first systematic musical notation, providing both written music and written words, recorded them for the first time in the Korean alphabet then available. Whether Koryŏ songs were all orally composed is uncertain, but there was an interaction between oral and written forms and the high and the low as there was in medieval Japan, for example, where waterfront prostitutes and roaming actors and jugglers (kugutsu) played an important role in transmitting popular songs.13 Sijo 時調 (contemporary tune), the most popular of the classical poetic forms, consists of three lines in the original, with four metrical segments to a line, a caesura coming after the second segment: 3/4    4    3/4    4 3/4    4    3/4    4 3    5    4    3/4 The following example shows how the repetition of grammatical and syntactic elements enhances the intended tone and meaning: Ch’ŏngsando chŏllo chŏllo (3/4) [Green mountains are natural, natural] noksudo chŏllo chŏllo (3/4) [Blue waters too, natural, natural.] san chŏllo chŏllo su chŏllo chŏllo (5/5) [Between natural mountains

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature and natural waters,] sansugane nado chŏllo chŏllo (4/2/4) [I myself am natural, natural.] kŭjunge chŏllo charin momi (3/4/2) [This body that grew naturally] nŭlkido chŏllo chŏllo nŭlgŭrira (3/4/4) [Will no doubt naturally age.]14

Except for ch’ŏngsan (green mountain) and noksu (blue water), the song draws its diction from native common words. In his philosophy of life, the author Kim Inhu 金麟厚 (1510–1560) repeats the adjective/adverb chŏllo thirteen times; the ideophone is charged with polysemy and musical property (melopoeia). The cognate of the Chinese ziran (“so-ofitself”)—natural spontaneity, the Korean chǒllo, repeated for emphasis and metrical requirements—is associated with the Daoist view of life: detached, free, enlightened. A man fully awakened, the speaker has comprehended the relationship between the phenomenal world and ultimate truth and has taken transformation as his final abode. In “Expressing Myself” (1618), Yun Sŏndo 尹善道 (1587–1671), generally considered the master of the sijo form, creates suspense by an emphatic repetition of verbs: Moehŭn kilgo kilgo (3/4) [A chain of mountains is long, long;] murŭn mŏlgo mŏlgo (2/4) [Waters flow, far, far.] ŏbŏi kŭrin ttŭdŭn (3/4) [Love for parents is endless,] mank’o mank’o hago hago (4/4) [And my heart is heavy.] ŏdŭisyŏ woegirŏginŭn (3/5) [Far off, crying sadly,] ulgo ulgo kanŭni (4/3) [A lone wild goose flies by.]15 The five adjectival verbs in the continuative form ko are among the simplest of Korean verbs, but tension builds as the poem moves steadily from one to the next. The long vowels in kilgo, mŏlgo, mank’o, and ulgo (all repeated for emphasis) and the l’s in kil, mŏl, and ul provide a resonant tone. The fourth line literally means “much much vast vast” to underscore his longing for his parents in a place of exile in the cold northeast, but its music is lost in translation.

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The Song of Ch’unhyang explores to the maximum all the rhetorical devices known to the language. Simple repetition of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs fecundates the music of sound and sense. Here Ch’unhyang expresses longing for her husband after his departure: Pogo chigo pogo chigo (4/4) [I yearn to see him, yearn to see him,] Ime ǒlgul pogo chigo (4/4) [Yearn to see my beloved’s face.] Tǔtko chigo tǔtko chigo (4/4) [I yearn to hear him, yearn to hear him,] Ime sori tǔtko chigo (4/4) [Yearn to listen to his voice.] Again she attempts to describe in words the depth and height of her love: Kǔnwǒn hǔllǒ muri toego (4/4) [A spring grows into a stream,] Kipko kipko tasi kipko (4/4) [Deep, deep, deep again—] Sarangmoe wa mega toeyǒ (4/4) [Our love piled high like a mountain,] Nopko nopko tasi nopko (4/4) [High, high, high again—] Kkǔnǒ chilchul morǔ kǒdǔn (4/4) [ Love does not know when to break;] Munǒ chilchul ǒi alli (4/4) [Who would know when it might crumble?] Guards and servants rush to Ch’unhyang’s home to take her to the new magistrate, and the head of female entertainers urges her on: “ǒsǒ kaja pappi kaja” (4/4)—“Let’s go quickly, make haste.” Audience and jailers, after Ch’unhyang is beaten, exclaim: Moji toda moji toda (4/4) [Oh, it’s cruel, it’s cruel,] Ch’unhyang chǒngjǒl moji toda (4/4) [Ch’unhyang’s chastity is cruel—] Ch’ulch’ǒn yǒllyǒ roda (4/2) [A chaste woman sent from heaven!] Ch’unhyang speaks to her mother, who laments her lot with an implied criticism of the mother’s preference for a son: Mao mao sǔlp’ǒ mao (4/4) [Don’t, don’t, don’t cry,]

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And note the parallel construction here: Sonnǔni yuhyǒl iyo (3/4) [What rushes out is blood,] Hǔrǔnǔni nunmul ira (4/4) [What streams are tears.] In addition, the narrator often uses ideophones—phenomimes and phonomimes—to picture in sounds the state, mood, and acts of humans as well as phenomena of nature. Phenomimes include, for example, ajang ajang (with toddling steps); allong allong (mottled); chosok chosok (drowsy); hǒlttǒk hǒlttǒk (panting); hǔnǔl hǔnǔl (swaying gently); hwich’in hwich’in (round and round); kubi kubi (at every turn); nǒul nǒul (sways, undulates); and taerung taerung (dingle-dangle). Phonomimes include, among others, ch’ullǒng ch’ullǒng (lapping); kamul kamul (flickering); kurǒng chǒrǒng (one way or another); k’wang k’wang (a dog’s barking—bowwow); pǒllǒng pǒllǒng (quivering); p’ǒl p’ǒl (fluttering); tongdong (jumping up and down); and tungdung (boom-boom).16 Most of these imitations of sounds and acts occur when Ch’unhyang is the object of focalization: her movements, surroundings, feelings, wishes, prayers, and what others do to her. Enumeration is another device as, for example, in sasǒl sijo—Pangja lists fourteen scenic spots in the country; the narrator cites fourteen items of Yi’s attire and nine items of Ch’unhyang’s; nineteen dishes are served for Yi by Wǒlmae; the word “love” (sarang) is repeated twenty-eight times in “Song of Love”; words with the graph chǒng 情 appear thirty-nine times (“Song of the Graph Chǒng”); words with the graph kung 宮 appear sixteen times (“Song of the Graph Kung”); the verb “to ride” (t’ada) appears sixteen times (“Song of the Graph Sǔng”); words with the graph chǒl 絶 appear seventeen times (“Song of Parting”); twenty-four entertainers are reviewed; each stop along the route is counted as Inspector Yi travels from Seoul to Namwǒn; and the

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blind fortune-teller appeals to some twenty mythological and historical persons. We are often reminded of the fact that certain poems are untranslatable. John F. Nims comments: “There is no way, for example, to translate ‘nostra vita’ [Inferno 1:1] into English so that the two simplest words for the idea ‘our life’ preserve the cadence of the Italian.”17 Or, one might add, “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Paradiso 33:145) with its alliteration of m, assonance of o, and consonance of l; or Goethe’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Meine Ruh ist hin, / Mein Herz is schwer; / Ich finde sie nimmer / Und nimmermehr); or Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne.”18 If translation of Dante, Goethe, and Verlaine is difficult, what about translation of an East Asian poem into a Western language, when the resources of East Asian languages differ from those of, say, English, and the field of association and allusion and the cultural context the poet/singer exploits are different? Is it possible to translate, transfer, reproduce, or approximate the materiality of language, its physical properties and recognizable qualities, words charged with musical property, and such sound-making devices as alliteration, assonance, consonance, and verbal synesthesia? We are reminded too that to translate a poem well is harder than to write a new poem; that the translator should take nothing for granted; that no translation (which involves interpretation and creation) is ever finished; that translation is an approximation but must provide an experience comparable to the original; and that the translator of poetry must himself be a poet. Here I have attempted to point out the relations that exist between sound and meaning—a meaning embodied in the audible shape of words, mimetic expressiveness in sounds, and sound symbolism in all its diverse aspects. I have also tried to show how Korean poets, past and present, have skillfully explored the intrinsic expressive power of sound symbolism and exploited words of native origin—particularly the concrete, sensory words belonging to the common language. In the words of Paul Zumthor: “All poetry aspires to being made voice, to

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making itself heard one day.”19 Where orality and performance have been the characteristics of vernacular poetry, a poem in Korea has been an elaborate rhythmical structure that explores all the hidden possibilities of the language bequeathed to the poet by his tradition. Christopher Middleton comments that the translator “must extend his own linguistic resources beyond their normal limits so that he can reach out with both hands and touch the original, and modify, modulate, and transfigure his own linguistic resources and extend them.”20

Intertextuality: Quotation and Allusion Sukchong taewang chǔgwi ch’o e (4/4) sǒngdǒgi nǒlbusisa (3/4) sǒngja sǒngson ǔn / kyegye sǔngsǔng hasa (5/6) kǔmgu okch’ok ǔn / Yo Sun sijǒl iyo (5/6) ǔigwan munmul ǔn / U T’ang ǔi pǒgum ira (5/7) The first five lines of the Song are intelligible to the listener because they invoke names known generally—Chinese sage lords Yao and Shun and culture heroes Yu and Tang. Yu controlled the flood and became the founder of the Xia; Tang the Completer is the mythical founder of the Shang—these names are widely known for their frequent appearances in the mirror literature and even in conversation. “Kyegye sǔngsǔng” are two reduplicatives for emphasis by repeating kye 繼 (continue) to convey the sense of “unbroken” and sǔng 承 (inherit, continue what has gone before). “Royal sons and grandsons will succeed one another” (line 3) is somewhat ambiguous—it could be read as a prophecy or taken to imply that the reigning king, Sukchong, succeeded his father and grandfathers going back to the dynastic founder. I have chosen the future tense here considering line 2 (“Royal virtues are / vast,”) because unbroken succession in the future is the product of his virtues guaranteeing continuity. The listener, especially one without the classics, encounters the first hurdle in the phrase, “kǔmgu okch’ok”—kǔmgu 金甌 (a golden bowl, or a flawless golden bowl), a metonymy for the perfect and secure national

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polity. Okch’ok 玉燭21 refers to the harmony of the four seasons—spring should be warm; summer, hot; autumn, cool; and winter, cold. The difficulty of the phrase does not matter, though, because this segment is followed by another mention of Yao and Shun; so it can be understood as recalling the times of Yao and Shun, all the good qualities associated with them, and equating Sukchong’s reign with a golden age. Other examples of repetition for emphasis occur in kaga 家家 (every house); mijae mijae 美哉美哉 (how beautiful, how admirable), and ch’ǒch’ǒ 處處 (everywhere). Englishing the rhythmic compactness of literary Chinese (and Korean) requires more words and syllables than in the original. Resonant Sino-Korean words, like Latinate expressions in English, echo canonical predecessors, force such terms into a position of emphasis, and delight the reader/listener upon recognition. The text quotes from twenty-one Chinese—mostly Tang—poets in citing thirty-four heptasyllabic, nine pentasyllabic, and four tetrasyllabic lines. Some represent direct quotations to enhance a description of a given scene or object, while others are allusions to intensify a given mood or tone. Heptasyllabic lines harmonize well with the p’ansori meter (4/3, 3/4). Two lines (3–4) from Cen Shen’s (715–770) “Song of the Bay Steed of Governor Wei,”22 for example, are brought in to help describe how Yi’s donkey is rigged out: hongyǒng chagong sanhop’yǒn (4/3) [Crimson reins, scarlet bridle, crop of coral,] ogan kǔmch’ǒn hwanggǔm nǔk (4/3) [Jade saddle, embroidered blanket, and bit of gold.] The narrator recalls them from memory. The listener, however, will have trouble making them out in sounds alone. They constitute an example of direct quotation that might escape an inattentive audience without knowledge of the poem. They are more for the eye—the meaning of the four graphs with the radical 177 (or 227: “leather, hide”) will help, if the reader has a printed version of the text before his eyes. Some lines later, the narrator says the people turned to watch Student Yi, handsome as

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the Tang poet Du Mu (803–852) and the Wu musician Zhou Yu (174– 218), then adds two lines from Cen’s same poem: hyangga chamaek ch’unsǒng nae (4/3) [On the scented streets and purple paths of our Phoenix City,] mansǒng kyǒnja suburae (4/3) [The wonder and envy of all who see him.] They repeat from a different angle the intent of the previously given lines: to praise Yi’s appearance as a person of lofty bearing. Next the narrator describes what Yi sees from Great Cold Tower as he scans the four directions and quotes lines 2–3 from Du Fu’s (712–770) “On Yueyang Tower,”23 comparing what he sees to the Chinese lake: O Ch’o tongnamsu nǔn (2/4) [East and south waters of Wu and Qu] Tongjǒngho ro hǔllo chigo (4/4) [Flow into Grotto Court Lake.] Here the narrator has replaced the graph t’ak (split, cleave) with that for su (water), changing the original, which read: “Now today I’ve climbed up Yueyang Tower. / The lake cleaves the lands of Wu and Qu to east and south.” He has also dropped the first two graphs that begin the original poem, “sǒngmun” (Long ago I heard). The lines now convey a dimension of vastness and offer parallels between the landscape around Namwǒn and those celebrated in Du’s poem: Yueyang Tower and Great Cold Tower; Grotto Court (Dongting) Lake and the artificial lake with Magpie Bridge spanning it—an instance of hyperbole. When Yi playfully rewrites the meaning of the graph suk, he quotes line 36 from Wang Bo’s (649–676) “Looking Down from the High Terrace,”24 which becomes a whole line with a quotative particle –ra: karyǒn kǔmya suk ch’angga ra (4/4) Wonderful to spend tonight (suk) at the singing girl’s home wǒnankǔmch’im e chal suk (5/2) Under a mandarin-duck embroidered coverlet and pillow—suk

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When Yi says good-bye and mounts his horse, Ch’unhyang throws herself down on the ground outside the main gate, pounding the earth with her slender hands: “Aego, aego, my wretched lot!” In that single cry, Hwangae sanman p’ungsosak (4/3) [Brown dust spread in billows, howling was the wind,] Chǒnggi mugwang ilsaekpak (4/3) [The royal banners shed no light, the beams of sun were pale.] These two lines (43, 45) from Bo Juyi’s (772–846) “Song of Lasting Regret” (807)25 concern the enduring love and sorrow of the Tang emperor Xuanzong for the Precious Consort Yang, whose beauty shook an empire. The lines liken Ch’unhyang and Yi’s sorrow to that of the emperor after Lady Yang was strangled at the Mawei post station on July 15, 756 to pacify the angry soldiers accompanying the royal party in their escape from the An Lushan rebellion. Essentially, then, the lines try to capture the state of mind of the devastated Ch’unhyang. These poetical reminiscences ask us to look before and after, but only a tiny circle that has drunk deep of Chinese learning would have recognized them by bringing into play the intertextual resonance. Retroping Bo Juyi in this context makes us hear the hoofbeats of horses upon the young couple’s hearts. Lastly, in her dream journey to the shrine of chaste women celebrated in myth and literature, Ch’unhyang meets the spirit of Wang Zhaojun 王 昭君 (Brilliant Consort), who became a bride of the khan of the Xiongnu (Hun) in 33 BC In her speech to Ch’unhyang, Lady Wang quotes two lines (5–6) from Du Fu’s poem, “Thoughts on Historical Sites 3: On Wang Zhaojun:”26 hwado sǒngsik ch’unp’ung myǒn iyo (4/5) [A painter might well have recognized a face as lovely as the spring breeze;] hwanp’ae konggwi wǒryahon ira (4/5) [Now, pendants jangling, her soul returns in vain on

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The Korean particles –iyo (it is and . . .) and –ira (a quotative indicative assertive) have been added to connect the two lines. The quotation is more for the eye than for the ear: Ch’unhyang’s circumstances are akin to those of Lady Wang, and the quotation stresses the former’s grievance. All these quotations add a classical aura to the text, reminding the listener and reader that intertextuality is possible not only because literature is a system but also because “most allusions of subtlety and efficacy are likely to be related in some important way to inheritance.”27

P’ansori P’ansori (song sung in a performance arena) is a Korean oral narrative sung by a professional singer, accompanied by a single drummer, who narrates with mimetic and conventional body movements and gestures, sings, and assumes the roles of his characters. The singer dons no special costumes, wears no mask, and uses no props except for a fan (although sometimes a screen is on the stage). As in other vernacular poetic genres, performance helped to preserve and maintain p’ansori. “As a product of serial composition by many singers over a long period of time, p’ansori has four characteristics: it is a solo oral technique, dramatic, musical, and in verse. It developed its three aspects—music, drama, and literature—in response to the demands of audiences; and it interpolates songs of various kinds with a variety of modes and rhythms.”28 P’ansori emerged from the narrative shaman songs in the southwestern part of Korea, Chǒlla province, and the singer was from a hereditary shaman household; in fact, he was the husband of a shaman, “who had served as an accompanist or assistant to his wife, eventually emerging as a professional actor and singer on his own.” The shaman was a spiritually empowered woman who acted as a medium for gods and spirits, healed the sick, summoned the dead, and drove out demons. A professional mnemonist, a ritual specialist, and a repository of tales and songs, proverbs and riddles,

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in the community, she was socially abject. A study of the stages of serial composition from the original text or ur-form as it grew in size through accretions of more episodes and interpolated songs raises the following questions: How did the singer/redactor take advantage of the full resources of language in all its representative power? A close textual analysis of the language shows heteroglossia at its most exuberant; the diglossic and dialogic imagination work to suggest experiential richness of the luxuriant world. What is the relation between different modes of cultural production at specific historical moments? The different versions reflecting the fluidity of the oral tradition represent a collaborative re-creation involving singer/performers and redactors/scribes. Here Zumthor’s notion of “mouvance,”29 an esthetic principle of transmission leading to changes that were intended and perceived as improvements to the received text, is useful. Successive singers and redactors went on to revise the Song for a new audience—a dialogue between the performer and tradition and the performer and the present audience, who played a role in shaping each oral performance. The ur-form is forever inaccessible and irrelevant, because each surviving redaction is ultimately authorized by the singer (or redactor). P’ansori is an anonymous collective oral work that lives through its variants in a state of perpetual recreation.30 This study will focus on nineteen narrative songs that constitute the core of the Song of Ch’unhyang. Most versions contain all or some of them, and a close textual and cultural study will illuminate the organization and rhetoric of the Song. While authorizing a poetics of mouvance, these songs at crucial junctures represent repositories of themes, images, and episodes, highly intertextual and rhythmic. Formulaic style is a narrative strategy—effects of recurrence such as repetition of an identical syntactic/lexical structure at fixed intervals; repeated lines that help retention in memory; the use of refrain and enumeration; wordplay; and multiple meanings in the sequence of sounds. These are the most efficacious means of verbalizing “a spatiotemporal experience and of bringing the audience to participate in it.”31

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The Kisaeng The origin of the kisaeng (female entertainer)32 is often traced to the wicker workers (yangsuch’ǒk 楊水尺 or kori changi 고리장이) who made round baskets or other utensils from wicker (kori) or poplar. The word for professional actor or singer—kwangdae—may come from kwangjang, one who makes baskets. If a wicker worker’s son was talented, he became a kwangdae—one who possessed special skill; if not, a slave. If a wicker worker’s daughter was talented and beautiful, she became a kisaeng; if not, a slave. The female entertainers came from the lowborn. Those registered with the central government (kyǒnggi 京妓) and those belonging to the local administration (kwangi 官妓) had different functions. They were trained by the state from a young age to develop such special skills as singing, playing musical instruments, dancing, composing poems in literary Chinese and the vernacular, painting, and engaging in polite and sometimes learned conversation with upper-class men. They were public performers commanded to entertain the king, the court, and foreign envoys in the capital and local magistrates in the provinces. History records a number of exceptional female entertainers known for their loyalty, filial piety, and literary and musical accomplishments. The important social and legal issue raised by the Song is whether Ch’unhyang, like her mother who was once an entertainer, is herself one. Ch’unhyang’s father, Second Minister Sǒng, is a member of the ruling class, but her mother is a retired entertainer belonging to the lowborn. It is very likely that either by petition or a purchase (100 yang cash) of freeborn status, Wǒlmae became a free woman and her name was removed from the roster of entertainers. Ch’unhyang’s father promised Wǒlmae to take his daughter to Seoul to rear as his own, even if he never saw her, but it is unclear whether he went through the necessary procedure to have her registered as a freeborn (soksin 贖身), as the Kyǒngguk taejǒn 經 國大典 (Great state code of administration, 1485; 5:445–46) stipulated.33 Ch’unhyang has been acknowledged as the daughter of a ruling-class member, but her legal status is ambiguous. In our text her age is given as

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sixteen, the latest age to have her status changed. As the daughter of a minister, as attested by Student Yi’s servant boy and officials in Namwǒn, she grew up self-confident. She herself does not think she behaves like an entertainer. She was educated like a member of the literati class. When the servant boy, at Yi’s request, comes to invite her, she throws insulting words at him; only at the third invitation does she consent. To the community she is known for her beauty, literary talent, and virtue; officials in Namwǒn know her as a freeborn, as they remind Magistrate Pyǒn on several occasions. Although the chief clerk and secretary assert that “Ch’unhyang is not an entertainer,” Pyǒn nonetheless treats her like one. The class difference implied or suggested between Ch’unhyang and Student Yi has narrowed, however, since the first extant edition of the Song in 1754.

The Kwangdae Until 1894, when the class system was abolished,34 the kwangdae35 was a hereditary lowborn social group who intermarried among themselves and passed on their hereditary occupations. They could not take the civil service examination, nor own land,36 but paid cloth tax (mup’ose 巫布稅) every year. They were musicians who played musical instruments but also acted as public performers and entertainers. In the south, they were drawn from male relations (usually husbands) of the hereditary shamans, and their origin is often traced to the hwarang 花郞—Silla’s unique social group who through communal life and rites learned military arts, cultivated virtue, and toured famous mountains and rivers to nurture love of their country. From the Koryŏ period, they were mobilized to perform in national ceremonies: when sandae 山臺 plays (discontinued from 1694),37 in conjunction with the p’algwanhoe 八關會,38 were staged to please the autochthonous gods and spirits of the Korean people; when the tablet of the former king was enshrined at the Royal Ancestral Shrine; at the reception of Chinese envoys (discontinued from 1784);39 when the king attended certain functions outside the palace; and when a new governor arrived at his appointed province.40 They also performed at the

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exorcism rite at year’s end to expel evil spirits (narye 儺禮)41 at court and in the provinces, and during the festivities celebrating successful candidates in the civil service examinations—such as one performed at the palace (ŭnyŏngyŏn 恩榮宴)42 and a procession through the streets of the capital and provincial towns for three to five days (yuga 遊街).43 Similar festivities were also held in the administrative offices in the provinces (yŏngch’inŭi 榮親儀)44 and at the candidate’s own home (munhŭiyŏn 聞喜宴).45 The term kwangdae first referred to a mask or a masked performer;46 later, to public entertainers and those belonging to the group. Early Koryŏ musicians attached to the palace were recruited from official slaves (kwanno 官奴) and were called akkong 樂工 (slave musicians), not kwangdae. Registered as performers of musical instruments, the kwangdae became a central group of performing artists serving the needs of the court and government and preserving Korean folk arts. They were both a status group and a skilled occupation group. The size of the group can be seen in the 1836 registry of Kyŏnggi province, which lists some 40,000 members.47 In addition to being musicians and singers, some kwangdae also performed certain acrobatics, such as tightrope walking, dish spinning, somersaulting, spitting fire, throwing large round beads into the air and catching them, and tricks on horseback. Kwangdae also performed masked dance plays and puppet plays. As male members of the shaman households, the kwangdae’s repertory included songs, incantatory and religious in nature, invoking the blessings of gods and spirits of houses and villages at the beginning of the new year (kosa sori)48—as Silla hwarang sang to entertain gods of famous mountains and rivers or to praise the dynasty and the reigning king; when the successful candidates offered sacrifices at the shrines of their ancestors (sobun 掃墳); when a monument was erected at the grave site; or when a building was completed. These kosa songs are extant only in Chŏlla and part of Ch’ungch’ŏng provinces.

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T’aryŏng 打令, perhaps the most popular genre of song, etymologically derived from the words t’aryŏng 妥靈 written in different sinographs, means “to quiet the spirits,”49 and, by extension, a song sung for that purpose by the shaman. It was used when an ancestor was placed in a family shrine or a scholar was enshrined in a private academy. Later it became a folk song for amusement, and the term was used as a synonym for “song.” Yŏngsan 靈山,50 originating in Buddhist and shamanist rites to pray for the repose of the dead, refers to Vulture Peak, where Śākyamuni Buddha is said to have preached the Lotus Scripture to his disciples. This touching song concerning the transience of life reminds humans of the urgency of awakening from illusion and ignorance so that they can shuttle to paradise in order to take part in the Buddha’s assembly. The singer developed it as a literary and musical work, and soon this kind of song began to be sung outside the ritual context. Before the advent of p’ansori, entertainers in both the south and the north developed witty humorous chatter (chaedam 才談)51—hilarious jokes, ingenious witticisms, satire addressing physical defects, wordplay based on similar sounds with different meanings (paronomasia), and parody. Inspired by the shamanist narrative songs detailing the origin of gods and hardships in their career, the singer needed a long secular narrative song to entertain, for example, successful candidates at their festivities. The earlier term for p’ansori was t’aryŏng—especially narrative t’aryŏng.52 In its earlier phase, the p’ansori repertory included humorous episodes as, for example, in pyŏl Ch’unhyang ka dating from the 1840s; but the extant five pieces have dispensed with these, perhaps to cater to the taste of the educated. The four requisites of the singer, according to Shin Chaehyo (1811–1884), the first commoner teacher and redactor of the p’ansori repertory, include stage presence (inmul 人 物), narrative art (sasǒl 辭說), vocal attainment (tǔgǔm 得音), and mimetic ability (dramatic gestures: nǒrǔmsae or pallim). P’ansori developed continuously as the singer won the affection of the audience with

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his narrative song and highly developed vocal art. What set the singer apart from other entertainers was that he could sing and sing. Sometimes he sang all night long—when he entertained at the feast in honor of the successful candidate, for example, or had the opportunity to sing before the king and the common people.

Namwǒn: Setting of the Song The Korean city of Namwǒn,53 in the southeastern part of Chǒlla province, is famed for its many historic and religious sites. Its current population is over 89,898 (2008 census); in the mid-fifteenth century, it had 1,300 households with 4,912 people. A noted tourist resort, Namwǒn is part of the national park of Mount Chiri 智理山, one of Korea’s three sacred mountains, where main railroad lines meet and climbers begin their hiking. Known from the Three Kingdoms period, the city belonged to Paekche; in 1380 General Yi Sǒnggye, founder of the Chosǒn dynasty, repulsed a host of Japanese pirates at Mount Hwang 荒山 in Unbong 雲峯 (Cloud Peak).54 Above all, however, Namwǒn is known as the birthplace of Ch’unhyang—the most enduring female protagonist in classic Korean literature. The administration complex lies in the center of the walled town; a shrine to loyal officials is to the northwest, a jail to the northeast. The district school (hyanggyo) is north of the wall almost at the midpoint. Sǒnwǒn Monastery is to the northeast, the shrine to Guan Yu (d. 219)55 to the southwest. Southwest of the walled town are the precincts of a walled and gated park named Great Cold Tower Park廣寒 樓苑 (Kwanghallu Wǒn), considered an exceptionally pleasant place.56 At the north corner there is a shrine to Ch’unhyang, with her full-length portrait in the midst of a bamboo grove, the bamboo representing fidelity and constancy. The shrine was built in 1931; its first sacrificial rite was offered on Double Five (Tano端午), the day of purification. Some steps south is Great Cold Tower, the Palace on the Moon, and the Milky

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Way galaxy (the Silver or Han River), constructed by drawing water from Smartweed River 蓼川 (Yoch’ǒn) nearby, and Magpie Bridge烏鵲 橋 (Ojakkyo) over it. The bridge figures prominently in the story of the star gods Herd Boy 牽牛 (Altair) and Weaver Maid 織女 (Vega) —fated to be separated on the east and west sides of the Milky Way throughout the year but allowed by the god of heaven to meet once during the night of Double Seven when magpies build a bridge for them to cross.57 The mythopoeic imagination has created earthly representations (or counterparts) of the celestial bodies and the galaxy. Great Cold Tower is where Ch’unhyang and Student Yi (Yi Toryǒng), the son of the magistrate of Namwǒn, meet for the first time. On the lake are three sacred seamounts from Chinese mythology—Yǒngju (Yingzhou; Mount Halla), Pongnae (Penglai; Diamond Mountain), and Pangjang (Fangjang; Mount Chiri). Let the narrative’s servant boy (pangja) describe the setting: “Now listen to what Namwǒn offers: if you go out East Gate, there is Sǒnwǒn Monastery in the long forest; from West Gate you reach the temple of Guan Yu, where the commanding presence of the ancient hero seems to linger; out of South Gate you will see Great Cold Tower, Magpie Bridge, and Yǒngju Pavilion; out of North Gate you see sheer rocks like a golden lotus piercing the blue sky and the fortress of Mount Flood Dragon (Kyoryong) on a strange-shaped rock—let’s go and see!”

The Story: Chronotope and Narrative The Song of the Chaste Wife Ch’unhyang begins with the typical provision of the time of the story, an outgrowth of historiography indicating that history and fiction are branches of the same tree. In addition, the introduction offers an image of peace and prosperity enjoyed by the people, a gift of virtuous rule that guarantees order and harmony. Thus the song defines itself by means of the time and space relations (chrono-

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tope)—the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relations artistically expressed in literature.”58 When Great King Sukchong ascended the throne, (4/4) His royal virtues were vast, (3/4) And royal sons and grandsons would succeed one another; (5/6) The nation was flawless, as in the days of Yao and Shun, (5/6) And civilization quite like the days of Yu and Tang. (5/7)59 Advisers on left and right were pillars of state, (5/6) And brave generals prancing like dragons and guards racing like tigers60 Were able to repulse the foe and protect the state. (5/6) Moral influences of the court (3/5) Reached remote districts and villages, (3/4) And security reigned within the four seas. (4/3) Loyal subjects filled the court (3/4) As filial sons and virtuous daughters filled every house. (4/4) How beautiful, how admirable! Rain and winds were seasonable, (5/6) The people enjoyed a happy contented life; (4/4) Everywhere, beating the ground to keep time,61 they sang of peace.62 (3/4) It was in the early years of King Sukchong (1674–1720), the nineteenth ruler of Chosǒn, and the place was the city of Namwǒn, a specific geographical space. In this introduction, the anonymous narrator (redactor) is conversant with the metrical scheme of vernacular poetry. Note how this narrated portion (aniri) scans, each line consisting generally of two metric segments, as the syllable count in parentheses shows. At the outset, one is made aware of the work’s distinctive music, a marriage of sound and sense, its rhythms resembling the pulsing of the human heart, rich in echoes, as the narrator purloins a line or phrase, pirates an image or trope. Throbbing with felt life, the diction summons the sensory world in its inexhaustible richness to invite the fullness of response it creates in the reader.

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The story time (Erzählte Zeit) covers about eighteen years; the discourse time (Erzählzeit) covers about two years: from Double Five when Ch’unhyang and Student Yi, both aged sixteen (fifteen by Western count), meet and marry, about “a year” passes (101) before Yi leaves in the fall for Seoul and returns as inspector the following autumn. Instances of an evocation of events that occurred before the present moment in narration (analepses; flashbacks) include when Wǒlmae recalls first her conception dream and later Ch’unhyang’s education (57) and her dream of a blue dragon, the night before Student Yi, named Mongnyong (Dream Dragon), visits her home (27); and when Magistrate Yi recalls an event seven years before when his son was eight (47). Contrarily, for the evocation of events that will occur after the present moment, we may cite the blind diviner’s prediction that Ch’unhyang’s husband will return soon and her sorrow will end. While 214 pages of discourse time is allotted for two years, only the final seven lines (215) cover some sixty years of the couple’s life. Our narrator, omniscient and heterodiegetic,63 knows everything about the situation and events recounted; he is overt, learned, and reliable. He also pretends to be an intradiegetic64 narrator posing as an insider to imitate his individual characters. The story’s center of action is Ch’unhyang, and the narrator has an agreement with his/her audience/reader that he will tell a story of a chaste wife who triumphed after a great ordeal. The place where the story unfolds is Namwǒn; the secondary space is Seoul, where Yi passes the civil service examinations and is appointed secret inspector by the king. Namwǒn functions structurally—it is where Ch’unhyang is born and has lived sixteen years of her life until she meets Student Yi. Her marriage takes place in Lotus Hall in her home, and that is where she awaits the return of her husband after his departure for Seoul. Yi, son of the town’s magistrate, lives in one of the buildings in the administration complex. And it is there that the new magistrate Pyǒn tortures Ch’unhyang and throws her into prison and later, Inspector Yi dismisses him there and saves his wife. Great Cold Tower Garden (with the Milky Way and Magpie Bridge), situated

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almost equidistant from the administration complex and commoners’ houses, functions thematically—a mythopoeic representation of stars and the galaxy. When one cleanses one’s mind/heart with waters of the Milky Way, crosses Magpie Bridge, and ascends Great Cold Tower on the moon, one may fancy riding the winds, pacing the void, and being among the heavenly bodies. Temporal and spatial formations are expressed in the story’s chronotope. Both Ch’unhyang and Yi exercise choice and are aware of the responsibilities that follow. The time/space relationship illuminates the sequence of events; socialized intersubjective time and the rhythms of inner time interact. Ch’unhyang learns from her decisions and becomes an individual with a sense of historical consciousness and inner time. She affirms the enduring self-identity. She is a reliable reporter of her own feelings, motives, and beliefs. Diverse social classes interact—the literati (ruling class), commoners, and slaves. Ch’unhyang affects and is affected by a society whose value systems are changing. The narrator’s creativity is evinced from his responses to social and economic problems emerging in the late seventeenth century, when the story is set, and the late nineteenth century, when this wood-block edition came into being, reflecting the changing epistemic configurations and the view of the anonymous redactor and singer. Interaction among characters is dialogic, and the text is polyphonic, hopeful, and open. Both the listener and the reader of today should not, Bakhtin reminds us, suppress chronotopic differences.65 * Wǒlmae 月梅, approaching forty, laments her lack of progeny and speaks to her husband: “I don’t know what good deeds in my former life have brought us together as husband and wife. I have given up my career as entertainer, observed manners, and made efforts to do needlework. But what great sin have I committed that I have no child of my own? Since we have no relations, who will offer sacrifices and burn incense to our ancestors and bury us after death? If I pray at famous mountains and

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major temples in order to bear a child, male or female, then will I realize my desire. . . . We should try to offer prayers.” Wǒlmae passes through hills and waters and reaches Prajnā Peak on Mount Chiri where she builds an altar, sets out sacrificial offerings, prostrates herself beneath the altar, and prays. Then she has a dream: an auspicious pneuma (ki; Ch: qi) fills the place, in five brilliant colors; a transcendent lady riding on a blue crane comes, crowned with flowers and in iridescent robes, her pendants and bangles tinkling. She holds a branch of cassia flowers, ascends to the hall, raises her hands with respect, and slowly makes a low bow. I am the lady of Luo River, Consort Fu. (3/4)66 On my way to the Jade Capital to present immortal peaches, (4/4) I happened to meet Master Red Pine67 in Great Cold Palace; (5/5) Our feelings were endless, and I dallied until it was dark. (4/4) I was late, though, and committed an offense; (4/4) The Jade Emperor in anger banished me to the world of dust. (2/4//3/4) I did not know where to go, (3/4) But a spirit of Mount Turyu68 directed me to you. (5/5/4) Please, take pity on me. (3/4) “So saying, she enters Wǒlmae’s bosom. The crane cries loudly because its neck is long. Its cry startles Wǒlmae awake—it was nothing but a dream.”69 She conceives, and after ten months she gives birth to a child. The narrator does not forget to arrange for fragrance to fill the room and colored clouds to hang resplendent—auspices accompanying the birth of heroes and heroines. It was a girl fine as jade. Wǒlmae wanted a son, but her desire for progeny was nonetheless realized. She called the baby Ch’unhyang and nurtured her like a jewel in the palm of her hand. Gentle and gracious as the unicorn, the child had no equal in filial devotion. When she reached the age of seven (six by Western count), she took to reading books and devoted herself to good manners and fidelity, and the whole town praised her filial devotion.

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Ch’unhyang is born in answer to prayers, and the association of the birth of the heroine with the divine indicates that Ch’unhyang is the daughter of Consort Fu 宓妃, the Chinese culture hero Fuxi’s 伏羲 daughter, who drowned in the Luo River and became a river goddess. She is incarnate, exiled to earth for the infraction of breaking a heavenly taboo against dallying with a male transcendent. Nature sends auspices, as in the case of heroes and saints, and as a child Ch’unhyang distinguishes herself with virtue, learning, and talent—qualities that define a class. The servant boy describes her as a “gentlewoman” and the “noblest woman in myriad years” (mango yǒjung kunja 萬古女中君子, 23). She is the joint handiwork of nature and heaven, a living embodiment of the ideal. * Stirred by spring, a “time to make merry,” Yi, the magistrate’s son, decides to go sightseeing. Yi is likened to Du Mu (803–852) for his fine presence,70 his generosity like the emerald sea, and his magnanimous wisdom. His talent for poetry is that of Li Bo (701–762),71 and his calligraphy is like that of Wang Xizhi (321–379).72 When the servant boy reminds him that he should study rather than go out, Yi retorts to justify his planned outing. Let’s Go Sightseeing Talented writers have ever sought Places of superb scenic beauty As sources of their poetry. Even the transcendents travel around widely. So how is my going out improper? When Sima Qian73 was traveling south by boat on the Yangzi and Huai Rivers, He was sailing against the river, With raging waves and cold, howling winds— From of old, it has been said, Changes in all things in the universe

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Are sometimes surprising, joyful, and lovely— Always material for poetry. Li Bo, king of poetry, Went boating on Colored Stone River;74 Su Shi enjoyed autumn moonlight at the Red Cliff,75 Bo Juyi,76 the bright moon on the Xinyang River; And Great King Sejo,77 Munjang Terrace on Mount Songni in Poǔn. So how can I not enjoy myself? Reaching Great Cold Tower and Magpie Bridge, Yi ascends the tower and scans all four directions. The scenery is indeed splendid: “Purple halls and red towers shine sparkling everywhere, Jade-plaqued chambers, brocade halls, laid out like latticework,” Says Wang Bo in “Looking Down from the High Terrace.”78 “Its marble railing and carved towers, tall in the sky,” Truly refers to the Great Cold Tower in Namwǒn. Yueyang Tower79 and Gusu Terrace,80 To east and south the waters of Wu and Qu Flow into Grotto Court Lake. At the northwest of Swallow Tower,81 I can see Pengze Lake82 . . . Among a riot of pink and white blossoms, Parrots and peacocks fly— In the landscape all around, Twisted pines and overcup oaks, Unable to withstand spring breezes, sway. Beside the tumbling stream, The stream-girding blossoms chuckle, And towering pines luxuriate. The season of green shade and fragrant grasses excels that of flowers. Drunk by laurel trees, purple sandalwood, peonies, and blue peaches, A hillscape sinks in the long Smartweed River with a splash.

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Yi cannot view the Korean landscape without seeing at the same time the scenery mentioned in Chinese poetry. This technique of superimposition (which Yi uses to spread his plumage) was a means to show one’s familiarity with the works of canonical poets in China and Korea. The skillful use of written Chinese, the supreme cultural creation, was a status symbol whose value was seldom questioned. If a soldier, merchant, or slave is mentioned in history, it is because of his or her ability to write poetry in literary Chinese. During the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598, Korean literati prisoners taken forcibly to Japan were set free when at the captor’s request they showed their ability to write poetry in Chinese.83 Educated men from different countries had a common language. The educated reader would have at his fingertips a grounding in the thirteen Confucian canonical texts, histories, and canonical writers of verse and prose in Chinese. *

Ch’unhyang on the Swing Unable to resist the spring feeling At the singing of birds, A fair girl plucks a spray of azaleas And puts them in her hair; She picks a white peony And puts it in her mouth; Lifting her unlined gauze garment, She bends to rinse her hands And takes a mouthful of water to cleanse her mouth In the clear water of a flowing stream; She picks up a pebble and Throws it at the orioles in the willow. Was this not “Striking the oriole to wake it up”?84 She strips the leaves off the willow And scatters them on the water. Snow-white butterflies and bees, Holding the stamens,

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Dance in pairs, swaying; Golden orioles Flit among the trees. Great Cold Tower is beautiful, But Magpie Bridge is better— Truly the loveliest in all Chŏlla province. If this is indeed Magpie Bridge, Where are Herd Boy and Weaver Maid? In such a beautiful place, How can there be no poetry? Yi then composes two couplets: A boat, light and bright, left by magpies, Jade steps to Great Cold Tower. Who is Weaver Maid in the sky? Today, what pleasure, I’ll be Herd Boy. The spring landscape, so insistently described in several places, is a conventional opening for a love poem—as, for example, in troubadour poetry and in sijo. Indeed the harmony of nature has a strong bearing upon Yi and Ch’unhyang: earth and sky strengthen the awakening of love. The space evoked, adorned by flowers, is one where amorous desire is felt and expressed. The tradition of the connection between desire in nature and the natural desires in human beings offers “a playfully eroticized version of the natural world.”85 The sighting of Ch’unhyang may be the beginning of Yi’s poetic impulse. Spring also recalls a shared experience of the mutability of life and the transience of beauty. Can one halt the flux of time? It is better to accept time as it is and the impossibility of permanence in this world. Ch’unhyang, versed in poetry, calligraphy, and music, surely knows the Tano festival. Accompanied by her maid Hyangdan, she comes out to play on a swing. Her hair, lovely as orchids, is combed over her ears, neatly plaited, and fixed with a golden hairpin shaped like a phoenix. Her waist in its gauze skirt seems as frail as the slender willow of Everlasting

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Palace.86 With her lovely gait, at a leisurely pace, treading lightly, she enters and walks through the long forest with its green shades, sweet grasses, and golden turf, and a pair of golden orioles flits hither and thither. A swing suspended from a thick, tall willow tree is a hundred feet high. She takes off her long coat of green brocade with pomegranate pattern, long hood, unlined trousers, and unlined indigo silk skirt and hangs them up. She then takes off her purple embroidered Chinese silk shoes. She pulls up her new white petticoat under her chin, grasps two thick hemp ropes in her slender hands, and mounts the swing in her white stocking feet, setting the swing in motion. With her body, slender as a thin willow, her jade hairpin in the back of her hair and the amberand jade-encased knives in front, her silver bamboo hairpin, and her lined gauze blouse matching well with ribbons of the same color, she cries: “Hyangdan, push me!” One push, she goes higher; another push, she goes higher, fine dust underfoot flying to the winds, far forward and far back. The leaves above follow her body, hurtling downward, zooming upward. The hem of her red skirt billows in the green shade. Riding the wind, like a flash of lightning among the white clouds, she flies forward like a light swallow darting to seize a falling peach blossom and then backward like a butterfly that has lost its mate. Surprised by a sudden wind, she turns around like the female transcendent on Mount Shaman87 riding the cloud and descending to the Sun Terrace. Ch’unhyang bites a spray of leaves and plucks a flower and sticks it in her hair. “Oh Hyangdan, this strong wind is making me dizzy. Catch the rope for me.” The swing goes back and forth many times before they can stop it, and her jade hairpin falls on the rock by the tinkling stream.

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“Oh my hairpin, my hairpin!” Her voice is like a coral pin tapping a jade tray—her bearing and figure do not seem to belong to this world. Yi feels lonely, imagining all sorts of things, and mumbles to himself. He wishes to identify this female transcendent on the swing.

Who Is She? Xi Shi followed Fan Li 88 On a skiff to Five Lake, So she couldn’t be here. Lady Yu sang a sad song before she turned To Xiang Yu in the moonlight at Kaixia,89 So she couldn’t be here. Lady Wang Zhaojun left Tanfeng Palace And went to the desert Where now she lies in her Green Tomb,90 So she couldn’t be here. Ban Jieyou shut herself in Changxin Palace Where she sang her sad song,91 So she couldn’t be here; Zhao Feiyan left Shaoyang Palace After attendance in the morning,92 So she couldn’t be here. Is this a transcendent of the Luo River, A transcendent on Mount Shaman? His soul flew away to heaven Bearing his body weary— Truly he was still single. The usual moment of the onset of desire is sight.93 The overpowering effect of her beauty makes Yi, smitten at first sight, identify her with an incarnation of a heavenly ideal. Everything disappears before her beauty. Love is a power that annihilates masculine pride. A victim of the power of love beyond his control, he has contracted the malady of love.

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Finally, the servant interjects and identifies her for him as “an entertainer Wǒlmae’s daughter in this town.” Yi orders the servant to go and fetch her, but he adds his own blazon—extended praise of the qualities of her body: “Her snow-white skin and flowerlike face are famous throughout the south. . . . She is beautiful as Lady Zhuang Jiang, wife of Duke Zhuang of Wei (d. 672 BC),94 virtuous as Tairen, King Wen’s mother, and Taisi, King Wen’s wife, and chaste as the two consorts of Lord Shun, sage ruler Yao’s two daughters who became Shun’s two wives known for their humility, frugality, intelligence, and devotion—a woman of peerless beauty, the noble lady in myriad years.” When the servant returns for the third time to say that Yi wishes to compliment her literary talent, she agrees to go to the tower and meet Yi with her mother’s approval. (“When a gentleman sends for you, how can you refuse? Go and see him.”) After a brief exchange, Yi promises to visit her at home in the evening. At the discovery of her identity, he succumbs to the eternal power of the feminine. When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring. (As You Like It 5:3:21–22) In spring lovers consent / and the birds marry. (Vigil of Venus)95 Ch’unhyang’s social position has changed: from the daughter of a retired entertainer in the 30-sheet version, she has become a secondary daughter of Second Minister Sǒng, former magistrate of Namwǒn. Therefore, when Ch’unhyang meets Yi at the tower, she does so as a social equal, and when Yi visits her house, he treats her as an unmarried woman of a respectable family. Unable to collect his thoughts, Yi goes to his room and spends hours in anguish as he waits until dusk. No books interest him: not the Doctrine of the Mean, Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, Book of Songs, Book of Documents, Book of Changes, Treasury of Ancient Writings, Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, compendia of history, works of Li Bo and Du Fu—books every student must read and memorize for the

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civil service examinations. Finally he settles on the Qianziwen (Thousand-sinograph primer) by Zhou Xingsi (fl. 550), the first text of literary Chinese every four-year-old boy begins with. When his servant, who is eager to show off his broken phrases from the flotsam and jetsam of all he has overheard, tries to quote from the text, Yi then makes humorous puns on each graph:

Song of the Thousand Sinograph Primer Heaven opened at the time of the Rat,96 The Great Ultimate97 is vast—ch’ŏn 天. Earth split open at the time of the Ox,98 Five elements99 and eight trigrams100—chi 地. Thirty-three heavens101 are empty and void, The hearts of humans regard them as black—hyŏn 玄. Twenty-eight lunar lodgings102— Metal, wood, water, fire—earth is yellow—hwang 黃. The sun and moon in the universe are bright again and again, The abode of the Jade Emperor is lofty—u 宇. Rise, prosperity, and decline of a state’s capital From ancient times to the present—chu 宙. Yu controlled the flood103 and Viscount Ji’s104 Great Plan105 and its nine divisions are vast—hong 洪. After the death of Three August Ones106 and Five Lords,107 Rebels and thieves raged wild—hwang 荒. East will be bright, At the sky’s edge the sun’s red disk Will rise—il 日. Myriad people sing the “Ground Thumping Song,” The misty moonlight in the great highway108—wŏl 月. Sad early moon that starts to wax Will be full on the night of the fifteenth—yŏng 盈. When I ponder the world’s myriad affairs, They are like the bright moon About to wane from the sixteenth—ch’ǔk 昃. Twenty-eight lunar lodgings, River Diagram and Luo Document109—

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Sun, moon, and stars—chin 辰. Wonderful to spend tonight at the singing girl’s home—suk 宿. Under a mandarin-duck embroidered coverlet and pillow, An elegant pastime with a peerless beauty Throughout spring and fall—yŏl 列. At the third watch110 under a soft waxing moon, Express all that’s in my heart—chang 張. Today a cold wind comes soughing—han 寒. Let’s retire to the bedroom; If your pillow is too high, Then use my arm, Come on, then, close to me—nae 來. Holding you tight And entwining our legs, It’s warm despite snow and gales—sŏ 暑. If the bedroom gets hot, Let’s take the northern wind And move around—wang 往. When is the time neither hot nor cold? Phoenix trees shed leaves—autumn (ch’u 秋). White hair will come soon, Gather the fruits of youth with an imposing presence—su 收. Cold wind on the bare tree, Snow on the rivers and hills—winter (tong 冬). Sleeping or waking, I’ll never forget Our love hidden in the inner room—chang 藏. Last night’s drizzle brings Lustrous sheen on the lotus—yun 閏. Such beauty will endure Even after a lifetime—yŏ 餘. The solemn oath of the marriage bond, Vast as myriad acres of azure waves, will be fulfilled (sŏng 成). While we play this way and that, We won’t know the passing of years and months—se 歲. The Great State Code111says—yul 律— A wife who shared poverty with you112 Can’t be cast away, Nor be ill-treated. Is she not a gentleman’s fit mate?

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When Ch’unhyang’s lips are pressed ardently to mine, Will that not be “two mouths together”113—yǒ 呂? How I long to see her! As soon as the yamen is closed and dusk announces night, Yi and his servant boy steal out, heading for Ch’unhyang’s house. Helpless in the face of love and its transforming power, Yi’s desire to be with her intensifies—from the graph yǒl Yi rewrites the text with Ch’unhyang in mind. Ch’unhyang’s mother welcomes the surprise guest and regards her daughter’s meeting with Yi as an ineluctable destiny based on her auspicious dream the night before. Yi then describes what he sees upon arrival at the house. Already Yu Chinhan has spent nine lines describing the house, garden, screens, furniture, utensils, dishes, wine, and meat. Unlike the Seoul editions, our text, following other Chǒnju editions, limits description to the garden:

Song of the House and Garden After the main and middle gates, Go round the rear garden— An old thatched cottage With candles alight inside. A willow’s drooping sprays Hide the candlelight Like the strands of a beaded blind. To the right a parasol tree, Dripping with clear dewdrops, To startle the dream of cranes. To the left a gnarled pine— When the clear breeze blows, It bends like the old dragon. The plantain by the window, Its tender leaves stand out Like the phoenix’s tail feathers. The young lotus flowers— Black pearls from the heart of the water—

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Barely above the pond’s surface, Hold up the dewdrops of jade. Sleek and plate-sized golden carp Try to change into dragons, Beat the water wriggling, Slopping in their play— The new lotus leaves Open to receive them. Three lofty peaks of the rock garden Pile upon pile; Cranes standing by the steps, Startled by visitors, spread their wings, Stride with their long legs, And whoop. A little shaggy dog barks under the laurel tree. A pair of ducks in the pond Afloat free and easy Seem to welcome the guest.

The garden, private, enclosed, and in harmony with the surroundings, is cultivated for its beauty, inviting visitors to behold and contemplate its simple and symbolic scenes. As a system of signs, it is emblematic of those who inhabit it. It is a pleasant place (locus amœnus) that exists over time after people are gone. One might say it combines nature and nurture, utopian innocence and classical learning. Ch’unhyang, “beautiful as the shining moon emerging from the clouds,” opens the screens and comes out. Her room in Lotus Hall, a “topographical middle ground between culture and nature,”114 is like a place in fairyland.

Song of the Paintings on Four Walls Looking at the walls, A number of implements— Wardrobes carved with dragons and phoenixes, Cabinets with many drawers, Ornamented with paintings. . . . Ch’unhyang is a maiden

The Road to Ch’unhyang But a studious girl, So she won’t have acquired these items, But her mother, a famous entertainer, Prepared them for her daughter. Calligraphy by Korean writers of renown And famous paintings in between— A striking painting of eight transcendents With a colophon: The emperor gives audience To holders of the red tally. Li Bo, the retired gentleman from Qinglian,115 Reads the Scripture of the Yellow Court 116 Kneeling at Yellow Crane Tower.117 Li He118 invited to draft a report When the ridge beam is raised Upon completion of White Jade Tower for Jade Emperor. On the eve of Double Seven Herd Boy and Weaver Maid on Magpie Bridge. The moon goddess pounds magic herbs At Great Cold Hall in the moonlight— These arrayed paintings dazzled him. Off to one side another painting: Yan Guang on Mount Fuchun,119 Having declined the offer of Grand Master of Remonstrance, White seagulls for friends, Monkeys and cranes for neighbors, Dressed in sheepskin And casting his line In the Seven League Brook at Chutong River. The room is truly a fairyland, Fit for the bride of a gentleman! With a sincere heart, Wishing to serve only one husband, Ch’unhyang wrote a poem And pasted it above her desk: “Elegant bamboo rustles in the spring breeze, Burning incense I read books at night.”

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Paintings are described according to the convention of ecphrasis, a narrative description of a work of art. Ch’unhyang has a room of her own, privacy, and leisure, but probably no economic independence. She leads a circumscribed existence in a tightly regimented culture—where accidents of birth determine her station not just ideologically but also architecturally, “since women occupied the inner, private quarters . . . in the culture marked by gender distinction and isolation.”120 Woman—docile, silenced, patient, and obedient—is consigned to a separate private sphere (if her parents can afford it) and subjected to the three dependencies121 (that she follow the wishes of her father, husband, and son) and the seven wifely faults122 (failure to produce a son; adultery; extreme disobedience; extreme talkativeness; theft; jealousy; and grave illness). Yi wants to marry her right then and there, without the formalities required of his class, and obtains Wǒlmae’s consent. Both are sixteen years old (fifteen by Western count)—a nubile age in the Great State Code of Administration (3:241).123 An informal wedding takes place, therefore, in Ch’unhyang’s mother’s house without an exchange of gifts, a nuptial procession, or the bridegroom’s visit to the bride’s home to present a wooden goose, symbol of conjugal fidelity. That is, the young bride’s rite of passage is not made spatially—unlike the prevalent custom, she does not move to a new home to live with her husband and in-laws. The best dowry she can bring to Yi is her goodness and constancy: her moral center. After a feast, Wǒlmae calls Hyangdan to prepare the bedroom. Theirs is a spontaneous and irrepressible love at first sight. Ch’unhyang and Student Yi, of the same age, valorize voluntary love and marriage. As opposed to the arranged union characteristic of the time, they exalt a relationship of mutual love. Although gender roles then were not equal, both share intelligence, refinement of taste, internalization of cultural codes and values, steadfastness of purpose, and loyalty to each other. Neither Ch’unhyang nor Yi, we should note, feels that their love has crossed class lines—there is no disparity in status.

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At this point Yi learns from Wǒlmae that Magistrate Sǒng passed away in Seoul and Ch’unhyang was raised by a single mother. Thus Ch’unhyang never knew her biological father. Courtship is brief—a romance convention to underscore that love at first sight is the most authentic and must be consummated on the first night. Nevertheless Yi goes through, as in troubadour poetry, the five phases of love—seeing, speaking, touching, kissing, and consummation. From this point on the narrator switches modes from the decorous to the erotic. After a second night, they renew their joys and lose their shyness; they begin to joke with each other, and jointly they compose an impromptu love song:

Song of Love Love, love, my love, Love high as Mount Shaman under the moon Shining upon seven-hundred-tricent Grotto Court Lake, Love deep as water at the horizon’s end, Deep like heaven and emerald sea, Love high as the top of Mount Jade under the bright moon, Enjoying it on myriad peaks of autumn mountain— Love as she has spent her years for the study of dance And asks for one who plays the pipe124— Love that shines like the evening sun and moon Upon the peach and plum blossoms seen through the screen— Love that abounds in winsome smiles and graces With a new moon powdered white, Love that brings us together through three lives, Bound by the Old Man of the Moonlight125— Love between husband and wife without reproach— Love like a well-rounded peony on the eastern hill Amid the rain of blossoms— Love entwined and bound Like a net in the sea off Yŏnp’yŏng126— Love joined on end like a brocade woven by Weaver Maid in the Silver River— Love sewn tightly Like seams in the quilt of a singing girl,

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Love drooping Like fronds of weeping willow by the river— Love piled up like grains In the southern and northern granaries— Love deeply etched in every corner Like silver and jade inlays in the chest— Love enjoyed by golden bees and white butterflies As they hold pink flowers And dance in spring breezes— Love that floats like a pair of mandarin ducks Bobbing on the clear green stream— Love of Herd Boy and Weaver Maid On the night of Double Seven— Love of Sŏngjin, pupil of Master Liuguan,127 Frolicking with the eight fairies— Love of Xiang Yu, whose strength can pluck up the hills, Meeting with beautiful Lady Yu128— Love of the Brilliant Emperor of Tang For Precious Consort Yang129— Love swaying gracefully Like the sea roses on long Bright Sand Beach130— You’re indeed my love, all of you is love— Ohwa tungdung, my love, O my lovely one, My love!

Yi emphasizes the power of love, which he attempts to re-create by the stock-in-trade of romantic rhetoric, enumerating love’s charms and delights and celebrating the claims of physical passion. He runs through the repertory in similes and catalogs its manifestations. Love is high as a mountain, deep as the ocean, abounds in smiles and graces. Old Man of the Moonlight, a matchmaker who ties knots between a man and a woman by using red strings, brought them together through three lives —past, present, and future. Love is entwined and bound like a net, joined like a brocade sewn tightly—the lover’s sense of interlacement becomes embodied in a net—a distinctly feminine discourse with its own diction emerging from a feminine body and experience. Catullus compared an

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amorous couple to a vine entwining a tree (Poem 61).131 Yi’s song also explores a feminine space of language together with images of water, immersion, and engulfment—passionate merging, the union of beloveds. Poets in the past have defined love in various ways to probe its diverse responses, mystery, and power. Love is a fire that converts and melts and dissolves. Love is a sickness for which there is no remedy. Love is a violent gust that shakes the mountain oaks (Sappho). Love is death, involves the whole of existence. Love offers highest ecstasies and deepest torments. “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; / Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; / Being vex’d, a sea nourished with [lovers’] tears; / What is it else? A madness most discreet, / A choking gall, and a preserving sweet” (Romeo and Juliet 1:1:196–200) Ch’unhyang possesses a fund of passion and laughter, and Yi wishes to commemorate love and the beloved in monuments more lasting than bronze. The body is the source of language, yet language outlasts the body:

Life After Death When you die, I’ll tell you what you’ll be: You will be a sinograph— Graphs for earth, for female (ŭm 陰), For wife, and the radical for woman. When I die, I’ll become graphs For heaven (kǒn 乾), husband (pu 夫), male (nam 男), The body of the son (cha 子) attached to the woman radical Making the graph for good (ho 好). Love, love, my love! When you die, I’ll tell you what you’ll be: You’ll become water— Water in Silver River, Water of waterfalls, Of myriad acres of emerald seas, Of clear valley brooks, of jade valley brooks, Ending in a long river for the whole region.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Even during a seven-year drought, You’ll become the water of yin and yang Overflowing always and sinking to the bottom. When I die, I’ll become a bird, Not a cuckoo, Nor a blue bird at Jasper Lake, Nor a blue crane, white crane, or roc, But a mandarin duck That never leaves its mate, Bobbing on the green waters-Love, love, Ǒhwa tungdung, that’s me. Love, love, my fascinating love! “No, I don’t want to be any such thing.” All right, then. I’ll tell you what you’ll be after death. When you die, you won’t be the great bell at Kyŏngju, Nor that in Chŏnju, or Songdo, But the one in Chongno in the capital. When I die, I’ll become the clapper of the bell, In accordance with thirty-three heavens and twenty-eight lunar lodgings. After the beacon on Mount An132 flares three times, After the beacon on Mount South flares twice, The first sound of the Chongno bell— Every time it rings, People will think, Only the bell: But inside ourselves we’ll know It’s Ch’unhyang’s clang, my clang. Let the two of us conjoin, Love, love, my fascinating love! “No, I don’t like that either.” Then, when you die, what will you be? You will become a mortar, I’ll become a pestle when I die, The mortar made by Jiang Taigong133

The Road to Ch’unhyang At the hour, day, month, year of the White Monkey . . . And when I pound, clang clang, You’ll know it’s me. Love, love, my love, My charming love! “I don’t like it, I don’t want to be that either.” Why do you say that? “Why must I be At the bottom In this life and the next? It’s no fun, it won’t do.” Then, when you die, I’ll put you on top. You’ll be the upper plate of a millstone, And I the lower plate, When slender hands of young handsome faces Hold the millstone and turn, Like round heaven and square earth together, Then you’ll know it’s me. “Still I don’t like it and won’t be that either. When I was born, this top part was given only to me. For what sort of grudge Was I given an extra orifice? I don’t want anything.” Then when you die, I’ll tell you what you’ll be: Be a sea rose on long Bright Sand Beach; When I die, I’ll be a butterfly And nibble with antenna And you brush it with pollen. When spring winds blow, We’ll dance swaying— Love, love, my love, My charming love! If I look here, you’re my love; If I look there, you’re my love. If all this is my love, How can I live caught up in love? Ŏhǒ tungdung, my love!

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature My beloved, my love! When you smile sweetly, The peony, king of flowers, Seems half open After a night’s drizzle. Wherever I look, I see my love! My charming love!

The death and transfiguration of the lovers culminate in a series of parallel metaphors that meet in the linked images (love-death) and the lovers’ metamorphosis as a sea rose and a butterfly dancing in the spring breeze. First Yi equates Ch’unhyang with earth, female, and wife, the radical for woman (radical 38), and himself with heaven, husband, and male. He then brings in the mandarin duck to underscore his devotion and conjugal fidelity, clappers, pestle, the lower plate of millstone, and a butterfly; Ch’unhyang is the Chongno bell, mortar, upper plate of a millstone; and a sea rose. He is the subject; she is the other. When Ch’unhyang cites female anatomy to point out their differences, those of a Freudian cast of mind may call it penis envy (her lack of a phallus), but the imposition of such theory on another culture, we know, is at best problematic. In all likelihood, an image of woman in a male-authored text (the object of a male gaze) is meant to provide the male audience with voyeuristic titillation—a romance tendency; but it may also be read as registering a male bias in favor of woman’s traditional place at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Earlier in the “Song of Love” she is associated with the sea, the source of creativity and sublimity. Is she exploring a feminine space of language with images of water—virtues associated with the female in Daoism? Not a silenced subject, she interrogates the accepted hierarchy where man holds power and prevails. We may recall that Ch’unhyang is a reincarnation of the goddess of the Luo River, Consort Fu, and is at times also likened to the Xiang goddesses, Yao’s two daughters Fairy Radiance (Ehuang 娥皇) and Maiden Bloom (Nuying 女英), married to Shun long ago and far away. In her dream journey to the Temple of the Yellow Tumulus (Huangling

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Miao 黃陵廟), Ch’unhyang meets Nongae134 the patriot, who drowned herself with an enemy captain, and the Xiang consorts mentioned earlier. More important, Ch’unhyang meets Yi in the Korean counterpart of Great Cold Tower on the moon. The moon is feminine in East Asia and represents “the female principle in the cosmos.”135 The moon is also the mother of waters—the genetrix of sublunar waters136 (Irigaray’s economy of fluids whose properties are “continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusible”137 may be cited as a modern example). Here the narrator seems to play on the feminine-moon-water association. In addition, the given name of Ch’unhyang’s husband Yi is Mongnyong 夢龍 (Dream Dragon)—a dragon that resides in great rivers and marshes and brings down rain. In a conception dream, however, the dragon betokens a male child. It is also a thematic emblem of royalty in East Asia—the rulers of China and Korea wore dragon robes.

Song of the Graph Chǒng Listen, my love, You and I are in love, So how can we not be loving? Clean waters of a long river Carry the traveler’s sorrow138—kaekchŏng I can’t send you off at the bridge, The trees on the riverside Harbor a traveler’s lonesome feelings139—hamjǒng I send you off to South Cove,140 I can’t overcome my sadness—pulsǔngjǒng With no one to see my parting sorrow—ajǒng The founder of the Han’s Glad Rain Pavilion141—Hǔiujǒng Three terraces,142 six ministries,143 a hundred officials at court —chojǒng The clean and pure place of worship—ch’ongjŏng Woman’s natal home—ch’injŏng Friends sharing feelings—t’ongjŏng Suppressing turbulence—p’yŏngjŏng Our love that lasts a thousand years—injŏng

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature The moon is bright and stars are few, Xiao and Xiang rivers and Grotto Court Lake—Tongjŏng All the creations fashioned by nature—chohwajŏng Cares—kŏkchŏng Petitions and pleas for grievance—wŏnjŏng Sharing love—injŏng Grumbling about food—t’ujŏng Unfortunate frivolity—pangjŏng Law court and palace courtyard—songjŏng/kungjŏng Internal conditions—naejŏng External affairs—oejŏng Loving Pine Arbor—Aesongjŏng Archery Arbor—Ch’ŏmyangjŏng Fragrance Sinking Arbor and Precious Consort Yang144 —Ch’imhyangjŏng Lord Shun’s two consorts’ Xiao-Xiang Arbor—Sosangjŏng Cold Pine Arbor—Hansongjǒng Spring Delight Arbor when a hundred flowers bloom —Hoch’unjŏng The moon above Giraffe Peak over White Cloud Arbor —Paegunjŏng The joyous meetings—mannanjŏng If we speak of eight feelings—p’alchŏng My mind encompasses qian’s virtues— Fundamentality (yuan), prevalence (heng), fitness (li), and constancy (zhen/chǒng),145 Your mind is what appeals to my feelings—t’akchŏng But if in all this affection—tajŏng If ever we should grow cool—p’ajŏng How it hurts inside to sever ties—chŏlchŏng And that in truth-chinjŏng Is how I protest my original feelings—wŏnjŏng.

The meanings of the graph chǒng 情 (qing) include affection, love, passion. The song also brings in homonyms in Sino-Korean (but not in Chinese) pronunciation: chǒng 亭 (ting: pavilion); chǒng 定 (ding: decide, fixed); chǒng 庭 (ting: courtyard, law court); chǒng 淨 (jing: clean); and chǒng 貞 (zhen: loyal, faithful, chaste). The rhapsodic and

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sonorous enumeration of words ending in chǒng evinces an overflowing playfulness with language.

Song of the Graph Kung Open Way Palace in the narrow universe, Majestic Heaven’s Gate Palace, Shined by the auspicious air of the sun, moon, and stars Amid wind and rain with thunder and lightning, Where the king ruled the people wisely with august virtue— Great Court Palace of the King of Yin who, in full flourish, Welcomed guests to the lake of wine146— Ebang Palace of the First Qin Emperor,147 Manifest Yang Palace of the founder of the Han Who asked how he had won the world,148 Enduring Joy Palace149 beside it, Lasting Trust Palace of Favored Beauty Ban,150 Enjoying Spring Palace of the Brilliant Tang Emperor, The detached palace here, The separate palace up there, Crystal Palace in the Dragon King’s palace, Great Cold Palace in the moon, You and I become one body (hapkung), Our life will be without limit. Let’s stop talking of these palaces— A water dragon palace between your legs I’ll make my way there With my powerful cudgel. Here is a similar catalog of words ending in kung 宮 (gong: palace, temple, womb, a note of the ancient Chinese pentatonic scale), culminating in a sexual union (hapkung 合宮), two becoming one body. The narrator leads us to the bedroom door and invites our covert gaze through peepholes drilled in the paper screen.

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Song of the Piggyback Ride Listen, I’ll tell you nice things— As if I’m carrying on my back Fu Yue,151 Lü Shang (Taigong), He has great plans in his heart And will be known throughout the land. A pillar of state, a loyal minister who builds up the kingdom. As if I am carrying Six Martyred Ministers,152 Six Loyal Subjects,153 Master Sun, Master Moon, Koun Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn,154 Chebong Ko Kyŏngmyŏng,155 Kim Ŭngha, count of Liaodong,156 Songgang Chŏng Ch’ŏl,157 Lord Ch’ungmu, Admiral Yi Sunsin,158 Uam Song Siyŏl,159 T’oegye Yi Hwang,160 Sagye Kim Changsaeng,161 Myǒngjae Yun Chŭng162— You’re my husband, my husband, The husband I love forever. Passing the literary examination, You’ll be recorder at the Royal Secretariat, Learned doctor of the Office of Royal Decrees, Then Third, Second, And First Royal Secretary— After serving as governor of eight provinces, You’ll be called to court As an official of the Royal Library, Second Diarist of the Office of Royal Decrees, Official to choose a state counselor, Director of the Office of Special Advisers, Assistant Master of the Confucian Academy, Minister of six boards, Third, Second, and Chief State Counselor, And head of the Royal Library, You’ll fill three thousand court and eight hundred external posts, A pillar of the state, my husband, My husband I love forever.

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Not only is her knowledge of government offices and positions of the Chosǒn dynasty impressive, but she understands that the civil service examination is the only path to success. From childhood virtually all aspirants for public service were trained in the same (primarily Chinese) works. Upon passing the examinations, the successful candidate received a political appointment that carried immense social prestige—the highest recognition a man of letters could achieve. Official titles stand for power and authority, and at every turn one needs the help of those holding them. Ch’unhyang wants her husband to be a class individualized, the best in officialdom, with exemplary character. The only valid test of being the king’s man lies in his ability to right wrongs and to care for powerless people subjected to unspeakable cruel treatment. The narrator’s list reminds us of the importance of ranks and titles for the literati class. They would study a chart listing all the coveted positions at court and would play a dice game on a board with these titles written on it163—all to whet their ambition. Soon Ch’unhyang will, she hopes, have a chance to use her own life as evidence to appeal to the court.

Song of the Graph Sǒng Let’s play riding— Like the Yellow Lord who drilled his men and made clouds and fog, Caught Chiyou in the Zhuolu wilderness,164 Beating the drums of victory On the leading chariot— Like Great Yu of Xia in his land-roaring chariot When he tamed the nine-year flood, Like Master Red Pine riding on the cloud, Like Lü Tongbin165 on his egret, Li Bo, banished transcendent, on the whale, Meng Haojan166 on the donkey, Transcendent Great Unique167 on the crane, A Chinese emperor on the elephant, Our king on the carriage, Three state counselors on sedan chairs,

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Six ministers on carriages, A general of military drill on his war carriage, Magistrates on their palanquin, Magistrate of Namwŏn on a special carriage— Old fishermen on their leafy boat at sunset But I’ve nothing to ride on. This night at the third watch, I’ll ride on Ch’unhyang’s belly, Hoisting the quilt for a sail, My member as an oar, Enter into her sunken spring— As without effort I cross The waters of yin and yang, If I take you as horse to ride, Your pace may vary— I’ll be the groom Gently holding your reins. You may trot and canter, Go rough and hard Gallop like a piebald horse.

Yi offers lessons to his new wife, hitherto innocent of amorous experience, serving as the agent of initiation to erotic love with various moves and caresses. Both “Song of the Piggyback Ride” and “Song on the Graph Sǔng” become more erotic and verge on sexual blazon with the diction of attack and penetration: “I’ll ride on Ch’unhyang’s belly, / Hoisting the quilt for a sail, / My member as an oar, / Enter into her sunken spring”; and “If I take you as horse to ride, / Your pace may vary— / I’ll be the groom / Gently holding your reins.” That is, Ch’unhyang can either trot, canter, or gallop to guide and control Yi’s movements. Just as there is a homology between hunting and sexuality in early Greek poetry, there is a homology between combat and sexual intercourse in Chinese and Korean fiction.168 Nineteenth-century Koreans are not the prudes we might take them for. Propertius (2:15) describes the lovemaking of a pair: “O that tangle of arms clasping, O the kisses / when you held me with your lips and

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wouldn’t let go.”169 Sidney fell in love with Penelope Devreux, then twelve, the daughter of the Earl of Essex, who became the Stella of his sonnets: “I on my horse, and Love on me doth trye / Our horsemanships” (sonnet 49). Carew (1594/5–1640), in “A Rapture,”170 refers to Aretino’s (1492–1556) sixteen sonnets on coital posture: . . . Till a soft murmure, sent From soules entranc’d in amorous languishment Rowze us, and shoot into our veins fresh fire, Till we, in their sweet extasie expire . . . (51–55) Now in more subtile wreathes I will entwine My sinowie thighs, my legs and armes with thine Thou like a sea of milke shalt lye display’d, While I the smooth, calme Ocean, invade With such a tempest . . . (79–83) My Rudder, with thy bold hand, like a tryde, And skilfull Pilot, thou shalt steere, and guide My Bark into Loves channel, where it shall Dance, as the bounding waves doe rise or fall. (87–90) Culture intrudes on life, and intertextuality defines the song’s playfulness, festive and fun, and functions to serve the interests of Yi’s class. In a Confucian hierarchical society, there was patriarchal oppression and subordination of women. They were restricted to the private domestic sphere with a sociosexual division of labor—pregnancy, child care, and household management. Marginalization of women in the patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal kinship system increased from the seventeenth century as Confucian moral discourse became repetitive and repressive. A uniform portrait of the premodern Korean woman has been constructed by recent studies that present her as powerless, dependent, passive, and denied opportunity for education, inheritance, and participation in family ritual. Girls could no longer associate or eat with boys and men from the age of seven and were segregated in separate living

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quarters. Mothers and elderly women in the family would teach them how to move, talk, eat, and dress. Girls also learned how the female body became sexualized, how different parts of the body became associated with sexuality, and how heterosexual sex is governed by the institution of marriage. Sexuality, “that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men,”171 was controlled by an ideal of chastity, limited by virginity cults, and upheld with a sanction against adultery. Thus sexuality, culturally variable, is an essential dimension of identity. According to Wǒlmae, Ch’unhyang studied the Xiaoxue 小學 (Elementary learning; preface dated 1187) at seven, and she probably taught her daughter the importance of educational capital to advance in society. An educational manual for parents and teachers, this sixchapter text is organized around three main subjects: the foundation of moral teaching, the basic human relations (parent/child, ruler/minister, husband/wife, old/young, and friend/friend),172 and the cultivation of self. The section on parent/child relations discusses the parental role in education, obedience to parents, and ritual duties after their death. The section on husband/wife discusses separate functions between the sexes, especially the subordinate position of women to men, female chastity, and nonremarriage of widows. The section on cultivation of self discusses mind cultivation, comportment, dress, and food. Then follow examples of sages, worthies, and the virtuous—such as self-sacrificing sons, wives, brothers, and officials—drawing apothegms culled from thirty-two classical and medieval texts from the Han to the Song. After a thorough study, the young student would have achieved a strong sense of self-discipline, order, and degree, a responsiveness to others, and unselfishness. Ch’unhyang probably read other conduct books such as Naehun (Instructions for the inner quarters; 1574, 1611) by Queen Sohye (1437–1504),173 Samgang haengsil to (Illustrated conduct of the three bonds; 1431), and Sok samgang haengsil to (Illustrated Conduct of the

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Three Bonds Continued; 1514), which presents twenty-eight examples of faithful women to suggest the cult of chaste wife or widow. Instructions for the Inner Quarters, made up of selections from four basic Confucian texts, comprises seven chapters: speech and comportment; filial piety; marriage; husband and wife; motherhood; amiability; and thrift. History presents cultural models of acceptable femininity, which helped Ch’unhyang to construct her own conception of sexuality. Ch’unhyang has internalized behavioral patterns from exemplary women in mythology, romance, and history. Her understanding of her body, desire, and pleasure, as well as her ability to express emotional intimacy, seem to indicate that she exercised some agency within the limits of asymmetry in sex roles and gender relations and made interiority the source of her emotional spontaneity and daily conduct. * Meanwhile, Yi’s father, the current magistrate of Namwǒn, is appointed Sixth Royal Secretary (Tongbu sǔngji; 3a) in Seoul and orders his son to depart the following day ahead of him. Yi tells his mother about Ch’unhyang only to be scolded, then goes to her house. At first Ch’unhyang suggests that he go first and she will follow. But Yi tells her that they have to part, because if their love becomes known at court, he will not be accepted. At this, Ch’unhyang loses her temper, wails, and protests. Yi tries to devise a futile means to smuggle her into the palanquin with the ancestral tablets. Resigning herself to the inevitable, she offers her beloved a cup of wine before he mounts his horse. She then sings the “Song of Parting,” each word ending in chǒl 絶 (jue: break off, cut off) and another homonym, chǒl 節 (jie: chastity, moral integrity). After joy comes sorrow; after the bitter, the sweet, an adage says. Ch’unhyang spends her time praying and grieving.

Song of Parting Love, Tell me, when are you coming back?

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Cut off without news for four seasons—sajŏl I send you off for a long farewell—yŏngjŏl Green bamboo and pine, the lasting loyalty of Bo Yi and Shu Qi174—ch’ungjŏl No bird flies over a thousand hills175—chobijŏl Lying in sickness cut off from others—insajŏl Joints of bamboo—chukchŏl; joints of pine trunk—songjŏl Spring, summer, autumn, and winter—four seasons—sajŏl Severance—tanjŏl Division—punjŏl Forgoing my integrity—hwejŏl My love leaves me and ruthlessly departs—pakchŏl My hopeless chastity—chŏngjŏl When I sleep alone in an empty room—sujŏl Shall I ever think of forgoing my integrity—p’ajŏl Details of my grievance, my sad unswerving loyalty—kojŏl Night and day my thoughts never cease—mijŏl I beg you not to leave me without news—tonjŏl. *

After some months, a new magistrate, Pyǒn Hakto, is appointed. The narrator enumerates his faults: he behaves irresponsibly, forgets his morals, makes errors of judgment. At the first staff meeting, Pyǒn inquires about Ch’unhyang. His curiosity has been kindled by rumors about her beauty. The first item on his official agenda is to inspect all entertainers registered in his town. Each is called to present herself for his review. After a survey of eighteen girls, Pyǒn notices that Ch’unhyang’s name is not on the list and asks her whereabouts. The head of slaves answers: “Ch’unhyang’s mother was a female entertainer, but Ch’unhyang herself is not. She is so virtuous and beautiful that when the literari from powerful clans, talented writers, and officials visit here, they ask to see her; but mother and daughter refuse. Not only the literati but even those who live in her neighborhood may see her only once in ten years, much less speak to her. . . . It seems that through heaven’s predestined bond, your predecessor’s son met her and

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pledged a hundred years’ love to her. When he left Namwǒn, he said he would come to fetch her after he had been appointed to office, and Ch’unhyang believes him and remains faithful to him.” Then the chief clerk in the personnel section speaks: “Not only is Ch’unhyang not an entertainer, but her betrothal to the former magistrate’s son is a serious matter. Although your ages are different, please summon her as one of the same social class as yourself. Otherwise we fear you may damage your honor as an official.” Ch’unhyang’s reputation as a faithful and cloistered wife of Yi Mongnyong is known to the public; but Pyǒn orders his men to cut the chatter and fetch her at once. While soldiers are on their way to Ch’unhyang’s house, she sings the “Song of Mutual Love.”

Song of Mutual Love I want to go, I want to go, I want to follow my love, I’ll go a thousand tricents, Ten thousand tricents, I’ll brave storm and rain, Scale the high peaks, Where even wild falcons, tamed falcons, Peregrine falcons, trained falcons rest Beyond Tongsŏn Pass. If he’ll come and look for me, I’ll take off my shoes, Carry them in my hands, Race to him without pause. My husband in Seoul, Does he think of me? Has he forgotten me utterly? Has he taken another love?

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Her song includes a well-known sasǒl sijo,176 a form of sijo in which more than two metric segments are added in each line, except for the first in the third line: Pass where the winds pause before they cross, Pass where the clouds pause before they cross, The pass of Changsǒng Ridge Where wild-born falcons, Tamed falcons, Peregrine falcons, And yearling falcons pause before they cross— If they said my love was over the pass, I would cross it without a pause. Another sasǒl sijo: I take off my shoes to Clutch in my hand, My socks in my arms, then helter-skelter Scurrying, hurrying, Without a moment’s rest, I struggle up. . . . When the soldiers arrive, Ch’unhyang serves them wine and gives them some money before going to the yamen. Pyǒn orders her to come up on the dais and then tells her to “attend on [him] in the yamen,” a euphemism. His banter with the treasurer whom he asks to serve as his matchmaker infuriates her. Pyǒn even goes to the length of pointing out the generational gap between himself—worldly and experienced—and Ch’unhyang’s husband, a “mere boy” (tongja nom), thus placing himself in a different chronotope from that of Ch’unhyang and Yi. Ch’unhyang answers that she is married and would rather die than serve him. Now let us examine how she defends her decision. To the magistrate: “Your commands overwhelm me, but since I wish to have only one husband, I cannot carry out your order. A loyal subject cannot serve two kings, and a chaste wife cannot have two husbands177—

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that is my principle. I would rather die than live on, however many times you ask me. Please deal with me as you see fit.” A pipsqueak official chimes in: “What do you singing girls know about fidelity and chastity? What have loyalty and chastity to do with a lowly person like you?” (The words simply steel her resolve and determination.) To the official: “Loyalty, filial piety, and chastity are the same for both high and low. Please, listen, I will explain. Let’s speak of female entertainers. There are no virtuous ones, you say; but I will cite them to you one by one. Nongsǒn 弄仙 of Hwanghae province died at Tongsǒn Pass; an entertainer of Sǒnch’ǒn, a mere girl, learned all about the seven wifely conditions; Nongae 論介 of Chinju is known as a patriot, and a memorial gate was erected to her where sacrifices are offered forever. Hwawǒl 花月of Ch’ǒngju had a three-story tower raised in her memory; Wǒlsǒn 月仙of P’yǒngyang has a memorial gate for her patriotism; Ilchihong 一 枝紅 of Andong had a memorial gate erected in her lifetime and was ennobled. So please don’t belittle female entertainers.” To Pyǒn: “Even a mighty man like Meng Ben178 could not wrest from me my resolve, high as Mount Tai and deep as the Yellow Sea, that I made to my young master Yi. The eloquence of Su Qin and Zhang Yi179 could not move my heart; Zhuge Liang’s tactic180 could summon the southeast wind to turn the tide of battle, but he could not make me bow to authority. Xu You181 would not bend his will to Yao; Bo Yi and Shu Qi on Mount Shouyang would not eat the grain of Zhou. Were it not for Xu You, there would be no one to transcend the mundane world. Were it not for Bo Yi and Shu Qi, there would be many more traitors and outlaws. I may be of humble birth, but how could I not know these examples? If I betray my husband and become your concubine, it would be treason just as if a minister were to forget the state and betray his king. Please, deal with me as you see fit.”

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Again to Pyǒn: “If the rape of a married woman is not a crime, what is?” When the fawning treasurer asks, “What have loyalty and faithfulness to do with a lowly person like you?” he is putting the Confucian virtue of chastity on trial. Is it a privilege for women of certain classes or for all women? Moral values transcend social status. All human beings, regardless of gender, have moral autonomy. At this affront, Ch’unhyang cites names from history as evidence that no force, eloquence, or strategy will work. Ch’unhyang is a woman who talks back—she resists the designs Pyǒn has on her body through direct defiance. She wishes to die rather than dishonor her husband. Note her unabashed directness of speech: “If the rape of a married woman is not a crime, what is?” A magistrate rules not by law and punishment but by virtue, and guides by personal example. Having internalized social virtues expounded in the Confucian canon, which he must have studied for the civil service examinations, he is to develop such virtues in his people. The health of a community depends on the moral health of its magistrate, and the cultivation of moral standards, especially ren (benevolence, goodness, love), “to love human beings” (Analects 12:22), is the basis of human relations. A magistrate has the opportunity to inspire and guide his people to the good by his moral example. Unselfish magnanimity and the impartial administration of justice are the sine qua non of a humane government. But instead of providing protection and safety to his people, Pyǒn’s deeds and passions poison them. He looks at Ch’unhyang with a predatory gaze of masculine domination and reduces her identity to the eroticized body alone. By ordering an excessively disproportionate punishment, not sanctioned by the state code, for what he labels “her disobedience and humiliation of an official,” he threatens to contravene the stability of Namwǒn society. He attempts to transform a wife into an adulteress but realizes that he cannot budge her fidelity, not even “with a team of horses.”182 No longer the central symbol of order in his community, he becomes the source of disruption and injustice: he violates the

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three bonds and five relations, especially the centrality of marriage, the sanctity of the family, and the stability of society. Only the king’s secret agent can punish this man’s corrupt use of power and restore order and harmony to society. Keep in mind that Ch’unhyang cannot temporize before a magistrate who stands for authority and whose mind is focused only on his aggressive desire. She is at a great disadvantage given the constraints intrinsic to this kind of interrogation. Penelope, by contrast, during her husband’s twenty-year absence invents such ruses as the deceit of the loom and the contest of the bow and axehead to forestall her 108 suitors; Lucretia has at least two days before her decision to stab herself; Tomi’s wife over several months’ time inventively avoids the royal advance. Ch’unhyang’s refusal, termed “suicidal”183 by one reader, turns the interrogation into a public spectacle, and her voice dominates the scene. “If the rape of a married woman is not a crime, what is?” The meanings of the original kǒpt’al 劫奪, here translated as “rape,”184 include plunder, robbery, seizing a person by force, abduction by violence, and rape. Ch’unhyang here reminds Pyǒn, a member of the corrupt bureaucracy, of the consequences of the cross-class forced coitus committed by the upper-class male against the female slave or entertainer: the only extramarital relation allowed for men of the upper class in the Chosǒn dynasty was with a slave or entertainer. As chattel, slaves were bought and sold, bequeathed and exchanged, and their status by law was hereditary. They had no surnames. As the hands and feet of the ruling class, slaves were crucial to the economy and lifestyle of the elite. Forced coitus was systemic, as long as the upper-class male retained hegemony, and the relationship was that between oppressor and victim. Reduced to the status of an object, slaves were prey for the appetite of their masters. The damage done to these women by the prevailing gender and status hierarchy is unimaginable. No study thus far has scrutinized the double standard of sexual morality (adultery is permissible for men, forbidden for women) as a prevailing gender system with embedded assumptions.

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Indeed, violence against the rapable body pervaded Korean society until the end of the nineteenth century. The slave population—both official (governmental) and private— declined from 30 percent in the early seventeenth century to below 10 percent by 1780. In 1801 the government manumitted almost all official slaves; in 1886 hereditary slavery was abolished; finally, in 1894, the institution of private slavery came to an end. From the seventeenth century such enlightened scholars as Yu Hyǒngwǒn (1622–1673), Yi Ik (1681–1763), and Yu Suwǒn (1694–1775) indicted the evils of hereditary slavery,185 including starvation, hardship, unremitting labor, and harassment.186 In a mixed slave/commoner marriage, children followed the status of their mother (matrilineal succession law of 1039) or their fathers of noble or commoner status. After numerous changes between the matrilineal and patrilineal succession laws, depending on the increase or decrease of tax revenues (slaves did not pay taxes), the matrilineal succession was reinstated in 1731. Hundreds of thousands of female slaves were culturally invisible and voiceless, unless their offspring became known as the subject of history (Shin Ton, d. 1371), romance (Hwang Chini, ca. 1506–1544), or contemporary TV drama series (King Sejong’s consort, née Kim, and King Chǒngjo’s consort, née Sǒng). Discrimination against the sons and daughters from such alliances —the illegitimate or secondary children—was harsh and relentless.187 Secondary sons were barred from the higher civil service examinations and prohibited from using their talents in the service of the state. They had to accept inferior social status before a legitimate half-brother and could not address their father as “Father,” as the eponymous hero in the “Tale of Hong Kiltong” illustrates (he was the offspring of Minister Hong and his maidservant Ch’unsǒm). Some secondary daughters became renowned entertainers, for example Hwang Chini and Yi Okpong in the late sixteenth century.188 Institutionalized inequality, a form of domination, can be maintained only by the exercise of force. Legitimacy is an ideology created by the oppressors. Again Yu Suwǒn laments the restric-

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tions on the sons of concubines: “A person’s capabilities should be determined more by his own efforts than by his bloodline.” In 1568, Shin Yu and sixteen hundred other secondary sons presented a written complaint seeking redress for the restrictions imposed against them; in 1695, Nam Kǔkchǒng and nearly a thousand others from the southeastern part of the country did the same;189 and in 1769 Yi Sudǔk (1697–1775) memorialized the throne on behalf of secondary sons.190 This social injustice lasted until 1894 when the status system was finally repealed. Ch’unhyang is herself a secondary daughter of Minister Sǒng and Wǒlmae, a former female entertainer. * The soldiers drag Ch’unhyang down to the courtyard and throw her on the ground. Pyǒn orders them to “bind her to the chair, break her shinbones, and submit a report of her execution.” That is, he wishes not only to leave permanent marks of torture on her body but also to club her to death (mulgo 物故).191 Her crime is to have disobeyed and humiliated an official. His act of retaliation, however, is not commensurate with the situation. Torture is something that a public authority does or condones.192 Here the torment is inflicted by a public authority for personal gratification. The jailor begins to flog her with the club (a thorn branch, gnarls and joints removed). At each stroke, she shouts out her response, punning on each count—one for one sincere firm heart; a chaste wife does not serve two husbands; three bonds; four classes/limbs; five relations/elements; and the like:

Song of Ten Strokes One sincere and firm heart Is to follow one husband. One punishment Before one year’s over, But not for a moment will I change.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature A chaste wife does not serve two husbands— Hence there can’t be two husbands. Though beaten and left for dead, I’ll never forget Master Yi. “Three Dependencies” is a heavy law; I know three bonds and five relations. Though I am punished and exiled three times, I’ll never forget my husband— Master Yi of Samch’ŏng Street. A magistrate, a king’s official, Disregards the affairs of four classes; He rules exercising his power, Doesn’t know the people In forty-eight wards of Namwŏn resent him. Even if you sever my four limbs, I’ll live and die with my husband, Whom I cannot forget in life or death. The five relations remain unbroken; Husband and wife have separate duties. Our tie, sealed by the five elements, Cannot be torn apart. Sleeping or waking, I cannot forget my husband. The autumn moon on the phoenix tree Is watching over my love. Will a letter come today? Will news come tomorrow? My innocent body Does not deserve death. Don’t convict me unjustly— Aego, aego, my lot! Six times six is thirty-six— Investigate every detail and Kill me sixty thousand times;

The Road to Ch’unhyang Six thousand joints in my body Are all tied by love— My heart cannot be changed. Have I committed the seven wifely faults? Why should I receive seven punishments? With a seven-foot sword, Cut me up And kill me quickly. Bureau of Punishment, Don’t hesitate when you strike, I, all seven jewels of my face, die! This fortunate Ch’unhyang’s body Met a renowned official Among magistrates of eight provinces. Governors and magistrates of eight provinces— You’re sent to rule the people, Not to inflict cruel punishments. In the nine bends of my bowels and innards, My tears will make a nine-year flood. With tall pines on the nine hills193 I’ll build a boat for a clear river, Go quickly to Seoul, Lay my case before the king In the nine fold palace; I’ll then step down nine steps, Go to Samch’ŏng Street, Meet my love joyfully And vent my grudge Tied in knots. Though I live ten times, After escaping death nine times, My mind is made up for eighty years— A hundred thousand deaths Won’t change it, Will never change it.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Young Ch’unhyang, just sixteen, How sad the wronged wretch beaten to death! The full moon Is hidden in the clouds, My husband in Seoul Has withdrawn to Samch’ŏng Street— Moon, moon, do you see him? Why can I not see where he is? Playing the zither of twenty-five strings in the moonlight,194 I cannot restrain my sorrow. Wild goose, where are you going? On your way to Seoul, Take a message to my beloved Who lives in Samch’ǒng Street. Note every detail of how I look now, Do not, by any means, forget.

Note the public exposure of her body and the violence against her— as if a chaste wife deserves torture. One of the effects of torture is to disable language in the victim,195 but Ch’unhyang interrupts the scene of violence with words addressed to her torturers and spectators. Although Pyǒn conspires to deny her any capacity for agency, Ch’unhyang refuses to be a passive victim of patriarchal violence and resists objectification through language. She presents herself as a moral agent accountable for her actions. How beautiful is death, she cries, when earned by virtue. She calls upon heaven to testify to her fidelity. The body in pain is the seat of resistance on which multiple meanings can be inscribed. Her sheer strength, stamina, and endurance are remarkable; her resistant female voice makes every spectator weep. She is beaten twenty-five times—her white body is covered with blood, and she faints. Blood could serve as a sign of innocence or culpability: here she must bleed for love to uphold fidelity. The narrator allows her to enjoy sympathy and affirmation from those outside—the p’ansori audience. No listener will want to forgive Pyǒn his perverse pleasure in inflicting pain on a frail body.

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Pyǒn orders soldiers to put Ch’unhyang in a cangue and take her to prison. Violence against women is “represented not as it is suffered by women but as it is recognized by men. . . . The language of suffering is masculine.”196 Chastity is a virtue defined by men as well, constructed by male upholders of Confucian ideology and morality. The narrator can cause Ch’unhyang to perish in order to be sanctified and compensated by a moral reward—her gate marked and included in a conduct book illustrating the three bonds. As virgin martyrs endure torture for the faith, so Ch’unhyang prizes her chastity so highly, “a dearer thing than life” (The Rape of Lucrece 687), that she is willing to die for it. The threat to her body and her fidelity opens a space for female heroism. She is bound to be interpellated by Confucian ideology. Her chastity, a cultural construct, is a product of her classical upbringing. “In what voice do female virgin martyrs speak—their own, those of their authors or readers, or voices continuous with the language of their oppressors?” asks Robert Mills in his article “Can the Virgin Martyrs Speak?”197 Ch’unhyang, according to her mother, studied Elementary Learning at seven, which suggests that she began her studies at four or at the latest five—she had to start with the Thousand-Sinograph Primer and two or three other didactic texts. When Princess Hyegyǒng (1735– 1815), at age nine, was chosen to marry the crown prince, her future father-in-law King Yǒngjo told her: “We’ll send you a copy of Elementary Learning. Study it with your father and be happy until you return again to us.”198 On the walls of Ch’unhyang’s room, we recall, Yi finds her composition, a pentasyllabic couplet in Chinese: “Elegant bamboo rustles in the spring breeze, / Burning incense, I read books at night.” Yi reads these two lines as her credo showing the constancy of a girl who will serve only one husband. Her ability to make allusions to classical writers and understand them indicates her reading, including perhaps some chrestomathies: anthologies of passages in verse and prose for literary and moral studies. Her four walls are covered with paintings illustrating Li Bo (701–762), known as a banished transcendent delighting in the moon and wine; Li He (790–816), who is sometimes compared to Keats

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and Mallarmé for his precocity; and Yan Guang, who renounced the world to live in harmony with nature. She contemplates and appreciates them as capable of illustrating certain moral and esthetic principles, as she applies herself diligently to cultivating herself. Thus Ch’unhyang is capable of composing impromptu responses to every stroke she receives in order to demonstrate her conviction to the magistrate, his staff, and the community. Or is this simply the strategy of the literate redactor to reaffirm the importance of benevolent and just rule for the maintenance of society and culture; to advocate chastity and containment for women; or to glamorize suffering and make it seem like a privilege? This anonymous redactor, most likely male, must have spent many years at study and passed or failed the civil service examinations; but in nineteenth-century Korea perhaps he could not find a job and as a member of the lumpen intelligentsia wished to vent his frustrations against the court and society. If he was not starving, this song was composed as a pastime; if he was starving, it was a potboiler. Whatever the circumstances, he did write a work that is read and reread and studied. Let us dwell a bit longer on this crucial scene that made Ch’unhyang the first Korean woman character who values love and virtue more than life. Magistrate Pyǒn, who says he has heard her name—then only a sign and absent figure of his fantasy— thinks that she is an entertainer like her mother and therefore must serve him. He insults her as “a willow spray or a roadside flower that any passerby can pluck” and demands that she abandon her integrity. Portrayed as a typical bureaucrat who indulges in extortion and plunder (the text explores the impoverished ethos of the ruling class and indicts the corrupt system—the organized brutality of the status quo), he tramples upon human rights. He is portrayed as a conflicted lover/torturer—torn between desire and dominance. Ch’unhyang’s resistance, by contrast, is against one who hinders her enduring love for her husband. She wishes to preserve the dignity of a married woman. Not to marry twice, or not to serve two husbands,

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was a general norm of Confucian morality—indeed, Confucian discourse emphasized it for several centuries. Even a lowborn has the freedom to maintain human dignity. Literature offers examples of similar attempts at rape—beautiful married women who refuse a powerful man’s attempt to seduce them. Tomi’s wife defends her chastity with her life.199 When King Kaeru (128– 166) of Paekche cannot have her, he has Tomi’s eyes gouged out and sets him adrift on the river. After putting off the king one last time, the wife escapes and finds her husband. In the story of Peach Blossom Girl and King Chinji (576–579) of Silla,200 the girl says to the king: “It is not a woman’s way to serve two husbands. To have a husband of my own and to accept yet another, this even a king with all his majesty cannot force upon me.” Only after the death of her own husband and the king does she allow the king’s spirit to enter her bedroom. Pyǒn’s violence against Ch’unhyang makes her the utter model of chastity, a paragon of womanly perfection. In this extreme situation she confronts his tyranny and testifies to her authenticity. With her virtue publicly recognized by the community and later by her own husband, spectators try to identify themselves with her, especially because they cannot imitate her deed. Eventually her status and virtue are recognized by the king, who confers on her the title of chǒngnyǒl puin, “a lady who is ready to die to preserve her chastity.”201 Indeed, Ch’unhyang single-handedly invented the discourse of chastity in Korean literature, especially in p’ansori. She answers the audience’s emotional needs— sing me a song about a woman with defiant devotion to the claims of love. In the prologue to Tristan, Gottfried von Strassburg (died ca. 1210) comments that his work “will make love lovable, ennoble the mind, fortify constancy, and enrich their lives.”202 In her thirty-eightline speech, Francesca da Rimini in Circle 2 (lust) utters a moving verse, “Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving” (“Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona”) (Inferno 5:103),203 whose deep meaning Ch’unhyang would have understood.

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In prison Ch’unhyang sings:

What Was My Crime? What was my crime? I’ve not stolen government grain. Why was I beaten so savagely? I’ve not killed anyone. Why was I put in a yoke and fettered? I’ve not plotted a rebellion, Why was I bound hand and foot? I’ve not committed adultery. What is this punishment for? The waters of three rivers for ink, The blue sky for paper, I’ll protest my sorrow And petition the Jade Emperor. My heart burns with longing for my husband. My sigh becomes a wind That blows those flames; I shall die in vain. That single chrysanthemum, Its constancy is great! The green pine in the snow Has kept faith for myriad years. The green pine is like me, The yellow chrysanthemum like my husband. My sad thoughts— What I shed are tears, What soak me are sighs. My sighs as a wind, My tears as a drizzle, The wind will drive the mizzling rain, Blowing and splashing To wake my beloved. Herd Boy and Weaver Maid, Meeting on the seventh night, Never broke a promise

The Road to Ch’unhyang Even when the Silver River blocked them. What water then divides me From where my husband is? I never hear news from him. Rather than live in longing, It’s better to die and forget him— Better to die And become a cuckoo in the empty hills, At the third watch when The pear blossoms are white beneath the moon, To sing sadly in my husband’s ears; Or become a mandarin duck on the clear river, Calling in search of its mate, And show him My love and tender feelings; Or become a butterfly in spring With two scented wings, Glorying in the spring sun, And settle on his clothes; Or become a bright moon in the sky, Rising when night comes And shedding my bright light On my beloved’s face. With stagnant blood from my innards I’d draw his likeness, Hang it as a scroll on my door To see it when I go in and out. A peerless beauty, chaste and faithful, Has been treated cruelly. Like white jade of Mount Jing204 Buried in dirt, Like a fragrant herb of Mount Shang205 Buried in weeds, Like a phoenix that played in the paulownia Making its nest in the thorn patch . . . From olden days sages and worthies Died innocent— Benevolent rulers Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang Were imprisoned

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature By evil Jie and Zhou206 But were set free and became holy lords. King Wen of Zhou, Who ruled the people with bright virtue, Was imprisoned in Yuli by Zhou of Shang.207 Confucius, greatest of all the sages, Because he looked like Yang Huo, Was imprisoned in Kongye,208 But he became a great sage— When I think of these things, Will my innocent body Live to see the world again? Stifling sorrow! Who will come to rescue me? Would my husband in Seoul Come here as an official And save me Close to death? Summer clouds on strange peaks209— Do the high hills block his way? Will he come only when the highest peaks Of the Diamond Mountains are flat? Will he come only when at the fourth watch A yellow crane painted on the screen Stretches its wings And caws at dawn? Aego, aego, my wretched fate!

She is not a thief, rebel, or adulteress, but a victim of arbitrary outrage. She compares herself to the green pine, an emblem of integrity and constancy, and her husband to the chrysanthemum, one of the four gentleman flowers known for the same qualities. Her lot is worse than that of Herd Boy and Weaver Maid. Her diction here recalls that of Chǒng Ch’ǒl (1537–1593) in his two hymns to constancy210 and that of Hǒ Nansǒrhǒn (1563–1585), the author of “A Woman’s Sorrow,” a dramatic narrative in the kasa form and a museum of topics.211 She wishes for metamorphosis in a dream or after death, then wishes to draw

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a portrait of her husband with blood drawn from her innards. She likens herself to white jade buried in dirt, a fragrant herb engulfed by weeds— no one knows the difference because it is a world turned upside down, where the phoenix makes its nest in the thorn patch rather than in the paulownia, its tree of choice. She then cites examples from history: the sage rulers Yao, Shun, and Tang (founder of the Shang), imprisoned by the evil Jie and Zhou; King Wen, founder of the Zhou, thrown in jail by the last evil king Zhou of the Shang; Confucius, jailed after being mistaken for Yang Huo who had once created a disturbance. Her only hope is her husband, who should come as an official, for only such a person has the power to chastise the evil magistrate Pyǒn. Her song ends with the topic of impossibility: the Diamond Mountains becoming flat and a painted yellow crane, another symbol of the nobility of mind, crowing at dawn. Chastity in women was valued in most times and cultures in the past, and women who violated it were threatened with death or shame. Penelope, the patient and devoted wife of Odysseus, is not convinced that the Cretan beggar is her husband until he can explain the secret of their bed —an olive tree whose trunk is used as a bedpost (Odyssey 23:188–204). In the Heriodes (The Heroines), Ovid’s Penelope, however, is angry (“I’m stuck here in pseudo-widowhood / Forever”) (105) and bitter (“Must I suppose you tell your beautiful / Mistresses what a frump your dutiful / wife is” (106) and ends the letter, “a girl the day you sailed away / You’d find a crone if you returned today” (107).212 In Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (Concerning famous women; ca. 1355–1359), Penelope is a “woman of untarnished honor and inviolate chastity and a holy and eternal example for women.”213 Christine de Pisan (1365–ca. 1431), in the Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the city of ladies; ca. 1405), praises her as “wise, prudent, and devoted to the gods and to living virtuously.”214 Concerning Lucretia’s wifely virtue and exemplary suicide after being raped, Laura speaks with her mother about her in Petrarch’s Canzoniere 262:

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature There never were, Mother, things dear or lovely without virtue, And anyone who lets herself lose honor Is not a woman and is not alive; Though she may look the same, her life’s a death, Or worse than that, made bitter by her sorrow. (3–8)215

Boccaccio calls her “the outstanding model of Roman chastity and sacred glory of ancient virtue, who cleansed her shame harshly, and for this reason she should be exalted with worthy praise for her chastity, which can never be sufficiently lauded.”216 Lady Rectitude speaks with de Pisan’s persona about sexual violence: “Chaste ladies who live honestly take absolutely no pleasure in being raped. Indeed rape is the greatest possible sorrow for them.”217 She adds: “Many women are loved for their virtues more than other women for their prettiness.”218 In The Legend of Good Women (1386), Chaucer comments: “For the praise and the remembered glory / Of that true wife Lucrece, whose faithfulness / To vows of wifehood and great steadfastness / Won praise not just from pagans for her deed / But also from the one called in our creed / Augustine.”219 * While dozing in prison, Ch’unhyang has a dream of flying myriad tricents to the south. In a quiet bamboo grove among beautiful hills and waters, she sees a temple with a plaque in golden letters, “Temple of the Yellow Tumulus: Shrine of All Faithful Women.” There she meets Lü Zhu, favorite wife of Shi Chong (249–300); Nongae, the Chinju entertainer who, during the Japanese invasion in 1592, threw herself into the river with a Japanese captain in her arms;220 and Wǒlsǒn, the P’yongyang entertainer who sacrificed herself to help a Korean general kill an enemy commander.221 They lead her to the inner sanctum of the temple where two women in white robes take her hands and ask her to the dais, which she twice declines. At the third urging, Ch’unhyang goes up and takes a seat. The two ladies tell her that when they attended the heavenly court by Jasper Lake, they heard so much about Ch’unhyang that they

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wished to see her. Ch’unhyang bows and replies: “Although I am ignorant, I have read in old books that after death I might meet you.” Still she is puzzled why she is there. Two Shang queens, Fairy Radiance and Maiden Bloom, Lord Shun’s consorts, know and commend Ch’unhyang’s constancy—she is equal to these ladies canonized in mythology and literature. Ch’unhyang also meets the spirits of Nongyu 弄玉 , the daughter of Duke Mu of Qin (r. 659–21 BC), Brilliant Consort Wang and Lady Qi 戚夫人 (d. 194 BC), Han Gaozu’s favorite. Then Fairy Radiance sends her away, and Ch’unhyang wakes up with a start. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? This episode resonates with allusions to antiquity’s exemplary women. When a blind man passes by the prison, Ch’unhyang asks him to divine her fortune:

Song of a Blind Man’s Divination To the constant and worthy Diviner, I express my respect and pray. What would heaven say? What would earth say? But you’ll respond if I knock, Spirit is wondrous, Please feel and let me communicate. Because we won’t know good and bad luck And can’t resolve our doubts, You spirits, I hope, will bestow clear guidance. Please tell us whether it is right or wrong, And respond at once when I knock. Fuxi, King Wen, King Wu, Duke of Shao,222 Duke of Zhou,223 Confucius, five great sages,224 Seventy-two worthies,225 Yan Hui,226 Tsengcan,227 Zisi,228 Mencius, Ten worthy disciples of Confucius, Zhuge Liang, Li Shunfeng,229 Cheng Hao,230 and Cheng Yi,231 Shao Yung,232 Zhou Dunyi,233

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Zhu Xi,234 Yan Junping,235 Sima Guang,236 Master Gueigu,237 Sun Bin,238 Su Qin, Zhang Yi, Wang Bi,239 Zhu Yuanzhang,240 Liu Bei,241 Hemp-robed Master of Dao, dark daughters of nine heavens, Divine generals Liuding and Liujia,242 You know intuitively, so together help us. The lad who arranges and throws divine sticks, You who perceive without senses, . . . Please descend! The faithful wife Sŏng Ch’unhyang, Born in the imja year, Lives by a streamside In Namwŏn, Chŏlla province. In what month and on what day Will she be released from prison? And Yi Mongnyong Who resides in Samch’ŏng Street in Seoul, In what month and at what hour Will he return here? I humbly beg the spirits to explain clearly. Now let’s see: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Good, it’s a lucky number: Ken, seventh diagram, keeping still, mountain. The fish plays in the water but avoids a net. Many a mickle makes a muckle. Long ago, when King Wen of Zhou was in office, He drew this diagram And went home in glory. Isn’t it a good omen? Knowing they’re a thousand tricents apart, Friends will see each other. This means your husband Will come back in the near future And your sorrow will be over. Don’t worry, all is well.

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The blind diviner draws lots from eight thin sticks made of bamboo or bone and from the numbers etched on them makes his prediction based on a trigram (or hexagram) in the Book of Changes.243 He invokes the spirits of sage lords, Confucius and his disciples, a mathematician, diviners, philosophers, traveling persuaders, famous generals, and others to ask when Yi will return. His list of names is random, both Confucian and Daoist, and invoked to impress his client that he is a professional versed in the art. He then draws the lucky number seven and declares that Yi will soon return. Then the blind man becomes an oneiromancer to interpret Ch’unhyang’s dream. His diction is heavily Chinese and formal, and smacks of a technical language used in prayers and divination.

Ch’unhyang’s Dream Your dream is a good one. When the flower falls, the fruit can form; When the mirror breaks, the sound is loud. Only when it bears fruit Will the flower fall. If the mirror breaks, Should there not be a sound? A scarecrow over the door Makes everyone look up; When the sea runs dry, You can see the dragon’s face. When the mountain crumbles, the earth becomes flat. Good! It’s a dream that foretells You’ll ride on a sedan chair drawn by two horses. [Ch’unhyang sees a crow cawing twice overhead; She raises her hands to shoo it away.] Just a moment! Doesn’t the crow caw kaok kaok? That’s good. Ka is a graph for good; Ok for a house.

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature A beautiful joyful event will come; Your lifelong sorrow will end. Don’t worry at all. Even if you were to pay me a thousand yang, I wouldn’t take it. Wait and see. When you gain riches and honor, Don’t pass me over. Now I’ll take my leave.

What is the origin of her dream? Is it heaven-sent or a message from the unconscious? Is its origin outside or inside the mind? In Penelope’s dream of the twenty geese slaughtered by an eagle, the eagle returns and offers its symbolic interpretation: But [the eagle] came back again and perched on the jut of the garbled roof. He now had a human voice and spoke aloud to me: “Do not fear, O daughter of far-famed Ikarios. This is no dream, but a blessing real as day. You will see it done. The geese are the suitors, and I, the eagle, have been a bird of portent, but now I am your own husband come home and I shall inflict shameless destruction on all the suitors.” (19:544–50)244 Just as Penelope’s dream is the product of her unconscious thoughts, Ch’unhyang’s dream—subjective, symbolic, and foreboding—is coming from inside her mind. To Jean Paul (1763–1825), dream is involuntary poetry;245 to Jung, a mysterious message from our night-aspect;246 to Bert O. States, one kind of nocturnal thinking;247 to Charles Rycroft, a private self-to-self communication;248 to Christopher Evans, based on decades of neurophysiological research, a momentary interception by the conscious mind (while asleep) of material being sorted, scanned, sifted, during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.249 Dreaming is a form taken by the imagination during sleep250—an activity independent of will, occurring during sleep that is

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healthy and normal, not pathological.251 Dreaming occurs during the paradoxical phase of sleep associated with REM.252 Ch’unhyang’s dream as remembered constitutes its manifest content. She breaks it down into single items instead of apprehending them as a whole. She refrains from making free associations concerning the details of her dream and realizes that its images are oddly combined, hyperbolic, opaque, and cryptic. Her psychic experience does not disguise her emotions and feelings—her emotion precedes the images and can call them into being. The five dissimilar images and the dream plot seem to indicate a combination of fears, physical and psychological pain, and anguish. Coming at the moment of her great extremity, her dream, without beginning and ending, transforms mental excitation into its imagistic equivalents. It is a traumatic dream based on her experience of torture, as well as an anxiety dream evoked by the prospect of her imminent separation from loved ones—her husband and mother. Is it a lucid dream253—a quasi-lucid state of consciousness in which she is aware of dreaming? (Experimental research has demonstrated that lucidity is accompanied by normal REM.)254 To qualify as a dream, the report of an awakened sleeper must be visually imagistic.255 The basic unit of the dream, States suggests, “is the image, because dream unfolds in the mode of action. It is constantly evolving, never a still picture.”256 The brain, “the tropological machine,” thinks images out of feelings and then converts these images to other images along paths of likelihood. “The sequence never follows experience or logic.”257 In the dream state, we “produce images similar to our feelings, we dream like what we feel like.”258 “Every dream image is bitemporal: its present is a collusion of past and future in which [my] attention is trapped between ‘something is happening that is going to happen’ and ‘something is going to happen to what has just happened.’”259 Dream, Gaston Bachelard says, is hungry for images.260 It “has no discretion, has a penchant for trivialities, is artless, seems to carry things to extremes,261 and in it hypothetical and real are identical.”262

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In Korean myths, the mirror of stone, bronze, or silver symbolizes the ruler. A merchant returning from Tang China bought a mirror in the market. When hung on the wall, it revealed a prophecy in sinographs: Wang Kǒn (918–943), the founder of Koryǒ and the son of the heavenly deity, would conquer Silla and the territory of his new kingdom would extend to the Yalu River in the north. Canto 46 of Songs of Flying Dragons reads: “Wishing to display his august power, / Heaven induced him to have a game / And caused him to place / Ten silver mirrors.” The poem’s background is that King Kongmin (1351–1374) of Koryǒ asked the contestants to shoot ten small silver mirrors from eighty paces. General Yi Sǒnggye (1392–1398), the future founder of Chosǒn, hit them with ten arrows. The compilers claim that Heaven caused the king to hold such a contest in order to display Yi’s divine skill. Moreover, the mirror (myǒngdo) is used by the shaman as a guardian spirit with divine power derived from the sun’s bright light. In folklore and romance, the divided half of the mirror serves as a token of pledge by lovers and friends. In other versions of the Song, Ch’unhyang and her husband exchange a mirror and a jade ring. A number of interdictions related to the mirror exist as proverbs: If you break a mirror, it will bring disaster. If you look at a broken mirror, you are out of luck. If a woman looks at a mirror at night, she will be mistreated or deserted. The broken mirror symbolizes breaking of an engagement, desertion, and death.263 The falling of flowers is a recurrent symbol of mutability. A scarecrow, more likely a straw effigy, hanging over the door is commonly used in exorcism. The crumbling of Mount Tai and the sea running dry are conventional images for a cataclysmic change in nature, world upsidedown, or end of the world. They are used in vows and pledges (When the roasted chestnuts sprout, then . . .), and as a rhetorical device in the poetry of praise and love. What goes on in Ch’unhyang’s dream, then, is a transformation of feelings, emotions, and thoughts into their imagistic equivalents. A dream’s meaning is “always outside the text.”264 Interpretation is “the translation of non-discursive pictorial statements into words

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arranged into sentences.” 265 The blind man’s oneiric hermeneutic is derived from what he knows about Ch’unhyang’s circumstances outside the dream—her identity and existential situation. Evoking the discrepancy between surface and deeper meanings,266 like Artemidorus (2d cent. A. D.) in his Oneirocritica (Taxonomy of Dreams),267 he reads Ch’unhyang’s dream as a semiotic code to predict the future: her dream images are a disguised expression of her real-life situation, but in the different context of the waking world. The blind man finds connections between oneiric image and existential outcome by radical intervention. The flowers fall—the fruit can form. The mirror cracks—there is a sound. A scarecrow hangs over the door—everyone looks up. The mountain crumbles—you will ride on a sedan chair. The sea runs dry—you can see the dragon’s face. These are recurrent symbols with culture-specific meaning. All this manifest content of her dream foretells that she will have a happy conjugal life and enjoy riches and honor. (The situation is about to take a sudden turn in Ch’unhyang’s favor, but she does not know it.) Dreams lead into the future, not into the past. Of course, the anonymous narrator is compelled to offer a happy reading consistent with the ending of the Song. The blind man works within a tradition that placed value on dreams. Both Ch’unhyang and Wǒlmae, we recall, believe in the reality of dreams, visions, and supernatural beings. The dream is a cultural discourse shared by all Koreans regardless of social class or religious practices. * Meanwhile, Yi in Seoul studies day and night and passes the civil service examinations with flying colors. The king compliments him and appoints him a secret royal inspector (amhaeng ǒsa 暗行御史)268 of Chǒlla province, the post he has wanted. Then he directs his agents and soldiers to meet at Namwǒn on such and such a day.

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The secret royal inspector was a temporary post during the middle and late Chosǒn dynasty. Under the king’s direct control, he was dispatched to provinces to inspect provincial administration, official misrule such as the exaction of illegal taxes and misappropriation of public funds, and the condition of the people. His appointment and duties were kept secret. Before this institution, officials in the Office of the InspectorGeneral (Sahǒnbu) or the king’s close associates conducted their mission in secret. In the mid-seventeenth century, the number of such appointees increased. The king either selected a trustworthy young official or picked one from a list of qualified persons compiled by high ministers. The king then chose the place to be inspected by drawing a stick from a bamboo cylinder containing the names of the country’s 360 districts (ch’usaeng 抽栍). If a person received a sealed envelope—his appointment letter —from the king, he was expected to depart immediately and open the envelope only after he had passed through the South or East Gate. If he opened it within the capital’s walls or visited his family, he was punished.269 The inspector carried with him a document detailing his duties: a horse warrant (map’ae 馬牌)—usually with the image of two horses engraved on one side—that confirmed his authority to mobilize soldiers and servants and use horses kept at the stations. He also carried two brass rulers (yuch’ǒk 鍮尺) to inspect the careless manufacture of implements of punishment and to hold an inquest over a corpse. The death of his parents (or even death of the king) could not stop him from carrying out his job, nor could he return to Seoul without completing his mission. Accompanied by one or two lower-ranking officials, he walked around in disguise, wearing tattered clothes and a crushed cap. He was expected not to inconvenience the village chief and often carry dried cooked rice and camped outside. When necessary he would display the horse warrant to disclose his identity. If he found a corrupt magistrate, he would confiscate his official seal and dismiss him from office. Upon returning to Seoul, he submitted a detailed account of his findings (sǒgye 書啓)—mistakes of a magistrate, the state of civil and military adminis-

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tration, hidden deeds of a filial son or a chaste woman (pyǒltan 別單). The king then ordered the Border Defense Council (Pibyǒnsa) to act on his recommendations. The last inspector was appointed in 1892 by King Kojong (1864–1907), the twenty-sixth ruler of Chosǒn. Yi’s disguise has a narrative function in the economy of the Song. The incognito guise of a beggar not only implies the low social status that guarantees anonymity and freedom of movement but also carries a set of literary and extraliterary associations. His disguise conceals his social person, status, education, and speech. It represents his calculated effort to investigate administrative and social problems and realize his goals by manipulating his identity. Since Yi can preserve the secret of his identity from all save his own wife, her maid, and his mother-in-law, the narrative’s disguise episodes generate comic, ironic, or dramatic effect, depending on whom he encounters. On the way to Namwǒn, Yi listens to farmers singing near Kuhwattol, Imsil:

Farmers’ Song Ŏyŏro sangsadiya At the time of peace between heaven and earth, High is the virtue of our king— Children sing on the thoroughfare As they once praised Lord Yao’s virtue. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya Lord Shun’s eminent virtues gave us the tool And now we plow the field on Mount Li.270 Ŏyŏro sangsadiya Divine Husbandman made the hoe That has lasted myriad generations. Wasn’t that a noble invention? Ǒyǒro sangsadiya

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Yu of Xia, benevolent ruler, Controlled nine years’ floods. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya Tang the Completer of Yin271 Suffered seven years of drought. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya After tilling the soil And paying our tax, Keep what’s left To serve our parents And feed wife and children. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya We plant the hundred plants That tell the four seasons— How trustworthy the hundred plants. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya High rank and name Can’t be compared to our work. Ŏyŏro sangsadiya Till the southern fields, plow northern paddies, Fill our bellies and take it easy. Ŏnǒlnǒl sangsadiya!

Political rhetoric celebrates farmers as the foundation of the state in China and Korea. Among many regional variations, the farmers’ song from Chǒlla is widely known. It is a means of keeping rhythm as farmers work together. The three aspects of such songs are music, function, and verse, and they allow farmers to mesh their efforts and work smoothly and more efficiently together. The lead singer sings alone and the group chorus repeats the same refrain. At another place on Yi’s journey, old farmers wearing bamboo hats and carrying rakes sing a song protesting gray hair:

The Road to Ch’unhyang Let’s Present a Petition Let’s present a petition! A petition! If we submit a petition to a heavenly god, What should he say? Let the old not die, Let the young never age. Let’s send a petition to a heavenly god. It’s hateful, how hateful! Gray hair is our enemy. We try to stop it With an axe in the right hand, With thorns in the left. Strike down the oncoming gray hair, Pull the ruddy face back, Bind gray hair in blue threads, Bind it tight; but The ruddy face goes on its own, Gray hairs come back, Making wrinkles under our ears Turning black hairs white. This morning, blue-black strands of silk, By evening turned to snow. O heartless time! Youth’s pleasures may be many, But the days run swiftly by. Is this not time’s nature? I want to ride a fleet steed, Ride the highway to Seoul. I wish to see Scenic beauty again; With a beautiful lady beside me, I wish to enjoy her airs and graces. Morning flowers and moonlit evening— All the glories of the seasons. I cannot see or hear— Eyes are dim and ears fail, There is no remedy, How sad, my friends!

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Where are you now? Like the falling maple leaves You fall slowly soughing; Like the dawn stars at daybreak, You fade away thinly. What path are you taking? Ǒyǒro, our work of plowing— Our life is nothing but A spring dream!

This inserted song appears mostly in the Wanp’an editions of the Song of Ch’unhyang and concerns capricious time and its alliance with mortality and death. Change is the witness of human follies and virtues. Ovidian time devours all things (“Tempus edax rerum”; Metamorphoses 15:234)—constant inconsistency characterizes his world. Time’s daunting quality is its undeviating motion, the pervasiveness of change: So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life, the leafe, the bud, the flower. (Faerie Queene 2:12:75) Winter functions as “a metaphorical mirror of the speaker’s state of mind, a link between his own condition and that of nature.”272 The winter of old age prefigures death’s eternal cold. Seasons seem to lead relentlessly to death in winter—the devastation observed gives him the subject of meditation (ubi sunt). All things are in perpetual flux—hence his urgent desire to visit scenic spots and enjoy a beauty’s graces, but these activities are not outside of time. He even attempts to block the assault of white hair, alluding to U T’ak’s (1262–1342) sijo: Sticks in one hand, branches in the other, I try to block old age with thorn bushes, and white hair with sticks. But white hair came by a shortcut, having seen through my devices.273

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But he cannot prevail, because time’s weapon is change and oblivion. Life lived according to nature yields death, as Tao Qian (365–427), for example, exclaims: “So I manage to accept my lot until the ultimate homecoming” (“The Return”).274 Western pastoral and East Asian nature poetry demand a commitment to the finality of death. The speaker declares at the end, “Life is a spring dream”—a rehearsal of topos. A human’s passing is likened to the falling of leaves and hiding of dawn stars. “Born into the midst of dream-illusion / Why should I submit to dusty bonds? (Tao Qian, “Twenty Poems After Drinking Wine,” 8:9– 10);275 “Life in the world is a big dream” (Li Bo, “Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day”);276 and, “Man’s life is like a dream” (Su Shi [1037–1101], “Recalling Antiquity at Red Cliff”).277 The images of insubstantiality and mutability are summarized in the Diamond Scripture: As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp, A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble, A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud, So should one view what is conditioned.278 * Then Yi meets a youth on the way to Seoul, carrying Ch’unhyang’s letter written in blood. It reads: “I have had no news of you since we parted and pray that you and your parents are in good health. Your lowly wife Ch’unhyang has been beaten and put in the rack. I am at the brink of death. My soul flew to the Temple of the Yellow Tumulus and frequented the demons’ quarters. Even if I were to die myriad times, I only know that a chaste wife cannot serve two husbands. Whether I live or die, I don’t know what will become of my old mother. Please be kind to her.” A heptasyllabic quatrain at the end reads: When did you part from me last year? Winter has gone, autumn has returned. Midnight gales, rain like snow—

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The Story of Traditional Korean Literature Why am I a prisoner in Namwǒn?

The letter is intercepted by the addressee on his way to Namwǒn. He cajoles the carrier into showing it to him and upon reading it sheds tears. He tells the boy that the addressee is a friend who will meet him at Namwǒn tomorrow. The purloined letter is unequivocal and austere. Ch’unhyang’s voice seeks to transcend the confines of prison— the unlawful confinement of her body and freedom. What other meanings does the letter evoke that exceed or disrupt her intention? The letter of blood and love reveals her needs and fears. Words are made of flesh and bone, blood and tears. Every sentence conveys unbearable pain and despair. “Your lowly wife Ch’unhyang”—using a humility formula to observe decorum, she refers to herself in the third person. She is inconsolable. She speaks of the impossibility of speaking of her torture. A primary characteristic of traumatic recollection is the lack of integration into conscious understanding. Her delayed response to emotional and physical trauma, “a blow to the tissues of the body and those of the mind,”279 takes the form of “repeated intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behavior stemming from the torture, indicating the limits of representation and human understanding.”280 To render her trauma as narrative, she must present a coherent flow of the inconceivable event with death at its center. She thinks, therefore, she is near her death (“I am at the brink of death”) and sees the advance of wailing ghosts and demons. A group of girls washing clothes under Magpie Bridge chatter about Ch’unhyang’s sorry state. Yi spots the willow tree where her swing once hung and reaches Ch’unhyang’s dilapidated house toward dusk. He then announces himself to Wǒlmae, who is shocked to see her son-in-law in ragged clothes, suggesting that he is in trouble or ruined. With Wǒlmae, Yi visits Ch’unhyang in prison. *

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Half dreaming and half awake, Ch’unhyang thinks her husband has come, with a gilded cap on his head and a black-rimmed red court robe. They embrace each other and begin to talk of myriad dear memories. When she hears him calling, she asks: “Is that voice real or in a dream? It’s a strange voice.” To Wǒlmae: “What are you talking about? You say my husband has come. Can I see him in reality?” [She grasps his hand between the bars and immerses herself in memories and grief.] To her husband: “Aego, aego! Is it really you? I must be dreaming. Now I can easily see the one I have longed for. I have no regrets even if I should die. Why were you so heartless? Mother and I are wretched. Since you left, I have passed days and nights thinking of you; for days and months my heart has been burning. I have been beaten till I was almost dead. Have you come to save me? I don’t care whether I live or die, but what has happened to you?” To her mother: “I longed for my husband in Seoul as people long for rain after seven years’ drought. Did he long for me? A tree planted gets rotten, the stupa built with labor collapses. Alas, there is no help for my lot. Mother, please let me feel no regret after I’m gone. The silk coat I used to wear is in the inlaid wardrobe. Please, take it out and exchange it for the best ramie cloth from Hansan and make him a decent coat. Sell my white silk skirt and buy him a horsehair hat, headband, and shoes. My silver hairpin shaped like a rice cake with imprinted flower patterns, my encased ceremonial knife with amber handle, my jade ring in the box —sell them too and make him an unlined inner jacket and short pants. Sell the contents in the drawers of wardrobes with dragon and phoenix designs for what you can get and use the money to buy him dainty side dishes. After I am dead, look after him as though I were still alive.” To her husband: “Listen, my beloved husband. Tomorrow is the magistrate’s birthday. If he gets drunk, he will probably summon me and beat me. Unkempt hair tied up on my head, I will stagger along

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to the yamen and be beaten to death. Then pick up my body like a hired man and take it to Lotus Hall where we spent our first nights, lay me out with your own hands in a quiet place, dress me for burial, and comfort my soul. Please don’t remove my clothes but bury me as I am in a sunny place. Then, after you have achieved high office, come back and rebury me in a fine linen shroud. Have me borne in a simple but elegant bier, not to the front or back of Mount South but straight to Seoul, and bury me near your ancestral plot. On my epitaph carve eight graphs: “Grave of Ch’unhyang, Chaste Wife, Unjustly Killed.” It will serve as a legendary stone by which a constant wife awaited her husband, perished, and finally turned to stone. The sun that sets behind the western hills will rise again tomorrow; but poor Ch’unhyang, once gone, will never return. Requite my wrongs. Aego, aego ! My wretched lot! My poor mother will lose me and, destitute, become a beggar, asking for food from house to house, and doze off here and there beneath the hill. When her strength fails and she dies, the jackdaws from Mount Chiri, flapping their wings and cawing, will peck out her eyes, with no offspring standing by to scare them away. Aego, aego!” Ch’unhyang blames him for his silence and can only register a skeptical expression of disbelief, “What has happened to you?” But she reveals a great deal about herself when she pleads with her mother to take care of him after her death. Yi arrives in Namwǒn on the day before Magistrate Pyǒn’s birthday—the “nick-of-time” motif associated with hopes of his return. The narrator does not wish Ch’unhyang to die. But the only way to keep her alive is through an intervention from someone, such as a royal inspector, with more power and authority than the current brutal magistrate. The convergence of husband and beggar attests to the capacity of disguise to misrepresent reality, but Ch’unhyang’s faithfulness to Yi does not diminish. She does not know the telos toward which the narrative rushes forward—her husband’s identity is withheld from her. The audience/reader knows more about Ch’unhyang’s situation, foreseeing an outcome contrary to her expectations.

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Similarly, knowledge held by the audience/reader is withheld from other characters. When Yi is appointed royal inspector, the audience/reader knows that Magistrate Pyǒn will be dismissed, but Pyǒn himself does not know. Before his identity is revealed, Yi meets with farmers (who blame Yi for his long absence while his wife is suffering from Pyǒn’s tyranny), a letter carrier, Wǒlmae, Ch’unhyang’s maid, jailors and other minor officials. When Yi appears as a beggar to Wǒlmae, she cries out in disappointment, but the audience/reader chuckles. Finally, Yi pretends to be another evil magistrate asking Ch’unhyang to be his mistress while she lays bare her heart, uttering her fidelity to Yi. All these instances of dramatic irony provoke the audience/reader to observe the true mind of a given character and experience a heightened response. Ch’unhyang does not despair even if her husband is a ruined gentleman. She is more concerned about those who will live on: she prays that Yi will become a renowned official and take care of her mother. The audience/reader finds her last injunctions heroic. She thinks that she will die the following day, beaten by Pyǒn, but the audience/reader knows that she will be saved. At Pyǒn’s birthday party, Yi is given a seat and proposes that everyone compose a verse on a given rhyme. His heptasyllabic quatrain goes: Fine wine in a golden cup is a thousand people’s blood, Viands on jade dishes are a thousand people’s flesh. When the grease of the candles drips, the people’s tears are falling; When the noise of music is loud, the people’s grudges grow louder. Pyǒn and his officials fail to fathom the intent of the verse. Yi then collects his troops who shout, “The Royal Inspector comes.” Yi removes Pyǒn from office and suspends the administration. Ch’unhyang, together with others wrongly jailed, is brought in. Yi then puts his wife to the test (“Will you refuse to be my mistress?”), and she makes the last public declaration of her fidelity: “All you officials who come here are indeed notorious. Please, listen to me, inspector in embroidered robes!

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Can the wind break the layered rocks of a cliff? Can the snow change the verdure of the pine and bamboo? Do not ask such a thing. Have me killed quickly!” Only then does the inspector say: “Raise your eyes and look at me!” When she sees that the new inspector on the dais is none other than her own husband, she half laughs and half cries. There is no limit to her joy—this is the recognition (anagnorisis) scene for which the narrative has prepared the reader, an instant reversal of fortune (peripeteia), the most dramatic scene in the Song.281

What’s in a Name? The name Ch’unhyang literally means “spring fragrance.” We may conjecture all the wonderful qualities associated with spring—rebirth of nature, awakening of love, birth of song, harmony between nature and humankind. The second graph, hyang, means fragrance, sweet-smelling, savory, perfume, and incense. Probaby no literati family would name their daughter so, because it is traditionally given as a professional name for an entertainer or public performer. The two graphs—ch’un and hyang—have few homonyms and little chance for paronomasia—no play on the sounds of her name. The name does not hint at a social identification by paternity or genealogical reference. Is it adequate for the heroine of the Song of Ch’unhyang? She plays the most vital role in the narrative, the central character with the greatest positive agency in the plot, but her name does not in fact display her full dimensionality. Even with the extratextual clue provided in the title of the work, yǒllyǒ (a woman who prefers to die rather than remarry or take another lover) and sujǒl (to remain chaste, not remarry), does it fix her heroic character and destiny? She is a woman with stout heart and steadfast mind and her own prodigious virtue, a heroine who has made the hard choice that no one else can, capable of enduring the most arduous and severe ordeal. A mere woman with the name Ch’unhyang is allowed to act like a mighty hero, and the fame of her fidelity shall never die—indeed, Ch’unhyang in Korean literature is synonymous with a woman “who maintains chastity

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even unto death” for the sake of her love. Is the secret of her name a mystery? Remember what it literally says, suggests Wǒlmae: spring fragrance comes from flowers. She is a goddess of spring, a mistress of flowers, a messenger of love, a symbol of youth and joy, and Yi’s beloved. * P’ansori, a multivoiced genre before the arrival of the Western polyphonic “novel” in Korea, has been a “means of joining people in the immediacy of performance.”282 It is a supreme form of projecting emotional energy. “With its fluidity, dynamism, connectedness, and particularity,” p’ansori answers the audience’s emotional needs. It combines the literati culture of the classical tradition and the language spoken by everyday people, “superior to those that are merely written and not intimately connected with speech.”283 The spoken language is “a mediator between humanity, nature, power, ideas, and god.”284 Every version may “displace, excise, add, but can never touch what gives the song life and meaning.”285 Ch’unhyang was invented by a male author who created a feminine voice to speak for him and for other men and women. Working within a particular cultural and ideological climate, this anonymous male author, a protofeminist, presents a feminocentric song that sings the primacy of female experience. Composing within the antecedent canon of p’ansori, he manages the feat of pleasing both the lettered and the unlettered— one audience who can listen to a performance but cannot read, and another who can enjoy both a performed version and the text. He is able to internalize a female subject’s position to present it and valorize certain qualities cherished by culture. In the eyes of Yi Mongnyong and the reigning king, for example, Ch’unhyang represents an ideal preexisting in their minds. Our author has textual authority but no political authority. The social consensus embodied in the narrative enables a participating response shared by his fellow human beings. He understands the complexities of a bicultural society in which literary Chinese and the vernacular interacted with vernacular orality. Exploring to the

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fullest the Korean luxurious indulgence in consonants and vowels, and with a passion for the concrete sensory world, he has an enviable lexical range and verbal ability and his marriage of sound and sense conveys exhilarating wonder at the world’s plenitude. Why are the characters in the Song of Ch’unhyang so real? Is it because they are so individual? Certainly the main characters are true to their kind and environment.286 That is, for example, there is no machinery (deus ex machina)—supernatural beings who take part in the action of a p’ansori as in the Song of Sim Ch’ǒng and the Song of Hǔngbo. In the former, the Jade Emperor orders the dragon kings of the four seas to save the filial daughter Sim Ch’ǒng who, in order for her blind father to regain his eyesight, volunteers to be cast away as a human sacrifice to appease the gods of the Yellow Sea. In the latter, a grateful swallow brings the poor but good Hǔngbo a magic gourd seed that yields worldly treasures. Ch’unhyang in a written version rises off the printed page and comes fully alive. She is a whole human being, a whole woman— virtuous, passionate, intelligent, capable, dynamic, and genuine, attributes that make her exemplary. “Personal autonomy is a way of living in harmony with one’s true self.”287 Secondary studies mention popular narratives that may have inspired the Song: a tale of redressing a grievance—a female entertainer named Ch’unhyang dies of unrequited love for a son of the upper class; a tale of famous royal inspectors—No Chin (1518–1578), Cho Sik (1501–1572), Sǒng Isǒng (1595–1664), Kim Uhang (1649–1723), Pak Munsu (1691–1756); a love story between an upperclass man and an entertainer; and a tale of a faithful woman, especially a faithful female entertainer. Whatever the kernel, our song acquired artistic quality by combining colloquial and literary styles suitable to contemporary sensibility. Some have tried to identify a historical person behind each character; others complain that Yi could not have become an inspector in such a short period of time; some have even ventured to propose a historical person as the real author, such as Cho Kyǒngnam 趙慶南 (1570–1641), which has created a rumpus among students of the Song.288

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Ch’unhyang has been commemorated with a shrine, a grave, a theme park, a culture center, and a monument erected to honor the good administration of Sǒng Anǔi (1561–1629), who served as magistrate of Namwǒn in 1607. She has become a contemporary myth. A traditional folk festival is held in Namwǒn to commemorate her birthday on Double Eight (traditional birth date is the eighth day of the fourth lunar month), rather than on Double Five, the day she meets Student Yi. Her shrine was erected in 1931, and the festival in her honor has been held by the citizens of Namwǒn since 1986, with some 200,000 people in attendance to view dancing, musical performances, games such as archery contests, sijo singing, and choosing a young girl thought to embody Ch’unhyang’s character and spirit as a twenty-first-century clone. On every Saturday of April 2008, for example, the Ch’unhyang Culture and Art Center and National Center for Folk Performing Arts presented a film and drama version, a p’ansori version sung by a professional singer (An Suksǒn, an intangible cultural asset), and a dance, “Echo of Love,” to commemorate the late singer and intangible cultural asset Kim Sohǔi (1917–1995), who recorded the song. The Song of Ch’unhyang is not only a work of p’ansori, fully imagined, but also a lisible text, one that with each reading yields more pleasure. The fullness of response it creates in the reader is the measure of its success, and its literary quality will ensure its lasting permanence in cultural memory.

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Notes 1. For Yu Chinhan’s version see Hanguk kososǒl yǒnguhoe, ed., Ch’unhyang chǒn ǔi chonghapchǒk koch’al (Asea munhwasa, 1991), 469– 504 (uncommon paging); Sǒl Sǒnggyǒng in ibid., 430–31. 2. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack, eds., Vox Intexta (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 227. Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, tr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 183. 3. Doane and Pasternack, 58. 4. Doane and Pasternack, 3. 5. Zumthor, Oral Poetry, 23, 22. 6. The version I have used is by Ku Chagyun, Ch’unhyang chǒn, Hanguk kojǒn munhak taegye 10 (Minjung sǒgwan, 1976), 2–215. Hereafter cited in the text with the page number, but without “p.” According to Yu T’agil, “Wanp’an panggak sosǒl ǔi munhǒnhakchǒk yǒngu,” this version is the oldest edition. Cited in Sǒng Hǒngyǒng, “Ch’unhyang ǔi sinbun pyǒni kwajǒng yǒngu,” in Yangp’o Yi Sangt’aek kyosu hwallyǒk kinyǒm nonch’ong: Hanguk kojǒn sosǒl kwa sǒsa munhak, 2 vols. (Chimmundang, 1998), 1:423 (n. 10). I have also consulted Kim Tonguk et al., eds., Ch’unhyang chǒn pigyo yǒngu (Samyǒngsa, 1979). 7. Ed. Maria Simonelli (Bologna: Riccardo Patron, 1966), 15. 8. Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2:637. 9. Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 70–71. 10. Translation by Richard Sieburth in Sulfur 26 (1990): 83. Quoted in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), 13. 11. Chǒng Inji (1397–1478) says this in the postface (1446) to the Hunmin chǒngǔm 32a. 12. YS 4:184–85. 13. Barbara Rush, “The Other Side of Culture in Medieval Japan,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 3, ed. Kozo Yamamura (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 500–43. 14. No. 2587 in Sim Chaewan, Kyobon yǒktae sijo chǒnsǒ (Sejong munhwasa, 1972). 15. No. 1044 in Sim Chaewan.

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16. Ho-min Sohn, Korean (London: Routledge, 1994), 491, 495–96; see also section 4:1, ideophones (495–519) in The Korean Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Samuel E. Martin, A Reference Grammar of Korean (Rutland: Tuttle, 1992), 340–47. The term “ideophone” was coined by Clement M. Doke in his Bantu Linguistic Terminology (London: Longmans Green, 1935). 17. John F. Nims, “Poetry: Lost in Translation?” Delos 5 (1970):113. 18. Donald Frame, “Pleasure and Problems of Translation,” in The Craft of Translation, ed. John Biquent and Rainer Schulte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 71. 19. Zumthor, Oral Poetry, 127. 20. Edwin Honig, The Poet’s Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 190. This applies as well to the translation of English poetry into East Asian languages. Sound symbolism in certain poems by Stevens, Williams, Moore, and Cummings would be difficult to reproduce. After reading an analysis of Cummings’s “love is more thicker than forget,” in Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987), 225–32, few will attempt a translation into Korean or Japanese. 21. Erya (Sc) 2:6a. 22. Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, eds., Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 148–49. 23. David Hawkes, A Little Primer of Tu Fu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 209; Dushi xiangzhu (Peking: Zhonghua, 1985) 22:1946. 24. Quan Tangshi 55:674–75. Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 115–18. 25. Quan Tangshi 435: 4828–4830; Owen, Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Norton, 1996), 442–47 (lines 43 and 45). 26. Liu and Lo, 140. 27. Quoted in Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 101 (the quotation is from Christopher Ricks without reference). See Christopher Ricks, Allusions to the Poets (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 86. 28. This and the next quotes are from Marshall Pihl, The Korean Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5–20 passim. 29. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique mediévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 65–74; translated as Towards a Medieval Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 42–55. For mouvance see also Zumthor, “The

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30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

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Text and the Voice,” New Literary History 41 (1984–5): 67–92; “Spoken Language and Oral Poetry in the Middle Ages,” Style 19.20 (1985):191–98; Speaking of the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 59–62, 85; and Mary B. Speer, “Wrestling with Change: Oral French Textual Criticism and Mouvance,” Olifant 7.4 (1980): 311–26. Elizabeth Aubrey, in The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), renders “mouvance” as “fluidity,” 28 and 289, n. 6. Doane and Pasternack, 244; see also Bernard Cerquilini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 38. Zumthor, Oral Poetry, 118. For a discussion of interpolated songs, see Chǒn Kyǒnguk, Ch’unhyang chǒn ǔi sasǒl hyǒngsǒng wǒlli (Koryǒ taehakkyo Minjok munhwa yǒnguso, 1990). For p’ansori’s melodic modes (cho) and rhythmic patterns (changdan), determined by meter, accent, tempo, and phrase, see So Inhwa, Theoretical Perspectives on Korean Traditional Music: An Introduction (National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, 2002), 103–22, and Chan E. Park, Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 168–77. KS 129:22b6–8; KSC 14:36b; Yi Ik, Sǒngho sasǒl 23:7a–8a (translation in Kojǒn kugyǒk ch’ongsǒ 115; Sǒngho sasǒl 9: 21–22); Chǒng Yagyong, Aǒn kakpi, in Yǒyudang chǒnsǒ (Kyǒngin munhwasa, 1982)1:43a; Kang Hǒngyu, “Kisaeng ǔi ǒwǒn,” in Kang Hǒngyu kyosu hwagap kinyǒm kugǒhak nonmunjip (Kongju: Posǒng, 2000), 218–44; and Cho Kwangguk, Kinyǒdam kinyǒ tǔngjang sosǒl yǒngu (Wǒrin, 2000), 32–47. Han Ugǔn et al., trs., Yǒkchu Kyǒngguk taejǒn (Sǒngnam: Hanguk chǒngsin munhwa yǒnguwǒn, 1992), 2 vols. Also consulted: Sok Taejǒn (Sǒul taehakkyo Kyujanggak, 1998) 5:28a–29a; and Kugyǒk Taejǒn hoet’ong (Koryǒ taehakkyo Minjok munhwa yǒnguso, 1982) 5:573–75. Kojong sillok (T’amgudang, 1977), 32:1b. On Kwangdae and his music I have relied on Son T’aedo, Kwangdae ǔi kach’ang munhwa (Chimmundang, 2003), 1–12 and 47–152; for hwarang(i), Sǒngho sasǒl 23:7a–8a (translation in Sǒngho sasǒl 9:21–22); Sǒngjong sillok 20:5a. KS 73:3b and 78:41b. See SjS 31:22a (60 feet high); Munjong sillok 12:27a–b; Yǒnsangun ilgi 63: 22b; Kwanghaegun ilgi (Chǒngjoksan ed.) 144:7a; and (T’aebaeksan ed.) 144:20c; Yi Saek, Mogǔn chip, in Koryǒ myǒnhyǒn chip, 5 vols. (Sǒnggyungwan taehakkyo Taedong munhwa yǒnguwǒn, 1973), vol. 3, 33:27a

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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(for his poem on “sandae chapkǔk”). Sandae was a mountain-shaped structure with crevices and terraces for performers. Decorated with colored silk and lanterns, man-made animals and birds, the mountain was supposed to symbolize three magic seamounts, such as Mount Penglai, in the Yellow Sea, an abode of transcendents, or the Diamond Mountain, Mounts Chiri or Halla in Korea. It was about 60 feet high or as high as Kwanghwa Gate. Some sandae had wheels to facilitate transport (yesandae; Tanjong sillok 11:38b). On the terraces actors performed somersaults, tightrope walking, Ch’ǒyong dance, fireworks, songs, and dances. SG 4:40; KS 69:33a–b. T’aejong sillok 12:30b. SjS 52:25b, 26a. KS 64:38a–40a; Sukchong sillok 5:35a; Yǒngjo sillok 94:22b; YC 1:12, 17– 18; Yi Saek, Mogǔn chip 21:9a–b for his poem, “Kuna haeng.” Son T’aedo, 356, 359–60; Kyǒngguk taejǒn 3:248. KS 74:5b; Sejong sillok 81:5b5; Sǒngjong sillok 100:11b. KS 68:29b–31a; Kyǒngguk taejǒn 3:248. KS 74:5b; 68:30a; Kyǒngguk taejǒn 3:248; Son, 223, 356–57, 387–407. Kwanghaegun ilgi 106:29b. Son, 50–51. Son, 156–79; T’aejo sillok 2:5a: Chǒngjong sillok 6:10b: T’aejong sillok 22:10b; Sjs 52:42b. Sǒnjo sillok 187:41; Hyǒnjong sillok 10:40a; Son, 179–89. Son, 189–218. Son, 218–38. Son, 239–41. SjS 151:16b–17a; TYS 39:1a–12b. Canto 50 of Songs of Flying Dragons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 203–205. Sanguozhi (Peking: Zhonghua, 1975) 36: 939–42. For his description see Moss Roberts, tr., The Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9. Built 1419; Chǒng Inji named the building Kwanghallu in 1444. Kwanghan kung/lu/chǒn/pu is the name of a palace on the moon. Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 165–67, 206–207. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84; Gary Saul Morson and Caryl

354

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

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Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 366–432; John Bender and David E. Wellbery, eds., Chronotope: The Construction of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Hwang Hyejin, Ch’unhyang chǒn ǔi suyong munhwa (Wǒrin, 2007), 32–63. For Yao, Birrell, 238–40; for Shun, ibid., 74–75, 104–105; for Yu, 146–59; and for Tang, 156, 256–57. Hanshu 43:2127. “In the days of Ho Xu, / . . .Their mouths crammed with food, they were merry; drumming on their bellies, they passed the time.” Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 106. Gushiyuan (Sb) 1:1a; Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 70. Gerard Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 40b. Prince 46a–b; Nancy Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 11 and 149 (n. 37). Morson and Emerson, 429. Fufei is the daughter of the Luo River, Fuxi’s daughter who drowned in the Luo; see Cao Zhi (192–232), “Rhymeprose on the Goddess of the Lo,” Burton Watson, Chinese Rhyme-Prose: Poems in the Fu Form from the Han and Six Dynasties Periods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 55–60; and Edward H. Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),132–37. The rainmaster under Shennong. See Kenneth DeWoskin and J. I. Crump Jr., trans., In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 1–2. Turyu is another name for Chiri. Li Gongzo’s (ca. 778–848) tale; see Wang Mengou, Tangren xiaoshuo yanjiu (Taibei: Yiwen yinshugwan, 1971), 2 vols. 1:201–207; “An Account of the Governor of the Southern Branch,” in Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 861–71. A handsome Tang poet. A Tang poet known for his poems on the moon and wine; Jiu Tangshu 140B: 5052–5054. A famous calligrapher of the Jin.

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73. His dates are ca. 145–85 BC, the author of the Shiji (Records of the Historian). 74. Below Maan mountain in Dengtu, Anhwei; see Jiu Tangshu 140B:5053. 75. Su’s rhymeprose on the Red Cliff, where Cao Cao’s (155–220) fleet was destroyed by the Wu admiral Zhou Yu (175–210) in AD 208. 76. Whose dates are 772–846, a Tang poet whose 128 poems and one short prose piece are translated in Burton Watson, Po Chü-i: Selected Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 77. Sejo (r. 1455–68) is the seventh ruler of Chosǒn; Munjang Terrace is atop Mount Songni. 78. For Wang Bo’s (649?–676?) poem, see Quan Tangshi 55:674, and “Looking Down from the High Terrace,” in Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 115–18. 79. At the northeast corner of Lake Dongting, a large lake in Hunan, and Du Fu’s poem (760) on the tower reads: “The lake cleaves the lands of Wu and Qu to east and south.” Dushi xiangzhu 22:1946. David Hawkes, A Little Primer of Tu Fu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 209. 80. A pavilion in the state of Wu where the residence of Xishi was. 81. Northwest of Tongshan district in Kiangsu. 82. Shanyang Lake in Kiangsi. 83. See Peter H. Lee, The Record of the Black Dragon Year (Seoul: Institute of Korean Culture, Korea University and Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii, 2000), 37–48; “Athenian prisoners of war in Sicily [. . .] gained their freedom from their captors by their ability to recite the choruses of Euripides,” says Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 94. 84. Refers to Jin Changxu’s poem, “Chunyuan,” in Quan Tangshi 768:8813. 85. Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5, 9. 86. Weiyang palace built by Xiao He (d. 193 BC) in Changan. Hanshu 1B:64; 4:122. 87. In eastern Sichuan where the transcendent of the mountain, near the Yangzi Gorges, is believed to dwell. See Song Yu, “Gaotang fu” and Lois Fusek, “The ‘Kao-T’ang Fu’” Monumenta Serica 30 (1972–73): 392–425. 88. Xishi, a famous beauty from Yue, followed Fan Li (ca. fifth cent. BC) on a skiff to the five lake(s). Five Lake refers to Lake Tai or five lakes near it with or without it.

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89. Lady Yu parted from Xiang Yu (232–202 BC), hegemon of Qu, with a sad song on a moonlit night at Kaixia. See Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:70. 90. Wang Zhaojun (Brilliant Consort) became a bride of the khan of the Xiongnu in 33 BC Green Tomb is her tomb supposed to stay green throughout the year. 91. Favored Beauty (ca. 48–6 BC) served King Cheng of the Han but had to retire to Lasting Trust Palace (Changxin). Hanshu 97B:3983–3988. 92. “Flying Swallow” (d. 6 BC), a favorite of Han emperor Cheng who ousted Favored Beauty Ban. 93. Goldhill, 9. 94. Watson, The Tso chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History (New York: Columbia University Presss, 1989), 5–6. 95. George Steiner, ed., The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 149. 96. Zhuzi yulei 45 (Peking: Zhonghua, 1994), 3: 1154–1155. The time of the Rat is 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. 97. Also translated as the Grand Culmen, the source of the yin and yang, which by their complementary action generates all things. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China 2:460ff. (the Supreme Pole). 98. 1 to 3 a.m. In scene 17, “Sorceress of Tao,” “the old bawd’s monologue consists essentially of ludicrously misapplied lines of the Thousand Character Text” (p. 80, n. 3). See Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, tr. Cyril Birch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). She uses line 171, then line 170, not line 1. See Kang Yǒngmae, “Ch’unhyang ka wa Chungguk Moranjǒng ǔi ‘Ch’ǒnjamun’ suyong yangsang pigyo,” in Pak Chint’ae et al., eds., Ch’unhyang yesul ǔi yangsikchǒk punhwa wa segyesǒng (Pagijǒng, 2004), 233–53. 99. Or Five Agents: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. 100. Qian, dui, li, zhen, sun, kan, gen, and kun. Needham 2, table 13 and Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or the Book of Changes (New York: Pantheon, 1951), 1:305. 101. Trayastrimsas: the Indra Heaven, the second of the six heavens of form. Its capital is on the summit of Mount Sumeru, where Indra rules over his thirty-two devas, who reside on thirty-two peaks of the mountain, eight in each of the four directions.

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102. Twenty-eight constellations divided into four mansions of seven each referring to east/spring, south/summer, west/autumn, and north/ winter, Needham 3: Fig. 94; table 24 on 242–59. 103. Birrell, 157–59. 104. See Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993–6), 1:7, 19–20, 535–36. 105. On political, economic, moral, and religious principles to be observed by the people. Zhou i (Sc) 7:10a; Shangshu (Sc) 7:1a–b; James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5 vols. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 3:320–44. 106. Fuxi, Shennong, Suiren or Zhurang. 107. Yellow Emperor, Zhuanxu, Di Ku, Di Yao, Di Shun. Bernhard Karlgren, “Legends and Cults in Ancient China,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 18 (1946): 206–34. 108. Liezi 4: A. C. Graham, The Book of Lieh-tzu (London: John Murray, 1960), 90. 109. “The scroll of the Luo River and the plan of the Yellow River”: Heaven gave Yu the mysterious tortoise that made fifteen appearances in the Luo, bearing marks on its back. Zhou i 7:10a (Legge 5: 374); Liji 4: 9; Needham 3 (1959): 55–62; Analects 9:8 (Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius [London: Allen & Unwin, 1949] 140). 110. 11 p.m.to 1 a.m. 111. Great state code of administration, a collection of statutes compiled first in 1470, revised in 1474, and 1485. Annotated translation in 2 vols, published by Hanguk chǒngsin munhwa yǒnguwǒn in 1985. 112. Literally “wife of dregs and husks,” who accompanied a man through his days of youthful poverty. 113. The graph yǒ (lü: tube, musical note) looks like two graphs for “mouth” joined by a vertical stroke. 114. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 114. 115. In Sichuan, identified as the birthplace of the poet. 116. Isabelle Robinet, Taoist Meditations: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity, trs. Julian F. Pass and Norman J. Girardot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 55–96; Taoism: Growth of a Religion, tr. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 114–98 (on the Shangqing school). 117. Refers to Cui Hao’s poem, “Huangho lou,” in Quan Tangshi 130:1329.

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118. His dates are 790–816; he wrote poetry of allusion with Daoist and shamanist elements, which is compared to Mallarmé, in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 310. 119. His dates are 37 BC to AD 43, a contemporary of Emperor Guangwu; he retired to Mount Fuchun and spent his time fishing. Hou Hanshu (Peking: Zhonghua, 1963), 113:2763–2764. 120. Anna Roberts, “Introduction,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 7. 121. “Three dependencies” suggests T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, in Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton, 1961), 102–103, 140; Kongzi jiayu (Sc) 6:12a–b. Women have to obey their father at home, their husband after marriage, and their eldest son after the husband’s death. 122. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü 118–23; Kongzi jiayu 6:13a. 123. Boys age 15 and girls age 14 may marry. 124. Lu Jiaolin (635–84), “Changan gui,” Quan Tangshi 41:522–53 (The text reverses lines 17 and 18 and gives only 4 graphs to fit the p’ansori meter): “Tell me of her who plays the pipes off into purple mist— / she has spent her years of beauty in the study of dance,” in Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang, 105–09. 125. See Taiping guangji (in the Chingyin Siku quanshu ed.) (Taiwan: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983), 159:1a–3a. 126. On the southern shores of Hwanghae province, consisting of two islands, known for a fishing place. 127. The protagonist in A Dream of Nine Clouds (1687–88) by Kim Manjung (1637–92). 128. Shiji 7:295–339; and see Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:70. 129. Xuanzong (r. 713–56) with his undying love for Yang Gueifei (d. July 15, 756) is immortalized by Bo Juyi in his “Song of Everlasting Regret” (806); Quan Tangshi 435:4828–30. 130. Well-known beach in Wǒnsan, South Hamgyǒng. 131. Peter Green, tr., The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 107–23, esp. 109, lines 31–35. 132. In Imje county, Kangwǒn province. 133. Taigongwang (Lü Shang), a counselor to King Wen of Zhou who found him fishing in the Wei River. Shiji 32:1477–1481 and Sarah Allen, “The Identities of Taigongwang in Zhou and Han Literature,” Monumenta Serica 30 (1972–73): 57–99.

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134. An entertainer in Chinju, she died on August 6, 1592. When the Japanese celebrated the fall of Chinju fortress on Ch’oksok Tower, she enticed one drunken Japanese commander and threw herself with him into the South River. In 1722 her deed was recognized officially, and in 1740 a shrine was built for her spirit and sacrifice offered in the spring and fall. 135. Edward H. Schafer, Pacing the Void: T’ang Approaches to the Stars (Warren, CT: Floating World Editions, 2005), 171–200. 136. Ibid., 174; and Schafer, The Divine Woman, 40. 137. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 111; Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 59. “Physiologically and psychologically, women are wet . . . The emotions of eros are especially liquid and liquefying,” says Anne Carson, in “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David Halperin et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 137, 139, 142, 159, esp. 137–38. Elizabeth Robertson describes “the medieval belief that women were physiologically cold, wet, and incomplete” and the “pervasiveness of images of moisture in the medieval women’s texts” in “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142–67, esp. 142 and 161. 138. Wei Chengqing (640–706)’s poem, “Nanxing bieti,” line 2; Quan Tangshi 46:560. 139. A poem by Song Jiwen (d. ca. 713), “Song Du Shenyan,” in Quan Tangshi 52:640. 140. Reference to a poem, “Parting,” by Chǒng Chisang (d. 1135); see Tong munsǒn (Hyǒpsǒng munhwasa, 1985) 19:19b, and Peter H. Lee, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 206. 141. Built by Su Shi (1037–1101) in northeastern Fengxiang district in Shensi in 1061. The completion of the pavilion is said to have brought rain after a drought. Dongpo quanji 35:2a–3a. 142. Refers to three communication agencies: imperial secretariat, the censorate, and tribunal of reception. See Charles O. Hucker, A Dictio-

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143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature nary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 403. Personnel, Punishments, Rites, Taxation, War, and Works. Built by Yang Guozhong, where Xuanzong and his Precious Consort Yang enjoyed viewing the peonies and had Li Bo write a poem. Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–42. Shiji 3:105. Built by the first Qin emperor in the Shanglin Park; Shiji 6:256. Shiji 8:380–81. Changle Palace was erected by Liu Bang out of an old Qin palace in 200 BC and became his residence. Shiiji 8:385; Hanshu 1B:58. The palace where Favored Beauty Ban retired after losing favor with Emperor Cheng. Minister of Wuding of Shang; Mencius 6B:15. Those murdered by the usurper Sejo include Yi Kae (1417–56); Ha Wiji (1387–1456); Yu Sǒngwǒn (d. 1456); Yu Ǔngbu (d. 1456); Sǒng Samnun (1418–56); and Pak P’aengnyǒn (1417–56). Six ministers who refused to serve the usurper Sejo include Yi Maengjǒn (fl. 1427); Cho Yǒ (1420–89); Wǒn Ho (fl. 1423); Kim Sisǔp (1435–93); Sǒng Tamsu (d. 1456); and Nam Hyoon (1454–92). Ch’oe Ch’iwǒn (b. 857), the most famous Silla writer of poetry and prose. Ko Kyǒngmyǒng (1533–92), leader of 6,000 troops at Kǔmsan; died in a battle against the Japanese invaders. Kim Ǔngha (1580–1619), a military official who lost a battle against the Manchu. Chǒng Ch’ǒl (1537–94), a Chosǒn poet and politician. Yi Sunsin (1545–98), the most famous Korean admiral, who never lost a sea battle against the Japanese navy. Song Siyǒl (1607–89), Chosǒn scholar and politician. Yi Hwang (1501–71), the most famous Neo-Confucian philosopher in Korea. Kim Changsaeng (1548–1631), Chosǒn scholar. Yun Chǔng (1629–1714), Chosǒn scholar and politician. See Peter H. Lee, A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany: The P’aegwan Chapki of Ǒ Sukkwǒn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 180–82.

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169. 170.

171. 172.

173.

174. 175. 176. 177. 178.

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Shiji 1:3–4; Birrell, 132–34. Lü Tongbin (755–805), Chinese alchemist; see Needham 2:159. Meng Haojan (689–740), Tang poet. Taii (Great One or Unique) is the supreme sky god in Chinese mythology who resides in the palace at the center of heaven, marked by the pole star. Needham 3:260. Charlotte Furth, “Rethinking van Gulik: Sexuality and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Christina K. Gilmartin et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 135. John Warden, tr., The Poems of Propertius (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 82. Sidney’s sonnet is cited from Astrophil and Stella, ed. Max Putzel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 49. Carew is quoted from Rhodes Dunlap, ed., The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 49–53. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7.3 (1982): 516. M. Theresa Kelleher, “Back to Basics: Chu Hsi’s Elementary Learning (Hsiao-hsüeh)” in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, ed. Wm Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 219–51. King Yǒngjo translated the text into Korean (1744). See Yves Hervouet, ed., A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), 233–35. John Duncan, “The Naehun and the Politics of Gender in 15th-Century Korea,” in Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century, ed. Young-key Kim-Renaud (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 26–57. They disapproved of the Zhou conquest of their overlord the Shang king and retired to Shouyang Mountain where they died of starvation. Shiji, 61:2121–2129 and Birrell, 58–59, 220–21. Liu Zongyuan, “Jiangxue,” Quan Tangshi 352:3961. No. 1113 in Sim Chaewan, which has Changsǒng Pass; see Peter H. Lee, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, 152; for part of another sijo (no. 752) cited, see 156. Shiji 82:2457. A warrior of Qi who is said to have plucked the horns of an ox.

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179. Su Qin (d. 317 BC) and Zhang Yi (d. 309 BC) are renowned traveling persuaders during the Warring States period (403–221 BC). For Su see Shiji 69:2241–77, and for Zhang, Shiji 70:2279–2305. 180. Zhuge Liang (181–234), the counselor and a commander of military campaigns for Liu Bei, considered the greatest strategist of China. Sanguozhi 35: 911–37. 181. When Emperor Yao wished to make Xu his successor, he went into hiding. At the emperor’s second offer, he went to the Ying River to cleanse his ears. 182. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 231. 183. Kim Tonguk, Ch’unhyang chǒn yǒngu (Yǒndae ch’ulp’anbu, 1965), 42. 184. I have borrowed some terms from Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds., Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 185. For slavery see Yi Sǒngmu, Chosǒn yangban sahoe yǒngu (Ilchogak, 1995), 306–65; Yǒksa hakhoe, ed., Nobi, noye—yesongmin ǔi pigyosa (Ilchogak, 1998); Ellen J. Kim, “The Enduring Institution: A Case Study of Slavery in Traditional Korea,” B.A. thesis, Harvard College, 1991; James B. Palais, “Slave Society,” in Views on Korean Social History (Institute for Modern Korean Studies, Yonsei University, 1998), 23–47; Hanguk minjok taepaekkwa sajǒn, 27 vols. (Sǒngnam: 1991), 5:679c–88c; and Lee, Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 1:326–28; 2:178–92. 186. Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 2:182. 187. Lee, Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 1:565–56; 2:192–207. 188. A secondary daughter is said to have exchanged poems with Chǒng Ch’ǒl (1536–93) and Yi Hangbok (1556–1618). Karim sego contains thirty-five poems. Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 215–17. 189. Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, 2:202. 190. Lee, Sourcebook of Korean Civilizaion, 2:204–07. 191. Kyǒngguk taejǒn, 2:167 and n. 374. 192. Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Blackwell, 1985), 3. 193. Book of Songs 184:1 (Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs [London: Allen & Unwin, 1954], 158).

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194. Qian Qi, “Gueiyan,” Quan Tangshi 239:2680. Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–77) compares his lady’s gent corps to “the 25 strings that a harp has” (17). Bruce W. Holsinger, in Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), comments on “pain’s fundamental audibility to produce sounds that can be heard and felt” (192–94), “a commonplace association between torture and song” (198), and “devotional writers imagined as the unique propensity of musical sonority to embody and channel extreme somatic experience, particularly pain” (208). Here one can say that unremittant percussive beatings felt by Ch’unhyang’s body in pain produce her song. 195. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3–5 and 35. 196. Anna Roberts, ed., Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998), 10, 11. 197. Robert Mills. “Can the Virgin Martyrs Speak?” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 179. 198. For Princess Hyegyǒng (later Queen Kyǒngǔi), see Peter H. Lee, ed., Anthology of Korean Literature: From Early Times to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 142. 199. SG 48:446–47. 200. SY 1:56. 201. The 1754 version says, “She offers worship at the Yi clan’s ancestral shrine (180b) and becomes a sister-in-law of the noble women (that is, whose husbands serve as royal secretaries or special advisors; 181a– b) of the Yi household.” See Sǒng Hyǒngyǒng, “Ch’unhyang ǔi sinbun pyǒni kwajǒng yǒngu,” in Hanguk Kojǒn sosǒl kwa sǒsa munhak, 1:417– 30. 202. Stephen C. Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 192. 203. Robert and Jean Hollander, Dante Alighieri: Inferno (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 89. 204. Han Feizi 4:13–14; Burton Watson, Hen Fei Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 80–83. 205. Four white beards retired to Shangshan at the end of the Qin. Shiji 55:2044–2045. 206. Jie is the bad last ruler of Xia; Zhou is the bad last ruler of Shang. 207. Birrell, 110–12, 239–60.

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208. Yang Huo seized power in Lu (505 BC) and the people of Kuang mistook Confucius for Yang. Shiji 47:1930; Analects 9:5 (Waley 139, 244–45). 209. “Summer clouds,” supposed to be by Tao Qian in Ding Tinghu, Tao Yuanming shijianzhu (Taibei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1960), 3:25. 210. Peter H. Lee, Pine River and Lone Peak (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 53–59. 211. Lee, Anthology of Korean Literature, 116–68. 212. Daryl Hines, Ovid’s Heriodes: A Verse Translation of the Heroides (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 105–07. 213. Guido A. Guarino, tr., Concerning Famous Women (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 81. 214. Earl Jeffrey Richards, tr., The Book of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 158. For a study of this work see Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 215. David Young, tr., The Poetry of Petrarch (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2004), 186. 216. Guarino, 101. See Ian Donaldson, The Rape of Lucrece: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). 217. Richards, 161. 218. Richards, 206. 219. Ann McMillan, Legends of Good Women (Houston: Rice University Press, 1987), 120. 220. See n. 133. 221. Kim Ǔngsǒ kills her from fear of being discovered by Japanese soldiers. See Lee, The Record of the Black Dragon Year, 22–23, 74–78. 222. Duke of Shao (fl. 841 BC), King Wen’s secondary son. 223. Duke of Zhou (d. 1094 BC) helped the founders of Zhou. 224. Probably refers to Yellow Emperor (Birrell 130–37); Yao (Birrell 238– 40); Shun; Yu; and King Tang. 225. Refers to disciples of Confucius (551–479 BC), the most influential thinker of China. Shiji 47:1905–47. 226. Yan Hui (514–483 BC), Confucius’s favorite disciple. 227. Tsengcan (505–ca. 436 BC), a pupil of Confucius’s, noted for filial piety, to whom are ascribed the Great Learning and the Book of Filial Piety. 228. Zisi (492–431 BC), Confucius’s grandson. 229. Li Shunfeng (602–70), Tang mathematician.

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230. Cheng Hao (1032–85) built his philosophy on the concept of the principle (li) of nature; Wing-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 518–43. 231. Cheng Yi (1033–1107) believed that the way cannot be found outside of material force; Chan, 544–71. 232. Shao Yung (1011–77) believed that the supreme principles governing the universe can be discerned in terms of numbers; Chan, 481–94. 233. Zhou Dunyi (1017–73), the pioneer of Song Neo-Confucian metaphysics and ethics; Chan, 460–80. 234. Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Song synthesizer of Neo-Confucianism. 235. Yan Junping (fl. ca. 34 BC), Han Daoist who made a living by telling fortunes at Chengdu; Hanshu 72: 3056–3057. 236. Sima Guang (1019–86), the author of Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in government). 237. Devil Valley Master (Needham 2:206), a leader of the vertical alliance against Qin. Shiji 67:2241, 2279. 238. Sun Bin (?378–301 BC) learned military arts from Gueigu and helped Wei; Shiji 69:2241. 239. Wang Bi (226–49), commentator of the Book of Changes. 240. Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98; r. 1368–98), founder of the Ming. 241. Liu Bei (162–223), founder of the Shu kingdom (221–63). 242. Daoist deities. 243. For divination by blind people see Murayama Chijun, Chōsen no senboku to yogen (Chōsen sōtokufu, 1933), 436–41. 244. Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 296. 245. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 40; and Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77. 246. Rycroft, 53. 247. States, 38. 248. Rycroft, 72, 164. 249. States, 17. 250. Rycroft, 153, 163. 251. Rycroft, 39. 252. Rycroft, 131. 253. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 94, 84–88.

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254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262. 263.

Shulman and Stroumsa, 105. Shulman and Stroumsa, 94. States, 95. States, 93. States, 115–16. States, 145. States, 151–52. States, 145. States, 157, 209. Hanguk munhwa sangjing sajǒn (Dictionary of Korean Myths and Symbols) (Tonga ch’ulp’ansa, 1992), 43–48. States, 184. Rycroft, 47. Shulman and Stroumsa, 132. Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 80. Hanguk minjok munhwa taebaekkwa sajǒn 14:581a–82c. The text has, “Yi said good-bye to his parents and left for Chǒlla province,” which may be a scribal error. Another lapse is that Ch’unhyang says her mother’s age is 60 (31, 105), but Wǒlmae says she is going to be 70 (103). Shun is said to have tilled on this mountain; Shiji 1:31–39. See Birrell, 128–29, 256–58. Alan T. Bradford, “Mirror of Mutability: Winter Landscape in Tudor Poetry,” English Literary Renaissance 4.1 (1974): 3–39, esp. 3, 33. No. 3177 in Sim Chaewan. James R. Hightower, The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 270. Hightower, 136. Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese (New York: Vintage, 1971), 122. James J. Y. Liu, Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 139. Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books Containing the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958), 68. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 183. Caruth, 4.

264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269.

270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278. 279. 280.

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281. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 27–54. 282. Doane and Pasternack, 139. 283. Maria Rosa Menacol, Shards of Love: Exiles and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 101. 284. Zumthor, Towards a Medieval Poetics, 20. 285. Zumthor, Towards a Medieval Poetics, 191. 286. Among Northrop Frye’s five literary modes—myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic—our song is a work in the low mimetic mode. See Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 33–66, esp. 34, and Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 3 passim. 287. Diana T. Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 20. 288. Sǒl Sǒnggyǒng’s proposal in Ch’unhyang chǒn ǔi pimil (Sǒuldae ch’ulp’anbu, 2001), 19–20.

Appendix

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Figure 1. Yi Kyubo, beginning of "Lay of King Tongmyŏng."

Source. Tongguk Yi-sangguk chip (1958 reprint) 3: 1a-2b.

Appendix Figure 2. Songs of Flying Dragons (1445–1447), cantos 1-2: 1:1a-b.

Source. Yongbi ŏch'ŏn ka (reprint of 1612 ed.).

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Figure 3. Beginning of "The Turkish Bakery."

Source. Akchang kasa (7a).

Appendix Figure 4. Beginning of "Song of P'yŏngyang."

Source. Siyong hyangak po (24b).

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Figure 5. Beginning of The Record of the Black Dragon Year.

Source. Kim Kidong, ed. P’ilsabon kojǒn sosǒl chǒnjip 6 (1980), 197.

Appendix Figure 6. Beginning of The Song of the Chaste Wife Ch'unhyang.

Source. Woodblock edition printed in Chŏnju (n.d) 1a.

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Index

abak 牙拍 (6-leaved ivory clappers), 36 Achilles, 9 Ai Pu 艾璞 (came 1492), 119, 169 Akchang kasa 樂章歌詞 (c. early 16th c.), 24, 243 Akhak kwebǒm 樂學軌範 (Guide to the study of music; 1493), 23, 70 akkong 樂工 (slave musicians), 58, 274 Alienor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine (1122–1204), 51 amhaeng ǒsa 暗行御史 (secret royal inspector), 335 An Chi 安止 (1377–1464), 175 An Ch’im 安琛 (1444–1515), 115 An Ch’uk 安軸 (1287–1348): “Song of Kwandong,” 172 An Chunghu 安重厚 (n.d.), 162 An Chungson 安仲孫 (n.d.), 122 An Hyang 安珦 (1243–1306), 28, 162 An Hyorye 安孝禮 (n.d.), 167 anagnorisis (recognition), 34 Analects, 98, 288, 314 analepsis (flashback), 279 aniri (spoken parts of p’ansori), 278 An Suksǒn 安淑仙 (p’ansori singer; b. 1949), 349 An Sungsǒn 安崇善 (1392–1453), 171 An Ǔngse 安應世 (n.d.), 180

An Wǒn 安瑗 (1346–1411), 177 Aretino, Pietro (1492–1556): “Sonetti lussuriosi” (1524), 307 aristeiai (grand heroic moments), 9 Artemidorus (2nd c. AD): Oneirocritica (Taxonomy of dreams), 335 Augustine, St. (354–430): Confessions (c. 397–400), 54–55 Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1963), 333 Bakhtin, M. M. (1895–1975), 280 Ban Jieyou 班婕妤 (c. 48–46 BC), 287, 303 baozhi 儤直, 108 Bayan Khuldu (Princess Kyǒnghwa; married 1333; d. 1334), 26, 29 Bayle, John: The Vocacyon of John Bayle (1553), 146 bie (force), 9 Black Death, 32 Blanchot, Maurice (b. 1907), 8, 257 Bo Juyi 白居易 (772–846): “Song of lasting regret/sorrow” (807), 269, 283 Bo Ya 伯牙, 124 Bo Yi 伯夷, 174, 313 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375), 188; De mulieribus claris (c. 1355–1359), 327–328 Book of Changes (Ijing, Zhouyi), 288 Book of Documents (Shujing; Shangshu), 103, 288

408

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經), 9, 288 Botashirin (d. 1315), 26, 28 Buddhism, 12, 16, 128, 184–186, 231 Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia), 25 canso (Troubadour love song), 73 Cantigas d’amigo (female-voiced), cantigas d’amor (male-voiced), 25, 72 Carew, Thomas (1594/5–1640): “A Rapture,” 307 Carmina Burana (discovered 1803; pub. 1847; 228 Latin and German poems), 25 Castigione, Baldassare (1478–1529): Il libro del cortegiano (pub. 1528), 169, 178 Catullus (c. 84–54), 296 Cen Shen 岑參 (715–770), 267 Chadongsǒn 紫洞仙 (n.d.), 183 chaedam 才談, 275 chaeng 箏 (lute of Kaya), 36 Ch’a Ch’ǒllo 車天輅 (1556–1615), 165 Ch’ae Hongch’ǒl 蔡洪哲 (1262– 1340), 65 Ch’ae Su 蔡壽 (1449–1515), 170 Ch’aeunja 採雲子 (n.d.), 112 Changagwǒn 掌樂院 (Chosǒn music bureau), 58 “Changdan” 長端 (Koryǒ praise song), 51 changgo 杖鼓 (hourglass drum), 36 Chang Tǔksam 張得三 (n.d.), 189 changwǒn 壯元 (first-place candidate), 162 Changwǒnsim 長遠心 (Buddhist monk; n.d.), 185

Chao Yun, 231 chapki 雜記 (literary miscellany), 89, 96, 106, 155 Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1343–1400): The Legend of Good Women (1386), 328 Chaun 紫雲 (n.d.), 183 chazhi, 108 Chen Kan 陳侃 (1489–1538), 120 Chen Jian 陳鑑 (came 1457), 169 Chen Shou (233–297): Sanguozhi, 231 cheng 正 maneuver, 6 Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085), 329 Cheng Yi (1033–1107), 329 Chinhye 眞慧 (1255–1324), 50 chinja, 40 Chinogi (or Saenam kut), 13 ch’iŏ 致語, 40 Chiphyǒnchǒn集賢殿 (Hall of Worthies), 36, 157, 168 Chisik 知識, 102, 122 Chiyou 蚩尤, 305 ci 詞, 35, 40 Cho Hǒn 趙憲, 234 Cho Ingyu 趙仁規 (1227–1308), 28 Cho Kyǒngnam (1570–1641), 348 Cho O 趙吾 (n.d.), 175 Cho Ǒjǒng (n.d.), 176 Cho Sik 曺植 (1501–1572): Somun swoerok, 117, 348 Cho Sin 曺伸 (fl. 1470–1494), 95, 111, 146 Cho Su 趙須 (fl. 1401–1431), 116 Cho Taerim 趙大臨 (1387–1430), 173 Cho Wi 曺偉 (1454–1503), 112 Cho Wǒngi 趙元紀 (1457–1533), 124

Index Cho Yong 趙庸 (d. 1424), 166 Ch’oe Cha 崔滋 (1188– 1260): Pohan chip 補閑集 (Supplementary jottings in idleness 1254), 41, 99, 113, 116, 122 Ch’oe Chi 崔池 (fl. 1438–1465), 165 Ch’oe Ch’iun 崔致雲 (1390–1440), 179 Ch’oe Ch’iwǒn 崔致遠 (d. 857), 168, 304 Ch’oe Hang 崔恒 (1407–1474), 160 Ch’oe Harim 崔河臨 (1455–1486), 186 Ch’oe Howǒn 崔灝元 (n .d.), 107 Ch’oe Hǔnghyo 崔興孝 (fl. 1411– 1421), 172 Ch’oe Ilgyǒng (Illyǒng), 209, 210, 217, 212, 213, 214 Ch’oe Kukkwang 崔國光 (n.d.), 182 Ch’oe Kyǒnghoe 崔慶會, 208 Ch’oe Pu 崔府 (1370–1452), 174 Ch’oe Sejin 崔世珍 (d. 1547), 131 Ch’oe Sukseang 崔淑生 (1475– 1520), 112, 132 Ch’oe Talsǒng, 219 Ch’oe U 崔瑀 (d. 1249), 64, 121 Ch’oe Wigong, 212 Ch’ǒin Fortress 處仁城, 25 chǒk 笛 (large transverse flute), 36 Chǒk Island 赤島, 4 Ch’ǒlsan Sogyǒng 鐵山紹瓊 (eminent monk), 50 chǒn 傳 (tradition, story, life), 143 Chǒn Im 田霖 (d. 1509), 123 Chǒn Mok 全穆 (n.d.), 183 Chǒng Chadang 鄭子堂 (fl.1489), 111

409 Chǒng Chayǒng 鄭自英 (d. 1474), 178 Chǒng Ch’o 鄭招 (d. 1434), 166 Chǒng Ch’ǒl 鄭澈 (1537–1593): “Sa miin kok” 思美人曲(“Hymn to constancy”), 326;“Sokmiin kok” 續美人曲, 326; “Sǒngsan pyǒlgok” 星山別曲 (“Little odes on Mount Star”), 243, 244–246, 251, 304 Chǒng Ch’ong 鄭摠 (1358–1397), 172 Chǒng Ch’ullam, 209 Chǒng Ch’ungnam 鄭忠南, 212 Chǒng Hǔmji 鄭欽之 (1378–1439), 162 Chǒng Ingyǒng 鄭仁卿 (n.d.), 41 Chǒngjae, 35 chongjǒngdo 從政圖, 108, 305 Chǒng Inji 鄭麟趾 (1396–1478), 169, 170, 179 Chǒng Kapson 鄭甲孫 (d. 1451), 170, 174 Chǒng Ku 鄭矩 (1350–1418), 180 “Chǒng Kwajǒng” 鄭瓜亭 (Koryǒ song), 68 Chǒng Mongju 鄭夢周 (1337– 1392), 41 Chǒng Pǒm 鄭凡 (n.d.), 189 Chǒng Pǒn 鄭蕃 (n.d.), 126 Chǒng Pu 鄭符 (n.d.), 180, 194 Chǒng Saryong 鄭士龍 (1491– 1570), 115, 119, 131, 169 “Ch’ǒngsan pyǒlgok” 靑山別曲 (Song of green mountain), 54, 56, 64–65, 70 “Chǒngsǒk ka” 鄭石歌 (Song of the gong and chimes), 69

410

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Chǒng Sǔmmyǒng 鄭襲明 (d. 1151), 48 Chǒng Tojǒn 鄭道傳 (d.1398), 176; ‘Chǒng tongbang kok” 靖東方 曲 (“Pacification of the east”), 58; “Napssi ka” 納氏歌 (“Song of Naghacu”), 58; and “Sindo ka” 新都歌 (“Song of the new capital”), 58 “Chǒngǔp sa” 井邑詞 (Song of Chǒngǔp), 36, 69, 70 Chǒng Yǒch’ang 鄭汝昌 (1450– 1504), 177 Chǒng Yusan 鄭惟産 (d. 1091), 160 Chosǒn 朝鮮 (dynasty ruled by the Yi house; 1392–1910), vii, x, 4, 9, 24, 43, 49, 58, 94, 144, 147 Ch’ǒyong dance, 40 Christine de Pisan (1363?–1431): Livre de la Cité des dames, 327 Chuci 楚辭 (Elegies of Chu), 156 ch’uk, 35 chukkanja 竹竿子, 40 Chumong 朱蒙 (later Tongmyǒng 東明; 37–19 BC), 2–3, 8 chunggǔm (13-holed medium transverse flute), 36 chungin 中人, , 136 Chungyang 重陽 (Double Nine), 59 Ch’unhyang 春香, 255, 264, 269, 277, 280, 281, 283, 288, 292, 293, 294, 298, 300, 305, 306, 308–309, 310–312, 314–315, 317, 319–324, 328–329, 330, 331, 333–335, 342–344, 346–347, 349 Chunqiu (Spring and autumn annuals), 165 ch’usaeng 抽栍, 336 civil service examinations, 160

Cixous, Hélène, 255 Confucianism, 12, 16 Confucius, 98, 327, 329 contrafactum, 23, 58 “Cuckoo song, The” (first half of the 13th c.), 56 Dadu 大都 (Khambalikh; Peking), 28, 29, 30 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321): Il Convivio, 257; Inferno, 265; Paradiso, 265 darughachi (one who presses an official seal), 29 Dasheng xinyue/yayue 大晟新樂/ 雅樂, 35 Daxue 大學 (Great Learning), 124 Devil Valley Master (Gueiguzi, 鬼 谷子), 330 Diagram of Dharmadhātu , 227 Diamond Scripture 金剛經, 166 Dong Yue 董越 (came 1488), 119, 169 Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770): “On Yueyang tower,” 268; “Thoughts on historical site 3: on Wang Zhaojun,” 269, 288 Du Mu 杜牧 (803–852), 268, 281 Duke of Zhou 周公 (d. 1094 BC), 329 Earle, John (1601–1663), Microcosmographie (1628), 99 Fan Kuai 樊噲 (d. 189 BC), 195 Fan Zongshi 樊宗師 (c. 808), 117 fin’amor (courtly love), 51, 72

Index Finke, Laurie A.: Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England (1999), 48–49 First emperor of the Qin, 231 Francesca da Rimini (Inferno 5), 323 Frauenlieder, 72 Fu, consort 傅妃, 281–282 Fuxi 伏羲, 329 Fu Yue 傅說, 303 Galician-Portuguese songs (fl. 1200–1350; 1700 poems by some 160 male poets); 25, 72 Gao Run 高閏 (came 1457), 119 Gaoli tujing 高麗圖經 (An envoy’s illustrated account of Koryǒ; Xuanhe fungshi 宣和奉使), 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749– 1832): “Gretchen am Spinnarde,” 265 Gong Yongjing (came 1536; 1500– 63), 119, 131 Gottfried von Strassberg (d.c.1210): Tristan, 323 Grotto Court Lake 洞庭湖, , 295, 301 “Ground thumping song” 擊壤歌, 278, 289 Guan Daosheng 管道生 (1262– 1319), 50 Guan Yu 關羽 (d. 219), 11–12, 206–7, 210–211, 212–213, 215, 217, 222, 223, 225, 230, 240 Gusu Terrace 姑蘇臺, 283 Ha Kongjin 河拱辰 (d. 1010), 40 Ha Yǒn 河演 (1376–1453), 174 Haech’o 海超 (Buddhist monk), 185

411 Haemosu 解慕漱, 2 Hakcho 學祖 (fl. 1464–1520), 186 Hall, John, 99 “Hallim pyǒlgok” 翰林別曲 (“Song of Confucian scholars”), 163 Ham Purin 咸傅霖 (1360–1410), 182 Han Ch’iyun (1756–1814), 95 Han Kǔkham, 208 Han Kyehǔi 韓繼禧 (1423–1482), 174 Han Kyǒnggi 韓景琦 (1472–1529), 183 Han Xin 韓信 (d. 196 BC), 231, 232 Han Yongun 韓龍雲 (1879–1944), 283 Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), 112, 114, 117, 168 “Hansongjǒng” 寒松亭 (Koryǒ popular song translated into a pentasyllabic quatrain by Chang Chin’gong), 51 Harley lyrics (comp. c. 1314–1325), 25 Heloise (1101–1164), 50–51 Herd Boy 牽牛 (Altair), 277, 285, 293, 296, 324, 326 Herrick, Robert (1591–1674), 101 Hideyoshi秀吉, 206, 210, 228, 231 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 44, 50 Hǒ Cho 許稠 (1369–1439), 174 Hǒ Chong 許琮 (1434–1494), 119, 169, 170, 175 Hǒ Kyun 許筠 (1569–1618), Hong Kiltong chǒn洪吉童傳, 95, 316 Hǒ Nansǒrhǒn 許蘭雪軒 (1563– 1585): “A woman’s sorrow,” 326 Hǒ Sǒng 許誠 (1382–1442), 174

412

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

hohon 戶婚 (“Household and marriage” in Koryǒ penal code), 45, 46 Holdheim, W. Wolfgang: The Hermeutic Mode: Essays on Time in Literature and Literary Theory (1984), 92–93 Homer: Iliad, 260; Odyssey, 327, 332 hǒnga 軒架, 35 Hong Ch’ǒngi 洪天起, 184 Hong Iltong 洪逸童 (d. 1464), 170, 176, 179 Hongmungwan 弘文館 (Office of Special Counselors), 104, 140, 163, 164 Hong Ǒnbak 洪彦博 (1309–1363), 121 Hong Yunsǒng 洪允成 (1425– 1475), 166, 179 Honsu 混脩 (1320–1392), 185 Hua Cha 華察 (came 1539), 119 Huangling miao 黃陵廟 (Temple of the Yellow Tumulus), 300, 328, 341 Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045– 1105), 131 Hung Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202): Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆, 98 Hǔngnyong ilgi 黑龍日記, 202, 205–209 Hǔngnyong nok, 202 Hwang Chini 黃眞伊 (female entertainer; c. 1506–1544), 70 Hwang Hǔi 黃喜 (1363–1452), 162, 173 Hwang Hyohǒn 黃孝獻 (1491– 1532), 112 Hwang Shin 黃愼, 208

Hwang Susin 黃守身 (1407–1467), 162 Hwang Yungil 黃允吉, 206 Hwangbo In 皇甫仁 (d. 1453), 171, 182 Hwanghwa chip 皇華集 (Bright flower collection), 118 hwarang 花郞, 38, 233, 274 hyangch’al 鄕札 (orthography), 47 Hyangdan 香丹 (Ch’unhyang’s maid), 286 hyangga 鄕歌 (Silla songs; c. 6th– 10th c.), 58, 159 hyanggyo 鄕校, 276 hyegǔm (2-stringed fiddle), 36 hyǒngǔm (6-stringed black zither), 36 Hyǒn Maengin 玄孟仁 (fl. 1400– 1418), 172 idu 吏讀, 47 Ilchihong 一枝紅 (female entertainer), 313 Im Chae 林宰 (n.d.), 41 Im Ch’un 林椿 (d. 1170), 111 Imjin nok 壬辰錄 (Record of the Black Dragon year), x, 9–13, 201; version A, 205–209; version B, 209–211; version C, 212–215; version D, 215–228 Im Sahong (1454–1506), 137 imun 吏文 (documentary style), 104 Im Wǒnjun 任元濬 (1423–1500), 166 Iram 一庵 (Buddhist monk), 185 Irigaray, Luce, 301

Index Irinjinbal (Princess Tǒngnyǒng; Ch’unghye’s Mongol queen; d. 1379), 26 Irinjinbala (Ch’ungsuk’s Mongol queen; d. 1319), 27–28 Iryǒn 一然 (1206–1289), 260 “Isang kok” 履霜曲 (“Treading frost”), 54, 56, 65–67, 68, 70, 71 Jalayirtai, 31 Jia Yi 賈誼 (201–168 BC), 246 Jiang Taigong 姜太公 (Lü Shang), 298 Jie 桀 (bad last ruler of Xia), 246, 326 Jin Shi 金湜 (came 1464), 119, 183 Jizheng tiaoge 至正條格 (Jizheng code; promulgated 1346), 117 Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784), 142 Jonson Ben (1572/3–1637): “To Penshurst,” 253n5 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), 332 ka 歌, 259 Kaegyǒng (Koryǒ capital), 51–52 kanbi 姦非 (“Illicit coitus” a section in Koryǒ penal code), 44–45 Kan Hong 簡弘 (n.d.), 41 Kang Hon 姜渾 (1465–1519), 181 Kang Hongnip 姜弘立 (1560–1627), 204, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 224–225, 229 Kang Hǔi 姜曦, 160 Kang Hǔian 姜希顔 (1417–1464), 168, 170 Kang Hǔimaeng 姜希孟 (1424– 1483), 168 Kanghwa Island 江華島, 33

413 kasa 歌詞, 326 “Kasiri” (Will you go?), 68–69, 70, 72 Kayagǔm 伽倻琴 (12-stringed zither of Kaya), 86 Keats, John (1795–1821), 322 Kenkō 兼好 (c. 1283–1352): Tsurezuregusa (Essays in idleness 1329–1333), 98 kharjas (short final refrains of songs composed by Hispano-Arabic poets called Muwashshahas; late 10th– 14th c., embodying such poetic motifs as the abandoned girl, the faithless lover, and the mother/sisters as confidants; see James J. Wilhelm, Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York 1990), 225–228 Khubilai, 30, 32 Khudulukh-kalmish (Khubilai’s daughter who married Ch’ungnyǒl; d. 1297), 26, 29 Ki Kǒn 奇虔 (d. 1460), 175 Ki Yu 奇裕 (n.d.), 193 Kim Adong 金阿童 (n.d.), 188 Kim Allo 金安老 (1481–1537), 137 Kim Cha (d. 1429), 160 Kim Changsaeng 金長生 (1548– 1631), 304 Kim Ch’ǒ 金處, 172 Kim Chǒn 金詮 (1458–1523), 116 Kim Chǒng 金淨 (1486–1521), 111 Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492): Ch’ǒnggu p’unga 靑丘風雅, 113, 176 Kim Chongsǒ 金宗瑞 (1390–1453), 171

414

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Kim(n)dong 金童 (Chungsuk’s Mongol queen; married 1324; d. 1325), 26 Kim Hallo 金漢老 (1367–after 1417), 161 Kim Hǒ 金虛 (n.d.), 176 Kim Hǔn (1448–1492), 120 Kim Hyomyǒng 金孝明, 192 Kim Hyǒnbo 金賢甫 (n.d.), 70, 177 Kim Hyosun 金孝順, 189 Kim Inhu 金麟厚 (1510–1560), 262 Kim Ku 金鉤 (d. 1462), 168 Kim Kuji 金懼知, 167 Kim Mal 金末 (1383–1464), 168 Kim Mun 金汶 (d. 1448), 166, 168 Kim Myǒngwǒn 金命元 (1524– 1602), 206 Kim Pan 金泮 (fl. 1399–1445), 168 Kim Pokch’ang 金福昌, 159, 175 Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151): Samguk sagi 三國史記 (1146), 38, 118 Kim Puǔi 金富儀 (1079–1170), 121 Kim Sejǒk 金世勣 (d. 1490), 166 Kim Sanggon 金尙昆 (n.d.), 187 Kim Sehan 金世澣 (n.d.), 108 Kim Sisǔp 金時習 (1435–1493), 124, 146; “Letter to Yu Chahan,” 144 Kim Sǒ 金鉏, 168, 178 Kim Sohǔi 金素姬, p’ansori singer, (1917–1993), 349 Kim Soksi 金束時 (n.d.), 166 Kim Sǒngil 金誠一, 206 Kim Sukchung 金叔重 (n.d.), 189 Kim Sundal, 234 Kim Sunmong 金順蒙 (n.d.), 187 Kim Suon 金守溫 (1409–1481), 124, 135, 168, 175

Kim Suǒp 金守業, 211, 213 Kim Suryang 金遂良 (n.d.), 187 Kim Toch’i 金都致 (n.d.), 180 Kim Togyǒng 金道景, 212 Kim Tǒngnyǒng金德齡 (1567– 1596), 207, 208, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 221, 230, 231, 232, 234 Kim Uhang 金宇杭 (1649–1723), 348 Kim Ǔngha金應河 (1580–1619), 304 Kim Ǔngsǒ 金應瑞 (1564–1624), 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220, 224–225, 229 Kim Wǒngdonga, 219 Kim Wǒnsang 金元祥 (d. 1339), 348 Kim Yangil 金良一 (n.d.), 70 Kim Yakhang金若恒 (d. 1397), 171, 176 Kim Yullyang 金允良 (n.d.), 159 Kim Yunhu 金允侯 (c. 1233), 25 King Chinji 眞智王 (25th ruler of Silla; 576–579), 323 King Chǒngjo 正祖 (22nd ruler of Chosǒn; 1776–1800), 95, 316 King Chungjong 中宗 (11th ruler of Chosǒn; 1506–1544), 95, 156, 192 King Ch’unghye 忠惠王 (Putashiri; 28th ruler of Koryǒ; 1315–34; r. 1330–1332; 1339– 1344), 26–27, 29, 42 King Ch’ungjǒng 忠定王 (Chosgamdorji; 30th ruler of Koryǒ; 1337–1352; r. 1348– 1351), 27

Index King Ch’ungmok 忠穆王 (Batmadorji; 29th ruler of Koryǒ; 1337–1348; r. 1334– 1338), 27 King Ch’ungnyǒl 忠烈王 (25th ruler of Koryǒ; 1236–1308; r. 1274–1298; 1298–1308), 26, 27–28, 41–42 King Ch’ungsǒn 忠宣王 (Ijirbukha; 26th ruler of Koryǒ; 1275–1325; r. 1298; 1308–1313), 26, 29, 30, 42 King Ch’ungsuk 忠肅王 (Aratnashiri; 27th ruler of Koryǒ; 1294–1339; r. 1313–1330; 1332–1339), 26, 42 King Hyǒnjong 顯宗 (8th ruler of Koryǒ; 1009–1031), 29 King Kaeru 蓋婁王 (4th ruler of Paekche; 128–166), 323 King Kojong 高宗 (23rd king of Koryǒ; 1213–1259), 31, 33 King Kojong 高宗 (26th king of Chosǒn; r. 1874–1907), 337 King Kongmin 恭愍王 (Bayan Temür; 31st ruler of Koryǒ; 1330–1374; r. 1351–1374), 27, 334 King Kǔmwa 金蛙, 3 King Kwanggaet’o 廣開土王 (19th ruler of Koguryǒ; 391–413), 2; stele erected 414 King Munjong 文宗 (5th ruler of Chosǒn; 1414–1452), 156, 161, 169 King Sejo 世祖 (7th ruler of Chosǒn; 1455–1468), 125, 157, 158, 167, 174, 177, 178, 180, 189

415 King Sejong 世宗 (4th ruler of Chosǒn; 1418–1450), 53, 102, 156, 157, 159, 169, 316 King Sǒnjo 宣祖 (14th ruler of Chosǒn; 1567–1608), 206, 212, 214, 215 King Sǒngjong 成宗 (9th ruler of Chosǒn; 1456–1494), 157, 165, 166, 179, 182, 184, 186 King Sǒnjong 宣宗 (13th ruler of Koryǒ; 1083–1494), 35 King Sukchong 肅宗 (19th ruler of Chosǒn; 1674–1720), 278 King T’aejong 太宗 (3rd ruler of Chosǒn; 1400–1418), 156, 161 King Ǔijong 毅宗 (18th ruler of Koryǒ; 1146–1170), 38 King Wen 文王, 326–327, 329, 330 King Wǒnjong 元宗 (24th king of Koryǒ; 1259–1274), 35 King Wu 武王, 329 King Yejong 睿宗 (16th ruler of Koryǒ; 1105–1122), 35 kisaeng 妓生 (female entertainer), 257, 272–273 Kiyomasa, 206, 207, 209, 210–211, 213, 218, 232 kleos (glory), 9 Koguryǒ 高句麗, 226 konghu 箜篌 (horizontal harp; zither-like instrument with 7 strings; of Central Asian origin), 36 Kong Sǒk 孔碩 (n.d.), 168 Korean Tripiṭaka, 227 Koryǒ 高麗 (dynasty ruled by the Wang house; 918–1392), 25, 261, 334 kosa sori, 274

416

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Ko Tǔkchong 高得宗 (fl. 1413– 1448), 191 Ku Ch’igwan 具致寬 (1406–1470), 174 Ku Chongjik 丘從直 (1424–1477), 165, 167, 169 kuho 口号, 40 Kukcho pogam 國朝寶鑑 (Treasure mirror of the reigning dynasty; comp. 1908), 177 Kuk Kyǒngin 鞠景仁, 208 kǔm 琴 (black zither), 36 “Kǔmgangsǒng” 金剛城 (Koryǒ folk song), 52 kundam sosǒl 軍談小說 (war tales), 201 Kwak Chaeu 郭再祐 (1552–1617), 207, 234 kwangdae 廣大 (professional singer of p’ansori; public performer), 256, 273–276 Kwanghallu wǒn 廣寒樓苑 (Great cold tower park) in Namwǒn, 276, 279–280, 283, 285 Kwǒn Hyǒp 權悏, 206, 209 Kwǒn Kǔn 權近 (1352–1409), 167 Kwǒn Kyǒngu 權景祐 (fl. 1470– 1498), 122 Kwǒn Kyǒngyu 權景裕 (n.d.), 122, 182 Kwǒn Nam 權擥 (1416–1505), 161 Kwǒn Talsu 權達手 (1416–1505), 122 Kwǒn To (later Che) 權蹈 (踶) (1387–1445), 161 Kwǒn U 權遇 (1363–1419), 167 Kwǒn Ǔngin 權應仁 (d.c. 1590), 95 Kwǒn Yul 權慄 (1537–1599), 207,

Kwǒn Yul 權慄 (1537–1599) (continued), 222 Kyewǒrhyang 桂月香 (female entertainer), 207 Kyǒngguk taejǒn 經國大典 (Great state code of administration 1479; rev. 1474; 1485), 58, 273, 294 Kyosǒgwan 校書監 (Office of Editorial Review), 163 Kyujanggak 奎章閣 (Royal library of Chosǒn), 95 Lady Qi 戚夫人 (d. 194 BC), 329 Late Middle Korean, 4, 53, 73 Lengyen jing 楞嚴經 (Śūraṃgama (samādi) sūtra; Scripture of heroic march concentration), 122 Li Bo 李白 (701–762), 114, 115, 247, 282, 283, 293, 305, 341 Li He 李賀 (791–816), 293, 321 Li Qingzhao 李淸照 (1084–c. 1151), 50 Li Rusong 李如松 (1549–1598), 208, 210, 213, 214, 216, 220, 223, 226–227, 229, 231, 232 Li Shunfeng 李順風 (602–670), 329 Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602), 89 Liu Bang 劉邦 (206–195 BC), 231 Liu Bei 劉備 (162–223), 330 Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819), 114, 168 locus amoenus (pleasant place), 247, 292 Lotus Cloister (on Mount Chi), 39 Lotus Scripture, 185 Lu Chi 陸機 (261–303), Rhapsody on Literature (Wenfu), 247

Index lun 論 (treatise), 100 Lü Shang 呂尙, 303 Lü Tongbin 呂洞賓 (755–805), 305 Lü Zhu 綠珠 (d. 300), 328 Maeng Sasǒng孟思誠 (1360–1438), 111, 173, 175, 242 Magpie Bridge 烏鵲橋 (over the water drawn from the Smatweed River), 277, 285, 293 Mallarmé, Stephane (1842–1898), 322 “Manjǒnch’un” 滿殿春 (“Spring overflows the pavilion”), 54, 67–68, 70, 71 Marlow, Christopher (1564–1593), 101 Master Red Pine 赤松子, 281, 305 Master Wǒlmyǒng 月明師 (c. 742–765): ‘Che mangmae ka” (“Requiem for the dead sister”), 260–261 Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣, 24 Mencius 孟子 (371–290 BC), 8, 288, 329 Meng Haojan 孟浩然 (689–740), 305 metis (craft), 9 Middleton, Christopher, 266 Minnelieder (“love song”; 12th to early 14th c.), 25 Min Po 閔甫 (n.d.), 52 Min Poik 閔輔翼 (fl. 1483), 188 mongyu rok 夢遊錄 (record of dream journey), 242 Moniot d’Arras (c. 1213–1239), 43 Moniot de Paris (n.d.), 43 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–1592): Essais (1588), 133,

417 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–1592): Essais (1588) (continued), 147 Mount Chiri 智異山 (also Turyu 頭 流山), 276, 281, 344 Mount Hwang 荒山, 128, 276 Mount Shaman 巫山 (eastern Sichuan), 286 mouvance (fluidity), 271 Mozarabic kharjas (“exit”), 24. See also kharjas muae (Koryǒ dance music; decorated gourd dipper), 36 mugo 舞鼓 (large barrel drum hung from a frame), 36 Mugǔk 無極 (eminent monk), 50 munhǔiyǒn 聞喜宴, 274 myojimyǒng 墓誌銘 (tomb epitaphs), 49 myǒngdo, 334 myŏnsin 免新 (ritual/ordeal), 163–164 Naghacu 納哈出 (Mongol minister), 6 Nam Chi 南智 (fl. 1435–1453), 184 Nam Kan 南簡 (fl. 1419–1436), 177 Nam Kǔkchǒng 南極井 (fl. 1695), 317 Nam Kyeyǒng 南季暎 (fl. 1423– 438), 168 Nam Sumun 南秀文 (n.d.), 179 Namwǒn 南原, 255, 276–277, 283, 305, 330, 342 narye 儺禮 (exorcism rites), 274 naozi 腦子 (arsenic), 108 Neo-Confucianism, 94, 121, 145, 166, 168, 246 Ni Jien倪謙 (came 1450), 169

418

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Nims, John F. (1913–99), 265 No 儺 (exorcism rites), 40 No Chin (1518–1578), 348 No Chungnye 盧重禮 (n.d.), 187 No Sasin 盧思愼 (1427–1498), 161 nok 錄 (record), 108 Nongae 論介 (female entertainer), 207, 210; (Moran), 215, 221, 229, 233, 315, 328 Nongsǒn 弄仙 (female entertainer), 313 Nongyu 弄玉 (daughter of Duke Mu of Qin; r. 659–621 BC), 329 nostos (safe return home), 9 ŏ 敔 (a wooden percussion instrument shaped like a tiger), 35 O Cham 吳潛 (fl. 1296–1345), 60 “Ogwansan” 五冠山 (Koryŏ popular song about filial piety), 51 Ǒ Hyoch’ǒm 魚孝瞻 (1405–1475), 128, 159 ohyǒn 五絃 (Korean lute), 36 Ǒ Mujǒk 魚無迹 (n.d.), slave turned poet, 136, 146 ortogh (“partners,” Western Asian merchants), 52 Ǒ Segong 魚世恭 (1432–1486), 170 Ǒ Segyǒm 魚世謙 (1430–1500), 112, 169 Ǒ Sukkwǒn 魚叔權 (fl. 1525–1554); Kosa ch’waryo 攷事撮要 (1545), 97, 126; and P’aegwan chapki 稗官雜記 (The storyteller’s miscellany), x, 90, 92–96, 97 134: verbal skills, 105–110; favored topics, 110–135; value systems,

Ǒ Sukkwǒn 魚叔權 (fl. 1525–1554); Kosa ch’waryo 攷事撮要 (1545) (continued), 135–141 Overbury, Sir Thomas (1581– 1613), author of Theophrastian “Characters,” 99 Ovid (43 BC–AD 18): Heriodes, 327; Metamorphoses, 340 Paekche 百濟, 226 paekchung 百中 (the 15th of the 7th lunar month), 99 Paek Kwirin 白貴麟 (n.d.), 187 pak 拍 (6-leaved wooden clapper), 36 Pak Ansin 朴安臣 (1369–1447), 173, 194 Pak Chagye 朴子啓 (n.d.), 161 Pak Ch’ung 朴忠 (n.d.), 161 Pak Hǔimun 朴希文 (n.d.), 127, 176 Pak Ich’ang 朴以昌 (d. 1451), 164 Pak Illo 朴仁老 (1561–1643); “Sǒnsang t’an” (“Lament on the water,” 1605); “Tognaktang” 獨樂堂 (“The hall of solitary bliss,” 1619), 243, 246–248, 251 Pak Kon 朴棍 (n.d.), 180 Pak Kyegang 朴繼姜 (n.d.), 136 Pak Munsu 朴文秀 (1691–1756), 348 Pak Ǒudong 朴於于同 (executed 1480), 181, 183 Pak P’aengnyǒn 朴彭年 (1417– 1456), 168 Pak Sǒngmyǒng 朴錫命 (1370– 1406), 192 Pak Taeyong 朴大容 (n.d.), 120 Pak Ǔn 朴誾 (1479–1504), 111

Index Pak Wǒnhyǒng 朴元亨 (1411– 1469), 169 Pak Yǒn 朴堧 (1378–1458), 180 pakp’an 拍板 (wooden clapper), 36 P’algwanhoe 八關會 (Assembly of the eight commandments, harvest festival), 35, 273 Pangja 房子 (Yi Toryǒng’s servant boy), 277 Pangsangssi (Fangxiangshi方相氏), 40 p’ansori (“song sung in a performance arena”), vii, xi, xii, 255, 270–272, 276, 323, 347 Pari kongju (Princess Pari, The Abandoned Princess), xi, 13–17 Paul, Jean (1763–1825), 332 Peach Blossom Spring 桃園, 241, 245, 247, 250 Peerless Transcendent 無上神仙, 15 Penelope, wife of Odysseus, 327, 332 peripeteia (reversal of fortune), 346 Petrarch, Francesco (1304–1374): Canzoniere, 327 p’illyul 篳篥 (6-holed double-reed oboe), 36 pip’a 琵琶 (5-stringed Korean lute), 36 p’iri (double-reed oboe), 36 “Pǒlgok cho” 伐谷鳥 (by King Yejong), 51 Pong Sǒkchu 奉石柱 (d. 1465), 166 Precious Consort Yang 楊貴妃 (d. July 15; 756), 231, 232, 269, 296, 302 Prince Anp’yǒng 安平君 (Sejong’s 3rd son; 1418–1453), 158, 168

419 Prince Chean 齊安君 (Yejong’s 2nd son; 1446–1526) 136, 183 Prince Ch’uksan 竺山君, 180 Prnce Hǔngwǒn 興原君 (n.d.), 182 Prince Sunp’yǒng 順平君 (Chǒngjong’s 1st son), 159 Prince Wǒlsan 月山君 1454–1488 (Tǒkchong’s 1st son), 167 Prince Yangnyǒng 讓寧君 1394– 1462 (T’aejong’s 1st son), 158 Prince Yǒngch’ǒn 永川君, 183 Princess Hyegyǒng 惠慶宮 (1735– 1815), 321 Propertius, Sextus (c. 50–16 BC), 306 pu 缶 (a baked clay jar struck at the top with a bamboo rod split into 9 sections), 35 pugun 府君 (shrine where votive paper money was offered), 128 “P’ungyo” 風謠 (c. 635; Silla song), 260 “P’ungipsong” 風入松 (Koryǒ popular song with Chinese translation), 51 Putashiri (d. 1365), 27 Pyǒl Ch’unhyang ka 別春香歌, 275 pyǒltan 別單, 337 Pyǒn Hakto 卞學道 (evil magistrate of Namwǒn), 279, 310, 312–314, 317, 321–323, 345 Pyǒn Kyeryang 卞季良 (1369– 1430), 168, 177 Qianziwen 千字文 (Thousand sinograph primer, comp. Zhou Xingsi), 289–291 Qi Shun 祈順 (came 1476), 119, 169

420

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Queen Sohye (1437–1504): Naehun 內訓 (Instructions for the inner quarters 1574), 308 Record of the Black Dragon Year, The (Imjin nok) 壬辰錄, x, 9–13, 216–240 Red Turbans 紅巾賊, 5 Redfield, James, 9 Royal Lectures 經筵, 157 Rycroft, Charles, 332 Sadǒk 四德 (slave girl), 182 saeng (sheng 笙; mouth organ made of 13 bamboo pipes), 36 Saga chip 四佳集, 90; Tongin sihwa 東人詩話, 111, 112–113, 117; Tong munsǒn 東文選, 169 Sahǒnbu 司憲府 (Office of the Inspector-General), 163 Śākyamuni Buddha, 14 Samgang haengsil to 三綱行實圖 (Illustrated conducts of the three bonds), 308–309 “Samjang” 三藏 (a pentasyllabic quatrain in Chinese of 2nd stanza of “The Turkish bakery”), 60 Samyǒngdang, Great Master 泗溟堂 (1544–1610), 12, 209 214 (Yujǒng), 215, 227–228, 229, 231 Sandae plays 山臺劇, 40, 273 Sangimch’un 上林春 (female entertainer), 181 Sangjǒng kogǔm yemun 詳定古今 禮文 (Detailed ritual texts of the past and present, c.1155–1162), 32

Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志 演義(Romance of the three kingdoms), 11, 230 Sappho (b. late 7th c.), 71, 297 “Sarihwa” 沙里花 (Koryǒ satirical song), 51 Sarta (Mongol commander, d. 1233), 26 “Saryong” 蛇竜 (a pentasyllabic quatrain in Chinese), 60 sasǒl sijo 辭說時調 (longer sijo form in which more than 2 metric segments in each line except for the first in line 3 are added), 312 Scripture of the Yellow Court 黃 庭經, 293 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616): As You Like It, 288; Macbeth, 19n9; The Rape of Lucrece (1594), 321; Romeo and Juliet, 297; The Tempest, 12, 23; sonnet 130, 70 Shangdu 上都 (Xanadu of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), 30 Shao Yung 邵雍 (1011–1177), 329 Shennong 神農 (Divine Husbandman), 337 Shen Weijing 沈惟敬, 207 Shin Chaehyo 申在孝 (1811–1884), xii, 275 Shin Cham 申潛 (1491–1554), 168 Shin Chongho 申從濩 (1456–1497), 181 Shin In 辛鏻 (n.d.), 170 Shin Ip 申砬, 206, 231 Shin Kak 申恪, 206, 234 Shin Kwanghan 申光漢 (1484– 1555), 112

Index Shin Kyǒnghaeng 辛景行 (fl. 1573–1604), 222 Shin Sukchu 申叔舟 (1417–1475), 102 Shin Ton 辛旽 (d. 1371), 316 Shin U 辛禑 (32nd ruler of Koryǒ; 1374–1388), 41 Shin Yonggae 申用漑 (1463–1519), 181 Shin Yǒnghǔi 辛永禧 (fl. 1454– 1492), 113 Shin Yu, 317 shugua 樹掛, 108 Shun 舜, 231, 266, 288, 325, 327, 337 shuo 說 (discourse), 100 si 詩, 258 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1604): Astrophil and Stella, 306 sihwa (shihua) 詩話, 16, 93, 99 sijo 時調 (“contemporary tune”; the most popular of Korean classical poetic form consisting of 3 lines in the original), 70, 242, 248, 261, 285 Silla 新羅, 226 Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086): Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in government), 157, 247, 288 Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–85 BC): “Letter to Ren An,” 144 231 (Shiji), 282 Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 BC), 231 Sima Xun 司馬恂 (came 1450), 119 Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Notations for Korean music in contemporary use; early 16th c.), 23, 261

421 Skelton, John (?1460–1529), 138 sobun 掃墳, 275 sogak 俗樂 (Korean music; esp. popular Koryǒ songs and music), vii, xi, 35, 58, 90 Sǒ Kǒjǒng 徐居正 (1420–1488): P’irwǒn chapki 筆苑雜記, 90, 92, 119, 167, 169, 184; Saga chip, 90; Tongin sihwa, 111, 112–113; Tong munsǒn, 169 sogǔm 小琴 (7-holed small transverse flute), 36 sǒgye 書啓, 336 “Sǒgyong pyǒlgok” 西京別曲 (“Song of P’yongyang”; popular Koryǒ song), 56, 62–63, 70, 71 Songak 松嶽 (also Puso 扶蘇), 51 Sǒk Ch’ǒnbo石天輔, 60 Sǒl Wi 薛緯 (n.d.), 114 Son Sunhyo 孫舜孝 (1427–1497), 175, 176, 179–80 Sǒng Anǔi 成安義 (1561–1629), 349 Song Ch’ǒnhǔi 宋千喜 (d. 1520), 100 Sǒnggyungwan 成均館 (Royal Confucian Academy), 123, 140 Sǒng Hyǒn 成俔 (1437–1504): Yongjae ch’onghwa, 90, 119, 120, 129, 159, 169, 182 , 188, 189, 193, 194; Hǒbaektang chip, 90 Sǒng Isǒng 成以性 (1595–1664), 348 Sǒngjin 性眞 (a pupil of Master Liuguan in A Dream of Nine Clouds; 1687–1688), 296 Sǒng Kan 成侃 (1427–1456), 170, 192 Song Kukch’ǒm (d. 1250), 48 Song Kyǒngin 宋景仁 (n.d.), 41

422

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Song of Ch’unhyang (Yǒllyǒ Ch’unhyang sujǒl ka) 烈女春香 守節歌, xii, 256, 263, 271, 340, 348–349 Song of Hǔngbo 興甫歌 (p’ansori), 348 Song of Sim Ch’ǒng 沈淸歌 (p’ansori), 348 Sǒng Sahyǒng成士衡 (n.d.), 173 Song Siyǒl 宋時烈 (1607–1689), 304 Sǒng Sǒgyǒn 成石珚 (d. 1414), 178 Sǒng Sǒngnin成石璘 (1338–1423), 171, 174, 189 Songyang 松讓 (king of Piryu), 3 Sǒng Yǒwan 成汝完 (1309–1397), 101 Sǒrong 雪翁, (Buddhist monk), 139 Sǒsan, Great Master 西山大師 (1520–1604), 207, 211, 214 So Seyang 蘇世讓 (1486–1562), 115, 116, 118, 119, 169 sosǒl 小說 (small talk; fiction), ix, 90, 91, 107, 117, 134 Sosǒp (Konishi; Chosǒbi), 209, 210, 221 Spenser, Edmund (c. 1552–1599): Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene (1590–6), 56–7, 100, 340 “Ssanghwajǒm” 雙花店 (“The Turkish bakery’), 54, 56, 60–62, 70 States, Bert O.: The Rhetoric of Dreams (1988), 332–333 Su Qin 蘇秦 (d. 317 BC), 114, 313, 330 Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101): “Recalling antiquity at Red Cliff,” 283, 341 Sun Bin 孫臏 (?378–301 BC), 330

Sǔngmunwǒn 承文院(Office of Diplomatic Correspondences), 118, 163, 164 taeak 大惡 (Great abominations; section in Koryǒ penal code), 45–46 taegǔm 大琴 (13-holed double-reed oboe), 36 Taejungnae 待重來 (female entertainer), 182 Tairen 太任, 288 Taisi 太姒, 288 t’amhwarang 探花郞 (a candidate who placed 3rd), 162 Tang 湯 (founder of the Shang), 266, 325, 338 Tang Gao 唐皐 (came 1521), 119 Tano 端午 (Double Five; day of purification), 277, 279 Tao Qian 陶潛 (363–427), 114, 252; “The Return” and “Twenty Poems After Drinking Wine,” 179, 252, 341 t’aryǒng 打令/妥靈, 275 Telemachus, 144 tingzhang 廷杖 (court beatings), 28 “Tongdong” 動動 (Koryǒ dance music and song; “Ode to the seasons”), 36–37, 55, 59–60, 70, 71 Tonginhong 動人紅 (female entertainer; n.d.), 48 Toghōn Temür (Shundi 順帝; 1320–1370), 29, 31 Tomi 都彌 (c. 2nd cent.), 323 Treasury of ancient writings, 288

Index trobairitz (Occitan women troubadours who wrote between c. 1150–1250), 24, 70 troubadours (460 composers/ performers of Old Occitan lyrics; we have 2542 songs, 1100–1350; classical period 1170–1220), 24 trouvères (2000 songs by 8 named women and 250 named male poets in northern France; late 12th–13th c.), 24, 43, 56 Tsengcan 曾參 (505–c. 436 BC), 329 tǔngga登架, 35 Tunu 屯雨 (c. 1350), 185 u (yu; large mouth organ with 36 pipes), 36 ubi sunt, 340 Udol 于咄 (female entertainer; n.d.), 48 Ǔich’ǒn 義天 (1055–1101); Taegak kuksa 大覺國師 (National preceptor Taegak); Sin–p’yǒn chejong kyojang ch’ongnok 新編 諸宗敎藏總錄 (New catalog of the teachings of all the schools 1090), 32, 33 Unbong 雲峰, 4, 276 Ǔndaesǒn 銀台仙 (female entertainer; n.d.), 181 ŭnyǒngyǒn 恩榮宴, 274 U T’ak 禹倬 (1262–1342), 340 Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), 257 “Veni dilectissime” (Cambridge song 49), 56 Verlaine, Paul (1844–96): “Chanson d’automne,” 265

423 Vigil of Venus (Perigilium Veneris, 2d–4th c.), 288 Villon, François (b. 1431): “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade of dead ladies,” pub. 1489), 56 Waller, Edmund (1606–1687): “Of English verse,” 139 Walton, Izaak (1593–1683): “Life of Herbert,” 123 Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249), 330 Wang Bo 王勃 (c. 649–676): “Looking down from the high terrace,” 268, 283 Wang Chang 王敞 (came 1488), 119, 169 Wang E 王鶚 (1190–1273), 36 Wang Kǒn 王建 (918–943): “Ten Injunctions,” 37 Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (321–379), 282 Wang Zhaojun王昭君 (Brilliant consort), 269, 287, 329 Weaver Maid 織女 (Vega), 277, 285, 293, 295–296, 324, 326 Wei Yingwu 韋應物 (737–c.792), 168 Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature, ed. Xiao Tong; 501–531), viii, xi, 91 Whythorne, Thomas (1528–1596), 144 Wǒlmae 月梅 (Ch’unhyang’s mother), 272, 279, 280–281, 294, 308, 317, 343, 345 Wǒlmyǒng, Master 月明師 (c. 742– 746): “Che mangmae ka” 祭亡 妹歌 (“Requiem for the dead sister”), 208, 260

424

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Wǒlsǒn 月仙 (Wǒlch’ǒn; female entertainer), 210, 212, 220, 313, 328 Wǒnhǔng 元興 (Koryǒ popular song about female fidelity), 51 Wǒnhyo, Great Master 元曉大師 (617–686), 37 Wǒn Kyǒng 元卿 (d. 1302), 20 Wǒn Kyun 元均 (d. 1597), 208, 224, 234 Wǒnok 原玉 or Uhu 牛後 (female entertainer), 48 Wǒn Poryun 元甫崙 (n.d.), 170 Wu Ximeng 吳希孟 (came 1539), 119, 169 Wu Yangao 吳彦高 (n.d.), 36 Xiang goddesses; Yao’s 2 daughters, Fairy Radiance (Ehuang 娥皇) and Maiden Bloom (Nuying 女英), 303, 329 Xiang Yu 項羽 (232–202 BC), 231, 232, 287, 296 Xia Yan 夏言 (came 1534), 169 Xiaoxue 小學 (Elementary learning), 308, 321 Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433), 114 Xishi 西施, 231, 232 Xu Jing 徐兢 (1051–1153), 43 Xunzi 荀子 (fl. 298–238 BC), 129 Xu You 許由, 313 Yan Guang 嚴光 (37 B.C–A.D. 43), 293, 322 Yan Hui 顔回(514–483 BC), 329 yangban 兩班 (the literati), 135 Yan Junping 嚴君平 (fl. c. 34 BC), 330

Yang Huo 陽虎 (fl. 505 BC), 326–7 Yang Sǒngji 梁誠之 (1415–1482), 53 yangsuch’ǒk 楊水尺 or korijangi, , 272 Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206), 115 Yang Yǒgong梁汝恭 (1378–1431), 160 Yao 堯, 266, 288, 313, 325, 327, 337 Yemungwan 藝文館 (Office of Royal Decrees), 104, 140, 163, 164, 180 Yi Changyong 李藏用 (1201–1272), 35 Yi Chehyǒn 李齊賢 (1287–1367): Nagong pisǒl 櫟翁稗說 (Lowly jottings by old man “Oak”), 30, 48, 50, 51, 91, 98, 121, 129 Yi Chik 李稷 (n.d.), 192 Yi Ch’ik 李則 (1438–1496), 178, 195 Yi Ch’ǒm 李詹 (1345–1405), 177 Yi Chǒngbo 李廷甫 (fl. 1469–1494), 172 Yi Chonghak 李種學 (1361–1392), 171 Yi Haeng 李行 (1352–1432), 178 Yi Haeng 李荇 (1478–1534), 112, 115, 119 Yi Hangbok 李恒福 (1556–1618), 203, 206, 207, 208, 210, 215, 219 Yi Hǔibo 李希輔 (1473–1543), 131 Yi Hwang 李滉 (1501–1571), 304 Yi I 李珥 (1536–1584), 205, 223 Yi Ik 李瀷 (1681–1763), 316 Yi Illo 李仁老 (1152–1220): P’ahan chip 破閑集 (Jottings to break up idleness, pub. 1260), 48, 97,

Index Yi Illo 李仁老 (1152–1220): P’ahan chip 破閑集 (Jottings to break up idleness, pub. 1260) (continued), 98, 99, 112, 113, 116, 121, 129, 150 Yi Kǔngik 李肯翊 (1736–1806), 95 Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241): “Tongmyǒngwang p’yǒn” 東明王篇 (“Lay of King Tongmyǒng”), 2, 41, 112, 114–115, 116 Yi Maenggyun 李孟畇 (1371–1440), 181 Yi Monghak 李夢鶴 (d. 1596), 207, 208, 222–221 Yi Nae李來 (1362–1416), 159 Yi Okpong 李玉峰 (c. 1550–1600 daughter of Yi Tal and poet in literary Chinese), 316 Yi Ǒnjǒk 李彦迪 (1491–1553), 246, 247 Yi Pan李班 (n.d.), 189 Yi Pyǒl 李鼈 (late 15th c.), 122, 136 Yi Sach’ǒl 李思哲 (1405–1456), 176 Yi Saek 李穡 (1328–1396), 41, 113 Yi Sangjwa 李上佐 (fl. 1506–1544), 136, 192 Yi Siǒn 李時言, 222, 234 Yi Sǒnggye 李成桂 (1335–1408; r. 1392–1398), 4, 9, 117, 156, 276, 334 Yi Subong 李秀葑 (n.d.), 182 Yi Sudǔk 李秀得 (1697–1775), 317 Yi Sukcha 李叔自 (n.d.), 122 Yi Sukham 李淑瑊 (fl. 1454–1490), 195–196 Yi Sungmun 李淑文 (n.d.), 179 Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598), 11,

425 Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598) (continued), 204–205, 206, 208, 209, 212, 218, 223–224, 229, 230, 234 Yi Tal 李達 (fl. 1568–1608), 95 Yi Tǒkhyǒng 李德馨 (1561–1613), 215, 219, 220 Yi Tǒngmu 李德懋 (1741–1793), 95 Yi Toryǒng 李道令 (Mongnyong; Ch’unhyang’s husband), 255, 268, 277, 279, 288, 294, 300, 301, 306, 309, 311, 318, 330, 337, 341–342, 347 Yi Tu 李杜 (n.d.), 193 Yi Wǒnik 李元翼 (1547–1634), 207 Yi Yangdong 李良童 (n.d.), 191 Yi Yangsaeng李陽生 (1423–1488), 167 Yi Yejang 李禮長 (n.d.), 162 yogo 腰鼓 (waist drum), 36 Yǒllyǒ Ch’unhyang sujǒl ka, 257, 277. See also Song of Ch’unhyang Yǒm Hǔngbang 廉興邦 (d. 1388), 41 Yǒndǔnghoe 燃燈會 (lantern festival), 35 Yongbi ǒch’ǒn ka 龍飛御天歌 (Songs of flying dragons), 4–9, 334 yǒngch’inǔi 榮親儀, 274 Yǒngsan 靈山, 275 Yǒnsangun 燕山君 (16th ruler of Chosǒn; 1494–1506), 101, 137, 179, 191 Yu 禹, 266, 305, 325, 338 Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568– 1610), 89 Yu Chahan 柳自漢 (n.d.), 144

426

The Story of Traditional Korean Literature

Yu Chinhan 柳振漢 (1711–1791), xii, 256 yuch’ǒk 鍮尺, 336 yudu 流頭 (15th of the 6th month), 99 yuga 遊街, 274 Yu Hoin 兪好仁 (1445–1494), 158 Yu Hong 兪泓 (1524–1594), 113–114 Yu Hǔiryǒng 柳希齡 (b. 1480): Taedong sirim 大東詩林 (1542), 113–114 Yuhwa 柳花 (eldest daughter of River Earl), 2 Yu Hyǒngwǒn 柳馨遠 (1622–1673), 316 Yu Hyot’ong 兪孝通 (fl. 1403– 1431), 182 Yu Kǔn 劉瑾 (n.d.), 123 Yu Kwan 柳寬 (1346–1433), 175 Yu, Lady 虞美人, 287 Yu Panghyo 柳方孝 (n.d.), 180 Yu Pangson 柳方孫 (1388–1443), 167, 180 Yu Sǒngnyong 柳成龍 (1542–1607), 206, 210, 212, 213, 219, 223, 228 Yu Sǔngdan 兪升旦 (1168–1232), 52 Yu Sunjǒng 柳順汀 (n.d.), 182 Yu Suwǒn 柳壽垣 (1694–1775), 316 Yun Chayǒng 尹子榮 (n.d.), 161 Yun Chǔng 尹拯 (1629–1714), 304 Yun Hoe 尹淮(1380–1436), 168, 179; “Ponghwang ǔm” 鳳凰吟 (“Song of the phoenix”), 58 Yun Ki 尹耆, 166 Yun Sagyun 尹士畇 (n.d.), 160

Yun Sang 尹祥 (1373–1455), 167, 168 Yun Sǒndo 尹善道 (1587–1671): “Expressing Myself” (1618), 262; “Ǒbu sasisa” 漁父四時詞 (The Angler’s Calendar 1651), 248–252 Yun Tusu 尹斗壽 (1553–1601), 222 Zhang Ning 張寧 (came 1460), 169 Zhang Yi 張儀 (d. 309 BC), 313, 330 Zhao Feiyan 趙飛燕 (d. 6 BC), 287 Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), 30, 50 Zhao Yun 趙雲, 231 zheng 正 (maneuver), 6 Zhongyong 中庸 (Doctrine of the mean), 124, 288 Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期 (6th c. BC), 124 Zhou 紂, 326, 327 Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), 329 Zhou Yu 周瑜 (175–210), 268 Zhuang Zhiang, Lady 莊姜, 288 Zhuo Wenzhun 卓文君, 231 Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), 117, 230; Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通 鑑綱目 (Outline and details of the Comprehensive Mirror) by Zhu Xi and his disciples, 166 Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328– 1398; r. 1368–1398), 330 Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), 222, 313, 329 Zisi 子思 (492–431 BC), 329 Zu Chengxun 祖正訓, 207 Zumthor, Paul (1915–95): Essai de poétique mediéval (1972), 351n29; Oral Poetry (1990), 256, 266

Index Zuozhuan 左傳, 156

427